Future of book publishing

Digital and Social Book Discovery

by Sabrina EBooks
Jellybooks Widgets for Book Samples

Digital Book World hosted an interesting webcast today, called Finding Books Without Borders: Discoverability in a Digital and Social World. Two fairly new companies, Jellybooks and Readmill, talked about how they tackle the issue in their own ways. 

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Immersive Storytelling

by Sabrina Future

Transmedia, apps, and other forms of immersive storytelling are getting more and more popular. For large worlds like Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones, to name a few well-known examples, immersive storytelling can be a great extension or better way to connect with readers.

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Building the Next Generation of YA Stars (Webinar)

by Sabrina EBooks

Last month I attended a webinar hosted by Publisher’s Weekly, called “Building the Next Generation of YA Stars.” The speakers included the editorial director of Disney-Hyperion and the executive editor of Harlequin Teen. Together they covered new marketing strategies for YA novels, trends, and what they look for when acquiring books.  Marketing According to them, YA books have more [...]

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Publishing as a Function

by Sabrina Future

Mike Shatzkin wrote an interesting post about how, ten years from now, people in publishing might not be working in publishing-specific companies. Instead, other companies may branch out to include publishing books as one of their strategies. And so publishing may become like an accounting job, where every company has publishing employees and theoretically you could [...]

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What Do Authors Want?

by Sabrina Future
Thumbnail image for What Do Authors Want?

Digital Book World hosted a webinar a while back, called “What Authors Want.” The webinar was meant to promote DBW’s survey of 5,000 authors. The survey was submitted to the Writer’s Digest community (whose writers tend to be female and over 35, and write fiction), as well as SFWA (mostly male fiction writers), Romance Writers of America (mostly female writers), and [...]

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KYS Realm and Transmedia, the Future of Storytelling

by Sabrina Future
Thumbnail image for KYS Realm and Transmedia, the Future of Storytelling

Technology lends itself to new creative forms of storytelling. One example is transmedia, a new technique of storytelling that involves enhancing the experience through multiple platforms, such as books, videos, and even live events. The Elements Club is one such transmedia series, where every few months a new segment telling the tales of a quirky, yet [...]

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What’s Going on With Readers Today?

by Sabrina EBooks

What’s Going On With Readers Today from Goodreads A while back, Goodreads asked publishers what questions they would like to ask readers. The results of the Goodreads survey from December 2012 are now up, and there are some interesting finds. I do wonder, however, how accurate these findings are. Yes, Goodreads has a huge base [...]

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WordPivot: Boosting Vocabulary One eBook at a Time

by Sabrina EBooks
Thumbnail image for WordPivot: Boosting Vocabulary One eBook at a Time

Digital publishing has leveled the playing field for startups. One new company, that I’m excited to blog about, is called WordPivot. Launched a few weeks ago, WordPivot is, according to the press release, “a research‐based reading app that creates personalized quizzes inside the pages of your favorite eBooks to help you turbocharge your vocabulary.”

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Thoughts on Tools of Change

by Sabrina EBooks

I had the pleasure of attending the first day of the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) conference this year. It’s an annual conference that mainly covers digital publishing, and it’s nearly as good as Books in Browsers. There were a lot of great talks and some interesting startups and companies on exhibit, but I’m going to focus this [...]

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Trends and Startups in Book Publishing

by Sabrina EBooks

The last couple years have been a time of change for the publishing industry, and I expect this year to be the same. Every few weeks I’ve been hearing about new startups and ventures that expect to–and probably will–disrupt publishing. I think it’s worth sharing some of them here, and what their success could mean [...]

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Living in a Sci-Fi World

by Sabrina Future

CES (Consumer Electronics Association) was last week, and companies demoed a lot of really cool gadgets. One I think is worth sharing is a product by Tactus, a company in California. Tactus developed a screen that can turn into a flat tablet into something with actual bumpy buttons, to make it easier to type. When [...]

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The Coming of Age of E-Textbooks?

by Sabrina EBooks

I’m not as familiar with what’s going on with e-textbooks, but there seems to have been a lot of exciting developments recently. One thing I often hear about e-textbooks is that, despite the expectation that young people, particularly college students, would be the first to eagerly adopt all things digital, most students don’t like e-textbooks [...]

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E-Books v. P-Books

by Sabrina EBooks
ebooks infographic thumb

Wonderful infographic by http://www.teachingdegree.org/2012/11/26/ebooks-vs-print-books/ that shows how ebooks and print books can co-exist. The idea came from a study by the Pew Research Center about the rise of ebooks and people’s reading habits. According to the designers who created the infographic, a lot of the data showed how print books still dominate in a lot of [...]

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Books in Browsers Recap Day 2

by Sabrina EBooks

Part 2 of my Books in Browsers post. Read part 1 here. The second day of BiB had a number of really exciting demos. Just as with the first post, I’ve broken down the highlights below. You can also watch most of the talks on video here. 

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Books in Browsers Day 1 Recap

by Sabrina EBooks

Books in Browsers is an annual conference at the Internet Archive, where for two days technologists and book publishers gather to discuss and share all the wonderful new ways to create digital content. It’s probably my favorite publishing related conference.

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Trends in Publishing (Part 3)

by Sabrina EBooks
Book publishing trends 3

Part 3 of 3 of my Trends in Publishing post, which covers trends in metadata and collecting  publishing data. From the original post: “While researching my thesis project for my M.S. in publishing at NYU, I came across several interesting trends that I think will affect publishing. In fact, I’ve already seen some of these [...]

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Trends in Publishing (Part 2)

by Sabrina EBooks
Book publishing trends 2

Part 2 of 3 of my Trends in Publishing post, which covers subscription websites and gamification trends. From the original post: “While researching my thesis project for my M.S. in publishing at NYU, I came across several interesting trends that I think will affect publishing. In fact, I’ve already seen some of these at work [...]

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Trends in Publishing

by Sabrina EBooks
Book publishing trends

While researching my thesis project for my M.S. in publishing at NYU, I came across several interesting trends that I think will affect publishing. In fact, I’ve already seen some of these at work in the three months since I wrote the report, and I plan on using this information for my own startup, Write [...]

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Disruptive Digital Publishing

by Sabrina Future
Thumbnail image for Disruptive Digital Publishing

I’m a fan of new ways of publishing. 

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Data Mining in the Publishing World

by Sabrina Future
Thumbnail image for Data Mining in the Publishing World

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, by Yodane59 Big data is the latest buzz word in publishing, so it seems like an interesting issue to explore. Lots of new publishing related companies using data are springing up, such as Booklr, Hiptype, and Write or Read.

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Penguin Becomes First Big-6 Publisher to Disrupt the Book Business Model

by Sabrina Future
Penguin group

Pearson, the parent company of Penguin Group, acquired Author Solutions, a self-publishing platform, for $116 million. This makes Penguin the first of the big-6 publishing companies to provide full services, including editorial, marketing, and design, to self-published authors. Penguin will also be the first big publisher to start learning about customer acquisition and data analytics. 

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BookStats, What Happened in the Publishing Industry in 2011

by Sabrina Future

BookStats, the annual survey conducted by BISG that captures the size and scope of the publishing industry, was released today. See the press release below; there are some interesting factoids, particularly for anyone working with ebooks. 

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