If you're looking for an old favorite or a lost “gem,” many long out-of-print titles by popular authors are finally available again. Every week, we feature a handful of titles from the hundreds on our site. Be sure to check out the latest featured titles!
William C. Dietz is the best-selling author of more than thirty novels, some of which have been reissued by E-Reads. Recently he was invited by the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Bulletin to write a bi-monthly column called "Words for Hire," exploring the world of media tie-ins and novelizations. The articles demystify a fascinating genre and we're delighted to reprint them as a regular feature in these pages. RC ****************************** William C. Dietz introduces his third column:
My last two columns were focused on the ultimate source of most tie-in work: the film, television and gaming industries which typically create and produce the properties that novelizations and tie-ins are based on. Now it’s time to consider the publishers who purchase the rights and produce the actual books. Continue here.
When I was a young man apprenticing at a literary agency, our boss sent me and several fellow staffers on a confidential mission to the offices of a prominent and flamboyant publisher. His company had just published a novel represented by our agency. The publisher handed us envelopes containing cash and instructed us to visit one of several large New York City bookstores and buy a copy of the book. We were then to bring our copy back to his offices, go to another store and do the same. And again and again until we had spent all the cash. The object, he explained, was to inflate sales figures and put the book on the bestseller list. The ploy succeeded.
This little piece of chicanery came to mind when I read a New York Times story by Stephanie Clifford that Microsoft had brought a civil lawsuit in the United States District Court in Seattle against a number of individuals and corporations that Microsoft alleged had manipulated clicks on an Internet ad. The corporation is seeking at least $750,000 in damages. What exactly did these folks purportedly do to incur MS's wrath?
The offense is called click fraud. Fraud is broadly defined as deliberate deception committed either for personal gain or to damage someone else. It's a serious tort (violation of civil law) for which one can be sued, or a serious crime for which one can go to jail, or both.
The Microsoft case has to do with the way companies measure their ads' exposure to viewers who are potential buyers of the advertised products and services. The effectiveness is gauged in cost her click. Clifford cites an outfit called Click Forensics as asserting that "about one in every seven clicks on an advertisement is estimated to be fraudulent." If the dodge is so commonplace, why would anyone spend a lot of money suing? "Microsoft is trying to make that kind of deception more expensive for perpetrators," says Clifford. Making an example of click fraudsters, in other words.
Here's how the reporter explains what happened.
"Advertisers bid on what they will pay to appear in the paid-search results for certain key words. The more an advertiser pays, the higher they are on the list, and advertisers usually pay for each click on their ad.
"In March 2008 several audo insurance advertisers began complaining to Microsoft that traffic to their ads was spiking suspiciously...And clicks to the advertisers appearing at the top of the paid-search results listings for those terms were high. Although traffic appeared to come from different computers, it was actually coming from two proxy servers, which mask the original address of a click."
Clearly, if the charges stick they will show that this was not a bunch of students in a dorm room earning beer money for repeatedly stroking "Enter" on their keyboards, but rather powerful robot servers that MS investigators tracked to various accounts registered to the defendants. The complaint stated that one of them "directed traffic to competitors' Web sites so [Microsoft}] would pay for those clicks and exhaust their advertising budgets quickly, which let the lower-ranking sites that he sponsored move up in the paid-search results," writes Cliffor. You can read more about the investigation and lawsuit here. Click fraud is as old as the Internet, according to Stefanie Olsen, writing in 2004 for CNET News. "The practice...began in the early days of the Internet's mainstream popularity with programs that automatically surfed Web sites to increase traffic figures. This led companies to develop policing technololgies touted as antidotes to the problem."
Nor is Microsoft the first company to take action over click fraud. "In one recent example of the problem," Olsen wrote in 2004, "law enforcement officials say a California man created a software program that he claimed could let spammers bilk Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks. Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program." Considering that advertising is the foundation for Google's fortunes, it will come as no surprise that the firm has taken the most stringent actions to protect itself. Olsen quotes a statement issued by Google that it has been "the target of individuals and entities using some of the most advanced spam techniques for years. We have applied what we have learned with search to the click fraud problem and employ a dedicated team and proprietary technology to analyze clicks." Olsen called it the "Google Fraud Squad."
Though click fraudsters are fiendishly clever and possess powerful tools and weapons, the good guys are well armed to combat them. You can visit the website of the Click Fraud Network, "a community of online advertisers, agencies and search providers working together to develop an industry solution to the click fraud problem. Network members that provide data to the network receive free access to online campaign and risk assessment reports." Among other services the Network offers are a "Click Fraud Index™" tracking click fraud rates by quarter and even a "Click Fraud Heatmap."
Though the commercial reasons for such aggressive warfare are plain, there's another less obvious but extremely important one. As newspapers and magazines desperately fight for their lives, they are turning to online advertising as a possible key to salvation. If the metrics are unreliable, however, that door will be closed to those industries. Says Tom Cuthbert, president and CEO of Click Forensics, the company sponsoring the Click Fraud Network, “Click fraud activity continues to grow especially on made for ad sites, parked domains and on the content networks. Advertisers, publishers and search engines need to take notice because content networks are becoming the fastest growing source of click fraud. Ensuring their quality is essential for the pay per click advertising market to continue its growth.”
Looking back at that bit of skullduggery committed by the publisher years ago, I wonder if, today, we would have been asked to perpetrate some variety of click fraud to boost his book's fortunes. Knowing what I've just learned about the consequences, I'm certain I'd think long and hard before I started clicking.
Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.
The Holy Grail of screen technology is the gesture-activated virtual screen portrayed in Stephen Spielberg's 2002 blockbuster futuristic film Minority Report. Technologists inspired by the brilliant effects have been laboring ever since to interact with screen images, getting them to do what we want them to do by a mere wave of the hand or point of an index finger.
The iPhone's introduction of multitouch was an astounding innovation that brought Spielberg's vision closer to actualization. But the Apple device still requires physical contact with the surface of the device, whereas the next generation of virtual screens will liberate our hands from any contact whatsoever. Where are we on the continuum between touchscreens and Minority Report's magic one?
Rebounding from an Apple-led consumer flight to handhelds, a number of PC manufacturers are developing applications designed to lure consumers back to their desks and, according to Ashlee Vance of the New York Times (PC Touch Screens Move Ahead), high on the list are touchscreens. For instance, Hewlett-Packard is pushing the TouchSmart, a desktopper with an upright screen on which you can access every function with your stylus or index finger. TouchSmart offers a variety of great applications. Vance points out that "Customers can turn these machines into bespoke kiosks for, say, ordering merchandise at a sporting event or flipping through a menu while waiting at a restaurant." Indeed, touch screens are commonly used for keeping track of tables and food orders at restaurants. They can also be embedded in homes to control lights, music, thermostat, etc., and in he kitchen to follow recipes.
