By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

Apple unveiled iBooks 2, the next iteration of its iBooks software. It also launched iBooks Author, a new e-book and enhanced e-book creation tool. Both are available in the Apple App Store for free today, the company said at an announcement this morning at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.

The new software will revolutionize both the textbook industry and e-book creation. There is a new section in the iBooks store for textbooks and the Author app is geared toward textbook creation with built-in templates for math and science books, but it can be used for the creation of any book.

Related: Apple iBooks Author Tool Sets Stage for Showdown With Amazon

For more advanced content creators who are fluent in JavaScript and HTML, iBooks Authors allows for the creation of custom widgets in e-books. (Apple has not yet responded to requests for comment on what kinds of files iBooks Author creates, whether EPUB 3 or some other format.)

The iBooks Author software “opens the door to self-published illustrated [e-books],” according to Publisher’s Lunch. In early trading, Apple shares were up $0.36 to $429.47.

In a stunning display of e-book creation acrobatics, Apple executives dragged images and video into an e-book page and text wrapped seamlessly around it. The company also demonstrated completed textbooks, showing off interactive features, including: Images that come alive with explanations when tapped; fluid layouts that shift smoothly from portrait to landscape view; and index and glossary functions that are integrated directly into each page.

Textbooks will be available for $14.99 or less in the iBooks store and several publishers, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have already produced several of these new, interactive textbooks, which are available for sale today.

All notes and highlighted text in the new e-textbooks are instantly turned into flashcards for later study and students who buy the textbooks own them forever and can re-download them any time from the cloud.

After weeks of speculation, Apple finally revealed its secret textbook project, reportedly codenamed “Bliss.”

Early in the presentation, Apple executives decried print textbooks as lacking portability, search-ability and interactivity, problems that e-textbooks on an iPad would solve.

Apple also released the next iteration of its iTunes U app, which now will allow professors to create syllabi, post messages to students and run many professorial functions remotely. Students will be able to review all course materials, including text and video, and listen to lectures. The iBooks software will be fully integrated with iTunes U. Six universities, including Duke and Yale, are already using the software.

From an Apple statement on iTunes U:

The all-new iTunes U app lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes and syllabuses and offer them to millions of iOS users around the world. The iTunes U app gives iOS users access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content from top universities including Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford, and starting today any K-12 school district can offer full courses through the iTunes U app. iTunes U has already become an incredibly popular learning tool for students with over 700 million downloads.

From an Apple statement on iBooks 2 and iBooks Author:

iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don’t weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore℠ with most priced at $14.99 or less, and with the new iBooks Author, a free authoring tool available today, anyone with a Mac® can create stunning iBooks textbooks.

Sign up for today’s webcast to hear about the best practices for enhanced e-books and more about today’s big announcement from Apple.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

Related: Apple iBooks Author Tool Sets Stage for Showdown With Amazon

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Don’t miss out on the buzz about the new Apple iBooks store and Author tools at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

The future of e-books is now.

The approval of a new coding language for e-books, developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), a global trade and standards organization for the promotion of electronic publishing, means that soon it will be a relatively simple matter for e-books to contain video, audio, dynamic content and all sorts of interactive features.

The catch? Many of the features of EPUB 3, as it’s called, can’t currently be rendered by most e-reading software. Meaning, if a book publisher created a new e-book using EPUB 3 to embed a Google map or a Twitter feed, the book wouldn’t work properly on most e-readers.

But that’s all about to change.

“2012 will be the year when retailers adopt EPUB 3,” said Bill McCoy, executive director of the IDPF.

For instance, Ingram Content Group, the country’s largest distributor of digital and physical books, said that its e-textbook reader, VitalSource Bookshelf, which is available as an application for the iPad, iPhone, Mac Windows, browsers, iOS clients, and Android in the near term, will begin to support EPUB 3 in April.

“VitalSource works with 200 education publishers, most of which are gearing up for EPUB 3,” said Rick Johnson, chief technology officer for VitalSource.

As more e-reader software supports more of EPUB 3, publishers need to prepare for changes in creative capabilities, workflow, hiring and, maybe most important of all, their relationship with booksellers.

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Hear more about EPUB 3 and what publishers should do about it at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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The Coming Battle With Retailers

First the tech jargon, then the plain speak: EPUB 3 is built on HTML 5, which means that publishers can build JavaScript into their books.

This is significant, because JavaScript can theoretically be used to track e-book reader behavior, information publishers have coveted since the dawn of the Kindle age – and that retailers have refused to share.

“Retailers, like Amazon, are known for not disclosing certain information,” said McCoy. “Publishers would love to know that information.”

