Maybe it was just a clever way of disarming me, and if so — it worked. But no sooner did we end our Skype chat then I was on Twitter, inquiring of my bookish-techy tweeps, “Would you be interested in such a webcast?” The answer was “yes.” Joe jumped into the tweet fray and suggested the topic for what will be our first in the TOC Debates: Amazon vs. Apple.

Joe valiantly (ahem) volunteered to take up the cause of Amazon and act as Team Bezos. But, who, pray tell would be brave enough to stand up for Apple? The most eloquent arguer one could hope for — Ms. Booksquare herself — Kassia Krozser stepped up to the challenge to represent Team Jobs.

So, what began as a disagreement between colleagues has blossomed into what we think might become the most fun you can have fighting at work: the TOC Debates.

Register to attend the free Amazon vs Apple webcast.

As a bit of a preview, I offer a statement from each of the opponents (also available in audio form, above). As we say in Arizona, “Them’s fighting words …”

Joe Wikert (GM and Publisher, O’Reilly Media):

This will be like shooting fish in a barrel. When I said I’d like to see a debate about Amazon vs. Apple’s ebook platforms, and said I’d take the Amazon position, I never thought I’d find someone who would represent Apple! Shortly after that, Amazon announced their Kindle Cloud Reader initiative. Wow, yet another point for my case! I have loads of respect for Kassia Krozser, but she’s got her work cut out for her. I’m very much looking forward to the debate as well as addressing questions from the audience.

Kassia Krozser, (proprietress of Booksquare.com):

Joe may wish he chose the Apple side! I won’t deny that Amazon has many strengths, but they also have an amazing weakness: selective vision. The Kindle platform is based on an old, creaky format. Apple gets the web, and it gets the technology, hardware and software, that runs the web … which, we all know, will expand both our ability to read all kinds of books in digital format and our definition of a “book.”

Our first fight/debate takes place live via webcast on Thursday, Sept. 15 at 10am PT. Register for free here. And if you have ideas for publishing debates you’d like to see, please let me know.

TOC Debate: Amazon vs Apple — What began as a disagreement between colleagues has blossomed into the most fun you can have fighting at work: the TOC Debates. Our first debate, “Amazon vs. Apple,” features Joe Wikert and Kassia Krozser.

Join us on Thursday, September 15, 2011, at 10 am PT

Register for this free webcast

Related:

• See more upcoming webcasts

Yes, Virginia there really is a Google eBookstore

Google’s just-launched eBookstore is not yet available outside the US. According to TechCrunch:

They’re launching with the support of around either 4,000 or 35,000 publisher partners, depending on how you count. 4,000 is the figure for the US launch, but internationally, they’re working with the remainder of that figure for a predicted 1Q 2010 launch. All the major publishers are signed on and will be providing a total of around 300,000 in-copyright works, mostly likely including anything you could buy new at any other bookstore.

They also are proud to be working with university, academic, textbook, and professional publishers whose works are harder to come by. They’ve worked out deals with the American Booksellers Association, Powell’s, and Alibris as well. By way of a shortcut, I asked if there were any major associations or publishers that Google had not included in at least a basic partnership, and they said no. And of course there is the immense library of public domain works, over two and a half million at the moment, which swells the total Google eBooks count to around three million.

Not to be out-launched, Amazon launched Kindle for the Web

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb is skeptical:

You too can now pay $9.99 to read text on a Web page, in Amazon’s proprietary format, with the graphically limited format of a printed text-only book of yore. Sure, your bookmarks and notes will carry over from the Web pages you’re reading on to other devices — but could that possibly be enough to warrant paying for Web-embedded eBooks? I don’t think so. Once it hits the Web, premium content is only sellable because of scarcity or a superior user experience. I don’t see either of those being true in this case.

Amazon and Seth Godin launched The Domino Project

From Seth Godin’s Blog:

Working with a great team at Amazon, I’m launching a new publishing venture called The Domino Project. I think it fundamentally changes many of the rules of publishing trade non-fiction.

The fairly less mogul-like Figment launched as well

From Figment’s home page:

Figment is a community where you can share your writing, connect with other readers, and discover new stories and authors. Whatever you’re into, from sonnets to mysteries, from sci-fi stories to cell phone novels, you can find it all here.

Kobo launched Reading Life

From the National Post:

Kobo’s Reading Life is a new e-reading iPad application that integrates with the company’s digital bookstore designed to bring social-networking capabilities to the world of electronic books, in a sort of Book Club 2.0.

James Bridle launched BMXL and the Open Wiki at Open Bookmarks

From the Open Bookmarks blog:

The latest addition is a proposed XML interchange format for bookmarks — a very simple, small and powerful thing. At the moment, we’re still nailing down what we mean by bookmarks and the thorny problems of positioning and identifying books (OpenLibrary?).

