Do You Skype?
If you’re a Skype user and you have an iPhone, you’ll be a happy camper tomorrow.
An Author’s Perspective on the Book Publishing Industry
Dr. Gary S. Goodman, best-selling author of 12 books, warns prospective writers to be aware of the current state of the book publishing industry.
(1) Distribution through bookstores has never been tougher. Most publishers sell to stores on consignment. If books don’t fly off shelves into the hands of buyers, they’re returned to publishers, very quickly. Your title doesn’t get very long exposure or time to establish itself.
(2) Books used to be kept “in print” and available for longer periods of time, in many cases, for years. Now, they’re put to death quickly, if initial sales are anything other than brisk.
(3) We live in an era of the celebrity book. If Oprah wants to write a diet book, it will be a monster hit; you know that. But the most exciting, up and coming, highly credentialed nutritionist may not have a chance of breaking into print.
(4) Publishers expect authors to make them profitable through personal promotional efforts. “What are you going to do to sell this book?” is the major question they ask, and agents will tell you, without a personal commitment to sell your own copies, stated in your book proposal, you won’t get a publisher to bite.
(5) Publishers are clueless, themselves, about what to put out there. Reluctant to lead, and reluctant to follow the success of others, they are like the proverbial deer in the headlights.
Just the rantings of a disgruntled author? Some may believe that’s what motivates Goodman. I’m not so sure. It’s possible that his experience echo’s that of other authors who are thinking twice before handing over the copyright to their next work to a book publisher. As I’ve said before, the book publishing industry is in danger of losing the very asset they need the most – the writer. Counting on the laziness of the author and their lack of enthusiasm for self-promotion isn’t the best business model. Just look around. Many of today’s self-published books are hard to distiguish from their counterpart coming out of a major NYC publishing house. As self-publishing matures and begins to mirror professional publishing, the lines between the two blur and the need for a traditional book publisher becomes less necessary.
Move Over Kindle: New eBook Readers Enter the Market
Samsung and Fujitsu enter the market with eBook reading devices.
Let me say up front that I’m not a big fan of dedicated eBook hardware. Call me jaded ever since I bought the Rocket eBook (now living in a cardboard box somewhere in my garage). I’ve seen/held/experienced most all of the gadgets on the market, and while many of them include compelling feature sets, and adequate reading experiences, they remain elusive to the broad consumer market due to high prices and complexity. Until these constraints decrease, devices like these will remain locked within the realm of the early adopters.
Book Publishers Want To Keep DRM Alive
As long as book publishers have a say, DRM, or Digital Rights Management, will be around for a long time. Yet while most every consumer of digital products has encountered DRM in some form, an almost equal percentage of customers hate DRM with every fiber of their soul. But publishers aren’t swayed by what bugs customers. Why? They don’t know who their customers are. They don’t talk to them, they hardly hear from them, and they rarely consider their preference when building digital products. When the book publishers customer is a retail partner, the end-user is just a number. And numbers rarely tell you more than what sold and what didn’t sell. Numbers don’t tell you why. And therein lies the problem. Many say the book publishing industry is headed down the same road as the music industry.
You see, it was those record executives who decided to lock music up on CDs and hard wire digital files to proprietary music players. They thought that would solve all their business model problems, but it didn’t. The MP3 music format waltzed in and before they knew it Napster came along and permanently changed their industry. Now, some 15 years later, and after tens of millions of dollars in losses, they are finally coming around to the notion that customers want to download music and play it on their iPod, their computer, and burn the same files to CD. And you know what? Those customers made iTunes the biggest selling music retailer in the world.
Yet book publishers believe their fate is somehow different than that of the music industry. In the opinion of some, DRM is the only way they can protect their authors and remain viable. That may be true, so long as authors need publishers, and many of them are proving they don’t. More and more writers are publishing books themselves, marketing them on blogs and through social media, and giving away digital editions. And the funny thing? Their print sales are increasing, not decreasing. Just ask guys like Chris Anderson, and Cory Doctorow. Their success should scare book publishers to death. But are they listening? Are they aware? Do they know the real answer is less DRM? In a word, no.
I’m not total advocate for unprotected eBooks. In some categories, proprietary eBooks are successful because they are tied to powerful search software, or unique value added hardware appliances. Yet in the general trade category, fully DRM’d eBooks have a short shelf life. Their complexity and restrictiveness only frustrate the end-user.
NPR recently aired a story on the subject of DRM (catch it here). I think the viewpoint of the end-user and the publisher is represented well. I can’t help but listen to it and feel like history is replaying itself. A tough business lesson is about to be taught once more.
Update for Outlook 2007 Available
Do you have to use Microsoft Outlook 2007 for all your corporate email and calendaring needs? If you are like the millions of us who do, you know why many call this product Microsoft “Look Out!” The app is less than sleek. OK, it’s a real sluggard for the most part, and with random errors and lockups, a lot of us face each day wondering what joys it will bring. Well, someone at Microsoft must be frustrated too, because the software giant released a hotfix today that gives the bloaty app a well deserved angioplasty. Now, I know most of you are leary of installing any patch that comes out of Redmond, Washington, and with justification. Hotfixes can turn into Hot-brokeness. Not so here. After installing this thing, my Outlook runs like a rocket, kind of like it should have when it was originally released. The entire app is more snappy than before, and the startup is blazingly quick. Go ahead and apply this patch…you’ll be glad you did.
