Sneak Peek: TOC Online Directory

Andrew Savikas
June 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Update: From the Murphy's Law department, we temporarily lost a bunch of the directory entries for a few hours this morning. The entries have been restored, and we'll be working with the company providing the directory service to find out what happened (and probably evaluating alternative providers ...).

We talk with a lot of publishers looking to adopt new technologies like XML, ebooks, and Print-on-Demand, and while many of them are convinced of the need to move ahead, they're not sure where to find the right partners, vendors, and service providers.

To help the situation, we've put together the TOC Online Directory, which includes listings for:

• Technology companies
• Publishing tools
• Service providers
• Printers
• Consultants
• Associations
• Industry events

You can rate the companies listed, and even subscribe to an RSS feed so you'll know about new listings added within a specific category.

Listings that include just name, phone number and URL are free, or you can choose a Basic, Premium, or Showcase listing for a higher profile. Some levels also include goodies like embedded video, longer descriptions, a contact form, and images.

The site is now in "beta," which means that while most everything is up and running, there are still some wrinkles to iron out (see: the first paragraph of this post). Your feedback is important and quite welcome. Just send mail to tocdirectory AT oreilly.com with any comments or questions.

In addition to listings for all of our TOC 2008 sponsors, we've begun adding entries for other companies and organizations that seem relevant to the publishing and technology ecosystem. If we already have you listed, you can "claim" your listing and customize it. If you're not already listed, join today. As a bonus for blog readers, save 30% on upgraded listings with discount code blog through July.

Open Source DocBook XSL Experimental EPUB Support Released

Andrew Savikas
June 3, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Publishers with content in DocBook XML format can now easily create EPUB files using the open source DocBook XSL package (which already supports output to HTML and to XSL-FO -- a format that can be turned into PDF -- along with several other formats). Here at O'Reilly we've long used DocBook as the format for Safari Books Online, and more recently been using it more for standard book production (rather than converting to XML from a format like FrameMaker).

The 1.74.0 release is experimental, and additional feedback would be a big help for improving the output. From Paul Norton at the Adobe Digital Editions blog:

The ePub target has been tested against a number of files, but I would encourage those of you who use DocBook to try out the new target and to submit any issues you find to the tracking system on the DocBook project site. The only way we'll know if it doesn't work for you is if you tell us. :)

My personal thanks to Keith Fahlgren for driving the development of the ePub target and basically making it happen.

I'll second the thanks to Keith (an engineer here at O'Reilly) for his work on the project, and also extend the thanks to Paul and to Adobe for their contributions.

Blogger Begins Amazon Boycott

Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Over on O'Reilly Radar, blogger and author Allison Randal announces that in light of recent events, she's decided to abandon Amazon:

In light of Amazon's attempts to lock print-on-demand publishers into their own printing services, I've made a personal decision not to buy from Amazon any more. Since the site first launched over a decade ago, I've spent thousands and thousands of dollars on Amazon feeding my addiction to tech books and fiction, on music, DVDs, electronics, and gifts for friends and family. I realize my spending is a tiny drop in the bucket of Amazon's total revenue, but it's a decision I feel good about, the same way I feel good about using low-energy lightbulbs, reusing plastic bags, and buying a car with environmentally friendly fuel economy and emissions ratings. One of the fundamental principles of capitalism is that when one source of goods and services isn't meeting your needs, you switch to another. The power to decide which businesses succeed and which fail lies in the collective hands of millions of individual consumers.

If anyone else decides to join her, let us know.

Related Stories:

• POD Publisher Files Class Action Lawsuit Against Amazon
• Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights
• Amazon Ups the Ante on Platform Lock-In

Another Perspective on the AAP/EPUB Endorsement

Andrew Savikas
May 20, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Adobe's Bill McCoy has responded to my post on the AAP's endorsement of the EPUB format over on his blog:

Andrew says he's "not clear why it's the IDPF's problem to deal with conversion into non-standard formats" and quality assurance of the results. But this is the AAP, comprised solely of publishers, speaking to the IDPF, a broader group that in particular includes the eBook format and device vendors. It seems perfectly appropriate for AAP to make sure it's on record with vendors that the job isn't done just in having a neutral open standard for intermediate distribution of reflow-centric content. Ideally all the proprietary distribution formats will go away over time, but meantime the conversions and resulting quality issues are very real.

