blog on hiatus

Due to personal and professional demands on my time, I have decided to put this blog on hiatus for the time being. I hope to be able to pick it up again in the future, but until then...keep reading, keep working, and keep your mind open to the ever transforming world of publishing.

Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.

(Andrew Savikas, August 7, 2009)

One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for ebooks, and it's a quite reasonable concern.

Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what's happening:

Over the past 18 months, we've gone from print outselling digital by more than 2:1 to just the opposite.

But that's not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you'd expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that's not what's happening. Here's a comparison of how our sales (as measured by Bookscan) stack up against the broader computer book market. The data here is normalized (the first period in the graph is set to 100, and subsequent results are calculate relative to that period):

Roger Magoulas, who heads up our Research Team (which is doing some way cool stuff with App Store data) put it this way in a recent backchannel email covering this as part of a larger analysis:

By looking at the data and these charts we infer that while O'Reilly physical book sales are down compared to last year, this seems more the result of the drop in demand for computer books since the financial meltdown than the impact of ebook sales. Since O'Reilly is a relatively prolific publisher of econtent we would expect that ebooks would affect O'Reilly's physical book sales more than other publishers and we don't see that evidence in these results. Even if ebooks are taking a bite out of O'Reilly physical book sales, we see no negative effect on O'Reilly's slightly increasing share in the physical book market nor on how O'Reilly's sales correlate with the overall market for physical computer books.

So, for now, if what we infer is correct, you can put away your exorcism crosses, ebooks seem more a legitimate expanded market opportunity than a projectile vomiting Linda Blair wannabe.

University Presses Stepping Up e-Book Efforts

(By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 7/17/2009)

In separate announcements, a coalition of four university presses have received a planning grant to study the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book program, and the University of Chicago Press announced a multi-faceted program to make 700 e-books available immediately.

A coalition of presses from New York University, Rutgers, Temple and the University of Pennsylvania, plan to use a planning grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hire a technical consultant for a six-month study looking at the feasibility of a collaborative scholarly e-book publishing program. The new program will focus on studying the particular needs of university presses and their library partners. (A spokesperson for Temple Univ. press noted that TUP plans to immediately release 50 new e-books that are not a part of this announcement or coalition study.)

The coalition of presses plans to study how to bring together a wide variety of university presses of different sizes—a minimum of ten presses at launch—in an e-book publishing program that would launch with at least 10,000 e-book titles and add five to 10 new UPs each year over 5 years. According to the details of the grant, the new program would focus on the library market and then on supplying e-books to students as well as looking at variety of payment/delivery models—from purchase/subscription to rental models, bundling and POD.

Steve Maikowski, director of the NYU Press, is co-principal investigator on the grant along with Marlie Wasserman, director of Rutgers University Press. “This is a very ambitious planning grant and we are thankful to the Mellon Foundation for supporting the research,” Maikowski said.

For its part, the University of Chicago Press is well under way with its e-book program, announcing plans to partner with BiblioVault, a Chicago digital book repository, to immediately make 700 academic titles available in e-book form. The e-titles are available through the University of Chicago Press website and can be downloaded to a variety of laptops, desktops and mobile devices and read using Digital Editions, a free software reader available from Adobe.

Patti O’Shea, executive director of information systems at the Univ. of Chicago Press, said the press also plans to release more backlist e-book titles as well as begin simultaneous print and digital releases of its books. O’Shea said the press is offering a variety of purchase/rental options including “perpetual ownership at list price, 180-day ownership at about 50% off or 30-day owernship for $5.” O’Shea said the rental options were aimed at students and noted that using Digital Editions allows the e-books, “to be used on up to six unique devices registered to a single users. Readers can seamlessly transfer their e-books between different computers and e-book devices.”

Dean Bobaum, e-commerce and marketing manager at the press, said the press will continue to distribute e-books through vendors like Amazon and suppliers such as NetLibrary. However, Garrett Kiely, director of the Univ. of Chicago Press, said that seeing “big players like Sony and Google in the e-book game, “has lit a fire under academic presses,” to get into the e-book business.

My first e-textbook experience: Big disappointment from Pearson

(Teleread, By Ficbot)

I’ve just had my first e-textbook experience, and if this is what the future of e-books in education looks like, color me disappointed.

The course is an on-line summer credit offered by a somewhat local university. I have taken one such course every summer for the last three years to add various teachables to my teaching credentials, and in the past, the course has consisted of the following:

• A print textbook.
• An online forum with an organizer listing the schedule of readings, discussion questions for them, etc., and a message board to talk about them
• A “lecture” for each section of the course which could be read on-line or cut and pasted to a word file
• A section of Internet links to other websites or readings

This course had an “e-book” option where one could pay on a sliding scale to get a) a print book and “access” the e-version b) only a print book c) only the e-version “access.” I suppose the word ‘access’ should have clued me in that this was not a PDF or some-such, but I was just so excited not to have to deal with the clutter of a paper copy (and to save the $20 more plus shipping that the deluxe “e-book plus paper copy” would cost) that I didn’t investigate the situation more carefully.

I came to regret this. If the e-book system used by this course is any way becoming the “standard,” then e-books have no way of conquering the mainstream educational market.

The”’e-book” was compiled by a site called Pearson Educational Media. One can access the “e-book” by setting up an account with them and logging in. From here, I thought I would get a PDF, perhaps with a password, but what I instead got was a Macromedia Flashpaper document. There was no facility to download the text as a file so it could be read on a mobile device. There was no facility to cut and paste the text into a word processor to make your own file to read on a mobile device. You could not even use the arrow keys to read easily off the screen; you needed a mouse so you could move down the hand or click on the arrows. You could print the book to paper. That was the only real “functionality” you had beyond sitting in front of your computer and clicking with the mouse.

There were some other usability concerns. Our on-line postings to the message board required that we respond in such a way as to prove we had done the readings. But there was no cut and paste! So if you had the e-book open in one window and the message board open in another, and you wanted to quote a line or two, you would have to switch back and forth between the two windows and manually type in every word! It’s ridiculous. I still think cutting and pasting the whole shebang into Word so I could read it on my Sony is fair and should be permitted, but you could persuade me why this might not be allowed. But two lines, to put into my message board post? I can’t do that? Piracy of three-year-old journal articles from educational trade magazines is such an issue? Why even have an e-book if you have to type it in from scratch anyway?

Here was another issue: the search box. It seemed to work fine for standard text—plain, simple, less formatted stuff that seemed to come from textbook chapters. But it could not make sense of anything formatted (such as call-out boxes from scanned magazine articles) or anything that wasn’t just regular, basic text. One particularly vital chapter seemed to be scanned from an older book, and there was a lot of ’static’ on the page. The whole chapter was unreadable by the search function. Every time I wanted to refer to it, I had to manually scroll back and find what I was looking for. And of course, once I found it, I had to juggle two windows back and forth while I manually retyped whatever word or phrase I wanted…

So what did my $35 get me? “Access” to a website (for the duration of the course only) that pretty much lets me look, but not touch. No ability to download to my mobile device. No ability to cut and paste even two words from one browser window into another. Limited ability to search for parts I want read later, the usefulness dependent on whether the parts important to me have the fortune to be recognized by the program as actual words. And if I want to keep any of it after the course is done, only a print button and a pile of papers, just like in the old days. This is progress?

At minimum, we should have a PDF we can download and read off-line, and the ability when reading off the OC to copy/paste even in a limited way. Better still would be if they took the raw scans, run them through an OCR program and left us with text we could actually search and bookmark. I would not “buy” another textbook under a scheme such as the current one. I hate reading lengthy documents off a computer screen and need to be able to download it for off-line, off-computer use. And an e-book that a) requires you to print it in order to read it later b) does not let you copy even a snippet from one browser window to another c) only sometimes allows you to search through text as if they were actual words is barely an e-book at all.

The Summer of E-books

Ditto Book Digital Reading Device Hits the Market

By Calvin Reid -- Publishers Weekly, 7/6/2009 7:49:00 AM

With the release of the newest handheld digital reading device, the awkwardly named Ditto Book (Digital Interface Total Text Organizer), this has truly become the summer of the e-book reader.

