Ebooks

This podcast, featuring Ron Hogan, originally appeared on the Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond The Book site on 2/27/11 and is provided here in its entirety with the permission of that site.

Attend enough conferences on the future of publishing, and pretty soon, you start to wonder if the future of publishing is conferences about the future of publishing. The small talk and the big presentations alike often portray an industry that is diplomatically referred to as “in transition,” which can reliably be taken to mean, “on its back.” Ask Ron Hogan, who’s been watching the business and working in it since the birth of digital media, for his two cents, and you get a real bargain-priced basket of feisty, no-nonsense views.

“I’m tired of hearing about the death of publishing. If these companies die, it’s because they were dedicated to a dying model,” Hogan says. “I also don’t believe that the book is going to die out; the digital economy is not going to completely overwhelm the existing print market for books anytime soon.

“People like to give each other real books, especially pretty books,” Hogan explains to CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Art books are going to be a category where print is going to continue to matter for some time. There are going to be very cool things that you can do in digital books and e-book apps, but at the same time there are some things that you can really only present effectively and most attractively in paper.”

Everyone is blogging about the collapse of REDgroup, the company that owns the bookshop chains of Borders and Angus & Robertson (and Whitcoulls in New Zealand). I was going to write a big long ranty post all about it, but the truth is it’s all been done. A quick web search will yield more opinions than you can fit on a ballot sheet. But I will add, very briefly, my perception of the whole thing. (Which probably means I’m about to write a big long ranty post!)

Lots of people are trying to establish exactly what this collapse is and what caused it. I’ll tell you what it’s not. It’s not the great ebook revolution; it’s not shitty management by REDgroup; it’s not the global financial crisis; it’s not the rising cost of physical shop rents; it’s not the massive surge in online shopping and stores like Amazon stealing business. At least, it’s not any one of these things. It’s all of these things.

It’s the progress of industry. Sure, the management of the whole group was blindly stupid and greedy, but without the other factors they’d probably have survived. Sure, Amazon, Book Depository and stores like them are having a massive impact on brick and mortar bookstores, but without the other factors they’d probably have survived. When you combine all the factors at once, this stuff is inevitable. Pretty much every major bookstore chain will suffer. The nature of the industry is changing. It’s a terrible shame for all those people that are going to lose their jobs, but that’s a part of life. It’s like the shipbuilders on the Tyne, the coalminers in the Welsh hills, the dudes that used to run photo processing shops specialising in dark room development. The world moves on, things change, technology develops and old methods and jobs slowly disappear. But new ones also emerge. The smart and the rich are the ones that stay ahead of the curve.

Putting shitty American coffee chains in shitty American book store chains wasn’t going to suddenly make Borders a going business concern. Turning Angus & Robertson into cheap remainder bins with plate glass windows was never going to ensure their survival. High street and mall book stores, just like paper books, are going to be disappearing. There will still be paper books (I’ve talked about this a lot before) but they’ll be specialty books, or Print On Demand books from online stores. Just the same, there will still be book shops, but they’ll be specialty stores, catering to a particular niche of collectors or genre and they’ll have to diversify – comic books, trading cards, games, collectibles – all the stuff that fits the niche.

Whether we like it or not, the world is constantly changing. With change comes death and rebirth. Some things crumble to dust while others are born from the ashes of their predecessor’s demise. There were once people that were skilled at many things that no longer have a place in the world. You can’t blame any one thing except progress. The same is true of the recent book store collapse. There are many mitigating factors that contributed to the stores going under at this particular time, but that’s the small stuff. The changing face of publishing, reading and book selling is going to keep changing.

Within the next decade, I predict, we’ll see very few, if any, big chain book stores. Mass market stuff will be in all the department stores and K-Marts and places like that, but mainly online. Eventually you’ll only get your mass market release in hard copy at a POD booth or ordered that way online. There’ll be specialist stores dealing with specialist buyers and collectible books, while pretty much everyone else buys their stuff online. And the vast majority of it will be ebooks, with a small chunk held by POD releases. There’ll be a rise in collectible, beautiful, probably limited edition hardback releases. Kids starting school now will look at print books the same way we look at vinyl and tape cassettes. If you compare books to albums, you can look at the ebook as the CD and the print book as the vinyl release. The ratios will be pretty similar soon enough, I expect. And before long the CD and will disappear unless you order one, POD style. There’ll be a rise in small press releases with short print runs, and more small press will utilise online bookstores and ebooks for their distribution. Eventually the small press print run will be a thing of the past.

