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Michiko Kakutani Surveys the Cut and Paste Culture
In the three years that we've been blogging we've urged you to read books and articles that we thought interesting, but we've never presumed to order you to read something.
There's always a first time, and an article by Michiko Kakutani in the March 21, 2010 New York Times has inspired us to resort to the imperative case. Ms. Kakutani is the Pulitzer Prizewinning reviewer for the Times, a job she has performed with distinction for almost three decades, and in her penetrating essay Texts without Context she has captured our zeitgeist in a way that few other brief examinations of contemporary culture that we're aware of have done.
Our zeitgeist not a pretty sight. But if you want to understand who you are and where you fit into 21st century civilization, we herewith direct you to read and reflect on what Ms. Kakutani has to say.
Her ruminations take the form of an overview of books about the influence of the Web on art and entertainment. "These new books" she writes, "share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity."
We find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. Ms. Kakutani's essay is about the transformation of our culture from an immersive one (like losing yourself in a good book) to a cut-and-paste one. If we extract some gems to tempt you to read her article, doesn't that make us guilty of the very sin of cutting and pasting that is the essence of what's gone wrong in our culture? But if we don't paste some gems from her essay, can we trust you to thoroughly read her argument?
Okay, we trust you. Immerse yourself in Texts Without Context and have your report on our desk first thing in the morning.
In his wrap-up remarks at February's Tools of Change conference, host Tim O'Reilly urged attendees to focus on "the boring stuff" that needs to be done to realize their vision of the future of the e-book industry.
I found this statement puzzling. Despite the widespread impression that e-book people are the jet-setters of the publishing business, the truth is that just about every step in the creation and publication of e-books is excruciatingly boring. In fact, e-book publishing may be described as long stretches of stupefying tedium punctuated by moments of numbing monotony.
Let me take you through a book's conversion so you will understand what I mean. I urge you to have a strong cup of coffee to stay awake. Bear in mind that though this abstract will take but a minute for you to read, the actual operation requires dozens of man-hours per title. I say "man-hours" but "troll-hours" is more apposite, as the people who do it work in Stygian gloom, eat living things and snarl when poked with a stick. Our staff posed for this group photo.Left to right: Richard, team captain Anthony Damasco, Nathan, John, Pam and Liced. (Not in picture: Michael, who left our company for a less boring job.)
A brief explanation is in order. Most books published by E-Reads are previously published works that went out of print and reverted to the author. In order to reissue them we scan the original printed volumes rather than use text documents furnished by the author, because the former have been copy-edited.
Scanning. The first task in the production of an e-book is scanning. The book's cover and binding are stripped to facilitate the feeding of pages into the optical reader, and headers and page numbers sliced off to reduce garbage in the scanned document. Even if high-speed scanners are used the process must be overseen by a human. Monitoring a scanner has the allure of watching someone rake seaweed.
Proofreading. However state-of-the-art the scanner may be, a digitized document will invariably have errors due to misreading by the camera. The word "in" for instance may be interpreted by the scanner as "m". Thus a proofreader must view and clean up the obvious glitches in the first-pass RTF (Rich Text Format) file created by the scanner. That process is called OCR - Optical Character Recognition. The RTF is then closely read and corrected by a proofreader who compares it word by word and line by line to the original published copy of the book. If you are ever given a choice between proofreading a text file and spending six months in a sensory deprivation chamber, take the chamber.
Final Review. The RTF - the basic building block of e-books - must then be reviewed page by page by a designer to make sure it reads seamlessly. "Once a book gets scanned," explains Nathan Fernald, E-Reads' production manager, "it tends to lose all of its formatting with the exception of single line breaks. And line breaks must be clearly delineated to prevent scene shifts within a chapter from running into each other. When we get a file back from scanning, I have to flip through the physical book page-by-page, comparing it with the file to see if there was any formatting lost such as centered text, indented text, extra line breaks, etc."
The staggering monotony of this process will explain why I granted Nathan one day off every week. He was beginning to exhibit classic symptoms of going postal.
