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"Jason Epstein believes that publishers have been handed a golden opportunity. The agency model, he says, is really another form of the consortium he proposed a decade ago: 'Publishers will be selling digital books directly to the iPad. They are using the iPad as a kind of universal warehouse.' By doing so, they create opportunities to cut payroll and overhead costs. Epstein said that e-books could also restore editorial autonomy. 'When I went to work for Random House, ten editors ran it,' he said. 'We had a sales manager and sales reps. We had a bookkeeper and a publicist and a president. It was hugely successful. We didn’t need eighteen layers of executives. Digitization makes that possible again, and inevitable.'
~ Ken Auletta, The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of the book business. . Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business? (The New Yorker, 4-26-10) The old days.
"We proudly carried manuscripts everywhere.... Decades later, I discovered that my right arm was a half-inch longer than my left.
"But it was our office archaeology that I remember the most. There was a primitive chaos to it all — the hybrid scent of tobacco and mimeograph ink, and the sounds of ringing phones, of typewriters zipping along until the warning bell pinged near the end of a line, and of the clack-clack-clack of the return handle as the carriage reset."
"... And dictionaries, atlases and all manner of reference books were propped high over file cabinets.
~ Joni Evans, When Publishing Had Sights and Sounds (NY Times, 9-5-09) "People outside the publishing industry are often shocked to learn that bookstores don’t buy books, but take them on consignment; that publishers knowingly overprint to achieve economies of scale, that wholesalers intentionally overfill warehouses; and that retailers greedily overstock stores, knowing they can routinely return any excess inventory without paying. These bad business practices, widely accepted for years in the book world, are wasteful, environmentally hostile, and unfair to both readers and writers. Perhaps most egregious of all, they’re simply inefficient."
~ Danny O. Snow, Sr. Fellow, Society for New Communications Research, in a white paper/research brief: Publishing at the Tipping Point (PDF) "I am not at all excited about e-books. I believe they pose threats to profitability for most book publishers. Here are a few that face publishers who adopt e-books as their primary format.
"Weaker attraction for authors. The reason you make money as a publisher is that authors believe your participation adds value. Although editing and graphic design are important, the major area in which you add value involves your knowledge of, and access to, printing and distribution resources. If you’re publishing e-books, authors may decide they don’t need you.
"The process of converting a Microsoft Word document into a PDF file for download is much simpler (or at least, perceived to be much simpler) than the process of engaging the services of an offset printer and dealing with all those thousands of books that come off the press. If e-books are sold more than printed books, the publishers’ added value may seem irrelevant."
~ Bryan Rosner, from E-Books: Not So Fast! (Independent Book Publishers of America) "For a long time, I assumed publishing companies needed sales and marketing executives in generalist positions to focus the priorities of the house, but that's just more Kabuki. Books only the editor has read become bestsellers. Titles launched with a battalion of support go straight to the remainder bins. We all like to believe we are essential to a book's success, but the truth is, we are a marginal factor. The author, and the book, matter most, followed by the media, booksellers and readers. We're facilitators. The most important decisions we make are at the acquisition and positioning stages. That's where sales and marketing experience is most useful and why those executives should be assigned to specific titles at the outset.
"...authors usually write the best promotional copy (they're writers, after all), and they certainly know their readership best. Yet they are underutilized in the publishing process. Empower them. Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin's Three Cups of Tea, for example, has been sustained by a dynamic author and a multi-year speaking tour, and the hit Twilight series has greatly benefited from Stephenie Meyer's extensive online promotional efforts. At Hachette, I've had a peripheral view of the Twilight phenomenon. It began with an astute, passionate editor and publisher named Megan Tingley, who read the manuscript on an airplane, and made a pre-emptive three-book deal. The readership built gradually, and with the help of much inventive in-house marketing. But everyone within Hachette points to the author as the driving factor in the books' success."
~Jonathan Karp, 12 Steps to Better Book Publishing (PW 4-20-09)
"In recent years...some [publishing] houses changed the rules about editing. I have been told that now, after an editor signs up her book for the house, she is told not to worry about editing. What she must do is help market the book. 'Don't worry,' they tell her, 'we'll get a good freelancer to edit your book.' Except that the author then loses something vital--the inspiration of the discovering editor, ready to try to make the work better. Yet these young ones who sought the calling are still helping to keep book publishing afloat, helping to keep the word alive."
