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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.
Okay, hotshot, so you want to be an e-book publisher? Piece of cake. All you have to do is provide your retailers with the following information about your books:
eISBN
Title
Contributors
Description
Publisher
Language
Territorial Rights with Country Code
Suggested Retail Price with country code
Publication Date
BISAC Code
Collectively, this information is known as Metadata, and unless you provide it for every title and in a format that is usable by retailers, the stores will not carry your e-books. And every retailer has its own format requirements.
Take the simple matter of book titles. What is your retailer's protocol for designating them? Do they prefer "The Grapes of Wrath" Or "Grapes of Wrath, The"? And how about the byline? "John Steinbeck"? Or "Steinbeck, John"?
Or take suggested retail price. Which currency are we talking about? US dollars? Canadian dollars? Australian dollars? British Pounds? And do you know the Country Code associated with the currency?
Then there's the matter of territorial rights. There's a code for every country in which you have the right to sell your books. Do you know the country code for Lesotho? Cameroon? Mozambique? How about the USA? Canada? You'll need a 13-digit eISBN for each and every e-book. Do you have them? Know where to get them? Are they free or do you have to buy them?
And of course you'll need BISAC codes, the numbered subject headings organized to help retailers display books by topic. Are you publishing a fantasy? What kind of fantasy? Contemporary (FIC009010)? Historical (FIC009030)? Paranormal (FIC009050)? (You can read all about BISAC Codes here.)
What about your covers? What's the retailer's convention for image files, .png or .jpg? What's the minimum pixels per square inch? Minimum width in pixels?
There's lots more -- pages and pages of definitions, specs and tolerances in fine print provided by each retailer.
Still think any bozo can become an e-publisher? Do your Metadata homework and get back to me.
What Publishers Can Learn From Cablevision-ABC Feud
When the publishers of #1 bestselling hardcover Game Change windowed the e-book edition rather than issue it simultaneously, Kindle owners protested by deliberately downgrading the book in their Amazon reviews. Their action, which fell somewhere between populist revolt and temper tantrum, elicited an editorial by Publishers Lunch's Michael Cader urging publishers to do a better job educating the public. "Publishing people who care about these pricing discussions need to get in the online forums and start issuing press releases and find other ways to address readers honestly about price," he said. We agreed with him.
We've changed our minds.
What made us change our minds was the confrontation between Cablevision and ABC over how much the cable provider should pay ABC to carry its programs. Held as hostage was the Academy Awards, one of the most watched shows on the annual television calendar.
The reaction of subscribers was identical to that of Kindle owners deprived of Game Change. They didn't understand the issues, nor did they give a damn who was in the wrong. They wanted their Academy Awards, and they wanted them now. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, said this about the blackout: "When pulling a signal becomes the nuclear option in negotiation, it inflicts collateral damage on consumers who pay their bills and have done nothing wrong. Someone needs to be speaking up for them in this dispute and those like them, and make no mistake, this is the latest example of consumers getting caught in the middle because the high stakes incentives created in these negotiations are not working for the average customer who just expects their programming to be there when they want it."
Fortunately for the average customer, the dispute was settled in time. (Actually about 18 minutes late, occasioning the wry observation by New York Magazine's blogger that subscribers blessedly missed the egg laid by co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.)
The moral of Cablevision vs. ABC as far as the publishing industry is concerned is that consumers have no patience for such arcane issues as windowing, loss leader pricing or agency business models. They expect their book when they hit Download and they want it at a reasonable price. Educational initiatives are a waste of time. We need to get our pricing act together. Though there is no Academy Awards show to bring us to the brink of catastrophe, the e-book industry will not realize its full potential until we provide our products reliably and at prices that make sense to customers.
John Sargent, admiral of the Macmillan fleet, has charted the course of his company to meet the challenges of modern publishing, traditional and digital. In a memo to Macmillan authors, their agents, and readers, Sargent spelled out a host of initiatives and policies. "It has become clear to me," he says, "that there is far too little accurate information available in this time of unprecedented change. The issues we all face together are complex, and no news story or 140-character snippet can adequately address them."
Some of the content of his message had been explicitly announced in the last turbulent months, other policies are fully articulated for the first time. You may read the announcement in its entirety here, but in essence:
Starting at the end of March, we will move from the “retail model” of selling e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who then sell to readers at a price that the retailer determines) to the “agency model” (publishers set the price, and retailers take a commission on the sale to readers). We will make this change with all our e-book retailers simultaneously.
