Don't Change for the Sake of Change

Change is an interesting thing. It is often talked about and there are books, courses, and probably songs dedicated to it. Most people fear it and even go to extremes to avoid it, yet many, once forced to accept it, often go overboard and change too much. That is change for the sake of change instead of to improve a broken process.

Publishing is all about change, and many would say,  has been since its inception. Many publishers resisted the change to digital but now that this is no longer possible, I feel that they're throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Yes, workflow and process need to change to accommodate this new era of publishing, and even thinking has to change. But before you discard all your resources, human or otherwise, take the time to reevaluate which can be adopted and which need to be upgraded. Some publishing systems still work: editorial still need to acquire good content; production editorial, the project managers of the publishing world, still needed to ensure quality content is produced--in whatever format--on time and on budget; and marketing, sales, publicity, etc. still need to work towards higher sales. Manufacturing is still needed regardless of the size of the print run, and if they have downtime, why not allow for employee development and cross-training? Unless you choose to have e-book producers in-house, there's no reason Manufacturing/Production staff cannot work with e-books and/or learn how to--and they already know your other systems and mission.

If current employees are not able or willing to learn new skills, or you choose to produce/convert files in-house, then additional resources are needed. But before you make them a standalone department, stop and think if this makes the most sense process and morale-wise. Process-wise, the less handovers the better since each handover is an opportunity for delay, errors, and redundancy. Morale-wise, why separate e- and p-production staff instead of having them work together to incorporate best practices and an efficient process?

Change is a catalyst and can be used to inspire innovation...or to just keep making the same mistakes but in different ways. And speed is not an excuse. If you have to catch-up on a system and/or get something to market sooner, hire a contractor or consultant to fill the short-term need and take your time to think through the long-term change. Haste makes waste...and some changes are too costly to undo or redo.

Children's E-books

When I upgraded my Nook First Gen to the new Nook Easy Touch Reader, I gave my ten-year-old son my original Nook. I honestly didn't know how many kids e-books were even available: last time I had checked (granted, a while ago) there hadn't been many. Both my son and I were pretty impressed with the selection B&N now had and he quickly bought a few (much cheaper than adult ones) to get him started.

Most agree that making children's e-books enhanced and interactive makes a lot of sense and adds value beyond what the p-book can offer. After reading about all the backlist titles that are being made digital and enhanced, I started thinking back to some of my favorite series.

The first one that came to mind was the Choose Your Own Adventure series. They're still around and I tried to get my son into them a few years back. Can you imagine the potential of that in e-books? There of course is the risk of making it more of an interactive movie than an enhanced e-book, but there may be demand for both.

What series did you love as a kid that would make a great enhanced e-series?

Migrating to Digital Publishing? Answers from the Experts

(The following article first appeared in Publishing Perspectives.)

I attended Publishers Launch: E-books for Everyone Else (presented by Publishers Launch Conferences and The Center for Publishing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies) in the hopes of getting some answers to the questions I posed in my previous article, Migrating to Digital Publishing? The Six Key Questions to Ask. When I mentioned this to an industry friend at the event, his response “You have answers? I thought no one had any” was quite telling.

In addition to attending this event, I listened to a Digital Book World webcast on the same topic and spoke to several industry people who have first-hand experience on migrating content to digital.

And the truth is, there are very few “answers” everyone agrees to:

• Everyone agrees that with the constant developments in technology, it’s important to “future proof” your content as much as possible, and the current thinking is that an open-format, multiple-platform workflow, such as an XML workflow, is the way to go.
• More companies are using third-party suppliers to assist with this migration, both because they have the skill set to do so efficiently and to keep costs down. Whether you choose to use a third-party service or bring the skill set in-house, it’s still important to have people in-house with the understanding to intelligently interact, oversee, and assure the quality of the work from the third-party suppliers.
• Quality control is more important than ever. With multiple reading devices needing different outputs and tweaks, automation can only take it so far. Someone knowledgeable needs to review the files for formatting and other errors before they are released to the public.
• Metadata is more important than ever in the world of digital.