With EPUB 3, publishers should be able to build software into their books that tells them how much a reader reads, when they read and for how long, for starters.

While publishers should push hard to gather all the information retailers will allow, retailers may resist, citing security risks and privacy concerns, said McCoy.

But the terms of the conflict might change when retailers allow books to fetch remote data, like a dynamic Google map or an ad that changes at the whim of the publisher.

“Once you allow that, it’s very hard to limit,” said McCoy. “Some distribution channels will enable that kind of remote data access early in 2012. The question is when the top-end vendors do that. That will depend on competitive situations. Some may try to jump first. I don’t want to predict the moves in the game of Risk, but some of the vendors are more oriented at being open than others.”

Publishers might have an unlikely ally on their side: the specter of piracy.

“As you move into the world of HTML 5, interactivity is becoming the new DRM [digital rights management],” said Johnson, who helped craft the EPUB 3 language as part of a working group at IDPF. “As you enable new interactivity, you are making it harder for people to share the content; you have to have the whole book in order to use those rich features.”

As EPUB 3 is adopted, many of those “rich features” will require remote data calls.

New Paradigms in Sales and Marketing

If allowed, remote data calls through JavaScript embedded in an EPUB 3 e-book will open up a whole new world of customer information and customer interaction for book publishers.

Beyond being able to collect dynamic data from readers, publishers will be able to talk to readers, on the fly. The most obvious incarnation of this is advertising.

“JavaScript support allows the same kind of ad ecosystem as exists on the Web,” said McCoy, meaning that publishers can theoretically advertise anything at any time using ad space they develop in their books sold with such capabilities.

For instance, a book sold today might advertise a related book in the back-matter, plugs for new books that typically appear in the back of the book. If that ad were served through JavaScript, publishers would know just how readers responded to it, and if response wasn’t what was hoped for, they could change or adjust the ad for better results.

New Ways of Thinking About Content

As tablet and smartphone adoption increases, readers will expect richer features from books.

“Users want features. They want eye candy, they want sharing,” said Johnson.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that publishers should seek to add features haphazardly to their current pipeline of e-books. Publishers should think more holistically about their content.

“Publishers are going to need to think about their content as a more malleable asset,” said McCoy. “If you’re doing a novel, you don’t think of it as only a hardcover.”

With the proliferation of devices and screen sizes, publishers need to consider all of the different kinds of places their content could appear – and both compensate and take advantage of those different venues.

“It’s not just about tablets. EPUB 3 is going to live in browsers, in native applications,” and publishers that try to get their content onto screens of all sizes – and looking good – will be ahead of the curve, said Johnson. Scripts, or bits of code that answer questions for a piece of software, that can be built within EPUB 3 will allow publishers to optimize one piece of content for multiple screens, he added.

New Workflows

Publishers that want to build new kinds of reading experiences need to think about what new features they want to add to their books at the earliest possible stage.

“They need to figure out how they want their books to sing and dance,” said Eric Freese, until recently a solutions architect at Aptara, a Falls Church, Va.-based e-book production house; he was also part of the working group at IDPF that developed EPUB 3 and is now an information architect at Amsterdam-based health publisher Elsevier. “Do they want audio and video added in? If so, they need to be thinking about that at creation time, not publication time. The earlier the better. By thinking about it early, you’re more nimble and flexible with what you can do at the end.”

For those publishers that haven’t quite mastered the art of quality assurance (QA), EPUB 3 will bring fresh challenges, ones that should be addressed by changes in workflow.

“With EPUB 3, you have the capability to style things differently and have things adjust to layout,” said Johnson. “You have to make sure you have all the basics down. I encourage publishers to have a good way to do QA work.”

Hiring New, Expensive Workers

EPUB 3 is built on HTML 5. A relatively new coding language, HTML 5 isn’t yet a common skill for developers. And where there’s scarcity, there’s cost.

“If you’re doing children’s books or cookery or anything that needs to take advantage of interactivity, HTML 5 is going to be the core building block and that’s the core skill that publishers need to make sure they have in house or an outsourced relationship that they can count on as a business partner,” said McCoy.

Publishers will need to hire more in-house staff, said Johnson. They will either need to build their own HTML 5 development teams or at least hire a knowledgeable liaison for any vendors they work with.

“With this enhanced digital content, they [publishers] will need to grow the skills and capabilities of their staff,” said Johnson. “They will also demand more from their vendors.”

Building it or buying it, engaging an HTML 5 development team is a costly proposition.

According to Salary.com, the median salary for a Web applications developer in New York is nearly $95,000. And that’s for people whose skills may not even reach the high level necessary for top HTML 5 development.

