Doing the Work

Most publishers are now releasing books in 5 formats: the traditional hardcover and paperback, as well as Kindle, ePub and PDF. That’s at a minimum – and does not include audio, or enhanced ebooks with multimedia features embedded. Publishers are selling these different formats at different prices in the supply chain – agency pricing to Apple, MSRP to other retailers, institutional pricing to libraries.

Publishers are selling these different formats at different prices…overseas – meaning they have to grant the appropriate rights to the appropriate bookseller in the appropriate country. And publishers are selling books through tech companies – Apple, Amazon, Google, Sony, Overdrive, Copia, Blio, Kobo – rather than through traditional booksellers.

Publishing ebooks is not simply a matter of tacking on another output at the end of the production process. Ebooks – because they are new – are somewhat unstandardized. The same ePub file that gets in the door at Kobo can be rejected at Apple. An ePub validator only catches so much. The wrong (or missing) metadata can trip a publisher up as well – Apple requires some data elements (such as page count of the print book) that other retailers do not.

So it’s important to recognize that, on a day-to-day level, publishing is a lot more work than it used to be. Just as importantly, publishers are not seeing much of a rise in overall revenue due to ebooks (thanks to the inevitable cannibalization of print sales) – so that increased workload is handled without a whole lot of new hires. If you feel overworked, frazzled, harried, and perpetually behind where you think you should be…that’s the new normal. If your relationship with publishing were a Facebook status, it would be, “It’s Complicated.”

Here’s the part where a vendor newsletter generally gets all sales-y and starts talking about magical solutions that will give you the clear conscience and peace of mind to plan your vacation to Playa del Carmen while your ebooks publish themselves.

But instead, probably the most productive thing we can do – for current customers and Firebrand friends alike – is offer some practical advice for dealing with the complications of publishing digital and print side-by-side.

1. Recognize the complexity – at all levels. From the C-Suite on down, it’s important that everybody in the organization understand that complications are a way of life in this environment, and deal with them realistically rather than insisting that “it shouldn’t be that complicated.” Maybe it shouldn’t! But it is.
2. Use your single source of truth. Task tracking and scheduling, title search – the tools in Title Management, for example, are there to streamline your workflow, help you generate to-do lists, keep you in sync with your ebook deliveries and conversions. Spreadsheets on hard drives add to the noise and clutter (which version is correct? Can I trust this data?)
3. Slow down to speed up. (This is always a hard lesson for me.) Take time before you hit “save” or “send” to review what’s in front of you at that moment. In today’s frenetic environment, undoing something done wrong takes a lot more time than doing something right the first time.

It would be great if there were magical solutions out there so ebooks could publish and distribute themselves. But in this chaotic market, it’s best to have control over your processes – it’s best to actually do the work. It’s complicated – and there’s a lot of it – but being realistic about that is what determines a publisher’s sustainability in the long term.

Blio, We Hardly Knew Ye….

Launched yesterday, after nine months of hype, the Blio reader fell so short of so many expectations (expectations that have become basic market requirements for digital reading), it was deemed by many as a failure. What struck me is that many of the failures are fundamentally at odds with the one thing that Kurzweil was touting above all else: accessibility. But accessibility is not just about text-to-speech. Accessibility comes on many levels. And Blio didn’t hit ANY of those levels.

1. The first release is Windows-only. Yes, most digital reading is still done on actual laptops and desktops. And yes, most of those machines are not Macs. But given that Adobe (with all its Apple woes) can develop a platform-independent e-reader in Adobe Digital Editions, you’d think someone over at KNFB would have considered this a gating issue. Why trim down your potential customer base by limiting what platforms your software can run on? Particularly when, in this day and age, you have so many options? We hear that iOS and Android versions will be released “soon”. As soon as the Windows one was? Why all the different OS-dependent rollouts?

2. The Windows text-to-speech functionality is notoriously bad. Why dedicate your first release to a platform that has KNOWN ISSUES with TTS, while you are advertising the accessibility options? It makes no sense. According to PW, “[Blio executive Peter Chapman] acknowledged that most people’s Text To Speech (TTS) would likely have problems because, “the TTS software on most Windows machines isn’t very good.” KNFB, Chapman said, is in the process of making new and affordable TTS software available through the Blio bookstore. Chapman said consumers dissatisfied with their TTS can purchase better  (but significantly more expensive) software immediately online that will improve its quality. However, he said they are working with TTS software vendors to offer a better and much cheaper TTS software that will allow users to choose different voice qualities and he said it will be available very soon.” This is just a botch. A botch at the heart of Blio’s value proposition.

