Think

For those of us who are more seasoned citizens, remember the battle between cassette tapes and 8-tracks? Remember the video format fights between VHS and Beta? Those seem very simple choices when considering what format choices we have today for ebooks. I certainly don’t claim to be the expert here, but hope those more knowledgeable will feel free to chime in with comments, which will expand our knowledge base. Please treat this as a forum.

According to my research there are quite a few methods to view ebooks, and, therefore, quite a few formats. What is a publisher to do? Stick to the most common format or publish his ebooks in several different formats? First, let’s take a look at some of the ebook devices, because they drive the formats. One term you should be aware of is DRM, or “digital rights management,” which refers to techniques that seek to prevent illegal copying or pirating of a digital work, like an ebook or music:

• Computers (PC and/or Mac) which easily read the pdf format.
   
• The Sony Reader primarily uses Sony’s proprietary Broadband eBooks (BBeB) format for documents with DRM but also supports RTF and non-DRM PDF.
   
• The Amazon Kindle uses Amazon’s proprietary AZW format, which supports DRM.
   
• Flip Book is an online connected technology that uses their proprietary format and plays on a computer (PC or Mac versions). It presents a 3-D appearance for those of us who like flipping pages and want something that looks like a book.
   
• As the market expands, there will be more devices. For example, former HarperCollins President and CEO Jane Friedman has launched Open Road Integrated Media (ORIM) in partnership with film producer Jeffrey Sharp. They will use a proprietary format for their own devices. Barnes and Noble, not to be out done by Amazon, will be releasing a new device called the Plastic Logic e-reader. It will use the EPub format that has also been adopted by Sony. Yet Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore won’t be accessible by Sony Reader. Amazon Kindle users won’t be able to download books from Barnes & Noble’s e-book store. And so the Tower of Ebook Babel continues to grow toward Heaven.

What’s A Publisher To Do?

First, in my opinion, it’s not worthwhile to use DRM features, because it treats all customers as potential pirates. That doesn’t make for good PR, and it adds more complexity to your sales process, which is never a good idea because it gives the customer the opportunity to become frustrated and opt out before the sale is made. Pirating is a problem, but it isn’t that big of one. Besides, pirates will always develop work-arounds, which may render DRM useless.

If you would like a free resource that rates all the different ebook formatting software packages, click here to obtain the Ebook Developers Association free ebook software comparison guide. Personally, for the time being, I will stick to a simple pdf version.

I’m going to wait for device dominance, unless the ensuing battle goes on for too long, then I will consider going to multiple format editions. How will I do that? By relying on a formatting service. One such that I found is Smashwords. Click here to learn how they produce multiple DRM-free format versions and publish the ebooks for you for 15% of the retail price. I consider that a good deal, especially if it takes you out of the fulfillment loop.

Ever the pragmatist, I have offered my approach; however, I easily could have missed something. So, here’s the opportunity for the experts to weigh in and present alternatives. As I said, please treat this as a forum.

This is a cross-posting from Guy LeCharles Gonzalez‘ Loudpoet site.

Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a tecnology is entirely netural… Each technology has an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

There’s a lot of hand-wringing and finger-pointing happening in publishing these days, both by those struggling to find solutions to the challenges the industry faces, and by various Joker-pundits who apparently “just want to see the world burn.” Demagogues and idealogues love the spotlight, and attention-seeking media outlets happily provide them a stage to stoke faux controversies over what’s not being done, or is being done wrong, yelling loudly about the inevitable end of publishing as we know it!

Personally, I’m pretty confident that the end is not near; in fact, I’m very optimistic that new generations of readers will continue to be served by ambitious authors, passionate publishers, and brazen booksellers for many years to come. The individual players and channels may will change, of course, but that’s neither new nor a bad thing.

Change is good, inevitable, and in publishing, very necessary.

For all the talk of publishing’s supposedly imminent demise, there are far too many passionate people working in and around the industry, at every level, to let that happen. And whether they realize it or not, it doesn’t matter if they’re working for one of the major publishers or an independent press, in senior management or as an editor, author or bookseller — there’s a wide and fertile common ground we all share and it’s best represented by the community we all serve: the readers.

