Q&A with Brad Inman, founder of Vook

After the widely-covered Gary Vaynerchuk launch, we caught up with Brad Inman to see what Vook was going to do next.

LJND: So what's on tap for the Vook now?

BI: We've got a Japanese cookbook coming out, where we've worked directly with the author. There will be a series of other publishers getting involved - we've found lots of publishers dying to do it.

LJND: So the response has been enthusiastic?

BI: The response has been overwhelming, and we’re still learning & trying to figure it all out. We've got mass production planned for next year - we're still working out which genres are best, the best places to get distribution. We're experimenting with pricing and business models. We're new to the book business – in our industry, you get proof of concept, you do experimenting and testing, and then once you have a vein you think you can tap, you get really aggressive. We are seeing that there’s an opportunity here – book, ebook, audiobook, vook.

LJND: One of your other businesses is TurnHere, the book video company. Does Vook use Turn Here footage - is there a natural outgrowth here?

BI: We've always viewed Vook as an extension of TurnHere – we shoot very high quality video at very low cost. This gives us great leverage and scalability in the market. Simultaneous production gives us great capacity to scale the business. We're going to do hundreds or more book videos next year.

LJND: How did the "Crush It" Vook come about?

BI: Gary's publisher came to us when they saw the article in the NYT in the spring – they thought he was perfect for it. They have a series of other titles we’re negotiating with them on. The Vook is natural for his audience and his crowd.

LJND: What sort of book is ideal for the Vook?

BI: The fan base needs to be there on the internet – and it can be a book from a traditional author, because the internet is so comprehensive. There are some authors that don’t have any internet fan bases and they’re not authors we’d want to do – this is a way to expand the audience of the book publishing business: tons of people are watching video all day and not reading. So if the author (or genre) doesn’t have an internet fan base, that’s a problem. We’ll be taking two of the Sherlock Holmes stories out of the public domain – we shot the videos in London with the cooperation of the Sherlock Holmes Society. The title has a huge fan base and they helped us shape the video – which is an annotation to the stories.

Another example: recently we had a newsletter that’s focused on losing weight, where they send out to a list every day – in that case, our author had no connection to this group, but the fan base around the genre is huge – it's about a 90-second workout. You unsurface a whole new distribution channel on the internet than by only going to B&N.

LJND: It sounds like what Mike Shatzkin has to say about vertical markets , about niches.

BI: We think verticals/niches is really the way the internet works. The internet is already organized around subjects. The general, mass-market shotgun approach – from news, television, books – these sales channels haven’t been very organized. And the internet is made for verticals. Users are affiliated with a group; they've personalized a page.

LJND: Obviously Vooks can't play on ebook readers - how do you see people accessing them?

BI: We seem people using smaller devices – phones. It won't be long before everything’s browser-based, so there are no closed systems. Universality is making sure your app is universally accessible. If you’re in all the devices, the global population can find you. Once you're universally available, you can then use the power of segmentation of the internet.

Our iPhone app is our best seller. Of every 100 sales, two-thirds are iPhone apps. Apple’s gotten behind us in a big way - two of our apps are in the top 10 for books that turn into apps. Our apps get featured. Apple’s seeing the value of our multimedia. That’s really what we’re building to, is the market for these devices. They embrace multimedia.

Everything’s going to come together by the end of next year. There will be a multiple selection of computers and devices that we can choose from, all browser-enabled. And there will be more competition – the good thing about B&N coming out is all the competition. They’re going to have to add features and content, and that’s going to enable all kinds of creative enterprises.

LJND: Now that you've been working with publishers a little, what final observations do you have?

BI: We bring video and technology and internet marketing and relationships – but the foundation of all of this is good books; we depend on publishers and authors for that.

We’re in the first inning of something that’s much bigger than people realize. Handwringing and fear don’t get us anywhere. There’s a huge new opportunity. The key is to experiment – with us or others – but the only way you’re going to be part of it is to participate.

PubPocalypse Now - a guest post by Brett Sandusky

Mythbusting the ISBN

It’s probably not healthy to keep thinking about this. It certainly makes me a lousy conversationalist. Because in all the ruminating and talking and (if you must know) mad nattering to myself (luckily, I spend LARGE portions of my day alone), I keep coming back to the ISBN.

Bear with me. (I have already investigated, and there is no rehab facility that deals in identifier addiction problems, so that’s out.)

Last month, the AAP’s Digital Initiatives Working Group and BISAC’s Identifiers Committee conducted a survey among members to determine what publishers’ views actually are on the ISBN. Publishers have been told what to think, repeatedly – and we know how much publishers like being told what to think – so we thought we’d turn the conversation around and ask them what they thought. The results are not yet finalized, and when they are I will talk about them.

But I worry. Because as we expand book distribution from merely a paper-with-occasional-ebook business to an all-kinds-of-paper-and-lots-of-different-ebooks-plus-vooks-plus-promotional-packages-plus-print-on-demand-plus-subscriptions-to-book-content-plus-downloadable-audio – well, you can see where this is going, and it’s messy.

And I have been in more than one meeting where I have heard these exact words (and I am not making this up), “If only we had some kind of system to deal with this, some way of identifying content…”

Hello????

So, first, some mythbusting.

ISBNs are expensive.

