Twitter Scorecard for Publishers

Mike Hendrickson
May 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

Recently Publisher's Weekly published an article The Twitter Scorecard that showed which Publishers were using Twitter. I found the piece missing key elements that would provide more insight to their question "So who is twittering, and how effectively?" I believe that if you are asking how effectively we are using Twitter, there is considerable more data needed than was presented. In my opinion, the number of Followers is not a complete measure of effectiveness. In fairness, PW did not say they were attempting to be comprehensive or complete in their scorecard, so I thought I would provide the data that is available mixed with some of my own obtained by scraping. So, I'll attempt to fill-in the scorecard a bit more.

First a note on who is behind the publisher accounts. O'Reilly as a company has oodles of Tweeters who blog about work, life, interests, etc., including @timoreilly who is nearing the half-million followers threshold. I suspect other publishers have the same army of tweeters too, but the data below is is just for the publisher account only. Oftentimes, these sort of accounts are run by PR groups in a Publishing company.

Below, you will find the same list of publishers contained in the original article with the addition of the following column headers and data:

Pub_Twitter is the Publisher account on Twitter. This list was created by PW and am not sure what the criteria was. Followers is the number of people that are following the publisher. These numbers are already off as many of these publishers have added many new followers since the original writing. I kept the same number that PW reported. Following is how many users the publisher follows. Updates is how many tweets the publisher has posted since the account was created. Content is the most popular words the publisher uses in their tweets. Url is a link to a wordle that visualizes the corpus of tweets for the publisher. At the bottom of the table, you will see All Publishers which shows averages and the link includes all words in a visual wordle.

I am thinking of making this a quarterly scorecard for 2009. Before I do that, are there meaningful and obtainable measures you would like to see added to the scorecard? What are the real measures: Sales increases? Information disseminated more efficiently and targeted? Increasing the feeling of community? What elements do you think should be measured in a Twitter Scorecard? Finally, if you are a publisher using Twitter and want to be included in future scorecards, let me know. I am mikeh {at} oreilly {dot} com or @mikehatora on Twitter.

New on O'Reilly Labs: Open Feedback Publishing System

Andrew Savikas
May 21, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

O'Reilly engineer Keith Fahlgren has formally launched our new Open Feedback Publishing System over on O'Reilly Labs:

Over the last few years, traditional publishing has been moving closer to the web and learning a lot of lessons from blogs and wikis, in particular. Today we're happy to announce another small step in that direction: our first manuscript (Programming Scala) is now available for public reading and feedback as part of our Open Feedback Publishing System. The idea is simple: improve in-progress books by engaging the community in a collaborative dialog with the authors out in the open. To do this, we followed the model of the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others) and built a system to regularly publish the whole manuscript online as HTML with a comment box under every paragraph, sidebar, figure, and table.

You can see the system in action at the site for our upcoming book Programming Scala.

Undocumented Kindle "Clippings" Limit?

Andrew Savikas
May 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

O'Reilly author Shelley Powers is a heavy user of Kindle's "clipping" feature, and has run into an apparently undocumented clipping limit imposed by Amazon:

I tried to find information about the clipping limit in the Kindle TOS or User Guide, but nothing was covered. I also tried to find out if one can "delete" items from the existing clipping file, in order to replace with other clippings at a later time, but once the limit is reached, nothing associated with the book can be added to the clipping file, not even a highlighted sentence.

Shelley also notes that the clipping limit applies to DRM-free books as well, which definitely doesn't make much sense.

Amazon's Physical vs. Digital Dissonance

Andrew Savikas
May 18, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (4) | Listen

In March of 2008, I wrote about the frustrating experience of trying to get this blog added to Kindle. Fourteen months later, apparently that "rather large ingestion queue" is still full, because the blog never showed up, and I never heard another peep about it. (There is now a self-publishing feature for blogs, but as with their self-publishing book feature (known as DTP), the standard terms of service you must accept to participate aren't something many commercial publishers will be willing or eager to swallow.)

As you might expect, Amazon is one of our biggest customers, and our relationship with them is an important one. They give us far more (virtual of course) "shelf space" than most retailers could possibly provide, and their lean ordering systems mean much less exposure to the risk of significant returns. But much of the efficiency and innovation that is the hallmark of their physical-goods business doesn't seem to be translating into their newer digital programs.

