[YADS] Ourboox

epublishabook · May 15, 2014

Old Hack said:
If you aren't willing to reveal your business model, how can you reasonably ask people to sign up to your services?

Our business model will be implemented in stages, as technology development allows.

Currently, our services are limited to those of a display site with a dedicated e-reader enabling sharing the url of the sample chapters or book for online reading, with no download required.

So we intend to begin as a display site, with the dedicated e-reader and the ability to create books just for fun to demarcate Ourboox from all the other display sites out there.

Gravity · May 15, 2014

Okay, non-buying public then. Either way, for now I'll pass.

Deleted member 42 · May 15, 2014

epublishabook said:
Our revised plan is to provide a platform where both serious writers and amateur writers - and by this, we mean people who just want to write for fun, not writers who did not succeed - have a place.
We will now work on seriously restructuring the website so as to provide a clear demarcation line between "books for fun", sample chapters and real books.

Again, please re-think.

You've described many, many sites, often with "built-in" ereaders (this is not a plus, by the way).

Differentiating books for funk, sample chapters, and real books is not really that big a deal; it's a metadata thing. It's trivial.

How are you different from Smashwords, or Wattpad or any number of upload-and-publish-your-book site?

Think about this. Look at the competition. What's working? What isn't Find your niche. The more niche-driven a content site it, the better it will thrive.

epublishabook · Jun 1, 2014

Ourboox just added the possibility of including a link to your book's selling point to your book free sample chapters, this icon will appear next to the sample chapter and remain visible while reading the sample, making it easy to switch from "tasting' to buying.

Here is what it looks like, as shown with the samples of one of the first writers to use that feature (by the way, it's one of my favorite series ever, Martin Ash got in touch with me after I left a glorious review on his book on Amazon, so read the sample, you might be enchanted...) so that you can see what it looks like

Notice the 3 arrows? These have been added here to give a better idea of what this promotion tools does and are not visible on the website.

Look at the "Sell your book" arrow : It points to the "Buy the book" button at the left bottom corner links to your book selling point. It remains visible whilst the reader scrolls through your free sample chapters, increasing the odds of leading the interested reader to buy your book.
The "Share sample chapters" arrow points to the social media sharing options, meaning that a reader can share your free sample chapters with friends and family, and sample chapters have their own URLs that can be used in all promotional material you use to enable people to read a sample of your book. There is no registration required from readers, so a single click leads them straight to your sample chapters. (Note: when sharing on Facebook, the book cover is displayed with the first lines of the book description, we are working on doing the same for Twitter, or at least the book cover).
The get started arrow points to the "Create your own book now!" option, from where you can sign up or simply sign up here and follow instructions.
The author's profile on the left also remains visible throughout the reading process, increasing author's name recognition.

The mobile version for e- reading is still not perfect but is being improved as we write.
Improvement will apply to all sample chapters already uploaded, so no need to come back later to edit, though editing can be done at all time.

Does this give a better Idea of what we are heading to?
There are amny changes in the pipline, the homepage and library are soon to be completely revamped, but i thought this would give a better idea of our direction. As they say, "Show, don't tell!"

Old Hack · Jun 1, 2014

epublishabook said:
Ourboox just added the possibility of including a link to your book's selling point to your book free sample chapters, this icon will appear next to the sample chapter and remain visible while reading the sample, making it easy to switch from "tasting' to buying.

How many unique visitors does your site receive per day and per week? And how many of them click through to those buying links?

Here is what it looks like, as shown with the samples of one of the first writers to use that feature (by the way, it's one of my favorite series ever, Martin Ash got in touch with me after I left a glorious review on his book on Amazon, so read the sample, you might be enchanted...) so that you can see what it looks like

This is what it looks like to me:

1,070px × 458px

We have a maximum image size of 400px x 400px at AbsoluteWrite. Please either resize or delete that image, thanks.

