From the first publication of the Gutenberg bible to the current shift to e-books, authors have always been trying to publish as universally as possible. Now with electronic publishing, Barnes & Noble VP, Retention and Loyalty Management, Marc Parrish said the idea is to try to get your media out to the greatest number of people as quickly as possible.

Speaking at Structure Big Data today, Parrish opened by posing the question: Would Shakespeare be involved in social media today to promote his writing? Parrish noted that he built the Globe Theatre using forward-thinking design, including the ability to create special effects, and said that Shakespeare would have no fear of modern technology. Many authors today are the same.

The initial print run of the Gutenberg Bible comprised 180 books, qualifying it as the first mass-produced book. The usual print run following was 200-1000 books. By 1600, 200 million physical books had been published.

There were fits and starts of digital content in the 1980s and 90s, but the technology just wasn’t there yet for e-books. Franklin’s electronic dictionary was the biggest success at 800,000 sold, when it found the magic price point. Other efforts failed because the digital version was the same price as the physical.

By the end of 2011, penetration of e-readers could reach as high as 35 percent. We’re on a diet of 34GB a day: one-quarter of War and Peace, with books starting to become part of this data mix. In 2008, a total of 3.6 zetabytes of information were consumed.

The book business is now changing more rapidly than any other form of physical media. At this cusp, the industry needs to understand the data being generated, as well as consumed, by customers. In the past year, 25 percent of those surveyed said they’d read both ebooks and print books. Five percent read more e-books than print books.

Parrish still gave no concrete numbers of Nook sales, only mentioning “millions” of Nook users.

He did note that the consumption pattern of books is also shifting. Readers tend toward a favorite author, category, personal recommendations, or flap text. Thirty percent of books are still discovered in the brick-and-mortar bookstore, but many then purchase in e-book format. The discovery model for publishers on e-readers is shifting; people buy a narrower set of books, because they have no idea what’s out there. They need a new way to discover books, but brick-and-mortar stores are still the best advertising.

For Barnes & Noble, the data they are dealing with is exploding. It’s a big, rapid change: They have 35 terabytes of data currently, but expect 20 terabytes in 2011.

The challenge now for book sellers is to merge the dot-com website, mobile devices, and brick-and-mortar stores for a seamless experience. E-books are at a turn in the road; but with analytics at hand, they can capture the customers’ imagination.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

• Mobile Operators’ Strategies for Connected Devices
• Three Ways Barnes & Noble Can Prosper In the E-book Era
• In Q3, E-books and White Spaces Ruled

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Publishers joining Apple’s iBooks store are turning their back on Amazon and its vision of the flat $9.99 ebook. Apple forced the music industry to charge 99 cents per song, so why are they helping publishers set their own prices?

To screw Amazon.

The difference between Amazon and Apple is this: Amazon is very much in the ebook business to sell ebooks. They want you attached to their platform. That’s why the Kindle Reader is on both PC and iPhone, as well as the eponymous e-ink device. Ebooks are huge for them. They sell six ebooks for every 10 physical books. That’s why they want to own the market. Apple, on the other hand, sells content in order to sell hardware. The iTunes Store, the App Store and the brand-new iBooks Store exist so you’ll buy iPods, iPhones and iPads, which is where Apple really makes money. iTunes revenue is just a bonus, though an ever fatter one with the explosion of the App Store.

You can see that the two companies place far different values on the content they sell. A more illustrative example: Amazon has been selling books at a loss—paying $15 for a hardcover bestseller, only to turn around and sell it for $10 on the Kindle. Apple would never, ever sell content at a loss. They make a decent bit of change, but apps and music are really just a way to fill up your iPhone.

