I’m a firm believer in publishers as “idea advocates“, and the annual SXSW festival in Austin, TX is widely regarded as a can’t-miss gathering of  musicians, filmmakers, web designers and other creative types sharing innovative ideas that often bubble up into mainstream consciousness a few years later. (eg: Twitter launched there in 2007.)

As a result, SXSW Interactive is firmly engraved on the conference calendars of many of the savviest (and from a budget perspective, luckiest) digital professionals in publishing. Billed as “five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology”, the lineup of speakers is undeniably impressive but the program can be overwhelming for a first-timer to navigate.

This will be my first year attending, and while a few presentations immediately jumped out at me as must-sees (eg: You Are Not a Gadget author Jaron Lanier; see our review here), I decided to ask other people in publishing why they are going and what/who they are most looking forward to seeing.

“I believe it’s important for publishers to attend conferences outside of the traditional industry forums, to gain perspective from other industries, become inspired by innovation, and collaborate with unique partners,” says Kate Rados, Director of Digital Initiatives, Chelsea Green Publishing. “It’s my first time attending, so I’m very excited to get a healthy dose of digital brain food.”

“I’ve never been to SXSW before, but I’m looking forward to hearing from creative, smart people (bookish and not) about topics very near and dear to my work-online-heart,” says Maggie Hilliard, Marketing Manager, DailyLit. “I’m also excited about getting inspired by unexpected places/people/panels–something Debbie Stier mentioned she’s experienced at SXSW.”

“I love to fish in a different pond,” explained Debbie Stier, Senior Vice President & Associate Publisher, HarperStudio, and Director of Digital Marketing, HarperCollins. “I had a great time last year and learned a lot in the least likely places.”

“I’m looking forward to meeting people outside of publishing, since I’m a big believer in cross-discipline networking,” says Pablo Defendini, Producer, Tor.com. “‘I’d like to get a good sampling of the state of the art when it comes to the social web, of course. I’m also looking to get a bead on the emerging trends in tech, as well as maybe discover some good new music!”

“I’ve attended SXSWi for many years now,” says Kassia Krozser, Publisher and Chief Crank, Booksquare.com. “I love that what people talk about today becomes the mainstream conversation a few years down the road. I also leave energized thanks to the creative, can-do energy of other attendees.”

Stier, Defendini and Krozser will be bringing their own “can-do energy” to the panel “A Brave New Future for Book Publishing“, along with Matthew Cavnar (Vook). Organized by Kevin Smokler (Booktour.com), it is being billed as the unofficial sequel to last year’s controversial “New Think for Old Publishers” panel that put traditional publishers under an uncomfortably harsh spotlight when reaction to it exploded on Twitter and across a number of industry blogs.

Among the many reactionary tweets and blog posts that panel spawned, one of the best and most thorough was from Peter Miller — Publicity Director for  Bloomsbury USA; co-owner of Freebird Books in Brooklyn, NY; and, most importantly, a participant on the panel:

A little after 5:30 pm, Deb asked questioners to line up behind a microphone in the center aisle. Quickly five or six sprang up. The first one cut to the chase. Where are the new ideas we were promised? Why were we taking up precious time with this prattle? Did we have a clue? We weren’t startled by the sentiment as much as the audience’s spontaneous reaction. They erupted in a giant applause that must have made neighboring panels think we were scoring with the crowd. Deb attempted to calm things down by saying we never misrepresented this–that the point of the session was to open up the dialogue and hear what they wanted from old publishing.

kirkbiglione: Let me see if I understand this. The audience is a focus group for the panel? #sxswbp

SXSWers do not just value the DIY ethos, they revel in it. Any number of times I heard how users need to eliminate the middleman, bypass the system, build a better mousetrap. Do-it-yourself isn’t only an agent of change. It’s outlaw. It’s punk…

One person made an intriguing suggestion about applying the digital jukebox idea to books. Another complained how authors had to do their own publicity without support from their publishers. Some pitched their own websites before sitting down (a particularly common practice at SXSW). A conference handler at the back of the room signaled we had five minutes left. The last questioner delivered the parting shot. If, as an author, I can design it myself, write it myself, publish it myself, why would I bother going to a publisher at all? What purpose do you serve? Clay Shirky reiterated one of his mantras that publishing raises the signal and separates it from the noise. Aren’t you merely a filter? the questioner retorted. Raising his voice Clay boomed into the microphone, “the filter is the single most important function on the internet today.” And with that the audience was briefly back on our side.

–”How to say f*ck you in 140 characters“

In the aftermath, there was a call for publishing to better represent itself at SXSW 2010, and while Smokler’s is one of the only panels specifically focused on book publishing that made the cut, there are several intriguing panels and presentations for bookish types to consider for ideas and inspiration.

I’m participating on one that is especially relevant for authors, editors and marketers: “Why Keep Blogging? Real Answers for Smart Tweeple“. We’ll be looking at where blogs fit in a world of status updates, tweets and shortened attention spans, and besides me, the panel includes veteran bloggers Josh Fruhlinger (The Comics Curmudgeon), Lizzie Skurnick (Old Hag; author of Shelf Discovery), and Scott Rosenberg (cofounder of Salon.com; author of Say Everything); it’s moderated by Emily Gordon, former Print magazine editor and founder of EmDashes.

“It has been a long time since I entered into the world of anonymous, off-hours, should-quit-my-job pre-print-crash blogging,” says Skurnick, also a columnist for Jezebel and Politics Daily. “I’m looking forward to seeing what those who always thought of it as a real thing are doing!”

Other notable sessions of interest include:

“At a glance, Battledecks 2010 sounds good,” suggests Stier. “I’m a big fan of Anil Dash.  And I definitely want to check out Danah Boyd’s Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity.  I saw her speak last year at the Web 2.0 conference and it was a disaster, which led me to investigate who she is, and I discovered that she seems like a really cool, interesting, and smart person who had a really really really bad day at the Web 2.0 conference.  I definitely want to give her another chance!”

“Branding is fascinating to me, and publishers don’t do it nearly well enough, so I’ll check out Brand 2.0: Elevating an Icon Using Next-Gen Technologies,” Defendini declared.  “And A Conversation with Gustavo Santaolalla; Santaolalla is a legendary music producer, and a partner in crime for one of my favorite bands: Cafe Tacvba.”