All the new adult trade books for which we have the rights to publish in e-book format will be available at the first release of the printed book. We will no longer delay the publication of e-books (read: no windowing).
We will price our e-books at a wide variety of prices. In the ink-on-paper world we publish new books in different formats (hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback) at prices that generally range from $35.00 to $5.99. In the digital world we will price each book individually as we do today. Generally e-book editions of hardcover new releases will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99; a few books will be priced higher and lower. This is a tremendous discount from the price of the printed hardcover books, which generally range from $28.00 to $24.00. E-book editions of New York Times hardcover bestsellers will be priced at $12.99 or lower while they are on the printed list. E-book editions of paperback new releases will be generally priced between $9.99 and $6.99.
For physical books, the majority of new release hardcovers are published in cheaper paperback versions over time. We will mirror this price reduction in the digital world.
There has been a lot of concern from e-book readers that $9.99 books will no longer be available. Most Macmillan e-books will still be priced below ten dollars.
Sargent says he has not addressed illustrated books or books for young children, nor the long-term or author royalty consequences of the change. He will save those and other topics for future posts. But he does state categorically that "these changes will apply to every e-book retailer with whom we do business."
If for no other reason, e-books are the perfect vehicle for immediately correcting errors in published books. And if the errors are serious enough to damage a person's reputation or otherwise incur potential legal liability, a prompt correction and withdrawal of the offending text demonstrate the sincere determination of the those who messed up to set the record straight without delay.
Such might be the recourse of Charles Pellegrino and his publisher Henry Holt in expunging material in his otherwise highly acclaimed account of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, The Last Train From Hiroshima.
According to William J. Broad in the New York Times, a section of the book cites recollections of someone who says he flew in an observation plane accompanying the bomber that released the a-bomb, the Enola Gay. But the man, Joseph Fuoco, "never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer," says Corliss’s family. "They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor," writes Broad.
The author of the book "now concedes that he was probably duped" and plans to "rewrite sections of the book for paperback and foreign editions."
If normal production timelines apply, that means that the paperback might not come out for a year after hardcover publication, or six or nine months if Holt accelerates release of the reprint. Foreign editions? Foreign publishers need to translate the book first, so don't expect a correct edition to appear overseas for many months as well.
If there was ever a case for e-books, this is it. Pellegrino and his publisher could remove the controversial passages for an immediate e-print and write an apology that might remove not just the insult of the offending passages but also the injury of making the Corliss's family wait, brood - and, perhaps, call a lawyer. As of this writing, however, there is no e-book edition. It undoubtedly has been "windowed", the term used by publishers to describe the holding back of an e-book edition until the hardcover has had its run. Though controversial (see Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Prints), windowing is sound strategy for many books and might have been fine for Last Train too had it not been for this alleged error, which if true is embarrassing at the very least but potentially damaging as well.
Holt should consider crash-releasing a corrected Last Train in e-book.
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.
Ticked Off about Delayed Release of E-Book Reprint? Enhancements Will Make It Worth Waiting For
In July of 2008, about nine months after the first season of Mad Men ended, Lionsgate, the hit television show's producer, released the DVD. It not only carried all 13 episodes but a number of special features as well. Among them were audio commentaries on each episode; a "featurette" exploring the world of Mad Men; a documentary called The Desire of the American Dream, described as "featuring the 1960's creative revolution in media"; "Pictures of Elegance" a photo gallery with commentaries from the costume, hair and production designers; another featurette called "Scoring Mad Men"; and a Mad Men Music Sampler.
Some leading publishing executives must have watched that or some other DVD and had an "Aha!" moment. Why couldn't you enhance e-book reprints the same way that film and television studios enhance the DVD rereleases of theatrical movies or television series?
That idea seems to be taking hold. Jack McKeown, a founder of book publisher and distributor Perseus Group, recently discussed this idea, citing remarks by HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray: "Publishers would do well to seize the high ground here by offering enhanced e-book editions, accompanied by robust internet-focused marketing campaigns to further distinguish their e-book launches."
And Jeffrey Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal reports that Macmillan will be releasing special e-book editions of key hardcover books, but with an interesting twist: they will actually be sold for a higher price than the hardcovers! "The special editions, which will include author interviews and other material, such as reading guides, will carry a list price slightly higher than the hardcover edition. (Hardcover books typically list for at least $25, while e-book versions of best sellers can go for as little as $9.99.) The new e-books will go on sale on the same day as the hardcover. After 90 days, the special edition will be replaced by a standard e-book."
