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Exploring iPad Typography With Bibliotype for WordPress

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Bibliotype A few weeks ago, book designer Craig Mod released Bibliotype, an HTML template system that designers can use to explore typography on the iPad.

Bibliotype is a thoughtful approach to designing typography for long-form reading on tablet devices. The template includes support for several viewing distances, portriat and landscape orientations, and a hyphenation library, among other features.

If you’re a book designer looking to experiment with typography on tablet devices, Bibliotype will jump start your design process.

What’s missing from Bibliotype is a way for designers to easily work with real content. If only there was some way to connect Bibliotype to a light-weight, user-friendly, content management system.

Well, now there is. Presenting Bibliotype for WordPress.

As a WordPress theme, Bibliotype becomes a framework for publishing beautifully designed books on the web for consumption on tablets.

Point your iPad here to see the theme in action. Or download BiblioType for WordPress and start designing your own web-based book.

Event Alert:

I’ll be speaking about Open, Webby Book Publishing Systems at tools at O’Reilly Media’s Tools Of Change conference next week in New York City. Registration is still open, but probably not for long. The event sells out every year. If you’re planning on going register today and use the Medialoper code toc11med to save 15%.

eBooks: Going Digital…The Hard Way

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Book SaverWhile the news from CES last week buzzed with updates about the latest Android tablets and stories of self-navigating iPad robots, a new product with the potential to further disrupt the already troubled book business went largely unnoticed.

The ION Book Saver is a new scanning system designed to convert print books into eBooks at a rate of two facing pages per second. It’s fast. It’s cheap. And it has some in the publishing industry wondering if it’s a precursor to a new class of product that will one day enable consumers to digitize their book collections in much the same way they ripped their CD collections.
[Read more…] about eBooks: Going Digital…The Hard Way

Medialoper’s Guide to Unicorn Watching

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Unicorn watching tips Forget the Super Bowl. Tomorrow is The Big Game.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a Blackberry, you’re aware that tomorrow is the day that Apple unveils its highly anticipated new product. After nearly three years of speculation, tomorrow is the day we all get to see…the Unicorn.

Rumors abound about the alleged capabilities of this mythical beast. Some say that it can fly. Others have suggested that it’s invisible. Those same people insist that it’s already here and we just can’t see it yet. There is a rumor floating around the net theorizing that tomorrow morning when Steve Jobs walks onto the stage to introduce us to his new creation, a shiny new Apple tablet will materialize in each of our homes. These invisible unicorns have apparently been hiding in the corner for months, just waiting for the right moment to come out and meet us.

Steve Ballmer will bow down to this supernatural new technology. Pat Robertson will condemn it as satanic. Newt Gingrich will buy three.

As for you and me? Who knows. Whether or not this “revolutionary” new product actually transforms our lives in the ways that we’ve been lead to believe it might, depends on any number of things.

Here are a few of the things I’ll be looking for to determine whether the Apple tablet turns out to be a unicorn or a duck-billed platypus. [Read more…] about Medialoper’s Guide to Unicorn Watching

How the Apple Tablet Will Help Amazon Dominate the eBook Market

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After two years of non-stop rumors and wild speculation the Mythical Apple Tablet (aka the Unicorn) will apparently become a reality later this month.

Among other things, the Unicorn is expected to single handedly (hoofedly?) save newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, while simultaneously killing Amazon’s Kindle. That’s a tall order for a device that no one outside of Apple has actually seen yet. These expectations are not surprising considering the amount of wishful thinking that has been projected onto the device by print industry insiders desperate for salvation in a world that is increasingly turning digital.

I have no intention of adding to the ill-informed speculation about the Unicorn’s specifications or magickal capabilities. Instead, I’d like to take a moment to dissect the claim that an Apple tablet will somehow kill the Kindle.

The logic seems to be that Apple’s tablet will provide a superior user experience to the Kindle (a reasonable assumption), and that consumers will favor a multi-purpose device over a dedicated reading device (probably true). As a result, the tablet is expected to become the digital reading device of choice. In other words, the Kindle is toast!

