publishing

Big Mama Six, Big Daddy Six, and their son, are standing in the living room, having a conversation. Big Mama: We're so happy you're our son. Big Daddy: So very, very happy. Son: Thanks. Big Mama: We recognize what a good job you're doing. Big Daddy: Such a better job than your brothers and sisters. I know we're not supposed to play favorites, but son... you're our favorite. Son: Thanks. Look, I really need to tell you something. Big Mama: We're so proud of you. Do you remember when you were just a baby? Big Daddy: Needed us to wipe your nose. Big Mama: All the poopy diapers we changed. Big Daddy: But look at you now. All grown up. Big Mama: I must say, Big Daddy, we sure did a good job raising him. Big Daddy: We sure did. And look at him now! Such a strapping young man. Big Mama: We've done so much for you. Big Daddy: And we'll keep doing it. Because we're your parents, and you need us. Son: Guys... Big Mama: The risks we took! The time investment! Big Daddy: And the monetary investment! Buying you food all those years. Clothes. School supplies. You couldn't have gotten those straight A's if we didn't buy you pencils. Son: (sighing) Yes. You bought me pencils. You're the best parents ever. Big Mama: We've been talking, your father and I. And we have some news. Big Daddy: It's true. We've discussed it, and we've decided we're going to raise your allowance by 2%. Big Mama: Aren't we generous? Big Daddy: You're now making $21.50 a week. How do you feel about that, young man? Son: You both are making this awkward. Big Mama: Now don't think that 2% raise doesn't come with added responsibilities, son. Besides doing the cooking, the cleaning, the yard work, and building that addition onto our house, you'll also now be required to service all four of ours cars, twice a month. Big Daddy: But we do have a lot of bills to pay. Rent. Utilities. Food. And let's face it, you eat a lot. So we're going to have to charge you for the extra food you're consuming. Big Mama: But it's okay. Our relationship isn't just about food, or money. We nurture. We protect. We guide. Big Daddy: When you painted that beautiful watercolor, who sold it for you and gave you 17.5% of the money? We did. Big Mama: That's what we do. Because we're a team. Big Daddy: Risky business, raising children. But you've made us so proud. Son: Enough! I wanted to tell you I'm leaving home. Big Mama: What? Big Daddy: Are you serious? You can't survive without us! Big Mama: You need us! Son: I'm going into business for myself. Big Daddy: You'll never make it! Big Mama: Without us to do all that we do for you, you'll never succeed! Son: In the last three weeks I've earned over $100,000. Big Daddy: Uh.... Son: That's more than you make annually, isn't it, Big Daddy? Big Mama: But... but... we've done so much. Son: These past few years you've done nothing but rip me off and constantly remind me how valuable you are. But you actually haven't given me any value whatsoever. You've worked me almost to death, taken heaps of money from me, and there isn't a single thing you can do for me that I can't do for myself. Big Daddy: You ungrateful little jerk! We made you what you are today! Son: Goodbye. Big Mama begins to cry. Big Daddy puts his arm around her. Big Daddy: It's okay, dear. We don't need him. We still have hundreds of other children. Big Mama: But what if they all figure out they don't need us? Big Daddy: They won't. We're authority figures. They need our approval. Plus, they're really naive. Big Mama: How long will they stay naive? Without our kids to help pay our bills, we won't be able to keep the house. Big Daddy: It'll all work out just fine. Big Mama: Maybe I should go after him. Offer to triple his allowance. Big Daddy: I don't think he'll be persuaded. Big Mama: What if, next time we sell one of his paintings, we give him 20%? Big Daddy: I've done some research. He can get 70% on his own. Big Mama: That much? Big Daddy: Yes. Big Mama: Can we match that? Big Daddy: No. We have too many bills to pay. Big Mama: Do you think he resents us for using him for his talents all those years? Big Daddy: Hush, dear. We didn't use him. We provided guidance and support. We nurtured him. We loaned him thousands of dollars. Big Mama: He paid back those thousands of dollars, and then some. Big Daddy: That isn't the point. The point is there will always be children who need the validation, coddling, and reprimanding that we have to offer. And they'll let us rob them blind in order to get it. Big Mama: I hope so, Big Daddy. Big Daddy: Trust me. Now run into the bedroom and fetch my Kindle. There's a new Konrath ebook on Amazon for $2.99. I love how he can offer such low prices. Big Mama: Me too. I have no idea why some other ebooks are so expensive. Big Daddy: It's simple, dear. Big corporations are wasteful and don't care about their customers. They charge a lot to pay for their overhead without providing value to either the authors they work with or the readers they sell to. Big Mama: (shaking her head) I'm glad we're not self-deluded like that. Big Daddy: Amen.