It’s all going to happen, so trying to find a particular reason for the demise of Borders is like trying to look for a particular reason for the demise of the Victorian era. It didn’t die because Victoria did – it ended because we all moved on, in a slow and incremental way with all kinds of contributing factors. That’s life.

Told you I wasn’t going to write a big long ranty post.
 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

This article, podcast and transcript, by Chris Kenneally, originally appeared on the Copyright Clearance Center’s Beyond the Book site on 2/14/11 and are provided here with that site’s permission.

Not so long ago, a book was an unmistakable object. Then someone came along and started digitizing content, and very soon, books were something else, something much more than ink on dead trees. That transformation, indeed the redefinition of books, matters enormously to readers and publishers, as well as retailers and librarians. Without a way to identify “books” as they are published, information and creativity could be orphaned.

To discuss this challenge, CCC’s Chris Kenneally recently spoke with publishing consultant Michael Cairns who had just completed a report for the Book Industry Study Group examining practices in the identification of e-books in all their vast variety. The research turned up several surprising findings, as well as revealed a tension between US publishers and their counterparts around the world.

“We’re in this transition between the sale of a physical book to one that’s a digital book, and in that transition, some aspects of the ISBN number are not being upheld as they were in the physical world,” notes Cairns, who is a highly-regarded blogger at PersonaNonData. “And when there’s a breakdown, that starts to increase the likelihood that the supply chain does not operate as efficiently as perhaps it should or could. And so that’s a real issue.”

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This letter, by Chris Meadows, originally appeared on Teleread on 1/23/10.

This letter is also being sent by snailmail to J.K. Rowling’s agents, the Christopher Little Literary Agency.

Dear Ms. Rowling:

For several years, you have adamantly refused to make e-book editions of your Harry Potter series available, citing concerns over promoting piracy. In May, The Bookseller reported that you were considering releasing the Harry Potter novels in e-book form. However, it is now October, and we have heard no further word as to when or if these e-books will be coming out.

I am writing to ask that you release these official e-books, as soon as you possibly can.

To begin with, your prior reluctance to license Harry Potter e-books has not resulted in any reduction in piracy of these books. Indeed, each time a new book in the series was published, a fully scanned e-book edition of it was on BitTorrent within hours.

Indeed, at the moment, if I enter “‘Harry Potter’ e-book torrent” into Google, it returns 690,000 results, in a variety of e-book reader formats. I have little doubt that by now that if I were to download one of these at random, I would find it had been proofed and polished sufficiently to compare favorably to professional quality. One of these in particular claims to be “reference quality”, with “exact layout and page sizes” and “every word on every line”.

Try as you might, you will never eradicate these illegitimate e-books from the Internet. What you should be thinking about doing is supplementing them with authorized versions that would earn you some money, and divert at least some of these e-books’ popularity to legitimate ends.

Read the rest of the letter on Teleread, and also see New Harry Potter piracy reported: Time for J.K. to allow legal Potter e-books, an earlier article on the same site.

To sell: “to influence or induce to make a purchase” Merriam-webster.com

To market: “to expose for sale in a market.” Merriam-webster.com

People commenting on the new trends in publishing frequently say that for self-published authors to be successful they need to be entrepreneurs. In fact they often say any author who wants to be successful needs to participate fully in the selling of their own books. I heard stories for years from my traditionally published friends about going to conventions to network with book sellers, arranging book tours, book signings, and speaking engagements at local libraries, and how much they dreaded this aspect of being a published author.

Author Forums and groups like Murder Must Advertise are still dominated by similar discussions of the ins and outs of selling books, including these traditional methods. As I prepared my historical mystery, Maids of Misfortune, for publication, I found myself dreading having to actually sell it. When, miracles of miracles, I found that marketing my book on the internet was much less painful than I feared. What I also discovered was how difficult I find it to “sell” my book or “my self” through the traditional routes.