Actually, no they are not! The new My Identifiers site will offer new pricing in January. A single ISBN will cost an author or publisher $125. Ten ISBNs are $250, or $25 per ISBN. A hundred ISBNs are $575. This is cheap!

An ISBN is just a bar code for a book, and if my books are digital, I don’t need ISBNs.

Not so! In using an ISBN for a digital book (or any book), a publisher creates an automatic web page for that book, which is populated by the bibliographic data in Books in Print (and can be edited or added to by the publisher). Bowker hosts that web page, and the hosting price is included in the purchase of the ISBN. Publishers can choose which booksellers will sell their titles on that page – or direct traffic specifically to the publisher itself.
br /> The price of the ISBNs also includes a widget for each title, to put on your own website or to share – you can choose to display as much or as little of each book as you want.

Amazon doesn’t use ISBNs, so I don’t need them.

Wrong again! It is true that Amazon doesn’t depend on ISBNs – but when they have them, they do use them to create their ASINs. ISBNs are the foundation of Bowker's Books in Print, which in fact licenses data to Amazon. Also to Barnes & Noble – the website and the physical stores. Also to ebooks.com, Abebooks.com, Indigo, and almost every single public and institutional library in the US.

So if your book is listed in Books in Print (and if it has an ISBN, it will be), it is automatically available to book buyers – consumers, librarians, and the people who stock books in physical bookstores. If your book is NOT in Books in Print, it might be available on Amazon - but unless you approach all these other outlets yourself (and many will require an ISBN to sell your product anyway), Amazon will be the ONLY place it is listed.

Consumers don’t search using ISBNs.

Again, not true! College students have learned that the best way to find the textbooks they need is to search by ISBN. This way, they can be sure that they are getting the latest edition, the used version, the ebook - whatever they want - at the best price possible. (Almost two years ago, the Harvard Coop arrested students who were jotting down ISBNs to take home and search online to see if they could find better prices.)

These students will graduate. And by then they will be used to finding their books online by searching for the ISBN.

More importantly – search engines use ISBNs. Books in Print licenses its database to “the top 3 search engines” (they are not allowed to name names, but we know who they are). BIP is also searchable on the open web. Search engines crawl that database as well. ISBNs are, in fact, the cornerstone of book search on the web – even though most people don’t realize it. Books – whether digital, print, or audio – are very nearly not findable without an ISBN; publishers are really testing the odds by not using them.

And now…some confirmation of suspicions. The more ISBNs I have, the more metadata I have to keep track of.

Absolutely true. If you have a lot of products, they all need to be described. This is not an argument for fewer ISBNs, however. It may be an argument for fewer products. It may be an argument for the ISTC, which would allow publishers to group ISBNs together and repurpose much of the same metadata among them, streamlining databases everywhere. But not using ISBNs will not ever solve your metadata problems.

We only produce a single EPUB file, which has a single ISBN. We don’t care what it gets converted to once we send it to our distributors. They can assign more ISBNs for the different formats they create from our EPUB file.

And that makes a lot of sense. Until you need to change the metadata on that file – if, for example, you’ve accidentally misspelled the author’s name. Or if the price changes. Or if your hung-over intern has assigned a BISAC category of “Juvenile – Ducks” to a romance novel. Once metadata is being assigned to an ISBN you did not create, you have no control over that data. None. Even though it’s your product. So the metadata associated with that EPUB file better be pristine before it leaves your house, or you’ll be in a massive game of catch-up.

Publishers in other countries don’t have to pay for ISBNs.

This is true – except for the UK. ISBN agencies are subsidized by taxes, ultimately, in many other countries. (Somehow I don’t see politicians being able to put that one across here. Call me cynical, but I just don’t think we have such powerful lobbyists in the book industry.) But the money that publishers pay does actually go somewhere. It funds the web pages for each ISBN. It funds the widgets. It funds manual editing of a publisher’s metadata when there are typos or misspellings or other errors. It funds the title maintenance software, the data hosting, and the teams of programmers and editors who manage Books in Print.

The very fact that I know all of this disturbs me deeply. But what disturbs me still more is that so many publishers do not know it. Yet.

Kindle-Killer or Dr. Seuss Rhyme?

The Scamp and I arrived at Pier Sixty yesterday afternoon ready to tweet. Well, Scamp was ready to ignore her homework and play on her Gameboy. Why would I bring an 11-year-old girl to the launch of B&N's Nook? Two reasons: The alternative was leaving her at home by herself, in close proximity to a jar of Nutella; and because presumably by the time she's out of college, she'll be reading on a gadget.

So...pomp, circumstance, history of B&N as the "real" innovator when it comes to bookselling. And then the Nook.

First, the obvious. The name. Obviously, "nookie" jokes abound. And the official name is "nook", not "Nook" - lowercase "n". That said...nobody thought Kindle was a brilliant name either. And I am not using the lowercase "n" - it's confusing.

Moving on: What features does this thing have?

Like the Kindle, the Nook has a 6-inch e-ink screen. Their reading areas are completely identical. The Nook, however, has a color touchscreen where you can view and navigate your library by book cover.

As far as downloads are concerned, the Nook relies on AT&T 3G for most downloading. However, if you happen to find yourself in a Barnes & Noble store, you can take advantage of the free wifi there.

