TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Another publisher discovers free e-books lead to greater sales

By Chris Meadows

Here’s a blog post from Nathan Henrion, a midlist publisher who made a title available on Amazon as a free e-book. He reported seeing the sales rate of the second and third books in its series increase at a rate of 20 to 1. He says that digital sales make up 1/5 of the total sales of this particular series so far, and are growing.

Henrion writes:

Much of the talk by the big 6 publishers has been stress over cannibalization of print sales, or the idea of replacement sales, by ebooks. For midlist publishers such as ourselves, I believe we fight against substitution. We capture the “browser” market. If our title is not available or visible, a customer will simply substitute for another one in the genre. Free gave us the visibility that we could not purchase.

Funny how publishers just keep discovering this anew, isn’t it?

Further discussion by Mike Masnick at TechDirt, and Nate the Great on his blog The Digital Reader (formerly Nate’s Ebook News).

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National Broadband Plan includes copyright reforms

By Chris Meadows

Here’s something interesting about the FCC National Broadband Plan, which I’ve mentioned here a couple of times in recent days: it has quite a few provisions that are only orthogonally related to broadband, and a number of them have to do with copyright.

For example, the Plan suggests adoption of a new voluntary permissive copyright license, administered by the government, to permit educational digital use—even including a mock-up of a new copyright symbol to be used with the program (see left).

While a number of educational uses are already permitted under fair use, fair use is a defense rather than an affirmative right which means educators still run the risk of being sued. This new license would work like Creative Commons, in that rights holders would have to choose to use it. (I wonder how many actually would?)

There are a number of other copyright-related matters discussed in the National Broadband Plan document as well. For example:

Other copyright suggestions include "a statutory framework to facilitate identification of copyright holders and securing of permissions in an efficient and cost-effective way" so that teachers can, for instance, "use Beatles lyrics to promote literacy, employing music as a cultural bridge" without paying the "$3,000 licensing fee charged by the rights holders."

It suggests amending the Copyright Act to make such uses feasible.

I rather doubt that these proposed copyright reforms will get very far, but it is at least good to see some people are thinking about them.

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Ebooks and pBooks in Tandem

By Rich Adin

It appears that Barnes & Noble and some publishers plan to experiment with giving pbook buyers a discount coupon to purchase the ebook version of the purchased pbook. I’ve been wrestling with this idea for quite some time and I’m still undecided about how valuable such a system will be to me.

There are several considerations. Will I need to buy the hardcover or can I buy the paperback pbook? Buying the hardcover pbook isn’t much of a problem for me as I only buy hardcover pbooks. But where it does have some effect is on which books will come with the discount coupon and how recent will those books be: Will they be brand new releases still on the bestseller lists or will they be part of the long tail only? The answer also affects the price I would be willing to pay (or maybe it doesn’t; let’s see how the discussion unfolds) for both the p and e books.

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University of Tokyo researchers create fast-flipping book scanner

By Chris Meadows

You may recall how Data the android read books in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the robot Johnny Five in Short Circuit—by riffling through the pages and absorbing the information in the time it took to go from the front to back cover.

Now researchers in Tokyo have come up with a system that can scan paper books into electronic form just as fast. The video (embedded below the jump) shows University of Tokyo assistant professor Yoshihiro Watanabe literally holding a book under the camera and riffling through the pages.

The monitor captures the images and, as shown above, overlays them with a laser grid that is used to calculate the curvature of the pages so it can be compensated for in the image-capturing process. The scanner works at a rate of 500 frames per second, and can capture a complete 200 page book in a minute. Its developers say they hope to be able to make it even faster.

They also hope to be able to make it smaller, so it can be integrated into portable devices such as a cellphone. Imagine being able to OCR any book, anywhere, for later reading on your iPhone.

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Amazon and Apple playing hardball on ebook prices

By Paul Biba

Amazon is now asking for a 3 year “most favored nations” clause from publishers who use the agency model. In other words it doesn’t want any competitor to get lower prices or better terms than Amazon. This is reported in the NY Times which cites industry executives. To make matters worse, Apple, on the other hand, is requiring all publishers, not just ones who use the agency model, not to allow ebooks to be sold by any other retail outlet at lower than the iBookstore price.

This means that Apple is actually tougher than Amazon. Apple wants publishers to sell to all retailers at the Apple price or above, but Amazon is only asking that for price parity on those publishers adopting the agency model, and is evidently trying to limit the agency model to only a few of the big publishers. Thus Apple is controlling all publishers who enter its store, but Amazon is leaving 50%-60% of its content to its standard distribution terms which will still force Apple to compete with Amazon’t pricing.

All this, of course, is a perfectly normal type of thing in retail, but I bet the publishers are tearing their hair out. When the big guys went to the agency model I suspect they had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. Once you control the price, rather than let the retailer do it, you have all this type of stuff to contend with.

More info here.

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Results for Read an EBook Week 2010 by Rita Toews

By a TeleRead Contributor

Read an E-Book Week 2010 may be over but the amount of downloaded reading material should last readers for quite a while. Several participants of the event commented that traffic on their websites was up dramatically from last year. The Read an E-Book website had well over 60,000 page hits just prior to, and during the week. Mobile phone traffic – both Android and iPhone – was also up from last year.

Libraries from around the world were visitors this year. Wright State University Libraries did an article on Read an E-Book Week and produced lapel button templates. Several libraries in Canada and the U.S. contacted me for the templates so they could produce buttons for their own staff.

