The FastPencil Marketplace brings authors, editors, illustrators, marketing professionals, and other experts together as part of a new approach to writing, publishing, and distributing books and eBooks.
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This post makes the case that the Kindle is doomed, not because of the iPad per se, but because the iPad is just the first of many devices that will provide more than the Kindle, making the Kindle’s price unsustainable.
Kindle owners, do you agree?
If you want to not just write your book, but also have control over distribution, the Apple iPad will be a bonanza for you and your readers. You can sell your book in ePub (the format used by the iPad and many other eBook readers) through the FastPencil Marketplace (taking advantage of our BookBuy widget), and through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online retailers.
As this NY Times article makes clear, there will be all kinds of options for iPad owners seeking to buy eBooks. Take advantage of the flexibility of ePub and FastPencil. If you haven’t thought of producing in eBook format, now is the time to rethink your position.
Excellent! Thousands of public domain books made available by Project Gutenberg will work on Apple’s soon-to-be-released iPad. This isn’t really a surprise, but it’s good to hear.
As this NY Times article illustrates, there’s a war on. It’s a war for the future of eBooks. The combatants are fighting over who controls pricing. Will the “agency model” used by Apple (publisher sets price and Apple receives a 30% commission) prevail, or will Amazon’s approach ($9.99 standard eBook price) win?
And while the big guys slug it out, where are authors? Who is watching out for their interests?
What about a model in which the author sets the price for eBooks? In fact, why not let the author set the price for any book they publish, regardless of format?
Electronista takes a closer look at the three devices. While the Kindle’s capabilities are limited, it costs less than the iPad. The HP slate will run Windows 7, so could be more like a full-fledged laptop than either of its competitors, but it will also likely cost more.
![mrgan:
I like the design of Apple’s invitation to the rumored-tablet event on January 27. It’s not pretty, I don’t want to start seeing it all over the place, but it grabs you.
And I’ve been saying this for a while: e-ink has its advantages and its fans, but the minute America sees a colorful display, ebooks are going to become 300% more desirable. Battery life, matte surface, more like paper - doesn’t matter. People love color. You better believe Apple is going to hue the heck out of their ads for [whatever it is].](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kwgf7tT6iJ1qz50x3o1_400.jpg)
mrgan:
I like the design of Apple’s invitation to the rumored-tablet event on January 27. It’s not pretty, I don’t want to start seeing it all over the place, but it grabs you.
And I’ve been saying this for a while: e-ink has its advantages and its fans, but the minute America sees a colorful display, ebooks are going to become 300% more desirable. Battery life, matte surface, more like paper - doesn’t matter. People love color. You better believe Apple is going to hue the heck out of their ads for [whatever it is].
The success of Amazon’s Kindle and speculation about the Apple iSlate has led to many a blog post about the future of eBook publishing. Neven Mrgan’s take is one of the most interesting. He hopes Apple will unveil an eBook publishing system that will make micropublishing easy:
Let’s say you’ve written a short story. (You’re still working on your first novel; courage!) As a piece of entertainment and education, it’ll enrich about twenty minutes of someone’s life. That’s worth 99c in my book. You write this in Pages, perhaps using the app’s writer-friendly full-screen mode, and lay it out using Apple’s elegant templates. You publish it to the, err, Media Store - hey, I’m no ad wizard - where it’s checked for plagiarism, validated for formatting integrity, and placed in your desired category. Congratulations! you’re an almost-self-published writer. Tell your friends, blog about it, buy ad space. Whether you make millions on your story or not, you’re better off than when it just sat on your hard drive.
It’s an excellent idea. John Gruber, who makes a living writing about Apple, agrees with Mrgan, and adds this flourish:
Here’s my other thought: the old-growth print industry — books, magazines, and newspapers — have shown zero aptitude to date to produce compelling designs and business models for digital content. Left to themselves, they’d botch this too.
It’s hard to argue with Gruber on this one. The legacy publishing world is built around a scarcity-driven model. Scarcity of access to publishing tools. Scarcity of distribution capability. Scarcity of pricing options. It’s no wonder they are having a difficult time adapting to abundance.
So it’s up to a completely different kind of publisher to bust the mold. Enter FastPencil.
You can use our book writing software (which also includes built-in collaboration tools) to write your book. Sell any combination of print, PDF, or ePub in the FastPencil Marketplace at a price of your choosing. Your book is stored in XML, so you never have to tie yourself to a particular army in the eBook Format Wars. As new eBook formats become popular, FastPencil will support them. As new devices take center stage, content developed in FastPencil won’t be trapped inside a walled garden.
Easy micropublishing is already here, as these sample FastPencil titles illustrate:
The collaboration tools built into the FastPencil writing tool make projects like Seth’s accessible to the less tech-savvy as well as tech maestros.
fastpencil:
Here is another great example of a shifting paradigm in publishing. Seth Godin not only breaks rules by giving his book away free, but the book is a collaboration between 60 or so big thinkers, and it’s being spread all over the world. Why does this matter to FastPencil? Because shift happens, and FastPencil is at the crest of a wave that is breaking over the entire publishing industry. FastPencil enables the writing and publishing and distribution of projects just like this. Download What Matters Now here.
