Notable Bookish/Techy News, Links and Tweets: (you know - a roundup)

Kat Meyer
July 30, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Such a week. The prevailing theme this week was low, low prices! Yes, in a flurry of well-placed PR, Amazon took the e-reader pricing wars to new lows. Read all about it here.

Also newsy, but receiving considerably less fanfare (or, at least far fewer national talk show appearances), SkyRiver filed an anti-trust suit against Online Computer Library Center.

Some of my favorite blog posts this week:

Delusions, Illusions, and the True Costs of Digital Publishing by Kent Anderson at the Scholarly Kitchen:

Why I recommend it: It's about time we started acknowledging that digital does not equal cheap and/or easy, and in this post, Kent Anderson does a very nice job of explaining why.

Just this year, Clay Shirky invoked the "marginal cost" argument in his most recent book, "Cognitive Surplus," stating that, "Information can now be made globally available, in an unlimited number of perfect copies, at zero marginal cost."

However, for those of us inside the belly of the beast, just the opposite seems to be happening. That is, digital publishing seems to be getting more expensive while we wring costs out of print as we draw it down.

Vending Machine Library Hits the Spot by Joanne Chianello, The Ottawa Citizen

Leave it to the Canadians (why are they so darned cool?) to come up with something charmingly hip, yet undeniably good for the world -- library vending machines!

These library kiosks -- there are two of them in the foyer of the Hunt Club-Riverside Community Centre -- are the first of their kind in Canada. They work just like regular vending machines, except that users swipe their Ottawa library cards instead of inserting coins into the machine. And instead of buying a pack of gum, the user is borrowing a library book or DVD. The printed receipt tells the library customer when the item is due back.

At last count, almost 1,700 items have been checked out since the program began in April. One machine stocks children's materials, while the other offers items for teens and adults in both English and French. The selections are chosen by library staff from the most popular, in-demand titles. Between the two kiosks is a return bin, where residents can bring back not just items that they borrowed from the kiosks, but from any library in the city.

It's been such a hit, says Councillor Maria McRae, that she once saw a little boy hugging the machine.

Kickstartup: Successful fundraising with Kickstarter.com
& (re)making Art Space Tokyo
by Craig Mod.

Herein, Craig provides a very thorough reporting of how he used Kickstarter.com to fund the reprinting (and digitization) of his OP book Art Space Tokyo. Read it and learn!

The Technology of Reading: A Long View (pts i and ii) by Sheila Bounford, Off The Page.

Sheila has been doing some history reading, and connecting a lot of dots between publishing of the very distant past, and publishing in the here and now.
 

The technologies of reading and publishing have entwined and evolved since writing was first invented - often in response to the available resources and the cultural pressures in play as societies have changed. So over the next few days I'm planning a sequence of short posts on some of "eureka" moments I've experienced while reading the book.

Also of Note:

Jeff Bezos, Charlie Rose & a $139 Kindle: eBookNewser Live Blog by Jason Boog, eBookNewser

My favorite part of the Amazon news this week - it unseated Andrew Wylie as most over-discussed topic in publishing of late. Well, leave it to Jason Boog of eBookNewser to turn the tables on us with his live-blogging/tweeting of the Jeff Bezos/Charlie Rose interview.

Yes, Jason (who is surely the hardest-working man in publishing blogalism), faithfully live-tweeted the interview, dutifully reporting throughout the absence of Wylie mentions:

11:42 STILL NO MENTION OF WYLIE/AMAZON DEAL!!!!

11:44 Publishing journalist Sarah Weinman is still awake. "Favorite part of @ebooknewser liveblogging Bezos on Charlie Rose: 11:42 STILL NO MENTION OF WYLIE/AMAZON DEAL!!!!"
 
11:42 STILL NO MENTION OF WYLIE/AMAZON DEAL!!!!"

11:55: Show wraps. No mention of Wylie deals and very little attention focused on eBook pricing.

Doh!

And in wrapping, I offer you one Liza Daly (@Liza) with a few words of wisdom regarding Amazon and their real ace in the hole:

Metadata, Not E-Books, Can Save Publishing...

Nick Ruffilo
July 29, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

Metadata is king. I will repeat this as it is important. Metadata is king.

I need not go through the barrage of articles and statistics that show that publishing is in a minor state of panic. Revenues are down and until recently (past 1-2 years) many publishers were unsure how they should play with e-books (many are still not completely settled in their e-strategy). The reason that e-books will not save publishing is that all they are is another format. E-books will not revolutionize reading, nor will they change the content. I've seen some social reading projects (copia) but they are in beta and I cannot make a prediction if readers are willing to accept a completely new reading experience.

Some statistics:
* There are roughly 230MM adults in the US.
* US Literacy rate is 99% - leaving 227.7MM adults in the US who can read.
* 28% of US adults are avid (5+ hours/week) readers [Verso] - 64MM Avid reader
* 20% of book purchasing happened online [PW 2007] This has grown, but is still under 30% (have heard via word-of-mouth from some book stats people but cannot quote them).

Why won't e-books save publishing?
E-books represent a format, just like hardcovers and paperbacks. Because they are a different format, they require different pricing. Things that are consumed and priced differently do open themselves up to a new market but unless that new consumption method is revolutionary, the growth (new readers) to the market cannot be large. E-readers will never be purchased by non-readers in the hopes of becoming readers (until they reach an extremely cheap price-point). The iPad is one such device that can create new readers. Its conceivable that someone who would buy an iPad and is not a book buyer, but because they can do so while sitting in their La-Z-Boy, will buy a book. If they like that book, they may even buy another. Ok. Now re-read that last statement. "If they like that book, they may even buy another." If they don't like the book, their sentiment of "this is why I don't buy books" will be solidified. Another non-book-buyer remains a non-book-buyer.

According to the Wikipedia bestselling books chart Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code sold over 80 Million copies. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows sold at least 44 Million copies. Does that mean that nearly every avid reader bought the last Harry Potter book? Does that mean that every avid reader bought 1.25 copies of Da Vinci Code? No. It means that people who normally don't read books opened their wallets to buy and read a book. That means that 163 million non avid reader Americans are potential readers.

How to capture some of those 163 million and get avid readers to buy more.
Simple: Give them what they want and more of it. How do we do this? Metadata. It's that simple. Tech people love metadata. We eat it up and beg for more and build amazing utilities around it. In fact, Pandora is an amazing example of what metadata can do for music. But, a limiting factor of Pandora is their selection and their metadata gathering techniques (they have to do it manually). How does metadata sell? Let me start with an anecdote.

The book Paradox of Choice talks about how people tend to shut down when shown too many options. If you're a seasoned book buyer, when you walk into a bookstore (or are browsing Amazon or another online retailer) you know exactly where to go for bargain-bin books, where your favorite genre is located, and where the new releases section. If you're new to reading, a bookstore is extremely intimidating. Don't believe me? Go wander into an electronics expo, the car audio section of a Best Buy, or some sporting goods store (assuming you're not a tech-geek, car tinkerer, or sportsperson). You'll soon see that there are 14 different types of cables or gloves and all at different prices. How do you make your decision? Thankfully in those stores there are sales people who are trained to spot people like this and offer their help. Brick and mortar stores offer an information booth at best. Online you're left to your own devices...

