Pirates Desiring Kindles Should Ask Santa

Peter Sunde, a co-founder of the BitTorrent site the Pirate Bay, has asked for a Kindle. He does not intend to buy one, of course - he has asked Wired, posted on his own blog, and just generally made it known that he would love one. (Hey, I would like a LiveScribe pen and a new digital camera - anybody? Anybody?)

He does not say what he is going to do with it, but the folks at Teleread have a good guess.

David Rothman Recovering

David Rothman, the man behind Teleread, recently suffered a heart attack - but the folks at Teleread are keeping us all updated and we're grateful for the news that he's recovering and expected to leave the hospital sooner than initially anticipated.

Borders on the Brink

Yesterday Borders issued Pershing Square Capital 5.15 warrants because it failed to find a buyer by a previously-set deadline of October 1. And no wonder, in this market.

The question is, now what? Borders is frantically cutting costs - adjusting hours, slashing inventory, and renegotiating distribution deals. That saves $120 million per year over what their costs are now...but they won't even see that savings until the end of 2009.

Finding a buyer right now is not a very promising prospect. How do they hold on? Physical retail is so tough because so much is predicated on real estate - for your shops, for your inventory. And who knows when that market is going to gain some traction again. Add to that the forecast that folks are not going to be doing a lot of holiday shopping this year - which for bookstores is fundamental to survival - and things look grim.

OCLC adding tagging to Worldcat

Yes, folks, the tagging mania has hit the library catalog. OCLC has announced that it's allowing a tagging functionality in WorldCat. From Library Journal:

Now, logged-in users can add an unlimited number of their own tags to any item retrievable by the WorldCat.org search engine...Bob Robertson-Boyd, OCLC product manager social networking, told LJ that the company is waiting for a critical mass of tags to be added before factoring them into the search results: “we want [the tag data set] to grow large enough to make it useful for users.” When that happens, OCLC may consider adding tags as another advanced search option, or featuring tag results as part of the faceted browsing on WordCat’s search results page.

Capstone buys Heinemann-Raintree

PW reports it, and I heard it from Capstone themselves - they bought Heinemann-Raintree and have added 6000 titles to their list (which is already considerable). HR is based in the UK and serves a similar market to Capstone - school libraries.

Personalized Books on Sharedbook.com

Sharedbook.com is announcing today that it's launching a program of personalized books - mostly aimed at the kids' book market - where gift-givers can log in, upload a photo and a personal message, and choose a book to personalize. Publishing partners include Random House, HarperCollins, DK, Sterling and Bloomsbury. I spoke with Sharedbook CEO Caroline Vanderlip on Friday, and got more of the lowdown.

Last year, Sharedbooks did a pilot with Random House's Poky Little Puppy. Parents (or grandparents, uncles/aunts, etc.) could upload a photo and a personalized message, and Sharedbook would, essentially, print that book on demand. Sharedbooks has now taken that model to 5 publishers, offering classics and favorites that gift-givers will remember from their own childhoods.

You can visit the online store here.

Bloggers We Love: Kassia

Kassia Krozser bitch-slaps your idealism in this post on her Booksquare blog. Kassia's got a great outlook on publishing, and she skewers that NY Mag piece on the end of publishing quite nicely:

You don’t have to read Danielle Steel, but you have to accept this fact: people buy her books and people read her books. There was never a Golden Age of Publishing where people bought only high-brow fiction that elevated the mind. It’s a figment of your imagination. When it comes to fiction, readers flock to books and authors for varying reasons, one being the deep satisfaction that comes from a story that touches them.

Don’t insult the readers, man. It’s just bad form, and you really, really need people to buy your books.

Honestly, I think I am in love.

David Foster Wallace

I can't keep ignoring this one.

I was a writing student at Mount Holyoke in the mid-1980s. I took every writing course they offered, went to the Bennington Writing Workshops, and ran out of writing courses by my junior year. I was going to come to New York and Be A Writer. Ambitious as I was, I also wanted to Be An Editor and pretty much run my own publishing house - world domination!

My kids' dad went to Amherst...with David Foster Wallace - an English major, he was a year behind DFW. When "The Broom of the System" came out, I read it (at my ex's behest) and loved it. Loved. It.

Reading these obituaries hurts. DFW was 3 years older than I am. He did things - built up English departments, wrote jaw-dropping works of genius, inspired and motivated hundreds if not thousands of students. 

And suffered from debilitating depression. I know a few things about that as well. It runs in my family, and I have had numerous friends who suffer from it also. Depression is not romantic - it is a physical disease. Few who have it actually run out of options, but I found Wallace's father's observations to be most haunting:

He’d been in the hospital a couple of times over the summer and had undergone electro-convulsive therapy. Everything had been tried, and he just couldn’t stand it anymore.