3. A small offering. Blio launched with only 11,000 titles. This is mind-boggling. There are HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of books available digitally. Publishers are already sending files to the new Big Six – Amazon, B&N, Sony, Google, Kobo and Apple. Adding another vendor to the file distribution is not hard. Why did KNFB not solicit more content? Do they expect people will adopt Blio if there are no books to be read on it? Yes, they’re adding 7-800 titles per day, but given all the books that are already available from other vendors, you still have to actually COMPETE.

There are many, many other issues being reported, but these four really spoke to me. Kurzweil’s partnership with NFB suggested a product that would have accessibility as a priority. And this launch was truly disappointing.

Move Along Folks, Nothing To See Here

The announcement on Tuesday that “Barnes & Noble Is Putting Itself Up For Sale” pretty much set Twitter on fire last night. Where had this even come from? We thought Borders was the one in trouble!

Make no mistake, Borders is still in trouble. But the state of Borders has nothing to do with B&N’s pondering as to whether or not to sell itself.

The state of ebooks has nothing to do with B&N’s pondering as to whether or not to sell itself.

And the wild speculation that perhaps Borders will buy B&N, or Amazon, is patently nuts. Amazon has no desire to bog itself down in a brick-and-mortar business. Borders has enough on its plate (and getting the board to authorize such a purchase would put even Lebow’s formidable skills to the test).

This is not about the sale of B&N. This is about Ron Burkle and Len Riggio.

Barnes & Noble has been a family business since Len Riggio bought it in the 1970s. Many executives and board members have been there for decades, and have worked very closely with Len and his brother Steve as they built up the business from some college bookstores to a nationwide superstore chain to an online presence that – while not exactly giving Amazon a run for its money – nevertheless offers reliable access to millions of books, well-written reviews by professional reviewers, and great delivery and return options.

Disclaimer: I used to work there. For three years, I managed the database that powered both the stores and the website. I experienced the corporate cultures of both Inc. and .com, as they were called internally – the corporate cultures of Len and Steve. The Riggios make a very big distinction between who’s family and who’s not.

Burkle is not.

In aiming for a majority share in B&N, he’s overreaching. You don’t overreach with the Riggios. When you do, you get spanked.

But of course Burkle does not like being treated like a child who doesn’t know proper limits.

Is Riggio cutting off his nose to spite his face? On the face of it, the situation appears to be one of “If I can’t have control, we’ll sell it.” But let’s look a little deeper.

Last summer at this time, Barnes & Noble bought B&N College from Len Riggio. In fact, Len loaned B&N $250 million for that sale. So B&N is already in the hole to Len for that amount.

If Len and Steve form an investment group (with others, of course), which then turns around and buys B&N, essentially taking it private, the actual price of B&N to Len might well be reduced by $250 million. It would NOT be reduced to anyone else, and B&N would still be in that much debt to its founder even if someone else bought it. Not a comfortable situation for a prospective buyer.

The Riggios are perfectly positioned to do this. To an observer who knows how they run their companies, it seems highly likely that they will.

And then? Then things continue to develop the way the Riggios want them to – much the same as they are developing now.

The European Market for eBooks

Two weeks ago I was fortunate to be asked to speak at the Associazione Italiana Editori’s EdiTech conference in Milan. I gave my usual StartwithXML spiel (“ROI” is the same in English and Italian), but I was really struck by the presentations of the other participants – from Italy, yes, but also France, Switzerland, Germany, and the UK. All together, they gave a great picture of ebook publishing in Europe.

In the US, we rail against competing formats, the necessity of assigning ISBNs, the difficulties of DRM, agency pricing, and re-engineering publishing companies to accommodate all these changes as we move towards a digital model.

Yeah, they’re not there yet in Europe.

OI was in Milan for three and a half days. And while, granted, I spent some of that time sleeping off the jet lag, for much of the rest of the time I was walking around the city. It was warm – plenty of people were out at cafes and bars, sitting on the steps of the art museum, hanging in store doorways watching the World Cup, waiting for trams and trains. Not a single e-reader among them. Loads of cell phones – all being used largely for passionate conversations about Team Italia’s failure, and not at all for reading. I saw plenty of paper books – Milan is, after all, where Italian publishing happens.

Obviously this is purely anecdotal and can’t be used to extrapolate anything. But it’s nevertheless an observation. So different from San Francisco or New York, where you see a smattering of e-readers on the train or in nail salons (oh, how we love our e-reader while waiting for our nails to dry!) or in coffeeshops.

I wasn’t putting too much weight on my observation until I attended the actual conference. Presenter after presenter gave ebook market penetration statistics for their country – and not one went over 1% of the total book market.

So what I was seeing (or not seeing) was a reflection of reality. Here in the US, our ebook-to-total-book market penetration is roughly 5%, depending on how you count things (in some areas, it’s more).