In fact, one of the most compelling aspects of the Nook is its interoperability with the physical world. While in a B&N, you can read an entire ebook - just as you would a physical book, in the cafe or sprawled on the floor - because B&N will stream that book to you via wifi.

You can also LOAN BOOKS TO FRIENDS. And they don't even have to have a Nook - you can share your ebooks for up to 14 days at a time, sending them to iPhones, iPod Touches, Blackberries, Motorola smartphones, a PC or a Mac. Just as you can share physical books (and demand them back), you can do the same with ebooks.

As with the Kindle, the Nook allows for bookmarking, and syncing among devices. So if your battery runs out or you forget the thing, you can pick up where you left off on your iPhone or Blackberry or other supported device. (In my mind, this is an improvement over the physical world - if I lose or forget my book, I can't just pull another copy down from the cloud; I actually have to go and buy a new one. Or wait till I get home. God forbid I should have to wait. That's just asking too much.)

The Nook holds up to 1500 ebooks, and an expandable memory slot allows for 17,500 more.

But one of the greatest features is portability. Meaning users can "side-load" (makes me think of "side-along apparition" from Harry Potter). You can transfer PDFs and EPUB files to the Nook from your computer. Why is this huge? Because you can borrow EPUB books from the library and load them onto the Nook. You can load business documents (converting books from Word to PDF is so easy these days!). You can use the device for ALL your long-form reading, not just some of it.

Which brings us to the issue of content. B&N offers over a million ebooks (half of which are Google Editions of public domain titles, but half of which are not). Additionally, newspaper and magazine subscriptions are also available.

And as noted previously, in January B&N will be offering blog subscriptions via Bloggapedia - over 8000 blogs, hand-picked and curated, categorized into a great taxonomy for easy browsing. (If you haven't registered your blog with us, please do!)

As to whether or not this is a Kindle-killer, it is of course too early to say - the Nook is not yet on the market. But given the way the device is capable of handling real-world interactions - with the physical store, the library, the user's friends/family, and other devices - I'd say Amazon has a bit of catching up to do.

FiledBy adds video

FiledBy has announced that it has partnered with StudioNow, an online video production company, to provide video capability to authors who want to create video content for online marketing. According to the press release:

"Producing commercial quality video is normally expensive and out of reach for many authors,” said Peter Clifton, CEO and President, FiledBy. “The efficiencies brought to the process by our partner StudioNow make on-location video shoots and custom book trailers more accessible and affordable. This will allow more authors, illustrators and book contributors to take advantage of the promotional power of the video medium, especially since so many are interested in sharing their video on their FiledBy sites."

 

Girls Quest - call for books!

There is an organization called Girls Quest, which provides mentoring and other services for New York City girls ages 13-17. On October 17, they are sponsoring a career day for about 40 teenage girls, and they need books!

If you're a publisher with books for teenagers about careers, money management, inspiration, personal growth - please email me and I can let you know how to donate appropriate titles. Thank you!!!

Q&A with Peter Brantley, Director of the Bookserver Project at the Internet Archive

Q. What now? Where does this leave not just Google but also Yahoo/Microsoft and the OCA?

All of the interested parties have an opportunity to consider next steps in light of their goals.  For the Open Book Alliance, we continue to seek ways of fostering an open and competitive market for books online, and to engage with government agencies and the U.S. Congress to advise on long term solutions to the problems created by an aging copyright framework for access and use of digitized content.

Q. Do you see a role for the Library of Congress in constructing a new settlement?

Clearly the Copyright Office voiced strong concerns about the legality of the settlement in the House Judiciary Committee hearing, and I would expect them to continue to articulate their views, in concert with the Department of Justice, which represents them.

Q. Does this set back the cause of having full-text book content on the web? If Google stops its scanning efforts while this is renegotiated, how much time have we lost? What's the up side?

No, in fact, I think it reinvigorates it.  The efforts of the Open Content Alliance, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, and hundreds of individual libraries around the world have indicated the strong desire to have digital books online.  We are witnessing an explosion of interest in digital content, new and old, and I think the discussions around the settlement provide an opportunity for us to consider how to engender a robust, competitive, and innovative market - and not just here, but in Europe as well.

Q. What do you think will be the points around which new negotiations will center? What were the stickiest parts of the settlement, in your view?

Clearly, the Rule 23 issues on class representativeness for orphan authors, foreign authors, and academic authors, are significant. The prospective use of copyright in future BRR business models was addressed by the Government, and the antitrust issues surrounding price fixing, constraints on discounting, the institutional license, and achieving fair and competitive access to the books database are going to have to be considered.

Google Book Search: Well, That Was Fun - Now What?

Tuesday afternoon, the plaintiffs in the Google Book Search Settlement filed a motion to adjourn the fairness hearing (scheduled for October 7th) indefinitely, in order to “amend the agreement”. What does this mean? Well, it means a mess. Not that things weren’t messy before the adjournment. Let’s look at the various parties involved:

AAP and Authors Guild Publishers and authors need to look carefully at the original settlement document. They need to determine what Google should have the rights to do with their content – they may decide that Google should not have the exclusive right to do very much, which offers other services the same opportunity to make books discoverable on the web.

