09-18-2007, 02:30 PM | #1 |
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They Just Don't Get It!
I don't know if this belongs in the News section or not. If not, please feel free to move it.
This article from Adweek (Will E-Books Get Lost in Translation?) demonstrates just how far out in left field the industry is when it comes to e-books. Clearly, the HarperCollins iPhone experiment has nothing to do with e-books. It's all about using the iPhone as another marketing tool. They don't care about the actual reading experience. They're just hoping to sell more p-books. Read the whole thing and pay close attention to the comments from publishing company representatives. They just don't get it. Why does it seem like authors and readers live in one universe, and publishers in another? |
09-18-2007, 02:33 PM | #2 |
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News section is perfect, Jason.
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09-18-2007, 02:41 PM | #3 |
Sir Penguin of Edinburgh
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Baen didn't get it either
To be honest, Baen Books got into ebooks not for the ebook market, but as a way of promoting the pbooks.
The e-anthology series Grantville Gazette was not entirely expected. |
09-18-2007, 03:55 PM | #4 | |
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The article author apparently has no idea what the Kindle is...
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09-18-2007, 04:04 PM | #5 |
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Many of us started that way when e-ink was just marketing hype and just around the corner.
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09-18-2007, 04:15 PM | #6 | |
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What Baen did was to put out e-book X in order to sell p-book Y. The HC person doesn't appear to care about putting out e-book X, though. The intention seems to be to put out sample X in order to sell p-book X. Maybe, just maybe, if enough people beg them, they'll think about putting out an e-book edition. |
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09-18-2007, 08:45 PM | #7 | |
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Baen didn't know what would happen when they got into the ebook market back in 2001(2002?). But that was 5 plus years ago. Now, Baen is making a profit on its ebook sales, as is Fictionwise, Mobipocket, and a bunch of others. It is now an established fact that there is a potential market for HC ebooks. There is no need to test it by offering fragments of ebooks. Offer the real thing; see what happens. What HC is doing is probably stupid and certainly pointless. |
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09-18-2007, 10:47 PM | #8 |
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The thing is, HC is daft. Who in their right mind wants to download a sample that is incomplete? An example of how to do a sample correctly. There is a new Star Trek sort story anthology coming out based on TNG. They have a sample up on their website. (I'll have to dig out the URL) and they give out one complete story.
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09-19-2007, 06:14 AM | #9 |
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It would be curious if the high level decision makers working at a publishing company reads any more than the general public. If not, and they read the 'typical' 2-3 books a year (compared to the average of, what, 1-2 a week on this forum) then it isn't much of a surprise they don't get it.
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09-19-2007, 06:44 AM | #10 | |
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one might think that most people have never heard of a phone that has PDA capabilities. iPhone this ... iPhone that ... oooh, look, internet on a PHONE ! i will forever be a die-hard smartphone-ebook-reader, since for me, portability is the key. i could immagine a pda/phone with an e-ink screen. but i will not carry one of those huge readers around with me. btt: another problem i see with the iPhone is that currently, all "ebooks" available for the iPhone seem to be PDF files. and that most probably means non-reflowing text. so while it'll be cool to pinch, swipe and swoosh, it'll be a bitch to read. left-right-scrolling is horrible when you want to read something. i've said it before and i'll say it again: we need mobipocket reader for mac/iPhone. whoops, wrong forum |
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09-19-2007, 06:48 AM | #11 |
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I tried reading on iPhone. Without hardware buttons to scroll it's extremely awkward. Swiping the screen to scroll looks very cool until you have to do it for an hour or more. So, I don't see iPhone as a reading platform unless they add some buttons. (I guess a third-party reading software could try to intercept volume buttons... that might work.)
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09-19-2007, 09:06 AM | #12 |
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This article's basis is mainly 'reading on a phone'. The shame of it is thinking that ebooks are only meant for 'reading on a phone'. This is a poor limited view and frankly just as poor journalism. They mention the reader but only so. It is clear this writer's never tried one of the different devices available.
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09-19-2007, 10:06 AM | #13 |
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09-19-2007, 04:05 PM | #14 |
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I don't know... I didn't think the article was that bad. I mean, it starts with noting that the Japanese are reading a lot of books on their phones, and goes from there. The criticism of the Sony Reader is primarily that Sony hasn't done any serious marketing of it. Is there anyone here who would disagree with that?
I'll grant that the article assumes that the Kindle will somehow connect to a phone, which makes no sense based on what we know... but on the other hand, the Kindle is rumored to be using EVDO, so one can see how someone might have picked up the wrong idea there. As far as HarperCollins and their limited view of what customers would like to download, I think what the article is trying to say is that HC is using a service they already have, namely online browsing or "Browse Inside," to offer content first, to see if it would be worth their while to offer full content. I personally can't imagine reading on a phone (or a PDA). It seems far from ideal to me. But lots of other people read on phones and PDAs, and the Applie iPhone is a pretty hot item right now as far as the media is concerned, so I can see why this story got written the way it did. |
09-19-2007, 05:18 PM | #15 | |
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Quote:
Scrolling is the wrong design paradigm to use. One shouldn't swipe the screen to scroll down the page. One should swipe the screen to turn the page. Were you using Safari to read? How does Books.app work? |
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