And that doesn’t factor in the recruitment costs. Good developers are hard to come by, with the unemployment rate for technology workers under 4% for most of 2011 and companies like Google, Facebook and hot startups duking it out for top talent.

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As EPUB 3 gains support among reading platforms and devices, publishers will face a time of difficult change. But there is light at the end of the tunnel.

“As the adoption of digital continues to accelerate, many of the problems that have emerged – workflow for publishers, expectations of readers – are addressed by EPUB 3,” said Johnson.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

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Hear more about EPUB 3 and what publishers should do about it at the Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

On January 27, 2010, Steve Jobs changed the course of consumer technology yet again when he announced the first iPad.

While Silicon Valley gushed, another group was buzzing all the way across the country at the Sheraton Hotel in New York. It was the scene of the first-ever Digital Book World Conference and the attendees in the room – representatives from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Random House, HarperCollins and many other major players in the book publishing industry – knew that the business of books would never be the same. It was the talk of the conference.

Two years later, Apple will hold its first public event since the death of its founder, but this time, in New York. Speculation has been that the location of the announcement indicates that it’s about the book publishing industry, which is largely headquartered in New York. More recent media reports indicate that the announcement will be about the textbook industry; more specifically, that it will be about new software that, like GarageBand for music, will allow users to create interactive e-textbooks.

Whatever the announcement, Digital Book World 2012, held on January 23 to 25 at the same Sheraton Hotel in New York, will be buzzing with the news. Here’s some early, pre-announcement speculation from people who will be attending the conference next week.

“It would be great to see Apple invest more in iBooks,” said Samantha Francis, a marketing and communications manager at BookNet Canada, a Toronto-based non-profit focused on sourcing and developing new publishing technology. “A lot of people in publishing feel that way.”

Alphonse MacDonald, director of marketing and technology at The National Academies in Washington, D.C., agrees. “I hope that there will be some improvements to the iBooks application,” he said.

Others ventured that the announcement would be education-related.

“I think that it’s going to be a large-scale tool that publishers will use to develop interactive content for textbooks – a platform for e-textbooks,” said Dev Ganesan, CEO of Falls Church, Va.-based Aptara, a digital content design and production firm. “It might also tie back to publishers’ own content management system…so somebody using a McGraw Connect portal [an educational portal from McGraw-Hill, the educational publisher that will be partnering with Apple on its announcement] will be able to use the textbooks.”

Ganesan and others also think that whatever the announcement is, it will focus around the iPad – that if a textbooks platform is built, it will be optimized for and maybe even limited to the device.

“They could truly revolutionize textbooks in ways I probably can’t even fathom,” said Francis. “[It] could relate to distance education. What if they created a virtual classroom?”

MacDonald agrees. “There has for a long time been things you can do on websites in terms of sharing content that provide a collaborative experience to students which is really valuable in terms of working on a text,” he said.

Many DBW attendees declined to comment on the record for this article for fear of alienating Apple, an important partner for many in the publishing industry.

“I would love to see a Genius recommendation engine for the iBookstore,” said one. Others speculated that whatever the announcement was, it wouldn’t disrupt the industry as much as the January 2010 announcement of the iPad did.

Regardless of what the announcement is, DBW attendees are waiting with bated breath.

“Whatever it is, I hope it’s good because there’s just so much build up,” said Francis.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

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Don’t miss the buzz at this year’s Digital Book World Conference + Expo in New York City from January 23 to 25.

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Average price of a Kindle best-seller over the past year. (Source: e-Book Market View)

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

While the price of e-readers has come down dramatically in the past several years, the price of e-books is reportedly edging up.

According to The Wall Street Journal, owners of new e-readers who unwrap them on Christmas morning will face “sticker shock” at the price of books. In some cases, WSJ points out, e-books are priced higher than their print counterparts.

While there are isolated cases of e-books costing more than print books, overall, the price of e-books has dropped by 11% since 2009, according to the WSJ report.

Isolated cases and macro-trends aside, for most of the books that people buy, the price has actually dropped significantly since last Christmas.

The average price of an Amazon Kindle best-seller on Christmas day 2010 was $8.21 and 17 of the 100 books on the list were priced $2.99 or lower, according to data provided by e-Book Market View.

Since then, average price has decreased appreciably. As of December 14, 2011, the average price of a book on the same list was $7.08, a 14% decrease, and 35 of the 100 books on the list were priced $2.99 or lower.

The average price of an Amazon print best-seller is currently $15.08 and there are no books on that list priced at $2.99 or below.

To be sure, the number of books on the Kindle best-seller list priced at $10 or higher has increased since last Christmas from 22 to 32, meaning that more higher-priced books are being sold on the device.

