Amazon/BookSurge roundup

http://www.bloggernews.net/114844

http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/03/amazon-ups-the-ante-on-platform-lock-in.html

http://dianacastilleja.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-discussion-over-amazonbooksurge.html

http://thebrokenforum.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/there%E2%80%99s-something-about-amazon/

And a new blog started just for this: http://www.amazontroopsurge.com/?utm_campaign=Google&gclid=CP_Hreb-t5ICFSK9FQod_w5jQg

Making Information Pay

BISG has announced the speaker lineup for this year's Making Information Pay conference, which will be held on May 9th. According to the press release that went out today:

• Carolyn Pittis, Senior Vice-President, Global Marketing Strategy & Operations at HarperCollins, giving her insight into attitudes to

experimentation in one of the largest and most innovative trade publishers in a presentation called "Teaching an Old House New Tricks."

• Michael Cader – well-known in the industry as the innovator behind Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace – reflecting from personal experience on the value of persistent, but modest, innovation.

• Michael Raynor, author of the best-selling book The Strategy Paradox and a leading consultant with Deloitte Consulting LLP, discussing the necessity of experimentation for business success.

• Todd Anderson, Director of the University of Alberta Bookstore, talking about his experience with the extraordinary Espresso Book Machine – a truly local POD solution.

The event will also feature a panel of representatives from some of the most innovative publishers discussing their first-hand accounts of experiments that made a difference:

• Gwen Jones, Vice President, Publishing Information Systems and Technologies, John Wiley & Sons, discusses a new proposal process for eProducts.

• Malle Vallik, Director, Digital Content and Interactivity, Harlequin Enterprises, talks about a new model for selling short form fiction on the web.

• Neil DeYoung, Director of Digital Media, Hachette Book Group USA, shares the results of an experiment offering audio downloads without traditional digital rights management.

• Julie Grau, Senior Vice-President and Publisher, Spiegel and Grau, Random House Inc., shares her experience of offering free online content from a best-selling title.

Interested folks can go to the BISG website for more info.

Ebay not liking digital sales so much

Using the Classified Ads format, sellers receive a 30-day ad at a fixed price. This solution enables sellers to continue to market their digital goods on eBay; however, because Classified Ad listings are a lead generation tool and do not result in transactions that go through eBay, Feedback cannot be exchanged between buyer and seller.

 

No Lightning Source at Amazon?

The intertubes have been flapping today about Amazon's latest move to get its POD publishers and self-published authors to exclusively use BookSurge for printing their titles. I just posted a blog entry over at O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing blog.

Peter Brantley's listserv is all over this, as is Michael Cader. It's pretty huge.

Borders's Digital Center

The In-Store Marketing Institute reports on the digital center at the hub of the new Borders concept store in Ann Arbor:

The digital center has usurped a majority of the former music department, carrying a downsized inventory of product and a large amount of technological services. (Borders alluded to the change in its year-end financial release, reporting a decline in music sales and a plan to "reallocate floor space" accordingly.)

Services in the digital center consist of:

• Borders Digital Music, which enables shoppers to burn CDs and download music to digital music players from the chain's music library.
   
• Personal Publishing, a service powered by the Lulu.com digital marketplace. Shoppers can publish their own books and register for an International Standard Book Number (ISBN).
   
• Genealogy Searches. A partnership with Ancestry.com lets shoppers search that company's website from kiosks or sign up for an Ancestry.com subscription.
   
• Downloadable Digital Audiobooks, which Borders claims is the first "audiobook download service in a physical retail environment." The retailer offers approximately 15,000 titles.
   
• Custom Photo Books, an area where shoppers can digitally create and personalize photo albums that will be shipped to them upon completion.
   
• Photo Printing, where shoppers can print photos from a digital camera.

Borders also is merchandising products related to the services, including digital cameras and photo frames, GPS devices and Sony's Reader Digital Book.

It sounds really compelling, in a lot of ways - but you have to wonder how many people wikll want to stand at a kiosk and do genealogy searches in a bookstore.

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Continuing the discussion:
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference 'Borders's Digital Center' from LJNDawson.com Blog:

O'Reilly TOC - Tools of Change for Publishing: Borders Prototype Store Shows Off Digital Center

On Not Owning Your Content

Traditionally, for Easter, I stick a movie or two in the kids' Easter baskets. This year I didn't. I'm not quite sure why - it just didn't occur to me. The kids have HBO On Demand. They each have a Netflix account. We're never short of movies around here. But of course the kids argued with me this year. I pointed out how they are constantly getting movies - either in the mail or in the tubes.

"But we want them to OWN," said my little girl, who is 9.

"Why?" I said. "You can get them anytime - you can re-order them from Netflix, and HBO cycles their stuff, and half of what you already own is on the Disney Channel all the time anyway."

