Kobo Pulse gets to the heart of “social in-book e-reading”

Kobo has released more details about Kobo Pulse, its new “social in-book e-reading experience”

Essentially a social media tool, Kobo Pulse will allow Kobo users to connect with other people reading the same book, comment on passages or the book as a whole, and view statistics (e.g., how many people are reading the title at a given time). According to a press release, readers can also post reviews and engage in online conversations. As more people join the conversation, the Kobo Pulse will turn “larger and brighter,” indicating the level of interaction.

Last Friday at F8, Facebook’s developers conference, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis spoke about how the company’s e-reading app, Kobo Reading Life, will be seamlessly integrated into the Facebook interface. Today’s press release provided more details on the new features, which include the ability to follow friends’ reading activity; customizable privacy settings; automation of Ticker e-reading updates; and profile “‘call-outs’ for recently read books, most read authors, books that have the most time read and recent awards.”

A release date for Kobo Pulse was not available. However, the Facebook integration features will “roll out gradually over the coming months.”

Kobo Reading Life and Facebook partner for “frictionless” social e-reading

Soon Facebook users won’t have to click a button to tell their friends what they’re reading. Yesterday at F8, Facebook’s annual developers conference, Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis announced that its e-reading app, Kobo Reading Life, will be seamlessly integrated into the Facebook interface as part of the website’s Open Graph product, along with services for music, film, games, and news media.

During the conference’s keynote speech, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to Open Graph as a means of “frictionless sharing,” meaning once a user signs up for an app, it will automatically track their media usage, which will then be shared, in real-time, with friends as part of Facebook’s new Ticker feature.

“You don’t have to ‘like’ a book, you can just read a book. You don’t have to ‘like’ a movie, you can just watch a movie…” says Zuckerberg, referring to the website’s ubiquitous Like button. Facebook’s new Timeline feature, available now as a beta program, also gives users the ability to build personal reports, such as how many pages read in a single week.

In a video interview at F8, Kobo Reading Life product manager Jason Gamblen and Serbinis offered more insight into the integration. Through the Reading Life app, Serbinis says, a Kobo user can track “all the books you’ve ever read, what you’re reading right now, times a day you read, stats about yourselves, friends that you share books with.” Gamblen explained that when a Facebook user adds Kobo to their Timeline, they can also account for the number of books read, the amount of time and the most popular days spent reading. Users are also eligible for awards by hitting milestones such as reading 50,000 pages or a certain number of classic books.

Reading Life’s “social e-reading” features allow people to connect and engage with other Kobo users via Facebook. “Our best recommendations come from friends, not the 400th Harry Potter review on some e-commerce site,” says Serbinis, who also briefly mentioned a new initiative, Kobo Pulse, which will be officially announced in the next couple of weeks.

Anansi puts Rob Ford on a streetcar

When House of Anansi Press was strategizing its marketing campaign for The Little Book of Rob Ford, a collection of “quips, quotes, and colourful comments” from Toronto’s mayor, it took a more subtle approach than NOW Magazine’s controversial nudie cover. They put Ford on the side of a streetcar.

Anansi’s director of publicity Laura Repas says the idea originated with one of Ford’s own quotes: “If you get stuck behind a streetcar you’re stuck! Enough with the streetcars!” Originally Anansi wanted to do a vinyl advertising wrap that would cover the entire car, but with a price tag of more than $20,000, the bold idea was cost-prohibitive. Repas says that poster ad on the side of the TTC streetcar was “an amazing deal,” especially considering the “happy accident” timing of Ford’s new transit plan announced on Thursday.

The book, conceived a day after Ford was elected and released on Feb. 16, does not have a huge marketing budget outside of the streetcar ad, which runs on the Queen Street line: “It goes by City Hall and it’s such a great, long route,” says Repas. Anansi also organized direct outreach to unconventional bookretailers like bike stores and “edgy, fun giftshops,” and set up a Tumblr page to promote the book. Anansi’s Twitter and Facebook followers are encouraged to send in their photos of the TTC ad for a chance to win a package of spring 2011 titles.

Daily book biz round-up: turning poetry into e-books, and more

• Breaking lines: the challenges of translating poetry collections into e-books
• British children’s fantasy and sci-fi author Dianne Wynne Jones has died
• Muggles can now rent Harry Potter films through Facebook, but still no word of e-book availability
• Call for 2011 Matrix magazine/Pop Montreal Litpop Awards, now with creative non-fiction category
• A designer’s interpretation of classic record albums transformed into book covers

Jacob Scheier’s first rule of awards controversies: don’t talk about awards controversies

Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet Jacob Scheier has weighed in on the Ali Smith/Giller Prize controversy on Now Magazine‘s website. As you may recall, Scheier himself was at the centre of an awards scandal after winning the GG in 2008, when it was discovered that jurors Di Brandt and Pier Giorgio Di Cicco had clear ties to both him and his collection, More to Keep Us Warm.

