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Category: E-books

Published January 18, 2010

“E” is for Experiment (Not E-books)

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Audience Development Director at F+W Media, had an interesting op-ed at Publishing Perspectives last week about e-books and e-readers:

[T]here is a lot of R&D money being poured into [e-readers] — that’s how technology companies work — and one or more of them may eventually click with consumers, but right now it’s a fledgling market and the hype surrounding it has reached irrational levels in publishing circles… There are many fundamental business issues that need to be addressed related to e-books — rights, royalties, pricing, distribution, marketing — and it’s up to publishers, agents and authors to figure them out together and not be distracted by every new shiny object the technology companies come up with.

Although clearly not a big advocate for e-readers, Guy raises a lot of the question marks that I think still hang over the devices in a fairly balanced way, and the article as a whole expresses a lot of the doubts I hear from other quietly skeptical people in publishing.

Needless to say, the whole thing is worth reading and Guy has more to say on the subject at his blog loudpoet.

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Published January 8, 2010

More than…

In a recent op-ed for The NY Times, ‘There’s More to Publishing Than Meets the Screen’, Jonathan Galassi, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, asked:

Are e-books a new frontier in publishing, a fresh version of the author’s work? Or are they simply the latest editions of the books produced by publishers like Random House?

This is essentially a more articulate framing of a question I asked here a couple of weeks ago. But unsurprisingly Galassi offers a far more compelling defence of Random House than I could manage:

[S]hould another company be able to issue e-book versions of Random House’s editions without its involvement? An e-book version of Mr. Styron’s “The Confessions of Nat Turner” will contain more than the author’s original words. It will also comprise Mr. Loomis’s editing, as well as all the labor of copy editing, designing and producing, not to mention marketing and sales, that went into making it a desirable candidate for e-book distribution. Mr. Styron’s books took the form they have, are what they are today, not only because of his remarkable genius but also, as he himself acknowledged, because of the dedicated work of those at Random House.

I think the point here is that books are often a collaboration between author and publisher, and in this sense publishers add value — or, at least, they did in the past. Galassi’s example is Styron, but we now know that Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish was instrumental in defining the author’s trademark style. No doubt there are other high profile examples…

As Peter Ginna, director of Bloomsbury Press, points out in this post, and in a comment on my post here, there are definitely some issues around royalty payments that Random House need to address. But while e-books are little more than converting the file format of a work, I do have some sympathy for Random House’s argument about rights.

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Published December 18, 2009

A Question

I’ve been staying clear of the publishing shit-storm du jour — Random House’s claim to backlist e-book rights and Stephen Covey’s decision to sell exclusive digital rights to two of his bestselling books to Amazon rather than his traditional publisher Simon & Schuster — because I simply don’t know enough about rights. But, Peter Ginna, publisher and editorial director of Bloomsbury Press, (who should know a thing or two) has a couple of interesting related posts, ‘The E-Book Wars Have Really Begun’ Part 1 and 2, on the issues.

Leaving the specifics of Covey aside (because I just don’t think you can generalize from his position), Peter Ginna doesn’t seem to think Random House has much of a leg to stand on. Nor, for that matter, does Richard Curtis, or the Author’s Guild. And agents are understandably unhappy…

But my question (to someone who does know something about rights) is if e-books remain essentially shovelware and aren’t substantially transforming the original book as edited and designed by the publisher, don’t Random House kind of have a point?

[Before you yell at me — I’m just curious!]

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Published December 3, 2009

E-Reading the Tea Leaves

While The Wall Street Journal recently suggested that e-readers are more eight-track than iPod and Forrester Research predicted that B&N will steal market share from Amazon and Sony in 2010, Joe Wikert, General Manager & Publisher at O’Reilly Media, made the even bolder prediction that Amazon — in the face of stiff competition from other e-readers and multi-use devices like the iPhone — “will completely exit the Kindle hardware space within the next 3 years”.

Although predicting the future is a mug’s game (and Amazon are particularly adept at being at least 2 or 3 steps ahead of the pundits), I think that Joe — an early Kindle advocate — might actually be onto something and Amazon really might be prepared to let the device, if not the format or apps, die quietly.

Does this mean that Amazon made a mistake in launching their own e-reader?

I don’t think so.