Cory Doctorow has a post over on boing-boing venting his own frustrations with trying to get answers from Amazon:

I love Amazon's physical-goods business. I buy everything from them, from my coffee-maker to my DVDs. I love their consumer-friendly policies, and their innovative business practices. I just wish their electronic delivery business was as good as their physical goods side.

(For the record, we're the "major publisher" Cory references -- I passed his questions along to my own contacts on the Kindle team, and despite repeated attempts haven't been able to get a response either.)

I do understand that many of these are new products and systems, and it's inevitable that there will be glitches and problems; it's often important to be willing to be "good enough" in order to move quickly. But some of these things are bordering on the absurd (like the 14-month wait for ingestion of this blog...). For example,  while we were thrilled they worked quickly to help us get The Twitter Book up for sale on Kindle, for more than two weeks (until just last Friday) the product page for the print version not only didn't show the Kindle version as available, it actually included a link saying "Tell the Publisher! I'd like to read this book on Kindle." Sigh.

In the wake of releasing about 200 of our books onto Kindle, more than one customer complained that the Preview wasn't up to par:

@timoreilly I love how the Kindle sample of the Twitter book doesn't even get past the preface for the book. Not much of a sample.

Turns out the default preview percentage is 5% of the book, so we asked if we could dial that up to 20% (in line with the amount included in a preview of one of our books on Google Book Search). The response? Since we're the only publisher that's asked for it, it's not a high priority change they're prepared to make right now. (Note to other publishers: please let Amazon know you'd like the option to increase the preview percentage on your Kindle books.)

Amazon is a business like any other, and they're entitled to prioritize as they see fit. And I hope that all of the new vendors, sites, and services popping up (or ramping up) to sell ebooks create some urgency for Amazon to improve their own programs so they're as efficient in the digital supply chain as they are in the physical one.

Scribd Store Sets New Standard for Ebook Ecommerce (and 650 O'Reilly Ebooks Included)

Andrew Savikas
May 17, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

There are more than 650 (DRM-free of course) O'Reilly ebooks now on sale in the new Scribd store, which officially launches Monday morning. Full details over on O'Reilly Radar:

For a publisher (and I use the term loosely) the terms for the Scribd store are impressive -- publishers set the sale price directly, and keep 80% of the revenue (compare that to Amazon's DTP program, where the standard terms are that Amazon gets to set the actual price, and the publisher only gets 35% of their "suggested" price). There's also an interesting "automated pricing" option in Scribd, which uses an (unspecified) algorithm to set the sale price. But the pieces of the Scribd store I'm most excited about is the real-time reporting (compared with a lag of a month or more with most ebook resellers, including Amazon), the option to easily provide free updates to existing content, and the variety of adjustable display options -- like preview amount, refreshingly optional DRM, and purchase-link images. Administering and understanding your sales in Scribd is downright delightful compared with the same for Kindle.

Ebook Piracy is Up Because Ebook Demand is Up

Andrew Savikas
May 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

My email, twitter, and "real-world" information stream is abuzz today with references to a New York Times story about the increase in piracy of ebooks:

“It’s exponentially up,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, whose Little, Brown division publishes the “Twilight” series by Stephenie Meyer, a favorite among digital pirates. “Our legal department is spending an ever-increasing time policing sites where copyrighted material is being presented.”

John Wiley & Sons, a textbook publisher that also issues the “Dummies” series, employs three full-time staff members to trawl for unauthorized copies. Gary M. Rinck, general counsel, said that in the last month, the company had sent notices on more than 5,000 titles — five times more than a year ago — asking various sites to take down digital versions of Wiley’s books.

The reason there's an "exponential" increase in piracy of ebooks is because there's an exponential increase in demand for ebooks:

That's not a bad thing! It's an indicator of unmet demand (and in particular for non-DRM encrypted content). I know I have no interest in buying an ebook that's locked to a single vendor or device, and I'm sure many of these "pirates" feel the same. This is a good time to revisit Tim O'Reilly's seminal Piracy is Progressive Taxation, which includes the following lessons:

1. Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.
2. Piracy is progressive taxation.
3. Customers want to do the right thing, if they can.
4. Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy.
5. File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers.
6. "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service.
7. "There's more than one way to do it."

I'm not suggesting publishers stop sending those DMCA notices; but 3 full-time staffers? Putting those resources toward building new ways to meet that demand is a much better investment.

