TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Tools of Change for Publishing’ Category

By Chris Meadows

Kassia Kroszer at Booksquare has a great wrap-up of the Tools of Change conference, in which she talks about her own and others’ presentations, links to interesting blog articles, and shares some general thoughts on the state of the e-publishing industry at this point.

There are far too many interesting observations to summarize, so I’ll just pick out a few to mention here.

Early on, Kroszer points out that “all publishing is already digital”—insofar as manuscripts are by and large now submitted electronically, rather than as typewritten or handwritten pages. But publishers are still using an old-fashioned print-based workflow, and there is room for some savings by going to a more streamlined digital workflow instead.

Later, Kroszer talks about emerging markets around the world. Piracy in these markets, she says, may indicate that there is a demand that is not being served—which is an opportunity to develop a viable marketplace in those markets. “I firmly believe viable marketplaces are the first line of defense when it comes to piracy.”

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By Chris Meadows

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change website that I wanted to cover, but it was so long that I never actually got around to looking at it in the detail I needed, until now. Fortunately, the article is still no less timely.

This piece is an interview with Richard Nash, a theater-director-turned-publisher who has now launched a “social publishing” start-up called Cursor. Nash talks about Cursor and its goals, then goes on to discuss some of the broader implications of publishing meeting the kind of “Web 2.0” interactivity that is a hallmark of today’s Internet.

It’s a fascinating article, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. After the jump, I will discuss it and bring up some supporting examples.

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By Paul Biba

I’m back from an exhausting time of trying to cover TOC for you guys and here are a few thoughts about my overall impression of the conference.

TOC is a rather odd duck in that I don’t think it quite knows who is eating its eggs. It is a mixture of low level, in the trenches, stuff and very high level thought pieces. This makes many of the sessions suitable for the worker bees and mid-level managers (for example those on copyright, the workshops on the first day). The dichotomy comes in when TOC goes with its keynotes. These are very high level sessions that are more suitable for upper management (for example the interview with Ray Kurzweil or Law is Not a Business Solution) who are more concerned with larger issues such a strategy and planning. The two don’t really meld.

The overall message being sent by the conference was inconsistent this year. Throughout the sessions publishers were being told that innovation was the key to success. Do things differently, do new things, think in new directions. But the message of the final keynote by Tim O’Reilly was that publishers will never win in the technology race and they they should do what they always do, but just do it better. Not what everyone else was saying.

Should you go next year? On the whole I would say yes if you are in management up to the mid-level. I do know from talking to attendees that people make a lot of contacts here, so if you are in a small business it might just be the place for you to meet one of the big guys you haven’t been able to get ahold of or to be able to find contacts to help you in the operation of your business.

As to specific presentations, three stand out in my mind as head an shoulders above the others. The first is Peter Meyers 10 Ways to Enhance Your iPad Books. This really was an eye opener when it comes to how to think about really enhancing books, not just enhancing them by adding a video. Second was Perseus Books Groups 10 Secrets of Digital Publishing No One Will Tell You. Some good stats and also some real insider info about what it was like to really do an enhanced book. It isn’t easy. And the third, which really should have been a keynote instead of a session was Michael Mace’s Check Out My Scars, Seven Lessons From the Failure of Ebooks in 2000. His discussion of the tipping point should be required reading, especially the part about how the publishers’ increase in ebook prices will bring the tipping point closer, as opposed to putting it off. They are inadvertently hurting themselves.

O’Reilly has been putting the sessions on the web and I would suggest you go to the O’Reilly site and see if the three I mentioned above are on line.

By Paul Biba

Tim O”Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly media. Challenge is not to build the coolest and most enhanced ebooks. The publisher will never be a winner in a technology race. Innovations do come from publishers, but that’s not the heart of what publishers do. Publishers’ job is to do for authors those things that authors can’t do for themselves. Be creative, but remember what you really do. Which is often the boring stuff. If not good at those things then someone will take your place.

