Two Cool New Bookworm Features

Andrew Savikas
July 30, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

There's no question that there's plenty of room for improvement among EPUB readers. From simple things like poorly handling multiple author names to more complicated issues like CSS support, readers (the people, not the software) deserve better. That's one reason we've been sponsoring the open-source Bookworm reader, which is among the best ebook readers around (and looks great on mobile browsers, including Kindle's).

Liza Daly (@liza) has a post over on the O'Reilly Labs blog covering two very cool new Bookworm features:

• Feedbooks integration: one-click import from the most popular Feedbook titles, localized to the language set in your Bookworm preferences
• Add to Bookworm: any website can use the same technique to create an "add to Bookworm" button

Bookworm is currently available in seven languages: English, German, Danish, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese (if you're interested in helping to translate Bookworm into more lnaguages, let us know). Report bugs and request features over at the public issue tracker. (And if you want to contribute to the project, visit the project page over on Google Code.)

Anderson: "It's All About Attention"

Andrew Savikas
July 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Over on Spiegel Online, Chris Anderson does a great job responding to nearly all of the standard old-media responses to new media. Unsurprisingly (I'm sure Wired would have done the same) they pulled one line from a lengthy response to create the provocative title "Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job." The full passage is much more useful and nuanced:

In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we'll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money.

The complete interview is worth a read.

Would an Apple Tablet be an Ereader? Yes and No.

Andrew Savikas
July 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Last Friday the latest round of rumors of an Apple Tablet swelled considerably after a piece from Apple Insider asserted the device is now on the 2010 product roadmap:

However, the past six months have reportedly seen the critical pieces fall into place. Jobs, who's been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction. He's since cemented the device in the company's 2010 roadmap, where it's being positioned for a first quarter launch, according to people well-respected by AppleInsider for their striking accuracy in Apple's internal affairs.

That means that the device, which is expected to retail for somewhere between the cost of a high-end iPhone and Apple's most affordable Mac notebook, is bound to turn up any time between January and March, should there be no last minute setbacks. Analyst's following the Cupertino-based company may consider factoring first full-quarter sales of the device into their models for calendar Q2.

The news sparked considerable interest among publishers, who apparently see this development as a "Kindle killer" that will upset Amazon's apparent dominance of the ebook ecosystem. It's understandable from the perspective of a publisher, but if this device actually exists, it's doubtful anyone at Apple sees it as an "ereader" any more than it sees the iPhone as "a GPS device." (The speculation stems from a piece in the Financial Times quoting an anonymous "publishing executive" and saying Apple has been talking to publishers.) Apple also talked to major newspapers before the iPhone launched, but they didn't build the iPhone as a mobile newspaper.

Some have been speculating about whether Apple would ink deals with aggregators like OverDrive or Ingram Digital to secure ebook content for a tablet. But that assumes that Apple sees a need to directly deal with ebooks the way they deal with music, and I don't believe that's likely. While it's possible they'd beef up the native PDF capabilities in a larger device, I think it's much more likely they'll establish the market (the App Store) and the platform (some variant on the iPhone SDK), and let developers and content creators take care of the rest, the way they have already on the iPhone with games.

Seeking Alpha has a nice analysis of Tablet Fever, and correctly places any discussion of news or books in the context of the App Store, where it firmly belongs:

Steve Jobs has mentioned that he has never seen anything like success of the App Store in his career. If he is saying that, then I'm saying that this 9.7 inch iTouch that has been designed to optimally utilize the apps will become the flagship Apple product... The order of operations for the iPhone are phone first, iPod second, Apps third, and Internet browser fourth. This new iTouch is principally designed to take advantage of the App Store gaming, books, news, entertainment, social networking, etc...

Wanted: Proposals for TOC 2010

Andrew Savikas
July 23, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

If you follow us on Twitter, you already know that the Call for Proposals is now open for the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (Feb. 22-24, 2010 in New York).