My daughters weren't buying my argument, but they will, I think. If our content is in the ether - if it's available by subscription (and subscriptions are getting increasingly cheaper) and we can pull it down whenever we want, what's the point of cluttering up your house with plastic boxes? Do my kids need movies as souvenirs the same way I need books as souvenirs?

Are you buying or leasing ebooks?

Via Peter Brantley, an examination on Gizmodo:

If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the "first sale" doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School's Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?

Good question. And the answer appears to be, you're buying a license to the content. You can resell your physical device, with all the content loaded on it - but the doctrine of first sale seems only to apply to content embedded in physical media:

You'd have to sell the physical media where the "original" download is stored—a hard drive or the actual Kindle or Sony Reader.

Yet another instance where law has to catch up to technology.

Borders stock up

Borders stock is swinging back upwards after its "For Sale" sign went up last week. Check out the Big Picture extra we're sending out this week for more analysis on what happened to Borders and what's going to happen.

Brennan out at Muze - and where's he going?

Several sources confirm that SVP of Media Development & Partnerships, Paul Brennan, is leaving Muze tomorrow. No word on where he's going. Lots of words on why he is leaving, but until we hear from the man himself, it's all speculation. Paul had been at Muze for 9 years, through enormous upheaval(s), which requires a tremendous amount of tact and diplomacy.

Can't We All Get Along?

The Bookseller's Association Digital Taskforce, out of London, is not going anywhere, reports The Bookseller.

After a carefully-researched report by Francis Bennett (founder of BookData) and Michael Holdsworth (head of BIC), the Bookseller's Association has "no plans" to adopt the report's recommendations:

Bennett believes that “intense competition” is behind the inertia. “Everyone continues to believe that their answer is the right one. As I have said on many occasions, that’s not very helpful.”

Essentially, it seems that publishers are each pursuing their own solutions, and collaboration isn't among them.

Bennett claimed that the publishing industry could face a format war similar to Sony and Toshiba’s dispute over who would become the dominant high-definition DVD supplier. “The book trade is not big enough to support dozens of different solutions. There’s always one dominant solution and I would rather get that now.”

Will the Riggios Buy Borders?

Borders Borders Borders Borders Borders

After having staffed up in the IT department and launched downloadable ebooks and audiobooks with Overdrive, Borders is on the brink of...something horrible involving having its various divisions bought up by Pershing Square Capital Management, the hedge fund that is Borders's largest shareholder. According to Shelf Awareness this morning:

[CEO George] Jones added that Borders believes that its 2009 financial targets "remain attainable, yet within the current economic environment, we will be slowed in our progress and expect that we'll reach them later than originally planned. Still, we believe our strategic plan remains the right path toward achieving these goals." This plan includes the imminent launching of the company's website on its own, the spread of "new concept" stores that emphasize digital offerings, the display of more titles face out and a related reduction in inventory of 5%-10%, among other initiatives.

Because Obviously Women Rule the World

Tim Lott has blasted the Orange Prize as being a "sexist con-trick" in an article for the London Telegraph. Apparently there are too many women running the publishing world and only publishing books for their own selfish interests.

That's a big bit of whining. Perhaps he ought to try telling this to the countless women who are FORBIDDEN to read or go to school by fundamentalist regimes; perhaps he ought to try telling this to the countless women who throughout millenia were prevented from reading OR writing. Should they have had the good fortune to get "published" or circulated in some way, they are now topics of "rediscovery" for "feminist" scholars.

Bite me, Lott.

Our Wiki's Done!

Folks, our Big Picture wiki is all done (for now - is a wiki ever done? isn't that the point?) and cleaned up.

We've got a page for acronyms.

We've got a page for hot topics in the business.

We've got a page of interviews with notable folks doing interesting work.

All of this is from The Big Picture newsletter - you do NOT have to be on the subscriber list to get to the wiki. (But we'd like it very much if you joined!)

Ingram Gets Learned

Ingram Digital announced that it's partnered with the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (and you've got to be learned and/or professional to be able to remember that) to create ebooks of the titles of ALPSP's 260 member publishers. According to the press release quoted at LJ's InfoTech:

The company said ALPSP members are invited “to contribute titles to an ALPSP-branded range of subject-based eBook collections which will be offered to libraries and other institutions” through its MyiLibrary content distribution partners including Swets. ALPSP members have access to all of Ingram Digital’s digital content solutions, like CoreSource for digital asset management, and member publishers can use Lightning Source Inc. to produce print-on-demand titles as well as enable digital content distribution to all markets and channels.

Because They're French!

The Bookseller reports today that France is launching a competitor to Google Book Search.

Of course they are.

Barbara Cassasus writes:

The project, to be unveiled at the [Paris Book] fair, will offer more than 60,000