NEW YORK – (Business Wire) DynamicBooks, a new subsidiary of Macmillan, unveiled today a new digital publishing platform that allows instructors to freely customize and modify some of today’s most respected textbooks. Using the DynamicBooks’ editing tools, instructors can tailor world-class content to suit their classroom needs by editing existing content or adding new text or media assets. Once instructors “publish” their custom book, their students can choose to purchase either a fully featured digital text or a printed version of the new book.

DynamicBooks was created in close partnership with Ingram Content Group Inc. and utilizes Ingram’s successful VitalSource Bookshelf platform and Lightning Source print-on-demand capability.

DynamicBooks seeks to lower costs to students and is working with its publisher partners to do so. As an example, Bedford, Freeman and Worth books will be available in digital form for 40-50 percent of the price of traditional books.

“DynamicBooks strives to put control of world-class textbook content into the hands of instructors. Our easy-to-use custom publishing platform allows instructors to create tailored versions of many of today’s most popular textbooks, and then instantly publish them for their students in both digital and print versions,” said Clancy Marshall, General Manager of DynamicBooks. (Marshall will demonstrate DynamicBooks at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York on Wed, Feb 24 at 8:30 a.m. in the Broadway North room.)

“Most college students don’t read textbooks anymore,” said Charles Grisham, professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia. “Students jump from point to point as they do on the Internet. It’s also safe to say that no textbook has completely matched every instructor’s syllabus. DynamicBooks offers instructors and authors a better way to convey content that is more relevant and creative-minded, and that mirrors the always interactive environment in which students live.”

Brian Napack, President of Macmillan, said: “DynamicBooks is a win for everyone. Instructors and students get more engaging, more relevant textbooks; our authors get a more engaged community of instructors; and publishers get to deliver more powerful content, made so through collaboration with their customers.” He continued, “The rapid launch of DynamicBooks represents an extension of our deep partnership with Ingram, who were uniquely positioned to deliver both state-of-the-art e-book and print-on-demand platforms.”

David “Skip” Prichard, President and CEO of Ingram Content Group Inc. said: “Ingram Content Group has invested in innovative technology tools to enable the creation of customized textbooks. We are excited that Macmillan has chosen VitalSource to offer this capability to educators.”

The digital textbook package includes online access; a downloadable version; and an iPhone application. Students can annotate or highlight and search terms or their notes in their DynamicBook and can print from within the application. Printed, bound versions are also available in black and white or full color. Students can order these books from retailers such as Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Follett.
Read more: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/new-macmillan-subsidiary-dynamicbooks-redefines-interactive-textbooks-for-higher-education,1173765.shtml#ixzz0hgLBgsRw

I’ve been having a long Twitter discussion with Will Wilkinson about the economics of the book industry. Will wanted to know how authors could make money without “digital rights management” technology, and I replied by saying that writing a book has always been less about making money than it is about promoting the book’s author, and I suggested that the activity is going to become a lot less lucrative in the future.

To think clearly about the future of the book industry, it’s essential to understand its present. In particular, to make an educated guess about what the price of a book will be in the future, we need to understand why books cost what they cost today. I think there are two key insights that largely explain the structure of the book market. First, publishers are really bad at predicting whether any given book will be a success. And second, there is an almost unlimited supply of aspiring authors, some non-trivial fraction of whom would, if given the opportunity, produce a best-selling book. Call these the ignorance and competition assumptions, respectively.

Now, today’s book prices have two distinct and puzzling characteristics. First, book prices don’t vary much and don’t seem to be correlated with popularity or quality. Most categories of hardcover books cost around $25.00. Publishers do not seem to charge extra for books by famous people. They don’t jack up the price if a book is well-reviewed, or offer discounts they’re panned in the New York Review of Books. As Paul Graham has observed, publishers seem to price their books in rough proportion to the cost of the raw materials: longer books are somewhat more expensive, but what’s actually printed on the page has relatively little effect on a book’s price.

This can be explained by ignorance (on the part of customers) and competition (among publishers). A customer generally don’t get to read a book before you buy it, and other indicators of quality, such as reviews, are only weakly correlated with a given customer’s enjoyment of a book. Moreover, there are lots and lots of books to choose from. These factors, together, make the book-buying public strongly price-sensitive. A publisher selling a $40 book in a market where the norm was $25 would lose a lot of customers. Because book-buying is always a hit-or-miss affair, few would want that specific book enough to pay an extra $15 for it, while most would have plenty of other books of similar perceived quality and dramatically lower price.

The second puzzling characteristic is that books are dramatically more expensive than their cost of raw materials. Printing and distributing a book costs around $5. This means that every book sold for $25 represents a huge profit to be divided among the bookseller, publisher, and author. This too is explained by ignorance, this time on the part of publishers. The print process is characterized by high fixed costs and economies of scale. This means you have to sell several thousand copies of a book to recoup the costs of printing it. Most books do not hit this target and so lose their publishers money. Hence, when you buy a book for $25, you’re not only covering the $5 it cost to print and distribute that book, but you’re also helping to defray the costs of several other books that wound up in the remainder bin.
With this background, it should be easy to see how authors’ compensation is determined. To simplify the math a bit, let’s assume there are only two outcomes for a book: hit or not-hit. Then the value of a manuscript is the profit from a hit, times the probability of a hit, minus the losses from a non-hit times the probability of a non-hit. Our ignorance assumption means that the probability of a hit is low, which means that the expected value of printing a book—and hence the value of a manuscript from a first time author—is very low. And this is what we see in the marketplace. When a publisher takes a chance on a non-famous, first-time author, the advance tends to be relatively small……………. Click here to read the complete article

Article written by Timothy B. Lee

Courtsey – Timothy B. Lee

The London Book Fair is a three day event from April 19-21 next and it will be thronged with over 23,000 industry professionals from all areas of the book trade, but mainly publishers wanting to sell new titles and international rights, and store buyers lining up future stock purchases.

In a conversation with LBF Conference Director Orna O’Brien,The Read discovered a key event will be the annual digital conference held on Sunday 18 April. This will focus on three areas: Readers of Today and Tomorrow; Bringing the Book to Life and Transforming the Core of your Businesses.

As part of the LBF program there will be over 150 other seminars, workshops and panels. O’Brien regrets these will not run live online on the website.

“There are so many we will only be recording the major ones and putting them on the site as podcasts,” she explained. “That may change in the future.”

As a 20-time veteran of attending LBF, Doris Mousdale has plenty of tips for newbies. “The seminar sessions are good – and sometimes you get so hooked in when you go to one that you then stay for the next session. You often feel better just for having been to them!” But leave plenty of time to get to seminars and workshops, just getting across the fair can take 10 or more minutes she warns.

Why does she go? “It fixes you up for the year with all the information you need to plan right through.”

The days of needing to bring back heavy catalogues as excess baggage are gone, she notes with relief. “Now you just get the business cards and look at things online and make contacts by email.”

Mousdale goes to LBF with the intention of seeking out small boutique publishers she would not otherwise discover, and to “catch up with friends.”
She has also supported friend and independent publisher Annabel Langbein in the past at the book fair.

Visit the Article Page to read further

Courtsey: BookSellers.Co.Nz

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