Have you discovered The Alexandria Project?

Anyone who reads eBooks is aware that a number of content vendors are using proprietary platforms in an effort to lock you into their content libraries: most obviously, Amazon, with its Kindle line, Barnes & Noble with its Nook devices, and Apple with its iPads and iPhones. But there are many non-content vendors that would love to sell you an eReader as well, such as Kobo, and Pocketbook, not to mention the smartphone vendors that would be happy to have you use their devices as eReaders, too.

But can you? Well, as you’re probably also aware, that depends. For example, in addition to selling content that will play only on their devices, Amazon and Apple also produce versions of their content that can be viewed on the readers of their competitors as well.

All of this not only makes it confusing and limiting for eBook buyers, but also for content publishers large (like Random House) and small (like technical title boutique publisher O’Reilly), that have seen their traditional distribution models not only upended by the eBook revolution, but complicated by the proprietary antics of the Amazons of the world.

Meanwhile, eBooks themselves frequently leave out features that their print versions include (e.g., less often used and/or more complicated formatted features, such as tables), and what they do contain often displays poorly on some readers, notwithstanding the effort that authors and intermediaries put into formatting their files for the greatest variety of platforms and distribution channels possible.

If you were an author, it would (eventually) get to be far easier to create an eBook as well, because word processessers  would allow you to save files in the most current version of the EPUB standard, and every vendor’s device would presumably display your book properly if you’d done a proper job of creating your files. And your eBook could provide a richer reading experience as well.

So why isn’t that the way it is now?

The easy answer is because the proprietary vendors don’t want it that way. But things could change, particularly as Android devices become better eReaders, and if alternative stores (like Google’s iPlay store, which only sells eBooks in EPUB 2.0 and PDF form) become more competitive.

But there’s another missing piece, which is whether or not the marketplace will commit to using the newest version of the EPUB standard – version 3.0, which can allow eBooks to more completely and easily match the features of print books. And that’s not a small task, since it requires some heavy lifting at the publisher’s end, all of which will be wasted if the eReader vendors don’t add support for EPUB 3.0 as well. So, like the Semantic Web, there’s a chicken and egg, tipping point issue here. And the question for the last year has been which way will it go – with the world commit to EPUB 3.0, or, like the Semantic Web, will key players be unwilling to commit?

Which brings us, at last, to the topic promised by the title to this entry: O’Reilly has not only taken the plunge, but also posted a very informative blog entry outlining how they came to the conclusion that it was time to make the leap, what the factors were that influenced their timing, and the implementational decisions they made in the process of building in EPUB 3.0 support – such as whether to make compliant files backwardly compatible for use on devices that support only EPUB 2.0.

The answer to that last question may sound obvious, given the chicken and egg concern. But it’s not quite as obvious as it seems, at least for the content vendor that would have to do the extra work (which does, however, allow them to avoid selling two different versions of their inventory).

You can find that entry here. It’s written by Sanders Kleinfeld, and subtitled “Upgrading to EPUB 3 is not a trivial undertaking.”  On the question of “why now?” Kleinfeld reports:

…To successfully produce and deliver EPUB 3 as part of a ebook program, there are two key prerequisites: having the necessary workflows and tools in place to create EPUB files compliant with the EPUB 3.0 specification, and having ereader platforms available that formally support the 3.0 format. As of early 2012, neither of these preconditions was met, but in the past year, there has been much progress on both fronts. Here are some key milestones:

•    December 2011: Azardi launches one of the first desktop readers for EPUB 3
•    February 2012: Launch of Readium project, an open source EPUB 3 reader for Google Chrome browser
•    October 2012: Apple releases iBooks 3.0, with formal support for EPUB 3 and accompanying documentation
•    December 2012: After beta updates throughout the year, Epubcheck 3.0 (validator for EPUB 3 content) is officially released

Obviously, the prior decision by Apple to support EPUB 3.0 was huge. But as you can see, Kleinfeld notes some other interesting items as well, including the release of a content validator. In other words, there are more chicken and egg issues to deal with in creating a new ecosystem than simply content and platform vendor adoption. O’Reilly, incidentally, provided assistance in closing this gap by being a sponsor of The DocBook Project.