Do you remember three years ago, when Apple was battling with the record labels for control over (legal) digital music? Apple still owns 69 percent of the market and sell 1 out of every 4 songs, period—in other words, they owned the market, which deeply frightened the labels, who were afraid of losing control. Universal, the biggest label, flipped out, and even tried to build the anti-iTunes. That failed, so the music business bit the bullet (or the poison pill) and went DRM-free, not with Apple at first, but with Amazon. It became a (sorta) credible competitor to the iTunes monster, long enough to give the labels just enough extra negotiating power. When iTunes music downloads went DRM free, many of them—particularly hit singles—suddenly cost $1.29.

The situation is remarkably similar, except this time, Amazon’s wearing the market-maker pants. Some estimate Amazon’s share of the ebook market to be 90 percent, but I’ve heard from people in the publishing industry say it’s closer to 80 percent. But that’s nitpicking. At this moment, Amazon owns ebooks. The book publishers’ fears are the same as the record labels with iTunes: They’re paranoid about losing control over pricing, and their own digital destiny. They’re worried that books are being undervalued, and that once people have the mindset that the price of an ebook is $9.99, and not a penny more, they’re doomed. They needed an insurgent player: Apple.

Apple has advantages that Amazon didn’t have with music: Scale and technology. iTunes has just moved 3 billion iPhone apps. Apple’s sold over 250 million iPods. By contrast, Amazon’s sold an estimate 2.5-3 million Kindles since it debuted 2 years ago. Analysts predict Apple will sell twice as many iPads this year alone.

In terms of technology, e-Ink looks old and busted and slow next to the iPad’s bright, color display. (Even the fact that the written word is much easier to stare at for long periods of time when presented on e-ink won’t save the current Kindle.) An iPad can do more than books: Beautiful digital magazines, interactive textbooks, a dynamic newspaper. Oh, and it’s a computer that does video, apps, music. Amazon’s scrambling now to make a multitouch full color Kindle after betting on E-Ink, but that kind of development takes at least a year. Even if they churn out a full color reader that is somehow better than the iPad, it likely won’t matter: It would just be a very nice reader to iPad’s everything else, and it would be 9 months too late.

The print industry is swirling down the toilet, and apocalypse-era publishers minds’ dance with hallucinations of digital salvation via iTunes for print. It’s the iPod for books. What Amazon was supposed to deliver, but now maybe never will.

With that contrast in mind, all the publishers needed was a little push. All Apple had to whisper was, “Hey, we’ll let you set your own prices for books. You should control your own destiny. We’d love to have you. You know, $12.99 is a really good price for a beautiful color version of your amazing books. BTW, why are you letting Amazon undersell you?” It doesn’t matter that publishers make less absolute money through the agency model used by Apple—Amazon might’ve given them $15 for a book it sold for $10, but under the agency model, the seller takes 30 percent off the top. They wanted to feel in control, and that their books are worth something more. Steve gave them that, even as he’s probably got his fingers crossed behind his back.

Amazon knew what it was doing by insisting on $9.99 as the price for ebooks. A flat, easy-to-understand rate—one that’s notably cheaper than its analog counterparters—is a paradigm that works, especially when you’re trying to essentially build a whole new market. It plays into the part of our brains that like easy things. That likes the number 9. (No really, 9 is a psychologically satisfying number.) Amazon believed in it so strongly, as I said before, they sold books at a loss to keep it up. (I’m not suggesting, BTW, that Amazon would be any more benevolent to the industry than Apple. They wouldn’t.)

Price would’ve been Amazon’s major advantage over Apple too—being able to undercut Apple by setting whatever price they needed to compete would’ve been its ace in the hole against the iPad’s flashy color screen, and everything else it can do. And now that’s poofed. Apple will be able to sell you ebooks for the exact same price as Amazon. By turning the publishers against Amazon, they’ve effectively dicked the Kindle over. Why? To fill out another bullet point as to why you should buy an iPad. The real question is how long it’ll take publishers to realize that’s all they are to Apple: one little bullet point.

"Hylozoic," the physical book: saying good-bye.

