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

In the publishing world there are three main types of book layouts: square, landscape, and portrait.

Square is pretty straight forward: the width and height of your book are the same. It is when you get into rectangular layouts that things start to get a bit tricky, and you have to pay attention to the way you lay your book out and how you place your images and text in your book. Depending on where your long axis lays determines whether your book is Landscape or Portrait.

Landscape Layouts
A landscape layout has the longest edge ( axis ) of your book along the horizontal, and the shortest edge ( axis ) along the vertical. In the image below I have shown an example of a standard US Letter sized page in Landscape Layout. Any time the width of your book is greater then the height of your book you are working in a Landscape Layout. In all of your layouts for Sharing Books ensure that your binding edge ( the edge where your book is bound ) faces to the left.



Portrait Layouts
A portrait layout has the longest edge ( axis ) of your book along the vertical, and the shortest edge ( axis ) along the horizontal. In the image below I have shown an example of a standard US Letter sized page in Portrait Layout. Any time the height of your book is greater then the width of your book you are working in a Portrait Layout. In all of your layouts for Sharing Books ensure that your binding edge ( the edge where your book is bound ) faces to the left.


Hopefully this helps you out when you are trying to do the layout for your book. In most PDF and image editing software you are able to set your document size to landscape or portrait. If it does not just remember you can just change the width and height to suit what you need for your book.

Labels: advice, help, publishing, support, tips n tricks

I was in a meeting with some people today and the subject of 'who is in the Sharing Books community' came up. It is a fascinating question. My answer at the time was 'the rejected'. Sharing Books is a lot like America at various points in history: give us your tired, your rejected, your unwanted. This isn't to say that the people we seek out or the books we publish are poor quality, far from it. Our authors and illustrators are proving to be far more talented and motivated then we ever expected.

When we started out we fully expected the need to deal with a serious quality problem. This is proving far from the truth. Our creators are putting together books that are full of fantastic illustrations and well crafted stories. We are seeing fewer and fewer books with technical problems, and in general as more creators get involved the knowledge base has steadily grown. We have a Facebook group for people looking for help, and it has been steadily growing as well.

All this leads to the point, and title, of this post. Sharing Books exists because there are tens of thousands of books that get rejected each and every year by mainstream publishers. These books are not rejected because they are poor quality. They are rejected because mainstream publishers have a huge production overhead and are afraid to take on the risk that a new author or illustrator represents.

So if you are a children's book author or illustrator, and you've been rejected, you have a home here at Sharing Books. We are happy to help get your work into the hands of children all over the world.

Labels: business philosophy, community, publishing

I recently posted a long reply to a good question posted on the Children Books Insider site. This is a frequent discussion for us so I thought I'd post my reply here. Hopefully it will help those of you pondering the question.

"First a disclaimer: I am with www.sharing-books.com so I am biased in favour of e-books.

However it does not mean that we believe paper books will completely disappear. I think it is Bill Gates who said that we overestimate how fast a new technology will change the world but we underestimate how big the change will be. In the mid eighties I worked in the cellular telephone industry, few of us dreamed that one day young people would not even consider having a land line phone. It never crossed the mind of our adult children to have a home line in their appartments. Yet we still have a land line in our home because my wife likes to use it (though I never use it being the family geek).

I am writing this note from a home office with walls and floor covered with paper books. Yet I believe that e-books will inexorably replace most paper books over the long term. Other than artfully created books which will remain with us, most paper books printed today are simply information containers. We have to make sure we do not confused content and container.

PCs and most new mobile phones can contain books and provide a decent reading experience. The development of e-readers is accelerating. Most units available today are still expensive and not completely satisfactory due to either format or proprietary closed distribution systmes for content. Similarly, the first cell phones were limited in functionality and cost $5,000 and up. One thing is sure - the e-readers will keep improving and become as convenient and affordable as today's cell phones.

The wild card we see is the gaming consoles adding reading applications. This is what today's children have in their hands today - not paper books. Some industry estimates report over 15 million Nintendo DS sold in the US in 2008. Add the other gaming devices offered and you see sales totals indicating a change as profound as the cell phone. When we researched the market before founding Sharing-Books, we searched photos of children holding gaming devices. We could not help to remark that most photos showed young boys and that most of them were forwning and looking rather tense as they played the game.

We believe that we have a collective responsibility to offer e-books that can be read on these gaming devices. The devices are ready. Gaming devices can browse the web and most can display e-books. What we need is content adapted to these new containers so that children can have the reading/imagination experience we all had to complement their gaming time. Hopefully our stories can be compelling enough to have them read more and play less.