If publishers had rushed to embrace the Kindle, Amazon would have completely pwned the distribution of e-books (and had publishers even further over the proverbial barrel).

But even though this hasn’t quite worked out, Amazon are still sitting pretty. The Kindle has undoubtedly increased the popularity of e-books and Amazon — the best known and largest online bookstore — is the natural beneficiary. Even if manufacturing the hardware becomes too much like hard work, Amazon will still sell a lot of e-books and the Kindle will surely have served its purpose as a beachhead…

Kindle and Shortcovers

And on the subject of the Kindle, it’s been interesting to see Indigo, Canada’s biggest book retailer, respond to Amazon launching their e-reader north of the border.

Joel Silver, President of Indigo, — who apparently reads on his Blackberry — discussed e-readers and e-books on Business News Network last week (there’s also an interesting follow up interview with the estimable Jason Epstein) and Michael Serbinis, President of Indigo’s e-book initiative Shortcovers, took a few (slightly uncharitable) pot-shots at the Kindle in a recent interview with The National Post.

But, as Shortcovers clearly demonstrates, Indigo have been preparing for the arrival of the Kindle for a while, and — if you have a spare hour — it worth listening to Michael Tamblyn, their VP of Content, Sales & Merchandising, re-enact his Tools of Change presentation Your Reading Life, Always With You to see where they are going…

So what do you think is the future of e-readers? Any thoughts?

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Published October 22, 2009

The World’s Most Advanced E-Reader or the Worst Product Name Ever?

Despite being lumbered with “the worst product name in recorded history”, Barnes & Noble‘s new dual screen e-reader the ‘Nook’ is getting a lot of favourable reviews.

An appallingly kept secret, the Nook was officially unveiled earlier this week and is being widely touted as a ‘Kindle Killer’ (whatever that actually means).

Direct comparisons with Amazon’s e-reader are inevitable of course — especially given the Nook will go on sale for $259, the same price as the Kindle 2.  And, if nothing else, US publishers seem relieved that Amazon finally has some serious competition from the country’s largest bookstore chain.

As reported in Publishers Weekly and the New York Times, part of what is attractive to publishers (aside from the simple fact it is not owned by the Amazon) is that the Nook is relatively flexible and supports formats, including ePub. and — perhaps more crucially in the short term — PDFs, that can be read on other devices.

Of course, that B&N has 1,300 stores and already understands books (and the publishers that publish them) doesn’t hurt.

Much is also being made of the Nook’s promising ‘LendMe’ feature, which will let readers share their books (within limits) with others, even though some people aren’t entirely happy about it.

Unsurprisingly, B&N are describing the Nook as “The World’s Most Advanced eBook Reader”, although it is unclear whether the Nook will be available outside the US, which could be problematic in the long run (especially as Amazon and Sony both have global reach). The Guardian Technology Blog does point out, however, that the Nook’s 3G wireless is provided by AT&T, “one of the GSM [Global System for Mobile Communications] providers in the US, so from a technical standpoint, it should be easy to launch the reader internationally.”

But does B&N really have the will or the way to make the Nook available beyond its US home base? And could it do so successfully?

Ultimately perhaps, the real question though is whether there is actually a mass market — either in the US or internationally — for single purpose e-readers. Some smart people clearly think so, but given that non-proprietary formats like ePub can be read on more useful, convenient and competitively priced multi-purpose devices such as laptops and cellphones (and whatever else Apple are currently cooking up), and that books still look like the most robust, simple and elegant format — I’m not so sure…

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Published July 20, 2009

More Knots

As has been widely, widely reported, Amazon remotely deleted copies of books by George Orwell from their customers’ Kindles last week after a rights issue with the publisher MobileReference.

Even if it was not actually a huge surprise that Amazon had the ability to claw back e-books it had sold (or — to be honest — that someone might publish something that didn’t belong to them on the Kindle), there has been a predictably hysterical reaction, fuelled — at least in part — by antipathy towards DRM and Amazon, and the delicious irony of the particular books involved.

Even Michael Bhaskar, who reignited the online DRM debate last week on The Digitalist by having the audacity to suggest that DRM might not be all bad (twice), is having second thoughts:

When I wrote the piece I was perhaps slightly self consciously swimming against the tide. However all that is made a mockery of when something like this happens – faith in the system is, well, annihilated and the issues of trust that came up are starkly thrown into relief.

