The Year of Living Digitally: How e-books have transformed our industry

By John Parsons

6. It should be said that creating tablet-enhanced ebook content is no small undertaking. The chicken-or-egg dilemma facing nonfiction publishers is made worse by the limitations of EPUB version 2, which is meant for simple, linear content, and the slow, fragmented adoption of the multimedia-friendly EPUB3 standard. Multimedia authoring is problematic today, since many of the existing tools are limited to a single platform, as in the case of Apple’s iBooks Author (www.apple.com/ibooks-author).

7. Apple iPad users can read non-iBooks content on each company’s respective reader app, but they must purchase ebooks via the Web, thanks to Apple’s restrictive in-app purchasing requirements.

8. In August, Kobo and the ABA announced a program to promote and sell Kobo ebooks in independent bookstores (bit.ly/PsFctH). However, according to the latest BISG research, Kobo’s ereader app is only installed on 1.8% of respondents’ devices, compared with 52.4% for the Kindle app. Current ownership of “other” e-reading devices, including both Sony and Kobo, is at 3.1%.

9. Patron Profiles; www.patronprofiles.org

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John Parsons

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John Parsons (john@intuideas.com), former Editorial Director of The Seybold Report, is an independent writer, ghostwriter, and editor. He is the co-author of the interactive printed textbook, Introduction to Graphic Communication, on the art, science and business of print, which has been adopted by Ryerson, Arizona State, the University of Houston, and many other schools and vocational training centers. Custom editions of the book are under consideration by major printing companies and franchises for internal training purposes.

Ebook Trends: The Year of Living Digitally