But ultimately, the question for O’Reilly was whether to be a leader or a follower, and also to face the fact that without leaders, there may never be anything to adopt as a follower.  Or, as Kleinfeld phrased it:

How bad is it? Well, it’s pretty bad.  You can find a partially complete table of platforms, and the myriad file formats they support (or partially support), here.    It’s not a pretty picture, is it?

Wouldn’t it be far better for the consumer if everyone could read everyone’s content on everyone’s reader – just like an MP3 file (and, come to think of it, don’t you remember a time, long ago, when music players were proprietary, too?)  Couldn’t someone could up with, I don’t know, like, a standard to do that?

The answer, of course, is not only yes, but they already have. Let’s go back to that table again, and you’ll notice that a few green vertical lines (indicating full support for the file format in question) do make it most of the way from top to bottom: txt, PDF – and EPUB. The first two are familiar from long-standing general use, but what’s that last one all about?

Unlike plain text and PDF, the EPUB format was created expressly, and only, to optimize the creation and interoperable use of eBooks.  It was developed by a consortium called the International Digital Publishing Forum, or IDPF.org.  Theoretically, if every platform vendor faithfully supported the current version of EPUB without adding proprietary extensions, then you could buy eBooks anywhere and use them on anything – a Kindle, an Android Phone, a Nook, a laptop, or wherever.

Additionally, we believed it was important to further throw our support behind the latest version of the EPUB standard to encourage vendors to upgrade their ereading platforms to support HTML5 and EPUB 3. Since 2011, there has been a chicken-or-egg attitude that’s pervaded much of the hand-wringing around EPUB 3, where publishers felt justified in holding back from producing EPUB 3 content until there was widespread ereader support, and ereader vendors felt no sense of urgency in adding EPUB 3 support to their products because there was no significant influx of EPUB 3 content from publishers. We’d like to think that by releasing our content in EPUB 3, we’re doing our part to help break this impasse and push the industry forward.

So here’s a high five to O’Reilly for making the move to EPUB 3.0, and a hope that others in the publishing world will be emboldened by their example to take the plunge as well.

eBooks Sales Surpass Print Sales for Adult Fiction

From time to time I Google my way around a few search terms looking for useful information on one or another self-publishing topic. One of those topics, of course, is promotion.

Some time back, I ran across Smith Publicity, a book promotional firm that has been around for awhile. Smith puts out a monthly newsletter they call “Power Book Publicity Tips” which I’ve now been receiving for about six months. It’s short, relevant, and I usually find what I read there to be useful.

Here’s an excerpt from the February update, which contains a data nugget that I expected would arrive some day, but not as soon as it has (after all, it was only a few years ago that we’d never heard of something called a ‘Kindle,’ the device that launched the armada):

•  E-book sales have surpassed hardcover and paperback for adult fiction [emphasis added]
  

•  E-book authors get up to 70% royalty as opposed to traditional 20%

• While people are buying online, they are not “searching” for new books online—simply going there to order them.

• 79% of ebook sales are fiction

• Only 3 of top 20 ebooks for 2012 were priced over $10

The logical questions to ask are whether there will be other categories of books that will follow, and if so, which ones?

I think that’s partially a question of how eReaders evolve (and indeed, whether the genre survives at all, now that tablets are becoming ubiquitous). Fiction is an easy and appropriate read on all kinds of devices, but how about technical books? Tables are still awkward to format without professional help, and the proprietary outlets have ensured that the EPUB standard hasn’t been able to achieve the goal of easy format once, display anywhere, on any device.

Logically, you would think that textbooks would be the next category to fall to the eBook tide – after all, who really wants to carry a sack of heavy textbooks from first grade through grad school? But first the books have to find their way to mobile devices, and those devices would need to support easy highlighting, annotation and the like. There are some good devices out there that permit just this, but they’ve been swept to the side by the tablet revolution, and the fact that the Amazon and Barnes & Noble readers are proprietary – and how many devices do you really want to own?

That said, there’s a huge amount of non-fiction that people read the same way that they read fiction. I expect that if these books were broken out (e.g., NYTimes best sellers) from other non-fiction titles, like text and technical books, that they have already crossed the line as well.

If you’d like to sign up to receive Power Tips, you can find a button to do just that on the left side of the Smith Publicity Home Page.

Is Paying for Book Promotion Worth it?