It should come as no surprise that the idea for enhanced e-books was introduced, or at least articulated, last March by Mike Shatzkin, the closest thing our business has to a Nostradumus. In a two part posting he laid out everything a publisher needs to know and do to maximize its e-book resources.
One of the key benefits of the medium is economy. Enhanced e-books "present the opportunity to deliver additional content and features to consumers with no additional run-on production cost," Shatzkin explains. "Traditional printed books cost something additional for every extra page we put into them; e-books don’t.
"An enhanced ebook," he points out, "can be an infinite number of things, and probably will become dozens, if not hundreds, of different things over time...The tools include internal linking, external linking, embedded video and audio, additional text-and-illustration content, and even software utilities." You can read details in Part 1 and Part 2 of Shatzkin's oracular posts.
By glamorizing their e-book reprints with author interviews, special prefaces by guests or by the authors themselves, audios and videos, previews of the author's new book, etc., publishers will go far to pacify complaints by fans irritated about having to wait. (See Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Reprints.)
Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal.
Separation of E-Book Rights: Publishers' Worst Nightmare
Publishers are fighting the last war, but they'd better turn their heads forward if they don't want to lose the next one.
The notice served by Random House to authors and agents, vowing to protect its backlist from predatory e-book developers, focused so much attention on previously published books that just about everybody took their eyes off an infinitely larger issue and an infinitely larger prize: the future.
When we look back at the fireworks triggered by Random House's action we will see it as a noisy squabble over a relatively small number of contracts with ambiguous definitions of the word "book". Very old books have entered the public domain beyond the reach of proprietary publishers. Very new ones, on the other hand, dating from around 1990, carry explicit language defining e-rights that no buccaneer would dream of challenging. That leaves a body of post-World War II titles predating the e-book revolution, and in a great many cases their contracts have just enough references to things like "information storage and retrieval rights" and "no competing editions" to intimidate most would be poachers. There may not be that many books worth fighting over, and certainly not that many worth suing over.
But there is one body of books that publishers will have to fight for if they are to avoid calamity: the ones that have not yet been published. Events of the last few weeks have introduced a concept so terrifying to book publishers that they have refused to think about it: the separation of e-books from the suite of rights that they have taken as God-given for centuries. Who can blame them for living in denial? Deprive publishers of e-rights and they become mere printers, game set match.
We don't have to look at ancient history to see how another right that publishers took for granted was pried out of their clutches, and that's audio. For decades "audio" was a sleepy little curiosity that no one felt worth fighting over. For many of us, it meant a boxed set of Caedmon records of Dylan Thomas reading his play Under Milkwood in 1953. But as recording media evolved from vinyl to tape to CD to streaming, the audio business became a billion dollar one, and authors and agents began demanding separation of those rights from the fundamental package just as they had done early in the 20th century with movie and television rights.
The turmoil of the last few weeks, capped by the dramatic announcement by business book author Stephen Covey of his intention to sell his e-book rights to Amazon, should make it crystal-clear that severance of those rights from a publisher's franchise is now a viable option for authors. At the moment it is an option for big-name stars only, but don't so many revolutions begin on the backs of the mighty? As we recently wrote, agents have been sitting on the sidelines waiting to hear the words "e-book" and "advance" used in the same sentence. Now they smell money. A recent all-expenses-paid junket by agents to Amazon's headquarters may have had some influence on these developments (See Why Don't Agents Want to Play? Amazon Flies a Bunch to Seattle to Find Out).
The implications of separation of e-rights are profound and for publishers they must be excrutiatingly threatening, for their biggest nightmare is that Amazon will become a publisher. Now that Amazon is a bidder for electronic rights, that day has arrived.
It must be said that publishers have brought some of this on themselves by pegging the e-book royalty rate at 25% of net proceeds or even less. There are enough independent e-book outfits offering 50% (including - full disclosure - E-Reads) that it was only a matter of time before authors and agents did the math and came to the conclusion that 50% was twice as large as 25%.
The nightmare is out of the box. Is there any way for publishers to get it back in and contain the threat? The answer is yes, if they are willing to bite the 50% royalty bullet. Earlier this week in connection with Random House's dictum, the Authors Guild urged that very condition. Random House, said the Guild, should "start offering a fair royalty for those rights." Their statement went on to say:
Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We're confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That's beginning to change.
