“Finding community as an ebook developer is a weird challenge,” writes Laura Brady, as “some of us work in complete isolation in our remote offices.”
So where do these people go to commiserate with like-minded folks? To get help and to ask questions? To find that community?
“Believe it or not, Twitter.”
The social media platform has a thriving community of ebook developers who are, according to Brady, “famously generous, smart, slightly drunken and most definitely my favorite colleague.”
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Scribd Selects New VP of Strategy (DBW)
The subscription content platform Scribd announced Tuesday that it has hired its first Vice President of Strategy and New Content Verticals, Theresa Horner. Horner comes most recently from Barnes & Noble, where she served as Vice President of Digital Content and worked on the Nook ereader. Scribd called Horner a “publishing all-star” who’s “been at the forefront of the massive changes that new technologies have brought to the publishing industry.”
Japanese Readers Spend Most on Ebooks (Business Insider)
According to new research, Japanese readers will spend the most on ebooks in 2015 — an average of $86.50. UK readers will follow closely, with US readers somewhere in the middle, spending an average of $46 this year. Chinese readers will spend an average of only $4.30 this year on ebooks.
Word of Mouth Recommendations Go Digital (Publishing Perspectives)
In an editorial for Publishing Perspectives, a co-owner of Written Word Media says his company is trying to replicate word-of-mouth book recommendations in the digital sphere: “rather than build a one-size-fits-all site for readers, we design separate web communities that cater to the needs of each reader group.” The company also uses email as a means to deliver recommendations, as, despite some opinions of the medium, “people are very happy to get an email as long as it delivers value to them.”
Russian Publishing Industry in Crisis (Publishing Perspectives)
According to the president of the Russian Book Union, more than half of Russians didn’t read a single book last year, and the number of bookshops in the country has dropped from 8,500 in the 1990s to just 1,500 today. With the Russian publishing industry in crisis, some had hoped ebooks would be a boon, but wide-scale piracy has meant low earnings from digital sales, accounting for a market share of less than 2 percent.
Amazon Selling Kindle in Cosmetics Chain (The Bookseller)
Amazon has reached an agreement with the British cosmetics chain Boots to sell the Kindle Paperwhite and Fire tablet in stores. According to The Bookseller, customers are being offered a £5 Amazon gift card to buy the devices from Boots, “as part of an Amazon push to encourage customers to take up digital reading over the summer holiday period, accompanied by the Twitter hashtag #KindleSummer.”