Windows Live Search is...Live

The big news, of course, is that Microsoft's Windows Live Search is live. Cliff Guren explained all the features today, and it's very similar to Google Book Search except for this important differentiator - no scanning of books with dubious copyright status. Microsoft scans books that are out-of-copyright, and publishers submit in-copyright books for inclusion (giving their permission for scanning).

There's no cost to publishers for the service. And there's no print functionality, or even cut-and-paste functionality, in the search: "As we all know," Guren says, "hacks run amok." So expect a few wiseasses to create end-runs around the protections that Microsoft has installed.

Publishers are able to control how much of a book they want consumers to see - including blocking certain pages from view altogether (in the case of a mystery, for example), or images to which they don't have the rights.

Guren admitted that the primary reason behind Windows Live is competition with Google for "query share" - which has a heavy influence on ad revenue. Look for a Windows Live demonstration at the Crystal Palace - which sounds like a brothel but is really a section of Javits.

How many DADs do you have?

Shatzkin once more took the stage in the afternoon as he moderated a panel discussion on Digital Asset Distribution. This was a great panel which included HarperCollins, Random House, Holtzbrinck, and Ingram Digital Group.

Carolyn Pittis of HarperCollins began by talking about using book content "everywhere possible" - emphasizing that publishers should have control of how the content is used. She also noted that "those who scan books for free" (ahem! Google; ahem! Microsoft) don't always produce the quality that an individual publisher can produce if they maintain control of the content.

Pittis also noted that the new widget released by Harper earlier this year has proven to be the third most powerful driver of consumers to the HarperCollins website; 14,000 books have widgets so far.

Up next was Brian Napack from Holtzbrinck, who gave a very wry and witty presentation. Holtzbrinck has chosen Ingram to manage its digital asset distribution, and Brian stressed that a powerful digital infrastructure is key to succeeding in an era increasingly dominated by technology.

He also mentioned that Holtzbrick is launching a social networking site for books called Lovely Books. It's in beta at the moment.

Kent Freeman of Ingram Digital stated that Ingram currently has 170,000 ebooks archived and ready for distribution among a variety of channels - Lightning Source, VitalSource, and MyiLibrary. Their digital warehouse service supports a wide variety of formats (including audio)...and, Kent said, "We have not yet announced our widget, but we will shortly." Which is, of course, a form of announcement.

Matt Shatz of Random House also discussed the Random House widget, which is a bit different from the Harper one - there's no branding on the images, for example, and it includes a search function which the Harper widget doesn't have. Matt confirmed that Random House's marketing efforts amount to "fishing where the fish are" - and that the Internet is universally acknowledged as the space where consumers discover products, sample them, and do research online.

Best Practices for Digital Marketing

Mike Shatzkin Explains It All

"You either OWN the tollgate, or you PAY at the tollgate."

So said Mike Shatzkin at his presentation this morning on disruptive technologies and the publishing industry. Defining "horizontal" marketing as a sort of carpet-bombing, standardized (mass-market) approach, and "vertical" marketing as an approach that targets niches in the same way special sales departments have been doing for years, Shatzkin talked about the power of the niche, about publishers leveraging the many communities that are coming up around these new technologies like MySpace and Facebook - how empowering authors to do their OWN marketing (because THEY are the brands, and THEY reach the niches) is far more effective than buying banner ads.

He also made this observation, which appealed to me tremendously, as my great-grandmother was a Sooner (one of the Oklahomans who raced over the border and staked a claim just PRIOR to the border opening - getting her land "sooner" than everybody else): "Pubishers need to be Internet-niche Sooners."

Another crucial point - and one I continually try to get across to clients: "Don't shut out your competitors: manage their involvement." A version of "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." We learned about "co-op-itition" in the late '90s - it's come back around again, folks.

His presentation can be found here.

Goin' down to BEA

It's not South Park, but it'll do in terms of surreality and general madness. I'll be at some of the conferences on Thursday, and then back again for exhibits and meetings on Saturday and Sunday. We're gonna try loading up PHOTOS - oh boy! Look for posts late Thursday.

RFID at BEA, PDQ

Our crew is very busy at BEA this year - in addition to Ted Hill's seminar on Best Practices in Digital Marketing (Thursday at 12:30), Jim Lichtenberg is leading a session on RFID in bookstores, using the by-now-famous example of the Dutch bookstore chain BGN. His panel of 16 participants will have a rousing discussion on the progress RFID has made over the last year. This is on Friday at 9:30.

Public Library Signs Up for LibraryThing

The Danbury Public Library is the first public library to sign up for LibraryThing, where individual readers classify and comment on books. Library Journal reports:

LibraryThing developer Tim Spalding may have warned in LJ four months ago that public libraries were more scared of user-contributed data than academic ones, but he’s found a taker in the Danbury Public Library (DPL), CT...It went live May 13, and initial promotional efforts are under way, DPL coordinator of library automation Kate Sheehan said. DPL’s tags are "keywords and labels used by regular people to categorize books," explains DPL in its catalog.

