How many ISBNs for e-books?

PersonaNonData blogged about the reasons for e-books to have a unique ISBN per format.

According to ISBN official standards, each format of an e-book should be given its own ISBN. This means if a book is sold in mobi-pocket and Adobe formats each would be given a separate (unique) number by the publisher even if the content is exactly the same. During the revision process for the current standard, this point received intense discussion mostly focused on the burden that applying what could amount to several hundred ISBNs to a single work would have on publishers' processes. We resolved this issue for the standard with judicious use of words such as 'shall' and 'should' but the issue was raised again recently when the ISBN board released a 'policy statement' reaffirming the need for separate ISBN's on each format of an eb0ok.

The reasons for this action is simple. Downstream supply chain business such as wholesalers, distributors and retailers require a unique reference to all products that pass through their operations. If one doesn't exist these businesses tend to apply their own numbers. In actuality, the practice of downstream partners applying their own numbers has been going on since the establishment of ISBN and isn't unique to e-books, but the issue is coalescing now around the obligations of a publisher to 'correctly apply' the ISBN standard to e-books.

At a meeting this week at AAP NYC a number of publishers expressed doubts about the need for this requirement. As a participant in the revision of the standard my view was simple. A publisher should want to manage and control the meta-data associated with all their products and enabling - by omission - the need for someone else to apply their own information never seemed prudent to me. Secondly, the veracity of the ISBN system is brought into question if more than one entity applies separate numbers to the same content. This occurs if B&N and Amazon sell the same e-book in the same format but in the absence of a publisher number they apply their own identifier.

At least one major publisher at the AAP meeting is not following the standard and after several years of distributing e-books and applying one ISBN irrespective of format (.epub for example) they are seeing no issues with confusion or misuse of their meta data. This is a powerful argument and comes from a publisher that is highly protective of their bibliographic information. If reflective of a general consensus the ISBN board should reconsider the wording of there directive. For example, simply changing the wording by inserting the words 'publishers may apply ISBNs to separate formats' would give enough latitude to those publishers that see a need to apply separate ISBNs and those that do not.

There are several qualifications (and others may raise more). Firstly, the issue of downstream partners which need identifiers for their internal process requirements must be governed. For example, in those cases where a publisher expects detailed sell-thru data they may provide ISBN's. If a downstream partner can only use a 13 digit identifier in their systems the publisher may require the partner to use an ISBN provided by the publisher. If the partner can use a non-ISBN (but NOT a dummy ISBN/13 digit id) such as letters and numbers the publisher may see no need to apply ISBN's. Secondly, the danger that rogue ISBNs that are intended to operate only within the operating systems of specific partners (wholesalers, vendors, etc.) escape into the supply chain causing confusion and much remediation is a real one and should be recognised. Currently, there aren't that many e-books and there aren't that many publishers working outside the recommendations of the standard. As e-books explode in distribution, data integrity problems that are virtually non-existent today may become very relevant issues very quickly.

Lastly, in a supply chain world where suppliers and retailers are racing (admittedly not a sprint more a marathon) to apply unique identifiers on individual items via RFID, this discussion runs counter to the logic other more sophisticated industries are following. Quite rightly, with volumes as small as they are, it may not be interesting to know which e-book versions seem to perform better, or get less customer service/help desk calls, or which package of products seem to show up on what platform or which segment of buyers seems to have what behavioral characteristics, or which partner seems to sell what types of products or formats, or which formats tend to be pirated more or less, and on and on and on. As the chain becomes flatter - as it is - publishers are going to want to know this stuff and tying a user to a format may be critical to all aspects of what they do.

What do you think? Should publishers be mandated to provide unique ISBNs for every format or should another identifying system be created for the "downstreamers"?

Offshore Outsourcing

Since more and more publishers are being forced to turn to overseas vendors and printers, whether for full-service or just for specific services, I thought it worth sharing with you Jen Butenschoen's article, based on her session at the Publishing Business Conference given in March of this year.

9 Tips for Building Healthy Offshore Manufacturing Relationships

Jen Butenschoen has spent the past 13 years with Harvest House Publishers, a Christian book publisher headquartered in Eugene, Ore., where she is director of production. She has extensive experience working with offshore manufacturers, and so she led the “Tips for Healthy and Profitable Global Sourcing Partnerships” session at the 2008 Publishing Business Conference this past March in New York. During her session, she presented dozens of tips on how to make the most of your relationships with offshore manufacturers. Here are nine of them.

