Peter Osnos wrote a column yesterday about the contrast between the tightly-synched-up distribution of Harry Potter (any Harry Potter, frankly, not just this last one) and the rest of the book industry.

He'd read a review of the new Wilfred Sheed book - which was not a blockbuster bestseller:

My guess is that Sheed’s book was a “mid-list” title, based on his sales track and the subject, which means that less than 10,000 copies were shipped based on initial expectations.

What happened is that those 10,000 copies were printed and shipped. The book was reviewed. But by that time, there were no more copies left for new customers to buy; the publishing house had to go back for a reprint, leaving customers waiting. Osnos notes that he is a participant in the Caravan Project, which explores alternatives in book distribution:

Had the Sheed been offered to me as an audio book, I might have bought it. Print-on-demand technology could have made the book available for shipping while a larger reprint was prepared. In any case, not one bookseller made a concerted effort to actually sell me the book and promise to send it to me as soon as possible and by the fastest means. The money that I was ready to spend—$29.95 plus tax, shipping, and handling—stayed in my pocket.

All weekend I was battling NeoPets for my 9-year-old - she'd forgotten her password and we did everything short of putting a jinx on her computer to retrieve it. No dice - it was truly forgotten and she had to start over. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued (some of it mine).

So imagine how thrilled I was to read this morning that HarperCollins has teamed up with NeoPets to produce a series of books based on these creatures inhabiting the virtual world of Neopia:

"It's exciting to bring Neopets, a digital first brand, to the publishing platform offering our audience new ways to interact with the virtual world, its characters and storylines," said Kyra Reppen, senior vice president and general manager of Neopets. "Not only will we be expanding the virtual world to include books, but will also include unique connections between the books and the website that unlock special features to further enhance the Neopets experience for readers."

Oh, boy! 

Ingram Books announced yesterday that Skip Prichard has been appointed COO. Prior to serving at Ingram, Prichard was CEO of ProQuest, and a VP at Lexis-Nexis.

Ingram Library Services has hired away from ProQuest before, with Joe Reynolds who is now president of that division. 

Joe Nocera has an article in today's NY Times which uses Harry Potter as a framework to investigate the phenomenon of book discounting. He's done his homework.

The big retailers - B&N, Amazon, Costco, Target, Wal-Mart - are selling HP7 at 40-50% off (or more) the list price of $35. Independent retailers are not - I bought my (two - one for me and one for my kid) copies at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn for $30; other stores are selling it full-price.

Nocera delves into the "screwball logic" of bookselling, covering familiar territory:

• Returns - "Name another industry, for instance, where the manufacturer agrees to take back — and reimburse the retailer! — for unsold merchandise."
• Volume - "And what other business can you think of where sales are essentially flat, yet the manufacturers keep ramping up volume? In 1980, the book industry produced about 42,400 new titles, according to the R. R. Bowker Company, which monitors new books. By 2001, the number had jumped to 141,700, and 168,000 by 2005."
• Discounting - "You just don’t see other industries losing money on their hottest brand to get people to buy less desirable merchandise. But that’s what the book industry does."

Nocera finds reasons for stores like Costco and Target and Wal-Mart to heavily discount HP7 - customers come into those stores for a wide variety of items, and enticing them with Harry Potter is a good way to get them to come in and buy all the other things they really need. He also finds a good reason for Amazon to discount - to entice people to get more comfortable with online shopping.

But, Nocera says,

[This] brings us back to the original discounter, Barnes & Noble, which, unlike its rivals, would very much like to make money on the book. So why is it discounting the book so heavily? Because it has no choice. Costco may not view it as a head-to-head competitor, but every book Costco sells is a book sale Barnes & Noble has missed. As for Amazon, the fact that it has a set of motives different from Barnes & Noble’s is meaningless. No one doubts that Amazon is a direct competitor.

“It’s almost biblical,” said Sara Nelson, the editor of Publishers Weekly. “What they did is now being done to them.”

One interesting fact that Nocera points out is that over 50% of all books sold are being sold in non-bookstores. (That doesn't mean 50% of TITLES are being sold there - we're just talking sheer bulk.) Bookstores are increasingly a long-tail business. Which means that the independent bookseller - always the home to the long tail - may ultimately be the book outlet that thrives.

A final note: Could we please stop the comparisons of the Riggios to the Mafia? You'd think the Times would be tired of doing that by now. And Wal-Mart makes the Riggios look like pikers, frankly. 

Despite the numerous troubling issues surrounding the iPhone (including the fact that it is not QUITE flying off the shelves as quickly as Apple seemed to have hoped), the Wall Street Journal reports that Apple's earnings were up 73% this quarter.  Says New York Magazine:

In short, while bloggers were griping about the fallibility of the Jesus Phone, Jobs sold 'em two Powerbooks, four Shuffles, and a Nano.