Both AAP and Authors Guild need to determine whether or not they are representing their constituencies’ interests appropriately. There are plenty of authors and publishers who were incensed at the original settlement and who felt that a so-called “class action” wasn’t really representing them as a class.

Furthermore, if the AAP and the Authors Guild is going to truly represent publishers and authors as a class, they need to figure out what exactly should be done about “orphaned” works – books for which rightsholders cannot be determined. This has to be done from the authors’ and publishers’ point of view – this is not something that any third party should have anything to do with.

Google They need to continue to talk with publishers and authors and negotiate agreements with them directly, essentially creating content licensing deals for full-text book content. This will be slower, more expensive, and less lucrative, but it will be ultimately more efficient than what has happened up to now, for the simple reason that there will be agreement on all sides about the uses to which that content will be put.

BRR The Books Rights Registry is needed, I would argue, now more than ever. One thing the Google Book Search fiasco has pointed up is the desperate need for rights management and standardization in the book world. However, Google was essentially going to fund the BRR for the first few years. If the BRR is going to be truly impartial, the funding has to come from elsewhere, not only Google.

Upcoming Events for the Digitally Bookish

• Firebrand Community Conference - October 5-7
• TOC Online Conference - October 8
• TOC at Frankfurt - October 12th
• Publishing Business Virtual Conference - October 29
• Self-Publishing Conference and Expo - November 7
  

ISBNs and ebooks: Part 7624

Yesterday the AAP's Digital Working Group hosted a meeting where Phil Madans of Hachette, Angela Bole of BISG, and I talked about ISBNs and identifying digital content. This came on the heels of Mark Bide's webinar for BISG yesterday on the same subject.

We broke the topic down into three discrete parts: ISBNs and ebooks, ISBNs and chapters, and ISBNs and "chunks". I stopped the presentation after each slide so we could discuss each part before moving on to the next one. And some interesting findings emerged.

Metadata

The primary objection (even more than cost - but of course these were larger publishers who can buy identifiers in bulk at a discount) to assigning an ISBN to each format of ebook is having to track the metadata on each record. Databases begin to bloat with products that are identical except for format, and managing the metadata becomes both repetitive and confusing. 

Furthermore, it became apparent that publishers are not particularly using ISBNs to track royalties and sales - they are using SEVERAL fields, and the ISBN is not even necessarily the most important among them. So the ISBN International Agency's argument that the ISBN is an essential tool for tracking these things falls by the wayside.

We talked a bit about the prospect of third parties assigning ISBNs to different ebook formats - most publishers seem to just want to produce an EPUB file, assign an ISBN to that one, and then send it "into the wild" (as Bide says) for conversion and distribution. The distributors and retailers are primarily book-related and their databases are generally keyed off an ISBN, so those third parties would have to assign ISBNs to whatever formats they are distributing and selling. But the publishers at this meeting did not seem particularly worried about that prospect.

One publisher also stressed that by supporting more than one format, they're contributing to format proliferation and they would prefer very much not to do that.

However, the downside to allowing third parties to assign ISBNs to digital products on an as-needed basis becomes problematic when there are changes to the metadata. If a pub date shifts, if a price goes up, if there are corrections to author names, additions to synopses and reviews - any time you have to edit the metadata on a title, if you've got third parties with their OWN editions of that title, you can't be sure the edited/corrected metadata will reach those editions.

ISBNs and Chapters

Even less popular than the one-ISBN-per-format model is the one-ISBN-per-chapter idea. This expands the metadata bloat exponentially. At present, most publishers who are offering chapters for sale are doing so from their own websites, so ISBNs are not such an issue. However, once retailers begin offering individual chapters of books, the industry will face the same problems it does with different ebook formats. Multiplied by however many chapters are in a given book.

In addition to identification of chapters for the purposes of trading with third parties, there is the issue of tracking royalties. With textbook authors, this is problematic - many authors contribute to textbooks, and determining who wrote which chapters can be daunting. It was generally agreed that without significant market demand, identifying chapters for the purposes of trade is not a high priority.

ISBNs and "Chunks"

First there was the objection to the term "chunks". Which I agree with! It's nasty. But Anna Wintour said the same thing about the word "blog"...and look where that got her! It seems "chunk" is the term we're stuck with, and I am heartily sorry about that.

Second, everyone at the meeting pretty much agreed that this is a vastly esoteric subject and not likely to become a pressing issue anytime soon. Even Amazon does not sell sub-chapter-level content. Licensing content to third parties (such as websites) will likely mean putting together discrete digital assets into various packages, but there seems to be no trade reason right now for ISBNs to be attached to those packages. This may change as the market changes.

We ended with a "watch this space" message, and are now putting together a survey which looks at some of the assumptions behind past ISBN-use recommendations.

US Register of Copyrights on GBS

Marybeth Peters, the US Register of Copyrights, testified before the House Judiciary Committee today regarding the Copyright Office's view of the Google Book Settlement. I've read her testimony - it's a good summary of the problems with the settlement.