(Credit: Scott Stein/CNET)

It’s been widely debated since Amazon’s Kindle began redefining the e-book space: when will e-books become more compelling than the physical books they were meant to replace?

For me, it happened. Today, at 2 p.m. Eastern, I went to Borders and returned a book I bought just a week ago. The reason was this: I found the book had popped up on the Amazon Kindle store for less. So I pulled the trigger.

The funny thing is I don’t even have a Kindle. I have an iPhone 3G running the Kindle app. Yet, for me, in a crowded New York ecosystem where I barely have time or room to pull a book out of my backpack while crammed onto a subway, quick-fix iPhone reading does the trick better than anything else.

The book in question was “Hylozoic” by Rudy Rucker, an excellent and weird science fiction writer whose works I’ve become addicted to. I had tracked the release of his latest, a sequel to his equally odd “Postsingular,” for months. I should have ordered on Amazon in the first place, where it was far cheaper than Borders’ full retail, but I wanted instant satisfaction and got trigger-happy. Hylozoic wasn’t available on the Kindle store when the book first hit the streets.

I submitted a “this should be a Kindle book” request to Amazon and went back to my life, when yesterday I discovered that “Hylozoic” had in fact been added…for $14.95.

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What if I have other questions, including technical questions?
What is an eBook? An eBook, or electronic book, is a digital book that you can read on a computer screen. We support Adobe eBook readers for the PC and Mac (About the Adobe Acrobat Reader). Some eBooks can also be read on an electronic device such as a Palm or other portable devices.Answer. Our site is available in English or French. If you need to switch to the other language click on the country flag in the top center area next to “Welcome”. But we also carry eBooks in many languages, not just English or French.. You can view those titles by choosing a language in the drop down box on the left. Please note that we only provide support in English or French.Answer. Our site is available in English or French. If you need to switch to the other language click on the country flag in the top center area next to “Welcome”. But we also carry eBooks in many languages, not just English or French..

How is the Acrobat eBook Reader able to display color graphics and fancy typefaces?
Because the Acrobat eBook Reader displays eBooks in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), you can view the same beautiful typeface, images, and page layout you would see with a paper book.We carry eBook formats that are compatible with the Macintosh and Windows operating systems, and other portable devices. Also see the Adobe site. The Adobe Reader works on any PC running Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows 2000, WindowsXP, or Windows NT 4.

What’s an ebook?
Ebooks have some advantages and some disadvantages, compared to physical books.

What types of computers does the Adobe Reader work on?
We carry eBook formats that are compatible with the Macintosh and Windows operating systems, and other portable devices. Also see the Adobe site. The Adobe Reader works on any PC running Windows Me, Windows 98, Windows 2000, WindowsXP, or Windows NT 4.0. The Adobe Reader requires Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.x or 5.x (standard with Windows Me and Windows 98). It runs best on computers with at least 32MB of memory and at least an SVGA color display (800×600).Ebooks have some advantages and some disadvantages, compared to physical books. They can contain movies, sounds and other media, as well as live links to the Web and to internal book navigation aids – very much like web pages and also very good for teaching and learning. On the other hand, display screens have lower resolution than books, making them harder to read from. And a computer is hardly as convenient as a physical book. Not for our ebook.Answer. Our site is available in English or French. If you need to switch to the other language click on the country flag in the top center area next to “Welcome”. But we also carry eBooks in many languages, not just English or French..

Question. How many languages do you support?
Answer. Our site is available in English or French. If you need to switch to the other language click on the country flag in the top center area next to “Welcome”. But we also carry eBooks in many languages, not just English or French.. You can view those titles by choosing a language in the drop down box on the left. Please note that we only provide support in English or French.ebook is a book that is downloadable onto your computer. You can then access and read the book (or print it) whenever you would like.

What is an ebook?
ebook is a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. When you view it on Adobe Reader it has the look and feel of a real book.

Click here for more information… portable ebook reader