Month: April 2012

Free Books: Concord Free Press Creates New Nonprofit Publishing Model

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This article, by Madeleine Crum, originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 3/30/12.

The cover of Castle Freeman Jr.’s sixth book, a collection of 12 stories set in the rural North East, has a few eye-catching elements: The image is of brittle grass and a rickety, abandoned home, an aesthetic matched by the rough texture of the cover.

More unusual, though, is the price tag situated above the bar code. This book costs $0.00.

 

"Round Mountain" is one of seven novels published so far by Concord Free Press, which, as its name implies, is a nonprofit that creates free printed books that can be requested via their site. The only condition is that the reader donates to a charity of their choice and passes the book along when they’re finished. The organization has so far raised over $260,000 for various charities including Planned Parenthood, local libraries and hurricane relief funds.

Its other titles include "The Next Queen Of Heaven" by "Wicked" author Gregory Maguire and "Give and Take," the fourth book by the press’ founder, Stona Fitch.

"My book was about generosity. It’s sort of a latter day Robin Hood story. This jazz player steals diamonds and BMWs then gives them away," Fitch told The Huffington Post on the telephone from the organization’s headquarters.

Although "Give and Take" was bought by a major literary imprint in 2007, the book was "abandoned" when Fitch’s editor left the industry. Faced with the choice of ditching or self-publishing his story, he instead decided to open his own company, employing the philosophy of a nonprofit farm he works with, which grows produce to donate to local shelters.

"My agent told me not to open the press. A lot of friends said I’d make a fool out of myself," Fitch says. "[But] writers have to be activists. I’m very much an activist. You can’t wait for publishing to figure it out for you."

Nestled above a bakery in Concord, Mass., the company takes pride in their humble philosophy and alternative to mainstream publishing houses. Three-and-a-half years in, Concord Free Press has published just six books using its unusual model.

 

Read the rest of the article on The Huffington Post.

Does Agency Pricing Lead to Higher Book Prices?

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This post, by Smashwords founder Mark Coker, originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 3/28/12. In it, Coker rebuts the widely-held contention that agency pricing drives up ebook prices.

According to a March 9 story in the Wall Street Journal, The U.S. Department of Justice is considering suing Apple and five large US publishers for allegedly colluding to raise the price of ebooks.

At the heart of the issue, I suspect, is concern over the agency pricing model. Agency pricing allows the publisher (or the indie author) to set the retail price of their book.

Although Smashwords is not a party to this potential lawsuit, I felt it was important that the DoJ investigators hear the Smashwords side of the story, because any decisions they make could have significant ramifications for our 40,000 authors and publishers, and for our retailers and customers.

Yesterday I had an hour-long conference call with the DoJ. My goal was to express why I think it’s critically important that the DoJ not take any actions to weaken or dismantle agency pricing for ebooks.

Even before the DoJ investigation, I understood that detractors of the agency model believed that agency would lead to higher prices for consumers.

Ever since we adopted the agency model, however, I had faith that in a free market ecosystem where the supply of product (ebooks) exceeds the demand, that suppliers (authors and publishers) would use price as a competitive tool, and this would naturally lead to lower prices.

I preparation for the DoJ call, I decided to dig up the data to prove whether my pie-in-the-sky supply-and-demand hunch was correct or incorrect. I asked Henry on our engineering team to sift through our log files to reconstruct as much pricing data as possible regarding our books at the Apple iBookstore.

We shared hard data with the DoJ yesterday that we’ve never shared with anyone. I’ll share this data with you now.

As background, Smashwords is one of several authorized aggregators supplying ebooks to the Apple iBookstore. On day one of the iPad’s launch, we had about 2,200 books in the iBookstore, and our catalog there has grown steadily ever since.

Henry was able to assemble a complete data set going back to October 2010. We created once-a-month snapshots of the Smashwords catalog at the Apple iBookstore between October 2010 and March 2012. Our data captures the average price of our titles in the iBookstore, and the number of titles listed.

