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.

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...]

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.

(Photo by Roo Reynolds).

1. You’ve been involved in so many experimental bookish projects (Bkkeepr, Bookkake, the Twitter book, Bookseer, Enhanced Editions, Golden Notebook). What are you working on now?

At the moment I’m helping to develop a London-wide digital arts project for the 2012 Olympic Games; trying to find the time to put out some more Artists’ eBooks; preparing a new Bookkake collection; building a couple more small publishing propositions; filming and writing.

2. Has Bookkake been a success?

Absolutely. It’s proved that it’s possible to start what amounts to a traditional book publisher with nothing but a laptop. It’s proved that POD can form the basis for a real publisher, that the internet marketplace has levelled the playing field between large and very small publishers, and that good design, typography, editorial attention and passion still matter in the age of the ebook. And it’s proved that there’s very little money in publishing, but we knew that already.

3. Since the dawn of the web, there has been talk of the new things we could do with text. What’s wrong with just starting at the beginning and reading until the end?

I don’t think anyone’s said there is. But the idea that there are other things to do with text than linear narrative has a pretty impressive pre-web history. Leaving aside the fact that we far, far too often conflate the terms “book” and “novel”, writers such as Sterne, Woolf, WS Burroughs, BS Johnson, Sebald, Calvino, Perec, Queneau, DF Wallace, Joyce – in fact, anyone who wrote the barest “experimental” work, or even short stories or poetry – to me seem to cry out for an end to the hegemony of the one true book, the relatively recent invention of an industry in need of a packageable format, not some mythical apotheosis of literary form.

4. It seems like we’ve had the ability to make “enhanced ebooks” for as long as we’ve had web pages, but no one bothered. What’s changed? Why is everyone getting so excited about enhancing ebooks now?

Mobile and dedicated devices. The essence of the book has always been not that it is made of paper, but that you can hold it in your hand. It is /wieldable/ – a very different thing to reading on a computer monitor. Now mobile technology is more available and more advanced, you can read ebooks on the bus, in bed and on the loo, readership is exploding, and publishers are realising they can stick some extras in there too. Whether they should is an entirely different question.

5. What will a “book” mean five years from now?

The same thing: words, bound together. That’s pretty much it, whether you’re talking pbooks, ebooks or audiobooks. But perhaps even the most literary readers will have come to include notebooks and netbooks and any number of other things in their thinking too.

6. Are publishers really as clueless about digital as everyone seems to think they are?

Absolutely not. If by “publishers” you mean publishing companies, then they are stuffed full with bright, innovative, book-loving folk who want to do the best by their books and their authors. But they are groups of people, and of course opinions differ on what is best for the industry, and of course there are luddites among them. When I started writing booktwo.org almost five years ago, the publishing industry’s overwhelming response to ebooks was to put their hands over their ears and sing loudly. This attitude has now changed, almost beyond recognition, and publishers are learning as fast as they can.

We can berate publishers for making what we think are bad decisions about digital, but to accuse them of cluelessness just inflates a very dangerous animosity. Publishers love books as much, if not more, than most readers. It’s one of the very few industries where this is true almost all the way up. And we should be working together for the best of all possible futures for books and authors and readers.

6. If you became the Head Decision-Maker at one of the the Big Six tomorrow, what three decisions would you make by next week?

Running on the pretty definite assumption that I won’t, I’d say: (1) All ebooks to be released at the same time as paper release, hardback or paperback (this is not about pricing, which is a different fight, just availability). (2) Bundle ebooks with physical book purchases to grow electronic readership. (3) Stop the in-fighting and present a united front to the retailers, particularly Amazon, because there are very real dangers on the horizon.

That said, I wouldn’t expect them to be implemented very quickly…

7. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the “future of books” ? Why?

Optimistic. Extraordinarily, joyously, heart-burstingly optimistic. Because I genuinely don’t see why we have to nail literary culture to a single format, or why people who love reading will suddenly stop. All I see is an extraordinary, sustained, over-flowing encounter with ideas and stories, across a multiplicity of platforms and practices.