Bill's response is reasoned and thorough, and raises understandable objections to my original post. And the root of my objection to the AAP's approach is summed up nicely in how Bill concludes his post:

It's been over six months since EPUB 1.0 was approved, so from where I sit, it's not too overly demanding for the AAP to start asking the IDPF "what have you done for me lately?".

My concern is that by spending energy and resources working to satisfy publishers concerned primarily with replicating a print experience (something I contend is unnecessary for the vast majority of books published today), the opportunity cost is measured in lost energy and effort that should be directed toward building knowledge and capabilities for true digital publishing.

When I read between the lines of the AAP's letter, it's something like: "EPUB still isn't as good as PDF as far as we're concerned, and we want you to keep working to make it more faithful to our printed pages." But to me, EPUB is so extraordinary because it brings books that much closer to the richness of the Web. What are the standards and best practices for incorporating live web content into ebooks? Where's the framework for incorporating Google's new Friend Connect or OpenID into ebooks (so I know which of my friends is also reading the book)? What about a standard or mechanism for aggregating annotations and comments from ebook readers? To me, these are the kinds of questions publishers should be asking and the IDPF should at least help in answering.

I have a tremendous amount of respect for Bill, and for the IDPF. I just think the AAP is misguided in asking them to make ebooks work more like print books, rather than how to make ebooks work more like the web.

Responses and Additional Coverage:

• Original Post: "AAP Passive-Aggressively Endorses EPUB"
• Bill McCoy Response: "AAP EPUB Endorsement On Target"
• Peter Brantley Response: "IDPF: Boundaries of Participation"

POD Publisher Files Class Action Lawsuit Against Amazon

Andrew Savikas
May 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

On his blog Morris Rosenthal reports on a class-action lawsuit filed today against Amazon by POD publisher BookLocker.com:

Today a class action lawsuit was filed in response to Amazon’s threat to remove the "Buy" buttons of publishers who refuse to sign up with their on-demand printing subsidiary, Booksurge. If certified, the class action will most likely include all publishers who use on demand printing to print their books for distribution. If it functions like the class action lawsuits involving credit card or telephone billing that we all find ourselves party to on a regular basis, publishers will automatically be included unless they opt out. The primary plaintiff in the suit is BookLocker.com, Inc., the company that first broke the silence about the heavy-handed tactics Booksurge was using against Lightning Source's larger publisher customers.

The full complaint is available as a PDF, but I've taken the liberty of posting it here via SlideShare as well (click here if you don't see the embedded doc below):

| View | Upload your own

Essentially, the complaint alleges Amazon is in violation of the Sherman Act by engaging in "tying":

An arrangement whereby the seller of some product or service requires, as a condition to the sale of that product (the tying product), that the buyer purchase some additional product (the tied product). The tying arrangement is unlawful when the seller has some power over the market for the tying product. Tying arrangements are generally per se illegal, assuming that the selling firm has the market power to force the arrangement upon its customers.

The meat of the complaint is in paragraphs 38 and 39:

Amazon forces POD publishers to use BookSurge for printing services when they might otherwise prefer to purchase such printing services elsewhere.

Amazon’s practice of tying printing services to sales in the Online Book Market unreasonably restrains trade and is unlawful per se under Section 1 of the Sherman Act.

In light of recent moves by Amazon (including reports of bullying in the UK), litigation was an inevitability. And this isn't the only pending lawsuit Amazon's involved in (it's not even the only anti-trust lawsuit Amazon is involved in -- Gerlinger v. Amazon.com is still under appeal). Amazon lists seven items in the "Legal Proceedings" section of its 2007 annual report, among them patent infringement and breach of contract, fairly standard for a public company of their size (and they're on the plaintiff side of the aisle against New York State on sales taxes). It will be interesting to see whether other POD publishers join the fray.

