GigaOM » Vintage

Is this the next “50 Shades of Grey”?

Laura Hazard Owen — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:15:38 +0000

This weekly feature tells the backstory of how one e-book became a bestseller, and highlights bestselling titles that are selling more copies in digital than in print.

This week’s featured title: ”Bared to You” by Sylvia Day. It’s #20 on the New York Times e-book bestsellers list this week and

What it’s about: The first in a trilogy, this erotic novel tells the story of a recent college grad, Eva, who meets billionaire businessman Gideon.

How it became a bestseller: Day self-published “Bared to You” on April 3, 2012. The book immediately invited comparisons to “50 Shades of Grey,” the originally self-published erotic trilogy that Random House’s Vintage acquired for seven figures in March and that has now sold over 10 million copies. Jane Litte, who runs the romance blog “Dear Author,” writes that “if I were to recommend any book today to readers who enjoyed 50 Shades and was looking for another book like it, this would be the first one I would offer. However, Bared to You is far better written with much hotter sex scenes.”

Like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” “Bared to You” has now found a traditional publisher: Penguin’s Berkley imprint snapped it up this month and has already released the e-book with a new, “50 Shades of Grey”-esque cover. (That’s Day’s original cover on the left and Penguin’s cover on the right.) Penguin will release a paperback edition on June 6. (Day writes a bit more about the Penguin acquisition here, and notes that Penguin’s ability to get the paperback into bricks-and-mortar bookstores was one of the main reasons she signed up with them.)

“Bared to You” is $5.99 on … Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo

New York Times bestseller list, week of 6/3/12

Here are the titles in the top-35 that appear on the e-book bestseller list, but not on the print bestseller list (click the link to expand the chart).

USA Today bestseller list, week of 5/24/12

USA Today includes all formats and genres in one list and notes which format of a book sold best. Here are the titles in the top-35 where e-books outsold print (click the link to expand the chart).

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Amazon will publish the James Bond books in the U.S.

Laura Hazard Owen — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 21:03:51 +0000

When the Ian Fleming estate gave up the digital rights to the James Bond backlist last month, Random House UK’s Vintage grabbed the English-language print and e-book rights everywhere outside the U.S. and Canada. Well, guess who’s getting those North American digital rights? Amazon.

Amazon announced today that it’s acquired a ten-year license for the North American rights to the print and digital James Bond backlist, as well as James Bond author Ian Fleming’s two nonfiction titles. All of the books will be reissued by Amazon Publishing’s mystery and thriller imprint, Thomas & Mercer, starting this summer.

“We believe that Amazon Publishing has the ability to place the books back at the heart of the Bond brand, balancing traditional publishing routes with new technologies and new ways of reaching our readers,” Ian Fleming Publications managing director Corinne Turner said in the release.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the Bond e-books “will be initially available only via Amazon’s Kindle e-book store.” That means that Barnes & Noble will likely refuse to carry the print books.

Penguin had held world English print rights to the books, but suggested to The Bookseller that renewing those rights was not worth the high cost. Amazon has repeatedly demonstrated that it will spend large sums of money on acquiring titles, but publishers likely did not suspect that the company was in the running for the James Bond books.

How big a deal is this?

The James Bond books have sold 100 million copies worldwide. Of the 16 titles that Amazon is acquiring, the “newest,” Octopussy and the Living Daylights, was published in 1966. Daniel Craig appears in a new Bond movie, “Skyfall,” this autumn — it is the twenty-third Bond film and is not based on a Fleming title.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s when the books were released, they were only semi-hits in the U.S. The movies have been much more popular here; they’ve grossed a little over $5 billion. This is to say that “James Bond” is a very recognizable brand — and a symbolic win for Amazon, at what was likely a very high price — but that does not necessarily translate into huge book sales in 2012.

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Two Vintage Movie Making Apps Vie for an Audience

Darrell Etherington — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:30:00 +0000

Apple is finally bringing AirPlay to home movies shot on the iPhone or iPod touch in iOS 4.3, which got me thinking that when it does arrive, I’d like to have some actual videos to show friends and family using the feature. Home movies tend not to be too thrilling, but a couple of new apps promise to at least make them visually interesting.

8mm Vintage Camera and Super 8 aim to do for iPhone video what Hipstamatic and Instagram did for iPhone photography. Both apps let you use filters to give video shot using your iPhone’s camera a retro look, but they go about it in different ways. 8mm applies the filter as you shoot, providing a live preview of how the end product will look while filming. Super 8 lets you film first, and then lets you choose which filters and effects to apply after the fact. Which will I use to document my excesses then share with friends and family? Let’s find out.

User Interface

Both apps feature a user interface in keeping with the concept behind their purpose, meaning they mimic the lock of old-school camera hardware. It’s cute, but it isn’t ideal from a UX perspective. While the built-in camera app features very little beyond a nearly full-screen preview of what your video will look like, both Super 8 and 8mm cut down considerably on how much of the screen is devoted to showing what you’re recording. At first glance, Super 8 seems to offer only a tiny viewfinder, but when you hold down the record button, the view expands to mostly fill the screen. Compared to Super 8, 8mm displays less of the video while actually recording, but it has to accommodate a variety of onscreen controls you can make use of while recording. Of the two, I prefer 8mm despite its smaller preview screen, since it doesn’t require you to hold the record button down to capture video.

Features

Speaking of those onscreen controls, they make for much more on-the-fly creative play from 8mm. You can switch lenses or film while recording with 8mm, and add authentic-looking frame jitter. The end result might not always work out with such a range of experimentation abilities, but it’s a lot more fun than Super 8, which just lets you record without the opportunity to add or change effects until you’ve finished recording.

Once you’re done recording, 8mm has basically done its job. You can share your videos via email or YouTube, or save them to your iPhone’s camera roll. Super 8, on the other hand, is just getting started. The edit suite is where you apply your vintage effects. You can choose from Light, Medium or Heavy effects, and adjust the color filter of your video from cool to warm using a slider. Hit the Process button, and Super 8 outputs the resulting video to your camera roll, while preserving the original unedited.

8mm offers more customizability, and Super 8 only lets you record snippets of up to 20 seconds at a time. I wish 8mm had an option to change or apply effects post-recording, and I wish both apps could import video already recorded to add effects after the fact, but I still think it offers the better feature suite overall.

Results

For my money, 8mm does the better job of delivering an awesome finished project with very little effort. I’ll let you check out the videos below, though, and judge for yourself.

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

Conclusion

At $1.99 for 8mm Vintage Camera, and $0.99 for Super 8, neither app is going to break the bank. But for my money, 8mm is hands-down the best buy in this category. The lack of a limit on the length of your video, the ability to switch and experiment on the fly, and the look of the final product put it well ahead of Super 8.

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