If the publishing industry is myopic in its definition of its own business, then it may well be in for a turbulent time (although, to be honest, it’s always a turbulent time in publishing), but the book – and other definitions of “the book” are available – will be just fine.

8. What depresses you most about the book industry?

Pessimism.

9. Who’s work in the publishing industry has most inspired you in the last year?

Richard Nash’s Cursor project (and Richard Nash). Many, many bloggers, but particularly Booksquare and Teleread. Startups like ORBooks, Zero Books, Cow Books and Muumuu House. We Are Words + Pictures. Book Works’ Semina series. Supervert. So many more things that I can’t possibly remember.

10. Is the novel dead yet?

Two of my favourite books from the last 12 months include Roberto Bolaño’s ‘2666‘ and Jonathan Littell’s ‘The Kindly Ones‘ – both clocking in at well over 900 pages and selling very well indeed. I’ve recently read three books out now or forthcoming – Max Schaefer’s ‘Children of the Sun‘, Emily Mackie’s ‘And This Is True‘, Ned Beauman’s ‘Boxer, Beetle‘ – that have each challenged, engaged and delighted me in a different, extraordinary way. The novel is not going to die, the book is not going to die, nothing ever really dies, no energy is ever wasted, all manner of things shall be well. I read that in a book somewhere.

[Up next: Don Linn]

1. There are lots of good mobile ereader applications out there: Stanza, Kindle, eReader, Kobo, not to mention dedicated readers like Nook and Kindle and the Sony Reader. Why do we need Ibis?

Ibis isn’t meant to compete with any of these. In fact we’re quite open about encouraging readers to take their books off Ibis Reader and put them on a preferred device. You can download a complete epub off the web site any time, and on the mobile devices we provide some quick “Read in Stanza” links on the iPhone (or Aldiko on Android).

What we hope to be able to do in the coming months is provide features that are only available on a web-native platform. Because everything is just a web page, and the code is common across all devices, we can roll out new features and fixes quicker than any of the above. We should be able to innovate as fast as the ideas come.

2. How does OPDS work with Ibis?

OPDS is critical to discovering and acquiring books in a mobile context where people don’t want to type and can’t upload their own books. At launch, we’ll use OPDS similar to the way Stanza and Aldiko do: we browse public catalogs of free content and let people get those books with just a click. The catalogs are always up to date and provide great metadata, covers, etc., all in a commonly-understood data format.

Eventually, of course, we’re interested in using OPDS to manage paid transactions, and we’ve got some other ideas about how OPDS can help people discover books outside of just browsing catalogs.

3. The big problem with mobile readers right now is availability of titles. How will Ibis users get access to new books?

We’re committed to a DRM-free approach, which we know is going to be tricky in terms of acquiring popular content. But there’s great literature and non-fiction being created outside of the traditional publishing industry. We’re still calling titles on Ibis Reader “books,” but in the digital space it doesn’t have to be a traditional book at all. We want to help readers and authors connect with all forms of writing — short stories, literary criticism, poetry, comics, even interactive fiction or video! It just has to be wrapped up in epub, and despite some anti-hype, epub is a great container for any content you want to distribute digitally.

4. Will people be able to buy books and read them on Ibis?

We sure hope so. For us, it’s critical that paid content be almost as frictionless as free content. Anyone who’s bought an ebook lately (outside of the Kindle hardware ecosystem) knows that it’s anything but straightforward to buy digital books. So we won’t go ahead until we’re happy with our approach.

5. Will publishers be able to sell books to Ibis users?

We’re definitely interested in talking to publishers who want to be able to sell direct-to-consumer. That’s been very successful for small to medium niche publishers.

