My Spew
I co-hosted Friday's Californian Radio show with Louis Amestoy, and our topic was The Californian's new e-book, "March Meet: Bakersfield's Love Affair with Speed, Nitro & Good Times."
The book is now for sale for iPad, Kindle and Nook tablets and e-readers.
Californian Radio, Louis Amestoy It took way too long, but Apple this afternoon finally added our March Meet iPad book to its iBookstore.
;)
The iBookstore page offers a glimpse of what's inside our iPad book."March Meet: Bakersfield's Love Affair With Speed, Nitro & Good Times" can de downloaded for only $9.99.* Quite a bargain for an iPad book that contains loads of great stories, a dozen videos, more than 200 photos and much more.
"Lighter" versions of "March Meet" are available for the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (We have reports B&N is showing off the book on devices displayed in its Temecula store.). Because most versions of the Kindle and Nook favor text over multimedia, versions for those devices contain no video and far fewer photos.
But we're quick to point out that buyers of all versions of "March Meet" will get access to a password-protected page containing exclusive videos, most of the great photos (plus access to high-resolution versions that can be purchased separately).
This was our first foray into e-book publishing, so please let us know what you think.
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* = For some reason, Google eBooks is/was selling "March Meet" for $7.99, prompting Amazon to drop its price to match. We already believe $9.99 is a killer bargain, so we're going to try to pull the Google edition and see if Amazon restores its price to our starting retail price. Neither entity asked us for permission, although the fine print gives them a lot of flexibility to grind us into a nub. Sigh.
Check out a sample chapter from the Kindle version.I've written previously about The Californian's cool e-book documenting the world-famous March Meet held just north of Bakersfield.
And here's some good news regarding "March Meet: Bakersfield's Love Affair with Speed, Nitro & Good Times": Amazon and Barnes & Noble are selling versions for $9.99. The Amazon Kindle version is here
The bad news: Our enhanced iPad edition of the e-book, featuring hundreds of embedded photos and a dozen videos, remains in queue in the iBookstore. It's been sitting there for more than one month, and Apple has told us several times it's simply backed up reviewing iBookstore submissions. Hmmm, you'd think a company with $100 billion in cash could hire a few extra people to help unclog the pipeline.
Mad props to BookBrewer, an e-book publishing tool we used to upload the book to Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Simple, easy and cost-effective. And less than a two-day turnaround to hit the Kindle and Nook stores.
Apple, Kindle, March Meet, Nook, The Bakersfield Californian, e-books, iPad
The Californian's Louis Amestoy has been experimenting with a cool software tool called Storify to quickly and easily produce local stories in an engaging way.
You can find a few in our Bakosphere blog, but his latest example is this "Social media look at Bakersfield weather" slideshow documenting the storm that hit Bakersfield overnight. Storify's drag-and-drop tools make it easy to monitor social media and deliver a mix of content from pros and everyday people to document news around our town.
I shared some thoughts on The Californian's iPad edition on the fine blog of Steve Yelvington, a web visionary whose post on newspaper replica editions prompted a related thread on Twitter that caught my attention.
I'll share more on in the future on our work with e-editions of The Californian, but Yelvington's post is a good start for people who are in the business of producing replica editions of printed publications. There's life in these editions that many -- including myself -- once considered substandard products.