Still, it bears pointing out that the top-selling book on the Kindle best-sellers list on December 14, 2011 was The Grail Conspiracy (A Cotton Stone Mystery) from Woodbury, Minn.-based publisher Midnight Ink, priced at $0.99. The book was promoted as a Kindle Daily Deal on the Amazon landing page.

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Hear from Iobyte Solutions about more data in book publishing at Digital Book World Conference + Expo 2012, this January 23-25 in New York. More>>>

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Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

New recommendations from the Book Industry Study Group as to how publishers assign ISBN numbers to their books are intended to anticipate further innovations in publishing.

After years of debate in the industry as to how e-books, apps and other kinds of digital editions should be classified, the BISG has set guidelines for publishers and their partners as to assign separate ISBN numbers for each version of a book – hardcover, paperback, ePub, PDF, for example.

While the guidelines address the many new formats that exist today because of the proliferation of e-readers and tablets, they are also designed to address future formats that could be invented.

“This wasn’t developed in a vacuum,” said Angela Bole, deputy executive director of the BISG. “This is a moving-target document.”

The recommendations themselves are granular and potentially confusing, but the overall rule is, if it’s a different e-book format, then it gets a new ISBN number, unless the difference is “transactional,” like the addition of digital rights management to the file, according to the BISG.

As publishing analyst Thad McIlroy explains it on his blog:

1. Assign a unique ISBN to each file format for each ebook.

2. The digital ISBN must be different than any print ISBN.

3. If you submit the same EPUB, PDF or Mobi digital file (and a few other defined formats) to a different distributor, use the same ISBN.

The idea is that as future file formats proliferate or new concepts of what is a “book” evolve in the future, this division between products and transactional accoutrements will provide publishers with guidelines as to how to classify their content.

“This system lays the groundwork,” said Bole. “They begin a dialogue about the differentiation between a product and a transaction in order to see where that takes us.”

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The best in ebooks, enhanced ebooks, and book apps will be honored at the Publishing Innovation Awards on the evening of January 23rd, 2012, as part of the opening ceremonies for Digital Book World Conference + Expo. More>>>

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Industry in Agreement?

Some major publishing houses and book classification governing bodies have come out in support of the new guidelines. Meanwhile, some have not.

“We wholeheartedly endorse the policy,” said Phil Madans, director of publishing standards and practices at Hachette Book Group and the chair of the committee at BISG that crafted the policy statement.

Workman Publishing and Simon & Schuster were also among the publishing houses that confirmed to Digital Book World their support of the initiative.

“Up until now, it really hasn’t been clear what the recommendations were,” said Andrea Fleck-Nesbitt, director of digital publishing at Workman. “Hopefully this will help publishers and vendors alike adhere to one standard.”

Other publishers were not able to comment before press time. Random House declined to comment.

Meanwhile, the the U.S. ISBN Agency, the National Standards Organization and BookNet Canada, the Canadian organization that administers book classification, have all endorsed the guidelines.

The International ISBN Agency has not. There are differences in BISG’s policy recommendations and those of the International ISBN agency.

“There are slight discrepancies, but they are truly very minor,” said Beat Barblan, director of identifier services at Bowker, the company that administers the U.S. ISBN system. Barblan heads that operation.

Barblan and others anticipate that BISG’s policy will spur more debate on the details of ISBN classification.

The Cost to Publishers

Many publishers, including those that spoke to Digital Book World, saw this move coming and had already been adhering to the standards. For those that have not, changing their practices could mean additional costs to their businesses.

ISBN numbers themselves are sold by Bowker and vary widely in cost, depending on how many are purchased. They are sold in batches of 1, 10, 100 and 1,000 at $125, $250, $575 and $1,000, respectively, for standard processing. That means that they range in cost from $125 to $1 per ISBN number*.

But it’s not the cost of the ISBN numbers that publishers should be concerned about.

“If you look at the cost-per-book, it ends up being nothing,” said Bablan. “The bigger issue might be making changes to internal systems.”

As publishers have learned from transitioning from solely print production to print, e-book and app production, changing internal systems can be difficult and costly.

“If people want to make system changes, that might cost money,” said Hachette’s Madans.

Fortunately for publishers, tweaking the ISBN classification system will likely cost little – and many that are already following the guidelines will not have to implement changes.

*The numbers in this sentence have been updated to reflect new Bowker pricing. We had earlier reporter the old numbers which were still on the Bowker website. We regret the error.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

By 2016, e-book revenues from portable devices will reach nearly $10 billion and bookstores that don’t merge digital and traditional commerce may face extinction, according to a new report.

Already at $3.2 billion this year in worldwide revenues, e-book sales on portable devices are predicted to grow three-fold to $9.7 billion, according to the Mobile Publishing 2011-2016 report released today by UK-based research firm Juniper Research. At the same time, how people buy books is predicted to change.

