What the iPad Told Me

ISBNs and ebooks: Part 7624

Yesterday the AAP's Digital Working Group hosted a meeting where Phil Madans of Hachette, Angela Bole of BISG, and I talked about ISBNs and identifying digital content. This came on the heels of Mark Bide's webinar for BISG yesterday on the same subject.

We broke the topic down into three discrete parts: ISBNs and ebooks, ISBNs and chapters, and ISBNs and "chunks". I stopped the presentation after each slide so we could discuss each part before moving on to the next one. And some interesting findings emerged.

Metadata

The primary objection (even more than cost - but of course these were larger publishers who can buy identifiers in bulk at a discount) to assigning an ISBN to each format of ebook is having to track the metadata on each record. Databases begin to bloat with products that are identical except for format, and managing the metadata becomes both repetitive and confusing. 

Furthermore, it became apparent that publishers are not particularly using ISBNs to track royalties and sales - they are using SEVERAL fields, and the ISBN is not even necessarily the most important among them. So the ISBN International Agency's argument that the ISBN is an essential tool for tracking these things falls by the wayside.

We talked a bit about the prospect of third parties assigning ISBNs to different ebook formats - most publishers seem to just want to produce an EPUB file, assign an ISBN to that one, and then send it "into the wild" (as Bide says) for conversion and distribution. The distributors and retailers are primarily book-related and their databases are generally keyed off an ISBN, so those third parties would have to assign ISBNs to whatever formats they are distributing and selling. But the publishers at this meeting did not seem particularly worried about that prospect.

One publisher also stressed that by supporting more than one format, they're contributing to format proliferation and they would prefer very much not to do that.

However, the downside to allowing third parties to assign ISBNs to digital products on an as-needed basis becomes problematic when there are changes to the metadata. If a pub date shifts, if a price goes up, if there are corrections to author names, additions to synopses and reviews - any time you have to edit the metadata on a title, if you've got third parties with their OWN editions of that title, you can't be sure the edited/corrected metadata will reach those editions.

ISBNs and Chapters

Even less popular than the one-ISBN-per-format model is the one-ISBN-per-chapter idea. This expands the metadata bloat exponentially. At present, most publishers who are offering chapters for sale are doing so from their own websites, so ISBNs are not such an issue. However, once retailers begin offering individual chapters of books, the industry will face the same problems it does with different ebook formats. Multiplied by however many chapters are in a given book.

In addition to identification of chapters for the purposes of trading with third parties, there is the issue of tracking royalties. With textbook authors, this is problematic - many authors contribute to textbooks, and determining who wrote which chapters can be daunting. It was generally agreed that without significant market demand, identifying chapters for the purposes of trade is not a high priority.

ISBNs and "Chunks"

First there was the objection to the term "chunks". Which I agree with! It's nasty. But Anna Wintour said the same thing about the word "blog"...and look where that got her! It seems "chunk" is the term we're stuck with, and I am heartily sorry about that.

Second, everyone at the meeting pretty much agreed that this is a vastly esoteric subject and not likely to become a pressing issue anytime soon. Even Amazon does not sell sub-chapter-level content. Licensing content to third parties (such as websites) will likely mean putting together discrete digital assets into various packages, but there seems to be no trade reason right now for ISBNs to be attached to those packages. This may change as the market changes.

We ended with a "watch this space" message, and are now putting together a survey which looks at some of the assumptions behind past ISBN-use recommendations.

Ebay not liking digital sales so much

Using 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.

 

Big Digital On Campus

Ebooks up, audiobooks down

Michael Eisner gets into digital book marketing

Publishers have attempted to use the Internet to market books and attract new readers with little success, but G.P. Putnam president Ivan Held thinks this could be a breakthrough approach.

"One of the challenges for the industry in marketing books is how to bring in new readers," Held said. "This concept will certainly help reach a new audience as well as hook the consumer on the book before it ever comes out."

Borders staffs up in IT

the development and execution of IT strategic processes related to the delivery of technology as well as leading teams to ensure that business goals are met through delivery of necessary IT products and services, among other duties.

David Cully at B&T

Cully's primary responsibilities include managing all merchandising and purchasing functions, managing BTMS, and managing Baker & Taylor's new Specialty Markets Group.

BISG/BIC White Paper on identifiers

The Identification of Digital Book Content is intended to stimulate debate in the book industry about how digital book content should be identified and to encourage further work on the development and implementation of identification standards and best practices for such content.