Some excerpts:

When the parties announced last fall that they had reached a settlement in what was becoming a long and protracted litigation, our initial reaction was that this was a positive development.  But as we met with the parties, conversed with lawyers, scholars
and other experts, and began to absorb the many terms and conditions of the settlement—a process that took several months due to the length and complexity of the documents— we grew increasingly concerned.  We realized that the settlement was not really a
settlement at all, in as much as settlements resolve acts that have happened in the past and were at issue in the underlying infringement suits.  Instead, the so-called settlement would create mechanisms by which Google could continue to scan with impunity, well into the future, and to our great surprise, create yet additional commercial products without the prior consent of rights holders. For example, the settlement allows Google to reproduce, display and distribute the books of copyright owners without prior consent,
provided Google and the plaintiffs deem the works to be “out-of-print” through a definition negotiated by them for purposes of the settlement documents.  Although Google is a commercial entity, acting for a primary purpose of commercial gain, the
settlement absolves Google of the need to search for the rights holders or obtain their prior consent and provides a complete release from liability.  In contrast to the scanning and snippets originally at issue, none of these new acts could be reasonably alleged to be
fair use.

 

She goes on to compare Google's scanning to services provided by cable companies and the like - "compulsory licenses":

At very least, a compulsory license for the systematic scanning of books on a mass scale is an interesting proposition that might merit Congressional consideration.  As stated above, various compulsory licenses have been carefully crafted over the years after extensive deliberation and consideration of the viewpoints of all affected stakeholders, though none apply to books or text.  Among the issues Congress would want to consider are the pros and cons of allowing copyright users, rather than copyright owners, to initiate the digitization of copyrighted works; the rate of compensation that should be paid to copyright owners; and whether the same license terms should apply to mass digitization activities undertaken for the public interest by non profit organizations such as libraries, and for profit purposes by commercial actors.  Congress also would want to consider whether all books merit the same attention, or whether differences can be drawn from the date of publication, the type of publication, or such facts as whether the rights holder is likely to be alive or deceased. 

Here, she explains that "out of print" is not the same as "out of copyright":

The activities that prompted the plaintiffs to file suit against Google – the wholesale scanning of  books, electronic indexing and snippet display – are activities as to which reasonable minds might differ when considering whether such activities are acts of infringement or are, for example, fair use.  However, the same cannot be said of the new uses that the settlement agreement permits Google to make of out-of-print works.  We do not believe that even Google has asserted that, in the absence of this class action settlement, it would be fair use to undertake the new activities that Google would enjoy risk-free as a result of the settlement.  In essence, the proposed settlement would give Google a license to infringe first and ask questions later, under the imprimatur of the court. 

Also, "orphan works" are not the same as "out of print":

As a side note, the Copyright Office would like to underscore for the Committee that out-of-print works and orphan works are not coextensive.  Orphan works are works that are protected by copyright but for which a potential user cannot identify or locate the copyright owner for the purpose of securing permission.  They do not include works that are in the public domain; works for which a copyright owner is findable but refuses permission; or works for which no permission is necessary, i.e. the use is within the parameters of an exception or limitation such as fair use.  Many out-of-print works have rights holders who are both identifiable and locatable through a search.  In fact, the U.S. works covered by the proposed settlement would all be searchable, at a minimum, through Copyright Office records because the settlement includes U.S. works only if they are registered. 

Problems the BRR cannot solve:

The Office also notes that while the BRR might well provide a place for rights owners to come forward with contact information, it is also likely to have the unfortunate effect of creating a false database of orphan works, because in practice any work that is not claimed will be deemed an orphan.  Many rights holders of out-of-print books may fail or refuse to register with the BRR for very good reasons, whether due to lack of notice, disagreement with the Registry’s mission or operations, fear (e.g. privacy concerns) or confusion.  The fact that the rights holder is missing from the BRR may also mean that he has no interest in licensing his work.

And...the French (and everybody else outside the US):

We are troubled by the fact that the proposed settlement implicates so many foreign works even when they have not taken steps to enter the United States market.  While it would be appropriate to allow foreign nationals to participate voluntarily in licensing programs that may be developed by the BRR or other collectives, they should not be automatically included in the terms of the settlement.  Moreover, we are aware that some foreign governments have noted the possible impact of the proposed settlement on the exclusive rights of their citizens.  Indeed, many foreign works have been digitized by Google and swept into the settlement because one copy was in an academic research library in the United States.  As a matter of policy, foreign rights holders should not be swept into a class action settlement unknowingly, and they should retain exclusive control of their U.S. markets.  

Read it!

 

FiledBy works with Cambridge Univ. Press

FiledBy announced today that it is helping Cambridge University Press by providing a platform for over 100 authors' websites. According to the press release sent out this morning:

A pilot program was designed to register 50 Cambridge authors on FiledBy and provide them with powerful premium web tools. Given the success of the pilot program, Cambridge elected to expand with an additional 65 author sites in August.  Since FiledBy websites are pre-assembled and all published authors and their books are represented, the sites are easy for an author to claim and enhance with photo, biography, videos, documents, podcasts and links.

New pricing for ISBNs

I just received this from Andy Weissberg, VP of Identifier Services at Bowker:

 In 2010, the U.S. ISBN Agency will change its pricing models for ISBNs to accommodate the digital identification needs of authors, publishers, libraries and the supply chain at large.  Unit prices for all ISBN prefixes will be discounted by as much as 50% from the currently established rate structure, with additional discounts applied to large volume purchases.