Below are some highlights from my interviews.

Michael Weinstein (most recently VP, Global Content and Media Production at Cengage Learning, and prior to that held VP positions at Oxford University Press, Pearson, Prentice Hall, and several others)

• If conversions can be automated, outsource them.
• Since don’t know what’s coming, be generic and build workflows/tagging that’s updatable: it doesn’t pay to build proprietary.

Andrea Colvin (Director, Publishing Operations at Open Road Media)

• Don’t skimp on any quality control, which most publishers do right in the print world.
• Learn the types of errors introduced by OCR and educate your proofreaders on these, creating guidelines and checklists to facilitate this.
• Have as many sets of eyes as possible looking something over to ensure that nothing has been missed, and review things at different stages for different things.
• Strive for “graceful degradation” of content: since EPUB is HTML-based it can gracefully degrade.
• “Reading is an immersive experience” and the publisher has to decide when to interrupt it and when this adds value.
• Test out different conversion partners to determine their strengths and weaknesses so you can choose the best partners for your projects. Also look for developers and different types of expertise depending on the type of the book.
• Important to have someone in-house with technical skills to go in and correct files plus have an editorial point of view.
• “Don’t split the branch of time” until it’s concluded: so print and e-files should be on same path until one goes to printer and the other to conversion house; this also allows everyone to learn best practices and makes edits easy to both parallel streams.

Pauline Ireland (Former Production and Design Director, Cambridge University Press)

• Best archive: keep a print copy of everything — you can always scan it; keep typesetting files, but be aware that proprietary typesetting systems have a limited shelf life.
• Small publishers should have robust relationships with service providers who can help them; many will be offshore, requiring time and effort upfront to get them to understand your workflows and to get it right. Go visit them and if possible; have staff on the ground at the suppliers (even for a limited period) since it’s a worthwhile investment.
• XML-preserving today’s content for an unknown future. XML allows you to do what you like and when you like with files; unless files are open-format, they won’t be usable in 10 years.
• Use conversion and content suppliers, but do have staff on-site who understand quality assurance (QA), workflows and managing suppliers; ideally they should have a background in publishing, not only technology.
• If scanning a hard copy for POD, you might as well use it for online/digital as well.
• Make the workflow for third-party rights a priority.

Cathy Felgar (Current Production Director, Academic and Professional, Cambridge University Press)

• Work on simultaneous e- and p-books. Challenges include third-party rights and non-XML workflows (e.g., LaTex files). Come to grips with third-party e-rights from contract stage, if possible.
• Use a CMS (CAMS) with XML parsing capabilities, which could be used for e-book conversions, too. Problem is, if standards change, conversion routines will have to be reconfigured.
• Future-proof content with XML or other well-structured file type so your files remain format agnostic.
• Decide what skills you want to keep in-house, which depends on size of organization: small companies should outsource; large companies can hire in-house talent.
• Taxonomy is important, and publishers need people with SEO knowledge, especially since indexing may disappear as keyword search becomes more dominant.

Overall, although every new “answer” — and new development — brings more questions with it, publishers and industry people are more aware of the viable options and the pros and cons for each choice made, as the Publishers Launch speakers demonstrated. Like much else in life, there is no one right answer for everyone, so just to stay aware, keep asking questions, and if you don’t succeed at first, try another option.

E-books for Everyone Else

(The following article first appeared in Publishing Perspectives.)

E-books for Everyone Else was the name of the Publishers Launch Conference, co-presented with NYU's Center of Publishing, that I attended on September 26th. You can check out the program at http://www.publisherslaunch.com/events/launch-new-york/program/.

I didn't know what to expect but I was pleasantly surprised. The room was crowded (and unfortunately freezing) and presentations ran the gamut from workflow to conversion to metadata to social media to distribution: something for everyone in the audience. They also tried a publishing version of "speed dating." Registrants were asked to pick the top 3 sponsors they wanted to learn more about and got about fifteen minutes with each. Mike Shatzkin would announce when it was time to move to your next speed date. I know that the sponsors I sat with had a blast and participants seemed to find it worthwhile as well.