As we consider e-books, we need to remember Marshall McLuhan's famous quote "the medium is the message". New technology transforms the content. Cell phones made us mobile but their digital capabilities compared to land lines made texting possible. Our children rarely answer their phones - to confirm a family dinner time it is more efficient to text them. Similarly e-books will change how we write and read books. We can lament the change but it will not stop it from happening. We believe it is best to embrace the new possibilities offered by e-books.

Publishing will change. A site like Sharing-Books offers speed publishing. Upload your book, it will be reviewed by our volunteer librarians for appropriateness and usually published within 48 hours. This is highly disruptive for a slow and methodical industry. It shocks elitists that we let the public decide what is a quality book. The truth is that the public always votes with their purchases as to which book has the most real value. What we built in is the ability to upgrade a book rapidly. If a book creator want to edit a book, they can simply upload a new version replacing the previous one. In the web world we use agile development - publish your site, get it out as fast as possible and keep fixing it and improving it. We see a similar process happening to book publishing.

More creators than ever will publish. Universal access to the web and speed publishing sites will unleash an enormous amount of creativity. Removing industry barriers to publishing will permit new authors and books to be read and discovered by millions. Clay Shirky talks about an enormous cognitive surplus. People wanting to create rather than just consuming information. In a few months, without any publicity, Sharing-Books has published 140 books, making it the second largest publisher of new children books in Canada. At this pace we will be a major publisher in North America by the end of the year.

Legal rights will change. We do not believe that Digital Rights Management (DRM) will ever really work to the satisfaction of all parties or that they will resist hackers. Lawsuits like the music and movie industry are engaging in will eventually alienate the audience - especially the younger audience that has grown up with unlimited access to free information. Fighting to maintain the old publishing models will be futile. We chose to offer our books free of DRM and in a widely available format PDF to maximize the exposure our book creators get. We also chose to leave the copyrights in the hand of the book creators.

New business models will emerge. The real challenge is how to make money at this new game. We are exploring some innovative approaches. No one has the right answer yet. But we know that new models will emerge that will transfer a higher portion of the revenue directly to the creators (1/3 in our case). News writers feel very threatened as the sale of news papers decline rapidly. I don't think the news writers are at risk. There will always be demand for good reporting. What will disappear is the inefficient industry of printing, distributing and recycling millions of tons of paper daily when every thing can be instantly distributed for free on the internet. This is an industry that has lost its economic value.

Printing fewer books is better for the environment. We will see on-demand paper printing becoming the norm. Paper books will be eventually printed only when really needed and because of that they will be valued and cherished more. The team at Read an E-book week researched extensively the amount of paper and ink saved by not printing. The potential ecological benefits are enormous. This consciousness is now part of our culture, especially with young people.

The users will find new uses for the new technology. As texting spawned Twitter and novels written entirely on cell phones in Japan, e-books creators and readers will invent unanticipated uses for the technology. Children e-books offer new possibilities for illustrators. For example, the images are backlit rather than needing reflected light, this opens up new illustration techniques. For the new digital arts graduates e-books mean a very fast production cycle. As touch screen become the norm we expect a new generation of pop-up e-books to be created. At Sharing-Books we have extrapolated a number of future applications by examining how people use technology, yet we have already been surprised by our users. Jennifer Poulter, one of our book creators came up with the idea of a one page book - poster poems as teaching aids. Teachers from around the world love them.

I hope these comments help.

Pierre Lapointe

Labels: DRM, e-books, e-readers, gaming consoles, publishing

Sharing Books has been featured on the video podcast SmibsTV this week, if you have a moment go check them out! It is not to long, only a few minutes, and it features me ( Marcus ) chatting with Peter Urban from Smibs about Sharing Books, the publishing industry, and the fantastic people here on Sharing Books.

A big thank you to the Smibs team for driving down to Calgary Alberta from Edmonton Alberta to do the shoot. The roads and weather were typical Alberta in the winter, and they zipped down on the Red Arrow bus ( which apparently has wifi internet for all us mobile computing junkies ).

Labels: business philosophy, media coverage, publishing, SmibsTV

Digital publishing platforms allow authors and illustrators to explore contemporary issues as they are unfolding. Sometimes events happen that are so moving, so important to an individual that they feel the need to create work around it right away. Events that are horrific, like the bush fires that swept Australia this season. Events that are culturally significant, like the election of President Obama. Events that are joyous, like a new member to the family. These are events that unfold in real time.

Sharing Books offers a place for people to take these real-time events, the living situations of humanity, and put them in a format for children to read. Our book creators can tackle some of the most difficult subject matter in ways that help children understand what has happened, and is HAPPENING, around them.

A great example of this is the Poster Poem, "Survivors" by Jennifer Poulter and Arti Chauhan, which tackles the aftermath of something like the bush fires in Australia. A simple illustration and poem that talks of the mixed emotions that grip survivors, whether they are adult or child.

People live in real time, not the years lag time found in traditional children's publishing. Parents can find they need material to deal with issues in the now, not two, three, or ten years after an event when their children are fully grown. Digital publishing offers a space where authors, illustrators, and content consumers can meet to produce, consume, and share creative works centered on our real-time lives. Content can be published in days instead of years, hours instead of days. What a powerful thing it can be, that space where speed meets relevance.

Labels: business philosophy, publishing

Sharing-Books is an e-publisher so you know how we answered the question. However I think it will be of value to current and future authors pondering whether to e-publish or not, to share some of the reflections that led us to spending quite a bit of time and money building an e-publishing engine for children books.

First let me confess that I am a paper book fanatic. Our home (and our garage) is full of paper books. I love the smell of ink and glue that tickles your nose when you open a new book. It is just like when you smell that your favorite dish is in the oven. So if I love paper books so much, why am I an e-book publisher?

Simply e-books are inevitable. Paper books will remain with us for a long time but their importance will diminish. Fortunately for us we can look to the music industry to see our future. (Along with the cases of books in our garage you will find boxes of vinyl LP's.) Although many have resisted, no musician today would think of not releasing new music as digital files.

So as a writer and an illustrator you have to adapt to this new medium. First you must start by separating the content from the container. Your book, your story is the content and it is the part that matters whether the container is made out of paper or electronic bits and pieces. However this new container offers new and different possibilities even if we lose some of the features we are romantically attached to.

Some of these changes will be challenging, like how to promote your book. The music industry used to have quite a packaging surface with the LP to create eye catching covers. Then the packaging shrank by three fourths to the size of the CD cover, and now in digital format all you see is a thumbnail picture. There are numerous similar unexpected changes that will come as the book industry goes digital.

Let me examine the key changes that we have identified. Hopefully it will help you embrace this new way to publish knowing what to expect from your efforts as an author. As you will notice, many of these changes have to do with what we call removing the friction is the business model - making things happen much faster and at an insignificant cost. These changes will disrupt the publishing industry as we know it the same way that the music industry has been.

• Paper books have limited distribution due to geographical constraints like transportation costs or duties and taxes. E-Books are instantly available world wide at no cost. This means that if your paper book failed in a region it is unlikely that it will be offered elsewhere. On the other hand, your e-book can fail in one region and be immensely popular in another region at the same time.
• Paper books are made from dead trees and chemicals. Now that there is a more eco-efficient alternative, it is just a matter of time before paper books become an issue with environmentalists . While the electronic devices we use to read e-books do have a certain environment cost in their manufacturing processes and recycling, each device can hold thousands of books and therefore they are far more eco-efficient.
• Another environment element is that there is no wastage with e-books. Paper books require long print runs and often the unsold books are either liquidated as remainders with losses to the publisher, and hopefully they eventually get recycled.
• A paper book is passed from reader to reader one person at a time. An e-book can be passed from one person to hundreds or thousands of people at a time. Going from one to one to one to many means that the popularity of an e-book is achieved much more rapidly.
• While a strong person can probably carry 50 paper books, a weak person can carry thousands of e-books. We use to go to the library with our kids and come home with a pile of books. With e-books the entire library comes to you or your child.
• A paper book can be easily damaged and can't be repaired. Electronic devices become more rugged with each generation and if you damage one you can easily replace your e-books in a few minutes.

By now you should see the irresistible efficiencies offered by e-books. Paper books will not disappear but their relevance will decline. Like any transition to a new technology this change has some challenges that must be pondered and planned for.

• Your first challenge as an author publishing an e-book will be the resistance of the industry. You will not be recognized as a "real" writer by older paper published authors or publisher. Many will cling to their status and put down this new technology that threatens the status quo. Accept it. You won't change them. On the other hand with e-books you might have the joy of Andrea Azevedo, our first author, whose two young sons exclaimed "Mom! You are famous! Your books are on the Internet!"
• The most difficult change to adapt to and to understand is how this affects copyrights and piracy. Physical media like vinyl or paper offered much greater protection for your intellectual property. The music industry has tried everything it could to protect digital files with software referred to as Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM has failed. There has not been one version that was not been rapidly broken by hackers who took pride in their feat.

At Sharing-Books we decided to offer the books without DRM and to accept that this is now a fact of life. We simply need to create new business models that take advantage of the speed of distribution of e-books. We plan to have the books sponsored and if a book is copied and emailed a thousand times, it simply means more value for the sponsor. Some of you will be scandalized at the idea of sponsoring a children book. However, we are talking about sponsoring not advertising, something that is done for every play you attend. You will also find it interesting if you shop for antique children books to find many that were sponsored in the same fashion a hundred years ago.

• E-books present different challenges for illustrators. They will likely be read on a screen that does not offer the same resolution as paper. Colors will be displayed differently depending on how a reader has set up his/her screen. The screen sizes will vary greatly. From PCs with great screens to black and white e-readers to cells phones and to gaming devices. You will find e-books everywhere. Our job at Sharing-Books is to make our authors e-books available on as many device types as possible. The illustrator's challenge will be to draw in a way that is flexible and adaptative.
• E-books present different opportunities. Paper children books sometimes have pop-up features or pull features that work for some time and then are usually damaged by the children. E-books will offer more flexibility for the creative mind. Click on the cow in the picture and see information about cows or hear the cow moo. We are excited to see what our creators will come up with.
• E-books can become paper books. On demand printing will be the norm and the reader will be able to customize the printed copy. No waste and a great marketing opportunity.
• E-books offer great opportunities for teachers. E-Books are free or at least they save money. The majority of teachers end up spending their own funds to supplement school materials. As we advance Sharing-Books will be able to offer teachers tools to integrate books, questionnaires and lessons in coherent programs that will use the capabilities of the devices the children use to read.
• E-books offer great opportunities for students. E-books are free. Voracious readers will never run out of material to read.
• E-books are much easier to convert into formats friendly to the visually impaired or the learning challenged.
• E-books' world wide and free accessibility will help bridge the knowledge gap between developed and developing nations. This means that we will also have better access to literature form authors from developing nations and that they will be able to benefit from their exposure to developed nations markets. This will be the literature version of free-trade coffee.

We do not have complete answers to all the changes described above but we prefer to see them as opportunities for imaginative solutions and innovations.

Already after only a few months in business, we have seen one of our authors Jennifer Poulter come up with the idea of the one page book. Jennifer collaborates with illustrators to create poster-poems that can be downloaded and printed by teachers who get an instant vocabulary lesson for their class. Jennifer received a number of testimonials from enthusiastic teachers.

We have a number of our own innovations in development but we are anticipating that our authors, illustrators and users will continue to come up with great ideas - many better than our own.

Indeed the answer to the question to E or not to E, is to E.

Labels: children books, content, e-books, marketing, publishing, reading

Although I am a businessman, I have always considered myself an artist - a creator. I know this is a paradox but an entrepreneur creates organizations. Some artists work with a medium where they reach a completed stage, when everything is done and their work acquires permanence. On the other hand, everything an entrepreneur works with is dynamic; people, products and the economy change all the time. In addition we face competition, people who try to undo what we create. Imagine painting while someone rips your canvas or splatters paint on your work. That is what we business creators face and probably it is why we love the challenge.

When the economy goes into collective paranoia like we live right now, there is a phase of fear that induces paralysis. Many people stay paralyzed for a long time. The creators are the first ones to take the initiative and move on. If necessity is the mother of invention, we are about to see a number of initiatives by creators that will again transform the world like it was changed after each recession of the last century. The wonderful thing for artists is that for them necessity - the need to create - is fueled internally rather than by external events like a recession. Creators were conceiving and creating before the recession started. They will continue to create as the economy recovers and they will keep changing our lives for the better. They will simply be ahead of the pack.

A recession creates a vacuum that gives space for new ideas to blossom as obsolete and no longer useful ideas or businesses disappear. For example, Apple just killed Digital Rights Management for the music it sells. DRM has failed to add value to musicians and consumers alike and deserves to disappear. We believe that what is happening in the music industry is a predictor of the future of the "publishing" industry. New media require new ideas and new business models. We believe that an innovative publishing model like Sharing-Books combining social initiatives with new revenue streams for book creators is an idea whose time has come.

Every day I receive phone calls or emails from children books creators who are in the action mode, writing and illustrating new books. Their initiatives are an expression of hope that is much healthier and promising than the fear that grips the economy. We are very proud to be associated with hopeful people who put effort behind their ideas. These colleagues inspire us to do our best to provide a valuable outlet for their creative efforts to be welcome, published, read and rewarded.

Labels: children books, creators, entrepreneurs, publishing, recession