From The Guardian:

Fiction edged its way closer to a digital incarnation with the publication this week of an interactive visual version of John Buchan’s classic thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Publisher Faber&Faber announced that it had up with two software publishers and a developer, The Story Mechanics, to create a “fully playable, fully immersive product” which it believes breask new ground in digital reading.

It said the app includes classic stop-frame animation and original silent film music. It would allow readers to “unlock dozens of achievements and items to collect on their reading journey, and explore hundreds of hand-painted digital environments and context from 1910s Britain.”

. . . .

Faber also took advantage of this week’s London Book Fair to introduce another innovative piece of fiction, Arcadia, by Iain Pears – which will be published in digital form in the autumn, with a book following next year.

. . . .

The aim was to create an infinite number of ways in which the story could be read – though Pears emphasised that Arcadia was not an interactive novel. “I’m still in charge of the story because I’m arrogant enough to feel that I’m a better story-teller,” he said.

One result of its format, he said, was to get the story beyond the constraints of time. “It also gets rid of causality. I use the analogy of dropping a cup and causing it to break. It’s also possible that the cup breaking causes you to drop it.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From The Guardian:

Online fiction is a remote world, peopled by elves, dragons and whey-faced vampires. At least that is the view shared by millions of devoted readers of the printed novel. But now serious British literary talent is aiming to colonise territory occupied until now by fantasy authors and amateur fan-fiction writers.

In the vanguard is Iain Pears, the best-selling historical novelist and author of An Instance of the Fingerpost and Stone’s Fall. Pears will offer readers the chance to go back to check detailed elements of his narrative and will even flag up sections they do not have to read. “I am trying to find a new way of telling stories, and once you start thinking about it, there are almost too many possibilities,” said the Oxford-based writer, who is completing an interactive ebook for Faber that will stretch the form to its current limits. “There is no reason to think the printed book will be the defining literary format. I don’t want to be cautious any more. This is about changing the fundamentals. The worst that can happen is that it won’t work.”

. . . .

“Reading by its very nature is interactive – whether you do it on an iPad or with a printed book, you participate,” he said. “The novelist creates a world and the reader brings something to it. Reading is not a passive process. Literary interactivity means more than computer games. Or should do.”

. . . .

With a nod in the direction of avant-garde 20th century writers such as BS Johnson and Georges Perec, Self notes that the printed novel is still a relatively new form. “It took a long time for it to find the appearance of a realistic, linear form,” he said. “It is true that linearity in the novel is undoubtedly an ideology, but people still write novels in linear form because they read books in linear form.”

When complaints reached Self that Umbrella had no chapters, he asked readers if there were chapters in their lives. “Some told me that there were, so I said they were reading too many novels with chapters. You cannot abandon all linearity on the page, though. There is some unavoidable traction for the reader there.”

At the recent FutureBook conference, Faber’s chief executive, Stephen Page, urged publishers to bring leading writers together with software developers. “Ebooks are a boring format that just comes straight out of normal books,” he said.

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From Digital Book World:

Seeing as though 2012 is just about over, we’ve gathered more publishing experts to predict what extraordinary events are to come in book publishing in 2013.

. . . .

2. 2013 will be the year of the enhanced ebook.

“Every year, we say this is going to be the year of the enhanced ebook,” said Wiley’s director of digital business development Peter Balis. “But in the second half of this year you’re going to see a significant number of titles with robust interactivity in areas like test prep and other non-fiction categories.”

The enhanced ebook has been the next big thing for several years running now, but it just hasn’t gained the traction that its immersive reading counterpart has. There have been some hits, like Hyperion’s Jacqueline Kennedy Enahnced eBook from 2011, but they have been few and far between.

So why this year?

First, “there will be an increased appetite for illustrated and nonfiction books that did not sit well on e-readers,” said Jo Henry, director of Bowker Market Research, a book-focused research firm.

Second, more people will have the devices that make reading enhanced ebooks pleasurable with the precipitous rise of tablets.

And, third, more publishers will be producing the kind of content for those devices that people want to read.

“There will be more enhanced ebooks by far in 2013 than there were in 2012,” said David Wilk, publishing consultant and provider of publishing services through his firm Booktrix.