Imagine you just finished reading a book. We'll take the Da Vinci Code. After putting it down you filled out a short survey which asked you what qualities you liked out of the book (lets call them tags). For me, I liked that it was a suspense novel, that it was a religious mystery, and that it took place in present day. Now, assume that this tag data was available for all books and that I could walk into a bookstore, hand them my little survey and they could show me 6 books. That would be much easier to chose from. In fact, if you showed me only 3 books, I may even buy all three. In the current environment, the best I could do was to buy more of Dan Brown's books (Author is the #1 reason why people buy books) and hope that he's written more than 1 book, or attempt to use the recommendation engines provided by online retailers. Recommendation engines are OK, but they are based on purchasing habits or in rare cases "those who liked also liked" which is fairly arbitrary and not nearly as good a predictor as metadata.

That is giving a user more of what they want. They read a book, extract from it what they liked and you give them books with similar qualities. Next is giving them what they want in the first place.

Giving a user what they want.
The best metadata we have in mass is category data. This data isn't exactly easy to wade through, but if you like romance, you can click on the "romance" category and see a list of books that are considered romance. For new readers, the amount of books within the romance category is daunting, plus what is "paranormal" and how do I know if I'll like it? Categories are also boxes that have connotations. Yes, books can live in multiple genres, but can a book have a vampire in it and not be a book about vampires? Can a book be a love story with an intimate scene without being romance? Tags help narrow down specific traits of a book. Some tags are already gathered but below are a list of tags I feel are important to gather:

• Page numbers (or word count). Its important for readers to know if this is a short read or long one.
• Time Period. (1990s, 1870s, future). Some people love historical fiction. Some people hate a specific time period.
• Categories. A category is a specific tag. But they don't live in hierarchies. A book can have the category tag "romance" and "vampires" independently. For non-fiction themes make great categories for example: "war" "history" "1900s" "war of 1912″
• Writing Style. Is this a 3-act play? Is this done in 3rd person or 1st person? Is this dialog heavy?
• Series. Is this part of a series? What number in the series? Is this an ordered series or just a collection of fiction built around a specific world?

I could go on and on with more data, but these are what I believe is the core. If every book had this data, you could essentially have an eharmony for books. You fill out a small profile of your likes and dislikes and now are shown a much smaller set of books to chose from. The best part of these selections is that there is a very good chance you'll like them. If you like a book, you're more likely to buy more books turning new readers into avid readers and avid readers into, well, hyper-avid readers.

To bring it all together, if you want to grow the market, you must do things better and in a new way. E-books aren't a new way to sell, just a new format to sell the same old books you've been selling for years. Make readers happy by providing them with the books they want.

About Nick Ruffilo: In 1998, Nick Ruffilo help to found CheatWorld.com and online video game cheats website that utilized early forms of metadata for recommendations. Afterward, he worked in helped to defining metadata standards for the financial industry from 2001-2008.

In 2008, he joined BookSwim and has worked to aggregate multiple sources of data as well as gather internal data to redefine the internal recommendation engine of BookSwim.

Book Publicity and Marketing: How Soon was Yesterday?

Kevin Smokler
July 28, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (14) | Listen

I spoke to a touring author last week who repeated this phrase about 9 times over a one hour coffee date.  "Everything's changed."

• She wasn't talking about digital pricing, vanishing review coverage, closing independent bookstores or KindlePadNookKobos (KPNK's) although I'm sure they had crossed her mind plenty. No, this afternoon she was a single-minded author/chief salesperson with a book to promote and a long road ahead staring immovably back at her. 

The "everything" therefore pressed up against her nose like store window. Around the publication of her last novel....

• There was still some debate over how much promotion authors did on their own vs. fulfilling marketing obligations set up by their publisher. That authors must promote, often on their own, is now an accepted reality.
  

• Authors promoted their books as long as their publicist worked on them, typically 3 months, longer if the book is a knockout success. Now, the time authors devote to book promotion, again often on their own, has increased dramatically. A year spent on events, conferences and festivals and maintaining a social media presence is no longer madly obsessive, but professionally responsible.

• Authors still wrestled over whether they should be using social media tools or not. Now authors debate not "whether" but "which." Is Twitter or Facebook or Blip.tv better for my promotional efforts? The answer is no longer "should I even bother?" 

• Marketing efforts were largely geared at review coverage or a guest spot in major media outlets. Those still matter but smaller media covering books has increased dramatically. The ubiquity of book-minded blogs, online radio stations, videocasts, and avid twitterers means an author can feel at once empowered ("There's always something I could be doing for my book!") and demoralized ("I will never be able to do enough.") 

Given that list, I figured it had been a solid 10 years since my author friend's last book. It had been 4. Her last novel hit shelves in 2006. 

With book marketing, everything has changed. We are now in the uncomfortable middle of not knowing what will work or what that even means. Does a successful marketing campaign mean increased sales (an effort that's "working" in the traditional sense) or does that ignore the intangible equity produced by social media and an author's raised profile? If an author has 50,000 twitter followers but can only sell 400 books, does that mean a) it's a lousy book b) the author is compelling but obnoxious c) those 50,000 followers mean nothing or d) publishers need to rethink their business model and value proposition if they can't convert someone who follows an author into someone who reads them? 

We don't know. An Uncomfortable Middle needs then to be a time of great fear leading to passionate experimentation. The genetically-quotable Clay Shirky put it best when he said "Nothing will work. Everything might." 

The "everything" Mr. Shirky refers to is a lot of little experiments which when tossed together may result in gumbo instead of sludge.

Is there a "what do to?" during the Uncomfortable Middle other than wait the experiments out? I've taken note of the following adjustments we as an industry can make right now.

• Education. Authors recognize they must promote their books themselves but don't know how or even where to begin. This means first a culture of openness and honesty must develop between publishers and authors, guided by a clarity of whom is responsible for what class of marketing efforts. Second, if publishers must spend limited time and resources on promoting a particular title, they owe it to the author to educate or at least pair them with the proper tools and materials on how to market for themselves.
  

• Conversation.  Smaller homegrown media makers enjoy hearing from authors, particularly in conversation with the author as fellow lover of literature and not simply a salesperson with soap flakes to push. Speaking personally and all other things being equal, I am more likely to recommend or buy the book of an author I find friendly and engaging on Twitter, in my favorite podcast, or at an informal live event. I am much less likely to do the same if I find the author wooden, standoffish, or seemingly uninterested in their readers attentions expect at high-priced, ticketed on-stage interviews. 

That doesn't mean that every author can or will be a sparkling conversationalist. But it is incumbent upon those that are to participate in the conversation; those that are less so to get over their shyness and simply be kind, generous people to their readers; and their publishers to loop proper reader/author interaction, in both real world and online setting, into the pre-pub process.

• Retention. We live in a loud, crowded world. It is far too easy for an author and their book to get lost if success depends too heavily on a single kind of media effort, on too limited a geographic reach, on too little time to get traction, on too much time spent in promoting to readers instead of in conversation with them. A hybrid model--live events, a social media presence, traditional media and conference appearances, publisher support--that empowers author to continue on after the traditional publicity window has closed seems the only logical way forward. 

Does that mean that publishers and authors will be working twice as hard to get half as much? Most likely. But we also need a larger definition of "much." If all marketing efforts--from lead title down to self-published author--are ultimately and only measured by sales, then we are tacitly saying that in fact nothing has changed, which we know isn't true. Naturally we shouldn't market books for our health. But perhaps there is another way to win, to have sales generate from deepening relationships with readers and books and authors a more consistent presence in the entertainment fabric of our lives. That's an "everything's changed" worth trying for.

About Kevin Smokler
Kevin Smokler is an author, journalist, speaker and entrepreneur. He's the editor of the anthology Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, June 2005), which was a San Francisco Chronicle notable book of 2005. His writing has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The LA Times, Fast Company, and on National Public Radio.
 
