Posts tagged ebooks

Why publishers should give away ebooks

Nicholas Carr writes that book publishers should follow the lead of a few record labels that give away mp3 downloads of an album when you purchase the vinyl.

Via Rough Type:

Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow.

There’s a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren’t going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it’s not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.

Sex, Kink and Plagiarism

Adam Penenberg writes at Fast Company that Amazon’s erotica ebook section is rife with plagiarized works. Seems “authors” are simply cutting and pasting stories found elsewhere (such as from Literotica), putting pen names on the titles and passing them off as their own.

Via Fast Company:

Writing a book is hard. All those torturous hours an author has to spend creating, crafting, culling until nonsensical words are transformed into engaging prose. It’s a whole lot easier to copy and paste someone else’s work, slap your name on top, and wait for the money to roll in. This creates a strong economic incentive, with fake authors—Sharazade thinks it’s possible they are organized gangs based in Asia—earning 70% royalty rates on every sale, earning far more than a spammer could with click fraud. The new self-publishing platforms are easy to use and make it possible to publish a title in as little as 24 hours. There’s no vetting, editing, or oversight, and if your work is taken down you can always throw up more titles or simply concoct a new pen name and start over. There’s even a viral ebook generator that comes packed with 149,000 articles that makes it possible to create an ebook in minutes.

Penenberg’s proposed solution is to require those submitting ebooks to use a credit card that would be charged should the work infringe on existing copyright.

It sounds reasonable, but if there are “organized gangs” I’d imagine they could also get their hands on pilfered bank accounts.

His other solution is to run content through plagiarism detectors such as such as Turnitin and iThenticate before a book goes on sale. This would work somewhat like YouTube’s Content ID system where uploaded content is scanned to see if it matches existing, copyrighted work. Those that match get blocked until the copyright holder decides whether he/she/it wants the work to be published.

19 free ebooks on journalism (for your Xmas Kindle)

Via Online Journalism Blog

Can Amazon Lure Authors with $6 Million?

Via Slashdot:

Amazon just announced a $6 million pool of money that it plans to pay authors. All you have to do to get a share of the loot is commit to sell your ebook exclusively through the Kindle Store and agree to let your ebook be lent to Kindle Prime members. Amazon has already signed up a number of authors, including 31 of the top 50 self-published ones (J. Carson Black, Gemma Halliday, J.A. Konrath, B.V. Larson, C.J. Lyons, Scott Nicholson, Julie Ortolon, Theresa Ragan, J.R. Rain, Patricia Ryan, and more). It looks like Amazon launched this to support the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library that Amazon launched just over a month ago. When it launched it had around 5 thousand titles as well as some less than voluntary participants. But there’s a catch. Authors are required to give Amazon an exclusive on any title in the program. That means they’re giving up the rest of the ebook market. Would any authors care to weigh in on the deal?

Amazon’s press release announcing the plan is here.

Ten Free eBooks for Writers

November is National Novel Writing Month. Or, as NaNoWriMo puts it: Thirty days and nights of literary abandon with a challenge to start and finish a 50,000 word novel.

In support of the effort, Amazon has a deal going on: Ten ebooks about writing, for free.

I haven’t read any of them but free’s free so there’s not much of an excuse not to check them out. I think I’ll start with Write Good or Die. 

Li Gardner has the list and the links over at Google+. 

Weighty eBooks

A scientist demonstrates that when you fill your Kindle with digital books, it actually gets heavier.

Via The Telegraph:

Using Einstein’s E=mc² formula, which states that energy and mass are directly related, Prof Kubiatowicz calculated that filling a 4GB Kindle to its storage limit would increase its weight by a billionth of a billionth of a gram, or 0.000000000000000001g.

This is roughly equivalent to the weight of a small virus, while the equivalent number of books – about 3,500 – would weigh approximately two tons.

So now we know.