Related Links:

• Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights
• Amazon POD: Friend of Foe to Indie Publishers?
• Amazon Ups the Ante on Platform Lock-In

Profile of Hay House: "An Attitude is Not a Business Plan"

Andrew Savikas
May 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

A recent New York Times article on self-help publisher Hay House is a glimpse into the fascinating life of founder Louise Hay. Whether you believe she really cured her own cancer is up to you, but beyond the human interest part of the profile are some great insights about publishing, including the importance of keeping practical business concerns in mind:

But an attitude is not a business plan. Hay House was not, in the beginning, very well run. The employees were mainly “people I knew,” Hay says, “a friend, or somebody who turned up, or somebody who wanted to work for Louise Hay. ... Meanwhile, large trade publishers, like HarperSanFrancisco and Tarcher/Putnam, were seeing the potential in New Age and investing heavily. Hay House would have failed quickly, or been bought out, but for the vision of Reid Tracy, who joined the company as an accountant in 1988 and became president in 1998. He invested his own money, too, and now owns 35 percent of the company; he is the sole shareholder besides Louise Hay herself, and everybody at Hay House, including its founder, considers Tracy the true leader.

That itself isn't terribly novel. But Reid Tracy's recognition that for authors (and savvy publishers) books are often just a means of enhancing their reputation in order to sell speaking engagements and ancillary products presaged the current buzz around using free content as a promotional tool:

[Tracy] realized more than 10 years ago that much of the money in New Age was to be made in items other than books: in card decks, audio tapes and page-a-day calendars. Major authors like Wayne Dyer and Marianne Williamson, who first came to Hay House just for ancillary products, later abandoned big trade houses to also do their books with Hay House.

And while the content Hay House published arguably couldn't be farther from what we publish, O'Reilly editor Andy Oram (who shared the original article link) pointed out some notable parallels to our eponymous brand:

• They realized that their authors had many channels for making sales besides conventional books, and they use all these channels to bolster one other.
• They recognize that their authors' work complements each other, and bring their authors together in group seminars.
• They play up the celebrity of their founder, who tends to choose trusted people based on intuition.
• They have a brand that goes far beyond the significance of any single offering, and fans accept what they think up next while staying true to the brand.
• They tend to follow their star authors wherever they take their ideas, and trust them.
• They're very self-consciously branching out into specialized products that also hold interest for children.

Related Stories:

• Why TOC is an Idea Much Bigger than O'Reilly
• A Q&A; on O'Reilly’s "Up-to-Date" Publishing Experiment

Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking

Andrew Savikas
May 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

I spent most of this morning reviewing several O'Reilly books in Adobe Digital Editions that we've converted into EPUB format -- we've been working to get our heads fully around the spec, and figure out how to best fit some our content into the constraints of the ebook medium. And the more time I spent scrolling and clicking through the books -- a very Web-browser-like experience -- the more I realized how frustrating it was that the books don't take full advantage of something we take for granted on the Web: outbound hyperlinks. The constraint sword cuts both ways (at least for now).

I can't really blame the authors -- they wrote their manuscripts for print, after all. And there's much we as the publisher can do to retrofit at least some links prior to distributing books in a digital form.

But this issue is a great example of the changing nature of book content, something nicely described in a great post from Martyn Daniels (link via Peter Brantley) about digital text and non-linear thinking:

We have long promoted that ebook readers and the current conversion of 250 pages of text into 250 pages of digital content is transitional. The challenge is not just to adopt the technology but adapt it to do things differently, exploit its true potential, learn from the experience and move on to the next step change. Merely taking today’s content and converting it into digital content follows the logic that digital is merely just another format or manifestation and that it will be read the same way. This is the greatest challenge to many genres: travel, reference, religion, art and design, craft etc, who can do things differently in the digital world and must not be drawn into mere replication.

