BEA BEA BEA BEA

Twitter is - for a recession year, this show is getting quite a bit of attention!It will be a smaller convention than even the LA show last year (where attendance was down). But the conference sessions promise to be wonderful and timely. Some highlights:

Thursday

• 9:30-10:30 - Brian O'Leary talks about the piracy project he's doing with O'Reilly Media.
• 10:30-11:30 - James Howitt runs through some pretty incredible statistics being gathered through Bowker's PubTrack Consumer program.
• 11:00-12:00 - Mike Shatzkin, noted futurist, talks about the rise of community and how publishers can sell their books in a community-centric world.
• 12:30-1:30 - Michael Smith of IDPF moderates a panel on distributing digital books and audio.
• 2:00-3:00 - Brian O'Leary, Mike Shatzkin and I talk about XML for editors.
• 2:30-3:30 - Richard Nash discusses the new curation in "The Concierge and the Bouncer".

Friday

• 9:30-10:30 - Michael Healy discusses POD for Dummies.
• 9:30-10:30 - Google Book Search talks about libraries.
• 10:30-11:30 - CreateSpace talks about self-publishing and Amazon.
• 3:30-4:30 - BISG presents Book Industry Trends 2009
• 3:45-5:00 - Alternative Sources of Income for Authors in a Digital World 

Saturday

• 9:30-10:30 - Librarian as Digital Diva
• 10:30-11:30 - Uncovering the Potential of Library Sales
• 11:00-12:00 - Book Reviews 2010: What Will They Look Like?
• 2:00-3:00 - Book Bloggers: Today's Buzz Builders (pretty much answers the 11:00 question, doesn't it?)
• 3:30-4:30 - GBS Partner Program

Sunday

• 9:00-10:00 - Metacomet Roundtable on Rights, Google, and "Chunking"
• 11:00-12:00 -  Metacomet Roundtable on Rights, Google, and "Chunking"

Yesterday I received a very helpful email from someone at Amazon named Zoz, informing me of their new self-service blog distribution platform for the Kindle.

Amazon already distributes blogs using Newstex's Blogs on Demand service (full disclosure: I consulted to Newstex for over a year, helping them develop News on Demand and Blogs on Demand). And I've written on the effectiveness of that on David Wilk's Livewires blog.

What I've found in running Bloggapedia for nearly four years now (OMG, it's really been that long) is that when distributing blog content, human intervention is everything. To state the obvious, blogs can be ephemeral things. People start them, and abandon them. There are countless spam blogs, mirrors of existing blogs. When blogs are good, they're fantastic - some of my favorites are The Awl, Teleread, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, Persona non Data, Peter Brantley's blog - but those are the cream of the crop. At the next level you have personal blogs, which are also great but have a very limited audience. And at the bottom level you've got porn, blogs that make no sense, and hateful blogs.

Curation is crucial for content distribution. Not providing that service for your customers is just baffling.

Why The Kindle DX Is Not Going To Save The Textbook Business

The new Kindle is getting a lot of attention for its ability to display newspapers better than its predecessors, and it's obvious that this gizmo is being aimed at newspaper readers because they're offering discounts on metro dailies for those who don't live in the region those dailies are published. There are all kinds of reasons why tying the Kindle DX to newspapers was a botch on the part of the NYTimes, et al, but I don't come out of that industry and I won't address those.

The new Kindle is also being marketed as a balm to the textbook industry. And that's where I call shenanigans.

The textbook business is suffering from all kinds of problems right now. Prices of new textbooks are too high, and even Congress has had to step in on the issue. Because the prices are so high, there's an enormous aftermarket for used textbooks - of which the publishers don't see a penny. Which only encourages them to put out new editions frequently, and charge lots of money for them.

Ebooks have been viewed as a solution to this vicious circle of pricing. The cost of distributing ebooks is far, far less than distributing print books - shipping all that paper around the country, and storing it in warehouses, is expensive. Cutting out that cost, and passing on some of the savings to the end user while pocketing the rest, seems to be a good compromise.

But users have more expectations of ebooks than they do of print books. Consequently, new e-textbooks have Flash animations, embedded videos - there are audio downloads for language textbooks (replacing the traditional language lab), and activities, online tests, and other features that print books cannot possibly contain. These cost money to develop. So the price of e-textbooks is not going to drop as significantly as people hope.

Purely on a level of cost, then, the Kindle DX is a bad idea. It's $489. That's more than some laptops, which are also a requirement for college. 

Let's look at student behavior as well. They're on their computers practically all their waking hours. They're IMing and Facebooking and Twittering in class - as part of the learning experience, as a way of communicating with fellow students. They're in front of those screens 24/7. Adding a new device - which does not have the capacity to network with others - is a little unconsidered.

Sure, the Kindle DX is lighter than 3 or 4 textbooks - it's lighter than one! But students are already hauling their laptops around - if they can have their textbooks ON their laptops, they don't need another device at all!

And let's look at the capabilities of the DX versus a laptop. The Kindle does not support animation. It does not support embedded video. It does not support taking quizzes and doing learning activities. All the recent developments in e-textbooks are wholly unsupported by the Kindle.

I know that several textbook publishers are working with Amazon to distribute their textbooks this way. But I have to wonder who will be buying these devices and how they will be used in college settings. Princeton is doing a pilot, as are Reed and a few other colleges. I'm going to be following that very closely.

BISG's Michael Healy to run Google's Books Rights Registry