Enhanced Editions

Tag: iphone

Ebook adoption rate beats expectations 19/01/11

We all know that digital books are coming, however recent news seems to indicate that their adoption is happening faster than even we expected.

Part of the reason is the rapid proliferation of the relevant hardware:

Apple sold 7.3m iPads over Christmas, effectively doubling its installed base to 14.5m. They’ve sold 160 million iOS devices in total, including 90 million iPhones.

And Amazon, without giving exact figures, has announced that the Kindle has become the most gifted item in their history, and that customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books on Christmas Day last year.

It’s also increasingly clear that consumers are warming to the idea of digital reading:

While the industry barely blinked at the news that bestselling author Nora Roberts has become the third author to sell over one million ebooks (joining Stieg Larsson and James Patterson in the ‘Kindle Million Club’), the news that Disney had downloads of over one million enhanced ebook apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch to date was more surprising.

gab_n_iPad_01

Its Toy Story Read-Along app, which has had over 5,000 reviews already, averaging four stars, and been described as ‘the model for how children’s e-books should be done’ is marketed as a ‘fully interactive reading experience packed with Games, Movie Clips, Coloring Pages, Sing-along Tunes, and Surprises on every page’. Children can hear the story read aloud, record their own narration, or explore at their own pace.

Some observers reckon that while print book sales in the US fell 4.4% last year, it was entirely offset by an increase in the sales of ebooks.

So what does this mean for publishers? For one thing, the speed of digital adoption means that if you don’t have a point of view on digital now, you’d better get one soon.

We believe that for the publishing industry to survive (and even thrive), it needs to change its role away from managing the supply of books to bookshops and focus more on consumers and providing them great reading experiences.

To do this, publishers should consider two things:

1. Develop consumer brands and communities – finding writers for your readers rather than readers for your writers (as Seth Godin puts it). Knowing and understanding your readers will be critical in the digital future as readers try to make sense of the infinite choice available to them.

2. Embrace consumer-facing technologies and innovations that converge with other media and content – books also need to integrate into and be relevant with people’s digital lives.

Enhanced Editions co-founder Peter Collingridge will be at this year’s Digital Book World in New York telling you how to do this, talking about the importance of discovery and metadata, and reporting back on the differences between enhancement in the UK and USA, with examples from each. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, or follow us on Twitter or RSS to keep in touch.

Image © Peng-Chun Lee, all rights reserved.

Philip Pullman at the Oxford Literary Festival 29/03/10

Update: Filmed by Mike Paterson for Canongate Books, we now have the video of Philip Pullman’s closing comments from his talk at the Oxford Literary Festival. (more…)

Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ available on the App Store 29/03/10

From one of the great modern thinkers, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ re-assesses the treatment of Jesus in the gospels, inviting readers to question how the myths and stories which have come to define our culture have themselves been formed, and to ponder the relationship between ‘gospel truth’ and history. (more…)

Quick Reads now available 03/03/10

World Book Day is the biggest annual celebration of books and reading in the UK and Ireland. Enhanced Editions is proud to partner with a number of leading publishers to bring this year’s Quick Reads titles to the iPhone.

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Enhanced Editions’ founders to speak at Tools of Change 19/02/10

Tools of Change

Both Peter Collingridge and Rhys Cazenove have been invited to speak at O’Reilly’s prestigious conference.

Peter will be giving the first keynote address of the conference, on Tuesday at 8:45am EST / 1:45pm GMT, in which he will address some of the crucial issues affecting the publishing industry today, such as the relevance and value of books in a digital landscape, the challenges involved in tailor-making digital books, and why he believes publishers need to solve such technical problems, as opposed to technologists solving publishing problems.

He will also be turning a critical eye on Enhanced Editions, breaking down and analyzing the inception of the business, the mistakes made along the way, and the pitfalls and anxieties of developing for the App Store.

For the first time, O’Reilly will be streaming all of the keynote speeches online. If you can’t make it to the conference this will be a great way to keep your finger on the pulse. Further details TBC.

Rhys Cazenove will be taking part in the first ever Ignite event at TOC, on Tuesday at 4:05pm EST / 9:05pm GMT. Using only 15 slides, which rotate every 20 seconds, Rhys will be giving the publishing industry an analytics wake-up call, showing the integral part that analytics play in forming a digital strategy, and asking why some publishers have been neglecting such figures entirely.

Reading books on the iPhone 08/10/09

If you’ve been enjoying Bunny Munro, and the experience of reading on your iPhone, we thought you might like a quick guide to reading more books on there…

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Reviews from the App Store 10/09/09

Bunny Munro, our new app featuring the new novel by Nick Cave, has only been in the App Store for a few days, but we’re chuffed to bits to see some great reviews from users already appearing there:

Brilliant
by jacklouisburns – 6th September 2009
“A fantastic way to really get into a book.”

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Enhanced Editions in the Press 10/09/09

We’re really pleased to see some recent and very kind mentions of Enhanced Editions and our new Nick Cave / Bunny Munro app in the press – including some of our favourite blogs:

Wired: Hear Nick Cave Read The Death of Bunny Munro

The multiformat release turns the tables on the traditional roles of reader and writer: In the audiovisual versions, Cave drives your emotions where he wants them to go. Readers get inside his head rather than projecting their own ideas on the work.

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Bunny Munro currently still in review 02/09/09

Thanks everyone for your support. Just a quick update.

The Bunny Munro app is currently in review at Apple. We had hoped to clear the process before yesterday’s iTunes podcast and audiobook went live, and before the Guardian ran a piece about Enhanced iPhone books, but haven’t quite made it.

Still, the book officially comes out on September 9th in the UK, and we’re talking to a lot of people at Apple, all of whom are being really helpful, and hope to resolve this really soon.

More info as soon as we have it.

Podcast of Nick reading from Bunny Munro at the iTunes festival
Audiobook version of Bunny Munro
Guardian piece

Feature: Synched Audio and Text 31/08/09

The iPhone is many things beside a phone of course, and what must be the most-used feature is audio – usually music. And audio impinges heavily on the reading experience as well, whether it’s listening to an album while you’re reading, or making the full transition to an audiobook read in a lively and entertaining style. (The audiobook has been around for many years now, from those huge tape packs you used to buy for long car journeys, through CDs to a new lease of life as mp3s from retailers like Audible and iTunes. The fact that audiobooks frequently outsell the hardback edition of many books is a direct but little-quoted challenge to the persistent idea that the physical, paper book is the only “real” way to read.) (more…)

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