Mastering the Mysteries of Metadata

Okay, hotshot, so you want to be an e-book publisher? Piece of cake. All you have to do is provide your retailers with the following information about your books:

• eISBN
• Title
• Contributors
• Description
• Publisher
• Language
• Territorial Rights with Country Code
• Suggested Retail Price with country code
• Publication Date
• BISAC Code
  

Collectively, this information is known as Metadata, and unless you provide it for every title and in a format that is usable by retailers, the stores will not carry your e-books. And every retailer has its own format requirements.

Take the simple matter of book titles. What is your retailer's protocol for designating them? Do they prefer "The Grapes of Wrath" Or "Grapes of Wrath, The"? And how about the byline? "John Steinbeck"? Or "Steinbeck, John"?

Or take suggested retail price. Which currency are we talking about? US dollars? Canadian dollars? Australian dollars? British Pounds? And do you know the Country Code associated with the currency?

Then there's the matter of territorial rights. There's a code for every country in which you have the right to sell your books. Do you know the country code for Lesotho? Cameroon? Mozambique? How about the USA? Canada?

You'll need a 13-digit eISBN for each and every e-book. Do you have them? Know where to get them? Are they free or do you have to buy them?

And of course you'll need BISAC codes, the numbered subject headings organized to help retailers display books by topic. Are you publishing a fantasy? What kind of fantasy? Contemporary (FIC009010)? Historical (FIC009030)? Paranormal (FIC009050)? (You can read all about BISAC Codes here.)

What about your covers? What's the retailer's convention for image files, .png or .jpg? What's the minimum pixels per square inch? Minimum width in pixels?

There's lots more -- pages and pages of definitions, specs and tolerances in fine print provided by each retailer.

Still think any bozo can become an e-publisher? Do your Metadata homework and get back to me.

Richard Curtis

At Least Plastic Doesn't Come Off On Your Fingers

Apple's new iPad tablet gives newspaper and magazine publishers an opportunity to claw back what they've given away: profitability. The potential for reading a newspaper on a screen of reasonable size and shape and in a format that actually resembles the paper-paper you hold every morning, has been boosted sky-high by the introduction of Apple's tablet.

Actually, for an inveterate reader of newspapers the format issue remains, whether you read one on a Kindle, iPad, Skiff (pictured above) or other device. If you hold the device vertically (portrait format) you see just one page at a time and thus lose the option of viewing at a glance what's on both sides of your newspaper, even peripherally. If on the other hand you hold it horizontally (landscape format) you can see both sides of the paper but cut the size down to an uncomfortable dimension. If this is the price we pay to shift from paper to plastic, I say so be it, but I say it with a big sigh. Because, dammit, I love my newspaper just the way it is.

But throwing a tantrum won't stop the clock, so we must expect a day when today's "paper" will be plastic, and reading the paper will become an anachronism as quaint as the "cc" in our emails that describes carbon copies. Newspaper publishers are rethinking their business model and considering a variety of solutions aimed at sealing the leak of content into the digital river from which all currently come to drink their fill free of charge. Last fall the Wall Street Journal started forcing news-hungry website visitors to become subscribers or miss out on breaking news. The New York Times has announced a similar initiative.

Though dropping today's news into e-book format seems simple enough to do, there are land mines, As Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford of the NY Times point out "Media companies may have to swallow hard before tethering their futures to any high-tech company, let alone Apple."

"Many publishers believe their economic health depends on finding a direct line to their customers, and it is not clear whether Apple — and other aggregators of Internet content — will allow that.

"Magazine publishers, for example, maintain sophisticated databases about their customers, which lets them cross-sell products, renew subscriptions and entice advertisers with statistics about their wealthy readers. A big part of the business is automatic renewals charged to credit cards.

"But when magazine publishers sell applications through the iTunes store, they do not get credit card information or even the name of the buyer."

To make sure they aren't jumping from the frying pan into the fire, Stone and Clifford report, some powerful magazine and newspaper publishers have formed a consortium that will operate its own online store, sell its own content, and collect its own consumer information.

You can read about it online here. Enjoy the pleasure while you can; the day will come when you'll have to become a subscriber to access this content.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Pirate Stole Your Book? Prove It

"I've been robbed!" is a cry heard with growing frequency as authors discover that their books are being sold or given away on any one of countless pirate websites. To make things worse, these pirates work in the open, flagrantly touting their wares and thumbing their nose at legitimate copyright owners and their legal representatives.

Many of the perpetrators operate far beyond the reach of any laws and understand too well that few copyright owners are willing to spend time or money to bring them to justice. Stephen King stated it as well as anyone: “The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” he said in an email reported on Teleread. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.” (It's a wonderful image but not necessarily an accurate one, as we recently reported).

Although piracy is rampant, victims are not completely without recourse. Every major legitimate Internet service provider has a procedure for reporting incidents of piracy perpetrated on their sites and redressing offenses. Reputable ISPs fear liability if they enable infringements. Using threats of terminating service, they will pressure culprits to take down illegal material - at least, when they know about it. All too often, however, they do not know they are hosting an infringement until the infringee brings it to their attention.

You would think that as soon as that happens the ISP would hasten to yank the pirated material off its website. But, as those who have complained to their carriers have discovered, it's not that easy, because the service provider has no way of knowing whether or not the complaint is valid. You have to prove that you are the true copyright owner and have a valid claim of infringement. The victim, in other words, has to demonstrate that he or she is in truth the victim. Here is where injury is compounded by insult.

Anyone who's ever been abused and then told that he or she was "asking for it" will appreciate how offensive it is for an author to be asked to provide proof of authorship. But if we put our lawyer hat on we will realize that it's necessary. Those who review claims have no way of distinguishing the robber from the robbed without some ID and documentation. Thus, when you click on a website's "takedown" link to request removal of your stolen book, try to keep your cool when you are informed that "Under Section 512(f) of the DMCA, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity is infringing may be subject to liability."

We recently had reason to ask Scribd to remove a work by our client that had been posted on its site by a third party. We were furnished with a link to its takedown procedure such as this one. It took us only a few minutes to fill out and within 24 hours our request was heeded and the file removed. I am told that Scribd has been cooperative about such complaints. Once it receives and investigates one and confirms that an infringement has occurred, Scribd creates a file documenting the true copyright owner so that future attempts at illegal uploads will be flagged if not summarily rejected.

That's one win for the good guys. Unfortunately, the score is Bad Guys 1000- Good Guys 1. What it will take to level the playing field?

Richard Curtis

The Wicked Wisdom of an E-Book Pirate

After reporting on a remarkable dialogue between blogger C. Max Magee and a book pirate we received a comment from a person named jap [sic] claiming to be a pirate too.

His posting elicited a host of comments from readers ranging from vituperative ("Pirate is too sexy a term. What you are is a petty thief") to respectful ("You have me intrigued, Jap. I would suggest you are not a typical pirate...") to grudging agreement ("In a world without pirating, a majority of people would just not buy the book. So yeah, I definitely think the impact is overrated (or over-agonized about.")

From his cover of anonymity jap responded to many of these comments and amplified on his original contention that "You have your morality and I have mine." Though we deplore piracy and are reluctant to offer a forum for its practitioners, we happen to think that it's sometimes better to listen to our adversaries than ignore them, however diabolical their reasoning may seem. This is especially true when they offer cogent suggestions about where we should be focusing our efforts to deal with piracy.

I invited "jap" to write an article for us but he declined. However, in the hopes that we can benefit from his observations, below are a few that we have gleaned from his communications. We will do our best to accept his airy reassurance: "Don't worry: the book business is not in danger."