According to the report, about 30% of e-books will be purchased on tablets, 15% will be purchased on smartphones and roughly 55% will be purchased on e-readers by 2016. And bookstores in general will be under pressure.

“Unless bookstores can marry the digital and the physical, then they’re going to go under,” said Dr. Windsor Holden, research director at Juniper Research and one of the authors of the report.

While Holden predicts that there will still be a need for physical storefronts in 2016, the ones he thinks will survive are those that leverage both digital and physical promotional methods, like Barnes & Noble, which sells books through stores, through its Nook devices and through other devices like tablets and desktops.

Some of the issues publishers will have to face in the next five years, according to the report, are legal challenges to the agency pricing model, Apple and potentially other booksellers blocking moves toward interoperability between reading platforms and reading devices, the rise of self-publishing and loss of revenue as out-of-copyright works are increasingly downloaded for free.

But the overall outlook for the industry is fairly positive. Holden predicts there will be growth in total revenues when combining both print and digital.

“We’ll see a gradual increase in the size of the industry, but pretty minimal,” said Holden.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

Free WEBcast presented by Digital Book World and sponsored by Innodata

Tune in on December 15th at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT for the latest on illustrated ebooks on new devices.

This holiday season, millions of readers will be unwrapping new tablets designed with ebooks in mind. With beautiful full-color screens, the Kindle Fire, Vox, and Nook Color offer publishers new ways to display their highly illustrated content. Publishers who have hesitated to make their highly illustrated print content available to consumers will undoubtedly want to start distributing widely, and those who have great ebooks in the marketplace today will most likely see a huge revenue boost this month.

But highly illustrated content is also one of the most difficult to design, format, and produce. In this free 1-hour WEBcast, we’ll talk with publishers, retailers, and experts with hands-on experience creating great color content. Attendees will find out what goes into great illustrated ebooks, and how to improve your ebooks so that your ebooks will be recommended well past the holiday season.

Attendees Will Learn

• Format considerations when producing complex ebooks – does a title require reflowable text or fixed layout and how does that change the publishing process?
• What platform and retailer differences publishers need to keep in mind when planning a release strategy.
• Basic overview of workflow and resources necessary to produce highly illustrated content.
• How to ensure that your titles look their best on multiple devices.
• What additional items do publishers need to watch out for when creating content for 7” ereading tablets, like the Nook, Kindle Fire, and Vox?
• When should your publisher explore creating fixed-layout titles?
• What sort of content displays best on tablets, and how can your content better exploit these screen.
• How ereader tablets are opening up new digital revenue streams and new markets.

Who Should Attend

Editors, marketers, production, and publishing executives interested in exploring the latest content platforms

Panelists

• Ami Greko, Senior Vendor Relations Manager, Kobo
• Andrea Fleck-Nisbet, Digital Publishing Director, Workman
• Derek Young, eBook Program Manager, Innodata

Moderator

• Matt Mullin, Community Relations Manager, Digital Book World

Sponsor

Innodata (NASDAQ: INOD) provides editorial, production and technology services to the world’s leading media, publishing and information services companies. We also help information-intensive companies – in fields from defense and aerospace to IT and telecommunications – reduce costs and improve how they create technical documentation and customer and product information. We help many of the world’s leading companies create and manage content more efficiently and economically. We’ve geared our entire infrastructure – people, processes and technology – to help clients meet their content creation and publishing challenges. And we deliver these services through a globally distributed workflow that draws upon our proven project management expertise to deliver rapid scale, quality enhancements and significant economic benefits.

About the Panelists

Derek Young is the Program Manager for Innodata’s eBook division. He bridges the gap between the technical side of eBook production and the business needs of publishers, whether they are new to eBooks or have produced thousands of titles. Prior to joining Innodata, he worked at Project MUSE at the Johns Hopkins Press, coordinating journal content and XML for their online platform. He has a degree in Scientific and Technical Communication from the University of Minnesota, and an MBA from Johns Hopkins.

Ami Greko manages vendor relations in the US for Kobo ebooks. She is a founder of Book Camp NYC, an unconference for publishing types and readers, and co-curates and hosts the Ignite-style lecture series 7x20x21. A member of the PAMA and DBW advisory boards, Greko also presents regularly on digital marketing, including at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the LA Times Book Festival, and New York University. You can find her online on Twitter and on Tumblr as ami_with_an_i, and in real life probably in a bookstore in Brooklyn.