That's very much in line with Thursday's post on the AAP's EPUB stance: publishers must begin making the transition from creating books to be consumed primarily in print with ebooks as an afterthought, toward designing books intended to remain digital throughout their lifecycle -- in particular, adding new value that leverages the potential of digital content. Of course, that also means that sometimes they won't be building "books" at all -- but instead whatever does the job best (here's Tim O'Reilly on the subject):

The failure to think about what job your product does for the customer, rather than the tools or approach you've historically used to do that job, is the reason why many established companies fail to make the transition when there is a technological change. Hence the old saw, "If the railroads had realized they were transportation companies, they'd be airlines today." (Well, maybe yesterday, as the airlines are suffering their own business transition. Maybe they'd be Fedex/Kinko's today. Or Google/Skype.)

Martyn's point about transitional forms is a critical one, and a simple example illustrates Tim's point about the transition: Encarta on CD-ROM was a transitional format from printed encylopedias to Wikipedia. Note that's three completely different players: Brittanica sold encyclopedias; Microsoft sold software; readers were looking for comprehensive general reference, not encylopedias or software.

We're experiencing this acutely at O'Reilly, as more of our audience finds the information online they once sought in our books. We've historically sold books; readers are looking for answers, information and instruction. We've found other ways to do those "jobs" and remain relevant, but it's not an easy transition.

Related Links

• The Importance of Viewing the World As Readers Do
• Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success
• Penguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity
• The Key to Web Success: Pretend Print Doesn't Exist
• The Future of the Book

AAP Passive-Aggressively Endorses EPUB

Andrew Savikas
May 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Note: Most of this post was drafted on the train ride back from New York on Wednesday night, and I held off posting it because I thought it sounded too snarky. Well, a day later I still think it sounds snarky, but that's a consequence of how strongly I feel about this stuff. I really do have a lot of respect for the publishers named in the AAP letter's footnote, many of whom are experimenting and innovating in a lot of very interesting ways. I have no idea who suggested those caveats, or more importantly, who insisted on them, just that they really don't belong there in the first place. Note that O'Reilly is not a member of the AAP. You've been warned, snarkiness ahead... 

Timed with yesterday's IDPF's Digital Book 2008, the AAP (Association of American Publishers) has put out a letter in support of the EPUB format (that the letter is posted as the scan of a printed letter is certainly amusing, and also quite telling). While this is a positive development, the "yes, but..." part of the letter reveals a subtle lack of understanding on the part of AAP (not the first time -- two weeks ago at OnCopyright 2008, AAP VP Allan Adler said that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all have the same "database" and Google Book Search was how Google was trying to differentiate itself; also not the first time we've disagreed with the AAP).

In particular, the AAP highlights three issues that they "encourage the IDPF to work with its member organizations to develop guidelines/plans for addressing":

A Manifesto on Publishing in the 21st Century

Andrew Savikas
May 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Sara Lloyd, head of digital publishing at Pan Macmillan, is in the middle of an impressive book publishers' manifesto over on the digitalist:

The locked-in perception of the book as a unit or a product has also led to digital ‘strategies’ which largely consist of the digitisation of existing print texts in order to create eBooks. This in turn has led to an obsessive focus on the reading device and a perception that the emergence of a ‘killer device’ will be a key driver in unlocking a digital future for books in the way that the iPod was, say, for music. This is a flawed perspective in a number of ways, not least because it fails to recognise the enormous amount of online or digital ‘reading’ that already takes place on non-book-specific devices such as desktop PCs, laptops, PDAs and mobiles, but also because it fails to recognise that the very nature of books and reading is changing and will continue to change substantially. What is absolutely clear is that publishers need to become enablers for reading and its associated processes (discussion; research; note-taking; writing; reference following) to take place across a multitude of platforms and throughout all the varying modes of a readers’ activities and lifestyle.

Today's installment continues the discussion:

Publishers need to provide the tools of interaction and communication around book content and to be active within the digital spaces in which readers can discuss and interact with their content. It will no doubt become standard for digital texts to provide messaging and commenting functions alongside the core text, to enable readers to connect with other readers of the same text and to open up a dialogue with them.

Definitely required reading.

The Importance of Viewing the World as Readers Do

Andrew Savikas
May 14, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In the rush to experiment and innovate with technology for printing, selling, writing, and marketing books, there have been some recent and relevant calls to take pains to remember the reader in all of this.