Richard Curtis
**********************************
*You have your morality and I have mine. It is perfectly okay for me to download books (or movies btw). It was also okay to copy or print books for everybody before 1710 (when the first copyright law was passed), or buying that "unauthorized by author" book...

*Probably you are thinking just now "but it is unlawful!!" Is it necessary to explain that law and moral[ity] are not the same thing?

*Morality aside, it is probably of your interest to know that we the ebook pirates do buy books. I understand you are worried for your business but don't worry: the book business is not in danger.

*I have never read most of the books I have downloaded. One of the downloads was a file containing several thousands of books. I have also bought several of the books I previously downloaded and read. Other books I did read I would never buy them. There are also books that I did read and I will buy as soon as I find them in a bookstore. I have also bought books that I know are easy to find and download. In fact buying books is a great pleasure for me.

*Why do many people pirate? I think the answer is different for each person. In my case, I think and I feel that that Internet is a great tool to get books, tons of books. It is the greatest library and the greatest bookstore at same time.

*DRM is a Bad Idea. It decreases sales, and believe me, it has never stopped pirates.

*There is a difference between stealing and downloading. If I steal a printed book at Best Buy, Best Buy becomes poorer. If I download a Dan Brown's book, Dan Brown does not become poorer.

*Part of my money went to Dan Brown's pockets. If you are interested in business, instead of your morality, the question is why many people go to library, and download books AND buy books. For centuries books have been bought by the very same people that go to libraries.

*I am a typical pirate. Most pirates never upload works, neither sell them, just download. Also most pirates buy content in a way or other. I for instance download movies but go to movie theatres. In fact many pirates are high spending people. And many music pirates are buying CDs, the real problem of CD market is that CD is becoming obsolete. Digital sales (iTunes and alikes) are speedily increasing. Hulu is not yet available in my country but I am willing to try it as soon as possible,

*Do you really think a guy who is scanning a book and uploading it is trying to avoid buying it at Fictionwise? That's nonsense.

*How is not paying for a book in a library wrong? How is downloading for free a 1922 book (public domain) right but a 1923 book wrong?

*Until 1978 copyright term was a maximum of 56 years since the work was first published. Nowadays is 70 years since author's death. If I download a 1950 book, is that wrong or right?

*The above terms are for United States. If I live in a country where a 1989 book is in public domain, is it wrong to download it?

*Morality? Copyright is (sometimes) useful, not moral.

*Btw I prefer to buy O'Reilly ebooks, they are not DRM'd.

*It is not possible to protect copyright. You can fight for-profit piracy because you can always follow the money and because any seller (lawful or not) needs to offer his product to public. You cannot successfully fight not-for-profit piracy because it is possible to do it so privately as desired. 10 years of RIAA prosecution did get nothing.

*However may be I can be useful for your business. I am not just a pirate, I am also a customer. Sometimes I pirate books, sometimes I buy them. Obviously, if you get to maximize the times I buy then you are increasing your sales.

*As I said DRM is a Bad Idea. When people buy ebooks, they want to do things like read that book on any present and future device. So many people break the DRM (it is easy) but breaking the DRM is unlawful, so your customers have paid to be outlaws. This is not the kind of thing that discourage piracy.

*Everytime I have bought a DRMed book I broke the DRM for the above reason and I did feel fooled because I paid but I was out of law. Just imagine which is the effect on your law abiding customers. They get a product that is worse than what I get when I pirate. Do you want to reduce piracy? Sell your books sans DRM.

*My best hint for you: don't obsess with piracy, focus on selling.

*How did I read this article? It is not because it is an article about piracy, but because it is an article of this blog, and I usually read this blog because it is a good blog about the book world.

A Grumpy Old Visionary Revisits His Vision

A few years ago a pair of reporters for a now-defunct publication called Inside ran an interview with three men from the old world of publishing who were in the process of reinventing themselves.

The article was titled "Publishing's Grumpy Old Visionaries" and the three were depicted as "wundermenschen of the brave new book world". One of the three was former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein. Another was literary agent John Brockman. To understand my reluctance to reveal the third, you'll have to click on the article. (And incidentally, one of the two reporters was none other than Sara Nelson, who went on to become editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.)

Though their projections differ in a number of particulars, the Grumpy Old Visionaries accurately foretold the place where we are now and the rock-strewn path that led us here.

The three ageless hotshots are still working their visions and walking both sides of the publishing street - the dusty, decaying old one and the gleaming but bewildering new one. One of these three caballeros, Epstein, has tried to fix his coordinates in both past and future in a reflective article in the New York Review of Books. Like the rest of us he has mixed emotions about the two worlds but he lets his predilection show in this poignant summing-up:

"I must declare my bias. My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend."

Read his elegant and elegiac essay here.

RC

We Have Met the Enemy and He is The Real Caterpillar

• He's ripped off hundreds of books.
• He can rip yours off in five minutes. It's so easy even a caveman can do it.
• He painstakingly proofreads the books he steals.
• He has ethical and moral standards. And a conscience...of sorts.
• Though piracy's toll is in the billions of dollars, he thinks the crime is overrated.
• But he admits it's a crime.

That's a thumbnail profile of a book pirate. I've condensed it from an astounding interview with one conducted by C. Max Magee on his website "The Millions".

After pondering the phenomenon of book piracy, a crime estimated to drain over $3 billion annually from legitimate copyright owners, Magee decided the best way to understand it was to ask a practitioner. "Who are the people downloading these books? How are they doing it and where is it happening? And, perhaps most critical for the publishing industry, why are people deciding to download books and why now? I decided to find out. After a few hours of searching – stalled by a number dead links and password protected sites – I found, on an online forum focused on sharing books via BitTorrent, someone willing to talk."

The perpetrator's handle is "The Real Caterpillar" and, as is so often the case, he is far from a noble Robin Hood. "He lives in the Midwest," writes Magee, "he’s in his mid-30s and is a computer programmer by trade. By some measures, he’s the publishing industry’s ideal customer, an avid reader who buys dozens of books a year and enthusiastically recommends his favorites to friends. But he’s also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he’s downloaded thousands."

Here are a few revelations in his own words:

• I generally only upload content that I have scanned, with some exceptions. I have been out of the book scene for a while, concentrating on rare and out of print movies instead of books because it is much easier to rip a movie from VHS or DVD than to scan and proof a book
• I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may
• Just because someone downloads a file, it does not mean they would have bought the product I think this is the key fact that many people in the music industry ignore – a download does not translate to a lost sale
• In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing…however, I feel the impact of e-piracy is overrated, at least in terms of ebooks
• I’ve spent anywhere from 5 to 40 hours proofing the OCR output

And, finally: "In truth, I think it is clear that morally, the act of pirating a product is, in fact, the moral equivalent of stealing… although that nagging question of what the person who has been stolen from is missing still lingers."