The use case is obvious, and because it’s our first challenge, simple. It’s also personal, because we believe that the first benefits of Open Bookmarks must be to the individual: social benefits are built on selfish behaviours (there’s more on this over at Booktwo).

The Internet Archive launched a new browser-based bookreader

The updated reader has an improved UI and support for read aloud (TTS). Here’s an example.

And, Apple launched a rumor of a launch

From Wired’s Gadget Lab:

Apple has put in the request for its Asian partner Foxconn to produce and ship the second-generation iPad within 100 days, with plans for a spring 2011 release, according to a Taiwanese publication.

Foxconn was notified of plans to ship the iPad by February 2011, with initial shipments of 400,000 to 600,000 units, according to DigiTimes. Sources expect the product to launch April 2011.

Got news?

Feel free to send along any news items, blog posts, or things of note from the publishing world.

On Tuesday evening, February 15th, we’ll have approximately 20 publishing and publishing-related startups demoing in one large room. If your company is chosen to participate, we’ll provide you with a small table and room for two people to demo — you’ll bring a laptop (or two) and a founder (or two).

TOC attendees and a panel of judges from the investor community will have 50 minutes to visit the demos and listen to your pitches. We’ll sound a chime every five minutes, letting people know it’s time to circulate. As they walk around, attendees will vote on their favorite demos. At the end of the hour, the judges will announce their top picks, along with the audience favorite. These winning startups will then each give a pitch and have an on-stage conversation with the judges.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Relatively young publishing (and publishing-related) startups that aren’t drowning in investment (yet)
• Companies incorporating new technologies and/or innovative business models in their approach to publishing.

If you’re selected:

• You’ll supply your own laptop for the demos (we won’t provide power, so we recommend bringing two laptops)
• Wireless Internet access will be available, so web-based demos are okay.
• You’ll bring a maximum of two people (at least one of whom must be a founder or C-level equivalent)
• The week prior to the event, you’ll supply us with a presentation of 2-4 slides that includes screenshots for your onstage pitch in case you are selected
• You’ll receive a complementary TOC Day Pass that will get you into all of Tuesday’s keynotes, sessions, and events.

Submit your proposal by Jan. 10, 2011.

From the official press release:

O’Reilly Media and the Bologna Children’s Book Fair today announce the first Tools of Change for Publishing event at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. TOC Bologna will be a one day conference held on Sunday 27 March 2011, focusing on digital and mobile technology. This new collaboration between O’Reilly Tools of Change and the Bologna Book Fair unites two well-known and professional event organizers to produce an inspirational conference. TOC Bologna will be a landmark event for children’s publishers, agents, writers and international book people who are looking for the best speakers and insight into this new digital era.

Andrew Savikas, VP of Digital Initiatives at O’Reilly Media:

O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing events have helped define the agenda for publishers seeking to understand the impact of digital and mobile technology on reading and the business of publishing. The mobile web is driving fundamental changes in modes of reading and sharing, and few audiences will adopt those new modes more quickly than digital natives coming of age immersed in that mobile web. We’re thrilled to be working with the Bologna Children’s Book Fair to bring the TOC message to the children’s book industry.

Roberta Chinni, Project Manager for the Bologna Bookfair:

The Bologna Children’s Book Fair is the top meeting place for the children’s book industry. We are delighted to be working with O’Reilly Media on this new conference. We aim to offer a lively and profitable debate on the issues that the industry is facing. It is fantastic to start 2011 with a conference about the digital book world so that we can explore the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

Tickets go on sale Jan. 1, 2011. To receive more program information please email tocbologna@bolognafiere.it

Tim Berners-Lee defends the web

From Scientific American:

A neutral communications medium is the basis of a fair, competitive market economy, of democracy, and of science. Debate has risen again in the past year about whether government legislation is needed to protect net neutrality. It is. Although the Internet and Web generally thrive on lack of regulation, some basic values have to be legally preserved.

Amazon continues quest to dominate the world by innovating and making customers happy

• Amazon Kindle tops Consumer Reports ratings.

• Amazon acquires Toby Press literary fiction list.

• Amazon gives the gift of gifting Kindle books.

Copyright-challenged Cooks Source calls it a day

From Techland:

Whether or not the intentions of the angry Internet mob was to tear down a local publication or not, the Cooks Source Magazine controversy has forced the magazine to fold. In an interview with the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Griggs tells the reporter that the free magazine is done for. The November 2010 issue will be the last publication.
“The name is compromised, big time,” Griggs said.

paidContent urges media industries to create their own disruption

From paidContent:

It is now clear that the same digitization process will eventually transform all industries, that companies lose control of their customers when new technology enables them to interact with products…You may well have heard it before, but to respond to disruption you really need to become your own disruption. To do this you need to identify the disruption that needs harnessing (like banks did with telephone banking) not just fight it (like the music industry did with file sharing).

