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11 posts from September 2012

Signs of life at Barnes & Noble

I tend to be pretty open with my criticism when I feel an organization is doing something wrong. That’s why I feel compelled to also speak up and give credit when credit is due. In this case, I’d like to applaud some recent announcements by Barnes & Noble.

This recent article from Laura Hazard Owen highlights B&N’s news and the most important point can be summarized in one word: discoverability. B&N has always had the benefit of a brick-and-mortar presence and that presence brings with it years of knowledge about the art of discoverability, at least in the physical world. Now B&N needs to apply that knowledge to the online world.

Most importantly though, I’m thrilled that B&N is acting like a leader here and not simply following Amazon on the critical issue of discoverability.

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HTML5, EPUB 3, and ebooks vs. web apps

One of the benefits of working on TOC is that I get to see some of the behind-the-scenes industry debates that take place via email. Since it’s “formats” month here in TOC-land I thought it would be fun to share a thread about HTML5 vs. EPUB 3 featuring O’Reilly’s Sanders Kleinfeld and the IDPF’s Bill McCoy. They’ve both agreed to share this thread with the TOC community since it helps clarify the state of both EPUB 3 and HTML5.

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Three questions for…Lou Rosenfeld

1. You recently wrote an article talking about how Rosenfeld Media is “now more than a publishing company.” You talk about adding consulting and training services to your portfolio. How would you respond to skeptics who might say that’s fine for your business, but a typical trade publisher doesn’t have the content or expertise that lends itself to this diversification?

Publishers without content or expertise? I hope they manage to enjoy the view of the approaching iceberg while fumbling for their life jackets.

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Reinventing the Book: How eReaders, Multimedia Content, and Social Reading Are Changing the Way We Read

Screen Shot 2012-09-23 at 6.28.10 PMReinventing the Book. That's the name of the "blog-to-book" project Hyperink created from my Publishing 2020 blog. If you haven't heard of Hyperink you need to check them out. Yes, blog-to-book isn't a new concept but Hyperink is taking it to a new level. Browse the Hyperink site and you'll see they've curated the content of many popular blogs and offer the greatest hits in a convenient to-go format.

You can get a portable version of my blog's most popular posts for only 99 cents. Here are your options:

Hyperink's site for Nook, iPad, PDF and Kindle formats

B&N for the Nook format only

Amazon for the Kindle format only

Take a look and tell me what you think. The Hyperink model is fascinating as I often find myself wanting to dig deeper into new blogs I discover but I don't want to take the time to Instapaper all the more interesting posts. Time is money and if someone like Hyperink is willing to deliver the posts I want I'm more than willing to pay a few dollars for the results, especially since I'll get it in any format I want.