In 2007, Kevin Smokler founded with Chris Anderson (editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine) BookTour.com, a complete set of online tools to help authors promote their books at a reasonable price, and the world's largest online directory of author and literary events. Kevin now serves as the company's CEO, regularly speaking at publishing industry conferences and book festivals throughout North America. In April of 2008, Amazon purchased a minority stake in BookTour.com.

Four Short Links (and One Semi-Short Ramble)

Kat Meyer
July 23, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

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.

First up - a nice take from Kassia Krozser on news that is only a few days old, and is nowhere near being played out...The Wylie Affair. Yes, it appears an agent has gone and done a crazy out-there thing and licensed some digital rights. Okay, so the rights were exclusive to Amazon/Kindle, and the print publisher thereof seems to think that they own the rights to the rights in question, but the madness that has ensued has convinced me of one thing only: Andrew Wylie knows how to get media attention. All else, remains to be seen.

BookSquare's Kassia Krozser makes more salient observations, and more elegantly. If only to to witness Kassia's talent for taking a topic that has elsewhere devolved into pure snarky speculation, and present it with a cool calm collectiveness, you should go and read: Today in a Publishing War.

Next on the agenda, CNET's David Carnoy gets a shout out for asking the media to take a closer look at the Kindle emperor's new clothes in his post,  "What Amazon Didn't Say About e-books." Along with some nice factoids and numbers, Carnoy offers those who might be a bit quick to gobble up a well-polished press release some good advice, "remember who's trying to control the narrative here. Amazon has an agenda. It wants to sell e-books. And lots of them."

Do not miss a gem of an article over at The Atlantic wherein Peter Osnos examines the ever-"about-to-debut" Google Editions. What Is Google Editions? asks Osnos. And while for many of us who follow such things, a more pressing question might be, "When is Google Editions?"-- I have to give Osnos major props both for nicely breaking down the potential "what," and for capturing my favorite quote of the year from the American Booksellers Association's Len Vlahos: "Now you can buy e-books from someone you love." (And Len, I hope now happens soon because I heart my indies!)

So here's where I start coloring outside the "weekly roundup" lines even more. This next one is a bit of a nuisance as one must register to read it, but it's well worth it (and really, as a techish pubby you ought already to be registered at the MobileRead Forums). In the latest addition to a discussion about Spanish ebookstore consortium Libranda, "Logesman" sheds some light on how Libranda does (or does not) work. If you have not been following the Libranda launch, this is a good place to get some background. Also, I truly dig the title of the post, so go and check out: "Libranda: the Spanish Armada, or how NOT to sell eBooks."

My final offering also falls well outside the weekly publishing roundup lines (a. it's not from this week; and b. it's not about publishing, exactly), but I think I can make a case for you to read it anyway. It's Digital Trends' profile of the music site Pandora. 

"Pandora Breaks the Odds, Has Bright Future Ahead" might be a little on the puffy PR side, but there is much that authors, book sellers (online and off) and publishers can learn from the trials and errors of Pandora. Among what seems to be working: innovative ideas including sharing ad revenue directly with artists; offering exclusive content; and creating customized listening lists that continually improve based upon algorithms AND customer input. In fact, it looks like the user data being gathered by Pandora might prove to be more valuable to Pandora (and to the artists and ad companies with which Pandora works) then the ad or subscription revenue itself. My personal favorite takeaway: Pandora founder Tim Westergren's traveling town hall meetings - in person events that are making Pandora not just a radio station, but an In Real Life community that Pandora users seem to love being a part of. Just some food for thought bookish friends...just some food for thought.

See(k)ing Opportunities

Mark Nelson
July 14, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

As someone in the retail channel for physical books, it might be hard to believe that book retailers have much to offer publishers in the way of advice about digital. Indeed, many have already written the physical channel for books off as a quaint piece of history about to go the way of record stores and newspapers. That does not have to be the case. Most of us would not give up our light bulbs for candles, but candles do still have a place. So too, retailers (and in my case, collegiate retailers - i.e., college bookstores) have great opportunities to be the purveyors of light bulbs and candles, digital and print. That is also true for publishers and those opportunities are ours to win or lose as we approach the future. Those of us thinking about that future have spent a great deal of time scanning the environment and talking with our customers (who are also your customers), and some of our observations might prove useful to publishers as well as the channels they use.

Observation 1: You can learn things from books.

Yes, a bit obvious given this audience, but sometimes the best observations are hidden in plain sight. As a former faculty member with interest in how organizations respond to large-scale technology-based change, the pending transformation of publishing and related industries is fascinating. Of course, I turn to books to try to help understand the trends and changes we are observing. In this case, I am thinking specifically of a particular book - Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation by James Utterback (Harvard Business School Press, 1996). This book may perhaps seem dated by publication year, but few references are more relevant to the forces affecting our industry today. I will use some of the concepts from Utterback's book to frame some of my subsequent observations.

Observation 2: Seeing waves of innovation for what they are.

Utterback talks about innovation occurring in waves across phases. There are two key waves: product innovation and business model innovation. Typically, product innovation occurs first. A new product or technology innovation emerges. As the product matures, companies tend to replicate and expand on the core features that consumers like. To gain critical mass for adoption, as well as economies of scale for suppliers, we begin to see the emergence of standards, and ultimately what might be seen as the "dominant design" upon which the emerging technology or product category is based.

The second wave of innovation focuses on business model innovation. In other words, once we have a better sense of the emerging product or technology, what business models will make that technology commercially successful? This is the window of opportunity for traditional and new players in a market to seize upon an emerging technology and define the future channels. The battle at this point is about market share - gaining enough share of mind and market to direct standards, business models, and shape the new channel for the emerging product.

Observation 3: We see the shift from one wave to the next.

E-readers are converging on a pair of dominant designs: the e-ink, dedicated reader device represented by examples like the Kindle or the Sony Reader; and, multi-function devices, perhaps best represented at this moment by the Apple iPad, or comparable devices like the Entourage Edge or the Kno tablet. With each of these technologies we see migration toward a standard set of features that replicate or enhance the intended reading experience over print books. At the same time we are seeing movement toward standard formats for e-books, such as EPUB.

Over the past six to eight months in particular we have observed a shift away from companies talking about their devices, and instead talking more about their platforms. The companies are as interested (or sometimes more interested) in selling the content than selling the device. As a dominant design emerges among content formats and device capabilities, they tout device agnosticism and push their platform as the business model of choice for capturing the customer flag. We are seeing the late stages of early device wars, and the first volleys of the platform wars.

Observation 4: Sometimes it takes a long time for change to happen quickly.

The emergence of a dominant design is critical. Typically it precedes the rapid adoption of a technology by the early majority of consumers. This point is sometimes referred to as the "knee of the curve" or the point where compound exponential or geometric growth begins to produce real numbers. More importantly, it usually immediately precedes the definition, or redefinition, of the channel and signals to the market that there is a defined window of opportunity. In other words, if you see a window of opportunity spanning the next five years, you do not want to wait four years and 11 months to do something about it. If you do it will be too late and you will have lost all potential market share in the channel to someone else. It is this point in the emergence of e-readers and e-books that we are seeing today.

Publishers, as suppliers of content to emerging platforms, have immense opportunity at this point in time to drive future business models and define their future distribution channels. That opportunity is not on a limitless time horizon. We must pick our partners wisely. We must experiment and pilot, and learn as much as we can, while still acting in a sufficiently expedient manner to have influence over and in fact shape our futures - whether as publishers or retailers, new entrants or incumbents. Our collective choices over the next few years are likely to have strategic implications far beyond our individual organizations. That is one window we cannot afford to leave closed.