However, after you've worked an iPhone screen with multitouch, one-finger functionality feels pretty limited, and we have to wonder how practical the TouchSmart approach is for business offices. Here's a simple test: next time you're sitting in front of your desktop monitor, try stretching your arm out and poking the screen every time you want to open a file, drag, drop, highlight, cut and paste or perform some other task. Do we really want to reach out to our screen every time we want to move something around or shift to another function? Don't be surprised if your arm grows weary and your back strained. Let's face it: some functions are best left to keyboard commands or mouse navigation. And - sitting at a desk is not necessarily where today's sedentary or peripatetic computer users want to be. If you're thinking about students, so am I. We'll get to them in a moment.
But soon, even five digits may be passé. Enter advanced multitouch and an Israeli outfit called N-trig. Its advanced PC screen technology called "DuoSense" enables users to use both hands as well as a pen.
N-trig is the only industry provider to offer a combined pen, touch and multi-touch solution, having overcome the technological hurdles of combining the two seamlessly in a single device. DuoSense is an intelligent digitizer, fully compatible with Microsoft natural input standards. N-trig's DuoSense digitizers are are easily integratable, support any type of LCD, keep devices slim, light and bright, can support numerous applications, and can be implemented in a broad range of products ranging from small notebooks to large LCDs.
For a cool demo check out this video of N-trig. By the way, if you're fascinated by the possibilities and have some clever ideas of your own for Windows 7 apps, N-Trig offers a $900 touchscreen kit that software developers that can use to develop their own. Note that N-trig's demonstration is being performed on a tablet computer, as well as on a convertible laptop/slate. Why tablets? Aren't they just a niche? So far, yes. But that's going to change big time. There's a whole population of computer users that is simply not deskbound. It's called students, and, as we have stated in these pages again and again, the only viable computer product for students is the tablet. "Textbooks and other illustrated books simply cannot be crammed into anything smaller than a screen close to the size of a laptop," I wrote. "Tablets have all the virtues of laptops PLUS touchscreen functionality. For students, reading books on an e-reading device is highly desirable but not as imperative as the ability to handwrite notes on their device's screen."
Students will certainly give N-trig's DuoSense two thumbs up, plus the other eight digits as well. "Such touch software can handle lots of fingers hitting a screen at once rather than just relying on one or two digits, as most of today’s touch screens do," writes Vance.
In anticipation of a major push into the tablet market, Microsoft is reported to have invested $24 million in N-trig, and the forthcoming Windows 7 (look for it in 2010) "supports gestures such as pinching and fingertip scrolling,"reports Wired. "Other Windows programs, such as Paint, will also include new brushes designed for multi-touch and features such as panning across a page in Internet Explorer." But the outer limits of known touchscreen tech is Microsoft Surface's Cynergy Labs, and it's likely that Surface will dominate the field until 3D replaces it. Check out these dumfounding videos.
Microsoft's Surface is probably the direction consumers will go over the next few years, but shimmering on the distant horizon is a means of projecting action onto a screen without any contact whatever. We caught a glimpse of this with the wearable "Sixth Sense" device demonstrated at a recent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference. But for a mind-bending look at the state of the art of virtual, check out Project Natal by Microsoft designed for XBox 360. Stephen Spielberg, eat your heart out.
Richard Curtis
This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers. Without them our free society would not only be impoverished but imperiled. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry, even if it means nothing more than buying a paper on the street. Support your local newspaper.
Losing Bidder in Cheney Book Auction Offers Advice to Winner Matalin
Ms. Mary Matalin Threshold Editions c/o Simon & Schuster
Dear Mary Matalin:
Richard Curtis here, CEO of E-Reads, the publishing company that made what we thought was an irresistible offer to Dick Cheney to publish his book. In case you missed our proposal you may read it here.
But I don't want to sound like a sore loser. If I had to lose a bidding war, I'm relieved it's to you. I was terrified it might end up with Harper, who would probably do the same kind of trashy treatment they did for Peggy Noonan's The Case Against Hillary Clinton, with those made-up internal monologues and transcriptions of speeches Hillary never made. At least I can be confident that your approach to the Cheney book will be utterly responsible, something along the lines of your superb editorial job on Jerome Corsi's The Obama Nation.
You described that book as "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that," and I could not agree more. Your impeccable vetting of Barack Obama's extensive connections with Islam and radical politics, his Communist and socialist mentors, his close associations with members of the Weather Underground, his involvement in the slum-landlord empire of a notorious Chicago political fixer - well, Mary (if I may), reading that meticulously documented work was an inspiring reminder of why I went into the publishing business.
Nevertheless, I hope you will not be afraid to be stern in your dealings with Cheney. If there's one thing I know about him, it's that he has the utmost respect for those who hold people's feet to the fire.
I realize that my role as underbidder for the Cheney book does not entitle me to any special consideration. Nevertheless, I am happy to share with you some of the suggestions I made to Mr. Cheney in my original pitch to him, and I hope you'll adopt them. For what it's worth, here's what I think Cheney needs to discuss to make this book a blockbuster international bestseller:
How he helped President Bush to deceive Congress and the American people into buying into a connection between Al Qaeda and the Iraq government under Saddam Hussein
How he misrepresented available intelligence
How he outed covert intelligence officer Valerie Plame and got his Chief of Staff Scooter Libby to take the fall
How he steered no-bid government contracts to Halliburton, a company in which he has a multimillion dollar interest that has appreciated by thousands of percent since the war began
How he undermined the Constitution
How he suspended the right of Habeas Corpus
How he subverted the rule of law
How he instituted secret wiretapping and email monitoring of American citizens
How he scammed America's allies with Saddam's "weapons of mass destruction"
How he created a secret cabal of oil and other energy lobbyists
How he sent thousands of young men and women to death and maiming in the prosecution of a "phony" war whose real goal was to exploit Middle East oil
How he leveraged his office to create a policy of torture and brutality
Do these correspond to your own ideas? Have I missed anything?
Also, since it's no longer of any use to us, I might as well give you the title that we'd planned to put on the book had we won the auction:
GO FUCK YOURSELF My Life in High Crimes and Misdemeanors by Dick Cheney
What do you think, Mary? Is that a winning title or what?
I invite you to reply to this open letter and I promise to promote your response in the widest public forum.
Lev Grossman and Andrea Sachs write in Timemagazine about our love-hate relationship with Amazon. Their conclusion? It depends on who's doing the loving and who's doing the hating. Defining Amazon is about as easy for us as defining the elephant was for the blind monks of Chinese legend. Time succinctly states the case:
"Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it's hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza."
As if all that were not enough, Amazon has now become a publisher, too. First, there's its Encore program "whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers."
Amazon has also put its print on demand division into play in the form of a service called CreateSpace aimed at self-published authors.
For publishers the thought of Amazon becoming a competitor in their own space is their worst nightmare come true. As Time puts it, "If Amazon is a bookstore, it's supposed to be buying from publishers, not competing with them. Right?"
