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29 Dec 2011

5 eBook Apps that Amazon and Apple Will Fear
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How do you autograph an ebook?

by Daedalus Howell

Dec 29, 2011 - 03:40 PM

Daedalus Howell

Given Amazon’s pre-Christmas blitz and Apple’s prowess with any object they care to precede with a lowercase “i,” there’s a significant chance that you’re either reading this on a Kindle or an iPad. Dozens of e-reading devices have proliferated in the market. Even brick-and-mortar stores like Barnes and Noble proffer a book device some marketing type convinced them to call a “Nook,” which sounds more like a place one might have breakfast or a word you’d repeat three times to summon the ghost of Curly from the Three Stooges.

If you’re presently swiping and hyping the written word on your shiny new e-reader, let me personally welcome you to the 21st century. You’re evolution from pulp to pixel is not only saving the backs of hacks but some trees as well. But don’t worry, your media diet won’t suffer for lack of roughage. There will be much to chew on, from breathless editorials eulogizing the passing of print to the inclusion of paperboys on the endangered species list.

It’s notable that in 2011, Kindle ebook sales overtook those of traditional printed books at Amazon. In an unmarked grave somewhere in Mainz, Germany, a man named Gutenberg is beginning to turn. Though this might betoken a critical shift in how we read books, it also changes how we handle books – or, for that matter, mishandle books – now that they’ve gone from physical objects to merely data on an expensive device.

For example, how do you burn an ebook without having to visit the Apple Store afterward to replace your beloved iPad? There should be an app for that. In fact, there are several apps waiting to be born into this brave new world of reading without paper (it’s when we start reading without words that we should worry).

Here are my prospective “5 eBook Apps that Amazon and Apple Fear:”

1. As mentioned: The ebook-burning app. This app allows you (or the fascist regime you live under) to “burn” your ebooks by erasing their data with virtual fire without harming your device. As the author of a forthcoming ebook, I invite my critics to purchase and “burn” as many books as they wish. Seriously, go big – then watch your money burn a hole in my pocket.

2. An autograph app. There’s nothing sadder than watching a fanboy trying to wipe Neil Gaiman’s scrawl off an iPad 2. Yes, you can effectively tattoo your tablet with a Sharpie but it makes using it similar to wearing glasses that have been tagged with graffiti (attention, “cool hunters,” this could be a hot trend for 2012).

3. An overdue library book app. Many libraries now lend ebooks but unlike printed books they don’t need to be returned, the data just evaporates from your device – as does the library’s revenue stream in overdue fees. Using geo-location to virtually hide your borrowed ebook somewhere in your house, office, car, etc., the library can charge your credit card until you find it. If you find it.

4. Smarty Pants eBook Covers. Change lowbrow Stephen King into highbrow Albert Camus with a mere tap of this app, which will stock your virtual bookshelf with a pile of “trophy” books that make you look smarter than you are.

5. The Used College Textbook app. This app adds a yellow “used” sticker to the cover of your selected ebook, covers its text with erroneous notes and charges your parents and extra $50 for the privilege.

• • •

Daedalus Howell’s "I Heart Sonoma: How to Live & Drink in Wine Country" is coming to an ereader near you in January. Learn more at FMRL.com.

via sonomanews.com
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29 Dec 2011

The Rise of the eBook
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Sure, 2011 saw a congressman inadvertently tweet his boner to the masses, Steve Jobs' permanent departure from Apple, and Amazon's overheated foray into the tablet market. The media and tech news of 2011 that will likely have the most enduring effect on our culture, however, is the rise of the e-book.

The Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group released a report earlier this year that indicated e-book sales in 2010 were 114 million. When sales data for 2011 rolls in, I expect it to have doubled.

Thank the iPad and the Kindle. Though e-books existed in various form long before tablet devices, the sales for Apple's iPad (about 25 million sold by June of 2011) and Amazon's Kindle Fire (reportedly selling 1 million a week) suggest cultural ubiquity.

Moreover, these guys are ruthless. Amazon recently raised the ire of indie booksellers and their patrons with its price-check shopping app, which enables consumers to scan a barcode and compare the prices of goods at brick and mortar stores with Amazon's prices. This in itself wasn't necessarily offensive; it was the 5 percent discount offered by Amazon for choosing to purchase from the online juggernaut instead of Main Street.

Predictably, an "Occupy Amazon" movement ensued among booksellers, which might seem like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. E-books now account for about 20 percent of all book sales, which is remarkable when one considers that movable-type press was created 561 years ago and the iPad only two years ago. At that rate of disruption, e-books will entirely supplant printed books within the decade. Real life, of course, doesn't work this way. But still, the numbers are staggering.

Consider this: in 2011, a mere four years after the introduction of its first Kindles, Amazon reported that e-book sales have surpassed those of printed books. Even sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury, who's been publicly skeptical about digital media (e-books "smell like burned fuel," he famously opined to the New York Times) has finally permitted Fahrenheit 451 to be released as an e-book.

Of course, the revolution has not been without its casualties—like, perhaps, fair trade. The European Commission recently opened formal antitrust proceedings to "investigate whether international publishers" including Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Penguin, have engaged in "anti-competitive practices affecting the sale of e-books in the European Economic Area, in breach of EU antitrust rules." Moreover, they allege Apple may be helping them.

Be assured, the outcome of this investigation is coming soon to an e-book near you.

Daedalus Howell's e-book 'I Heart Sonoma: How to Live and Drink in Wine Country' comes out in late January.

via bohemian.com
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18 Oct 2011

Kindle Aflame
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Nearly 60 years ago, sci-fi scribe Ray Bradbury put the "lit" in literature when he opened his dystopian exploration of censorship Fahrenheit 451 with the memorable line "It was a pleasure to burn." In the classic fable of a world without books, "firemen" of the future pump kerosene onto pulp, thus keeping dangerous ideas from impressionable minds. (In an ironic turn, Bradbury's book was eventually banned itself.) Now where there's smoke, there's also Amazon's latest addition of its e-reader line of products, the Kindle Fire.

Unlike those in Bradbury's tome, Amazon's CEO Jeff Bezos isn't trying to do away with the dissemination of ideas so much as make it easier, or at least make easy money while making it easier, while obviating the need for print editions. Lauded as the first serious rival to Apple's iPad, the Kindle Fire is also a tablet device, competitively priced at around $200, about half the price of an entry-level iPad. This has led some to conjecture that Amazon's device is a loss-leader in the same manner that low mobile-phone prices are subsidized by their calling plans. If this is true, the use of ye olde "give them the razor, sell them the blades" business model suggests that once again content is king.

Using 2010 sales data from major publishing houses, last March, Publishers Weekly released a study that indicated that ebooks are turning as many heads as digital pages. "Many top-selling authors on the 2010 hardcover chart are among the e-book top-sellers, including Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, with electronic sales of 775,000 compared to 1.9 million in print," wrote Daisy Maryles. This bodes well not only for the usual suspects of bestsellers lists but for newbies, who aren't often invited to the print party.

The advantages of e-book publishing are manifold—it's cheap, the barrier to entry is low and there's no dearth of old and new content flooding into the ubiquitous ePub format. A universal electronic text platform, ePub was devised by the International Digital Publishing Forum as a "reflowable" device "agnostic" ebook standard, meaning it formats itself to whatever format one uses, from an Apple iOS device to Google's Android or anything in between. It's the mp3 of books.

Given its price point and symbiotic relationship with the world's largest bookseller, the Kindle Fire and its e-reader brethren are both fanning the flames of retail-reading and hosing some much-welcomed kerosene onto the publishing biz. Surely, print die-hards will balk at the notion of reading on a digital device, but as Robert Frost wrote, "I hold with those who favor fire."
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9 Jun 2011

