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This is a round-up of sorts. Not all of these links have been bandied about in the book-o-sphere, and not all of them are even from this week, but they're all interesting to me. And, I hope, of interest to other folks with a penchant for publishing and tech and related.

Some photos snapped yesterday during the first day of the London Book Fair. Crowds have picked up on Day 2, but still an eerily quiet show.

From @liza at Threepress:"EpubCheck’s lesser-known companion checks for additional issues like content documents that exceed 300K, which can’t be loaded on the Sony Reader."http://blog.threepress.org/2009/11/04/epub-validator-updates/(ps -- thanks to @liza for making my day with the pointer to http://twitter.com/big_ben_clock)

One of my favorite keynotes from TOC 2009 was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) founder Chris Baty. It's November, which means the annual event is now underway. Check out the website for ways to support and participate.

Full details are in Tim's post on the Radar blog (and in the Press Release and in the statement from Microsoft ), but thought one part of this deal worth calling out specifically here:

BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times:

Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said Google's program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. "We don't believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go," he said.

Recently Publisher's Weekly published an article The Twitter Scorecard that showed which Publishers were using Twitter. I found the piece missing key elements that would provide more insight to their question "So who is twittering, and how effectively?" I believe that if you are asking how effectively we are using Twitter, there is considerable more data needed than was presented. In my opinion, the number of Followers is not a complete measure of effectiveness.

Recently Publisher's Weekly published an article The Twitter Scorecard that showed which Publishers were using Twitter. I found the piece missing key elements that would provide more insight to their question "So who is twittering, and how effectively?" I believe that if you are asking how effectively we are using Twitter, there is considerable more data needed than was presented. In my opinion, the number of Followers is not a complete measure of effectiveness. In fairness, PW did not say they were attempting to be comprehensive or complete in their scorecard, so I thought I would provide the data that is available mixed with some of my own obtained by scraping. So, I'll attempt to fill-in the scorecard a bit more.

First a note on who is behind the publisher accounts. O'Reilly as a company has oodles of Tweeters who blog about work, life, interests, etc., including @timoreilly who is nearing the half-million followers threshold. I suspect other publishers have the same army of tweeters too, but the data below is is just for the publisher account only. Oftentimes, these sort of accounts are run by PR groups in a Publishing company.

Below, you will find the same list of publishers contained in the original article with the addition of the following column headers and data:

Pub_Twitter is the Publisher account on Twitter. This list was created by PW and am not sure what the criteria was. Followers is the number of people that are following the publisher. These numbers are already off as many of these publishers have added many new followers since the original writing. I kept the same number that PW reported. Following is how many users the publisher follows.
Updates is how many tweets the publisher has posted since the account was created. Content is the most popular words the publisher uses in their tweets. Url is a link to a wordle that visualizes the corpus of tweets for the publisher. At the bottom of the table, you will see All Publishers which shows averages and the link includes all words in a visual wordle.

Pub_Twitter

Followers

Following

Updates

Content

URL

@AAKnopf

1,581

390

495

Book,
New, Read, RT

http://twitpic.com/5k982

@AtriaBooks

1,809

1,813

257

Book, ChetTheDog , Dog, New

http://twitpic.com/5k97i

@BantamDell

1,987

1,125

244

Blood,
Page, Free, Literary

http://twitpic.com/5k95r

@ChelseaGreen

5,003

5,296

4185

Green, RT, Thanks, Book

http://twitpic.com/5k93w

@DCComics

2,176

0

0

---

@DoubleDayPub

1,057

622

137

Lost,
RT, Pygmy, New

http://twitpic.com/5k908

@FreePressBooks

516

387

16

Book,
Check, Mason, tinyurl

http://twitpic.com/5k8yu

@GrandCentralPub

3,726

3,004

671

Thanks,
RT, Book, UR

http://twitpic.com/5k8xd

@GroveAtlantic

268

59

297

Wetlands,
Hely , Books, tinyurl

http://twitpic.com/5k8uc

@HarlequinBooks

2,187

159

776

Harlequin,
Romance, Author, Free

http://twitpic.com/5k8qn

@HarperPerennial

805

459

149

RT,
Book, Story, Read

http://twitpic.com/5k8oq

@LittleBrown

5,999

6,238

1359

RT,
Author, Scarecrow, Book

http://twitpic.com/5k8mj

@OReillyMedia

7,340

3,640

2073

O'Reilly,
RT, New, Book

http://twitpic.com/5k8l2

@ThomasNelson

678

834

182

Announced,
List, Best, Times

http://twitpic.com/5k8g8

@TinHouseBooks

892

162

58

Forgot,
New, Tin, Books

http://twitpic.com/5k8c7

@TorBooks

3,995

2,056

1525

Post,
Tor, Blog , New

http://twitpic.com/5k89z

@VintageAnchor

1,643

1,278

237

RT,
Tonight, Book, New

http://twitpic.com/5k86u

@VintageBooks

783

448

348

Vintage,
Book, Read, Books

http://twitpic.com/5k84j

@WorkmanPub

1,485

562

174

RT,
Book, Great, Books

http://twitpic.com/5k80s

All Publishers(avg)

2,312

1,502

  694

http://twitpic.com/5k9p4

I am thinking of making this a quarterly scorecard for 2009. Before I do that, are there meaningful and obtainable measures you would like to see added to the scorecard? What are the real measures: Sales increases? Information disseminated more efficiently and targeted? Increasing the feeling of community? What elements do you think should be measured in a Twitter Scorecard? Finally, if you are a publisher using Twitter and want to be included in future scorecards, let me know. I am mikeh {at} oreilly {dot} com or @mikehatora on Twitter.

Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times:

Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times:

The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.

Amazon is positioning the iPhone app as a gap filler: nibble on book content while waiting at the airport, in line, at a restaurant, etc., but settle in for deep reading with the original Kindle (or, presumably, the printed edition). Toward that end, the Times says Amazon is using a bookmark feature that keeps a reader's spot as they switch devices.

Reaction to the Kindle iPhone App

I'll be adding to this list over the next few days as more coverage appears (I highly recommend following the real-time Kindle trend on Twitter). Please share additional links and your own Kindle/iPhone analysis through the comments area.

Hands on: Kindle for iPhone a great Kindle companion(Chris Foresman, Ars Technica)
Clicking on the "Get Books" button on the Home screen instructs users to got to Amazon's Kindle Store via a computer for "the best shopping experience." And they aren't kidding; while there is a link that will open the Kindle Store in MobileSafari, browsing and buying books this way is just plain frustrating. The Kindle's own integrated buying is far simpler in comparison. Apple presumably has this restriction in place so that developers don't abuse the App Store system, giving away free apps on Apple's dime and then selling content elsewhere. Perhaps Amazon can build an iPhone-browsable version of the Kindle Store and display it via an embedded browser, or better yet, perhaps Amazon and Apple can come to some sort of agreement to allow in-app purchasing.

First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone(Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD)
... it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon's servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does. It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone.

Kindle for iPhone Review(Perrin Stewart, 148Apps)
... it's worth having the app on your device for the access to Amazon's virtual library alone. In many cases, the pricing on Kindle versions of books are much cheaper than other ebook stores (compare the Kindle version of "The Graveyard Book" for $9.99 to the Fictionwise version which is $17.99 and the stand-alone iTunes store app which is $17.99, for instance), and they often have books that other stores do not.