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Evan’s post last week, Do I Believe in Ebooks?: Part One, stimulated some interesting conversation in the blogosphere and I hope that Part Two, his bold recommendation, will encourage all of us to reconsider the potential of ebooks. I will be at the Tools of Change conference today and I hope some of my fellow attendees will share their opinions with me both in person and in the comments section below.

By Evan Schnittman

In my last posting I promised to delve into my vision of the evolution of ebooks and in doing so offer a dramatic proposal to make them more mainstream and more widely used. I propose that an ebook license be granted as part of the purchase price to anyone who buys a new print book. Yes, you read correctly; the ebook is free with a new print book purchase. (more…)

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By Evan Schnittman

Recently I was on an airplane reading an article in the New York Times when the woman in the seat next to me leaned over and asked what I was holding. I told her it was a Kindle, Amazon’s new ebook reader. I showed her how it worked, explained e-ink, walked her through my collection of titles and subscriptions, and showed how I could look up words in the built in Oxford dictionary. Her response; “That is really cool, but I prefer the feel and smell of a real book.” (more…)

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and yes, I'm in the passenger seat.



"These two lanes will take us anywhere..."
Where I'm Coming From, what it feels like to leave the city behind and "stumble" towards the outskirts of town. Driving out of New York, driving home and into the arms of Long Island, kicking off my shoes and letting go...

My very first YouTube upload.


Pinch me. I feel as if I discovered electricity.
I YouTubed myself and.. it worked.
"Mr. Watson! Come here!"

It's Newbery/Caldecott announcement morning. Life's about to change for a few of you out there. I suspect you're not sleeping either. ;>



p.s. January 14th. Happy Birthday to my cousin David... wherever you are

By Evan Schnittman

You have heard rumors of it for nearly a year now – Amazon has an ebook reader that will run on a new ebook platform powered by Mobipocket. Well, after many stops and starts, today Amazon released Kindle, or, what I call the “readers’ iPod.” This device, coupled with the awesome power of the Amazon web sales machine, represents perhaps the most significant moment in the history of eBooks.

I have always maintained that the iPod coupled with iTunes model is the key to a compelling ebook business. The iPod, perhaps the most fantastic device any of us own, would have been just another cool device sitting in our junk drawer if Apple hadn’t been prescient about the duality in digital content; Device + Network = Adoption. (more…)

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Might the social networking site CafeScribe be the solution
Higher Ed publishers have been waiting for?

By Evan Schnittman

Last week Salt Lake City based social networking site CafeScribe visited our NY office to demonstrate their service and explain their business model. These kind of meetings happen all the time and I usually sit politely through a series of PowerPoint slides which show how Site X or Product Y appeals to a myriad of users who are in our target demographic, and how these users would love to have access to our content. When discussion of business models comes around, they are usually what I call “personal hovercraft business models” (i.e., this will start earning OUP and its author’s money when everyone is floating around on their own personal hovercraft.) (more…)

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By Evan Schnittman

To avoid confusion lets get everyone on the same page. Google Library (GL, as opposed to Google Book Search) is a program that has scanning facilities set up at 20+ libraries around the globe. These facilities digitize the print books in a given collection and then index the text so that it can be discovered by Google’s search engine. The search engine displays only a snippet(250 characters or so) if the book is in copyright, the full text if the book is deemed to be part of the public domain. In exchange for sharing their collections, Google gives a digital file of each book to the library for their archives. GL should not be confused with Google Book Search (GBS), which is a publisher sanctioned program in which Google licenses the right, from publishers, to digitize, index, and display 20% of a book for the purpose of making it “discoverable” in Google’s search engine. See The ABC’s of GBS, Part 1 for a complete description. (more…)

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Evan Schnittman (an OUPblogger) gets interviewed at BEA on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Have an itch for prank calls? Have Nancy Drew call your friends. (Yes, someone did have Nancy Drew call me. Was it you?) (more…)

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By Evan Schnittman

Corey Podolsky has written an excellent essay, Book Widgets and Book Selling 2.0 that clearly explains the thinking behind the large scale repository efforts underway at a few publishing giants. He posits wisely that Web 2.0 viral marketing, especially on sites like MySpace.com, is wonderfully afoot. These publishers have enabled their content to be safely and securely discovered and displayed in the hope that at some point, some sort of monetary transaction will occur. (more…)

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Consumer choice and publisher dilemma in the era of Google Book Search

By Evan Schnittman

Google announced plans a few months ago to roll out “100% online access” in Google Book Search (GBS).

Currently, Google (and Microsoft with its Live Book search) have full book contents on their servers which are indexed for the purpose of discoverability (See the ABC’s of GBS – Part 1) (more…)

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Evan Schnittman wrote an article for Publishing News last week entitled “Facing The Digital Reality.” Schnittman writes in his article that,

“…at the 500-year-old publishing house where I am employed book sales still make up the lion’s share of our income. Yet, as print-oriented as we may be, we have successfully launched many digital products - all into institutional and library markets. Until recently, however, the boundaries of e-content success seem to have stopped at journals, reference, and STM content in institutional and library markets.” (more…)

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