3. The $0 Kindle.

It’s a prediction that we made last year, but this year will finally be the year that we see a free e-reader, specifically a free Kindle.

For Amazon, it’s not just about getting more customers for its content ecosystem but about keeping the e-ink e-reader device manufacturers in business.

Forrester’s McQuivey explains:

“We’re now starting to see shipments go down for e-readers. The devices and components that go into them – the people that do the building and assembly, the people that do e-ink – there is good evidence that they’re getting fewer orders. If you’re amazon, you want those devices to still be out there. They create customer stickiness that you want.”

That said, the e-reader that you get for free isn’t going to be top-of-the-line.

“If you want a nice [Kindle] Paperwhite, that’s going to cost you money, but if you want the cheapest, smallest device, they’ll give it away for free,” said McQuivey.

It’s not so far-fetched. After all, this year did see the invention of the $13 e-reader.

. . . .

6. Ebook marketing will be completely re-thought.

“Conventional trade book marketing at established, general publishers is going to be completely re-thought,” said publishing consultant and Digital Book World Conference + Expo partner Mike Shatzkin. “It has always been title-specific and publishing-date centric and it won’t be anymore.”

The way book marketing worked before the rise of digital marketing and ebooks was (roughly), that a book would have a pre-publication push that included publicity and advertising; after publication, it would receive more of the same for a set period of time; and then it would be left to fare on its own until sales petered out enough so that stores stopped stocking it as consistently. And then it would be relegated to the back-list, rarely to be seen as a priority by marketers again (except in the case of a movie deal, an award, or other public mentions that could revive a book’s status).

With the rise of digital marketing, ebooks (which make it relatively easy to sell back-list titles) and highly developed communities of interest on the Web, more successful book marketers are looking at their marketing agenda as anything they can sell, any time of year.

“There will be an obvious leader – that is to say, at some point we’ll start to see back-list books popping more out of one publisher than out of others,” said Shatzkin. “That will be the way the world finds out and people will be saying, ‘why is it that suddenly we see “Publisher X” books that are nine months old showing up on the best-seller list’ and somebody will poke around and say, ‘oh, well, they’re all part of their “single women” marketing group’ for example.

“What drives change is success. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” he said.

Some publishers, like digital-first Open Road have already adopted similar marketing philosophies.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

From FutureBook:

Charlie Redmayne has been in the top job at Pottermore for a year now, casting numerous multimedia spells along the way to enchant its 40 million-strong fanbase. Leaving his role as HarperCollins’ chief digital officer in November 2011 (Redmayne was brought in to spearhead the publisher’s digital transformation), he has since led the Pottermore team in the creation of an online home for the seven Harry Potter books.

. . . .

“What we’ve done with Pottermore is harness a fanbase of millions of the biggest Harry Potter fans. In terms of producing value to all of the rights holders—be it J K Rowling, Bloomsbury, Scholastic, Warner Bros, or indeed our sponsor Sony—that’s an immensely valuable thing as any new books, content or products come out. For any launch we have a direct relationship with those fans already, who we can then engage with.”

. . . .

Redmayne says his job now is to “take what we’ve done with the browser experience to other platforms, be it YouTube, app stores, the gaming world.” He explains: “What we built initially was for hardcore fans, but what we will be shaping out now is how to engage with new fans. There are X million new eight-year-olds in the world who are discovering Harry Potter every year—how do we engage with them? How do we make sure Pottermore is an important part of that discovery of Harry Potter?”

. . . .

“The convergence of media challenges existing rights structures that were put together at a time when there was clear blue water between what publishers did and what film companies did. There is a lot in the middle that you could do great stuff with, if the film and publishing companies got together and said ‘your rights, my rights, lets put them together and do something amazing on YouTube, with in-flight entertainment, or on tablet devices’. But in many cases, they look across suspiciously at each and don’t speak to each other, so that stuff in the middle drops through. Pottermore is about doing all of those things in the middle.”

Link to the rest at FutureBook

From NBC News:

Thanks to J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, there are legions of children (and adults) around the world who fervently wish they weren’t the Muggles that they are.

. . . .

 

Enter video games. A number of Harry Potter video game spin-offs have tried to do what the Harry Potter books can not: Turn us boring magic-free humans into powerful student sorcerers (at least in our living rooms and on our TVs). Alas, most of the Harry Potter games have been mediocre, putting players into the shoes of Harry, Hermione and Ron so we can try to relive adventures we already know.

