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  Browse Inside this book |
I just came across this while desperately trying not to start work this morning, thanks to Stumbleupon.
The complete text of Neil Gaiman’s bestselling novel American Gods is available to read online thanks to Harper Collins’ Browse Inside service. This service provides online access to a total of 500 books, enabling you to read any part of them prior to purchasing.
There is no download option, of course, simply online reading in your browser. I guess this is no different to being sat in the comfy sofa of a bookshop perusing your potential purchases as the online reading experience is going to make it a challenge to get through the entire book - but by no means impossible.
This is an interesting move for a major publisher and I’ll bet there are armies of suits in the halls of Harper Collins suffering sleepless nights over the idea of making stuff available for free on the internet. They know full well, however, that th enumer of people who will use this service for anything more than a pre-sale taster is extremely low, so it acts as a promotional piece rather than an alternative to buying.
Once again, great to see the big publishers testing the online world.
Over at Wordsushi, Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff yesterday published a passionate call to arms to understand the importance of the current new media revolution.
This is a passionate argument to the cynical couch potatoes still sat embracing the old order of traditional, mediocre, brainwashing traditional media. Mark talks about how new media is a revolution, and enabler of creativity and the bringer of freedom from corporate restraints imposed by monolithic, suit-fueled, companies. Read the post and get ready for action.
But what Mark fails to cover is what new media also brings with it is a level of flotsam that can clutter the space to such a degree that forward, valuable, genuinely creative progress becomes like wading through treacle. New media is all about giving the masses the control over content, whether that be at the creation stage or the consumer stage - we might say that this is wrenching control away from the traditional media structures. But the masses are a mob, a pack, a less than intelligent combined force that swarms around the latest fad and consuming it in a very disengaged manner before moving on to the next. The swarm is more interested in what is around the next corner than it is about exploring the depths of what it has right in front of its collective nose.
Lack of engagement brings with it a sense of the temporary, and I in the literary world, I wonder if there is not a shrinking future for the one-off, great novel. Publishers are beginning to understand the need to brand and market an author over an above the works they create, for it is the author to which the mass swarms can be enticed back. There is nothing new here, but during 2007 we saw a distinct change in the emphasis publishers were beginning to give to author brands - many prominent authors now have their own strap-lines!
The importance of the new media revolution in instigating change within the industries it touches is undeniable, but - put it down to my classic British cynicism if you wish - we are still unable to see past the surge and noise to have any idea that what is on the other side will be a positive future.
Today’s Publishing is all about the new and expanding opportunities available to authors and writers, particularly when those opportunities break old ideas of how to reach an audience and discover success.
PodShow has been around for a couple of years helping to shake up radio, tv and music industries through enabling independent serialised productions (podcasts) to reach sometimes huge global audiences. Formed in part by Adam Curry, one of the pioneering forces behind the podcasting phenomena of the past four years, PodShow has become a truly global company and has changed perceptions on how audio, video, and music are produced, distributed, and consumed.
While the core of their business continues to grow, a new arm has been under development for the past year, driven by writer Mark Yoshimoto Nemcoff. Marked success by new authors such as Scott Sigler, Mark spotted the potential for authors to build an audience and fan base even before any of their words can be seen in print - and an audience without boundaries, truly global.
Officially launched yesterday, PodShow Press will combine the distribution experience of PodShow for author-created audio books, and combine it with the production and distribution support to bring authors’ works to print. Printed books are produced at cost, with the author pocketing 100% of the profit from booksales, after the absolute production costs. This may all sound a little too good to be true, but as a company that provides all of their content entirely for free - whether it be aggregated content from all over the web, or their own, high quality, in-house productions - they are more than able to make it work.
We will be watching PodShow Press closely as we move through 2008.
