Wednesday, March 05, 2008


Book Publishing Goes Paperless
A Hachette job.

From New York magazine 3 March.

The Hachette Book Group recently distributed hundreds of Sony Readers to its editors and publishers. “People are evangelical about it,” says publisher Jonathan Karp, who has about 30 submissions on his Reader. “If you’re traveling, this is so much easier than lugging around manuscripts. It’s good for reading in bed, too.”

Agents selling to Hachette’s imprints are now required to e-mail their texts to acquiring editors, who download them to their Readers; paper manuscripts are no longer routinely circulated. “The savings on Xeroxing are considerable,” says Karp. Sony managed to infiltrate the books business ahead of Amazon’s Kindle release—Simon & Schuster’s Readers arrived last fall, though only some editorial types there are currently using them. Unlike the Kindle, the Sony has no note-taking ability, which means editors can read but not edit on their devices. That’s fine for now, says Hachette digital-media director Neil De Young. “Some of the more senior editors like sitting on their couches with a glass of red wine and pencil in hand,” he says.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Dear Graham,

Heard about your blog from your interview on Radio National which I've been listening to to acclimate myself to the day-to-day of NZ before I travel to Christchurch for a wedding next week.

And I'm happy to read this post about the Sony Reader. As an adult, I've continually declined my parents offers to buy me a gift for Christmas, but when I started seeing ads for the Sony Reader, and after doing research to see if it accomplished what I wanted (that is, being able to read WORD Docs) I decided to let them buy me one and I've become a huge advocate for the Sony Reader ever since.

If there's one thing I could chage about how eBooks have been marketed is to de-emphasize the 'book' part. I still read books in their modern form and plan to for a long time. (I will buy many books while in NZ, so while I'm at it, any Christchurch Dunedin bookshoppes you could recommend? Is there a Unity Bookshoppe in either city?) What I wanted an eBook for was not to read books on, but to reduce my paper consumption. I used to print out sooooooo many articles from the web I began to feel guilty about all the trees I was killing. Now I just copy/paste the web articles to a Word doc and then drop it into my Sony Reader (which converts it to an RTF). Sure, PDFs don't work well right now, but hopefully they'll fix that with a later release. Besides, reading web articles on my Sony Reader is actually MORE pleasant than on paper and that's more than enough. Yes, I can't make notes, but you can bookmark and, for the most part, that's enough for me, although I hope for later PalmPilot-y modifications.

So my advice to Sony and Amazon, emphasize the paper-reduction qualities over the books.

But speaking of books, my Sony Reader is getting me to finally catch up on the classics, because, when you purchase the Sony Reader, they enable you to acquire all these free downloads of classics for free. And since the classics are in the public domain, when I run out of my free downloads through my Sony Reader purchase, I know I can cruise the web to find perfectly legal downloads of more classics free of cost.

And finally, the Sony Reader just feels better than the Amazon Kindle, I think.

Next to my sleek-bullet-like Philips GoGear pod player, on which I listened to your interview on Radio National, my Sony Reader is my favorite technological gadget in my possession.

Cheers,
Adam