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.

Big Digital On Campus

John Mutter today has an awesome piece in Shelf Awareness about the impact of digitization on college textbook publishing and bookselling. It supports a lot of what I'm finding as I spelunk around in this world: college students increasingly go for digital options ("Some 18.5% of students strongly prefer e-texts over the print version of the same books, and 18% have purchased or accessed digital material. More students want a digital option, and 17% of them have said they would pay more for a print book if a digital version is included"), and library use and courseware use are on the upswing:

In addition to the bookstore, students are already getting digital material through the library via an e-reserve system or an e-book collection; a course management system or professor's site; off campus; or direct from the publisher. "In most cases," [Mark] Nelson [digital content strategest for NACS] said, "we don't know where [college bookstores are] losing digital sales to."

Ebooks up, audiobooks down

The AAP released sales figures for the fiscal year ending in November 2007, reports Shelf Awareness this morning. Notable stats (to us, anyway):

Sales of ebooks rose 36.4% over 2006. Sales of audiobooks declined by 24.1%, which I found quite surprising given the hype around audiobooks in the previous year. I'm wondering if it's because the only downloadable games in town are Overdrive (which does not have a commercial application, only one for institutions) and Audible.com (which does not have an institutional strategy, only a commercial one). MediaBay went out of business last year. It may also be due to the migration from CD audiobooks to downloadable ones - there's bound to be a dip as people learn new technologies. And, as belts tighten in this economy, it may also be that audiobooks are proving to be a luxury that consumers are deciding they can live without.

Michael Eisner gets into digital book marketing

The New York Post has a squib this morning about Michael Eisner's new company Vuguru, an internet production studio. Apparently he's hooking up with Robin Cook, who has a new book coming out. Vuguru will be producing 50 2-minute videos for release on the web, which will serve as "prequels" to the novel. Says the Post:

Publishers have attempted to use the Internet to market books and attract new readers with little success, but G.P. Putnam president Ivan Held thinks this could be a breakthrough approach.

"One of the challenges for the industry in marketing books is how to bring in new readers," Held said. "This concept will certainly help reach a new audience as well as hook the consumer on the book before it ever comes out."

Borders staffs up in IT

Borders announced that it has hired Gary E. Baker to serve as VP of IT Delivery Services. With deep background in IT (he hosts a radio program called "Internet Advisor" on Saturday nights), Baker will be responsible for

the development and execution of IT strategic processes related to the delivery of technology as well as leading teams to ensure that business goals are met through delivery of necessary IT products and services, among other duties.

David Cully at B&T

David Cully, formerly of B&N, has gone over to Baker & Taylor as...well, his title's far too long so you can go to the press release here. According to this,

Cully's primary responsibilities include managing all merchandising and purchasing functions, managing BTMS, and managing Baker & Taylor's new Specialty Markets Group.

BISG/BIC White Paper on identifiers

BISG/BIC has commissioned Michael Holdsworth, formerly managing director of Cambridge University Press, to write a white paper on identifying digital content. It's out, available, posted:

The Identification of Digital Book Content is intended to stimulate debate in the book industry about how digital book content should be identified and to encourage further work on the development and implementation of identification standards and best practices for such content.

I've read the paper - it's really good and should indeed spark a lot of discussion. We'll be covering it in Identifier Committee meetings at BISAC - those who are interested should go to the BISG website and sign up for that committee. We'll be sending around a new meeting time soon (having it after the BISAC General meetings hasn't been too inspiring, frankly).

Richard Willis Out At B&T

Richard Willis is no longer CEO at Baker & Taylor, according to Shelf Awareness this morning. In the press release, Willis states he wants to spend more time with his family. (Didn't members of the Bush Administration stop using that excuse years ago?)