Ultimately, it’s readers’ changing habits that are driving the fundamental changes in the publishing industry – everything from the types of books they’re reading to the formats they prefer reading them in – and as a result, it’s the current business model of most publishers that’s under stress, not the community service of publishing itself.

I’m in Frankfurt this week for Tools of Change and the Book Fair, and I’m particularly excited about the opportunity to see Cory Doctorow, Richard Nash, Dominique Raccah, and the Pecha Kucha presentations at the former; and to get a glimpse of the global publishing community, including this year’s guest of honor, China, at the latter. I’m also here on behalf of Digital Book World, meeting some of our Advisory Board and sponsors, and getting feedback on the exciting program we’ve put together for the event in January.

Among the hot publishing topics of the moment, the eBook debate is perhaps the most torrid, and a particularly annoying one when it’s treated like a zero-sum game — Print vs. eBooks in a Battle to the Death! Death!! DEATH!!! It’s also fraught with larger implications for both publishers and authors alike that too many pundits willfully overlook (while pushing their own self-serving agendas), like DRM, international rights, and unequal access to information and technology.

Publishers are also facing the difficult question of justifying their role in the supply chain when the Internet has cracked the playing field wide open, making verticality a more viable model than it’s ever been, and enabling savvy authors and small presses to outmaneuver their larger, more established competitors.

On the flight over I caught up on some reading, a one-two punch of the July/August issue of the Harvard Business Review, and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.

Postman’s must-read classic could easily have been written in 2009 about the current Internet era; many of his critiques of television apply doubly today, especially with regards to social media, and there are many interesting parallels to be made in the current “battle” of print vs. eBooks.

HBR’s “Managing in the New World” special issue offered a thorough and insightful look at what’s changed and what needs to change for businesses to survive in 2010 and beyond, noting that, “An organization that depends solely on its senior managers to deal with the challenges risks failure.”

Coupled with that statement, perhaps the most relevant article in the issue is Henry Mitzenberg’s “Rebuilding Companies as Communities“, which argues that in order to succeed in the future, companies have to become places “where people are committed to one another and their enterprise.”

Leadership at the center. A robust community requires a form of leadership quite different from the models that have it driving transformation from the top. Community leaders see themselves as being in the center, reaching out rather than down. They facilitate change, recognizing that much of it must be driven by others.

This week, I’ll be giving a lot of thought to what I can do to help move the industry forward in a community-centric direction, and I already have a few intriguing ideas that will unfold over the coming months.

What are some of the things you’re doing from your vantage point to serve the publishing industry’s community of readers?

This post, from Kirk Biglione, originally appeared on Medialoper on 6/23/09.

The Kindle is popular for a reason.

Amazon has created the most painless ebook experience any consumer could possibly ask for. No other system makes the discovery, purchase, and transfer of ebooks so frictionless. As a result, Kindle has become the standard everyone else in the ebook business will have to match just to compete. So far no one comes close.

But Kindle has a dark side that is starting to emerge with startling regularity.

This past weekend Dan Cohen was surprised to find that he could not re-download some of his Kindle books. After several lengthy exchanges with Amazon customer support Cohen was informed that some (but not all) Kindle books have download limits. Or maybe it’s a limit on the number of devices they can be transferred to. Or it might be both…

To be honest, Amazon’s customer service department isn’t entirely sure of what limits are imposed on DRM protected Kindle books.

This isn’t the first complaint we’ve heard about Amazon’s Kindle policies. Not long ago a Kindle owner found that he’d lost access to his books after Amazon terminated his account. And a dispute with the Authors Guild has led Amazon to allow publishers to disable text to speech capabilities AFTER consumers have purchased books.

Imagine buying a product with one set of capabilities then having that product downgraded after purchase. That scenario would never be tolerated with a physical product and it shouldn’t be considered acceptable simply because the product in question is digital.