While it's well and good for publishers to pore over their old contracts, they really need to examine the boilerplate in their current ones, and where it says "25%" they should consider amending it to 50%. Otherwise they may see their digital book rights calve off irretrievably like glaciers falling into the sea.
Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Reprints
Literary agent Nat Sobel, one of the most respected figures in his field, has issued an appeal to book industry leaders urging them to resist the temptation to release e-book reprints of hardcover books too early. Noting with alarm that movie exhibitors had recently pulled a film after learning that an early release of the DVD had been scheduled, Sobel drew the analogy with booksellers whose hardcover sales are cannibalized by early release of e-book editions.
The issues Sobel raises reared their head last summer when Dominique Raccah, publisher of Sourcebooks, put the brakes on simultaneous e-print of a hardcover YA thriller, Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse by Kaleb Nation. When pundits questioned the wisdom of waiting to release the e-edition, Raccah wrote a lively defense of her decision in a posting for E-Reads called Are E-Books the New Cheap Paperback Reprint Edition?
Now Sobel is advancing Raccah's argument with a plea for publishers to hold back e-prints to give hardcovers their moment in the sun without fear of being undercut by a cheap digital edition. "I suggest that the electronic versions not be made available for six months after initial publication, eventually being released when the paperback hits the market," Sobel writes. "I’d like to believe that electronic book sales can and should be the mass market of the future."
His reasoning is by no means theoretical. He recently demonstrated its correctness by asking Tor Books to hold back the e-edition of a series by the late bestselling fantasy author Robert Jordan. "Now," he writes, "four weeks after its release in hardcover, The Gathering Storm has sold 24% more copies than the previous volume, even though the work was completed by another writer."
Sobel told us that only one of the sixteen publishing executives he'd contacted had answered him. Because he feels that "the future of hardcover publishing is at stake" we believe it is incumbent on those executives to respond and make their views known. We are inviting them to comment on Sobel's letter, which we reproduce in its entirety below, and we will publish their remarks on this website. Needless to say, we invite all writers, agents, editors, booksellers and book lovers to post their comments here as well.
Richard Curtis
*************************************************
Subject: Before It's Too Late
Dear Friends,
This week’s Variety has a story of the fight going on between the studios and the exhibitors about the too-early release of films electronically. The exhibitors pulled the film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on news that the studio planned a special quick release of the film prior to the DVDs hitting the market. The independent booksellers, even some of the chains, do not have this option, when it comes to instant releases of hard cover bestsellers
Why did that movie news remind me of what book publishers are doing to the lives of the hardcovers they publish, by making their top books instantly available electronically? We’ve lived for a year or two with the Kindle, but must now reckon with how the dissemination of books through some of the 140 million cell phones available, is going to change hardcover publishing?
In just a few years we have seen electronic sales of bestsellers go from 2% to 12 to15% of total sales. Next year, they may constitute 20%. Who knows where this will end, once bestsellers are on cell phones, blackberries and the like?
As someone who got his first job in publishing 40 years ago, working for a mass market paperback house, I have seen that area of sales rise and then nearly disappear. My first job was to open accounts and get a 64-pocket wire rack of Dell paperbacks into every imaginable outlet – variety stores, cigar stores – wherever there was foot traffic. At one point, there were more than 100,000 outlets for mass market paperbacks in the US. Those millions of customers didn’t disappear, but the racks and the distributers did.
I’d like to believe that electronic book sales can and should be the mass market of the future. For this reason, I requested that the bestselling Robert Jordan fantasy series not be available electronically until the paperback is released. Now, four weeks after its release in hardcover, The Gathering Storm has sold 24% more copies than the previous volume, even though the work was completed by another writer.
I have nothing to gain, personally, by urging all of you to consider postponing the release of the electronic version of your next bestsellers. As a first step, I suggest that the electronic versions not be made available for six months after initial publication, eventually being released when the paperback hits the market. There’s a clear line between the success of the mass market paperback and its electronic cousin – convenience and price.
The future of hardcover publishing is at stake. You don’t have a lot of time left to save it.
Where Is E Going? Forrester Research Offers Ten Predictions
PaidContent.org has released ten predictions for the e-book industry prepared by Forrester Research analysts Sarah Rotman Epps and James McQuivey. They offer a rich banquet of food for thought, and though many are surprising, all of them confirm what we know in our bones and our stats - that the industry is definitely going in the right direction. Here's an abstract:
1. "E Ink will lose its claim to near-100% market share for e-reader displays. Next year will see the first devices that are marketed as “e-readers” but that don’t exclusively use E Ink displays."