One of our main themes last year was that all publishing is now digital publishing, and that's becoming clearer with each new announcement about a new device, reseller, smartphone, or other new way to reach an audience -- an audience that is now often walking around with a bookstore in their pocket or briefcase. Here's some of the topics we're looking for:

• Reaching mobile readers: when your customers carry bookstores in their pockets
• Pricing and packaging digital books
• Case studies of successful (or unsuccessful!) new publishing and digital initiatives
• Case studies from implementing lessons learned at a previous TOC Conference
• Strategies and tactics for incorporating print-on-demand into a supply chain
• Moving beyond books: selling merchandise, community, experience, and other scarce goods in a world of "free"
• Tools and challenges for an efficient all-digital workflow
• Revising your P&L's for the economics of digital publishing
• Understanding and responding to the changing retail landscape
• Using the web to find and promote the original people behind "user-generated content"--authors
• Best practices for working with Amazon, Google, and other big internet players
• How to capture and analyze web metrics of interest to publishers
• Best new practices and tools for working with and supporting authors during editorial, production and/or marketing phases
• Systems and devices for displaying digital copy (demos welcome)
• Business models for delivering and/or receiving material via new devices
• New copyright clearing, assertion, and determination mechanisms
• XML, EPUB, RDF, and other TLA's (three-letter acronyms) decoded and explained
• Using open-source tools to assemble a digital publishing workflow

If you have an idea for a session, tutorial, or "lightning demo" we want to hear from you.

And if you're making plans for the Frankfurt Book Fair, don't forget to sign up for TOC Frankfurt, a one-day conference looking at these issues from a European perspective.

Long Tail Evidence from The App Store

Andrew Savikas
July 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Last week we released 16 of our books as iPhone Apps (and on Saturday added The Twitter Book), and there's some interesting Long Tail data coming in. We've seen Long Tail behavior in the data from Safari Books Online and from Google Book Search, though in this case it's about geography: even though regions like Colombia, Belgium, and Greece are individually generating a small number of sales, together they add up to more than the total number sold in the US:

CSS in an XML Workflow

Laura Dawson
July 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

At the StartWithXML Forum in New York in January, Rebecca Goldthwaite of Cengage gave a great demonstration of how Cengage uses CSS in their XML workflow. Many publishers regard style sheets as an invitation to create cookie-cutter book production, with the fear that all their books will look the same. This is emphatically a myth. Have a look at her seventh slide for examples of how one stylesheet can actually create many different looks.

CSS Zen Garden has been up for a while (Liza Daly used this model to create the EPUB Zen Garden a few months ago). It's a sort of CSS sandbox where graphic designers can play with style sheets and render the same content in very different forms. Clicking on the four links below will demonstrate what CSS can do:

• Home Page 1
• Home Page 2
• Home Page 3
• Home Page 4

It's well worth checking out and maybe having some graphic designers play around with it.

StartWithXML is Going to London

Laura Dawson
July 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

StartWithXML will be continuing in London! On September 2nd, at the British Library, we'll be conducting a one-day forum similar to the one we held in New York last January, but with a British publishing focus. Our sponsors for this event include Klopotek, MarkLogic, PLS, BIC, Publishers' Association, and of course O'Reilly.

We're still in the process of firming up our speakers, but we do have information posted here. Additionally, if you are a British publisher or service provider, there's a survey for you here.

As we get more news, we'll add it here - meanwhile, we're continuing to research and gather information about where publishers are in the StartWithXML process.

Content is a Service Business

Andrew Savikas
July 13, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (25) | Listen

I've been a fan of Trent Reznor's music since first hearing Pretty Hate Machine in junior high school, but in the past few years I've been increasingly impressed by his attitude and approach to the economics of the modern digital media business. His release of Ghosts I-IV is a case study in how to do exactly what Kevin Kelly outlines in Better than Free : "When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied." Notice that even though the Free Download option is right there at the top, the $300 "ultra-deluxe" version is sold out (and was sold out within 24 hours of being released).