“I’m looking forward to the DIYU: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education (full disclosure:  one of our authors!),” recommends Rados, “and We F*cked Up:  Happy Cog and Friends, Exploring Failures, Together. And for the REAL geek in me, Moon: 2.0: The Outer Limits of Lunar Exploration, which focuses on generating interest in Moon experiments via social media.”

You can view my full SXSW schedule, but along with the aforementioned Lanier presentation, I’m especially looking forward to What Are Analytics? A Guide To Practical Data and Zombies, Vampires & Monsters: Fostering Loyal Genre Communities.

If you’re attending SXSW Interactive, what are you looking forward to and why?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Executive Optimist for Digital Book World.

You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010; ISBN 978-0-307-26964-5)

Let’s just get this out of the way: I really like this book. This book changed the way I think about the Internet and intellectual property, and I think could change a lot of minds, but only if a critical mass of people start reading it and talking about it. So this is my Queen’s Gambit.

There are too many ideas in this book that I underlined and starred and ?ed and yes!ed to count. I’m just going to touch on a few, and especially the ones that made me think of books and publishing.

Probably the most interesting idea in this book, especially for the book world, is how the Internet’s push towards the hive mind (also known as the noosphere, a word so creepy that I almost become a Luddite every time I read it) has already damaged and threatens to essentially destroy art as we now experience it.

As Lanier puts it:

“The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush.”

A thing, I’m sure we can all agree, that is not great for writing, which pretty much lives and dies by things like the strength and believability of an author’s individual voice.

“Authorship—the very idea from the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new ideology.”

Which is pretty well borne out by a quick glance at Wikipedia (an entity to which I am not opposed, by the way). The argument on behalf of the hive mind is that many many people working together will come up with a better answer, and faster, than individuals working alone. Lanier pretty conclusively demonstrates that this is not always the case, even for things to which humanity already knows the answer.

And what about novels, of which there is no clear question, let alone a clear answer?

Most interestingly, Lanier talks about how hive mind thinking has interacted with advertising to create an entirely new hierarchy of creativity on the web.

“The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

In other words, we’ve decided, or been persuaded to decide, that original content is not worth paying for, very often with the justification that the corporations that mainly provide that content are dinosaurs who can’t keep up with technology or don’t distribute the money fairly anyway (both of which are valid points, sometimes). Ironically, though, we’ve also elevated the only artistic output of non-media corporations, advertising, to a sainted level. We expect ads on websites, blogs, nytimes.com and Pandora to pay for our content instead.

Eyeballs on content: worth less and less with every $9.99 e-book.

Eyeballs on banner ads: expected to prop up an entire Internet’s worth of information commerce.

This is something I wonder about constantly. Writing has never been a reliable way of making a living, as anybody who reads biographies will tell you. But there has always been the (somewhat) rational expectation that if you wrote something good enough that other people would enjoy reading it, or be enriched by it, somebody would eventually pay you for it. Very few people have ever gotten rich as writers, but many people have eked out a living.

The (d)evolution towards hive mind thinking and writing makes that more impossible with each passing day.

“This trajectory begs the question of how a person who is volunteering for the hive all day long will earn rent money.”

(As an aside, this is not just important to booksellers because we sell the fruits of creativity, although that’s not to be ignored. But also because what we do is something that has been increasingly crowdsourced, via Amazon’s odd algorithms and reviews, and a million other ways besides, including my willingness to share book recommendations for free on Twitter with people who have neither the willingness nor the ability to reward my professional expertise with a purchase. On my cynical days, I wonder where it all will end. Will we all be expected to work at jobs to which we’re indifferent so we can come home and do the things we love for free online? If creativity is at the heart of most careers that people love, how many of those careers will disappear as we make the group decision that creative talent is no longer something to be financially rewarded? Is this potential insanity something that can be avoided? Lanier seems to think that yes, it is. I hope he is right.)

There’s another quote in here that I think can be fairly well applied to independent bookstores, but would be interesting even if it couldn’t be. “No one’s ever been able to offer good advice for the dying newspapers,” Lanier writes, “but it is still considered appropriate to blame them for their fate.”  You could substitute publishers in there for newspapers, or independent bookstores, and the sentence reads fine.

This is not to say that newspapers and publishers and independent bookstores have all been taking advice well, certainly. Obviously, it’s not necessary for me to recount the many things that failed bookstores might have done to stay in business. But sometimes (again, on cynical days only) I wonder if even everything we’re doing at WORD, and these are all at the top of all thinking people’s bookstore advice lists, will be enough: having an online store, curating our book selection to suit our neighborhood, hosting grand events, special ordering out the wazoo, and free shipping over $50, and great customer service, and all the rest.

Can any of those things matter if creativity is no longer valued because the general belief is that the product of the group is superior to the product of the individual? I suspect they will not matter a whit if that is the case. And that is the case that Lanier worries we are heading for.

I’ll mention just one more thing that piqued my interest: the ways in which our creative culture has stalled since the prevalence of the Internet. I can’t put it better than Lanier when he writes:

“Certainly with enough time, culture will reinvent itself. But how patient should we be? I find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age…It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.”

And it’s true that mash-ups and re-mixes have become one of the pre-eminent forms of art of late. Lanier points out that while most of the decades of the twentieth century have their own distinct musical styles, due to rapid leaps and changes in the possibilities of music over the course of the century, there’s very little that distinguishes that last ten years or so of music from the ten years previous. There’s a lot of throwbacks, a lot of retro music—and not all of it necessarily bad, and some of it quite good—but also not the overhauling quirks of imagination that propelled music forward several decades ago.

I don’t know that I agree with all the conclusions that Lanier draws from this observation, but I think it’s a very good point.

Again, it’s also echoed in the book world. For all the expansion of book technology, there’s been precious little expansion of writing formats. I’ve always wondered why the main focus of e-readers has been a fancier version of reading a .pdf one page at a time on a screen small enough to fit in my purse. Even things like the Vook seem to me like the offspring of a book and the jump scenes in a video game, to be honest. Emily Pullen at Skylight has written movingly about her desire to see the boundaries of this new medium pushed a little. Writing and storytelling themselves seem also to be at a relative standstill; “it’s all been done already” echoes off every bookstore wall and writing garret.