I ran across an interesting pair of articles concerning academic journal indexes—a complaint about the journals’ expense and inaccessibility by Laura McKenna in The Atlantic, and a rebuttal pointing out a number of errors and misconceptions in McKenna’s article by Nancy Sims of the University of Minnesota Libraries on her blog.

At the heart of McKenna’s complaint is the often outlandish pricing for individual articles found on some of these journals, such as JSTOR. She brings up the example of a charge of $38 for a 12-page article. McKenna posts an explanation for this state of affairs that involves publishers selling rights to academic articles to index services, which then sell the articles themselves back to universities. Sims points out this is an oversimplification, and that McKenna is imputing for-profit status to some entities that are actually non-profits.

McKenna concludes:

How could we make this academic research more accessible to the public? The challenge is finding a way to get research on the web by bypassing the publisher/JSTOR nexus. If academic journals skipped that needless step of providing a print version of their journals, they could stop this cycle. They could simply upload the papers to a website and take the publishers out of the process.

Sims responds:

I think I’ve pretty much fully addressed the misconception of a "publisher/JSTOR nexus", but wanted to point out that continuing to provide print access is not the thing that’s hanging up this dysfunctional cycle. Online-only access carries plenty of costs of its own. The non-profit open access publisher PLoS charges a publication fee of couple thousand dollars an article to underwrite only some of their costs. Many institutions or grants underwrite open access publishing fees or even whole open access publications, though. In the long-run, the costs are much lower to institutions than when subsidizing commercial profits.

Sims points out that, while JSTOR does have some problems, it is actually one of the better elements of the current academic publishing landscape. There is room for improvement overall, and there are many people already trying to reform the system. But the academic publishing system is not as simple as it looks, and complicated systems take time and effort to change.

I wonder just how much of this stems from people accustomed to the ease of finding things on the Internet being exposed to the less user-friendly nature of academic indexes? I was using indexes well before the World Wide Web, thanks to the systems at my local college library, and they took some getting used to. Many of them didn’t store text at all, but just told what issue of a magazine the article you wanted was in, and then you had to go to microfilm to find the actual citation.

Now the Internet has become a lot easier to find stuff you want (thanks in no small part to Google), but indexes have stayed about the same. Perhaps when people are used to getting stuff fast and free, costly and tricky-to-navigate systems seem that much more offensive. (This might also be why most paywall implementations run into trouble.)

Regardless, I’m sure that sooner or later the net’s simplifying influences will reach into academic publishing as well. It’s just a matter of time.

(Found via BoingBoing.)

Salon Magazine has republished an Imprint review of a book about two men who revolutionized the paperback publishing age back in the 1960s. The Electric Information Age Book is about publisher Jerome Agel and designer Quentin Fiore’s bold experiment in making paperback books that were more than just flimsy versions of hardcovers.

Agel aimed to produce paperback books that best represented and conveyed the media realities of the era. The radical use of text, typography and illustrations challenged the traditional expectations of how the pages of a book could be presented to readers. The opportunity that Agel recognized was in how media culture, as mediated through the popularity of film and television, could be explored, employed and exploited to make an event of a newly published book, turning it into a media spectacle.

After communication theorist Marshall McLuhan said kind things about their first book, Agel and Fiore approached McLuhan with a proposal for The Medium is the Massage, a book pairing quotes from McLuhan’s prior works with suitable images. Combined with Agel’s promotional abilities, the book was a big hit, and others followed.

The article gets a little deep philosophically for me at times, but one thing that stands out is a rumination on what some of McLuhan’s observations should mean for the e-book of today:

In a 1967 letter, McLuhan wrote, “Every new technology creates a new environment that alters the perceptual life of the entire population.” This is true. But why hasn’t this maxim found purchase in publishing today? The potential for e-books is staggering though that potential remains disappointingly unrealized. The presentation of content and the form of books, whether printed or digital, remain, for the most part, the same as ever. Social networking has reconfigured elements of promoting books to an extent, but no book trailer or Twitter trend has ever generated as much interest in a book as when this past October FSG paid for a Times Square billboard to promote Jeffery Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot.”

