Yet, as we’ve tried to illustrate numerous times before, the “investment” idea of publishing—that publishers buy the risk from authors in exchange for the reward—is exactly the economic model that is collapsing for publishers, with or without the threat of digital distribution. Makinson seems blind to the basic facts that his industry is facing a crisis of oversupply and too much risk. As publishers pull back from buying the rights to as many books as they try to husband their capital in fewer, more successful titles, they will open the door for new hits to be developed outside of their control.

Amazon’s new 70 percent royalty opens the door for enterprising authors—and authors are shockingly enterprising—to invest in themselves. If Makinson thinks this can’t or won’t happen, he should look at the last 20 years’ transformation of research and development in the U.S. economy. Corporations once accounted for the vast majority of new ideas and technology. But the venture capital revolution of the 1980s and 1990s created an entirely new economic landscape for the launch and creation of new products and technology.

Now companies find it more efficient and productive to buy established companies. Self-published authors have been doing a version of this for decades, too. Amazon and Apple (AAPL) are now making that much easier. Through a combination of forced circumstances and a desire to limit their exposure to failed book projects, publishers like Penguin will continue to chase the book projects that come with the most publicity attached, leaving the rest to self-fund through digital distribution. [more...]

Whoever won, ebook pricing is a hot, tough topic. I’ll guess this chess match isn’t over yet, so we’ll be watching this space.

But in the mean time, I must say, I like Macmillan’s stance on pricing: new releases between $12.99 and $14.99, and backlist ebooks as low as $5.99. To me, that $5.99 is the key number, and I think it might be very smart.

Price your new release ebooks high, along with hardcovers; and then drop below paperback when the book is no longer commands the cultural hype/attention.

This does a whole host of interesting things:

• it implicitly explains to people that what you pay for when you buy books is not the paper & print, or electrons, but the cultural value of the book itself
• it addresses the famous cannibalizing worry, so that your margins on ebook sales can be high enough, without pissing off your e-buyers
• it lets cheapskates like me (who already have a backlog of dozens of books) wait till prices get reasonable before buying

If I interpret Macmillan’s stance on Aamzon, the problem is that in the current pricing scheme, Amazon is setting prices:
a) so that Macmillan has no control over cashflows
b) so that Macmillan’s had no ability to convey messages about the value of books

(My knowledge of the ins and outs of book pricing are pretty sketchy, so apologies if I got that wrong).

But: as long as we see commitments to low backlist ebook prices, I think this is a win for readers, as well as writers, and publishers. Amazon, I’m not so sure.

At the end of 2009 Shortcovers changed into Kobo (one presumes to better capture the international market?):

We have changed our name from Shortcovers to Kobo. Kobo is an anagram of the word “book” and we think that it is a name that will appeal to readers around the world….plus we think it’s a catchy name!

We’ve also updated our web experience (http://www.kobobooks.com and mobile apps. If you are a Shortcovers customer, your account, password, library, profile – all remain the same…

So Coming Soon, we’ll be adding:
Over 1.8 million free eBooks from the Internet Archive!
New apps for smartphones, and the desktop (PC & MAC)
New supported devices…
More books from publishers around the world and the ability to buy in your local currency

Our objective with all of these changes is to give you, our valued customer, the ability to read ebooks anytime, anyplace, on the device of your choice. We hope you love our updated look and feel, new features and apps. There is more to come soon!” [more...]

I’ve always like the Shortcovers approach: get books to the devices people have (rather than building a new device for readers). It makes a lot of sense to me.

Good luck.

Because he was self-publishing some titles, he could play with the price-point. And here is what he found:

We can draw some simple conclusions looking at these numbers.
* Ebooks priced at $4 sell an average of 1100 ebooks per year.
* Ebooks priced at $8 sell an average of 342 ebooks per year.
* Ebooks priced at $2 sell an average of 4900 ebooks per year.
It doesn’t take a math whiz to see that the biggest profit is with low priced ebooks. [more...]

Read the rest, it’s well worth it.

If you attended the event, you can hear the audio here.

Not sure if that will be made available to the wider public eventually?

