TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘publishing industry’ Category

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: The following is from Sue Polanka’s No Shelf Required blog.  Reprinted with permission.  Sue is Head of Reference, Wright State University Libraries, Chair, Editorial Board, Reference Books Bulletin,  Paul Biba

Bowker and AAP sponsored a webinar today on US Consumer Book Buying.  It was incredibly well organized and full of good data.  My notes and comments are included below.

Speakers

• Tina Jordan (AAP)  moderator
• Kelly Gallagher (Bowker) speaker

2009 data, first 6 months, based on what consumer is buying/reading

• 2008 – e-commerce the dominant channel for book sales, beating out brick n mortar
• 2009 – so far, large chain bookstores are back at the top
• Consumer is King and defines the marketplace, we can’t publish like we used to – the old supply/demand model.

3 indicators – impact of economy, competition for leisure time, product selection (genres, formats)

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By Paul Biba

Mobcast has struck a deal with Editions Harlequin to distribute their ebook catalog on GoSpoken.com making French language titles available on the RIM, Nokia and Sony Ericsson devices that use the BlackBerry App World, Nokia Ovi store and the Play-Now Arena. GoSpoken now offers over 8,200 titles and will have a catalog of 25,000 at the end of 2009 and hopes to grow to 100,000 in 2010.

By Paul Biba

The ugly spectre of protectionism continues to haunt us. A correspondent sent me the following:

Just a quick note to say that the technical measures to enforce the geographical restrictions are slowly but surely tightening. The iPhone eReader application just refused to download 2 books that I had purchased (by pretending to be in the USA). It said I was in the wrong location. Curiously I had no problem downloading them to my Mac, form where, in a spirit of perversity, I uploaded them to my Personal Content shelf at Fictionwise, and from there to the iPhone.

However, it does seem that the days of being able to get around this sort of measure are numbered. The FAQ on the FW site still says that less than 10% of their books are protected in this way, but this is woefully short of the truth now. In effect the site is now USA only, and there is nothing much we can do in the rest of the world until the publishers sort themselves out. The local alternatives have a very poor and very expensive selection.

By Stephen Windwalker

Amazon’s Price War with Walmart:

It’s All About the Kindle,

But It Could Render the Organizational Structure

Of the Book Business Meaningless

By Stephen Windwalker

Author and Publisher, Kindle Nation Daily

Back in 1953, after he got his gold watch from H.P. Hood & Sons, my grandfather gave up the life of a milkman and moved from Everett, MA to East Dixfield, ME to semi-retire as proprietor of the East Dixfield General Store & Esso Filling Station. Once a year or so he would fall into a full-tilt gas price war with Sharon’s Chevron station, which was located a few hundred yards down the road. Mr. Sharon would take his price down to 11 cents a gallon. My grandfather would change his sign to read 10.9 cents. Back and forth they would go for days and sooner or later they would each get into single digits.

Gramps tried to explain the economics and marketing principles behind this death-spiral of decreasing prices and increasing losses. He may even have said something about "making it up in volume." But I was in single digits myself, and let’s just say that neither he nor I possessed the language or acumen of a Jeff Bezos. What I can tell you is that these price wars became a pretty big story among the very limited citizenry of East Dixfield. And the same people, as consumers, made out pretty well.

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By Paul Biba

That’s what Jane Friedman’s new publishing company, Open Road Integrated Media, announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The new company will be using “every bit of technology” to market ebooks of past and present authors. Open Road will be selling titles by William Styron, Pat Conroy and Iris Murdoch as well. The new company plans to be the marketing arm for niche backlist titles, but will also be looking at select new authors as well.

They hope to publish 750 to 1000 titles in their first year. You can find out more here.

By Paul Biba

Charles Stross, among the best science fiction authors today, has released a number of his books in non-DRMed e-book form. On his blog he has a great post about why he thinks the worldwide release of the Kindle is very bad news (the bolding is his) for writers. Here’s the summary and you can find the rest here:

So, to summarize: what have I got against Amazon’s Kindle?

1) DRM. (It’s unethical, immoral, fattening, and a royal pain in the ass. To be fair: this also goes for other ebook platforms.)

2) Amazon reserves the right to delete work from your Kindle. (Under circumstances which are now a little clearer and a little tighter, but nevertheless still present.)

3) Censorship.

4) They’re using their monopsony position [link added] to fuck over their suppliers (i.e. the publishers) in a manner that threatens a catastrophic crash in author royalties in the medium term (up to 5 years). NB: as a reader, you may enjoy the short term price benefit, but you’ll pay for it in the long term in reduction of choice.