In the past I’ve argued that Amazon has an obligation to fully disclose the DRM limitations of every Kindle title so that consumers can make an informed decision before they make a purchase. What the latest incident has revealed is that, in many cases, even Amazon doesn’t know what those limits are. Surprisingly, this seems to be by design.

Jeff Bezos says the Kindle is “DRM agnostic” and that it’s up to publishers to determine whether their books will be locked-down by DRM. While that may sound like an enlightened approach that gives publishers complete control over DRM, it’s a position that creates serious problems for both Amazon and Kindle owners.

By allowing each publisher to set its own DRM policy, Amazon has no idea what restrictions are in place for any given book, and no way of enforcing anything resembling a standardized DRM policy for the Kindle marketplace. The otherwise stellar Kindle user experience suffers as a result of these inconsistencies.

Read the rest of the post, and also the discussion that follows in the comments section, on Medialoper. From the same site and author, also see Digging Deeper Into Amazon’s Orwellian Moment, for analysis of the incident in July of this year when Kindle owners found their purchased digital editions of George Orwell’s 1984 had been remotely removed from their devices.

This post, from William Landay, originally appeared on his site on 7/27/09.

I had an interesting conversation on Saturday with Bruce Spector, the founder and CEO of a new web service called LifeIO. (See the end of this article [Publetariat editor’s note: follow the ‘read the rest’ link at the end of this excerpt] for an explanation of what LifeIO is all about.) Bruce was part of the team that developed WebCal, which Yahoo! acquired in 1998 to form the core of its own calendar service, so he has been watching the web with an entrepreneur’s eye for some time now and he had an interesting take on the whole “free” debate and how it might apply to book publishing.

If you somehow missed the recent back-and-forth about Chris Anderson’s book Free, read the pro-”free” comments by Anderson, Seth Godin and especially Fred Wilson, and the anti-”free” perspective by Malcolm Gladwell and Mark Cuban, among many others. This piece by Kevin Kelly, not directly about “free,” is very good, too.

For the uninitiated, the issue boils down to this: The marginal cost of delivering a bit of information over the web — a song, a video, a bit of text like this one — is approaching zero. As a result, information is increasingly available, and consumers increasingly expect to get it, for free. So traditional “legacy” information-sellers like musicians or movie studios or newspapers, whose actual costs are very far from zero, have to figure out how to turn free-riders into paying customers — and fast, before they go out of business. Fred Wilson’s answer is “freemium“: you lure the customer in with a free basic service, then up-sell the heaviest users to a premium version of your product. As Wilson puts it, “Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don’t start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid.”

How does all this apply to book publishing?

Here are some of Bruce Spector’s ideas. He is a great talker, though, and a summary like this doesn’t do him justice. Also, this was a private conversation, but Bruce kindly gave me permission to repeat some of his comments here.

First, book publishers are no less vulnerable than other old-line media industries to the tendency of information to squirt around the web for free. E-books will be passed around as promiscuously as MP3’s. You can bet on it. So book publishers should expect their customers to demand that e-books be, if not free, then radically less expensive than traditional dead-tree books have been.

That means the current approach publishers are taking is precisely the wrong one. Locking up your content with DRM and enforcing higher prices will not work for books any more than it has for CD’s or movies. You cannot resist the downward price pressure of the web merely by refusing to acknowledge it. The old business model simply won’t work anymore.

How, then, will Random House — and novelists like me — make a profit? After all, in a world where iTunes sells songs for 99 cents, even successful musicians can’t make ends meet by selling recorded music anymore. They have to tour relentlessly. But a novelist like me can’t cash in by touring. I can’t play nightclubs performing my work live. For a novel, the book is the performance; the reader performs it in her head. So how do I survive in a world of, say, five-dollar e-books?

The answer is right in front of our noses, says Bruce. The business model is long established and proved to work.

Read the rest of the post to learn Bruce’s suggested solution on William Landay’s site.

This post, from Bob Stein, originally appeared on the if:book blog on 9/24/09.