On his forum a few days ago, Reznor posted advice to aspiring young musicians eager to make it in the music business, and the advice is just as applicable to writers and other artists working in almost any digital medium and attempting to compete with the vast content available on the Web:

[W]hat you NEED to do is this - give your music away as high-quality DRM-free MP3s. Collect people's email info in exchange (which means having the infrastructure to do so) and start building your database of potential customers. Then, offer a variety of premium packages for sale and make them limited editions / scarce goods. Base the price and amount available on what you think you can sell. Make the packages special - make them by hand, sign them, make them unique, make them something YOU would want to have as a fan. Make a premium download available that includes high-resolution versions (for sale at a reasonable price) and include the download as something immediately available with any physical purchase. Sell T-shirts. Sell buttons, posters... whatever. [emphasis added]

This is not just about using free digital content to sell physical goods. It's an acknowledgment that what you're selling as an artist (or an author, or a publisher for that matter) is not content. What you sell is providing something that the customer/reader/fan wants. That may be entertainment, it may be information, it may be a souvenir of an event or of who they were at a particular moment in their life (Kelly describes something similar as his eight "qualities that can't be copied": Immediacy, Personalization, Interpretation, Authenticity, Accessibility, Embodiment, Patronage, and Findability). Note that that list doesn't include "content." The thing that most publishers (and authors) spend most of their time fretting about (making it, selling it, distributing it, "protecting" it) isn't the thing that their customers are actually buying.

Whether they realize it or not, media companies are in the service business, not the content business. Look at iTunes: if people paid for content, then it would follow that better content would cost more money. But every song costs the same. Why would people pay the same price for goods of (often vastly) different quality? Because they're not paying for the goods they're paying Apple for the service of providing a selection of convenient options easy to pay for and easy to download.

This is not new to digital content. Why would the price of admission to see a given year's Razzie Award winner be equivalent to the price of admission to see the year's Best Picture? Because the price of admission is not for the content. It's for the privilege of seeing it early, and doing so on a big screen in a social environment -- movie patrons pay for the service provided by the theater, not for the movies themselves (here's a counterpoint on movie pricing). That's the point that Reznor and Kelly are making: think long and hard about what your customers want, and provide the service of giving that to them.[1]

"But people are still buying content when they buy a book or an album," the argument goes. Yes, they are. The same way that you're buying food when you go to a restaurant. You are purchasing calories that your body will convert to energy. But few restaurants (especially those you visit frequently) have ingredients any different from those you can get yourself at the corner store, for much less money. So it can't be true that your primary goal is to purchase food; you're purchasing a meal, prepared so you don't have to, cleaned up so you don't have to, and done so in a pleasing and convenient atmosphere. You are paying for the preparation of the food and the experience of eating it in the restaurant, not the food itself [2] (beyond the raw cost of the physical ingredients, which in the case of digital content is effectively zero).

This came up during a discussion on Peter Brantley's email list recently, in the context of what someone is paying for when they buy one of our Cookbooks (which contain "Recipes" for how to accomplish specific tasks with a particular computer language or technology, often culled and curated from material and techniques previously published in blog posts, mailing lists, or help forums). I asserted that rather than the content itself, people are paying for the preparation of that content, to the extent that it helps them solve their problems more quickly and conveniently. When you think about what we do as a service business, then it makes perfect sense: readers are paying us for the service of finding a bunch of great and interesting stuff, and putting it together in a convenient package. It's the convenience of not having to find it themself, and the concise package that saves them from having to dig through a bunch of web bookmarks or search results. I didn't buy "Home Buying for Dummies" last year because I wanted a book on home buying; I bought it because I didn't want to screw up something really important (buying a house) and was willing to pay someone to spell out all of the stuff I needed to worry about in one place. People don't buy Jim Cramer's books because they want Jim Cramer's content -- they buy his books because they think it will help them get rich, and they think paying him is a great shortcut alternative to acquiring his knowledge (knowledge, not "content") themselves. These are services, not products.

