The much trumpeted Harry Potter Website has had to announce a serious delay in its plans to start selling all the Hogwarts books as ebooks.

The idea was that they would start selling the Harry Potter books online as ebooks this month (October 2011), but apparently owing to a combination of several million frenzied kids playing away at some form of Wizard’s fencing online game on the Pottermore site and other unspecified problems, they have announced that they will start selling those ebooks sometime next year.

Many commentators have pointed out that this means they will miss the Christmas shopping frenzy, but it has also been pointed out that they don’t really need to give a damn about this, as they have already made more money than one would think possible from those books.

As a spokeperson for Pottermore puts it:

(we)are in no rush to launch anything until all potential problems have been sorted out. . A delayed launch may even mean a greater second wave of excitement about the ebooks becoming available as the anticipation builds up over a longer period of time.”

However, one thing they may have overlooked here is that in setting up this website with lots of trumpets and drums, they have pulled Harry Potter fans onto the net, and will certainly have thus caused many of them to realize that they can download any or all the Harry Potter books in ebook format from no end of free (illegal) torrent sites, which must effect sales when finally Pottermore get themselves together enough to actually open shop.

Link to Pottermore: http://www.pottermore.com/

Share with us:

So, what do you think about not being able to (legally) get hold of Harry Potter books as ebooks?

Ebooks, paper books, books for African kids, all in the one place.

They have come up with an intriguing way of letting others decide if a book is worth publishing or not, a sort of Peer review system, which they explain as follows:

The process is simple. Just as it’s done in the publishing world, we ask authors to submit ten pages and a summary of their book. We then let you browse the submissions based on your preferences. You read a brief overview, and if it strikes your fancy, you click through to read a more in depth description. If you’re still interested, you read an excerpt. And if that leaves you wanting more, you support it (which is essentially like preordering the book)! You don’t get charged unless the book is published, so there’s no risk.

So that is their plan, simple but rather neat I think you will agree, and certainly opens publishing up and gives aspiring authors a good chance of seeing their work actually printed, if it is any good at least.  I like it.

All books that get published will be published as paper books, but also as ebooks, which will be available  in Kindle, Nook and Sony formats. In other words, the books -  both ebook and paper book – will be available at most of the normal outlets and for almost all ereaders, which is great news.

On top of that,they also have a forum on their site, which in their words (again):

Read full story »

Today’s guest writer, Jim Fallone who has worked in the publishing industry for many years contemplates the mistakes the publishing world is making with ereaders and ebooks, and has some interesting thoughts on the topic.

Read on:

Publishing’s Old and Dusty Concept of Perceived Value is Keeping it from Embracing the Digital Age

By Jim Fallone

The Publishing Industry is undergoing a massive shift in revenue streams right now and its inability to understand it has already claimed its second largest book retailer and devalued the perceived value of a bestseller from $27.99 to $9.99.  Borders miscalculated the consumer’s readiness to adopt the format and had no stake in the game to offset the loss in print sales. The Publisher’s greed and fear caused them to abandon windowing which was effective in managing perceived value down the format chain to the mass market which early on is where front list ebooks might have simply replaced mass market paperbacks. Instead publishers agreed to sell new bestsellers in ebook format concurrent with the hardback assuming that the perceived value of the ebook would be “worth” more than $9.99.  Initially they felt that the value would be related to the physical artifact. But in a digital world we are faced with the challenge of placing a value on things that cease to exist when the power is turned off.  One reason the web is filled with free information, tools, and entertainment is that as humans we find it hard to attribute tangible value to intangible things. This is not only because of lower production costs, it’s that people just don’t perceive value online the same way they do in the real world. (How many times have you asked yourself is Photoshop really worth $699?) With ebooks unless someone clicks a download button the book does not exist. It is just a single unopened zip file on a server somewhere. So with ebooks the “right” retail is whatever it takes to get the customer to click a button.

According to Billboard Lady Gaga‘s Born This Way sold 1.1 million copies in a single week. Even excluding the estimated 430,000 digital downloads sold for $0.99 by Amazon (at a $7.40 loss) she still sold four-and-a-half times as many records as Brad Paisley whose new album was a distant second. In a Wall Street Journal interview when asked if considering her phenomenal popularity she thought her album was worth more than $0.99. Her answer was surprising.

