App Development
February 1, 2014 at 7:00 pm
According to Dan Whaley, founder of Hypothes.is, online comments sections are no longer practical. He believes the solution to creating active and functional online commentary lies in open annotation.
January 30, 2014
Swing a cat on the App Store - boots optional - and you'll hit hundreds of rubbish fairytale apps for kids. More grim than Grimm.
One of the publishers to have bucked that trend is Nosy Crow, the British children's publisher that has built its business on a blend of traditional (print) book publishing and a series of critically-acclaimed book-apps.
Its Three Little Pigs, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood show it is perfectly possible to make a fairytale app with craft and care, while ensuring that interactivity
January 29, 2014
A book trailer is a kind of content that supports a book promotional campaign. It started in the late 90s in the US. Since then, the type of content available on video format has become increasingly diverse. When we speak of book trailer, we are doing so more general terms and include audio-visual productions such as teasers, or video-interviews with the author or the publisher, video summaries, video recommendations from readers or literary industry players, etc..
January 28, 2014
Simon and Schuster Children's Books today launched the first fan-driven cover reveal for a UK YA title, for global bestselling author Darren Shan's next novel, Zom-B Mission.
The book, which is the seventh title in the 12-part Zom-B series, will be published on 27th March 2014, but from today fans can take part in revealing the cover by visiting a dedicated website, www.zombreveal.com. Each fan can choose a square to reveal then share the page through their social networks to uncover a portion of the image underneath.
January 27, 2014
Reading the original Oprah Book Club list is like throwing yourself into a dizzying cultural time machine. From Charles Dickens to Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Toni Morrison, her Book Club picks from the platform of her storied ABC television talk show imprinted a new generation of readers with classics, both new and old. When her talk show went away, her Book Club did too after a long 15-year run that spread "The Oprah Effect" across the lucky publishers of roughly 70 books.
January 27, 2014
Arguably, the largest missed opportunity for publishers in the digital revolution is in predictive analytics. Predictive analytics is an algorithm-based science of deciphering captured data to discover probable customer actions. Capturing relevant data is severely limited with printed books as compared to ebooks. Location, device, reader behavior, and demographics (attainable depending on device and app) are just some of the ebook data that can power analytics.
January 20, 2014
New Year's Day saw the launch of 365, a collaboration between Scottish writer James Robertson and Hamish Hamilton, a Penguin imprint. It sounded promising: one 365-word story to be published online every day, with a print collection at the end of the year. I was disappointed to find out Robertson wrote them all last year. The best thing about digital publishing is its immediacy, so it would have been nice to publish the stories as soon as they were written. That way, 365 could have been a gripping
January 20, 2014
A quick Amazon search for vampire titles shows 21,103 Kindle ebook results; on Smashwords, that number was over three thousand. And while sociologists have looked at the cultural phenomenon surrounding the popularity and sexual appeal of vampire lore, one thing is for certain: fans of the genre have not tired of it yet. When Good e-Reader first launched its Indie Author Initiative in 2010 to highlight the stories of authors who opted to try out this "new fangled" self-publishing option,
January 17, 2014
On the surface, it looked like business as usual at this year's Digital Book World conference in New York City earlier this week, with no groundbreaking announcements, no radical plans hatched to transform the book business as we know it. But as always, when publishers convene to discuss the state of the industry, a few ideas emerge.
Teens Not Reading for Fun
Of the news repeated over-and-over again in private conversation, it was that a recent Nielsen Books survey revealed 41% of teenagers aged 13-17 said that they do not read books for fun.
January 15, 2014
For a bunch of rapacious capitalists, the people who start technology companies are strikingly ambivalent about the concept of owning stuff. Silicon Valley would like to replace the practice of owning copies of, say, a song or a movie, with a world where everything's kept on servers that people pay to access. Next up: books. As startups have started offering services inevitably referred to as literary Netflixes (NFLX) or Spotifys, the idea has been gaining momentum. Still, it's getting a mixed reaction at Digital Book World, a publishing industry conference about e-reading.