Dr. Mark R. Nelson is the Digital Content Strategist for the National Association of College Stores (NACS), and VP for Strategy and Development for NACS Media Solutions. You can follow his blog on Course materials, Innovation, Technology, and Education (The CITE) at thecite.blogspot.com.

Indie ebooktailers and the Agency Model: Where Are They Now?

Kat Meyer
July 13, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

"Even though the big five has been a small part of our bottom line, we do want them back and I don't want to do anything at this point to jeopardize our relationship with any of them. I definitely don't want to see a market where only Amazon, Apple,  and B&N are selling those titles." ~ anonymous indie ebook retailer

"It's ironic that the publishers who were going to level the playing field amongst retailers pretty much now only have their titles available on B&N and Amazon."  ~ anonymous indie ebook retailer

In the fast-paced news cycle generated around publishing and technology, the Agency Model discussion may seem like old news, but for indie ebook retailers, the story is still (rather slowly) being played out.

Just where do the indie etailers currently stand in regard to getting Big 5 titles back into inventory, and how has not having Big 5 titles available affected them? We asked these questions and more of Diesel ebook store's Kelley Allen. (Actually we asked a few other etailers and distributors, but only Kelley was brave enough to answer us on the record!)

ToC: When the Agency model contracts came into play, what was your plan of action?
KLA: Batten down the hatches and ride out the storm! We immediately informed our customer base about the changes and took all the titles down. That was all we could do in the meantime.

ToC:What were the implications for your business and for your customers, and how did you deal with it?
KLA: We posted a nice little blog called The Agency Model - Diesel's POV amid all the chaos and drama that we wrote when the whole A5 thing first went down in early April.

We were rather bummed since all the large multi-billion dollar corporate stores got all their A5 titles up rather quickly.  

As a result, we wrote a funny little melodramatic blog called JILTED that captured how we felt / still feel:

ToC:  Have publisher and distributor partners been good about communicating with you regarding where things stand/whether progress is being made?

KLA: No comment since we are negotiating with three of the A5.

Our other distributor, Mobipocket, just wrote a very short e-mail to all their distribution partners instructing us to pull all their A5 titles.  We posted on our blog about Mobipocket pulling their A5 titles.

ToC:  Where do you currently stand in terms of access to Big 5 titles? 

KLA:  We are currently selling HarperCollins and Penguin.  Penguin was the first go back up on the site on May 10^th (Day 40) and HarperCollins on May 13^th (Day 43).   

The new contracts all have confidentiality clauses and thus we are not at liberty to disclose terms. 

 

ToC:  Given that the wholesale pricing and terms will be changing (and possibly will vary according to publisher), how much work will it require to make programming changes on your site?

KLA:  Quite a lot of programming changes!  Matter of fact, we heard that a few of the smaller eBook retailers decided to just drop out since it was too much for them. 

We have a blog posted here about the implications of Sales Tax

We had to install a very comprehensive tax table to our backend system.

In addition, A5 allows for no discounts and thus we had to modify our entire system to identify any A5 and prevent discounts on the site. 

ToC: How is this affecting your bottom line? Are you losing customers? Are customers being supportive/ buying titles that you DO have?

KLA:  Our sales are down as a direct result.   However, we have been relatively vocal about any updates to our customer base and thus our customers are supportive. We also found that sales of titles for the Indies are increasing by large numbers.

ToC: A lot of the indie online ebook retailers, and their distributors, are reticent to talk about how the Agency Model disruption has affected their businesses. Do you worry that being vocal about the subject might offend your publisher and distribution partners?

KLA:  It's crossed our mind.  

 

ToC: So why the industry-wide silence? And why are you willing to talk when others don't seem to be?

KLA:  Well, basically our distributor needs to sign individual contracts for each retailer for each A5.  That means there could potentially be hundreds of contracts as a direct result of this.  So, you better be extra nice to your distribution partner and their publishers!

Scott and I decided that we wanted to be vocal about all this despite any potential repercussions (and there have been!)  

 
ToC: Have you been in discussion with non A5 publishers as to whether they are planning to go to agency model? 

KLA:  Yes.  I have been talking to quite a lot of the smaller publishers / indies.   Many seem not too anxious to jump full-heartedly into Agency and instead are adopting a "hybrid" approach - agency for Apple and wholesale for everyone else.  I asked one rather large and highly respected Indie about how they could do it legally.  They replied that there are some loopholes in the Apple contract to get around that issue. 

ToC: Are you looking forward to Google editions? care to share any thoughts about how Google Editions may affect your biz? have you been talking with them?
KLA:  We are not at liberty to talk any specifics but yes, we are excited about Google for a couple of different reasons.  One, they are having a calming influence on the eBook marketplace.  Two, they will be adding a whole different technical slant to the eBook experience for both the retailer and consumer.  We've always had a strong relationship with Google and expect that to continue

Ricoh Innovation's Visual Search Technology: A Potential Revolution for Booky Books

Kat Meyer
July 7, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

For those with a fondness for paper book reading, no ebook or book app or shiny, portable reading device can compare to the real thing. Some will cite their appreciation for quality paper stock and gorgeous typesetting. Others may tell you they love the smell or feel of books. And quite a few printed paper book diehards will say that there is nothing like a bound book for a truly engaging reading experience. For many, the  buttons and screens and links are anything but enhancements. 

I buy all these pro-booky book arguments and more, but I love the possibilities of digital books. It's a shame to give up all the potential webby goodness of an ebook for the tried and true goodness of paper books. Makes one wonder... what if one could have their printed bookish cake and eat it too? What if booky-books could transform, when so desired, into fully networked booky-books -- all without altering the design, the production, or the printed content?

Well, now they can. And, a small Palo Alto-based research center/start-up called Ricoh Innovations is leading the way.

How It Works
According to Jamey Graham, Distinguished Research Engineer at Ricoh, RI's technology is similar to that of QR codes, but uses the natural patterns of an object or a page as opposed to a barcode. "Over the last few years we've developed algorithms for indexing & recognizing visual patterns. Using an Android or iPhone device, readers can snap a picture of a region on the page (text or images, or a combination) and they will be presented with online material just as if they'd scanned a barcode."

With RI's visual search system, areas of a page are mapped and linked to corresponding content. RI has developed both cloud and mobile versions of their device recognition engines, and are hoping that publishers will recognize the opportunity that their particular approach to visual search can offer to the reading experience -- bridging the physical book with online media.

Ricoh recently launched their first app to accompany the soon-to-be-released novel by Matt Stewart, The French Revolution (Soft Skull). The app, dubbed the "French Rev," links pages in the book with web-based content including videos, recipes, and music. Geo location data alerts readers to mapped locations from events in the book (set in San Francisco) such as Coit Tower, Pier 39, and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Why Publishers Should Be Excited About It:
It's relatively painless.
For one thing, publishers can take full advantage of RI's visual search technology regardless of how their books are designed or printed. Because RI's technology utilizes pattern recognition (as opposed to technologies such OCR), the visual search is not dependent on language, font or characters.

Oh, the data possibilities!
There's not a marketing person in publishing who doesn't salivate over the opportunities digital provides for consumer research. For books connected via visual search, the apps "phone home" with data on a regular basis. RI's visual search app records and reports which pages are scanned the most, the number of unique users that are scanning the location, the geo location of user, etc. Basically, any data that you can acquire they can track.

Why Readers Should Be Excited About It:
For "booky" book lovers and the digitally inclined alike, books embedded with RI's visual search offer the best of both worlds. Pretty bound books, enriched (at your convenience) with easily updatable web-based content, and no ugly QR codes to disrupt the reading experience.