2. "Dual-screen mobile phones and netbooks will eat into e-reader demand. Most consumers don’t read enough to justify buying a single-function reading device, and according to Forrester’s data, more consumers already read e-books on mobile phones and PCs than on e-readers."
3. "Apps will make non-reading devices more e-book-friendly. E-readers like the Kindle have catalyzed demand for digital reading: e-books have been around for more than a decade, but no one bought them before Amazon made it convenient to buy and consume them. But the market for e-books is not limited to e-readers."
4. "eReaders will get apps, too. As anyone with an iPhone knows, apps are where the magic happens: They make the device infinitely more useful."
5. "Amazon will launch a suite of new touchscreen e-readers. Awkward Kindle keyboard, begone!"
6. "B&N will steal market share from Amazon and Sony. This year was a setup year for B&N, and 2010 will see its efforts start to pay off."
7. "E-book content sales will top $500 million in the U.S. ...This means that AAP data, while directionally useful, far under-reports the true size of the e-book content market. Considering the growth rate of e-book trade sales (up 176% year-to-date), we think it’s reasonable to project overall e-book revenue will top $500 million in the U.S. in 2010."
8. "E-textbooks will become more accessible, but sales will be modest. If you’re holding your breath waiting for the electronic textbook market to take off, slowly start exhaling, because it won’t happen in 2010."
9. "Magazine and newspaper publishers will launch their own apps and devices. Magazine and newspaper publishers aren’t satisfied with the way their content looks and acts on the Kindle and Sony Readers—they want color, video, interactivity, the ability to sell ads and control the subscriber relationship."
10. "China, India, Brazil, and the EU will propel global growth, but the U.S. will still be the biggest market. Right now, the U.S. is the biggest market for e-readers and e-books, and that won’t change in 2010. But the rest of the world will start to catch up."
Bottom line? "Next year will be anything but boring." Amen to that, Forrester Research!
For the full and detailed summary of Forrester's predictions, click here.
In our coverage of the friction between Harlequin and Romance Writers of America (New Harlequin Venture Doesn't Pass Romance Writers of America Smell Test) we may have given the impression that both of the recently announced initiatives, Carina and Horizons, are self-publishing enterprises. Angela James, Executive Editor of Carina Press, has informed us that "Carina and Horizons are two separate entities and Carina is not affiliated in any way with self-publishing. We [Carina] differ from the traditional model in two ways: our books go digital-first and rather than paying advances we pay larger royalties. But Carina is not a self-publishing enterprise and I'd hate for anyone reading your post to think it was."
We're happy to set the record straight and apologize for any misimpression we may have communicated. And while we're at we do want to express our hope that Harlequin and RWA will find a path back to the harmony that has characterized their relationship for decades.
We also take this opportunity to reiterate our welcome to Carina Press and wishes for its success.
Macmillan Issues New Contract Boilerplate for All Divisions, E-Royalty Lower than RH, S&S, Other Majors
Agents are poring over a new contract boilerplate issued by Macmillan, parent company of St. Martin's, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, Picador, and Tor among others. The contract files were emailed to agents on Monday (October 26th) with a covering note from Macmillan CEO John Sargent (link at bottom of this post).
Sargent highlights key elements in the homogenization of the contract forms, namely: 1) a new across-the-board (all Macmillan divisions) e-book royalty; 2) a new across-the-board direct-to-consumer royalty; and 3) enhanced promotional and Internet marketing initiatives.
The e-book royalty will come as the biggest surprise to e-book royalty watchers, as it goes contrary to the trend (which some think is a polite word for something darker) among major publishers to pay 25% of net e-book receipts to authors. Unfortunately, Macmillan offers even less than that - 20%.
It will be interesting to see if Macmillan will hold the line at an e-book royalty below that of its playmates such as Random House and Simon & Schuster, who in the last year have reduced their e-book royalties to 25% of net receipts. It will be even more interesting to see if the agents fall into the trap of accepting 25% as the "standard" e-book royalty. Who says that's all it should be? (Full disclosure, E-Reads pays 50% of net receipts to its authors, and always has.)