We’re so down in the weeds of actually forming this market – that is a very real market and not a passing fad – that we don’t often look up from our work and observe the rest of the world.

At this conference, attendees and presenters alike were very excited about the iPad, which had just debuted the month before and promptly sold out. The fact that the European market is just not dealing with e-ink screens at all speaks volumes about what those readers will and won’t put up with in a reading experience. During the breaks, we milled about in a room with various e-ink readers on display, but few attendees seemed interested in them.

It’s not that Europe is not adopting ebooks – every presenter seemed to feel that this was a market that is here to stay – but readers there do not seem to be adopting e-ink at anywhere close to the same rate that they are here. It will be interesting to see what comes out of Europe now that they’ve got the iPad.

The presentations can be found here. Many are in Italian – we were fortunate enough to have simultaneous translation at the time, but I don’t think the translations were recorded for later use. Nevertheless, it’s great content and worth running through Google Translate.

The Thing-ness of Things

On Twitter, I follow a gentleman named , who blogs in several places but most lately blew my mind today.

Over this past weekend, my youngest daughter (who is known as Scamp on Twitter) had to go to a birthday party. She’s nearly 12 now, and she wanted to get a Really Awesome Present for this kid. We wound up getting him a picture frame with a photo inside that she’d downloaded from Facebook. Digital picture frame prices have still not dropped to the point where they are good gifts for adolescents – but I realized…that time will come! Soon!

And then what? What will people get one another, besides iTunes/Amazon/BN/whatever gift cards? What will be a lovely personalized gift?

June is a crisis month for my family because in addition to the usual “outside the family” birthdays, there are three others – plus Father’s Day. Gifts are tough. And it’s useless to bemoan the physical book/CD/movie as a gift – increasingly, that just isn’t an option.

Hence the new homemade.

When books, movies, music become commoditized – and available on a streaming free-or-near-free basis – how do we acknowledge one another’s tastes, celebrate uniqueness, toast a point of view?

The reason Scamp and I got a picture frame is because our original idea didn’t work. That is because Mom is video-ignorant. Scamp had made a lovely video for her friend. Supportive, smart-ass, funny, motivational – it is a truly great little video. But I could not burn it to DVD because I am Fail Mom.

I will not, however, be Fail Mom forever. We will learn to do these things. Just as my mother learned to create her own greeting cards (and God help us all), I will learn to burn DVDs or upload YouTube videos to private accounts or do whatever. Just as my grandparents gave us generous gifts of homemade jams and pickles, we will inflict emotional generosity on our friends.

Yes, well, how many of us have books that are sort of embarrassing that we won’t get rid of because they are gifts?

This is why self-publishing is important. Because once “things” become streamed, we will find ourselves having to create in new ways to connect with people, acknowledge them and ourselves, have media conversations.

And naturally there will be metadata considerations to render this all multi-dimensional and searchable, but that is another conversation for another day.

Which, of course, I intend to have – eventually.

Q&A with Ami Greko, GetGlue

LJND: What, exactly, is GetGlue supposed to do? (yes, the corporate speak, but let’s have it in English too?)

AG: Plain and simple, we’re there to help users figure out what to read, watch, listen to, or play next. There’s a bunch of different ways that we do that, from personalized new release recommendations to allowing you to read reviews from your friends around the web.

LJND: How do you attract people to actually do the work to rate/recommend things?

AG: A number of ways, including good old publicity and browser recommendations, but I have to say the most effective is word-of-mouth (so everyone reading this please go tell five people about us right now).

LJND: What other social networking platforms are interoperable with GetGlue?

AG: Twitter and Facebook, of course – we’ve enabled users to share their comments and rewards from GetGlue with these platforms pretty easily. With our browser add-on installed, you’re able to reach a really wide range of social networks, including things like Goodreads and Shelfari. Our add-on technology means that when you’re looking at a book on one of these sites, GetGlue knows what book you’re looking at, and it allows you to rate and comment via a toolbar at the bottom of the screen. These ratings and comments are then automatically fed to your profile on GetGlue.com, which means that you’re building a profile of your tastes automatically, just from your normal web browsing.

LJND: How do you serve other websites, such as McGraw-Hill Professional and Alibris?

AG: Same as above – with our add-on installed, you’re able to interact with books on these sites.

LJND: What’s your role in the organization?

AG: Lots of things! Technically, my title is director of business development, but on a day-to-day basis I work on a range of things, from company PR to liaising with book publishers to writing blog posts.

LJND: What’s exhilarating about your work?

AG: I really geek out on working with books in this way. The fact that GetGlue is cross-vertical – meaning we work with books AND movies AND music, etc. – means that I have a chance to think about where books fit into the larger media landscape. Books are drivers of culture. They actually power lots of other media, and sometimes when you’re in the publishing trenches, it can be easy to forget about that. One of my favorite things so far has been working on our book giveaways program. I’m able to give books to our influential users in all verticals, which means a comment we hear a lot is, ‘I’d never heard of this book before, but I loved it.’ That’s a good feeling.

