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Mountains & Plains ABA

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be at the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association’s Spring Meeting in Austin, TX. I’ll be giving a fun talk on Web 2.0 marketing for booksellers – how to promote not just their great new books, but the stores themselves: the events they stage, the community they bring, their own personalities.

More information is here.

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Digital Downloads – a nest of vipers

BusinessWeek brilliantly illustrates the problems that digitally-downloaded movies pose in the consumer market…by using the book industry as an example:

Imagine a bookstore that sells only works published by Random House. If you want a HarperCollins title, you have to go to the store down the street. In this world, you’re permitted to read Penguin books either on the train or lying in bed, but Vintage books can only be read on the couch. It’s absurd—but no more so than the world of video downloads as they exist today.

I wasn’t aware of ALL the restrictions regarding downloadable movies – they are utterly ridiculous, depending on the vendor (or your operating system) – and BusinessWeek is utterly right…with all this chaos and shackling, it’s no wonder the market’s been slow to catch on.

The beauty of a physical product is that it can be shared with anyone. Once I’ve finished a newspaper, I can leave it on the subway seat for the next rider…who doesn’t have to pay. Once I’ve finished "Memoirs of a Geisha", I can give it to my 13-year-old daughter. Once I’ve finished listening to a Stevie Wonder CD, I can loan it to my 8-year-old who is studying "Sir Duke" in her music class. In the digital world, I can’t do any of this – the "pass along" market doesn’t exist. I can’t lend an ebook version of a book to my 13-year-old for her laptop. I can’t give a song to my 8-year-old for her Nano.

And why? Because the content provider sees no profit in the "pass along" market. No transaction, no market. (Publishers have, for years, gotten a bit huffy about the used-book business for the same reason – why shouldn’t they be participating in the sale of one of their books, even downstream?)

By untying content from its media (the physical book, the CD, the DVD), content providers are shackling it to something else…the machine it gets played on. And that’s a much more limiting, much less profitable proposition.

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Borders and B&N – back in the ring

The Motley Fool yesterday had a great analysis of the problems plaguing both Borders and B&N – and why the competition between the two has heated up. B&N’s main issue, financially, is its membership program – it’s costly to the bookseller and the rewards for the coupons and discounts it ramped up in the fall of 2006 have yet to be recouped.

Borders, meanwhile, finds itself overextended internationally and with its Waldenbooks chain. By shuttering its overseas stores and Waldenbooks, it can focus on redesigning its US stores and enhancing its logistics/distribution efforts. However, if B&N is engaging Borders in a price war, Borders is going to have less money to fund these projects.

It’s been a while since superstores have been exciting. Let the games begin.

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Ebooks First

Harper continues to innovate: TeleRead reports that eroticist Delilah Devlin will be publishing 3 novels with HarperCollins…and they will be released in ebook format prior to print. Presumably, this amounts to a cheaper option for Harper – they can see how Devlin’s work does in an ebook trial, and then print hard copies if the situation warrants.

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Books on YouTube

Harper Perennial’s "The Average American Male" turned out to be too controversial for the traditional media outlets to review. Even Penthouse called the book "appalling", though it printed an excerpt. So instead, Harper created 3 videos which it ran on YouTube. Says the Wall Street Journal:

[F]or titles like "The Average American Male," targeted at young men, Internet video can be a better marketing vehicle than traditional media outlets.

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More on Muze CEO

Muze made the formal announcement this morning: Janice Anderson, former CEO of Onyx Software, is now CEO of Muze. Bill Stensrud, interim CEO, will remain Chairman and be focused on finding strategic partners for Muze.

Anderson was also at Lucent and AT&T, prior to Onyx. The full press release is here.

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POD for everyone!

Teleread had an interesting story yesterday on the new $200 printer that prints 360 pages per minute.

[C]onsider ordinary people being able to print out best-sellers for instant reading on paper—maybe bound, maybe not.

The accompanying photo shows a Ugandan boy holding up a POD book. Yeah, the possibilities are mind-blowing.

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Brooklyn Public Library to compete with Netflix

Brooklyn Public Library announced recently that it is considering adding DVDs and videos to its books-by-mail service…and opening that service up to everyone. Right now, books-by-mail is only available to the elderly and shut-ins. But getting your books and movies shipped to you in prepaid envelopes that you could use to return them…eliminates fines and keeps materials in circulation. Awesome!!!

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Libraries still not getting Swimsuit Edition

Library Journal reports that libraries are still not getting their Swimsuit Edition from Sports Illustrated.

On the SerialST electronic discussion list this week, librarians complained that the issue has yet to be delivered and that the process for getting it delivered seems to be as confused as the initial policy decision not to send it.

Apparently Sports Illustrated’s giving all manner of confused messages to libraries – each library seems to be getting a different message, sometimes a different one every time they contact Sports Illustrated.

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Kluwer sold

Wolters Kluwer will be selling its education unit to Bridgepoint Capital, a European private equity firm. Apparently on Monday everybody knew this but me.

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