Broomeshtick

Enhanced Editions have published an extremely interesting post about metadata, apps and ebooks. I don’t know much about Facebook and metadata, but this makes sense:

In the US in December last year, Facebook saw more visits to its site than to Google for the first time. We think that how your data appears in social media is so important that we created a Facebook-specific metadata component for our Odyssey Editions apps. We think providing Facebook with a cover, title, and descriptions of a product rather than just a ‘like’ is a much more effective way of influencing consumers.

I can’t tell you how awesome it is to see a publisher both thinking about these things and talking openly about it to the world.

Innovation is most certainly what we need.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce the launch of TED Books, an imprint of short nonfiction works designed for digital distribution. Shorter than traditional books, TED Books run less than 20,000 words each — long enough to explain a powerful idea, but short enough to be read in a single sitting. Books are available on the Kindle and Kindle Reader apps, and cost $2.99 each.

And if that’s not a bargain, I don’t know what is.

I also think that ebooks will truly become mainstream when, like TED have here, other organisations, TV studios, radio stations and all manner of exciting people start releasing great content for a couple of quid.

Or dollars. Whatevs.

This is a great overview of the Sony Touch e-reader from Emma Newman at Post-Apocalyptic Publishing (also a previous guest blogger at my own Write for Your Life).

I particularly like the following paragraph. It highlights the need for us to stop comparing e-readers to books. They are not books. Yes, they provide the same content, but they are not the same thing and to constantly compare and contrast does both a disservice.

Here’s that paragraph:

There’s an implicit comparison between an e-reader and a book which I have come to realise (having done that myself) is useless. They are incomparable. Yes, both deliver books into your brain, but the sensory experience shouldn’t be equated. Why? Because an e-reader has different functionality, is made of different materials and I think is doomed to failure if all you want it to do is replicate the experience of reading a paper book.

The other thing I found interesting about Emma’s article was her initial reason for buying an e-reader in the first place:

The need didn’t have anything to do with e-books, it was all to do with my voice work. I was printing out manuscripts to take into my recording booth and the cost was becoming prohibitive (I have a rubbish inkjet printer) in ink cartridges and paper, not to mention the need to recycle the materials afterwards. I couldn’t get away from the need to have something to read aloud from, but figured that having an e-reader would mean I wouldn’t have to keep printing out all the time.

Much of the talk is about how the current generation of e-readers perform as straightforward reading devices.

I wonder if, when the manufacturers and publishing industry have collected more usage data, whether it’s for tasks like Emma’s voice over work that will help e-readers become mainstream more quickly.

I believe the iPad will continue to do its own thing. It’s not an e-reader. It’s a tablet. It’s a computer. And that’s just dandy.

But the true e-readers, like the Kindle and the Sony Touch, if they can get the fine details just right - if they can provide simple, but faultless functionality - then they will move from give it a try to must-have at quite a rate.

Tablets are in many ways just like physical books—the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books—the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?

Super article from the ever marvellous A List Apart on the brave newish world of designing ebooks for tablet devices.

I wonder, should I be in a position at some point to be having my own book published in tablet form, whether, as a writer whose day job encompasses UX design and usability, I’ll have any say in the design process.

I’m guessing not. Authors rarely get much of a say in what their physical book sleeves will look like, so I don’t see why ebook versions will be different.

Shame, really.