iCloudius: Apple's Man in the Sky
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When it rains it pours for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The lauded gadget guru qua rainmaker came out of medical leave to formally introduce attendees of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to a bevy of new products, among them the much anticipated announcement of the iCloud. Apple’s own spin on so-called cloud-computing, which, sans the weather whimsy, simply refers to information stored in remote servers and accessible via your device of choice anywhere there is a decent Internet connection. Though the concept isn’t new (telephone companies once used the metaphor to describe their early forays into “virtual private networks”) its implementation in tech quarters gained real momentum in 2006 when Amazon introduced its Elastic Compute Cloud, a service that obviated the need for expensive server systems and paved the way for a bevy of start-ups. It was Google, however, that brought the cloud to civilians with its suite of document creation tools (aimed squarely at Microsoft’s bread and butter). Now, with iCloud, Apple has also entered the consumer cloud market, touting synchonization of one’s digital data – docs, email, calendars, iTunes library, videos and plans for world domination, between one’s MacBook, iPad, iPhone and beyond. And it’s free. Heretofore, one’s computer was like the sun in a private digital solar system around which all other devices orbited and depended for data (through increasingly arcane syncronization rituals). Conceptually, iCloud collapses this solar system into a single celestial body accessible, anywhere, anytime by whatever piece of gear happens to be in your hand. It’s as if you’re opening a wormhole into the fabric of your virtual universe andt hough other companies offer aspects this “unified field theory of your stuff online,” including Amazon’s “Cloud Drive” and Google’s Gmail inbox (sort of), none offers total integration of everything in a single service that’s hardware-agnostic. This is the crux of Jobs’ plan, “demoting” the “PC” and even his own company’s iconic Mac line to mere, as he explained, “devices.” Of course, to those who’ve eluded induction into the cult of Apple, the company’s products have always been mere devices. For true believers, however, they’re tantamount to religious talismans that signify belief in a higher being – namely Jobs. His conceptual downgrading of his stock and trade might prove as revelatory a moment in the history of personal computing as Macintosh did for user-experience in the early 80s. It takes the way we deal with data, the ones and zeroes that comprise much of our quotidian experience not to mention whole flanks of our self-concept and moves them from the concrete to the abstract, from “there” to “everywhere,” in a manner analogous to going from the corporeal to the spiritual (which, by some accounts, Jobs might be soon doing). The device, like the body, is but a vessel. “We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud,” Jobs beamed. It’s not hard to imagine him hovering there too – lightning bolt in hand.
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4 Nov 2010

Buzzy Logic: Jail House Rock + Facebook + Amazon = Book Deal
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When it comes to publishing a memoir, the odds of obtaining an agent, bringing a book to market and selling it within one’s lifetime whilst the publishing industry endures seismic change, are astronomical. Local music scene fixture Buzzy Martin, however, aimed for the stars (and scored) by doing precisely none of the above. Don't Shoot! I'm the Guitar Man

, recounts an odyssey that began with Martin teaching music to at-risk kids to a stint playing tunes for hardboiled cons at San Quentin. Throughout, he brought back life lessons he shared with his young pupils – think Scared Straight with power chords. This very paper applauded the book as “a compelling portrait of the transformative power of music and of the impact that it can make on men from drastically different walks of life” and recommended highly. Berkeley, an imprint of publishing juggernaut Penguin, released Martin’s book in a trade paperback edition last month. A film adaptation is underway. Martin’s accomplishment is interesting on several levels, not least of which because the wild-haired and mustachioed guitarist never intended on being a writer. He wanted to be a rock star. “That never happened and I have to cop to that and that’s okay but what did happen is that I’m changing the world in my own way.” More specifically, Martin is changing the worlds of those he mentors through music and now words. Martin’s commitment to healing broken souls through music is total and he’s more inclined to discuss the issues faced by incarcerated kids than the vicissitudes of the publishing industry. However, his experience in this realm is an object lesson in persistence, friendship and belief in oneself – attributes he tries to awaken in his students. This is how he did it: After afternoons playing ZZ Top covers sand stewing in the existential experience of jailed felons, Martin would recount his experiences into a tape recorder to decompress during his commute home. Being computer-averse at the time, Martin later transcribed the six resulting 90-minute tapes by hand and later coaxed his wife into keying his words into a word processor. Thereafter, Martin began working the material into a cogent narrative – writing and rewriting until he “had what I didn’t realize was called a manuscript.” With little notion how to proceed, Martin sought publishing advice from staffers at Copperfield’s Books who suggested he self-publish. With his wife’s continued assistance, he did. He then proceeded on an ill-fated campaign to place the book in the hands of juvenile hall inmates, which he perceived as his target audience. “The only juvenile hall director I talked to said ‘Don'’ ever call me again, these kids are my fucking retirement, I’m not going to read your goddamn book’ and that was it,” said Martin. Mike Grabowski, a professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Santa Rosa Junior College, had a markedly different response and made Martin’s self-published book required reading. “That was the first ‘yes,’” said Martin. It only takes one. If the so-called “vanity press” finds some authors gazing fondly at themselves in the mirror, Buzzy Martin is the opposite – he went through the looking glass. When Martin finally got hip to Facebook he used it to connect to everyone from guitar players (Toto’s Steve Lukather among them) to criminal justice professionals and asked each if they would accept a copy of the self-published tome and review it on Amazon. The approbations rolled in. Meanwhile, a friend’s wife at Penguin Books gifted a copy to a colleague who emailed Martin some kind words about the work. Contemporaneously, Martin pursued a contact in San Francisco’s juvenile court system who learned had quit and moved into a position at Prodigy Motion Pictures. She recognized the potential of Martin’s story, which also sparked with company founder Ray Robinson, which Martin shared with Penguin. He was offered a contract in a matter of days. The film contract followed shortly thereafter. Don't Shoot! I'm the Guitar Man

