I’m very pleased to announce that all five Bookkake titles are now available direct from Apple’s iBookstore, and several are available on the Kindle. In addition, all Artists’ eBooks titles are also available free in the iBookstore.

This has not been the simplest process, but I think it’s really important to make ebooks available in as wide a number of ways as possible, and in particular in ways that make it easy for people to find them—an issue I recently addressed in the discussion of Tony Blair’s multiformat memoir.

Initially, I made ebook editions of all Bookkake titles available for free. This was in part because I wanted to see what would happen, but also because I was dissatisfied with then-current ebook distribution and display systems. Times have changed, and so in making these books available more easily, I’ve also removed the free ebooks. Bookkake has always been an experiment, and I’m looking forward to seeing the response to more easily available, if priced, editions.

Artists’ eBooks is similarly experimental, and the free ebooks are still available from the website, as well as available as free downloads for iPhone/iPad users in the iBookstore.

With respect to the process, here’s how it breaks down:

To get books into the iBookstore directly (as opposed to going through an aggregator) you need an account with iTunes Connect, which in turn requires a US Tax ID, a non-trivial process that required some very complicated forms and quite a lot of time on the phone to someone in an IRS office, somewhere in the Midwest.

When you’ve got this, you upload your files—a slightly modified ePub format, which Lisa has covered in detail over at Threepress—via Apple’s iTunes Producer application. This part is pretty straightforward, once you’ve worked out the formatting kinks, but then the fun starts.

Submitted books are “under review” for about a week on average. And then, in my case, they’re all marked “Withdrawn from sale”. And that’s it: no message, no feedback, no information. So you email Apple, several times, and after a week to ten days you get an email from someone telling you what’s wrong—in the first case, it was cover images at the wrong resolution. So you resubmit, wait out the review period, and then repeat the whole process again, several times, for a series of very minor but critical issues.

The upshot is that it’s taken almost two months to get all the books submitted correctly—only a couple of hours of actual work, but a lot of waiting and sending emails and hoping. Still, the books are now available (search iBooks for Bookkake, Artists’ eBooks or any of the authors or titles), and Apple support staff have promised that they’re aware of and looking into the notification system. It’s a new programme, and this sort of thing will undoubtedly improve, if not, as we’ve seen with the App Store, ever be fully transparent.

The Kindle application process has been simpler, if slightly less successful. Although some have reported difficulties, Amazon’s Digital Text Platform happily converted my existing ePub files to Kindle platform, and made them available very quickly—although I’ve been unable to convince them of the rights status of a couple of the titles, so only three are available. Still.

I happen to like both reading experiences very much, and will be writing more about them soon. Both stores are OK, but it’s very annoying you can’t link directly to products in the iBookstore [Update: see comments] as you can for the Kindle store (or, indeed, for iTunes).

Please, go read the Artists’ eBooks titles if you’re interested, and the Bookkake titles if you’re so inclined, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

I’ve been wanting to play with Layar, the augmented reality browser for iPhone 3GS and Android for a while. So I did. As a test case, I’ve created a layar for Noticings, the utterly awesome photography game created by my friends Tom and Tom.

It lets you see and find Noticings near you (if there are some within a reasonable distance. It works. It’s nice. It’s available in Layar now.

Why did I do this? You still have to ask? Well, I have a hunch that Layar might be one of the possible ways to implement a version of Storypoints, the locative storytelling thing I proposed some time back. I’ve started hacking at that.

All will be revealed at a later date. Until then, play with Layar*, and play Noticings.

* Unfortunately, Layar is not currently available for the iPhone, unless you downloaded it before they pulled the current version from the App Store. It should be back soon. Android users can get it from the market.

A couple of weeks ago, Russell Davies noted that most podcasts of the kind we (meaning, I think, Russell, me and some like-minded folk) listen to while wandering around are quite long for most of our wanderings – typically 30 minutes or more, like the radio programmes we post at Speechification. There’s room in the world for shorter, regular podcasts – micropodcasts if you will – to fill the shorter gaps: bus stops, changing trains, a stroll to the shops, that kind of thing.

Lots of non-podcast content works well at this length – things like Thought For The Day (OK, there is a podcast of that) or Channel 4′s 3 Minute Wonder films.

