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Ebooks and Publishing, who do you trust and why?

November 9, 2011 By

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Please welcome Vincent Tan, Website In A Weekend’s newest guest author. Vincent, also known as The Polymath Programmer, hails from Singapore and publishes an online magazine called “Singularity” on a (roughly) monthly basis. Vincent’s talents are manifold, as one would expect from a polymath. (He does video, too, so don’t miss him on Youtube.) In the latest issue of Singularity, Vincent had the following to say about ebooks and publishing, and I just had to have it for Website In A Weekend. With great pleasure, Vincent Tan.

Ebooks: authority, authentication and trust

There was an unconference called BarCampSG7 held in Singapore in September 2011. One of the speakers was Peter Schoppert, who talked about ebooks and the publishing industry. Now for ebooks, Peter was referring to the ePub format, and not books in electronic form (such as PDFs). In particular, he’s talking about books read on e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle, Nook and even mobile devices.

The ePub format is basically a combination of technologies. XHTML for content, CSS for styling, and JavaScript for some interactivity. You don’t need to know the actual technologies involved. Just know that because the content is in XHTML format, the content flows around any textual container easily.

This means whatever device you’re using to read the content, the text automatically flows nicely to fit your screen. Compare this with a PDF, where the text and layout are fixed. In terms of publishing, the major publishing houses have some problems.

From a business standpoint, authentication is problem number 1.

You buy a physical book, and it’s yours. You can give it to a family member, lend it to a friend, or even just throw it away.

For ebooks, the publishing houses want to control your ownership. Because after you buy the ebook, it’s extremely easy to just copy and paste and give the copies to anyone. The physical book has a limit, that of itself. The electronic book can be copied infinitely.

This is why the publishers (Apple iTunes, Amazon Kindle) have authentications that tie the bought ebook to an account you own.

This means you can’t give or lend the ebook to anyone else. Unless you give your account away.

You also can’t mix accounts.

Think about it. You can buy books from a small bookstore, or a large chain, or from the Internet (Amazon for example), and they’re still yours. But ebooks bought for a particular e-reader have to be read on that e-reader, using the account you have with the e-reader’s publisher.

Another problem is with authority.

Generally speaking, a physical book carries with it the weight of the publishing house behind it. A publisher has vetted the book and deemed it “worthy” of publishing it. An ebook can be published by anyone, and thus only have the credibility of the author behind it. Although anyone can now self-publish and have a physical copy of your book, so even physical books need to go through that credibility test.

The crux of the matter seems to be with trust and credibility. This has moved from the publisher to the author. Think on this question:

Do you trust a publishing house or an author more?

When you’re considering buying a book (physical or electronic), do you now want to know who wrote the book, or who published the book?

Vincent Tan is a mathematician and programmer, and writes at Polymath Programmer. He makes YouTube videos and also publishes an online magazine for the curious called Singularity, covering science, art and culture with an emphasis on Singapore and loaded with great photography. Subscribe to Singularity, you’ll be glad you did.
Filed Under: Blogging business Tagged With: , , , , ,

How To Fly To The Moon In Two Easy Steps (and blogging stuff)

June 19, 2010 By

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

Justin Germino (Dragon Blogger) made an interesting comment to me about Blog Post Engineering: a whole ebook on a single blog post might seem overwhelming.

Justin has a good point.

But really publishing a blog isn’t quite so simple as pressing “Publish.”

Let’s take a look at it from another perspective, answering the question “How do I fly to the moon?”

Flying to the moon is easy:

  1. Build a rocket ship.
  2. Fly it to the moon.

Easy peasy.

But it kind of feels like something is missing, right? (Like everything in between)

On the other hand, getting bogged down in the minutia of purchase orders for, say, O rings is tragically uninteresting.

Publishing in any medium is similar. If you want your words to hit escape velocity, you need to do a little more than “write it and they will come.”

Publishing in the “real world”?

Our typical, non-Website In A Weekend reader treats their blog pretty much like “Microsoft Word for The Interwebs.” This isn’t necessarily wrong, as long as you understand what you’re getting. Most don’t, then wonder why.

Let’s think about The Real World.

You have your Fresh New Manifesto, hot from your laserjet printer. Let’s go staple that bad boy up to a few telephone poles, and maybe mail it to Mom (because we’re not sure our friends are right there with us, yet).

That’s pretty close to what happens for most of us when we hit the “Publish” button in WordPress.

In short, crickets.

If you want your little essay or pamphlet or brochure or magazine or book to get more eyeballs, you need to do considerably more work. If you want a lot of eyeballs, you will need to do enough work to get a real publishing company, with distributors and stuff.

That’s in The Real World.

And that’s a lot of work.

It turns out it’s a lot easier on the internet, but it’s still a lot of work.

Hitting that publishing sweet spot

Let’s agree that writing for web is a little bit more than just hitting “Publish,” but going full-bore down the SEO road leads to artistic perdition. And only a few of us are novelists (you know who you are). Here’s that in a handy list:

  1. “Write whatever and they will come.”
  2. Keyword driven writing for SEO, using e.g., spreadsheets.
  3. Using dedicated software to track story lines (Great American Novel).

Seems like we want to be somewhere in the middle of all that, but not too close to any of it. We can do that.

Blog Post Engineering sits in the sweet spot

Blog Post Engineering sits in the sweet spot

When you’re ready to get into the sweet spot, heres a copy of Blog Post Engineering, just for you: Add to Cart

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: ,
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