eBooks

In his National Book Awards acceptance speech this week, biographer T. J. Stiles thanked everyone in a book's traditional production chain, from the agent to the bookstore clerk. Stiles concluded with an note of apprehension: "The advent of the eBook is fooling some into thinking that these people are not necessary anymore."

As the digital publishing industry grows over the next few years, publishers, authors, and readers need to reconcile these fears about the future. Earlier this week, GalleyCat writers and readers mingled at the eBook Summit preview party, trying to start a more productive conversation about the future of eBooks.

In this special video feature, eBook Summit speakers like Movable Type Literary Group agent Jason Allen Ashlock and Electric Literature co-founder Andy Hunter shared advice for reaching new digital audiences. Visit the Summit Facebook page to continue the conversation. (Special thanks to AgencySpy editor Matt Van Hoven for that excellent headline.)

Little, Brown has just released an eBook-only update of the print title, "The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child"--an instantaneous publishing response to public concerns about H1N1 flu (or Swine Flu) vaccines.

To find out more about how eBooks can help medical publishing, GalleyCat interviewed the book's author, Robert Sears, M.D., about the digital addition. He hoped that more medical publishers could adapt a similar digital book strategy: "Since I wrote "The Vaccine Book," several important changes have occurred that I wish I could have immediately updated. This is true for virtually any medical book, and it takes many months before such changes can appear in a subsequent book printing. eBooks can be immediately updated as new information comes out, and breaking health news topics can easily be added to compliment any health book," he explained.

He also outlined the timely information included in the eBook extra: "The H1N1 flu, or 'swine flu,' vaccine [requires] two extra doses that parents have to give their infants and children this year. Educated parents will naturally wonder about this new vaccine--How is it made? What are the ingredients and side effects? How risky is the disease? Should I add this vaccine to my child's already busy vaccine schedule? And pregnant moms are also concerned; the disease poses risk for them, but there is uncertainty over using an untested vaccine during pregnancy."

As All Romance eBooks celebrates its third anniversary, the company has released some impressive statistics--mapping out a booming future for this side of publishing.

The digital romance book company launched with just 18 publishers and 2000 titles. Now, between the company's Omnilit and All Romance eBooks sites, they count more than 3000 and 250,000 titles. In addition, the company recently partnered with the Aldiko eBook reader, bringing more titles to Android smartphones.

In an interview, All Romance eBooks founder Lori James explained her marketing strategy: "We knew the bigger challenge was going to be attracting the print romance reader and young female internet users in general who we believed were ripe for becoming romance eBook readers. Since this was a new concept, we tried many things in the beginning. In addition to a vast array of web-based advertising, we've done everything from trade shows to developing commercials for movie theaters and spots on television."

The early-bird discount for the mediabistro.com eBook Summit expires tonight at midnight EST, the best ticket price for the digital publishing conference next month.

The keynote will be delivered by former HarperCollins president Jane Friedman and film producer Jeffrey Sharp--unveiling their plans for their brand new digital book outfit, Open Road Integrated Media.

The eBook Summit will run from December 15-16 at the New Yorker Hotel in New York City, a chance to build digital publishing community and learn from leaders in the field. Participants also include: DailyLit CEO Susan Danziger, Sony's Digital Reading Business Division President Steve Haber, Lexcycle co-founder Neelan Choksi; Google Books product manager Brandon Badger, author Katty Kay, and Books on Board CEO Bob Livolsi.

Since the application's September launch, 120,000 users have downloaded the Aldiko eBook reader for Android smartphones. According to the company, the average Aldiko user downloads more than seven books a month.

Ever since Google released Android, an operating system and mobile phone platform, some have speculated that the platform could soon rival the iPhone. To find out about the publishing implications of this new system, GalleyCat interviewed Tiffany Wong, co-founder of the Android e-reader, Aldiko. The company has already partnered with O'Reilly Media, All Romance Ebooks, Feedbooks and Smashwords. (Editor's note: eBook connoisseur Mike Cane reviews the app's display).

Wong was "very optimistic" about the future: "The key advantage of Android is that it is not a platform specific to one hardware manufacturer, but one that will be deployed on dozens of products from dozen of companies, which in the long run will drive a lot of volume. At Aldiko, we've actually seen a huge surge in app downloads after the launch of the Motorola Droid last week," she explained.