Look at the "Sell your book" arrow : It points to the "Buy the book" button at the left bottom corner links to your book selling point. It remains visible whilst the reader scrolls through your free sample chapters, increasing the odds of leading the interested reader to buy your book.
The "Share sample chapters" arrow points to the social media sharing options, meaning that a reader can share your free sample chapters with friends and family,

If those "share" buttons allow people to effectively paste sections of books up on Facebook etc then that's a worry. I wouldn't want my work being copied in places I didn't know about, without my permission.

and sample chapters have their own URLs that can be used in all promotional material you use to enable people to read a sample of your book. There is no registration required from readers, so a single click leads them straight to your sample chapters.

So anyone can share the books on Facebook etc., and have not agreed to any terms of service which limit or control the use they put that work to. Blimey. That's really not safe.

The mobile version for e- reading is still not perfect but is being improved as we write.
Improvement will apply to all sample chapters already uploaded, so no need to come back later to edit, though editing can be done at all time.

If the people who signed up before you introduced this new feature of your site did not agree to their works being shared in this way, you might well be committing a copyright infringement by allowing it. Especially as it seems you're not giving them the choice to opt out. Have you notified everyone who has posted work on your site of this change, and of the implications it holds for their copyright?

Does this give a better Idea of what we are heading to?

Yes. It makes me even more convinced that your service is not of benefit to me.

There are amny changes in the pipline, the homepage and library are soon to be completely revamped, but i thought this would give a better idea of our direction. As they say, "Show, don't tell!"

Indeed.

epublishabook · Jun 1, 2014

Old Hack said:
How many unique visitors does your site receive per day and per week? And how many of them click through to those buying links?

Again, we are starting, and the number of visits varies also according to wether the author uses the sample chapters as promotional material

Old Hack said:
We have a maximum image size of 400px x 400px at AbsoluteWrite. Please either resize or delete that image, thanks.

Thank you, I resixed the image

Old Hack said:
If those "share" buttons allow people to effectively paste sections of books up on Facebook etc then that's a worry. I wouldn't want my work being copied in places I didn't know about, without my permission.

There is no option to copy/paste the text, only to read it online. You can try and copy/paste, it does not select text to be copied.

Old Hack said:
If the people who signed up before you introduced this new feature of your site did not agree to their works being shared in this way, you might well be committing a copyright infringement by allowing it. Especially as it seems you're not giving them the choice to opt out. Have you notified everyone who has posted work on your site of this change, and of the implications it holds for their copyright?

There has been no change, all books and/or samples on Ourboox have always been meant to be shared, we simply switch the platform priority from promoting collaboration between writers and illustrators to providing free promotion tool for writers.

veinglory · Jun 1, 2014

It is normal for a display site to link to point of sale and do social media stuff. The main metric here is traffic, specifically traffic that leaves through the buy link. This is because most DSs fail to get traffic other from other authors. Amazon itself is already a great display site with fully integrated purchase. So you need to offer more than they do in some way.

veinglory · Jun 1, 2014

I am curious, I don't see a policy about erotica on the site?

Deleted member 42 · Jun 1, 2014

veinglory said:
Amazon itself is already a great display site with fully integrated purchase. So you need to offer more than they do in some way.

This is key; it really is (emphasis mine).

Torgo · Jun 1, 2014

epublishabook said:
There is no option to copy/paste the text, only to read it online. You can try and copy/paste, it does not select text to be copied.

Just on that: Wattpad, for example, do this - there's some kind of Javascript running to prevent you from right-clicking and saving selected text. But the kids on the site quite quickly worked out that if you turn off JS it gives you control back.

I'm not saying this is a terrible thing - I'm not sure it has a measurable negative impact on people who post things on Wattpad - but it's worth realising that if you post words on a screen, people will find ways to copy it, no matter what the technical measure applied might be,

epublishabook · Jun 1, 2014

Medievalist said:
This is key; it really is (emphasis mine).

We are working on that, but Rome was not built in one day...

Torgo said:
Just on that: Wattpad, for example, do this - there's some kind of Javascript running to prevent you from right-clicking and saving selected text. But the kids on the site quite quickly worked out that if you turn off JS it gives you control back.

