TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Book Expo America’ Category

By Paul Biba

I’m at the show this morning and I stopped by the Ingram booth to say hello.  They told me that, from their viewpoint, the show has been very successful on the digital end.  They said that last year people were asking them to explain what all this digital stuff was, but this year people seem to know all that and are talking about implementation.  They said that they are getting a lot of interest from hardware manufacturers, so Amazon may be seeing some competition in the future.

Update:  As I was leaving I ran into the CEO of Overdrive and told him about the Ingram comment.  He pretty much agreed and said that people are finally starting to ask the right questions.  He said that there is a sense of urgency with people wanting to convert all their books now and they still need some education on formats, ecomerce models etc.  He also said that there is a lot of interest from international publishers.

I also ran into a small publisher, who must remain nameless, who would like to do some innovative things with ebooks. They told me that even though there is a lot of publisher interest in ebooks, once you get a way from the main stream or want to do something different that does not include full text with DRM, publishers are shying away, not knowing what to make of something that is not plain vanilla.

By Paul Biba

Here’s a shot of Sarah Wendell (left) from Smart Bitches, and Jessica Kennedy from Books Reviews by Jess. I’ll be at the Net Galley booth #4077 at noon on Sunday.

The final panel I attended was on, and by, book review bloggers.

The panel included Stephanie Coleman-Chan of Stephanie’s Written Word, Jennifer Hart of Book Club Girl, Candace Levy of Beth Fish Reads, Natasha Maw of Maw Books, Julie Peterson of Booking Mama, Amy Riley of My Friend Amuy and Dawn Rennert of She is Too Fond of Books. It was given in one of the largest rooms and it was packed. Standing room only. They gave out a list of some book blogger directories to help publishers and marketers find target blogs. The panel was also recorded. If you keep your eye on Book Club Girl they will post the recording and also links to the directories, as they didn’t have enough handouts. Keep checking here.

By Paul Biba

At BookExpo I attended a workshop on copyright enforcement. It was a joint presentation by the Association of American Publishers and the U.K. Publishers Association. They presented a whole bunch of info on how much infringement there was, how many evil sites there are and gave some plain misinformation about the Pirate Bay case. I was going to write it up and give you the details, but something about it kept nagging at me and I realized, today, what a sorry thing it was.

The thrust of the presentations was how good they were in issuing, and getting compliance with, take down notices. The U.K. Publishers Association is developing a portal, which members pay for, to make issuing these notices easier. It seems like a good idea, actually. But they miss the point completely.

What all of this does is simply try to overlay the already failed model into the future and convince people (paying members, of course) that by doing this thrashing around they are actually accomplishing something. It is so sad that the industry doesn’t recognize this for the failure it really is.

When you are faced with an overwhelming paradigm change the proper thing to do is to adapt to it and try to find new ways to deal with it. I had hoped that these groups would have come up with some creative solutions. But no go. Just keep plodding on with the old failed model.

I’ll give you a good example of what could be done. Instead of spending lots of money hiring a major international law firm to prosecute take down notices (which they did), why not spend the same amount of money with a high powered software house to help develop filters that companies like Scirbd or Wattpad could use to screen out copyrighted material. No, they won’t do that. They talked about the stuff that those sites have done so far - talked about it with some disdain by the way - but took that attitude that it was those sites’ complete responsibility, rather than it being a shared effort. Why this old school attitude?

For three reasons. First, because it might put them out of business if a new model worked. Second, to justify membership fees they need numbers. They can point to the hard numbers of the take down notices they issue and this can be used to drive membership. (Hey, I was counsel to a trade association once and I’m familiar with this game.) But they can’t get any hard numbers out of a software program. But the real reason is next.

Three, that organizations like this are still mired in the old paradigm and can’t see that the world is changing around them. They keep fighting the old fight, but don’t realize that they don’t even know who the enemy is any more.

By Paul Biba

Got the following email from Simon Owens:

Hey Paul,

I saw it mentioned on Follow the Reader that you’re going to be featured in the blogger signing at BEA. I recently got a chance to interview Kat Meyer and several of the participants of the event for an article I published about the signing:

http://bloggasm.com/can-i-have-your-blogograph

Anyway, I thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.

take care,

Simon

I went over there and, indeed, it is an interesting article. I learned some stuff that I didn’t know, even though I’m participating. Take a look.

By Paul Biba

Here’s a shot of them setting up the Expo floor, taken from the Press Room.

At a general press conference about the show we were told

• Attendance is down 14% from 2007 in New York, but up 36% from 2008 in LA. Exhibitor registration is down 10-15% from last year and square footage is down 21%
• Michael Smith of the IDPF organized a panel about marketing ebooks that played to standing room only. The place was packed and, by a show of hands, they were almost all publishers. Pretty much the same stuff I reported on at the IDPF conference, including the speakers, but Andrew Weinstein of Ingram gave some interesting numbers I hadn’t heard before:
• In the library market not only are sales to libraries up, but the actual usage of the digital media by the end users is increasing as well;
• Digital textbook users tripled on their platform over last year;
• Students shared over 3 million notes on Ingram’s textbook platform in January.

Here’s a shot of the room:

By Paul Biba

The press facilities here are the worst I’ve ever seen at a major show.  There’s no WiFi and the Ethernet access doesn’t work.  The “press center” has 3 old Pentium 4 computers with floppy disks!  I haven’t seen a floppy in years!  Well, once things get started these 3 poor old computers will be swamped so it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to post until I get home.  No real time updates from this show.  Tomorrow I probably won’t even bother to take my computer with me.  Good old pen and paper will work just fine.

By Paul Biba

I’ll be at BEA Thursday through Sunday, looking around and reporting to you on what I find interesting. If any of you will be there you should check out the Firebrand booth, #4077, as 44 bloggers have signed up to meet their readers. GalleyCat, Tools of Change, Booksquare, Smart Bitches, and many others will be present. I’ll be at the booth at noon on Sunday if any of you want to, or dare to, come by. You can find the complete blogger signing schedule here.

By Paul Biba

I will be at BEA Thursday through Sunday to cover it for you guys. I’ve never been to one before so I am quite curious about the whole affair. It seems like a lot of time to devote to just one topic, but I’ll see.

As part of the event the Follow the Reader Blog has organized a “Blogger Signing” event. I will be at their booth on Sunday, at noon, if anyone wants to drop by and see what I look like. The whole schedule for the event is too long to publish, but go over and take a look. You may have the chance to meet some of your favorite bloggers. Here’s the description of the event:

Firebrand is thrilled to announce that 41 bloggers signed up to be at our booth (#4077) during Book Expo America. It’s clear from how quickly this idea went from concept to reality, that book bloggers need and want to create community-to-community relationships with publishers, retailers, and readers. This is an incredibly exciting time in publishing!

We invite every publisher at BEA to review this schedule and mark their calendars, so they have a chance to meet the bloggers who are helping to sell their books.