But now J.K. Rowling herself has gotten involved in a new kind of … well … perhaps game isn’t quite the right word for the ”Book of Spells.”

The “Book of Spells” —  written in part by Rowling —  is the first augmented reality book/game hybrid to arrive for the new Wonderbook from Sony, which launched this week. Wonderbook is, as the name suggests, a book —  a real-world book that you use in conjunction with your PlayStation 3 game machine, a PlayStation Eye camera and a PlayStation Move motion controller.

Link to the rest at NBC News and thanks to Kat for the tip.

From The National Post:

Sarah MacLachlan remembers her first e-reader. It was the Rocket eBook, which lifted off in 1998 and soon crashed back to earth. Although the device never caught on, MacLachlan, then a VP at Publisher’s Group West, ever so briefly glimpsed the future.

“I gave the Rocket eBook to my then nine-year-old daughter,” recalls MacLachlan, now the president and publisher of House of Anansi Press. “They had already loaded onto it Alice in Wonderland. And she read all of [it] on the Rocket eBook. And it didn’t phase her one bit. And I thought, well, that’s interesting …

“I will admit to not thinking it would take off in the way it ultimately has,” she adds.

. . . .

But how to harness this? That’s something Anansi is still figuring out. On a recent Friday morning, members of the Anansi brain trust — MacLachlan, editor Jared Bland and Erin Mallory, the company’s manager, cross-media group — meet with Jeffrey Remedios and David Harris, the president and co-founder and vice-president of marketing and business development, respectively, of Toronto indie music label Arts & Crafts, to discuss ways the two companies could work together on digital initiatives.

“There’s probably some learned lessons that we could try to distill and share with you,” Remedios says. “Napster came in in ’99 and completely disrupted the music industry. The music industry’s reaction was to try to sue Napster out of business. It took from ’99 until April ’03 for the industry to actually have an economically driven response to the mp3, and that was through Apple.”

“I think the difference between what happened with music and what is happening with books is that we did sort of learn from music,” MacLachlan says.

. . . .

Since many Anansi’s books were acquired before the existence of e-readers, and therefore before the existence of digital rights, they’ve had to negotiate with authors throughout the process. Digital rights, says Matt Williams, the company’s vice-president of publishing operations, only began to appear in contracts around the turn of the century. “There are a couple of authors … who have not given us e-book rights,” he says.

. . . .

Mallory envisions transforming the print product into something with audio, video and photographic slide shows. “A companion piece to the print edition, rather than a strict replication,” she says.

“What would you price a product like that?” Harris asks.

“The Northwords pieces, as a compilation — there were five pieces — is $4.99,” MacLachlan says.

. . . .

Digital revenues at Anansi are growing. Last year, e-books accounted for 8% of sales. “So far in 2012, we’re running about double that — 16% of so,” Williams says. “For a bestseller like The Sisters Brothers that percentage is slightly higher, in that case about 19%.” A recently-published study by BookNet Canada revealed that e-books now account for approximately 16% of the Canadian market.

Of digital sales, they sell the most e-books through Kobo, which was launched by Indigo in 2009 but is now owned by Japanese conglomerate Rakuten. Amazon’s Kindle does not have a Canadian store, though MacLachlan wouldn’t oppose one: “I think it would be good if they started a store. And I probably will be villified for having said so. I think the more, the merrier.”

Link to the rest at The National Post

From The Wall Street Journal:

Last Monday, David Mitchell’s eight-year-old novel “Cloud Atlas” was ranked 2,509 on Amazon.com Inc.’s best seller list. On Friday, it was No. 7.

The surge of sales was thanks to a trailer for a film version of the novel that debuted on Apple Inc’s website Thursday, combined with the power of social media.

“Almost as soon as the trailer went up, we saw chatter on Twitter and sales on Amazon really jumped,” said Jane von Mehren, publisher of trade paperbacks for the Random House Publishing Group, a unit of Bertelsmann AG’s Random House Inc.

. . . .