Meanwhile, BusinessWeek is convinced the Kindle changes everything

BusinessWeek went ahead and said it - that the Kindle "just might be the iPod of reading". Man, I wouldn't want to be responsible for a statement like that one. Author David Kiley goes on to say:

It's not hard to see how Kindle will take off. Business travelers, I predict, will be the first to embrace it. Having a device with multiple books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs to travel with, which also has a long battery life, beats wrangling a laptop, magazines, and papers in an airline seat. The next market will be university students, undergrad and grad. With such a nifty application and the tension over ridiculously high prices for textbooks, going digital is a brainy way to deliver textbooks to an audience that is already used to digital consumption.

Again I say, when I see it on the F train, I'll know it's getting somewhere.

From the Mailbag

Michael Holdsworth writes in to say that it looks like E-Ink-type technology and laptops are not going to get along for quite some time. He refers to it as "Etch-A-Sketch" technology that isn't robust enough to run on Windows/OS platforms or via video/animation. Additionally, it seems the color E-Ink is quite a ways off - I thought I'd seen something in my Google alerts saying they were on the verge of a color display, but upon further research this seems not to be so. Furthermore, there's that page-turn "blink" that the machine does when you scroll to the next page.

So the idea of comfortably reading on a laptop with this technology appears to be still some ways off....We can add that to our list of "dream features" for a laptop/ebook-reader, then!

I do wonder, when the human race moved from papyrus scrolls to bound books, if anyone complained about having to turn pages instead of rolling them.

Fooling Around With the Kindle

Jessica McMahon over at LibreDigital sent us this link, wherein the folks at Motley Fool re-think the Kindle (and mirrors the approach that Peter Brantley is taking on the O'Reilly blog as well):

Amazon's Digital Text Platform is in beta, but it's an open beta. Anyone can sign up. Anyone can be published. In fact, the only requirements to get an item listed on Kindle are a title, an author's name, and of course, content.

I wrote a cheesy coming-of-age novel called The Last Perfect Father's Day during my undergraduate days. It's not my best work. It might be my worst. I've let two people read it. OK, I've suckered two people into reading it. I had it lying around on my hard drive in MS Word, so I figured I'd serve it to Amazon's service as a guinea pig.

In seconds, Amazon chewed it up and spit it back out in Kindle's HTML-coded format. All that was left was to price the puppy, from $0.25 to $200. I chose the low end of that scale and clicked the Publish button.

Several hours later, it was up on the site, complete with an Amazon-assigned ASIN code. That was too easy.

Indeed. It disturbed me a bit that (a) it wasn't necessary for the ebook to have an ISBN (b) it didn't conform to the IDPF's .epub standard. And yet, if history is any guide, Amazon will set the de facto standard and all that .epub work will kind of fall by the wayside....

However - and this is crucial - so many more people are doing self-publishing these days that this capability to upload and download and distribute your own titles is pretty amazing. I mean, just load your book up on Amazon for anyone to find in their web search. Jaw-dropping!

Kindle talk

Over at O'Reilly's Radar blogs, Peter Brantley is leading a discussion of the Kindle - the comments are interesting, particularly Peter's most recent one about looking at the Kindle holistically (rather than merely "slamming the device qua device" - which, as he says, is "fun"...and it is!).

BAMM sales up

Books-A-Million third quarter sales were $117.7 million, according to a report in The Book Standard this morning. That's up 6.3% over last year at this time.

Giving E-books a bad name

MSNBC's Red Tape Chronicles has a piece today on credit card theft and e-book companies. Apparently, there was strange coincidence of credit card numbers being used legitimately to buy Equifax jproducts, and then used illegitimately at a couple of disreputable companies who run e-book fronts...and false charges appeared on hundreds of credit-card statements. Small amounts - $4.95 on average - but nevertheless:

It's not clear when the e-book scam began. A few consumers say they saw fake e-book charges beginning in February, but it appears there was a flurry of activity in September.

Credit card thieves often create fake businesses to process bogus transactions -- that's much easier than using stolen cards to make purchases at legitimate retailers, and one of the quickest ways to turn stolen numbers into cash.

Meaning don't buy your ebooks from weird little stores you never heard of.

Scobelizing the Kindle