You got that right, Time! However, before we get out our pitchforks and start baying "Restraint of trade!" at Amazon you need to be reminded that it is not the only book retail behemoth that is also a publisher. Let's look at Barnes & Noble.
At the beginning of 2003 Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling Publishing, described at the time as "one of the top 25 publishers in America and the industry's leading publisher of how-to books." Publishers were gravely concerned and with every reason. Barnes & Noble's own titles were like a supermarket's house brand, often undercutting the prices of outside purveyors. Their anxieties were well founded. On many occasion, when I pitched a nonfiction book at a publisher, the editor would tell me to forget about it, Barnes & Noble already had such a book and the new one could never match the house-brand's low retail price.
The case against bookstores becoming publishers was stated so cogently by Morris Rosenthal that I reproduce it in full below. Though written four years ago as a followup to Barnes & Noble's acquisition of Sterling, it is word-for-word valid for Amazon as well and should serve as a chilling cautionary tale for all book industry watchers:
Monday, July 25, 2005 Sterling Publishing and Barnes & Noble Books
Barnes & Noble bought Sterling Publishing a little over 3 years ago, and publishing has been a rapidly growing segment of Barnes & Noble's strategy ever since. Sterling has over 5,000 titles in print and is adding about 1100 annually, primarily in the How-To area. Barnes & Noble also acquires books from other publishers, such as the "in easy steps" computer series from U.K's Computer Step publishers, and Barnes & Noble also publishes an extensive backlist of out-of-print and out-of-copyright classics. According to their annual 10K filing, Barnes & Noble also "commissions books directly from authors" and "creates collections of fiction and non-fiction using in-house editors." All of this shapes up as good business for Barnes & Noble, but doesn't cheer most self publishers.
The reason has to do with shelf spaces and market saturation. Barnes & Noble is the dominant bookstore chain in the country, and they have a good record of working with small publishers when it comes to in-store events and stocking titles. However, as their annual report points out - "Each Barnes & Noble store stocks from 60,000 to 200,000 titles, of which approximately 50,000 titles are common to all stores." For the true super stores which stock 200,000 titles (though I suspect they may have meant "books" rather than "titles") that leaves a lot of room for regional or independent books, but the smaller stores seem to do an excellent job stocking the Barnes & Noble published books (and they'd be nuts not to), so it's a scary thing for a small nonfiction publisher to find that a Barnes & Noble imprint is publishing a competing title.
Barnes & Noble now has some 10,000 books in print, and they tend to be lower priced than the competing titles, which while great for customers (vertical supply chain) doesn't make publishers very enthusiastic. I seem to recall Steve Riggio saying last year that they were targeting 10% of book sales as self-published by Barnes & Noble. I also seem to remember him saying three or four years ago that they were targeting 5%, so it stands to reason if they reach 10%, they'll up the ante again.
With half their books coming from their Sterling subsidiary which specializes in how-to, and a good chunk of the remaining half also in the how-to segment, it's safe to assume that how-to publishers are at the greatest risk for the time being. The how-to emphasis makes sense, since Barnes & Noble can easily track which titles are doing well throughout their chain, than commission or acquire similar titles. They don't need to be huge sellers, the acquisition cost for a commissioned book is pretty low (lots of hungry writers out there) and the guaranteed shelf space makes a large first print run, which combined with the lack of middlemen, makes the low pricing possible. If I was in the process of setting up a new imprint to publish nonfiction, I would look long and hard at my business model and focus on titles I felt would do especially well on Amazon or independent stores, as opposed to making plans based on the whole market.
The New York Observer has picked up on a story broken by E-Reads a month ago speculating on why the New York Public Library was not carrying Rogue's Gallery, a recently published book by Michael Gross. Rogue's Gallery is a provocative look at the Metropolitan Museum and contains some observations critical of a leading socialite supporter, Annette de la Renta, who happens to be on the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library.
"When literary agent Richard Curtis and his wife, Leslie, heard about journalist Michael Gross’ unauthorized Metropolitan Museum exposé Rogues’ Gallery, they wanted to check it out. Literally! So they searched the online catalog of the New York Public Library. But the book wasn’t listed. Then they called the library and got 'kind of a vague answer,' Mr. Curtis said.
"Then he remembered Rogues’ Gallery had stirred up some controversy regarding Annette de la Renta, who is a trustee of both the Met and the NYPL."
Here's an excerpt from our story.
Gross's book has been widely ignored in the media, and Kornbluth suggests that a sort of Gentleman's Agreement among heavy-hitter members of de la Renta's august social circle is the reason why. "I am not a conspiracy theorist," writes Kornbluth, "but the media coverage -- or lack thereof -- of this dustup and of 'Rogues' Gallery' could certainly make me think of becoming one." You can read all about it in Kornbluth's blog as well as Gross's own account of the sordid maneuvers to chill his book.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist either, but what started as a routine inquiry about the availability of the book in the New York Public Library system has definitely pushed me several notches closer to paranoia. It seems that the book is simply not there. You can see for yourself by calling your local librarian or visiting the Library's website and entering the title and author into the Search box.
So what’s the problem? It seems difficult to determine. Some tell Michael he’s being “paranoid.” I’d tell Michael he’s onto something although where it might take him may not be worth the trip.
It is true that there are people in this town who have what is generally recognized as power. Can they kill people? I don’t know about that. Maybe with kindess or a harsh Fifth Avenue froideur.
Annette de la Renta is the name that comes up first and foremost in the Michael Gross/Met biography business.
As of this writing, as confirmed by the Observer's Pillifant, there are still no copies available in Manhattan libraries. But I managed to secure a copy anyway, using an ancient but tried and true technique: I bought a copy at a bookstore. Pillifant expresses my dismay at having to resort to a commercial transaction: "As for Mr. Curtis? 'I paid retail for it, which, for a professional literary agent, is scandalous.'”
My advice? Support the book, the author, and bookstores: do the same. But let your local library know you expect it to carry Rogue's Gallery.
Asked to Donate Work for Nothing, Artists Flip Google the Bird
"I should do a freebie for Google? What's the matter, do they have a tin cup and an eye patch on the street? F**K NO!"
Though none of the artists solicited to donate their work for nothing to Google Chrome actually said that, they might well have paraphrased Harlan Ellison's foaming-at-the-mouth rant against Warner Bros. and all other corporate patrons that think they're doing writers and artists a favor by displaying their work.
Canadian-based illustrator Gary Taxali's written response to Google was slightly more printable than Ellison's, but the writer would certainly agree with the graphic one issued by the artist (left). Here's what Taxali had to say:
DON’T CALL ME In the last little while, there has been a MAJOR backslide in the industry. Poor rates have been an issue for a while but things are becoming worse. Clients fees are getting even lower and the rights theyre demanding are even higher.