How It Could Change the World
Ricoh has hopes to work with the Gates Foundation to create a visual search companion app for Hesperian's Where There Is No Doctor. As part of the project, villages would be provided with a smart phone and a copy of the physical book. In addition to providing instantaneous and crucial updates and revisions, the app would allow users in remote areas to view online maps of where medical experts are located, feature videos of procedures described in the book.

Copyright Issues Ripe for Reform

Alexander Macgillivray
June 17, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

Now that I've been mostly away from the copyright battles for a while and am unlikely to have much to do with them in the foreseeable future, I thought it would be good to get down some thoughts about issues I think are ripe for reform in that area and solicit feedback. These are not Google Book Settlement-related but are things that should be done regardless of how that works out.

My standard disclaimer applies. I used to work at Google and worked on the settlement which is currently awaiting final approval but I do not work at Google now and my views are not Google's views (nor are they my current employer, Twitter's, views).

Copyright, DRM and Uses of Books: One of the differences between an ebook and a book is that reading an ebook likely involves making a copy under US law (but see Cablevision and this is less true in many circumstances under EU and other international law but see Eric Smith's presentation on why he thinks there is a Berne/Trips obligation to force ereading to be a copy right). Similarly, lending a book will likely mean making a copy, as would giving or selling an ebook to someone else. These typical uses of books were not traditionally the exclusive right of copyright holders (though a variety of countries have adopted a registration-required lending right) or even the subject of copyright law but become potentially problematic for readers of ebooks. It is easy to see why this is bad for readers and libraries as a bunch of stuff that was previously done without a gatekeeper now has a gatekeeper who may or may not be able to be found or want to be paid again for the "new" right. Add digital rights management, and many uses taken for granted by readers, including those with print disabilities, lose out in a pretty major way without much gain for authors or publishers. Much has been written about this part of the copyright and digital rights management problem as applied to ebooks, so I won't bore you with more.

However, one issue that has not received much attention is the problem these new rights within copyright pose for ebook sellers, publishers and ultimately authors because of the jurisdictional/licensing implications. For example, if Amazon sells you an ebook in the US, can you then read it in France? What if Amazon only has a deal with the US publisher and not the French rightsholder? For physical books this was not a big issue mostly because neither buying a book in the US nor reading it in France involved making a copy and the imperfect information about a person's "true" home market meant that most agreements were about sales location as opposed to the reader's location when reading. At the end of the day, some books would enter France without any payment to the French publisher who had an exclusive agreement but that slippage was not that measurable and, apart from in piracy or price discriminatory contexts, was not a big deal. With ebooks, because of both potential copyright implications in access and much better data to be gathered, it becomes a bigger deal. This is particularly pernicious for books that are not new because old licenses are very unlikely to take this into consideration. Add statutory damages and class actions and you have a potentially huge mess.

Orphan Works: The fate of orphan works in the digital age also has been frequently discussed. The one wrinkle I would add here is that it would be great to solve this issue in a way that includes the various things that are in books but owned by people other than those that we generally consider the author or publisher of the book. Many call these "associated rights" and they include content not owned by the author even if it is hard to tell it is not owned by the author. Furthermore, while book copyright holders are often compensated through a royalty structure, associated rightsholders, when compensated, are usually compensated by a fee limited to a specific set of uses, such as a print run.  One solution is to cut out such pieces of books but because of the difficulty in figuring out which pieces need to be cut out what this problem really means is that most orphaned books simply can't be republished without copyright threat.  Whichever way the Google Book settlement goes, this is an important problem that could use some (more) hard work.

Twin Books: There is an argument under the U.S. 9th Circuit's Twin Books case that there are some books published pre-1923 that are actually still in copyright in the U.S. Most experts think this is silly and I certainly agree, but it poses a potential danger to folks such as the Internet Archive, which is based in the 9th Circuit, and it does nothing to help authors or publishers. In October 2008 the Ninth Circuit in continuing to follow Twin Books wrote "Although the reasoning of Twin Books can be, and has been, criticized, it is still binding in this circuit." (See Societe Civile Sucession v. Renoir -- yes, that Renoir). And then imagine how that plays out in various bits of a book, such as pictures and excerpts, that are not owned by the author or publisher of the book.

108: Section 108, which is a specific US copyright exception for archiving (in addition to fair use) needs to be updated for the digital age. Many believe the Section 108 Study Group, though well-meaning, arrived at an end point that is worse than fair use for people that want to archive. Archiving, done well, is a boon to authors and not a threat to publishers. It would seem like a no-brainer to do an updated version that would allow archives to exist and function well without having to rely on fair use. And yet, none has been forthcoming.

Reversion and "Older" Books: A typical book contract allows for reversion of rights back to the author once a book is out of print and certain steps have been taken. There are reversion issues for newer books hotly contested between authors and publishers. For example, does a book ever go out of print when on-demand printing happens? But less attention has been focused on the mess created by reversion in older books. These issues principally arise for three reasons: (a) different contracts treat reversion differently; (b) records of contracts and reversionary actions are not well kept; and (c) authors and publishers disappear or change. Combine the three and you have many authors who can't even tell whether rights for their own works have reverted to them. Publishers have trouble saying whether they own the rights to a particular book or group of books. And in many cases there is no good way to "open" a book by republishing it. This has always been an issue but is more of an issue now because the declining cost of "publication" re-values back catalogs (as it has with music and video). Bringing an old book back to publication used to be a non-starter for economic reasons. Now, in many cases, it is only legal reasons which frustrate republication.

Solutions: I don't claim to know good solutions for all of these and am interested in the constructive thoughts of others. I'm pretty sure stopping the Google Books settlement from happening will solve none of these problems.

---

Alexander Macgillivray is Twitter's General Counsel and also leads its Corporate Development and Public Policy efforts. You can follow his tweets at @macgill. Previously Mr. Macgillivray was Deputy General Counsel for Products & IP at Google and a litigator at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

Sifting Through All These Books

Hugh McGuire
June 14, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

There Sure Are a Lot of Books

The latest numbers from Bowker are extraordinary: In 2002 there were 215,000 books published in the USA, and a further 32,693 print-on-demand title (short-runs, self-published etc).

In 2008, traditional publishers put out 275,000 books; but there was a huge surge in print-on-demand titles, and at 285,000, for the first time there were more non-traditionally published books than traditionally published.

By 2009, the whole applecart was upside down: 288,000 books published traditionally, and 764,000 (!) self-published and print-on-demand books. That doesn't include, as far as I can tell, the thousands of ebooks getting published at places like Smashwords.

Even if you forget about the self-published books, since 2002 we've seen a 105% increase in poetry and drama books (11,766), 80% increase in the number of biographies published (12,313), an 80% increase in general fiction titles (45,181), a 75% increase in literature (10,843), a 50% increase in religion titles (19,310), and a 30% increase in science books (15.428). There have been declines in only three of the twenty-five categories tracked by Bowker: Agriculture (down 6%), computers (down 32%), and languages (down 32%). Across the spectrum, we've seen a 32% increase in all titles published since 2002, all without an appreciable increase (that I know of) in the number of people who actually buy books, let alone read them.

Add to this significant growth the 764,000 (!!!) non-traditionally-published books, and you can see where the fundamental problem for publishing lies: there are so many books out there, and a limited number of readers.

Supply Makes Demand Look Puny

We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially. There is a whole other article to write about the business implications of these numbers, but I'm interested here in some ideas about how our info systems might manage this huge pile of books. That is, how are people going to sift through all these books to find what they want?

How the Web Solved the Problem of Over-Supply

If you think the problem of books is a hard one, consider this: there are 72,000,000 active websites on the Internet. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that 5% of those websites are blogs.

