by PunditGuy | Apr 27, 2009 | eBooks |
Lexcycle, the company who created the Stanza book reading software for the iPhone, has been acquired by Amazon.com.
Stanza allows users to browse a library of around 100,000 books and periodicals for the iPhone, many of them in the ePub format — a widely accepted standard for e-books that Amazon has yet to support with its proprietary Kindle platform.
In its blog post, Lexcycle said, “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.”
It is not clear how much Amazon is paying for the year-old company with offices in Austin and Portland. But the move indicates Amazon wants to consolidate its position on mobile devices, particularly within Apple’s ecosystem, which may include a tablet computer later this year. The Lexcycle team should also help Amazon stake out ground on Google’s Android phones, the Palm Pre and Windows Mobile devices — and perhaps eventually turn to more open e-reading formats.
“It’s very early days for e-books, and we believe there is a lot of innovation ahead of us,” said Cinthia Portugal, a spokeswoman for Amazon.com. “Lexcycle is a smart, innovative company. and we look forward to working with them to innovate on behalf of readers.” (NYT)
eBook sales last year were about 1.5% of all sales, so there’s lots of room to grow. Amazon has a huge stake in the business with its Kindle eBook reader and sales of Kindle compatible eBooks. The question now is, will Stanza continue as a product or will Amazon throw it away and steer Stanza users towards its iPhone Kindle app? Amazon needs customer names, they don’t need a second iPhone app.
Congrats to the guys at Lexcycle. Just last week I listened to Neelan Choksi at the London Book Fair. No wonder he had a perma-smile on his face! 🙂
by PunditGuy | Apr 21, 2009 | Travel |
Day number one of the London Book Fair is complete. Even though the business climate is difficult for most publishers, the show floor was busy and one could almost sense a bit of optimism amongst the exhibitors. Attendee traffic was brisk for most of the day and I didn’t notice many empty stall spaces. The aisles seem a bit wider than in years past, and that is usually an indication of fewer exhibiting publishers. All in all though, it was hardly noticeable.
Like last year, everyone is talking about digital this and digital that. This year a “Digital Zone” is set up in hall 2. The zone is actually a pad of 8 stands melded together to make an island of small kiosk’s and a theater for product and service demonstrations. I sat in on a couple of the demos, and for the most part they were informative. One must remember though that this is a publishing show, and as such, those who demonstrate need to know their audience. The term “.epub” was thrown around with abandon, and it could have easily been misunderstood by the majority. The XML standard is being heavily pushed by most everyone, so much so that the term is freely used both as a noun and as a verb.
Of the things publishers are struggling with, monetization is tops. While everyone agrees that digital is no longer a futuristic dream, it is a reality of the day, the debate over pricing and channel ownership has just begun. There is still so much for a publisher to learn. Most acknowledged that the key to addressing digital today is the length at which a publishing house is willing to take risks. Experimentation is key, yet in these difficult economic times, it isn’t easy for anyone to play with capital.
The complex discussions are being tempered by the extraordinarily nice spring weather here in the UK. If things get too stuffy inside, one only needs to walk a few hundred feet to bask in the warm 70 degree sunshine.
by PunditGuy | Apr 18, 2009 | Travel |
I’m in London for the book fair, which officially starts on Monday. I’m looking forward to attending a digital seminar tomorrow. It will give me something additional to do on Sunday, which is traditionally my “get acclimated to the time zone” day. This year I brought along my Dell Mini 9 instead of the full fledged Thinkpad. So far, I’m mostly concerned with getting on the the net, and that’s what these things are best at. If I have to remote in to my work machine, that’s when the rubber will meet the road. We’ll see how well the Mini does. If things get interesting at the seminar tomorrow, I’ll blog about it here. I’ll be twittering as well, so if you want, you can follow me.