Two persons mentioned by Caterpillar as having been stolen from are Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison. Both have published privacy or anti-piracy statements on their websites. You may read Helprin's here but it says in part: "You agree to comply with all copyright laws worldwide in your use of this site and to prevent any unauthorized copying of the materials." Ellison's is an all-caps fist-shaking no-prisoners Jeremiad which you may read in its entirety here. Here's a taste:

A HOST OF SELF-SERVING INDIVIDUALS SEEM TO THINK THAT THEY CAN ALLOW THE DISSEMINATION OF WRITERS’ WORK ON THE INTERNET WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION, AND WITHOUT PAYMENT, UNDER THE BANNER OF “FAIR USE” OR THE IDIOT SLOGAN “INFORMATION MUST BE FREE.” A WRITER’S WORK IS NOT INFORMATION: IT IS OUR CREATIVE PROPERTY, OUR LIVELIHOOD AND OUR FAMILIES’ ANNUITY. WHY SHOULD ANY ARTIST, OF ANY KIND, CONTINUE CREATING NEW WORK, EKING OUT AN EXISTENCE IN PURSUIT OF A CAREER, FOLLOWING THE MUSE, WHEN LITTLE INTERNET THIEVES, RODENTS WITHOUT ETHIC OR UNDERSTANDING, STEAL AND STEAL AND STEAL, CONVENIENCING THEMSELVES AND “SCREW THE AUTHOR”? WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT IS THE DEATH OF THE PROFESSIONAL WRITER!

Caterpillar laughs at them. "One thing that will definitely not change anyone’s mind or inspire them to stop," he says, "are polemics from people like Mark Helprin and Harlan Ellison – attitudes like that ensure that all of their works are available online all of the time."

For the full flavor of Magee's interview read Confessions of a Book Pirate in its entirety here.

We are Harlan Ellison's literary agents. Our e-book company is publisher of some thirty of his books. Though we cannot express ourselves as colorfully as he, we support his position completely. His work and property, the work and property of countless other authors, our own labor and investment and that of all legitimate, reputable publishers worldwide are being stolen. Those who file-share copyrighted books are receiving stolen property. We ask those who take and those who receive to consider whether there is any difference between having your literary property robbed and your purse stolen. For one victim's answer, read Are Pirate-site Downloaders Better Than Muggers, Pickpockets and Shoplifters? This Victim Doesn't Think So.

Richard Curtis

Inkling Cuts Textbooks into Inexpensive Bite-Sized Morsels

"There are lots of schoolkids in the world," writes Tyler Cowen on the Marginal Revolution website.

We were thinking the same thing. In fact, we were thinking it a decade ago when we leaped into the e-book space: the medium is perfect for textbooks. But education had to wait for hardware and software to catch up.

It's caught up.

Hardware: Apple will lead the way. "The superior Apple graphics, colors, and fonts will support all of the textbook features which Kindle botches and destroys" says Cowen in My predictions about the iPad. "In the longer run the iPad will compete with your university, or in some ways enhance your university. It will offer homework services and instructional videos and courses, none of which can work well on the current iPhone or Kindle."

Platform: We've been reading up on a San Francisco startup called Inkling. "Stacked with pedigreed veterans of Microsoft and Google, Harvard, MIT and Stanford," writes Paul Boutin of VentureBeat, Inkling surfaced after Apple's iPad launch with $1 million to seed development of software aimed not just at student's learning needs but their pocketbooks as well. The company is working with a number of textbook publishers like McGraw-Hill and Pearson."First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules — interactive, social, and mobile — that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust."

Inkling offers color, interactivity, highlighter capability, social network sharing features, talking text and dynamic quizzes. And all of this delivered lightning-fast. "The iPad’s A4 chip is even faster than the Android G2 that gets geeks so excited," says Boutin, "so rich layouts and interactive illustrations run quickly."

"But the real breakthrough," he writes, "is in pricing. Instead of a $180 textbook, learning modules built with Inkling will be priced individually on iTunes, just as music and TV shows are. Instead of buying all 50 chapters of a 1,200-page biology book, an instructor can create a customized bundle of only the modules students will actually use. Pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but it’s likely to be a few dollars per unit — much cheaper than current textbooks.

Are you listening, students? Modular bundles so cheap they're not worth ripping off!

Here are some details from Inkling's "About" page:

• Interactive figures. Inkling lets you directly manipulate objects to explore them. Want to know if two molecules bond? Use your fingertips to pull them together and see what happens.
• Custom spine. Inkling organizes content based on your assignments. It shows you everything you need to do, all at once, no matter where the content is from. It's like a custom textbook, just for you.
• Reader. When it's time to read a traditional textbook, Inkling does an amazing job. Dog-ear your pages, skip from chapter to chapter with gestures, and jump from figure to figure with your finger.
• Quizzes. Measure your progress with interactive tests that deepen your understanding of the content.
• Note following. Ever borrow a classmate's notes? Borrow them in realtime with Inkling NoteSync™. Annotations, highlights and comments from your friends show up alongside your own, instantly.
• Device sync. Want to finish up a reading while waiting in line? Anything you've got on your iPad appears right on your iPhone or iPod touch, too.

Look for iPads utilizing the Inkling platform on campuses as early as next fall.

Richard Curtis

How to Prosper in the Coming Apocalypse

This book that will enable you to watch the final convulsions of civilization from the veranda of your country estate. When the last trumpet sounds and the end of the world is nigh, remember to pick up your dry cleaning, cancel your subscriptions and call your mother. And don't forget to pack your copy of Richard Curtis's How to Prosper In the Coming Apocalypse. It's available in e-book and will be in paperback before long.

From the introduction.

"The most important things for you to concern yourself with in the coming bad years is, Who's responsible and how can I get even? It is essential that we find someone to blame and really beat the hell out of him. Sure, the tragedy of the past is that we are condemned to repeat it, but does that make you feel any better? No! Your first task is to find a scapegoat." (You can click here to read the complete introduction, "What is an Apocalypse, and Why Can't People Just Call It Doomsday?)

And if you enjoy Curtis's brand of whacked-out humor, read his satires on authors, agents and publishers in The Client From Hell.

Panic in Blogger Park! Google Pulls Plug on FTP Feed

Last week many bloggers received an email notice from Google that triggered an OMG moment, except that the "G" stood for Google. The firm announced the imminent shut-down of support for those who use Google's FTP site to post their blogs.

Though less than 1% of active blogs are published on FTP, the medium "remains a significant drain on our ability to improve Blogger," writes Rick Klau, the company's Blogger Product Manager. Thus Google will turn the lights out on FTP on March 26 2010. You can read the full text of his announcement here.

"FTP", which stands for "File Transfer Protocol," is a common and convenient method for transferring or exchanging files between computers over the Internet. Most blogger platforms like Blogspot, WordPress and Drupal do not rely on FTP. Those that use Google's FTP may not realize the huge impact on Google's server. Every time you upload a new post via FTP, Google's server republishes and re-synchs every previous single file, image, archive page, and link. If you've been blogging for years, the hit on the FTP is mammoth. Savvy bloggers have been wondering when Google would finally pull the plug. "It was too good to be true," one told me.

Those bloggers that do depend on Google FTP are going to have to scramble to migrate their blogs to another host. Google has offered all sorts of support to make the transition as easy as possible. First, they'll issue more email information in coming weeks, and have created a dedicated blog which you may visit here. In addition, they tell us that...

• We are building a migration tool that will walk users through a migration from their current URL to a Blogger-managed URL (either a Custom Domain or a Blogspot URL) that will be available to all users the week of February 22. This tool will handle redirecting traffic from the old URL to the new URL, and will handle the vast majority of situations.
• Blogger team members will also be available to answer questions on the forum, comments on the blog, and in a few scheduled conference calls once the tool is released

Klau expressed his regrets, acknowledging that his company's decision "will frustrate some users."

Frustrate? How about opening their veins in a tub of warm water! If you're working your blog through Google's FTP feed we strongly suggest you put your backside in overdrive and find an alternative.

Richard Curtis

John Sargent: Macmillan Royalties Going Up

Were you one of the skeptics who faded me on my pinkie bet that e-book royalties would go up? Well, chum, you owe me a pinkie. Royalties are going up, at least at Macmillan. But even I'm stunned that it took only four days. I should have remembered that in the digital world, things that used to take two years now take two hours.

