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.

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 digitised works from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and 2,000 from about 50 publishers, some of whom received subsidies for the purpose. The BNF plans to add another 40,000 books imminently, with those copyrighted books supplied by publishers expected to quickly exceed 10,000.

Because why use something already in existence when you can reinvent your very own French wheel?

Google Book Search Releases API

Web developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.

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."

Digital gurus frighten publishers, leave them twitching in anxiety

Saying that the industry as a whole is "in denial", Collingridge and other speakers described the crucial importance of online marketing, social networking, and employee empowerment.

Then, presumably, they all went out to dinner while publishers were left gnawing their knuckles in fear.

BISG survey on experimentation and innovation in publishing

BISG, in conjunction with the IdeaLogical Company, is running an online survey, trying to assess whether companies are investing R&D dollars in new strategies, whether all within a company are expected to innovate or whether it's select teams of people who are tasked with that, etc. The survey opens on Thursday morning and can be found here.

It's an awesome idea and I think the findings will be very instructive.

Suzanna Ellison leaving McGraw-Hill

Suzanna Ellison, sponsoring editor of Psychology textbooks at McGraw-Hill, has announced that she is leaving MH to work in market development at Wiley. She will be at McGraw until February 8th.

Amazon to buy Audible

For $300 million, Amazon will be acquiring Audible.com - Amazon issued the press release this morning at 7 a.m. This is on the heels of the departure of COO Glenn Rogers.

Damn the iPod, damnit!

My iPod blew on Friday night.

Neither Windows nor iTunes would recognize the damn thing. At first, iTunes was telling me I had a device called "hegsie" that had 1700 gigabytes of space, most of which was taken up by non-audio files. My iPod is very sensibly named "Laura's iPod", and I don't know who this ridiculous "hegsie" is coming in and imposing itself on my iTunes.

I rebooted, reinstalled, restored, did all the "R" things. And by Saturday afternoon, "hegsie" had disappeared entirely. But "Laura's iPod" did not come back.

Because I restored the iPod to its factory settings (following the instructions on the Apple website!), I consequently deleted all the files off it (though they are still on my computer).

So now I have a blank iPod, which my computer will not recognize. I can't load it with audiobooks and music and videos. My workouts at the gym are...uninspired. That happy place I get to on the elliptical machine? No soundtrack for it anymore.

The iPod is not making the sad face, but I am.

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."

Steve Jobs to Publishers: Drop Dead

The NY Times reports this about Steve Jobs's appearance at Macworld the other day:

Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Not a very nice thing for the brother of Mona Simpson to be saying.

Macbook Air vs Kindle?

Yesterday at MacWorld, Steve Jobs debuted the Air, a superslim laptop that weighs maybe 3 pounds. I've been saying this for a while, but I'll say it again - dedicated ebook readers will soon be outstripped by light/thin laptops that have far more functionality than the readers do. I think investing in standalone ebook readers, as opposed to multi-functional machines like iPhones and laptops, is needless. Reading's not enough - you want to be able to share what you're reading with people. And while the Air certainly has its problems, it's a sign of things to come - I'll take Jobs's design and know that he's going to fix storage and port problems rather than relying on Jeff Bezos to come up with a Kindle that can send email.

OCLC extends partnership with Blackstone Audio