You want examples? How about SWATCH calling me and asking me to design a watch. They wanted a complete transfer of copyright for a paltry fee. As if thats going to happen. Google calls me and wants my work for their new search engine all over the web, the fee? Nothing. Editorial clients are slashing 1999s fees almost in half and citing the bad economy as an excuse. You know what? My excuse is that the economy is bad so you have to pay me MORE for an illustration. Hows that for an economic stimulus package?
So heres to every client with shitty fees and terms. Do not waste my time or contact me. I am very busy working with clients who respect artists and youre wasting my time with your solicitations. So for you, I give you a special salute that I hope will keep you away because I dont need your work.
According to Andrew Adam Newman writing in the New York Times about the Taxali-inspired uprising, his posting on Drawger "drew more than 200 responses, many from other illustrators who also had rejected Google’s offer." Newman quotes another illustrator, Brian Stauffer, who also turned Google down. “When a company like Google comes out very publicly and expects that the market would just give them free artwork, it sets a very dangerous precedent.”
Sadly, there are plenty of artists who need the exposure and will take Google up on its offer.
And of course, Google may feel it needs an eye patch and tin cup. It only squeaked by the first quarter of 2009 with a $1.42 billion profit.
Richard Curtis PS: This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. I want to acknowledge the newspaper's invaluable contribution. A free society cannot endure without its newspapers. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry. Until then the least that caring individuals can do is buy a paper on the street or purchase a subscription. Support the New York Times.
The following release was emailed by Hachette Book Group to literary agents and other publishing industry professionals this afternoon. It is a followup to a tough-talking release issued less than a month ago. We reprint it in its entirety. For information about Attributor, click here.
Last month we contacted you, Hachette Book Group authors and their agents, regarding our position on online book piracy. We’re pleased to announce that HBG has engaged Attributor, a leading anti-piracy protection service, to monitor the web for unauthorized copies of our authors’ titles. Please see announcement below for more details. If you have any questions, please email us at piracy@hbgusa.com.
***************************
June 17, 2009 – Hachette Book Group has engaged Attributor, a leading anti-piracy protection service, to monitor the web for instances of unlawful use of its authors’ books and content.
The rapid growth in digital availability of books has resulted in a dramatic increase in pirated editions on file sharing websites that allow users to upload, share and download content of all kinds, free of charge. While some of the content appearing on these sites is lawful and user-created, an alarming number of unauthorized copies of copyrighted book titles are uploaded and shared for free.
Attributor’s web-crawling tool checks document hosting sites, linksites, and social media and social networking sites, quickly identifying unauthorized copies. Attributor’s monitoring service will enable Hachette Book Group to proactively find unlawful uses of content and have infringing material taken down when necessary.
“Attributor is an essential resource in achieving HBG’s commitment to combating online book piracy and protecting our authors’ work,” said David Young, Chairman and CEO of Hachette Book Group. “With our lawyers and legal assistants spending a significant amount of time checking sites for pirated content, it was clear that we needed to automate and augment our monitoring, while keeping our staff very involved in the process. This automation will dramatically increase our reach and effectiveness.”
Hachette Book Group is a leading trade publisher based in New York and a division of Hachette Livre, the second-largest publisher in the world. Hachette Book Group publishes under the divisions of Little, Brown and Company, Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, Grand Central Publishing, FaithWords, Center Street, Orbit, and Hachette Digital.
This may contain confidential material. If you are not an intended recipient, please notify the sender, delete immediately, and understand that no disclosure or reliance on the information herein is permitted. Hachette Book Group, Inc. may monitor email to and from our network.
A Google-Fu Master Unlocks the Wall Street Journal. Or, How I Know Subscription Model Won't Work for Online News
Though I possess the technical skill of a herring I easily accessed the text of a Wall Street Journal article that the newspaper's website requires a subscription to read in its entirety. In the hope of saving the news gathering industry a lot of grief and money I'm going to tell them how I did it. And in the hope of saving the news gathering industry, period, I'm going to urge them to seek a different business model than one that prohibits readers from reading complete stories unless they become subscribers. You might as well try to carry water in a sieve.
It started with an item on a British website called Book Trade News, to which I have a free subscription. Every day or so the site emails me a digest of book industry-related stories, some of which I select as possibly blogworthy.
Today I received the following item: S&P Cuts Bertelsmann Ratings On Debt Levels, Ad Woes. The subhead was: Ratings closer to junk territory. If anything is blogworthy, the reduction of Bertelsmann's Standard & Poor ratings to near-junk certainly is.
To follow up on this intriguing hint, I clicked on the hotlink that took me to Book Trade News's website. There I found this short abstract:
Standard & Poor's Ratings Services cut its ratings on international media conglomerate Bertelsmann AG closer to junk territory, saying declining advertising will hurt results this year.
The rating agency also noted Europe's largest media company's leverage is high for its rating level, BBB.
The abstract was followed by a hotlink to the source of the story, "Wall Street Journal item". I clicked on it and got the same tease followed by a hotlink that said, "To continue reading, subscribe now". When I clicked on it, I was taken to a page offering various subscription packages and their costs.
Okay, fair enough. But I wondered if I could get around the requirement to subscribe. Out of curiosity I copied the opening sentence of their teaser, pasted it into a Google search box, and hit "Enter". It took me (in 0.26 seconds) to a page of Google listings: the very first item displayed was the exact same opening line of the Journal story. I clicked on it and was taken to the wsj.com page. There I found the complete text I was looking for, but it was overlaid with graphic material that appeared to be intended to block my reading or copying. Now what?
Determined, I highlighted the entire page, copied it and pasted it into a Word document. The junk that had obscured my view disappeared and the text came out clean, legible and - free!
To make sure this wasn't a fluke, later in the day I tried it again. This time Google took me to the same wsj.com page but without the garbage: the complete and unabridged story (actually a Dow Jones item) stared me in the face. I did not have to pay a dime to subscribe.
You can read the Bertelsmann story in its entirety by clicking on the above hotlink.. But that's not the point. Here's the point: as passionately as we all long to see the newspaper and magazine industries survive, I'm skeptical that restricting stories to subscribers will work. As much as I hate the Information Wants to Be Free concept, it's unrealistic to think that information can be withheld from determined seekers. All the more dismaying is that an apparently secure system yielded to a complete amateur. Yielded, in fact, with scarcely any resistance at all.
My technical guru has since informed me that the procedure I instinctively followed is called Google-Fu, which Chris Perillo defines as “the ability to quickly answer any given question using internet resources, such as a search engine. It’s a Zen concept, if you will. The better and faster you become at finding the right answers quickly online, the higher your 'Google-Fu rating'”. Check out his video explanation of the term to a chat-room caller.
Here's the bottom line: information must either be locked up behind an unassailable firewall or we have to find a different way to monetize it.Armed with nothing but my trusty mouse, I laid siege to the Journal's firewall and it came tumbling down in moments.