The revelation about a royalty boost was embedded in an update by CEO John Sargent on Macmillan's negotiations with Amazon in which he assured us that Amazon is "working very, very hard and in good faith" to resolve the issues that have stalemated publisher and retailer ever since Apple introduced a retail model that restores control, and ultimately more money, to publishers. Here's Sargent's full statement.

But if there has been no big breakthrough in Macmillan's relationship with its retailers, there's been a huge one in its relationship with authors and agents. Sargent says:

"And now on to royalties. Three or four weeks ago, we began discussions with the Author's Guild on their concerns about our new royalty terms. We indicated then that we would be flexible and that we were prepared to move to a higher rate for digital books. In ongoing discussions with our major agents at the beginning of this week, we began informing them of our new terms. The change to an agency model will bring about yet another round of discussion on royalties, and we look forward to solving this next step in the puzzle with you."

We'll review the sweetened royalty and report to you.

Richard Curtis

Paradigm Shift in Striking Evidence at Digital Book World

After two intense days of speeches, panels, presentations, celebrations and debates, breakout sessions, networking and exhibits, there was so much to take away from the Digital Book World conference that my head swam. But after contemplating it all in tranquility I was able to reduce the takeaways to one simple but powerful impression: the paradigm shift in publishing from a tangible culture to a virtual one has finally begun to take hold, and its grip will endure.

The moment I beheld a CD-ROM I knew that a day would come when I would behold an electronic book reader. For years I have chronicled the evolution of digital technology, noting its incremental but inexorable trajectory toward a tipping point. I cannot say that we have reached it - indeed, Impelsys's Sameer Shariff told an audience at DBW that the industry is where the primitive video game Pong was in the early 70's. Nevertheless, the conference attendees clearly grasped that the gravitational pull on their home planet has weakened and the tug of a new world has become palpable.

How to characterize that new world? It's no longer about the product. It's about community, the impossibly tangled, virally sprawling, thrillingly energetic, intoxicatingly imaginative web of writers, editors, readers, entrepreneurs, aggregators, curators and technologists in the service of authors and books, utilizing tools of staggering complexity and power. It's bigger than any of us but publishing people, even old timers (over 40), have lost their fear and accept the new medium and its tools not just as inevitable but as benign.

Indeed, it took an over-40 veteran, publisher-turned-agent Larry Kirshbaum, to remind the assembly that however dazzling the delivery systems may be, the real magic of books is produced by authors and publishers, and it always will be. Good for you, Larry! And a big shout-out to Mike Shatzkin, F+W Media and the other sponsors for creating an event that would enable us to grasp how vast and wonderful our community is.

We are told that "May you live in interesting times" is a curse. I cannot remember a more interesting time for publishing than today, and I feel blessed to witness and be part of it.

Richard Curtis

Curtis Chairs DBW Panel on Future Book Contracts

"In a dynamic panel at Digital Book World about rights in the electronic age," writes Rachel Deahl in Publishers Weekly, "a number of hot-button, complex issues were broached on Tuesday. One of the best rights panels of the afternoon, 'Tomorrow's Book Contract,' moderated by Richard Curtis (of Richard Curtis Associates), saw lawyers, agents and an executive at one of the 'big six' coming up against pressing problems regarding the fact that the industry has no solutions for how to address certain rights snafus that have arisen as a result of the increasingly fractured, digital retail market for books."

Curtis's panelists were agents Simon Lipskar and Miriam Kriss, attorney Dev Chatillon, and Penguin USA Corporate Director of Business Affairs John Schline. Curtis is pictured left. Another illustrious chairman is pictured right.

For the full story read Digital Book World: Debating E-Rights Issues

Publishing's Weekend War: 48 Hours That Changed an Industry

The facedown lasted from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon but when it was over the landscape of the book business was permanently altered. On Friday, in reaction to Macmillan's refusal to play the Kindle pricing game by Amazon's rules, the retailer punished Macmillan by extinguishing the publisher's Buy buttons on the Amazon website.

Obviously, Amazon hoped this tactic would bring Macmillan to its knees. Instead it triggered another wave of customer outrage as Kindle owners reacted just as they had in 2009 when Amazon reached into their Kindles and recaptured files without notice or explanation. Though the response of the author community was mixed, many authors were angered at becoming victims of a war they scarcely understood but they too blamed Amazon.

Amazon also underestimated the possibility that other major publishers might support Macmillan. This turned out to be a well founded concern. In the past few weeks all of the big houses except Random House conducted discussions, and in all likelihood negotiations, with Apple to forge a new retailing model that would return control of e-book pricing to the publishers, who had become alarmed that Amazon's insistence on a $9.99 price cap would force them to accept lower wholesale terms. Conditions were ripe for mutiny, and on Friday the test of wills began. By Sunday, as Amazon realized that this was a fight it could not win, it capitulated.

I stated that this might well be a turning point for the book industry - both e-book and print - and I stand by that statement.

I also made a prediction that publishers will no longer be able to hold the line on the current 20-25% royalty rate offered to authors. In fact I guaranteed that they won't be able to, and I stand by that guarantee as well. Authors, and more importantly their powerful literary agents, have viewed the new landscape and found it rich with the potential for profit. They perceive the current royalty level as arbitrary and without basis in the economies of e-book production and distribution. The current rates cannot and will not hold. Just as Amazon blinked in its stare-down with Macmillan, Macmillan and its Big Six companions will also blink in the inevitable confrontation with authors.

You heard it here first.

Richard Curtis

Amazon Blinks in Macmillan Facedown: "We Will Have to Capitulate"

Boy, that didn't take long!

Remember the pinkie bet I made ten minutes ago? I wagered that once publishers' hands were untied from the $9.99 price ceiling on e-books we would see an increase in the royalty percentage paid by publishers to authors on e-book revenue. Well, I'm halfway there to winning it. Amazon's Kindle team has just released a statement accepting Macmillan's position even though disagreeing with it. The statement in part says:

"We will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."

The Kindle spokesblog added that "We don't believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan." Perhaps not, but they will now be encouraged to do so by Macmillan's stand. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say this may be a defining moment in the history of the e-book industry.

Read the Kindle Team's full statement here.

Richard Curtis

Guaranteed: E-book Royalties Will Rise When Publishers' Hands Untied

I don't know if people still make pinkie bets, but when I was a kid that's what we called friendly wagers with no money at stake - just the satisfaction of being right. And I'm making a pinkie bet right now: If publishers can untangle themselves from the current e-book pricing model that ties their hands with a $9.99 ceiling, author royalties will rise. Any takers? Warning - before you extend your pinkie, you must know that I never bet on anything I'm not absolutely certain about.

Currently the e-book royalty offered to authors by five of the Big Six is 25% of the publisher's net receipts, and Macmillan's is even lower. Indeed, it's the lowest in Big Publishing: 20%. And because it is, Macmillan has attracted less support from the author community for its facedown of Amazon than it would otherwise receive. Here for instance is a line from a Silicon Valley blogger that called Macmillan "evil": "they're trying to force all ebook vendors to adopt the new contract, while forcing authors to accept a below industry average (20% vs. 25%) on ebook royalties."

If, as a result of negative publicity, Amazon relents on its rigid pricing formula, e-book revenues will increase and it will be so much harder - indeed, it will be intensely embarrassing - for publishers to continue parceling out the mingy royalty they now proffer. How much higher will the royalty go? Publishers will kick and scream over every point they have to give up, but in time someone will blink and go to 50%, and the rest of the industry will follow.