Coincidentally, our research report Impact of P2P and Free Distribution on Book Sales is now available.

Twitter Boot Camp Coming June 15 in New York

Mac Slocum
May 12, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Twitter seems simple on the surface, but it takes practice to harness Twitter's audience development power. That's why we're hosting a one-day Twitter Boot Camp in New York City on June 15.

Join O'Reilly Media founder and CEO Tim O'Reilly, Edelman Digital SVP Steve Rubel, Twitter expert Sarah Milstein and others at this one-day educational event. Speakers and instructors will reveal best practices you can immediately apply to engage your audience and grow your business.

Full event information and registration details are available here. Use the discount code "toc" to get $50 off the registration fee.

Authoring Tools from Alpha Geeks

Andrew Savikas
May 11, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (7) | Listen

Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) has posted a nice article covering some of the tools he's built or borrowed to make his writing life more manageable. I'm especially intrigued by the Flashbake project, which augments simple use of version control (something many of our authors have been using for years, and which we use extensively in our production toolchain) to automatically capture contemporaneous data about the writing process:

Now, this may be of use to some notional scholar who wants to study my work in a hundred years, but I'm more interested in the immediate uses I'll be able to put it to — for example, summarizing all the typos I've caught and corrected between printings of my books. Flashbake also means that I'm extremely backed up (Git is designed to replicate its database to other servers, in order to allow multiple programmers to work on the same file). And more importantly, I'm keen to see what insights this brings to light for me about my own process. I know that there are days when the prose really flows, and there are days when I have to squeeze out each word. What I don't know is what external factors may bear on this.

Thinking about content like code opens up a wealth of tools and techniques for managing that content. After all, programmers spend more time than just about anyone doing what can very easily be called "creative writing" with text, so it's no surprise they've built tools to make their lives easier and more productive. We're getting ready to announce a new project over at O'Reilly Labs, one also built on top of version control (Subversion in our case) and another example of using software tools to improve the writing (and in this case reading) experience.

Amazon Demos Large Screen Kindle DX

Mac Slocum
May 6, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Amazon released the large-form Kindle DX this morning. Notable specs include:

• The $489 DX ($130 more than Kindle 2) will be shipped this summer. It's currently available for pre-order through Amazon.com
• The DX screen measures 9.7 inches diagonally; 3.7 inches larger than the Kindle 2. Including the frame and keyboard, the DX is 10.4 inches high x 7.2 inches wide x 0.38 inches deep.
• The DX holds 3,500 books. Kindle 2 holds 1,500.
• The DX has built-in PDF support. The Kindle 2 requires conversion through the Personal Document Service, which was recently switched to a $0.15 per megabyte variable fee.
• Auto-rotation switches between portrait and landscape modes.

During this morning's demonstration, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos addressed the DX's two target markets: textbooks and newspapers. Bezos announced an agreement with Pearson, Cengage and Wiley to bring textbooks to the device.

In its live-blog coverage, Engadget offered this quote from Jeff Bezos in regard to newspapers:

"We're pleased to announce that three papers have signed on with us, the NYT, Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle. They will offer reduced prices for long term commitments on subscriptions."

Adam Ostrow from Mashable says the "reduced prices" pertain to the cost of the Kindle DX, but I'm looking for clarification. Technically, those price reductions could apply to subscription fees. The Kindle-based New York Times subscription currently costs $13.99 per month, and the Times may knock that monthly fee down in return for a multi-year commitment. More to come ....

(Update, 5/6/09, 2pm) -- Ars Technica says a lower-cost DX will be available with newspaper subscriptions. Further details have not been announced.

Report: Large-Form Kindle to Target Textbooks and Newspapers

Mac Slocum
May 5, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

The Wall Street Journal says a large-form Kindle -- rumored to make its debut tomorrow -- will be partially targeted at the textbook market:

Beginning this fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science and a freshman seminar already installed, said Lev Gonick, the school's chief information officer. The university plans to compare the experiences of students who get the Kindles and those who use traditional textbooks, he said.

There's also considerable discussion about the impact a large-form Kindle could have on newspapers and magazines. Large-form e-readers from Plastic Logic (due in 2010) and iRex (currently avaialble) are aimed at the same business/media-consumer market.

We'll know full details after tomorrow's Amazon press conference.