For those of us who are intimate with the ravages of depression, this is terrifying. Because some people do - truly do - run out of options, and find themselves with utterly no relief. And some of these people are extraordinarily gifted and inspirational and shine a beam of light onto life in a way that nobody else possibly could.

 

Start With XML

So how do publishers stay alive when the business is tanking?

I'm fortunate to be part of a project called Start With XML. Conceived of by Mike Shatzkin, sponsored by O'Reilly's Tools of Change, Start With XML aims to help publishers consolidate costs (so that long tail publishing is more profitable) and monetize content in new ways. The Start With XML team consists of Mike, Ted Hill, Brian O'Leary, and myself.

There are four components to the project:

The End of the World

I'm tackling this in more depth in The Big Picture tomorrow. You can sign up to get it delivered to you free here.

Kindle Caution

Publishers Lunch has a brief item about Globe Pequot's decision to release the bios of Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain on the Kindle today. The Obama biography will be available in print on November 26th.

The McCain biography? Well, it's never going to be out in paper if the Republicans lose the election.

Let's save some trees.

Friday's BISG meeting

Stay tuned for a cool announcement being made this Friday at the BISG annual meeting. I'll be writing about it in next week's The Big Picture as well.

Same old same old

Psst. We have that already. It's called the Internet. With laptops becoming even more portable, cheaper, and wirelessly accessible, isn't tomorrow already here?

 

Ravenous Romance Responds

A commenter on our Ravenous Romance post notes that other erotic romance publishers are heavily invested in a digital publishing strategy - Ellora's Cave, for example - and wonders "what new twist is RR bringing to the game?"

I got in touch with Holly Schmidt and Lori Perkins, two of the founders, and they responded that they are still in development, and there will be further press releases that will address RR's market differentiation. Launch, they state, is 3 months away - and invitations for beta testers will be going out soon. Stay tuned!

And now it's time for newspapers

Google is now vacuuming up digital newspaper archives, and newspaper publishers are joining the ranks of book publishers - worrying that their business model is about to change as a result.

(Well, the newspaper business model HAS to change anyway, or there won't be any more newspapers.)

The main concern seems to be that if Google is posting contextual ads, that ad revenue will be going to Google and not the newspaper publisher whose content is generating the context for those ads:

But many newspaper publishers view search engines like Google as threats to their own business. Many of them also see their archives as a potential source of revenue, and it is not clear whether they will willingly hand them over to Google.

“The concern is that Google, in making all of the past newspaper content available, can greatly commoditize that content, just like news portals have commoditized current news content,” said Ken Doctor, an analyst with Outsell, a research company.

Google really is taking an extreme library model - using ad dollars instead of tax dollars to subsidize making content available "for free" - and this article notes that they're working with ProQuest in this latest initiative. Of course publishers - of newspapers, magazines and books - are threatened. Find me a publisher who is NOT made uncomfortable with library models.

Online Catalogs and Users

In 1999, Barnes & Noble decided to accept customer reviews of the books it sold on its website. I had to manage that. Customers would come to the site and post comments on the books they were reading - the VPs at the time thought it was a great way to get content onto the site without editorial staff to create it.

What a monster.

Yes, we set up filters to catch posts with offensive or hate-based language. But you can't catch everything. And it wasn't long before B&N found itself on the receiving end of letters from various lawyers, citing various posts as defamatory, etc. "So-and-so stole my idea" is not going to trip any filters.

Machines don't catch everything. You need humans to look over your content.

These days, it's tag clouds. Look at any tag cloud and you'll see the results of users managing their own data with little thought as to how other users are managing THEIR data. On Technorati today, for example, there are tags for both "John McCain" and "McCain" - each of which gives you different search results. Shouldn't they be combined into a single tag? The tag cloud on I Can Has Cheezburger is a right royal mess - there are 3 or 4 tags for every concept (something I find particularly irksome because I use them in presentations). The tag cloud on LibraryThing is nearly unusable.

You need human intervention for standardized, meaningful data. And yes, humans are costly. And when you're starting something new, you don't want to shell out for humans when machines are "good enough". But machines will never be entirely good enough. And you will always, always, ALWAYS wind up paying more later - in lost sales/clicks, in frustrated customers, in hiring someone to come in and clean up your data when it finally gets out of control, in hiring someone else to come in and set up a new system that institutes business rules in a data-entry form so that users can't screw up as much.

In other words, the best correction for human error is...other humans.

Constellation

Perseus Books Group announced that it is offering its independent publisher clients (which number in the hundreds) the same sort of digital publishing options that the bigger houses have. The NY Times reports that Perseus is offering widget functionality ("See Inside"), POD, Google Book Search services, formatting for the Kindle and Sony Reader:

Publishers who use the new service can provide a single digi