Digital Publishing | Dax on Data

Okay, so this isn’t web related, but it’s important enough to put it out there.

Working for a book publisher and owning an iPod and liking audio books means I want audio books on my iPod. Thomas Nelson has many audio book products (fiction, nonfiction, bibles, gift books, Spanish). If I don’t buy audio books off iTunes or Audible, then I have to import them from MP3 CDs or audio CDs. The problem with iTunes is that Apple didn’t really consider the process of importing audio books. Instead, iTunes treats any audio file like a music file unless it has an M4B extension (as of iTunes 7.6 and earlier versions). M4B is Apple’s audio book file format.

What You Really Need to Know: If you change the extension of any AAC file (mp4 or m4a) to M4B and add the files to your iTunes library, it automatically applies its audio book features to the file. There is no special encoding to the file needed. Continue reading “Importing Audio Books into Your iPod”

I cannot authoritatively speak for all of us, but from what I have seen, we in the print publication industries find it hard to include digital products in our business. But I think it’d be no surprise to all of us that if we don’t consider publishing more digital products in the near future, our business will be on track for exinction.

But I want to take the concept farther. If we don’t intricately integrate digital publishing into our publishing process and product concepts, we will eventually fail in the dust of other publishers who do. And I’m not looking 10 years down the line as we may naturally feel it is. It’s much, much closer.

I’d like to give some basics to be sure we are on the same page. When I speak about digital publishing, I’m not talking about creating a book or magazine in Adobe InDesign or Quark and then having it printed out. I’m talking about two general concepts. Continue reading “We Are Media”