We posted a quick question about this on our Facebook page earlier in the week before Apple announced its new textbook initiative and new ebook authoring software, but Shannon is also reaching out on her site to ask for more information on how you are using ebooks and other digital knitting media. Join the conversation there!

What can we do to make ebooks and other digital products more useful for you? Embedded videos? Audio? You name it…but please go over to this entry to post and discuss with other knitters. Cooperative Press is dedicated to bringing you the very best, including any new technologies that will help you get more out of our books!

Thanks to everyone who entered the giveaway and answered the poll questions — I was really blown away by all the thoughtful responses in the free-form comment section, and I want to thank all of you who took the time to give us such great feedback.

Meanwhile, I wanted to share some of the results with you. Some were about where I thought they’d be (the first question in particular), and some surprised me a lot. The OTHER category for ebook readers — what else are you using apart from the listed items? I’m extremely curious! Feel free to comment here. On the last question, respondents could choose more than one response. As expected, the I WANT IT NOW factor was the largest, with 72% of respondents checking that box!

What do you find interesting about these answers?

From yesterday’s Financial Times:

The severing of ties between publisher Random House and Andrew Wylie, one of the world’s most powerful literary agents, left many executives fearing the showdown over e-book rights would lead to the death of the 500-year-old publishing business as it is known.

The split with the Bertelsmann-owned publisher was sparked by Mr Wylie’s deal last week to sell the electronic versions of 20 classics such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children exclusively through Amazon.com.

Random House accused the long-time enfant terrible of the publishing world of “undermining our longstanding commitments to and investments in our authors” and said it would immediately halt entering into new business with the agency.

Wylie is known as ‘The Jackal’ in publishing circles, apparently, for his willingness to swoop in and scoop up good stuff that other people apparently can’t be bothered to pay the proper amounts of attention. I don’t care. He’s my new hero. He sees where the industry is going and he’s not afraid to forge ahead.

See Odyssey Editions for some of the available titles — when you click on the “buy for Kindle” link, you are immediately redirected to the title’s Amazon Kindle edition page. The Author’s Guild has spoken out on the issue, but their message is strangely disjointed. On one hand, they support Wylie’s right to sell ebooks, but on the other, they seem to think it odd an agency would step in and do such a thing. To quote them: “A major agency starting a publishing company is weird, no matter how you look at it.”

No, not really. When you’ve been in the trenches watching the fight, it makes perfect sense, actually. Some publishers are kicking and screaming and seem to want to hop in a time machine straight back to Johannes Gutenberg’s office. Authors want their books for sale in multiple editions, realizing that ebooks are not only popular, they’re actually outselling hardbacks. Two+ years ago, my [CP owner Shannon Okey's] agent sent letters to all the publishers representing my dozen or so books, asking for them to be digitized and placed for sale on Kindle, etc. One did. I think it’s up to two, now. So when you see your clients being thwarted at every turn and denied the chance to earn additional income (thereby earning you additional income, since you get a percentage), starting a publishing imprint at your agency is not weird, it’s downright sensible.

Random House has been the target of an awful lot of ire in recent months from the other side of this war (I lobbed a firebomb over the barricades myself when The New Yorker published some spectacularly clueless quotes from RH execs — search that last linked post and you’ll find them). But when you really drill down, you start to notice that Amazon is the company the publishers really love to hate. One of the major objections raised by the Author’s Guild to Wylie’s deal was its Amazon exclusivity. Well, let me tell you something as a small publisher: the competition sucks.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook platform is nigh-on inaccessible to smaller publishers, and I have a delightfully clueless form letter to prove it. We’ll continue to sell and support .ePub-formatted books here at Cooperative Press, because the iPad and other devices use them, but unless B&N gets their act together soon, don’t expect to see our ebooks for sale on their site.

So where does that leave smaller publishers? We work with Amazon. They’ve changed their royalty structure to our benefit. They make it easy to publish our content. They have a giant userbase. Why shouldn’t Wylie make a deal with them?

Two interesting recent articles from the New York Times:

Former Book Designer Says Good Riddance to Print

The killer quote (bolding mine):

As someone who long reaped a paycheck from the sale of books, Mr. Mod isn’t looking at the transition with any form of glee. Instead, he argues that it doesn’t really matter which vessel we choose to read on, since the content will always be king. He writes, “For too long, the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existence.”

