Comment On The gTLD dotBOOK Domain Grab

Who’s After the dotBOOK Top Level Domain

Maybe we can stop this idiocy after all.

ICANN is asking for public comments: “Closed Generic” gTLD Applications

dotBOOK should not belong to any commercial entity.

Microsoft No Reed Gud

It’s Official – Microsoft Doesn’t Understand Visual Novels

I give up. I see nothing to indicate that MS is serious about addressing the issue of giving developers a way to communicate directly with the folks doing the testing. I doubt that submitting it another twenty times with more and more instructions is going to solve this, and I doubt anyone is going to put that kind of time in just to be in their App Store. If you can have a $2.99 program in the Windows Store that is nothing but a wrapper for Picasa, but I can’t get my game in, then I think you know what you can expect to find (and not find) there going forward.

Ah, but the Microsofties smile a lot.

But then morons usually do.

Angry Birds Overturn The Book Publishing Cart

Rovio announces Angry Birds book app: Live from Frankfurt Book Fair

Rovio Entertainment, the Finnish company whose “Angry Birds” app has now been downloaded over 1 billion times, announced its first book app, an iOS cookbook app called “Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes,” at the Frankfurt Book Fair on Thursday afternoon.

The print version of the book, which Rovio published last year, goes by the same title, but the app is “not just a book,” said Peter Vesterbacka, Angry Birds CMO. “We took the content from the book, 41 egg recipes, but didn’t want to just take the book, make a PDF and sell it to people. We actually made it a lot more interactive.”

“Bad Piggies’ Best Egg Recipes” is on sale for an introductory price of $0.99 or €0.79 in the iTunes Store and includes step-by-step photo instructions, an egg timer and photos of the finished dishes. Users can also upload their own pictures of the recipes they make. A Chinese-language version of the app, featuring some additional recipes and photos, will be available in the Chinese app store soon.

Boldfaced emphasis added by me.

Why is this such a frikkin big deal?

Who’s After the dotBOOK Top Level Domain

Dave Winer’s post caught my attention and my curiosity was incited: Tech press misses Google/Amazon name grab

Then I read this post he linked to: Big Brands Trying To Corner Generic Namespaces?

That got me wondering: Who is going for book-related domains? Specifically, the dotBOOK one.

What follows is not the kind of thorough investigation a full staff of trained pros would turn out (like, for instance, the lax CNN-Money team who apparently just take everything at face value). But it’s damned more than anyone else has so far bothered to do. Which is really shocking — because why are they being paid if they can ignore something as big as this?

For those who want spoilers:

1) Annie Callanan, last known as COO of ProQuest — sister company of R.R. Bowker (which are both owned by Cambridge Information Group) — applies as an entity with partners, separately from Bowker’s application. If she is still a ProQuest employee, this is a conflict of interest and could also be seen as double-dipping since both ProQuest and Bowker are owned by the same parent.

2) Amazon wants the entire dotBOOK domain for itself! Really, no one else can use it except Amazon.

3) Bowker has a plan to make a mint off dotBOOK with auctions of certain URLs — which could actually be an infinite list of URLs

4) Everyone else just wants to make a buck off writers and at least one of them openly hates self-publishers — and probably independent small presses too

iBooks Author: Creating A Children’s Book

Shoo Rayner is a professional who does children’s books.

This is his website (warning: autoplay music; click Stop button when there!)

He found out about iBooks Author by accident and has done two videos about it.

Now All eBook Eyes Turn To Kobo

Children of @elandes reading on Kobo eReaders

https://twitter.com/#!/mikecane/status/160410153454288897

https://twitter.com/#!/mikecane/status/160410422879584256

Two Years Later, Apple Is Bringing The xBooks

2011: This Month’s Apple Event To Focus On Publishing And iBooks

2009: Apple Will Break Open The Digital Book Floodgates

I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting.

“xBook” is my designation, coined here:

Since people cannot decide whether they are “enhanced” or “enriched” or “eBooks with extras,” I am coining the term xBook to encompass digital books that contain audio, video, and other interactive elements that require more than an eInk device to read. xBook has the advantage of not being a widely-known trademark and the “x as extra” is easy to explain to people. (Western Skyland Corporation holds a trademark for “xBook.” Western Skyland Corporation is a beard company for Microsoft. Since all but one other trademark held by this beard company is dead, I think it’s safe to use xBook as a generic term since it is not being actively used in the marketplace by the registrant.) Note that xBook should refer to an eBook — ePub or Kindle format — with extras, not an app, such as Vook.

What I didn’t know then was that Apple was part of the IDPF and waiting for the ePub3 spec to be finalized.

Doctor Who Encyclopedia For iPad

This is where digital books come into their own.

I want one for The Avengers (Steed and Mrs. Peel), Blake’s 7, and all of the Gerry Anderson Supermarionation and live-action productions being abused by those bastards at Carlton TV. Thunderbirds itself could be a standalone, but there should also be a massive Gerry Anderson one. And one for Space Patrol (aka Planet Patrol).

Doctor Who Encyclopedia iTunes webpage link

Push Pop Press Does A Lexcycle

April 2009: Amazon Buys Lexcycle/Stanza Reader

August 2011: Push Pop Press acquired by Facebook

While no one believed Amazon would buy Lexcycle to kill it, that’s just what happened.

At least the Push Pop team are straightforward:

There are no plans to continue publishing new titles or building out our publishing platform that was in private beta.

The realities are these:

1) A Push Pop digital book took a lot of work. This capital- and labor- intensiveness is not something conventional print publishing is willing to do. Budgets cannot accommodate it. Unlike movies, there’s no way to expect a huge immediate return on release day.

2) A digital book like that is not something that can done to just anything. It requires a brand new way of thinking. And we’re just not anywhere close to that yet.

3) The Push Pop people could have seen their money burn away in a fruitless endeavor to woo publishers or they could have taken their expertise and given it to someone willing to pay for it.

Facebook was willing to pay.

What’s interesting, though, is why wasn’t Apple?

America Not Working

Innovative OR Books has something here: an upcoming multimedia book called America Not Working, sort of an update to the classic Working by Studs Terkel (which is still not available in e).

They have an entire website set up for it.