~Al Silverman, author of The Time of their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors, in an interview with Isabel Howe, in the Authors Guild Bulletin
What does this passage mean? Why is it on this page? (See link to answer below.)
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You don't have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.
~ Les Brown
Contemporary Latin American Short Stories, ed. Pat McNees
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E-mail Pat (pat at patmcnees dot com)
Writers on Writing(complete archive of the NY Times series, writers exploring literary themes. Requires free membership.)
Letters of Note (fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos--that you were never expected to see)
Aha Moments (from the brilliant Mutual of Omaha campaign to record people's stories about moments of clarity, defining moments when they gained the wisdom to change their life)
TED: Ideas worth sharing Riveting talks by remarkable people, free to the world
Freelance National Anthem (Bill Dyszel, 4 minutes)
KeepMeOut (addicted to a website? bookmark this page and it will remind you to get back to work!)
Today's Front Pages (check out Newseum's U.S. map -- move your cursor across the map and see the front pages change)
Online Education Database150 resources to help you write better, faster, or more persuasively
Help a reporter out (HARO)(useful for reporters and for sources)
Paris Review "Writers at Work" Interviews (selections from 1953 on, a gift to the world, and with a single click you can view a manuscript page with the writer's edits)
The Onion (if the news is making you sick, try this approach)
Truth-o-meter (St. Petersburg Times, www.politifact.com)(St. Pete Times on whether, and how much, various notable people are telling the truth)
Fact Check (Annenberg sorts political truths from half-truths)
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You will find many "how-to" links under Self-Publishing.
"Since I joined the publishing business as an editorial assistant in 1951, I have been obsessed with the preservation and distribution of backlist, for I understood from the beginning two important truths about our business: the first is that publishing is not really a business at all, at least not a very good business. If it's money that you want to make, go into a real business and take your chances. The second truth is that publishing is a vocation, a secular priesthood, for publishers are caretakers of our collective memory, indispensable servants to those other caretakers, poets, storytellers, librarians, teachers and scholars. The cultivation of backlist is not only our business but our moral responsibility."
~Jason Epstein, "Backlist Maestro: Mr. Epstein's Dream Machine," an excellent article about the changing nature of publishing and the ideal possibilities of print-on-demand publishing, in the Winter 2009 Authors Guild Bulletin, excerpted from a speech given at the 2008 Hong Kong Book Fair. Among other things, Epstein launched the first "trade paperback" line, Anchor Books, at Doubleday--when he'd been working in publishing only six months.
ABookInside.blogspot.com. How to Write and Publish a Book. Author Carol Denbow on how to write a fiction, nonfiction book or novel; find a publisher or publishing option; and market your book for free. Tips and expert advice.
Lynn Chu: Agent Unplugged, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett's informative interview with this principal of Writers' Representatives LLC, appears in the public part of the January 2010 issue of ASJA Monthly (the confidential section goes to members only). This is as helpful an analysis of what authors should know about their rights in the new electronic world as you are likely to read. It starts on pp. 6-7 of this PDF file,then jumps to p. 13. Print those pages out and highlight them! Her most valuable comments are on book publishers trying to becoming licensing agents for e-rights while taking a print publishers' share of income and without doing what a licensing agent ought to do, and since authors will very quickly learn how much they can do without the publishers, they are playing a dangerous game. Authors: there IS no standard on e-publishing terms, so do your homework. At a minimum, read this article.
BEA: Why Small Publishing Will Save the World. Literary agent Janet Reid reports from Book Expo about the coming artistic revolution. She doesn't know what will turn things around--maybe an enhanced e-book--but it won't come from traditional book publishing, which is not set up to invent things. Writes Anthony, in Comments, "Essentially, what it boils down to is decentralization and just-in-time (JIT) content models based on nimble movers and shakers that can turn on a dime."
Blads ("book layout and design") are booklet-sized previews of books, printed samples from a book to help sell it in advance of publication--showing basic publication information, cover artwork, sample pages showing layout and images.