I'm not saying this is a terrible thing - I'm not sure it has a measurable negative impact on people who post things on Wattpad - but it's worth realising that if you post words on a screen, people will find ways to copy it, no matter what the technical measure applied might be,

Indeed, Our programmer is fully aware of the problem and implementing security measures. However, just google "cracking DRM" and you will find a wealth of sources explaining how to break through major DRMs systems.
There will always be someone to crack the code. so yes, there is a risk that someone will be able to do so. However, the monetary gain they might obtain from copying material that is already free on line to start with is negligible to nil, so the incentive to do so is as well.
Unfortunately, the only way to be entirely safe from being copied online is to stick to paper, and even then, someone mighr scan the paper...

Terie · Jun 1, 2014

epublishabook said:
However, the monetary gain they might obtain from copying material that is already free on line to start with is negligible to nil, so the incentive to do so is as well.

A friend of mine designs knitting patterns. She created a freebie to celebrate an anniversary. Within days, people in countries that aren't signatories to the Berne Conventions had copied her free pattern and were selling it.

The fact that you dismiss such a concern so easily is...concerning. With nearly post you make here, you exhibit more ignorance about how publishing -- in all its aspects -- works. All the issues that have been brought up here are issues you should have understood thoroughly and addressed in your business plan long before taking your product to the public.

epublishabook · Jun 1, 2014

Terie said:
A friend of mine designs knitting patterns. She created a freebie to celebrate an anniversary. Within days, people in countries that aren't signatories to the Berne Conventions had copied her free pattern and were selling it.

The fact that you dismiss such a concern so easily is...concerning. With nearly post you make here, you exhibit more ignorance about how publishing -- in all its aspects -- works. All the issues that have been brought up here are issues you should have understood thoroughly and addressed in your business plan long before taking your product to the public.

On one hand, I do not underrstand how you are comparing the piracy of a pattern, given in its entirety, and that of sample chapters that are a small part of a full work.
On the other handhere is a huge difference between "dismissing such a concern easily" and admitting that there is no 100% safe way to publish anything online.
If you do have a look at the music and the movie industry, all the copyright laws and terms and conditions major music publishers had did not prevent massive piracy of music sources resulting, following massive financial losses for publishers and musicians alike, in revenue share agreements with youtube and other such channels to mitigate the damage resulting from piracy.
Piracy is indeed a problem, we are barring access to copying material but cannot pretend to provide a 100% protection. If we were, you would indeed be right to dismiss our claim as frivolous, since even giants like Amazon are experiencing some level of piracy.

kborsden · Jun 1, 2014

epublishabook said:
On one hand, I do not underrstand how you are comparing the piracy of a pattern, given in its entirety, and that of sample chapters that are a small part of a full work.

On the other handhere is a huge difference between "dismissing such a concern easily" and admitting that there is no 100% safe way to publish anything online.

It's true that there is never any guarantee and no way to 100% safeguard against IP theft online, or with regards to digital formats. I've stumbled across my own poetry supposedly as someone else's work, work previously published in online journals or that's been locked away on this forum's critique section behind a password protected sub-forum.

At the same time, what's to stop someone from downloading a kindle book, converting to epub with a program like calibre, disassembling and editing the xhtml -- complete product stolen and re-attributed in 15 minutes or less?

Thing is, everything is open to some form of piracy, and there will always be someone with the skills to make it happen... my question on this point is then, how difficult will you make it? At least Amazon have a patented file format complete with low-level encryption, what's your alternative/equivalent?

Java script to prevent r-clicking is pointless when all the savvy needs to do is 'view source'. Having the content hosted somewhere unreachable and presented as content via an on-page plug-in will obfuscate most of what is viewable in browser and behind, but how skilled is your team of devs? What's the base line of the technologies you intend for this and how far can you see this going (the continued effort and cost of development for example) without buy-in at this stage?

With regards to just content sharing for visibility, there are already services available (see my sig for an example of one), most will use flash objects or similar embedded objects to present the work professionally and relatively securely, and many are high scorers on Google and interface with social network sites. You'd need the same level of integration with your platform to make it worth while... is this also part of your model at current or future? I spent a lot of time voluntarily building something similar for WAMM, a flash flip-book for content previews instead of bulk pasting chapters into pages as bare html... they didn't go with it in the end because of the relative size and number of the files they'd have to host vs. doing so alongside hosting the actual files to purchase. What form will your content previews take?