1. Be sure offshore manufacturing is right for your products.
Offshore manufacturers have different capabilities and technologies than many of their U.S. counterparts. Some are behind on technology, so know what their capabilities are before giving them work.

2. Don’t hesitate to ask your printer’s input on anything on which you’re unsure.
Ask your printer for their suggestions on such issues as file prep, best manufacturing methods, special treatments, etc.

3. Make sure that all costs are accounted for.
Overseas partners do tend to price things out differently than what you may be used to with domestic partners. And be careful, because sometimes you get what you pay for. “Often, there’s a reason for that low price tag,” said Butenschoen.

Don’t forget about additional costs like freight and shipping, and customs’ import and export taxes. For example, there is a significant import tax in Italy on items a publisher would supply to their printer for the work.

4. Request a variety of samples.
Examine them closely. See what they’ve done for other publishers and take a close look at the quality. Would you be happy with the work? If you’re considering placing a job with the manufacturer, request dummies that are made out of the materials you plan to use. That way you can be sure you’re getting exactly the product you want and precisely the product that was quoted.

5. Keep an eye on fluctuating currency.
With the U.S. dollar constantly on the move, quotes can wind up being quite inaccurate by the time the work is done.

6. Pay attention to payment terms.
Strive to get equivalent payment terms with offshore manufacturers as you have with your domestic partners. Often you can negotiate 60-day terms, especially once you’ve built a relationship with the partner.

7. Specifically request not only manufacturing time but also lead time.
Partners will usually offer you a manufacturing schedule with the quote, based on the date of final file approval. You’ll want to consider the full picture, however.

8. Be aware of peak seasons and holidays.
“If you’ve worked with Asia [partners], you know they take a lot of holidays. And it’s not just a few people that take vacation, but the entire plant shuts down,” said Butenschoen.

Printing during peak seasons mean schedules will run longer. Plan your own schedules accordingly.

9. Plan shipping time accordingly.
“I allow up to six weeks … not because it takes that long, but because you never know when one of your shipments is going to be flagged for customs exam. They do that at random periodically and can hold your shipments up to two weeks,” said Butenschoen.

If you’re doing regular overseas work, you’ll probably begin to get a sense for how long it takes to receive your product.

From online to print?

Since most of us are thinking and getting used to digital after being in the print world all our publishing lives, I found this article about an e-publisher experimenting with print interesting.

Book Publisher “Experiments” With Print: Christina M. Brashear, owner of e-book publisher Samhain, on her unconventional business model.

Macon, Ga.-based Samhain Publishing has found its niche in the world of book publishing, despite the fact that most of its titles aren’t resting on bookstore shelves. The e-book-minded publisher has only tread lightly in the world of traditional print publishing since it first opened up shop nearly three years ago.

While print versions of the company’s line of popular romance and erotica fiction are now more commonplace, Owner and Publisher Christina M. Brashear says these traditional books haven’t changed the main focus of providing electronic versions of Samhain’s titles. The publisher has achieved such success selling e-books to loyal readers, according to Brashear, that later this summer she will begin selling other publishers’ digital editions alongside Samhain’s titles on My Bookstore and More (www.MyBookstoreandMore.com), a retail Web site that Brashear also owns.

Brashear spoke with Book Business Extra on her approach to selling books.

Book Business Extra: Beginning primarily as an e-book publisher, what advantages did you see in also offering print versions of some of your titles?
Christina M. Brashear: You do get an idea of what is or isn’t going to do well in print by how well a book does in e-book form. I have found that booksellers who read e-books will write and ask when certain titles are going to go to print. I know those titles will do well and can plan an appropriate print run.

Extra: What challenges have you faced as you have started to delve into print?
Brashear: … I like being “green”—e-books don’t get returned and aren’t destroyed. [With print,] you have to plan carefully so your print runs are on target with the demand. Most of our titles stay in [print on demand (POD)], which can be a hardship because of the stigma attached to [POD]. … We gamble on certain titles and have print runs made based on what we project they will sell. We try to print enough to satisfy the first few months of orders, and then allow POD to fulfill on a continuing basis. If the book is very popular, we’ll go back to press and order additional print runs as demand necessitates.
The next toughest part would be learning to work with the industry schedule. In e-books, you can do things in a shorter time frame and make changes on the fly. With print, you’re planning January 2009’s schedule in February of 2008.