Hay is a lovely little town, well worth visiting, but probably not to buy books. I was struck by strangeness of the scene, thirty-plus bookshops most of which seemed to me to be about equivalent of the middling used bookshop nearest to you, just more of them. If you are going on a literary pilgrimage looking for great book experiences, Booth’s shop is beautiful, true, and there are a couple of other nice ones in town. But mostly they’re run-of-the-mill shops with run-of-the-mill selection. One of them – the Cinema Bookshop – is a vast warehouse filled with just about everything, and I was struck by what a strange scene it was, especially with my iPhone in my pocket, packed with 175 books waiting for my attention.

I wasn’t quite sure what to think of Hay. Of course, its bookshops have always been a tourist gimmick of some kind, and still they are. Perhaps in the digital age, they will be more so – more valuable because of rarity. Curiosities, relics, like museum smithies that imitate the real ironwork that to anchor every town.

Self-Publishing Review: So how’s the site work? What do people do once they create a project and how can writers contribute to other writers’ projects?

Hugh McGuire: Firstly, we’ve just launched and we have lots of work to do yet. In fact, one of the reasons we decided to open things up before we were finished is that we want to build something that writers, editors, proofreaders, designers and readers will love using. We are trying to create a new kind of model for publishing, and in order to do that we need to have the active input of the people who share our vision of something new.

After that intro, what you can do now:

1. Proofread texts that are in the system using Bite-Size Edits (it’s fun, if you can believe it)
2. Upload your own text, and: a) proofread it yourself using Bite-Size; b) get a private group of people you select to proofread it using Bite-Size Edits c) open it to the world to be proofread
3. Accept/reject/modify all Bite-Size Edits, so you retain control of your book.
4. Invite reviewers/editors/colleagues to an online reviewing/annotation/editing tool, built especially for long-form texts, which helps you collect editorial feedback in one place; and gives an easy way to implement that feedback.
5. Publish your book as ebook/epub, or html
6. Eventually you’ll be able to do some other things:
7. sell your finished book as an ebook, or as a print-on-demand book (in the Book Oven store, and in partner retailers)
8. find editors/proofreaders/designers/collaborators to help work on your book

SPR: What’s in it for readers?

HM: In the coming years, I expect we’ll see readers and writers getting much closer together. And one of the ideas behind Book Oven has always been to introduce new ways that they might interact. For instance, what if, prior to publication, you invited your potential readers to help you proofread your text using Bite-Size Edits? Or, what if you opened your novel to a select group to comment on, annotate, before you published? What if you held a cover design contest for your next book of non-fiction? What if you took one of your existing books, and opened it up for annotation – and subsequently published a second edition, with the annotations?

These are all possible now, and these are the kinds of things we would like to see happen.

But really the answer, for readers, is that Book Oven, we hope, will help spawn a new movement of grassroots, indie writing and publishing. We’ll make it easier for people who wish to publish to do so, but we’ll be giving the tools to allow the collaboration that will make those published books better.

So, what do readers get? More ways to connect with books and writers and writing; more books; more quality in indie publishing; we hope: a vibrant new of grassroots of writing.

I guess in some sense I look at the coming digital revolution in books as similar to the indie revolution that came to music with digital and the web. As a music listener, I now have access to a more wonderful and varied assortment of music than ever before in history, because music is no longer constrained by the physical/economic limitations that existed in the era of radio & record labels. We still have radio and labels, of course, but now we also have a vibrant, thriving music culture enable by the cheap production tools and the infinite global distribution enabled by the web.

The results haven’t been great for labels. For music fans, it’s been wonderful.

I expect we’ll see the same with books, and we’d like Book Oven to be a driving force behind that change.

SPR: What I first notice on the site is that the writing is good. In the Bite-Size Edits section you’ve got Ford Maddox Ford and Tolstoy – which is incredibly fun to edit. A couple of writers that have uploaded stuff are MCM and Barbara Jean Walsh – both good writers. The old problem with self-publishing is the quality of the writing. How do you exert quality control at the Book Oven – or do you see this as anti-free expression. But supposing in a worst case scenario you’ve got a lot of people uploading poorly thought-out work and users have to sift through all of that. What will Book Oven do to exert a little quality control?