Andrea Fleck-Nisbet is the Director of Digital Publishing at Workman Publishing. She got her start in Special Markets before moving to online sales and marketing, followed by digital development. Andrea oversees the ebook program and the development of new digital products based on Workman’s rich list of titles. These include multimedia ebooks, apps and a line of short ebooks called Workman Shorts. You can reach Andrea by email at andrea@workman.com or follow her on Twitter: @adfnisbet23.

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

At $1.74 billion in revenue for its last fiscal year ending in April 2011, John Wiley & Sons is one of the largest publishing companies in the world. Perhaps to the envy of some other publishers, Wiley has managed to make a significant portion of that revenue “digital” in nature. Each of its three business units – STMS (science, technology and math journals and books), education, and professional and trade – derive at least 10% of their revenue from digital.

Near the center of that action is Peter Balis, director of digital content sales for Wiley’s professional and trade division (full disclosure: Balis is also a member of the Digital Book World Conference Council). Balis has been in publishing since 1998 and at Wiley since 2001, when Wiley acquired his employer IDG Books, the book-publishing division of technology-media company IDG, publisher of PC World and other magazines.

When he arrived at Wiley, the company was already thinking both “globally” and “digitally,” said Balis. Ten years later, both global and digital are at the core of everything the company does, according to Balis.

We sat down with Balis to talk about the most exciting developments in digital publishing, the digital workforce of the future, and why he doesn’t use Twitter.

Jeremy Greenfield: You have a lot of responsibilities at Wiley. Can you explain what you oversee on a day-to-day basis? How did you come to be in this position?

Peter Balis: I oversee digital business development at Wiley with primary focus on e-books. I also manage our strategic partnerships with accounts like Apple, Amazon and Google.

I transitioned into this position from being the director of the online sales team. So, I managed the group that sold to accounts like Amazon and Walmart.com. I slowly migrated over into non-book product and eventually developed this role, which never existed before at Wiley.

JG: You’ve been in the business for a while now and at Wiley since 2001. How has Wiley changed since then?

PB: When I came to Wiley, it was a large, somewhat-global company, and Wiley has really become over time a dynamic, global company. We work globally all the time. We look at our product assortment and our organization from a global perspective in every angle, and it makes us a better publisher. When we take on a new relationship, we look at that relationship across all territories.

Wiley in 2001 was already a fairly digital company. We were producing PDF e-books at the time. And we had already launched our online platform, Wiley Online Library, which distributed STM [science, technology and math] content through our own online platform to academic libraries.

Since that time, our digital infrastructure, our digital products and our digital capabilities have grown exponentially. We manage our own digital asset distribution, we have robust CMS [content management system] capabilities, we have XML-first workflows.

Our digital staff has grown accordingly, whether in the production of our files, or our marketing organization.

And the last thing we’ve done is that we went through this period where our sales-force, which was really just a print-based sales-force, has integrated ‘e’ into their offerings. We now have a sales-force that sells format-agnostically when they go into their rounds. That’s a fundamental shift in the way we operate.

JG: Speaking of staffing, what kind of digital talent do publishers need to attract and retain to compete in the coming years? How do you compete with Google and Facebook for talent? Is there a skills gap in the industry?

PB: The challenge is that the publishing industry is in a period of transition. It’s been a long time since the two-martini lunch was ubiquitous, but the pace of technological change has been rapid and we keeping up with it is challenging. But we are now evolving, and are identifying what our technology hiring needs are as we become publishers in a new age. Our challenge is two-fold.

First, it’s finding a way to help re-define the roles of different publishing jobs. Let’s take an editor, for example. An editor today has to have a digital understanding, a digital knowledge or some affinity for it, if they’re going to survive in the next wave of publishing. Part of it is how do we raise the level of our employees to the point that they can contribute to our success digitally and in print as our sales migrate that way.

Second, there is a whole technology infrastructure we have to bring in so we can innovate technology-wise and product-wise. We at Wiley maintain our own website, so we have an active developer group. That doesn’t mean we have a set of HTML5 developers that can experiment and develop the next great interactive cookbook, so until we can fully acquire those skills, we outsource so we can continue to move forward at the rapid pace this transition demands.

We have to go after some of those folks who are producing products for Google and Facebook and others and it’s hard – not just because we’re competing against them for employees. It’s hard because we’re not by definition a technology company. We’re a content and solutions provider and will add services as we go into e-learning and other areas, but we have to focus on technology since that’s where our next change is happening.

JG: As you look out at the e-book landscape and see myriad issues that publishers face, what do you think is going to be the one over the next few years that publishers need to pay the most attention to?

PB: File standardization and interoperability.

As devices continue to proliferate and technologies continue to become more robust – and not necessarily at the same pace – it is not scalable for a publisher to produce unique file formats to fit every device. We produce one hardcover edition and that goes out to every retailer. We don’t want to have to produce a different file for Amazon and a different file for Apple and a different file for Barnes & Noble.