At Bowker, we recognize the emergent need for a more economical solution for the practical and responsible identification of digital content and products.  ISBN price decreases, however, are one of many necessary paradigm shifts for the supply chain to effectively identify and catalog digital assets for discovery and trading purposes.

Most importantly, as new digital formats and capabilities proliferate and diversify, end-users (consumers) must be able to differentiate one digital product form from another during discovery and the digital point of purchase, particularly when differentiated usability, access rights and functionality are key considerations to be made during a purchasing decision.

The ISBN standard has a proven track record as a supply chain identifier in the book industry, and the U.S. ISBN Agency is committed to maintaining this standard in the digital publishing supply chain.  We encourage publishers and content owners to continue to leverage the ISBN for identifying digital products, and strongly discourage the use of alternative, non-standardized identifiers that will ultimately cause for confusion in trading and discovery.

More specific details regarding forthcoming ISBN pricing changes, as well as new value-added discoverability solutions that will be made available in conjunction with ISBN purchases, will be made available to the public before year end.

Overdrive/Sony in Library Deal

This is one of those developments that's kind of low-key and insidery, but ultimately has a big impact.

Sony and Overdrive have announced a cross-marketing effort. This is big news because Overdrive supplies ebooks to libraries. Users can download Sony Reader ebooks from library websites. The books "expire" after a few weeks - this is a fantastic service for readers of genre fiction, particularly. You don't necessarily want to own every single book you read.

I know that many libraries have already been doing this - my impression from the press release is that new marketing initiatives consist of:

• Reminding visitors to both websites that this service exists, and providing a search box to locate their library
• Training librarians to help patrons with the Sony Reader
• Doing marketing within the Sony Style stores to raise in-store awareness about this service

It's a great idea - for all the complaints about Amazon raiding users' Kindles to "take back" books they never should have sold in the first place, it may be that those who are not interested in perpetual ownership of books come to see ebooks as a way of reading quickly and disposably - and begin using their libraries more often.

Book Oven Ready To Bake

I received word the other day that Book Oven is out of alpha.

Their first offering, Bite-Sized Edits, is open to the world. Bite-Sized Edits allows you to upload a document, share it (or not) and offers proofreading tools. According to Hugh McGuire, who created Book Oven:

You can help proofread other peoples’ texts, you can proofread your own text (in private) using Bite-Size Edits, you can invite a small group, or open up your project for proofreading by the world.

Hugh's vision of collaborative or "cloud-based" publishing uses a little bit of crowdsourcing, some innovative tools, and a lot of love for books and reading:

Book Oven was born of this inspiration: to make an online space where writers could gather a group of collaborators (editors, proofreaders, designer) around their work to help take a raw manuscript through to finished product, and then, if they wish, to sell it through online channels (though of course, if they wish to ship the final manuscript to a publisher, they can do that too; or they can just keep it for themselves).

 

More on teens and ebooks

A couple of weeks ago, the Bits blog of the NY Times covered a proposal by the Democratic Leadership Council called "A Kindle in Every Backpack." Says the Times:

Its authors argue that government should furnish each student in the country with a digital reading device, which would allow textbooks to be cheaply distributed and updated, and allow teachers to tailor an interactive curriculum that effectively competes for the attention of their students in the digital age.

David Rothman at Teleread pointed out subsequently that he's already done a lot of research along these lines, going back to the 1990s. But David also brings up a very good point - a Kindle is not the magic bullet. He stated in an email (which I have his permission to quote):

So why do standards matter? To separate the idea much as possible from specific brands and types of machines. Policymakers need to understand that just like adults, kids ideally should be able to use whatever kinds of devices they want for reading, Web-browsing, you name it. Many children can benefit from the interactivity of netbooks, the compactness of iPod Touches and so on. And it would be horrible to force all low-income students to use Kindles--without good keyboards--when they lacked decent hardware at home and faced long lines at the library for use of Internet-connected machines.

I'm thinking of the entire population, not just young people. For example, what about the seniors for whom Kindles or variants might be more appropriate than for the young? As some have said, Kindle-style machines could be the new large print. 

David is absolutely right - and what I like about David's approach is how it highlights the critical role that libraries take in a ebook world. Libraries provide content that we look at as "free" - subsidized by taxes and private grants. Distributing content independent of the device is the only way ebooks are going to flourish at the rate many initially envisioned - strapping content to DRM (and a particular device) and squeezing every last penny out of it consumer-by-consumer is yet another stranglehold being put on ebooks, ensuring that only those with disposable income can take advantage of their benefits (those who need these benefits the least, I might add).

 

Teens and ebooks

Recently I've been part of a couple of discussions about reading habits, and some interesting themes have begun to emerge. One, of course, is that ebooks are still a small fraction of books read by consumers (3.5%, according to Bowker's PubTrack Consumer reports). And the fact that the primary audience for the Kindle and other readers seems to skew towards older generations (most likely because font size can be adjusted) leads many to conclude that teenagers and college-age kids are not adopting ebooks very quickly.

Which really runs counter to common sense, given how much time young people spend online. (I have a 16-year-old and an 11-year-old, both of whom have their MacBooks open whenever they're in the house.) 

Does this mean they have a weird retro fondness for paper books? Does it mean they're not reading at all? What DOES it mean?

