Publishing

Been thinking about eBooks a lot. How to make them, how to align them with publishing processes. Been reviewing a new vendor almost every day.

When trying to communicate findings, three general types have emerged: Flat eBooks, embedded media books, and interactive books. This short post quickly defines these, reviews some options, and shares my own cost expectations. I think it's important because "eBooks" is too big a term-- Ford doesn't talk about "cars", they design coupes, sedans, trucks...

Publishers need to segment eBooks.

Spent some time developing in iBooks author tonight and after having thought about and read about and discussed it all day, it seems right to jot down a few thoughts. Right now it isn't a revolution, but we live in the world of the fast update. I think it could very quickly become a revolution.

Today I went back to the very first episode of Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt's great Triangulations series. The opening episode was an interview with game industry legend Warren Spector. They never really leave the theme, but the first fifteen minutes or so capture a great conversation on games as an artistic medium. I love the eagerness to really think about new media as new, rather than simply a way to further existing publishing successes. In fact, it's not even eagerness but a sense of artistic integrity that seems to drive this view.

Over the summer I posted on "5 differences in publishing print and digital courses". That post was inspired by the 2011 mLearning conference and was really about how differences in print/digital product features affect the publishing process. In this post I'd like to consider how differences in the print/digital development processes affect the business model. However, it's not simply print vs. digital, it's traditional vs. new media-- the point is that more than just the products have changed, at least for the successful!

If I have to summarize, I would say the big difference is social.That includes "social networks" but I mean social more in the sense of "interactive" products and "interested" organizations.

Tonight I went to a forum on Digital First at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. @jxpaton and Justin Smith were interviewed by @jeffjarvis. (Jeff Jarvis wrote an essay in the Guardian earlier this year called Digital First.)

I started this post yesterday. But with Steve Job's resignation, please note that his work exemplifies what this post promotes. Cliff Kuang wrote in Fast Company Design, "Steve Jobs may not be the greatest technologist or engineer of his generation. But he is perhaps the greatest user of technology to ever live..." A Jobsian focus on the user experience is an excellent aspiration for any software engineer.

An important aspect of any product's development is quality assurance. Essential to that is the reviewer's mindset. This is a cliché in macro approaches; of course a "quality mindset" should inform all product creation phases. But even in the micro of quality assurance as discrete phase, mindset matters.

I often serve as a digital ambassador to traditional print leaders. They're very smart people, but they have decades of creating course materials a certain way. Here's a set of 5 differences between the publication of print and digital course materials:

Last night I was thrilled to see that the iTunes App Store included in its featured apps section a group of "Apps for foreign language learning". When I clicked through, I found an interesting list of apps.

Recently I shared this summation of benefits from open APIs with a colleague: http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/03/3-ways-api-help-publishers.html. She 'gets it', but asked, "But what do I do when management asks, 'what do we charge for if all our content is free?'" 

The publishing world has been abuzz with "mobile is disruptive" for a while. The iPad and lately Android have only stoked the fires.

But how exactly is mobile disruptive? Here's two ways mobile is disruptive, specifically to publishers: