Around this time last year, Rowling started hinting that she was no longer completely against having official ebook editions, but nothing more came of it other than a few hopeful articles and blog posts.

But today she finally made an official announcement (one that neatly coincides with the growing marketing push for the final movie). She’s come around to ebooks:

“E-books are here and here to stay. Later than a lot of people, I for the first time downloaded ebooks and it’s miraculous for travel and for children in particular. I feel great about taking Harry into this new medium.”

Accordingly, in October she’ll start selling official DRM-free ebook editions and digital versions of the audiobooks from her own website, Pottermore, which will also be a free online reading community that will contain new Potter-related writing that hasn’t been published before.

Some interesting details of the arrangement:

• Rowling will sell the ebooks, not Amazon, B&N, Sony, Kobo, or any other retailer, but they’ll be compatible across all of the major ebook devices.
• Sony will be handling the online community aspects of the site for easier hacking and account thievery. (Oh snap!)
• The cross-compatibility editions will be managed by OverDrive, the company that handles the vast majority of library ebook lending in the U.S.
• The website will soft launch on July 31st with one million members, then launch officially in October with the accompanying ebook store.
• The site will feature newly-commissioned illustrations and interactive experiences, like shopping for a the right wand or being sorted by the Sorting Hat, that you can participate in as you read the corresponding chapters in the books—think of it as an enhanced ebook where all the enhancement is hosted online.

Although the details on translations and regional availability are a little fuzzy, The Globe and Mail says the website will launch in English, French, German and Spanish, and also says that the ebook editions will be made available in multiple languages. I don’t know who owns the ebook rights to HP… (Update: Rowling indeed holds the ebook rights, not her print publishers, reports Wired UK.)

As for the cross-platform compatibility, which I’d say is the real magic Rowling is performing here, my guess is that it will be possible because of Amazon’s upcoming move to work with OverDrive to allow library lending of the Kindle format. This also suggests that Amazon will launch its U.S. library lending program by October. Update: Via The Digital Reader, the ebooks will be DRM-free but watermarked with the purchaser’s identity to dissuade rampant piracy, so it looks like this isn’t dependent upon Amazon’s library lending program after all.

Another mystery is how the online community will work, and what “free” actually gets you in terms of content on Pottermore. The Bookseller notes that Rowling has 18,000 words worth of new content, including some backstory on Professor McGonagall, that will be available exclusively on the new site.

[Owl image via Pottermore.com]

That, in a nutshell, is one of the reasons why Sidney Williams recently teamed up with Crossroad Press to republish his older novels as well as new works.

Williams published his first book in 1989 through Pinnacle, and in the years since he’s written horror, young adult novels, and graphic novels like “The Dusk Society”, as well as an audio adaptation of “War of the Worlds”.

But like many midlist and genre authors his titles have all but disappeared from brick and mortar bookstores, even though there’s still an audience for them.

While the early novels involve werewolves, vampires, and—in the case of “Gnelfs”—malevolent children’s cartoon characters, his latest book, “Midnight Eyes”, is a more realistic suspense thriller about a Louisiana serial killer, a dangerously ambitious newspaper editor, and a sheriff who must ask his estranged son (and former FBI agent) for help if he wants to prevent more deaths.

I asked Williams about his decision to publish through Crossroad Press, and his own experience with ebooks so far.

Booksprung: In your bio and in other interviews, you’ve said that you were a journalist for eleven years, and among other things you covered crime. Was that the genesis for “Midnight Eyes”?

How did you decide to publish digitally, and why did you choose to go with Crossroad Press?

What’s your writing process like, and has it changed much over the years?

What was the first ebook you read?

How was that experience?

Do you have any “guilty pleasures” that you find are easier to read in ebook form?

The cover art for your earlier paperbacks from Pinnacle are definitely of an era, but there’s no denying they were striking and attention-grabbing. What do you think about the role of cover art in digital publishing?

I like cover art a lot. I miss record albums because you had such beautiful big artistic opportunities for covers. I am kind of fanatical about my mp3s. I try to get all the cover art right on my iPod, or my iPhone now, and I still like covers, I like seeing them on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, wherever.

As far as covers with Crossroad, its been fun to have a second edition of my books out and kind of see new directions with them.

It’s challenging to get cover art. David Dodd did “Blood Hunter” and I thought he did a great job. I can remember being on the phone with—you know you didn’t get a lot of input on covers in the old days, and I remember being on the phone with my editor talking about what the cover should be. My original idea was of a moss-covered arm or claw reaching across the cover, but instead we got a swamp scene and a young girl looking through the trees on the original cover. I thought David Dodd did a great job of capturing the setting for the story without giving much away.

Neil Jackson did the new “Gnelfs” cover, and I really like that. The original “Gnelfs” cover is very 80s/90s, and I thought Jackson kind of captured the mood and the flavor of the story without giving too much away or spoiling letting your imagination form the monsters in that one.

You know when you download a book, it usually defaults to the first chapter, and I go in on my Kindle and reset it so that the cover is the first page until I start reading it, because I like even the monochromatic covers.

You have an unlimited budget and a crack team of designers and engineers. What does your ideal ebook device look like?

What are your thoughts on ebook lending and resell rights? How do you think those two issues should be handled in a way that’s fair to all parties involved?

Do you have any preference for print or digital books?

And finally, who are your favorite authors?

Sidney Williams is currently working on a literary thriller as well as a fantasy novel, and he’s re-editing his vampire novel “Night Brothers” for the forthcoming ebook edition.

“Midnight Eyes” is available on the Kindle Store and in multiple formats from Crossroad Press.

Visit Sidney Williams at sidisalive.com

(Photo: treyevan)

By michellewegner

Instagram is an iOS app that lets you shoot a quick photo, tint it or age it so that it has a more organic/hipster look, and then share it online like a tweet or Tumblr update. I never use it, but it’s crazy popular — and apparently lots of Instagram users tend to take pics of their Kindles.

I guess it makes sense. Most Instagram snapshots I’ve seen are of those casual in-between moments of a person’s life, like for instance when you’re sitting somewhere reading. And although I want to criticize the whole aged/tinted photo thing as being too damned trendy, I have to admit it sometimes adds a romantic glaze to the little plastic and glass device.

There’s even a few Nook shots!

Unfortunately to search the pics online you need to have an Instagram account, which you have to set up through the app on your iOS device. [Update: This site will let you browse Instagram pics via keyword search.] The blog Ebook Friendly has put together a nice sample collection for you, however, so head over there and take a look.

Photo credits from left: ramens, jgrillo, bridgetcmc. (I was going to look for Kobo, but I got hipstered out.)

Callaway Digital has published two “Miss Spider’s Tea Party” app books on Apple’s iOS platform, among other titles. Although his company started off in the ’80s publishing traditional books, it now focuses solely on iOS app versions. The interactive app version is the primary and only in-house instance of the work, with all other formats, even print editions, licensed out to other companies.

What’s cool about Callaway’s story is although he started out as a traditional publisher, that was due to the limits of technology. He seems to always have approached storytelling as something that is shaped, but never completely defined, by format. He tell Reuters:

“You can tell a story in a book. You can tell a story in a game, in a film. You can tell a story in a watering can… No one in publishing was doing this. People wondered, ‘What is he doing selling watering cans?’ In essence, we were building ownership of intellectual property across many different forms.”

That’s a philosophy entertainment giants like Disney (and maybe only Disney) figured out a long time ago, but I think it still doesn’t gain much traction for many publishers and authors, even now that digital publishing makes it relatively affordable to refract a story through multiple media.

But storytelling is about more than just merchandising, obviously, and this is probably where he really parts ways philosophically with most publishers. Callaway partnered with “Miss Spider” creator David Kirk, instead of just offering a royalty agreement in exchange for publishing rights. The two split profits, and they work together to create new forms of content around the popular kids’ book character. A lot of publishers talk about their “gatekeeper” role in culture, which seems to naturally assume a hierarchy of publisher over storyteller. Callaway’s partnership approach is more democratic.

I really like that Callaway is an optimistic geek at heart: he tells Egan that he’s been waiting since 1972 for the right tablet platform for ebook apps. That’s when computer scientist Alan Kay published his template for the DynaBook, which has informed much of the One Laptop Per Child program and seems to be the template for much of the iPad’s UX.

His advice for other publishers (check the bottom of page 4 of the profile) is to get out from under the costs of being in the distribution business, and instead focus on the triad of the author/reader/publisher.

The last half of the article expands to talk to other publishers and developers, and is dotted with one-off examples of success stories in digital publishing. But the Callaway story is enjoyable because it reminds me that, despite the grumblings of some, not every first mover in a new market is simply an opportunist who is deliberately hyping a new bubble. Sometimes they’ve been waiting all along for the marketplace to catch up with them.

Gerard Lagana interviewed Callaway last year about his iPad-only shift. Here’s the clip from that post.

“Dumping print, NY publisher bets the ranch on apps” [Reuters via The Mac Observer]
“Miss Spider’s Tea Party for the iPad, and an interview with Nicholas Callaway.” [Macgasm]

Here’s hoping March brings some rays of light; in the meantime, here’s a recap of last month:

• Apple and Sony start things off with a public PR fight about Sony’s ebook app, which Apple rejected over a proprietary in-app bookstore. This is the early tremor that leads to a major iOS earthquake for publishers a few weeks later.
• Murdoch launches The Daily, an iPad-only newspaper app that pushes out new content, from an in-house staff of journalists, around the clock. The only problem is, the interface is kind of glitchy, the content is (mostly) generic and shallow, and the ads are intrusive. (I deleted it after about five days.) Eventually The Daily will cost 99 cents a week, but for now the free trial period keeps getting extended.
• NPR shows off a video of an Espresso Book Machine, the print-on-demand copier/printer/computer set-up that Xerox is leasing to bookstores. I go check it out in person and report back with my own experience.
• The day after Valentine’s, Apple makes content publishers cringe when it announces that by mid-2011 all entertainment content — books, magazines, papers, movies, music — that passes through an iOS app will have to agree to new rules that allow Apple to take 30% of each sale. It now seems likely that most of the major ebook apps on the iOS platform will disappear by June.
• Borders U.S. files for bankruptcy. Thanks to the Internet, there’s plenty of behind-the-scenes reporting happening online.
• HarperCollins rolls out a new “self-destruct” licensing scheme for public libraries; after 26 check-outs, the license expires and the library must buy a new one.
• Random House finally embraces agency pricing; it was the sole holdout among the Big Six publishers. There’s speculation that the change was meant to give indie sellers on Google Books a fighting chance; what it means for consumers is that prices on Random House titles might go up at all ebook retailers in the coming weeks. (Update: this also means Random House titles will start appearing on Apple’s iBooks store soon.)

• For our amusement, Electric Literature shoots bullets into books (and a Kindle) and films it.
• The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) happens. The Digital Reader blog goes to check out the five billion tablets that were on display, and reports back on two of the most promising “new” display techs that might finally reach the marketplace this year: the Pixel Qi screen and the Mirasol screen.
• Nora Roberts becomes the third author to sell more than a million ebooks on the Kindle store, after Stieg Larsson (#1) and James Patterson (#2). This is easier for her than for many other authors, because to date she has her name on at least 678,000 different books. Update: a new one was released as I typed that imaginary number.
• A website goes where other blogs (including this one) fear to tread: it provides a full tutorial on how to strip DRM from protected ebooks. Of course, every other blog (including this one) picks up the story and links to it.
• Mike Shatzkin sets the record straight, at least for himself and the executives and agents who answered his poll, about what DRM is really intended to prevent: casual sharing among legitimate readers.
• I try the Nook Wi-Fi and find that although the hardware is nice, when it comes to usability, it pales in comparison to the Kindle Wi-Fi. This makes me sad, because I don’t want to be a cheerleader for just one ereader platform. Honestly.
• Joanna (a frequent Teleread contributor) launches a curated website for well-reviewed independently published ebooks called the Indie eBook Hall of Fame. Although it launches with only a handful of titles, it looks like more are being added weekly.
• Someone releases an add-on for the Chrome web browser that lets you instantly clip websites and send the content to your Kindle’s free email address. For other browsers, there are other options.
• I freak out about the concept of cloud-based ebook selling licensing, after checking out the cloud-only implementation being offered by Australian bookseller Readings.
• Amazon renames its ebook self-publishing program to Kindle Direct Publishing, and extends its 70% royalty offer to Canada as well as the U.S. and U.K.
• Websites start popping up all over the place to help Kindle customers lend ebooks to each other. Here’s a list of lending sites.
• Amazon launches Kindle Singles, which are short stories, novellas, essays and longform journalism sold for $0.99-4.99. At least one other person agrees with me that the name sounds like processed cheese slices, not album tracks.
• Digital Book World happens. Teleread’s Paul Biba attends (except for the day he leaves early to escape an impending blizzard) and reports back with recaps of panel discussions.
• Amazon announces that it now sells 115 Kindle ebooks for every 100 paperbacks. Kindle titles already outsold hardcovers on the Amazon store.
• Borders buys a little more time to try to avoid bankruptcy.
• Feedbooks gives up on providing support for the Kindle, at least wrt its beloved (by me) Download Guide.
• The New York Times bypasses traditional print and publishes “Open Secrets,” an ebook about Wikileaks, for Kindle, Nook and iBooks.
• And finally, Granta launches a Kindle edition, which marks the first time the literary journal has ever published in another format.

The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) has the speech available for download, but only in PDF format, because it’s been (intentionally!) laid out in three columns of tiny text like a weird civic bible from the 19th century.

So I grabbed it, pasted it into TextWrangler, and cleaned it up — then realized that WhiteHouse.gov had beat me to it. You can download the full speech in text only format from their State of the Union page.

Even if my hard work was wasted, it’s nice to be able to get the text of an important political event onto my Kindle, in an easy-to-read format and untouched by any third-party news media. Now I just need to remember to randomly clap a lot while reading it.

Update: And all of this was without knowing that the President mentions digital textbooks in the speech!

“Remarks by the President in State of Union Address” [The White House]

(Photo: Pete Souza)

The Kindle, he writes in a forthcoming article for Locus magazine, “wins” over print in two areas. First, it’s easier to read than a printed book if you need larger sized text, because it can make any book a large-print edition without requiring any real knowledge of how the device works; this is both a crucial feature and usability requirement for the current 40-and-over set. Second, its “buy once, read anywhere” approach makes reading big books a pleasure instead of a task. (Gaiman writes that he still prefers paperbacks for smaller, pocketable books.)

That first achievement–ease of use–sounds like common sense, but it’s actually pretty hard for companies to pull off these days, which is why you should always try out an ereader in person before you buy it. In my opinion there are only a handful of truly easy-to-use consumer electronics in the world: the iPhone, the Tivo (with the original menu, not the unusable HD interface), the Keurig brewer, the Flip videocamera, and the Kindle. Although Amazon’s web interface for the Kindle is nothing to brag about, it’s possible to avoid it almost entirely and still get full use out of your Kindle.

This simplicity really hit home for me last week, when I took advantage of Borders’ “please give us some revenue” sale and bought the Kobo Wi-Fi for $100. I bought it for my mom, because I figured even though she’d miss out on cheap Kindle books, she’d be able to access library ebooks on a Kobo. But I wanted to give it a test run first to make sure it would be easy to use. I immediately fell in love with the hardware, but I kept running into problems with the usability. First, I hated how it was pre-set to connect only to the Borders ebook store and not to the general Kobobooks.com website (actually I hated that there were two shopping destinations at all–Kobo should just be Kobo). I also didn’t like how you had to navigate down through multiple screens just to toggle wireless access, when that’s the very first menu item on the Kindle. I hated that you have to install a desktop app if you want to wirelessly sync the Kobo with your library. And then there was the Adobe Digital Editions program requirement for authorizing library check-outs.

In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to send my mother an ereader that was looking suspiciously like it would require many hours of technical support. I took it back and spent the extra $40 for a Wi-Fi Kindle. She’ll never have to connect it to her aging iBook or think of it as a PC peripheral for as long as she uses it. She can buy a new book while she’s at work, or I can email her a file, and it will appear on her Kindle automatically when she gets home. Hooray for simplicity.*

The second achievement Gaiman describes–the ability to access a book across multiple devices–isn’t unique to Kindle, and I think it’s more of a general benefit of reading ebooks, at least if you’re a Nook, Kindle, Kobo or Google eBooks customer. In fact, it’s one of the innate benefits of storing your books in the “cloud”–they’re easy to access from multiple devices, no matter where you go.

But in theory, at least, cloud storage has a heavy potential cost you should be aware of, which is that it forces consumers to give up control over their purchases.

Publishers would love to see the cloud become the only way to sell ebook licenses to readers, because they could finally get rid of unprofitable consumer behavior like passing books along to friends or shifting formats–the kinds of privileges that consumers demand when they feel like they “own” something, but that are easier to kill off when a customer grows comfortable with simply paying for access to the cloud. Cloud access also makes it easier for publishers to enforce their interpretations of fair use, and to block any applications of technology that they haven’t yet monetized.

For that reason, even though I share Gaiman’s pleasure at being able to pick up my reading where I left off as I move among devices, I always download and save backup copies of my ebooks. That way I will have at least a fighting chance of preserving access to them in the future, no matter what the publisher or retailer decides.

The bad news is, the type of consumer who takes care to make backup copies of ebook purchases probably isn’t the same one who needs an easy-to-use device, so I fear the cloud approach will win out in the years to come. The good news is that the topic is moot right now, because today all the major ereader stores let you download copies of your purchases. But as long as we still have a choice, I suggest that you patronize retailers and publishers who offer file downloads as well as cloud storage.

This isn’t just a pro-Kindle post. I would have happily bought my mom a Nook Color instead of a Kindle had it been in my budget. I wouldn’t have bought an original Nook, though, because I find its interface too clunky. (Return to the post.)

(Neil Gaiman photo: Jutta @ flickr; cloud image: akakumo)

“This morning when I booted up my computer and immediately went to check Publetariat to make sure it’s up and running normally, as I always do, it occurred to me that if I lose my home I probably won’t be able to keep running Publetariat and its sister sites. Then it occured to me that Publetariat’s audience would probably be very disappointed if this happens.
And it further occurred to me that Publetariat’s audience numbers in the tens of thousands, and if each one of them were to pitch in just one dollar, it could keep my children and I—and therefore, Publetariat—afloat for a few more months, while I try to get more work and make other financial arrangements.”

If you’ve ever found Publetariat useful, or just want to help out your fellow man, you can read her full story and donate a dollar or two at Publetariat.

In addition to those five books, Adler is giving Amazon a 2-year exclusive on an anthology of short stories by the winners of his annual writing contest. The most recent anthology is on sale now (although it looks like the winning stories are available for free on Adler’s website). If you’ve got $15, you can submit a story for consideration in the next one, which Warren says will also be available exclusively on Amazon for two years.

WarrenAdler.com