There are also a few things in this book that I disagree with; namely, Lanier’s characterization of (and subsequent dismissal of) social media rankles, for me.

Perhaps this is because I’ve had a uniquely good experience with social media, but I doubt I’m the only one. His main argument against its ubiquity? Its calculated personalities: we spend an absurd amount of time crafting our online personas, and there are few true friendships to be found in social media.

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.”

It would take more than one person’s anecdotes to disprove his belief, I guess, but let me be the first to say that I have formed several true and important (and unexpectedly weird) friendships due to social media. This is partially because I experience it through the existing book community, and probably also because that community is full of fantastic people who I am predisposed to like. Nevertheless, here is a short list of people I never would have met, let alone shared booze and good times with, if not for social media spurring the whole thing: Jenn! Suzanna! Melissa! Michele! And for Pete’s sake, Josh and also Liberty, neither of whom I’ve even met in person yet, but who I would invite to my wedding if I had one tomorrow.

My friendships with these people are almost exactly like many of my real world friendships, except that we type with each other more than talk.

For those six reasons and many others, I feel that Lanier is wrong to write off social media as he does, although I understand why he does: like many of the things he talks about in the book, it’s a tool that is not always well-wielded. Which is not to say that everybody should use social media the way that I do, just that a lot of the anxieties and potential problems he sees in it are non-existent for me and I suspect a lot of other people. (Aside from the “favorite music” prompt on Facebook. I hate that section.)

This is an especially odd problem because Lanier so clearly draws a line between the capabilities of tools/means of communication and what people actually do with them elsewhere in the book, especially with his emphasis on the importance of the individual voice and authorship.  Different types of communication are best served by different forms of media, but a person can retain their individuality and sense of self in all of them if desired. Social media is still developing in that regard, but I think Lanier is too focused on the primary implementations of it.

In any event, I would recommend this book to anybody reading this review. If I were Oprah, I would pick this for my book club.

If you love technology and are excited about its future, you need to read this book, because there are a lot of things you and I haven’t thought about yet. You won’t agree with all of it, but at the end I think you will agree with me on this point: we are not hearing enough voices talking about human interaction with technology. We hear a lot of “it’s fantastico!” and a lot of “it’s an abomination!” and not much in-between.

For that alone, this book is very important.

So too, if you do not like technology, or are nervous about it, I think you should also read this book. Lanier is one of the first technophiles I’ve ever read who acknowledges and treats as valid many of the anti-tech arguments I hear on a regular basis. Primarily, I thought often of a point that Jonathon of Talking Leaves…Books made in a discussion about e-books at NAIBA in 2009. Though I didn’t agree with everything he said, I did agree when he cautioned everyone in the audience to keep an eye on who is the greatest champion of e-books, and what they have to gain from the success of e-books. (Obviously, this applies more to Amazon than Booksquare.)

This same idea—who gains from the current and coming technological changes, and what do they gain?—is a crucial underpinning of this book, and I will never regard digital advances in the same way because of it.

I’m sorry this review was so long and rambling. Scarily, it was originally twice this length! There’s just so much to talk about wrt this short little book. (On that note, though: a $23.95 hardcover for 200 pages about, you know, changing the way we look at the digital world? Wowza, would I ever have played that one differently). Anyway, one of the things I’m most excited to see in the coming months is the responses of many other people to this book and the ideas therein. I encourage all of you to get your hands on it, read it, digest it, and comment on it as well.

[This review was originally published at Bookavore.com and has been reprinted with Ms. Anderson's permission.]

Stephanie Anderson is the manager of WORD Brooklyn, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a “voracious reader with a certain verbal attitude”.

By

A growing number of authors and publishers freely distribute their books electronically to increase the visibility of their work. These books, for both academic and general audiences, cover a wide variety of genres, including technology, law, fantasy, and science fiction. Some authors claim that free digital distribution has increased the impact of their work and their reputations as authors. [1] But beyond increased exposure, a vital question for those with a commercial stake in selling books is, “What happens to book sales if digital versions are given away?”

One answer may come from the National Academies Press (NAP), which makes the text of all of its publications freely accessible. “Consequently,” reported Michael Jensen, Director of Publishing Technologies at NAP, “we are very well indexed by search engines.” [2] Jensen wrote that as a result of this indexing they receive many visitors, a small percentage of whom purchase books. Jensen reported that NAP’s 1997 publication “Toxicologic Assessment of the Army’s Zinc Cadmium Sulfide Dispersion Tests” had 11,500 online visitors in 2006. Those visitors “browsed approximately four book pages each. Of those, four bought a print book at $45, and two bought the PDF at $37.50. So 0.05% of the visitors to that particular book purchased it, even though they could read every page free online.” [3] Thus, a nine-year-old out-of-print publication that otherwise would likely have been inaccessible was viewed 11,000 times and purchased six times.

The Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago digitally distributes free copies of its books, and recently reported that print sales have not decreased. Specifically they noted that “[a]fter the complimentary distribution of twenty-one titles in 2008 that had for many years only been available in print, sales of these titles increased by 7% compared with the previous two years.” [4]

The question of how freely distributing an electronic version of a work affects print sales is difficult, if not impossible, to answer experimentally because there is no way to simultaneously release and not release free versions of a book. It is not possible to determine causation; nevertheless, the effect of free distribution on print sales is an important issue to examine.

In the present study we explored how free digital book distribution influenced book sales in the short term by examining a series of books that were released in print at one point in time, and then later released in a free digital format. Our specific question was, “Are book sales in the eight weeks following a book’s free digital release different from the eight weeks prior to this release?” Because most books have a pattern of declining sales as time goes by, our assumption was that sales would decrease slightly in the eight weeks following the free release.

Method

We followed the lead of Tim O’Reilly in using Nielsen BookScan to track the data on book sales before and after free versions were available. [5] BookScan tracks point-of-sales data from most major booksellers, meaning that it tracks the number of books actually sold to customers, as opposed to books sold by distributors to retailers. Notable booksellers that BookScan does not track include Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club. [6] In general, BookScan estimates that it tracks approximately 70% of all book sales in the United States.