The recent (and absurd) notion put forward by European publishers to "strengthen copyright protection as a way to lay the groundwork for new ways to generate revenue online" is intimately tied up with this issue of the value of content (and therefore the value of various players in the content value chain, like authors, publishers and the latest bogeyman, aggregators and search engines). Arguing that you need to beef up copyright protection to make sure there are ways to generate revenue online incorrectly assumes that what people are paying for is the copyrighted content itself. People do not care about content, they care about themselves and their problems.

You don't get an "A" for effort just by spending time and money creating content (and you are not entitled to your business model -- you have to earn that money every day by doing something that people find worth paying for -- and they decide it's worth paying for, not you). Content only has value to the extent that someone will pay for it because it accomplishes something they'd rather exchange money for than do themselves -- and when was the last time you said "Gee, I really need some content. I could write some of it for myself to read today, but I'd rather pay someone else to do it." [3] Google and other aggregators haven't stolen any value from the creators of the content they are aggregating -- they have done what intermediaries have always done, which is create new value based on doing for customers what those customers cannot or do not want to do themselves -- the service of sorting through all that content to find the thing that solves their problem. (I use "problem" loosely -- it may be boredom, loneliness, a tax audit, an idea for a first date,...) Again I'll return to Kevin Kelly, who elucidated the role of aggregators in relation to content creators far more eloquently than I ever could:

The giant aggregators such as Amazon and Netflix make their living in part by helping the audience find works they love. They bring out the good news of the "long tail" phenomenon, which we all know, connects niche audiences with niche productions. But sadly, the long tail is only good news for the giant aggregators, and larger mid-level aggregators such as publishers, studios, and labels. The "long tail" is only lukewarm news to creators themselves. But since findability can really only happen at the systems level, creators need aggregators. This is why publishers, studios, and labels (PSL) will never disappear. They are not needed for distribution of the copies (the internet machine does that). Rather the PSL are needed for the distribution of the users' attention back to the works. From an ocean of possibilities the PSL find, nurture and refine the work of creators that they believe fans will connect with. Other intermediates such as critics and reviewers also channel attention. Fans rely on this multi-level apparatus of findability to discover the works of worth out of the zillions produced. There is money to be made (indirectly for the creatives) by finding talent. For many years the paper publication TV Guide made more money than all of the 3 major TV networks it "guided" combined. The magazine guided and pointed viewers to the good stuff on the tube that week. Stuff, it is worth noting, that was free to the viewers. There is little doubt that besides the mega-aggregators, in the world of the free many PDLs will make money selling findability -- in addition to the other generative qualities.

I love his metaphor of the internet machine ("a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly"), and it's one worth keeping in mind if you think you're in the business of selling "content," because you are probably wrong.

Update: Jim Lichtenberg kindly reminded me he gave a presentation [PPT] on the same topic at the 2008 TOC Conference. Worth a read.

1. Many publishers have actually been doing the same thing for years with hardcover, trade, and mass-market editions of the exact same content at different prices.

2. This is why celebrity chefs aren't particularly worried that doing TV shows and selling cookbooks describing exactly how to make the food they serve in their restaurants will harm business.

3. There are people who do in fact want to pay someone to write content for them as a service. They're called publishers.

What Ebook Resellers Should Learn from Scribd

Andrew Savikas
July 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (12) | Listen

Scribd made a splash when they opened up a "Scribd Store" for selling view and download access to documents. Their terms (80% to the document publisher) are quite generous, though one reason publishers keep so much is that most of the merchandising (including pricing) is self service -- Scribd could learn a lot from other media retailers if they're interested in really promoting document sales.

But one area where existing ebook resellers could really learn from Scribd is in terms of data access and reporting. During one particularly frustrating conversation with an ebook reseller just last week, I learned that we'd be lucky to get sales reports nearly 6 weeks after any sales. These are digital sales. On the Web. Paid by credit card. No inventory to track, no shipping, no check or invoice processing.