Bob Miller: The Coming Editorial Crisis. HarperCollins chief Bob Miller tells Media Bistro about economic variables shaping publishing industry and prospects of "more work for fewer people" ahead, with YouTube video of his comments.
Book design: a primer. Dick Margulis has some useful material on his website about book design. Go here to read a sequence of clear, brief explanations of typography, the architecture of the page--especially the chapter opening, the color of the paper and ink, and font choice and spacing.
Book Publishing 3.0, a video of Richard Eoin Nash's provocative half-hour talk on the future of book publishing. Nash's start-up, Cursor, is "a portfolio of niche social publishing communities, one of which will be called Red Lemonade." Combine Kinko's (which democratized copying) with Netflix (which brings in "if you liked this, you may also like this") and you go from "The 20th century was about sorting supply" to "the 21st century will be about sorting demand" and Oprah's book club. "The end is connection." He also speaks on Surrounding the Audience: Cursor and the Social Publishing Community, or, Apres Le Blockbuster, Le Niche.
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Children's Books by Harold D. Underdown, 3rd edition--as reviewers put it, a cheatsheet to the very specialized separate world of children's and adolescents' book publishing
Digital Self-Publishing Shakes Up Traditional Book Industry by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg (WSJ.com 6-3-10),or 'Vanity' Publishing Goes Digital. Among other points made in this important article: "The new formula makes digital self-publishing more lucrative for authors. 'Some people will be tempted by the 70% royalty at Amazon,' Mr. Nash says. "If they already have a loyal fan base, will they want 70% of $100,000 or 15% of $200,000 for a hardcover?"
Does Free Pay? Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, thinks you should consider giving your book away. Jordan E. Rosenfeld on why he thinks so. (Writer's Digest, 11-3-08)
The eBook Wars: The Price Battle (1). Rich Aden, on his An American Editor blog, writes about what happens to the quality of books when accountants call for outsourcing at prices so low that a well-edited book is unlikely.
Losing the Secondary Business Can Kill You (Mike Shatzkin, 5-23-10, on the changing value chain: e.g., how in the past someone with money got "self-published" through a traditional publisher; changing role of independent bookstore)
Metadata, about:
• Metadata Demystified: A Guide for Publishers (PDF, Amy Brand, Frank Daly, Barbara Meyers, Niso Press)
• Publishers Take Seat at Metadata Table with Giant Chair (Jennifer Zaino, Semantic Web, 3-1-10).
• Metadata is the new most important thing to know about (Mike Shatzkin, IdeaLogical, 6-8-10)
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future. Jason Epstein, NY Rev of Books, 3-11-2010, on "the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all--readers and nonreaders--depend."
Publishing Careers blog (An online "informational interview" for college students, new graduates, and career changers interested in knowing what a job in publishing is like and how they can get one)
A roadmap for the future: 6 suggestions for today’s publishers that many can’t follow (Mike Shatzkin, The Shatzkin Files 6-13-10). Shatzkin thinks ahead for the rest of us. In brief, he suggests that publishers have to change the way they do business, because digital delivery increases supply even more than it increases demand, so prices have to go down. So "getting from today (selling content) to tomorrow (selling audiences) depends on using today’s asset to build tomorrow’s." Doing this will require using "content as bait," monetizing "the eyeballs you own," not "the copyrights you own."
"Find multiple ways to engage your audience." Sell other people's e-books, not just your own. Serve your community. Readers don't care where the book comes from.
"...if you can appeal to a community, you have an opportunity to build a brand. Brands are shortcuts for consumers; they orient us as to what to expect in products or services, including social cred, quality, and price."
Reusable cover art. Sarah Johnson's site showing how certain art gets used and reused for covers on historical novels (and Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of Love, hardcover edition). Art directors: your secret is out!
Rights databases and transaction costs are an issue in the slimmed-down world publishing must become, says Mike Shatzkin in Ever heard of Tata Consulting? Well, I hadn’t either…
Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Publishers Can Do to Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World. Mike Shatzkin (slideshow and transcript of talk at BookExpo America 5-28-09). And a follow-up blog: My advice is not always easy to follow, but sometimes it proves right anyway, in which he says no publishers are following his advice, "to switch from a model based on selling products to a model based on owning communities." Book clubs failed to make that conversion, settling for a "last man standing" attempt to squeeze "every last penny out of the old model." His other "alternative to my 'multi-niche development' suggestion is to convert from a rights-acquiring publisher to a service organization. HarperCollins seems to be at least exploring the development of that alternative."