For a publisher (and in particular an editor and especially an author), energy and effort is understandably often directed at the book itself. But echoing a point made during this conversation between Kathy Sierra and Tim O'Reilly, customers don't really care about you or your products -- they care about what they're trying to accomplish, and successful product marketers remember that.

At Friday's BISG Making Information Pay event, Michael Cader drove the point home nicely using the Alex Rider series of books as an example. "I want to buy my son the third book in the series, and he wants to read it." But just looking at the books on the shelf, "I can't figure out which one is the third one." These are books that are competing just fine with the Wii and MySpace and World of Warcraft, yet (at least according to Michael -- I should acknowledge I'm unfamiliar with the books) they don't include an easy way for novices to navigate from one book to the next.

Some Quotables from OnCopyright 2008

Andrew Savikas
May 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

I spent last Thursday at Copyright Clearance Center's OnCopyright 2008, and came away with some great lines from the panelists well worth sharing here.

On a meta-level, one of the recurring themes on the panels was the value of using the work of others as a starting point for creative experimentation, as in a pastiche. So it was fitting to learn from the organizers that they found inspiration at the February TOC Conference, both in terms of speakers and in staging. (The panel title "Technology: Confronting the Tools of Disruption" was another nice nod.)

I've enclosed direct quotes in quotation marks -- the remainder is generally faithful paraphrasing, but may suffer from some transcription abbreviation.

Chris Sprigman:

• "Copyright law is not in place to protect business models, it's in place to protect creativity."
• Who controls copyright law? According to a 5th-grade civics class: Congress. According to a cynic: People who care enough to spend money to get Congress to do what they want.
• Intellectual property has nothing to do with what craigslist does, and craigslist has significantly diminished newspapers' ability to create a return on what they do.

Think Digital and Get Accessible for Free

Andrew Savikas
May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Today brought news of the release of a "Save to Daisy" add-in for Microsoft Word, and while a new Word add-in wouldn't normally be news for publishers, there's a bit more to this story.

Among the benefits of distributing content digitally is that it ostensibly makes the content more accessible to alternate reading devices. It's not difficult to see how -- compared to a printed page -- text marked up for computers to read (think HTML) would be much easier for a computer to read to a human (like Braille readers or text-to-speech). Indeed, for some time now we've offered audio versions of many O'Reilly articles and blogs (including this one). But in reality, format diffusion and DRM has often frustrated accessibility efforts (and by extension, consumers).

The industry migration toward EPUB has the potential to address this -- any (non-DRM) EPUB file should in theory be readable by a variety of accessibility devices, with no added conversion cost or delay.

But first there's a shift that needs to happen, and that's a shift on the part of publishers from building books primarily intended to be consumed in print to building books that are intended to be consumed digitally. When we first learned of the "Export to EPUB" feature in InDesign, there was premature optimism internally that it was the answer to a lot of questions about how to present some of our most popular content in a more digital-friendly form. The reality though is that simply exporting EPUB from InDesign files designed for print created essentially useless output. Our contacts at Adobe helped clarify that a huge part of getting good EPUB out of InDesign is about designing the content with that format in mind -- something very few designers are doing yet that I'm aware of. There's a serious education issue here, in that most people who hear that InDesign can export to EPUB assume it's as easy as "Save as..." and it's not. For example:

... when threading together text fields, they will always be exported in the correct order. However, they will also always be in one flow. All of the layout editing that you have done to place the text boxes with respect to each other or the page is discarded. You will have to style the layout of the EPUB manually, after export.

There's growing inertia behind EPUB (I like to refer to it as the "mp3 of ebooks"), and when ebooks become a primary delivery format, rather than a secondary one, expect to see much more content available in an inherently accessible way. Here's hoping the next version of Word includes "Save as EPUB" from the start. (For now you can try the free DAISY pipeline to convert those exported DAISY Word files into EPUB.)