So with an entire day of people speaking at me or with me, these are the things that stick out in my mind when I think back at the event:

• Thank the Lord quality control is being stressed. I'm embarrassed for our industry as a whole when I hear people complain about the crap e-book they bought. Not everything can be, or should be, automated and someone must look at the content--in each device to be used--before it's released to the public. 
• Metadata is more important than ever in the digital world. 
• Publishers still need to decide what to outsource and what to do themselves; the two big outsource options in the e-book world are conversion and distribution.
• With agents becoming publishers, and new digital and self-publishing options being introduced weekly, the traditional publishing lines are beyond blurred and it will be interesting to see what new relationships and business models evolve.
• Although we still don't have many answers regarding the future of publishing and e-books, we at least have more documented and thought-out options to better advise our decisions.
• With the new digital and self-publishing options, more books will be available than ever before.

Depending on your point of view, the above is either scary or exciting, but the one thing we can't argue is that publishing is far from dead. You can argue about the definition of publishing (or the what or who of publishing), but the industry is alive and kicking, bringing in fresh talent and being discussed by non-publishing people on a regular basis.

And more people reading and interested in publishing is definitely a good thing.

Quality

One of my recent bosses, who came to publishing via another industry, once commented that for a business that talks so much about quality, it's surprising how ill-defined and controlled it is. With the recent errors abounding in e-books, I hate to admit that I agree with her.

Yes, publishing is no longer an old boy’s club where the wealthy enter it for the prestige—or for something to do—and yes, whether for profit or non-profit, it is a business and needs to make money. But what is a publisher’s core value and what value do we provide our customers and authors if quality means so little to us?

Here’s what got me thinking about this:

• Just this week a romance author had to publicly apologize for a blatant and embarrassing typo in her e-book. You can read her post here, but basically “shifted” became “shitted.”
• PIA (Publishing Innovations Awards) have announced a new quality seal of approval for e-books: QED (quality, excellence, design).  Since when do we need an award to ensure quality and that we’re doing our jobs?

And here are just a sampling of posts/articles that I came up by typing “ebooks” and “errors” into my Google search:

• http://americaneditor.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/the-problem-is-publishers-dont-read-ebooks/
• http://www.the-digital-reader.com/2010/09/16/in-the-face-ebook-errors-4/
• http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100005238/ebook-publishers-must-do-more-to-eliminate-annoying-errors/
• http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/08/error-free-ebooks/

I’ll stop now, but you get the picture.

So how can publishers keep costs down without it being at the expense of quality?

1. First and foremost, every manuscript needs both copyediting and proofreading, and this should be done professionally. Writing, editing, and proofreading are distinct skill sets and just because one can do one does not mean that one can do the other well.  And even if you are one of the rare few who can, it’s a good rule of thumb to have a second fresh set of eyes to review anything you’ve written. Even professional copyeditors and proofreaders know to put things aside and go back to it with a fresh perspective.
2. Every time you change formats, a quick proofread is necessary: whether you go from hardcover to paperback or from paperback to e-book, errors are bound to happen when words reflow. It's far better for your future sales and reputation if you, the publisher--and not the author or customer--catch the mistakes. Think how quickly mistakes can be publicized today? Between tweeting, blogs, and even social media now built into e-books, the word will be out before you know it.
3. Build copyediting and proofreading into every P&L. Consider these required, non-negotiable costs of doing quality business and protecting your core values and brand.
4. Reevaluate other costs to streamline workflows, eliminate redundancies, and remove activities which do not add to your core value or business.

Maybe the QED award is necessary to remind publishers that they are meant to be gatekeepers of a higher-standard.

