Day: June 13, 2012

Go Read This | Independent bookstores embrace digital publishing with ‘espresso’ book machine – The Washington Post

~ Eoin Purcell ~ 4 Comments

I’m intrigued by this. Not least because 5,000 paperbacks in 7 months is 23 books a day. Impressive stuff, though I wonder if ut makes any money:

Politics and Prose has produced almost 5,000 paperback books — some in as little as five minutes — since receiving the book machine nicknamed “Opus” last November. Leggett said about 90 percent of the books printed on the machine are self-published works by local authors.

The others are out-of-print editions, millions of titles available in the public domain like Google Books, and digital formats licensed out through major publishers including Harper Collins.

Alfred Morgan Jr. was able to get a copy of his father’s out-of-print 1923 aviation guide, “How to Build a 20-foot Bi-Plane Glider,” printed on the machine for $8. The volume was on Google Books.

via Independent bookstores embrace digital publishing with ‘espresso’ book machine – The Washington Post.

Go Read This | Introducing GigaOM Books — Tech News and Analysis

~ Eoin Purcell ~ Leave a comment

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.

via Introducing GigaOM Books — Tech News and Analysis.