Staying Ahead of the Shift - the Discussion, about Mike Shatzkin's presentation at BookExpo America, May 28th, 2009. Presented on Web-to-print content transformation (personalized books, annotation)
Time to Change: Authors'--and publishers'--shifting responsibilities. Jesse Kornbluth, in PW (11-23-09) writes: "Online book promotion requires more than a marketing assistant's willingness to drill down through 20 screens on Google. To be effective, it requires imagination, the out-of-the-box quality that in-the-box people like to think can be turned on at will. Not so." (It's worth reading the whole piece.)
Time to rethink contracts, writes Trevor Dolby, in an opinion piece on BookBrunch. "Author advances are the original no-doc mortgages. They base their lending decision on nothing more than a feeling that the author is good for the money." So goes this poor-publishers-screwed-by-authors opinion piece, suggesting it's time to be less generous. If you want to save the industry, the last thing to do is add one more reason for writers to wonder if it makes sense to go the traditional publishing route. Trevor thinks it's time for a more equitable sharing of risks, as if taking a year or more of one's life to write a book is not a major risk.
Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, 2009
The O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference explored emerging trends in digital publishing. Missed it? Click here for links to videos of interesting talks that may change your thinking about how to publish fiction and nonfiction in today's market. Titles you may find of particular interest:
• E-books: How Soon Is Now? (Peter Balis, Wiley)
• "Where Do You Go with 40,000 Readers? A Study in Online Community Building" (Ron Hogan interviewing science fiction novelist John Scalzi and Tor Book editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden)
• The Long Tail Needs Community
Lessons from a Book's Simultaneous Publication in Print and on the Web (Stephen Smith, talking about the 2700-page ESV Study Bible, which went through first two printings in two months and has sold more than 150,000 copies)
• New Reading Habits, New Distribution Models
• "What Happens When Anyone Can Edit Your Book, Online?" (John Broughton, author of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual)
Where things are going in book publishing, part 1, Mike Shatzkin's important "What I would have done in London (part 1)" blog entry, a follow-up to his major Stay Ahead of The Shift blog essay. Starts with things "coming right up" and continues with the view of the next 20 to 25 years. Essential reading for booksellers and buyers.
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Courses on Book Publishing
Columbia Publishing Course
www.journalism.columbia.edu/cs/ContentServer/jrn/1175372207611/page/1165270091617/simplepage.htm
EEI (the publishing think tank, Washington DC area)
www.eeicom.com/training/
New York University
Summer publishing course
www.scps.nyu.edu/areas-of-study/publishing/continuing-education/summer-publishing-institute.html
Continuing education
www.scps.nyu.edu/areas-of-study/publishing/continuing-education/
Radcliffe Program (now at Columbia)
Salon.com article about:
www.salon.com/it/career/1998/11/23career2.html
University of Chicago editing courses
https://grahamschool.uchicago.edu/php/editing/
University of Denver (The Publishing Institute)
Yale launches course for the magazine and book publishing industry (to fill the gap left by the closure of the renowned Stanford Professional Publishing Course (SPPC), which was offered from 1978 to 2009). First session to be offered July 18–23, 2010, with subsequent sessions held annually, says Publishing Executive 4-12-10.
Copyeditors' Knowledge Base KOK Edit's useful directory to places to get training and certification as an editor, copyeditor, or proofreader.
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On Amazon's Kindle, the Sony Reader,
and conflicts about e-book markets and rights
Oh yes, and the iPad
Apparently the two places to find out what's really going on in the e-book world are TeleRead (news and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics), which has a good blog, and MobileRead (excellent forums "for mobile geeks seeking information and advice for keeping their gadgets happy").
