The Death of the Book has Been Greatly Exaggerated Tech pundits recently moved up the date for the death of the book, to sometime around 2015, inspired largely by the rapid adoption of the iPad and the success of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. But in their rush to christen a new era of media consumption, have the pundits overreached? I’m calling the peak of inflated expectations now. The signs of a hype bubble are all around us. In Clearwater, Florida, the principle of the local high school recently replaced all his students’ textbooks with latest-gen Kindles - without, apparently, any awareness that formal trials of the Kindle as a textbook replacement led universities like Princeton and Arizona State University to reject it as inadequate. Then you have pundits like Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT’s Media Lab, making statements to the effect that the physical book is dead in 5 years. How can that be possible, when Amazon recently said that ebooks are outselling hard-cover books at Amazon.com? Many tech pundit wants books to die.
Book Reviews, Excerpts, eBooks and Reader Exclusives - HuffPost Books .epub eBooks Tutorial Jedisaber.com Original Content:Home | Books | eBooks | Other | Links | Fan Content: Andromeda | Avatars | Anime | Dark Angel | Matrix | Pern | Stargate | Star Trek | Star Wars Introduction: What is ePub? First, let's go check out the official specs. IDPF Specs: Note: If you want to download an ePub file to un-zip and poke at it's guts to see how it works, I recommend either the sample ePub file mentioned in this guide, or "A Girl of the Commune" by G.A. The XML files are all the other stuff in the ePub book that tells where your content is, and what to do with it. Before we start preparing our own eBook, lets look inside a sample file. Download the sample file to your hard drive Rename the .epub extension to .zip Open the Zip file Great. The root of the zip file The Meta-inf folder the OEBPS folder A .epub file contains, at a bare minimum, the following files/folders: Lets look at each of these in more detail. One thing to note before we get started: the filenames are case sensitive. <?
David Gaughran | Let's Get Digital O'Reilly Labs Kindle Publishing Tips and Authority Internet Businesses BookGlutton - Social Reading Dean Wesley Smith eBooks 101: The Digital Content Strategy for Reaching Customers Anywhere, Anytime on Any Device « Against-the-Grain.com A Case Study Webinar with ASTD THUR • MARCH 31 • 2:00 PM EDTRegister Now Whether you sell books, software, or pharmaceuticals — if you produce or distribute large volumes of content, you’re a publisher — and are faced with how to provide your customers the content they need, when they need it, in their language, and on their preferred device. eBooks are an ideal solution. If you’re considering a foray into eBook or app production, join digital publishing maven Ann Rockley, the principal author of eBooks 101: The Digital Content Strategy for Reaching Customers Anywhere, Anytime, on Any Device for this free one-hour webinar. An open Q&A session will follow the presentations.
Writing Tips Sometimes you’re not in the mood to write, but you know that you should. Maybe you’ve set a goal and hope to reach it, or you’re on a deadline. Here are a few strategies that you can use to get started. KamiMMcArthur - 11/3/2014 Every so often, I will be writing along on a tale (often with a new novel), and suddenly find myself “stuck.” KamiMMcArthur - 10/30/2014 Whenever you express an idea, you can look at the poetry of your language, your use of diction, your originality, and compare it to other samples of the same idea. KamiMMcArthur - 10/29/2014 Many times as an editor, I will look at a scene and ask myself: “Does this scene belong? KamiMMcArthur - 10/24/2014 In your rewrites, take the opportunity to add as many virtues to your work as possible. KamiMMcArthur - 10/22/2014 National Novel Writing Month starts the first of November, and a couple of times in the past week I’ve had people ask, “How can I make the most of nanowrimo?” KamiMMcArthur - 10/17/2014 KamiMMcArthur - 10/15/2014
Publishing Technology Blog Blog | Kristine Kathryn Rusch Free Fiction Monday: Snapshots Cleavon saw his first murder victim at his friend Emmett Till’s funeral. Cleavon fled Chicago to raise his family, but the violence followed him. Now, he worries that his grandson Ty will die as horribly as Emmett, and for no good reason. Cleavon wants his family out of Chicago, but Ty wants to repair the city—and he just might do it. Part historical fiction, part science fiction, “Snapshots” deftly melds despair and hope into a cautionary tale about a deadly problem. “Snapshots” by Hugo Award-winning author Kristine Kathryn Rusch is free on this website for one week only. Kristine Kathryn Rusch Let the people see. —Mamie R. quoted in “Mother receives the body of her slain son,” The Atlanta Daily World, September 7, 1955 The church was hot. Mama didn’t want him sayin “ain’t,” but he could think it, at least today. Mama was draggin him here, not Papa, not his older brother Roy. Roy ain’t been home since. “Not with all these people watching,” Mama said. Enough.
Books Without Borders: The Digital Infinite Library | Endless Innovation It almost goes without saying that the recent demise of bookseller Borders, which is in the process of liquidating more than 200 of its superstores around the nation, was inevitable. The rise of digital book culture has made many of the traditional trappings of a physical bookstore presence obsolete. Booksellers like Borders and Barnes & Noble are trying their best to innovate their way out of a difficult situation - dedicating more floorspace to digital book readers, emphasizing higher-margin multimedia items (educational toys) and hosting more live events to draw in neighborhood foot traffic - but the economics of the publishing industry have forever changed. And that's where it gets interesting. In other words, in exchange for continuing to make books available to us in digital format, we are implicitly assigning a company like Amazon, Google or Apple the privilege to act as the ultimate "gatekeeper" for our books. But does the Digital Infinite Library approach make sense?