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 (0) | 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 (5) | 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.

Amazon Acquires Lexcycle

Mac Slocum
April 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, has just announced it's been acquired by Amazon:

We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.

The New York Times says terms of the deal have not been released. It's not yet known how Stanza will fit amidst Amazon's Kindle and recently-released Kindle iPhone app.

Karen Templer from the Readerville Weblog poses a number of key questions:

Will the Stanza/Fictionwise store be replaced with a Stanza/Amazon store? (Presumably.) And/or will Stanza be merged with the Kindle app? Will it continue to read ePub and other formats or will it conform strictly to Kindle? (Conversely, will Kindle begin reading ePub?) And, most of all, where does this leave IndieBound and their ebook plans?

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Over 160 O'Reilly Books Now in Kindle Store (without DRM), More on the Way

Andrew Savikas
April 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (23) | Listen

I'm happy to announce that more than 160 O'Reilly books are now available on Kindle (both Kindle 1 and Kindle 2), and are being sold without any DRM (Digital Rights Management). Though we do offer more than 400 ebooks direct from our website, the number for sale on Kindle will be limited until Amazon updates Kindle 1 to support table rendering ("maybe this summer" is the most specific they would get). The text-to-speech feature of Kindle 2 does work with these books. A list of currently available titles is below.

There's a lot of overlap between the kind of early-adopter crowd likely to buy a Kindle and the audience for our books. So it's no surprise that we received a lot of requests to add O'Reilly books to the Kindle store, and it's great to finally be able to get those readers the books they want. We expect to add another 100 or so titles in the coming weeks; those have needed a more detailed analysis of the table content to identify good candidates.

There were two main reasons we held our books back from sale on Kindle:

1. Poor rendering of complex content. Kindle 1 was optimized for the simple text of mainstream trade books (think airport-bookstore fiction and non-fiction), and lacked support for properly displaying tables or computer code, two very common elements in O'Reilly books. We knew customers would be disappointed to find much of the content of our books unusable (and likely to complain to us about it, rather than to Amazon). In this case, Amazon actually agreed with us, and after they saw how those tables looked on a Kindle 1, told us they weren't comfortable selling many of our books until they've updated Kindle 1. (More details below the fold).
2. Compulsory DRM. We strongly believe DRM (Digital Rights Management) encryption adds unwelcome cost and complexity to any digital system, frustrates legitimate customers who respect copyright and want to pay for their content, and is demonstrably ineffective at preventing unauthorized copying -- much of it done by people who either (a.) wouldn't otherwise pay, or (b.) resort to piracy when there's no legitimate sales channel. Other publishers are free to make their own decisions on DRM, but Kindle's compulsory DRM was inconsistent with our views on digital distribution.

Although we've been working for some time with Amazon to resolve these issues, as a stop-gap we'd been directing Kindle owners to oreilly.com, where all of our "ebook bundles" include a Kindle-compatible .mobi version that can be uploaded or emailed to your Kindle. While the table and code issues remained, readers at least had the other, richer formats (EPUB and PDF) for reference. We've now updated all of the .mobi files for sale at oreilly.com to display properly on Kindle 2 (basically undoing many of the hacks we'd done to get something passable the first time around). If you own a Kindle and have purchased ebooks from oreilly.com, visit oreilly.com/e from the Kindle browser to download the updated .mobi files directly to your Kindle. While we will also update our ebooks with Amazon as changes are made and errors fixed, they currently have no way of updating that content for customers who already purchased it.

While the rendering in Kindle 2 still leaves a bit to be desired, we felt it was an acceptable baseline, and look forward to continuing to work with them to improve the display of technical content on Kindle. (Ironically, the Kindle 2 web browser displays complex content like tables and code quite well -- check out the Bookworm mobile version if you have a Kindle.)

Our thanks do go to Amazon for working with us on this. They're a favorite target of criticism (often right here, and often for good reason), but this is a good step and they do deserve some kudos. While we'd prefer that Amazon directly supported the open EPUB standard, this is real progress in giving readers easy access to digital books without locking them in to a single vendor.

If you want to tell Amazon to hurry up and update your Kindle 1, or to improve their rendering of technical content to match Sony Reader, Stanza, Bookworm, Calibre, and others, you can drop them a line at kindle-feedback@amazon.com.

