Joe Wikert's Digital Content Strategies

Ebook lending vs. ownership

In an earlier article called Free and the medium vs. the message I excerpted liberally from a terrific short ebook by Joshua Gans called Information Wants to Be Shared. (Buy the ebook direct from HBR’s website, use the code ADINFO1 you’ll only pay 99 cents, btw.) I’d like to revisit and excerpt from that title one more time and focus on the subscription model Gans sees for the book industry.

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It’s the brand, stupid!

None of the Big Six are all that interested in creating their own direct channel. They usually say “we already have retail partners…we don’t know how to sell direct and we don’t care to learn.” That’s all true but the real reason they won’t do it, and wouldn’t be successful if they did right now, is because none of them are household brand names.

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The self-publishing book

As we sat in Liza Daly‘s and Keith Fahlgren‘s Books in Browsers presentation many of us wondered why she was wearing an iPhone earbud and mic. Many also noticed her words were being transcribed in a tiny box in the corner of the screen.

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Three questions for…Christian Damke of Skoobe

1. What is Skoobe?

Skoobe is an ebook subscription service for smartphones and tablets featuring fiction and non-fiction trade books. Members can read as many books as they want. There are no out-of-stock titles at Skoobe; every ebook is available always and everywhere. The free app allows you to read extracts of all available books without registration or payment and is also widely used [as a discovery tool] to find new books for later purchase. The membership costs 9.99 Euros per month and is automatically renewed every month. Since our launch in February 2012 we have been consistently among the most downloaded apps in the books category and have been awarded 4.5 stars on average both in the Appstore as well as in Google Play.

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Wiley & O’Reilly Media sign ebook distribution deal

I’ve mentioned before that O’Reilly’s direct ebook channel is an extremely important sales outlet for us. We want our content to be in all stores but the direct channel is pretty much the only one where we can establish an ongoing relationship with readers.

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Free and the medium vs. the message

I wrote a short piece earlier about an interesting ebook from HBR by Joshua Gans. It’s called Information Wants to Be Shared and I’m declaring it the must-read ebook of 2012. If you buy it direct from HBR’s website and use the code ADINFO1 you’ll only pay 99 cents, btw.

I spoke with Joshua and his editor and, true to the promise of the title, they’ve given me permission to share many of the longer excerpts I highlighted while I read the book. This is the first of what will be a two- or three-part series with those highlights.

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The slow pace of ebook innovation

I love this comment from Dave Bricker regarding an earlier post, EPUB 3 facts and forecasts:

Ebook vendors enjoy a closed loop ecosystem. They have millions of reader/customers who are satisfied with EPUB 2 display capabilities and devices. Amazon readers, for example, are largely content with the offerings in the proprietary Kindle store; they’re not lining up with torches and pitchforks to push for improvements. While publishers wait for eReader device manufacturers to add new features and EPUB 3 support, eBooksellers are just as happy to wait.

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TOC’s Global Ebook Market report

One year ago we published the first edition of our Global Ebook Market report. We focused on the major English language territories but also featured coverage of several other popular languages as well.

A lot has changed in the past year so we recently published a completely revised edition of the report. You’ll find it here. The good news it’s totally free, both in terms of cost and DRM.  It’s also available in all the popular formats (PDF, EPUB, and mobi), so you’ll be able to read it on any device you own.

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The dangers of platform lock-in

One reason some consumers haven’t jumped on the ebook bandwagon is because they’re concerned the format they select might become obsolete in a few years. Others dismiss that as unfounded pessimism but I have an example of how it can happen, and not with some fly-by-night platform. This problem happened on Apple’s extremely popular iOS platform.

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Penguin Random House: Parsing the messages

Word clouds offer a different way of viewing a document. Sometimes they shed more light on what the author is really emphasizing. You’ve probably already read the merger messages sent by Random House’s Markus Dohle and Penguin’s John Makinson. I’m sure each of those letters were edited by quite a few people before they were sent. They’ve been scoured and polished till just the right message was communicated.

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