One of the more difficult issues the author of a self-published book faces is whether to pay others to help promote their book. Broadly speaking, such services fall into three categories: creating sales materials (postcards, posters, press releases), reaching out to influencers (reviewers, bloggers and interviewers) and direct selling (via mailings, social media and advertising). Most print on demand (POD) publishers offer at least the first, some provide the second, and a few may provide some of the third.

Assistance with sales collateral such as postcards, posters and the like makes sense, if you actually intend to use them. But what of the other services, which tend to be very expensive? Are they worth it or not?

As a rule I think that spending money to promote a book is (as the Brits say) a mug’s game. There are legitimate businesses out there, I’m sure, that will deliver, but the question is “deliver what?” Even if you spend thousands of dollars on hiring a promotional agency to see if they can secure interviews and the like, the impact on actual sales of books appears to be, at best, iffy.

I engaged with one of the well-regarded PR companies some months back which charges thousands of dollars a month to mount a promotional campaign, and was totally mystified with the degree of effort I had to put into trying to determine what, if anything, I could expect to result from making an investment of that magnitude. I began by asking what the typical results of a sales campaign might be, and the answer was, “Well, we really can’t predict.  There are so many variables, and there’s really no way to guarantee how any particular book will do.”

Fair enough.  How could you expect the reality to be any different? What I didn’t expect was how hard it would be to get anything more definite than that from the representative I tied up with. After all, as a service provider, I’m well aware that while you should never promise what you can’t deliver, you shouldn’t expect anyone to hire you if you can’t provide real examples of situations where you had delivered what the customer wants to buy.

So I tried to circle around the question and come at it from a different angle, and asked, “Can you give me some examples, though, of the results of a campaign or two that you’ve conducted recently?” Same answer.

The most I was ever able to achieve (after asking the same question at least four different ways) was to get a sample schedule of what the PR firm had been able to arrange for a couple of their authors. And to be fair, what they had achieved was impressive – they contacted thousands of media targets, and generated inquiries, requests for review copies, and reviews.

But when I checked out the Amazon ranks for the books in question, they were each below 1,000,000, meaning that they hadn’t sold a copy in weeks. So while the success of the campaign may have been real, in the sense that the results targeted by the campaign were achieved, those targets were not, apparently,  relevant to achieving the real goal – not getting reviews, but getting a sustaining audience of readers.

I’m not too surprised at this juncture that this would be true. After all, with everything else in the publishing world turned upside down, why should the traditional methodology for book promotion be any different? Like so many other aspects, it seems that we are still in the “destruction” par of the creative destruction process, and the “creative” part has yet to kick in, or at least settle down into new, reliable modes of book promotion that can be taken on by a third-party for an author, let alone by the authors themselves.

So what’s an aspiring author to do?

Most of what you read today says that promotion is all up to you and your efforts, and it appears that this is indeed the case. The consensus is that it takes effort, every day, and indeed doing several things every day, to keep your sales alive.

Problem is, not everyone has that kind of time. Even if they did, it’s questionable whether that level of effort is adequately rewarded by moving a few books a week in hopes of eventually establishing, more by luck than anything else, a real beach head in the marketplace (which also, by the way, involves writing a new book once or twice a year).

The result is that I haven’t spent almost anything to date on third-party assistance marketing my book. But I have been on the lookout for any services that seem to stand a credible shot of producing sales with the intention of giving a few a try.

That hasn’t included Google ads, as not only has this seemed like a very long (and expensive) shot to me, but I haven’t heard of fiction writers having much success with this approach. Earlier this week, though I decided to drop a little cash on an outfit called BookDaily.com. I had already listed my book with them (for free) here, and set up an author page here.

BookDaily is a site I stumbled on some time back, with a an interesting model: every day, they send out alerts to those that sign up to receive a sample chapter from one emerging author, and one established one writer, every day. The established author provides the teaser even if the title of the emerging author’s book doesn’t, but hopefully you’ll spend a moment on the emerging author’s work either way to see if it piques your interest. It’s a clever idea, especially where the emerging author’s book is priced at the low, impulse-purchase end of the pricing scale.