The following started out as a set of notes to various colleagues suggesting that successful digital publishing involves much much more than coming up with a viable form for networked books. rather unexpectedly this led to the question of how bookstores might evolve to give publishers a way to reassert their brands and strengthen their position vis a vis Amazon (as well as Google and Apple). This is very much a work in progress but i thought i’d post it and bring others into the discussion along the way.

The idea that "a book is a place (where readers, sometimes with authors, congregate)" arose out of a series of experiments investigating what happens when the act of reading moves from the printed page to an online space designed for social interaction. as we expanded the notion of a work to include the activity in the margin, in effect we re-defined "content" to include the conversation that a text engenders. Put another way, locating a text in a dynamic network brings the social aspects of reading to the fore. (see Without Gods, Gamer Theory, Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Golden Notebook projects)

In an earlier set of notes ("A Unified Field Theory of Publishing in the Networked Era") I suggested that as discourse moves off the page onto networked screens, the roles of authors, readers, editors, publishers will shift in significant ways. For example, the author’s traditional commitment to engage with a subject matter on behalf of future readers will shift to a commitment to engage with readers in the context of a subject. Successful publishers, i posited, will distinguish themselves by their ability to build and nurture vibrant communities of interest, often with authors at the center, but not necessarily always.

The purpose of this new set of notes is to expand the thinking beyond how a specific text is presented or interacted with. Reading (and writing) do not happen only at the level of the individual work. There is a broad ecology of behaviors, activities and micro-environments that surround each work and our relationship to it — how things come to be written, how we choose what to read, how we make the purchase, how we share our experience with others. Currently (i.e. toward the end of age of print), that ecology is defined by agent/editor mechanisms of acquisition, sharp delineation between authors and readers, top-down marketing, heavy reliance on big mainstream media to get the word out, the bookshelves that make our books part of our daily life, bookstores and — yes — Amazon. Much more than not, Amazon is a product of the same DNA that underlies the still-dominant mode of the print-book read by the solitary reader. Everything about the Kindle, from its interaction design to its draconian DRM provisions, underlines its conservative role in preserving the ecologies of print.

The current e-book business (the buying/selling bits) was designed (or at least evolved) to minimize friction with the legacy business; pricing, release schedules and DRM all structured so as not to challenge print, which is still the predominant source of revenues.

To succeed at publishing in the networked era, it won’t be enough just to re-conceive the work as a "networked book." If we accept that social interaction will be paramount, not just at the level of the individual work but throughout the ecology of networked reading and writing, then it’s important also to ask the question "if a book is a place, what is the place for books? (or, more accurately but less forceful, "what are the places for books?")

Currently the predominant place(s) for books are bookstores, libraries, classrooms, cafes (as a stand-in for the general category of informal brick-and-mortar gathering places), living-room reading groups, and the infoweb (mainstream media + internet) where books are reviewed, promoted, and on sites like LibraryThing and Shelfari, discussed. Each of these places has its own culture, its own social fabric that determines how people relate to each other, what their transactions are like, how you meet "new" people, how you come to trust them or not, and how you manage ongoing connections/relationships.

The bookstore, The Library and The Cafe
Brick and mortar bookstores are much better for (un-directed) browsing than online stores. This is probably mostly a function of bandwidth, i.e. I can see so much more in a bookstore than I can on my 2D screen. This will change as the web and its attendant hardware/software develops over time, but my guess is that a satisfying browsing experience of the order i can get in a great bookstore is many, many years away from practical. On the other hand if you know what you’re looking for, online shopping excels at simplifying the process of making the transaction. In fact, in every sense except immediate transfer to the buyer of the object they’ve purchased, online buying is vastly more efficient. When the bulk of our book purchases are in electronic form, and therefore delivered instantly, the significant advantages left to the bookstore will be the superior browsing experience, the help desk and the cafe.

[And before you say "oh, it will be years before the bulk of what we’re buying is in electronic form," think about how many iPhone apps or iTunes purchases you or your friends have made in the past few months (including the books you’ve been reading on your phone or Kindle) compared to how many print books you/they bought. This part of the future seems to be near-now.]

Read the rest of the post on if:book.