Read and E-Book week 2010 will be held from March 7 to 13.  This initiative started in 2004 by Rita Toews and friends is now in its sixth edition.  While E-Books were still a novelty in 2004, they are rapidly becoming  mainstream.  When Fortune magazine makes E-reading the cover of its current issue, you know that E-Books have become a major publishing form.

Sharing-Books was conceived as an E-Book publisher from day one.  We believed that readers would separate the concept of book from "paper".  Books are a collection of thoughts expressed with words.  Whether these words are printed on paper or displayed electronically does not change the story or ideas the writer is sharing. 

As a baby boomer I remember fondly the smell of a new paper book.  By contrast today's kids will remember discovering the features of their new electronic devices.  When we wrote our original business plan in 2007, we envisioned delivering children E-Books to gaming devices like the Nintendo DS.  A little over 2 years later the humble Nintendo becomes an E-Reader. 

We are entering a new and exciting phase in the deployment of the e-reading industry.  The devices are becoming much better.  The industry is grouping around a few distribution models, closed store/device systems like the Kindle that mimic the very successful ITunes/Ipod combination, open e-readers that accept a variety of format and allow sourcing of books from any vendor, and in our opinion the biggest market will be multipurpose devices like the IPhone acquiring e-reading capabilities.  I started reading E-Books on my first smart phone, a Palm Treo, in 2002, so I am partial to the phone/PDA/e-reader combination.

What is more interesting to us is how the E-Book publishing business will look like in years to come.  There is a consolidation play by giant channels like Amazon and Google.  There is price point resistance from large  books publishers like MacMillan and the Murdoch empire who want more money for their content.  Small publishers like us welcome their initiative as it protects the value of the E-Books we publish.  So we are optimistic that we will be able to realize more value for our book creators.

E-Books offer greater value-add possibilities than paper books.  It is much easier to vary the format of an E-Books than a paper book.  New free software like Blio will make it easier to move E-Books across software and hardware platforms and to transform E-Books into audio-books or other forms friendly to the visually challenged.  Children E-Books will become especially fun as book creators master how to insert in their books hyperlinks to sites that add to the e-reading experience.  Book creators will also learn to add short videos and sound effects that will make E-Books a richer learning experience and become an interesting alternative to the video-games children have in their hand held electronic devices.

So let's celebrate E-Book Week as we can all benefit from the emergence of this new way to share stories and ideas.

Labels: children books, children's ebooks, digital publishing industry, e-books, e-readers

The beauty of a web 2.0 site is that your users innovate with the tools you give them.

We originally saw the site as a book publishing tool. But Jennifer Poulter, an educational author form Australia, saw in Sharing-Books a tool to publish one page books that she calls poster-poems as classroom aids to help students learn poetry and/or help teachers introduce discussion topics relevant to their classes. The form of the poster-poem has been received well and Jennifer's work has been used in classrooms around the world. One of our authors, Urs Dietrich, who wrote Miki Makes a Promise, reported that on his last trip to Odessa, he visited a classroom where Jennifer's poster-poems were used to teach English.

Now it is author Timothy Schenk who published last week a surprise he had hinted was coming. Timothy has previously illustrated two poster-poems written by Jennifer. He also wrote and illustrated My Pretty Pointe Shoes that won the second prize in the July 2009 Simone Woods Awards. This time Timothy published our first talking book: Fan of Halloween.

Fan of Halloween demonstrates Timothy's technical know-how as he took advantage of a new feature Adobe introduced to PDF files, the ability to insert flash files. So as you download what looks like a normal and relatively small PDF file, you also download a little movie and a recording of Timothy reading his poem. When you click on the image of the pumpkin on the page, the pumpkin moves in as Timothy reads the poem.

This is very exciting and very promising. We deliberately limited the file type of our books to PDF so that universal distribution would be easy and that given the small size of the files, our books could be downloaded in low bandwidth regions of the world. Obviously this limited the books in being two dimensional. Now we can see the form of the e-book developing new and valuable attributes. Imagine a PDF e-book where a child can click on a cow and hear it go Moo! Or have an alphabet book read to them or having technical details added to a science book.

We thank Timothy for innovating with this first book and showing the way to one more imaginative use of Sharing-Books.com

Labels: children books, digital publishing industry, e-books, Halloween, J.R. Poulter, new features, picture books, publishing, teaching english, technology, Timothy Schenk

Today at Sharing-Books, we are celebrating UNESCO's World Book and Copyright Day! April 23rd was selected as a date shared by several authors such as William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. On April 23 2009, we will join thousands around the world to pay respect to book creators and their achievements. As many of our book creators already know, Sharing-Books shares one third of its revenue with its book creators - a generous offer in the world of children's book publishing. Plus when you create, you also contribute to a growing library of online books available for free to our world's children. We publish stories in French as well as English, and are sourcing Japanese titles. All our classics are copyright-free as well, continuing to be on the forefront of the digital publishing industry. Come join us and register online - for free!

Labels: children's books, children's illustrators, children's writers, digital publishing industry, ebooks, UNESCO