Unfulfilled Promise of e-books Offers Lessons for News Organizations (Poynter)
My disappointing experience offers a lesson for news organizations that are considering selling e-books because its shows how legacy media is still thinking like … legacy media.
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B&N Seeks Kid’s Nominations for ‘My Favourite Teacher’ Contest (GalleyCat)
Middle school and high school students can nominate their teacher the My Favorite Teacher Contest at Barnes & Noble.
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Showrooming Doesn’t Mean the End of Brick and Mortar Retail (GigaOM)
A new study aims to bust a few assumptions surrounding the threat of “showrooming” and the challenges faced by traditional retailers in responding to mobile shoppers.
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JK Rowling to Write New Film Series Set in World of Harry Potter (Bookriot)
J.K. Rowling has agreed to write a series (!) of films set in the world of Harry Potter. Apparently the films will be based on a textbook used at Hogwarts, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and will follow the adventures of that book’s fictional author Newt Scamander.
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Kindle Daily Deal: A Place Beyond Courage (and 3 others)
Re the unfulfilled promise of eBooks (Poynter), Bill Adair makes some excellent points but I wondered why he placed all of the blame on the publishers when authors may be just as culpable. How many authors really think beyond words? Why should things like audio and video be added by publishers after the author has submitted the words? Shouldn’t the authorial process have a greater degree of integration than that? I’d think that many authors, seeing the potential of such add-ons to change the meaning and feel of their words, would want to be heavily involved in such decisions.
Normally, this post might not have drawn me in but I’ve been exploring the ePub 3 test suite using Readium, a Chrome extension developed by IDPF and partners. As I looked at all of these features, I could not help but be impressed by the vastly greater pallet that an author might select from as he or she seeks to inform or entertain.
Read more about and download the ePub 3 test suite here: https://github.com/mgylling/epub-testsuite
… and download the Readium extension for Chrome here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/fepbnnnkkadjhjahcafoaglimekefifl
I agree with you, Frank. I think many authors still cling to this ideal of only having to do the writing, and I can’t think of a single other career that functions that way. I am a teacher and between staff meetings, playground duty, lunch supervision and so on, easily a quarter of my day is taken up by non-teaching tasks. Writers who want to just write for fun are welcome to do so of course, but I think writers who want a career will increasingly have to gain professional skills (or outsource them to someone else) in PR, social media usage, basic HTML for proofing ePub galleys, and so on.