HM: Book Oven is built for anyone who wants to use it, and we won’t put restrictions on what writing goes in & what doesn’t. For non-writers, however, the quality control will come from helping readers/editors etc find the kind of text they want to find. The internet is very good at allowing people to sort through mountains of information; helping people sift will be important for us.

But I’d like to address the underlying question about quality.

It is my belief that the act of creation is the most satisfying and valuable act a person can perform. Whether that is building a bookcase, or building a company, or writing a song, or writing a novel, I don’t think there is anything more valuable to a person. An act of creation — the vision it requires, the dedication, the discipline, the belief, the stubbornness, the time, and the passion — is more meaningful to a person than just about anything else I can think of.

Now, the next question that’s asked is: well, is it any good? Will anyone like what you’ve created? That’s an important question, and certainly it’s more deeply satisfying to create something that people like than it is to create something that people don’t like.

Whether other people will like what you’ve created is an important question, but it is far less important than the question: have you created something?

With LibriVox (the volunteer, public domain audiobook project I started in 2005), I had this insight at some point: That what we were really doing was providing a platform to allow people who wished to create audiobooks of texts they love, to create them and give them away for free to the universe. That the world gets a huge library of free public domain audiobooks is a wonderful and important fringe benefit. But the main thing we do is enable people to create things they are passionate about.

And it turns out that LibriVox volunteers make some extraordinary recordings; it turns out that millions of people love many of the recordings we make; it turns out that some of the recordings are less good; and that some people find it offensive when they fall upon LibriVox recordings that they don’t like. And it turns out there is a simple solution for that last problem: listen to something else.

We never ask whether people who don’t talk as well as Obama should be able to talk; it never occurs to us to tell our kids that if they can’t hit like Babe Ruth, that they should not play baseball; we would never tell our mothers (or fathers) that they can’t cook as well as Gordon Ramsay, so they should stop trying.

Instead we say: try to do the things you love, try to do them as well as you can.

Whether other people will like what you do is a whole other matter, but if you are driven to do something you love, you should work hard to do it.

And if that is publishing a book, so much the better for you and the universe.

If it’s publishing a great book, even better again.

SPR: The stigma about self-publishing is definitely fading. What’s your feeling on self-publishing in general? Do you think it’s totally legitimate, worthy of some of the scorn, the future? All of the above?

HM: To me the only thing that is relevant is the text. Is it good? Do I like it? Would I read it? If it is a great book, I couldn’t care less what particular publishing model was used to get it to me.

Does more people writing books mean that there will be more bad books? You bet. But that’s a good thing; it means more people are writing books. And more people writing books — especially if they are writing from passion — means we’re likely to have more extraordinary books.

And as above, the question is: how do I as a reader sift through the mountains of books to find the extraordinary texts that I want to read? And the answer will come from the web.

There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the web. Many of them are terrible and I would never want to read them. (I could say the same of the vast majority of traditionally-published books).

However blogging means that I now have access to so much wonderful writing, about topics that are of particular interest to me. The economic/physical constraints of pre-internet writing meant that I had a smallish choice of content that was deemed commercially viable by companies who distributed content near me; the web means that I have an unlimited choice of content, some of it deemed commercially viable; much of it just interesting to the writer; and lots of it interesting to me. And the key thing about blogging was that it got going because bloggers were reading each others’ work. There was a distributed network of writers connected by the link and by shared interests in the things they were writing about and reading about. The link-connections between bloggers is what allowed people to find more interesting stuff, and encouraged more people to read and write and blog.

So, turning to self-publishing, (specifically talking about fiction) I think what has to happen is a more connected network of independent writers and small presses, who are actually working on/ reading each others work. And if that happens successfully, the stigma that’s now attached to self-publishing doesn’t matter anymore.

Especially if the text is good.

SPR: I think I know the answer, but what’s so refreshing about your site is that you talk about print on demand and don’t offer a caveat. Of course print on demand is amazing: anyone can make a book. But still there are detractors. I guess I’m asking for you to explore the caveat and any pitfalls there might be to starting a service like this.

HM: Yes, I still read the odd article about how dumb “bloggers” are, how bad their grammar is, how they are all opinionated jerks etc etc. You might as well complain about how dumb “talkers” are. I heard someone talking on the bus, and he was an idiot, ergo talkers are idiots.

