Free apps are winning over paid downloads.  In 2011, 96% of smartphone apps were downloaded for free. A recent report states:

Today’s smartphone users are increasingly unenthusiastic about paying for mobile applications. Consumers are closing their wallets at app stores, preferring free app downloads instead.

As revenue goes, that’s the bad news for today’s apps.

Now the good news.

IHS Screen Digest suggests in-app purchases will become the new standard for mobile app revenues. The freemium model, proven successful by gaming companies that charge users for accessing new tiers of content, involves consumers downloading an app for free, then being drawn to make purchases within the app. IHS projects that in-app purchases will account for 64% of total smartphone app revenue in 2015, up from 39% in 2011.

But Trapdoor Technologies goes one step better.

Trapdoor Technologies has embraced this ‘freemium’ model with their first entry in this market with my techno-thriller Cyberkill. The download of the full version advertising supported enhanced ebook app is entirely free.  All enhance content is included. Nothing is left out.

The reader can turn off the ads in the ebook at any time by doing an in-app purchase.

Pretty cool, huh?

One scene in Cyberkill, describes an AMTRAC train being deliberately sabotaged by hackers hacking into the AMTRAC system leading to hundreds of death. I won’t spoil it here by describing the scene. You’ll have to read the book to find out.

At any rate, just the other day hackers, possibly from abroad, executed an attack on a Northwest rail company’s computers that disrupted railway signals for two days in December, according to the TSA.

On Dec. 1, train service on the unnamed railroad “was slowed for a short while” and rail schedules were delayed about 15 minutes after the interference, stated a Transportation Security Administration summary of a Dec. 20 meeting about the episode obtained by Nextgov. The following day, shortly before rush hour, a “second event occurred” that did not affect schedules, TSA officials added.

“Amtrak and the freight rails needed to have context regarding their information technical centers,” the memo stated. “Cyberattacks were not a major concern to most rail operators” at the time, adding, “the conclusion that rail was affect [sic] by a cyberattack is very serious.”

Grab a copy of CyberKill (print, digital, enhanced ebook app) and see what other possibilities speculated in my book are on the horizon.

As I said in my first post, publishers claim that their rejections are not necessarily based on value judgments.  But it makes you wonder. How did they arrive at the decision to turn down these famous pieces of work?

Margaret Mitchell received “that” letter 38 times. The book? Gone With The Wind.

James Joyce’s Dubliners was rejected 22 times! And even after it was published, only 379 copies were sold in its first year. To make matters worse, Mr. Joyce admitted that he purchased 120 of those copies himself.

So here are some additional rejections of famous works.

“A very bad book.” Told to Pierre Boulle about his “Bridge Over River Kwai”

“The book is not publishable.’ regarding – “Who Killed Viriginia Wolfe?”

“…too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling” told to Dr. Seuss, about his book And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street.

“This is a work of almost-genius – genius in the power of its expression – almost in the sense of its enormous bitterness. I wish there were an audience for a book of this kind. But there isn’t. It won’t sell.” told to Ayn Rand about her book The Fountainhead

“Jonathan Livingston Seagull will never make it as a paperback” the book written by Richard Bach ended up selling more than 8 million copies.

“…she is a painfully dull, inept, clumsy, undisciplined, rambling and thoroughly amateurish writer whose every sentence, paragraph and scene cries for the hand of a pro. She wastes endless pages on utter trivia, writes wide-eyed romantic scenes …hauls out every terrible show biz cliché in all the books, lets every good scene fall apart in endless talk and allows her book to ramble aimlessly …” The author was Jacqueline Susann and the book was “Valley of the Dolls”

“An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would “take”…I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book’.” This was written about The War of The Worlds by H.G. Wells. Here is another wonderful critique Mr. Wells received about The Time Machine; “It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader.”

“It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish it.” Was in the rejection letter that Ernest Hemingway received regarding his novel “The Torrents of Spring”

“an absurd and uninteresting fantasy,” regarding Lord of the Flies

And probably the most ironic rejection is:

“You’d have a decent book if you’d get rid of that Gatsby Character.” told to F. Scott Fitzgerald.

So stick with it. Maybe one day you can flaunt their rejection letters when your book hits the bestseller list.

I ran across an article in Wired Magazine that disproves that ‘reality’. It seems some very noted authors of some very popular books have proven otherwise.

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in less than a week. He burned the first draft when his ego was bruised by his wife’s critique.

When Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451, he had to rent a typewriter at the UCLA library at 10 cents a minute. The ticking meter spurred him to write this classic in nine frantic days.

Georges Simenon churned out each of his 75 Inspector Maigret novels in less than two weeks.

And Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, wrote the popular droog novel in less than three weeks.

Oh, and if you think such feats are performed by only the well-known classic authors, think again. Sara Gruen, inspired by the National Novel Writing Month, pounded out 50,000 words in 30 days. Gruen produced a first draft of her novel in just four weeks.

That book? Water for Elephants, a number-one best seller that became a hit movie.

So hit those keys and pound out the next best seller. It should only take a few weeks.

Right now, the e-book market is growing at over 10% per year. Meanwhile, the sale of paperbacks and hardcovers is dropping disproportionately. In fact, sales last month on hardcover books were down more than 40% from just the month before!
Now, there are reasons for this. Part of the problem has to do with the collapse of the Borders bookstore chain here in America. That might account for a drop of 25%. Another drop of 10% might be claimed because of the rise in sales of e-readers that people got for Christmas. But that means that there is still a substantial drop that doesn’t make sense—another 8%, more or less. What’s going on? I think that there may be people who are delaying hardback purchases in anticipation of buying e-readers. After all, why pay $25 for a hardcover when I plan to buy a Kindle and then get the electronic copy for $15 on Mother’s Day?