I don’t read the alerts every day, but when I do, I find that it’s an excellent way to compare writing styles, and focus on what works and what doesn’t. Often the samples are pretty intriguing. I also get exposed to genres I don’t normally read, which let’s me appreciate writing styles that I wouldn’t otherwise take the time to find. Back at the BookDaily site, you can sample lots of other books before you buy them. Authors can log their books in for free, including uploading up to 10,000 words of text by way of a sample of their work. The site has a clean, friendly, (although slightly out of date) style, and you don’t feel overwhelmed. It’s easy for readers to browse, and for authors to update.

Predictably, BookDaily.com sells (unobtrusive) advertising, and for $49 a month, they will include your sample in one of their emails to at least 25,000 subscribers. They’ll also highlight it to a degree in other ways on their site.

It’s not often that I see a promotional model that seems to make sense, but I found the BookDaily approach appealing. The question was, would it work?

To my surprise, although I had signed up for the service only this last Sunday, I received an email the next day stating that my book would be featured in an email that would go out around 5:00 on Wednesday to an appropriate email list.  Sure enough, on Wednesday just after 5:00, my book showed up as the second of two books.

The book I was paired with in the email was The Columbus Affair: A Novel (with bonus short story The Admiral’s Mark), by Steve Berry, which at the moment has an Amazon rank, in Kindle, of 1,831 and 229 customer reviews with an average of 3.7.  Berry is a well-reviewed author of top-selling genre books – 11 in all, with over 15 million copies in print in 51 countries – so BookDaily was certainly delivering on its promises with my match. According to BookDaily, the email went to a total of 20,400 recipients.

So what was the result?

At this point, I need to digress to touch on a real problem for gauging the effect of any promotional effect. As the consultants are fond of saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” In other words, if you can’t tell which of your marketing efforts work and which don’t, there’s no way to know where and how to direct your efforts. And sadly, there is no way to tell how many books you are selling through your various channels until weeks, or even months (depending on your publisher) later. When you do receive the data, it won’t be broken down by days, but will most likely be aggregated by the month.

Which leaves you with only one ready measure: your book’s Amazon rank, which is supposedly update hourly. In fact, this doesn’t always seem to be the case, but it does update often enough that it can provide, if not exact data, at least a trend line, assuming that enough additional books are selling as a result of your latest efforts to move the needle above the already existing trend line.

In the case of the BookDaily email, I could attribute at best a couple of eBook (and no print) sales to the ad. This is particularly relevant, because the BookDaily sales page includes a direct link to your book’s Amazon page.

So what’s the takeaway here?

I can’t fault BookDaily. They certainly delivered on their promise. What this experiment shows is just how difficult it is to find really cost-effective ways to generate interest in a book. In the long-term, the service they provide for free (listing my book and an excerpt) promises to be more useful in the long-term than the paid service was in the short-term. That’s fine, but the value I can expect from the free service is small. More important, though, is its incremental value – another of the many bits of bread an author needs to spread on the available waters in hopes that the totality of the effort will have the desired result.

I’ll continue to keep my eye out for promising, affordable promotional services, and will report on those that I try.

Third Anniversary

I was surprised this morning when I opened my other blog to see something unexpected: the first chapter of my book. It didn’t take too long, though, to figure out what caused it to magically materialize.

Three years ago today I posted the first draft of the first chapter, adding a new chapter every Monday until I had finished the original version of the book ( I think I posted one chapter late, and did miss one week, but over all, I didn’t do too badly).

It took more than a year for me to rewrite the book, go through the inevitably vain exercise of trying to find an agent, and then complete my workout on the treadmill of picking cover art, writing the back cover blurb, picking a publisher, and all the rest of the steps needed to turn a draft into a “real” book. Simultaneously, I started posting the sequel in weekly installments (on Mondays), and my Adventures in Self-Publishing series (on Fridays), and also redated the serial version of The Alexandria Project (except for the first three chapters) so that they would no longer be visible. All had then been prepared, I thought, to tee off a successful launch. Of course, it turned out to be a lot harder to launch a successful sales campaign than just that.

Anyway, the easiest way to hide the posts without deleting them using the blogging software I was using was to redate them. Apparently I had chosen 2013 as an appropriate time in the future to which they should be banished, and hence the reemergence of the first one today.

Not such a bad occurrence from a marketing perspective, so I plan to let the first several chapters continue to post on a weekly basis, and we’ll see if it has the desired effect. Any one who reads my other blog will have seen more than enough ads for the book already, and may have read the serial three years ago as well, but perhaps it will motivate some of them to want to read the final product. It also reminded me to post a few sample chapters at this blog, which I’ve now done.