LJND: Can you explain the Facebook API in English? Why is it a good thing?

AG: In short: using our API, you can take a URL of any page that GetGlue understands and get meta data using Facebook Open Graph Protocol without doing any coding. (emphasis on the last four words)

LJND: What about those widgets? Why does everybody have a widget? Why is yours awesome?

AG: First of all, it’s free, which can be the only word some folks need to hear to equal ‘awesome.’ We’ve also just made them easy to generate on your own instantly, just by entering ISBNs, at MyBookWidget.com. I know it sounds like crazy marketing speak, but for Blogger and Typepad platforms, they really do install with one click. My favorite thing about them, though, is that they make the necessity of linking to multiple retailers much easier and a lot prettier looking – instead of a list of hyperlinks, everything is elegantly embedded within the widget.

LJND: Why do you start off with movies? When I log in for the first time, I have to “like” a bunch of movies. I want to “like” books first thing.

AG: As an affirmed book lover, I hear you! You can always choose to exit out of the movies screen if rating those things is not working for you.

LJND: What’s next? What are you working on (that you can talk about)?

AG: Right now, we’re all hands on deck creating our iPhone app. It’s going to be a way to share with your friends what you’re reading, watching, and listening to, while you’re out and about. I’m really, really, really excited about it.

Leapfrogging

It’s going to happen slowly, and then it’s going to happen very quickly. It has already started – the rate at which independent bookstores have shuttered over the years is not publicized, but we know they’ve been an endangered species since the 1990s, when Borders and Barnes & Noble began their rapid superstore expansion.

Borders is suffering a lingering death, but there’s little doubt among industry pundits that its lifespan is seriously limited. (Please prove them wrong, please prove them wrong!!!) This will be a much bigger deal than anybody’s anticipating.

Why?

Because Barnes & Noble is not going to pick up all those locations. And if a huge chain like Borders can’t survive, what indie bookstore in its right mind is going to open in those locations?

There will be fewer brick and mortar bookstores. By a factor of a lot. Possibly a third of bookstores in the US will close when Borders is finished with its death spiral and Barnes & Noble and successful independents have picked up what business makes sense in those locations. But for that newly-deprived third of bookstore customers? Where will they get their books?

Two places: the library and the internet.

Libraries are themselves rather limited in this way: waiting lists for popular books. (This includes ebooks.) If you really must own a book right now, the best way to get it is online.

So in approximately a third of areas previously served by large chains, customers will become quickly accustomed to ordering books online.

How long do you think it will be before they realize that if they order ebooks, they don’t have to wait even 24 hours before they get what they want? How long do you think it will be before instant gratification means that suddenly these underserved areas are hotbeds of ebook consumption?

We’ve seen this sort of leapfrogging happen in underdeveloped areas before – that is why residents of certain African and Asian countries are so wedded to their cell phones; they skipped the land-line process altogether.

We’ve seen it happen in the music industry as well – when was the last time you went into a store where the primary stock was CDs? A Virgin or an HMV or a Tower? Or, heaven help you, your local indie music store?

We are seeing it happen in video. I live in New York City – there used to be video stores every few blocks, staffed by amazing kids from NYU or Columbia; those Quentin Tarantino-breeding environments are gone. We get our movies from Netflix. We get our movies on demand from Time-Warner. We get our movies streamed through our laptops directly to our TVs.

That leapfrogging in the book business is going to happen primarily in rural and suburban areas where intellectual life was always underserved. That is where it will start. And once that convenience of immediate delivery of digital books is realized, it is only a matter of time before we see that the bookstores we treasure have to offer more than just books if they want to attract customers. Books are commodities – and they will become increasingly more commoditized as Google Editions launches, as Kobo develops device-independent platforms, as Overdrive adds more titles to its Content Reserve service.

The bookstores that will be successful in that environment will be shops that sell deep inventory in specific areas (such as the spiritual/inspirational Breathe Books, staffed by the amazing Jenn Northington, aka @JennIRL on Twitter) and can provide a rich experience (offering CDs, videos, other media within those areas), or shops that have deep ties to their communities – that offer afterschool programs, sports events, matchmaking services (if you doubt me, look at WORD Bookstore’s Lonely Hearts board, or follow @bookavore on Twitter), or other beyond-the-book activities. Because when a book becomes commoditized, what becomes important – and NOT a commodity – is the conversation AROUND the book. The community of readers. And if brick and mortar bookstores can tap that community, engender those conversations in ways the community finds valuable…then their community will support them.