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A Big Boost to Books as Apps?
Andrew Savikas
August 14, 2008
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Perhaps inspired by Apple's success with their iPhone App Store (which is already bringing in $1 million a day), T-Mobile has announced plans to add a similar storefront across all of their phones -- reaching more than 30 million subscribers. From Silicon Alley Insider:
This fall, T-Mobile is planning to gut its current, lousy method of distributing mobile apps -- favoring software companies that it has revenue-sharing deals with, according to MocoNews. In its place: An iPhone-like app store that's organized by popularity, not payola. The platform will be open to "almost any developer" that agrees to T-Mobile's revenue split, which one developer says is "very generous."
Books as standalone apps (and as collections, such as Shakespeare) have already proven popular enough for Apple to add "Books" as a category. There are several important implications of this for publishers:
- Disintermediation. This is yet another channel for individual content creators to reach an audience, and some part-time app developers are already earning a nice payday. Surely some will be vanity press material; just as surely some will not.
- Pricing and discount structure. Right now Apple takes a 30% cut, and paid app prices are settling around tiers like $0.99, $1.99, $4.99 and $9.99 (amusing $1,000 outliers aside). The thrashing continues on this front, and consumers will be the ultimate arbiter.
- Distribution. Publishers are rightfully wary of Amazon's growing power, and the wireless delivery is arguably the driver behind the bullish outlook on the Kindle. The iPhone App Store and now T-Mobile are welcome competition, though carry a double-edged sword as gatekeepers controlling which content gets in front of their customers.
- Form, not just format. Smart publishers (and as usual, I use the term loosely) will go beyond just displaying printed book content in these new devices. Digital, networked environments require rethinking how best to do the "job" of a book.
The distinctions between content and software are falling away, and smart publishers need to begin adjusting accordingly.
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Pricing Digital Book Content: Where's the Sweet Spot?
Andrew Savikas
August 12, 2008
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A recent post from Adam Hodgkin over at the Exact Editions blog on book pricing kicked off a great thread on Peter Brantley's Reading 2.0 list. (Pricing also popped up quite quickly in the comments thread around our recent ebook pilot.) Adam argues that deriving digital prices from print ones is the wrong way to go:
At this stage in the development of the ebook market, book publishers who think about digital pricing tend to work back from the print price, to find a satisfactory, ebook price at 50% or 60% or X% of the list price of the print work (think of £195 annual subscription as the mortgage payment on a book -- I bet that is the way OUP fixed their subscription price). It will take a bit of time before publishers and marketers realise that the cost of production, in the sense of 'unit cost', has no conceivable bearing on the digital pricing, whether for outright sale or for an annual subscription. The chances are that in the medium term ebook prices will migrate to some more or less fixed pricing levels: $2.99, $4.99, $9.99, perhaps $19.99. Simplicity will be a virtue and digital books will be seen as having some natural price points (cf CDs or DVDs).
Mike Shatzkin followed up with his own insights:
This triggers a few thoughts about ebook pricing which are neither conclusive nor particularly consistent.
Ebook pricing for IP that is sold in single-title print book form (i.e.stand-alone trade and professional books) will inevitably refer to the unit cost of manufacturing the print book. Since that was a component of the print book price, it becomes a factor in the publisher's formulation of the ebook price. Why?
Because the author and the retailers will expect it to be that way and anything that fails expectations results in friction, contentious conversation with important trading partners a publisher would prefer to avoid.
Amazon is doing their best to break this linkage by having seized control of Kindle book pricing in ways that only they can. (It is highly unlikely that Sony would see value in selling a book below cost in order to establish a $9.99 pricing standard, as Amazon has done.) So far, publishers have not been forced to alter their pricing to Amazon to make wholesale prices conform to that retail price.
There is a "Soapbox" piece in this week's PW -- not available online as far as I can tell -- by superagent Andrew Wylie advocating (with flawed facts and flawed logic, in my opinion) that ebook retail prices should be the same as printed book retail prices and that the author's royalty should go up to 22.5% on the ebook. That's the author expectation I was referring to earlier, expressed by a powerful agent.