Amazon Kindle for PC E-Book Software. "Amazon's Kindle family gained a new member today with the arrival of the free Amazon Kindle for PC reader app," writes Yardena Arar, of PC World, in a review of the new Kindle software for reading books on a computer (Washington Post, 11-12-09)
Amazon lets publishers and writers disable Kindle 2's read-aloud feature (Alana Semuels, Business, Los Angeles Times 2-28-09: The Authors Guild objected to device's text-to-speech function, saying Amazon doesn't have the right to essentially turn e-books into audio books)
Amazon Threatens Publishers as Apple Looms (Motoko Rich and Brad Stone, NYTimes, 3-17-10). Rumors swirl that Amazon could revoke the buy buttons for books by Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin, or Hachette if the major publishers don't strike an eBook deal with the online bookseller. "The hardball approach comes less than two months after Amazon shocked the publishing world by removing the “buy” buttons from its site for thousands of printed books from Macmillan, one of the country’s six largest publishers, in a dispute over e-book pricing."
Apple reveals new service for authors to sell their books directly in the iBookstore (David W. Martin, MacLife, 5-26-10). You no longer have to use a service like Smashwords to put your book in Apple's iBookstore.
Apple's disruption of the ebook market has nothing to do with the tablet (Mike Shatzkin on the implications of Apple's switch from the "wholesale" model to the "agency" model, putting control of ebook prices back in hands of major publishers)
Baker & Taylor has the next big thing in ebooks. Really! (Mike Shatzkin, Idealogical,12-8-09) and Ray Kurzweil Teams with Baker & Taylor on New eReader Software (Calvin Reid, PW, 10-15-09). Blio software can work on "any device with an operating system."
Bend me, shape me, any way you want me: Flexible display screens (The Economist, 1-22-09, reports that electronic screens as thin as paper are coming soon)
The big guys don’t see the fundamental problem, Mike Shatzkin, The Shatzkin Files 12-17-09. He says: "selling content as a publisher is a business that is going to just get harder and harder until it won’t really be much of a business anymore." He holds Publishers Marketplace as an example of a model that does work in this marketplace for eyeballs. "Publishers have always focused primarily on the content. Survival in the future will require focusing on the market." The answer: "In the digital age it will make much more economic sense for the owner of the audience to find the content rather than the way we’ve always done it, which is the other way around." Read this article!
Cader's analysis of the e-book price wars: Two blogs start their discussion by saying anyone who wants to be in the know about book publishing should pay $20 a month for a subscription to Michael Cader's
Publishers Lunch Deluxe or at least subscribe to his free Publishers Lunch. They then relay his criticism of the NY Times piece on e-book pricing, E-Book Price Increase May Stir Readers’ Passions (Rich and Stone 2-10-10). In Notes from a lecture by Professor Cader(2-13-10), Mike Shatzkin quotes Cader as saying that Amazon (and Sony and Apple) are making their money from the sale of expensive e-readers (Kindle, $200) and Amazon is losing money on the $9.99 prices of bestsellers that that they are using as loss leaders to sell their reader. Moreover, they're not giving credit to the publishers who are making backlist titles of bestselling authors available free as e-books, in hopes of bringing new readership to those authors. Read Shatzkin on the subject, subscribe and read the original in Publishers Lunch, or check out Michael Cader's Masterclass (Dennis Loy Johnson's Moby Lives, a column about books and writers).
Can e-publishing overcome copyright concerns? by David Pogue (New York Times 5-22-08)
The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of the book business. . Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business? (Ken Auletta, Publish or Perish, The New Yorker, 4-26-10). Responses: Erik Sherman, The New Yorker's Ken Auletta Needs a Calculator, not an E-Book Reader, and Mike Shatzkin, Ruminations on Returns
"Debut pricing" for ebooks: a better idea than withholding them (Mike Shatzkin, The Shatzkin Files, 8-23-09) and Debut pricing: my idea, great idea, unfortunately can’t work (Shatzkin's follow-up entry). In a follow-up story, also on ebook pricing, Shatzkin writes, about the race for market domination:"Epub is probably the publishers’ best defense against Amazon and the Kindle. With all other device manufacturers able to coalesce around a non-Amazon standard, we have a situation analogous to the VHS-Beta conflict of the 1980s and the Mac-Windows duke-out of the late 80s and early 90s. On one side, we have a standard that remains closed to enable “control” (Beta, Mac, Kindle.) On the other side, we have a wide-open standard to enable multi-player use (VHS, Windows, Epub.) In the two cases we know about because they are historical, the consensus was that the “loser” of the numbers race (Beta and Mac) provided a superior technological performance. Kindle does not seem to have even that element in its favor. Whether you use something larger that does e-ink (Kindle, Sony Reader) or something you’re carrying anyway that is backlit (the iPhone or any other smartphone) is a matter of personal preference. But does anybody doubt that a world full of hardware creators will soon make a device that is similar but demonstrably better than the Kindle?" Read this if you're trying to figure out which device to buy, or whether to wait.
Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers (Electronic Frontier Foundation white paper)
Digital Perception, thriller writer JA Konrath's entry on his blog, A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, makes a compelling case against publishers trying to raise the price of e-books: it will encourage more e-book piracy (which is easy). Elsewhere Konrath talks about the money he's making selling e-books of his old titles that NY book publishers didn't want. In June, his royalty rate went from 35% to 70%. Surely Amazon would have kept getting its 65% if it weren't under pressure to create more favorable terms--first from Sony and now, more effectively perhaps, from Apple.
Digital Text Platform (lets you upload and format your books for sale in Kindle Platform
The digital transition really IS harder for trade publishers than for other publishers (The Shatzkin Files 7-3-09)
Dual display e-book reader (story on NewScientist blog 6-25-08)
E-book complexity: good news for publishers (Mike Shatzkin, The Shatzkin Files, 6-3-09)
Ebook growth explosive; serious disruptions around the corner Mike Shatzkin, 8-12-09
E-Book Price Increase May Stir Readers’ Passions (Motoko Rich and Brad Stone, NY Times 2-10-10)
eBookGuru(digital magazine devoted to eBooks)
The e-book revolution favours the agile (but deep pockets help), Dan,The Casual Optimist (books, publishing, ideas)--like their quote: "The basis for optimism is sheer terror." ~Oscar Wilde
E-books: Not so fast! (Bryan Rosner on what publishers have to fear, IBPA)
The e-Book Test: Do Electronic Versions Deter Piracy? by David Pogue (New York Times, Personal Tech 6-19-08)
The ebook windowing controversy has subtext (Mike Shatzkin, 12-10-09). Shatzkin writes: "This is really about the agents and publishers trying to take control of ebook pricing, and value perception, back from Amazon." And this: "There are two important aspects of this that will play out later. One is that what the publishers can do to Amazon today, the authors can do to the publishers tomorrow. If the publishers could sell the ebooks of big books successfully from their sites, then the big authors could also sell them directly without a publisher. The other is that this is a 'last gasp' of a 'static product' publishing economy. Big moneymakers ten years from now won’t often come from just selling the same content over and over again, but will more often come from content that triggers a more extended interaction. The most future-oriented thinkers are already past this battle, although there’s still a lot of fighting left to be done."
ebrary (a content platform)
Fear the Kindle: Amazon's amazing e-book reader is bad news for the publishing industry (Farhad Manjoo, Slate, 2-26-09), admires the Kindle 2 but fears its implications: "Amazon's reader is a brilliant device that shanghais book buyers and the book industry into accepting a radically diminished marketplace for published works. If the Kindle succeeds on its current terms, and all signs suggest it'll be a blockbuster (thanks Oprah!), Amazon will make a bundle. But everyone else with a stake in a vibrant book industry — authors, publishers, libraries, chain bookstores, indie bookstores, and, not least, readers — stands to lose out." An honest look at the 800-pound gorilla that endangers the publishing industry: Amazon.com.
Flexible display screens: Bend me, shape me, any way you want me (The Economist, 1-22-09, reports that electronic screens as thin as paper are coming soon)
The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age (John Siracusa, ars technica, 2-1-09 — check out the comments after reading the article)
Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader (Verlyn Klinkenborg, Editorial Notebook, NY Times 5-28-10). Among drawbacks of the e-book, as Klinkenborg sees them: ugliness of the fonts etc. (as opposed to the text), the system for showing where you are in a book, the fact that you may be reading an earlier, inferior version of a book, and the fact that most e-readers don't permit short-term borrowing (as of library books)--that you have to own the book to read it.
