Californian e-book highlights 'Unbeaten' season

The Bakersfield Californian has just released "Unbeaten," its third e-book this year, an iPad-only celebration of Bakersfield High School's unbeaten 2011 football season. 

The Drillers' 13-0 season was the latest in a long string of titles for the state's most consistently successful prep-football program. 

Louis Amestoy, The Californian's Digital Convergence Manager, used Apple's iBooks Author program to produce the 150-page book that's stuffed with multimedia by repackaging a variety of staff-produced stories and photos with video highlights recorded Game-by-game summaries include detailed stats. by BHS staff. 

All told, "Unbeaten" includes:

• 132 photos, most never-before-published.
• 41 videos of game highlights. 
• Game stories, stats and  Californian prep reporter Zach Ewing's richly reported live-blog posts.
• Features on head coach Paul Golla and Drillers legend Frank Gifford, and more.

The 41 videos feature key plays from throughout the season.And all this for only $3.99 in the iBookstore. 

Click to read more ...

Basque culture is focus of second Californian e-book

The Bakersfield Californian has released its second e-book, Louis Amestoy's "Being Basque in Bakersfield." 

The book shares a newcomer's observations about connecting with Bakersfield's large and vibrant Basque community. Amestoy, The Californian's digital convergence manager, is of Basque heritage but had little contact with the culture until moving to Bakersfield in January.

Click to read more ...

Good news, bad news about our March Meet e-book

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 and the Nook version is here. Buyers of the book will get a link and password to a special web page containing 21 videos and hundreds of photos covering a wide variety of people, events and happenings at the March Meet. 

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.