Because BookScan tracks sales by week, we had to exercise some judgment in designating which weeks were “pre” and which were “post.” For example, if a free digital version was released on a Friday, some of the sales that week would be when the book was freely available and others would not be. If the release date of the free version was such that five or more days of the week fell into either a “pre” or “post” category, we assigned it to that category. In instances where the free version was released in the middle of week we did not count that week at all in our analysis; rather we tracked the eight weeks before and after the week the free version was made available. To protect BookScan’s proprietary business information, we did not link the sales figures with specific book titles in this paper.

We organized the books we studied into four different groups. The first group consisted of seven nonfiction books that had digital versions that were released at various times. The second group consisted of five science fiction/fantasy titles that had digital versions that were released at various times. The third group consisted of five science fiction/fantasy books that were released together by Random House. The fourth group consisted of 24 science fiction/fantasy books released by Tor Books. The Tor group was different from the previous three in that Tor ran a special promotion in which they released a new book each Friday. The book was available for free download only for one week and only to those who registered for Tor’s newsletter. With the other three groups, once a book was released in a free digital format it remained available, at least for several weeks, and in many cases, indefinitely.

It is important to note that some publishers, such as the National Academies Press, allow readers to view only a page at a time, and make the downloading of an entire book difficult. This was not the case with the specific books we studied. With two exceptions all of the books were available to be downloaded as entire PDF document. The two exceptions were Cult of iPod and Cult of Mac. Rather than making PDF versions of these books available to download from a static site, the author of these two books used BitTorrent to encourage the spread of the book. [7]

Some books were available free in digital formats beyond PDF. All of the books released by Random House were available in Stanza, an e-book format commonly used on the iPhone, Kindle, or at Scribd.com, the social publishing site that allows anyone to post a work. Several of the Tor books were made available in additional formats such as Mobipocket, a format used on some “smart” cell phones and personal digital assistants. At a minimum, all books except the two previously described were available as complete PDF downloads.

[View the full data from the results at The Journal of Electronic Publishing.]

Discussion

Perhaps the most significant finding of this study was the contrasting results received by Tor and the other three groups studied. With one exception, sales of the nonfiction titles increased after a free digital release, and when the sales of the books were combined, sales were up 5%. The majority of the fantasy/science fiction books that were not part of a group release also had increased sales, and as a group their sales increased 26%, largely as a result of “Title 12.” Four of the five Random House books saw sales gains after the free versions were released; in total, combined sales of those five books increased 9%. These three groups were in contrast to our initial hypothesis that book sales would decline. Although we cannot say that the free e-books caused sales to increase, a correlation exists between a free e-book and increased print sales.

The results of the Tor book sales were quite different. Only four of the twenty-four books saw increased sales during the eight weeks after the free version was made available. Two of these books (titles 32 and 41) both had releases of paperback editions that preceded the free book by only a few weeks. Thus for the majority of the “pre” weeks, a paperback version was not available. These newly released paperback versions could easily explain why the “pre” sales of these titles were less than the “post” sales.

The book with the most dramatic pre–post difference (title 40) was released just ten weeks before the free digital version was released. It is possible that what was measured with this title was the natural decline of book sales over time instead of a result of a free version being made available. But even when these three books were excluded from the analysis, combined sales of the remaining 21 books decreased 18%.

Why were the results from Tor so different from the others? This question cannot be answered with certainty. The only thing we know is that Tor’s model of making the books available for one week only and requiring registration in order to download the book was substantially different from the models used to create free versions of the other books we studied. Further research is necessary to determine if the Tor results were related to their model of free book distribution, a natural drop in sales, or if other factors account for the decreased sales.

Conclusion

The present study indicates that there is a moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sales increases. However, free digital books did not always equal increased sales. This result may be surprising, both to those who claim that when a free version is available fewer people will pay to purchase copies, as well as those who claim that free access will not harm sales. The results of the present study must be viewed with caution. Although the authors believe that free digital book distribution tends to increase print sales, this is not a universal law. The results we found cannot necessarily be generalized to other books, nor be construed to suggest causation. The timing of a free e-book’s release, the promotion it received and other factors cannot be fully accounted for. Nevertheless, we believe that this data indicates that when free e-books are offered for a relatively long period of time, without requiring registration, print sales will increase.

Although this article has focused on print sales, it should be noted that in addition to print sales, publishers and authors may have other reasons for releasing free electronic versions. As Anderson has pointed out, there are many ways to make “free” profitable. [8] Increasing electronic sales may be an additional motive. For example, it is possible that Kindle book sales of second and third books in a series increased dramatically when the first book was available for free. We cannot determine if this happened, because Amazon does not release Kindle book sales figures. In addition, publishers and authors may have motivations indirectly related to sales. For example, although Tor may have lost sales as a result of their free e-book promotion, the customer information harvested and the publicity gained may have been more valuable than sales they perhaps lost.

Another factor that we did not analyze was the differences in the size of the audience for the books we studied. Even within the four groups there were large differences in total sales of specific titles. Some of the fiction books had sold several hundred thousand copies, others fewer than five thousand. Future studies might examine relationships between the potential audience for a book and the impact of free digital distribution.

In addition, we did not study how free books affect the sales of other titles by an author. For example, all the books released by Random House were the first books in a series. Future analysis needs to be done to determine whether sales of other books by an author (e.g., later books in a series) are influenced by making one of an author’s works freely available.

As books increasingly become available in digital formats, the effects of free distribution may rapidly change. The explosive growth of Kindle and other e-book formats could dramatically impact how free distribution affects for-profit sales and even alter the relative importance of print sales. As the electronic publishing industry matures it will be increasingly important to research the effects of free distribution of electronic books.

[This paper was refereed by the Journal of Electronic Publishing’s peer reviewers, and has been reprinted here with the permission of Mr. Hilton.]

John Hilton III received his M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and currently is a Ph.D. student in Instructional Psychology at Brigham Young University. He is interested in researching open-access issues, particularly the creation and use of open educational resources, and looking at how free digital book distribution affects print sales and the impact of books.