I’m sharing four data sets. The first data set, …at left, shows the number of Smashwords titles for sale in the Apple iBookstore. As you can see, the numbers have grown steadily. I’m not aware of any other agency pricing study that worked against such a large body of data.

 

Read the rest of the post on the Smashwords blog.

What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter

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This post, by Mathew Ingram, originally appeared on GigaOm on 3/27/12.

After months of anticipation, the e-book versions of author J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally successful Harry Potter series are now available through Rowling’s Pottermore online unit, and as my PaidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted in her post on the launch, Rowling has chosen to do a number of interesting things with her e-books, including releasing them without digital-rights management restrictions. Obviously, the success of the Potter series has given Rowling the ability to effectively dictate terms to just about anyone, even a powerhouse like Amazon, but there are still lessons that other book publishers should take from what she is doing.

 

One of the encouraging things about the Pottermore launch is that the books will be available on virtually every platform simultaneously, including the Sony Reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble, the Kindle and Google’s e-book service (which is part of Google Play). And in keeping with Pottermore’s status as a standalone digital bookstore in its own right, users will be able to buy the books from the Rowling site and then send them to whichever platform they wish. As Laura points out, even Amazon has bowed to the power of the series and done what would previously have seemed unthinkable: it sends users who come to the titles on Amazon to Pottermore to finish the transaction.

As we’ve pointed out before at GigaOM, one of the problems for users when it comes to the e-book landscape is the clash between competing platforms — with Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble all trying to create their own walled gardens, where users can only access titles from publishers that have deals with the platform they happen to be using. Amazon and Apple in particular both seem to see books and other media content primarily as loss leaders that can help them lock users into their proprietary platforms, and recent skirmishes have seen Apple reject books that have links to Amazon’s store, and Barnes & Noble block Amazon titles from its store.

 

Read the rest of the post on GigaOm.

INTERVIEW: Seth Godin on Libraries, Literary Agents and the Future of Book Publishing as We Know It

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This piece, by Jeff Rivera, originally appeared on the Digital Book World site on 3/4/12.

He is arguably one of the most successful bloggers and thought-leaders of our time. When Seth Godin speaks, people sit up and listen, even if they’re the CEO of one of the Big 6 publishers. He raised eyebrows with his decision to leave the traditional book publishing industry in order to form his own entity called The Domino Project. But when he made the decision to move on after 12 bestsellers, tongues wagged.

Had his precious experiment failed or knowing Godin, was something greater in store? To find out, I asked Godin about this as well as his thoughts on not only the future of the book publishing industry as we know it but also why he calls some book publishers’ decision to pull the plug on libraries’ access to eBooks “silly”. 

Rivera: Your latest book, Stop Stealing Dreams deals with the educational system in America. If you were to have a sit down with the Secretary of Education, what would you say?

What’s school for?

Instead of overhauling our tactics to get better at delivering what school used to deliver, can we have an honest discussion about what we’re trying to create?

And if you don’t believe the entire system can be rebuilt to deliver on these goals, how can we blow it up into little bits in a way that causes the quickest reinvention?

 

Rivera: You recently closed The Domino Project. If you could do it all over again, what would you have done differently?

You never close a book project, in that the books remain on sale, hopefully forever. We did 12 books, had 12 bestsellers, brought a dozen big ideas to more than a million people–I’m not sure I’d change any of that.

The book industry is going through a massive change, and the reason I called it a project, not ‘the answer’, is because this is a step along the way in a pretty long journey.

 

Rivera: If The Domino Project wasn’t a “failure”, what were your main reasons for “transitioning” it and refocusing on other things?

Godin: Of course it was a project, not a forever gig. Deep down, I’m a writer, not a publisher, and as I saw the shifts in the way people are consuming media, I came to the conclusion that my authors would be better off being even more directly engaged with their readers than I could deliver for them. We were 12 for 12, but that’s a big promise to make to the next round of authors and I just didn’t want to jump through those hoops to deliver on it.

 

Rivera: Forrester recently reported that they foresee a drastic drop in book print sales by 2013. What do you envision the book publishing industry looking like in 3-5 years?

 

Read the rest of the piece on Digital Book World.