It turns out that some of the best writing in the world about whatever topic you care to mention is happening on blogs, written by “bloggers.”

What is blogging? Loosely, a mechanism to get written text from a writer to a reader. The quality of that written text has *nothing* to do with the mechanism of transmission. And bloggers are just people who write text and publish it on the web.

What is print-on-demand? Same as above. Just a mechanism.

SPR: How about a few words about LibriVox, for those who don’t know about it.

HM: LibriVox.org is a volunteer-driven project to make public domain audiobooks and give them away to the universe. It’s a totally decentralized project that runs completely on the web. Our objective is:

To make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet.

SPR: What sorts of books have been read aloud, and how many?

As of today, our catalog contains 2,547 works, in 26 languages. Our range of books is constrained only by copyright law and the curious passions of our volunteer readers. We’ve got Austen, Nietzsche, Twain, Sun Tzu, Einstein, Descartes, Thucydides, Sayers, Phaedrus, Machiavelli, Barrie, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante, Dickens, Voltaire, Belloc, Wells, Dumas, Joyce, Trollope, and on and on and on.

SPR: Is this a place for self-publishers to store readings of their own texts? So if I release something free to read on Scribd, can I read the audio book on LibriVox?

HM: No. Our requirements for inclusion in the LibriVox catalog are:

1. text must be in the public domain (ie. out of copyright) in the USA
2. text must be published (or in certain cases, “notable”)

We send self-publishers to our great friends at http://podiobooks.com.

SPR: How does the success of LibriVox fit into your vision for Book Oven?

HM: The key insight I had from watching LibriVox evolve is this: with the right kind of space and tools on the web, people will organize themselves to do the most extraordinary (and complex) things together. I also learned that many people, given the chance to *help* in the creation process, are very happy to do so, if they believe in what is being created. And by providing a vision about what we were trying to do at LibriVox, and the tools/platform, some wonderful things happened.
So this is what we would like to do with Book Oven:

• articulate a vision for a new model of publishing books, that is totally native to the web
• provide a platform for people to organize how they wish around the creation of books
• enable a grassroots community of bookmakers and booklovers to come together with the purpose of: making & distributing/selling & reading books

SPR: The difference with an audio book and the written word is significant – it’s just not as obvious if the writing isn’t up to par, and sometimes doesn’t even matter. It’s just a different process listening to or reading a book. I just keep coming back to the concept of “bad” writing that could end up on the site and how to deal with that.

HM: It’s easy: don’t read it, and instead read some of the great stuff.

SPR: There’s just a lot of writing where even intensive collaboration isn’t going to make it a readable novel.

HM: I totally agree. In fact, I’d bet that intensive collaboration might make some novels worse.
Book Oven is not about forcing everyone to open up their manuscripts to mass collaboration.
What we are trying to do is build an online space where groups of people can work on a book and easily publish it.

This is how traditional books are published: groups of people work together on them (writer, editor, proofreader, designer, cover designer, printer, distributor, retailer, marketer, publicity).
What we are doing is putting a basic toolset on the web, that allows much of that to happen easily.

SPR: Is it the case that those books will likely not find collaborators and better books will find more interest? I suspect that’s the case. If so, how is that sort of collaboration system going to work?

HM: We see two kinds of streams of activity:

• open collaborations where people are helping each other make books out of interest, kindred spirit etc.
• a simple marketplace exchange where writers/editors/proofreaders/designers can find each other & get work done.

SPR: So this is going to be a marketplace?

HM: Yes, though we want to be careful to make sure that the marketplace does not drown out the more spontaneous — and less commercial — collaborations. That is a challenge we are very much aware of, and we’ll work hard to make sure that Book Oven is not *just* classifieds for bookish people. And we’d love some help thinking about that, if any of your readers are interested in helping us work through it.

SPR: When designers come to collaborate on projects, for example, are they going to be advertising their services?

HM: I think we’ll have to have some kind of reputation system, so we’re taking suggestions on how to work that out! Early days yet.

SPR: How is money going to change hands, or is it more a place for designers or editors to pad their resumes. What do participants get besides the satisfaction of collaborating?

Again, I think it’s a bit early to make any final statements. I imagine there might be three models: collaborate out of interest/shared sense of purpose, collaborate for a fee, or collaborate for a % of sales.