Related links:

• New DAISY Pipeline Released
• Ebook Format Primer
• Keep Your Eye on the epub Ball (But Do Play Nice)

Trent Reznor Continues to "Get" the Value of Free Content

Andrew Savikas
May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Radiohead may have gotten more of the press for their "name your price" album, but Trent Reznor continues to demonstrate that he understands the value of free content as a promotional tool, and perhaps more importantly that what he's promoting can be quite far from free. Content Nation has a nice post on the ultimate goal of free-as-promotional:

In other words, this group of artists is recognizing that content's primary value in media formats is to help people build valuable relationships. While there's money to be had in mass-produced intellectual property, the high-margin business in content is in person-to-person relationship building that results in both executed business and a more multi-dimensional relationship that can be leveraged in many more ways than mass manufacturing can manage.

Related Stories:

• Lessons for Publishers in IDG's Digital Success
  
• That Was Fast: $300 "Free" Album Sold Out
• The Price of an Album (approaching zero) and the Price of a Souvenir (sky's the limit)

Why TOC is an Idea Much Bigger than O'Reilly

Andrew Savikas
May 1, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

One of the reasons we at O'Reilly believe so strongly in what we're doing with TOC is that we see it as something much bigger than ourselves. While we of course value the opportunity to create a context for conversation (whether that's in person, online, or in print), the real payoff is seeing what others do after spending time thinking in that context.

This great note just came over the transom from Richard E. Miller, English Department Chair at Rutgers, who wanted to share what he'd worked on following February's TOC Conference:

The conference that my collaborator, Paul Hammond, and I attended in New York this winter was transformative for us. We returned to the university with a very clear sense of what we needed to be doing to bring the humanities to the table for discussions about the future of higher education.

That led to a Web publishing venture, which had a near immediate impact on our efforts to bring attention to the New Humanities project. We are continuing to work with and off the presentations we attended, matching our best efforts with the efforts that were on display at the conference. We've got a three minute account of this up now:

Mostly, though, we wanted to thank you for putting together such a compelling and thought-producing event.

Richard E. Miller
Chair, Department of English
Executive Director, Plangere Writing Center

Save the date and plan to join the conversation at TOC 2009, Feb. 9-11, again at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. Sign up for the conference newsletter to catch updates about registration, speakers, the program and more.

TOC Tutorial DVDs Now Available

Andrew Savikas
April 30, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

DVDs from four of the eight TOC 2008 tutorials are now in-stock. If you attended the conference, check your email for information on how to save 50%. If you missed TOC 2008, you can still save 30% on the DVDs using discount code TOCD3 (and sign up for the conference newsletter to make sure you don't miss TOC 2009).

The available tutorials are:

• Digitizing Your Backlist
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for Publishers: Beyond Book Search
• XML for Publishers
• Making Mobile Work

And if you buy two, the third is free. More details here.

Save the Date! TOC Conference 2009 -- February 9-11 2009 in NYC

Andrew Savikas
April 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The 2009 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference is now officially scheduled for February 9-11 2009, again at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. We haven't yet opened up the Call for Proposals or registration, but if you sign up for the conference newsletter, we'll keep you updated so you can be sure to reserve your spot.

We'll be building on the success of this year's sold out conference with a revised and updated program, more video and audio coverage, and an expanded exhibit hall. As news develops we'll post updates right here on the blog, and at the TOC conference website.

Responsibly Assuaging Author Concerns about File Sharing and "Piracy"

Andrew Savikas
April 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6) | Listen

Eric Freeman, co-author of O'Reilly's Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML and Head First Design Patterns, recently asked via email about a rise in activity for Head First books on a popular file-sharing site. His query sparked an interesting thread on the Radar back-channel that I thought worth sharing here.

The original question (sent to Tim O'Reilly, who passed it along to the Radar list):

Tim

Any thoughts on the rise of Head First titles (mostly HFDP and HTML) on Pirate Bay? I'm trying to just take it as a sign there is strong interest in the books still ;)

Hope all is well,

Eric

First to respond was Nat Torkington, who nicely summarizes the "Piracy is Progressive Taxation" argument (emphasis added):

Fantastic! There's absolutely nothing you can do about it, and unless you see sales dipping off then I don't think there's anything you *should* do about it. The HF books work really well as books, so at best the torrents act as advertisements for the superior print product (not often you can say that with a straight face). At worst most of your downloads are going to people who wouldn't have bought the book at cover price and who will, if they enjoy it, rave about it to others.