To promote the film, the studio unveiled a trailer on Apple’s iTunes movie trailers page early Thursday morning. Running nearly six minutes, the trailer features scenes from the movie in a bid to explain the complicated plot. The trailer got picked up by numerous other websites, says Warner Bros., making it difficult to get an accurate count of how many viewers actually saw it.

. . . .

There will also be an enhanced digital book edition of “Cloud Atlas” that will be slightly more expensive than the $11.99 e-book now on sale and which will feature movie-related extras.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire)

From A New Kind of Book:

Most ebook experiments do a better job of showing off our devices rather than solving specific reader problems. We get video extras, web links, piped in Twitter feeds. Problem is, these “enhancements” often answer the wrong question: what can we add? In an age of Information Overload, readers don’t need more; they need help.

. . . .

Rather than starting from what the iPad or EPUB 3 makes possible, we should instead think about where print fails to solve readers’ needs. By keeping a simple question in mind regarding any enhancement — what’s it for? — I think we can create digital books that are superior to print in some really tangible ways.

. . . .

When readers encounter terms they don’t fully understand — melody, histogram, mothers-in-law — comprehension suffers. The best solution, of course, is writing that’s clear and engaging. But figuring how much detail to provide is tough. So we often use presentation tools like sidebars and glossaries to aid those who need extra guidance. But think about the distraction we impose on a reader’s flow when a book forces her to leave the main text and go elsewhere. A simple, unobtrusively designed pop-up box is a great alternative. It’s guidance at the point of need.

. . . .

A key part of understanding a book’s meaning lies in remembering what the text says. We draw conclusions and pass judgements only when we’re able to stash away mental nuggets: a character’s actions, events in a country’s history, and so on.

But reading today is fraught with distractions. Maintaining focus and sustaining attention is tough. Even our reading schedules are a problem. We start books, put them down for two days, and then have a hard time recalling characters and concepts when we return. Sure, in an ideal world you’d simply concentrate more closely and take careful notes. But we don’t live in an ideal world.

Why not, instead, think about instrumenting books so they help us remember? A year or so ago I roughed out an idea I called “Character Notes”: brief character summaries, available at a tap and just as quickly dismissible.

. . . .

It’s also worth thinking about designing books that expand and contract in response to how much time a reader has. In other words, think about providing an executive summary for readers who want a quick take versus the unabridged edition for those ready to do a deep dive.

For example, what if I’m interested in Kevin Kelly’sWhat Technology Wants. But if the full book requires something like 15 or 20 hours of reading, perhaps that’s time I don’t have. Here’s where a book that presents multiple versions of itself could be really useful.

. . . .

Citia extracts a book’s key concepts and uses a nice visual layout to let readers explore the work in a way that interests them. So now you’ve got a chance to get to know Kevin’s ideas in something like two hours.

Link to the rest at A New Kind of Book

Hi all,

Looks interesting.  Unfortunately I can only post the link, not the video:

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/7443946-google-unveils-new-tablet-at-sf-io-conference/#.T-tmvMUIvME.email

–  Julia Barrett

Two interesting things popped up on my radar recently, both concerning turning books into something more than just passive words on a pagr. The first is from Nathan Bransford:

When we talk about e-books, we mainly think of them as rough, imperfect translations of a paper book. The illustrations within a paper book go straight into the e-book,  and while interactive e-books exist and offer some intriguing potential, they haven’t yet gone mainstream….

Now it’s black and white that’s the novelty. It’s a nostalgic throwback. And sure, many of us love old movies, but it would have seemed strange if James Cameron had tried to make Avatar in black and white.
There is a world of possibilities afforded by the format of e-books on tablets. Books could be colorful, interactive, three dimensional. Imagine the ease of a hyperlinked choose your own adventure novel (no more having every finger stuck in the page) or instructional videos within a cookbook. A lot of this already exists on tablets. Who knows what’s next?

Link to the rest at Are Non-Interactive Books Going to Be the Black & White Movies of the Future?

The second was  survey from SOHO Press asking Would you buy an e-book with a soundtrack?

I tend to be old fashioned and like my books to be, well, books. If I was interactivity, well, that’s why I have other toys. What do you think? And how did you answer the survey?

This article provided by guest blogger Kat Sheridan, who is thrilled that PG is planning to get some much needed R&R, while providing me with a perfectly legitimate excuse to surf the interwebz and avoid the writing cave!