In today’s crowded media marketplace, presidential candidates (and their media consultants) have an almost mind-boggling number of mediums in which to get a message across. From TV to talk radio to the printed word and all the permutations in between, there’s no doubt that a mastery of the message means, in large part, mastering the channels in which they are communicated across.

And while some channels of communication — such as cable TV, print news and talk radio — are fairly mature, history tells us early mastery of any new medium can give a candidate a discernible advantage in a given election cycle.

For example, it’s commonly accepted that Kennedy’s performance in his televised debate with Nixon helped him win in the 1960 presidential election, while Obama’s more evolved social media strategy gave the Democrat a competitive advantage that, in the end, helped deliver him the presidency.

But what about the book?  Judging by Obama’s success with The Audacity of Hope in 2008 and the rush by the current crop of 2012 candidates to push tomes out this primary election season, the book, while perhaps the oldest of all the mediums outside of speaking in the public square, is still one of the most effective ways for candidates to inject their messages into the stream of conversation.

As publisher Peter Cosnos puts it in this NPR piece, “If you can get somebody to buy it, a book has a great virtue. It’s just you and the reader. There is no interviewer; there is nobody to get in the way.”

However, while books can certainly be effective, the paper book is the product of an inarguably antiquated distribution model. To push a book out through traditional publishing means putting your message on the slow train to the voter; a book usually gets to the reader months after the final draft was written.

But just as the Internet (and in particular YouTube) has reshaped the way campaigns use video to get messages quickly out to the voter, is it possible e-books could create a similar disruption in how candidates reach voters through the written — and electronic — word?

If early e-book pioneers who were able to bypass the byzantine and slow-moving world of traditional book publishing are any indication, than yes.  John Locke, Bob Mayer and other authors have been able to go direct to consumer — with the help of Amazon — and reach a much wider audience.  So why couldn’t presidential candidates, or politicians in general, do the same?

In order to do so, candidates would need to change the way they think about the book today. Instead of viewing a book as a brute-force, one-size-fits-all message delivery vehicle it drops in one big package every election cycle, candidates need to instead think about how they could instead deliver a stream of targeted messaging throughout the long election cycle with electronic publishing.

Imagine for a moment if Obama or the prospective GOP candidate were able to publish e-books in advance of major debates, or to convey certain messages to address voter concerns.  One month a candidate could focus on national security, the next he or she could convey his or her personal story through a media-rich e-book with photos and video interviews.

Or, looking back, ponder how things might have been different last election cycle if, for example, McCain released an e-book with his plan for economic stability in the face of the financial crisis that assuaged concerns of those who thought he may not have had a plan, while also giving the faithful talking points to distribute by word of mouth.

Candidates also need to maximize what’s possible in this new medium.  By releasing enhanced e-books, they can create highly personalized messages rich with video and audio; they can become more humanized to the voter.

Lastly, with the traditional book model, candidates are often their own biggest enemy as they seek high book advances and try to climb the bestseller lists to put more money into their pockets.  This traditional approach to the traditional model only serves to create expensive books the vast majority of voters never buy.

But what if a candidate looked at the e-book as an interactive application complete with fundraising capabilities built in?  Would they possibly consider distributing all their e-books for free if they could, somehow, garner campaign contributions through an in-book (or in-app) payment model? E-books and enhanced e-book apps could become the main way in which candidates could come into many voters homes and, in a sense, fill their campaign coffers.

Book and e-book purists may be moaning at the thought of a flood of campaign e-books filled with talking points and calls for contributions. But that is, for better or for worse, what campaigns are about, and if these same messages are flooding every other medium during campaign seasons, it was only inevitable that the campaign would eventually come to the e-book.

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Amazon is trying hard to reinvent the library for the digital age, by offering e-book lending through the Kindle via a “Netflix for books” monthly subscription, as well as by offering Kindle e-books through a public-library lending program it launched earlier this year. But it can’t seem to get anyone to play ball with it on either score. None of the major publishers are taking part in the monthly lending program — which the Authors Guild is also protesting — and Penguin just recently pulled its e-books from the public-library lending service, saying it’s concerned about piracy. Going electronic should make books easier to lend rather than harder, but it doesn’t seem to be working out that way for Amazon.

