Saturday, July 19, 2014

Publishers Should Start Selling eBooks on Bittorrent

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Decentralized technologies like BitTorrent allow people to share books, films, music and pictures. The essence is software allows people download a file for multiple sources at the same time. The more users you have sharing the same file, the faster the downloads are for everyone. There are many companies that have their own clients for different operating systems, but the spirit of the software is  uniform. Over the past few years one  of the original pioneers, Bittorrent,  has offered paid downloads and bundes. This has piqued the interest from the digital publishing world, as an avenue to sell audiobooks, ebooks, magazines, newspapers .

Bittorrent has a free and paid system to distribute your digital content. It is tremendously customizable an artist can use to deliver their songs. Instead of paying web-hosting fees or arranging a complex relationship with a streaming service, Bitorrent makes good business sense. Lets say I have a music album, I can give select tracks away for free and offer a few that are paid.

Bittorrent also runs a bundling solution, where companies can offer a few movies, television shows or showcase different artists. Since bundling launched in 2013 free and paid downloads have reached over one hundred million, this is attractive to publishers.

Monthly Bundle site visitors have increased from 2.1 million, to 25 million (+1,095%). 25% of visitors share the content with their network across some social channel. And fans are coming back, over and over again. 75% of Bundles site traffic is coming from returning users.

Bittorrent makes distributing legitimate content fairly compelling. Of the 7,500 films made in 2014, only 100 will ever be seen. Netflix took down 1,800 titles in 2013, and another 470 in January. Things look pretty dire, even if you’re in a position to have your content played. They're worse if you’re looking to get paid. Youtube, the world's largest streaming platform, offers artists $1,750 in exchange for a million streams. Being able to tap into an ecosystem for hundreds of millions of people in a global market to distribute copyrighted work is fairly awesome.  Moby. Madonna. Cut/Copy. De La Soul. Diplo. Death Grips. Werner Herzog. Hundred Waters. Lee Scratch Perry. Lucy Walker. Joshua Oppenheimer. Gabe Polsky. Public Enemy. Amanda Palmer have all gave away free tunes or charged for it.

Publishers have been the one segment who have not gravitated towards the concept of distributing royalty free content, DRM-Free or otherwise. There are plenty of imprints such as science fiction specialized TOR. They sell their books with no encryption, which makes it perfectly viable to load it on your phone, e-reader and tablet. Pottermore, the publishers behind Harry Potter also do not employ DRM, and instead use digital watermarks.

Digital book sellers have been disappearing in the last few years and major publishers are trying to find away from exclusively relying on Amazon to distribute their books. Publishers can sell their EPUB and PDF books with DRM, and their customers can read them with their favorite e-reader or tablet via Adobe Digital Editions.

Publishers Should Start Selling eBooks on Bittorrent is a post from: Good e-Reader

Digital Publishing and e-Reader Gossip – July 13-19 2014

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There are a ton of gossip in the digital publishing and e-reader sector that transpires every single week. Most of these short snippets simply wouldn’t do as a singular article. Today, we look at all of the little tidbits we have gleaned from interviews and research.

Zinio is at a crossroads in the digital magazine sector. The company has fired most of the staff in their California office. This is where most of the app development and research and development occurs. Most high level staff have now abandoned the company as they try and rekindle some of the success they had when the iPad first came out.

ImCoSys imcoV6L e-reader never really took off in North America, due to FCC certification really late, and has been continuously delayed. Since they actually brought a new reader to market in Europe, this has attracted investment capital. The company has confirmed they will present the successor model, as well as another world novelty at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October. They also said “In the US we are in exclusive discussions with big partners for the successor of the imcoV6L.”

Barnes and Noble will be putting together an announcement in mid-August about the two new Nook Tablets, done in conjunction with Samsung. Likely a media event will happen towards the end of August, where they will do something at Union Square in New York.

PressReader, the Vancouver based digital newspaper company is unveiling PressReader Offline. It is a solution for airplanes, oil rigs, cargo vessels and cruise ships. It basically uses satellite internet in non-peak hours to download newspapers from the internet and then allow anyone on the vessel to download them to their smartphone or tablet via WIFI.

Netherlands based e-reader company Icarus is going to be releasing a six inch and 9.7 inch Open Android ereader around August. It will be running Android 4.2, which is way better than what Onyx is using.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos last week to talk about eBooks. There is no definitive word on whether it was the early stage talks on a new contract, something to do with Kindle Unlimited or some sort of bargain about the possible outcome of the Hachette dispute.

On July 22, Flickr will be removing the option to sign in with a Facebook or Google account. You must have a Yahoo account in order to sign in to Flickr.

JK Rowling has said that writing seven more Robert Galbraith is a “no brainer”, describing the Harry Potter novels as “six whodunits and one whydunit” – and admitting her “dirty secret” – that she never reads fantasy.

Pocketbook will be releasing the Ultra e-reader in a few weeks. This e-reader has a camera that they are billing as a tool to make scanlation copies of books and read it on your device.

Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Kobo self-publishing platforms have started to crack down on erotica featuring Sasquatch, minotaurs, aliens, and boar gods.

Digital Publishing and e-Reader Gossip – July 13-19 2014 is a post from: Good e-Reader