So somehow, you found this post, a 1 in 3.6 million chance, and have made it this far, which indicates that you found more-or-less what you were looking for.

We seem to have solved the problem of sifting content on the web and with blogs, where anyone can publish what they want. It turns out that the vast majority of blogs are uninteresting to me, and to the vast majority of readers. Blogs are, by the numbers, a vast sea of stuff people don't want to read.

And yet.

And yet - as a reader, I constantly find wonderful stuff to read on blogs. I read blogs of friends and colleagues and strangers, I read NYTimes blogs, I read BoingBoing - which usually points me to other blogs; I follow Twitter links to more blogs I have not heard of - almost exclusively now I find good blog posts to read through Twitter.

But, still, given the overwhelming preponderance of stuff I'm not interested in, how is it that I only read wonderful stuff on the web?

The answer is in the link. The link creates a currency for readers and writers to surface wonderful stuff. In the earlier days of blogging (I was relatively late to the party, arriving in mid-2004), links were an essential part of the ethic: we read each other, we pointed to the stuff we liked; people pointed back. Crucially, you could "see" when someone pointed to you (referrers, technorati, google alerts). And crucially as well, Google built a kind of reputation exchange, based on the link: the more links you got, the more "important" you were to Google's search; the more important you were to Google's search, the more heavily-weighted your links were in Google's algorithms - conferring your importance to others.

This created an ecosystem of readers and writers, that grew to the point that now blogs are a fact of life - and come in all flavours and shapes, from Samuel Pepys' diary, to this blog, to Paul Graham, to cat-pictures and everything in between.

What's the Difference Between a Blog and a Book?

Fundamentally, though, the stuff in blogs - and in "books" - is not anything in particular. Blogs - like books - are just a means to transfer words from someone's fingers tips into someone else's eyeballs. Blogs made it easy for anyone to do that. Enter an era of more terrible and irrelevant writing than the world has ever seen. Enter, also, an era of more wonderful and important writing than the world has ever seen.

The good stuff gets found. If there is one thing the web is brilliant at, it's getting millions of people - billions? - to sift through junk to find what is valuable.

The same will happen with books.

Book Economics

So this raises two questions:

1. how will we create a similar kind of reputation economy in books? i.e. what mechanisms do we use to bring something like linking to books? and

2. how is anyone going to make money?

To #1., my guess is that the next generation of writers and readers -- and their books -- will all be online as a matter of course. They will find, read, and link to each other in the same way that bloggers do.

To #2., my guess is that it's going to be very hard in the traditional publishing business. There will be money to be made, but nothing like the kind of money now, in the way it's being made. Big advances are going to start disappearing. Early cash investment in careers is going to start disappearing (it already is, usually). I talked to one senior executive at a big publishing house at BEA who thinks the publishing business as it is is about two thirds bigger than it "should be." I don't know if I'm that radical, but as a relatively heavy reader, I cannot understand how the commercial publishing business can sustain its current output. Supply and demand curves don't make any sense. 280,000 books is a lot of books. One million books is another thing altogether. And we are now publishing one million books every year. In the United States alone.

What's a Publisher For, Again? 

Still, publishers fundamentally provide two values to writers and readers:

1. quality (editorial)

and 2. audience (marketing)

So publishers who continue to figure out how to bring good books to the people who want them will be providing a great service, for which people will be willing to pay, one way or another.

But that role of "publisher" is going to look very different in 5 years than it does now.

Ebook Reseller Wishlist/Scorecard

Andrew Savikas
June 7, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (16) | Listen

I spend a lot of time talking with companies that want to resell O'Reilly ebooks. Some are large companies you've certainly heard of, others are small startups that haven't yet launched. But what's remarkably consistent is that few of them offer many of the options and features we at O'Reilly consider critical for customers.

Because I'm sure these will come up again, I've prepared a handy table outlining what we look for in an ideal ebook reseller, and provided a simple scorecard showing how several current ebook resellers stack up:

Reseller	Carries O'Reilly ebooks?	Multiple ebook formats	DRM-free option	Labels which are DRM-free ebooks	Provides free updates if provided by publisher	EPUB support	Notes
oreilly.com	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	✔	Multiple DRM-free formats, free lifetime updates, and an easy way to come back and download your ebooks again any time are some of the reasons our direct ebook sales are strong and growing.
iPhone App Store	✔	Technically possible, but not currently available for our ebook apps	✔	✘	✔	✔	Extracting the EPUB is a bit of a hack but it's possible, and updates are both easy and familiar since the ebook apps update just like any other app.
Android Market	✔	Technically possible, but not currently available for our ebook apps	✔	✘	✔	✔	Our Android ebooks use the fantastic Aldiko Reader for rendering, exporting the EPUB is just the push of a button, and like the App Store, updates are easy.
Kindle Store	✔	✘	✔	✘	✘	✘	While I'm happy to give credit where it's due to Amazon for putting in a process so we can sell O'Reilly ebooks without any DRM restrictions, the Kindle 1 rendering was (and remains) a real disappointment, and the lack of updates means customers miss out on our frequent updates, corrections, and enhancements. It's also unfortunate Amazon doesn't label which books have DRM/device restrictions (and which don't). Amazon says they support EPUB as an ingestion format, but if I can't add my own EPUB books to my Kindle (device or app) then I don't consider that 'support.'
Sony Reader store	✘	✘	✘	✘	Don't know	✔	It's been more than 18 months since we told Sony we can't be in their store unless our books don't have DRM, and they still won't give us (or any other publisher) that option.
Apple iBooks	✘	✘	✔	✘	✘	✔	It's a bummer that updates aren't an option, especially since it's been part of the App Store for years. O'Reilly books aren't (yet) available in the iBooks store, but if you buy direct from us, it's easy to load the EPUB file onto your iPad via iTunes, and our books look great in the iBooks reader.
Barnes & Noble	✘	✘	✔	✘	Don't know	✔	We expect to see O'Reilly ebooks available on the nook soon.
Scribd	✔	✘	✔	✘	✔	✘	Word on the street is that Scribd will be supporting EPUB, but they've been saying that since they launched the store. Their recent move from Flash to HTML5 was significant news among Web developers.

The power of promotional pricing

Andrew Savikas
June 3, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

We've been running an ebook "$9.99 deal of the day" promotion for some time now, and customer response has been quite positive. There's also some very interesting sales data coming out of these promotions.

It's no surprise that promotional pricing increases sales; the balancing act is in making sure that overall revenue increases (offsetting the per-unit revenue decrease) as well as making sure that other sales aren't cannibalized. If done right, promotional pricing is a powerful way to perform price discrimination -- in particular converting people who would not otherwise buy at the higher price into paying customers at a lower one.

Since implementing several promotions (first an "ebook upgrade" offer back in October and then the "Deal of the Day" starting in January, followed by a "Buy X, get X free" offer in April), overall ebook revenue has increased significantly along with unit sales, even though per-unit revenue for a particular promotion is lower. Here's the relative print/ebook revenue breakdown since January of 2008:

In fact, for the month of April, 23 of the top 25 selling titles from oreilly.com had more than 90% of their sales in ebook format. Obviously that's driven heavily by the promotional offers, but it's an indication that the flexibility to do more nuanced pricing promotions than would be possible with physical product is a benefit of ebooks well worth extensive experimentation. (Note also the uptick in print sales -- April was up 26% on March for print sales on oreilly.com, presumably driven in part by the increase in traffic coming for the ebooks.)

