Entries tagged with “bonus features” from Tools of Change for Publishing

Pan Macmillan Plans Ebooks Showing Edits and Changes

Peter Brantley
April 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Pan Macmillan is releasing ebooks with extra sauce. From thedigitalist.net:

The idea that a special edition eBook can contain marginal material produced before, during, or after a print edition features in two other eBooks to be published by Picador this year. Sid Smith’s China Dreams, which we published in hardback in January 2007 and in paperback in January 2008, will be issued in a uniquely up-to-date edition, in the author’s latest version, with corrections, changes, and new material, and a foreword in which he considers the process of composition and revision.

Cliffhanger, by T. J. Middleton (the alias of our established Picador author Tim Binding), takes this idea in the opposite direction: alongside the print edition, which we publish in October 2008, will be an urtext: a composite version of the novel as it was before it was edited here at Picador, with the text in its original form, reinstated and modified scenes and characters, and a radically different ending, also with a foreword by the author explaining the urtext’s conception and the editing process that turned it into Cliffhanger."

Related Stories:

• Cultural Amnesia Ebook: Bonus Material and DRM-Free
• Commentary on Penguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity

Cultural Amnesia Ebook: Bonus Material and DRM-Free

Mac Slocum
April 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The ebook version of Clive James' Cultural Amnesia includes three additional essays that were not included in the print editions. In a note on the Cultural Amnesia blog, Pan MacMillan project manager James Long says the additional material acts as an "extension of the scope of Cultural Amnesia ... and as a preview of writing that will be included in Clive's next essay collection." The ebook does not have any DRM restrictions.

Commentary on Penguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity

Jimmy Guterman
March 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

(Updated with excerpt/link instead of repost)

On Penguin's latest e-Book move via the O'Reilly Radar blog:

What's most galling, of course, is that Penguin isn't attempting to increase interest in ebooks as a medium by making these classics, long past copyright, available in free, un-DRM-encumbered formats. In an old-meets-new mashup, publishers could use free distribution of still-in-demand classics to generate interest in a form, ebooks, that is still only in the earliest days of its potential public acceptance. Wouldn't you be more likely to try something new if it was free?