Related to that is interoperability. For all of these bespoke products, there is no way to move a file from a Kindle Fire to a Nook, so we’re almost creating an environment like the Blue-Ray versus HDDVD experiment and people are not accustomed to living in that space. People expect a CD or a DVD to play in any device. If they want to play a Netflix movie, they want to stream it to an iPhone or an Android [phone].

If you’ve bought that book on a Kindle and you get a nook tablet for Christmas, you have to start all over again with a new library. That’s nothing that publishers can change because they’re not the device manufacturers, but they have to be wary of that industry trend and work with retailers to work toward that interoperable solution.

JG: Moving past the challenges, what do you think the exciting opportunities are?

PB: To create just a digital product out of a digital book is fine, but I think that we in the industry operating in the digital space have the responsibility to make things better than the printed product.

We are using technology that affords those opportunities and to not take advantage of them is to leave opportunities on the table.

I do not mean to imply that a great novel or a great biography need more than a digital replication of the printed product. But at Wiley, we are a knowledge provider. We’re trying to enrich people’s lives with information, to help them do things better and faster, to gain skills they have never had before. To just provide people with a simple digital reproduction is a baseline that affords people the opportunity to have content anywhere, anytime on a device. But we need to take that to the next level: How do we help them learn faster and better using digital technologies?

JG: The book industry is incredibly active on Twitter. Unless I’m mistaken, @nerdpete_nyc is your handle. You have one Tweet in nearly three years? Why?

PB: I never tweet.

And yet all these people keep signing up to follow me, I don’t know why. I’m a terrible social-media person.

I don’t have time. Wiley has huge twitter feeds. We have imprints that have twitter feeds. We set up twitter feeds for our authors and some of our partners.

That’s different from me having my own twitter feed. Do I get people to send me tweets so I know what’s going on in key isues? Absolutely. I wish I had more time during the day. I have to balance my desire to gather more information to balance the decisions that I make in light of the work I do every day to keep business going. It’s a frustrating place to be. I would love to have the time to process more information like that and to feed information outward.

I do other things that I think contribute to Wiley’s visibility in the industry.

Also, on a total personal note, I’m just not clever and pithy enough.

JG: What are you reading right now and on what platform?

PB: I don’t read print books. I’m reading The Marriage Plot [the new Jeffrey Eugenides book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux] on my iPad. I have not read a print book since 2008. Both my parents are in their seventies and both read all their books electronically.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGsaid

Penguin’s online genre fiction community, Book Country, has launched a self-publishing service, signaling the intention of big publishers to develop additional revenue streams in the face of a changing book-publishing landscape, even if it means letting authors bypass the traditional publishing process.

The self-publishing tool provides prospective authors with the option of either professionally producing their print and e-book or doing much of the production work themselves. It also offers the choice between distribution on just Book Country or a wider network, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other popular e-book stores.

“We’re at a point in the industry where there’s an understanding that there are multiple paths forward for authors,” said Molly Barton, Book Country president and newly appointed Penguin global digital director.

Related: Q&A With Molly Barton on Her New Position and Digital Books

Since its April launch, BookCountry.com has nearly 4,000 members who have posted 500 pieces of fiction, according to the company.

The self-publishing tool is integrated with Book Country’s “genre map,” a detailed classification system of many genres and sub-genres, offering authors fairly sophisticated marketing capabilities, including use of BISAC codes that help readers find books in their area of interest. Users are also given an online marketing guide and advice on pricing through a pricing calculator. Revenues from books sold are to be split between Penguin and the authors, depending on the price the author selects for the book and the distribution method.

“You don’t have to drive around with books in the back of your Subaru” anymore, Barton said.

Users can opt for professional print- and e-book production through outsourced firms for $549, produce it themselves for print and digital distribution for $299 or produce it themselves for e-book-only distribution for $99.

When asked who produces the books for authors who opt into Book Country’s most expensive package, Barton would not confirm a specific company but said it was of the “ilk” of well-known production firms LibreDigital and Aptara and that it was a set of vendors that Penguin would use for its own production.

Penguin plans on adding more a la carte services to Book Country in 2012, potentially like those found on other self-publishing sites like CreateSpace and Lulu, where authors can opt to pay for an online review of their book to generate buyer interest.

Industry observers who attended a series of special demos of the product left impressed. Several who asked not to be named agreed that the marketing integration, pricing and simplicity of the tool were significant selling points to authors.