I'm no Houdini, but at least I can now run with with the geeks. When they ask me what was my finest hack, I'll shrug modestly and say, "Wall Street Journal. Yeah, I Google-Fu'd it. Piece of cake."
For years I’ve wanted to do ebooks served efficiently from the cloud and I'm glad Google is finally implementing it with bravado, but I think publishers need to be aware that Google’s plans could have some serious implications for their content in the long run. How will customers use it?What will publishers have to do to compete in a space where Google is both the most popular search engine and a retailer? Do the other retailers who rely on searches or who pay for ad space with Google see it as a conflict of interest? And how do we as a publisher use this effectively to distinguish our needles in the haystack?
Recently, publishing guru Mike Shatzkin began talking about his project to chart the constantly developing ebook space as it relates to all the current devices, including the necessary software, supported formats, and retailers. Google is joining this grid in a big way. I’ll be very interested to see how he lines up all these new and old platforms, particularly if he starts to rank them in terms of profitability based on royalty rates and returns. But Shatzkin has also been making some excellent points that relate to how publishers see this space, namely that the continuing format and device wars make the role of publishers just as important as ever. “The more complicated this world becomes,” he says, “the more an author will need a professional organization.” I understand this because every day at E-Reads we channel our expertise to tailor authors’ content to fit what formats customers are asking for, and they continue to ask for plenty of options.
Google’s ebook sales channel will be the latest flavor. As Google prepares to enter the market, I’ve been wondering if there’s going to be any negative impact on other format sales or if there's going to be trouble with Cloud City. It’s hard to say until we've seen what Google finally brings out. Google will be doing a multifaceted delivery to many devices and future APIs. And the Google ebook platform doesn’t just allow publishers to monetize, it’s even open to author-bloggers. It’s the overdue advent of a paid premium text content system. As competition to services like Scribd, it's going to be easier than ever for the average person or company to set a price on written content they might have given away in the past, and to compete with traditional publishers.
As Shatzkin and the New York Times have pointed out, Google isn’t really aiming to sell files as much as they will be selling online access to ebooks and texts they’ve inventoried for their popular search engine. In that way, if your device can access Google on the net (iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows, Mac, Linux, etc.) you’ll be able to read premium content from your Google book shelf. Future web-applications might even be able to filter and reuse the Google-served content (with permission, of course), and deliver texts in ways we can't even imagine today.
Publishers will do very well in adopting Google as a sales partner for their content, providing they accept that this is a pivotal development that requires them to pay much more attention to marketing etext (both books and snippets, content integrated into different hashes) in the future. This is a natural evolution that coincides with the rise of social data increasingly being served from the cloud and the pressure Google faces to create a semantic Web 3.0 experience that can analyze data more effectively, particularly in valuable resources like books, and serve it up in new ways. And those new ways are going to make the retail space for etexts much more interesting in the coming years.
So what’s to worry about?
For the last few years, Google's business practice has been to take advantage of digitized books to extend the web's reference material, and thus add value to their searches and databases (not without some hiccups). Publishers were happy to see that it was driving sales for print and ebooks at retailers like Amazon. It was a means to an end at another location. But when Google starts merchandizing their data cache of library books and publisher content, publishers will have to work harder to make their content stand out at Google's site, especially older books, to make their upkeep worthwhile financially, seeing as it might be the only stop customers need anymore.
I’m sure Amazon is worried on our behalf. Despite appealing to publishers with a low discount rate, Google sees themselves as retailer agnostic, a mere stepping stone to helping customers get to the content they want, and so in some ways they’ve hobbled Google Books from being too competitive against the other players. You see, like Scribd, for the time being it’s not the best-looking presentation of material that publishers can ask for when you compare it to some of the better formats. I don’t think Google wants to dry up all the other format sales initially. But they may be devaluing the content anyway, unintentionally.
Books Still Need Packaging
Google wants to aggregate literature, which is traditionally stand-alone content, into fast-served web content and that can devalue the market value of authors' full length literary work. If you just want the words, why pay for bells and whistles? A library doesn't need curb appeal, right?
Customers are increasingly attracted to biting off smaller chunks of written content if the opportunity is presented to them. That's not to say that truncated and abridged versions are what people prefer to read, but I think eventually serving books from the cloud will allow Google to break up book content for micro sales, which is what publisher ebook services like LibreDigital have been anticipating. What if you only need the third chapter of a Malcolm Gladwell book? As it already stands, Google makes it easy to filter the content you need from the chaff, and now they'll sell it to you.
The cloud methodology of serving and selling books will further blur the lines about what a “book” really is. Is it just a lump sum of accessed words? Where’s the sense of unified aesthetic package? Long stories, novels and reference books without packaging don't compete for attention and pageviews well against attractive blogs, wikis, or streamed video, but book fragments and book widgets will be increasingly competitive. Google Books’ search tools already fragment the larger texts so that customers can quickly access relevant material. Google sees the web as a big haystack for which they map the way to your specific needle. It used to be that most publishers thought they were selling more than just another needle for the haystack.
I wonder how self-aware Google is that they are working at effacing the relevance of a "book" by supplanting it with data nodes on the Internet. Is Google Reader an adequate way to present long-form material and give it the luster it deserves? Publishers need to decide if they are sacrificing too much of the quality in a reading experience just to fit this new format. It's something I already worry about with ebooks on successful platforms like the Kindle and Sony.
You’re Now Shopping, Not Searching
It used to be that shopping was not analogous to web searching, but the future wants it to be. Does Google expect small publishers to start treating ebook content as if it deserves Google marketing ad words? This is money that large publishers know how to spend for traditional marketing, but it's more nebulous when it means spending money to distinguish older, backlist content. It doesn't look worthwhile at this point, but to protect the relevance of the material (even novels) at Google, publishers will have to adopt new strategies, including even more efforts at advertiser sponsorship. Widgets and viral campaigns aren't enough. Pushing content into Google and various ebook formats can't remain a relatively passive activity for too much longer: ebooks will need more of their own marketing.
But even when Google directs potential customers to premium content successfully, most people will look for alternatives where they don't have to pay. That's the nature of the web. Pirate material and advertiser sponsored Freemiums. Today you can pay $1.99 for the TV episode on iTunes or watch it for free with Hulu. Hulu wins.
Maybe the time for integrating books into the Internet is overdue, but it's divesting old social structures of their roles in book sales. The internet has increasingly been jeopardizing the influence of print culture, shaping a new discourse of short and snappy bite size reading experiences. Or maybe this is the happy start to a better future. Either way, publishers have their work cut out for them. Luckily, there are two strong groups who are proactively supporting publishers. First, public libraries are adopting ebook technology and are contributing to the ebook landscape in their efforts to survive the paradigm shift. And the IDPF has been helping publishers to rally around an open standards future with the ePub format. The increasing pervasiveness of the ePub format at retail points will be important for customers once the competition among devices and sales channels really heats up. After PDF, with all its limitations, the ePub format is the best-looking and most future-proof format you can buy.