Wylie's argument is that if ebooks are cheaper than the corresponding print book, printed books will be abandoned and publishers will then and therefore no longer be necessary.
There is actually an analogy between Kindle pricing and book club pricing. Publishers told retailers for generations not to worry about lower prices offered by book clubs, because club membership (the obligations...) created a hurdle that left most book readers out and the PR generated by the clubs were a catalyst to sales elsewhere. Similarly, Kindle pricing is only available (useful) to people who plunked down their $349 or $399 for the Kindle, which relatively few people have done. So the Kindle pricing shouldn't affect the printed book pricing. In fact, with overall sales levels still having trouble cracking 1% of the total, NO ebook pricing should have much impact on printed book pricing. Yet. Despite the concerns of retailers and authors.
We are many experiments away from settling this question, which is a moving target. What makes sense when ebooks are 1% of the market may not when they are 10%, or 30% (and we'll be working our way up to those levels for a VERY long time.)
Bill Janssen, who addressed this recently in a post of his own, then weighed in:
Excellent point.
But there are many facets to this. It's interesting that many booksellers for the iPhone (well, eReader, Stanza) are essentially repeating what they did with the Palm, by distributing an app that is both a bookstore and a reader. The books are hidden behind the retailer's icon. Is that the best idea? Would authors prefer their books to be "first-class" apps? That is, the book would have its own icon on the iPhone "desktop"? Perhaps the app would have links of some sort to other works by the same author? Author branding instead of publisher/distributor branding?
I still feel that there's a powerful economic pressure for more disintermediation here...
But i2s' Alain Pierrot isn't quite ready for publishers to step aside:
I'd hate having the narrow space of any of my mobile devices clogged by a dozen or more 'disintermediated' author's egoes...
Which doesn't mean either that I'm not a faithful 'fan' of individual authors. (I used to buy anything Julio Cortázar would issue and wait for the next...) But I do appreciate branding from a publisher as the good mix between time saving, quality warranty (whatever this can mean for each individual) and serendipity: obviously, some readers used to make a safe and fast bet when they bought latin american litterature from Gallimard's "La Croix du sud" collection without having been introduced to such or such an author.
Author branding might be a very short-sighted fantasm, nearer last century's most silly situations such as Enver Hodja's control of Albania's publishing, than any realistic situation where a brand offers good value to save time and attention.
Pricing also popped up in the comments thread around our recent ebooks pilot, including this one:
It seems to me though that your attempts to price "at a discount" from print books are misguided at best and silly at worst.
You need to start thinking in terms of "at an increment" from ZERO. The web is a huge place and offers amazing content for free. You would be wise to consider how much EXTRA you want to make from your existing paper publishing business. If you were only publishing digitally then I do agree that you need to take the discount approach.
I'll add that within our own Safari Books Online (our joint venture with Pearson), subscription pricing is not directly related to print prices, though the formula for paying out royalties to publishers does include the book's MSRP.
A lot of people are trying to figure out where prices are headed for digital book content, and to date there's not much consensus (among publishers or among customers). Add your own thoughts in the comments section -- what do you think?
iPhone Apps Developer "Shell Shocked" by Outsized Payday
Andrew Savikas
August 4, 2008
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Seth Weintraub over at 9to5Mac reports on the outsized success of at least one iPhone Apps developer, Eliza Block, who's now earning an unexpected $2,000 a day from her crossword puzzle app, 2Across. Noteworthy certainly, but also instructive about the platform Apple has created for what can certainly be called "self publishing":
But, she deserves it...her app is the best of the breed, filling a need that many people want. The amazing thing is that Apple has taken care of everything from the development environment to the transaction services to the distribution to the marketing. You can be a great software developer on your own without having a huge company to back you up. This is truly a game changing play for Apple and the development community.
Might that soon translate to: "You can be a great author on your own without having a publisher back you up?"
