O'Reilly is holding a one-day TOC at Frankfurt Book Fair and when I found out (Peter Brantley is going!), I about keeled over. This is the most delicious combo since raspberries and Shiraz. Since spaetzle and veal. Since pasta and cream sauce.

More info is here. Hammering Man wants you to go.

Tor debuted a new store today which is NOT JUST TOR-FORGE BOOKS! They are selling SF from OTHER PUBLISHERS! This is seditious stuff, and I love seditious stuff. Kudos to Tor for finally getting it, and to their partners for getting it too.

That said, it's not just a store. You can read short stories. There's a gallery of SF art (squeeeeeeeeeeeee!)! And...in the most intelligent stroke I've ever seen from any big publisher...there's a community. Because as we know, genre fans LOVE TO TALK ABOUT THEIR GENRE. And everything else. To each other.

Amen. Hallelujah. Publishing is saved.

Roundups abound, but I wanted to offer my own curated list of links that, I think, capture BEA09 best:

• Booksquare - Kassia's always brilliant, and this is no exception
• Peter Brantley - on Google
• Richard Nash - on publishing's inability to grapple with reality
• Russ Marshalek - liveblogging BEA, Days 1-4
  

I was a little concerned on Friday morning; it did not seem that crowded at Javits. I did my walkabout, wondering where everybody was. Over the course of the day, the place gradually filled up and by Saturday things were hopping.

Hopping being a relative term. A number of publishers declined to have booths altogether - Random House held a series of meetings in the basement of Javits - and other booths were shadows of their former selves. I didn't see much in the way of tchotchkes - giveaways came in the form of not-quite-canvas bags. As for crazy characters - a smattering of Storm Troopers, a pirate, and a couple of babes in bikinis. Not so outrageous.

Some increases: the number of self-published authors with a booth - usually promoting a single title. I don't know who advised this, but it doesn't seem like a brilliant way to spend money. There was an entire "Writers Row" - this was not well-attended and I really felt that these authors were not getting their money's worth out of the show. (More on that on my Authorweb blog.)

The publishing world decided to throw a bone to innovation by offering up a blogger space - which was depressing, poorly-lit, and (until Sunday) without any internet connectivity. This was in the same row as the booths for the various ebook readers and their suppliers - tiny booths, tucked away behind the Borders booth. It was hard not to regard this area as being for those that the industry wished would just go away so everything could go back to the way it had always been.

Highlights: Richard Nash gave a brilliant talk on the direction publishing is going. He's got a new venture called Round Table - a new model altogether that invites the community into the writing of a book. Brian O'Leary presented his findings to date on his piracy project - and a call for more participation by publishers so his data will be more robust. Mike Shatzkin called for more focus on community and "going vertical". Bowker presented some very compelling data from its PubTrack Consumer market research. Tina Brown's CEO Roundtable was extremely well-attended - although she lost her voice early on and had to be replaced by her husand, Sir Harold Evans. Michael Cader moderated a session on Google Book Search that proved a bit controversial (he covers that in Publishers Lunch). Sessions with Chris Brogan and Chris Anderson generated a lot of buzz.

Another couple of highlights: Firebrand's "blogger signing" events, with prominent book bloggers signing trading cards or printouts of their blog's homepage. And of course the BEA Tweetup (#beatweetup) arranged almost entirely on Twitter. 

Sunday morning at BEA saw Brian O'Leary, David Marlin, and myself giving a roundtable sponsored by Metacomet on the impact of the Google Books project on midsized publishers. Brian's posted the slides here.

There were two sessions, which we ran in similar fashion. First Brian went over the Google Settlement and the Book Rights Registry. He outlined how the settlement will work - and the role of ad revenue in the agreement. He brought up the issue of POD - Google may decide to run a print on demand business for out-of-print titles. And he emphasized that mid-sized publishers will find their midlist titles potentially "squeezed" by additional sales from the long tail. As with any project where old content is coming back onto the market, there are loads of rights issues which are not easily resolved.

Many contracts were drawn up with absolutely no thought giving to digital content distribution - because it hadn't been invented yet. And many old contracts are stored in boxes in storage facilities offsite - not digitized, and not readily available. In many cases, the rights-holders have disappeared - are deceased, have moved and left no forwarding contact information, or are otherwise unavailable for negotiation. So publishers are faced with a monstrous rights rathole.