You can bet the house on that, but I'll accept a friendly pinkie.

Richard Curtis (who is happy to disclose that E-Reads pays 50% royalty to its authors, and has paid it from Day One, 2000).

What Do Amazon and Prada Have in Common?

Today a publisher brought to my attention an oddity on the Amazon.com website. It seems that you cannot purchase more than three copies of many bestsellers. On the evening of January 28, 2010 I viewed the top ten books on the Amazon.com bestseller list. In every case I was prohibited from putting more than three copies into my shopping cart. To make certain this was not a fluke, I sampled the first 50 titles on the list but did not find any exceptions to the three-to-a-customer rule.

You can see this for yourself by clicking on the following links for the top five titles, then going to the "Quantity" drop-down box over the "Add to Shopping Cart" button. (As listings change, future visitors to this posting may not find the same condition.)

The Kind Diet - list price $29.99, Amazon price $16.49
Food Rules - list price $11.00, Amazon price $5.00
Game Change - list price $27.99, Amazon price $14.50
The Help - list price $24.95, Amazon price $9.50
A People's History of the United States - list price $18.95, Amazon price $10.00

It was not until I clicked on #53 - What Would Google Do? (list price $17.91, Amazon price $9.18) - that the Quantity drop-down box indicated I could buy as many as 30 copies. I did not try to buy multiple copies by buying three and three and three etc. - I don't really need one copy of Food Rules let alone six or nine or thirty - but I'm sure a clever shopper could find a way around the rule. It occurred to me however that if I did order three copies ten times, the freight and handling charges would be substantially higher than if I purchased 30 in one shot.

But that's just incidental to the bigger question of why one must buy no more than three copies in one transaction.

I can understand this restrictive practice in the case of a high ticket item, where one $10,000 fur coat or $50,000 diamond ring per customer is enough. Pictured here is a Prada Ostrich Leather Tote listing on Saks Fifth Avenue's website for $5,850.00. On the bag's web page is this notice: DUE TO POPULAR DEMAND, A CUSTOMER MAY ORDER NO MORE THAN THREE UNITS OF THIS ITEM EVERY THIRTY DAYS.

But books are not luxury purchases. Why would Amazon prevent us from buying as many copies of a book as we want? After all, the more we buy the more money Amazon makes, yes?

In listing the books here I included their list price versus their Amazon.com price. I wonder if therein lies a clue to the restrictive policy. Assuming a 50% publisher discount, Amazon's profit margin on these books is slim to none. For instance, on A People's History of the United States (list price $18.95, Amazon price $10.00) Amazon nets about $.50 profit. Food Rules retailing for $11.00? The wholesale price would be $5.50. Amazon is selling it for $5.00, a $.50 loss. For The Help (list price $24.95, Amazon price $9.50), Amazon is losing $3.00 a copy.

Nothing unusual here: retailers in every business work on a slim margin, and loss leaders are a common competitive practice. However...

Suppose I opened a bookshop and stocked it with bestsellers purchased from Amazon. I could buy 100 copies of The Help for $9.50 each and sell them in my store for, say, $15.00. Even folding in the cost of freight from Amazon to my shop, I would make two or three dollars profit and still sell the books far beneath the publisher's list price.

I anticipate your question: why would people buy from my shop when they could get the same book cheaper from Amazon? The answer is, some will but some won't. That's why we have independent bookstores (barely, but we still do have them).

If this reasoning is correct, then the Amazon's three-to-a-customer rule makes sense: Amazon doesn't want resellers stocking their stores with Amazon books. Why not? Because Amazon doesn't make any money on those resales.

Authors will recognize an irony here. When their books are resold via Amazon, Amazon gets a piece of the resale of those used books but the authors get nothing. Could it be that Amazon is worried that it is not benefiting from resales that do not use Amazon as agent?

This theory could be all wet. But if it is, I invite smarter business heads than me to speculate on just what's behind the three-book cap on Amazon's bestseller shopping cart. Meanwhile, publishers and authors may be hurt by the curtailment of large book orders on the Amazon.com retail site.

Richard Curtis

Ladies and Gentlemen, Start Your Apps

The other day we reported that Apple-watchers have taken to calling the imminent tablet The Unicorn because of all the magical properties being attributed to it - and because, of course, no one has seen it. If only there were a fly on the wall of Apple's Cupertino headquarters, a fly with a particularly sensitive transmitter...

In fact we have one. It's a company called Flurry Analytics. Flurry has developed tools that gather from app developers information about applications they are working on. Jenna Wortham, writing about Flurry in the New York Times, reports that "Flurry can generate reports about the location of an application’s users, for example, or how long it took a user to complete a game level."

It turns out that Flurry picked up some feedback from about 50 devices on or around the Cupertino campus and came to some conclusions about what we're going to find under the hood of Apple's tablet when we finally get our hands on one for a test drive.

Check Flurry's chart below and you'll see that the top three apps downloaded from Cupertino are for games, entertainment and news/books, followed by lifestyle, utilities, music, photography, travel, finance, social networking, weather and miscellaneous.

That games and entertainment are the # 1 and #2 apps should not surprise us, especially when one considers that the tablet's larger screen will enable more than one user to play games on it. But the third one, news and books, raises an eyebrow in view of Apple CEO Steve Jobs's declaration that nobody reads anymore. It sounds as if people are going to be reading newspapers and illustrated books big time on the iSlate, Unicorn or whatever it's called.

For more speculations on the Apple tablet, read Jenna Wortham's A Playland for Apps in a Tablet World. The speculation should end later today when Apple's formal announcement puts us all out of our misery. But if that Flurry fly on the wall of Apple's lab is transmitting accurate information, Apple's announcement should be anticlimactic.

Richard Curtis

Pundits on Parade: Digital Book World Conference Begins Today

Ladies and gentlemen, start your crystal balls.

Digital Book World, a conference devoted to exploring the future of publishing both digital and conventional (if there is any such thing anymore) begins today with guru Mike Shatzkin as its driving organizer and master of ceremonies. It will take place at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in New York City, January 26th and 27th.

The schedule is studded with publishing notables who have led the industry's charge into cyberspace, but it will be attended by professionals who have to apply the thrilling advances in technology to a business still mired in another century, arguably the 18th.

But "Digital Book World isn't just about strategies, it's also about the network," says the event's website. "Because of our focus on consumer publishing, our speakers and attendees represent publishers of all sizes and niches – from HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House to Tor, Chelsea Green, National Geographic and Ellora's Cave – as well as literary agents and other allied professionals, and vendors with an interest in the future of consumer publishing."

Among the highlights are:

• An overview of Google Editions
• "Back-Loaded Book Deals" with Roger Cooper, Bob Miller and several agents
• "The Next Generation of eBooks"
• "Tomorrow’s Book Contract: New Language and Provisions to Reflect New Conditions" hosted by yours truly
  

A big draw on Wednesday will be "The Changing Agent-Author Relationship: How it Will Affect the Business Model" moderated by Sara Nelson of Oprah's Book Club. Her panelists will be agents Gail Hochman, Scott Waxman, Brian DeFiore, and Wendy Keller of Keller Media.

A spectral but influential presence will be Apple, which will be announcing details of its tablet on the afternoon of the conference's second day, and not a few attendees will be glancing at their blackberries to learn details of the breaking news. Ironically, that will happen around the time of a concluding statement by Guy LeCharles Gonzales of Digital Book World entitled "The Future of Publishing is Bright".

You can click here to visit the conference website and here to view the schedule.

Richard Curtis

Who Should Rescue Borders? How About a Publisher?