As for direct-to-consumer sales, the new royalty is 10% of net receipts on the first 10,000 copies and 15% thereafter. The standard for as long as anyone can remember has been 5%. That low number was created in an era of mail order of hard copies, a cost-intensive process that was often generated by full color magazine ads, coupons, and other expensive forms of solicitation. This process will now yield to cheaper Web solicitations and streamlined delivery systems.
Buried deep in this change of royalty is the intriguing prospect that Macmillan might be moving toward a more aggressive approach to selling its books direct to consumers, a strategy from which many publishers have shrunk out of fear of upsetting Barnes & Noble and Amazon by competing with them. There is good reason to shrink, as Penguin discovered in April 2008 when Amazon threw an elbow at them over this very issue.
Nevertheless, if Macmillan is any bellwether, publishers may be gearing up for a push on direct-to-consumer sales. The prize? Nothing short of survival. See Direct Sales: Publishing's Last Stand.
The Medium is The Screen. The Message is Distraction
"My own research shows that people are continually distracted when working with digital information. They switch simple activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes. It’s just not possible to engage in deep thought about a topic when we’re switching so rapidly."
That observation was made by Gloria Mark, a University of California professor who studies human-computer interaction. But it is also the collective verdict of five experts invited by the New York Times to participate in a debate entitled Does the Brain Like E-Books?. We briefly posted about it the other day but after examining the transcript we feel the contents of the "debate" deserve closer attention. The reason we put "debate" in quotation marks is that there doesn't seem to be much disagreement about the conclusion that "watching books", as we call it, compromises our ability to immerse ourselves in books. This is particularly true for children.
Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, writes that "people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent... Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read."
Concentrating on serious reading and avoiding distraction "depends on the user's strength of character," she says. Her comment reflects the theme of Distraction by Mark Curtis (no relation), the book pictured here, namely, that "a new sense of discipline is required to prevent us drowning in distraction."
Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that "No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain." But "my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks)."
"The child’s imagination and children’s nascent sense of probity and introspection are no match for a medium that creates a sense of urgency to get to the next piece of stimulating information. The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it."
Finally, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, writes that
The most important ongoing change to reading itself in today’s online environment is the cheapening of the word. In teaching college students to write, I tell them (as teachers always have) to make every word count, to linger on each phrase until it is right, to listen to the sound of each sentence.
But these ideas seem increasingly bizarre in a world where (in any decent-sized gathering of students) you can practically see the text messages buzz around the room and bounce off the walls, each as memorable as a housefly; where the narrowing time between writing for and publishing on the Web is helping to kill the art of editing by crushing it to death. The Internet makes words as cheap and as significant as Cheese Doodles
As e-books move out of their infancy and into a dominant role in the reading life of our society, it is imperative that we recognize the significant psychological differences between reading on screen and reading on paper.
Professor Gloria Mark, deeply concerned about the distractions engendered by screen media, expresses her own preference: "I’d much rather curl up in an easy chair with a paper book. It’s not only an escape into a world of literature but it’s an escape from my digital devices."
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.
Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed - even, God help us, bored - when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium
Today the New York Times, in an online feature called "Room for Debate", began exploring the psychological issues arising out of reading e-books, touching in depth on many of the issues I explored in that first stab at understanding the new medium in which we have all been immersed.
"Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper?" the Times's editors ask. "Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?"
Participating in the discussion/debate are:
* Alan Liu, English professor * Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain” * Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development * David Gelernter, computer scientist * Gloria Mark, professor of informatics
Does the Brain Like E-Books? is a significant must-read debate that may well affect the way we read in the 21st century.
Getting Rid of Toxic E-Trash? Dump it on Asia's Poor
On a recent Chris Matthews Show the host asked his guests to "Tell me something I don't know." Rick Stengel, managing editor for Time Magazine, said, "By the end of the year you're going to see a plethora of e-readers - of post-Kindle devices - four color."
For those of you who have been keeping up with e-books Stengel didn't tell us anything we don't know. But here's something that nobody knows: when the next generation of e-readers arrives, what's going to happen to the Kindle or Sony E-Reader you replace?
If what's happening in Europe is any guideline, it will end up in a toxic e-waste landfill in Asia and Africa where the destitute, many of them children, will scavenge it for scrap. These scavengers incur horrifying and often fatal skin, lung, intestinal and reproductive organ ailments from the plastics, metals and gases that go into discarded cell phones, televisions, computers, keyboards, monitors, cables and similar e-scrap. Elizabeth Rosenthal, covering the story for the New York Times, tells us that "Rotterdam, the busiest port in Europe, has unwittingly become Europe’s main external garbage chute, a gateway for trash bound for places like China, Indonesia, India and Africa.