Richard Willis Out At B&T

Meanwhile, BusinessWeek is convinced the Kindle changes everything

It's not hard to see how Kindle will take off. Business travelers, I predict, will be the first to embrace it. Having a device with multiple books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs to travel with, which also has a long battery life, beats wrangling a laptop, magazines, and papers in an airline seat. The next market will be university students, undergrad and grad. With such a nifty application and the tension over ridiculously high prices for textbooks, going digital is a brainy way to deliver textbooks to an audience that is already used to digital consumption.

From the Mailbag

Fooling Around With the Kindle

Amazon's Digital Text Platform is in beta, but it's an . Anyone can sign up. Anyone can be published. In fact, the only requirements to get an item listed on Kindle are a title, an author's name, and of course, content.

I wrote a cheesy coming-of-age novel called during my undergraduate days. It's not my best work. It might be my worst. I've let two people read it. OK, I've suckered two people into reading it. I had it lying around on my hard drive in MS Word, so I figured I'd serve it to Amazon's service as a guinea pig.

In seconds, Amazon chewed it up and spit it back out in Kindle's HTML-coded format. All that was left was to price the puppy, from $0.25 to $200. I chose the low end of that scale and clicked the Publish button.

Several hours later, it was up on the site, complete with an Amazon-assigned ASIN code. That was too easy.

Kindle talk

BAMM sales up

Giving E-books a bad name

It's not clear when the e-book scam began. A few consumers say they saw fake e-book charges beginning in February, but it appears there was a flurry of activity in September.

Credit card thieves often create fake businesses to process bogus transactions -- that's much easier than using stolen cards to make purchases at legitimate retailers, and one of the quickest ways to turn stolen numbers into cash.

Scobelizing the Kindle

Tight Christmas

BoingBoing Says It Best

Is It Really As Drastic As All That?

Following is a link roundup for Kindle, but I have to say that when Publisher's Lunch hit my inbox, I was sort of taken aback at this quote from OUP's Evan Schnittman:

The risk here isn’t just to Amazon. If Kindle fails, the ebook is over, the theory of the “iPod model” is wrong for eBooks, and publishing must face the reality that consumers just don’t want to read immersive content on electronic screens of any sort…

You know what? No. I just don't believe it's as drastic as all that. We've been living with books for 500 years, people! To expect us to wake up one day and start reading them on screens - or it's all over, we'll NEVER read them on screens - is a little much. The comparisons/expectations regarding the music business are just not apt here - in listening to music, we've been accustomed to changing devices every generation or so - from wax cylinders to wax records to vinyl to 8 tracks to cassettes to CDs to MP3s - and the history of listening to personal music (as opposed to the history of reading, for God's sake) is a lot shorter. Innovation is expected there. But the runway for changing reading formats is a lot longer. Longer than any of us can see. To say it's now or never is...hysteria.

Which means, of course, that Bezos wins, in terms of whipping some of us up into a frenzy.

Roundup:

OUP 

Newsweek 

MediaBistro

Seth Godin

Forbes 

Engadget 

BISG Annual Meeting presentations online

Across-the-Border Discount

The US dollar is so weak now that Canadian bookstores are selling books at US prices, rather than the higher-marked Canadian ones. Reports Earth Times:

The retail prices printed on book covers are determined by the publisher often six months before a book appears on store shelves and often do not reflect the current exchange rate, said the Toronto-based chain, which also runs Chapters and Coles bookstores.

Okay, people, this is just embarrassing.

And the Kindle is...where???

The "Bits" blog at the New York Times points out:

According to publishing industry executives...Amazon had promised delivery of its keyboard-equipped electronic book reader during the second week of October. Now, those same people say that the company has pushed back that date and is aiming for a launch by the end of this year. Take that with a grain of salt. Amazon and its chief executive, Jeff Bezos, are notoriously persnickety. For example, they delayed their digital music service for two years, trying to find the best customer proposition in a rapidly changing competitive environment, before launching the DRM-free store last month.

But what I love are the comments:

If the picture I just saw on Engadget is correct, Amazon delayed the ‘Kindle’ because someone there took off their dark sunglasses off and noticed what was sitting in front of them. Readers living in 2007 would not go near “that thing” with a 10-foot pole.