Compare that to Scribd, where I get an email every time a document is sold telling me how much it sold for, and the total lifetime earnings for that document. I can also view a graph showing document views over time:

And every single day I get a detailed summary of document activity (this is a very small excerpt):

Here's your daily summary of what's happened with your Scribd account since 
you last checked out the site.
 ------------------------
      Someone liked your document entitled "Apache 2 Pocket Reference by O'Reilly Media"!     
 7 minutes ago
 ------------------------
      Someone liked your document entitled "JRuby Cookbook by O'Reilly Media"!        
 7 minutes ago
 ------------------------
      Someone liked your document entitled "Analyzing Business Data with Excel by O'Reilly Media"!    
 31 minutes ago
 ------------------------
Maria added your document "Tomcat: The Definitive Guide by O'Reilly Media" to their list of favorites
        
 39 minutes ago
 ------------------------

There's also quite a variety of reporting formats and interfaces in the wild among ebook resellers, meaning lots of time is spent by either IT staff or accounting staff (or both) parsing and processing each flavor of report. Though there is a Digital Sales Report format, I haven't heard about any reseller actually using it (if you know of one, tell me in the comments).

Success on the Web requires nearly realtime analytics, and that's one area of ebook retailing Scribd seems to really understand.

"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"

Andrew Savikas
July 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example:

In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're right, you'll be intellectually vindicated, and can take a bow. If you're wrong, your company may not exist in ten years. Whether you're right or not is not the point. When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that's just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea.

Around here we like to say "fail forward fast," and it's an acknowledgement that we will learn much more by trying and doing (and probably failing) than by planning. The real challenge with that is to make those experiments as cheap (financially and otherwise) as possible.

TOC Coming to Frankfurt

Andrew Savikas
July 1, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

I've had the opportunity to speak with quite a few of my industry colleagues in Europe during the past year, and it became increasingly obvious there was an opportunity to bring the Tools of Change for Publishing message to a European audience. So we've teamed up with the Frankfurt Book Fair to put on a special one-day TOC Frankfurt on Tuesday October 13, the day before the Book Fair begins.

Many of the topics (and some of the speakers -- including Tim O'Reilly, Cory Doctorow, and Sara Lloyd) will be familiar to TOC New York attendees, but tuned for a European audience. And while the program is still in development, we're also trying to include some fresh voices who can bring a more global perspective -- such as Kotobarabia's Ramy Habeeb and Guardian Media Group's Simon Waldman.

If you have your own ideas for a session, speaker, or topic, you can submit it right here (just a simple Google Form).

TOC blog readers get a discount on registration by using the code TOC09BL when registering.

Four roles for publishers: staying relevant when you are no longer a gatekeeper

Andy Oram
June 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (35) | Listen

Bookbuilders of Boston, a nonprofit membership organization for publishing professionals, held a panel on June 11 about open publishing. It attracted an usually large number of attendees--about 60--revealing the curiosity its members have toward the potential changes created by this movement.

I was one of the panelists, along with managers from MIT Press and Harvard University Press. In addition to a discussion of the core topic of open publishing--that is, distributing documents free of charge, often under a license that permits free alteration and distribution--I laid out a larger vision that places the publisher in a context where contributors hold conversations online and share large amounts of material freely among themselves. That vision is the center of the following remarks.

When trade publishers are invited to speak, we seem to be expected to follow a certain script. We must stress the importance of finding new ways to distribute and market our material online. We have to point out that only 15% of a book's cost goes to shipping and printing. We champion the importance of supporting authors financially, shed a tear or two for our sister industry, journalism, and so on.

When staff from O'Reilly Media are invited to speak, we defy expectations by throwing out all of that stuff, talking instead about the excitement exploring new technologies that can change people's lives, about working together to educate each other, about how sharing information in communities can help us all grow. This is the open source movement in a nutshell, as it were.

Tonight I'll take a somewhat in-between position: I'll talk about business models, but from the standpoint of open online content.

The bedrock principle in this environment is that the publisher is no longer a gatekeeper. Anything can go online to be linked to, rated, berated, or anything else people want to do with it. Since we are no longer gatekeepers, publishers have to focus on how we add quality.

