Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O'Reilly Titles Included)

The document-sharing site Scribd has launched a new "Scribd Store" selling view and download access to documents and books. As part of the launch, there are now more than 650 O'Reilly ebooks now available for preview and sale in the Scribd store, and all include DRM-free PDF downloads with purchase. (Scribd will soon be adding EPUB as a format, and we'll make that available as soon as possible.)

Many publishers (including O'Reilly) have kept Scribd at arm's length because the service was often used by people posting copyrighted material without permission. Though Scribd was reasonably responsive to takedown requests, that puts the onus for monitoring on the publisher, a whack-a-mole scenario that will consume as many resources as you throw at it if you let it. But Scribd has implemented a new system that uses the ebooks provided for sale to identify (and remove) any other unauthorized versions of that material, as well as prevent future unauthorized uploads. Like any technology it's far from perfect (for example, I suspect scanned images are more difficult to test than standard PDFs), but it's good enough for us to be comfortable participating, and is as good an example as any of turning lemons into lemonade.

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.

A service like Scribd further reduces the barriers to content creators interested in self publishing digital material (and again offers much better terms than Amazon's DTP program for Kindle), so in some ways absolutely a threat to existing publishers. But we also view it as an opportunity to get our books in front of interested readers, and a promising sign that the market for ebooks is large enough to continue attracting startups like Scribd who bring needed diversity and competition among resellers.

O'Reilly Labs: RDF For All of Our Books, Plus Bookworm Ebook Reader

There's more details on the Labs blog, but timed with our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, we've opened up RDF metadata for all of our books, and have also brought the open source Bookworm ebook reader into O'Reilly Labs. It's a great way to read any of our ebooks (more than 400 are now available as ebook bundles from oreilly.com) online and from a mobile phone:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="https://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <om:Product xmlns:om="https://purl.oreilly.com/ns/meta/" 
              rdf:about="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596521677.BOOK" 
              xmlns:dc="https://purl.org/dc/terms/"
              xml:lang="en">
    <dc:isFormatOf rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:955988693.IP"/>
    <dc:issued>2008-08-13</dc:issued>
    <dc:creator>
      <rdf:Seq rdf:ID="creator">
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:agent:pdb:350"/>
      </rdf:Seq>
    </dc:creator>
    <dc:rightsHolder>David Pogue</dc:rightsHolder>
    <dc:description>The new iPhone 3G is here, and bestselling author David Pogue 
      is back with a thoroughly updated edition of &lt;em&gt;iPhone: The Missing 
      Manual&lt;/em&gt;. With its faster downloads, touch-screen iPod, and best-ever 
      mobile Web browser, the new affordable iPhone is packed with possibilities.
      But without an objective guide like this one, you'll never unlock all it can
      do for you. Each custom designed page helps you accomplish specific tasks for
      everything from web browsing, to new apps, to watching videos.</dc:description>
    <dc:extent>376 pages</dc:extent>
    <dc:type rdf:resource="https://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/PhysicalObject"/>
    <dc:format>6 x 9 in</dc:format>
...

The URLs are structured by ISBN13. Once you have the ISBN13 for an O'Reilly book, you can get the full metadata via HTTP request to:

https://opmi.labs.oreilly.com/product/ISBN13

To get you started, here's direct links to the public RDF for our current top-5 bestsellers:

• Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual
• iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2e
• iPod: The Missing Manual, 7e
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
• Photoshop Elements 7: The Missing Manual

You can also follow @oreillylabs on twitter.

O'Reilly Ebook Bundles Now Available

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. Twelve of the 30 are also now available via the Kindle store, with the rest soon to follow.

Full details over on the TOC Blog.

Select O'Reilly Books Soon on Kindle, and as Digital Ebook Bundles

Update: 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 as noted here before on Radar, 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 soon 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.

Full details over on the TOC blog.

Amazon Accused of Anti-Trust Violations "Tied" to Print-On-Demand Terms

Amazon's March announcement that POD publishers would be required to use Amazon's own POD service BookSurge in order to sell books directly on Amazon's site predictably rubbed quite a few folks the wrong way. (Technically speaking, publishers can use alternative POD providers, but must then provide Amazon with an inventory of at least five books, and the ability to offer many titles for sale without tying up capital in inventory is one of the appeals of a POD model.)

Now comes word that one of those POD publishers, Bangor, Maine-based BookLocker, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon, alleging violations of the "tying" provisions of the Sherman Act -- in short, that Amazon has improperly predicated sales on use of printing services. From the complaint (PDF):

For example, on March 26, 2008, Amazon representative John Clifford notified Plaintiff that Amazon would only continue to sell BookLocker’s POD books through the Direct Amazon Sales Channel if Plaintiff agreed to print its books through BookSurge rather than Lightning Source. The Amazon representative further stated that books printed by Lightning Source or any other competing printer would have their “Add to Shopping Cart” buttons removed. (Amazon has also informed POD publishers that they may keep the Direct Amazon Sales Channel active if they agree to enroll in a program known as “Amazon Advantage.” However, the terms and conditions of participating in that program are so onerous so as to preclude it from being an economically viable option for POD book publishers.)

Amazon has continued through the present date to threaten POD publishers that unless they convert their inventory to BookSurge printing, their Direct Amazon Sales Channel will be discontinued.

The acrimony between publishers and Amazon is seemingly growing by the day, and this is hardly a surprising development. But it's also another sign that Amazon may be drifting toward damaging the very ecosystem it depends on for survival.

