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Month: January 2011 (Page 2 of 2)

Kobo Wireless eBook Reader $99.99 For 4 Days

Anyone looking to get a decent eBook reader for less than $100 has just had their wish granted! Borders is selling the Kobo eBook reader for $99.99 for the next 4 days. I think this deep discount of the regular $139 price is a sign that Borders is serious about selling more eBooks as talk of bankruptcy continues to haunt the beleaguered book seller. The discount requires membership in Borders Rewards and this coupon to use in stores. Or it can be purchased from Borders.com directly.

The Kobo is a good eReader that will continue to be useful whether Borders remains open or not because it supports a variety of file formats. So if price is a big consideration, then it is well worth it. If Borders makes this a permanent price drop, then they may just have a shot at staying in the game a little longer.

Buy It Again: Building Your Digital Bookshelf

Yesterday I gave my wife a Nook Color for her birthday. She had already shown a lot of interest in my Nook, but I also knew that she was very interested in Apple’s iPad as well. In the end, the Nook Color won out because it was the best overall value for the money. I knew my wife would want to do more than just read books, but not enough more to justify the greater cost of the iPad.

She’s very happy with her new Nook and now faces the joyful task of filling it with books. It seems that every media transition leaves us buying our collections all over again. I still remember the great tape to CD migration and the horrible carnage it left behind in my wallet! Going from CDs to MP3s was somewhat less traumatic. In each of the aforementioned transitions, most of the trouble and expense was due greedy record companies who kept costs for the consumer much higher than the cost of production justified. CDs cost a lot less than LPs and tapes to make, but even now you’ll find CDs in excess of $20 retail in the US, even higher in Japan. The artifically high high cost of music coupled with the growth of the web, lead to rampant piracy which eventually forced prices to go down. With that history still fresh in our minds, I don’t think there will be a repeat of this in the transition to eBooks.

It is true that publishers have pushed back, maintaining eBook prices that equal or sometimes exceed printed book prices for popular authors and inciting the wrath of many. But I don’t see this remaining the case very long for a number of reasons. One of those is the huge wealth of classic literature already available for free or very low cost, completely legal!  Amazon and Barnes & Noble have done well to make acess to these very easy in their eBook stores. Many of these public domain classics are also available for download from the Project Gutenberg and similar groups. So adding many of those books you had to read in high school won’t cost anything at all!

Another reason the high prices cannot be maintained is the declining number of physical bookstores. This has been the trend since Amazon became popular, first selling physical books and now eBooks. Sales of eBooks on Amazon recently passed those of hardback books on the site for the first time. And the Kindle has been their best selling product for a number of years now. Consumers are used to buying things online for less than retail stores and digital goods for less than physical ones. With fewer places to sell physical books and consumers who are warming up to buying eBooks online, the prices must come down.

Finally, piracy has not disappeared. As the number of eBook readers go up, so will demand for the works of popular contemporary authors in that format at what is considered to be a fair price. It doesn’t take a mathematician to know that it costs less to make and sell a copy of an eBook than a physical book. Any popular, but overpriced eBook will almost certainly be widely pirated, just as music and movies continue to be. There will always be piracy, but if the success of iTunes has taught us anything, it’s that if product is easy to get legitimately at a fair price, most will take the easy route.

So by all means, buy those books again! It’ll be cheaper than last time and the added functionality and portability is more than worth it. The only thing I really miss is not being able to proudly display my collection of eBooks when people visit my home.

More Manga For The Nook Please!

When I bought my Nook eBook reader, I already knew that I wasn’t going to find much in the way of comics and manga to read on it. I bought it because I wanted to be able to carry a lot of novels and technical manuals without the enormous weight and bulk of physical books. Still it was my hope that as eBooks gained in popularity, I would eventually see more titles for my ereader of choice.

I think that time has finally come! Manga, Japanese graphic novels, have been available in digital form for a long time in the form of illegal translated scans, or “scanlations.” And it is not too difficult to format and load these on eBook readers like the Kindle or Nook. But those looking to get their manga fix legally have had few options. Though I should note that there is a lot of yaoi (homosexual romance stories) manga available for the Kindle in Amazon’s Kindle store. But this has somewhat limited appeal.