The public library service was launched in September, fulfilling a promise Amazon made in the spring of this year to rollout an e-book program for 11,000 libraries across the United States. The feature allows Kindle owners to borrow books from those libraries with a single click, and even transfers their notes, highlights and other additions from the borrowed version to their own copy if they decide to buy the book. The Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, meanwhile, (the Netflix-style service) was announced earlier this month as part of Amazon’s Prime subscription service, and allows users to borrow one book a month from a pool of about 5,000 books — but none of the big six publishers has agreed to allow its books into the program.

Publishers would rather sell than lend

Earlier this week, book-industry observers noted that Penguin had pulled its e-books from the public-library program over what it said were concerns about piracy (although it didn’t provide any details about what those concerns were). On Tuesday, it restored access to its older titles through the libraries who have signed up for the Amazon service, but said it would not be providing any of its new e-books to the program. As PaidContent has noted, this leaves just two of the larger publishers participating in the service — HarperCollins  and Random House — and one of those (HarperCollins) puts significant restrictions on its books, including a requirement that libraries must buy a new copy if they lend an e-book more than 25 times.

While Amazon is getting the cold shoulder from publishers — which perhaps isn’t surprising, given the book retailer has been stepping up competition with its former partners by signing authors to its own in-house publishing imprints — it’s also apparently reaching out to a group it has helped develop: namely, self-published authors. According to one industry report, Amazon is offering self-published writers a share of a pool of 0,000 as well as the promotional value of having their books in the Kindle Lending Library, provided they agree to sign an exclusive deal with Amazon to represent their books.

Authors who have gone the traditional publishing route, meanwhile, are apparently incensed that Amazon is offering some of their e-books through its Kindle Lending Library without notifying and/or compensating them directly. In fact, the Authors Guild posted a statement earlier this month saying it believes that Amazon is actually in breach of contract with some of the publishers whose books it’s offering to lend — since the Guild says buying books in bulk (as Amazon has done in some cases, so it can offer them for free to subscribers) doesn’t allow the buyer to lend those books in the way Amazon intends.

The Authors Guild says Amazon is not playing fair

The Guild also argues that some of the publishers who have signed up for Amazon’s Lending Library might themselves be in breach of contract by offering their books to be lent — according to the authors’ organization, lending rights are supposed to be negotiated separately, and authors should be getting compensation for participating in those programs. While some writers seem happy for the exposure they would get via the program (which could theoretically lead to future sales) the Guild seems more concerned about getting more cash from Amazon and/or publishers up front.

The bottom line is that everyone seems to agree that electronic books are a boon — to readers, authors and publishers — but no one can figure out how to allow them to be loaned the way traditional physical books can. In some cases (as with Penguin’s refusal to join the public-library program), this seems to be in part a result of a fear of losing control over the content, and in part a fear of being disintermediated by Amazon. And in the case of the Authors’ Guild and the big six publishers, neither seems to deal with Amazon because they see it as a threat to the existing power structure in the industry.

Only Amazon seems to be interested in what users want, which is easy (and cheap) access to electronic books — and in the end, that could be the biggest weapon the retailer has when it comes to getting authors and publishers to play ball.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Marcus Hansson and Frederic Della Faille

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It’s no secret that most college students aren’t crazy about textbooks. But will moving required reading materials to an e-book format really change all that? A new market research study indicates that it just might.

73 percent of college students who responded to a new Kelton Research study sponsored by education software startup Kno said they’d be willing to do something they might not normally do — including giving up dating or sex — if they could never carry another textbook.

That sounds a bit sensational, but it makes a bit more sense when you think about the financial and physical burden that college textbooks represent: College students can expect to spend some 00 on textbooks during their undergraduate careers, and a quarter of students have to carry in excess of 20 pounds worth of books on a typical day, according to the study.

But would shifting to a digital format really make students fall in love with “books”? The research data implies that it certainly could help. 62 percent of respondents said they would study more often if they could access their textbooks from anywhere without having to carry them around, and 54 percent said it would make their studies more efficient. A full 71 percent of college students said they were keen to “go digital” by putting required reading materials on a mobile or desktop application or through the web.

Even so, many educational software companies have not taken off as quickly as many may have hoped. Kno itself was forced to pivot earlier this year after a number of launch-related hiccups. But now that college students are want to go digital more than ever, the tide may finally start to turn away from traditional textbooks for good.

