Caught Between Printings - Osnos on the Publishing Industry

Peter Osnos wrote a column yesterday about the contrast between the tightly-synched-up distribution of Harry Potter (any Harry Potter, frankly, not just this last one) and the rest of the book industry.

He'd read a review of the new Wilfred Sheed book - which was not a blockbuster bestseller:

My guess is that Sheed’s book was a “mid-list” title, based on his sales track and the subject, which means that less than 10,000 copies were shipped based on initial expectations.

What happened is that those 10,000 copies were printed and shipped. The book was reviewed. But by that time, there were no more copies left for new customers to buy; the publishing house had to go back for a reprint, leaving customers waiting. Osnos notes that he is a participant in the Caravan Project, which explores alternatives in book distribution:

Had the Sheed been offered to me as an audio book, I might have bought it. Print-on-demand technology could have made the book available for shipping while a larger reprint was prepared. In any case, not one bookseller made a concerted effort to actually sell me the book and promise to send it to me as soon as possible and by the fastest means. The money that I was ready to spend—$29.95 plus tax, shipping, and handling—stayed in my pocket.

Harper & NeoPets

All weekend I was battling NeoPets for my 9-year-old - she'd forgotten her password and we did everything short of putting a jinx on her computer to retrieve it. No dice - it was truly forgotten and she had to start over. Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensued (some of it mine).

So imagine how thrilled I was to read this morning that HarperCollins has teamed up with NeoPets to produce a series of books based on these creatures inhabiting the virtual world of Neopia:

"It's exciting to bring Neopets, a digital first brand, to the publishing platform offering our audience new ways to interact with the virtual world, its characters and storylines," said Kyra Reppen, senior vice president and general manager of Neopets. "Not only will we be expanding the virtual world to include books, but will also include unique connections between the books and the website that unlock special features to further enhance the Neopets experience for readers."

Oh, boy! 

Skip Prichard Is New Ingram COO

Ingram Books announced yesterday that Skip Prichard has been appointed COO. Prior to serving at Ingram, Prichard was CEO of ProQuest, and a VP at Lexis-Nexis.

Ingram Library Services has hired away from ProQuest before, with Joe Reynolds who is now president of that division. 

Book Discounts: The Disquisition

Joe Nocera has an article in today's NY Times which uses Harry Potter as a framework to investigate the phenomenon of book discounting. He's done his homework.

The big retailers - B&N, Amazon, Costco, Target, Wal-Mart - are selling HP7 at 40-50% off (or more) the list price of $35. Independent retailers are not - I bought my (two - one for me and one for my kid) copies at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn for $30; other stores are selling it full-price.

Nocera delves into the "screwball logic" of bookselling, covering familiar territory:

• Returns - "Name another industry, for instance, where the manufacturer agrees to take back — and reimburse the retailer! — for unsold merchandise."
• Volume - "And what other business can you think of where sales are essentially flat, yet the manufacturers keep ramping up volume? In 1980, the book industry produced about 42,400 new titles, according to the R. R. Bowker Company, which monitors new books. By 2001, the number had jumped to 141,700, and 168,000 by 2005."
• Discounting - "You just don’t see other industries losing money on their hottest brand to get people to buy less desirable merchandise. But that’s what the book industry does."

Nocera finds reasons for stores like Costco and Target and Wal-Mart to heavily discount HP7 - customers come into those stores for a wide variety of items, and enticing them with Harry Potter is a good way to get them to come in and buy all the other things they really need. He also finds a good reason for Amazon to discount - to entice people to get more comfortable with online shopping.

But, Nocera says,

[This] brings us back to the original discounter, Barnes & Noble, which, unlike its rivals, would very much like to make money on the book. So why is it discounting the book so heavily? Because it has no choice. Costco may not view it as a head-to-head competitor, but every book Costco sells is a book sale Barnes & Noble has missed. As for Amazon, the fact that it has a set of motives different from Barnes & Noble’s is meaningless. No one doubts that Amazon is a direct competitor.

“It’s almost biblical,” said Sara Nelson, the editor of Publishers Weekly. “What they did is now being done to them.”

One interesting fact that Nocera points out is that over 50% of all books sold are being sold in non-bookstores. (That doesn't mean 50% of TITLES are being sold there - we're just talking sheer bulk.) Bookstores are increasingly a long-tail business. Which means that the independent bookseller - always the home to the long tail - may ultimately be the book outlet that thrives.