New Reviews (thanks!)

One of the more gnarly issues I’ve tried to deal with in trying to promote my book is how hard to try to get reviews, and if so, of what types, and from whom. I decided in the beginning that trying to get highly ranked Amazon reviewers to read my book was likely to be a lot of work with little result (I wonder how much luck others have had with this?) I also haven’t spent any time trying to get print reviewers to read it, for the same reason. Instead, I looked for professionals in the subject area of my book (cybersecurity) that were frequent, well-followed bloggers, and offered to send them a free review copy.

That took a lot of research effort, in part because cybersecurity experts for obvious reasons aren’t as likely to post their email addresses at a blog as others. But eventually I came up with about 35 addresses, and a fair number of the emails I sent produced an affirmative response, and eventually a number of reviews (you can see them in the first category on this page).

It’s hard to say how many copies of my book this moved, because my publisher (Dogear) only releases reports on a very delayed, monthly basis, so the best I can do is to watch my Amazon page rank after a review is posted. The impact seemed very modest, at best.

I also invited friends and acquaintances to read and review the book, and you can find their reviews on the same page. As you’ll see, I’ve sequestered those from the other reviews, as I think that most people (rightly) will assume that reviews by folks you know are not likely to be too critical, and in some cases, the person might not have even read the book at all. I’m hoping that by segregating reviews in this way people will give more credence to (at least) those where I have no influence over the reviewer. Of course, people still have to trust me to have put the reviews in the proper categories.

That takes us to the last category you’ll find on my review page, which is spontaneous reviews posted at other sites, such as Amazon. Those always intrigue me, because, as with sales generally, I’d love to know how they found out about my book to begin with. For example, two new reviews were posted by readers I’m sure I don’t know at my Amazon page because they used their real names. Happily, they’re both very positive:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fun read, January 2, 2013

By Michael Bradley (Dallas, TX USA) – See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)  

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

The last couple of years have produced amazing works based on real events and epic hackers and heroes. This is not one of them. Sometimes you just want a funny story; the Alexandria Project is just a funny story that leaves you rooting for our hero and thinking of Dad. If you liked the whiz kids comics but cannot define the term, rootkit, and you don’t care too, this book is for you.

5.0 out of 5 stars Awesome., December 27, 2012

By Daniel Reurich – See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase(What’s this?)

This is an awesome book. Very gripping and a fantastic plot, well written and modern. It paints a picture of the dangers our modern world faces from mis-used technology and the bufoons that control it.

I wish I could thank both of these readers for taking the time to post a review. Of course, if I could, I’d also be tempted to ask them to be sure to tell their 1,000 closest friends that they think my book is a worthwhile read.

SmashWords’ Big Year

If you haven’t checked in on eBook publisher Smashwords (SW) lately, you’re in for a surprise. The little business that Mark Coker started five years ago is now the biggest publisher of eBooks around. And you don’t have to take his word for it – a Bowker press release in October reached the same conclusion.

So how big is big? According to a year-end blog entry by Coker, big is big, not just in numbers of titles, but in year over year growth. This year, the Smashwords author count jumped from 34,000 to 58,600, and the titles in the SW catalog leaped from 92,000 to 190,600. Eye-popping numbers like that would be the envy of any venture capitalist, but Coker has pulled this off without dipping into that well at all. Amazingly enough, he’s also done it with only 19 employees (up from 13 at the end of last year, and only 3 in 2010).

Of course, there are some downsides as well as upsides to that picture. True, SW offers a great deal that other eBook publishers don’t, such as no up-front fees, higher royalties (60 – 85% of the purchase price), the ability to do almost everything yourself if you want to (using site-based tools and advice), and access – without markup – to a growing ecosystem of recommended book-designers and other service providers to help you don’t. But SW also has an antediluvian Web site, doesn’t deal with print versions of books at all, and doesn’t have a partnership with Amazon (although you can submit your book directly there, allowing SW to handle distribution for you everywhere else). those gaps are a bit frustrating, because SW has so much going for it in so many other ways.

