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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Glenn Rogers leaving Audible

Glenn Rogers, COO of Audible and an incredible, reasonable, smart, kind, awesome, all-around-good-guy-mensch, is leaving the company to go back to consulting. I worked with Glenn when I was consulting at Audible and he is fantastic.

Good luck, Glenn!

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).

Warner Music to sell DRM-free through Amazon

Warner's the latest label to lose the DRM entanglements on its music, as Amazon attempts to compete with Apple by supplying Josh Groban tracks. However, the New York Times reports that Warner's deal with Amazon is not exclusive and they are negotiating with Apple to sell DRM-free music there as well.

As a Tastebook Customer

I fell for Tastebook. I uploaded all my recipes. I organized them into breads/brunch dishes, appetizers, fish, poultry, meat, pasta/rice/grains, soups and salads, desserts, and of course the ever-necessary "other stuff". I chose a cover image, a title, and placed the order: three copies shipped to me, three to my brother (Uncle Pete, of the House of Technological Wonders).

A week later, the order had weirdly cancelled itself. I placed a re-order. Suddenly, the order doubled itself. I called the helpdesk. They'd mistakenly cancelled the order, then un-did it themselves, then my re-order doubled the order. They cancelled the second order.

Two weeks later, Uncle Pete received six cookbooks and had not the foggiest idea what that was about.

Three weeks later, in several deliveries, I received six cookbooks. My account was only charged for one order.

The books themselves were gorgeous.  The exact cover I'd selected. Delectable illustrations. Awesome layout. Nice paper stock, tab dividers between sections. Inside, however, were 12 pages of advertisements (masquerading as recipes from Bertolli olive oil), which I removed from each book.

Would I do it again? Probably. As a gift item to friends and family. Would I use Tastebook as a POD? No. At $35/pop, it's tough to recoup cost plus profit. But as a vanity project, a gift of my kitchen to my friends and Uncle Pete, it's a great idea. 

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.

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.

Wal-Mart to record labels: Quit with the DRM already