Apparently the problem was a rights one and somewhere down the line the wrong books got into the system in the wrong way. Everyone was re-imbursed and the books are widely available. Does this make any difference to the body blow of seeing 1984 automatically deleted from people’s devices?

…Lets just say if this had come out last Monday, I don’t think the blog posts on DRM would have got written.

But — and perhaps I am alone on this —  I don’t think this debacle is really about DRM. I actually think it is about a publisher not knowing (or not caring) that Orwell isn’t in the public domain in the Kindle’s primary market, and a vendor — who is unable (or unwilling) to thoroughly vet submissions — making an awful customer service decision and overreacting to rectify an awkward situation (which perhaps they felt they were partially responsible for).

Of course, as Cory Doctorow rightly points out, DRM is a the ‘loaded gun’ that allowed Amazon to kill the books. In the traditional book world this would not have been possible, and it really does bring home some the scariness of ‘remote deletion’. And yet this really came about not because of DRM (the issue could have been resolved without deleting the books) but because of poor judgement (by a publisher and the vendor) and, perhaps, as Paul Biba at Teleread suggests, because Amazon still does not fully understand what they’ve got themselves into.

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Published July 17, 2009

Knots

I usually avoid discussions of digital rights management (DRM) as much as possible. It’s a Gordian Knot. We can spend a lot of time and energy painstakingly untangling it, never to find a form of DRM that keeps everyone happy. Or we can  end DRM altogether with one bold stroke (“mission accomplished!”) only to discover that cutting the knot takes longer than we expected and is more complicated than we first thought. Either way, my sense is that we will continue to have some kind of hybrid situation — with some e-books ‘protected’ by DRM and some not — as we both cut and untangle all the issues…

And for all that I’m often left wandering if DRM really matters as much as we tend to think it does. Do people outside of our strange intersection of media and technology really care about it as much as we do? Are there other pressing issues that we should direct energy towards?  I have this nagging sense that as we agonise over the do-we-don’t-we of DRM, most people just want to read good books.

Nevertheless, the great DRM debate has come to the fore again as a result of Michael Bhaskar’s seemingly mild assertion that DRM Is Not Evil on Pan Macmillan’s The Digitalist blog, which resulted in the (predictable) slew of comments.  Michael has now posted a response which has garnered another slew of comments.  It’s all worth reading if you can summon the energy and want some insight into the issue (although I don’t think anyone mentions foreign rights, but perhaps some one will get to that yet…)

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Published May 8, 2009

Bigger May Be Better, But Old Problems Persist

Amazon launched the new large-screen Kindle DX in the US on Wednesday. The device, apparently aimed at newspaper readers and the textbook market was met with much fanfare in the New York Times (who had leaked the announcement earlier in the week), the Financial Times,  Publishers Weekly and elsewhere.

Despite the immediate gadget-lust, the hype was also met with  skepticism (and more than certain amount of unlinkable ambivalence). The DX’s $489 price tag, ‘blah’ design, lack of colour and Amazon’s decision to release the new device so soon after launching the Kindle 2 have been common complaints.

But for all these (fixable) flaws, what really nags at me about the Kindle is that whilst I can see what’s in it for Amazon, I just can’t see what’s in it for me the reader. With each launch it seems that readers continue to be secondary to  Amazon’s business strategy.

I’m unlikely to buy a Kindle because, all things being equal, I’m always going to choose a paper book over an electronic one. If  convenience is the primary concern, then I’m going to read an e-book on the phone I carry in my jacket pocket.

The Kindle DX won’t change my habits either. I already read newspapers on my laptop and I don’t want to carry 2 large devices. If I was a student, I’d want to my textbooks on my laptop too — if only because of the 2 magic words: “copy” and “paste”.

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Published March 20, 2009

Something for the Weekend, March 20th, 2009

Book City Jackets— Printed at a small press in downtown New York, these lovely “updated versions of the classic paperbag bookcover” are made from recycled paper and sized to fit almost any book (pictured above). And they have a blog!  (via swissmiss & Design*Sponge).

Near Heretical — The inimitable Mike Shatkin on the story of DRM.

Don’t kill me, Robert Bringhurst — Nic Boshart, BookNet Canada intern and coordinating editor at Invisible Publishing, offers another nice round-up of lessons for small presses from the BookNet Tech Forum.