Both Brian and I emphasized that an agile content workflow would be able to help publishers grapple with a lot of these issues going forward. Bundling metadata with content means that rights information is always available. Chunking and tagging your content means you can determine downstream uses for it - such as licensing or creating new products - that Google will be able to help users discover and buy. And when you're negotiating your contracts, it's important to include language that covers you for these downstream uses - increasingly, you're not always going to know what those uses will be, but you want to be able to exploit them without having to go back to the agent or author every single time. 

It was a great session, with a lot of back-and-forth. If you were there, please comment below on your impressions; if you were not there and you have questions that Brian's slides don't answer, leave your questions in the comments and we'll crowd-source the answers!

Twitter is a-twitter with BEA prep - for a recession year, this show is getting quite a bit of attention!It will be a smaller convention than even the LA show last year (where attendance was down). But the conference sessions promise to be wonderful and timely. Some highlights:

Thursday

• 9:30-10:30 - Brian O'Leary talks about the piracy project he's doing with O'Reilly Media.
• 10:30-11:30 - James Howitt runs through some pretty incredible statistics being gathered through Bowker's PubTrack Consumer program.
• 11:00-12:00 - Mike Shatzkin, noted futurist, talks about the rise of community and how publishers can sell their books in a community-centric world.
• 12:30-1:30 - Michael Smith of IDPF moderates a panel on distributing digital books and audio.
• 2:00-3:00 - Brian O'Leary, Mike Shatzkin and I talk about XML for editors.
• 2:30-3:30 - Richard Nash discusses the new curation in "The Concierge and the Bouncer".

Friday

• 9:30-10:30 - Michael Healy discusses POD for Dummies.
• 9:30-10:30 - Google Book Search talks about libraries.
• 10:30-11:30 - CreateSpace talks about self-publishing and Amazon.
• 3:30-4:30 - BISG presents Book Industry Trends 2009
• 3:45-5:00 - Alternative Sources of Income for Authors in a Digital World 

Saturday

• 9:30-10:30 - Librarian as Digital Diva
• 10:30-11:30 - Uncovering the Potential of Library Sales
• 11:00-12:00 - Book Reviews 2010: What Will They Look Like?
• 2:00-3:00 - Book Bloggers: Today's Buzz Builders (pretty much answers the 11:00 question, doesn't it?)
• 3:30-4:30 - GBS Partner Program

Sunday

• 9:00-10:00 - Metacomet Roundtable on Rights, Google, and "Chunking"
• 11:00-12:00 -  Metacomet Roundtable on Rights, Google, and "Chunking"

Yesterday I received a very helpful email from someone at Amazon named Zoz, informing me of their new self-service blog distribution platform for the Kindle.

Amazon already distributes blogs using Newstex's Blogs on Demand service (full disclosure: I consulted to Newstex for over a year, helping them develop News on Demand and Blogs on Demand). And I've written on the effectiveness of that on David Wilk's Livewires blog.

What I've found in running Bloggapedia for nearly four years now (OMG, it's really been that long) is that when distributing blog content, human intervention is everything. To state the obvious, blogs can be ephemeral things. People start them, and abandon them. There are countless spam blogs, mirrors of existing blogs. When blogs are good, they're fantastic - some of my favorites are The Awl, Teleread, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, Persona non Data, Peter Brantley's blog - but those are the cream of the crop. At the next level you have personal blogs, which are also great but have a very limited audience. And at the bottom level you've got porn, blogs that make no sense, and hateful blogs.

Curation is crucial for content distribution. Not providing that service for your customers is just baffling.

The new Kindle is getting a lot of attention for its ability to display newspapers better than its predecessors, and it's obvious that this gizmo is being aimed at newspaper readers because they're offering discounts on metro dailies for those who don't live in the region those dailies are published. There are all kinds of reasons why tying the Kindle DX to newspapers was a botch on the part of the NYTimes, et al, but I don't come out of that industry and I won't address those.

The new Kindle is also being marketed as a balm to the textbook industry. And that's where I call shenanigans.

The textbook business is suffering from all kinds of problems right now. Prices of new textbooks are too high, and even Congress has had to step in on the issue. Because the prices are so high, there's an enormous aftermarket for used textbooks - of which the publishers don't see a penny. Which only encourages them to put out new editions frequently, and charge lots of money for them.