5) Their actions may start a trans-Atlantic price war between publishers, to the detriment of authors (again, in the medium term).

We desperately need a sane price structure for commercial e-books, a better answer to English language rights licensing, and solutions that make books easier and cheaper for readers to get hold of while enabling authors and editors to continue to earn a living.

But Kindle—as currently sold—ain’t it.

Thanks to Ori Avtalion for the link.

By Paul Biba

Joe Konrath is a published author and on his blog A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing, he discusses his royalties from ebooks. He says that he has gotten “quite a shock” with his bi-annual royalty statement on his ebook royalties. Not only does he sell ebooks through his publisher, Hyperion, but he also sells self-published ebooks through Amazon. He finds that his ebook sales are better on Amazon and and he comes to the conclusion that for a midlist author it is possible to make a living without print contracts.

There are a lot of figures in this post and I suggest that any new author, or any author interested in ebooks, take a careful look at what Joe has to say.

By Paul Biba

Publishing Perspectives is offering a free PDF version of its Frankfurt Edition for October 14. It includes photos from the opening ceremony with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Vice President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping. We also attended TOC Frankfurt, the International Rights Directors Meeting, the Supply Chain Meeting and the off-site STM conference.

You can find it here.

By Paul Biba

The following is being announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair today by LibreDigital:

Women are spending nearly 70 percent more time browsing books online than men.

The high-level review also found that people who browsed books online were more likely to purchase both print and eBook titles. These trends are important for publishers and authors seeking to market their content to digital consumers.

Evidently LibreDitigal developed this information as a result of looking at how readers sampled LibreDigital’s online book content over the past 15 months. LibreDigital has provided over 500 million page views of sample book chapters and content, the release says.

By Paul Biba

A new survey by BML and Bowker looks at this data. According to them 57% of British consumer bought a book last year, but only 50% of Americans did. Romance and mystery took up 57% of the US fiction market as opposed to 31% in Britain and men accounted for 29% of the US fiction market and 40% of it in Britain. (Isn’t that rather male-centric in the reporting? Why not say 71% of the buyers in the US were women and 60% of the buyers in Britain were female?)

In a, to me, scary statistic it seems that adults over the age of 42 accounted, in both countries, for 66% of all book purchases. More info here.

By Ted Treanor, publishing consultant

Editor’s Note: Here’s a contribution by digital publishing and eBook strategist Ted Treanor. His website is here and you can follow him on Twitter. Unfortunately the chart he refers to is copyrighted and I don’t think fair use will permit me to duplicate it. However you can find it at the Publishing Perspectives website. Paul Biba

The list [include chart of 20 co’s] of the top 20 publishers in the world shows a profoundly changing landscape in book publishing. The original post by Rüdiger Wischenbart at Publishing Perspectives in Germany, provides excellent analysis of the changes, and offers some forward thinking of the transformation of the publishing industry. Additionally, I’ve added my analysis.

Some publishers are fairing much better economically, while others are steadily sliding downward in revenue and in their global standing. The changing dynamics between the professional information, education and trade sectors has affected this year’s ranking. The good news is that publishers that have reinvented themselves (responded to market demand by listening to the customer) have done much better than most.

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By Paul Biba

According to the Bookseller publishers are insisting on territorial rights with the issue of the new international Kindle. UK publishers are insisting that these rights be observed if they are to make their books available. In a statement that is patronizing, at best, the UK Publisher’s Association said that they want to be sure that “… consumers will buy works appropriate to the country they are in.”

Evidently Amazon records your country or region when you first buy content, and then, according to Amazon, when you travel your ability to buy books will be determined by your “… home country, not by the country you are traveling in.”

Naturally this has complicated Amazon’s negotiations and undoubtedly delayed the introduction of an international Kindle. Evidently Random House UK, Macmillan and Oxford University Press are still holdouts. I wonder if this is part of the problem with the Kindle in Canada. Can you imagine how difficult this must have been for Amazon to negotiate on a worldwide basis.

Way to go publishers! In an economy where you are struggling to survive it makes perfect sense for you to restrict your markets and lower your overall sales. Don’t want to have to handle and of that dirty money, do you? Perhaps if you restrict book sales by cites, rather than by those awfully big things called countries, you can sell even fewer books and get rid of most of your accounting staff.

By Paul Biba

Articles in the New York Times and the Bookseller are reporting that pirated copies of Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol are appearing on the net. The interesting thing about the articles is that somehow the authors seem surprised by this.

Sorry, we live in a new age and books will follow the track that everything else has taken. I notice how that wonderful technology, DRM, has protected the books from being pirated. Not! All it has done is prevent legitimate buyers from purchasing their own copies – because buyers want to own their books, not to lease them. So in the end the publishing industry is loosing sales to pirates and to legitimate customers both. Way to go guys!