Sounds great, but of course, there's a catch...

Patrons can’t add their own tags at the moment, said Sheehan; it would require more work with the library’s automation product from Innovative Interfaces, Inc., and DPL users couldn’t generate the number of tags needed for effective use.

Eventually (sooner rather than later), ILS systems or libraries themselves will have to develop interfaces so that patrons can communicate not just with the library (in terms of requests, or renewals, or what have you) but with one another. The day of the passive patron is over. And it's critical to library relevancy that patrons be able to interact - to chat, to collaborate, to set up their own Library Thing-ish pages - with one another.

Books Are Burning in Kansas City

Y'all know where I'm headed with this one, so I'll just let it go at that.

The Big Picture - DRM is Not Copyright; Copyright is not DRM: A Primer (Part II )

In this issue of The Big Picture:

THE DOWNLOAD: - DRM is Not Copyright; Copyright is not DRM: A Primer (Part II of II), by Laura Dawson
TIA - THIS ISSUE'S ACRONYM - GTIN – Global Trade Identification Number
INTEL: COMPANIES - Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine announces new start-up
INTEL: PRODUCTS - Alibris launches “Alibris Basic”
INTEL: PEOPLE - Muze shakeup continues
THE JOB EXCHANGE - Listing the hottest jobs in the sector

"Where we left off, before we were interrupted by digital asset distribution issues…the crucial question, “How do we encode e-books with some kind of ‘locking’ technology that prevents people from copying them and sharing them?”

The answer, of course, is that we don’t.

Do we encode print books with a “locking” technology? If I finish a Greg Iles thriller, and I know I never want to read it again, as good as it was (it ain’t Dostoevsky), and I choose to leave it on the seat of the PATH train from Hoboken to 33rd Street for the next likely reader...no law is going to stop me (unless the definition of littering expands significantly)..."

Click here to access our newsletter archives and read the May 29, 2007 issue in full.

AAP sales reports

The AAP released its annual sales report, which like all industry reports is notoriously incomplete and a definite victim to "what goes in is what comes out". Results are culled from its 300 members - and given that there are hundreds of thousands of publishers in the US, it seems that reports like these are more of a Gestalt indicating trends than a true picture of what's going on in the industry.

That said, it's interesting to note that audiobook sales are down this year. I'm wondering if that's due to the rise of podcasts and radio shows and even magazine/newspaper subscriptions being available from many audiobook sellers. In other words, there's a lot more to listen to than just books.

Ebook sales are up - most likely due to the textbook market, which is following in the footsteps of the scholarly journal business; printing is becoming prohibitively expensive, and digital distribution is the most sensible way of maintaining the quality of the publication over the widest possible audience.

Dept of Why Didn't I Think of That

Dailylit.com offers a service where it'll send a chunk of a public domain book to your Blackberry or regular email every morning, meant to be read in under 5 minutes. It's also available via RSS feed. Titles include loads of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, and others you may have missed out on in your English lit classes. It's a very cool idea!

More on Amazon/Brilliance

Amazon's announcement yesterday that it is buying Brilliance Audio sent a few ripples throughout the industry. I was onsite yesterday at Audible, however, and I can say that all was calm there; Barron's blogger Eric Savitz can rest easy.

The one thing Audible's got going for it at the moment is its exclusive deal with Apple. This makes Audible's audiobooks the only ones that are easily transferrable to an iPod. While you can download books from Brilliance Audio, they are only playable on devices compatible with Overdrive's Media Console...devices that do not include the iPod family.

You can burn your Brilliance audiobooks to CDs, and then import those CD files into iTunes and thus onto your iPod, but that's significantly more work.

So as long as Audible's got this exclusive deal with Apple, it will retain the leadership position in the ever-expanding audiobook world.

Amazon to announce acquisition of Brilliance Audio

Shelf Awareness reports this morning on the rumors that Amazon is buying Brilliance Audio. PW sort of confirms this: on their story about Simon & Schuster, there's a link to a story about Amazon/Brilliance. However, there's nothing on that page...yet. Nevertheless, the fact that they've got the pod all ready to go suggests that those rumors in Shelf Awareness are about to become fact.

S&S Responds to Author's Guild

Perpetually in-print: one author's view

Maya Reynolds blogs about the S&S/Author's Guild kerfuffle, where S&S is essentially saying they're getting rid of the designation "out of print" - which means that authors who don't negotiate their contracts effectively cede the rights to their book to S&S in perpetuity.

Maya gives a really considered opinion, as an author - bringing in Long Tail concepts, the recent BISG study about used books, technologies such as POD and online bookselling, and the role of agents in all of this. She's incredibly thoughtful, and her post is terrific. Excerpting any one piece of it does the rest a disservice - go here and read the thing in its entirety.