Amazon/BookSurge roundup

http://www.bloggernews.net/114844

http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/03/amazon-ups-the-ante-on-platform-lock-in.html

http://dianacastilleja.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-discussion-over-amazonbooksurge.html

http://thebrokenforum.wordpress.com/2008/03/31/there%E2%80%99s-something-about-amazon/

And a new blog started just for this: http://www.amazontroopsurge.com/?utm_campaign=Google&gclid=CP_Hreb-t5ICFSK9FQod_w5jQg

Making Information Pay

BISG has announced the speaker lineup for this year’s Making Information Pay conference, which will be held on May 9th. According to the press release that went out today:

• 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.

Interested folks can go to the BISG website for more info.

Borders’s Digital Center

The In-Store Marketing Institute reports on the digital center at the hub of the new Borders concept store in Ann Arbor:

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.

It 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.

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Continuing the discussion:
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference ‘Borders’s Digital Center’ from LJNDawson.com Blog:

O’Reilly TOC – Tools of Change for Publishing: Borders Prototype Store Shows Off Digital Center

On Not Owning Your Content

Traditionally, for Easter, I stick a movie or two in the kids’ Easter baskets. This year I didn’t. I’m not quite sure why – it just didn’t occur to me. The kids have HBO On Demand. They each have a Netflix account. We’re never short of movies around here. But of course the kids argued with me this year. I pointed out how they are constantly getting movies – either in the mail or in the tubes.

"But we want them to OWN," said my little girl, who is 9.

"Why?" I said. "You can get them anytime – you can re-order them from Netflix, and HBO cycles their stuff, and half of what you already own is on the Disney Channel all the time anyway."

My daughters weren’t buying my argument, but they will, I think. If our content is in the ether – if it’s available by subscription (and subscriptions are getting increasingly cheaper) and we can pull it down whenever we want, what’s the point of cluttering up your house with plastic boxes? Do my kids need movies as souvenirs the same way I need books as souvenirs?

Are you buying or leasing ebooks?

Via Peter Brantley, an examination on Gizmodo:

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

Borders stock is swinging back upwards after its "For Sale" sign went up last week. Check out the Big Picture extra we’re sending out this week for more analysis on what happened to Borders and what’s going to happen.

Brennan out at Muze – and where’s he going?

Several sources confirm that SVP of Media Development & Partnerships, Paul Brennan, is leaving Muze tomorrow. No word on where he’s going. Lots of words on why he is leaving, but until we hear from the man himself, it’s all speculation. Paul had been at Muze for 9 years, through enormous upheaval(s), which requires a tremendous amount of tact and diplomacy.

Can’t We All Get Along?

The Bookseller’s Association Digital Taskforce, out of London, is not going anywhere, reports The Bookseller.

After a carefully-researched report by Francis Bennett (founder of BookData) and Michael Holdsworth (head of BIC), the Bookseller’s Association has "no plans" to adopt the report’s recommendations:

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.”