Do the Math

Tim O'Reilly is the founder of O'Reilly Media which publishes many technical and programming manuals for all the arcane branches of system management, specific languages, operating systems, design & graphics, databases, you name it. He has been around the tech business (and the publishing business, too) for quite a while and has probably forgotten more about some of today's "new ideas" than the people who think they've invented those ideas have ever imagined. Needless to say, he's worth paying attention to when he talks about matters technical and book-related. Not least among his accomplishments, O'Reilly was involved with GNN, the first ever commercial website and the place that ran the very first banner ad.

Fortunately, he sees blogging as a useful tool for plugging his product lines and his ideas and he also has a sense of humor since his corporate blog is named Radar. The M*A*S*H reference certainly tickles my fancy.

In a recent post, O'Reilly has some pointed, intelligent and business-like things to say about one of our favorite topics, the Kindle, as well as about e-book pricing, potential markets, making a profit and other relevant issues. He observes the enthusiastic and optimistic chat about how e-books need to be priced at no more than $5 each to broaden the market and how some writers have expectations, or at least hopes, that they will get rich, or at least make lots more money, selling updates to people who buy their book for the Kindle. ("I'll sell 40,000 e-book copies of my book and 25% of those people will pay me an annual fee for the updates and maybe I'll make some money by making my e-books ad-supported as well and...")

He applies hard-won knowledge of the ways of the marketplace (Think no more than 1%, not 25% as a likely subscriber ratio and don't forget that Amazon will take 65% of each sale since you're a solo content-provider...) and brings things down to earth. I can taste the reality in what he has to say because I've had my own versions of that glorious optimism and the inevitable sober reflection when the final picture doesn't turn out to be as rosy as the hopes that propelled the initial effort.

What he says may be discouraging on one level but it isn't intended to discourage. It's intended to make people think in terms that can actually be realized. It's intended to make people actually do the math and realize that if you sell too cheaply, you aren't necessarily going to make it up on volume. (Although that's an experiment that probably should be tried in multiple variations.) It's intended to make certain that rational planning and disciplined expectations rule the day and that massive disappointment down the line is less likely because "irrational exuberance" is not the order of the day.

By the way, not only does what O'Reilly say make sense, he elicits voluminous comments and a much higher percentage of them make sense than I'm used to seeing in most other blogs. I'm planning to add his blog to my must list.

-- John

What's So Funny about Publishing?

Those of us who toil in the publishing trade don't always have the objectivity to see the comical aspects of what we do. If you seek a dark view of our industry you'll find lots of confirmation: publishers gobbling each other up, dedicated editors summarily released from long-held jobs, an antique and horrifyingly wasteful distribution system, books orphaned and ruined by corporate indifference -- well, I could go on and on. And I did, chronicling these and other harsh realities in a column I wrote for Locus, the science fiction trade magazine, for a dozen years.

As time went by, however, I achieved a bit of perspective and began to see the ridiculous side of publishing. The world is certainly a tragic place, and if you measure tragedy against war, famine, earthquakes and floods, then the horrors of orphaned books, underpromoted authors and bankrupt publishers do seem petty, pathetic and preposterous by comparison.

It's in that spirit that I offer The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires. What if an alien visited Earth seeking intelligent life but, after studying publishers, concluded the planet was not worth a second look? Suppose a visitor from another galaxy engaged a literary agent to handle book and movie offers? Picture a convention of authors so jealous of each other that they rend their agents limb from limb a la Night of the Living Dead? Those are some of the nutty concepts you'll find in my book. And, if you're a denizen of the publishing industry, you may get a kick out of my end-of-the-year poetic spoofs that appeared in Publishers Weekly. You can hear more about these in my introduction.

Have your royalties plummeted? Editor left the industry? Publisher gone bankrupt? Smile -- it could be worse!

- Richard Curtis

Do Amazon Reviews Count?

If you were browsing a book in a store and the jacket blurb said,

"This is one of the best books of the year!"
– amazon.com

...would you be inclined to buy it?

Before you say no, here's something to think about.

Any author who wants to get published successfully must run a gauntlet of "gatekeepers" who judge whether the work has artistic and commercial merit. Among the Cerberuses guarding the franchise on taste are literary agents, editors, bookshop and chain store buyers, critics and reviewers. Today's Big Publishing establishment is dominated by such gatekeepers. They also guard tradition and guard it fiercely, and who can blame them? If the gates are breached a way of life comes crashing down.