Extra: What did you learn from working with Amazon and Sony to offer your e-books in the formats that their e-readers—the Kindle and the Reader, respectively—use?
Brashear: … All the e-books are picked up by Amazon from Mobipocket, so there is no additional work on our part. I love that. Mobi and Amazon are the easiest of all the processes we have in place right now. We’re in the process of working with Sony to get the titles into the store. It’s not as smooth of a process as Amazon, but Amazon had the benefit [of a process] being already in place. Sony is new—a new device using a new file format. We hope to get everything worked out soon.

Extra: What challenges has the company’s rapid growth presented?
Brashear: … We’ve been on a hiring binge in the corporate offices—trying to address the problems of spreading the workload so the staff doesn’t burn out and collapse into a pile of quivering flesh on the floor. It’s a challenge to keep up with the old duties while incorporating the new, and not let anything slip through the cracks.
Leasing office space is the biggest change due to growth. It does not matter what your top or bottom line is, when someone in the business arena realizes you work from home, you are instantly discounted as not being a legitimate, real business. I miss working from home, but in all honesty, I couldn’t see hiring admin staff and having them in my home. We have a great location. We’re on the 15th floor of the tallest building in Macon, and we look out over this beautiful, quaint city.

Extra: What are the advantages of owning My Bookstore and More?
Brashear: With Samhain as a wholesale-only company, we don’t have to worry about frog-marching people back to the Samhain site to make the most money. I can list many various sites from which people can buy the e-books. We do this now for print, but we plan to [do this as well] with e-books in the next incarnation of the site.
My Bookstore and More was developed as a sister company to Samhain, so that Samhain could focus on the publishing of books and working with authors. Having [the site] as a totally separate entity from Samhain allows us to sell more than just the Samhain titles. We can sell any publisher’s titles by any author, though we have yet to really expand that side of things. That’s coming this summer, once we launch the new, more robust site. We manually add books [that our] authors tell us are available by them through other publishers. But we will be developing an interface with Ingram, so we can automatically update our available products with the latest books available.

The article also confirms what I've always thought: print isn't dead, it's just evolving into more of an "on demand" platform.

What do you think?

Quebecor World Creates New Publishing Services Group Integrating Magazine, Book and Directory Businesses

MONTREAL, CANADA--(Marketwire - June 17, 2008) - Quebecor World Inc. (TSX:IQW) today announced that it is integrating its Magazine, Book and Directory Divisions into a single operating structure. The new Publishing Services Group will streamline the Company's operations, improve services, and better serve existing and new publishing customers.

"This organizational change will unify the capabilities of Quebecor World's Magazine, Book and Directory Divisions under one operating platform. This customer focused platform will allow the Company to optimize its resources and cost structure to further improve service to our publishing customers," said Jacques Mallette, President and CEO Quebecor World Inc.

Kevin J. Clarke will lead this new Publishing Services Group. He has been President of Quebecor World's Book and Directory Publishing Services Group for the last 5 years. Mr. Mallette commented, "Kevin's extensive management experience in the printing industry and his customer focused approach make him uniquely qualified to lead the new integrated Publishing Services Group."

"The integrated Publishing Services Group is part of our ongoing efforts to meet and exceed the requirements of magazine, book and directory publishers and to ensure we are in a position to provide innovative market leading services" said Kevin J. Clarke, President of Publishing Services Group. "This consolidation is a logical streamlining of our core functions and will speed decision making to benefit both our customers and our employees."

Today's announcement follows the earlier integration of Quebecor World's U.S. Retail Insert, Catalog, Sunday Magazine and Direct Divisions into the Marketing Solutions Group and the integration of the Logistics and Premedia divisions under one operating structure. This enhanced U.S. operating structure, comprising three divisions instead of six, will result in greater synergies, shared resources and faster decision making with a focus on delivering complete value-added solutions to two principle customer bases, multi-channel marketers and publishers.

Kevin J. Clarke has 26 years of management experience in the printing industry. His career with the company began in 1982. He has held positions of increasing responsibility in the Magazine, Book and Directory divisions at Quebecor World, including Vice President of Sales, Vice President/General Manager, and Senior Vice President of Operations.

This is a trend that I've seen throughout the industry of late: operations are being streamlined to save money. This is not a bad thing per se, but short-term usually involves layoffs. Long-term this means that redundancies are removed and that similar processes are centralized and or standardized.

Do you think there's a better way for companies to save money in this economy? If so, please share.

Flexible E-Paper?