The Future of Digital Distribution and Ebook Marketing (Tim O'Reilly at the O'Reilly Tools o Change Conference 2010, on YouTube)
Google sides against Amazon in e-book format wars (Brennon Slattery, PCWorld, 8-27-09)
How much should an e-book cost? (Motoko Rich, "Steal this book, for $9.99," NYTimes, 5-16-09)
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write (Steven Johnson, Wall Street Journal, 4-20-09)
In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History (Tamar Lewis, NYTimes, 8-8-09) Mind you, participants on one discussion list questioned that printing and shipping would add up to only 12.5 percent of costs--that figure, it was felt, was too low, especially with postage rates going up.
Is This the Future of the Digital Book?
Are books too one-dimensional for readers in the digital age, as Vook's Bradley Inman tells Brad Stone (NY Times 8-4-09) Will readers be expecting video in their novels?
Kindle and the future of reading (Nicholson Baker, The New Yorker, 8-3-09)
The Kindle Swindle (Roy Blount Jr., Op Ed, NY Times, 2-24-09, on the Authors Guild's objections to the Kindle in terms of authors' rights)
Legal Battles Over E-Book Rights to Older Books (Motoko Rich, NYTimes, 12-15-09) on authors' and agents' claim that publishers don't own e-book rights to older backlist titles
** Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book (Motoko rich, NYTimes, 2-28-10, making the case for i-Pad e-book prices)
** The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age (John Siracusa, ars technica -- check out the comments after reading the article
Publishers and authors battle over digital (e-book) rights (Pat McNees, Writers and Editors blog post, 12-13-09)
Publishers Test What Prices iPad Market Will Bear (Ed Sutherland, Cult of Mac, 4-30-10)
Random House Claims Digital Rights to Past Books (Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, WSJ, 12-14-09)
Random House, HarperCollins Look to Lock In Low E-Book Royalty Rates: 5 Ways to Protect Yourself. Message to all authors from the Authors Guild. Be sure to read this one, if you have, or expect to have, any kind of book contract. Main points, in brief (but read the details):
1. Get the absolute right to renegotiate.
2. Negotiate for a royalty floor.
3. Double-check your reversion of rights clause.
4. Check your contract; you may control e-rights.
5. If you can't obtain adequate safeguards, you may want to bide your time.
Random House's Retroactive Rights Grab (an alert from the Authors Guild)
Smashwords (your ebook, your way--a digital self-publishing platform and online bookstore)
Some Fear Google’s Power in Digital Books (Noam Cohen, New York Times, Link by Link, 2-1-09)
Stephen Covey's digital rights deal with Amazon startles New York publishers
TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home (a blog with news & views on e-books, libraries, publishing etc.—including recommended free reads)
A Walk Through a Crop of Readers (Danielle Belopotosky, NY Times, Personal Tech, 2-25-09), compares Amazon’s Kindle 2 to Kindle 1 and the Sony Reader.
Will Books Be Napsterized? (Randall Stross, Digital Domain, NYTimes 10-3-09)
With Kindle, the Best Sellers Don’t Need to Sell (Motoko Rich, NY Times 1-22-2010, on why publishers are giving "sample" books of little-known authors away for free).
Yahoo News: All major publishers but one raising e-book prices. Random House is the last publisher sticking to traditional model for e-book sales; other major publishers switching to "agency model." Result: higher e-book prices. Christopher Null, 4-1-10). But see Mike Shatzkin's 'We’ve had “gradually”; get ready for “suddenly”: "When I examined the Random House tactic of staying out of the iBook store initially, I said it made sense but that it constituted a bet that iBooks sales wouldn’t be robust right out of the box. Now that sales results seem to have proven that conjecture (which I shared) wrong, I’d expect that Random House will join the other big publishers in moving to the Agency model to enable them to join the iBook offering.'