Image courtesy of Flickr user pmccormi.  

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By any measure, the e-book market has been exploding: U.S. sales of e-books tripled in February, and Amazon said that it recently passed a milestone by selling 15 percent more e-books than printed paperbacks. While Amazon and Apple have been the big beneficiaries of that wave, a Toronto-based player has also been growing rapidly: Kobo, which has its own Kindle-style e-reader and online bookstore, says it now has close to 4 million registered customers, and growth continues to accelerate.

“It took us 10 months to get to a million users, and about 90 days to get to 2 million,” CEO Michael Serbinis said in a recent interview. “Getting to 3 million took about 60 days, and we are close to 4 million now.” Kobo — which is majority-owned by Canadian bookseller Indigo Books — was launched in late 2009, and is now the number three player in most of the major markets it participates in, Serbinis said. The company recently closed a new -million round of financing.

David and Goliath

Serbinis says that Kobo has no illusions about its place in the e-book market. “We recognize that there are some pretty huge players in this industry,” he said. “We are the David in the David-and-Goliath story.” But Serbinis said that Kobo believes there is still the opportunity for the company to carve out a substantial business.

“The existing books market is worth about billion,” the Kobo CEO said. “When we were creating Kobo, we thought that maybe 10 percent of that would go digital — now we think that it will probably be closer to 50 percent. And we thought the market would probably see the emergence of a few global brands,” as opposed to the old days of national or regional booksellers. “We figured there was room for a ‘pure play’ e-book company.” Although Kobo is controlled by Indigo Books, it is a separate entity.

Kobo started life as an experiment within Indigo called Shortcovers in 2008 — a venture aimed at producing one-off e-book titles, much like what Amazon is now doing with Kindle Singles. But “it was too early and it didn’t really work,” says Serbinis (although Kobo is working on relaunching the program). So the group developed and launched its own e-reader, which initially sold for 9, and it quickly took off. Serbinis — a Canadian — was brought into the venture because of his background in technology and startups: he was one of the founders of DocSpace, which was sold to Critical Path in 2000 for 0 million.

Although he didn’t know anything about the publishing industry, Serbinis says he had watched what had happened to the music business, and he knew the same thing was in store for books. “There was just no way a local provider would survive, just no way, because of the need for economies of scale,” he said. “The goal was to create something global.”

Amazon “not the partnering kind”

To that end, Kobo has been expanding its European footprint and partnerships with publishers. And while Amazon gets mentioned in some of those conversations, the Kobo CEO says it is rare. “They’re not the partnering kind,” he says. “People don’t want to partner with them” because they have their own retail business that effectively competes with the companies they are trying to partner with. “We are the natural open platform,” said the Kobo CEO.

And what about Google, which launched its open book program in December, pitching itself as the partner of choice for publishers and book retailers? “They have not made even a dent in the market,” says Serbinis. “We don’t really see them as a competitor either for the OEMs (original equipment manufacturers who are making their own tablets and e-readers) or for the retailers.” Kobo has signed deals with a dozen different tablet makers including Research in Motion, Asus, Acer and Samsung to have its software bundled on their devices.

Serbinis said that the next problem book retailers and e-book reader companies have to solve is discovery. To try and help with that problem, Kobo has launched what it calls Reading Life, a social platform that makes it easy for readers to share their books and create real-time, interactive book clubs. “It’s social, it’s local and it’s real-time,” the Kobo CEO says. “And since we launched it, we’ve seen people spent about 50 percent more time reading.”

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user TimeTrax23

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E-books have become very popular over the last couple of years. A great deal of the credit for that should go to the Amazon Kindle reader which, whilst it may not have been the first reader to be released, has been a real driving force in the growth and development of the market for both e-book readers and the associated e-books.

E-books are predicted to make up somewhere between 12 to 15% of total book sales in 2011. The market is still developing, but e-books are becoming an ever more important factor in the publishing world. The importance of e-books may even be a little higher than the percentage sales suggest. At the risk of stating the obvious, it seems likely that e-book reader owners will be likely to buy, and read, a lot of books. They are, in other words, the target demographic for the major publishing firms.