We all know that Amazon's Kindle, as popular as it is, is only the start of both e-readers and e-paper. Computer World reported on some of the other options out there, and they are pretty amazing, although not quite ready and/or cheap enough for mass consumption.

Do you plan on purchasing an e-reader? If so, why or why not? If not, what would it take to get you to reconsider?

Content on Demand

What do POD and digital have in common? Content on demand. What I mean by this, is that the modern consumer wants their content, and wants it now in whatever format they prefer.

As was repeated several times at the Book Business Expo hosted a few month's back, "content is king." How does this translate to the publisher trying to stay on top of the ever-evolving new media trends? How does this translate to the overwhelmed production professional trying to make all this work? It's very simple: let the consumer choose.

Develop good content, tag it with XML or whatever other format works for your CMS, and make the content available in all formats--simultaneously. Let the consumer choose whether they want to buy the book as a traditional print product; a pdf to be read on their laptop; or for their Kindle or Sony Reader (or whatever the next generation e-reader will be). Price these products appropriately, make it easy for the consumer to choose, and they will and will probably keep coming back.

It's obviously not that easy to get to that point, and this may vary from publishing sector to sector, but the more I read about what works and what doesn't, the more I believe it's really about "content on demand" and allowing the reader to choose.

Another example of this is in the educational market. Instead of professors having to create student reading packs to be copied and bound by the university copy center, they can now choose "custom" textbooks. Although only Wiley offers this now, I'm sure that others will soon too, since this is the "content on demand" trend at its best.

So for your given sector of the industry, what are the choices your reader is looking for and how will you make these more readily available to them?

New Web Authoring Tool

Since the web is here to stay, and publishing veterans can't necessarily learn all the new technology fast enough to help their companies compete, where does that leave them?

Aptara has come up with a solution, as Marketwire announced today: PowerXEditor, a user-friendly Google Doc-like web authoring tool that any publishing professional can use and that can be easily integrated into the company's current of future CMS.

Although being familiar with web basics is still necessary and helpful, user-friendly web authoring tools will help bridge the gap for those less tech savvy and will therefore keep publishing moving in the right direction.

How to Save the Publishing Industry, as per Henry Blodget

Despite Harry Potter selling 8.3 million copies in 24 hours, book publishers only sold 0.9% more books in 2007 than 2006--less than the country's rate of population growth.

How can publishers fix their business? Not by killing more trees. By radically retooling the business model.

Hardcover books should cost $25. And publishers should keep printing them--for people who want to buy them. Meanwhile, for everyone else, publishers should publish cheap electronic copies for 20% (or less) of the hardcover price.

$4.99 for a first run bestseller, downloadable to your Kindle, PC, or iPod--or simply readable on the Internet. The retailer keeps $1 or so, the author gets $1 or so, and the publisher takes home about $3. Some of that goes to marketing and some to overhead. And then you're left with the typical publisher profit of less than $1 (no returns, manufacturing, or distribution costs).

But here's what happens: book sales suddenly go through the roof.

Why?

Because you've made buying a book almost a no-never-mind. At $4.99, buying a book is like buying a couple of magazines: you can buy them on a whim and feel free to skim them. At $25, meanwhile, buying a book is like buying a two-pound guilt trip: Until you slog your way through it, you don't deserve to buy another one.

With a similar margin per book sold, cannibalization wouldn't matter. If publishers really wanted to get aggressive, however, they could cut book prices to, say, $1.99, compress all the revenue splits, and watch sales truly explode. Especially when they made available the out-of-print catalogs.

All that matters is the bottom line, and going digital could quickly resurrect the profit growth of the publishing industry. Unfortunately, right now, the publishing industry is obsessed with maintaining the status quo--which means print units and revenue.

Get over it folks. Time to get your butts out to Cupertino (Apple / AAPL) and Seattle (Amazon / AMZN), cut some real deals, and save your dying industry (and some trees, while you're at it).

I remember my finance professor at NYU explaining how, with the current return and advance policy, that everyone from publisher to bookseller had to mark up their prices to ensure they made their necessary gross margin. And although I don't necessarily agree with Mr. Blodget that sales will skyrocket as soon as prices go down with digitalization of all books, I do think that this is a growing market and a necessary direction for publishers to take.

To make the most profit of this change, publishers need to first fine-tune how to publish content on cross-platforms without further cost in translation, which is where XML and CMS comes in, and they need to figure out how to market to this new market.

And given how far some publishers have come, I don't think the industry is dead: it's just having a slow rebirth, which is only natural (ask any mother).