He may be right.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The first opinion states that enhanced ebooks with embedded video, sound and graphics, takes away from the enjoyment of the book because the enhanced ebook intrudes on the reader’s ability to imagine the story in his mind. The very popular Harry Potter books loved by children are used as a prime example.

This opinion states that any attempt to add greater dimensions to the Harry Potter story telling like the movies takes away from the imagination of the children. But that’s a false argument.

Sure, when a child reads a Harry Potter book, he or she congers up a vivid picture in their mind of the characters and environment in the book. Those critics hold that the movies made from those books somehow take away from that imagination process.

But if that were true, how do you account form the hundreds of millions of dollars each book in the series has generated as a movie? And most of the audience for these movies are the children that read the Harry Potter book.  The children enjoyed both versions of the story telling and it did little to take way their imagination of the story.

Of course, the professional handling of the book material by the movie studio did the story justice. As in anything creative – it has bee done well.

The second critique of enhanced ebooks comes from those that say the imbedded multimedia and extended material interrupts the reading experience. They claim, rightfully so, that the embedded video, audio and links to the Internet within the text interrupts the reading of the book. But Trapdoor Books has recognized this problem and placed its multimedia and outside links in what is called the ‘marginalia’ that sits along the outside column of the text. This marginalia can be totally turned off and the reader can read just text.

The third critique has nothing to do with the reading experience. It has to do with economics — the cost of producing enhanced ebooks. This is a valid critique. It does cost more to produce an enhanced book. Thus the retail cost of the ebook is higher than the traditional ebook.

But Trapdoor Books has found a solution to that. Their enhanced books are FREE. They are advertising supported and that revenue pays for the production of the ebook.

So, Trapdoor Books has found the way to meet the objections of the enhanced book skeptics.

One theory is that the closer they come to looking uncannily like humans the close they come to falling into the ‘Uncanny Valley’. At least, that’s the concept coined by Robotics Master Masahiro Mori.

Wired magazine did a large portion of their current issue on the Uncanny Valley.

In 1970, Mori, then a 43-year-old robotics researcher at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, published his now famous work not in a science journal but in an obscure Japanese periodical called Energy, owned by the oil company Esso. (That’s EXXON now for you younger folk) “It was an advertorial magazine,” he says. In that article, Mori envisioned a time when robots would become so sophisticated that they would look almost exactly like humans. But that “almost” was a problem. Whatever else those future bots might prove to be, he said, one thing was certain: They would strike us as monstrous. Mori created a chart describing how our degree of identification and empathy with inanimate objects increases as their appearance approaches our own. But at a certain level of near-humanness, our affinity falls off a cliff. Mori dubbed this the Uncanny Valley.

In short, Mori noticed that people presented with likenesses of increasing realism respond with increasing empathy, right up to the point where the likenesses are almost real. At that point, people are repulsed. When asked if there was a way to bridge the valley he replied, “Yes, but why try? I think it’s better to design things like Honda’s ASIMO, which stops right before it gets to be uncanny.”

When you are in the presence of ASIMO, it dawns on you that it’s not as tall as an average human but about two-thirds the size–the height of an average child.

Pretty uncanny of those Japanese – huh?

The Uncanny Valley has also been blamed for the box-office failure of movies like Beowulf and Final Fantasy. Perhaps almost-real humans look a bit too much like corpses for our comfort.

Can you think of other movies whose characters give you the creep crawlies?

Correction – Date Change for Interview – Same Time – New Date

CALLING ALL THRILLER AND CONTEMPORARY FICTION READERS and AUTHOR. 

I will be interviewed by JoAnne Vandermeulen to discuss my enhanced digital book CYBERKILL – the future of electronic publishing.

When: Monday – 3:30pm PST – December 6th

To Listen: http://bit.ly/sRn6i4

Guest call-in number: (347) 857-3752

Chat Link:  http://bit.ly/26Xy0A  (Must be registered with BTR)

To catch the recording: http://www.joconquerall.com

His conclusion?

Print books are NOT going away. As a matter of fact, we’ll soon be neck deep in them.

Why? How? Three little letters – POD (print-on-demand).

Did you know that the percent increase of POD and self-published books from 2009 to 2010 boomed to 169% – hitting a stunning 2.8 million unique titles! No wonder a new author has an almost impossible task of breaking through the clutter.

Anyway, back to Thompson.

Print-on-demand devices, like the Espresso Book Machine, do just what their name implies: You feed them a digital file and in minutes you have a good-looking paperback with a color cover. (Print-on-demand companies like Lulu or Blurb even produce hardcover and photo books.)

Mass publishers doing “big” books will continue to shift to the Kindle and its peers, while smaller outlets will use print-on-demand for formats that privilege physicality, like mementos, visually lush books, and custom-designed, limited-edition copies of novels. This trend will accelerate in 15 or 20 years, when, as some observers predict, your average home printer will be able to spit out paperbacks. “I see this fundamentally as a tabletop medium. It’s the photocopier of the future,” says Rick Anderson, a librarian who runs an Espresso machine at the University of Utah.

The fate of print books? We may soon be neck deep in them.