Penguin was unable to comment on certain issues about the project before press time, including how much marketing support it would get, how much revenue it’s projected to generate for the company in 2012 and the specifics around trade rights for the site’s users.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield

By Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director, Digital Book World, @JDGreenGrass

What are some of the most exciting developments and thorniest challenges in e-book production today?

To find out, we sat down with Aaron Hobbs, a manager for digital operations at e-book service provider Boulder, Colo.-based Constellation, a unit of New York-based Perseus Books Group.

Hobbs, 40, joined Constellation in June 2008, several months before the company’s September launch. Since then, he has worked through many changes in e-book technology, formatting and convention and watched Constellation grow from a six-person shoe-string operation to roughly 30 people servicing over 230 clients and partners.

As a manager of digital operations at Constellation, a position he was promoted to in June of this year, Hobbs is the technical contact for many of Constellation’s clients and helps shepherd digital book files through various processes on the way to becoming e-books. Hobbs also works with Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and others to place e-books in stores.

Jeremy Greenfield: What’s the biggest issue you’re facing right now in e-book production?

Aaron Hobbs: It used to be just one PDF and you could get one file that could go anywhere. When Constellation started off, we would take a PDF convert it to EPUB and the Amazon proprietary format. Now, with the differentiation of all the different devices, starting with the iPad, you may you want to handle the conversion a little differently to have it render really well. You have to do some additional work to have the characters render as they should. All devices aren’t created equal – just a little different.

The iPad has a reading engine that is really sophisticated. With the Adobe digital editions devices, you might have to embed fonts and there’s other special characters that you find in books that potentially have to be handled a little differently so they’re recognized on all the various devices.

We started seeing that a year ago: We realized that a standard EPUB was going to render great on the iPad but needed a little help to render on the Nook.

JG: What are some interesting things publishers are doing right now?

AH: We’re seeing publishers do some pretty cool enhanced e-books, primarily for the iPad but also for the Kindle. And there’s going to be some really interesting stuff coming out for Nook Kids.

JG: Children’s books are a really interesting area right now.

AH: The central challenge for children’s books is that typically the text is part of the image. So when you convert it as an e-book, the text won’t reflow. Nook Kids allows you to create an e-book out of the children’s book that will look exactly as it does on the printed page. That’s something that wasn’t possible a year ago. You can do a fixed layout on the iPad, which is essentially the same, so all the design elements will be exactly what they were in the original book.

For a standard EPUB, the text will get extracted and it reflows. When you give that control over to the reader, you also lose control over the design elements. The new formats are incorporating the ability to maintain the design.

JG: You mention the iPad gives you the ability to do some new and interesting things.

AH: Talking about Apple specifically, we’ve got some publishers that are doing fixed layout EPUBs, so for a cookbook or a children’s book, it will look exactly like it does in the book. Some are also tying in audio and video enhancements. Moby Destroyed is a really good example of something like that for one of our clients. Moby has put out an art-book with some of his photography and poetic explanations of the images. It incorporates some videos. It’s a fixed layout so it looks really cool on the iPad. With the Kindle Fire just about to come out, there’s going to be a lot more of it which is pretty exciting and pretty fun to work on.

JG: Let’s talk about some less exciting stuff. Quality metadata is important for a book’s discoverability – it’s the digital version of your book-jacket, back-matter and all the other things used to identify and sell a book. Are your customers on top of their metadata programs?

AH: That’s a good way of putting it. Metadata has been a mantra that we’ve been pushing since we’ve started.

It used to be that publishers would just supply the bare minimum, just the required fields. As they get more sophisticated with their digital strategy, they’ve figured out they can add things, like BISAC codes, which is a category for the book that makes it easier for people searching on a wider range of things to find it. Publishers are starting to add more metadata so people find their ebooks.

JG: One thing I’ve noticed as an issue in the e-book production world is digital talent. A survey recently came out that suggested that publishers are not confident that they can recruit and retain the digital talent they need. Are you seeing digital talent acquisition as a problem?

AH: Great question – I don’t know that I can answer it.

I’m down in the weeds a little bit on the operational side. We’re working with clients, moving files, working with our partners to get better reporting. As far as development talent, we’ve actually recently brought in an xml content manager, and her role is two-fold: to allow us to have more sophisticated ability to edit, correct and fix things in epubs; and in research and development to experiment with formats, audio and video. She has brought in a little team of freelancers who are pretty talented programmers who have typically worked with websites, and that team is really just working on EPUBs.

JG: What’s the future like for Constellation?

AH: It’s pretty exciting. We started off with zero clients and four partners and now we have well over 200 clients and 30 partners and we’ve just gone international. There are English-reading people all over the world and there’s no reason not to try to get e-books available to them. It’s as simple as that.

Write to Jeremy Greenfield