It also makes the case that one important difference between the way Agel and Fiore worked and the way publishers today work is that all their attention was on the reader, whereas today’s publishers have their minds solely on selling books—and if readers “happen to actually read the book, that’s a bonus.”

I haven’t read either The Electric Information Age or The Medium is the Massage, so I can’t really say what relevance the experimental design of the paperback book might have to today’s books. It seems to me there’s a lot of difference in purpose between an experimental book that pairs quotations with visual imagery and a prose novel meant to convey a story. Of course, there’s plenty of room for both kinds of book in today’s world.

Bloomberg Businessweek has a five-page profile on former publisher turned literary agent Larry Kirshbaum, who Amazon picked to head up its publishing division that is stirring up so much fear and loathing in the publishing industry. (The title of the piece, “Amazon’s Hit Man”, and the cover of the magazine issue featuring a burning book with the all-caps block-letter legend “AMAZON WANTS TO BURN THE BOOK BUSINESS” might be taken as some indication of that.)

For all that the title and magazine cover are a bit (literally) inflammatory, the article is a reasonably balanced look at Kirshbaum’s career and the history of the controversy and animosity that has sprung up between Amazon and the publishing industry.

Kirshbaum’s connections with Amazon go all the way back to 1997, when he introduced Jeff Bezos to publishing-industry magnates at a party thrown by Rupert Murdoch. He had been in publishing since the early 1970s, and became chairman and CEO of Warner Books, where he spent three decades before retiring to become a literary agent. However, publishing was where his heart really was, and when Amazon offered him a position heading up its own internal publishing imprint, he jumped at the chance.

Needless to say, many of Kirshbaum’s former colleagues in the publishing industry have not been terribly enthusiastic to hear that he has joined the company whose pricing practices are in danger of putting their companies out of business. But the literary agents who have worked with him over the years are much happier about it:

As he began to work on Amazon’s behalf last summer, agents, at least, were excited, because getting deep-pocketed Amazon into the game of bidding for books could translate into larger advances. “I want to do business with Larry wherever he is,” says agent Scott Waxman, who sold Amazon the Bob Knight book. “Do I think this is something that would make the Big Six publishers uncomfortable? Yes, with a big capital Y.”

It was interesting to see the description of Amazon’s Kindle launch wherein Bezos sprung a big surprise on the publishers who had up until then been extremely cooperative in preparing e-book editions for Amazon to sell. Bezos’s promise that New York Times bestsellers would go for $9.99 or less did not endear him to those publishers, as this was the first they had heard about it.

Another point that caught my attention was that Kirshbaum was an early proponent of e-books, and convinced Time Warner to invest $10 million in publishing for the Rocketbook. (As an aside, I’d just like to mention how old it makes me feel to hear the Rocketbook referred to as an “early e-reading device.”) Of course, it took the Kindle to make e-reading really popular.

At any rate, Amazon clearly could not have picked a better executive to head up its publishing division. It remains to be seen how well its publishing efforts will go over when it tries to place its books in the bookstores that it is also trying to put out of business, but given where Bezos’s razor-sharp business acuity has led him so far, I’m not about to say he’ll fail just yet.

(Found via Galleycat.)

Social reading site Goodreads is changing the API it uses for pulling book metadata to the site, PaidContent reports. It had been using Amazon’s public Product Advertising API which allowed it to import title, author, page count, and so on. However, Goodreads finds the terms of use for the API have become too restrictive for the site to continue to use it.

In particular, Amazon will not allow sites using the API to link to the book on any other on-line retailer except Amazon, but Goodreader provides links to titles on multiple retailers. Also, Amazon will not allow content from its API to be used in mobile sites or applications. Goodreads will switch to paying to license data from Ingram, and will also use information from the Library of Congress and other sources.

The change is causing concern amid a number of Goodreads users that data about some of their books might be lost in the shuffle, but Goodreads is hastening to reassure users that their data is “100% safe” and it is taking measures to safeguard any books that are in danger of losing their information.

The moral of the story is to be careful about relying too much on “free” services provided by a company out to make a profit. You never know when their needs will come into conflict with your own.