When Galley Cat invited me to make some predictions for the coming decade, I conjectured that sometime in the near future we would see the merger of a major retailer and a major publisher. Here was my reasoning: "A combined publisher/retailer solves many problems for both.The retailer owns the content and doesn't have to pay a premium for it. The publisher does not have to pay a premium to distribute its books. There would be huge efficiencies of manufacturing and distribution."

I've had about a month to think about what I said, and I want to revise it. The efficiencies of a retailer/publisher combine would not merely be huge. They would be decisive. If you don't believe it, ask Barnes & Noble and Amazon.

In 2003 Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling Publishing, described at the time as "one of the top 25 publishers in America and the industry's leading publisher of how-to books." Publishers were gravely concerned, and they had every reason to be. Barnes & Noble's own titles were like a supermarket's house brand, often undercutting the prices of outside purveyors.

And now Amazon is a publisher too. It started with its Encore program aimed at identifying overlooked books and authors. That was followed by the creation of a service called CreateSpace aimed at self-published authors. And now Amazon has begun publishing mainstream authors like Stephen King and recently acquired Stephen (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People®) Covey for the Kindle.

The potential for mischief created by such combines was cogently articulated a few years ago by Morris Rosenthal and I urge you to read it. In essence, the savings generated by dissolving the barrier between seller and buyer enable the combine to lower prices below - sometimes far below - those charged by publishers that do not own their own retail branch. To state the case as simply as possible: Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, the two most powerful retailers in the book business, have become competitors of the very publishers they serve.

Though these retailers have no qualms about becoming publishers, publishers on the other hand are terrified of becoming retailers for fear of provoking the wrath of their key accounts - B&N and Amazon! When publishers do dip a timid toe in the water and try to sell their books direct to the consumer, they offer them at full list price, which cannot possibly compete with the deeply discounted prices charged by B&N and Amazon. Yet, if they wanted to, publishers could sell their books directly to the public at 40% discount or higher and thus level the playing field.

The solution? To survive, to remain competitive, publishers may have no choice: they must either become retailers or end up being acquired by them.

At this moment Borders, one of the best and most popular bookstore chains in the business, is in a life and death struggle to remain viable. If a publisher were smart it would rescue Borders and go into the retail business.

Retailers, I said a while ago (see Direct Sales: Publishing’s Last Stand), are intermediaries in a world that is rapidly disintermediating. As big as they are, retailers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon are vulnerable to market forces bent on eliminating middlemen, and that's precisely why they have begun publishing books. The digital revolution demands a direct relationship between content provider and consumer. Merging a publisher and a bookstore like Borders would bring both struggling enterprises a little closer to that direct relationship, to profitability and to competitiveness.

Do I hear any bids?

Richard Curtis

Guessing Shape of Elephant? Easy. iSlate? Hard

Do twenty rumors add up to one truth? Maybe.

Like the blind men in the fable who try to infer the shape of an elephant by touching its body parts, countless Apple-watchers ranging from savvy geeks to clueless crackpots have been speculating on the nature of the iSlate tablet (including, by the way, the name itself). The difference is that the characters in the famous story actually had access to the elephant's trunk, tail, ear and tusk, whereas the speculators haven't even glimpsed the iSlate.

But a website called The Green Room has culled all the rumors and assembled them into an iSlate, or at least the tablet equivalent of the elephant. The composite they've constructed comes complete with callouts referring to each rumored component. It's pictured left, but click here to see it full size and legibly. A fun feature is Green Room's evaluation of the rumors ranging from highly likely to highly unlikely. Here are a few of those callouts with the URLs of the source of the gossip.

• 3D operating system navigation (very unlikely)
• Price around $1,000 (very likely)
• January 27 unveiling (very likely)
• 10” display (likely)
• Called iSlate (likely)
• Pixel Qi screen (very unlikely)
• OLED screen (unlikely)
• Multitouch version of iWork (likely)
• Interact with tablet using palms and fingers (likely)
  

The observation that interests us most is that the Pixel Qi screen is not a likely possibility. As we wrote recently (See Hybrids Work for Cars. Why Not for Screens?), Pixel Qi is a hybrid that alternates between battery-draining full color for applications like video, to battery-saving black and white for text reading. We had surmised that Pixel Qi might solve the problem of short battery life in the iSlate. But if The Green Room is right and Pixel Qi is a "very unlikely" feature of the iSlate - well, where does it leave us?

With a lot of questions, is where. They'll be answered on January 27th - unless Apple has simply hired an auditorium to announce it's installing new toilets in the executive washroom.

Okay, do you think you know the answers? If you do, Gizmodo is offering a free Apple tablet to whoever guesses the most features on the device (including the name). Here are the contest rules:

Fill out the survey before the Apple event, and whoever gets closest to having all the answers right is eligible to win a free Apple tablet—whatever it ends up being called—courtesy of us.

• If the final feature is not exactly like one of the answers we provided, we will pick the closest answer. If the feature is not in the answers, that question will be void, but the rest of the questions will still be valid towards winning.

• There is a reasonable chance that many people will get the correct answers. In the event that there are, all of those who made the cut will go into a drawing, from which we'll pick a winner at random.

Richard Curtis
iSlate background image created by Fotoboer, graphic © 2010 tgr network.

Apple Promoting a New (and Radical!) Business Model for Selling E-Books?

Is an e-book a physical thing? Or is it virtual and without mass? An object or a file? And is there a different model for selling virtual than there is for selling physical?

We're about to find out. Jeffrey Trachtenberg of The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has been in discussions, and possible negotiations, with HarperCollins over the terms of e-books to be carried on the soon-to-be released Apple tablet, which everyone is calling the iSlate until the official announcement on January 27th proves otherwise. It would appear however that Apple is discussing a similar agenda with other members of the so-called big six publishers (Simon & Schuster, Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Macmillan and HarperCollins).

Michael Cader, publisher of Publishers Lunch, has written an extensive analysis drawn from the molten news as it leaks out of so-called confidential discussions. "Apple," writes Cader, "has agreed in principle to do business with publishers under what is called the agency model--as opposed to the wholesaling model currently in place for ebook sales and most physical book sales. In the agency model, the publisher is considered as keeping possession of the actual goods (the ebook files) and it pays a commission to its authorized selling partners. So the publisher sets the retail price of the ebooks, and the commissioned agents have no ability to change that price. Ebooks sold under the agency model would be offered to any established trading partners who agree to the commission and other particulars."

Cader adds:

"Given that publishers, agents and even retailers have already skirmished over whether ebook sales are a traditional sale or a license, and given the completely different nature of selling access to a digital file versus a physical object, there's plenty of room to argue that a new selling model is only logical and overdue."

The implications of this development cannot be overstated, for it means restoration to publishers of control over the timing and pricing of e-books. It also means some pushback against Amazon, whose approach to pricing and simultaneous release of e-books has pretty much put publishers in a corner.

You can read the Wall Street Journal article here.

We've come a long way since Apple CEO Steven Jobs, referring to e-books, sneered "People don't read anymore." (See Will Steve Jobs Eat His Words with Ketchup, Mustard or Mayo?)

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal.

I Want my E-Book and I Want it NOW - Or Else

Eric Engleman, in his Amazon Blog, writes that Kindle fans are punishing a publisher that has held back the Kindle version of a just-published book.

The book in question is Game Change by Mark Halperin and John Heilman, the juicy tell-all about the 2008 presidential campaign. Though it has generally garnered raves for its brilliant investigative reporting and jaw-dropping revelations, and indeed has received 59 five-star reviews on Amazon, it has also received no fewer than 119 one-star reviews, with scarcely any ratings in between the two poles. Why?