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TechCrunch Reports 240K Kindles Sold
Andrew Savikas
August 1, 2008
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TechCrunch is reporting that according to their sources, Amazon has shipped 240,000 Kindles since launch, suggesting a $100M business so far:
Doing a little back of the envelope math, that brings total sales of the device so far to between $86 million and $96 million (the price of the device was reduced to $360 from $400 last May). Then add the amounts spent on digital books, newspapers, and blogs purchased to read on the device, and you get a business that has easily brought in above $100 million so far. (Each $25 worth of digital reading material purchased per Kindle, add $6 million in total revenues).
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How Hackers Show it's Not All Bad News at the New York Times
Andrew Savikas
July 30, 2008
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News of a looming downgrade of NYT stock to "junk" status by Standard & Poor's sadly isn't all that shocking. I'm certainly glad I'm not an investor holding any NYT.
But there's something going on at the Times that probably won't make it to Silicon Alley Insider, much less the mainstream business press, and it's something that's starting to make me think the Times just might succeed in adapting to the changing rules of the media and publishing game (though there will almost certainly be many more casualties before it's over).
So what's the Times doing that's so important? They're hacking.
Not hacking in the nefarious sense, but in the original sense of experimentation, and curiosity, and solving interesting problems (as Paul Graham put it, "Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.") How many other publishers are running blogs about their work with open source software? Even fewer are developing and releasing their own high-quality open source software:
Quite frankly, we wanted to scale the front-end webservers and backend database servers separately without having to coordinate them. We also needed a way to flexibly reconfigure where our backend databases were located and which applications used them without resorting to tricks of DNS or other such "load-balancing" hacks. Plus, it just seemed really cool to have a JSON-speaking DB layer that all our scriptable content could talk to. Thus, the DBSlayer was born.
That is not typical newsroom conversation.
But this isn't just about open source software, or even about some developers building cool software to run backend system. The Times has put developers right in the middle of the newsroom. At a MediaBistro event in May, Aron Pilhofer from the "Interactive News Technology" group at the Times (sharing the stage with their Editor of Digital News, Jim Roberts), talked about how the Minnesota bridge collapse was when they realized they needed to develop their own tools to cover the news with the web, and not just on the web. Less than a year later, when Hillary Clinton's infamous public schedule was released, they had the people and the skills in place to crunch 12,000 PDF documents (containing images of scanned documents) through a text-recognition program, on to Amazon's "Elastic Computing Cloud" and finally into a Ruby on Rails Web application providing full-text search across all eight years of calendars.
Just this week, the Times' Derek Gottfrid gave a talk at O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON) titled "Processing Large Data with Hadoop and EC2" based on work he'd done on the Times' archives. Again, this is the kind of talk you're not likely to hear at most newspapers (or magazines, or book publishers) these days:
I was able to create a Hadoop cluster on my local machine and wrap my code with the proper Hadoop semantics. After a bit more tweaking and bug fixing, I was ready to deploy Hadoop and my code on a cluster of EC2 machines. For deployment, I created a custom AMI (Amazon Machine Image) for EC2 that was based on a Xen image from my desktop machine. Using some simple Python scripts and the boto library, I booted four EC2 instances of my custom AMI. I logged in, started Hadoop and submitted a test job to generate a couple thousands articles — and to my surprise it just worked.
Earlier this month at FOO Camp I had the pleasure of meeting another hacker from the Times, Nick Bilton, part of the Times R&D lab -- the folks who built the impressive NYT iPhone App.
UPDATE: Nick Bilton points out via email that:
There were people from nytimes.com that were instrumental in building the NYT iPhone app also ... Is there anyway you can add a couple of words that the R&D Group 'worked with nytimes.com' to help build the iPhone app?
If you're worried about EBITDA and EPS, then you're rightly worried about the Times right now. But if you're worried about the future of journalism, and about the ability of established media companies to adapt to a digital world, there's also reason to be excited about the Times right now too.
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Tech Publisher Asks "Are Ebooks Ready for Technical Content?"