The Consumerist has a cautionary tale today.

An Amazon customer bought a Kindle, but the package went astray in shipment.  Amazon immediately sent another one, however:

My suspicions were confirmed. Someone else had gotten their hands on the first Kindle lost in shipment and because the Kindle came preloaded with my name, email, address and credit card information, this person(s) was able to make purchases on this Kindle. I spoke with the customer service agents who after understanding did their best to help me. They refunded all the purchases that were made. By the time I discovered this, the fraudulent user had made several big purchases of entire TV seasons. They also deactivated the Kindle so the person could no longer use it. …

I love Amazon. They make my life so much easier. What I do not like is them sending out extremely critical information pre-loaded onto Kindles. No one should be able to simply open a box and begin purchasing items on someone else’s credit card. I am lucky the user of the lost Kindle seemed to not really understand this because they didn’t begin purchasing anything until they were 3 days into it.

I am usually quite careful with my personal information, and it really bothered me that it was so available to someone else. I just wanted to let the Consumerist know about this so prospective buyers of Kindles or other electronic products can be wary of what is being stored in the device before you ever get your hands on it. …

More details in the article.

Apple’s recent publishing event raised many complaints about restrictive publishing rules for books created with iBooks Author application. In my opinion people don’t complain about iBooks Author or iBooks 2. The weak part is somewhere else – it’s the iBookstore.

I’m sure that if Amazon launched something similar to iBooks Author, not that many people would have complained about that. Kindle Store is closed (though not as closed as iBookstore), but it’s the largest and most advanced ereading ecosystem, available to users of the largest possible number of devices.

For now on, the iBookstore is the average store with overpriced books and limited access. It needs improvements (and it deserves a separate event to announce that). Changes should be made quickly, because it’s loosing ground. It never owned a lot of ground, anyway, compared to the number of eligible devices.

Here’s a list of things I need as an average reader to start shopping in the iBookstore. I’m a dedicated Apple fan, but I’ve never bought a book in Apple’s native ebookstore. If things change – I’m open to try one more time.

1. Web storefront

I’m a Mac/iPad/iPhone user but I rarely use iTunes. It’s the application which I associate with cables and waiting. Waiting for the content to be synced between iTunes and the iPad/iPhone or waiting for the update to be installed. I can accept using iTunes when it comes to unique content.

Books are not unique to iBookstore. They can be found anywhere else. I’m an online user, and the only thing I need is the web browser.

Why there is no web storefront for iBookstore is pretty easy to explain. Apple think they will have enough traffic from iOS users anyway. Plus while they keep their store closed, it’s much more difficult to learn how big is the offer and how low – or high – are the prices.

I use Google to find interesting data in the iBookstore, and if you want, you’ll find anything. The iBookstore doesn’t have a web storefront, but it does have data available for search engines, so there is no point in hiding anything any longer.

I wonder how much traffic they would have, if they opened a web storefront and made their books available for purchase from a web browser, as well as make their offer comparable with other ebookstores. It would definitely help the market, because Apple would have to make their content more competitive.

2. Better search

When I published my books in the iBookstore (via Smashwords), I was not able to find them by searching neither iBooks nor iTunes. I  knew that they were there, I checked it with Google.

Search is the key disappointment iBookstore brings. It’s very slow, returned results are odd, their number is limited and it’s actually not possible to limit search to books only. Searching here is about trying new key phrases again and again and going through the list of results until you find what you’re looking for.

It’s OK with apps, because apps are a completely new experience and users rely on recommendations like what sells best. Books are not new and are not only in the iBookstore. People want to find them quickly, especially that they already know what they want to buy.

3. Better recommendation tools

Everyone who browsed for items in iTunes knows that this marketplace is built around the idea of simple recommendation lists, like New & Notable,Top Charts or Recent Bestsellers. It’s OK if someone wants to buy a book other people read, but it’s not OK in case of more advanced personal preferences.

Kindle Store is the ultimate example of how the marketplace should function. You can get personal recommendations on the basis of the browsing history, you can find user lists with similar books, “customers who bought” and “other items to consider” display relevant books.

It takes some time to learn about all the possibilities of Kindle Store, but the moment you start using them is the moment you neglect any other place which doesn’t offer similar possibilities.