So it’s important that publishers get the price of e-books right. Or else they run the risk of upsetting some of their best customers. So what, exactly, would a fair price for an e-book be?

E-books don’t use paper, ink or bindings. Also, since they are not a physical product, there are no fees associated with delivery. So you would expect them to be quite a bit cheaper than normal printed books, wouldn’t you?

Or maybe not. According to publishers, the cost of paper, ink, bindings and transportation is only a small part of bringing a book to market. There are editing costs, proof reading costs, marketing costs etc. All things considered, the lack of a few reams of paper is, according to a number of major publishers, neither here nor there.

To a certain extent, you can see some logic in this argument. But it begs the question why, if these factors don’t influence book prices, is there such a difference between paperback and hardback prices? The argument doesn’t ring true.

Until quite recently, Amazon had a publicly declared policy of setting e-book prices at $9.99 or less. Until the big publishing houses took issue with it at least. One publisher’s books were briefly withdrawn from Amazon’s site at one point.

The agency pricing model has now been adopted by many publishers. What that means that the publishers set the selling price instead of the retailer. You may, whilst searching Amazon for something to read on your Kindle 3, come across the notice “this price was set by the publisher” – which is just Amazon’s way of making it clear that they did not set the price for that particular book.

On the other hand, many business analysts have suggested that Amazon’s $9.99 target price was unsustainable in the long term and that this may have been a loos leader from Amazon to allow users to get accustomed to e-books whilst simultaneously boosting Kindle sales.

Unlike a printed book, you can’t pass on your e-book to friends and family when you’re done with it (Kindle owners can now “lend” e-books out – for a fixed period only). You can’t sell it to a second hand book store or donate it to a charity shop or local library. E-books offer fewer end of life options than a standard print book in other words. Considering that you have fewer options with e-books, shouldn’t the price also be lower?

Today, the selling price of an e-book is whatever the publisher dictates. Not that means that you have to agree with them and pay that price of course.You could just wait for a couple of months and the price of the e-book may, as is often the case with video games, reduce significantly following the initial launch period.

You could even decide to spend your hard earned dollars on something entirely different – a DVD, a video game, tickets to a concert. You could watch TV or listen to the radio instead of reading a book. Books are, for the most part, a discretionary purchase and need to compete with a number of other products and services for both your leisure time and your money. As with any other discretionary purchase, an e-book should be pitched at the price that you are willing to pay for it. Not a penny more, not a penny less.

You have an intense desire to do vehicle pictures and you just don’t know where to start, right? If you’re anything like me you’re sick of the way your vehicle pictures look and you wish to learn to draw a real vehicle. Lack of know-how and a shortage of experience in the right techniques is what can cause people to really struggle and produce vehicle pictures which look average at best. However, that ends right now. Here are a few recommendations and tricks that will really help you in your quest to produce more reasonable-looking pictures of cars.

Most vehicle pictures that I have had people show me lack a few key things when trying to draw cars. My best suggestion on how to improve your vehicle pictures is just to spend more time practicing. Once you have honed straightforward vehicle pictures, try a more complex genre. The more you draw cars, the more you’ll be pleased with your vehicle pictures. They will have so much detail in them that in a few hours your current vehicle pictures will look like somebody else did them.

Something which you can practice is to make your vehicle pictures more well-known and impressive. From mastering point of view to sketching picture-perfect wheels every time, there are really excellent eBooks that break down vehicle pictures. There are in-depth tutorials about the trickiest facet of vehicle pictures. There are also websites that focus on vehicle pictures of all sorts, and get updated regularly with brand-new pictures and interesting factual information regarding vehicle pictures.

Look at other vehicle pictures to see how others have accomplished it and learn from them. The more of these you use in your own pictures the easier it is going to be to come up with your own amazing vehicle pictures. Also, the varied tones and tints made by these pencils are what make vehicle pictures sharp, metallic, and shiny. Remember, bad vehicle pictures are triggered by bad planning. Vehicle pictures can be ruined by the time you even touch the paper.

If you keep these recommendations and tricks in mind, and really practice and make truthful attempts to implement the techniques you find in the instructional articles and videos for vehicle pictures, you can be creating excellent vehicle pictures in no time, and be showcasing them to your friends, hanging them in your house, and framing them as gifts for unique people in your life, to celebrate unique occasions.