A final note: Could we please stop the comparisons of the Riggios to the Mafia? You'd think the Times would be tired of doing that by now. And Wal-Mart makes the Riggios look like pikers, frankly. 

Why Steve Jobs Gets To Be God

Despite the numerous troubling issues surrounding the iPhone (including the fact that it is not QUITE flying off the shelves as quickly as Apple seemed to have hoped), the Wall Street Journal reports that Apple's earnings were up 73% this quarter.  Says New York Magazine:

In short, while bloggers were griping about the fallibility of the Jesus Phone, Jobs sold 'em two Powerbooks, four Shuffles, and a Nano.

More Muzers Out the Door

Muze continues to bleed staff...In the 8 months since I was laid off, there have been more "redundancies" and outright quittings among high-level staff:

• Bill Caid, CIO
  
• Scott Lehr, VP Biz Dev
  
• Patty Hirsch, VP Digital Strategy
  
• Margenett Moore, VP Customer Servie
  
• Angie Hickman, Director, Outsource Business Unit
• Lonnie Chenkin, VP Biz Dev
• Mike Pegan, Sr Manager, Sales
• Corey Green, Manager, Sales
• Lara Lo Re, Manager, HR

...Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

Lorcan Dempsey highlights a quote from Peter Kaufman's presentation at JISC:

Over the next 13 years:

an iPod or a device its size will be able to hold:

• a year’s worth of video (8,760 hours) by 2012 (5 years from now)
• all the commercial music ever created by 2015 (8 years), and
• all the content ever created (in all media) by 2020 (13 years).

Lorcan posits:

At some stage in the near future, I assume, we will be shipping large amounts of content around to people on small devices. We could give people their own library, which synchs up from time to time with various services?

Legal blog urges poaching of BISAC codes

I ran across a weird little post today on the legal blog Slaw, a Canadian site devoted to "Canadian legal research and IT":

If you're working on a simple taxonomy of legal topics, you might take a look at the Book Industry Standards and Communications (BISAC) subject headings for law....I imagine, not being a copyright maven, that this sort of list is in a grey area, keeping company with compilations and tables of contents. I understand from some personal experience that it takes effort and creativity to elect a set of terms within a discipline and to order them. You'd be hard pressed, though, to prove that with a few twists here and there a list wasn't arrived at independently — and, more to the point, perhaps, these are such broad terms and so basic to legal work and promulgation no one should be able to stand in the way of their free use. Which is why I think the routine overreaching of copyright notices like this one are silly and maybe harmful: "No part of the attached documents may be… reproduced in any manner whatsoever…"

Well, if this guy had sat in on the meetings during which these subject lists are composed, along with all the publishers, booksellers, librarians, and others who fly to New York once a month and bust their butts on this, perhaps he wouldn't see the copyright notice as being particularly "overreaching". 

Thomson Learning Changes Name

Galleycat reports this morning that Thomson Learning is changing its name to Cengage:

The company, recently acquired by Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners, says the new name is based on being at the "center of engagement" for its customers worldwide.

Actually, the name sounds like a pill for "irregularity and bloating," but whatever.

ISBN Haiku

ISBN-10
Should only use 13 now
Alas -- still needed

 - Rachel Rushefsky, B&N 

Peter Brantley's Vision

I just had to share this amazing post from Peter Brantley's blog:

The future for libraries is not merely in their working together, but also, perhaps primarily, in working with others. The future resides in the creation of inter-institutional partnerships that marry libraries' wisdom in the organization, presentation, and accessibility of information to projects seeking to generate, deliver, and manipulate data in the service of science, learning, and education. Through these hybrid partnerships, libraries will enter a new territory of ideas, enriching their own experience while they bring insight to the work of others. Working beyond ourselves, libraries will chart a future into new lands.

This completely rocks. 

Capturing HP7 Reading Activity Online

Would You Like an MP3 with That?

Burger King will be giving away DRM-free MP3s with meals in the UK, reports Tech.co.uk:

Under the campaign, consumers will be able to search for, sample, and download a pre-paid EMI Music track from a specially created microsite after inputting a unique code. Codes are being distributed to Burger King consumers upon purchase, and there will be links from the microsite to an online retailer, allowing consumers to purchase further tracks by EMI artists featured on the microsite.

Yes, the same EMI that is releasing DRM-free music to Apple is also looking for innovative ways to distribute music outside of iTunes, the article says:

EMI made an exclusive deal with promotions company VerveLife . The partnership gives VerveLife's brand partners access to a significant portion of EMI Music's catalogue in order to offer their consumers higher quality, DRM-free downloads via global promotional campaigns.