Sound nice--but that puts us in a real quandary, because the elements of quality we have seized on so proudly over the decades no longer matter as much. We have to recognize the new environment we're in and find new meaning for ourselves.

This is a classic application of the principles from The Innovator's Dilemma, the classic book by Clayton M. Christensen, where he talks about changes caused by disruptive technologies. In our case, disruptive social norms are just as important.

In many areas of publishing--including certainly my own, computer books--there are enormous resources of free online material and innumerable forums where individuals can quickly and conveniently post their own observations. Much of the material can be edited and redisplayed instantly, particularly on wikis. That is the context in which we have to define the publisher's new roles.

I won't discuss marketing in this talk because I'm not a marketing person and because the rules are changing so fast that I'm afraid of making any predictions about what works. Focusing instead on content production, I've divided the roles publishers play in adding quality into four parts. For each one, I'll discuss how we're affected by the presence of so much online material.

Proofing for grammar, syntax, and consistency of usage

I think this as a valuable contribution to quality. Sometimes someone reading an article will stop and as me, "Here's an abbreviation spelled two different ways--does it refer to the same thing or two different things?" And sometimes I'll read a sentence that's missing a word, and have to go over it two or three times to see how the parts fit together. Proofreading can resolve real problems in comprehension.

But many modern readers don't value proofreading, because it comes at a cost. This cost, of course, is the extra time proofreading adds to publication. The modern reader would rather have the document right now, so he can get his tweet out before his colleague does. First tweet wins.

Proofreading is also like cleaning the Aegean Stables. I've found myself in the situation where I edit a whole book and get it looking really professional, then find that someone goes in the files the next day to make some updates--and there goes all my hard work.

But publishers can still offer professional proofreading. The time this is useful is when an organization needs a professional looking document--for instance, when it wants to print an online book in order to show off the organization's capabilities to a potential client. In the same situation where you take off your T-shirt and don a pants-suit, you want a professional-looking text. And publishers may be able to get revenue in such situations.

Fact-checking

A more significant contribution publishers make to quality is fact-checking. Many newspapers and magazines hire staff to do it; technical journals and book publishers such as O'Reilly pay outside experts a few hundred or couple thousand dollars to perform the same service.

Few authors and readers online hold the view expressed by a blogger in last Sunday's New York Times who said, "Getting it right is expensive. Getting it first is cheap." But there is an attitude among responsible bloggers--which I adopt myself--that if you've gathered enough of the facts to propound a valid opinion, you can go ahead and put the opinion out for debate. If other people see errors or have evidence that weakens your argument, they can cite them in comments. If you write a wiki, they can edit it. In any case, you're encouraged to express yourself so long as you're sure you're heading in the right direction.

This approach is more limited than many of its adherents think, though. In the computer field I work in, especially, a lot of online participants hold to an essential philosophy of logical positivism. They believe that if enough facts are brought to bear and enough people comment, we will all converge on the truth. If this were the case, most of the articles in Wikipedia would be perfect by now.

But if course this is not the case, because new information, new opinions, new interpretations get added all the time, and with them new errors are introduced as well.

So there may be a role for publishing professionals in fact checking. It will probably not be a large part of our work, though because in the Internet age fact checking is a lot easier than it used to be. Just don't rely on Wikipedia.

Editing unclear and ambiguous passages

This task is probably where publishers create the most value, and where they can make some of their biggest contributions to Internet content. I find it sad when I read a document by someone who is clearly brilliant and knows his material well, and come across a passage that doesn't make sense because no editor said, "You have to work on this."

And every editor knows the work involved in making text comprehensible by ripping up paragraphs, rearranging points in the proper order, introducing connecting or transitional material, and even adding facts that the author took for granted but that the editor knows have to be explicitly told to the reader.

I've noticed that the give and take of modern online media compensates even for poorly argued text. If someone doesn't understand a point, she can just post a question. The author can come back to cover it in more detail, and after a couple rounds of discussion they work out the meaning. Other people can join in to offer explanations.

