It's open season for advertisements in e-books.
Opening Day, Les Standiford's novella about Satchel Paige, former Negro Leagues baseball star (LiveReads), includes a lot more than good reading.
There's an interactive baseball game, rare photos, hundreds of hypertext and website links, and extensive background info on Negro League Baseball. Oh, and there are also advertisements.
Interestingly, the ads are for print books. "Still like paper and ink?" the ad on the second page asks. "Click to buy the paperback."
"We wanted the e-book to act as a brochure for the print version because we know most people still prefer the traditional experience," said Scott Waxman, president of LiveReads.
A print-on-demand version of Opening Day will go on sale Monday.
Neal Bascomb, LiveReads CEO, said that the company's release last fall of Jack Kerouac’s Orpheus Emerged helped generate serious print book sales. "So rather than wait around for e-books to become a market, we are going to use them to help publishers market print books," Bascomb said.
Bascomb sees such complementary editions as the real future of publishing. LiveReads studios said it will soon provide production and marketing services for other publishers, helping them to use e-books to stimulate and encourage print sales.
Queen gets royalty treatment: Months of self promoting recently paid off for self-published author India Edghill, when St. Martin's Press purchased her book, Queenmaker: A Novel of King David's Queen.
Edghill tried the traditional route three years ago, but her previous agent couldn’t interest a New York house. At that time, neither mainstream nor small presses thought the market for a woman’s biblical novel was very strong, said Edghill.
So Edghill went to Xlibris.com and self-published her novel about King David’s first wife. Then she did everything she could to get it noticed.
Of course it had to read well. Her sister, published author Rosemary Edghill, helped with the editing, and noted cover artist Judy York gave Queenmaker a professional look.
She distributed flyers and postcards. She promoted herself at the Romantic Times Book Fair. She browsed the listings for similar books on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and e-mailed a self-promotional piece to people who'd done reader reviews. Edghill also searched the Net for book clubs and book groups and sent them free copies.
The turning point came when – with the urging of Xlibris – The New York Times wrote about the book in an article about new frontiers in e-publishing.
The most important aspect, however, was the quality of the work.
"All that mattered to me was India’s strong narrative power," said Diana Higgins, senior editor at St. Martin's. The book is scheduled to be published in hardcover this winter.
Custom-made textbooks: By the fall of 2001, educators will be able to add their own content and customize more than 100 digital textbooks from Pearson, a leading education publisher. The integration is made possible by using the CourseCompass platform.
Pearson and NetLibrary will create these digital versions of hundreds of the world's most popular college-level textbooks over the next year. NetLibrary has the rights to re-sell Pearson's digital textbooks online at MetaText.com.
In addition to managing their courses from a personalized CourseCompass homepage, teachers can upload course documents – from simple MS Word documents to PowerPoint presentations – and create links directly to the digital textbooks without having any HTML experience.
The program, which began three months ago, supports more than 200 of Pearson's textbooks with original content.
Advice and prizes: Publishing Online, a digital book distributor, has launched its new website with hopes of becoming not only an e-book distributor, but also a resource for readers, writers and industry professionals.
The site includes the latest publishing industry news, featured author content, related links and exclusive articles by industry veterans.
The Writer's Community, which is part of the site, will give away over $25,000 in awards to select authors of poetry and fiction to help promote the digital publishing industry and introduce new writers to the literary community.
"One of the goals of our website is to help our partners make the transition from the 'old world' medium of print to the 'new world' medium of the Web," said David Humphrey, of Publishing Online.
M.J. Rose is the author of a new novel and a non-fiction book about e-publishing.
