What Do We Do with Books?

By hugh on August 31, 2010 in books, printing, publishing | Leave a comment

Nice historical analysis of how Gutenberg’s press brought evolution more than revolution. And much more great nuggetage to be found; the best historical overview I’ve seen in a while. I’d like to copy the whole thing here, but perhaps best for you to visit the site, The first printed books came with a question: What do you do with these things, byTom Scocca, in Boston.com:

Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items and were copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printer had decided to publish was an alien one.

Nor was print clearly destined to replace manuscript, from the point of view of the book owners of the day. A few fussy color-printing experiments aside, the new books were monochrome, dull in comparison to illuminated manuscripts. Many books left blank spaces for adding hand decoration, and collectors frequently bound printed pages together with manuscript ones.
“It’s a great mistake to think of an absolute disjunction between a manuscript world of the Middle Ages and a print world of the 16th century,” Pettegree said.

As in our own Internet era, culture and commerce went through upheaval as Europe tried to figure out what to make of the new medium and its possibilities. Should it serve to spread familiar Latin texts, or to promote new ideas, written in the vernacular? Was print a vessel for great and serious works, or for quick and sloppy ones? As with the iPad (or the Newton before it), who would want to buy a printed book, and why?

Pettegree explores this time of cultural change by looking at the actual published matter it produced. Drawing on the power of 21st century information technology, he and a team of researchers pulled together the catalogs of thousands of small, scattered libraries, assembling the broadest picture to date of the earliest publications.

What made print viable, Pettegree found, was not the earth-shaking impact of mighty tomes, but the rustle of countless little pages: almanacs, calendars, municipal announcements. Indulgence certificates, the documents showing that sinners had paid the Catholic church for reduced time in purgatory, were especially popular. These ephemeral jobs were what made printing a viable business through the long decades while book publishers — and the public — struggled to find what else this new technology might be good for.

[more...]

[via Chris Hughes]

Leave a comment

On Seth: Publishing Isn’t Marriage

By hugh on August 26, 2010 in books, business, buyingandselling, distribution, publishing, web, writers | 3 Comments

Seth Godin announced to great fanfare and hubub in the blog world that he will no longer publish his books through a traditional publisher.

Some see this as a big author shaking off the shackles of evil publishers; some publishers see this as Godin taking advantage of the investment traditional publishing made on his behalf, by giving Godin the credibility of a string of book deals.

It’s a bit of both and a bit of neither. As Stringer Bell says: it’s just bidness.

If Godin thinks he can do better for his business with a non-traditional model, then he’s smart to do it. (If he is wrong, he’ll be back).

If his publishers thought no one would buy his next book, they’d stop publishing him too.

Publishing isn’t marriage. It’s not till death do us part; it’s: “while it’s still mutually beneficial.”

For people like Godin – that is, those with enough profile and personal marketing muscle – publishing is a service business: publishers provide certain services (editing, copyediting, marketing & distribution … not to mention financing, in the form of an advance) in exchange for a cut of Godin’s intellectual output.

So, if big publishers can’t provide the right services for some of their clients (people like Godin), then their clients are right to go shopping for something else.

The problem – beyond a little stir about Godin – is a wider context of how the publishing business actually works:

- The financial health of the big publishing business depends on the top sellers
- The successful few books finance all the financial duds (~85-95% of published books don’t earn out, I have heard)
- But once an author is successful, their need of big publishers’ marketing weight declines significantly – the investment in profile has happened, and they can, if they wish, cut out on their own now under their own personal brand
- If all the big writers start to defect once they are successful, the whole system collapses

It would be like a Venture Capital (VC) system where start-ups could just “leave” once they were successful, and then negotiate their own sale to Google, without cutting VCs in. It doesn’t work.

Of course, that won’t happen. Contracts will start to change to reflect these new threats to publishers. Publishers will adapt their offerings, and their expectations; writers too will need to consider a broader range of possibilities beyond just: get an advance, publish a book. We’re in a time of negotiation.

But, lest you think it’s time to launch your literary career on your own, Mitch Joel reminds you: You Are Not Seth Godin.

3 Comments. Leave yours?

LibriVox Turns Five

By hugh on August 10, 2010 in audio, books | Leave a comment

Today, LibriVox celebrates five years of free public domain audiobooks.