But again, this part of things is complex and we want to make sure we develop the marketplace with lots of input from an engaged community.

SPR: The site says you’ll be adding more features in the coming months. What’s to come?

Well, just imagine everything you would want from a cloud-based publishing platform. What would the ideal look like from your perspective? We’d like to build that.

And that’s not meant to be facetious – it’s just that much of our decision-making will be driven by the needs & desires of our community, so we don’t want to make any promises about features until we’re certain it’s something people want.

SPR: Thanks a lot, Hugh. Best of luck with the site. Keep us informed.
Follow Book Oven on Twitter. Visit and sign up at the site.

Luckily, I noticed I could buy a hardcover version, or trade paperback from Indigo.ca, Canada’s leading book retailer & parent to Shortcovers.

But here’s a run-down on the kooky pricing:

• ebook: $20.99
• trade paperback: $15.69
• hardcover: $9.99

This may well just be a glitch of some kind; and it might be growing pains as we work out what a vibrant and legit ebook market will look like. Or maybe someone can tell me about the quirks or reasons behind the dark art of book retail that might explain such funny pricing:

UPDATE: Jordan reports below that this was indeed a glitch (see comments for more details); and that the ebook price is now corrected at $12.23. That’s better… But here is the image anyway:

Link to Human Smoke on Shortcovers.

But as a consumer, regardless of the various reasons and explanations, I feel like someone is trying to pull a fast one on me when I see such arbitrary and opposite-looking pricing.

It certainly doesn’t help the cause of publishers who claim the price of ebooks have to be high so they don’t cannibalize hardcover sales. Something is broken if hardcovers are priced in order to cannibalize ebook sales.

You might already see the problem: each year, thousands upon thousands of books are returned to their respective publishers, generating high levels of nigh-unsellable inventory at their warehouses. Because publishers can no longer write down the cost of their inventory based on inability to sell, they have to do one of two things: remainder the books, i.e. sell them for pennies on the dollar in order to get rid of them, or pulp (destroy) them. (This is the case for hardcovers and trade paperbacks; mass market editions are generally stripped. In case you were having a good day thus far, please note that 40% of books suffer this fate.) [more...]

Barnes & Noble … announced today the launch of the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, the world’s largest eBookstore, on Barnes & Noble.com, enabling customers to buy eBooks and read them on a wide range of platforms, including the iPhone and iPod touch, BlackBerry® smartphones, as well as most Windows® and Mac® laptops or full-sized desktop computers. In addition, Barnes & Noble announced that it will be the exclusive eBookstore provider on the forthcoming and much anticipated Plastic Logic eReader device. [more...]

Some thoughts/questions:

1. Competition is good – we can now see four-and-a-half big players in the ebook retail market: Amazon/Kindle, Barnes & Noble, Apple (not yet really in the game, but surely coming), and Google (not yet really in the game, but announced); as well as Indigo’s Shortcovers.
2. How will competition affect the consumer? Surely this means downward price pressure, which is good.
3. How will competition affect the publishers? This is the big question. For my money the big problem with the business is the pricing model. And the problem is that to date, it’s been approached with a discount/markup structure mimicking the bricks & mortar world. Kindle is taking a 60% discount on sales — the same as their physical book pricing scheme — meaning that all the cost savings of digital go into Amazon’s pocket. That can’t be sustainable in the long run, especially if consumer want to pay less for electronic books. So, what happens if Barnes & Noble offers a more competitive price structure (say a 70/30 publisher/retailer split)? I hope for publishers sake they take this route. In any case, having more than one retailer in etown seems like a good thing for the book market.
4. Formats. Does this mean yet another proprietary format? God help us all. (What happened to ePub?) … How about an open, interoperable standard for ebooks, in addition to PDF to maintain page design?
5. Devices. Please sell ebooks so that people can read them however they want. See above.
6. DRM? See: DRM? Dead? Yes, But Only For Music.
7. How big an impact will Apple have when they move into this market? For popular titles, it will be huge, I think.
8. How big an impact will Google have when they move into this market? For backlists, it will be huge, I think.

What questions does this announcement (long-awaited) raise for you? Is it good or bad? And what impact will it have on the evolving market?