And even the iPhone is demonstrating that users still choose to have it both ways: old-school (long form ebooks) and new school (short-form cloud-served micro content). Thanks to strong support from graphically inclined developers, iPhone ebook apps allow publisher content to flourish a bit better as “books,” especially titles that can sell themselves as stand-alone applications (such as with Iceberg Reader). These ebook apps set themselves apart and overcome the bias against long form content with excellent graphic presentation, and appear "special" to the readers and customers, and all this distinguishes the content much better. And that’s what matters to a publisher. Its why many of us love what we do. We strive to distinguish good content as a relevant experience for readers.
If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em: S&S to Retail 5,000 Titles on Scribd
One way to conquer pirates is to co-opt their territory. To chase would-be pirates off Scribd.com, Simon & Schuster has announced it will deploy some 5,000 e-book editions on the website, reports Brad Stone in the New York Times. Though still in startup, Scribd has mushroomed into a hugely popular locus for writers to upload documents, including books.
Unfortunately, despite heroic efforts, Scribd has not been able to bar its doors to those passing off as their own the work of others. But, like a policeman giving a sample garment to a dog to sniff, once the website's filtering software recognizes a legitimate copyrighted text it will instantly identify and reject imposters. Call it pre-emptive piracy management.
But there's a far less subtle motivation for publishers to cast their lot with Scribd: its irresistibly low commission on sales. In the first decade of the E-Book Revolution, retailers charged the same 50% discount for the sale of digital content that brick and mortar bookstores charged for print. Foremost among the fifty percenters is Amazon and its Kindle. But of late publishers have begun to question the 50%-off shiboleth. Guru Mike Shatzkin gave sharp voice to this restive group. Pronouncing high discounts "daft," he declared "There is no comparison between the retailers’ costs and risks associated with physical books and those associated with ebooks. There is no economic justification to providing the same level of discounts."
"Now," said Shatzkin, "is the time to change this." You can read about it in detail here.
Picking up on these populist sentiments, Scribd came out of the chute charging 20% off the list price to its content provider customers, and that includes publishers. Stone quotes Scribd chief executive Trip Adler as declaring that S&S "is the first public endorsement by a major force in publishing that the social Web will play a major role in the future of book sales.”
Other standard bearers of Big Publishing may well join the rush to Scribd. The anti-piracy features are certainly attractive, but the telling factor may well be a desperate need to push Amazon and other etailers back to a commission structure that is, well, not quite so daft.
There was a moment of ribald hilarity at the first government-sponsored e-book conference in 1998, where the e-book industry was officially launched in an atmosphere of evangelical fervor. As one of the few attendees from the traditional publishing sector, I was surrounded by a crowd of techies, engineers, entrepreneurial pioneers, geeks and dreamers who had toiled in the rocky e-book vineyard for years and were at last about to witness the realization of their vision. After a number of presentations had been given, a professorial gentleman took the podium and began a power point presentation. On the auditorium screen was a picture of what looked like tiny white balls.
The presenter explained that we were looking at something he called E Ink. Suspended in a liquid were millions of microcapsules containing particles that were dark on one side and light on the other, and each side had oppositely charged particles. By applying an electronic field, the white surface became black. And by sending a computer message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like a "W", the screen would show the letter W. Or by sending a message instructing the suspension to turn the white microcapsules into black ones shaped like War and Peace, the screen would show a book-length screen containing Tolstoy's epic.
He touched a key on his keyboard advancing to the next slide. Voila!
"See? Your white balls just turned black," the gentleman explained. He did not crack a smile.
An undercurrent of titters swept the audience as he droned on humorlessly about your white balls turning black and your black balls turning white. Aside from the inadvertent pun, the concept struck me as preposterous. I turned to a colleague and said, "That dog won't hunt!"
My notes on that 1998 conference are lost, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the presenter was Joe Jacobson, creator of electronic ink, who was awarded a patent for it in 2000.
Swedish Pirate's Booty: A Seat in Europe's Parliament
This one's going to blow your minds, folks.
BBC News reports that Sweden's Pirate Party, campaigning on a platform of reforming copyright and patent laws, has won a seat in the European Union's Parliament with 7.1% of the vote.
As we wrote in April, four men involved in the Pirate Bay file-sharing website were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay about $4.5 million in damages. Richard Falkvinge's Pirate Party seized on the high profile suit to rally supporters to a victory in EU parliamentary elections. "Last night, we gained political credibility," Falkvinge gloated as his bloc of one began negotiations with other EU parties for political support and credibility. "People were not taken in by the establishment and we got political trust from the citizens. "
It's hard to know what the citizens of Europe trust about the principles on which the Pirate Party bases its quest for power. "Many people just don't see illegal file-sharing as a crime, however hard the media industries try to persuade the public that it's just as bad as shoplifting," writes BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones. Falkvinge enunciated the piracy position succinctly: "The establishment is trying to prevent control of knowledge and culture slipping from their grasp."
Well, now, in a development that will delight freemongers, the Pirate Party has joined the establishment. Read about it in Swedish pirates capture EU seat.
My eyes moistened when I read that Franklin Electronic Publishers had been acquired by an investment company. The company played a significant role in my life and more importantly, in the histories of both the computer and book industries. In fact, it is not hyperbole to say that today's computer business would be radically different if a lawsuit brought against Franklin by Apple had had a different outcome.
The first electronic book I ever beheld was Franklin's Spelling Ace. Produced in 1986, the palmtop device, as they were then called, enabled users to type a word phonetically ("fonetiklee") on its keyboard and the Ace would display the correctly spelled word on its liquid crystal screen. It also intoned the word aloud in a lugubrious computer voice. My young son took great delight in typing in the clinical words for sex organs, then repeatedly hitting the voice function command at dinner parties.
Franklin launched its business in the early 1980s with the Franklin Ace 100 and 1000, clones of the Apple's Series II and II+ computers right down to Apple's ROMs. Franklin's justification for copying the software was that that because Apple's computer code was contained on a read-only memory rather expressed in a "fixed medium", as defined in the US Copyright Law of the time, it could not be copyrighted. Franklin also argued that Apple's operating system programs really constituted ideas. Copyright laws do not protect ideas, only the explicit expression of ideas such as novels, screenplays, musical composition and paintings, can be protected.
Not surprisingly. Apple took exception and sued. And even though Franklin freely admitted it had copied Apple's ROM and OS codes, Franklin won. Again, not surprisingly, Apple appealed. As Rob Hassett explained in his summary of the court's decision, in order to have a fighting chance to win its appeal, Apple had to stretch the definition of "idea". The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals listened to Apple's contention that programs coded in machine language and contained on a ROM chip were copyrightable. The court concurred with Apple's arguments and decided that, in Hassett's words, "the general function of translating source code into object code qualifies as an idea." The lower court's decision was reversed in Apple's favor.
