Sunday, August 21, 2011

2011 is the Year of the eBook

Young and old are reading as never before. 2011, the year of the ebook, has become the summer of the Kindle.
On planes, trains and automobiles, we are witnessing a sea change in our reading habits unprecedented since Gutenberg.
...here at the Observer, we detect a trend in reading that's exposing the digital book to sand, soap and seduction.

Popular Kindle reading has reached a tipping point. The average UK shopper now spends £4 per month on ebooks and 53% of Kindle users say they are now reading more books than ever before.

Better still, grumpy bibliophiles are falling in love with the Kindle's sleek, reader-friendly lines, its lovely facsimile of the printed page and, yes, its literary chic.

Across the Atlantic, sales of the Kindle and its many rivals (especially the Nook and the i-Pad) have become a bonanza for publishers.

Ebook sales are nudging $1,000m, a 200% increase on 2009. In a dire domestic economy, American publishers are, for once, not moaning about sales figures. 
Meanwhile, the future of the thing Caxton called the "boke" is, we believe, secure. Ebooks, now rapidly replacing mass-market editions, may have the paradoxical effect of sponsoring more and better hardback editions. 

As Umberto Eco put it recently: "The book is like the spoon, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved."

The Kindle, in fact, sends us back to Caxton. Today, everyone has to read. In order to read, you need a medium. Why not start with an e-reader?
Amazon Kindle 3 is PC Advisor's Gadget of the Year
the Amazon Kindle 3 beat the Apple iPad into second place by 80 votes to take the coveted Gadget of the Year crown.

With its sleek profile, scant 241g weight, high-contrast 6in greyscale display and built-in Wi-Fi, plus cut-price book deals, it proved a tempting £111 (or £152 for the 3G version) package.

iPad twice as popular as Kindle

As rival tablets bite the dust faster than Audley Harrison the battle for top mobile reading device is again set to be a battle between the Apple iPad 2 and Amazon’s Kindle 3. The iPad is still way out in front in terms of popular interest, but the Kindle is catching up.

Latest news: 
  • ebook readership 35 minutes ago
    Ebooks: the great rekindling of our love of reading The Kindle is lifting the spirits of a trade whose mood, traditi...
    • eReader Sales Figures Aug 18, 2011 10:10 am
      Liberty mulls Barnes & Noble options: source NEW YORK | Wed Aug 17, 2011 6:13pm BST (Reuters) - John Malone's Li...

      eReader Sales Figures       Aug 18, 2011 9:57 am
      E-book reader sales are tripling every year August 17, 2011 | Dean Takahashi Displays for e-book readers are in suc...

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      THE BOOK IS DEAD. LONG LIVE THE BOOK! Jason Gots on August 16, 2011, 12:00 AM {http://s3.amazonaws.com/bt_assets/sy...

    • Books give way to e-readers Aug 18, 2011 10:08 am
      James Patterson easily tops highest paid authors NEW YORK | Wed Aug 17, 2011 3:08pm EDT (Reuters) - American author a...
      Do we really want to curl up with an e-book? Yesterday 6:58 pm
      Brought to book: why Kindle has failed to light my literary fire MICHAEL SHMITH August 20, 2011 Electronic wizardry ...
  • Barnes and Noble business Yesterday 6:50 pm
    Barnes & Noble Will Not Be Sold 8/19/2011 2:37:31 PM {http://thestockmarketwatch.com/stock-market-news/wp-conten...
  • ebook Prices Aug 15, 2011 7:57 pm
    **Apple Sued For Fixing Ebook Pricing, Fearing Amazon** By Tony Ibrahim | Monday | 15/08/2011 Apple is being sued for...
    • ebook Prices Aug 15, 2011 9:55 am
      Hardback sales plummeting in age of the ebook Sales of adult hardback fiction have fallen by over 10% this year alon...
    • ebook Prices  There's a(n Ebook) War Going On Posted by Alan Wexelblat...
      8:48 am  Friday, August 12
  • Amazon Kindle  Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader: Hands-On First Look Amazon's Kindle Cloud Reader will bypass...
     

    • Amazon Kindle App Things Amazon Should Tell Us About the Kindle By Clayton Morris Published August 01, 2011 |...
     
    • Amazon Kindle App Amazon Kindle ebook selection worse than it first appears By CHAD SKELTON 2 AUG 2011...
     
    Books to become immersive multimedia experience ... Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this...


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Saturday, August 6, 2011

The Book as an App

Facebook has just acquired Push Pop Press, an ebook publisher and app maker. The two founders, Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris say in their farewell statement on the Push Pop Press site: "Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook."


Apps Blog interviewed Tsinteris in May 2011 about the company's plans. 
"We think that the app is probably one of the richest, most interactive forms of storytelling that exist," he said at the time. "One of our founding premises is to re-imagine the book."
Tsinteris and co-founder Mike Matas used to work at Apple – Tsinteris as a binary mixologist working most recently on maps and location-based services for the iPhone, and Matas as a human interface designer. 
Former US vice-president Al Gore has used various media to make his climate change arguments in recent years, starting with a live presentation, which evolved into a book and then Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth. His latest platform is Apple's iOS, with book-app Our Choice.
Our Choice, the app Push Pop Press made for Al Gore as the ebook version of his sequel for An Inconvenient Truth, is a truly phat app and one that has taken a huge amount of material - text, some glorious images and video - and, particularly on iPad, made them navigable in a compelling way that doesn't feel overwhelming, despite the volume of content. 
It was developed by San Francisco startup Push Pop Press, working with book publisher Rodale, production company Melcher Media and Gore himself. 
The Our Choice app was released in late April 2011 as a paid app, costing £2.99 and running across all iOS devices. "We weren't really sure how it was going to be received," says Tsinteris. "There are a lot of naysayers around digital publishing, but people have been very appreciative of the level of detail that has gone into it."
That includes more than 250 images, an hour of documentary footage and more than 30 infographics and animations, along with text from the original Our Choice book and an audio commentary from Gore. However, Push Pop Press wasn't set up to create just one app.
The Next Generation of Digital Books... In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming.
Our Choice melds the vice president's narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking multi-touch interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.
Our Choice will remain on Apple's App Store, with Push Pop Press' share of the profits from now on to be donated to Gore's environmental campaigning group The Climate Reality Project.
Matas runs through the Our Choice app in this Ted talk from earlier this year.
Assuming their skills will be used beyond a kick-ass Facebook app itself, applying those kind of principles and aesthetics to Facebook starts to get very interesting. 
'Everybody is a storyteller at heart,' says Kimon Tsinteris...Our Choice for iPad and iPhone

From the Blogs:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/pda/2011/aug/03/facebook-push-pop-press-ebooks
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/aug/02/facebook-buys-push-pop-press
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/appsblog/2011/may/16/push-pop-ipad-al-gore 
The Next Generation of Digital Books
From: http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/
Our Choice will change the way we read books. And quite possibly change the world. In this interactive app, Al Gore surveys the causes of global warming and presents groundbreaking insights and solutions already under study and underway that can help stop the unfolding disaster of global warming. Our Choice melds the vice president's narrative with photography, interactive graphics, animations, and more than an hour of engrossing documentary footage. A new, groundbreaking multi-touch interface allows you to experience that content seamlessly. Pick up and explore anything you see in the book; zoom out to the visual table of contents and quickly browse though the chapters; reach in and explore data-rich interactive graphics.





A Guided Tour of Our Choice

Al Gore demonstrates the groundbreaking features that make Our Choice the first full-length interactive book of its kind.


















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PHOTOS
AUDIO
VIDEOS
MAPS
INFOGRAPHICS

Contents



 
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