TFTD – or rather, the Humanist Society’s secular version, Thought For The World – collided in my head with the daily readings we had to do at school. At my (rather posh) school, every student was issued a mini Gideon Bible on arrival, and the first lesson of every day was 5 minutes longer than the rest to accommodate a mandatory daily reading. “Today’s lesson is taken from Matthew Chapter 5, beginning at the third verse…” and so on. Together with the increased ease of creating podcasts these days, I thought I’d give it a go – with a literary bent, obviously.

Mattins is a daily reading, every weekday, no more than 5 minutes long. The 5 minute limit is imposed by Audioboo, which makes podcasting from an iPhone startlingly simple. Every morning over my mandatory first coffee I take a book down from the shelves, hit record, and read a short extract. Audioboo takes care of uploading, hosting and syndicating each “boo”, and I can also extract this quite simply by munging the RSS to a standalone site with Feedburner and a bit of Simplepie tweaking. The choice of extract is almost-random – I like finding bits I’ve dog-eared in something I read a long time ago, or a good bit I read the night before, or I might just read the first couple of pages (five minutes is a lot shorter than you think).

I hate the sound of my own voice, but I’m aware that’s pretty common, so I’ll let it go. I’m also not a great reader-out-loud in general, and given it’s first thing in the morning and I’m only half way through the first caffeine shot, it’s not exactly broadcast-quality material. I stumble occasionally, and mispronounce stuff. But it is a nice thing to do for myself, and some people might like it too.

So, here’s Mattins: a daily reading. If you like that kind of thing.

Micropodcasting is officially easy. I look forward to seeing more things made this way.

Inspired by the Japanese iPhone/Book mashup that appeared in the Stop Press links recently, I made this rough concept of an in-book mobile app, riffing on ideas of the “enhanced edition“.

Imagine if when you got a book, you also got a mobile app that contained the footnotes and index, supporting material and the searchable text. The app sits inside the book itself. Search the app for “Leonardo da Vinci” and it points you to the relevant pages in the book. Supplementary material is accessed by typing in the page you’re on in the book. It includes biographical information, galleries of high-resolution, zoomable images. Take notes, save and email them. Find other readers nearby. Annotate the text, and keep those annotations in the right place – connected to the book itself, but accessible anywhere. For series books the possibilities are even bigger: linking a collection via a digital index and archive. And its updatable: the author can add in material to the book indefinitely after publication – and pitch their next one when it comes out.

At the weekend, the fruits of several months of work at Apt finally hit the App Store in the form of Enhanced Editions‘ first title: The Death of Bunny Munro, by Nick Cave.

Enhanced Editions ebooks are a different breed to most, as our mission is to work closely with publishers to obtain the best material, and take advantage of every possible benefit of the ereading experience. This means taking every feature you’ve come to expect from good ereaders – including bookmarking, full-text search, adjustable fonts and type sizes, night mode, tilt scrolling (on the iPhone) and so on – and adding exclusive additional content, and the real coup: full text-to-audiobook synchronisation. The latter means you can switch between the text and the audio without losing your place, and we hope it’ll get people excited, and prove that ebooks really can go to new places, over and above the physical book.

For my part, I’ve written a number of posts over at the Enhanced Editions blog explaining some of the thinking behind the design and user experience, such as serif vs sans-serif and audiobook integration. Other members of the team have also written about designing icons for the iPhone and our attitude to DRM.

We’ve been working on Enhanced Editions for just over a year, and it’s been great to have been part of the team, and great to have produced an app we’re proud of. There’s more to come here – and we should really talk about ebook pricing and convergence at some point – but until Obama arrives, go check out Bunny Munro in the App Store now.

*

P.S. The trailer’s another fine job by our friends at Asylum Films, who made 25th Estate: This Is Where We Live.

It’s a thought, isn’t it?

After initial doubts – why would Amazon deliberately waste all that investment in the Kindle hardware? – I did come to the conclusion that the Kindle and iPhone demographics, while they certainly overlap, are by no means mutually inclusive. I don’t have figures on this, but my presumption is that the iPhone’s younger and/or early-adopter audience is not quite the same as the Kindle’s slightly older, less techy, but more hardcore booky audience (heavy genre readers, in romance and sci-fi, reading up to several books a week, are the core Kindle audience, I’ve heard). The Kindle’s larger screen and seamless connection to Amazon speak to a different audience than the iPhone’s portability and rootlessness.

Thoughts?