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.

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.

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).

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. 

NYCIP this weekend

The New York Center for Independent Publishing's annual fair is on for this weekend at 20 W. 44th Street. Speakers/readers include Katha Pollitt, Ian MacKaye, and Amiri Baraka. Topics covered will be pitching your book, "authorpreneurship", and issues in translation, as well as an erotica workshop (oh boy!).

Pat Schroeder of AAP will also give a keynote address.

Juicy Juicy Juicy

The wires are abuzz with Judith Regan, who has little to do with what we cover. Everything's more or less drowned out by the shocking accounts of how she was asked to withhold information from federal investigators about her affair with Bernie Kerik, in a Murdochian scheme to pump up Giuliani's credibility to take the Republican Party nomination. In addition to Roger Ailes, Bill O'Reilly, all of Fox News, Jane Friedman, and a host of others, Sara Nelson of PW is also implicated, along with the writer Michael Wolff. She's not going down alone, people.

Link roundup: 

Mediabistro

NYTimes

PW

The Book Standard 

 

BISG Annual Meeting presentations online

BISG has posted the presentations of its annual meeting online. Some very cool observations were made by Michael Holdsworth, formerly of Cambridge Univ. Press and now an independent consultant, Richard Stark of B&N, and Ian Singer of Bowker. Topics covered were identifying digital material (ISBNs? DOIs? ISTCs?), the new data certification program, and GDSN.

More Lessing

Normally we keep this blog to issues of technology in the book world, but today we are over the moon about Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize. After decades of defending why we love her work, it feels so great to be validated. Yes, she can be a bit heavyhanded at times, and yes, her Campos in Argos series was probably not the most successful sci-fi ever written...but she articulates truths like nobody else. Martha Quest, The Golden Notebook, The Fifth Child, and The Diaries of Jane Sommers (as well as the first volume of her autobiography) are...probably the strongest depictions of the internal lives of women we've ever read. And to say that these depictions - to say that the internal lives of women - merit a Nobel is just...well, it's about freakin' time.

Istanbul or Constantinople?

Holtzbrinck is now Macmillan USA. You know, neither the Ivy League nor the Seven Sisters change their names this frequently - the Big Seven publishing houses are confusing the hell out of everybody. Stop it.

Frankfurt Vibe

Folks, the pre-Frankfurt drumbeat is SOOO digital. Monsters and Critics has a big article on how the book industry is afraid of 0s and 1s. Probably the most fabulous paragraph:

Some European libraries have portrayed the bid to digitize 500 years of books and newspapers as an imperialist plot, because the big players such as Google are based in the United States.

Yes! It IS an imperialist plot! (Gawd, wouldn't that be more intriguing than what it actually is, which is a FREAKIN' MESS.)

But the best news is at the bottom of the article:

The New York Times has reported that Amazon is to launch in October an e-book reader brand-named the Kindle and priced above 400 dollars. The most likely venue: the Frankfurt Book Fair.

I keep forgetting about that October launch. 

Print vs audio books

So I downloaded Stephen Colbert's book - I haven't started listening to it yet. But I saw the review in the Times and was glad I'd chosen to listen rather than read.

Meanwhile, over at the Huffington Post, Michael Giltz uses the Colbert/Audible thing as a jumping-off point to talk about One More Thing That's Wrong With Publishing:

One of the suits says the audio book is so creative and different that, "I would think that you would buy the book and the audio because they are really different." In other words, he expects fans of Colbert to buy the hardcover book for $27, then buy the audio book for about $16 and while you're at it, when a downloadable version becomes available for your Sony Reader or computer or Blackberry, maybe you'd be willing to pay another $25 or so for that version. He's not alone. Even when the audio book isn't somewhat different from the hardcover, they expect fans of a book to buy it twice.

Imagine if the music industry demanded you buy one copy of your album for playing on your home stereo, another for your car, another for your iPod and so on. You wouldn't do it, would you? But the book industry - which publishes more than 100,000 titles a year - thinks it's perfectly reasonable to expect you to do it for books. 

I don't think anyone expects that readers are generally going to pursue both the audio and the print book, AND the ebook - people consume their media in different ways. But later Giltz goes on to talk about bundling products - buy the hardcover and get the audio or the ebook for free - which makes eminent sense. Seth Godin was talking about that at last year's Google Unbound conference. I think that's only a matter of time. Publishers are very leery about cannibalizing book sales via other media. But they are coming around, gradually.

What is a book, anyway?

Did you know this? I didn't know this. In order to qualify for an ISBN (and therefore be considered a "book"), your product has to have 48 pages or more.

I wonder, with the advent of ebooks and the shortening of the attention span, if this will hold true over time. 

POD Price Comparison

If you're looking to self-publish, Writer's Weekly now has a handy-dandy guide to POD publishers. Purely on the basis of price, they recommend Booklocker.com as the best deal - AuthorHouse falls at the bottom of the list.