The Ditto Book is a nonwireless e-book reading device that looks a bit like the Amazon Kindle 2 but has a price ($249) that’s more like that of the Cool-ER, a similar nonwireless e-reading device that debuted at BookExpo America this year. (The Amazon Kindle 2 sells for $359.) Like the Kindle, The Ditto Book has a 6-inch black & white e-ink screen; long battery life and can read both text and PDF as well as play MP3 sound files. On the other hand, like the Cool-ER, the Ditto Book offers an expandable SD card slot that kicks its memory up to 2 GB of storage.

Most importantly, unlike the Kindle, the Ditto Book supports epub format titles, the industry's open e-publishing format standard and the format in which most e-books will be published going forward. In addition the Ditto Book is not a wireless device and users will need a computer and USB connection to move their e-books onto the device after downloading them to a laptop or desktop computer.

Although Amazon’s Kindle dominates part of the e-book marketplace, it seems that more companies are planning to target this sector of the market with black & white reading devices priced to undercut the Kindle. The Ditto Book is just the latest dedicated handheld reading device targeting this sector and it certainly won’t be the last. Companies like Plastic Logic are planning to offer their own black and white devices to a market that includes a range of devices that can used for reading, such as the Sony Reader, mobile phones (with high res screens and full color display for roughly the same price); and lesser known wireless and nonwireless b&w reading devices like the DRS series of devices from iRex Technologies or even the forthcoming full-featured CrunchPad. And you can bet there are even more devices offering similar functionality and similar prices on the way.

Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon

By MOTOKO RICH

Google appears to be throwing down the gauntlet in the e-book market.

In discussions with publishers at the annual BookExpo convention in New York over the weekend, Google signaled its intent to introduce a program by that would enable publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers through Google. The move would pit Google against Amazon.com, which is seeking to control the e-book market with the versions it sells for its Kindle reading device.

Google’s move is likely to be welcomed by publishers who have expressed concerns about the possibility that Amazon will dominate the market for e-books with its aggressive pricing strategy. Amazon offers Kindle editions of most new best-sellers for $9.99, a price far lower than the typical $26 at which publishers sell new hardcovers. In early discussions, Google has said it would allow publishers to set a suggested retail price, but that it would set the ultimate consumer price.

“Clearly, any major company coming into the e-book space, providing that we are happy with the pricing structure, the selling price and the security of the technology, will be a welcome addition,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, which publishes blockbuster authors like James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer and Nicholas Sparks.

Google’s e-book retail program would be separate from the company’s settlement with authors and publishers over its book-scanning project, under which Google has scanned more than seven million volumes from several university libraries. A majority of those books are out of print.

The settlement, which is the focus of a Justice Department inquiry about the antitrust implications and is also subject to court review, provides for a way for Google to sell digital access to the scanned volumes.

And Google has already made its 1.5 million public-domain books available for reading on mobile phones as well as the Sony Reader, the Kindle’s largest competitor.

Under the new program, publishers give Google digital files of new and other in-print books. Already on Google, users can search up to about 20 percent of the content of those books and can follow links from Google to online retailers like Amazon.com and the Web site of Barnes & Noble to buy either paper or electronic versions of the books. But Google is now proposing to allow users to buy those digital editions direct from Google.

Google has discussed such plans with publishers before, but it has now committed the company to going live with the project by the end of 2009. In a presentation at BookExpo, Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, added the phrase: “This time we mean it.”

Although Google generates a majority of its revenue from ad sales on its search pages, it has previously charged for content. Three years ago, it opened a Google video store, and sold digital recordings of N.B.A. games as well as episodes of television shows like “CSI” and “The Brady Bunch.” This year, Google said it might eventually charge for premium content on YouTube.

Mr. Turvey said that with books, Google planned to sell readers online access to digital versions of various titles. When offline, Mr. Turvey said, readers would still be able to access their electronic books in cached versions on their browsers.

Publishers briefed on the plans at BookExpo said they were not sure yet how the technology would work, but were optimistic about the new program.

Mr. Turvey said Google’s program would allow consumers to read books on any device with Internet access, including mobile phones, rather than being limited to dedicated reading devices like the Amazon Kindle. “We don’t believe that having a silo or a proprietary system is the way that e-books will go,” he said.

He said that publishers would be allowed to set list prices but that Google would price the e-books for consumers. Amazon also lets publishers set wholesale prices and then establishes its own prices for consumers. In selling e-books at $9.99, Amazon effectively takes a loss on each sale because publishers generally charge booksellers about half the list price of a hardcover ­ typically, around $13 or $14.

Mr. Turvey said that Google would probably allow publishers to charge consumers the same price for digital editions as they do for new hardcover versions. He said Google would reserve the right to adjust prices that it deemed “exorbitant.”

Pearson Answers Schwarzenegger’s Call for E-Textbooks

(By Craig Morgan Teicher -- Publishers Weekly, 6/18/2009)

Last week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed replacing school textbooks with e-books in order to help plug a state budget gap. Now, textbook giant Pearson has responded with digital content to supplement California’s programs in biology, chemistry, algebra 2, and geometry.

In a statement made recently, Schwarzenegger said, “Kids are feeling as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons. So why are California’s school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?” But easing the strain on students’ backs was not the Governor’s main reason for putting out a call to developers to create electronic textbooks. The current budget gap in the state is estimated at $28 billion.

Peter Cohen, Pearson’s CEO of North America school curriculum business, said, “We believe it is important to take these forward steps toward an online delivery system and we are supporting the Governor’s initiative, recognizing there are numerous challenges ahead for the education community to work through,” including “how we ensure that low income and disadvantaged students receive equal access to technology; how we address the needs of English language learners; and how we protect the intellectual property rights of content and technology creators to support future investment and innovation.”

According to the official Web site for California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative, e-books must “approach or equal a full course of study and must be downloadable.” The site also offers instructions and links for publishers of e-books to submit books for consideration for use in California schools.

Pearson is the first major company to respond to Schwarzenegger’s initiative, which garnered an array of responses from the media, from speculation in the U.K. that others will imitate the project, to others who point out that e-books in school are not more environmentally friendly than print textbooks.

McGraw-Hill Education Announces Digital Initiative

Programs will cultivate critical thinking and teach students ways to use the Internet for problem-solving

By Lynn Andriani -- Publishers Weekly, 6/16/2009 8:04:00 AM

McGraw-Hill Education today announced the creation of its Center for Digital Innovation, a research and development center that will focus on bringing technology to elementary and secondary classrooms. The Center will be led by McGraw-Hill Education’s team of former teachers, engineers and software developers.

The Center, in Bothell, Wash., is developing digital platforms that are customized by state standards, district requirements, and individual teacher and student needs. The Center’s digital platforms will allow teachers to quickly assess a student’s proficiency level, so that teachers can alter their instruction based on the needs of each student. Programs will cultivate critical thinking and teach students ways to use the Internet for problem-solving.

Programs will address literacy, mathematics and science. Today, the Center launched two new products that will be available in August for the new school year: CINCH Project, a collection of Web 2.0 tools for collaborative learning projects, with a community-based Web site where teachers and students create digital profiles and participate in group activities; and Planet Turtle, a K-3 social network where children can interact with their peers by developing online animal-based character avatars and completing learning “challenges” that progress as their skills improve.

While college publishers are rapidly moving into digital publishing, there has been less activity at the elhi level, something MHE hopes to address with the Center. Terry McGraw, chairman, president and CEO of the McGraw-Hill Companies, said, “Our programs will be the first to create offerings based on how students use technology to bridge the gap between digital socialization and digital learning. This will help teachers, parents and students to unite around the goals of fostering growth and development; creating richer, more involved methods of learning; and more effectively addressing issues that arise.”

"Giving It Away": When Free E-books Work and When They Don't

(Book Business, By Noelle Skodzinski)

More U.S. adults had read an e-book (15 percent) than had actually paid for an e-book this year, according to Michael Norris, senior analyst at Simba Information, based on the results of a recent Simba study called, "Trade E-book Publishing 2009."

