booktwo.org

I’ve wanted for some time to create a simple infographic of where a book’s cover price goes, and the Observer published a nice one in their Book of Books a few months ago. The figures made sense, so I’ve created a similar one here, in colour.

The Observer’s figures were based on a notional �20 hardback book, from which I’ve extracted the percentages, which in my experience hold fairly true across standard formats for traditionally produced books in the major bookshops. So for a �10 paperback, the retailers will take anything between a 40% to a 60% discount (and…

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Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of day, or time in years. Centuries might pass before the book tells the same story again.

The nature of the web makes such a book possible. Immediately, a simple reading of the user-agent to determine the reader’s operating system and browser could be used to present each with a different version, breaking the…

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O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog has a nice series of posts on books as ebooks as applications:

• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• A Big Boost to Books as Apps?

I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some current projects, may come back to bite me):

Books are not applications, or software. They are words.

I think there’s a danger inherent in regarding books as something to be run rather than something to be read. This argument is a bit hazy…

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