So long as the royalty checks are strong, take BitTorrent as a sign of success rather than a problem. A wise dog doesn't let his fleas bother him.

Nikolaj Nyholm followed up referencing Make Magazine's experience:

I agree with Nat. Tim, this is your own "my problem isn’t piracy, it's obscurity." PT [Phil Torrone] has made the argument that he tracks Make popularity based on number of seeders on Pirate Bay (correct me if i'm wrong, PT). However, I'm starting to see O'Reilly books in Poland, printed in China, but with a different cover. While it's a market that you probably wouldn't reach with their current buying power, it's something I'd look into nonetheless. I'll pick up a couple of books next time I'm there and bring them next time I'm stateside.

... and then Make's own Phil Torrone weighed in (again, emphasis added):

Yup - seeing your books / magazines on Pirate Bay is always a good thing - You're current, you're interesting, if you're lucky your content transforms in to advertising for other things - for Make, the magazines become a campaign for our kits and events.

Authors are rightfully concerned to see their work pop up on peer-to-peer file sharing sites (though on occasion they're the ones who put them there), but the answer should not be to reflexively seek to stop it (you can't anyway).

Related Stories:

• BitTorrent as a Book Publicity Tool
• Piracy is Progressive Taxation ...
• Do Publishers Have the Stomach for Innovation?
• How Do Publishers and Authors Get Paid in a "Free" World?

Measuring Success on Self-Published Titles

Andrew Savikas
April 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Over on his blog at Adobe, Bill McCoy comments on the numbers used in a Wired article to demonstrate "success" for a self-published book:

No insult intended to author Zeraus nee Suarez who "is planning to release a sequel". It may be great stuff. But [1,200 copies sold] are not stats to write home about, much less to hang a "who need Random House" thesis on. Per an established literary agent: "Less than 5000 actual sales, result: misery ... A solid midlist novel would reap on the order of 3,500-7,000 hardcover sales and 10,000-25,000 paperbacks in the US."

Bill is absolutely right that as measured by the yardstick of trade publishing, 1,200 copies can't rightly be called a success. But do self-publishing authors use that yardstick?  Let's build a simple scenario and run some numbers. Of course every author is different, but I think it's fair to say that for many authors, two big goals for writing a book are to (1) make money and (2) elevate their reputation.

I'm assuming that for #1, most authors interested in self publishing are modest enough to not expect to get rich from their first (and self-published) book. Instead, they'd like merely to earn the equivalent of a fairly standard advance on royalties. And for #2, let's assume that the marketing outreach needed to sell that modest amount (through, for example, blogging or bootstrapped book tours) will effectively elevate their reputation enough to be counted as a success. That ties the two goals together so they can both be measured via sales numbers.

To make things easy, I'll use my own book, Word Hacks, as an example. In order for me to earn out the advance O'Reilly paid me, the book needed to sell roughly 8,000 copies. Certainly not a blockbuster, but according to Nielsen BookScan data, only 2% of the 1.2 million books sold in 2004 (the year my book was published) sold more than 5,000 copies.

If I'd instead gone the self-publishing route, based on the cost structure of working with Lulu.com, how many books would I need to sell to earn the same amount as that advance? Roughly 500.

Number of copies needed to earn equivalent of publisher advance.

Granted, selling 8,000 copies and having the association with a well-respected brand like O'Reilly is certainly going to do more for reputation than something self-published. But the recognition I'd have had to build with bloggers and their audience to sell those 500 copies would arguably put me among the top choices if and when a publisher like O'Reilly goes looking for their own author.

If you accept my generalizations, the numbers above suggest that in terms of author income, selling one self-published book is roughly equal to selling 16 through a publisher. Getting back to the Zeraus nee Suarez book (that's a pseudonym, btw), 16:1 is the conversion factor needed to make a (somewhat) more accurate comparison with trade sales. Self-publishing and selling 1,200 is therefore more like selling almost 20,000 through a traditional publisher. Not too shabby.

