Comments on: On eBook distribution, and Artistry

By: Artists’ eBooks formed – artists and writers responding to new technologies | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:49:07 +0000

[...] pleased to announce that Artists’ eBooks, a project first mooted in this post a couple of months ago, is now live at [...]

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:33:26 +0000

Alex: What you’re talking about is technically possible, but I think you lose most of the benefits of digital distribution when you try and retain that much control. I don’t know how typical I am, but if I have to come back to you every time I want the next couple of chapters, I’m going elsewhere for my ebooks. There’s too much competition for my time for me to deal with something that inconvenient.

What about just asking the fans? The last page of the ebook lists a web or email address, and the author asks anyone who read the book to just share a quick note on the book, on who they might have shared it with, what they thought, or on anything else that might be relevant? Look at Amazon – they get hundreds of thousands of reviews, and the relationship between Amazon customers and Amazon is nowhere near as personal as the author-reader relationship. Surely someone who loved the book would send the author a note if you make it easy, and someone who hated the book is even more likely to share their opinions. And the people in the middle, relatively indifferent – they’re not likely to be back, so it doesn’t really matter what they thought. You have to start over from scratch with them anyway.

Again, I think focusing on raw download numbers is a waste of time. Focus on the fans, on making it easy for them, and on listening to what they have to say about the book. That’s way more important than the number of people who downloaded and don’t care.

By: Alex Fiennes

Alex Fiennes — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:17:34 +0000

Jon: in addition to this you could also make it so that the link to the next installment gets generated when the ebook for the previous installment is generated such that the link includes an encoded reference to the previous ebook. That way you could find out who was reading on, and also who was choosing to redistribute their copies to other locations who were then themselves reading further. Obviously the redistribution may or may not be something that you want to encourage depending on the licensing terms…

By: Alex Fiennes

Alex Fiennes — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:13:49 +0000

Jon: how about you divide the ebook up into a number of smaller ebooks, but only provide the link to the next (free?) installment at the end of the previous installment. Then you actually get stats as to who is actually reading and how far they get before they give up. I’ve been dabbling with similar things for web pages with javascript trying to work out when people actually scroll down (or not as the case may be) but I suspect that you wouldn’t be able to embed anything this intrusive inside an ebook that was going to be displayed in a reader that you don’t have that much control over.

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 00:05:55 +0000

Is it really the number of downloads that’s important, though? I have a ton of ebooks I’ve downloaded and never read. But they were free (And all legal, BTW), and hard drive space is cheap.

I think you’d get a better sense of the book’s popularity by looking at mentions on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. I may download a ton of ebooks, but I’m only going to mention the ones I read and liked.

What if a million people download it, but don’t read it? Or ten people download it, but each share it with ten friends, who all become big fans of the author? Measuring the number of downloads isn’t going to give you much meaningful data, so I think your time and effort would be better spent thinking about other ways to track the book’s popularity.

By: Sue

Sue — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:01:54 +0000

I am a librarian at a university in the US. I am commenting on something on one of your posts way back on OCLC. You were looking for a way to search and link to your local libary catalogue. You gave a link to the catalogue and I looked at it, and somehow you think it is not adequate enough. I am not sure why. It looked adequate with all the standard search features. Actually using WorldCat would have been much more cumbersome to look for materials solely from your local library, and would have given you basically the same results — assuming all of your library’s resources are in the WorldCat — some of their more specialized items may not have been easily enough catalogued to put into WorldCat.
Where I live, we have access to virtually any library catalogue in our state: university, local etc. through a database constructed by our state government for state residents. The database also contains full text magazine and newspaper articles and government documents.
You say that you think data, and I guess that would include data about libraries’ holdings, should be “free.” Who exactly is going to pay to make such data “free” – which would include data entry, upload and maintanance? I don’t know if OCLC is making huge profits or not, but what they do costs money — no one would be able to do it for “free.” For example, our US Library of Congress, which employs thousands of people, receives approximately 10,000 more items than they can catalogue every single day. I think of this when I hear people say things like “every book in the world should be made electronic.”
The main reason we use WorldCat at our library is to locate books we don’t own (there are other uses too). Then people can obtain them through Interlibrary Loan. It is a wonderful service, for the most part with no charge to the patron. Tell me how could this possibly be made “free”?
By the way a limited amount of WorldCat entries are available through the internet, for free, at least in the US. Perhaps some kindly non-profit group could do what OCLC does, but they would still have to charge for their services. It could not be “free.”

By: Alex Fiennes

Alex Fiennes — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:19:38 +0000

Kevin: if you are going to have interactive fiction, and it is running on a device that knows where it is as well as what you are doing with it (iphones and androids) then it may be interesting to get the story-telling algorithms to re-weight their choices based on how people who are allready reading things are changing their behaviour as they read them. I’m playing around with a similar idea with algorithmic music generation and listener position…

By: Kevin O'Neill

Kevin O'Neill — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:08:31 +0000

Hello.

Not about the e-book download, but intrigued by idea of artists ebooks. I suspect this stuff might already be happening. But I’m not sure where. McSweeney’s just released their iPhone app., which seems a bit gash by all accounts. But it was more an attempt to mimic the minimal aesthetic of the website, I think.

I’d be interested in seeing books that play with conventions, that rewrite themselves based on how long we’ve been reading, for example. Interactive Fiction (look up Nick Montfort) does some work with this.

Should probably get an ereader before I start getting excited about this, though…

By: James Bridle

James Bridle — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:18:05 +0000

Thanks all for these suggestions. Lots of things to try.

I think exploring the possibility or rewriting an epub on every download is a particularly interesting one, generating a unique ID every time.

By: Bradley Wright

Bradley Wright — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 14:38:28 +0000

No PHP scripts or such required–just monitor the URL in your web server’s access logs. See:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/logs.html

for an example.

By: Alex Fiennes

Alex Fiennes — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 09:53:48 +0000

Just been having a little look around the http://www.idpf.org/2007/opf/OPF_2.0_final_spec.html and my gut reaction of something that is most likely to provide a network lookup on the bulk of epub readers is to use an “Out-Of-Line XML Island” in the manifest (see 2.3.1.2).

If one had a single item in the manifest that had a required-namespace that pointed to the booktwo server to grab the schema required to process an XML document, and if one rewrote the epub document on every download such that the URL to the schema contained a different id then I think that the chances are quite high that most readers would download the resource at least once (although they may well cache it after the initial download). The download of this resource could then be tracked by whichever http tracking system you prefer (custom php download, log analysis, ethernet packet monitor, etc etc)

By: Mitch Ratcliffe

Mitch Ratcliffe — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:47:44 +0000

In addition to downloads, the content distribution network providers, such as Limelight, can report downloads of cached copies back to a provider. You’re still limited to counting files downloaded rather than installs, but without an authentication process of some sort at install time—meaning, usually, DRM is involved, though it could be as simple as adding a remote procedure call that pings the provide to say “I’m being installed on another device.” You wouldn’t likely be able to get device information, and the capability would be limited to devices that have a live network connection.