Leave a comment

Lessons from the Music Biz: Arcade Fire

By hugh on August 9, 2010 in books, business, buyingandselling, digital, distribution, ebooks, publishing | 1 Comment

The Montreal/Texas band Arcade Fire has just released a new album, Suburbs. Arcade Fire is about as big as indie bands get, and their plan is to stay indie – as far as I know.
You can buy the new album here:
http://www.arcadefire.com/ …

And some interesting notes about how you can buy:
* Premium digital ($7.99)
* CD + Premium digital ($12.99)
* Vinyl + premium digital ($24.99)
All orders come with non-premium digital (ie in lossy m4a format) … with “visuals for each song, lyrics & contextual hyperlinks.”

Finally, you get one of 8 covers … randomly assigned.

In short:
- low quality digital is the baseline
- and it’s implied that if you want that for free you can find it
- everything else is a bundle of some sort: digital + something
- high quality digital, and physical copies are premium products
- a kind of customization: only 1 in 8 purchasers will have the same cover as you.

The digital is almost a give-away, everything else you are paying because you care enough to have something more substantial.

I suspect the big problem in the book business is that most books aren’t worth caring about enough to want a memento. So the real problem in publishing is not so much the shake-up of digital, but rather that consumers (and publishers) just don’t care that much about the majority of books that are published and bought.

1 Comment. Leave yours?

Inspired by Amazon?

By hugh on July 31, 2010 in books, publishing | 2 Comments

In the publishing industry there are any number of bugbears people point to to explain the collapse of the universe. Amazon gets it’s share of blame. But Amazon does what every business ought to do: it identifies needs/desires among customers and tries to answer those needs/desires with as little friction as possible.

Here’s what Jeff Bezos says about Amazon’s approach to business, product development and marketing:

“Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.”

Making comparisons from one business sector to another isn’t usually all that helpful. Music doesn’t equal newspapers doesn’t equal books. Book retail doesn’t equal publishing. I think we’ve had enough blowhard articles about “saving publishing” … and I’d like to see more building of successful publishing businesses, and fewer articles about how to do it.

Still, I have to think Bezos, one of the most successful book businessmen in the universe, is on to something here, which is: pay attention to your readers, and always be building your business with them in mind. This is just more bromide, I suppose. Still, it’s bromide from a guy who knows a thing or two about making money and selling books.

Here’s more of Bezos, with Charlie Rose talking about business.

[Quote and link lifted from Mitch]

2 Comments. Leave yours?

Consultation on the Canadian Book Industry

By hugh on July 20, 2010 in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

From the inbox:

Good afternoon,

Earlier today, the Honourable James Moore, Minister of Canadian Heritage and Official Languages, announced a review of the Government of Canada’s foreign investment policy for the book industry.

The Revised Foreign Investment Policy in Book Publishing and Distribution, working in conjunction with the Investment Canada Act, sets conditions for foreign investment in the Canadian book industry. Given the changes the book industry has experienced since the policy was last revised in 1992, the review will seek to determine whether the policy continues:

to provide opportunity for healthy competition in the book publishing,
distribution, and retail sectors of the industry; and
to contribute to the broader government objective of ensuring that
Canadian cultural content is created and accessible in Canada and
abroad.

The first step of the review process is to invite interested parties — from the reading public to businesses from all sectors of the industry — to put forward their views on the subject. A Web site has been launched that offers relevant background information and that provides a forum for public comment (www.pch.gc.ca/bookconsultation). Submissions received through the Web site will help inform the Minister’s decision on whether
and, if so, how to revise the policy.

Given your interest in the issues raised by this policy review, I am writing to you at this time to ensure that you are aware of the review and of your opportunity to participate in its online consultation phase, should you wish to do so.

Sincerely,

Carla Curran
Director
Book Publishing Policy and Programs

Leave a comment

Sifting through all these books

By hugh on June 14, 2010 in books, business, distribution, ebooks, web | Leave a comment

I posted a new thing over at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Sifting through all these books, here’s the first bit:

The latest numbers from Bowker are extraordinary: In 2002 there were 215,000 books published in the USA, and a further 32,693 print-on-demand title (short-runs, self-published etc).

In 2008, traditional publishers put out 275,000 books; but there was a huge surge in print-on-demand titles, and at 285,000, for the first time there were more non-traditionally published books than traditionally published.

By 2009, the whole applecart was upside down: 288,000 books published traditionally, and 764,000 (!) self-published and print-on-demand books. That doesn’t include, as far as I can tell, the thousands of ebooks getting published at places like Smashwords.