We know that they are not reading print newspapers. They're getting the bulk of their news online - whether from newspaper sites, aggregation sites like Google News, or other online sources. We know they are not reading print magazines - again, they're getting that content online, largely from bloggers, who are supplanting magazines at a rapid rate. We know that when they do research for school papers, they are doing it online unless teachers or school librarians steer them to the stacks to find material that's not on the web.

Additionally, more students are using digital textbooks - PDFs or VitalSource or CourseSmart books (or in some cases, open-source textbooks) that integrate with their course management systems and include interactive features such as quizzes, labs, downloadable audio and video. The print textbook is gradually (very gradually but inexorably) being replaced by its digital counterpart.

So let's look at reading for pleasure. Truthfully, kids spend much of their leisure time online - IMing friends, Facebooking, downloading music and movies, playing games. The time they spend reading for fun has been shrinking for quite some time.

But there are certain authors whose books transcend online temptations - J. K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, Jodi Picoult, to name a few.

Rowling's an interesting case - she will not permit ebook versions of the Harry Potter series. So ebooks simply aren't an option with her titles. As for the others, they are also bestselling authors, but their print books are heavily discounted in chain stores - a Stephanie Meyer hardcover can sell for as little as $12.95 when all's said and done. So price - a huge issue with more mature readers, who pursue the ebook option in large part because of the $9.99 price point - isn't really much of a concern for younger readers.

Then there's the device itself. Teenagers and college students are not, unless they are required to, going to spend upwards of $250 on a dedicated reading device. Their parents are not going to buy them one (in this economy, anyway). They'll play with reading on their iPhones and iPod Touches - and I suspect that's where the younger ebook market will grow. 

But it's not there yet. Anecdotally, I can report that my teen continues to read her print books and swap them with friends (along with clothes, shoes, and everything else). Occasionally she'll use her iPod Touch to access my Kindle account and "borrow" a book. But this is still a novelty for her.

 

BISG's Annual Meeting

BISG has announced the date of their annual meeting: September 9th, 2009. As in previous years, it will be at the Yale Club, and admission for members is free.

You can consult the spiffy new BISG website for more details!

ONIX 3.0 Webinars

BISG is sponsoring two ONIX for Books 3.0 webinars. ONIX 3.0 is particularly concerned with digital products - downloadable audio, ebooks, video, etc. It is also NOT backwards-compatible with previous versions of ONIX. So it's important to understand 3.0 as your company moves forward.

Each webinar is 60 minutes. Registration info is below:

ONIX for Books 3.0: An Introduction
Presented by:
Mark Bide, Executive Director, EDItEUR
David Martin, ONIX Support Team, EDItEUR
Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Time: 11:00 a.m. EDT

 
ONIX for Books 3.0: Best Practices for Implementation
Presented by: Richard Stark, Director of Product Data, Barnes & Noble, Inc.
Date: Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Time: 11:00 a.m. EDT
 
To obtain general information on ONIX for Books 3.0 and previous ONIX releases, visit here.

Shortcovers is doing ePub Conversions

Michael Tamblyn at Shortcovers announced today that in addition to distributing ebooks using the .ePUB standard, they would be providing .ePUB conversion services!

...[W]e were also hearing from a lot of publishers who want to sell eBooks but don’t have the resources to create .epub files themselves. Independent presses, regional publishers, literary presses — publishers who are producing fantastic books but don’t have the wherewithal or the time to produce the accompanying digital files themselves. We also heard from medium and larger publishers who are grappling with the task of converting backlist that they think would be a good fit for the eBook space, but are shocked by the fees charged by conversion houses to convert their source files to digital.

This is great news for indies who are looking for a level playing field.

Books Rights Registry: There Should Be Standards

One issue that frightens the hell out of me is digital rights. I'm not just talking about DRM. Basically, I mean what happens when - a few years from now - digital formats proliferate and there are more than just a couple of booksellers in the ebook market. What happens when - a few years from that point - those many digital booksellers are also selling PORTIONS of books? Then you have format AND content proliferation across multiple vendors from multiple publishers, with the inevitable intermediation of distributors.

It makes ONIX look like a game of "play house".

At the heart of all this winging and wending and downloading are rights. Rights for the author. Rights for the publisher. Rights for the vendor. Rights attached to format. Rights attached to territory. Rights attached to portions of the whole. And someone - presumably the Books Rights Registry (should the Google settlement actually get settled) will be in charge of keeping track of all that information.

Standards, obviously, are the key here. And there are no standards when it comes to rights. "Worldwide rights, except for Tanzania" is an exaggeration, but not by much. Rights have been negotiated book by book, format by format, over decades.

Some of us in BISG are starting to get concerned about this and are researching what's currently out there to help us come up with standards that will be useful in this new chaotic world. The obvious question is, of course, "What about ACAP?" And we're thinking...not so much.

David Marlin of Metacomet has a great investigation as to why ACAP isn't going to help a great deal. An excerpt:

ACAP has been designed to identify how third party “crawlers” can use content on a website.  Therefore, it has an entirely different set of use-cases than is required by a BRR standard.  For the BRR, we need to identify content which may or may not be published on a public website.  Because it will often not be so published, a standard for crawling web sites is not appropriate. 

