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- Column - All About E-books - |
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July 30/2000 Ebook Update: Signs of Maturity By Ebook Editor Lisa Eagleson-Roever If you search long enough, or sign up for enough epublishing newsletters, you will see signs that the ebook industry is maturing. Although hardly settled into the proverbial house with the picket fence, the wild-child industry does appear to have aged enough across the boards to understand the need for showing up on time and playing well with others. Let's take a look at the signs: Who's Selling Ebooks - Epublishers sell their own ebooks, of course, but what if you don't want to surf from site to site? Bn.com and Chapters.ca now have ebook sections. Chapters.ca's ebooks are in the Glassbook format; bn.com's are in RocketEdition. Simon & Schuster have released not only Mary Higgins Clark's latest novel as an ebook but also her entire backlist. For the try-before-you-buy option for more expensive texts, such as reference books, you can hop onto the Bartleby (www.bartleby.com) and netLibrary (www.netlibrary.com) websites. They are electronic libraries, so you can't buy all their ebooks from them, but you can at least discover what e-references are out there, take a peek at how useful they might be for you and note which houses publish them. What's Out There - At the publisher-based book-selling sites, you can find virtually anything, although it appears that romances dominate the market. Nearly all epublishers sell their books in PDF format, and some now offer ebooks formatted for separate ebook readers and PDAs. At the non-publisher-based book-selling sites, the offerings still cluster around how-to and classics. For free, from Chapters.ca, you can download about a dozen titles, including: My Antonia, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, and This Side of Paradise. Glassbook Reader software (which is free) is also available on that site. The for-pay options include a number of Coles Notes books and business books by Evenlyn Jacks. Bn.com's total list is more diverse, but there are only two freebies and RocketEdition format requires a separate reader device, which is not free. Other Signs of Maturity - - NetLibrary is now providing ebooks to print-on-demand networks, personal computers, and handheld devices. - Time Warner Trade Publishing has bought into Bookface.com, a site that allows consumers to read excerpts - and in some cases whole books - on the Internet. It's not clear that all the excerpts and books you can read are ebooks available for downloading, but it's a step in that direction, I think. - The parent company of BEA, Reed Exhibitions, has announced that it will hold EPub Expo sometime this fall. The event will include a conference and trade show, and will focus on the management, distribution, and protection of digital content. - Penton Media is hosting E-Book World in November, a conference and exhibition devoted to ebook technology, publishers' issues, and cultural changes in society. - Ind-e-pubs group is opening a site for independent e-publishers to see samples of each others' works and to post comments. Ebook publishers are getting themselves organized as an industry and traditional print publishers are taking advantage of the Internet. Print-on-demand sites are increasing in number, both those that will print your manuscript for you (iUniverse) and those that will print others' books (netLibrary). Online book stores are giving away classics to encourage readers to try the electronic format. These recent signs of maturity hint at a move toward longevity - thinking farther ahead than the next book, the next bill, the next webpage - and those are good signs to me. -- Sources of information for this article include: Bn.com's website Chapters.ca's website CNet.com articles eBookNet's website ePublishing Connections newsletters: articles and news available via http://www.epublishingconnections.com PW Daily for Booksellers - June 7, 2000 Simon & Schuster's website "netLibrary Adds Print On Demand from Sprout," Studio B Buzz; See also: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000602/il_netlibr.html. See also: http://www.studiob.com/cafenews/ "Time Warner arm takes stake in Net book site," Sandeep Junnakar, CNET News.com, June 2, 2000, 5:35 AM PT |
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