Amazon: Profits Up, Tech Spending Down

According to Bloomberg, Amazon reported an increase of 38% in North American sales this year, causing stock prices to jump as well. The increase was largely, Amazon said, due to electronics and jewelry sales:

"Electronics and general merchandise are becoming a larger part of the business,'' said Colin Sebastian, a San Francisco-based analyst with Lazard Capital Markets LLC.

Amazon also reduced technology spending from 7.8% of sales to 7% of sales. Additionally, reports this article,

Amazon has sought to diversify its product offerings as Barnes & Noble Inc. and other bookstores have cut prices and promoted customer loyalty programs. Sales of books, DVDs and other media made up 64 percent of the company total, down from 68 percent a year earlier.

"Clearly, with the digitization of media, it's been a wise move to move to other areas,'' said Scott Tilghman, a New York-based analyst with Soleil Securities Corp. who rates shares "buy.''

XML in Publishing

Francis Cave and Alex Brown are running an XML in Publishing workshop which looks pretty fascinating. According to Alex's post on the Griffin-Brown blog, the course covers

• the basic principles of mark-up languages
• the roles XML can play in publishing
• what it is like to work with XML data.

The course is being offered on 9/25 at the Publishing Training Centre at Book House. (More or less the UK equivalent of the NYU Center for Publishing.) You can find out more here.

The Big Picture - Interview with Cliff Guren, Microsoft Live Search Books

SharedBook

GalleyCat covers SharedBook.com, a not-so-new service (which is now, of course, hot hot hot!) that allows people to create their own books as sort of mash-ups, compilations of content stored in XML databases:

I kept leaping ahead in our conversation, tossing out ideas for chunking personalized cookbooks and short story anthologies from vast content databases, while [CEO] Vanderlip patiently brought me back to the existing platforms, like a partnership with online obituary center Legacy.com that allows the bereaved to create personalized memorial books, or the a new "Blog2Print" widget, officially unveiled after the conference, which enables writers using the Blogger system to designate their posts as accessible for compilation.

I found this really interesting, as a number of folks at the Identifiers meeting at BISAC on Friday seemed to be under the impression that these mash-ups would be rare. And yet here's at least one company whose entire business model is centered around it. 

Recorded Books, NetLibrary suing each other

Recorded Books and NetLibrary are embroiled in some pretty ugly litigation regarding NetLibrary's distribution of Recorded Books' material. According to Library Journal, Recorded Books entered into a distribution agreement with NetLibrary assuming that this agreement was exclusive - that NetLibrary wouldn't distribute any competitors' audiobooks. NetLibrary took a different view, and made agreements with other audiobook publishers as well.

Recorded Books then sent out a notice to customers saying that RB material would no longer be available via NetLibrary; NetLibrary fired back a notice saying indeed, they would continue to distribute RB audiobooks.

Recorded Books filed an injunction on June 22nd; a hearing is set for July 24th. 

Post-HP Letdown

Well, we spent all weekend up to our ears in Harry Potter, and now it's done. A tough world to leave, but what choice did we have?

The reviews have all been fairly glowing - and it's true, Rowling didn't let us down - but PW makes a very good point: the more successful Rowling has gotten, the less editing she's received. And it shows. No matter how good a writer is, having a good editor makes her better.

Okay, now what? 

Kakutani Gets Advance Copy of HP7, Reveals Nothing

God bless her.

For several moments, I was afraid my pre-order for Saturday morning was in peril. 

Jupitermedia Buys Mediabistro

Spoilers Go Viral

Following on the heels of yesterday's release of HP7, painstakingly photographed page by page, over BitTorrent, spoilers have strafed across the web faster than Stealth fighter jets. Scholastic is vigorously sandbagging leak sources, a phalanx of Bloomsbury lawyers have swung into action, and those who want the full Potter reading experience are hunkered down in basements without internet access, wearing blindfolds and noise-reduction headphones.

Or so the media would have everyone believe.

Defense Against the Dark Arts of...Photobucket?

The Times reports that Photobucket.com (a subsidiary of Murdoch's News Corp) has been asked to provide certain web pages to Scholastic that may violate HP7's copyright. Additionally, Scholastic has subpoena'd Gaiaonline.com for the name of an individual who posted pictures of the pages of HP7. Scholastic has said there are at least 3 different copies (or partial copies) of the book online with what they call "conflicting content".

It's kind of like watching a plague of mosquitos attack a bear.