"The book has been deluged with one-star, negative reviews from people who are protesting publisher HarperCollins' decision to delay the Kindle version to Feb. 23," writes Engleman. "Those one-star reviews have contributed to a ho-hum average customer review rating of a 2.5 stars (out of 5). Customer reviews are an important factor for book sales on Amazon, and it will be interesting to see if the Kindle protests spread."

You can read both the raves and the boo-hisses here, but as to the latter, they can be summed up by this one: "No Kindle version? No Sale!"

The wisdom of simultaneously publishing hardcover books and e-books was questioned at the end of last year by a number of publishing figures including literary agent Nat Sobel whose posting here sparked an outpouring of strong feelings on both sides of the issue. Now the strong feelings have spilled over to consumers. The "windowing" (delay) of e-book reprints may seem like sound publishing practice for many kinds of books, but a hot-gossipy and time-sensitive book like Game Change may be the exception to that rule.

Consumers may not consider, and certainly may not care about, sound publishing practice. But for HarperCollins, Game Change's publisher, there's a solid economic reason for withholding the e-print. The hardcover lists at $27.99 on Amazon, discounted to $15.39. If it were available today on Kindle the price would undoubtedly be the standard $9.99 that Amazon is trying to impose on the book retail business. "Some in the publishing industry fear that Amazon's standard $9.99 (or lower) for new release books on Kindle will create a 'sticky' price in consumers' minds, dragging down the overall perceived value of books," writes Engleman.

Richard Curtis

Google Editions Will Unchain Content from DRM

Sometime in the first half of this year Google will open the doors to its bookstore, called Google Editions. Ian Paul, in PC World, writes: "Unlike Google's biggest competitors, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, which rely heavily on restrictive DRM, Google's store will not be device-specific - allowing for e-books purchased through Google Editions to be read on the far greater number of e-book readers that will flood the market in 2010"

That spells good news for the makers of all those new e-reading gadgets that may be well engineered and loaded with fun features but are hard-up for content. Amazon has its Kindle, but because its system is closed (that's what DRM means) you can't easily get Kindle content on a non-Kindle device. Same goes for B&N and its Nook.

Now you'll be able to download Google's vast (half a million at launch) library on just about any device available. Since most publishers have not given their content exclusively to Amazon or B&N, you'll be able to find and buy it from Google editions and read it on your Que, Skiff, Cool-Er, Flepia, or any other device. Just try not to be embarrassed when someone asks you the name of that e-book reader you're holding in your hand.

The deal Google offers publishers is 63 % of gross sales. This compares favorable with the 50% offered by most e-retailers. But Google is also offering to partner with retailers. If you decide you'd like to open an e-book retail store but don't know how and where to acquire the content, Google will furnish it. Your company would get 55 percent of revenues less a commission for Google.

"Google's e-books would reportedly be indexed and searchable like many books are now through Google's Book Search," says Paul. "Unlike titles offered through e-readers, Google Editions books would not have to be accessed through a dedicated reader or special application.Instead, any device with a Web browser will be able to access a Google Editions book. After you purchase and access your online book for the first time, it will be cached in your browser making the book available when you're offline."

Details in Google Editions Embraces Universal E-book Format

Richard Curtis

Digital Book World Conference Hopes to Lure Agents into E-Revolution

Don't start the e-book revolution without us. That seems to be the message coming out of the literary agent community as reflected in their response to invitations to a major conference taking place in New York City's Sheraton Hotel and Towers at the end of January and presented by F+W Media (publisher of Writer's Digest and Writer's Market)

The revolution has overcome countless obstacles on the road to the tipping point, but one stubborn source of resistance has been the agents. Their intransigence has not been so much a matter of hostility as uncertainty. Caught flat-footed by developments that went from zero to warp-drive speed in the blink of an eye, agents have struggled to get a handle on their role in the new e-world order. Though they take pride in being ahead of their clients, in the case of e-books many of their authors are way ahead of them, doing things or at least thinking thoughts that do not involve services commissionable by their agents such as self-publication of unsold books. Other agents simply want to be able to answer author questions or help their clients find a place in a universe that seems to be hurtling out of control. One wag described it as "Agents on the verge of a nervous breakdown." (See Why Don't Agents Want to Play?)

Mike Shatzkin, chairing Digital Book World on January 26th-27th, is determined to draw agents into the e-book process by designing a number of programs specifically to interest them. "The Changing Agent-Author Relationship: How It Will Affect the Business Model," chaired by Oprah's Book Club's Sara Nelson, is one such. Another, "Tomorrow’s Book Contract," chaired by yours truly, features several agents, a lawyer and a publishing company rights manager presenting wish lists of contract language and provisions reflecting changes in the publishing landscape.

Other panels and speeches will address non-e-book topics of concern to agents such as "Back-Loaded Book Deals: No (and Low) Advance Contracts, Profit-Sharing and Other Innovative Business Models".

With its glittering roster of publishing industry star speakers and panelists, we're told that the conference is almost sold out, but if you're a literary agent you can be sure Mike Shatzkin will do his best to squeeze you in.

For complete information, visit Digital Book World.

Richard Curtis

Will iSlate Battery Carry the Load?

We hate to rain on iSlate's apotheosis, but some of us are wondering about battery life.

A portable computer is only as good as its battery. A blogger with the handle of "Andrew", writing for TabletPCReview.com, said that "Whenever we review notebooks one of the questions that always needs to be answered is, what's the battery life like on this tablet? We all know manufacturers overstate the quoted battery life for a system, probably because they test for battery life under ideal conditions for getting a high number. For example, wireless off, processor underclocked, system idle, LCD brightness set to low, no DVD and so on. So when your notebook with a quoted 5 hour battery life actually gets three hours, you're left wondering what happened to those other two hours the manufacturer got?"

Andrew wrote that in 2007, but the fundamental issues have not changed since then.

A January 26-scheduled announcement by Apple, which few pundits believe could be about anything else than the imminent release of a tablet-sized computer/e-book reader, has created nearly messianic frenzy. A New York Times columnist said that some are calling the device a "Jesus tablet". But at least one authority, physicist Eric Hellmann, thinks we should look under the hood before declaring January 26th a religious holiday.

Hellman, whose popular blog Go To Hellman covers the e-book scene, has speculated on the device's power source. "The design problem is the battery," he recently wrote. "Assuming that the iSlate is a multimedia device implies that it's not an e-ink device. It's going to have a screen not so different from an iPhone screen, and that will consume power. That will in turn require a battery proportional to the iPhone battery, and batteries are what cause iPhones to be reasonably heavy for their size. The Kindle works as a book-replacement because it's light enough; I'm guessing the iSlate will be a more of a tv than a book."

Apple will undoubtedly imbed a state of the art battery in its tablet, but when you consider the load that a tabet will have to pull - movie and game videos, photo archives, videocam, multitouch screen, full color e-books, magazines, newspapers, music, plus countless juice-draining apps, to say nothing of the demands of the tablet's own operating and processing system, you have to wonder whether Apple's battery, or anybody else's at this moment in history, will be able to do the job without adding an unacceptable weight burden.

Knowledgeable insiders confirm these concerns. When a website named islate.org posted some allegedly leaked specs (you can read them here), one commenter wrote that "for as thin as the device is intended to be, there is no possible way it’ll run a HD, 2Gb RAM, and a Core 2 Duo processor. Factor in the large multitouch screen and you could expect a battery life of about 15-minutes with those specs, AND it’d be too hot to handle AND weigh a few pounds. No way."