Norris moderated a session at BookExpo called, "Giving It Away: Balancing a Sustainable Publishing Model While Discovering the Rewards of Free."

Peter Balis, director of digital content sales for John Wiley & Sons, and Brent Lewis, vice president, digital and Internet at Harlequin Enterprises, shared their experiences with free e-book efforts and their insights into the place for free e-books in a publisher's business model.

Balis, whose responsibilities span both nonfiction and trade publishing, said that this year, for the time, "thanks to mobile devices," trade titles sold more in e-book form than scientific, technical, medical and scholarly (STMS) titles—sales through "a consumer-facing retailer superseded Wiley's largest library wholesaler," he said. "That's very significant because it shows, for us, a migration from research-based [usage] to consumer [usage]. It follow our traditional best-seller list now."

Overall, Balis said, "When we explore free offerings at Wiley, we have to do so in light of our profit," he said. The company has found that "free does not cannibalize paid; free does not dilute brand; and free has some purpose," whether for marketing, public relations, or to upsell or generate traffic and/or sales/revenue on Web sites. (Wiley's online business model is a bit different than most publishers, however, as revenue from Wiley's Web sites is based on advertising, not book sales, said Balis.)

Balis discussed a few examples of the company's free e-book efforts—for Frommers.com and CliffsNotes.com. "Both are standalone, successful businesses," he said. "Any content on the site is there for these businesses' profitability."

The company, therefore, has been careful to ensure that free will not cannibalize print sales, he said. On Frommers.com, free content is "sectioned off," or served by segment, theme or destination, not by chapter or in a complete digital facsimile of print content. For example, said Balis, a search for content on accommodations or restaurants in Paris would produce a relevant chapter from a book, "but you can't read [the book] in its full form," he said.

Free content also is presented in a way that site visitors must click through multiple pages while reading, which Balis said "allows us to monetize other areas of content and create opportunities for advertising."

The lesson learned from this example, said Balis, "Is that despite offering free content in complete, but not identical form, Frommer's is the No. 1 travel site in its category and maintains its market share in travel books."

Cliffs Notes, which generally sell for $5.99 in print form, he said, are still a very successful print program for Wiley. On CliffsNotes.com, "any student can read a book in complete digital form," he notes. But, says Balls, "we find we sell the downloadable [PDF] form." In fact, 25 percent of those who view the free content convert to paid readers, paying $5.99 for a downloadable PDF. The key, suggests Balis, is the portability of the downloadable PDFs; students want something they can "take with them," he said. The bulk of orders are placed late at night when students "can't wait for the print version."

Overall, Wiley has "archived digitally the first chapter of every book, online only, non-downloadable," and a 15-page preview is offered on Wiley.com. The company also has explored (but not yet participated in) content-sharing sites such as Scribd, but said Balis, "We are cautious about our content. We want to take advantage of legitimate viral aspects, but these sites are also aiding in pirated distrubution of content."

Balis noted one example where offering content for free did not work so well. The author of "The Truth About Cheating" (M. Gary Neuman) wanted to offer his book for free on the Amazon Kindle for one week coinciding with his appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

"The book did well, but not as well as it should [have]," said Balis. "There's no question that one week [of] free download cannibalized sales." The one-week period was just too long, he noted.

Balis offered a word of caution for other publishers: Free e-books have to have some hook to a causal relationship, either by metrics and traffic increase or an upsell to future products.

Wiley is now exploring offering backlist titles for free to upsell an author's new title, as well as a "try-before-you-buy environment" for mobile.

"Be careful about how you use [free content], but don't be skittish," he said.

Lewis said that Harlequin has been doing free promotions for decades, and this year has a significant free e-book and print-book giveaway effort in conjunction with the company's 60th anniversary. The goal, he said, is "to increase awareness of our brand and the amount [and scope] of content we publish." To this end, he said, their efforts have been successful.

"I think it's really important to define the business objective of why you're giving it away free and how it's going to help your business," he said.

"The interesting thing about digital sampling," he noted, "is that a lot of people download the digital book, but don't read the whole thing; they read the first chapter and then go buy [the book]."

The key, said Lewis, is: "Make sure it's measurable—define success. What is success for you and can you track it?"

Google Promises Publishers (And Amazon) Will Sell E-Books In 2009

(paidcontent.org; By Staci D. Kramer - Sun 31 May 2009)

Nothing says we’re not a monopoly like trying to break up another perceived stranglehold. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) plans to enter the commercial e-book business this year—and, unlike Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), apparently plays to let publishers set prices, according to The New York Times. The program would be separate from the recent book-scanning settlement. Piecing together conversations Google held with publishers at the BookExpo in New York with a presentation made by Tom Turvey, director of strategic partnerships at Google, the NYT reports:

—Publishers could set their own prices and probably would be allowed to charge as much as they do for hardcovers but Google would retain the right to lower “exorbitant” rates. Amazon sets its own prices, buying wholesale and taking a loss on some to keep the usual price for hardcover equivalents at $9.99

—Publishers still aren’t sure how the direct-to-consumer sales would work but Turvey told them the company is committed to making it happen by the end of 2009: “This time we mean it.”

—Readers would gain online access to digital titles but also would retain access offline through cached versions in browsers. (This sounds like a job for Google Gears, the sync manager which is not the most stable app in my experience. It’s the app most likely to crash in Google Chrome for me so far.)

—Access would not be limited to certain devices but would require internet access.

Motoko Rich goes pretty far for a news piece with the flat-out claim that Amazon “is seeking to control the e-book market.” Dominate, I can see, but control suggests the M word and Amazon isn’t close to that.

E-book handicap?

I recently bought a fitness e-book, enjoyed reading it on my BlackBerry Fictionwise e-reader on the way to and from work, and then moved on to finishing the print book that I was simultaneously carrying around with me. I've limited most of my e-reading to non-fiction as of yet, and didn't think anything of it until I had a conversation with my mom.

My mom, unlike myself, enjoys cooking and trying out new recipes. Since she's only into healthy cooking, the recipes in the fitness book would have been ideal for her...but I had nothing to share with her, given that it was an e-book. As a publishing professional, I understand that we want to make sharing harder, but what if I wanted to try out some of those recipes? Should I have my expensive device sitting in my kitchen while I mix and match ingredients? And what if it wasn't recipes per se, but some other interactive book that required the reader to take a quiz? How can we do this with an e-book?

I came up with two options: the publisher should either allow certain pages--i.e., those with the recipes or the quizes--to be e-mailable, or have that information available for print/download from a companion website.

Any other ideas on how to get around this e-book handicap?

Bowker Reports U.S. Book Production Declines 3% in 2008, but "On Demand" Publishing More Than Doubles

NEW PROVIDENCE, NJ -- (Marketwire) -- 05/19/09

Bowker, the global leader in bibliographic information management solutions, today released statistics on U.S. book publishing for 2008, compiled from its Books In Print® database. Based on preliminary figures from U.S. publishers, Bowker is projecting that U.S. title output in 2008 decreased by 3.2%, with 275,232 new titles and editions, down from the 284,370 that were published in 2007.

Despite this decline in traditional book publishing, there was another extraordinary year of growth in the reported number of "On Demand" and short-run books produced in 2008. Bowker projects that 285,394 On Demand books were produced last year, a staggering 132% increase over last year's final total of 123,276 titles. This is the second consecutive year of triple-digit growth in the On Demand segment, which in 2008 was 462% above levels seen as recently as 2006.

"Our statistics for 2008 benchmark an historic development in the U.S. book publishing industry as we crossed a point last year in which On Demand and short-run books exceeded the number of traditional books entering the marketplace," said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publisher services for New Providence, N.J.-based Bowker. "It remains to be seen how this trend will unfold in the coming years before we know if we just experienced a watershed year in the book publishing industry, fueled by the changing dynamics of the marketplace and the proliferation of sophisticated publishing technologies, or an anomaly that caused the major industry trade publishers to retrench."