MORE: Well, I would have blogged about the seminar I attended today, and I probably would have twitter’d a bit too IF THERE WAS WIFI! That’s right, there was no internet in the room. A conference about digital books, digital publishing models and all sort of other digital talk, but with no internet available to the attendees. In fact, Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcycle (the folks who make Stanza) commented that this was the first conference he spoke at where he wouldn’t be able to get on Twitter and see what the crowd said about his presentation. In 2009, not having an internet connection during a conference like this is unheard of. A major mis-step by the organizers. Other than that, the room was packed with jetlagged people who probably would have rather been outside in the London sunshine than inside a poorly lit room on a Sunday afternoon. While some of the speakers made good points, all in all, it was not a very memorable event.
by PunditGuy | Apr 16, 2009 | Copyright |
Mike Shatzkin writes about a serious issue facing big publishers. That issue concerns publication rights owned by publishers, and what they know or don’t know about those rights. This is something I’ve also thought about and it really is a big deal. Most publishers have a terrible system for storing rights information about a book they’ve published. That terrible system is typically paper based and searchability is extremely difficult. The ramifcations of this organizational nightmare will soon come to a head once Google builds the Book Rights Registry, something they’re compelled to do as part of their settlement with the AAP and the Author’s guild. Publishers will find that they need to invest lots of time and money into the process of pulling data from paper and inputing it into the Google database. My bet is they won’t do it, and as a result, thousands of books will remain orphaned. That’s a shame.
by PunditGuy | Apr 13, 2009 | Industry |
Since I’m in the business of paying royalties, not collecting them, I’ll refrain from a lot of comment on the whole royalty advance issue and whether there’s any rhyme or reason to it all. The discussion is interesting though, and a few folks are collecting their thoughts on the matter. Bookends, LLC attempt to answer the age-old question, “what’s the story with earning out royalties?”. The Sunday NYT book review section recently published an essay “About that book advance…“, which brought this thorough author perspective response from Mike Shatzkin. Finally, Evan Schnittman of OUP comments from the publisher side of the tracks.
by PunditGuy | Apr 13, 2009 | Travel |
I’m heading to London on Friday for my annual trek to the London Book Fair. Besides the normal business meeting schedule, I’ve got plans to attend the following seminars:
- Strategies for digital publishing in a time of uncertainty (4/19 – Cromwell Room)
- Getting the best out of your digital deal: Commercial and legal issues (4/20 – Thames Room)
- Introducing the dedicated digital reading device to the UK consumer (4/20 – Cromwell Room)
- “Where’s the Money” Digital Keynote (4/21 – Cromwell Room)
I’m also looking forward to watching demos from LibreDigital and Code Mantra.
LBF is a more managable event than, say, the monster Frankfurt Book Fair. Rather than being spread across 8 buildings, LBF fits comfortably inside Earl’s Court. This years fair runs from 4/20 through 4/22.
by PunditGuy | Apr 7, 2009 | Industry |
In this era of government bailouts, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “too big to fail”. Most of the time this phrase is aligned with banks and insurance companies who are so interconnected with other industries that if they were to go out of business, the result would be a complete collapse of whole economies. According to Washington, being too big to fail means you automatically get a life extension, whether you deserve it or not.
None of this is lost on the publishing industry apparently. While no single book publisher can claim they are too big to fail, employees of one in particular believe their publishing house is too old to fail. Cambridge University Press recently announced plans to cut 150 jobs due in part from changes being forced on them as the book industry moves from lithographic to digital publishing. Critics of the staff reduction claim that this is just the beginning of the end for the publisher.
The CUP is a charity that is supervised by a “Syndicate” of 18 academics from the highest echelons of the university.
Representatives from the shop floor and the Unite union took their case direct to the Syndicate, which is chaired by Dr Gordon Johnson, the president of Wolfson College, and includes economist philosopher Amartya Kumar Sen, former master of Trinity College.
They say their arguments were sympathetically received and that this has led to a change in tack from the former accountant and current chief executive of the press, Stephen Bourne and his fellow-managers.
Tomorrow, Unite is set to meet CUP management again, amid mounting hope that at least half of the jobs threatened by the restructuring will be saved in what looks like a U-turn by the publishers.
But the management is more cautious. Peter Davison, CUP’s corporate affairs director, confirms that the company is trying to soften the blow in a harsh employment environment but says structural change in the printing industry has swept away pretty much every lithographic printing company in the high-cost south of England.
“We needed to take action because we saw losses of £2m annually for the next three years. We estimate that if we reduce the number of redundancies to 60 it would mean ongoing annual losses of £300,000 which we can tolerate for the time being, but it’s not as though we are free from the technological writing which is on the wall,” says Davison.