Formatting. Once we have a clean, error-free RTF we format it for various e-book platforms plus print on demand. For print editions, cover art must be sized precisely to the trim of the book using charts comparable to those used to navigate the waters off the Cape of Good Hope.
As if these labors were not excruciatingly demanding enough, we must then create...
Metadata. Metadata is vital book-related information required by retailers. It includes cover image, ISBN number, BISAC code, language, territorial rights, suggested retail price, publication date, brief description and other details and data. Retailers provide pages and pages of metadata definitions, specs and tolerances, all in fine print. And each retailer has different requirements or a different order of the same requirements. You can read about it in detail in Mastering the Mysteries of Metadata, but - long story short - it is comparable in complexity to the instructions for applying for a Fulbright grant, except that you can get away with lying on a Fulbright application.
ISBN Management. ISBNs are unique identifying numbers used in the book industry. They identify not just a book but every edition of a book. Publishing companies purchase a block of ISBNs and, after assigning them to each edition of each book, register them with R.R. Bowker, the official ISBN agency in the United States. (You can read more in Learning to Love your ISBN Number.) Of all the lassitude-inducing tasks performed by our staff, none compares to selecting, assigning, maintaining and registering ISBN numbers. It is like sorting jelly beans by color, except that when you are finished you are obliged to ship the jelly beans to a facility where someone else will eat them. Tales of woe abound. For instance, just when we had become resigned to the Sisyphean labors of managing 10-digit ISBNs the gods imposed 13-digit ones on us. Then Amazon informed us that none of our ISBN's were suitable for the Kindle, and required us to produce unique Amazon identifier codes.
Royalty Management. Retailers furnish sales information in spreadsheets. In an ideal world the formats and information fields would be uniform. In reality royalty reporting is the Second Coming of the Tower of Babel. We have to reformat each and every retailer's report so that our accounting system can read and process it. Though it is universally agreed that ISBN numbers are the key to successful royalty report generation, our filters constantly catch busted numbers requiring hours of sleuthing to set right. We find rogue data in other columns, too. All it takes is one misplaced article - "The"at the beginning of a title instead of at the end, for instance - to send our royalty tracker into paroxysms of indignation followed by stern instructions to mercilessly hunt and correct the offensive mistake.
There is much more that I haven't reported, but I'm afraid it would make you suicidally depressed. I asked John Douglas, who manages our database, to tell us what is boring about his job. "I'm sorry, I don't have time to tell you," he replied. "I'm too busy doing a boring job."
In conclusion, Mr. O'Reilly, be careful what you wish for when you wish for boring stuff.
The most exciting thing about being in the e-book space is telling people that we are in the e-book space. Showing off a cool e-book to a civilian? That's exciting. But making the e-book you're showing off? I think I'd rather watch paint dry.
January '10 E-Book Sales Almost Quadruple January '09
If your head is still spinning after 2009's triple digit growth rate, you'll need a clamp to steady your skull when you read that January 2010 e-book sales posted a nearly 370% jump over the same month in 2009, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum and the Association of American Publishers. The numbers are $31,900,000 for January '10 compared to $8,800,000 for January '09. January was also the biggest e-sales month ever, and it wasn't even close. The biggest month to date was December '09 at $19,100,000.
IDPF reminds us that:
* This data represents United States revenues only * This data represents only trade e-book sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts. * This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers * This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales * The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers * The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is "All books delivered electronically over the Internet or to hand-held reading devices"
The graph at at the top of the page shows sales through '09 but do not reflect January 2010.
Cory Doctorow Discovers Why Publishers Get 90% and Authors 10%
When Cory Doctorow launched his Publishers Weekly column a few months ago, we wondered what publishers could learn from him as he chronicles his efforts to self-publish a book. Our conclusion? Everything.
However, his latest article suggests that there's something that he can learn from publishers. It's that publishing is an exceedingly complex communal enterprise, one that relies on a surprisingly fragile network of interdependencies. As in the famous proverb about losing a war for want of a horseshoe nail, the difference between success and failure of a book may have to do with extraneous factors such as the cost of gasoline or a strike at a paper mill. Some of those factors may seem preposterous, but preposterous or not they can render us totally helpless when they bring the progress of an enterprise to a dead halt.