Andrew Savikas
July 29, 2008
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Dave Thomas from the Pragmatic Programmers is mulling whether to make their books available on the Kindle, and encountering many of the same issues we faced here at O'Reilly regarding technical content and the limitations of current ebook devices:
In fact, we've had a prototype form of that capability for a while now, but we've always held back. Frankly, we didn't think the devices worked well with our kind of content. Basically, the
.mobiformat used by the Kindle is optimized for books that contain just galleys of text with the occasional heading. Throw in tables, monospaced code listings, sidebars and the like, and things start to get messy.
Dave's post has sparked a great conversation within the comments, including one from Shelly Powers, whose book Painting the Web was among those included in our pilot program:
I think that providing the package deal that O'Reilly does (with PDF, epub, and mobi), in addition to downloadable code is the way to go. If you sell Kindle books, you definitely need to make both your figures and your source available, separately. For instance, I have my Painting the Web figures in an online gallery and the examples are available at O'Reilly--takes care of a lot of issues related to Kindle. Another approach could be to make available (for no additional cost) a PDF of just the figures, or the figures and code.
Preparing a book for the ebook market may seem like a lot of work, but you have the potential to reach a new audience of book buyers. Buyers used to the internet and having access to immediate information; who may not want to order a book and wait a week for it to arrive, but who will buy a book if it means they can have access to it now. I wouldn't have considered myself an "impulse buyer" when it comes to books, but I have probably at least a dozen books I bought because the ebook format was cheaper (that's a key element), and I could get the book _right now_.
On one hand, merely working to replicate a print experience isn't the right way to exploit the benefits of the new platform; on the other hand, publishers (and as usual, I use that term quite loosely) should be able to expect at least minimal rendering of common elements like tables, along with support for at least the same core 14 fonts available in Acrobat (speaking of fonts, if you're looking for a laugh check out this mock "font conference").
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Call for Participation Now Open for TOC 2009
Andrew Savikas
July 21, 2008
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The Call for Participation is now open for the 2009 TOC Conference, Feb. 9-11 at the Marriott Marquis in New York City.
As usual, we'll be accepting proposals for 45-minute breakout sessions (or panel discussions), 5-minute "lightning demos", and for longer 3-hour workshop tutorial sessions. For the latter, we're looking for people who really know their stuff, and are prepared to engage the audience with hands-on, practical material.
Some of the topics we'll be exploring at TOC 2009 (and accepting proposals about) include:
- Ebooks
- Alternative business models for paid content - both online and in print
- Content for mobile/smart phones (that includes the iPhone)
- Web-based marketing and promotion
- New digital publishing and authoring tools
- Managing the human side of change and innovation
- Case studies of successful (or unsuccessful!) new publishing initiatives
- Riding the wave instead of fighting the tide, such as using file-sharing sites to increase sales
- Strategies and tactics for effectively using print-on-demand
- Moving beyond books: selling merchandise, community, experience, and other scarce goods in a world of "free"
- Strategies and tactics for incorporating ebooks into your publishing program
- Tools and challenges for an efficient all-digital workflow
- Revising your P&Ls for the economics of digital publishing
- Understanding and responding to the changing retail landscape
We received far more great proposals last year than we could possibly find space for, and in some cases while the material was interesting, it wasn't the right fit for the audience or the rest of the schedule. To increase the chances of your proposal being accepted, here's some tips:
- Include as much detail about the planned presentation as possible. The more we know about what you plan to present and why it matters, the better.
- Be thorough! If you are proposing a panel tell us who else would be on it. If you are going to have a product announcement or software release, let us know. If you feel this is something that hasn’t been covered at TOC before, let us know.
- Keep it free of marketing. Nothing annoys an audience more than an unexpected sales pitch.
- Keep the audience in mind: they’re forward-minded, professional, and already pretty smart
- Clearly identify the level of the talk: is it for beginners to the topic, or for gurus? What knowledge should people have when they come to the presentation?
- Give it a simple and straightforward title or name – fancy and clever titles or descriptions make it harder for people (committee and attendees) to figure out what you’re really talking about
We're keeping the CFP open until August 25, but I encourage you to submit your proposal before then. There's always at least a few "must haves" that roll in along the way, and as they do the number of slots available to other sessions shrinks -- so your best bet is to be a "must have" session (see the tips above).