Current Available Titles

(As of April 16, 2009)

• 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know
• Access Data Analysis Cookbook
• ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns
• Adding Ajax
• Ajax Design Patterns
• Ajax on Java
• Ambient Findability
• Analyzing Business Data with Excel
• AppleScript: The Missing Manual
• ASP.NET 2.0: A Developer's Notebook
• Asterisk: The Future of Telephony
• Beautiful Code
• Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics
• Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5
• Building Scalable Web Sites
• Commercial Photoshop Retouching: In the Studio
• CSS: The Missing Manual
• Database Nation
• Designing Gestural Interfaces
• Designing Interfaces
• Designing Web Interfaces
• Devices of the Soul
• Digital Identity
• Digital Photography Pocket Guide
• DNS and BIND
• Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual
• Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual
• Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual
• Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual
• eBay: The Missing Manual
• Eclipse
• Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0
• Enterprise Rails
• Enterprise SOA
• Essential PHP Security
• Excel 2003 for Starters: The Missing Manual
• Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook
• Facebook: The Missing Manual
• Ferret
• FileMaker Pro 10: The Missing Manual
• FileMaker Pro 8: The Missing Manual
• FileMaker Pro 9: The Missing Manual
• Flash 8: The Missing Manual
• Flash CS3: The Missing Manual
• Flex 3 Cookbook
• FrontPage 2003: The Missing Manual
• Google Apps: The Missing Manual
• grep Pocket Reference
• Hackers & Painters
• Hardcore Java
• Hardening Cisco Routers
• High Performance Linux Clusters with OSCAR, Rocks, OpenMosix, and MPI
• High Performance MySQL
• Home Networking Annoyances
• Home Networking: The Missing Manual
• Integrating Excel and Access
• Intermediate Perl
• iPhone Forensics
• iPod: The Missing Manual, 6th Edition
• iPod: The Missing Manual, 7th Edition
• iWork '05: The Missing Manual
• Java Generics and Collections
• Java Message Service
• Java Servlet & JSP Cookbook
• Java Web Services: Up and Running
• JavaScript Pocket Reference
• JavaScript: The Good Parts
• JavaScript: The Missing Manual
• JBoss: A Developer's Notebook
• JRuby Cookbook
• Just a Geek
• Learning Flex 3
• Learning JavaScript
• Learning Perl
• Learning Perl
• Learning Rails
• Linux Device Drivers
• Linux Kernel in a Nutshell
• Linux System Programming
• Mac OS X Leopard Pocket Guide
• Macintosh Troubleshooting Pocket Guide for Mac OS
• Making Things Happen
• Managing Projects with GNU Make
• Mastering Oracle SQL
• Mastering Perl
• Maven: A Developer's Notebook
• Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual
• MySQL Pocket Reference
• Network Troubleshooting Tools
• Network Warrior
• NUnit Pocket Reference
• Objective-C Pocket Reference
• Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual
• Open Sources 2.0
• Oracle Essentials
• Oracle Essentials
• Oracle PL/SQL Best Practices
• Oracle Regular Expressions Pocket Reference
• Oracle RMAN Pocket Reference
• Oracle SQL Tuning Pocket Reference
• Painting the Web
• Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual
• Photoshop Elements 3: The Missing Manual
• Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual
• Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac: The Missing Manual
• Photoshop Elements 6: The Missing Manual
• Photoshop Elements 7: The Missing Manual
• PHP Pocket Reference
• PowerPoint 2007 for Starters: The Missing Manual
• Practical mod_perl
• Practical RDF
• Process Improvement Essentials
• Producing Open Source Software
• Programming .NET 3.5
• Programming .NET Components
• Programming Flex 2
• Programming Python
• Programming Web Services with SOAP
• Python Cookbook
• QuickBase: The Missing Manual
• QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual
• QuickBooks 2009: The Missing Manual
• Quicken 2006 for Starters: The Missing Manual
• Quicken 2009: The Missing Manual
• Rails Cookbook
• Rails: Up and Running
• Real World Haskell
• Real World Web Services
• Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
• sendmail Cookbook
• SharePoint Office Pocket Guide
• SharePoint User's Guide
• SOA in Practice
• Spam Kings
• Spring: A Developer's Notebook
• SQL and Relational Theory
• SQL Cookbook
• SQL Tuning
• Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
• The Art of Application Performance Testing
• The Art of Capacity Planning
• The Art of Lean Software Development
• The Canon EOS Digital Rebel XS/1000D Companion
• The Cathedral & the Bazaar
• The Internet: The Missing Manual
• The Myths of Innovation
• The Photoshop CS4 Companion for Photographers
• The Ruby Programming Language
• Time Management for System Administrators
• UML 2.0 in a Nutshell
• Understanding Open Source and Free Software Licensing
• Unit Test Frameworks
• Unix for Oracle DBAs Pocket Reference
• Using Moodle
• Using SANs and NAS
• Visual Basic 2005 Jumpstart
• Visual Basic 2005: A Developer's Notebook
• Visual C# 2005: A Developer's Notebook
• We the Media
• Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
• Web Security Testing Cookbook
• Wikipedia Reader's Guide: The Missing Manual
• Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
• Windows 2000 Pro: The Missing Manual