Publisher Value Add

Back in the day, prior to e-books, when an author "self published," this was done via a "vanity press" and was never taken seriously. With the advent of POD (print on demand), this preconception was challenged, but not severely. Then came e-books.

It is now easier than ever to publish something you've written, and to do it on your own. There are many blogs and courses out there that will teach wannabe authors how to self-publish an e-book. And with the help of either Amazon, who will carry many of these in their Kindle store, and/or the many new platforms being developed to help get these e-books to the public, what value do publishers really provide?

Let's take a step back first: how do you define a publisher? Traditional publishers vet manuscripts for what they believe can make a profit, then polish this into a finished product that (hopefully) will make them a profit. They do this by bringing together various skill sets: acquisitions editors, copy editors, production editors, typesetters, designers, proofreaders, marketers, publicists, etc. Not all of these are employed by the publisher, but those that are not, are hired on a freelance or project basis by someone who does work for the publisher. The author just has to trust these skilled professionals and do as directed.

With e-books, we now have many digital "publishers" who are offering some of these services to the wannabe author, but not all of them. Some just offer a platform; others offer ease of hiring freelancers and/or a community whereby there is support and peer review. Some will specialize in one aspect and partner with the publisher.

So in this shifting new world, how is a publisher defined and how much value does either a digital or traditional publisher still provide? I think ultimately three different parties will have to decide the answer to this question:

1. the author: How much does the author need his publisher to provide in return for splitting the profits? Some will be willing to do more work and forgo the traditional route; others will prefer the traditional route, both for the convenience--and for the prestige. But whichever the author chooses, he will need help. (It's a rare author that can copyedit his own work and even a rarer one that can also typeset, market, etc.)
2. the bookstore buyer: Amazon has chosen to carry self-published e-books but is now cracking down on their lack of quality. When a publisher puts out a book and their name is on the cover/spine, it's their reputation on the line; when there is no "publisher" and a bookstore chooses to carry a book, it's their reputation on the line. And this is where the third party comes in.
3. the consumer: What will ultimately matter to you, the reader, and all the other e-book readers out there will sway what value adds are still considered necessary. Do you, the reader, still care about writing that flows and is without grammatical and other errors? Do you still care about type that is pleasantly laid out on the screen, even when you change the font and leading, as your e-reader now allows? What do you care about enough to either boycott or to keep coming back for?

I don't know what these three parties will decide, but I do know that until quality continues to matter, publishers in all their iterations will have plenty of value they can provide a discerning and busy author. 

Choose Your Own Features E-Book

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been reading and thinking a lot about enhanced e-books. It's amazing what publishing and technology people are thinking of putting into e-books: from hyperlinks and social media to videos and music. And who knows what else is to come once the hardware, software, and workflows can keep up.

But what if you just want a straight e-book? What if you liked the words and nothing but the brilliant words that allow you to add your own mental pictures and video? What if you don't want the distractions or added expense?

Since it's all about the consumer, let's hope once e-book enhancements evolve, that the reader will be able to choose which flavor and therefore price of e-book they prefer, from the plain vanilla text-only to the chocolate-covered-with-sprinkles fully enhanced version.

And if midstream you want to upgrade to a more enhanced version,  you have the choice then to pay for the extra features. Now that would be great customer support and worth coming back for.

Another Interpretation of Enhanced E-Books

I've been reading about and listening to a lot of web casts on enhanced e-books, thanks to Digital Book World's E2BU (their Enhanced E-book University) and a somewhat whimsical idea came to me.

I know that some people love the feel and smell of books and would hate to lose that. I also know that some luxury publishers, like my last employer, actually use really expensive materials for their covers and even sometimes add scents to those covers to enhance the experience of the book...So if enhanced e-books are meant to capture all our senses--audio for auditory and video for visual--is there room for olfactory? The tactile is already being addressed with fancy e-book covers (I like the easel variety) but is there a way to build in scents, perhaps even several to choose from into those e-book covers?

Just an idea....Thoughts?

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.

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.

"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?

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.

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?

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?