Craig Mod, advisor to Medium.com and other start-ups, as well as a writer and former designer for Flipboard, delivered The Yale Publishing Course Keynote on Sunday night. The official title of the talk was "An Equilibrium in Digital Publishing?: Have We Hit a Point of Stasis For the Immediate Future of the book?", but the sub-text (or warning to start-ups) was simply: "'Beat Amazon!' is Stupid!"
Instead of concentrating on "beating Amazon" (which isn't bloody likely in Mod's view), publishers - indeed, any and all who are interested in keeping publishing aliveCraig Mod
We have our running shoes on today, day 1 of our Book Expo experience, as we race back and forth between two compelling events packed with content: IDPF
Digital Book 2013 and Publishers Launch. My colleague Brian Howard and I have each gathered snippets of wisdom to share with our readers from presentations we have heard today.
In a morning session at IDPF, Richard Nash talked about the book (ebook, that is) as algorithm vs. the book as data. As far as data, he says, the problem we face is abundance. He cites cognitive psychologists who study what our brains do when we read and it turns out what we do is we imagine ourselves doing the action we reading about. A novel, says Nash, is a novel is a program that runs inside the reader.
I decided to wait a few days before writing about Amazon's acquisition of Goodreads. I wanted to let the dust settle before weighing in with my own opinion. Now that I've had some time to mull it over, here's what I think: This has the potential to be a game-changer that could be the next, and possibly final, nail in the coffins of other ebook retailers...but only if Amazon actually does something with the Goodreads platform.
PressBooks founder Hugh McGuire refers to his company as “the indie rock band of ebooks startups,” which is why, unless you’ve been watching PandoDaily really closely, you wouldn’t have seen much of it in the media.
Today, just like an indie band that relies on its fan base for its survival, two-year-old PressBooks has announced that it is making its free book publishing software open source. McGuire, a Montreal-based entrepreneur who also founded crowdsourced audiobooks publisher Librivox, hopes that third-party developers can help PressBooks expand the meaning and utility of ebooks.
Craig Mod, a writer and designer who was part of the original Flipboard app design team, has written a very interesting discussion of what book covers were originally meant to do, and what to do with “covers” in the age of the e-book. It’s a very long and thoughtful piece (with footnotes), and points out [...]
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