Still, I look at these exchanges and think, "A lot of people could have saved a lot of time if someone had just edited the document." And some projects are recognizing the value of having an expert eye look over a document, something few amateurs know how or take time to do.

Integrating facets of a large-scale text

We all know the difference between reading an anthology of diverse articles for different audiences, written from different points of view in different tones of voice, and reading a 250-page book so well integrated that you start on page 1 and can't put it down till you reach the end. Achieving this quality is where publishers shine, and I haven't found any process or mechanism in collaborative, online document production that can carry it off.

But even this has diminished value in the Internet world, because hardly anyone reads a 250-page book at once. No one has time. If we read chunks of a few thousand words at a time, we could just as well read documents the way they usually appear on the Internet: many small contributions by different people scattered among different web sites. (This very article, topping 1,500 words, is about as long a text as most people would tolerate.)

That doesn't mean the problem of integration has disappeared; it has just shifted. Now the public needs help finding their way among the different documents. Hints are needed as to what to read first, where to go when they encounter a new concept they need to learn, and how to harmonize documents that use different terms or approach a problem from different angles.

I think publishers can play a major role helping to organize content culled from around the Internet. But the process is a lot different from organizing material into a book. It requires a new online tools and a type of different interaction between experts and those tools. I will leave you with a pointer to an article I wrote proposing some tools, and another pointer to my collection of articles about community educational efforts.

In summary, publishers still have roles to play when we are no longer gatekeepers. But we have to renew our relevance in environments where enormous amounts of information are put online by different participants, with ample facilities for commenting and linking. These new technologies and norms force us to look at every area where we traditionally boast of adding quality, and to find new ways to apply our skills.

Inside Look at RAND's $9.95 Ebook Pricing Strategy

John Warren
June 9, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

Recently, the RAND Corporation announced that it has revised the suggested retail pricing on all RAND ebooks to $9.95 each. RAND ebooks are available through a wide variety of wholesale and retail partners.

The press release provided some explanation for the decision, also discussed in Publishers Weekly. I have been asked by Tools of Change to provide some additional insight into our ebook pricing strategy.

There were several things that went into our thinking on, as one of my colleagues appropriately called it, this "new math." Some of these factors will generally not apply to other publishers, though I do believe some factors should, and eventually will, affect other publishers' pricing strategies as well.

• First of all, and this is important, RAND is not a traditional publisher. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decision making through research and analysis. RAND research, which spans a broad base of subjects and is funded through hundreds of resources, is dedicated to serving the public interest. RAND's focus is on conducting objective, high-quality research, and every publication endures a rigorous review processes. These exacting standards are the foundation of RAND's impeccable reputation throughout the world. No consideration is made on whether a particular topic or book might be a good title for sales -- the emphasis is on quality of the research. In addition, RAND's revenue comes primarily from its research and philanthropic support, not from the sales of books and ebooks.
• Going along with the first point, a crucial component of RAND's mission is operating in the public interest. This was written into the our charter, in 1948: "To further and promote scientific, educational, and charitable purposes, all for the public welfare and security of the United States of America." This is one of the reasons why we post all of our publicly available books and reports online for free PDF download; we had ~4.3 million PDF downloads from our site last year. Dissemination is more important than sales. (I do believe there is a compelling argument, supported by many, that free electronic dissemination helps drive sales, instead of cannibalizing sales.) We have posted all new titles since 1998 on our Web site, and sales of book sales have still increased during that period.
• Book sales help support the marketing and publishing program, but the main consideration, as a nonprofit, is to break even, not recoup a huge profit. Book sales need to recoup the costs of printing, distribution, marketing, etc., and with ebooks, conversion costs.
• Previously, we had been pricing ebooks at the price of the printed book, which in our case is nearly always paperback; we publish few hardcovers. This seems to be the most common model for publishers, price the ebook at the print price. RAND prints nearly everything print on demand (POD), and sells the majority of our print titles through our distributor, NBN, so the price of the print book factors in POD and distribution costs. POD cost rises when the book is longer in length and/or has color charts or graphs. Thus one book may be priced at $44 because of color charts, another may be $25 because it is shorter in length and entirely black and white. These factors have nothing to do with an ebook, however. Ebooks are agnostic as to length (except as the length may affect the costs of editing) and color charts and graphs have no bearing compared to black and white in terms of ebook costs.
• We have no manufacturing, distribution, or warehouse costs with ebooks, nor do we have to deal with returns, so the back end is much cleaner.
• I believe firmly that customers have an expectation, which is only likely to grow, that ebooks should cost less than printed books. I believe this is being reinforced, but not driven by, Amazon's decision to make many Kindle ebooks $9.95, even when they must pay the publisher more. I don't believe they pulled that number out of thin air, though that is possible. At $9.95, RAND hopes to make up in volume what it may lose in profits from a higher price on each ebook.
• Library funding is tight. Increasingly, libraries want to buy ebooks on demand, when a patron asks for it, not before. Jobbers and wholesalers are now entering into relationships with ebook distributors to aggregate ebook purchases, and the library market is a key market for us to reach. Libraries may balk at $35 for a printed book, or lack the shelf space to store it, but they can afford and store a $9.95 ebook.
• Since we post PDFs for free download, two reasons we are able to sell ebooks on other sites such as Amazon.com, Books 24x7, EBL/ebooks.com, ebrary, Ingram Digital/ MyiLibrary, netLibrary and Questia, and soon Sony and Overdrive, is from a convenience standpoint (customer has a particular device and wants it seamlessly integrated, or a library subscribes to an ebook service and makes all titles available to their patrons) and/or ignorance (the customer may not be aware that we post PDFs for free). I don't want to bank on customer ignorance, but the convenience factor can hold up over time.