More Lessing

Normally we keep this blog to issues of technology in the book world, but today we are over the moon about Doris Lessing winning the Nobel Prize. After decades of defending why we love her work, it feels so great to be validated. Yes, she can be a bit heavyhanded at times, and yes, her Campos in Argos series was probably not the most successful sci-fi ever written...but she articulates truths like nobody else. Martha Quest, The Golden Notebook, The Fifth Child, and The Diaries of Jane Sommers (as well as the first volume of her autobiography) are...probably the strongest depictions of the internal lives of women we've ever read. And to say that these depictions - to say that the internal lives of women - merit a Nobel is just...well, it's about freakin' time.

Borders Beta

Print vs audio books

So I downloaded Stephen Colbert's book - I haven't started listening to it yet. But I saw the review in the Times and was glad I'd chosen to listen rather than read.

Meanwhile, over at the Huffington Post, Michael Giltz uses the Colbert/Audible thing as a jumping-off point to talk about One More Thing That's Wrong With Publishing:

One of the suits says the audio book is so creative and different that, "I would think that you would buy the book and the audio because they are really different." In other words, he expects fans of Colbert to buy the hardcover book for $27, then buy the audio book for about $16 and while you're at it, when a downloadable version becomes available for your Sony Reader or computer or Blackberry, maybe you'd be willing to pay another $25 or so for that version. He's not alone. Even when the audio book isn't somewhat different from the hardcover, they expect fans of a book to buy it twice.

Imagine if the music industry demanded you buy one copy of your album for playing on your home stereo, another for your car, another for your iPod and so on. You wouldn't do it, would you? But the book industry - which publishes more than 100,000 titles a year - thinks it's perfectly reasonable to expect you to do it for books. 

I don't think anyone expects that readers are generally going to pursue both the audio and the print book, AND the ebook - people consume their media in different ways. But later Giltz goes on to talk about bundling products - buy the hardcover and get the audio or the ebook for free - which makes eminent sense. Seth Godin was talking about that at last year's Google Unbound conference. I think that's only a matter of time. Publishers are very leery about cannibalizing book sales via other media. But they are coming around, gradually.

Link Digest

• A dialogue on digital publishing and libraries, including reps from Microsoft, Google, and UCal.
• iPods don't work for blind people because you have to navigate them to find what you need to listen to. Fred's Head Companion details improvements and accessories to the iPod, so the unsighted can listen to audiobooks with ease.
• Marc Kramer, a business writer for The Street, lists four ways you can get your book published.
  
• Researchers at Carnegie Mellon are using CATCHPAS (those bits of nonsense text you type when you validate that you're not a bot, on Craigslist and Blogger) to digitize books.
• Silicon Alley Insider offers perspective on why ebooks continue to fail. It may have something to do with prices.
• MyiLibrary continues to collect publishers like Grandma collects Hummel figurines.
  

News Flash: Publishers Cautious About Digitization

Earthtimes.org posts a summary about publishers' tentative approach to mass digitization, listing the various digitization services (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) and publishers' reactions to each of their programs. It's actually a pretty clear delineation of publisher response, although it's framed in a way that suggests publishers are being dragged kicking and screaming into the world of ebooks:

Fearing that it will lose out financially, much of the book industry is resisting internet pioneers' vision of putting the world's entire store of published information online. Some European libraries have portrayed the bid to digitize 500 years of books and newspapers as an imperialist plot, because the big players such as Google are based in the United States.

Despite the histrionics, there's some good info here.

"Real" Book Critics vs. Bloggers vs. B&N Reviewers vs. Oh, Hell, Who Can Keep Track Anymore?

GalleyCat posts an interesting take on the new B&N.com's review section square in the middle of the new homepage - taking issue with National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman:

[I]n the summer of 2006, Freeman used the Critical Mass blog, which the NBCC has steadily maintained with near-legalistic precision does not reflect the ex officio positions of the various Circle officials who post to it regularly, to argue that bloggers who affiliate themselves with bookstores can't be trusted to review books honestly, a notion to which I roundly objected at the time. When asked by email Monday afternoon whether his new job generating content infused with links to B&N's online store could be reconciled with that earlier position, Freeman maintained that what he was doing was entirely different from the practices he had attacked....

All I'm saying is that it's long past the time for "real" book reviewers to concede not only that they're not the only experts in the field, but that their opinions are no more or less intrinsically valid than those of people who haven't convinced various corporate institutions to cut them a check for expressing themselves.