I [want] to draw a significant parallel between that controversy and this year’s Giller uproar, a parallel that holds true for many, if not every, literary award controversy.

What happens in these ‘controversies’ is the mainstream media jumps on conflict, regardless of the facts (or lack thereof), and stamps the words  ‘scandal’ in a big bold writing. They use these words, of course, to get us to read about it. If they could, with any legitimacy, add the word ‘sex’ to the headline, they would.

But I don’t blame media outlets for that. I blame the fiction writers and poets, the ones who fuel these dust-ups, by writing their speculations on their blogs and Facebook pages for the media to pick up.

[...]

I would urge all writers when they hear the siren sizzle of juicy gossip to stay off Facebook and blogs, and, if you have to, put that gossip where it belongs: into a good story.

Regina’s Book and Briar Patch to close

John Cress, owner of Regina’s largest independent bookstore, the 33-year-old Book and Briar Patch, announced this week that he’ll be closing shop on July 31. The store is part of a growing list of Canadian indies pulling the plug.

In an interview with the Regina Leader-Post, Cress blamed the store’s demise on big-box chains and the growing popularity of e-books – technology he didn’t  believe would be a threat until recently. Sounding rather defeated, he said:

Any bookseller that thinks there is a hope is dreaming. I watch a lot of trends and things are going to get really tough… If we signed another five-year lease, I’d say we’d have one year left.

[…]

There’s so much competition for the reader’s time with Facebook, YouTube, cellphones and computers. They can text, they can play games, watch movies — and that means a steady drop in readers.

Why social media does/doesn’t matter and why you should/shouldn’t just shut up about it already

• Journalist Dave Obee uses author Dave Bidini as an example of why artists shouldn’t quit Facebook
• Author Maureen Johnson’s hilarious rant on the tedium of social media marketing: I Am Not A Brand
• A marketing specialist discovers that all the time you spend hawking your work via social media is not paying off in sales at all
• and because it is Friday … a little something special

The luddites of dead tree media versus the thieving, arrogant tech whores

Over on TechCrunch, there’s a new-media old-media throw-down involving the website and both Fortune magazine and Simon & Schuster. In a nutshell, Fortune asked TechCrunch’s Michael Arlington to post an excerpt from Fortune editor David Kirkpatrick’s new book The Facebook Effect, published by Simon & Schuster. They sent Arlington the excerpt, and Arlington reprinted it in its entirety, including praise and pre-sale links, not understanding he was supposed to excerpt the excerpt. Fortune then got angry and is claiming copyright infringement.

From Arlington’s blog post on TechCrunch:

Just six minutes after e-mailing to tell me how great the post was, Fortune e-mailed again telling me that in fact they had only wanted me to post exerpts of the excerpts, not the whole excerpts…That was just before 6 am on May 6. I had been asleep for two hours. Fortune then called me three times between 6 am and 7:30 am.

After a tense conversation with Fortune‘s managing editor, Arlington received an email from Simon & Schuster threatening legal action unless the post was taken down. This is ironic, not just because it’s a book about Facebook, but the post in question reads like a glowing, slobbering press release and is published on a website with 9.2 million unique visitors per month. This appears, as Crissy Campbell pointed out on Twitter, to read like Simon & Shuster is threatening to sue TechCrunch for what is essentially free advertising.

Daily book biz round-up: one million iPads sold; Amazon Associates payola; and more

A quiet day in the land of book news:

• Amazon starts paying referral commissions on Kindle book sales
• One million iPads sold, says Apple
• Is Amazon’s “most-highlighted” tracking creepy and wrong?
• Comix artist Peter Kuper on the death of the book
• Pearson develops Facebook for lonely, unpopular children

Bookmarks: Going Rogue mistakes, aliens and werewolves, Xbox Bibles, and more

A few bookish links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s much-anticipated memoir hits shelves today. Palin tells Oprah in an unused clip from yesterday’s interview that “logistically speaking, practically speaking, it wasn’t a real difficult exercise to write the book” (via GalleyCat) 
• The Associated Press has compiled a list of the errors found in Going Rogue
• Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular Twilight empire series, also sat on Oprah’s couch in a rare public appearance last Friday. In an unused clip (via Entertainment Weekly), Meyer admits to being “a little burned out by vampires” and says that she “may go spend some time with … aliens.” 
• For those of you sick of everything vampire, Bookgasm offers a werewolf alternative in David Wellington’s Frostbite 
• The New Oxford American Dictionary‘s Word of the Year is “unfriend,” which is defined as: “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.”  Runners-up for the title included “hashtag,” “sexting,” “teabagger,” and “tramp stamp”
• The future is digital: the National Post reports that students at Toronto’s Blyth Academy will all receive a Sony Reader to replace those stuffy old textbooks of yore 
• How would you like your Bible?  Handwritten or on your Xbox?