The implications and precedents for the burgeoning computer industry were incalculable and resonate to this day.
Franklin also released a line of IBM compatible computers, but in time Apple edged Franklin out of the desktop business. The firm subsequently focused on its core competence, handhelds (dictionaries, thesauruses, language translators, Bibles, e-books), where it held its own until a new generation of portable e-books drove its stock down to $1.00 and ownership into the arms of a company called Saunders Acquisition Corp. Two days later Franklin announced it had lost $6.5 million in its fourth fiscal quarter.
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It was over Franklin's palmtop Bible that the first shot was fired in what was to become a rights war between the trade book industry and the author and agent community. And I believe I may have been the first agent to detect the muzzle flash.
Sometime early in the 1990s I was reviewing the contract boilerplate for a book I had sold to G. P. Putnam when my eye fell on an unfamiliar provision. It was titled "Display Rights." I had no idea what it meant. But whatever it meant, one thing was clear: display rights belonged to the publisher. I picked up the phone and called Phyllis Grann, then Putnam's chief executive. "We saw this electronic Bible at a trade show," she explained. "It's amazing. You type in 'meek' and it takes you right to the passage in the Bible! We're not sure how it works, but we're pretty sure it has to do with information storage and retrieval. So we decided to lock those rights into our contract language. I hope it's okay with you."
Well, it wasn't. But after my agent colleagues and I reviewed the boilerplates of Putnam and its Big Publishing colleagues, it was clear they held the high ground. Every one of them had some version of information storage and retrieval rights to the books they published. Though storage of information on computers was well advanced by the late 1980s (computers had guided humans to the moon some twenty years earlier) and the concept of hypertext had been promulgated in the early 1970s, the notion of a book stored, delivered and read on a computer was pretty much restricted to science fiction. Indeed, the term "cyberbooks" had been coined as the title of a scifi novel of the same name by Ben Bova published by Tor.
It took a while for the agents to grasp the significance of information storage and retrieval as it applied to book contracts. A critically important aspect was how to define "out of print". Defining it was hard enough before computers because of vague language in publishing contracts about "term of copyright". But the introduction of computers raised the possibility that the mere storage of a book in a publisher's memory bank would entitle the publisher to keep the rights in perpetuity.
Aggressive lobbying on the part of agent and author organizations eventually forced publishers to rule out memory storage as their definition of "in print".
Some ten years or so would pass after the debut of Franklin's "palmtops" before the next milestone on the e-book road appeared in the form of the Rocket Book, and yet another decade before the Sony and Kindle jolted the publishing industry into the modern e-book era. But it all started with the humble little Franklin e-Bible that a Putnam executive played with at a trade show.
Though he was the perpetrator of one of history's most heinous frauds, Charles Ponzi's swindle failed to gain him admission into one of humankind's most elite clubs. For "Ponzi" has never achieved higher status than that of mere adjective - as modifier of the noun "scheme." To gain admission to the lexicographical Olympus, his crime would have had to be so colossal that his name became a verb. The laurels for that achievement, like so many other dubious honors he has garnered, belong to Bernard Madoff. His scheme attains the distinction of becoming a verb, both transitive (to madoff) and intransitive (to be madoffed).
Even such distinguished brand names as Kleenex, Band-Aid and Frigidaire have been excluded from this pantheon. We do not Kleenex a nose, Band-Aid a wound, or Frigidaire a bottle of milk. But Madoff's notoriety entitles him to hobnob with the likes of Xerox and TiVo and...let's see, have I forgotten any others?
Ah yes. Google.
These ruminations were stimulated by an article in the New York Timesby Miguel Helft about Microsoft's efforts to produce a search service so indomitable, so ubiquitous that the noun assigned to it - "Bing" - will in the phrase of the company's chief exec Steven A. Ballmer "verb up". Looking for the author of the poetic line "trailing clouds of glory" or the first son of Elector Ernst of the House of Wettin? Why, just bing it and you'll learn it's William Wordsworth and Friedrich the Wise respectively.
"Microsoft’s marketing gurus hope that Bing will evoke neither a type of cherry nor a strip club on 'The Sopranos' but rather a sound — the ringing of a bell that signals the 'aha' moment when a search leads to an answer," writes Helft. Another Microsoft executive, Yusuf Mehdi, said that if MS's brandsmiths have done their job right, "bing" will become synonymous with “the sound of found”. We'll ignore the fact that "Bingo!" has been the sound of found since its the game was introduced in the United States 75 years ago.
Though boosted by an $80 to $100 million ad campaign and a “Bing-a-thon” on Hulu, Bing's verbward ascent will be arduous. Even in a fluid linguistic world where nouns morph into transitive verbs overnight - to impact, to message, to text - Google's preeminence dwarfs all competitors. Its name verbs up to Heaven itself, or at least to the next best thing to Heaven, the Oxford English Dictionary. OED conferred verbitude on the word in July 2006. (And by the way, "morph" and "dwarf" are nouns turned verbs too.)
You would think that the verbing up of your company name would be a little like entering Valhalla. Quite the opposite: it happens to be fraught with danger and you should be careful of what you wish for. Candace Lombardi, writing for CNET News, writes that "ubiquitous use of the company's name to describe something can make it harder to enforce a trademark. Bayer lost Aspirin as a U.S. trademark in 1921 after it was determined that the abbreviation for acetylsalicylic acid had become a generic term. The trademarks Band-Aid, Kleenex, Rollerblade and Xerox have had similar issues."
And Xerox? Many of us remember its advertising campaign urging us not to use its company name as a verb. We thought it was brilliant, reverse-psychology publicity. But apparently they weren't kidding. We owe it to a blogger, "ghouly05" writing on Yahoo, for an explanation of whether Xerox is a noun or a verb:
It is used as both, although the corporation does not really like that as they are afraid it will becoming a "generic" word for photocopy. This has happened with other brand names before (Kleenex comes to mind as a generic name for a tissue) and can be a legal problem for the parent company.
.... Though both are common, the company does not condone such uses of its trademark, and is particularly concerned about the ongoing use of Xerox as a verb as this places the trademark in danger of being declared a generic word by the courts. The company is engaged in an ongoing advertising and media campaign to convince the public that Xerox should not be used as a verb.
To this end, the company has written to publications that have used Xerox as a verb, and has also purchased print advertisements declaring that "you cannot 'xerox' a document, but you can copy it on a Xerox Brand copying machine". (Note that xerox is functionally a verb in this sentence.) Xerox Corporation continues to protect its trademark diligently in most if not all trademark categories. Despite their efforts, many dictionaries continue to mention the use of "xerox" as a verb, including the Oxford English Dictionary.
Could Google's trademark be threatened by its grammatical canonization? You can read one opinion that says absolutely. "Google does have something of a genuine concern, in as far as the inclusion of google as a verb does push it ever closer to becoming part of the general lexicon, and that would mean exclusion from legal protection for the trademark. The fact that Merriam-Webster's chose a lower case google, rather than the upper case OED usage, will ease the concern a tad."
