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.

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.

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.

Joe Reynolds promoted at Ingram Library Services

Joe Reynolds, who came to Ingram Library Services from ProQuest, has been promoted to president of the division, replacing Stephen Wilson. In the press release, issued to coincide with ALA, Reynolds says:

"Libraries everywhere will be the first important adopters of digital content...As librarians make the print-to-digital transition, we know we can be a valuable member of the team."

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?)

Larry Kirshbaum Joins Overdrive Board

Former CEO of Time Warner Larry Kirshbaum (now a literary agent) has joined the board of Overdrive, according to a press release I got around noon today. The obligatory quote:

"During my career, I've seen the publishing industry evolve with the adoption of new book formats, business models, and sales channels," said Kirshbaum. "Today, eBooks, audio books, and digital media markets are exploding, and OverDrive is uniquely positioned as a global leader in the value-added distribution of digital books and other content."

Credo Reference Expands Customer Base

Credo Reference announced that it has added the Wisconsin Library Services to its roster of clients. WiLS consists of over 500 libraries throughout the state of Wisconsin. Additionally, CEO John Dove emailed me that they've also added Brooklyn Public Library to their client list - so you can log onto the library's website and use Credo's service with your library card.

Overdrive's .epub is ready for download

Overdrive announced late yesterday that it is ready to deliver content in the new .epub format, starting in early 2008. According to the press release:

The new "epub" standard for eBooks and other digital publications was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (www.IDPF.org), a non-profit standards and trade association, and unanimously approved by IDPF member companies. Publishers benefit from "epub" as it allows them to produce a single digital publication for all distribution channels rather than producing multiple formats for competing reader applications. OverDrive, an IDPF member, joins Hachette Book Group USA, Adobe Systems, Sony, and others in actively supporting the new format.

More Muzing

Don Henderson left me a comment yesterday (my comments indicator isn't working properly for some reason, so it looks like there are 0 comments for that post, when in fact if you click on "comments" you'll see his post). He very justly corrects me - it's LEE Ho who's the VP of marketing over at Muze...JEFF Ho works in marketing at McGraw-Hill and I got them confused.

At any rate, Don goes on to say "There are plenty of Muze personnel left". Indeed! But my question is...how much experience do they have in the particular market Muze addresses? How much institutional knowledge is left when so many of the folks who have been with the company for years have now left? What's to prevent Muze from making the same mistakes over and over again when that institutional knowledge is no longer there?

Since I left in November 2006, the company has been gutted. I'm sure many wonderful people have come in to replace those who have left or been laid off, but that kind of turnover has a profound effect on a place. It's not a question of moving bodies and minds around - when turnover is that high, there's a sacrifice in the organic growth and cohesion of a company. And I wonder if Muze can make up for that.

Muze has amazed me before. It began in 1990 (or thereabouts) in a warehouse in Williamsburg. I came on board in 1995, at the tail end of the warehouse phase - wires and cables draped from ceiling to floor; running the copy machine too long would blow a fuse that would take out the entire video department; it was a bizarre combination of old and new that was right out of a Terry Gilliam movie. In that environment, we played and learned and developed amazing applications. Moving to Soho in 1996, the Skunkworks mindset continued. It was a place of extraordinary inventiveness.

And yet...it wasn't sustainable. Through massive mismanagement, Muze lost several dozen people, many of whom flocked to Barnes & Noble.com. (I was one of them - I went in 1998.) The mismanagement continued - we'd hear things about one disasterous CEO after another. When I returned in 2006, it seemed that things had stabilized...but this was deceptive, obviously.

No one running the company has ever known quite what to do with it. It is such a promising enterprise - and it attracts extremely gifted people - but every single CEO it's had has wanted to turn it into something it isn't. This last round...turning it into a company that distributes actual content instead of simply catalog metadata and sound samples...was particularly ill-thought-out. Acquiring the Loudeye assets was a mistake. It diverted the company from its core business. Muze, I think, is not a company to be transformed. It's a company that needs to make the best of what it's got - and it's got quite a lot.

I'm interested in what Peter Krause and Paul Parreira at Tactic Company are going to do - I believe they have taken the best in what Muze has to offer (editorial and data creation) and are making a business of it.

How Can They Have A Layoff If There's No One Left At The Company?

Just in time for Christmas, Muze has laid off an undisclosed number of staffers from its Seattle office. John Cook of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer apparently got a tip that 75% of the Seattle contingent was let go, but the new VP of marketing, Jeff Ho, disputes this:

"It is not that big of a cut," said Ho, who declined to disclose the number of employees at the company....Ho said the company is "right sizing" the digital media delivery group, which is based in Seattle.

Ho added (rather ominously) that in terms of severance packages, the laid-off employees were "taken care of". When Muze laid me off (at Thanksgiving of last year), I was taken care of, too - with a whole two weeks' severance.

Predicting that Muze strips the company of its assets and sells them off, and folds like a Japanese fan.

Institute for Future of the Book gets genius grant

Bob Stein's Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) has received a $400,000 MacArthur Grant (the "genius grants"). Stein tells Library Journal's Academic Newswire:

[The grant] will facilitate the completion of the long-awaited Sophie, a set of digital authoring tools. Stein told the LJ Academic Newswire that Sophie 1.0 could see a release as early as February '08. The grant continues the MacArthur Foundation's support of if:book. MacArthur helped found the institute with a 2004, $500,000 grant to its parent institution, the University of Southern California, Annenberg Center for Communication.

Sophie is designed to enable people to create "robust, elegant rich-media, networked" documents. "We have word processors, video, audio and photo editors but no viable options for assembling the parts into a complex whole except tools like Flash which are expensive, hard to use, and often create documents with closed proprietary file formats," notes a Sophie product description. "Sophie promises to open up the world of multimedia authoring to a wide range of creative people."

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!).