30 O'Reilly Titles Now Available as Ebook Bundles; Many In Kindle Store Later Today
Andrew Savikas
July 15, 2008
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Update: According to Amazon, the O'Reilly Kindle books can now be pre-ordered, but won't be available for download until Friday. The 12 titles listed below are now available in the Kindle store.
As promised last month, O'Reilly has released 30 titles as DRM-free downloadable ebook bundles. The bundles include three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price. And for a bit more than the cover price, you can get the print version too along with the ebook bundles.
Since we began selling PDFs directly some time ago, we've given those customers free updates to the PDFs to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles. These files (like all our PDFs currently for sale) do not include any DRM, though we continue to experiment with custom watermarking options.
With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader (Sony announced in May that EPUB support is forthcoming in a firmware update for their Reader).
Twelve of those 30 titles will also be available through the Kindle store later today are now available.
Ebook Bundles Now Available
The titles now available as ebook bundles are:
Read more…Ebooks Abound in New iPhone Apps Store
Andrew Savikas
July 10, 2008
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Select O'Reilly Books Soon on Kindle, and as DRM-free Digital Bundles (Including EPUB)
Andrew Savikas
June 18, 2008
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Update (7/15): 30 O'Reilly titles are now available as ebook bundles. Full information is available here.
Update (6/19): On his New York Times blog, David Pogue has noted O'Reilly's pilot in the context of the recent discussion prompted his column on ebooks and piracy (which brought insightful responses from Adam Engst and Mike Masnick, along with a follow up from David).
Ebooks are certainly nothing new for us at O'Reilly. We've offered PDFs of hundreds of our titles for some time now, and until quite recently Safari Books Online, our online-publishing joint venture with Pearson, generated more revenue than was typically associated with the entire downloadable ebook business.
But it's clear that things are changing in the ebook market (though precise numbers are proving hard to come by), so we've decided to officially announce two new e-publishing programs that have been in the works for some time:
- First, through oreilly.com we will offer a select number of books as a bundle of three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price -- starting in early July. Since we began selling PDFs directly some time ago, we've given those customers free updates to the PDFs to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles. That also means that although the ebooks aren't yet available, if you buy the PDF now, you'll receive the EPUB and Mobipocket versions as a free update once they're available in early July. These files (like all our PDFs currently for sale) will be released without any DRM, though we are exploring some custom watermarking options. With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader (Sony announced in May that EPUB support is forthcoming in a firmware update for their Reader).
- Second, O'Reilly has agreed to sell select ebooks for the Kindle through Amazon. We hope to see those ebooks available for sale through the Kindle store in the near future.
Amazon's Road to Profitability: Toll Booths on Your Road to Readers
Andrew Savikas
June 17, 2008
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Though mentioned here back in May, some recent strong-arm tactics by Amazon UK have been picked up by the New York Times, which is referring to the removal of the "Buy Now" button as "the literary equivalent of a nuclear option for rebellious publishers who balk at its demands":
“Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another, making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at our expense and sometimes at yours,” Mr. Hutchinson said in the letter. “If this continued, it would not be long before Amazon got virtually all of the revenue that is presently shared between author, publisher, retailer, printer and other parties."
This kind of aggression from Amazon is becoming commonplace, but it's worth a step back to try and understand the broader strategic context that might underlie these moves.
Read more…Sneak Peek: TOC Online Directory
Andrew Savikas
June 9, 2008
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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
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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
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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.
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Another Perspective on the AAP/EPUB Endorsement
Andrew Savikas
May 20, 2008
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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.
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POD Publisher Files Class Action Lawsuit Against Amazon
Andrew Savikas
May 19, 2008
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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):
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.
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Profile of Hay House: "An Attitude is Not a Business Plan"
Andrew Savikas
May 19, 2008
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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:
Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
Andrew Savikas
May 18, 2008
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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.
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AAP Passive-Aggressively Endorses EPUB
Andrew Savikas
May 15, 2008
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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":
Read more…A Manifesto on Publishing in the 21st Century
Andrew Savikas
May 14, 2008
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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.
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