Clearly, the decision to eliminate staff is a purely economic one. It’s math, plain and simple. If you want to be around next year and the year after and so on, you need a sound financial plan. Losses of 2 million pounds are catastrophic, and while smaller losses of 300,000 pounds can be tolerated, it’s not a plan for long term viability. Understandably, no one wants to lose their job or make decisions to eliminate jobs. It’s painful. Yet, it seems the intentions of the critics are confused. One the one hand, they complain that job elimination means the end of their beloved press, yet they are confronted with the reality that financial losses also mean the end of their beloved press. You can’t have it both ways. So, rather than confront the lesser of two evils, they collude with the members of the “Syndicate”, career academics without real business experience, to garner their sympathy. Perfect! Go and complain to the very people who champion the inherent value of traditions and resist change at most every level.
Let’s face it, change happens, no matter how much we conspire against it. Cambridge University Press, like many other publishing houses, must confront the changes occuring in the industry in order to stay in business. If this means they do it without pomp and circumstance, then so be it. If it means they can no longer afford to be the “printer to the Queen”, then that’s the way it must be. If it means they can no longer sustain the cost of weekly air shipments of thousands of pounds of printed paper, then they’ll have to find another way. But, if the people who claim to care so much about the future existence of the 425 year-old publisher continue to cling to a sentimentality of the past, they will ultimately succeed at insuring the very thing they fight against.
by PunditGuy | Apr 7, 2009 | Industry |
Seems as time goes by, more people are coming to grips with what’s in the Google Book Search Settlement. Everyone knows the basics of the agreeement – Google pays $125 million total to publishers, of which, $35 million will be spent to create the Book Rights Registry. The registry will be an online database of books and information about their ownership. It’ll also provide the ability to process royalty payments from online content sales and facilitate sending the payments to the proper parties. It’ll be run by author’s and publisher representatives and will be independent, in that, it won’t be used only by Google. Any service provider will be able to use the service. Sounds great, right?
Well, some folks are reading the tea leaves a bit and are now wondering aloud what it all really means. Others have already come to their conclusions and are filing objections to the settlement with the AAP and the Author’s Guild. While Google professes to “do no evil”, their willingness to agree to paying out such a large sum isn’t an indication of guilt and regret. There’s always a silver lining, and you can be sure Google will make the most of it.
by PunditGuy | Apr 3, 2009 | eBooks |
Most university presses are realizing a decline in revenue in this current economic climate. But rather than whine about it, some are seeing opportunity. Of those, the press at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is taking opportunity to the next level: action. The answer? eBooks.
In today’s soft economy, the eBook system has acted as a way out of financial shortcomings. According to Rebecca Schrader, Assistant Director of Finance of MIT Press, a large portion of the university press’ e-book sales comes from users of the Amazon Kindle, a portable e-book reader that has access to over 250,000 books.
According to Schrader, university presses throughout the country have experienced similar declines in sales. A recent survey published by the American Association of University Presses estimates an average 10 percent loss in sales and revenue between July and December 2008.
As a result of declining earnings, university presses are also starting to take different approaches to their business models.
And MIT isn’t alone in their need to shift focus from print only to print+eBook publishing. Yale, Cornell, and the University of Michigan Press also plan to cut back and increase their eBook publishing programs.
While it’s no surprise that text book publishers are heading toward broader eBook publishing initiatives quicker than the general book publishing industry, what university presses learn along the way will be of great help to the big houses in NYC and others around the country. That is, if they’re paying attention.
by PunditGuy | Apr 3, 2009 | eBooks |
Envy: it’s a powerful thing.
Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) and AT&T (NYSE: T) are both looking at e-book readers as a new source of income, having eyed up the success of Amazon’s Kindle, which uses Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel’s network to allow consumers to download digital books to their devices. The e-reader interest is part of a larger drive to find additional wireless devices to connect to networks, as the US’s wireless market for cell phones reaches saturation point.
Bloomberg quotes AT&T’s head of emerging devices Glenn Lurie as saying the Kindle has done a “phenomenol job” and that the network wants to be part of that market. Lurie told the news service, “There’s a whole bunch of ways to monetize that type of device. That’s coming, it’s coming fast. We’re going to be part of it.” Lurie didn’t mention any potential partners, however, or any timing on when such a device might be available.
The key sentence here is, “there’s a whole bunch of ways to monetize that type of device”. Sounds like part of that monetization could be ads. Like, popup ads, and ads embedded into content, like right in between paragraphs on the page of your most favorite novel.
Hope I’m wrong.