Hachette Livre moves forward with Google

From The Bookseller:

Hachette Livre has come to an agreement with Google that will see the giant search engine digitise the publisher’s out of print books in France, bringing to an end a long-running dispute stemming from Google’s vast book digitisation project. The deal will now be subject to six months ‘fine-tuning’, and will also be made available to other French publishers.

Indie press Gaspereau partners with D+M to deliver “The Sentimentalists” to the masses.

From Quill and Quire:

When asked if he is afraid of letting down Gaspereau partisans, who championed the company’s right to release the now much in-demand title at their own slow-and-steady pace, Steeves doesn’t miss a beat. “We have stuck to our guns,” he says. “We’ve picked partners that fit our philosophy, [who do] creative and original works. The most important principle here is to serve the text and to serve the author, and that’s what we’ve done. [D&M] is going to take good care of Johanna and get a quality edition out there. That’s all that matters.”

Agent Ari Emanuel ready to disintermediate publishing

From paidContent:

“I definitely don’t think i have to go to Knopf. I don’t think I have to go to Simon & Schuster for the book business. So I think that’s going to be a very contentious conversation,” he said. “They might just get hardcover (rights), but I don’t know yet.”

Got news?

Feel free to send along any news items, blog posts, or things of note from the publishing world.

Jonathan Safran Foer pubs crazy new book that can’t be digitized

Tree of Codes, produced with British publishers Visual Editons is a book that simply can’t be digitized because it has a different die cut on every page.

The literary magazine returns

Thanks to the Internet, literary magazines are flourishing.

Jay-Z pulls off an awesome book promotion

From Creativity Online:

The campaign made an opening splash at the Delano in Miami — a page was fully reproduced on the bottom of the hotel pool, with footnotes imprinted on towels strewn across the surrounding lounge chairs. While the words appear for real on the street, those who don’t have access to the locations can find them via a unique application/game that Droga5 developed using Microsoft’s Bing. Visitors to the site get daily clues, researchable via a Bing overlay, which will lead them to where the pages are, albeit virtually in Bing Maps.

Still no consensus where e-lending is concerned

From ReadWriteWeb:

… according to some publishers, if libraries start lending e-books, it could serve to “undo the entire market for e-book sales.”

What happens when the libraries die?

Jason Perlow considers the creation of digital underclass:

Libraries will need to be replaced with digital equivalents as publishing moves towards eBooks. As a result, will a new “Digital Underclass” be created from the base of technology have-nots?

Richard Nash previews Cursor with “A Red Lemonade Sampler”

From Richard Nash’s blog:

In a matter of weeks, links like I’m about to offer will be offered on Red Lemonade, but I didn’t want to wait to share these little digital objects with you.

David Pogue really likes the new Galaxy tablet

From the New York Times:

Samsung sweated the details on this thing. The screen is gorgeous. The touch response is immediate and reliable. The whole thing is superfast and a pleasure to use.

Ebooks to Join The New York Times Best-Seller List

Also from the New York Times:

The lists will be compiled from weekly data from publishers, chain bookstores, independent booksellers and online retailers, among other sources.

Got news?

Feel free to send along any news items, blog posts, or things of note from the publishing world.

• 2010 will end with $966 million in ebooks sold to consumers.
• By 2015, the industry will have nearly tripled to almost $3 billion, a point at which the industry will be forever altered.
• Current ebook readers in the survey expect an average of 51 percent of the books they read will be ebooks
• Four in 10 people who own or expect to buy an ereader shop at Amazon for physical books.
• Exactly 50 percent of people who bought an ebook in the past month have bought ebooks from Amazon’s Kindle store.

On the same day, French management consultants Bain + Company reported that by 2015 between 15-20 percent of the book reading public will own electronic devices, and up to 25 percent of books will be sold in digital form. This nice sound bite was included with their press release: “Experimenting with new formats — non-linear, hybrid, interactive or social — is where opportunity lies.”

These are just the tips of the e-iceberg. The data and research are coming at an unprecedented pace from all manner of organizations, associations, private firms, and individuals.

Studies are great. Data is awesome. The ebook market has gone without much of either for far too long. But, could it be that in our thirst for consumer ereading information, we’re drinking down all this newly available data without stopping to check exactly what’s in it? The temptation with market research is to read the cherry-picked bullet points and stop there. We need to look closer. Sometimes the small print says a whole lot more than the sound bites. It’s important to understand the methodology behind the results, including factors such as:

• How well-defined is the target population?
• Is the sample being studied random?
• How did the research group chose its random sample?
• Was the sample size large enough to produce meaningful results?
• Are the questions unbiased?