Visitors came from 137 countries speaking 74 languages. Countries included: U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Poland, India, Argentina, South Africa, Egypt, Peru, Croatia, Serbia, Albania, Cuba and American Samoa. [Read rest of post]

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Alex Reader has a different sales strategy

By Paul Biba

According to CrunchGear, the Alex Reader is taking a different path than some of its competitors. Their goal is is to work with publishing houses and periodicals to create a branded webstore and an unique GIU for each device. That way a newspaper or publisher could offer “their own” device at a subsidized price. In addition they are looking at getting universities to develop university-branded Alexes.

With all the “me too” readers out there now it’s refreshing to see someone thinking in larger terms. It does mean, though, that I’ll hold off buying one until I see if a branded, subsidized version will come out. I wonder if Kobo is thinking about this?

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Enhanced ebooks – problems for agents

By Paul Biba

Daily Finance is talking about enhanced ebooks and the problems they bring. To the reader everything seems simple. Just put out the book. However, there’s lots of other stuff involved:

And literary agents on both sides of the Atlantic are gnashing their teeth over the prospect of enhanced e-book editions being a separate right from standard e-books. If standard and enhanced e-books are classified separately, the battle will begin again over whether authors can hang onto those rights — and whether publishers even have the rights to the enhanced editions at all.

British publishing trade magazine The Bookseller outlined the quandary this week. Some publishers, like the independent Canongate, negotiate deals individually. Others, like Hachette’s U.K. arm, prefer to keep all digital rights. But agents are shaking their heads over the idea of equivalency between a text-only e-book and a more sophisticated edition enriched with audio and video.

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On David Baldacci’s “Writer’s Cut” and ebooks: when is the book itself “the whole shebang”?

By Stephen Windwalker, editor of The Kindle Nation

Originally posted at Kindle Nation Daily 3.17.2010

I’ve been a David Baldacci fan for over a decade, and I’ve easily read over half of the books he’s published since his stunning 1996 debut with Absolute Power. From everything I’ve heard he’s a decent guy — among other things, in addition to spinning a great yarn, he’s a national ambassador for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society and he funds his own literacy foundation, the Wish You Well Foundation. I’d love to keep reading his books on my Kindle, and I probably will do so. Since I and many other Kindle Nation readers are conscious both of content and price, it is worth noting that his most recent bestseller, True Blue, is priced at $9.99 in the Kindle Store. There are, also, over a dozen Baldacci backlist titles in the $6 to $8 price range as well as a couple of children’s books and other titles that fall outside that range.

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23 years of C-Span archives on-line

By Chris Meadows

While it is true that C-Span is not a “book”, it is a living repository of history. Over 160,000 hours of video footage of our government at work, spanning 23 years of network history.

And C-Span has now made all of that footage available for free, at C-SpanVideo.org.

This is every bit as valuable a resource as the Internet Archive—and searchable, too. Including on e-book related matters.

For instance, searching on “Digital Rights Management” brought up a number of results, including this clip of Soft Skull Books founder and Cursor developer Richard Nash (who we covered here) from a February 17, 2010 panel discussion on the future of publishing. (It even starts the video playback right before the mention of DRM.)

Searching on DMCA brings up 24 results. In fact, you can watch footage of any e-book-related discussion in Congress simply by searching on it. Or the discussion of any topic that interests you, for that matter.

This is a great tool for anyone interested in learning more about the way the US government works.

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Quick Notes: Kindle Reader for Mac desktop, BigPond DRM, EBSCO buys NetLibrary

By Chris Meadows

Amazon has released a Kindle Reader for Mac OS X desktop (Intel-based, running 10.5 and above). It can be downloaded here. According to the articles, it is pretty basic at the moment, but the press release states it will be adding additional features soon. Like the Windows version, the Mac Kindle Reader will download books from your Kindle library, and synchronize your place across all your Kindle platforms.

Like a number of other music vendors before it, Australian ISP BigPond is shutting down the DRM servers for the DRM-protected WMA files it used to sell (before switching entirely to MP3 in early 2009). It is advising customers to back up their music either by burning it to audio CD, or by copying the data files and keys to a backup storage device.

On The Digital Reader, Nate the Great reports that magazine database operator EBSCO has bought the NetLibrary e-book division from OCLC. NetLibrary has been shuffled around quite a bit over the last decade; at one point it owned eReader. EBSCO plans to integrate NetLibrary e-books into its EBSCOhost database, which already provides access to the full texts of various magazines and periodicals.

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Does anybody know? To DRM or not to DRM

By Chris Meadows

A reader, Edward, posted this as a comment, and it seemed like a good question to pose as a “Does Anybody Know” column.

I am a specialist author of business books who self-publishes. I sell direct yet with 2 million copies sold in 20 languages I would say I am good at what I do.

I have not sold on Amazon.
I have not sold digitally.
I own my rights [except in some foreign languages.]

I am going to launch digitally through Amazon and through my own new webstore.

My target industry is very networked and the chances of people forwarding an ebook like mine is very likely. Thus I have not sold digitally thus far.

Yet my industry is not technically competent. So I am not too concerned about people ‘unlocking’ DRM individually UNLESS someone unlocks then forwards.

I think many people would have ethical reasons with forwarding if the titles had ‘do not forward as this is stealing…’

What are your views?
On my site, DRM or NOT?
Strong DRM or simple?

My own advice would be to forego the DRM. It just adds extra cost, and makes it harder for your customers to read your books on the platforms of their choosing. But you should listen to what others say and make up your own mind.

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