Wish you were here — Seen Reading‘s collaborative Google map of independent bookstores.

That elusive viral component — Wired on Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications making e-books and excerpts available on Scribd:

For book publishers, Scribd is not the only platform they are utilizing with the rising e-book hype, but the viral components are limited elsewhere… Along with navigation features like search and zoom, the books can be download (as a .pdf) and viewed on compatible e-book readers or shared across numerous social networks including Digg, Facebook and Twitter.

“The YouTube for print” — PW has more on Scribd.

Sony e-book reader gets 500,000 books from Google, but Sara Nelson doesn’t think it will be enough in the LA Times:

Sony seems, instead, to be hitting hard on the theme that it’s giving options to publishers, who have not been shy about their complicated feelings toward Amazon and the power it wields.

Making public domain books more available is all to the good. But at the moment, Sony’s move appears to be too little, too late.

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Published March 16, 2009

Monday Miscellany, March 16th, 2009

Beyond Miffy —  Caustic Cover Critic on Dutch illustrator and graphic designer Dick Bruna, best known for Miffy, but who also designed some very cool book covers for crime novels (picture above).

Cautiously Hopeful — Literary agent Nathan Bransford, who has been talking about remaining positive in the face of negativity on his own blog recently,  interviewed by Alan Rinzler on The Book Deal blog:

The role of publishers especially is going to change dramatically as there will be tremendous downward pressure on prices and publishers increasingly retrench behind “known” commodities and bestsellers.

Publishers will live and die by their big bets if they aren’t cultivating any small bets that have the potential of panning out in a big way.

6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better — Michael Tamblyn’s  presentation from the BNC Tech Forum is available online.

Open Baskerville — An open source project to create a digital version of Fry’s Baskerville,  originally created by  Isaac Moore a punchcutter at the typefoundry of Joseph Fry in the 18th Century (via Eightface):

With the written word an absolute fundamental component of daily communication, typography and fonts have are vital to providing aesthetic harmony and legibility to our textual works. There are thousands of fonts available, of which only a small number are useful or any good for setting vast quantities of text, and of which an even smaller number are available to be freely distributed and shared. This project aims to help close that hole, beginning with a Baskerville revival.

Optic Nerve — the fabulous Adrian Tomine interviewed at the Creative Review (illustration above).

Why Kindle On The iPhone Matters — Michael Gaudet on the iPhone Kindle app at E-Reads:

What Amazon is finally acknowledging is that E-Books are a multi-device service and that Kindle is not just a device but an E-Book platform. E-Books may be commodities, but reading is a user habit that has always required a distribution service that anticipates the creative ways readers are looking to acquire new content.

Books and Stuff — Illustrator and designer Amy Cartwright, who blogs about vintage kids books and modern design at Stickers and Stuff, shares some wonderful pictures of her favorite books and “the stories behind some of her finds” at the always awesome Grain Edit (including the Cosy Tomato Post Card Book pictured above).

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Published March 13, 2009

BookNet Tech Forum

Yesterday I was at Book Net Canada’s Technology Forum at the Radisson Hotel on Queens Quay West in Toronto.

The theme of the event was Evolution or Revolution: “How does the publishing community best prepare for the next generation of reading (and readers)?”

With a wide-range of speakers from publishing and beyond, there were lots of ideas zipping around.

For basic details, the day’s schedule,  brief summaries, and slide-show presentations are available from the BNC website, and  immediate, off-the-cuff comments (including my own not terribly clever insights) can be found on Twitter with the tag #bnc09.

The Quillblog has just posted a scholarly summary of the day, but here are some of my slightly random notes on the good, the indifferent, and the ugly of Tech Forum 24 hours later…

The Good

BookNet. Along side SalesData and the forthcoming BiblioShare (which will facilitate access to bibliographic data),  Tech Forum demonstrated that BookNet is fast becoming the honest broker for publisher collaboration in Canada.  Whilst dropping heavy hints about future BNC projects (notably electronic cataloging) CEO Michael Tamblyn delivered a genuinely brilliant presentation, and slipped in the line of the day:

“Plastic Logic is like Jesus: It’ll save the world, but only 12 people have seen it, and no one knows when it is coming.”