David Wiley is an associate professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University. His previous appointments include the director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, a nonresident fellow of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, a National Science Foundation–funded postdoctoral fellow, and a visiting scholar at the Open University of the Netherlands. He is also the recipient of the National Science Foundation’s prestigious Young Researcher/CAREER award.

By Marian Schembari, Contributing Editor, Digital Book World

Everyone in publishing has been talking about “change”, throwing the term “social media” around like a game of monkey in the middle, and more often than not, we fret about these changes and few seem to know what exactly to do about it.

The most innovative and daring among us, though, don’t fret; they take chances.

Sometimes they work out (Pablo Defendini with Tor.com), and sometimes they don’t (Don Linn with Quartet), but the old saying applies: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

The best example of this at the 2010 Digital Book World Conference was the “Synergizing the Book and Web” panel, where we had a chance to peek into the minds of four very different people with four very exciting endeavors, each attempting to combine book know-how and web savvy to create something new.

The panelists were Will Schwalbe of Cookstr, Lisa Holton of Fourth Story Media, Hillel Cooperman of Jackson Fish Market and author Alison Norrington.

Check out what these incredible innovators had to say for themselves:

Cookstr

The enthusiastic and charming Will Schwalbe is the founder of Cookstr, having left his position as editor-in-chief of Hyperion after 11 years. Cookstr’s concept is essentially “recipes you’ll love, from cookbooks we trust.”

So far, 300 chefs and authors are registered on the site and every day an author and recipe is featured. With the ever-expanding amount of free resources available on the web, cookbooks are having a rough time of it, but Schwalbe is constantly playing with new ways to monetize Cookstr and compensate its contributors.

The website offers the option to buy cookbooks and also hosts a Wine of the Month Club, where you can sign up and get a cookbook and two bottles of wine delivered to your door.

Monetization also comes in the form of advertising revenue shared with the rightsholder (usually publishers) and Schwalbe pointed out that they are the only cooking site that pays content creators for their content.

Additionally, the Cookstr site isn’t the only place that content can be accessed. Schwalbe is slowly creating a syndicated experience and now has deals with Bravo, whose recipe search is powered by Cookstr, and has partnered with the Daily Beast.

A Story Before Bed

This brilliant idea came not from a publishing veteran but from a software developer, Hillel Cooperman, who wanted to create a space that allows absent parents and grandparents to read to their kids.

The idea of A Story Before Bed came from the fact that Cooperman and his family are based in Seattle, while his parents live in Maryland, “2,744 traveling miles away.” He tried Skype as a way for his parents to read books to his kids, but the video was low quality; then he tried to videotape his parents reading with a scanned copy of the book.

Cooperman showed a demo featuring his daughter reading The Three Little Pigs, and the entire audience melted into a puddle of toddler-induced goo. Watch the video here.

(The best part is in the first few seconds when you see it dawn on her that she can’t actually read!)

A Story Before Bed has a ton of amazing features that make those little things you do with your kids possible, even when you’re far away. The books are 3D and the kids can see both the video of their parent/grandparent reading and the book itself. Adding to the cool factor is that the pages of the book turn in sync with the reading.

As for compensation, Cooperman said they have contracts with individual rightsholders, and at $6.99 a book, a percentage goes to them. In a surprising twist, Cooperman pointed out that they didn’t take on any investors, saying investors and The Man are “the same dude.”

“With software. we can be a lot more aggressive with experimentation.”

Alison Norington

Speaking of experimentation, author Alison Norrington takes the cake. A bestselling chic-lit novelist, Norrington experimented with her most recent book, Staying Single, by telling the story through a wide variety of digital platforms. The book’s main site consisted of daily posts where readers could subscribe for free (about 800 subscribers total) and receive a chapter via email every day.

But Norrington didn’t stop there. Her protagonist, Sophie Regan, had profiles on a number of social networking sites including Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Second Life [Note: most of these profiles are no longer online]. She set up forums, interacted with readers and produced short YouTube documentaries featuring bad chat up lines, diving further into Sophie’s story.

Through this experimentation, Norrington learned a lot about what works in the digital world and what doesn’t. She thinks the genre might have actually held her back.

“With romance,” she said, “people don’t want to get involved. It’s not like crime; they just want to be told the story.” She also said she would have spent more time in preproduction and more time on YouTube, which apparently brought in the most blog traffic.

None of this was monetized as Norrington emphasizes it was all highly experimental, but she does want to try and sell the story as a book with the additional content.

The Amanda Project

“Fourth Story Media are doing very, very cool shit with transmedia storytelling.”

Ryan Chapman

The Amanda Project is a first of its kind transmedia experience – “an interactive, collaborative fictional mystery for girls ages 13 & up, told across a variety of different media including an 8-book series, a website that features games, writing, art & social networking, and a related series of blogs, satellite sites, music, and merchandise.”

It tells the story of Amanda Valentino, a mysterious high school student who “disappeared on the Ides of March,” and readers are invited to become a part of the story as they help the main characters search for her. Those stories become an integral part of the site, and some contributors have an opportunity to be published via a partnership with HarperCollins.

Lisa Holton, founder of Fourth Story Media, said, “everything is aggregated, from creating a voice to creating a sense of her character” and credits Our Stories as the “heart and soul of the site.”

Most recently, The Amanda Project partnered up with ModCloth to create a contest for Amanda readers. Girls used Polyvore.com to create a collage of clothes they thought Amanda would wear, and the winner received a $50 ModCloth certificate and a free signed book.

What an awesome and perfect example of synergizing the book and the web!

With intiatives like these, who could possibly worry about the future of publishing? Not me.

Marian Schembari digs social media and books. Usually at the same time.

Topic: Publishing Math Games

This episode of The Roundtable was webcast live at 1pm EST on March 4, 2010.

Subscribe to the audio podcast here. DBW Members can access the interactive video archive of The Roundtable here.