Bloomsbury Lawyers Unplug TorrentFreak

New York magazine reports that the website streaming the new Harry Potter book prior to publication has been, uh, zapped with Petrificus Totalus. See for yourself here.

Meanwhile, they warn to "click carefully" for the next few days. They don't call 'em spoilers for nothin'. 

Harry Potter hits BitTorrent

Thanks for the Strategies....

Cedric Venzura, the EVP of emerging business and technology, and chief strategy officer at Borders, is resigning. The Book Standard reports Borders CEO George Jones as saying:

"Now that the strategic plan is set and its initiatives are being executed within the individual business units, Rick and I agree that this is a logical time for him to transition away from his strategic duties."

Venzura will leave Borders in September when Susan Harwood steps in as CIO and his responsibilities are absorbed into her position. 

The World Is Even Flatter

Our favorite book - hey, it was the catalyst to finding the goddessly Tess and hero Hamid! (but that's a whole other story) - is now coming out in a "3.0" version. Reports PW:

The new edition offers two new chapters, one covering the spread of disinformation via the Web, and the second about the use of the Internet for activism. There’s a new 35-page conclusion and, promises the publisher, all the statistics are revised.

Does it make sense for Friedman to keep adding and padding - will people buy a third edition? Picador seems to have addressed that by publishing it in paperback, which will not only entice new readers, but be useful in the educational market as well.

Houghton Mifflin Buys Harcourt

The New York Times reports today that Houghton Mifflin has bought Harcourt from Reed Elsevier:

Houghton Mifflin said in a statement that it would buy the unit, which includes Harcourt Education, Harcourt Trade and Greenwood-Heinemann, for $3.7 billion in cash and $300 million in stock.

As part of the agreement, Reed Elsevier will hold about 11.8 percent in Houghton Mifflin’s parent, the Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group. The combined company will be run by Anthony Lucki, the chairman and chief executive of Houghton Mifflin and the former head of Harcourt.

Co-op in social networking?

It's long been a periodic scandal (on slow news days) that bookstores (gasp!) accept payment (horrors!) from publishers to promote certain titles on those display tables between the aisles.

A grad student in England is writing a dissertation about the Long Tail effect in book publishing, and he compares social networking sites like Library Thing and Shelfari to old-fashioned book clubs:

Many publishers bought up book clubs and various mail order networks to try and cement a customer base for their books (See F&W’s ownership of Reader’s Union). They offered extra value to members: early access to books / discounts / author correspondence or appearances; and the book clubs promised to buy a certain number of books before reviews came out. The system worked.

It seems to me that a similar arrangement is possible for these book-based social networking sites. Although their recommendations are based on peer review, there are ways for sites to promote certain imprints or books while maintaining the customers’ input. Amazon have been doing this for years without generating significant user complaints. I expect we’ll see publishers doing the same with their newly acquired social networks affiliates soon. It’s my guess that consumers will allow a little corporate invasion in return for added features. Would you say that an avid Stephen King fan would sacrifice a chance to ask his idol questions in order to chat in a corporate free zone?

And indeed, if publishers are NOT engaged in co-op ventures on websites like these, they should be. 

Libraries Ditching Dewey

On Web sites where librarians frequently post, the abandonment of Dewey has not been welcome. One blogger titled her entry “Heresy!” Another called the Perry Branch’s approach “idiotic.”

HP: There is no other news this week

No, there is no other news this week. My poor daughter, who turns 9 on the 18th of this month, is watching her birthday get swallowed up in Harry Potter madness. It's all her friends can talk about. Meanwhile, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel here for book-tech news, but nobody's going to make product announcements this week.

Private Equity Is Eating Us

The Book Standard reports this morning that "trade and private equity firms" are interested in buying the Australia/New Zealand Borders Book Group operations.

I'm trying to think how many book supply chain companies are owned by private equity firms:

1. SirsiDynix - Vista Equity Partners

2. Ex Libris/Endeavor - Francisco Partners

3. Baker & Taylor - Castle Harlan

4. Muze - Enterprise Capital

5. Nielsen - Valcon/3i

If I've missed any (and I'm sure I have - these are just the ones at the top of my head), add them in the Comments. 

Digital Standards

We've Got Jobs!!!

MediaBay Pulls Plug

Once the dominate book club for spokenword audio through its Audio Book Club division, MediaBay began to try to transform itself from a traditional direct mail company to a digital distributor in 2004 when it discontinued recruiting new members to its old clubs. As a result of that decision, sales through its traditional channels dried up and total revenue in 2005--the last year for which figures are available--fell to $9 million from $18.8 million. At its height in 2002, MediaBay had sales of $45 million, although the company lost money every year and as of December 2005 had an accumulate deficit of $163 million.

