Digital Book World Day 2 was even better than Day 1 and I came home both exhausted and energized. I directed my energies into getting the photos up on my website. I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies in my “take aways.” Please comment any corrections!
In the morning there was a presentation of the BISG data showing increasingly positive attitudes toward eBooks in most segments, although their sample of 800 was a bit small. And, amusingly, the Nook did a good job branding itself as several recipients claimed to be using one before it was available.
Liza Daly of Threepress Consulting, accounted some shamefully sloppy editing in eBook editions that are more than a little alarming. She also pointed out that the pirated versions of these same releases are edited correctly, presumably by the pirates (argh! Not to make light of it but I can’t help picturing editor pirates armed with sharpened pencils.) On that note, I didn’t mention something very interesting from Tuesday’s piracy presentation by Brian Napack, most pirated versions are generated from pre-publication copies.
I really enjoyed some of the panel discussions where really good questions were raised regarding everything from sub-rights to contracts to xml conversion to pricing and windowing.
During the lunch break there was a BLIO demonstration, I couldn’t help but think the timing, an hour before the big annoucement out of Cupertino was a bit, well, sad. No matter what your feelings on either BLIO or Apple, the only eReader people were buzzing about yesterday was Apple’s.
And speaking of the unicorn, we now have the skinny on the iPad. The name leaves a bit to be desired but I think as an eReader it looks great – sexy even, especially the page turn. And I love the price point making real competition for Kindle. Of course, it is also the lowest model that I have my eye on – I am really not interested in a netbook (I do need an iphone, erm need may not be the right word here, but I am holding out for the Verizon rumor to come true.) The iBooks App looks pretty darn cool too, and I think that the agency model may have some real merits for the publisher (apparently 5 out of big 6 are currently in, and I have no comment on that.)
The great thing about shooting DBW was I could easily wander in and out of all the breakouts, I wanted to listen to everything in full but in real time obviously that was not possible so I tried to get a taste of everything. DBW = smorgasbord?
In a discussion about eBook release timing the dvd model was raised, I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison. The ensuing marketing budget commentary was certainty not fair – although I’d like to know what percentage of a movie’s total’s costs become the marketing budget versus a book’s total cost compared to its marketing budget. I bring that up because I also learned that apparently the Titanic made 1.1 billion dollars and in comparison Bertelsmann bought Random House for 1.1 Billion dollars.
And lastly I learned, “comments gauge the importance of a blog.” So, clearly, I need to become more important here.