Download here. Oh, and because it’s delivered in a zip file, you’ll need a password: IBLyKz[k
HarperCollins Dumps Print
Actually, they are dumping their print catalogs. Starting this fall, HC will forgo the traditional bound catalog in favor of a digital one. Hard to believe this decision wasn’t made years ago.
HC’s digital catalogues, housed at www.harpercollinscatalogs.com, will, in addition to featuring the standard information in print catalogues, include reviews, interviews and promotional videos. The publisher is also promising that the online catalogues will be updated frequently, reflecting any evolving changes with the publication details or marketing efforts surrounding titles. The digital catalogues will also feature access to authors’ backlists and, on select titles, link to browsable galleys. The search functionality will allow users to create lists of titles based on categories like genre, format and on-sale date. A pdf version of the catalogue will also be available, for those who want to print it out, but HC will not mail any print catalogues.
Josh Marwell, president of sales at HC, said the new online catalogues mark the “next step in the evolution of how we bring our books to market.”
Amongst the trees, there was much rejoicing.
Teleprompter of the United States: Upping His Political Capital
He’s got a blog. When will Teleprompter (TOTUS) have his own reality show?
Transparency: Clear as Mud
From Slashdot:
Bob the Super Hamste writes…
“CNN is reporting that the page recovery.gov is not as transparent as it claims to be. The examples pointed out are: 1. The user is greeted by a large pie chart that show the breakdown of money spent by 2 categories, state government distributions and local government distributions. 2. Finding projects involves a complicated search, information on projects is not actually hosted on recovery.gov 3. The format of the information available is of poor quality (the article specifically mentions a PDF document that was created from a scanned sideways copy of roadwork projects from New York state). Given that this site was meant to make the spending of the new stimulus money more transparent to the citizens of the Unites States of America it seems oddly opaque. CNN does seem to praise the ability for government agencies to be able to exchange HTML based information between systems, which for government I would call a massive accomplishment. I tried to find information for my state and searched for Minnesota. I got 4 matches, 2 of which were generic ones: one was the Minnesota state certification that is required for a state to receive funds and one that lays out public transportation spending for all states of which Minnesota gets $94,093,115.”
I suppose we should thank God for small wonders. The fact that government managed to put anything on the web at all is a modern day miracle.
Joe’s Comin’ Afta Ya!
This is just precious. Our fearless Vice President, a.k.a. “the Sherrif”, is dead serious about his new job as stimulus nark-in-chief.
Warn your local mayor! Attend your city council meeting and sound the alarm! Joe’s comin’! Joe’s comin’!
Publishers Turn to Scribd
Book publishers have had a tough go of it lately. Not only is the economic downturn hitting them especially hard, they must contend with a growing consumer desire for digital content. But what do you do when you’re only known for publishing words on paper? You partner with technology companies who can help you promote your content. A group of major publishers recently announced a partnership with a company called Scribd, best known as a document sharing website where content is offered by download at no cost. As in, free. More on that in a moment.
So, if promotion is what publishers need in order to show that they too can play the digital game, why not just use Google Book Search and Amazon? Well, publishers need additional help in promotion if they have any hope at success with digital books. And while Amazon and Google provide plenty of eyeballs, they don’t allow easy sharing of content, something Scribd does with their iPaper technology. Using iPaper, bloggers can share and embed content into their posts. The end result is the book publisher garners the muscle of a cadre of promoters at virtually no cost. Bloggers can help promote both the digital book and the print edition too, and they can do that by sharing much more than just their opinion. Using iPaper, they can embed excerpts, or they can allow for an entire book to be distributed free of charge.
But there’s still that pesky issue of making money. If you’re giving your digital content away in the hopes that someone will buy a print copy, what happens when you want to charge money for the digital copy? Kind of hard to put that jeannie back in the bottle. Many technology consultant types hold to a position that says you gotta give away stuff in order to get people to pay for stuff. I think the jury is still out on that. If I were to give advice to a book publisher, I’d encourage them to give away a free print copy of a book in exchange for buying the digital edition. This way, they begin to build a community of customers who want to purchase pure digital books, and they can go back to them for future digital offerings. Publishers will need to begin to build a direct customer channel and this is one way to do it. Why give customer ownership to other partners? And if they charge for the digital content, they won’t have to face the argument of “you gave me digital books for free before, so why do I have to pay now?” Publishers can still stay focused on their print book partners (see Google and Amazon). Worst case, they’d still sell the same amount of print copies.
Unfortunately, book publishers are being bombarded with the notion that you have to be digital today (that’s true), and as a result, they make hasty decisions. We’ll see if working with Scribd is just another one of these.