Even if you forget about the self-published books, since 2002 we’ve seen a 105% increase in poetry and drama books (11,766), 80% increase in the number of biographies published (12,313), an 80% increase in general fiction titles (45,181), a 75% increase in literature (10,843), a 50% increase in religion titles (19,310), and a 30% increase in science books (15.428). There have been declines in only three of the twenty-five categories tracked by Bowker: Agriculture (down 6%), computers (down 32%), and languages (down 32%). Across the spectrum, we’ve seen a 32% increase in all titles published since 2002, all without an appreciable increase (that I know of) in the number of people who actually buy books, let alone read them.
Add to this significant growth the 764,000 (!!!) non-traditionally-published books, and you can see where the fundamental problem for publishing lies: there are so many books out there, and a limited number of readers.

Supply Makes Demand Look Puny

We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially. There is a whole other article to write about the business implications of these numbers, but I’m interested here in some ideas about how our info systems might manage this huge pile of books. That is, how are people going to sift through all these books to find what they want?

[more over at O'Reilly...]

Leave a comment

Four Reasons to be Worried about Publishing

By hugh on June 5, 2010 in bookoven | 3 Comments

I was invited to do a panel on Social Media for Authors at the Writers’ Union of Canada AGM. Writer Nichole McGill was the moderator, and I was joined by the wonderful Jenny Bullough, of the visionary publishing house Harlequin. (Harlequin is the most clued-in about digital of all the publishers I know of, along with O’Reilly).

As we discussed how things would play out, it was decided that I would be the prophet of doom – describing why everything has changed, and no writer can afford to ignore the web; while Jenny would follow-up with a concrete overview of the things writers should be doing on the web.

My – minimalist – slides are below, and I’ll give a tiny bit of context below that.

Four Reasons to be Worried about Publishing
View more presentations from Hugh McGuire.

Here are my Four Reasons to Be Worried, and One Reason to Be Optimistic:

Worry number one:
There are so many damn books published every year.

[Context: from 2002, number of titles published in the USA has stayed roughly constant, oscillating between 250,000 and 280,000. Which is an astramoical number of books. But in that period, a couple of things have happened: works of "literature" have increased from ~6,000 titles to roughly 9,000 titles, without any detectable increase in readership of literature. Secondly, the number of print-on-demand, self-published books was on the order of 25,000 in 2002. By 2008 that number was 285,000 - outstripping the number of traditionally-published books. In 2009, the number of self-published titles reached an astonishing 750,000; so there were more than 1 million books published in the USA in 2009. And that's ignoring all the stuff published without ISBNs.

Compared to the rest of the world, I am a relatively heavy reader: I read perhaps 25 books a year. So there are at least 999,975 books published every year that I don't read. There is a massive glut of books for people to read, and your book is one in a million.]

Worry number two:
Publishers can’t support all those damn books.

[Context: most publishers have tried to address this glut in supply by doing something counterintuitive: they've started publishing more books. Publishing is a lottery business: most books don't break even, and a tiny percentage are the big hits (Harry Potter) that actually finance the industry. No one really knows what the next big hit is, so the theory goes: if you double the number of books you are publishing, you double your chances of having a big hit.

But even if publishers are not publishing more books, they aren't swimming in cash either. Most writers think they are being neglected by their publishers, but the truth is everyone I know in publishing tells me that with the web etc. they have to work twice as hard as they used to, but they are still selling the same number of books.

Whether there are villains or heroes, I don't know, but I do know this: publishers have less time than they used to for editorial and marketing, except for a tiny handful of successful authors. Most writers are not in that tiny handful; and the tiny handful might not have to worry about the web all that much. The rest of us do.]

Worry number three:
Readers don’t have any damn time to read books anymore.

[Context: It used to be that books competed against radio, TV, bridge and cocktail parties, baseball and square-dances. Now they compete against all that, plus Youtube and Twitter, and the blogs, and Facebook and World of Warcraft and Chatroulette, and Xbox, and Wii, and and and... The competition for readers' leisure time is fierce, and writers and publishers need to do everything they can to make sure that readers will choose to read when they have a choice.]

Worry number four:
Prices are collapsing. Damn.

[Context: There will be lots of debates about ebook pricing and cost structures and hardcover sales and Amazon and 9.99 and all the rest. The debates will rage on with different theories about how much a book should cost, where the costs are (advances and editorial and marketing), and where they aren't (printing and distribution). But in the end, readers don't care about any of that: they will vote with their walltes. If you can spend $8.99/month for unlimited movie downloads from Netflix -- in the US -- then spending $27.99 on a hardcover of a book you aren't sure you're going to like starts to seem a bit dear. Not to mention the quadrupling of the number of available books, and the plentiful ways you can spend your time without paying a cent online, or elsewhere.