There will undoubtedly be a stampede to snap up the iSlate, but the coolheaded will scrutinize the specs before committing to the hefty - rumored at $1000 - price of a device that, if you believe some iSlate evangelists, embeds nothing less than the spiritual hopes and dreams of humankind within its fragile case.

Richard Curtis

Howdy Brownsville, New York Calling, Have We Got a Great Bio of Spinoza for Y'all!

If you're a sales rep for a publishing company, you can be replaced by a telemarketer. At least that seems to be the message communicated by Simon & Schuster.

Michael Cader reports in Publishers Lunch that S&S has cut nine field representatives, leaving but seven to service the book buying needs of a nation. An adjunct to this action is the establishment of a telemarketing group that will presumably service the needs of far-flung independent bookstores around the country.

S&S justifies its decision on "the changing nature of the market place." That phrase should be nominated for the Understatement of the Year Award. The marketplace served by publisher field reps twenty or even ten years ago is all but unrecognizable, and what's left of it is melting away like an ice cube in a teapot.

Up until the mid-1990s rural bookshops and paperback outlets like drugstores were serviced by traveling sales reps or independent distributors. These people not only understood the reading tastes of the communities on their routes but knew many of the readers personally. They knew that this bookshop catered to lovers of western fiction and that one to historical romance.

The system worked wonderfully well, but it suffered a major hammer blow in 1996 when several influential paperback distribution agencies let go of most of the independent driver/rack jobbers that covered all those rural bookstores. The reason was that the growing power of computers enabled these agencies to stock stores by remote control instead of employing human beings driving vans and station wagons. It wasn't long before stores in Tuscaloosa or Paducah were being stocked from agencies in Chicago or Toronto who knew little if anything about what they liked to read. And actually it didn't matter, because Chicago and Toronto simply shipped those stores the top fifteen or twenty New York Times bestselling titles anyway. (I've detailed this crucial moment in publishing history in The Rise and Fall of the Mass Market Paperback, Part 1 and Part 2.)

So much for mass market paperbacks. But there were still hardcover books being sold in mall bookstores, right? Wrong. As the 1990s progressed, closing of mall stores reached epidemic proportions as the major chains, especially Barnes & Noble, realized that store traffic simply didn't justify keeping them open. At the same time the rise of Amazon shifted book buying patterns from the car to the armchair. Why drive into town when you could handle the transaction at home?

Given the withering of the rural bookstore market, why should we be surprised to hear S&S declare that "new field sales team will focus on the geographic regions where our sales are strongest--urban areas with a large base of key independent retail, wholesale, and educational accounts"?

The fact that it makes perfect economic sense doesn't palliate the pain that independent bookshop owners and their customers feel to have one more tie to the publishing community severed. One store owner said it all in a tweet: "SO pissed to see my rep go. My one link to you is now someone who has NO idea about my store."

In fairness to Simon & Schuster, this erosion of bookstore culture outside of the big cities is reflected in strategies pursued by every trade publisher. But that will not mitigate the sense among our country cousins that they're having a lot of undesirable and inappropriate books shoved down their throats by (to use Dave Barry's phrase) a bunch of "godless unpatriotic pierced-nose Volvo-driving France-loving left-wing communist latte-sucking tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts."

Richard Curtis

Incentives? Or Shmears? A Window Into Bookselling's Heart of Darkness

Adam Pennenberg, writing for Fast Company, has discovered that books don't find their way to the front of bookstores by themselves. Someone puts them there, and that's because money has crossed hands. "The practice is known as Co-op," Pennenberg writes in Bookstore Baksheesh: The Real Estate Deals That Sell Books,"and each book on each table costs publishers anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000, and even up to $50,000 depending on placement. The closer a table is to the front of the store, the more expensive the real estate."

Pennenberg's depiction of the seamy side of bookselling will come as a revelation to newcomers to the book industry, and some of you will feel the same poignant disillusionment as the discovery that it was mommy and daddy who slipped the dollar under your pillow to compensate you for that tooth that fell out.

For older timers, however, Pennenberg's article is just an update of an age-old practice that reveals the ugly underbelly of our glamorous book business. More than ten years ago I wrote about it in a piece called Incentives? Or Shmears? For those of you who understand a shmear to be helping of cream cheese spread on a bagel, it also has a second connotation in the Yiddish lexicon, namely, a bribe or payoff. "It is somewhat disconcerting," I said, "to learn that such elegant phrases as 'sales incentives,' 'slotting allowances,' 'co-op contributions,' and 'display fees' may be euphemisms for something more akin to what was done in the garment business than to the way ladies and gentlemen conduct business upstairs in Editorial.

"Bismarck said that it is unwise to look too closely into the way we make our laws or our sausages. You may be able think of some other things that don't bear up too well under intense scrutiny. High on my list is what publishers, particularly mass-market paperback publishers, have to do these days to get their merchandise displayed in and promoted by bookstores. It might be described as publishing's dirty little secret, except that it's not so little. In fact, it's become so pervasive that it touches everybody in publishing."

If you'd like to descend into the sewer system that runs beneath your local chain bookstore, click here.

Richard Curtis

NYC Pharmacy Chain Installs Kiosks. Today DVDs,Tomorrow Books?

Do books have to be sold at bookstores?

After the introduction last year of the Espresso print on demand press we wondered about that. As we wrote at the time (see I'll Have Four Sesames, Four Poppy-Seeds, and One Copy of War and Peace), "If you think outside the bookstore box, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that, as POD printing technology improves and miniaturizes, tabletop presses could be installed in a Wal-Mart, Macy's or 7-Eleven. You just go to any neighborhood kiosk and browse Amazon or Barnes & Noble or another book retail website, make your selection, enter your credit card and order the book. Finish shopping or get a cup of coffee, then come back and pick up your bound volume, still warm like a fresh bagel. Hey, you can put POD presses in bagel shops too! Just don't shmear lox spread on your newly minted paperback."

Installation of kiosks to support any product is still an expensive proposition when you think about all the technical challenges and support they require. Think for instance about what's involved just to place an ATM - a kiosk that dispenses cash - in a newspaper shop. So, not only must the operation be impeccably smooth over countless uses, it must sell a product in volume that justifies the use of the real estate it sits on. DVDs are one such product. We wonder if print books are another.

These reflections were triggered by the recent announcement of installation of DVD kiosks in 200 pharmacies in the Duane Reade chain, a drugstore outfit that has become as ubiquitous in New York City as yellow cabs. The kiosks will be sponsored by Blockbuster, the movie rental giant that is trying to reinvent itself after a media revolution that left it holding a bag full of videotapes. "Now Duane Reade pharmacy customers can get a movie with their next prescription pickup," writes Alex Palmer in brandweek.com. (We're not sure where the kiosk pictured here is installed.)

Rental of a DVD is $1.00 per day, so cheap that it plays up how profitable volume projections must be if two corporations splitting the revenue believe they can make out well on a buck per item per day. Some other high-traffic chains like grocery leviathan Publix have opted in.“'These are places that consumers are going by every day,'” the Brandweek article quoted an executive for NCR, the company operating the kiosks under the Blockbuster name. “'You’ve got a kid who’s home sick, you can run to the drug store and pick up their medicine and grab a movie, so as they’re sitting on the couch they can enjoy the rest of their day.'"

Okay, now read Blockbuster Kiosks Debut at Duane Reade and switch "book" for "movie" and you will grasp that, as Espresso technology is refined and the machines are miniaturized, a Duane Reade or Publix book nook on every corner is entirely within the realm of imagination.

Richard Curtis