When Authors Ask Us About the Consequences of "Piracy"

Over on the Tools of Change for Publishing blog, I've reprinted a great exchange from the Radar backchannel addressing an author's concerns about seeing his books gain steam on PirateBay. Here's Nat's take:

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

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

Check out the full exchange here.

Amazon Gets Demanding with Print-on-Demand Publishers

We often hold up Amazon as an example of one of the original Web 2.0 companies. Their survival amid the tech meltdown was driven largely by the value of the data they'd acquired through thousands of reader reviews, recommendations, and "people who bought this bought that" collaborative filtering. Amazon was a system that grew more valuable with more users: a network-effect-driven data lock-in.

That kind of lock-in is implicit: publishers were free to sell their books elsewhere, and readers were free to buy them elsewhere. Such implicit lock-in is characteristic of other Web 2.0 success stories, like eBay and craigslist. These sites relied on the value of the unique data/marketplace they were building to implicitly raise enormous barriers of entry. Not much fun if you're a newspaper, but a boon for buyers and sellers.

But today's news from Amazon about Print-on-Demand is the latest move from Amazon revealing a trend toward much more aggressive explicit lock-in attempts. (Not that it's an entirely new strategy from the folks that brought you the "one-click" patent). Amazon has effectively told publishers that if they wish to sell POD books on Amazon, they must use Amazon as the POD printer. Small/self publishers are unsurprisingly feeling bullied.

Let's look at four levels of lock-in at play here:

(continue reading)

TOC Conference just around the corner

On the Radar backchannel today, Make's Phil Torrone shared a link about how author Paulo Coelho has "pirated" his own book using file sharing, with surprising results:

[U]ploading the Russian translation of “The Alchemist” made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more.

The use of technology like digitization, file sharing, the Internet is contributing to dramatic changes happening to the business of publishing. We launched the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last year (video on blip) to help publishers -- ourselves included -- begin to make sense of these changes. The name TOC (which publishing folks may recognize as the common acronym for a table of contents) was a nod to our intention to see the conference set the agenda for the future of publishing. We couldn't have said it better than TOC speaker Kirk Biglione:

TOC has emerged as the premier conference (possibly the only conference) designed to help book publishers come to terms with the range of technologies that are transforming their industry.

The second TOC conference is now barely two weeks away. You can preview the schedule and tutorials at the conference web site. This year's program includes several audience favorites from last year (including guaranteed profitability in publishing, hot new gadgets, and SEO (search engine optimization for publishers), and I'm thrilled about all of the new additions and speakers, including Seth Godin, Publishers Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson, and Lulu.com founder Bob Young.

As a Radar reader, you can get a 20% discount when you register using discount code toc08rdr. TOC 2008 is Feb. 11-13 in New York City.

P.S. -- We're closing day two of the conference with another crowd favorite, a panel discussion with a group of teens. If you know any teens in the New York area interested in participating, drop me a line at toc AT oreilly.com

Shelfari and the New Social Contract

The high value we've come to place in reputation on the Web is underscored in several ways by the recent dustup  over Shelfari. In short, Shelfari is being called out (primarily, but definitely not exclusively, by Tim Spalding, of competitor LibraryThing) for two violations of the norms of that reputation system:

• AstroTurfing (though in this case it sounds more like Sock Puppeting) in the comments of blogs around the Web.
• Deceptive spamming of new users' Gmail address books.

While Shelfari CEO Josh Hug has posted something that might be called an apology/explanation regarding the spamming, when considered alongside the rampant AstroTurfing, claims of benign neglect lose their credibility.

What is particularly telling is the profound sense of violation (and deep embarrassment) expressed by those who feel duped:

• "Red face. Egg on face."
• "surprise and horror" (In the comments) [BTW, if their customers were expressing "surprise and horror" all the way back in July, fixing the interface should probably have been escalated]
• "what sucks is the cheap tricks"
• "I have blacklisted email from shelfari.com [from] my servers"

Our personal social networks are not only more valuable than ever to us, but also to businesses, in particular those whose success requires social transmission. Smart ones will avoid pissing in the well.

A Word of Warning about Microsoft Live Writer

I know, I know, that's what I get for using beta software (from Microsoft no less), but might I recommend that if you choose to try out Windows Live Writer, that you decline when it offers to try and download your blog theme to improve the preview feature:

Reminds of my college newspaper days, when 20,000 copies hit the street with this gem of a headline (A 2-line headline is referred to as a "double-decker"):

A Triple Decker

Goes Up Here

And Down Here

I do love the promise of applications like Ecto and Live Writer, especially for someone trying to manage posts among multiple blogs. The emergence of blog management tools like that (from Microsoft no less), and of fully hosted services like Living Dot suggests an attractive market is forming as people and companies learn that much like traditional publishing, blogging does not scale comfortably without both technical and organizational effort.

It should be interesting to see that market develop as attention expands from tools designed for individual bloggers (or small teams) to ones meant for managing dozens or hundreds (look for something like an InCopy for blogging in the not-too-distant future).

Recent Posts

• NY Times Ends Subscription-only Access on September 17, 2007
• CFP Open for TOC 2008, Feb. 11-13 in New York on September 10, 2007
• Microsoft Open XML Failed ISO Bid Makes Big News on September 4, 2007
• eBooks with that "old book" smell on August 23, 2007
• Grandma definitely gets MySpace on August 18, 2007
• Authors Still Want Publishers on August 16, 2007
• Guest Blog: Teens Weigh in on Changes in Publishing, Media on July 25, 2007
• Harry Potter's no Magic for Publishers, Retailers on June 27, 2007
• Notes from TOC on the future of print on June 20, 2007
• TOC Day 3: Parallels between software development and content development on June 19, 2007