Featuring:

Pablo Defendini, Producer/Showrunner, Tor.com
Kate Rados, Dir. of Digital Initiatives, Chelsea Green

Special Guests:

Jane Litte, co-founder, Dear Author
Heather McCormack, Book Review Editor, Library Journal
Brett Sandusky, Digital Marketing Mgr, Kaplan

Moderated by
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, Dir. of Programming & Business Development, Digital Book World

Links:

Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book, NY Times

At a glance, it appears the e-book is more profitable. But publishers point out that e-books still represent a small sliver of total sales, from 3 to 5 percent. If e-book sales start to replace some hardcover sales, the publishers say, they will still have many of the fixed costs associated with print editions, like warehouse space, but they will be spread among fewer print copies.

Moreover, in the current print model, publishers can recoup many of their costs, and start to make higher profits, on paperback editions. If publishers start a new e-book’s life at a price similar to that of a paperback book, and reduce the price later, it may be more difficult to cover costs and support new authors.

The Math of Publishing a Book in Print or Electronic Format, TeleRead

As ebooks reach a tipping point where they can actually offset the calculations that a big publisher must make in sizing a 6-to-7-figure print run for a prospective bestseller, they can provide a powerful hedge for the publisher against the kind of huge losses, from unamortized front-end production outlays, that are symbolized so vividly on hundreds of bookstore remainder tables all over the country each year. Regardless of whether it’s price at $12.99 or $9.99, you’ll never see an ebook on a remainder table.

The Future for Publishing: Hint, It’s Not E-Books, The Big Money

Remember the Christmastime price war on best-selling hardcovers? Combined with the mass merchandisers, this 37 percent of the book market represents the heart of the business and the focus of much effort on the part of publishers.

For the big six conglomerates, this represents their future much more than e-books do. It’s a high-volume business that responds well to what the big publishers are good at, acquiring titles for large sums and moving books rapidly through the distribution channel.

Urgent note to book industry: There’s a better way to window eBooks, Forrester

Dear book industry, I’m so sorry to tell you this, but your books really aren’t worth $25. Just like newspapers weren’t really worth what people were paying for them and magazines, either. And CDs, and DVDs. These were all worthy of a high price when analog economics were the only economics. When people understood that they paid $25 to get some paper, ink, and a binding, all of which had to be warehoused, shipped, and slotted on shelves in warm stores with muzak and imported coffee odors wafting through the environment.

A digital book suffers from none of those impediments. Therefore: it should be cheaper. Stop glorying in historical prices and accept the fact that a digital book should not cost $25 unless it comes with some awesome, exclusive premium that makes it worthy of such a price. Otherwise, $9.99 is darn awesome a price to pay, given how cheap it is to deliver an eBook (which has fewer bytes in it than a TV episode sold for $1.99 on iTunes).

Have Publishers Helped Devalue “Content”?, Digital Book World

The inability to easily share content, not just with friends but even amongst one’s own devices (current and future), is one of the primary limitations of eBooks and has nothing to do with the quality (or lack thereof) of the eBook format. As more incompatible devices are sold, become obsolete and need to be replaced, it will likely become an even bigger issue than it currently is among the small but extremely vocal group of early adopters.

What happens when Kindle owners decide they want an iPad? Or disappointed Nook owners decide to buy a Kindle? Or one of the slew of new eReaders introduced at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show gains traction?

What can publishers do to change the value perception of their “content”, regardless of the “container,” or is that battle already lost?

How to Maximize Your Entertainment Dollar, Bargaineering

On the face of it, $59.99 per game (recently MW2 was lowered to $45), it seems expensive right? I mean one game for over sixty dollars after taxes? Seems absurd until you start comparing it with forms of entertainment.

Here are some forms of entertainment to compare it with:

• Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol: $31.50 for 17 hours, 51 minutes, $1.76 an hour.
• Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2: $45, at 72 hours so far, $0.63 an hour (and lowering).
• Cable Television – $60 a month, 161.5 hours a month (according to NielsenWire), $0.37 an hour.
• Movie – 2 hours for $10, $5 an hour
• Disney Theme Park – $79 per day, ~10 hours a day, $7.90 an hour

Notice a theme? You’re either buying or renting entertainment.

Twitter (As RTd by @DigiBookWorld):

RT @katerados: need to talk about danger of pub industry positioned as ‘the man’ therefore inspiring consumers 2 complain re: price. #dbw

RT @jimhanas: When you start trying to ‘educate’ your customers, it’s the beginning of the end for any industry. #dbw

RT @kellymcclymer: Authors just don’t feel valued by publishers (because the rules have changed — education will fix that #dbw

RT @jane_l: some authors are not very good at marketing and shouldn’t be out there marketing, just my opinion #dbw

RT @katerados: re: digital marketing – It Takes a Village to mkt every book #dbw

RT @jennybullough: #dbw I have to ask, though, why tens of millions of women worldwide are considered “niche”.

RT @FictionMatters: Isn’t the problem that publishers need to dual brand – once for author and once for the publisher? #dbw 15 minutes ago via web

RT @jennybullough” #dbw Most pubs’ strength is marketing book not author. Authors strength is building long-term relationship w readers. 14 minutes ago via web

RT @QOfTheDayBook: “Social Media is free, except for the time you spend on it.” @bsandusky #dbw 13 minutes ago via web

RT @bakersmark: It behooves publisher’s to create an experience with ebooks that gives the consumer a feeling of real value. #dbw yes! 12 minutes ago via web

RT @crych: Librarians want to be included in the conversation about ebooks, marketing, and pricing. -@hmccormack #dbw

Roundtable thanks to @katerados @jane_l @bsandusky @hmccormack @pablod and attendees. Check #DBW for great commentary! -@glecharles

“The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife. She wants all the information you can give her.”

–David Ogilvy

Jane Litte is a lawyer, an avid eBook reader, and the co-founder of the popular (and sometimes controversial) DearAuthor.com, “a romance review blog by readers for readers”. If you’re a romance author or publisher, you want her to love your book, and probably cringe at the thought of being featured in the notorious #romfail tweets that led to the Romance Writers Association not renewing her membership.

“I started Dear Author with a friend of mine four years ago,” Litte explains. “We had belonged to a small internet mailing group bound by our love for romance novels. As the internet mailing group activity was waning, reader blogs were on the rise. With the help and encouragement of other reader bloggers, I started Dear Author. We thought we would write our reviews and engage other reader bloggers and be thrilled if even 100 people visited per day. ”

According to Compete.com, Dear Author has far exceeded Jane’s early expectations, with traffic in January estimated at over 22,000 visitors and over 40,00 page views.

