Tag Archives: books

Book Talk, Digital Publishing, E-Books, Publishing Industry News, Technology

Mobile Books Climbing the Ladder

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The folks over at the O’Reilly RADAR blog crunched some numbers and churned out some graphs. With the iPhone Apps store about to sell its one billionth app download,  the “books” category is by far and wide the largest mover and shaker. It saw 279% growth over the past week and while sporting only 11% of the Apps Store’s total offerings. Granted it’s not as popular as the Games and Entertainment categories and the growth probably has a lot to do with the Kindle App, but with all of the geo-synching-motion-controlling-gesture-detecting-music-blasting features that the iPhone can do… look what all those iPhone owners are wanting to explore on their gadgets… books.

Authors, Book Talk, Events

2009 Alabama Book Festival

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The Alabama Book Festival is today down in Old Alabama Town, Montgonmery, AL. We’re loading the kiddos up and headed down there. Looks to be a good weather day.

Robyn Litchfield just had something post to the Montgomery Advertiser site though, and it sounds like it’ll at least be as good as last year’s!

Here is a list of authors and venue schedule for today.

Book Talk, Events, New Releases, Publishers, Upcoming Titles

The 5% Sweet Spot

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Chris Anderson says his new book Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business will be unleashed – free- upon the world on July 6th. As popular as his first book The Long Tail was, I’m sure I’m not the only anxious to read his latest thoughts.

In the interview he had with Guy Kawaski, Anderson does say that he expects the free version of his book to spur print sales. Something many in the industry are watching, I know. How does a publisher make money at giving their products away for free? While I’m sure the book will contain nothing as useful or solid as the formula filled The Art and Science of Book Publishing, Anderson says

“If you can convert 5 percent of users to paid, you can cover your costs. Anything above that, and it becomes extremely popular.”

I haven’t started crunching the numbers yet, but that seems to assume a very slim overhead. But it gives us a starting point. Something for the industry to aim for or pass. We’ll see. Five percent it is.

One of these days I am going to have to make it to SXSW…. but until then, thank the internet gods for blogs and twitter.

Book Covers, Book Design, Book Talk, On the Web

Buy a book just for the cover?

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The folks over at the Abebooks blog have published their picks for 30 Books Worth Buying For the Cover Alone. Only seven of the 30 use photographs. So illustration seems to be the way to go if you want to get noticed in the cover design crowd (of course, these are all fiction titles).

I REALLY like these two:

But have to wonder about this choice:

The image just seems to literal and obvious to be chosen as worth “buying for the cover alone”.