I recorded a piece about ebooks, digital change and self publishing for the media show last week. It’s right at the top of the show and I think it went pretty well:
There’s also a fascinating piece with the editor of the Irish Independent talking about the digital change going on at Independent (kicks off around 13.00 mins or so) and Brian Fallon from Distilled media talking about TheJournal.ie and the other brands in that group.
A nice post from Zoe Faulder about how publishers are positioned for the “third generation” of ebooks:
There is a third generation of ebooks that exists but is far less prolific than the previous two generations – primarily due to cost. Unlike a straight text ebook, or even enhanced ebooks to a degree, this generation cannot be tacked on to the existing production cycles and requires completely new skill-sets. The third generation of ebooks has been called apps, but I would argue that there is more to it than what we have come to expect of applications available in the iTunes App and Google Play stores. The third generation of ebooks is about taking the content and spinning it into something grander than its original form. It encompasses all the tools made available in today’s networked world. Ebooks could become immersive digital experiences based on locative media, social interaction, interactive narrative and gamification.
via A New Kind of Publisher: On Merging Creative Industries.
Much noise and heat generated by short ebooks (the kind of which, TheIrishStory.com has been selling for some time). Laura Hazard Owen’s piece over at PaidContent gets to the heart of it:
They don’t cannibalize other formats. It’s nearly impossible to find a magazine that will run a 10,000-word story these days (much less a magazine that will run your 10,000-word story — even if you’re a professional journalist). Many of these stories simply would not have been published in print, and that’s not because they’re not good enough. They just weren’t quite a fit for magazine or book publishers. Now the projects can come to light, and journalists who might once abandoned these stories because they weren’t sure how to pitch them can make a little money off them.
Very sensible and not even remotely surprising:
And increasingly, one of those ways is in digital book format. The fast rise of tablets and e-readers, the low-friction of buying content through vertically integrated experiences from the likes of Apple or Amazon, and the explosion in new voices that digital books have enabled, have all helped e-books ride up the hockey stick of growth to reach 25 percent adoption in the broader market, and is no doubt even higher among our own early adopter audience.So what does that mean for us? At GigaOM, it usually means we try new things. One thing I learned quickly when I came over to the company in 2009 to help launch a new model for market research, it was that Om and our CEO, Paul Walborsky, encourage their employees to experiment and embrace new ideas. So late last year, when Mathew, Nicole Solis and I suggested we should try our hand at e-books, they were all for it.
Announcing GigaOM Books’ first two titles
And so today, we’re happy to announce our new imprint, GigaOM Books. What is GigaOM Books exactly? Well, it’s where we’ll publish new works from our own team of writers as well as other great voices we’ve discovered. We’ll also publish some of our most popular reports from GigaOM Pro, allowing, for the first time, access in e-book format to great research on Kindle, Nook and iPad.