Ebooks have been viewed as a solution to this vicious circle of pricing. The cost of distributing ebooks is far, far less than distributing print books - shipping all that paper around the country, and storing it in warehouses, is expensive. Cutting out that cost, and passing on some of the savings to the end user while pocketing the rest, seems to be a good compromise.

But users have more expectations of ebooks than they do of print books. Consequently, new e-textbooks have Flash animations, embedded videos - there are audio downloads for language textbooks (replacing the traditional language lab), and activities, online tests, and other features that print books cannot possibly contain. These cost money to develop. So the price of e-textbooks is not going to drop as significantly as people hope.

Purely on a level of cost, then, the Kindle DX is a bad idea. It's $489. That's more than some laptops, which are also a requirement for college. 

Let's look at student behavior as well. They're on their computers practically all their waking hours. They're IMing and Facebooking and Twittering in class - as part of the learning experience, as a way of communicating with fellow students. They're in front of those screens 24/7. Adding a new device - which does not have the capacity to network with others - is a little unconsidered.

Sure, the Kindle DX is lighter than 3 or 4 textbooks - it's lighter than one! But students are already hauling their laptops around - if they can have their textbooks ON their laptops, they don't need another device at all!

And let's look at the capabilities of the DX versus a laptop. The Kindle does not support animation. It does not support embedded video. It does not support taking quizzes and doing learning activities. All the recent developments in e-textbooks are wholly unsupported by the Kindle.

I know that several textbook publishers are working with Amazon to distribute their textbooks this way. But I have to wonder who will be buying these devices and how they will be used in college settings. Princeton is doing a pilot, as are Reed and a few other colleges. I'm going to be following that very closely.

I wanted to turn folks on to a post by Bob Martinengo on Accessible Publishing. An excerpt:

[A]s the book form intersects with digital technology, surprisingly complex structures are being revealed, which, rather than point out the limitations of ‘old-fashioned print’, actually illustrate the boundaries of digital interfaces. In other words, the presumed simplicity of the book form has masked the truly complex information structures it can support.

 

Not usually my bailiwick, but my bro is one of Sun's best chip designers, so we've been swapping thoughts all morning.

Sun/Oracle Media Kit - Bro says the "highlights" are particularly good, so I checked them out (even though it's a PDF - grrr), and he's right.

NY Times - which is how I found out and accidentally sprung it on poor bro who hadn't gotten the memo yet....

Okay, so no libraries can change out their SPARC stations for 10 years because...I want little bro to keep working.

Pam Samuelson has a great article on the O'Reilly blog - thanks to Colleen Lindsay for tweeting it - on the Google Book Search settlement. It's very thoughtful and well-articulated, and the comments are also well worth reading. She also links to some slides from a presentation she gave on the subject.

She's especially cogent on the subject of orphan works:

An estimated 70 per cent of the books in the Book Search repository are in-copyright, but out of print. Most of them are, for all practical purposes, “orphan works,” that is, works for which it is virtually impossible to locate the appropriate rights holders to ask for permission to digitize them.

A broad consensus exists about the desirability of making orphan works more widely available. Yet, without a safe harbor against possible infringement lawsuits, digitization projects pose significant copyright risks. Congress is considering legislation to lessen the risks of using orphan works, but it has yet to pass.

The proposed Book Search settlement agreement will solve the orphan works problem for books—at least for Google. Under this agreement, which must be approved by a federal court judge to become final, Google would get, among other things, a license to display up to 20 per cent of the contents of in-copyright out-of-print books, to run ads alongside these displays, and to sell access to the full texts of these books to institutional subscribers and to individual purchasers.

Usually I roll my eyes at future-of-books/future-of-reading articles. But this guy knows what he's talking about.

Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We'll have to see.

This correlates directly to what we found during our research on the StartwithXML Project.  The problem? There are no standardized descriptive tags right now. There are tags to describe entire books, but not describe parts of books.

At every turn in the article, I expected to start with the eye-rolling. But I never did. 

Oh, and also?

This.

(Thanks to Evan Schnittman.)

This is a re-post, in a way - I posted to Peter Brantley's Read 2.0 listserv in response to Clay Shirkey's piece and Mary Hodder's other piece, and was urged to post publicly. 

