Doubt that ePub can boost the number of books available and help drive down the costs of the publishing industry?
Consider the PDFed presentation that Neil DeYoung of the Hachette Book Group USA, home to bestsellers like Boomsday, gave at the IDPF e-book conference this month. A few of his bullets:
—"Single ISBN (not without controversy)
—Commit more titles to eBook form.
-Pre .epub monthly output about 20 titles a month
–Post .epub monthly output about 35 titles a month
-End of 2008 goal is 100% of all titles that make sense from both Adult and YA lists
—Allows us to convert backlist quicker."
Along the way, the DeYoung presentation noted "consumer confusion between .epub and DRM." Amen! As I see it, the IDPF urgently needs to do an official logo for nonDRMed ePub.The image to the left is one that Travis Alber kindly created for the TeleBlog.
Short of the electric chair, which many a law-and-order zealot still likes, I couldn’t think of a more hated technology than DRM—well, at least among lovers of e-books.
Mobi’s Kindle-like shopping capabilities for wireless: Set for June 2008
Also of interest was a presentation where Martin Görner of Mobipocket talks about an apparently easy and well-integrated way for mobile phones to pick up e-books from stores. So they could be as simple to use as Kindles?
Potentially this feature, available in June 2008 for "all wireless devices" via Mobipocket Reader 6 OTA, could be big. Downloading of read-before-you-buy samples, judging from the screenshot, would appear to be a snap. Can the open source community come up with something as simple for public domain works and nonDRMed commercial titles? I know there are efforts underway, and I suspect that Feedbooks and others behind them are paying plenty of attention to Mobi.
A few details from other presentations
Meanwhile, ahead, I’ll share a few details from some other presentations at the conference and offer links to their PDFs or PPTs:
Garth Conboy
eBook Technologies Inc.
(Good background on ePub—and a call for a transition to ePub for production to be complete in 2008)
Peter Balis
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
(pro-ePub but not always keen on reflowability, right now)
Dawn Bruno
US. Department of Commerce
(provides information for U.S. publishers eying overseas markets)
Willem Endhoven
iRex Technologies BV
(iRex progress report)
Leslie Hulse
HarperCollins Publishers
(seems to want free e-book promos to be DRMed and registration to be required)
Malle Vallik
Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
(online promo tips)
Matt Shatz
Random House
(discussed ad-supported book sites, among other topics)
Mikio Amaya
Papyless Co Ltd.
("the sales of PC eBooks have increased smoothly and reached 58 million U$ in 2006"—with mobile book sales of more than 90 million U$)
Erica Lazzaro
OverDrive Inc.
(disappointing: "DRM is necessary but has legal and market implications"; um, has anyone at OverDrive heard of Baen?…but I liked her concern with the VAT issue)
Andrew Weinstein
Ingram Digital Group
(plays up VitalSource e-reading apps; "scheduled to support secure .epub distribution in Fall 2008")
Scott Cook
codeMantra, conversion house
(said that "Since the release of the Kindle just before Thanksgiving last year, many publishers have seen double digit increases in e-book sales, including renewed interest in downloads [for] the Sony Reader"; also discussed education and accessibility issues)
Sean Devine
CourseSmart
("joint venture of six leading higher education publishers)
Randall Walker MD
WRT Live Ink Reading Technologies
(displays text on screen in new way to increase brain’s ability to process information)
You know, if book publishers rally behind ePub, they could do what the RIAA couldn’t do with Apple: dictate some terms. In other words, they could force Apple to use ePub and not an Apple file format.