The Tables problem

Here's some screenshots showing the table problem:

How Kindle 1 (mis)handles tables:

The same table on Kindle 2:

Google's Distribution Advantage Has Its Limits

Andrew Savikas
April 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Scott Karp has an insightful (and provocatively titled) piece over on the Publishing 2.0 blog about just how deeply Google has inserted itself in Web distribution of content. While much of the piece is about linking, one paragraph in particular is worth calling out for traditional publishers (emphasis added):

If media companies want to compete with Google, they need to look at the source of its power — judging good content, which enables Google to be the most efficient and effective distributor of content. They also need to look at Google’s fundamental limitation — its judgment is dependent on OTHER people expressing their judgment of content in the form of links. Above all, they need to look at sources of content judgment that Google currently can’t access, because they are not yet expressed as links on the web.

"Content judgment" is a neat way to put it, reinforcing that when there's already more than 1 trillion web pages in Google's index value is shifting away from more content toward better filtering and curating of what's already there. (Or as Clay Shirky says, it's not information overload, it's filter failure.) While many publishers fret about customers no longer paying for content, they may miss the boat by not realizing that customers will pay for packaging and convenience (which often means judgment and filtering). For example, at the same time the market for our printed reference books has declined, our Safari online subscription service has steadily grown at a double-digit pace, in part because those subscribers value the implicit filtering of the library.

Open Publishing Distribution System -- an Open-Standards Catalog Format

Andrew Savikas
April 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

It's no secret we're big fans of the iPhone/iPod reading app Stanza. While the Kindle App has overtaken Stanza for the top-spot among free book apps in iTunes, Stanza offers a much better reading experience than the Kindle App (for example, by supporting standard formatting like tables and whitespace-preservation) (Update: You can use the latest version of mobigen.exe to get better whitespace-preservation (from <pre> and friends) on the Kindle.) And I'm not the only one who feels that way: "Stanza is hands-down the best e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and its free. Go. Get it now." (Wired.com).

But more than the quality of the software, the major reason I'm so bullish on Stanza is their willingness to experiment. When our own Keith Fahlgren suggested they use the standard Atom format for their catalog system, they responded:

We wound up taking your advice and implemented support for Atom for Stanza's catalog format. Thanks for the suggestion! Using the Atom standard is much better than using our own custom format (although we may need to eventually extend the custom format with our own tags).

And when we proposed using Stanza to create a standalone book app (for iPhone: The Missing Manual), they were eager to dive in head first, and we both learned a lot in the process.

That Atom-based Online Catalog feature turned out to be an interesting prototype for a distributed digital discovery and ecommerce system, and it's awesome to see them willing to embrace the potential for such a system well beyond the boundaries their own product, and to join with Peter Brantley and the Internet Archive in laying the groundwork for what's being called the Open Publication Distribution System:

Users of compatible Reading Systems, in addition to being able to access content they have previously acquired or acquire via other means, are also able to access a catalog (list of online sources of content). Typically, the catalog offers a number of free titles, which may be hosted by the Reading System vendor and/or other sites, as well as the opportunity to purchase or borrow paid content from stores and libraries. Additional stores and libraries may be added by the user to their personal catalog. The mechanism through which compatible Reading Systems access the distributed catalog has three components: eBook content, XML catalog metadata, and an HTTP transport for the catalog. The remainder of this document will discuss each of those components in turn.

One of the reasons we've thrown our support behind the Bookworm online ebook reading system as part of O'Reilly Labs is to help support the development and testing of new standards like this one, and we're excited to contribute to this new initiative. It's also great to see Adobe support this as well, and is a nice follow on to our work with them on EPUB output for the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets.  

