Web Development

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

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,

What's your strategy to get your content discovered and read? Most publishers follow the "if you build it, they will come" philosophy. Many of those same publishers won't be around in a few years.

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.

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.

Futurist Friday is a monthly Google Hangout where our Futurists discuss the future of the book and the trends that are reshaping it. Join the conversation live!

Today readers have more power than ever. Not only are publishers turning to their audiences to fund major projects, but they also look to consumers for feedback and help in creating the next bestseller. It's called crowdsourcing, and it has been growing in popularity as social publishing sites continue to thrive. For example, on Scribd, readers discover and discuss books from a massive digital library of bestsellers and self-published works, while on Medium, shorter articles are published by users, collaboratively edited, and ranked by popularity. Both platforms allow users to make comments on the work. Crowdsourcing gives readers a voice, but it also creates a buzz for the author's work and an audience ready to receive it.

Smashwords today unveiled our first major website redesign since our launch in 2008. We made hundreds of changes large and small.  We also made technical changes behind the scenes that will lay the groundwork for us to introduce many new tools and features for authors and readers alike in 2014. 

Among the highlights of the redesign:
The Smashwords home page - We doubled the number of books listed on the Smashwords home page from ten to 20, added 27 new book category filters to increase discoverability, added live stats

Why do we continue trying to mimic the print version when that same content is presented digitally? Why do app developers marvel at how good a job they've done simulating the print experience on-screen? We still live in a world where animated page-flips are a basic feature for many popular content consumption apps and services. Are we really that simple-minded that we can't figure out new user interfaces and ways to navigate content? I'm reminded of this terrific parody of how hard it was to move from scrolls to books.

When the Best Books of 2013 are listed, the most important may not make the cut. That's because the most exciting literary innovation of the year is not a book at all, but a video game for iPad and iPhone. Device 6 is a metaphysical thriller in which the world is made almost entirely from words. Playing it is like reading a book-except, in this book, the words veer off in unexpected directions, rather than progressing in orderly fashion down the page.