The data above doesn't include the promotion we ran on May 21, when we extended the "$9.99 Deal of the Day" to any title -- our servers metaphorically melted from the demand, which far exceeded our expectations, driving more than a 20-fold increase in sales over a typical day. Here's a graph showing the resulting sales spike:

Although that graph makes the days leading up to May 21 look low, they're just low relative to May 21 -- ebook sales have been tracking well above a 100% increase over 2009. It's nice to see aggregate statistics like those provided by the IDPF, but it'd be great to see more publishers share this kind of direct data. There are often understandable limits about the specifics that can be disclosed (note the dollar scale has been removed from the charts above), but making even obfuscated data more public reduces the control over perception held by those putting out numbers framing things in their own best interest.

The iPad in Europe (real live units)

Eoin Purcell
June 3, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

The iPad is here, or more accurately it's there (and there, there, there, there and there) which is closer to here than there or there or there but still not quite HERE. Even more confusingly and anomalously, it IS available on the island of Ireland, from the Apple Store in Belfast and some Apple fans from the Republic of Ireland have been heading over the border to buy units.

UK, German and French book publishers have all provided content for the ipad and while there remain some grumbles about legality, the agency model for bookselling now seems to have passed it's first challenge, actually existing.

The Bookseller, the UK book industry magazine, has pointed out that ebooks sold through the iBookstore and under agency pricing are available cheaper in print on Amazon.co.uk and in digital form on the Kindle. They also seem to indicate that the Agency Model doesn't apply to other ebooksellers!

I still find it strange that this new model has burst onto the scene in the UK with relatively little discussion from the industry or the wider public. It is almost as if the US has exported a model and we just have to live with it. Of course, there's a chance the model is illegal in the US and I have my suspicions about how the degree of co-ordination and collaboration required and the EU's competition rules will play together!

Of course, there is much more to the iPad than just the agency model and in encouraging news for publishers of all types PaidContent highlights the impressive sales The Times (which is beginning a crazy/brilliant experiment in paywalls this month) had for its iPad news app selling 5,000 copies in the first few days of the iPad's availability.

There is so much more to figure out about how the iPad will impact on the European book publishing scene that it feels a little premature to make a prediction. One thing is clear though, this year's Frankfurt Book Fair will be abuzz with information, statistics and details about digital book sales.

Roll on July when Ireland, along with Belgium, Luxembourg, Austria, Hong Kong, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore will see their own real live units of the iPad.


Bio: Eoin Purcell (@eoinpurcell) lives and works in Dublin, Ireland. He is a publishing industry analyst and commentator. He runs Green Lamp Media, a publishing and publishing services company. He also edits Irish Publishing News.

You may not be writing software, but someday you'll probably write like the people who do

Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (10) | Listen

Hugh McGuire's post yesterday raised some great points about what a really effective web-friendly distributed and inherently social writing platform should look like. When it comes to the software tools we use for certain classes of tasks, I always look to the software developers themselves for insight into what those tools will look and feel like. It's usually the developers who experience the particular pain point first (and most acutely), and who have the skills to build tools that solve those problems.

Writing (and "publishing") are among the most relevant and appropriate tasks to which we can turn to software developers for insight. After all, no one (no one) does as much collaborative and distributed writing, editing, and revising of complex, interrelated, long-form textual works than software developers. It's only natural they'd build tools to make the associated tasks easier and the problems more manageable.

I am not saying that everyone can, should, or will use the same tools that developers use today. But I do think Hugh is right on the mark to look toward something like Wordpress as being in the right direction (as opposed to Word or InDesign, however hacked). I'd go a step further and suggest looking at GitHub as a model to examine very closely for ways to provide the infrastructure for easy and effective distributed collaborative writing (and 'publishing'), as well as enable the social recognition and validation that are so important for many authors.

(I'd also like to think our own Open Feedback Publishing System is a step forward in the evolution of web-based book writing tools, though for now it requires authors write using DocBook XML or AsciiDoc, a high bar for non-technical writers.)

An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform

Hugh McGuire
May 19, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (73) | Listen

WordPress as Book Publishing Platform

This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on WordPress. My thoughts here come out of our experience building Book Oven (a thus-far closed, proprietary system envisaged to be just this); and subsequent conversations with John Maxwell, of Simon Fraser University's Masters of Publishing Program, and Kirk Biglione of Oxford Media Works. I am happy to report this is more than just thinking: this past term (January to April 2010), John Maxwell and his MPub students built a prototype of this WordPress-based publishing system, and tested the prototype by creating, and publishing the Book of Mpub, available in print-on-demand ready PDF, epub, and html.

Background: Book Oven

At the end of 2008, my co-founder Stephanie Troeth and I started Book Oven, an ambitious venture to work towards transforming the book publishing process into a webby, connected process. The key insights behind Book Oven were the following:
 

• publishing a book is (almost always) a collaborative enterprise
• online tools (should) make collaboration on making books easy(er)
• if you build a "book" in the cloud, using structured mark-up, then expression of that book in various forms (print, epub, pdf, mobipocket, html, etc), on various devices (including paper & print) becomes arbitrary, and should be nearly trivial
• further, if the "book" exists in the cloud, then the range of things that can be done with this "book" multiplies significantly
• if a system built on these ideals is implemented well, it will be transformative, both for professional publishing workflows, and for the emergence of a new grassroots of indie publishing.

I am still deeply committed to this vision. But I have shifted towards a belief that the above-described platform should be open source. Or at least, an open source version of such should exist.

The Big Revelation: WordPress

We've done some good things with Book Oven, but around November 2009, we shifted focus to the bit of our platform that was (according to our analytics) the most engaging to our users: Bite-Size Edits. That shift occurred in parallel with a revelation: We were trying to recreate so much in Book Oven that was already handled well by another class of software, namely blogging software, and specifically WordPress.

My thoughts about Wordpress were crystalized in October 2009, during a conversation with Shana Kimball of the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library. I was pitching Book Oven as a good tool (in progress) for academic presses to use in their production workflows. Shana had various hesitations -- open source vs proprietary being a big one -- but during our conversation, Shana said something like: "It would be great to have a tool that's as easy to use as WordPress. I love WordPress."

Indeed.

So, I started having some conversations with some people I knew who were already doing some work in this direction, in particular: John Maxwell, at Simon Fraser University, who was experimenting with prototypes for html-first book publishing systems, and was exploring different candidates, including WordPress; and Kirk Biglione who had independently started poking at WordPress as a book-publishing tool.

I also floated the idea to a few others who are doing some of the most interesting things right now in publishing/tech, especially Liza Daly and James Bridle, and two of the best Wordpress hackers I know, Steph Daury (who works for Automattic) and Jeremy Clark.

The idea, everyone agreed, had some legs.

WordPress, it seems, is an ideal candidate as a platform on which to build an open source, online, webby, book-publishing system. There may be other likely candidates, but Wordpress has the following characteristic which suggest to me that it is an excellent place to start:

• it is a familiar and comfortable tool to most writers and publishers who are at all engaged online
• it is a stable platform that can handle just about any scale of traffic you can throw at it (the New York Times, New York Times Blogs, for instance, run on a heavily-hacked version of Wordpress)
• it is open source
• through its plugin architecture, it is infinitely extensible
• through its template architecture, it is infinitely stylable
• through WordPress Mu, it is infinitely scalable
• it has a huge, world-wide community of committed developers
  
• existing plugins and plugin suites already achieve much of what would be wanted in a Wordpress-based book publishing system.

[NOTE: I've since discovered Leanpub.com, built by Ruboss, which is already going along this path].