It’s not easy to be found in this new world. Big haystack. All of the top blogs today are publishers and publishing with one of these will get writer more visibility that they can get on their own. Even iPhone apps are having a haystack problem. Given this there will always be a role in society for aggregators, and this should be a core competency for a publisher. Getting authors known and distributed. Publishers must be excellent distributors. Publishers must have the capability to create products in new formats and sell it into new channels. Publishers extremely weak in SEO.

Social media marketing: you gain and bestow status based on those you associate with. More important to build your status rather than trying to push product. Use social media to build the status of your authors rather than just to push product. Just like with Google, a new breed of social media analytics are coming on board and should be used in designing your social network. There will be ebook analytics as well. An ebook knows it is being read and this will lead to a lot of interesting tools.

Should be doing a lot of pricing experiments to find what works. One nice thing about the agency pricing model is that it allows the publishers to experiment with pricing rather than distributors.

Social media is not about trying to sell something but is about trying to add value to community who cares about what you card about. The more you create value for your community the more value will redound back to you.

By Paul Biba

Ramy Habeeb, established first Arabic language ebook house.

Arab publishing market behind western publishing, and its lessons also applicable to other emerging economies. 60,000 titles published every year. Arabic market is the size of the US.

Problems: distribution is still very primitive, In Egypt, 80% of books only available within 5 kilometers of publishing house. Censorship is still a problem. Three kinds: on purpose, self censorship and unconscious censorship. No viable OCR solution available in Arabic. International standards are a problem. Nobody uses ISBN numbers. They have them but don’t use them or any other international standard.

Industry is ripe to be entered and needs the major players. Mobile phones are everywhere, villages won’t have a library or bookstore, but will have 4 mobile phone stores. Would be an excellent book distribution system. PoD would work wonderfully in Arab countries and also to bring Arab books to the US.

By Paul Biba

Frances Pinter, Bloomsbury Academic. Startup academic publisher. Publishing monographs in academia, an endangered species. 1980 sold 3,000 copies of typical monograph, now sell about 350. Challenge: how do we get to a point where we can sustainably publish long form monographs. (Discussion covers only social sciences and humanities)

Academics still want independent verification of quality, editing, typesetting, curation, branding. Pressures on academic community: expanding academic ecosystem and need more publishing services, governments and foundation wants to see impact for research they are funding. Pressures on academic publishers: technology driven changes require investment in time of global downturn, authors still want services and royalties and want “free at point of use”.

New business model: website will go live in April. Put plain book content on line in HTML under Creative Commons. Will sell printed book and in Epub. Also sell enhanced ebook, content with extra content to be bought individually or by subscription. Going to create an experimental lab on line, with tools for collaboration, added value, cc licensing and monetization. Not sure where it will lead. Problem is that this doesn’t reduce first copy costs, duplicates the worst of the distribution issues with too many middlemen. Wants to find new pathways for money that is already there. Look at library budgets and take a small amount and aggregate and create an International Library Coalition for Open Access Books. Consortium will aggregate funds to pay for first copy costs and publishers publish as open access content and can make money on POD sales and formats, etc. Can get cost of monograph ot $2/copy for any library who participates.

By Paul Biba

Angela Bole, BSIG; Kelly Gallagher, Bowker

Consumer attitudes to ebook reading. Ongoing project. Very fresh data, completed survey last week and this is the first release to the public. Looked a print book readers who are moving to ebooks. Respondents had to have read an ebook. 95% confidence level, about 44K respondents.

Purchasing behavior: #1 reason to buy an ebook is affordability

34% acquired their first ebook within the last sixth months

Purchasers of ebooks are buying fewer hardbacks and paperbacks

47% read ebooks on a desktop, 32% on the Kindle, 11% on iPhone, 10% on iPod Touch, 9% on Blackberry, 9% on a netbook, 8% on the Nook, 8% on the Sony Reader, 13% on other

50% buy ebooks exclusively

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By Paul Biba

Peter Meyers, A New Kind of Book. Even Apple is focusing on the “dark ages” Epub standard which just recreates old fashioned paper books.

How to reconfigure books the way that modern brains have been reconfigured by the web and technology. All this can be done with current software. These are ideas that can be used to “enhance” a book in new and different ways.

