16/08/06
Browse / search / inside the eBook
This follows on from all of the ebook posts of late, and there is a collection of (mostly) related links at the end of this post. What the thread is here is the delivery of words digitially over a number of platforms.
The first point to note is the absence of announcement by Apples’ Steve Jobs at the WWDC about a new iPod with PDF or eBook support. Depending on who you are, you’ll either give a sigh of relief or sadness (or apathy). But there is still hope, as rumours begin for the next Keynote speech Jobs will give, although the Apple phone is currently top of the buzz list. I also came across (via the Millions links below) a Jason Kottke review of Sony’s first e-ink device, the Librie, from a number of months ago.
The next point is the introduction by HarperCollins of its browse inside feature. They say they are ‘First Publisher To Offer Sample Book Pages Globally On The Web
‘.
The feature is pretty similar to Amazon or Google Book search, where users can see limited amounts of the books in a web browser, displayed exactly as if the pages were in front of the reader.
Although HC is a client of Apt’s, I have to say (personally) I’m a little disappointed by it - it’s kind of slow and clunky, and doesn’t provide a reading experience that is enhanced or rich. But it’s a good effort, it just seems slightly underwhelming given the opportunities and the investment in the technology - which is supposed to be in the millions annually.
I’d like to find out more about the technical side of this. The delivery of the content is via flash player, which is different to Google and Amazon, and suggests good things about the content being made available dynamically over XML or something else - suggesting that they haven’t (unlike Amazon or Google) just scanned and indexed the pages, but are serving the content from well marked-up text files. (I could be way, way off the mark here).
This also bodes well for other uses of the content - such as making it available in HTML or chopping it up for other devices and marketing platforms, in smaller chunks, or (providing it is correctly meta tagged) allowing users to, say, compile their own anthologies from the content, and then printing on demand.
My main problem with it however is the sheer clunkiness of the design, and the generally horrible and counter-intuitive user interface. If it is able to be delivered dynamically through flash, why not spend some time re-thinking the interface, integrating the flash player into the main body of the site (HC does have a fetish for pop-up windows) and some slinky typography? And given Flash’s ability to pre-cache content (i.e. downloading in the background whilst observing one set of content) why are the pages only downloaded on demand? Still, I’m really glad they used Flash for this.
Anyway, we’ll wait and see what happens. Here is an example, for Isabel Allende.
At the time, Jane Friedman, global CEO (and someone I’d really like to meet) said
“Right now, we plan on letting readers view about 5% of a book online, but I could imagine some writers wanting to make more available, or even an entire book,” she said. While Friedman says she’s determined to make Harper-Collins the “No. 1” online marketer among publishers, she has no plans to become an online retailer: Penguin Group USA; Random House, and other publishers have been selling their books directly to readers, a policy that has angered booksellers. “We see no reason to duplicate a service that our friends in the retail business already do quite well,” Friedman said.
She also discussed ambitions to hook up with fellow News International company MySpace.
In other HC news, the second round of agglomeratisation in publishing may be beginning: VCs are reported to be sniffing around HC, Penguin and Simon & Schuster.
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2006/05/amazon-upgrade-reinvents-online-access.html
http://www.themillionsblog.com/2006/04/possibility-of-ebook-summer.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060726/20060726005556.html?.v=1
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/2006/07/26/how_soon_can_apple_build_an_e-book_ipod/
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2309797,00.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2006/08/11/ccmedia11.xml
http://www.kottke.org/05/04/the-sony-librie
http://www.cruelestmonth.com/cruelestmonth/weblogs/index.html
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# Pingback by Times emit » Blog Archive » Agents on Google @ 8:52 am, August 23, 2006:
[…] Another thing that came up was a recent presentation to one of the agents, by Google Book search. I was told that this presentation finally removed any doubt in the mind of the agent as to GBS being a very good thing. However - and apologies for this not being exactly news - what we agreed was the massive damage that had been done by Google on a public relations level, and the huge amount of ground they were going to need to reclaim to win the hearts and minds of publishers (who really, it seems, feel strongly enough about Google’s invasion to justify that kind of language). Admittedly it was late in the evening, but we agreed that surely, one very quick way to give some love back to the publishers would be for Google to hand back to the publishers the digitised files, in text (i.e. machine readable) as well as print/POD - ready PDF files, for the publishers to use in their own efforts? The cost of digitisation to the only publisher disclosing (HarperCollins, see previous post) is supposed to be in the seven figures each year - and that may just be for the USA. […]
# Pingback by Times emit » Blog Archive » Waterstones.com @ 7:12 pm, August 30, 2006:
[…] I like the fact they’re doing this, and the fact that it’s on the same page as the book is a vast improvement on the HarperCollins implementation I blogged about before - but their content is dire. If Waterstones is going to seriously compete with Amazon - and that is the goal here - then they need to up their game considerably on the new front, content. […]