(Editor's Note: Members of the news media who are interested in obtaining statistics from Bowker for specific industry categories are invited to email Daryn Teague, Bowker's public relations consultant, at dteague@teaguecommunications.com.)

"The statistics from last year are not just an indicator that the industry had a decline in new titles coming to the market, but they're also a reflection of how publishers are getting smarter and more strategic about the specific kinds of books they're choosing to publish," explained Gallagher. "If you look beyond the numbers, you begin to see that 2008 was a pivotal year that benchmarks the changing face of publishing."

Among the major publishing categories, the big winners last year were Education and Business, two categories that might suggest publishers were seeking to give consumers more resources for success amidst a very tough job environment. There were 9,510 new education titles introduced in the U.S. in 2008, up 33% from the prior year, and 8,838 new business titles, an increase of 14% over 2007 levels.

By contrast, the big category losers in 2008 were Travel and Fiction, two categories in which publishers clearly saw less demand during a deep recession in the U.S. There were 4,817 new travel books introduced last year, down 15% from the year before, and 47,541 new fiction titles, a drop of 11% from 2007. Moreover, the Religion category dropped again last year, with 14% fewer titles introduced in the U.S., and that once reliable engine of growth for publishers is now well off its peak year of 2004.

According to Gallagher, the Bowker data reveals that the top five categories for U.S. book production in 2008 were:

    1. Fiction (47,541 new titles)
   2. Juveniles (29,438)
   3. Sociology/Economics (24,423)
   4. Religion (16,847)
   5. Science (13,555)

Methodology

The book production figures in this news release are based on year-to-date data from U.S. publishers and include traditional print as well as on demand titles. Audiobooks and E-books are excluded. If changes in industry estimates occur, they will be reflected in a later published report. Books In Print data represents input from more than 75,000 publishers in the U.S. The data is sent to Bowker in electronic files, and via BowkerLink(TM), Bowker's password protected Web-based tool, which enables publishers to update and add their own data.

Books In Print is the only bibliographic database with more than 8 million U.S. book, audiobook and video titles. It is widely regarded throughout the publishing industry as the most authoritative and comprehensive source of bibliographic data available worldwide, and has been a trusted source of data in North America for more than 50 years.

More Things Digital

Mobifusion Releases New Cellphone Content Viewer

(Publishers Weekly, 5/11/2009 6:20:00 AM)

Mobifusion, a software developer of applications that deliver book content to handheld mobile devices, is releasing Mobiviewer 2.5, an upgraded multimedia platform that improves viewing and reading content on mobile phones. Mobiviewer 2.5 is a graphic user interface for mobile phones that can deliver photos, audio and graphic content from publishers (among them Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Avalon, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin) to a wide variety of handsets and OS formats, including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Mobile, Java, Symbian, iDEN, Palm and other platforms.

Pavan Mandhani, founder and CEO of Mobifusion said the new application, “raises the bar” for mobile entertainment viewing and reading. “We're giving consumers a new made-for-mobile experience of the content they know. By delivering 'snacks' of the mobile content wireless users want, Mobiviewer 2.5 will transform the way people use and see their mobile handsets.”

E-Reader Pilot Program at Princeton University

Princeton is using the Amazon DX electronic reader to pilot the use of an e-reader in a small number of classes during the Fall term of 2009. The project is sponsored by the Princeton University Library, the Office of Information Technology at Princeton, and the High Meadows Foundation, whose mission is “to support environmental sustainability; and to support a community of human interest through collaboration, inclusiveness and common values.” A major aim of the pilot is to help determine if e-readers can cut down on the use of paper at Princeton, without adversely affecting the classroom experience.

Amazon Launches Kindle DX

(Publishers Weekly, 5/6/2009)

Amazon introduced the third edition of its Kindle this morning, a version that, in addition to offering trade books, will now display textbooks, computer books and cookbooks on a 9.7 inch electronic display screen that includes 16 shades of grade. Magazines and newspapers, already available on the Kindle, will increase their presence on the new device. Price for Kindle DX is $489 and Amazon will start shipping the device in the summer.

Amazon hopes the larger screen and improved display will entice students to use Kindle DX and Cengage, Pearson, and John Wiley have agreed to make textbooks available through Kindle DX. Arizona State, Case Western Reserve, Princeton, Reed College, Pace and Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia will launch trial programs this fall in which they will distribute Kindle DX to students across a range of subjects. "We look forward to seeing how the device affects the participation of both students and faculty in the educational experience," said Barbara Snyder, president of Case Western.

To induce newspaper readers to use Kindle DX, Amazon is teaming with The New York Times and Washington Post in a program that will let would-be subscribers who live in areas where there is no home delivery to buy the Kindle DX at a reduced price if they agree to subscribe to a long-term subscription to the paper via the Kindle DX.

Defining Publishing Today

I will be explaining my job--and publishing--to my son's second-grade class Monday afternoon. Once a year, his school invites parents to come in and speak to the class about their jobs, and this is the second year in a row that I have volunteered to do so.

Last year, I brought Aliki's How a Book is Made and a magnifying glass for show and tell: the former to show some colorful visuals of printing presses and how colors combine; the latter to let them see for themselves that everything printed is made up of dots. The class enjoyed the show-and-tell and had several questions about publishing. Although I mentioned online trends, it was an addendum at the end of my "presentation."

Since publishing has changed that much in a year, I was going to focus on that change and how its evolved from a print-only industry to one where print is only one of the many platforms offered. But my son told me he had been looking forward to my show-and-tell, and I don't want to disappoint him, so I now need to figure out how to present all of that in fifteen minutes or less.

Even though I've been aware of the changes going on in the industry, and reading about them, it honestly still surprised me that last year when I spoke to my son's class, e-books was not a major part of my discussion--nor did I feel it necessary to make it so. This year, I would feel remiss not to mention it, and may even pull out my BlackBerry with its Fictionwise e-reader application as part of the show-and-tell.

How would you define and explain publishing to a child...or even an adult who was not familiar with the process? How do you define it to authors?

Publishers Participate in Espresso Book Machine Pilot Program

(Book Business Magazine, 4/24/09)

Lightning Source has launched an Espresso Book Machine (EBM) title pilot with OnDemand Books, the proprietor of the EBM.

Participating publishers in the pilot include John Wiley & Sons, Hachette Book Group, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, Clements Publishing, Cosimo, E-Reads, Bibliolife, Information Age Publishing, Macmillan, University of California Press and W.W. Norton. The pilot initially was offered to a small group of publishers that currently work with Lightning Source to enable them to enhance the availability of their titles at point-of-sale EBM locations.

Approximately 85,000 titles from these publishers will be available for purchase at EBM locations throughout the United States in May. Upon the completion of a successful pilot, publishers that print and distribute books with Lightning Source will have the option to participate in the EBM channel. According to Lightning Source, complete channel automation is expected in the first half of this year, and rollout of the program to publishers globally is expected to follow shortly thereafter.

"We see the Espresso Book Machine as an innovative and exciting way for publishers to get their books out into the market," says David Taylor, president of Lightning Source. "There is clearly a place for the in-store, print-on-demand model in the emerging landscape of globally distributed print. … In the times in which we are living, publishers need to be looking at every option to ensure that their books can be immediately available to people who want to buy them."

"OnDemand Books is delighted that the Espresso Book Machine is playing such a central role in a program that is blazing a trail to the future of book publishing," says Dane Neller, CEO of OnDemand Books. "With the book business facing dramatic changes and challenges, we believe the timing of the EBM couldn't be better. Publishers, retailers and libraries alike see the appeal of the machine that collapses the supply chain, boosts backlist sales, matches supply with demand, eliminates returns and powers new, high-growth sales channels for publishers."

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write

(Wall Street Journal, 4/20/09, by Steve Johnson)

Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha" moment in your memory -- the moment where you flip a switch and something magical happens, something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.

I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.

The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." By the time the check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter.

I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.

There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?