Recently, a number of publishers have started to offer popular manga titles online, readable in a web browser. These are either introductory chapters to new manga available for free, or entire volumes purchasable usually for less than the print version. While this doesn’t do anything for those wanting to read manga on the Nook, it makes sense given that the targeted market has been reading manga in their browsers on pirate web sites for years. A number of these pirate sites have been shut down over the last year, and now publishers are hoping that readers will embrace the legal alternatives they are providing.

Some Online Manga Sites

I think rising popularity of Apple’s iPad opened a door that is leading to greater manga availability for eBook readers as well. A growing list of manga titles, comics, and related magazines have appeared as iPad apps. The iPad has clearly popularized the tablet form factor. It’s $500 entry price forced down the prices of dedicated eBook readers like the Nook and Kindle which in turn increased their sales. Now a host of new tablets such as the Motorola Xoom and the Blackberry Playbook will soon hit the market.

Tablets are a natural fit for eBooks and color ones are especially good for comics, magazines, and manga. While manga are mostly black and white, the cover art and optional inserts are generally in color. So I don’t think it is a random coincidence that Digital Manga Inc. released Vampire Hunter D for the Nook around the time that the Nook Color became available. There are both black and white and color editions available. At only $250, the Android powered Nook Color has already seen good sales and may become the entry level tablet of choice for many.

I hope that we are seeing the beginning of more mainstream, popular manga titles for the Nook and other eBook readers. There’s no real technical cost to supporting a title on both tablets and readers. And with dedicated readers racing towards the $99 price point, it would be silly not to sell there. I think the next year is going to tell the tale. Manga looks pretty good on my Nook, so I hope I’ll see a lot more of it soon!

I Still Love Bookstores!

My favorite Chicago Borders bookstore is closing this month. After a one year extension, the end of the line is finally here and I’m very sad to see it go. I’ve always spent a lot of money on books, real paper, printed books! I love books, and the physical form of a book is still something that gives me a pleasure that can’t be duplicated in the digital form. I love eBooks too, but it’s a different and still evolving experience. My love of physical books is refined and mature.

There’s a Borders near my house which, while a wonderful space, simply does not have the selection of manga that my downtown Borders did. Manga, Japanese graphic novels, are very slowly making their way into legitimate eBook stores. Illegal, scanned translations abound on the internet, but I prefer to avoid these. So for now, I still buy these in bookstores and therein lies my problem. The closing of my favorite Borders leaves me no other choice but to buy manga online from Amazon.com. The remaining book stores in my area don’t have the titles I want anymore!

Peter Osnos at the Atlantic has written a wonderful analysis of What Went Wrong at Borders. Like many failing businesses, what was once a successful company has not thrived under the management of people who did not understand or have a passion for the underlying enterprise. Competitor Barnes & Noble seems to have handled the transition to online book selling and the rise of eBooks somewhat better than Borders.

I would like to see Borders and Barnes & Noble both survive and evolve. I still love bookstores and hope to spend many more hours in them in the future, browsing and buying books whether physical or digital in their form. It’s hard to see what form bookstores will evolve into. I suppose the era of the mega-bookstore is over. Maybe a smaller, boutique style store that blends digital offerings with physical copies of best sellers by the most popular authors, is the way of the future. Imagine a coffee shop with a couple of racks of books where one can buy eBooks on your Kindle, Nook, or iPad at a discount if you do it over the local hot spot. Barnes & Noble already does something like this in their stores, but I think the stores themselves are still too big.

Only the future will tell how this all plays out. My neighborhood still has a number of independent bookstores. Maybe it’s time I introduce them to my kids!

eBook Apps for Babies?

One of the exciting things about eBooks is the potential to do things that you simply cannot do with printed paper books. The Nook Color has already started to explore this territory with a growing line up of color kids books. And now for an even younger crowd, Ladybird has adapted its Baby Touch series of books for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. The obvious question arises of whether or not babies are too young to be interacting with eBooks of any kind.

Having some experience with babies and technology, I know that our kids usually want to play with our “toys” as much as we do. One of the first C++ applications I ever wrote was a keyboard banging game called Baby Mush that I created so that my daughter could bang away on my computer without disturbing my other work. I’m pretty sure it was the first and only such app ever written for OS/2! And of course, the urge that parents feel to dress and accessorize our kids like mini versions of ourselves is very strong.