Read full story »

Everything you ever wanted to know about computer cases, but were too embarrassed to ask, is now to be found in this superb ebook.

Tweak Town (a well known site about all manner of highly technical matters to do with computers and other digital things) have just produced an amazing ebook guide about computer cases for anyone thinking of building their own computer.  A definite Must Read.

This ebook has about 250 pages of highly specific advice and information on every aspect of computer cases – what they should include, all the various different types (according to which motherboard you want to bung into it) and all manner of other points you need to consider when deciding which case to buy to build your dream computer into.

What does it cover?

The list of chapters gives one an idea of the range of information to be found in this ebook:

Factors to consider when choosing a PC case

• Form Factor and Motherboard Compatibility
• Materials and Construction
• Coating
• Aluminum
• Plastic
• Steel
• Weight, Durability and Look

Cooling

• CFM and Noise
• Static Pressure
• Read full story »

At the Edinburgh International Book Festival this weekend, Ewan Morrison set out his bleak vision of a publishing industry in terminal decline and the equally bleak future for writers.

In a long article in the Guardian Newspaper yesterday, (link below) Ewan Morrison’s very depressing vision of what we are heading for in the world of writing and publishing was reported in some detail, and very depressing reading it makes too for all of those who love books and certainly depressing for those who want to write books as well.

Basically his contention is that the advent of ebooks and the drive to free or almost free ebooks being available online at sites such as Smashwords, Amazon and so on has removed the financial underpinning of the publishing and writing world, and thus the profession of writing will soon become a thing of the past.

He puts it thus:

Within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of “the writer” as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by specialty subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.

He supports this contention with a most impressive analysis of various other digital industries that have been established for longer than ebooks, and shows that all of them have found themselves in a downwards spiral of lower and lower earnings as people move away from traditional forms of music, film and so on in favour of the much cheaper (or free) digital forms of these arts.

Amusingly, and unusually he includes the porn industry in this list, stating that the income from all manner of pornography has dropped by almost 60% since the advent of free streaming video on line, quoting two sources for this:

According to the LA Times “Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined from 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply”. One top porn star, Savannah Stern, has cited that, on par with most of her colleagues, her earnings fell in 2010, from $150K a year to $50K. As Bill Asher, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment, states: “We always said that once the internet took off, we’d be OK … It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.”

Curious, no?   And I had always thought that porn was an industry that had guaranteed high income.

Author’s advances:

Read full story »

Don’t give up, justfight the good fight to  get your ebook published.

Alana cash, a successful filmmaker has written a long article for (http://www.insearchofdesign.com/) in which she describes the considerable problems she has experienced as she attempted to get her book TOM’S WIFE published as an ebook, and she has agreed to let me share some of her experiences with you guys, in a spirit of “I fell into the holes in the road, here are some warning signposts to help you avoid doing the same”.

When she decided to publish her ebook herself, she had a look at the various online outfits who offer what is called Publish on Demand (POD), such as Smashwords, Lightening and CreateSpace (the last being the outfit who distribute her films for her) and that is when her problems began.

Contract….  Oh yeah?

The first problem she ran into was one that has probably not really occurred to most of you hopeful authors out there, and that is the form of contracts that these POD’s offer authors who publish via them.

Basically when she looked a these contracts it quickly became obvious to her that they are actually in no way really contracts, or as she puts it:

In a standard publishing situation, once a book has been accepted for publication, the publisher and author negotiate a contract setting out the percentage of sales the author will receive as royalties, which rights (movie rights, international rights, paperback rights, etc.) the author transfers and which are retained by the author to be negotiated later and other matters.

OK, this all makes perfect sense, and is a real agreement between two parties, and is real protection for both of them, but in the world of POD things are not like that:

In the world of self-publishing/print-on-demand (POD), there are only implied agreements.  By going through the process of uploading a PDF to the POD company site, the author is agreeing to have the book printed and marketed by that company.  Meaning, an author can’t claim later any sort of infringement of copyright because they’ve implied an agreement to print the book, but the author retains all rights to the material. Read full story »