That leaves open the question of whether we can use the same methodology for identifying usage rights.  Again, ACAP is not designed for this purpose.  It has a much coarser descriptor of rights than is required.  For example, it defines that translation is allowed, but it does not indicate in which markets or which translations.  It also does not appear to address non-textual usage (i.e. a dramatic reading of content to be broadcast online).

So now we're going to look at whether ONIX for Licensing Terms can form a good basis for rights standardization. Stay tuned!

 

Smashwords at IBPA

Mark Coker will be giving a class on developing an ebook strategy at IBPA's Publishing University Online, on July 29th. According to the description, Coker will be covering:

1. Why ebooks are hot
2. Latest market sales data
3. Will ebooks cannibalize or complement print books?
4. How ebooks fit within overall publishing strategy
5. What books work best as ebooks
6. How Ebook formatting is different
7. Why multi-format is important
8. Evolving distribution models: The new ebook supply chain
9. How Amazon is vertically integrating its ebook business: friend or foe to the independent publisher?
10. To DRM or not DRM?
11. Ebook pricing models

For IBPA members (and any other small/midsized publisher), this kind of information is crucial!

Where the Readers Are

This is the Download column from this week's The Big Picture.

I’ve been working with Bowker’s PubTrack Consumer team in developing some industry reports on a variety of book-related issues. And just for the hell of it, I was playing around with some statistics for 2008.

Here’s a breakout of people who read, and the number of hours per week they spend reading books:

 

 

 

So you can see that not a lot of people read more than 20 hours a week. Just 11% of those surveyed.

Now here’s a breakout of time spent online:

 

 

 
You can see that 30% of those surveyed spend more than 20 hours per week online.

Now we can’t correlate which readers are spending more time online, but overall it’s clear that people are, in general, spending more time online than they are reading.

What does this mean for publishers?

Well, aside from the obligatory shirt-rending and bemoaning poor reading habits, it means that publishers should invest more time and resources (that means money) in marketing their titles online. Because online is where people are.

Yes, if you want to get people’s attention about something, it does help to go where they are already congregated.

We know that the world of print media is collapsing. Newspapers are failing all over the place. Book review sections are shutting down. All the outlets where publishers used to advertise are suffering.

Except online. In fact, 34% of all books purchased in 2008 were bought online.

And, even more crucially, 12% of book consumers became aware of the books they wanted to buy either through an Internet ad or an online book review – as many consumers as became aware of books through word of mouth (which we all know is the most powerful form of marketing there is).
So what does online marketing really mean for books? It means throwing as much of your books’ information as you can into the online world so people can find them.

It means having clean metadata – so search engines can find the books.

It means having BISAC codes and Library of Congress codes, so the books are categorized properly. If someone is looking for Thai recipes, and you’re a cookbook publisher, you want your books to show up in that search.

It means having a cover image, an annotation, a review or endorsement, and even an excerpt posted online, for each book, so consumers can understand what your books are about.

It means making sure that your books are listed in every available online outlet that sells books – not just Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but Ebay, Alibris, Hastings, IndieBound (which supplies book information to independent bookstore websites). It means having your book information listed on price comparison websites like Nextag. It means having your book information listed on library websites. (The most efficient one-shot way to accomplish all of this is to make sure your Books-in-Print data is up to date, because BIP licenses its data to most of these websites.)

It means making sure your books are listed with social networking sites like Goodreads (2.2 million members), Shelfari (owned by Amazon), and LibraryThing (40 million titles). People really DO congregate to these sites to get ideas on what to read next.

It means finding out who the top bloggers are in your areas of expertise, and sending them review copies. Do you know how many food bloggers there are? How many political bloggers (who would also be interested in history titles, or biographies)? As print review publications collapse, bloggers are stepping into the vacuum.

It means knowing which book review websites are worth having a presence on – Bookslut, Beatrice, Follow the Reader, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, among many others.

It means enrolling your books in book-scanning programs. Yes, that means Google Book Search. It also means the Internet Archive. You need to make your books find-able. That means making them searchable. On the web. Where people are already frantically searching for things.
It means making sure your authors have websites. Even a simple Facebook page is better than nothing at all – and Facebook has 200 million active users. One hundred million unique users log on at least once a day.

Notice that I have not mentioned ebooks. Digital marketing is not (necessarily) about ebooks. Ebooks are a format, like paperback or hardcover – and while people may prefer one format over another, they’re not going to have the option of any format if they don’t know that your books exist. Digital marketing is about getting information about your books in as many places as humanly possible – so that the ever-growing number of people who are online can find out about them.
 

Amazon to put ads in Kindle books?

Amazon apparently filed for a patent on contextual advertising in ebooks, according to Slashdot. Meaning that while you're reading Eat, Pray, Love on your Kindle, you may be directed to local restaurants via ads in the margins.

This is, of course, similar to what Google is doing on its website already, and will be doing via Google Book Search. On Google, it's not terribly intrusive - but we are not yet accustomed to ads in books.

That said, there hasn't been an enormous hue and cry...yet. 

TOC and Frankfurt - better than Wurst and beer!

O'Reilly is holding a one-day TOC at Frankfurt Book Fair and when I found out (Peter Brantley is going!), I about keeled over. This is the most delicious combo since raspberries and Shiraz. Since spaetzle and veal. Since pasta and cream sauce.

More info is here. Hammering Man wants you to go.