We’ve banged lightly on this drum before, but we thought it’d be nice, given so many new study summaries being released of late, to open up the topic for discussion.

So here goes:

Do you trust market research surveys? What would you need to know in order to make a key business decision based on survey results?

Feel free to chime in through the comments area. You’re also welcome to join us on Thursday during our first TOC LinkedIn Open House discussion, hosted by BookSwim.com’s Jeevan Padiyar. If you’re not already a member of TOC’s LinkedIn Group, it’s easy to sign up.

Also of interest: “eReading Survey Findings and Research: A Look Behind the Numbers,” a TOC 2011 panel to be moderated by Sarah Weinman.

In addition to traditional book publishers discussing their experiences from the trenches of change, TOC also brings in ideas from the wider global ecosystem.

Breakout sessions include:

• Is There Such a Thing as a Good Business Model for Publishing These Days?
• eTextbooks in Higher Education: Practical Findings to Guide the Industry
• Can you Afford not to Consider Accessible Publishing Practices?
• Data-driven Marketing and Product Development
• Copyright, Intellectual Property Rights, and Licensing Issues in the Digital Era
• Build a Book API in an Afternoon, Using FluidDB
• Improving Your Publishing Metadata and Delivery
• See the rest of the preliminary lineup

Featured speakers

• Ben Huh, I Can Has Cheezburger
• Margaret Atwood, author and CEO of Syngrafii
• Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor of Wired and author of “What Technology Wants”
• See the full list of speakers

Save 15% on TOC 2011 registration with the code “TOC11RAD”

Thank you

Our gratitude goes out to the following people who helped review the 200+ proposals, and offered much-appreciated advice on shaping the content for TOC 2011:

• Patricia Arancibia
• Mark Bertils
• Peter Brantley
• Liza Daly
• Kate Eltham
• Dedi Felman
• José Afonso Furtado
• Heather McCormack
• Kevin Shockey
• Sarah Weinman
• Sarah Wendell

We hope to see you in February

O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference
February 14-16, 2011
Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers
New York, NY
www.toccon.com

Cool new ways to write and publish

• Baker Framework — cool, free and open source
• Scivener 2.0 — not free or open source, but nonetheless cool

The government hires DRM basher Ed Felten

Ars Technica sums up the news:

Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten today was tapped for a one-year stint at the FTC in a decision so shockingly sane it’s still a bit hard to believe.

The Lost Book Sales site launches

• Authors and publishers lose sales every day. Here’s why

James Bond goes e-bookishly rogue

• Fleming estate to publish James Bond e-books

Alexis Madrigal asks “How does Google Books work?”

The system they’ve come up with has become increasingly sophisticated, as highlighted by their latest tweak, Rich Results … When you search for a book, Google Books doesn’t just look at word frequency or how closely your query matches the title of a book. They now take into account web search frequency, recent book sales, the number of libraries that hold the title, and how often an older book has been reprinted.

Diesel ebookstore assesses the Agency Model

In other words, the A5 performed an impressive near-checkmate on the eBook chessboard. And everyone, except for Amazon and perhaps a few authors, is as pleased as punch. Or are they?

Not so cool

• Australian iBookstore launches but leaves out a few folks
• Cooks Source and copyright infringement. Related: Edward Champion breaks down and dig into the Cooks Source story.

Got news?

Feel free to send along any news items, blog posts, or things of note from the publishing world.

A Bookish-techy “social” event

This bookish-techy social week actually got to a start last week at the Internet Archive’s Books in Browsers conference. BiB-related and/or inspired posts of note:

• Great round-up of BiB recaps, etc. from Gary Price at Resource Shelf
• Post-BiB 10 Thoughts from Kassia Krozser at BookSquare.com
• At The Millions, Patrick Brown weighs in on BiB.
• From BookGlutton’s Aaron Miller, a definition of social publishing.
• And Fran Toolan sums up and surmises it all at NetGalley’s
  Follow the Reader

Social networks for teen readers come and go

• Penguin gleefully launches a new social network for teens
• Jacob Lewis pulls the plug on Figment’s failed social network for teens

Sharing news from Amazon and Wowio

• Amazon to enable sharing on the Kindle
• Wowio doing all it can not to share advertising-supported ebook concept

New Nook not news?

So says CrunchGear

The last thing the world needs right now is another Android tablet, especially when the focus for e-readers should be on distinguishing them from tablets and not trying to compete with more capable and connected devices. Amazon is already neck-deep in Kindle sales, and this gamble by Barnes & Noble essentially forfeits their portion of this generation of e-readers.

In honor of a Bookish-Techy Halloween

• Stephen King on why ebooks aren’t scary
• Eric Frank, co-founder of Flat World Knowledge on how text book publishing got so scary
• Mobile Read’s ereader giveaway more treat than trick