The price of most books will drop, because books are "leisure time items" and we have a massive massive glut of leisure time choices. The pressures will be different in different sectors of the publishing business, but the short, medium and long-term trend is this: down.

No matter what you think the value of books, or literature, or your writing, you cannot fight against physics, and when you have a glut of supply, prices drop.]

Reasons for optimism, numbers one two and three:
There are more people writing and more people reading than ever before and you can reach all of them on the web.

[Context: And, after all this bad news, here is the good news: there are more readers, and more writers than ever before in the history of the universe. People who love books love them as dearly as ever. And the web gives every author the ability to connect with those readers, with other writers, with the people who love what they do in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago. The business side of all this will evolve, but we are about to enter a golden age of writing -- perhaps we are already there -- and that is something to celebrate].

3 Comments. Leave yours?

Best books about the digital, the web & culture?

By hugh on June 3, 2010 in books, technology | 7 Comments

I’m doing a little informal survey. I’d like to know what you think are the three most important books about the web, the digital, and its cultural implications. These could be books about technology, about sociology, about philosophy; but generally books that have helped, and will continue to help us navigate the future as it becomes increasingly digital.

That is, what three books have you read about computers and culture that have stood the test of time, and deserve to be read, or reread again?

I’ll get the ball rolling, with three that have had a profound impact on my thinking:
* Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler
* Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
* Programming the Uviverse, by Seth Lloyd

If you have suggestions, why not post comments here, or Tweet with the hashtag: #digitalculturebooks.

7 Comments. Leave yours?

An Open, Webby Book Publishing Platform

By hugh on May 20, 2010 in bookoven, books, digital, distribution, ebooks, technology, web | 1 Comment

Ever since Book Oven shifted focus in November 2009 to Bite-Size Edits, I have been wanting to write about one of the major reasons for the shift: my realization that:
a) the world needs an open book-publishing platform
b) rather than building from scratch at Book Oven, we should have started with Wordpress, and built atop it.

I just published my thoughts about this on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog. The key points are:

The key insights behind Book Oven were the following:

* publishing a book is (almost always) a collaborative enterprise
* online tools (should) make collaboration on making books easy(er)
* if you build a “book” in the cloud, using structured mark-up, then expression of that book in various forms (print, epub, pdf, mobipocket, html, etc), on various devices (including paper & print) becomes arbitrary, and should be nearly trivial
* further, if the “book” exists in the cloud, then the range of things that can be done with this “book” multiplies significantly
* if a system built on these ideals is implemented well, it will be transformative, both for professional publishing workflows, and for the emergence of a new grassroots of indie publishing.

I am still deeply committed to this vision. But I have shifted towards a belief that the above-described platform should be open source. Or at least, an open source version of such should exist.

And:

Wordpress, it seems, is an ideal candidate as a platform on which to build an open source, online, webby, book-publishing system. There may be other likely candidates, but Wordpress has the following characteristic which suggest to me that it is an excellent place to start:

* it is a familiar and comfortable tool to most writers and publishers who are at all engaged online
* it is a stable platform that can handle just about any scale of traffic you can throw at it (the New York Times, for instance, runs on a heavily-hacked version of Wordpress)
* it is open source
* through its plugin architecture, it is infinitely extensible
* through its template architecture, it is infinitely stylable
* through Wordpress Mu, it isinfinitely scalable it has a huge, world-wide community of committed developers
* existing plugins and plugin suites already achieve much of what would bewanted in a Wordpress-based book publishing system.

And elaborating more fully, here is a list of plugins such a system would need:

1. robust version control
2. digress.it (based on the old commentpress)- to allow para by para commenting for editors, and later, if desired, for readers
3. wordpress –> epub conversion
4. wordpress –> ~LaTeX –> print-ready pdf conversion (or similar)
5. wordpress –> InDesign-compliant mark-up conversion
6. book-friendly front-end template(s) (including Table of Contents, Title page etc)
7. generation of a download/(sales?) page that lists available formats (epub, html, pdf etc)
8. table of contents generator
9. a book metadata generation/management tool (ONYX, OPDS compliant?)
10. …etc.

This list of plugins can continue, subject to the interest of developers, and the needs of users of such a system.

You can read the whole thing here.

And props to John Maxwell and his students at the Simon Fraser Masters of Publishing Program for actually building a protoype and publishing a book with it. Also, do head over to Leanpub.com and see another implementation of something similar.

1 Comment. Leave yours?