How do authors and publishers feel about Dear Author?

“The reaction from authors has been mixed. Some believe we are devoted to tearing down books and authors,” explains Litte. “Some believe that we are too outspoken and demand too much from authors and publishers in terms of ethical behavior, quality products, and thoughtfulness in prose. Others enjoy the blog, the reviews, and even the opinion pieces we do which can be provocative.”

“Publishers, for the most part, view Dear Author as a way to publicize their books and have been very supportive by providing books for giveaways and galley copies for review.”

Essentials of Digital Books from the Consumer’s Point of View

At last week’s Tools of Change Conference in New York City, Litte teamed up with with Angela James (Carina Press) and Sarah Wendell (Smart Bitches Trashy Books) to present the findings of their survey, “Essentials of Digital Books from the Consumer’s Point of View”, the slides and data from which she’s shared with us.

“We promoted the survey on our own blogs and on ereader sites like mobileread.org, Amazon, teleread.org, and Nook boards,” says Litte. “We were trying to get a broad range of responses.”

While not scientific by standard definitions, they received over 2700 responses from passionate readers — approximately half of Verso’s response and more than five times BISG’s — and nearly 2/3rds left detailed comments that make for interesting reading for publishers, authors and eBook pundits alike.

“Ebook tags and filenames for authors & titles are not easily sorted by author LAST name and by series order. This is a HUGE frustration for me as I want to be able to easily know what order to read books in a series!”

“We want the same time and consideration put into ebooks as is put into hardcover books.”

“US-based publishers need to recognize that the publishing world does not end at the border. If they wish to increase their sales, they need to increase the availability of formats available to other countries.”

“Bloody geographical restrictions! Isn’t my non-US currency good enough??”

One of the most notable highlights was the response to this question:

Do you feel like publishers care about you as an ebook reader?

75.11% said “NO”

“I thought the response was very good,” Litte said. “My main takeaway is that readers are hungry to have a conversation with publishers.”

Publishers Need to Engage Their Readers Directly

I asked Litte for her three primary takeaways from the survey, for publishers and authors, and like any good lawyer would, she offered four:

1. Readers really want to be heard. They want to be engaged. I think that there is a real opportunity for authors and publishers to cultivate relationships with readers for the benefit of all parties.

2. Readers want flexibility. Many of the responses to the survey decried DRM not because they wanted to share but because they wanted to own the product that they paid for and DRM prevents free use of the product. Ownership has value to readers and DRM devalues the concept of ownership. Readers want to highlight and annotate. They want to be able to search and sort. They want to be able to organize their library and then they want to be able to read that library on any device that they own now or will own in the future. They can’t do those things with DRM.

3. Quality! Publishers need to expend as much effort producing the digital book as the print book. The readers in the survey commented that the formatting for text was off, not to mention the multiple spelling and punctuation errors that appear. The digital books are not up to par with the print books in terms of quality.

4. Geographic limitations are a thing of the past. Geographic limitations are antiquated. Because readers know that there are books available in digital format, they are not willing to wait until an author sells those rights to their market. They just want the book. They are willing to pay for it but right now readers are being forced into the pirate market and they are learning how to get books for free rather than through a legitimate marketplace because there is no legitimate marketplace for many of these non-US readers. This is a very real issue that needs to be addressed now rather than five years from now.

Jane Litte is the co-founder of DearAuthor.com, “a romance review blog by readers for readers.” She blogs about books, technology, and life. They converge at some point.

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Executive Optimist for Digital Book World.

My passion for metadata isn’t a big secret – since my days at Muze and B&N.com, I’ve witnessed firsthand how good metadata helps people find the books they are looking for, and how bad metadata prevents people from finding what they want.

Why is this relevant now?

Well, the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) showed us that there is a great interest in ebook readers – 23 of them debuted there, and an entire “Ebook Zone” was created. Apple is negotiating with publishers to sell content (books, magazines, newspapers) on the iPad. With all these digitized books, search becomes more crucial than ever – web search is the ONLY way people are going to purchase these digital products.

Discovery/review services like NetGalley – as well as all the ecommerce sites – are heavily reliant on metadata not just for listing titles, but also for search algorithms themselves. (You’d think that would go without saying, but it doesn’t.)

Whether it’s “semantic” search or a more traditional browsing hierarchy, search technologies rest on metadata. Tags, definitions, clarifications (“when we say ‘porcelain’ we mean fine china, not toilets”) are all necessary to guide users to the information they want.

This metadata may not come in the form of the traditional ONIX (ONline Information EXchange) feed. If a book file is marked up in XML (Extensible Markup Language) (whether via InDesign or anything else), the title, author, BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) and LC subject codes, price, publisher, and copyright date can all be easily derived from that book file – because those data points are defined in the file (usually in the front matter) with tags.

But just as with ONIX, what’s inside those tags has to be correct. This has a better shot at happening if the search engine is pulling from the book itself (the author name, for example, is not likely to be misspelled in the actual book).

In recently-released recommendations to the publishing industry, Book Industry Communication (BIC) has stated: “Publishers must retain responsibility, wherever possible and appropriate, for the metadata of the products they publish, in all formats, print and digital.”

Another company, Giant Chair has built its entire business around hosting a metadata platform for publishers: “When equipped with the appropriate tools, publishers are naturally the most qualified and motivated source for metadata creation and enrichment.”

Which makes sense!

Except in the real world it doesn’t quite play out that way. In my career, I’ve seen lots of publisher-generated metadata. There’s a reason why NetRead, Eloquence, and other data-scrubbing services exist. There’s a reason why Ingram, Bowker, and Baker & Taylor have departments of data editors who normalize and standardize that data. There’s a reason why librarians spend countless hours re-cataloguing titles for WorldCat.

There’s a reason why BISG launched its Product Data Certification Program.

And that reason is: while publishers make the books, they continue not to pay sufficient attention to the accuracy of their data. While publishers are the definitive source of who the author is, what the list price is, what the book is about…they are not recording a lot of that information accurately. Because if they were, Fran Toolan and Greg Aden would have to find new things to do. Richard Stark would suddenly find himself with weeks and weeks of free time. Thousands of library cataloguers would be out of work. Ingram, Bowker, and B&T databases would be redundant. PDCP would not be necessary.