Finally, the Authors Guild, in The Right Battle at the Right Time, writes: "Macmillan's current fight with Amazon over e-book business models is a necessary one for the industry. The stakes are high, particularly for Macmillan authors. In a squabble over e-books, Amazon quickly and pre-emptively escalated matters by removing the buy buttons from all Macmillan titles (with some exceptions for scholarly and educational books), in all editions, including all physical book editions. Thousands of authors and titles are affected; hardest and most unfairly hit are authors with new books published by Macmillan that are in their prime sales period."
And Amazon is tough on its own behalf, not on readers' behalf. The Authors Guild again: "Amazon has a well-deserved reputation for playing hardball. When it doesn't get its way with publishers, Amazon tends to start removing "buy buttons" from the publisher's titles. It's a harsh tactic, by which Amazon uses its dominance of online bookselling to punish publishers who fail to fall in line with Amazon's business plans. Collateral damage in these scuffles, of course, are authors and readers. Authors lose their access to millions of readers who shop at Amazon; readers find some of their favorite authors' works unavailable. Generally, the ending is not a good one for the publisher or its authors -- Amazon's hold on the industry, controlling an estimated 75% of online trade book print sales in the U.S., is too strong for a publisher to withstand. The publisher caves, and yet more industry revenues are diverted to Amazon. This isn't good for those who care about books. Without a healthy ecosystem in publishing, one in which authors and publishers are fairly compensated for their work, the quality and variety of books available to readers will inevitably suffer."
AG links to a quick rundown on media reactions to the fight over control of e-book prices: Amazon Revealed: It Hates You, and It Hates Publishers (Kit Eaton, Fast Company, 2-1-10). Eaton adds: "It's clear the move was inspired by Apple's iPad and simultaneous iBooks launch event, which promises a fairer share, more favorable terms and conditions than Amazon, and higher price points." (Fast Company's pieces on the iPad include Peripherals: The Forgotten Killer Feature of the iPad and How the iPad Could Drive Up College Tuition .
What's going to happen in book publishing. "[A]ll of us, to function, must have a view of how we think things in publishing will change," writes the always-interesting Mike Shatzkin in Part 1 of What I Would Have Done in London, a long blog entry that would have been his talk if an Iceland volcano blowing hadn't cancelled his trip to the London Book Fair. That blog entry is a follow-up to his major Stay Ahead of The Shift blog essay. He starts with issues "coming right up" and continues with his view of the next 20 to 25 years.
From Part 1, which spells out how much change can take place in 20 years:
Those who stay ahead of the curve prosper. "Cambridge University Press, for example, had tens of thousands of old backlist titles set up for print-on-demand long before other publishers did and they reaped a harvest of sales and profits in the past decade as a result. Last year, Simon & Schuster shifted resources from field reps to telemarketers."
This whole series is worth reading. In Part 2 he predicts: 'I’d expect that 20 years from now, the “local” hard drive will be relatively unimportant: a relatively short-term “emergency” cache for the rare moments when you aren’t easily connected to the network (the internet.) Data — all data, including everything you think you “own” — will live in “the cloud.” '
Publishers and other media will no longer be defined by format. The price of content (what writers can make) will go down, but the value of community/audience will increase. "The idea of a general book publisher will have no meaning." In comments, he adds: "the brands that can sell verifying the truth will command revenue."
In Part 3 he talks about "the process of content as bait to attract eyeballs -- providing tools, features, and databases to monetize the community" as is done today with Michael Cader's PublishersMarketplace. He uses Oxford Bibliographies online as an example of harnessing academic expertise to deliver curated and constantly updated bibliographies by subject.
And here's What I Would Have Said in London, Part 4 (what will happen in the short term--the next few years). He notes that e-book sales for new narrative books are "already in high single or low double digit percentages of the total number of units the book sells." (I assume that's both fiction and nonfiction.) Worth reading the whole series, for gems such as this: "Authors will be more inclined to self-publish, particularly their out-of print backlist and any title a publisher doesn’t offer an advance reflecting high expectations. That means that, on average, desireable books will be harder and more expensive for publishers to sign. The pressure for publishers to give more than a 25% ebook royalty will intensify. There will be excess capacity throughout the print supply chain: printing, warehousing, and sales operations, and the price of distribution services on offer will go down because the overhead cost of maintaining it, as a percentage of the sales it supports, will have gone up for those with fixed operations."
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