With a Kindle Hiring Spree, Amazon Gears Up for Battle With Apple

The summary:

Since Apple announced its plans for the iPad, Amazon has shared few details about how it would respond to the competition for its Kindle. But over the last few weeks, it has offered some more clues.

Lab 126, the division of Amazon responsible for building the Kindle, has been on a hiring binge, with dozens of new job listings on its Web site. Some are positions for testing and readying new products. And this suggests that the company might be preparing a new device.

You might also be interested in this recent post by CP owner Shannon Okey on digital readers, traditional publishing vs. independents and much, much more, sparked by a recent New Yorker article about the iPad and Kindle.

Our last few posts have been about the effect digital media has had on publishing. Here is an interesting resource: book publishing industry people who are using Twitter.

anezka media is currently working on bringing our title Purls Forever to the Kindle platform, and our next release will initially come out in multiple digital formats, no print. (At least not at first, we reserve the right to change that if we decide otherwise…)

Why? Because in watching the fast-moving and ever-evolving world of publishing from both sides, as both readers and producers of content, we think it’s the right thing to do. It’s ecologically friendly, for one — cuts the carbon footprint down to nearly nothing, makes it easier for us to price it fairly, doesn’t require shipping boxes and boxes of physical media. (I think the worst possible thing that happened during the production of one book was sending physical CDs of the photos for the book cross-country for layout and design!)

But what about the booksellers, you say? No problem. We have a new digital affiliate program that will allow any legitimate bookseller or book-related website to sell copies of the books with a mere cut-and-paste piece of code. This should be of particular interest to smaller, independent bookstores If you’re interested, leave a comment on this post or email info [at] anezkamedia [dot] com for more information.

One more thing to think about: an interesting article by John Siracusa called The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age

It’s time for independent publishers and booksellers to forge ahead, using the creativity and flexibility at our disposal to renew the current system of getting our books out to the public in a more personal, efficient and consumer-friendly way. Won’t you join us?

Inevitable, given modern publishing trends — the big houses are slowly moving away from the older sizeable-advance-then-hope-for-royalties model. Food author Michael Ruhlman, a fellow Clevelander, examines how this works as applied to cookbooks, and mentions the new Harper Collins unit discussed in the linked New York Times article.

From the NYT:

Author advances and bookseller returns have long troubled the publishing industry. Best-selling authors can command advances so high that publishers often come away with slim profits, even for books that are significant successes. Publishers also sometimes offer high advances to untested authors in the hopes of creating new hits, but often those gambles do not pan out.

Ms. Friedman said the new group, which will initially publish just 25 titles a year, would offer “low or no advances.” Mr. Miller, who was most recently president of Hyperion, said he hoped to offer authors a 50-50 split of profits. Typically, authors earn royalties of 15 percent of the hardcover price for each book sold after they have paid off their advances. Many authors never earn royalties.

In essence, they’re trying to do more or less what we do here at anezka media! Michael Ruhlman understands the model, and points out some problems with the old one.

Nick Kokonas, the restaurateur who, with Grant Achatz has created the restaurant Alinea in Chicago, was unhappy with the conventional deals publishers were offering Grant for his cookbook. Kokonas figured, given that they have an in-house designer and photographer, they could do it themselves. … they are creating an intriguing website with demos and recipes and techinques to go with it.

(Technology and bonus features are always a plus. Stay tuned — some upcoming anezka media releases will have both!)

As mentioned in the last post, Gina Wilde of Alchemy decided to go with self-publishing after finding the offers from traditional publishers unsatisfactory. The resulting book, Destination Alchemy, is fantastic. And, without knowing all the numbers involved, I suspect she’ll earn a lot more on the book in the long run than she would have under the old model.

This isn’t about vanity publishing — that’s an entirely different ball of wax. Amazon’s recent announcement that they will no longer allow print on demand books printed by vendors other than Amazon to be sold directly by Amazon is another. (There’s a lot of balls of wax in the publishing industry these days). This is about bringing quality niche content to its audience in the most efficient and highest-quality way possible while giving authors a fair deal. There’s no reason, given modern technology, to stick to the old ways. We can do better!