Amazon/BookSurge roundup
Making Information PayInterested folks can go to the BISG website for more info.• Carolyn Pittis, Senior Vice-President, Global Marketing Strategy & Operations at HarperCollins, giving her insight into attitudes to
experimentation in one of the largest and most innovative trade publishers in a presentation called "Teaching an Old House New Tricks."
• Michael Cader – well-known in the industry as the innovator behind Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace – reflecting from personal experience on the value of persistent, but modest, innovation.
• Michael Raynor, author of the best-selling book The Strategy Paradox and a leading consultant with Deloitte Consulting LLP, discussing the necessity of experimentation for business success.
• Todd Anderson, Director of the University of Alberta Bookstore, talking about his experience with the extraordinary Espresso Book Machine – a truly local POD solution.
The event will also feature a panel of representatives from some of the most innovative publishers discussing their first-hand accounts of experiments that made a difference:
• Gwen Jones, Vice President, Publishing Information Systems and Technologies, John Wiley & Sons, discusses a new proposal process for eProducts.
• Malle Vallik, Director, Digital Content and Interactivity, Harlequin Enterprises, talks about a new model for selling short form fiction on the web.
• Neil DeYoung, Director of Digital Media, Hachette Book Group USA, shares the results of an experiment offering audio downloads without traditional digital rights management.
• Julie Grau, Senior Vice-President and Publisher, Spiegel and Grau, Random House Inc., shares her experience of offering free online content from a best-selling title.
Ebay not liking digital sales so muchUsing the Classified Ads format, sellers receive a 30-day ad at a fixed price. This solution enables sellers to continue to market their digital goods on eBay; however, because Classified Ad listings are a lead generation tool and do not result in transactions that go through eBay, Feedback cannot be exchanged between buyer and seller.
Borders's Digital CenterIt sounds really compelling, in a lot of ways - but you have to wonder how many people wikll want to stand at a kiosk and do genealogy searches in a bookstore.The digital center has usurped a majority of the former music department, carrying a downsized inventory of product and a large amount of technological services. (Borders alluded to the change in its year-end financial release, reporting a decline in music sales and a plan to "reallocate floor space" accordingly.)
Services in the digital center consist of:
- Borders Digital Music, which enables shoppers to burn CDs and download music to digital music players from the chain's music library.
- Personal Publishing, a service powered by the Lulu.com digital marketplace. Shoppers can publish their own books and register for an International Standard Book Number (ISBN).
- Genealogy Searches. A partnership with Ancestry.com lets shoppers search that company's website from kiosks or sign up for an Ancestry.com subscription.
- Downloadable Digital Audiobooks, which Borders claims is the first "audiobook download service in a physical retail environment." The retailer offers approximately 15,000 titles.
- Custom Photo Books, an area where shoppers can digitally create and personalize photo albums that will be shipped to them upon completion.
- Photo Printing, where shoppers can print photos from a digital camera.
Borders also is merchandising products related to the services, including digital cameras and photo frames, GPS devices and Sony's Reader Digital Book.
On Not Owning Your Content
Are you buying or leasing ebooks?If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the "first sale" doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School's Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon's Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?Good question. And the answer appears to be, you're buying a license to the content. You can resell your physical device, with all the content loaded on it - but the doctrine of first sale seems only to apply to content embedded in physical media:
You'd have to sell the physical media where the "original" download is stored—a hard drive or the actual Kindle or Sony Reader.Yet another instance where law has to catch up to technology.
Borders stock up
Brennan out at Muze - and where's he going?
Can't We All Get Along?Bennett believes that “intense competition” is behind the inertia. “Everyone continues to believe that their answer is the right one. As I have said on many occasions, that’s not very helpful.”Essentially, it seems that publishers are each pursuing their own solutions, and collaboration isn't among them.
Bennett claimed that the publishing industry could face a format war similar to Sony and Toshiba’s dispute over who would become the dominant high-definition DVD supplier. “The book trade is not big enough to support dozens of different solutions. There’s always one dominant solution and I would rather get that now.”
Will the Riggios Buy Borders?
Borders Borders Borders Borders Borders[CEO George] Jones added that Borders believes that its 2009 financial targets "remain attainable, yet within the current economic environment, we will be slowed in our progress and expect that we'll reach them later than originally planned. Still, we believe our strategic plan remains the right path toward achieving these goals." This plan includes the imminent launching of the company's website on its own, the spread of "new concept" stores that emphasize digital offerings, the display of more titles face out and a related reduction in inventory of 5%-10%, among other initiatives.
Because Obviously Women Rule the World
Our Wiki's Done!
Ingram Gets LearnedThe company said ALPSP members are invited “to contribute titles to an ALPSP-branded range of subject-based eBook collections which will be offered to libraries and other institutions” through its MyiLibrary content distribution partners including Swets. ALPSP members have access to all of Ingram Digital’s digital content solutions, like CoreSource for digital asset management, and member publishers can use Lightning Source Inc. to produce print-on-demand titles as well as enable digital content distribution to all markets and channels.
Because They're French!The project, to be unveiled at the [Paris Book] fair, will offer more than 60,000 digitised works from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) and 2,000 from about 50 publishers, some of whom received subsidies for the purpose. The BNF plans to add another 40,000 books imminently, with those copyrighted books supplied by publishers expected to quickly exceed 10,000.
Google Book Search Releases APIWeb developers can use the Books Viewability API to quickly find out a book's viewability on Google Book Search and, in an automated fashion, embed a link to that book in Google Book Search on their own sites.
Digital Strategies: Getting More Bang For Your Buck
Big Digital On Campus
BookNet Canada Technology Forum
Paper Doesn't FailTolle's publishers, using old-fashioned print technology, have had no trouble supplying the masses. Penguin shipped 3.45 million copies of A New Earth in four weeks, a record for the publisher. And after Oprah's announcement, New World Library, publisher of Tolle's The Power of Now, went back to press for 600,000 copies of the book and other Tolle book, audio and card deck titles. Already New World had 2 million copies of the 1999 book in print.
To date, no copies of A New Earth or The Power of Now have crashed.
Simon & Schuster Certifiably...Certified
Oxford Editor Has Conversion ExperienceSchnittman has no idea if he'll continue to see those kind of sales. And since in the past he's only sold digital titles to libraries, not via retailers, he doesn't have a baseline comparison. But he says the sales have turned him from a digital skeptic to a believer, and that he's now rushing to finalize a deal with Sony to format Oxford's books for its Reader.
Sony Readers to Hachette EditorsAgents selling to Hachette’s imprints are now required to e-mail their texts to acquiring editors, who download them to their Readers; paper manuscripts are no longer routinely circulated.Unfortunately, the Readers don't have note-taking capabilities, so editors still have to print out titles that they want to actually work on. Neil de Young, the director of digital media there, says this is not a problem:
“Some of the more senior editors like sitting on their couches with a glass of red wine and pencil in hand,” he says.Don't we all.
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