This week I have been dabbling with Twitter and its a very good source of topical references. If you would like to know what Tim O’Reilly or John Battelle are thinking about, then you will get lots of good ideas following them on Twitter. Or you can pick up JAFurtado’s tweets, which scatter plenty of topical technology and publishing references (I like the fact that some of them are in French or Spanish and Portuguese, although I can only cope … Keep Reading
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Google were not much in evidence at the Online show at Olympia this week. But they were much in the mind of publishers and aggregators that I met. Its rather odd to be at a trade show where by far the biggest actor is not present, but the influence is pervasive. This got me to wondering how one might measure the Gravitational Pull of Google Book Search. One measure would be the number of published titles available through GBS compared … Keep Reading
We now have a flexible system of web access management that allows a publisher to select areas of a book which can be assessed and sampled in full view before a purchase. For example here are some full size pages from the Time Out City Guide to London.
From the book’s home page, there are some named links which allow the user to grasp the context of sample pages that might be of interest. Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia is … Keep Reading
Thirty years ago, when I was a rookie editor at Oxford University Press, there were quite serious discussions within that august organisation about electronic publishing. I remember being astonished when the then Finance Director, now deceased, wondered aloud whether it was wise to be building a new warehouse facility at Corby if the whole market for books was to be computerised by digital editions within five years.
At the time (this was when the standards for CD ROMs were still … Keep Reading
We have been working for some months with a way of selectively revealing content. Our internal codeword for this system has been ‘petticoats’, the idea being that there are some layers in the system which can publishers can raise to reveal more content.
Time Out City Guides can only be viewed in their 16 pp thumbnail format. But the text of the whole book is searchable.
Some of our other titles are viewable as double-page spreads throughout, and we also … Keep Reading