(With quips like that I can almost forgive him for: “What do you want your revolution to be?” Er… Something that doesn’t involve vacuous bullshit hyperbole?*)

Harlequin Enterprises. Discussing the evolution of their ebook program, it was hard not to be impressed with Harlequin’s willingness to experiment in  a potentially conservative market.  I’m yet to be convinced that everything they do could be done as effectively by a general trade publisher, but Harlequin’s initiatives  demonstrate  that publishers should innovate and innovate often. And involving authors and readers will only improve that process.

Neelan Choksi, COO of Lexcycle who managed to talk about technology without condescending to his audience or hard selling Stanza. He also dealt with  speed-presenting  the app’s new features as the video demo malfunctioned behind him with self-deprecating good humour.

Hugh McGuire (LibriVox, BookOven) shaking off scurilous internet rumours that he is the angry man of publishing, and talking about love. A lot. Hugh’s advice: Focus on readers and enable book lovers to talk about your books. Do not underestimate the power of passionate people!

And, it should also be said, Tech Forum was  a great opportunity to meet new people in the industry and catch up with familiar faces.

The Indifferent:

Too little discussion of quality and how to make better books; too much blather about marketing and window-dressing.

Asking a room full of Canadians “how many of you have Kindles?” is an easy mistake for an American to make, but it was indicative. The US and Canada are very similar — in lots and lots of ways — but there was very little recognition that there are also very real differences between the markets. The absence of any Canadian sales figures and stats (or even cultural references) made several presentations markedly less compelling.

Assuming that your specific experience can be generalized; the current model is valueless and irreparably broken (even though it provides the vast majority of our business and fuels yours);  that publishers are fiddling while Rome burns; you know something (anything) about the music industry and can make a convincing argument with sloppy comparisons;  all content is of equal value; social media will save the world; the screen is inherently better than print; DRM is the biggest thing we have to worry about…etc. etc.  =  big *meh*. Platitudinous  digital orthodoxy is . not. interesting.

The surprisingly low number of people online at the forum. Mark Birtels’ unofficial count had a dozen laptops in use in the room of around 200 people (all Apples except mine!), which is pretty close to the number of  people who live-tweeted the event… It’s hard to convince people we know our arse from our technological elbow with those kind of numbers…

The Ugly

The really good news is that there was surprising little to complain about. BNC Marketing Manager Morgan Cowie and the rest of the BNC staff did a great job of corralling everyone and ran a great event. BUT, just for the record,  if there’s one thing worse than PowerPoint presentations, it’s BAD PowerPoint presentations: Never. Use. Comic. Sans. In. Anything. Ever.


And if you were at Tech Forum yesterday, I would love to know what you thought about it. Send me an email send at danielwagstaff [at] gmail.com, DM me on Twitter, or leave a comment below…

*As its overall glibness atests, this post was written in haste  to be timely, ‘hyperbole’ better fits my intended meaning better than ‘bullshit’.

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Published March 6, 2009

Something for the Weekend, March 6th, 2009

Abecediary — Steven Heller on alphabet books (Die Flucht Nach ABECEDERIA by the French comic artist Blexbolex pictured above).

Imprints in the 21st Century — Admittedly HarperCollins new Imprint It Books is an easy target (NB use of “tap into the zeitgeist” in a sentence = fail), but Mike Shatzkin does a good job of explaining why their strategy is past its sell by date (and beginning to smell):

General trade publishers need to see, and apparently don’t,  that their legacy brands are B2B [business-to-business]. They should be exploited that way. They need brands that can work B2C [business-to-consumer], but it will require discipline, focus, and an audience-first picture of what to publish to accomplish that.

Writing for a Living — Luminaries such as Will Self, Joyce Carol Oates, and AL Kennedy (quoted below) discuss whether writing is a joy or a chore in The Guardian:

“The joy of writing for a living is that you get to do it all the time. The misery is that you have to, whether you’re in the mood or not.”

Hugh at BookOven is angry this week.  He wants to know why publishers are not selling directly to customers from their website and why they make e-books so complicated. I think Hugh underestimates the time/money/skill-deficit obstacles publishers face in regard to both problems. I suspect Hugh thinks I’m an apologist and will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.


Book Design Made Easy — cartoonist Tom Gauld is making his genius cartoons from The Guardian available on Flickr (via Drawn!, source of so many life-improving things).

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