September 14, 2009

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Smashwords Expands Distribution, by Anthony Policastro By Anthony S. Policastro If you thought the eBook market was hot before, it just went super nova with Smashwords newest distribution to "major online retailers, the first of which is Barnes & Noble and their various properties including Barnesandnoble.com, Fictionwise, and their eReader app." Like the other 2,600 authors on Smashwords, I received an email recently from Smashwords owner and creator, Mark Coker announcing the new distribution arrangement: To put everything in perspective, we're developing a process that will enable your books to receive widespread retail distribution within days or weeks of publishing on Smashwords. Some of what we're doing here has never been done before, so like I said above, please be patient as we work together to pioneer the brave new world of ebook distribution. In addition, Barnes & Noble just ramped up its eBook efforts and currently has more than 700,000 eBook titles listed on its site and it hopes to surpass one million books within the next year. The book retailer will also be the exclusive eBook provider to Plastic Logic's upcoming eReader device - an eight and a half by eleven inch device with a touch screen and wireless capabilities for downloading content. AT&T will be the wireless carrier for the reader and this means users in Europe and parts of Asia will be able to download content. The Kindle's wireless feature works only the United States. All of these developments could be a paradigm shift in the eBook market because Barnes and Noble is opening its arms and accepting the work posted on other commercial eBook sites. They are clearly scooping up as much market share as possible to compete against the Amazon Kindle. (See the related article below in The New York Times.) Even their pricing model is similar to Amazon's with major titles selling for $9.99 - the same price as the Kindle. Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol is featured on Barnes and Noble eBook site as a preorder for $9.99. What's more significant is that you can download a book from Barnes and Noble and read it on your iPhone, iTouch, Blackberry or PC or Macintosh by simply downloading the B&N eReader software for the particular device. And they announced they will be adding additional devices. Kindle books cannot be read on the Blackberry or on a PC or Macintosh. This move could pull market share from the Kindle. It will be interesting to see how the eBook market evolves in the next few months or years with these two titans battling for the same market share on an equal playing field. If Barnes and Noble keeps its pricing in line or lower than Amazon and stays a step ahead of the technology, they could be the winner. Smashwords photo is the official logo of Smashwords.com. The photo of Plastic Logic's new eReader is from Plastic Logic's website.
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More Ebook Survey Results My apologies for not following-up on the promise I made in this earlier post to provide more information in a subsequent post. I got distracted on a few other things but I finally managed to spend some time with the detailed results spreadsheet. Here's what I found... Which ebook format do you prefer? PDF rules the day. It wins out for a variety of reasons including portability, how it renders and even the fact that it's so mature. Epub was probably second on this list, but it was a distant second at best. And out of the 2K+ responses I only noticed a few references to "Kindle" or "mobi". What other publishers are doing innovative things with ebooks? Both Pragmatic and Manning were cited frequently in response to this question. A number of responses also noted O'Reilly's "liberal and useful ebook policy" though, so our DRM-free approach definitely resonates with this crowd. I say that mostly because other publishers were criticized in responses here for their use of DRM. Btw, Pragmatic and Manning mostly got kudos here for their respective "beta book" programs where you get access to the content before the book goes to press. We offer the same feature through our Rough Cuts program but we apparently haven't communicated it as effectively as we could, at least according to these survey results! What can we do to improve your experience with O'Reilly's ebooks? Price was a common theme here. Customers definitely want to see the prices remain low, but I think that's largely because the products are mostly quick conversions from print format. I still believe there's an opportunity to increase prices, but only if there's added value to what exists today. Another popular answer here was the ability to share notes with others. I'm still blown away by the fact that Amazon built wireless functionality into the Kindle but didn't offer this sort of collaboration option. What features should the next generation of ebooks include? Just to show how simplistic today's ebook offerings are, some of the most common responses here were simple things like including links and adding video. Not exactly rocket science but these are also things that are currently missing in ebooks. I also liked the suggestion of improving the errata process in books, mostly through automatic updates and/or overlays that show what's changed from one version to the next. Think of it as version control brought to books. Again, not revolutionary but it's not something you typically find in most ebooks right now.

Joe Wikert

I'm Chief Operating Officer at OSV (www.osv.com)

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