I have only approached two local books stores, asking them to sell my book on consignment, and while they both said yes, I haven’t followed up with other books stores in town, nor have I even used those two venues to schedule book signings, or ask if I should restock when the books I left were sold. I haven’t approached any libraries, and except for a talk I gave on self-publishing in general at the college where I taught, I haven’t scheduled any public appearances. I did go to the Bouchercon, and talked to two booksellers, but haven’t followed up on those two contacts. Yet every day I get on my computer, and read and comment on different blogs, forums, reader sites, and Kindle boards. I blog about once or twice a month, and I constantly work on different strategies to make my book visible to the reading public. So, the question I have asked myself is: why is it so difficult for me to sell my book through traditional means, but so easy to “market” on the internet?

I think that the answer to that question lies in the difference between the two definitions above. When I ask a bookstore owner to carry my book, or think about scheduling a book signing, or write to a library asking them to carry my book, I feel like I am trying to persuade them to sell my book. I feel that if I gave a talk, or book signing, I would be saying “Buy my Book,” thereby making them feel uncomfortable if they don’t want to do that. And I have felt uncomfortable with the idea of persuading or influencing someone to buy something that they don’t want to buy since I was a child selling girl scout cookies. Not because I think selling is bad, or sales people are bad, but because I personally feel uncomfortable doing it.

When I went to the Bouchercon, I felt like I had fallen through a time warp thirty years to when I was a graduate student going to history conventions, where I was supposed to sell myself to senior historians. You were supposed to court them, strike up conversations where you could flatter them about their work, thereby giving you the opportunity to mention your own work, in other words, “sell yourself.” All of this was in the hope that someday in the future, when you submitted an article or book to an institution where they were an editor or a reviewer, or, even better, if they were on a hiring committee for a job for which you were applying, that they would remember you and accept that article, or book, or hire you. I was terrible at this. Thank goodness I had a good friend who was better at it, so I would trail along in her wake, getting introduced to all the big names, but I doubt very much if any of them remembered me for more than a second. At Bouchercon, I had no friend to trail along behind, so I did very little selling of myself, beyond leaving some sell sheets on some tables, and handing out business cards to the few people-usually fans sitting next to me at a talk-who expressed any interest in my own work.
And this isn’t because I am a particularly shy person. I have taught for 30 years, standing up semester after semester in front of hundreds of students, speaking extemporaneously and with ease. I have run academic senate meetings, stood in front of Board of Trustees arguing vehemently to present the faculty’s point of view, and I have been the master of ceremonies at scholarship banquets with hundreds of people present. But in all of these cases, I didn’t feel like I was selling something of mine. I might have been selling an idea, or even trying to get people to fork over money to improve the educational opportunities for students, but it didn’t feel like I was selling myself, or something of mine, and I didn’t feel uncomfortable doing it.

My discomfort isn’t because I am not proud of my book, either, because I am, just as I was proud of my scholarship, or my abilities as a teacher when I did submit work for publication or applied for jobs. But I want readers and booksellers, (as I did editors or hiring committees) to make their own independent judgment on the quality of the work, not on my ability to sell it or myself.

However, when I engage in conversations on the internet, or blog about self-publishing, and mention my book, or have the title of my book as part of my signature, or have a link back to my product page, it feels different. I feel like I am marketing not selling. I am not trying to persuade them to buy my book, I am exposing my book out there to the reading public. I don’t go out and buy books from most of the people whose blogs I read or comment on, unless they happen to have written a book I would normally be interested in, and I assume the same goes for the people who are reading my comments or blogs. If they decide to take a look at my book, I then feel that the cover, and the description, and the reviews, and the excerpt will demonstrate the quality of the book (not me saying-buy this book, trust me it is good,) and I don’t have to worry that they are feeling bad because they decided not to buy it, so I don’t feel uncomfortable.