I'm not jumping on any 'anti-your-idea' bandwagon here, I'm genuinely interested in what your approach is.

Torgo · Jun 2, 2014

Terie said:
The fact that you dismiss such a concern so easily is...concerning. With nearly post you make here, you exhibit more ignorance about how publishing -- in all its aspects -- works. All the issues that have been brought up here are issues you should have understood thoroughly and addressed in your business plan long before taking your product to the public.

To be honest, Terie, I'm not sure there is a way to address things like this. If it's published, however it's published, it can be nicked, and nicked quite easily. Your options as a business are limited to (a) enforcement after the fact - DMCA takedowns etc - or (b) trying not to worry about it. (And I speak as someone who's being doing digital publishing for years now.)

You could probably set it up so that the text comes through as a flat image in some kind of Flash wrapper, but the problem then is device compatibility and legibility, etc.

Terie · Jun 2, 2014

epublishabook said:
On one hand, I do not underrstand how you are comparing the piracy of a pattern, given in its entirety, and that of sample chapters that are a small part of a full work.
On the other handhere is a huge difference between "dismissing such a concern easily" and admitting that there is no 100% safe way to publish anything online.

My comment was strictly limited to the part of your post that I quoted...where you said:

epublishabook said:
However, the monetary gain they might obtain from copying material that is already free on line to start with is negligible to nil, so the incentive to do so is as well.

I merely pointed out that the copying and selling of material that is already free online to start with is not negligible; in point of fact, it happens a lot.

There's a vast difference between saying, 'We're concerned about piracy and do what we can, although pirates seldom steal snippets of work' and what you actually said, which was (to quote a third time) '...the monetary gain from copying material that is already free on line to start with is negligible to nil, so the incentive to do so is as well'.

Torgo said:
To be honest, Terie, I'm not sure there is a way to address things like this.

Yeah, I know. As I explained above, my point was that it does happen, which epublishabook dismissed as 'negligible to nil'. Further, since it does happen, the incentive to do so is hardly also 'negligible to nil'.

epublishabook · Jun 2, 2014

kborsden said:
With regards to just content sharing for visibility, there are already services available (see my sig for an example of one), most will use flash objects or similar embedded objects to present the work professionally and relatively securely, and many are high scorers on Google and interface with social network sites. You'd need the same level of integration with your platform to make it worth while... is this also part of your model at current or future? I spent a lot of time voluntarily building something similar for WAMM, a flash flip-book for content previews instead of bulk pasting chapters into pages as bare html... they didn't go with it in the end because of the relative size and number of the files they'd have to host vs. doing so alongside hosting the actual files to purchase. What form will your content previews take?

I'm not jumping on any 'anti-your-idea' bandwagon here, I'm genuinely interested in what your approach is.

I will not pretend to reach even a fraction of your level of understanding, of these technical issues. So, having talked with our programmer, he suggests you contact him directly. I am sending you his email by PM.

veinglory · Jun 2, 2014

Still hoping to here about whether you list erotica.

Deleted member 42 · Jun 2, 2014

Torgo said:
To be honest, Terie, I'm not sure there is a way to address things like this. If it's published, however it's published, it can be nicked, and nicked quite easily. Your options as a business are limited to (a) enforcement after the fact - DMCA takedowns etc - or (b) trying not to worry about it. (And I speak as someone who's being doing digital publishing for years now.)

Torgo is absolutely right.

There's no percentage in this; Apple is the only one without easily crackable-in-seconds DRM, and that has been cracked in the past and will likely be cracked in the future.

There are options like unique identifiers in a file, tied to a user, but even those are easily circumvented.

[YADS] Ourboox

epublishabook

Gravity

Seen 'em come, seen 'em go

Deleted member 42

epublishabook

Old Hack

Such a nasty woman

epublishabook

veinglory

volitare nequeo

veinglory

volitare nequeo

Deleted member 42

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.

epublishabook

Terie

Writer is as Writer does

epublishabook

kborsden

Has a few recurring issues

Torgo

Formerly Phantom of Krankor.

Terie

Writer is as Writer does

epublishabook

veinglory

volitare nequeo

Deleted member 42