The good news for authors is that Coker’s year end update also includes promises for what SW authors can expect in the coming year, including a rebuild and updating of the SWs on-line book store (“When people tell us the design of the Smashwords store is so circa 2000, we take it as a compliment because we think they’re being generous by at least a decade”). The other improvements, though, are almost all in the nature of “faster” (e.g., catalog approvals, distribution and reporting) and “additional” (distributors, tools, etc.) changes rather than dramatic additions.

One exception is the news, also announced yesterday, that authors now have the ability to upload ePub files directly to SW. Until now, the only option was to upload MS .doc files to the sites “Meatgrinder” conversion software. This will allow SW to deal with books with more complex formatting and layout features. Elsewhere, Coker speaks of pulling together a volunteer team to enable easier uploading of files created using LibreOffice and OpenOffice.

There’s plenty of extra detail at the SW site, and you should be sure to read Coker’s Book-Publishing Industry Predictions for 2013, not only because it’s a fascinating read, but also because several SW authors add comments in detail about what they’re not happy with at SW, and what they’d like to see changed or added. Coker promptly responded to almost all of their concerns, providing further detail on what authors can (and can’t) expect in the future. It’s refreshing to see a business owner stay in such close touch with his customers, although it leaves you wondering where he finds the time to run his business, given the frequency and length of his blog postings and the time he spends answering comments. Unlike a big business with staff people to ghostwrite for the big boss, with only 19 employees one assumes that Coker really does write everything he puts his name on.

It’s hard not to like the SW model and Coker’s attitude, although it’s also hard not to think that he sometimes comes on too strong about the wonderful future of self-publishing, the degree to which traditional publishers are in trouble, and the splendid opportunities available to self-published authors.For example, Coker positions falling eBook prices as a plus for authors, since lower prices will presumably lead to more readers whose words of praise will lead to more readers and more sales. But that’s disingenuous for all but those authors that experience a modest breakthrough with their books to get the ball rolling.

On the other hand, dropping prices for self-published eBook authors is great for a publisher like SW, because there’s no way for traditional publishers to make enough money on $.99 – $2.99 books to bother with that end of the market at all. According to Coker, the average price of an SW title dropped from $4.25 in October of 2010 to $3.15 by March of 2012.With demand relatively fixed and supply continuing to explode (SWs alone is now publishing over 9,000 new titles every month), that sounds like a race to the bottom to me. if you look at the charts that Coker provides in a presentation to a self-publishing workshop, you’ll see how few SW authors are moving many books as it is.

To the good, this August there were four SW authors on the New York Times best seller list, and SW is reaching additional foreign markets through the expansion of its distributors’ networks (notably Apple, which now hosts iTunes stores in significantly more countries than Amazon reaches).

Be that as it may, I think that SW’s success is not only a good thing for its hard working founder, but for the emerging self-publishing marketplace as well. Here’s hoping that Coker continues to reinvest his profits in making the SW platform better and better for Indie authors.

Excellent Book Design Site

When I first started to prepare my book for publishing I spent a few hours cruising around looking for resources of various types, and bookmarking those that seemed worth revisiting. But I rarely did.

Today I spent a little time checking out a few of those sites, discarding some and highlighting others. One that I think is particularly worth sharing is a book design site called TheWorldsGreatestBook.com, hosted by Dave Bricker. Not everyone is going to look at book design as an enjoyable part of the self-publishing process, but if you’re someone that does care about design, this site is a gold mine.

If you’d like to be persuaded of Dave’s credentials, you might want to start with a recent post he wrote called Proposed Standards for Book Typography. It’s not unlikely that you’ll find more information here than you need (unless you’re really into book design), but I think you will be impressed not only with Dave’s depth of knowledge, but also with his solid common sense and clear explanations.

As you might have guessed from my taking the time to highlight this site, I do care a lot about book design, and have been concerned for some time over whether the advent of the eBook will lead to a deterioration of good book design. I wrote about that in greater detail a while back in a Consider This essay I titled Digitization and the (Vanishing) Arts of the Book.

As I note in that essay, designers of eBooks can only work with the technology that’s available. If software that supports a rich array of book design features (and that’s also easy to use) isn’t available, or if device vendors don’t do what’s necessary to allow eBooks designed using those tools to fully display, then the survival of the arts of the book will be in real danger.

Hopefully technical people will be willing to spend the time to provide the type of back end technology that will enable good book design to flourish rather than fail as more and more readers inevitably switch their purchasing preferences to eBooks from physical books.