So, maybe Microsoft shouldn't be so eager to verb up its search service. You can visit the Bing website and check it against its behemoth rival. If you're not sure how to find it on the Web, you can just do what I did: google it.
On Collision Course for an E-Book-Off, Google-Mothra Enters Fray Against Amazon-Godzilla
A slumbering monster is awakened by greed and folly and, tormented beyond endurance, goes on a rampage.
The formula for a Japanese monster film? No, it's a riff on a major breaking story in the New York Times.
Motoko Rich reports that "In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which is seeking to control the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle reading device."
Though Google is currently a facilitator for readers seeking links to e-book retailers, the company now intends to sell digital editions directly to consumers.
Google has discussed such plans with publishers before, but it has now committed the company to going live with the project by the end of 2009. In a presentation at BookExpo, Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, added the phrase: “This time we mean it.”
Google vs. Amazon is not merely a major trade battle but a test of reader preferences, with huge stakes and social implications. Writes Rich:
"Mr. Turvey said Google’s program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. 'We don’t believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go,' he said."
William C. Dietz's Words for Hire #2 - Television and Movie Tie-Ins
William C. Dietz is the best-selling author of more than thirty novels, some of which have been reissued by E-Reads. Recently he was invited by the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Bulletin to write a bi-monthly column called "Words for Hire," exploring the world of media tie-ins and novelizations. The articles demystify a fascinating genre and we're delighted to reprint them as a regular feature in these pages. RC ****************************** William C. Dietz introduces his second column:
Traditionally most tie-in novels have been based on movies and television programs. A quick check of the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW) website provides dozens of examples including Maverick, Murder She Wrote, James Bond, Batman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek, STAR WARS, Diagnosis Murder, Highlander and many more. But how do these deals get done? Who initiates them? And how are writers chosen?
In order to answer those questions and more I interviewed two experts and asked them a set of identical questions.
E-Card Handouts at BEA Weigh Little But Promise Tons
Publishers Weekly reports that his year's Book Expo America looked and felt smaller than any in recent memory. Was it a predictable dip caused by the economy? Or the first shovelful of soil dug in the graveyard, as book industry prophet Mike Shatzkin recently speculated?
Notable in their scarcity were advance reading copies of forthcoming books being pushed by exhibiting publishers. Traditionally, experienced convention-crawlers line up at the gates early in the morning and, like Black Friday shoppers, the moment the green light is flashed they charge to booths with swagbags agape, scooping up any and every bound galley they can get their hands on whether they're seriously interested in the titles or not. This year, however, there were far fewer ARCs on display, as PW's Lynn Andriani reported, and trophy-hunters had to be satisfied with downloadable simulacra. But one of these has seized our attention and given it a good shake. "Traffic moved freely at the HarperCollins booth," writes Andriani, "where the publisher was giving out Symtio cards carrying digital versions of its galleys."
You might want to commit the word "Symtio" to your memory, as I suspect you will be hearing a lot about it in the near future. Craig Morgan Teicher, another PW reporter, explains it:
The concept: stores stock and sell Symtio cards, which are good for downloads of particular e-books or audiobooks from the Symtio site. Consumers can access the site only by entering the code from the card bought at a store, but once they're logged on, they can buy more books, and the purchases are credited back to the store where the card was bought, meaning retailers can make more sales following the sale of a single Symtio card.
Symtio was created by Verne Kenny for Zondervan, a religious imprint of HarperCollins. More than two dozen publishers and hundreds of retail locations signed up after market tests indicated strong support for the concept. We support it too: in theory it provides a critically important bridge between brick and mortar bookstores and the digital sphere.
The company's website details the operation:
Symtio is the easiest way to buy digital media in a retail store. Digital books, both eBook and audiobook, are released the same day as print books and available for immediate download. That means you’ll always be able to get the latest releases no matter how you choose to read them. Plus, we keep track of your purchases in a media footlocker. If your computer crashes or you accidentally delete your downloads, we’ve got backups that you can re-download at no extra cost.
Among the benefits users get when they create an account:
A "Media footlocker" where you can store your Symtio purchases."Think of it as backup protection—your purchases are safe if your computer crashes or your hard drive fails."
Re-download—"You can come back to symtio.com at any time and re-download your digital purchases.
Order history—The service keeps track of your purchases and provides you with historical data such as date, time, cost and number of times you’ve downloaded your purchases.
Product Gift Cards - "Giving a Symtio digital product card says you’ve thought about your gift, much as when you used to give bound books or music. While Symtio products have the feel and convenience of a gift card, the difference is that you’ve hand picked and purchased a specific product with the recipient in mind."
DRM-free - To download an e-book, you select your device from a drop-down menu, then choose the appropriate file format. For audio you can use any MP3 player or supported media program to download digital products.
Of particular interest was the procedure for downloading e-books. Though not wireless, it is largely device-agnostic, and that includes (choirs of angels raise their voices) Macs.
Once a Symtio eBook is downloaded to your computer, transfer it to your digital media reader such as a Sony Personal Reader, PDA or personal computer as you would any other file. Or, if you prefer, you can read Symtio eBooks right on your Windows or Macintosh computer as long as you have a program that reads the format you purchased.
Supported hardware includes:
* Windows computer * Macintosh computer * Sony Reader Digital Book (PRS-505 and PRS-700) * Amazon Kindle * Palm based PDA or Smart Phone * Windows Mobile based PDA or Smart Phone * Symbian Smart Phone (Nokia and others)
Supported software includes:
* Adobe Digital Editions (.epub) * Adobe Reader (.pdf) * Mobipocket (.prc) * Microsoft Reader (.lit)
Will consumers go for it? According to PW, they have done so in spades: Symtio sold "thousands of products in the first 10 weeks," Kenny told PW. “Not only were people finding the bestsellers but they were browsing to find the backlist."
"Retailers are obviously concerned about the loss of traffic to online stores,” Kenny, noted in the grandest understatement to come out of this year's BEA. “I thought, what could the consumer do inside a retail setting to buy digital content. Out of that grew the idea of Symtio.”
You can visit the firm's website and read up on the Symtio cards FAQ. The site also has a store locator. We entered our zip code a few others at random and for now the bookstores are pretty much all dedicated to Christian literature. But it's hard to believe the product will expand not just to other HarperCollins imprints but to other publishers as well.
And why limit the products to books and the stores to bookstores? Let your imagination soar. Mine is working overtime.
William C. Dietz is the best-selling author of more than thirty novels, some of which have been reissued by E-Reads. Recently he was invited by the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) Bulletin to write a bi-monthly column called "Words for Hire," exploring the world of media tie-ins and novelizations. The articles demystify a fascinating genre and we're delighted to reprint them as a regular feature in these pages.