That seems to be the bitter lesson Doctorow is learning, a lesson that anyone with more than half an hour of experience in the publishing industry knows all too well. An example is typesetting, and Doctorow's frustration with a delay has him talking to himself. "I completely failed to note that any delays in the typesetting would grind the whole process to a halt. No galleys, no proofs of the printing process, no chances to experiment with the small-scale printing, not until the book is in a print-ready form. Let that be a lesson to you, Doctorow: job one is typesetting, period."
"All these logistics remind me of why I'm a sole-proprietor freelancer," he concludes. "I hate managing people. I hate critical paths and project management. And I suck at it. None of this is a surprise. I knew that these details would be the hardest part of the self-publishing job, and it's been made harder because pretty much everyone is working for free or cheap as a favor, so I can't call them up and demand results."
Here's the thing. Managing people, critical paths, project management are what publishers do. They do it every day, and most of the time they do it very well. But, unlike Doctorow, they seldom get people to work free or cheap as a favor. They have to pay salaries and rent and warehousing and printing and shipping as well as advances and royalties. Which is why, as we stated in our title, publishers get 90% and authors get 10%, and they're entitled to it.
Yes, there is an alternative - do what Cory Doctorow is doing. But hopefully he has gained some respect for how the other half lives. "Hell," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "is other people." But other people do occasionally serve a useful purpose, and publishing books is one of them.
File-Share This. Court Judgment Costs Music Downloader $675,000. Book Pirates Next?
One of the most Draconian suggestions for combating book piracy is to go after the people who download books from file-sharing sites. So far print and e-book publishers have refrained from doing so, mostly because it is bad public relations to sue customers. The music industry had no such scruples when, earlier in the decade, it went after music downloaders, taking some 30,000 of them to court. You have to be in extremis to do that. The music industry was in extremis.
Just about all of the cases except one were settled. (See Can You be Sued for Downloading a Book?) The one holdout was a fellow named Joel Tenenbaum, who opted not to accept a cheap settlement offer back in 2003, when he was accused of willfully infringing 30 songs by downloading and distributing them on fileshare website KaZaA. Last July a federal jury in Boston ordered him to pay $675,000 to various record companies - that's $22,500 per song.
"I'm thankful that it wasn't much bigger, that it wasn't millions," he said after the verdict. Well yes, but given that the average settlement was between $3,000 - $12,000, his statement was undoubtedly uttered through a clenched jaw and a stiff upper lip. His attorney says the penalty will bankrupt him.
The trial was a slam-dunk for the music industry. "Plaintiffs built their case with forensic evidence collected by MediaSentry, which showed that he was sharing over 800 songs from his computer on August 10, 2004," Sheffner says. "A subsequent examination of his computer showed that Tenenbaum had used a variety of different peer-to-peer programs, from Napster to KaZaA to AudioGalaxy to iMesh, to obtain music for free, starting in 1999. And he continued to infringe, even after his father warned him in 2002 that he would get sued, even after he received a harshly-worded letter from the plaintiffs’ law firm in 2005, even after he was sued in 2007, and all the way through part of 2008."
It's hard to quantify the effects on would-be file-sharers of the suits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America, but it's safe to assume that the same peer-to-peer network that shared music shared news of the lawsuits as well, and downloaders sought easier pickings.
Like e-books.
The effect on music uploaders, at least KaZaA, was dramatic. Under tremendous legal pressure, the company changed its name to Kazaa and went straight. If you visit their website you'll see a banner proclaiming "Kazaa is 100% legal and supported by" such record labels as Atlantic, Warner, Sony, EMI and Atlantic.
If book publishers were willing to drop their misgivings about public relations, you might one day see a similar banner hoisted by a book pirate listing Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, Penguin and HarperCollins as supporters.
In the three years that we've been blogging we've urged you to read books and articles that we thought interesting, but we've never presumed to order you to read something.
