News
for the PDA publisher
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| May5, 2005 Branding vs. blogging. In an age of transparency and new media publishing, some pundits are predicting the demise of advertising and public relations. Fad or transformative shift? Simon Fraser University's Summer Publishing Workshops kicks off July 3 with Publishing across New Media Platforms and The Future of Publishing Conference to explore new ways to reach audiences using cell phones, instant messaging, interactive exhibits, and other wireless devices. "Forward-thinking executives are recognizing that new technologies can put unprecedented amounts of information into their stakeholders' hands - be they customers, employees, or citizens," says faculty members Robert Ouimet and Emma Payne, At Large Media. "We'll hear from business and community leaders who are using new media tools to build community, sell product, and incite action." Hands-on projects, lectures, and roundtable discussions in SFU's one- and two-week immersion workshops will challenge participants to dive into the practical details of editing, publishing, and design for both traditional and new media. Some 100 industry faculty are expected from across Canada and the US.
This year's faculty includes top professionals from every sector of
the publishing industry including award-winning publishers, authors,
editors, sales directors, new media gurus, designers, and marketers. [April 19, 2004, Vancouver, British Columbia] We have been working to get the format of our e-books to work with PDAs as well as laptops and desktop computers. We are getting there. If you use a PDA, you might want to load Adobe Acrobat reader and take a look at our list of e-book titles for 2005. In recent months we have reduced the size of these files by 90 per cent and tweaked the look to fit a 240x320 pixel screen (PDA format). Our approach is somewhat different from othere-book publishers. We are publishing shareware titles for desktop, laptop and hand-held computers. The PDA is a growing medium. Using their PDA, friends are reading books on the skytrain, waiting for planes, and in unusual venues. The current version of Tess, Re: Archer works quite well on the PDA. There is still much to learn, as always with a new genre. The new generation of PDAs is faster, more sophisticated and able to provide a glimpse at what the future will be like. Tess, Re: Archer is a partially illustrated novel written and formatted for reading on a digital device, not paper. Currently we have two novels and a number of short pieces for download (as well as a couple of screenplays). We are looking for additional writers and looking at learning what we need to know to refine our design techniques for PDA publishing. Whatever Adobe is doing with Acrobat is the right thing. We are using Acrobat professional to do our publishing and it works like a charm. The file sizes are kept small, the graphics work on our PDAs. With a recent print job,a 32 page glossy magazine with 8 pages of color, we exported the document to the printer with Adobe and it was a mere 19 megs of data. The cover alone was a 300 dpi 4-color full-page bleed that took up 120 megs of space on our drive before doing the export. There are a number of pieces of software out there doing PFDs, but nothing comes close to Adobe Acrobat at the moment. Free e-books [April 18, 2004, Vancouver, British Columbia] Tess, Re: Archer is a semi-illustrated novel that roams the planet telling the story of Tess, a young woman who washes onto a Brtish Columbia island after a maritime disaster. Pursued by a mystery man, she brings baggage from conflicts halfway around the world. To help a complete stranger who tells a very tall tale, an island fisherman risks everything. In the process, he runs the risk of saving himself. Tess's story is wrapped in a much larger enchilada. (The illustrated nature of this e-book makes the file large.) Spiders on an
Angel's Face
is a novel by Bob Wakulich. Tom, a peripatetic journalist, is troubled
by a recurring dream which triggers a fear that he can't remember what
his mother looks like. Embarrassed and hesitant to see her until he
can, he returns to his home town in Southern Ontario and tries to rekindle
her image by visiting with Tales of Port Cloudy by John Shinnick is a collection of coastal yarns published as an e-book. Have fun. Spending Up [April 15, 2004, Vancouver, British Columbia] The public is spending more on-line. Top selling commodiities include music, games, gaming, pornography, dating services, books, business to business services, and investment information. Sales on-line grew 14 per cent last year to US$1.8-billion (stats from the On-line Publishers Association and comScore Networks). Entertainment spending topped the list, with better than 90 per cent growth last year ago. It's not surprising: Gaming accounts for the largest growth sector in the entertainment field. On-line gaming sales and music combine for a whopping $413 million in annual sales last yer. Everybody sees its potential: Apple, Microsoft and Sony are just three of the large players staking a claim on this lucrative niche. On-line poker and porn sites are probably chasing these numbers, but nobody releases stats for either industry. Porn and online gambling operate in the shadows of the internet, through offshore servers. The problem is how they handle money: their non-mainstream banking methods make some consumers nervous about the transaction. If they were more legit, they would be larger and growing faster. Consumers have been warned about putting poker site transactions on their credit cards because their personal banker will note this and the transaction, even for a few dollars, could affect their credit rating and have much larger costs. On-line legit business doesn't have this problem. Gaming is further evidence that the Web is becoming less an information medium and more an entertainment medium. High-speed Internet connections allow easier access to files that a consumer might want to buy. The higher speeds also allow real-time raises, bluffs and showdowns for real money. Gaming sites are booming and it is just a matter of time before bandwidth catches up to the PDA and poker games. One of the sites, Pokerroom.com, is developing a PDA version of its software. Also, the first generation to
grow up with the Internet are
now becoming consumers. |
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Surf's Up [April 12, 2004, Vancouver, British Columbia] Despite the growth in higher bandwidth, more than half of the Web users in the U.S. are still narrowbanders ( The Leichtman Group). Th increases in WiFi connection will probably keep these numbes close together for the forseeable future. More surfers will connect with their PDA or laptop via WiFi, on sites optimized wth HDML or WAP. |
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Design Considerations [April 10, 2004, Vancouver, British Columbia] A mass market is growing for the PDA and the mobile internet, but designers have not twigged to the ways to simplify their Web pages for the PDA. Media Wave hears the same criticisms of the PDA that we heard of the Web 12 years ago and the Internet itself 25 years ago. Media Wave has heard advertisers dismiss the web and publicaitons that address the Web, so today's criticsm of the PDA strikes a familiar cord. The clue is to get your web pages to work on handsets wth a 320 xy 240 pixel screen. Browsing the Web with a mobile phone poses a lot more problems than with a PDA |
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