There are some flaws in a rough comparison like this, but my point is that if publishers use their standard sales measures to judge the performance of self-publishing authors, they are underestimating the "success" of those authors.

Related Stories:

• The Bookseller: "Self-published writer in line for PEN/Ackerley"
• Podcasts and Web Promotion Boost Authors

Tim O'Reilly: Amazon Has Publishers in its Sights

Andrew Savikas
April 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Over on the the O'Reilly Radar blog, Tim O'Reilly offers a warning for publishers, and cautions Amazon against "irreparably" harming the publishing ecosystem:

It is a free-market economy, and competition is the name of the game. But as Amazon's market power increases, it needs to be mindful of whether its moves, even those that may be good for the company in the short term, are ultimately destructive of the ecosystem on which they depend. I believe that they are heading in that direction, and if they succeed with some of their initiatives, they will wake up one day to discover that they've sown the seeds of their own destruction, just as Microsoft did in the 1990s.

Related Story:

• Amazon Growth Fuels Online's Book Market Share

[LBF] This Way to the Egress, er, Ebooks

Andrew Savikas
April 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Along with my registration materials for the London Book Fair (sent to me by mail -- a sign of how traditional most of the publishing industry remains) was a ticket to something called the "London eBook Show at the London Book Fair."

At first glance, I was excited to see that ebooks would be featured so prominently at the Fair, but a closer look showed it was actually just a (brilliant) tactic from the folks at DNAML, ebooks to get bodies to their booth. The "show" was a presentation from DNAML's US GM Peter Kent about DNL's take on the future of ebooks (a future that unsurprisingly prominently features their software ...). If anyone's looking for a case study on effective trade show booth promotion, talk to these guys. It was quite impressive to see folks lined queued (I am in London) up with tickets in hand for the "show." While the overall message was right on target, there were several points of the presentation that don't quite mesh with the future of publishing as we've been seeing it:

• DRM. Peter talked quite a bit about DRM, and at one point even mentioned that their research discovered O'Reilly titles on file sharing sites. But that implies that we believe that's a bad thing, when in fact, we feel quite the opposite -- that "piracy" can be a valuable promotional tool (and we're not the only ones)
• The future of devices. I certainly don't fault someone who's selling PC-based ebook software for downplaying the future of dedicated reading devices like the Kindle and Sony Reader. And Peter's right that laptops are becoming cheaper and smaller, and I wouldn't be surprised if a considerable amount of ebook reading happens on laptops. But connecting a few dots (half of Japan's top 10 books last year were written on mobile phones; the iPhone has proven a game-changer for user expectations on a mobile device; Kindle results for at least some publishers have been quite strong) suggests that reading away from a PC will be at least as big, if not bigger, than reading on one.
• Open formats. I'll admit that DNL's software does some pretty impressive stuff with content. But I disagree that keeping that format proprietary is the best choice. The history of proprietary data formats is not a rosy one, and it would be great to instead see work contributed to the emerging .epub standard to improve features there -- if their reader is that good, they haven't got much to fear from sharing.

Those points aside, it really was great to see so much interest in ebooks among the publishers at their "show." And I thought Peter was spot-on in making parallels between ebooks and software: software used to be sold in boxes in retail stores (and later from online retailers, but still in boxes); now most software is downloaded and often includes a trial period. It certainly makes sense that ebooks will eventually follow a similar model, which does mean some serious re-evaluation of existing sales and distribution channels. We've said before that the tools and techniques for developing content are becoming very much like those used to develop software, and it was useful to hear this other analogy raised.

Although there are still standards squabbles, pricing questions, and distribution methods to be worked out, the money to be made is too attractive not to motivate resolution, and 2008 is going to be a very big year for ebooks. Perhaps next year there really will be an "ebook show" at the Fair.

Related Stories:

• Long-tail evidence from Safari and Google Book Search
• Dealing with the other F-word
• Keep Your Eye on the ePub Ball (but do play nice)