4. Better localization options

iBookstore is available to users in 30+ countries and the localization done right could have brought a lot of positive feedback.

The localization is not only about translating the user interface, but about adjusting the content to users in the particular country. There is no such thing in the iBookstore. There is no way to search books by language, the list called  Bestsellers by Language returns many languages, but your mother tongue is not going to be on top of the list.

If Apple’s marketplace is about simplicity, just make the Swedish books dominant in the Swedish iBookstore and Polish books in the Polish one.

5. Fix format incompatibility

The reason why so many users were annoyed with restrictions for books created with iBooks Author were about access. The format plays the major role in how the system works. It’s epub, and it’s good, but the books have Apple’s proprietary formats, Fair Play and the new one, specific for iBooks Author – and it’s terrible.

That’s just too much of incompatibility. Apple don’t understand the fight is not only about which device people will buy, but also about which cloud they will use. I stick to Kindle Store, because I have the most advanced tools to access books from my personal Kindle bookshelf.

What should I need to consider iBookstore as my cloud bookshelf? Epub with no proprietary DRM. Or epub with the industry-wide system, like Adobe DRM – if there has to be one. iBookstore is one of the challengers and being open helps. People will be looking for one cloud bookshelf. The more formats the cloud will “accept” the better. If someone will want to buy an iPad, and owns a 1st gen Nook already, accepting Adobe DRM books would help him to move the ebook library to iBookstore.

Obviously, this can work the other way round, but the freedom of choice is something people will appreciate, and they will be more willing to try the new ecosystem.

* * *

iBookstore is in a position of the challenger but Apple behave like having a leading product. The result is a weak proposal for consumers. They can consider it as a back-up option, but it’s far to treat iBookstore as a default place to shop for ebooks.

Apple, be more open to readers, and readers will be more open to you. You’ll fix a lot by improving iBookstore.

[Via Ebook Friendly]

Check out Woot!

This is a great price for a full-sized tablet – if you are willing to tackle webOS.  It’s refurbished.  HP has announced that webOS will be made open source later this year, so this might be a good bet for the more technically inclined among us.

New Features

• Allow calibre to be run simultaneously in two different user accounts on windows.
• Driver for Motorola Photon and Point of View PlayTab
• Add a checkbox to preferences->plugins to show only user installed plugins
• Add a restart calibre button to the warning dialog that pops up after changing some preference that requires a restart

Bug Fixes

• Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the remove format from book function to only delete the entry from the database and not delete the actual file from the disk
• Fix regression in 0.8.36 that caused the calibredb command to not properly refresh the format information in the GUI
• E-book viewer: Preserve the current position more accurately when changing font size/other preferences.
• Conversion pipeline: Fix items in the that refer to files with URL unsafe filenames being ignored.
• Fix calibre not running on linux systems that set LANG to an empty string
• On first run of calibre, ensure the columns are sized appropriately
• MOBI Output: Do not collapse whitespace when setting the comments metadata in newly created MOBI files
• HTML Input: Fix handling of files with ä characters in their filenames.
• Fix the sort on startup tweak ignoring more than three levels
• Edit metadata dialog: Fix a bug that broke adding of a file to the book that calibre did not previously know about in the books directory while simultaneously changing the author or title of the book.

(Via calibre Changelog.)

Presented at Digital Book World, Verso Advertising has posted the 46 slides from its 2011 Survey of Book Buying Behavior.  Note that Verso is an advertising agency, not a polling firm and we don’t have any information about the competence of the company to conduct such surveys.  However, it is still probably worth reviewing.

The ereaders/ebooks portion starts at slide 24 and here are some of the points made on their “Implications” slides, beginning at slide number 41:

E-reader owners reaching Early Majority with 15.8% penetration, double that of the 2010 Survey …

However resistance remains high and seems to be intensifying at 52%, higher than in the 2009 Survey at 40% (Undecideds seem to be grafitating to the “highly likely” or “unlikely” camps in considerable numbers.)

Among avid book buyers, e-reader ownership jumps to 22.3% yet the resistance level seems equally high at 49.7%.

Picture of future begins to solidify, with a high installed base fo e-readers/tablets in the 25-30% range within 3 years, but a large base of resistors at around 50% of the book-reading poopulation.  Consistent with our previous surveys.

Much, much more at the site.  Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.

 

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