Muze continues to bleed staff...In the 8 months since I was laid off, there have been more "redundancies" and outright quittings among high-level staff:

• Bill Caid, CIO
  
• Scott Lehr, VP Biz Dev
  
• Patty Hirsch, VP Digital Strategy
  
• Margenett Moore, VP Customer Servie
  
• Angie Hickman, Director, Outsource Business Unit
• Lonnie Chenkin, VP Biz Dev
• Mike Pegan, Sr Manager, Sales
• Corey Green, Manager, Sales
• Lara Lo Re, Manager, HR

Lorcan Dempsey highlights a quote from Peter Kaufman's presentation at JISC:

Over the next 13 years:

an iPod or a device its size will be able to hold:

• a year’s worth of video (8,760 hours) by 2012 (5 years from now)
• all the commercial music ever created by 2015 (8 years), and
• all the content ever created (in all media) by 2020 (13 years).

Lorcan posits:

At some stage in the near future, I assume, we will be shipping large amounts of content around to people on small devices. We could give people their own library, which synchs up from time to time with various services?

I ran across a weird little post today on the legal blog Slaw, a Canadian site devoted to "Canadian legal research and IT":

If you're working on a simple taxonomy of legal topics, you might take a look at the Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) subject headings for law....I imagine, not being a copyright maven, that this sort of list is in a grey area, keeping company with compilations and tables of contents. I understand from some personal experience that it takes effort and creativity to elect a set of terms within a discipline and to order them. You'd be hard pressed, though, to prove that with a few twists here and there a list wasn't arrived at independently — and, more to the point, perhaps, these are such broad terms and so basic to legal work and promulgation no one should be able to stand in the way of their free use. Which is why I think the routine overreaching of copyright notices like this one are silly and maybe harmful: "No part of the attached documents may be… reproduced in any manner whatsoever…"

Well, if this guy had sat in on the meetings during which these subject lists are composed, along with all the publishers, booksellers, librarians, and others who fly to New York once a month and bust their butts on this, perhaps he wouldn't see the copyright notice as being particularly "overreaching". 

Galleycat reports this morning that Thomson Learning is changing its name to Cengage:

The company, recently acquired by Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners, says the new name is based on being at the "center of engagement" for its customers worldwide.

Actually, the name sounds like a pill for "irregularity and bloating," but whatever.

ISBN-10
Should only use 13 now
Alas -- still needed

 - Rachel Rushefsky, B&N 

I just had to share this amazing post from Peter Brantley's blog:

The future for libraries is not merely in their working together, but also, perhaps primarily, in working with others. The future resides in the creation of inter-institutional partnerships that marry libraries' wisdom in the organization, presentation, and accessibility of information to projects seeking to generate, deliver, and manipulate data in the service of science, learning, and education. Through these hybrid partnerships, libraries will enter a new territory of ideas, enriching their own experience while they bring insight to the work of others. Working beyond ourselves, libraries will chart a future into new lands.

This completely rocks. 

Burger King will be giving away DRM-free MP3s with meals in the UK, reports Tech.co.uk:

Under the campaign, consumers will be able to search for, sample, and download a pre-paid EMI Music track from a specially created microsite after inputting a unique code. Codes are being distributed to Burger King consumers upon purchase, and there will be links from the microsite to an online retailer, allowing consumers to purchase further tracks by EMI artists featured on the microsite.

Yes, the same EMI that is releasing DRM-free music to Apple is also looking for innovative ways to distribute music outside of iTunes, the article says:

EMI made an exclusive deal with promotions company VerveLife . The partnership gives VerveLife's brand partners access to a significant portion of EMI Music's catalogue in order to offer their consumers higher quality, DRM-free downloads via global promotional campaigns.

According to Bloomberg, Amazon reported an increase of 38% in North American sales this year, causing stock prices to jump as well. The increase was largely, Amazon said, due to electronics and jewelry sales:

"Electronics and general merchandise are becoming a larger part of the business,'' said Colin Sebastian, a San Francisco-based analyst with Lazard Capital Markets LLC.

Amazon also reduced technology spending from 7.8% of sales to 7% of sales. Additionally, reports this article,

Amazon has sought to diversify its product offerings as Barnes & Noble Inc. and other bookstores have cut prices and promoted customer loyalty programs. Sales of books, DVDs and other media made up 64 percent of the company total, down from 68 percent a year earlier.

"Clearly, with the digitization of media, it's been a wise move to move to other areas,'' said Scott Tilghman, a New York-based analyst with Soleil Securities Corp. who rates shares "buy.''

Francis Cave and Alex Brown are running an XML in Publishing workshop which looks pretty fascinating. According to Alex's post on the Griffin-Brown blog, the course covers

• the basic principles of mark-up languages
• the roles XML can play in publishing
• what it is like to work with XML data.

The course is being offered on 9/25 at the Publishing Training Centre at Book House. (More or less the UK equivalent of the NYU Center for Publishing.) You can find out more here.