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Sources report that over the first half of the year, eBook sales at Random House have increased by 400 percent.

According to a leaked report obtained by Crain's NY, digital book sales at the company have increased dramatically. Despite impressive growth, the company called it "an incubatory period" for the digital book industry--a fraction of the company's overall revenues.

Here's more from the article: "sales of its Kindle e-books through September 2009 came to $22.6 million, an increase of almost 700% over the $2.9 million in revenue that the Kindle generated during the same period in 2008. The Lost Symbol was a big part of that growth. Published Sept. 15, the thriller sold 100,000 e-books its first week out, or about 5% of total sales for the book. In the first half of 2009, Random House e-book revenue grew by 400%, says a spokesman." (Via Jane L.)

In the company's largest publisher deal since its inception, Scribd has teamed up with ProQuestUMI to sell over 14,000 graduate dissertations and theses on the site.

Described by some as a "YouTube for books," Scribd collects thousands of documents, from scholarly abstracts to newspaper stories. The partnership will carry work from 14 universities including Princeton, University of Arizona, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, bringing a fraction of ProQuestUMI's 2 million doctoral dissertations to Scribd. The site currently has more than 48,000 monthly readers, and so far they have picked an odd mix of texts.

Priced at $49 apiece, the most popular theses are: "Single-name and multi-name credit derivatives: Pricing and calibration using multiscale asymptotic methods;" "Parents' vicarious shame and guilt responses to children's wrong-doings;" and the 591-page philosophy work, "Resolved to fly: The Virgin of Loreto, the Jesuits & the miracle of portable Catholicism in the Seventeenth Century Atlantic World."

Today the digital book service Shortcovers announced a new partnership with the digital self-publishing outfit, Smashwords. Starting November 18, Smashwords will to share titles from its nearly 5,000-strong collection of eBooks, a library drawn from 2,300 different self-published authors and small publishers.

Shortcovers has built an global infrastructure for reading digital books across multiple devices, including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre , Google Android and Sony Reader. GalleyCat caught up with Smashwords CEO Mark Coker to find out more. "From the beginning we wanted it to be a global platform--but Shortcovers created the infrastructure," he explained. "A lot of US publishers tend to be US-centric and they sell rights to other places. The beauty of eBooks is that publishers can reach a broader market easily at a low cost," he continued.

Coker concluded: "Online retailers will be extremely important in the [eBook] supply chain. That's why we are signing these agreements with Barnes & Noble, Sony, and Shortcovers. In print book world for the last couple centuries, publishers have controlled distribution. What we're doing is democratizing distribution."

Following more than a month of renegotiation, the Authors Guild and Google handed in a revised version of the Google Books settlement to U.S. District Judge Denny Chin on Friday the thirteenth.

According to the NY Times, only books from United States, Britain, Australia or Canada can be included in Google's efforts to digitize millions of books under the new settlement. In addition the new settlement has created an "independent fiduciary" who will decide how Google can handle "orphan works"-- books where the original copyright holder cannot be determined. This week Judge Chin will decide about the upcoming fairness hearing, a repeatedly postponed event that will determine if the settlement will stand.

Here's more about the independent fiduciary, from the article: "The trustee, with Congressional approval, can grant licenses to other companies who also want to sell these books, and will oversee the pool of unclaimed funds that they generate. If the money goes unclaimed for 10 years, according to the revised settlement, it will go to philanthropy and to an effort to locate rights holders."

The new literary journal One Good Read will publish individual issues online and through print-on-demand, with a unique social networking component: all submissions will be posted in the journal's community space at Fictionaut.

The journal is edited by Chris Kubica and will pay contributors, but, as he writes: "How much...not sure yet. Some $ and printed copies." According to the site, each issue will rotate around a single theme and all submissions should play with the idea. In an interesting twist, the journal has pre-prescribed table of contents.

Check it out: "In addition, each issue will have only ONE of each of the following types of creative works: One tweet, One poem, One list, One short story, One one-act play, One essay/creative non-fiction, One cartoon/comic strip, One photograph, One drawing/painting, One news story/editorial."