is available in 40 countries. It’s first printing sold out in six days. The movie is coming soon to theater near you. Originally published in the North Bay Bohemian.
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22 Feb 2010

From Kindling to Kindle
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Will the future of reading affect the future of writing?

James Joyce, it is said, became so disgruntled while drafting his first novel that he threw it on the fire. His girlfriend rescued the work-in-progress from the flames, and the subsequent rewrite became A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Such acts of literary self-immolation and redemption could only occur in our once-analog world, when the permanence of erasure moved only as fast as fire. These days, the irreversible deletion of one's work is a mere keystroke away. That said, it seems would-be authors are more apt to hit the "publish" key on their blogs than the "delete" key on their magnum opus. Future literary historians will decide whether this has been a positive trend for the world of letters. Of the 100 million–plus blogs in existence, it's unclear how many purport to be literature, let alone how many actually are. Nevertheless, entire industries have arisen to support the notion one's blog could be a book, turning aspirants into authors with a click and credit card—at least for now. Print-on-demand services like San Francisco–based Blurb will print the next Joyce a "Blog Book" for a percentage of that book's sale to the author or his readers, in as many or as few copies as desired. Blurb has even automated the process with a program that "slurps" a blog's content from its online habitué and excretes it in the shape of a book when ordered online. Likewise, online retail juggernaut Amazon provides a similar service, CreateSpace, an on-demand clearinghouse for everything DIY, from books to DVDs. It is a micro-mogul's mecca for the manufacture of media. Now print-on-demand might prove to be a transitional technology the same way DVDs are giving way to digital downloads. Amazon claims 35 percent of its book sales are downloads for its Kindle "wireless reading device." In March, cult brand Apple will overshoot the electronic book fray with the iPad, which aggregates print, video and music enjoyment into a single, sexy device. Be assured, publishers and independent authors alike are readying their wares for Apple's latest game-changer, which is an overgrown iPhone sans telephony. But who wants to take a call while in the thrall of a warm, glowing piece of technology anyway? It's like a vibrator for the mind, and a throng of independent content producers hopes to get you off. In the olden days of digital reading, circa 2000, premium content was scarce. Beyond being deskbound, the only texts available seemed to be classics poached from the public domain, Joyce included. Occasional experiments in electronic-book marketing came and went, with business ebooks and white papers seeming most prevalent. The transformation of print-to-pixel was a trickle with publishers wary or unsure of the medium, though pixel-to-print releases were garnering wider appeal and stoking dreams of digital discovery for thousands of would-be authors (blog-borne Julie/Julia is a popular example). Publisher HarperCollins even created Authonomy, an online authors community from which it occasionally cherry-picks and publishes material vetted by the crowd. Now, however, it seems a new type of author is poised to emerge, one tailored to the new medium literally at hand, whose work will bypass traditional publishers and appear in the iTunes store, forsaking the bookshelf entirely. Pictures in printed books must have once been a novelty—moving pictures embedded in the text of your iPad is an inevitability, not to mention audio, three-dimensional maps, animated sidebars and other electronic illuminations. How will this amplify or diminish storytelling as we know it? A fear is that mutant transmedia hybrids might obviate established forms or at least leave them marginalized in the market in which a bestseller and killer app are one and the same. What seems most uncertain is whether how we read will affect how we write. This will have to be determined in the field, for not even a visionary such as Joyce could have anticipated someone cuddling up with his words "In the silence their dark fire kindled the dusk into a tawny glow" from the glow of a tawny Kindle.
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