Still, Nintendo’s 3DS warning against use of the upcoming game console by players under 6 years of age, should give one pause against bringing babies into the digital age too soon. With eyesight and coordination still developing, babies need more interaction with the real world than the digital one. But it’s highly unlikely that any parent is going to abandon their infant to play with an eBook on an iPad all day. All in all, I’d say it’s a pretty good time to be a baby!

Read It Anyway You Like Baby!

One of the most daunting challenges of publishing in eBook format exclusively is choosing which platform to target. Or at least that’s how it was at first. Thankfully, you can read an eBook on pretty much anything that has a video screen! Anyone still on the fence about buying eBooks take note, all of the major eBook sellers have free readers for the Mac, PC, and all popular smartphones. So don’t let the lack of a Kindle or Nook keep you away from eBooks!

I’m particularly excited that with the success of the iPad, the tablet market place has been growing at a rapid pace. This past CES showcased a number of new Windows and Android powered tablets, and the BlackBerry Playbook. The Playbook, while not Android powered, looks pretty sweet and is a strong signal that RIM is still in the game! And of course, more tablets, means more people reading eBooks which will accelerate the move to the new literary medium. I still love my Nook, but I see a tablet in my future!

Huck Finn and Revisionist Editing

Family Guy Huck Finn Spoof

Jim explains how that's OUR WORD!!!

It doesn’t take a time machine to know what Mark Twain would likely think of a publisher’s proposal to release a version of Huckleberry Finn with the word “nigger” edited out. I’m sure he’d have a lot of colorful expressions with which to express his displeasure.

Arguments about the hurtfulness of the n-word aside, this smacks of what is perhaps the worst kind of censorship. That which attempts to build the future by erasing the past. Forgetting history is a sure way to ensure that it is repeated. While Huckleberry Finn is a work of fiction, it paints and preserves a picture of a time in American history that should not be forgotten and still holds valuable lessons for us going forward.

As an artist, my feeling is that once a work is completed, that’s it. The time for revision and refinement is over. Obviously, not everyone holds this opinion. But I think that the “enhanced” versions of Star Wars and E.T. and their less than pleased critical reception by fans of the originals, should give pause to anyone seeking to revise classic works, even the creator of said works! Han shot first, and no amount of CG editing is going to change that for me!

I grew up watching Tom and Jerry cartoons in the afternoon. These and other cartoons of that era had some horrible stereotypes of black people and other minorities and women. Years later, many of these same cartoons had been butchered to either remove or redub the black maid and other, now offensive, images. I thought it was a  pretty silly thing to do. Even as a kid, I knew those images did not represent my people. But I thought it was cool to be able to look back in time and get a glimpse of how things were in the past, even through a goofy cat and mouse cartoon.

We still need to know and remember a time when being called a nigger was not hip, cool, or a sign of friendship.

What to Write With: Choose Your Poison

My wife has been planning to write a book about, well about a lot of things actually. After I posted my eBook HTML template yesterday, she asked me whether it was the right starting point for her projects. I explained, that for me, a software developer, using Dreamweaver to edit a collection of chapters in HTML formatted files made sense. But for her, maybe not so much.

In the end, I suggested that she use tools that felt natural to her for the task. She’s an expert at writing with Microsoft Word, so it makes sense to use that to write the book.  Few, if any, are writing eBooks in ePub format directly. And I’m sure that somewhere out there, people are using WordPress or Blogger to write their eBooks too!

The Making of Books: An eBook Template

My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh. — Ecclesiastes 12:12

Indeed the making of books is endless, even more so now in the age eBooks. That would leave one with much to be wary of indeed, but not in this instance!

My first eBook, Anime Aftershocks, is a compilation of blog posts. So it was only natural, to me at least, to write the eBook using an HTML editor. Dreamweaver isn’t exactly a great word processor, but it got the job done. For later work, I figured I’d use Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org. That would be easier, or so I thought. I soon discovered that I would be faced with potential conversion issues and would likely have to convert the book to HTML before processing anyway.

With that in mind, I decided to stick with Dreamweaver and developed a template that has become the starting point for new eBooks which I’m sharing here. It is largely based on what I learned using Calibre, and Amalthia’s Ebook Formatting Tutorial. The Preface file contains some brief instructional commentary. Feel free to use this any way you like, and have fun making books!

Download eBook HTML Template

Rebirth!

Welcome to the new WordPress powered Learncrest site! Here I will be writing about all manner of things related to books, with a particular focus on books I’m working on for Learncrest. So stay tuned for future updates!

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