The Dark Matter

In our always-connected, everything-linked world, we sometimes forget that books are the dark matter of the information universe. While we now possess terabytes of data at our fingertips, we have nonetheless drifted further and further away from mankind's most valuable archive of knowledge: the tens of millions of books that have been published since Gutenberg's day.

That's because the modern infosphere is both organized and navigated through hyperlinked pages of digital text, with the most-linked pages rising to the top of Google Inc.'s all-powerful search-results page. This has led us toward some traditional forms of information, such as newspapers and magazines, as well as toward new forms, such as blogs and Wikipedia. But because books have largely been excluded from Google's index -- distant planets of unlinked analog text -- that vast trove of knowledge can't compete with its hyperlinked rivals.

But there is good reason to believe that this strange imbalance will prove to be a momentary blip, and that the blip's moment may be just about over. Credit goes to two key developments: the breakthrough success of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, and the maturation of the Google Book Search service, which now offers close to 10 million titles, including many obscure and out-of-print works that Google has scanned. As a result, 2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.

If so, if the future is about to be rewritten, the big question becomes: How?

The World of Ideas

For starters, think about what happened because of the printing press: The ability to duplicate, and make permanent, ideas that were contained in books created a surge in innovation that the world had never seen before. Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovation to bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.

Think about it. Before too long, you'll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you've ever read -- as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet.

The Impulse Buy

The magic of that moment in Austin ("I'm in the mood for a novel -- oh, here's a novel right here in my hands!") also tells me that e-book readers are going to sell a lot of books, precisely because there's an impulse-buy quality to the devices that's quite unlike anything the publishing business has ever experienced before.

On another occasion, I managed to buy and download a book on a New York City subway train, during a brief two-stop stretch on an elevated platform.

Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own it.

My impulsive purchase of "On Beauty" has another element to it, though -- one that may not be as welcomed by authors. Specifically: I was in the middle of the other book, and in a matter of seconds, I left it for one of its competitors. The jump was triggered, in this case, by a sudden urge to read fiction, but it could have been triggered by something in the book I was originally reading: a direct quote or reference to another work, or some more indirect suggestion in the text.

In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.

Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.

Ahead of Amazon's quarterly results, Citi analyst Mark Mahaney says the company's growth potential is robust and explains why he upgraded his rating on the stock to buy. Stacey Delo reports. (April 20)

The Kindle in its current incarnation maintains some of that emphasis on linear focus; it has no dedicated client for email or texting, and its Web browser is buried in a subfolder for "experimental" projects. But Amazon has already released a version of the Kindle software for reading its e-books on an iPhone, which is much more conducive to all manner of distraction. No doubt future iterations of the Kindle and other e-book readers will make it just as easy to jump online to check your 401(k) performance as it is now to buy a copy of "On Beauty."

As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.

You're Never Alone

Putting books online will also change how we find books -- and talk about them.

Now that books are finally entering the world of networked, digital text, they will undergo the same transformation that Web pages have experienced over the past 15 years. Blogs, remember, were once called "Web logs," cultivated by early digital pioneers who kept a record of information they found online, quoting and annotating as they browsed.

With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them. (As the writer and futurist Kevin Kelly says, "In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.") You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.

Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.

This great flowering of annotating and indexing will alter the way we discover books, too. Web publishers have long recognized that "front doors" matter much less in the Google age, as visitors come directly to individual articles through search. Increasingly, readers will stumble across books through a particularly well-linked quote on page 157, instead of an interesting cover on display at the bookstore, or a review in the local paper.

Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.

In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today. An author will write an arresting description of Thomas Edison's controversial invention of the light bulb, and thanks to hundreds of inbound links from bookloggers quoting the passage, those pages will rise to the top of Google's results for anyone searching "invention of light bulb." Each day, Google will deposit a hundred potential book buyers on that page, eager for information about Edison's breakthrough. Those hundred readers might pale compared with the tens of thousands of prospective buyers an author gets from an NPR appearance, but that Google ranking doesn't fade away overnight. It becomes a kind of permanent annuity for the author.

Writing for Google

A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written, just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.

Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.

What will this mean for the books themselves? Perhaps nothing more than a few strategically placed words or paragraphs. Perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind. We'll have to see.

(One geeky side note here: Before we can get too far in this new world, we need to have a technological standard for organizing digital books. We have the Web today because back in the early 1990s we agreed on a standard, machine-readable way of describing the location of a page: the URL.

But what's the equivalent for books? For centuries, we've had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down in this new digital world. The Kindle doesn't even have page numbers -- it has an entirely new system called "locations" because the pagination changes constantly based on the type size you choose to read. If you want to write a comment about page 32 of "On Beauty," what do you link to? The Kindle location? The Google Book Search page? This sounds like a question only a librarian would get excited about, but the truth is, until we figure out a standardized way to link to individual pages -- so that all the data associated with a specific passage from "On Beauty" point to the same location -- books are going to remain orphans in this new world.)

Paying Per Chapter?

The economics of digital books will likely change the conventions of reading and writing as well. Digital distribution makes it a simple matter to offer prospective buyers a "free sample" to entice them to purchase the whole thing. Many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge. The "free sample" component of a book will become as conventional as jacket-flap copy and blurbs; authors will devise a host of stylistic and commercial techniques in crafting these giveaway sections, just as Dickens mastered the cliffhanger device almost two centuries before.

It's not hard to imagine, for instance, how introductions will be transformed in this new world. Right now, introductions are written with the assumption that people have already bought the book. That won't be the case in the future, when the introduction is given away. It will, no doubt, be written more to entice readers to buy the whole book.

Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.

For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.

This fragmentation sounds unnerving -- yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition. Breaking the book into detachable parts may sell more books, but there are certain kinds of experiences and arguments that can only be conveyed by the steady, directed immersion that a 400-page book gives you. A playlist of the best chapters from "Middlemarch," "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Beloved" will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today.

Yet that modular pricing system will have one interesting, and laudable, side effect: The online marketplace will have established an easy, one-click mechanism for purchasing small quantities of text.

Tellingly, the Kindle already includes blog and newspaper subscriptions that can be purchased in a matter of seconds.

Skeptics may ask why anyone would pay for something that was elsewhere available at no charge, but that's precisely what they said when Steve Jobs launched the iTunes Music Store, competing with the free offerings on Napster. We've seen how that turned out. If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business -- a system many people wish had been built into the Web's original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.

We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?

Tech Rumor of the Day: Barnes & Noble

(TheStreet.com, Scott Moritz, 4/8/09)

Rumor has it you can soon add one more so-called eBook to the Amazon (AMZN Quote) Kindle and Sony (SNE Quote) Digital Book party.

Barnes & Noble (BKS Quote), the nation's No. 1 bookstore chain, is working with a device maker and Sprint (S Quote) on a Kindle-like device, according to one wireless industry insider. The news comes a week after the CTIA wireless show, where sources say there was heavy speculation surrounding Barnes & Noble's plan to give eBooks another try.

Barnes & Noble had been in discussions with Verizon (VZ Quote) as a possible wireless partner for the project, but those talks ended. The impression the insider got was that Barnes & Noble was going with Sprint, the wireless service used by Amazon's Kindle.

Some observers wouldn't rule out AT&T (T Quote) as another potential wireless media download service provider. AT&T, Apple (AAPL Quote) and Amazon partnered to deliver eBooks to iPhones last month. And last week, AT&T was reportedly exploring the eBook option.

If true, the device would give Barnes & Noble a direct competitor to the popular Kindle from Amazon. Fast network speeds for book downloads and sleeker designs have helped turn Kindle into a big success story for Amazon and an electronic opportunity for the publishing industry.

Kindle is expected to net Amazon a gross profit of roughly $63 million on about $285 million in sales this year, according to estimates by Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal.

Barnes & Noble has been through this before. In 2003, the company ended a three-year eBook partnership with Microsoft (MSFT Quote) and Adobe (ADBE Quote) the electronic publishing shop, after suffering disappointing demand for the tablet device.

Last month, Barnes & Noble bought electronic bookseller Fictionwise for $15.7 million. The move would help pave the way for Barnes & Noble's own eBookstore.