PS: I wonder how many copies of the pirated edition are from scanned books. Maybe publishers should stop putting out hard copy as well. This would really protect them.

By Paul Biba

Bookofjoe has reported on a story coming out of India. Mountblanc issues limited edition fountain pens on a regular basis. Some of them are quite beautiful, and some are really hideously ugly. They have done a whole writers’ series including Agatha Christie, Virginia Wolf, Voltaire and more.

Not a writer, but one of the world’s great statesmen, Mountblanc has just misunderstood his entire ethos and issued a $23,000 pen commemorating austere, ascetic Mahatma Gandhi! Bookofjoe reports that Amit Modi, secretary of the 102-year-old Sabarmati Ashram that Gandhi founded to promote his ideas of radical egalitarianism and simple living, expressed dismay at the product, which he called “not relevant” to Gandhi’s name. “If he had seen this, he would have thrown it away,” Mr Modi said. “I cannot imagine why anybody has done this. We cannot recognize this.”

Talk about misreading the consumer! Does this look familiar in the ebook arena? Publishers are continually misreading their public. People want reasonably priced, non-DRMed ebooks that can be read on more than one platform. For those who want ebooks, I strongly suspect that they will not buy the hard cover version when an ebook version is not available. That means no sale at all for the publisher. Pity.

By Paul Biba

Here’s just a snippet from an excellent article in The Huffington Post by bestselling author Jason Pinter who is the author of the Henry Parker novels.

Ebooks should look to expand the book buying market, not be used as an alternative for the print edition. Look at the ads for the iPod: they’re fun, they’re cool, they feature all sorts of (pastel-colored) people who are far funkier than anyone you or I know grooving to the licensed beat. Then consider the ads for the Kindle: the music is straight out of your local elevator. Hesitant readers aren’t going to rush out to spent $299 to listen to the reading equivalent of John Tesh.

Related: E-book biz too fixated on regular readers? If so, what to do about it?—earlier commentary on the Pinter post.

By a TeleRead Contributor

Editor’s Note: This is reprinted, with permission, from L’Ombre del l’Olivier, The Shadow of the Olive Tree, being the maunderings of an Englishman on the Cote d’Azur. Paul Biba

Dear Publishers

Other than a select few (and you know who you are) that is,

As ebooks become more popular the question of ebook pricing is beginning to become more important. As more and more people get their Kindles and Sonys and the like the more they begin to notice that ebooks aren’t always cheap and that the price seems to vary in highly inconsistent ways.

The latest person to encounter this is Test Driver Liz over at SBTB:

During the media blitz for Tempt Me At Twilight the price of $14.99 was floated. This led to the very natural assumption that the book was probably going to be a trade paperback. Since Lisa Kleypas’s last two books were hardcover – a great deal right? Then, when the loyal reader of Ms. Kleypas is offered the e-book at $9.99 (or $12.99 depending on your e-tailer) it seems like something you can swallow. Sure, it’s more than a mass market, but it’s not as much as a hardcover and you won’t have to wait a year to read one of your favorite authors. Ok, let’s buy it!! So you do. And then you go to Target to buy some Cheerios. Cereal is cheaper there and we’re all watching our money these days.

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By Paul Biba

The author of the Survival of the Book blog, who is evidently an editor, raises an interesting point about the lack of the editorial process in with operations such as Smashwords. Is this a valid concern, or are editors doomed to be a thing of the past. Here is what he says and you can read more on the blog:

… What concerns me more is this kind of news, about Sony working with Smashwords and Author Solutions to adapt self-published books to their readers. I guess it’s not the news that worries me, but the idea so celebrated by many folks that anyone can upload files and make books available on readers, and then HA! They are as good as your fancy-pants published books that go through a whole, ya know, editorial process.

I like the editorial process. I make my living off of it. And I find it disrespectful when it is dismissed so casually by folks in such a rush to get their words into print, or onto screen. Eliot Van Buskirk, who wrote this article on Sony, states,
When books and shelves are digital, rules about scarcity go out the window, allowing unheralded scribes to bubble to the surface based only on the crowd’s reaction — just as many self-motivated bloggers have become old media mainstays and video entrepreneurs have become YouTube phenomenons. …

I really dislike crowd sourcing. I don’t trust crowds. I see this as just civilized, not elitism. Crowds have led to things like lynchings and putting people into camps, and a whole slew of the worst kind of reality tv programming on VH1. Why would we want to entrust crowds with our reading choices?