6. What’s so great about HTML 5?

HTML5 has definitely been a wild ride. It’s got weaknesses for sure — Ibis Reader on a mobile device definitely isn’t as fast or as feature-filled as a native app, and Android doesn’t behave the same as the iPhone. There are limitations we’d love to be able to overcome. On the other hand, it’s a tremendous asset for a tiny company to have a cross-platform environment to work with, and adoption of HTML5 on devices and by consumers is only going to grow. It’s a good place to be even though it hasn’t been easy.

7. What is the relationship between ePub and HTML5?

Right now it’s uncertain. There’s definitely movement within the IDPF to make some kind of forward-looking statement about HTML5. In particular I think it’s critical that we adopt the <video> tag, to avoid unintentionally tying ePub to proprietary technologies like Flash. But HTML5 is more than just video and offline usage, and I don’t want ePub to stagnate.

8. What about DRM and Ibis?

Easy question. No DRM.

9. What do you think is the biggest challenge to for ebooks in the next few years?

Right now the fight is over pricing, but I think ease of purchase is the real barrier to consumer adoption. It’s so puzzling right now. People are going to be much more willing to pay publishers’ dream prices if they can just get the books with minimal hassle and have some of the same freedoms of use that print books have allowed.

10. What do you think about global markets for ebooks?

This is a huge area for us. I expect mobile reading and information access to be a key growth area for digital content globally, and in the developing world especially. The old publishing territorial rights models aren’t going to last long. I can’t think of a better way to ensure that ebook piracy becomes entrenched than a refusal to adopt worldwide rights for digital content sales. During Ibis development we’ve taken special care to make sure that we fully support non-English content and scripts.

#

Find out more about Liza & Three Press Consulting, and go play with Ibis Reader!

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.

If it turns out, based on solid evidence, that DRM is better for the business of publishing, I’ll change my mind (though I will grumble about it).

But right now the debate around DRM is couched in moral rhetoric (DRM is fascist!! vs. You are all thieves!!!), and sensationalized balderdash (piracy = $3 billion in lost sales!!! gasp!), and I look forward to the day when that is behind us.

Darwin has decreed that eventually it’ll all shake out: those who choose the “right” business models will survive; those that don’t will fail.

And that’s why I think it’s important to look at good evidence when making these decisions: it’s critical for survival.

If all goes well, there will be more and more good evidence out there in the next year or two, so that publishers and other businesses can make informed decisions.

Right now I’m confident in my own hypothesis, because of the evidence out there, as well as certain moral leanings. We’ll see how it all plays out; and I will gladly change my mind when compelling evidence suggests I should.

But I’ll bet you any DRM-free ebook you care to choose that my hypothesis is right.

Companies that sell textbooks to California universities must offer electronic versions by 2020, under a new state law…

The law, Senate Bill 48, says any individual or company selling textbooks to the University of California, California State University or private colleges must make them available electronically by 2020, “to the extent practicable.” Sen. Elaine Alquist, D-San Jose, authored the law, saying digital textbooks are the future of the market and can significantly reduce costs for students. [more...]

[via The Cite]

I started off 2009 with a trip to London, to attend BookCampUK – an unconference about books. While there were big rumblings of fear and hand-wringing about the arrival of the digital age in the publishing world, BookCamp was a great start to the year: a group of publishers, technotypes, writrers and book-lovers collecting in one place for some open discussions about the future of books. I left more enthused about books than ever, and promptly started organizing BookCampToronto, leading into another group of West-coasters putting together BookCampVancouver.

By March, the rate of change in the business had become positively dizzying. At BookNet Canada’s Tech Forum, Neelan Choksi, of the beautiful iphone ereader Stanza, presented a slide listing all the major announcements in the ebook space in the first three months of 2009 (Amazon’s new Kindle, Google Book Search, Indigo’s Shortcovers which has since become Kobo, and on and on). By there end of 2009, there would be no font small enough to allow all the significant announcements in publishing and digital to fit on one slide.

So, where are we, and more importantly, where are we going? …[more...]

[link]