Obligatory Harry Potter post

iPod DRM help

The digital rights management in the iTunes/iPod ecosystem only applies to music that you purchase from the iTunes Music Store (and not even all of that music anymore, as EMI has made its catalog available DRM-free on the iTMS -- time to buy Dark Side of the Moon AGAIN! :-). This DRM means that the tracks you buy online will only play on your computer + 4 additional computers you select, plus on any iPod you sync with your machine. You can generally identify these tracks by the .m4p suffix on their filenames, the 'p' standing for 'Protected.'

Your challenge is that you have music on your iPod that is not DRM-controlled -- standard MP3 files ripped from CD, which will play on any computer or any iPod -- but you don't have a handy way to get them back off the iPod and onto your computer, short of going back to your parents' house and burning them to CD. The iPod stores your music in hidden folders which
are not normally accessible to the Mac Finder or to Windows Explorer. This "feature," while not technically DRM, is intended to frustrate exactly the kind of casual music sharing you're trying to do, by preventing you from using your iPod as a music conveyor. Fortunately there are a slew of tools to help you work around this problem.

The simplest way to avoid this is to copy the music to your iPod as a disk (enable Disk Mode in iTunes) and then add it to your iTunes library when you get home. In your situation, where you've already loaded up the iPod, you need to use a copying utility to get the files from the iPod and into iTunes on your computer.

For the Mac, the most basic (and effective, and free) tool in this family is called Senuti, which is 'iTunes' backwards -- and that's exactly what it does:

http://www.fadingred.org/senuti/

There's a couple of other free tools called Floola & Yamipod, which are a bit more complicated but also will get the job done. Both work on Mac or PC.

http://www.floola.com/modules/wiwimod/index.php?page=WiwiHome
http://www.yamipod.com/

For $20, there's a Mac/PC application called iPod Access that will also let you copy music back off:

http://www.findleydesigns.com/ipodaccess/indexWin.html

The 'grandparent' tool in this space is Anapod Explorer, a very powerful ($25) tool for Windows that has every bell and whistle you'd want when it comes to managing your iPod data.

http://www.redchairsoftware.com/anapod/

I'll also put in a plug for the iPod/iTunes/iPhone coverage over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (tuaw.com), where I'm a contributor:

http://www.tuaw.com/category/ipodfamily/

Amazon Unbox Improves

The Big Picture - The Digital Divide Hasn't Gone Away

Google Book Search Gets Accessible

The Big Picture Introduces Interviews

PaperBackSwap

PW Discovers Social Networking

Film Industry Tries Its Own DRM

[O]nce a password is compromised and posted on the Web, the industry answers by changing the way in which its new DVD titles are made. Anyone who pops one of the new discs into their personal computer without installing a software upgrade will find that it destroys the computer's ability to play any high-definition DVD at all. To restore the computer's ability to play them again, the owner is forced to download new software from the Web -- software with a new password that hackers haven't yet discovered. The old password, or key, has been revoked.

Charts! We have charts!

What Publishers Should Know About Libraries

Okay, recovered

Sorry - can't blog - too disgusted

Universal puts Apple on a month-to-month lease

By refusing to enter a long-term deal, Universal may continue to press for more favorable terms from Apple or even explore deals to sell its catalog exclusively through other channels. If Universal were to pull its catalog from iTunes, Mr. Jobs would lose access to record labels that collectively account for one out of every three new releases sold in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan data.

But if Apple were to decide not to carry Universal’s recordings, the music company would likely sustain a serious blow: sales of digital music through iTunes and other sources accounted for more than 15 percent of Universal’s worldwide revenue in the first quarter, or more than $200 million. (Vivendi does not break out revenue from Apple alone).

NYC Libraries Recover from 9/11 (finally)

Touted as the return of six-day-per-week service by Mayor Mike Bloomberg and City Council, the funding also will support new librarians, new collections, and new programs. And though FY 2008 doesn’t begin until October 1, the impact will be felt almost immediately. Queens will add Saturday hours at all 63 branches and Sunday at select libraries "as soon as we can gear up," said Galante. Beginning July 2, BPL, which already has six-day-per-week service, opens earlier in the morning at its 59 branch libraries; in September, several libraries will be open every day.

Coutts and Stanford partner up

You Scream, iScream