I've done so much taxonomy work, both for Muze and BN.com - and my colleagues and I have all agonized over the political decisions we've had to make because in a taxonomy you have to articulate concepts and arrange them. Like staying-awake-at-night agonizing, because these articulations and arrangements either bring books to light or tuck them away where few can find them, depending. (Richard Nash also makes a great point up this same alley.)

And it's worth getting upset about. What happened at Amazon is the result of dozens of small decisions about how to name things and the structure of those names - whether the decisions were made by people at Amazon or they were importing other companies' taxonomies (probably both) or using semantics to create algorithms. Shirky is right in that it probably wasn't a person or group of people deciding that they didn't like gay people that day. But (as Richard points out) it was the result of heteronormative thinking creating search rules that ultimately resulted in...#amazonfail.

What taxonomizing teaches you is that no worldview is neutral, and the best you can hope for is to keep trying to reach in that direction. Detangling what happened at Amazon is compounded by the fact that they aren't talking to anyone, but it appears to be a compilation of complacent taxonomizing, linking certain concepts to the theme "adult", imposing some sort of filter on the "adult" titles (without realizing what "adult" meant in terms of the terms that linked to it) in a misguided effort to make explicit books less visible, not fully investigating the problem when it first came to Amazon's attention (but dismissing it as a "policy" decision, which is most likely never was in the first place), and now not really responding effectively. Probably because those in charge of responding really have no idea how it happened.
 

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (via Lilith Saint Crow's blog) has a statement from Amazon regarding the fiasco that reared its ugly head this weekend:

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

It has been misreported that the issue was limited to Gay & Lesbian themed titles – in fact, it impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories such as Health, Mind & Body, Reproductive & Sexual Medicine, and Erotica. This problem impacted books not just in the United States but globally. It affected not just sales rank but also had the effect of removing the books from Amazon's main product search.

Many books have now been fixed and we're in the process of fixing the remainder as quickly as possible, and we intend to implement new measures to make this kind of accident less likely to occur in the future.

Authors everywhere appear to be awaiting Amazon's apology.

Okay, a flurry of links to digest, so I'll do the best I can:

• Speculation that it's a hacker using Amazon's metadata against it here.
• Daily Kos on the "New Morality For Your Protection".
• Neil Gaiman's take on #amazonfail. 
• The Smart Bitches have a lot to say here.
• Speculation that it wasn't a hacker after all.
• Speculation that it's the French.
• Dear Author gets under the hood of the metadata and tries to figure out exactly how it could have happened.
• An anonymous coder from inside Amazon apparently has this to offer.
• Does #amazonfail mean that Amazon's now too big for its britches?
  
• And a summary of the whole hoo-ha is here.

There'll be a lot more about this in The Big Picture on Wednesday, but for now I wanted to give a link roundup to folks who've been covering Amazon's whacked-out metadata issue. Apparently books classified as "adult" - many of which are gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender titles which are not explicit, making it appear that Amazon has an anti-gay bias - are not appearing in search results. In addition to it being a GLBT issue, it's also a women's sexuality issue, as many of the books not appearing are erotica titles aimed at women. Clearly someone at Amazon made a decision not to display "adult" titles, and the criteria for what constitutes "adult" titles is messed up.

Links!

• This first erupted on Twitter.
• But it really began with this blog post from Mark Probst.
• Gawker calls out Amazon for calling this a "glitch".
• Ron Hogan at Galleycat used to be the GLBT editor at Amazon and offers an interesting perspective.
• Publishers Weekly gives more or less objective coverage.
• Foreign Policy offers a great view on activism.
  

Frantically being re-tweeted through the Twitter grapevine is a story via Teleread, originally from MobileReads - a Kindle user was banned from Amazon as a customer. He had "returned too many items for refunds" - three defective electronic products, to be exact. Nothing to do with the Kindle.

But as an Amazon customer, his Kindle account was killed too. In other words, when he was banned from Amazon, he was also banned from his Kindle library, which is stored on Amazon's servers. A library he paid for. 

Turns out he didn't pay for the library - he paid for access to the library.

Yes, you heard me right. Angela Bole is back at BISG, working with Karen Forster, Sara Raffel, and Michael Healy. Those who've been in BISG for a while know that this means all kinds of good things - Angela essentially ran BISG while the organization searched for a new executive director; she is deeply aware of all the issues in the book supply chain and it's a very good thing for our business that she has come home again. Just try leaving again, Angela! We will hunt you down and bring you back!