Let's file this rumor in the nonfiction section under mysteries.

Fujitsu Launches First Color E-Book Reader in Japan

(Book Business Magazine, April 3, 2009)

Japanese electronics company Fujitsu has launched the world's first color e-paper e-book reader. The Flepia is available for purchase in Japan through Fujitsu's "FrontechDirect" online store for approximately $1,000. The device will begin shipping April 20.

The Flepia, which weighs 385g and is 12.5mm thick, features an 8-inch touch display screen capable of showing up to 260,000 colors in high definition. It enables 40 hours of continuous battery operation when fully charged, and does not require power for continuous display of a screen image. When used with a 4GB SD card, the device can store the equivalent of approximately 5,000 300-page print books.

Equipped with Bluetooth and high-speed wireless LAN, Flepia users may purchase e-books from Papyless, Japan's largest e-book online retailer, and download them directly to the e-reader.

According to Fujitsu, the company hopes to sell 50,000 units by the end of 2010.

E-books, Tree-books, and On-demand Books

I was fortunate enough to attend this year's Publishing Business Conference and although much was discussed in the two-and-a-half days' worth of sessions I attended, there were a few themes that kept reappearing:

1. Traditional books--or "tree books"--and print is not disappearing anytime soon, but publishers should keep inventory and costs down, as well as acquire and market more wisely.
2. E-books may be on the rise, but given that they are currently such a small percentage of book sales, publishers should use them to complement, not replace, tree books: e-book sales are not currently cannibalizing tree book sales.
3. Since print is going nowhere anytime soon, more and more publishers are turning to print-on-demand and short-run digital as an alternative to the traditional offset model. And while the unit cost for these may still be higher than that of offset, the total cost is lower.
4. Inkjet technology will be the tipping point for POD by making color POD economically viable.

And although there were some bleak discussions of the current economic clime, there were hopeful predictions as well. Here's to the latter...

Know Your Requirements Before Shopping for the Right CMS

(Publishing Executive, 3/20/09, by Joe Keenan)

As many publishers have found out the hard way -- i.e., wasting their time and money -- identifying the right content management system (CMS) for your business is no easy task. As a prelude to a session he'll lead at next week's Publishing Business Conference & Expo in New York, CMS Forum: Identifying and Implementing the Right CMS for Your Magazines, Han Huang, principal and founder of Counterpoint Analytics, offered up some tips to help save publishers from the frustrations of a CMS implementation gone bad.

INBOX: What factors should companies weigh when determining whether to build or buy their CMS?
HAN HUANG: The first thing to do is look at their business objective. What functionality do they want on their site? Do they want blogs/forums? Do they want polls? What kind of reporting do they want? Do they want lead reporting? Look at what their Web site is trying to do -- what their business model is.

When they work out what that is and what functionality they want -- they literally want to list it out -- then it's a question of looking at CMS companies. Look at whether the build vs. buy question is favorable one way or the other.

For example, if all they have is basic article content, one could argue that they could build that themselves. But the moment you start wanting to have blogs/forums, it's pretty rare now that one could build it themselves. But there's a proviso on this: You have open-source CMSs. So it's not always a question of build vs. buy. You can actually get an open-source CMS. There's still a cost to it, and that's in development costs to integrate it. But essentially the short of it is: Know what your requirements are, know what your budget is and then shop around for the right CMS.

INBOX: What are the outside expenses that publishers need to budget for when implementing a new CMS?
HUANG: I'd argue that most CMSs are quite intuitive from an editor's point of view. There's not a huge cost there. The most significant cost generally with publishing is the development cost itself and the managing of it. It's one thing to get the CMS, but then you've got to integrate it. One thing to bear in mind is if someone's buying a new CMS, normally they're going to be doing a site redesign at the same time. It's pretty rare for someone to say, 'I just want a new CMS,' and then not use it on the front end. They normally get a CMS because they want to change something on the front end. There's a redesign process; it's not just about getting a CMS.

INBOX: In your experience, what are some common mistakes publishers make when implementing a new CMS?
HUANG: The first one is not laying out your requirements in detail. If you do that, you've got a road map for completion. The second one is the resources -- how you manage the execution of the project. Are you resourced properly? Most publishers implementing a CMS will outsource. It's very common to outsource the building of it and the integration because there's only one upfront cost for integration and redesign, which isn't the same as doing maintenance. Managing the outsource relationship; there's definitely a skill [required] there. If you get the wrong people to implement it or there's poor communication between the core people who are buying into it and the developers through the project managers, then that can cause problems.

And then you have some technical issues going live. A typical one that causes real problems is you have editors who are using the old CMS until the day it goes live, so managing the live date is quite tricky. It can get technical, but it's difficult to do the transition to live because sometimes editors have to double enter the content into both systems. And if there are any technical problems, then that can extend out. It's very common that as you approach the live date, it gets more and more complicated to execute it well. So the live date gets pushed back.

INBOX: What are the latest trends with CMSs that'll help provide publishers tangible ROI?
HUANG: First, from a user perspective I'd say Web 2.0 functionality -- blogs, forums, reviews. For users, especially younger users, social networking and interactivity is becoming much more important. They're moving away from the idea of just reading an article. Now for most publishing companies, orthodox print publication companies, it may be too early for social networking, but a lot of their users are using social networking. That's one thing that CMSs can provide -- relatively out-of-the-box solutions for those things. You don't need to build them yourselves. You have to tweak them, but you don't have to build them.

The next is reporting systems. Publishers are realizing -- some publishers, anyhow -- how to leverage their user information online, especially if they have subscriber databases. How do they monetize it? How can they not just provide clicks but qualified leads? CMS has helped with that because you don't have to build your own login and tracking system. It's already there. So it's easier to integrate with all the other functionality. You really don't want to have to build that yourself. Those two areas are the two opportunities on the revenue-generating side.

And then the other thing on the back-end, the trend is definitely toward open-source. In the mid- to low-range CMSs, open-sourced CMSs are incredibly competitive because you're not just factoring in the buying of the CMS, you're looking at the build and the maintenance.

Customer's Choice

So publishers and distributors are finally coming to the realization that it's all about customer's having the option to choose, whether it's what platform they want to read content on...or apparently even what price to pay for that content.

• Baker & Taylor Unveils First Phase of Integrated Digital Media Distribution Platform

• Publisher Lets Customers Pay What They Want for Latest Title

And according to Mike Shatzkin's article Will You Recognize the Industry in 10 Years? this will extend to e-books not only having links, but moving photos...kind of like in the Harry Potter world.

So if e-books will have links to videos and the web, will TVs have links to the web and to pdfs of text? Why can't TVs be large e-book devices too that get synched up to the smaller portable device you take with you? But how does that work with a family and their separate devices?

And when do we stop being publishers and just become part of the larger entertainment business? And does it matter as long as we're still dealing with the words we love?

The ever-evolving world of "publishing"

Here are just two of the exciting developments that occurred this week in the ever-evolving world of publishing:

• Amazon Joins the iPhone App Market
• Nelson Makes Books Available in All Formats for One Price

Although personally I don't understand why Nelson is choosing to give content away free with their one-price model, unless it's to drive people to buy the print product, it's still exciting in that it shows how publishers are having to rethink the traditional pricing and manufacturing model we're all familiar with.

Although it's nearly impossible to predict the next evolution, do you have any theories? Please share.

E-bookstore Browsing?

With the Kindle 2 out and e-readers becoming more and more popular, I have been thinking more and more about the bookstore experience, and what I enjoy most about it: browsing. Most of the times when I enter a bookstore, it’s not with a particular book in mind, but with the desire to see what’s come out and if anything’s worth buying and adding to my ever-growing to-read-pile…and half of the times, I actually will buy something. How do I find these books? I first go the “new fiction” table and shelves, then walk around the fiction and sci-fi aisles and see if anything grabs my attention.