"There, electronic waste and construction debris containing toxic chemicals are often dismantled by children at great cost to their health. Other garbage that is supposed to be recycled according to European law may be simply burned or left to rot, polluting air and water and releasing the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming."
Jessika Toothman, blogging on HowStuffWorks, describes how "A whole bouquet of heavy metals, semimetals and other chemical compounds lurk inside your seemingly innocent laptop or TV. E-waste dangers stem from ingredients such as lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, copper, beryllium, barium, chromium, nickel, zinc, silver and gold." In fact if you want to see what this "bouquet" of poisons is doing to your fellow man, woman and child, you can view this sickening video of a Chinese e-trash village.
One device not mentioned in Toothman's list of e-waste is e-book readers. The obvious reason is that we are still in the first generation of e-book devices (or second if you count progenitors like the Rocket Book) and there haven't been enough readers manufactured to make them a formidable source of trash like cell phones and TVs. But when the next generation of e-book readers floods us with Kindle and Sony rivals - better, cheaper, faster, more colorful, loaded with special features and options - will we simply add them to the tons of lethal junk earmarked for miserable dumps in China, Indonesia or Africa?
Because it is still young, the e-book industry has an unprecedented opportunity to exercise its social responsibility, as we recently pointed out. Here is a three-point program to make sure the e-books business remains green.
First, manufacturers must be compelled to disclose the chemical components of the e-book devices they produce so that we can evaluate environmental hazards.
Second, Amazon, Sony, Plastic logic, Philips and other developers must develop programs for either returning their devices for safe (and monitored) disassembly and recycling or for donation to students, armed services personnel and other charitable recipients.
And third, The cost of recycling and safely disassembling e-books must be built into the price structure of e-books.
Right now the hidden cost of computers and other electronic devices is human suffering. It is unacceptable for the e-book industry to boast about environmental advantages while secretly sticking the helpless poor with the bill or contributing to the poisoning of the world's water and air. If safety measures and sensible recycling add $25 or $50 to the price of their devices, that is an acceptable tradeoff. Because it would be assessed equally on all manufacturers, none would have a competitive advantage over its rivals.
We expect the e-book industry to do the right thing.
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.
Despite the fact that most trade book publishers are paying authors a 25% net royalty (25% of what the publisher actually receives after retailer discount), Random House UK is offering considerably less than that - indeed, considerably less than what its own US sister-house is paying. In October 2008 Random House US set its e-book royalty at 25% net and four months later Simon & Schuster followed suit.
Some agents are so ticked off at Random UK that they've stopped offering books to them. "I find it completely ludicrous that one branch of an international publisher is trying to say that 17.5% or 20% is the norm, when every other publisher in the UK has gone public on 25%," Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann is quoted as saying. Another says, "Random House is the only publisher not offering 25% as its best standard rate but not all agents are getting 25% from all publishers." "Industry sources said that a figure of 25% was becoming standard, though some admitted that it could be 'variable'," writes Benedicte Page in the article.
(As a matter of full disclosure, E-Reads pays a 50% net royalty to all authors.)
It's probably a good idea right now to make something clear to authors, agents, and other members of the book community: it is against the law for publishers to collude in the setting of royalty rates, at least in the United States. Though 25% of net receipts may be settling down as the the standard e-book royalty, it would be in restraint of trade for publishers to sit down in a room and agree on that rate. Though we often, in negotiations, agree on a "standard" royalty for an adult hardcover - 10% of the list price on the first 5,000 copies sold, 12.5% on the next 5,000, and 10% on all sales thereafter - there is no written code fixing the royalties at those rates. If there were, it would be considered price-fixing. Same goes for e-book royalties.
Random House UK defends its position by asserting that "The e-book market is still a very young market which will continue to evolve and our royalty rate is just part of an overall very attractive author package."
We can't comment one way or the other on how attractive the rest of Random UK's author package is, but we can certainly support its right to pay 2/3rds of what the rest of the industry calls standard; we will certainly support them if they decide to pay twice what the rest of the industry calls standard. What we don't support is agents and authors rolling over and accepting a "standard" royalty. Any time a publisher tells you "That's the going rate," ask where is that written? I guarantee you won't find it written in the minutes of the American Association of Publishers or any other book industry trade organization.
More importantly, it should not even be an unwritten law.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
u 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.)