Readers Boycotting Kindle Titles Priced Above $9.99

Andrew Savikas
April 3, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (8) | Listen

Pricing is a red-hot topic among publishers when it comes to ebooks. As I said in a Q&A for Forbes.com last week, cost-driven pricing (especially when the costs in question are calculated based on printed output) is a poor approach for ebook publishers. Readers simply don't care how much it costs a publisher to produce an ebook -- they only care how much it's worth to them. (This is especially true for the iPhone, where books must compete alongside games, music, movies, and other "apps" primarily priced well below $10.)

Now a group of readers is rebelling against books priced above $9.99 in the Kindle store (using Amazon's own tagging system, ironically) and there's a very interesting explanation of the rationale over at Electronic Cottage (all emphasis from the original):

The price also acknowledged the obvious: a Kindle edition is less valuable than a hardcover; although you cannot pass along your Kindle edition to friends, you are at least paying a significant amount less than the hardcover price. Unfortunately, short-sighted publishers feel they are losing dollars instead of realizing that a $9.99 Kindle sale doesn't usurp a hardcover sale. It is a brand new entity. A plus. Pure gravy.

...

I joined the boycott yesterday when I went to buy the new Harlen Coben book, only to be stopped by the high price. Since then, I've added the boycott tags to books over $9.99. I'm not happy about it. I'd rather buy the latest installment of Myron Bolitar's adventures and Chris Knopf's 2008 release, "Head Wounds." In fact, I was one of those who clicked Amazon's "Tell the Publisher" button to indicate that I wanted a Kindle edition of "Head Wounds." But not at $15.40. I'll wait for the paperback. Or get back into the library habit that I abandoned for my Kindle habit. I was irresistibly tempted by the lower prices of Kindle editions, I admit it. I just counted my Kindle orders since I got the reader in December 2008.144 Kindle books. Yikes. 144 books. I had no idea. Publishers, are you paying attention?

That's a very good question.

"Bite-Size Edits" from BookOven

Andrew Savikas
April 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

Hugh McGuire's startup BookOven has opened up an alpha version of a project they're calling the Gutenberg Rally, an attempt to harness collective intelligence Mechanical-Turk style to proofread Project Gutenberg texts for typos and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) errors. In "divide and conquer" style, the system presents just one small snippet of text at a time (with some surrounding context), effectively breaking down a mountain of a task into easily managed molehills:

I had a nice chat with Hugh on Wednesday morning, and what he told me about what's to come from BookOven was quite exciting (though apparently still very much in development).

This isn't the first attempt to harness eyeballs for finding and fixing OCR errors (see ReCaptcha), but reviewing the text in context is a much more satisfying experience, and left me wanting to read more of several of the books I was seeing only in snippet form.

Software Development as Collaborative Writing

Andrew Savikas
March 31, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Following a lively backchannel email discussion, I'd planned to blog about what writers, editors, and publishers can learn from software developers (specifically their tools and techniques) but Tim beat me to it over on the Radar blog.

As I said in my email, The more I think about it the more obvious it's becoming to me that the next generation of authoring/production tools will have much more in common with today's software development tools than with today's word processors.

Software developers spend enormous amounts of time creatively writing with text, editing, revising, refining multiple interconnected textual works -- and often doing so in a highly distributed way with many collaborators. Few writers or editors spend as much time as developers with text, and it only makes sense to apply the lessons developers have learned about managing collaborative writing and editing projects at scale.

Programmers faced with annoying problems like "how do I make sure that changes I make to this text don't conflict with someone else's changes" or "how do I tell who among several writers made a particular change to some text" solved those problems long ago (Wikis are a great example of applying some of those tools and techniques to the writing process; API-based offline blogging editors are another).

And while using those tools as-is probably won't make sense for a lot of non-technical writers, those willing to at least try them out will learn a lot about what the next generation of collaborative, distributed, digital publishing tools will look like.

Pragmatic Programmers Now Doing "Ebook Bundles"

Andrew Savikas
March 26, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

It's great to see other publishers picking up on the "ebook bundle" concept and including multiple formats -- the Pragmatic Programmers are now selling a combo of EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket files for their ebooks. I especially like the way they've phrased it:

You’ve bought a license to the content, not to a particular file format, so you are free to enjoy that content on whatever device, using whatever display technology you choose.

Well said.