|
Wednesday, 20 January 2010 09:32 |
|
With the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference coming up in February, James Turner (writing for O'Reilly Radar) interviewed me and Ramy Habeeb of Kotobarabia about ebooks in Africa (me) and Arabic ebooks (Ramy). We seem to be the conference's two developing-country experts, and perhaps this shows in our focus on ebooks and digitization as tools for upliftment and knowledge-preservation. We're clear that those priorities should be integral to our business interests.
I particularly like this practical approach Kotobarabia has developed to dealing with the difficulties of digitizing Arabic works:
The thing that we do is to scan the pages, and then we'll have people read the pages and pick out key words so that the books become semi-searchable. We do these for most of our books. But if we find that a book is being read over and over again or that this title has a particular interest, then we'll go back and retype it. It's actually cheaper this way to do it, it's a more sustainable business model.
If you don't feel like reading the article, there's audio of each interview there too. |
|
|
Friday, 08 January 2010 13:39 |
|
Late last year writer Carolyn Meads interviewed me for a newspaper article on ebooks that, sadly, ended up mostly on the editing-room floor. It was a nice chance to cover some digital-publishing basics, so we're putting it up here.
|
|
Read more: Interview on ebooks in South Africa
|
|
Tuesday, 15 December 2009 14:15 |
|
I've been working on an argument (when it grows up it'll be a presentation) about how publishers should set up simple ways to sell licenses to their content. These licences could be bought by a small or large business from the publisher's site, and that business could then reuse and resell the content. (Publishers could make the licenses valid only for regions their supply chain doesn't normally reach anyway.)
|
|
Read more: Reselling water: a publishing analogy
|
|
|
Monday, 21 December 2009 14:32 |
|
Book Industry Communication (BIC) has published a code of practice for assigning ISBNs to digital content. (I've included the full text below. Here's the original PDF.) The code is sensible in some ways, and less so in others, as I'll explain in a moment. On the whole, though, it's good to see efforts like this towards industry standards.
|
|
Read more: BIC code of practice for ebook ISBNS
|
|
Tuesday, 08 December 2009 13:19 |
|
I'm a big fan of Exact Editions, mainly for their great iPhone app, Exactly. Exact Editions puts magazines online looking exactly as they do in print (only with clickable links and great viewing functionality). Browsing the catalogue today, I was pleased to see a growing number of good-looking magazines on and from Africa.
|
|
Read more: African magazines on Exact Editions
|
|
|
RSS 