The Outline

I've described above some of the reasons why WordPress is, I believe, a good candidate as the basis for an online book-publishing platform. Here is a proposal for some very rough product specs:

• Authors/editors can add text
• Editors can edit text
• The editing/publishing process can be public or private, with easy assignment of various permissions (none, read-only, read/edit, read/edit/admin)
• Formatting creates structured html
• Finished text can be generated in the following formats:
• plain text
• epub
• html
• InDesign-compliant markup - to generate a professional print output from In-Design
• automatic print-ready pdf - using something like a web-based LaTeX system
• etc.

WordPress can do much of this already, but not all of it, and certainly not everything you would want it to do. The finished platform should have (among others) the following plugins/characteristics:

1. robust version control
   
2. digress.it (based on the old commentpress)- to allow para by para commenting for editors, and later, if desired, for readers
3. wordpress --> epub conversion
   
4. wordpress --> ~LaTeX --> print-ready pdf conversion (or similar)
   
5. wordpress --> InDesign-compliant mark-up conversion
   
6. book-friendly front-end template(s) (including Table of Contents, Title page etc)
7. generation of a download/(sales?) page that lists available formats (epub, html, pdf etc)
8. table of contents generator
9. a book metadata generation/management tool (ONIX, OPDS compliant?)
10. ...etc.

This list of plugins can continue, subject to the interest of developers, and the needs of users of such a system.

SFU and the MPub Prototype

All this would be just a lot of writing and good intentions and conversations, except for John Maxwell and his team of talented students at Simon Fraser University, including: Vanessa Chan, Cari Ferguson, Kathleen Fraser, Cynara Geissler, Ann-Marie Metten, and Suzette Smith.

In the span of four months in 2010, the SFU MPub team did two extraordinary things:

1. they built a prototype of this WordPress-based book publishing system (tied in with InDesign for the print book)
2. they published a book using the system - suitably, it was student-essays about the future of publishing: the Book of MPub

I had the pleasure of seeing John and some of his students present the results at BookCamp Toronto this past week, to a crowd of publishers, writers, designers, and technologists.

The Reaction

I was curious to see the reaction to John's presentation at BookCamp Toronto, with a wide range of people in the room. Particularly encouraging was Ingrid Paulson's take on it: Ingrid is one of Canada's best-known book designers, and was excited by the idea of streamlining and formalizing the process of text/mark-up delivery from publishers. She seemed entirely open to a better toolset to make that happen. Others in the room were equally intrigued.

For myself, I was amazed at what the SFU students delivered in such a short time, and was reignited with excitement for this project. I have no doubt that a streamlined online publishing system, using structured mark-up, will transform the publishing industry. And my bet is on Wordpress as a great starting platform to do just this. Whether or not it could be the long-term winner, I know not, but something will be, and WordPress has a whole lot to recommend it.

And how about you? What do you think?

Bio: Hugh McGuire builds webby things, and writes about media, publishing, mass collaboration, and technology. He is the founder of LibriVox.org, the volunteer-run makers of free public domain audiobooks; and Book Oven, which makes Bite-Size Edits, an online editing game/tool. He is a co-founder of BookCampToronto. His personal site is hughmcguire.net and you can find him on twitter at @hughmcguire.

[Pic of Hugh McGuire by Ron Grimes - Flickr / Twitter]

Is DRM More Costly Than Piracy? Thoughts on leveraging marketing strategy and DRM-free content

Brett Sandusky
May 6, 2010 | Permalink | Comments (9) | Listen

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about building better (read: strategic) eBooks. The more that I've tried to wrap my head around what would work and what wouldn't, I keep coming back to the idea of reversing self-imposed constraints and searching for opportunity in areas from which we've closed off opportunity. One such area is DRM.
 
As a practice, wrapping content in DRM finds its justification in the fact that digital content is being pirated across the internet and distributed to people who we presume could be customers. These lost customers are choosing to not purchase our content but to download this content for free.
 
Before we continue, let's address a few myths:

1. DRM will eliminate piracy. This is completely false. Pirated content is always going to be available, whether we allow it or not.
   
2. Pirates are stealing our customers. Most likely, the person who is downloading pirated content wouldn't consider buying it in the first place. Piracy is not an alternative to retail, it is a parallel eco-system.
3. Publishers will make more money by enforcing stricter DRM. I argue that this, too, is false. In fact, I think if we leverage the marketing possibilities of DRM-free content, we would end up making more money in the long run.

So, we start with a DRM-free eBook. Now what? What if we flat out encouraged sharing?
 
Let's say a customer purchases an eBooks and they want to share it with a friend who would enjoy the book. In the development phase, the publisher could easily include a 'share' button or option. This would set off a mechanism for transferring the content purchased by one customer on her device to someone else's device.
 
If we can get past the 'piracy,' unpaid content aspect, this simple act is incredibly powerful. Here's how:
 
What if we asked the customer who is sharing the content she's purchased to input her friend's email address in order to deliver a download link? Now we've collected a second customer's contact information. To use lead gen-speak, this customer is a "qualified lead." Another way to look at it is that this represents a sort of passive word of mouth system whereby we let our customers tell us with whom they are sharing their content.
 
Then, we can engage the recipient of said content, because they've already been identified as an interested party by one of our customers. If done properly, the follow up to these new customers can not only lead to a sale, but to something much greater. It could be a vehicle for presenting your company as tech-savvy and engaging.
 
Now, let's go a step further: what if, after a certain number of shares, we rewarded the customer for passing along their content and helping us to identify future customers? Say after a customer shares their content with 10 other people, the publisher can set up a mechanism which would send an invitation to receive a free eBook for all their effort. (Let's not fool ourselves, they would be doing work for us.)
 
Not only does this give customers incentive to spread the word about our books, but it creates heightened brand loyalty. We cannot expect our customers to simply become loyal to our brands based on the laws of inertia and chance. Brand loyalty is an active pursuit which can be fostered by putting more products into the hands of people who use them. The more we can actively identify those customers who are not only reading our books, but those who are evangelizing for us, the more we are able to keep this momentum going by providing additional fodder to share.
 
In the publicity world, we send books to 'influencers' or 'big mouths' in the hope that they'll initiate their own word of mouth campaigns. The only difference here is that we are using the available technology of eBooks in our favor to identify who the influencers are and who they are influencing.
 
File share points online such as SendSpace do something very similar to this already. Anyone can email anyone else with a file that is too large to send via email. The recipient receives an email notification and a download link. People are used to receiving a download link, to allowing their email address to be disclosed in order to receive something they feel is valuable or important.
 
The point: it is not unreasonable to ask for email addresses in order to provide a free service.
 
Let's go back to our three myths about DRM:

• DRM will eliminate piracy. We already know that DRM is not going to stop piracy because people want to share content. Response: avoid piracy by actively promoting user-to-user content sharing and make it worth it for the publisher by creating a win-win situation for both publisher and consumer.
• Pirates are stealing our customers. Pirates will not be able to 'steal' our customers if we can provide them with a better, more valuable experience.
  
• Publishers will make more money by enforcing stricter DRM. Publishers will make more money, in the long run, by growing their customer bases, collecting consumer data, engaging with their customers directly, actively fostering brand loyalty, and providing a superior user experience that exploits technology in a smart way.

Keeping content on 'lock down' is not good for anybody. We are in an age of digital sharing, of online exploration, boundaryless personal expression, and high engagement expectations. Wouldn't it be counterintuitive to go against these trends and make it increasingly difficult for our customers to tell their friends about our products? At a time when every publisher must be concerned with search and discoverability of digital products, encouraging sharing in order to learn more about our consumer base and their behaviors seems like a natural course of action.

Brett Sandusky is Digital Marketing Manager at Kaplan Publishing. He is also the founder of Publishr, an ever-growing collection of essays that explores the world of digital publishing through both theory and practice. He lives in Brooklyn.