How can we translate this “bookstore browsing” to “e-bookstore browsing”? Amazon is already ahead of the curve with the features it offers on amazon.com, but have they made this available on their Kindle? What if when you wanted to buy another e-book, you could click on a feature which showed you the “covers” of the latest releases, and then can further filter by genre. If you like something, you could click on the cover and have the option of reading the “back cover copy,” the first chapter, or a random sampling.

Or does the Kindle or Sony E-Reader already do this? Since I don’t own one (I’ll explain in a bit why), I may be behind and this has already been done. So let me ask those of you who do own one: how does the e-reader browsing experience compare to the brick-and-mortar browsing experience? Which do you prefer, and why?

And the reason I don’t own an e-reader is very simple, and not related to any of the above: I’m an Orthodox Jew and would not be able to use the Kindle on the Sabbath or on any of the holidays, which is when I do most of my reading.

Hearst Gets Into the E-Reader Game

(Mac Slocum, February 27, 2009)

Hearst Corp. is developing its own wireless e-reader that may debut this year. From Fortune:

According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.

The larger screen size will put the Hearst reader in the same class as devices from Plastic Logic and iRex.

Fortune says Hearst isn't discussing product specs, but the company has a longtime association with E Ink. Last September, Esquire published the first E Ink magazine cover.

eBook Evolution: Amazon and Google on Different Paths

(C. Max Magee at The Millions, 2/12/09)

Amazon sucked the all the air out of the literary room this week with its announcement of the new iteration of its Kindle reading device. That the announcement was coming had been no big secret to anyone paying attention and pictures of the device had been floating around online for at least five months, but nobody seemed to mind. The Kindle is just about the only game in town when it comes to sexy new gadgets for the book club set.

With Kindles hitting doorsteps in less than two weeks' time, however, and hands on reviews generally positive, if not glowing, it may be time once again to assess the ebook landscape.

Interestingly, while a watershed event in the evolutions of ebooks has likely occurred this month, the Kindle 2 unveiling is only one of the nominees for that honor. Also in the running is Google's "1.5 Million Books in Your Pocket" announcement last week. For those who missed it, Google has engineered a mobile version of Google Books, for use on iPhones and phones running Google's own mobile operating system. Right now it lets people access the public domain books that Google has scanned and automatically converts the scanned pages into standardized fonts for ease of reading on mobile devices.

Looking at the Amazon option and the Google option, you can begin to see two separate, though not necessarily mutually exclusive paths that ebook evolution will follow. The Kindle path is one of verisimilitude with the printed page, a uni-tasker that wants to provide an experience as close to that of being a book as possible while using technology to improve upon the book by, for example, being lighter and letting you carry multiple titles in one small package. Somewhat surprisingly, the early reviews of the Kindle from the gadget-hounds at venues like Gizmodo eschew their usual demands for "smaller" and "slicker" in wishing that the Kindle were more book-like not less, asking for things like a bigger screen and a sturdier rubber backing rather than "slick aluminum and plastic." Moreover:

Before they address the needs of some hypothetical super weakling who has the aesthetic sense of [Apple designer] Jon Ive, the cerebral voracity of Rain Man and the vision of Mr. Magoo, Amazon must address the needs of very real readers who read only a few books and magazines at a time, who like to download classic non-copyrighted lit and work-related documents for free, and who like to leaf through pages randomly. This last thing is important, though it may be insurmountable: Airport-friendly page turners don't really require non-linear random-access reading, but everything smart from Harry Potter to Infinite Jest does, and that's one concern that the Kindle, or any ebook reader, still does not address well.

If the Kindle will evolve to become more and more book-like, Google's path is much simpler. As our handheld gadgets have added ever more features - cameras, email, music and video playing capabilities - they have become ravenous multi-taskers, seeking out new functions to devour and turn into must-have features. If we are to be a society that reads its books on little electronic devices, one can sensibly argue, then this device will also be my cell phone, camera, mp3 player, and everything else. After all, we only have so many pockets. The Kindle may become the preferred device of the discerning and prolific reader, but the iPhone, or something like it, will do just fine for everyone else.

Even as ebook evolution follows both paths, the expanding capabilities of the devices will open up huge opportunities for newspapers and magazines to blend print and electronic publishing, and who knows what new media business models may blossom out of this new hybrid medium.

The final, and maybe most important piece, of the dual path ebook story, is the content. As has been the case with all "format wars" - VHS vs. Beta, HD DVD vs. Blu ray - the format that is able to attract the content is the format that wins. But in this case, the two formats may be able to exist and mature side by side because both have incredible access to the content for their devices. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the vision for Kindle is "Every book ever printed in any language, available in under 60 seconds." The Google Book search vision is "We see a world where all books are online and searchable." Both companies have the technical muscle and have built the relationships (and, in Google's case, the legal foundation) with publishers to make good on these claims. With no clear edge in content for either format, both formats have the capacity to survive and thrive.

This, of course, leaves out a third format - the physical book. As long as there is demand for books, they will survive as well. And with publishers and copyright holders maintaining a firm grip on their digital rights (and digital book piracy nonexistent) the new ebook formats represent new revenue streams for publishers that should exist comfortably alongside the old dead-tree model.

Google Buys a Paper Mill

Google continues to find new ways to influence the publishing industry. Stora Enso, a global paper, packaging and forest products company with facilities in more than 35 countries, announced yesterday it has agreed to sell its Summa Mill site in Finland to Google for approximately $51.7 million. Google is expected to convert the facilities into a center for data storage.

The sale should close by the end of the first quarter of 2009. Production had been halted at the mill in January 2008 as a result of "persistent losses in recent years and poor long-term profitability prospects," according to the company.

Google in the News

Too much to say, not enough time, so I'll just point you to the relevant articles (or at least three of them since I'm sure there are many more out there):

• Get Your Head Into the Clouds
• Google and Amazon to Put More Books on Cellphones
• Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books

And what do you think will be Google's next big initiative?

The Perseus Books Group Launches Mobile Editions

(Book Business Magazine, 1/30/09)

The Perseus Books Group (PBG) announced its first mobile book editions. Working with Incelligence, a mobile phone application provider, PBG now will offer mobile editions of the following titles: "Wine Enthusiast Pocket Guide to Spirits," "Quit: Read This Book and Stop Smoking," "Your Pregnancy Week by Week," and a Spanish-language version of the pregnancy guide, "Su Embarazo Semana a Semana."

The new Perseus mobile editions will be available to millions of mobile users worldwide through Incelligence’s distribution network, which includes major carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile, as well as independent mobile application distributors such as Thumbplay, Jamster and ClickApps.

“At Perseus, we are always looking for ways to reach readers wherever they are with books that matter,” says Rick Joyce, chief marketing officer for PBG. “Mobile editions put must-have content always in reach …. Relationships with mobile innovators like Incelligence are all part of helping independent publishers succeed in the digital marketplace.”

Books Unbound

(Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2009, By Lev Grossman)

Here's a literary parable for the 21st century. Lisa Genova, 38, was a health-care-industry consultant in Belmont, Mass., who wanted to be a novelist, but she couldn't get her book published for love or money. She had a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Harvard, but she couldn't get an agent. "I did what you're supposed to do," she says. "I queried literary agents. I went to writers' conferences and tried to network. I e-mailed editors. Nobody wanted it." So Genova paid $450 to a company called iUniverse and published her book, Still Alice, herself.

That was in 2007. By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5. "So this is extreme to extreme, right?" Genova says. "This time last year, I was selling the book out of the trunk of my car."

Something has changed, and it's not just the contents of Lisa Genova's trunk. We think of the novel as a transcendent, timeless thing, but it was shaped by the forces of money and technology just as much as by creative genius. Passing over a few classical and Far Eastern entries, the novel in its modern form really got rolling only in the early 18th century. This wasn't an accident, and it didn't happen because a bunch of writers like Defoe and Richardson and Fielding suddenly decided we should be reading long books about imaginary people. It happened as a result of an unprecedented configuration of financial and technological circumstances. New industrial printing techniques meant you could print lots of books cheaply; a modern capitalist marketplace had evolved in which you could sell them; and for the first time there was a large, increasingly literate, relatively well-off urban middle class to buy and read them. Once those conditions were in place, writers like Defoe and Richardson showed up to take advantage of them.