Well, maybe. [Read more…] about How the Apple Tablet Will Help Amazon Dominate the eBook Market

Book Piracy Is on the Decline

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Finally, some good news for publishers.

All year we’ve been hearing predictions that the book business is on its death bed — about to be completely transformed by ebooks, then eaten alive by pirates. Yet, despite recent reports to the contrary it turns out that book piracy is on the decline.

Based on piracy loss estimates published by the International Intellectual Property Alliance and generated by the Association of American Publishers, book piracy dropped over 13% between 2005 and 2007 (the most recent year that data is available).

The numbers look like this:
[Read more…] about Book Piracy Is on the Decline

Is Book Sharing Really a Threat to Publishing?

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Last week bookseller Barnes and Noble unveiled the Nook, its long-awaited eReading device. Although ill-named, the Nook is a worthy competitor to the Kindle, offering a number of features not found on the Amazon device, including LendMe, a feature that allows for controlled sharing of ebooks. While the sharing feature comes with a number of limitations, it would appear to be a small but important step towards making DRM-restricted content slightly more flexible for consumers. There’s just one problem — publishers want no part of the Nook’s LendMe feature.

Publishers Lunch reported last week (registration required) that many large publishing houses have indicated that they won’t participate in the LendMe program.

To be clear, the LendMe feature is extremely limited. Books are lent for a maximum of 14 days. And unlike the library, there are no extensions. When a book is lent, the lender loses access, and once the book is returned to the lender it can never be lent again.

So, why are publishers opposed to the Nook’s crippled ebook sharing scheme? As one Unnamed Publishing Executive told Publishers Lunch:

“if publishers agree to lending then every ebook offer now and in the future will come with this consumer feature. Over time, I’m concerned that lending won’t grow the market and in fact could hurt it.”

What Unnamed Publishing Executive seems to fear most is a sense of consumer entitlement. If consumers have the right to share ebooks now, they’ll expect to have that right until the end of time. Never mind the fact that consumers share print books all the time. Since the sharing of books is apparently a bad thing, we can only assume that the ease with which consumers share printed books is a flaw inherent in the print format. Fortunately publishers can correct that flaw in the digital realm through the liberal use of oppressive DRM.

I suppose this worldview shouldn’t come as a surprise. If the history of digital media has taught us one thing it’s that media companies see the digital future as an opportunity to exert extreme control over how consumers use and interact with content.

[Read more…] about Is Book Sharing Really a Threat to Publishing?

TOC Frankfurt Wrap-Up

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In some ways, TOC Frankfurt was like every other TOC conference. The event brought together the usual assortment of publishing professionals, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders to discuss the future of an industry in the midst of a massive transformation. Over the past three years TOC has emerged as the go to source for publishers looking to expose themselves to innovative ideas and the cutting edge technology that is shaping the future of the book business.

TOC Frankfurt differed from previous TOC conferences in a few notable ways, however. First, the event lasted just a single day, rather than the usual three. As a result, attendees got what might best be described as a concentrated dose of the TOC vision. Then there was the fact that the conference was being held in Europe for the first time. The Frankfurt conference had a distinctly more international feel to it than previous TOCs. And finally, there was the post-conference media coverage, some of which was less than flattering.

[Read more…] about TOC Frankfurt Wrap-Up

How To Fight eBook Piracy

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In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism the New York Times has discovered evidence of widespread ebook piracy. Again.

The surprise here is not that the paper has rediscovered piracy for the umpteenth time, but rather that, despite the paper’s many discoveries, it has failed to gain a deeper understanding of the issues surrounding piracy. Instead, the paper chooses to play to the worst fears of the publishing industry, while demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of what motivates consumers of digital media.