But good metadata IS publishers’ responsibility, fundamentally. They can outsource that responsibility, but ultimately it does all come back to the publishers. As our digital landscape explodes – as web search becomes not just one way but THE way readers find what’s next on their reading lists – metadata only becomes more important.

If your sales are dipping, it’s entirely possible that readers can’t find your books. Take a look at your data. The solution is probably there.

[This article was originally published on LJNDawson.com and has been reprinted here with the permission of Ms. Dawson.]

Laura Dawson is a 20+ year veteran of the book industry, specializing in its technology issues. She has worked at Doubleday, Muze, Barnes & Noble.com, SirsiDynix, and as an independent consultant whose clients have included R. R. Bowker, Chuckwalla, McGraw-Hill, the Book Industry Study Group, Ingram Library Services, Audible, IBS/Bookmaster North America, Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, Lexis-Nexis, Cosimo Books, and Dial-A-Book.

By Emily Williams, co-chair, BISG Rights Subcommittee

“This is an era when you have to give the consumer – or hopefully sell to the consumer – what the consumer wants. If you don’t you run into lost sales, piracy, and also losing the consumer not just to other books or to pirated books but to other media. Looking at that, territory can very much get in the way.”

- Devereux Chatillon, Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP

“There is a local knowledge that would be lost if you went to a more global setting. Aside from the revenue stream of I can sell this twice, I think there is a real danger to giving rights to someone who doesn’t know what to do with them.”

- Miriam Kriss, Irene Goodman Agency

“The reason you publish two separate editions is that there’s a value that’s created in the UK. It’s the way it’s packaged, it’s the way it’s presented. Let’s say there’s a country where the currency is really bad, where the math [for US or UK pricing] doesn’t work. You could create an edition just for that country. We could create an ebook edition priced specifically for the economics of the EU [open market]. We create value because we publish and present books in different ways to different audiences.”

- John Schline, Penguin Group USA

There is a new conversation — to put it in polite terms — bubbling up around the edges of the growing ebook market.

With mainstream publishers and retailers embracing (and battling over) ebooks comes the promise of wider access to content for readers around the world, along with the instant gratification of immediate download and zero shipping charges. Readers could also search retailers freely, regardless of what country they operated in, comparing prices for the UK or US or Canadian editions of the same book.

Briefly, I’m sure this seemed like utopia. The global promise of the internet fulfilled! One world market for literature! The end of national borders!

Then the cold reality of territorial restrictions descended, in the form of unpleasant little messages informing the would-be buyer that, essentially, your currency is no good here. We’re not allowed to sell this book to readers based outside of the US (most often it was the US, where the ebook market is so far at its most developed). The anger was immediate as a chasm opened up between discoverability of titles and the consumer’s ability to buy those titles once he or she had tracked them down.

Just as publishers are trying to learn how to cater to a newly important and growing base of ebook readers, one vocal group of ebook consumers seems angrier than ever.

These readers are impatient with explanations of why territorial restrictions came to exist.

They see the book and want to buy it, and fail to understand why no one seems to want to accept their money. On forums they indignantly demand answers: What is wrong with the book publishers, are they so hidebound they’ll pass up perfectly good sales because of outdated business practices?

Not to add fuel to the fire, but it’s really not that simple.

Territorial rights evolved as a way of serving readers – and authors – better, and for the most part I would argue they still do. The problem is that we now find ourselves at a difficult moment when the transition to digital publishing is moving at very different speeds in different countries, leaving some of the savviest digital consumers mismatched with publishers who are still scrambling to figure out a digital strategy for all the books to which they hold rights.

Why did we start breaking out rights by country to begin with?

Language is an obvious barrier, but is it really necessary to have different publishers each put out their own edition of the same book in the UK and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and South Africa and the US, where we all speak (some form of) English? The answer to this depends on the book, because some books travel better than others, but if a book has a sizable audience in any given country I think it’s better served by having a local publisher who understands the market and can help it reach all the readers who might be interested in reading it.

Those readers are also better served, in the best of cases, by having a local publisher who knows where to find them, what cover will best signal to them the book’s appeal, which media can best match the book with its audience, and which retailers are most likely to reach them and at what price. Any big online retailer is good at giving you what you know you already want, but creating that desire in the first place – getting the word out about a great new title or author – still tends to be a local specialty, and one that doesn’t scale well on the global web.

One of my favorite examples of this is Jennifer Lee Carrell’s INTERR’D WITH THEIR BONES, published in the US by Penguin as a literary thriller in hardcover and trade paperback while in the UK, Sphere put it straight into mass market as THE SHAKESPEARE SECRET by J.L. Carrell. Who was right? Both editions did well, because they were geared to the realities of their local market.

What appealed to US readers as an erudite but swashbuckling mystery sold better in the UK off supermarket racks as an action-packed code-cracker.

Wishing away borders does not make real differences in national character disappear, nor does it magically do away with variations in the retail, economic and media environment within each country. All the same, the frustration of readers who have discovered a promising new book only to be stymied in their attempt to buy it is just as real, and deserves to be addressed with more than a condescending “you just don’t understand”.

Not all books have big audiences in every territory, and if there is promise for publishers in finding incremental sales that might never have existed before the internet, part of the bargain is finding the way to serve those far flung readers and making the process of paying good money for books as pain-free as possible.

NOTE: The quotes at the beginning of this post were drawn from the 2010 Digital Book World Conference panel, “Tomorrow’s Book Contract“, which DBW Members can listen to here (Check out 5:15 to 25:50 for the rights discussion if you want to get into the gritty details).

We’ll also dig deeper into the question of territory and what’s best for authors and readers in the webcast Book Rights: Headed for a Borderless Future? on Tuesday March 2nd, when I’ll talk with Markus Hoffmann, Agent at Rights Director at Regal Literary, and Michael Tamblyn, VP Content, Sales & Merchandising for Kobo, Inc.

Emily Williams is co-chair of the BISG Rights Subcommittee and a former literary scout who currently works as an independent publishing consultant.