The Colonel Fitzwilliam problem: keeping track of many characters in a book can be tough. Put into each book a “tap” that will take you to a quick summary of the character whose nome you tapped on. Enhancing doesn’t have to mean super multimedia.

Give me back my notes: for note takers, the current tools make highlighting and note taking easy, but it isn’t easy to find them later. No easy way to browse notes on current reader. Build into the book a simple browser for all notes and highlighting.

Shiny, happy poems: for poems create an interface that is fun to play with by shining light on interesting content- need to see the slides to understand this. Makes sense when you see it on the screen.

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By Paul Biba

Peter Costanzo and Rick Joyce Perseus Books Group: independent publishing company and distribute other independent publishers.

Surveyed their independent publishing clients. What is most significant focus in 2010: ebooks, social media and direct consumer were highest top 3.

What percentage of your titles will be ebooks in 2010: 30% less than 10%, 50% half or more made into ebooks.

What are barriers to your ebook entry: highest barrie is poor fit of titles with device capabilities 43%, piracy 37%, retailer pricing 37%, cost of conversion 35%, confusion about technology standards or processes 34%, poor handling of color 34%, cost of conversion 35%.

Planning on windowing? 43% plan to release e and p at same time. 30% wait and see, 8% window, 11% experiment with windowing.

What format do you use: 40% PDF, 20% epub, 30% all, 12% azw, 21% other. (more…)

By Paul Biba

Final keynote of the day is a conversation between Kurzweil and O’Reilly.

Kurzweil presentation on Blio: enabling factors in place for ebooks. Blio is free ereader with free and for pay books. With audiobooks combine audiobook with the text book. Can synchronize highlighting on the text with the audiobook. Can use text to speech to do the same thing if don’t have an audiobook. For textbooks include auxiliary website material directly into the book. Connect directly from a book to Wikipedia, dictionary definitions, highlight material, take notes.

Conversation: For Blio what is the authoring environment: have an authoring tool that makes it easy to put stuff in. Underlying format is web based. Will be a lot of magazines doing it and ads can change after publication sold.

Are there performance rights with TTS: expect few problems because publishers afraid TTS will take away from audiobook sales and here can combine the audiobook with the regular book. May be premium versions of books, just like with DVDs. Their DRM contract will allow user to use the book with multiple devices. Talking to some retail chains, manufacturers and publishers about incorporating Blio into books, themselves.

What’s your position on DRM: It’s up to the publisher. Blio will not take the lead on that. (more…)

By Paul Biba

Bookserver is in technology demo basis. 1,800,000 books in the Internet Archive and it scans 1,000 books a day. Costs about 10 cents a page to digitize a book and takes half an hour or so to do it. Public domain is about 20% books, 70% out of print and 10% in print. Bookserver aimed at out of print and in print books. A distributed system for lending and vending on the internet. Laptop to search engine to find book, and goes to holder of the book. OLPC now has access to Internet Archive books. Kindle will connect to a search engine and download book from Feedbooks with no Amazon involved. Can do it on an iPhone too. The end website must be Bookserver enabled. Works with for pay books too. Will also work with DAISY reader for both in print and out of print and will access entire Internet Archive set of books directly. Bookserver can also work with libraries and restrict number of copies of books loaned out at the same time. Bookserver is not proprietary, but a set a standards for a distributed system that anyone can use.

By Karen Holt

Sourcebooks founder and publisher Dominique Raccah thinks of herself as running two companies: a book publishing house and a mixed media company. And so should every other publisher, Raccah told the audience during a workshop at TOC Tuesday.

The point, she said, is to think in terms of the content you have—or, “what are you expert at”—and how that expertise can be packaged and sold in different forms and at different price points. At Sourcebooks, that includes taking its popular baby naming title and repurposing the information as a high-end $19.95 gift book and a $4.99 iPhone app. That app, Raccah said, “is seriously fun.”

“This is not a regurgitation of the book…This is a lot cuter than the book. By the way, it quacks,” Raccah said.

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