BLITZES at bltcpress

Print and ebooks go together — someday, when I purchase a print book at the bookstore, the clerk will ask “oh, and would you like the ebook with that too? It’s only another 15%.” If I say yes, it will update through my store loyalty program, and I’ll receive the ebook in my reader library.

… Meanwhile, we can now offer the reverse at RetroRead: when you download your (free) converted ebook for the Kindle, you can also quickly add a print copy, if one is found. Every day, we update our library and if we can find a copy of a title in the inventory of used and rare book online merchant Alibris, we make a note of this and add a link to the title next to the download link.

I’m not in love with the layout (maybe too busy), but I do think the feature is neat. Plus, through our participation in the Alibris affiliate network, your purchases help the free service at RetroRead.

Always of interest as Google Books is of course the source of content for RetroRead. Some random observations: I just caught up with the fact that one of the driving forces behind the Google book project, Daniel Clancy, has apparently moved on to a focus at YouTube, although will remain involved in high-impact decisions with the project. Meanwhile, the settlement seems more or less out of the news and also noticing that ‘Google Editions’ — announced as in the works as early as last January — still haven’t materialized.

And this week, estimates are published that the ebook market is expected to break $1 billion in 2011. If something close to 90% of that isn’t going though Amazon I’d be more or less amazed. It seems that with the focus on the settlement and its cloud-centric view of epubs, Amazon has more than stolen a march on Google and it is hard to see where they will go. The origins of Google’s ebook efforts pre-date the advent of e-ink readers, and this reader, at any rate, can’t imagine why anyone would want to buy a book they can’t have wherever they go and in a readable format. And the cloud isn’t everywhere.

What is Google’s best destiny in the ebook world? Certainly, everything wants to be searchable; beyond that I think they are going to have to think very out of the box if they (or anyone) is going to pry Amazon’s domination away.

Not that it isn’t possible: there are many forces at work conspiring against Amazon, but so far they are riding the crest of the wave. And Google has plenty of leverage, but they will need to take it to the e-ink readers “in anger” because that is where the game is. Android could be a factor here.

See How to do (Almost) Everything With a Kindle for a nice plug for RetroRead in Wired’s “Gadget Lab” — nice spike in traffic day after posting!

A while ago I launched a series of public domain titles under the imprint “GoodMountain Books”. The content was all sourced from Project Gutenberg and the Gutenberg trademark is used to identify them. They are meant to be higher quality renditions of the titles broadly available through Amazon, often with generally inferior formatting and other production quality issues.

Anyway, the series has more or less languished with too agressive pricing amid the glut of free and $0.99 editions … so, if you can’t beat them, join them. Introducing GoodMountain Press editions for $0.99! (As soon as Amazon can update the prices, that is)(Search for them here). BTW, Project Gutenberg gets a 10% royalty on my cut from Amazon.

BTW, “Gutenberg” is German for “Good Mountain!”

… the ssl cert for retroread.com failed to renew resulting in “untrusted site” errors on login for last two days — fixed.

Also, Henry von Ofterdingen still not published…

Continuing the series of great German thinkers, I’ve added to my Hymns to the Night (published as “Novalis”) by Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis), the same author’s Henry von Ofterdingen, his incomplete novel.

It is the first book I have directly sourced from a Google epub, and it went well and developed a few good tricks and tools that will ease the process. (Of course, I was already 98% done when I discovered, it had already been converted by Project Gutenberg …)

(Publishing a “finished” book from a Google epub is quite a different matter from simply converting it, warts and all, from the machine scanned epub.)

Should appear in the Kindle store within the next 48 hours!

BTW, it’s been a while since I pressed the “Publish” button in DTP, most of my focus being on RetroRead, which continues to grow apace and has been much more stable. Re-doing Alice was fun and I hope to come to press again soon!

Well, the new Kindles must be selling very well, as evidenced by the rise in sales of BLTC Press titles, which show no sign of abating (in general I could always notice blips when Kindles were back in stock or new feature release) … going very strong now!

What is most (pleasantly) amazing is the the BLTC Press edition of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes seems to have crawled out of a rock and is — now in the top 1000 of paid titles. Published over two years ago, it has more or less languished (like: extremely — there are dozens of Sherlock Holmes titles available on Kindle). Either someone somewhere (?) gave it a reference, the RetroRead referrals have helped, or, just possible, it has “bubbled” up the visibility stack on Amazon due to, bit by bit, folks deciding they like the illustrations and formatting (I do: I think the edition is quite nice.)

… Just to make sure I was continuing to put my best foot forward with such a larger audience, I have re-published it using my latest publication engine, although the present edition was quite suitable.

Not quite so my Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, at least according to thoughtful reader “S. S.,” who took the trouble to write and task me, rightfully, with the illustrations for Alice being quite below the standard set by Through the Looking Glass (which, now perhaps understandably, has lately outsold Alice 2 to 1). I had to agree: Alice was my first publication venture, and the scans used were rather a bit low-res. (In defense, originally published for the Sony Reader with 4 shades of gray.) Thank you, your feedback is always appreciated!

A new edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is “at the printer’s” and should appear online at Amazon in a day or two. I’m quite pleased with it and was able to make a few formatting enhancements while I as at it!

A user brought to my attention (as I still rely on my Kindle2) that with wi-fi in place for Kindle, emails sent to mydevice@free.kindle.com bypass the wireless route (if available), and thereby, bypass the $0.15 / MB fee from Amazon. So if you have wi-fi connectivity available, you can now have your ebooks mailed directly to your Kindle for free. So the “wi-fi” delivery option has now been added to the user profile section of the RetroRead site.