And, I don’t have to sell myself or the quality of my book to Amazon.com or Smashwords to get them to sell my book. They just do, and again, if I have done my job right, and gotten the book into the right category, and have a good cover, good blurb, good review, and good excerpt, (in other words, if I have marketed it well) the book will sell itself. And that doesn’t make me feel the least bit uncomfortable.

I am not making any judgments here, (in fact I am in awe of people who go out to those conventions, and books stores, and libraries, and book clubs, and book signings—particularly when I know for many of them they are as uncomfortable about doing it as I am.)  And, I am probably making a distinction that won’t hold up to very much scrutiny, but the distinction between selling and marketing, and why I feel like I am doing the latter when I use the internet, does at least explain my own odd behavior. In addition, the fact that whatever I have been doing to market on the internet has actually resulted in over eight thousand sales, doesn’t hurt. But, what I am wondering is, are any of the rest of you out there finding yourselves making a similar distinction or facing a similar reluctance use the traditional methods, while enthusiastically embracing the new methods offered by the internet and ebookstores? Or is this just one of my own idiosyncracies?

This is a reprint from M. Louisa Locke‘s The Front Parlor.

This post, by "Elfwreck", originally appeared as a guest post on the blog of author Shane Jiraiya Cummings on 2/12/11.

[Introduction from Shane Jiraiya Cummings:] Elfwreck is the nom de net of an avid (some would say fanatic) ebook reader with over 10 years professional experience with digital imaging and over 25 years with document conversion and editing. She manages the ebooks community at Dreamwidth and is active at the Mobileread forums. She lives in the SF Bay Area in California, and is also involved in tabletop RPG gaming, copyright activism, filking, and slash fandom.

“Turning Pirates Into Customers”

Part 1: Customers in Potentia

Everyone knows the title of this post is an attention hook, not an offer, right? Presumably, readers understand that if I actually had any magic button that would turn digital pirates into paying customers, I’d either use it out of the goodness of my heart and make the world a more honest, more profitable place, or sell it to Disney for ten billion dollars and retire to my own island while they completed their takeover of world culture.

I do have some ideas on why it’s important to consider pirates as potential customers and how to convert them (or rather, how to convert the leeches; the uploading pirates are often already good customers).

When I’m being technically accurate, I call it “unauthorized file sharing” because it might not be illegal.^[1] Most of the time, I just call it “piracy” because that term has been embraced by several sides. Authors and publishers use it to imply they’re being raided and stolen from by people outside of the reach of normal laws; uploaders and downloaders use it to imply they’re creative rebels fighting against oppressive corporations (who did you root for — Captain Jack or the East India Trading Company?).

While the legal and moral issues of “piracy” aren’t certain, the practical truth is that it’s both frustrating and scary for authors who look at those downloads and think, “why aren’t they buying my book, if so many of them like it?” Which comes to the heart of the problem:

What authors need (and publishers, if those are involved) is not “an end to digital piracy.” What they need is more sales. They need more customers, and more of the current customers buying more ebooks. It doesn’t matter if they stop pirates; book contracts aren’t renewed based on the number of pirates stopped.

DMCA takedown notices to Megaupload and Rapidshare don’t result in more sales. Shutting down ThePirateBay doesn’t sell books. Even if takedown efforts resulted in removal of content, instead of pushing it laterally to somewhere else on the web, there’s no evidence that those people would turn around and buy the legit versions of the content they formerly pirated instead of turning to other legitimate free content online.

I’m focusing on ebooks and not including print as an acceptable substitute. The solution to “the ebook isn’t available at a price I can accept” will not be “just buy the paper version instead.” First, because some of us don’t read print, either as a matter of preference (like me) or ability (people whose hands are too weak or shaky for pbooks, or who need large text); second, because the most affordable print version is often second-hand … which still leaves the author out of royalties. Third … let’s just allow there is a third, and fourth, and more possible reasons why print is not always a reasonable substitute. Telling people they should be reading more pbooks isn’t going to work.

Might as well say, “if my book isn’t available at a price you like, read something else.” That’s a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot approach to potential customers when you stop and think about it.

Read the rest of the post on the blog of author Shane Jiraiya Cummings.