Fast-forward to the early 21st century: the publishing industry is in distress. Publishing houses--among them Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Doubleday and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt--are laying off staff left and right. Random House is in the midst of a drastic reorganization. Salaries are frozen across the industry. Whispers of bankruptcy are fluttering around Borders; Barnes & Noble just cut 100 jobs at its headquarters, a measure unprecedented in the company's history. Publishers Weekly (PW) predicts that 2009 will be "the worst year for publishing in decades."

A lot of headlines and blogs to the contrary, publishing isn't dying. But it is evolving, and so radically that we may hardly recognize it when it's done. Literature interprets the world, but it's also shaped by that world, and we're living through one of the greatest economic and technological transformations since--well, since the early 18th century. The novel won't stay the same: it has always been exquisitely sensitive to newness, hence the name. It's about to renew itself again, into something cheaper, wilder, trashier, more democratic and more deliriously fertile than ever.

What's the Matter with Publishing?

It isn't the audience. People are still reading. According to a National Endowment for the Arts study released on Jan. 12, literary reading by adults has actually increased 3.5% since 2002, the first such increase in 26 years. So that's not the problem. What is?

The economy, obviously. Plenty of businesses are hurting. And it doesn't help that new media like video games (sales up 19% in 2008!) are now competing with books for our entertainment hours and dollars. But publishing has deeper, more systemic problems, like the fact that its business model evolved during an earlier fiscal era. It's an antique, a financial coelacanth that dates back to the Depression.

Consider the advance system, whereby a publisher pays an author a nonreturnable up-front fee for a book. If the book doesn't "earn out," in the industry parlance, the publisher simply eats the cost. Another example: publishers sell books to bookstores on a consignment system, which means the stores can return unsold books to publishers for a full refund. Publishers suck up the shipping costs both ways, plus the expense of printing and then pulping the merchandise. "They print way more than they know they can sell, to kind of create a buzz, and then they end up taking half those books back," says Sara Nelson, editor in chief of PW. These systems were created to shift risk away from authors and bookstores and onto publishers. But risk is something the publishing industry is less and less able to bear.

If you think about it, shipping physical books back and forth across the country is starting to seem pretty 20th century. Novels are getting restless, shrugging off their expensive papery husks and transmigrating digitally into other forms. Devices like the Sony Reader and Amazon's Kindle have gained devoted followings. Google has scanned more than 7 million books into its online database; the plan is to scan them all, every single one, within 10 years. Writers podcast their books and post them, chapter by chapter, on blogs. Four of the five best-selling novels in Japan in 2007 belonged to an entirely new literary form called keitai shosetsu: novels written, and read, on cell phones. Compared with the time and cost of replicating a digital file and shipping it around the world--i.e., zero and nothing--printing books on paper feels a little Paleolithic.

And speaking of advances, books are also leaving behind another kind of paper: money. Those cell-phone novels are generally written by amateurs and posted on free community websites, by the hundreds of thousands, with no expectation of payment. For the first time in modern history, novels are becoming detached from dollars. They're circulating outside the economy that spawned them.

Cell-phone novels haven't caught on in the U.S.--yet--but we have something analogous: fan fiction, fan-written stories based on fictional worlds and characters borrowed from popular culture--Star Trek, Jane Austen, Twilight, you name it. There's a staggering amount of it online, enough to qualify it as a literary form in its own right. Fanfiction.net hosts 386,490 short stories, novels and novellas in its Harry Potter section alone.

No printing and shipping. No advances. Maybe publishing will survive after all! Then again, if you can have publishing without paper and without money, why not publishing without publishers?

Vanity of Vanities, All Is Vanity

When Genova had reached the end of her unsuccessful search, she told the last literary agent who rejected her, "I've had enough of this. I'm going to go self-publish it." "That was by e-mail," she says. "He picked up the phone and called me within five minutes and said, 'Don't do that. You will kill your writing career before it starts.'"

It's true: saying you were a self-published author used to be like saying you were a self-taught brain surgeon. But over the past couple of years, vanity publishing has become practically respectable. As the technical challenges have decreased--you can turn a Word document on your hard drive into a self-published novel on Amazon's Kindle store in about five minutes--so has the stigma. Giga-selling fantasist Christopher Paolini started as a self-published author. After Brunonia Barry self-published her novel The Lace Reader in 2007, William Morrow picked it up and gave her a two-book deal worth $2 million. The fact that William P. Young's The Shack was initially self-published hasn't stopped it from spending 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.

Daniel Suarez, a software consultant in Los Angeles, sent his techno-thriller Daemon to 48 literary agents. No go. So he self-published instead. Bit by bit, bloggers got behind Daemon. Eventually Penguin noticed and bought it and a sequel for a sum in the high six figures. "I really see a future in doing that," Suarez says, "where agencies would monitor the performance of self-published books, in a sort of Darwinian selection process, and see what bubbles to the surface. I think of it as crowd-sourcing the manuscript-submission process."

Self-publishing has gone from being the last resort of the desperate and talentless to something more like out-of-town tryouts for theater or the farm system in baseball. It's the last ripple of the Web 2.0 vibe finally washing up on publishing's remote shores. After YouTube and Wikipedia, the idea of user-generated content just isn't that freaky anymore.

And there's actual demand for this stuff. In theory, publishers are gatekeepers: they filter literature so that only the best writing gets into print. But Genova and Barry and Suarez got filtered out, initially, which suggests that there are cultural sectors that conventional publishing isn't serving. We can read in the rise of self-publishing not only a technological revolution but also a quiet cultural one--an audience rising up to claim its right to act as a tastemaker too.

The Orchard and the Jungle

So if the economic and technological changes of the 18th century gave rise to the modern novel, what's the 21st century giving us? Well, we've gone from industrialized printing to electronic replication so cheap, fast and easy, it greases the skids of literary production to the point of frictionlessness. From a modern capitalist marketplace, we've moved to a postmodern, postcapitalist bazaar where money is increasingly optional. And in place of a newly minted literate middle class, we now have a global audience of billions, with a literacy rate of 82% and rising.

Put these pieces together, and the picture begins to resolve itself: more books, written and read by more people, often for little or no money, circulating in a wild diversity of forms, both physical and electronic, far outside the charmed circle of New York City's entrenched publishing culture. Old Publishing is stately, quality-controlled and relatively expensive. New Publishing is cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money or institutional taste. If Old Publishing is, say, a tidy, well-maintained orchard, New Publishing is a riotous jungle: vast and trackless and chaotic, full of exquisite orchids and undiscovered treasures and a hell of a lot of noxious weeds.

Not that Old Publishing will disappear--for now, at least, it's certainly the best way for authors to get the money and status they need to survive--but it will live on in a radically altered, symbiotic form as the small, pointy peak of a mighty pyramid. If readers want to pay for the old-school premium package, they can get their literature the old-fashioned way: carefully selected and edited, and presented in a bespoke, art-directed paper package. But below that there will be a vast continuum of other options: quickie print-on-demand editions and electronic editions for digital devices, with a corresponding hierarchy of professional and amateur editorial selectiveness. (Unpaid amateur editors have already hit the world of fan fiction, where they're called beta readers.) The wide bottom of the pyramid will consist of a vast loamy layer of free, unedited, Web-only fiction, rated and ranked YouTube-style by the anonymous reading masses.

And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer--electronic books aren't bound by physical constraints--and they'll be patchable and updatable, like software. We'll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don't linger on the language; you just click through. We'll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.

None of this is good or bad; it just is. The books of the future may not meet all the conventional criteria for literary value that we have today, or any of them. But if that sounds alarming or tragic, go back and sample the righteous zeal with which people despised novels when they first arose. They thought novels were vulgar and immoral. And in a way they were, and that was what was great about them: they shocked and seduced people into new ways of thinking. These books will too. Somewhere out there is the self-publishing world's answer to Defoe, and he's probably selling books out of his trunk. But he won't be for long.