NYT columnist Randall Stross theorizes that the widespread availability of pirated ebooks combined with growing consumer adoption of digital reading devices like the Kindle, may ultimately lead to massive piracy of the sort that the music business experienced during the Napster era. Apparently it’s just a matter of time before Kindle owning consumers pirates wake up the fact that they can save 10 bucks by downloading bootlegged ebooks from RapidShare instead of buying direct from Amazon.

The scenario might actually seem plausible if you had no knowledge of either RapidShare or the Kindle. Let’s pause for a moment to compare the ebook acquisition process from both sources:

Kindle:

  1. Find the book you want by searching the store that’s conveniently integrated into your Kindle device.
  2. Press the buy button. Yes, you just spent $9.99. Painless, wasn’t it?
  3. Start reading.

RapidShare:

  1. Find the book you want by searching the… Wait a minute. It turns out that RapidShare has no on-site search engine.
  2. Turn to Google or some other search engine to find the exact URL for the book you want to download. This might take a while, but fortunately pirates have loads of free time.
  3. Once you’ve found the exact URL you’ll discover that you can’t download the file immediately. Instead, you’ll be told that all of the free download slots are in use. You’ll have to try again in two minutes. Repeat this step until a slot opens up (it might be hours, it could be days).
  4. Alternately, consider paying for immediate access. For a mere 6.99€ you can download from RapidShare without waiting. That’s only 20 cents more than the price of the book you’re about to steal. A small price to pay for sticking it to The Man.
  5. Once you’ve downloaded your book you’ll need to find a way to move the file to your Kindle (Whispersync might be convenient, but it’s not the pirate way).
  6. Prepare for the likelihood of some slight formatting problems with your new book. In most cases you’ll be able to figure out the intended meaning of the poorly OCR’d text. And you’ll just have to get used to the page numbers that are embedded in the middle of each page.

If publishers can learn one thing from other forms of digital media, it is the importance of a quality consumer experience. Consumers place a premium on convenience and ease of use. As a result, free is not always the clear choice.

The best way to prevent piracy is by making it easier to buy a product than it is to steal the same product. Despite my many reservations about Kindle’s proprietary DRM, Amazon has made the Kindle book buying experience frictionless. Publishers who fear piracy should work to emulate the Kindle discovery and purchasing process.

Right now the number one tool against ebook piracy isn’t DRM, it’s Whispersync.

Digging Deeper Into Amazon’s Orwellian Moment

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When media historians write the history of DRM they may well devote a whole chapter to the day that Amazon customers awoke to find that their Kindle editions of “1984” had vanished into a memory hole and that Big Brother Bezos had apparently turned George Orwell into an unperson.

You would be hard pressed to invent a more apt or ironic example of the dangers of DRM. Surely this will be the incident that finally raises consumer awareness of the risks involved in buying DRM protected media.

And yet, after digging deeper into this story, I’m not convinced that this was a DRM issue at all. At least, not in the truest sense.

Further, this incident raises a host of interesting rights related issues that have largely gone unexplored in the days since.

Consider the following: [Read more…] about Digging Deeper Into Amazon’s Orwellian Moment

Why Kindle’s DRM Free-for-All Is Bad for Consumers and for Amazon

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The Kindle is popular for a reason.

Amazon has created the most painless ebook experience any consumer could possibly ask for. No other system makes the discovery, purchase, and transfer of ebooks so frictionless. As a result, Kindle has become the standard everyone else in the ebook business will have to match just to compete. So far no one comes close.

But Kindle has a dark side that is starting to emerge with startling regularity.

This past weekend Dan Cohen was surprised to find that he could not re-download some of his Kindle books. After several lengthy exchanges with Amazon customer support Cohen was informed that some (but not all) Kindle books have download limits. Or maybe it’s a limit on the number of devices they can be transferred to. Or it might be both…

To be honest, Amazon’s customer service department isn’t entirely sure of what limits are imposed on DRM protected Kindle books. [Read more…] about Why Kindle’s DRM Free-for-All Is Bad for Consumers and for Amazon