These are the main factors influencing our decision making on this new ebook strategy. It will be interesting to see if others follow.

John Warren is marketing director, publications, at the RAND Corporation. He contributes to the Publishing Frontier blog. He was recently selected as the winner of the International Award for Excellence in the development of the book for his paper, "Innovation and the Future of ebooks," which is available for free download on the RAND Web site.

CrunchPad Tablet Prototype Coming Together

Mac Slocum
June 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The low-cost tablet project ("CrunchPad") from TechCrunch is nearing the working-prototype stage:

This launch prototype is another significant step forward from the last prototype. The screen is now flush with the case and we've decreased the overall thickness to about 18 mm. The case will be aluminum, which is more expensive than plastic but is sturdier and lets us shave a little more off the overall thickness of the device ...

The next time we talk about the CrunchPad publicly will be at a special press and user event in July in Silicon Valley.

The post's associated pictures and video are worth viewing. CrunchPad looks like something Apple would cook up.

Related Stories:

• TechCrunch: "About Those New CrunchPad Pictures"
• CNET News: "Fantasy features of an Apple tablet"
• MacSlocum.com: "Why Large-Form E-Readers are a Bad Idea for Media Companies"

Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales

Mac Slocum
June 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times:

Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said Google's program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. "We don't believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go," he said.

He said that Google would allow publishers to set retail prices. Amazon lets publishers set wholesale prices and then sets its own prices for consumers. In selling e-books at $9.99, Amazon takes a loss on each sale because publishers generally charge booksellers about half the list price of a hardcover -- typically around $13 or $14.

In addition -- and this is pure conjecture on my part -- Google's push into HTML 5 is a potential shot across the bow of e-reader manufacturers. Assuming it's widely implemented, HTML 5 will further blur the line between standalone software and Web browsers/cloud-based content. Toss in Google's Chrome browser and the Gears plugin and you can see how the dots (might) connect.

According to the Times, Google intends to launch its ebook project in 2009. This effort is separate from the pending Book Search agreement.

Related Stories:

• TeleRead: "Google wants to sell e-book access directly: ePub ramifications? Not just hassles for Amazon?"
• paidContent: "Google Promises Publishers (And Amazon) Will Sell E-Books In 2009"
• New York Times: "Steal This Book (for $9.99)"
• Sony-Google Deal Adds 500k Public Domain Books to E-Reader