Like a walled city, the gates enclose a world of tangible books produced in physical offices and distributed to brick and mortar stores. Until recently there was no other world, and as stupid and clunky as it is, somehow we've all managed to find a way to make a living in it. But now the Digital Revolution is eroding that world, just as it has done to so many business models that depended on middle agencies for distribution of tangible products. Today's publishing model is a virtual one, and can be reduced to a simple formula: A Writer, A Reader, A Server. Absent from this formula, you will readily note, is A Reviewer. The question arises, in a world where books are sold virtually, do we still need reviewers?

After all, one of the keystones (to use a tangible image for an intangible concept) of Internet marketing is the way that public opinion can be instantly and virally created and marshaled into an economic force. Do we need gatekeepers to help us judge whether we should buy or read a book?

I happen to think that not only do we need them, we really can't exist without them. And the interesting news is, we are creating a new class of pundits. Though their taste, judgment and experience may be no better than yours, we listen to what they have to say and, like it or not, we're influenced by them. In particular I'm referring to the people who review for Amazon.com.

The idea that your next-door neighbor's opinion may affect your decision to buy or pass up a book seems unlikely. True, word of mouth has always been a factor in the fate of successful books, but usually the mouth that the words come from belongs to someone you know, not an anonymous name on a website. But wait -- when you search your Zagat guide for a restaurant recommendation, do you know who has written the review? No, but in all likelihood it's a restaurant patron with no more professional reviewing credentials than yourself. That doesn't stop you from saying, "Let's go here!" Some of your neighbors thought the food was good, the place clean, the atmosphere pleasant, the service excellent, and the prices right, and that's good enough for you.

In short, we live in an age when peer review is meaningful if not significant, and Amazon.com has used this fact to create a cadre of reviewers who must be taken seriously. Go to Amazon, click on any recently published book and page down beyond the official reviews (Publishers Weekly, New York Times, etc.). You'll find Customer Reviews, and note that many of the reviewers identify themselves as the authors of a number of reviews. If they regularly review or blog about specific genres you may in time come to the conclusion that this person's judgment is reliable and enlightening. Thereafter, when you see his or her name next to a review of a new book, you may very well be motivated to buy it.

It's worth your time to click on the link that says "See all my reviews", or on the badge beneath the reviewers name. Amazon has created a badge system to help you identify the reviewers credentials and review-worthiness.

I haven't seen too many traditional books with Amazon.com quotes blazed on the cover, but I won't be surprised if that changes before long. The first time you see one, let me know, and remember you heard it here first.

- Richard Curtis

Stealing Books - Easy!

Here's another brief bit from one of my favorite blogs, TechCrunch. Although the Kindle, Amazon.com's brand-new e-book reader (about which we have blogged extensively) sells books in the proprietary, locked MobiPocket format, the writer points out how easy it is to download book files from any of the myriad BitTorrent sites (where all those illegal file copies--music, movies and, yes, books, too--can be found if you're not worried about being tracked by the RIAA or any of the other organizations dedicated to chasing after data thieves).

Now, there are a number of sites, like Project Gutenberg, where files exist for any number of out-of-copyright/public domain titles. These files can be downloaded for free and used as the reader chooses. They are often posted in multiple formats like .txt (Text only), .pdf (Adobe Reader), .doc (Microsoft Word) and .Lit (Microsoft Reader). The Kindle can read text and Word files and the other two are easily converted into one or the other of these formats and they can then be added to the Kindle via the dedicated email address that comes with every Kindle account.

However, the BitTorrent sites have files for lots of books, including plenty of brand-new copyrighted titles, that can be downloaded just as easily, converted to whatever format seems best and loaded onto the Kindle via that same email address.

It's easy. It's quick. It's convenient. It's free. It's also completely illegal--but we haven't seen that stopping too many music collectors or movie fans now, have we? Are book readers more honest and law-abiding than music and movie fans? There's no real way to know until some deep-pocketed publisher, or a publishers enforcement organization, starts tracking downloads and suing everyone in sight. Perhaps it won't come to that but Amazon has given all those downloaders a way to put their files, legally obtained or otherwise, on a handy portable reading device.

Maybe that Attributor story I did a while back, the one about a company whose service tracks content appearances on the net, begins to make a lot more sense. I wonder what they charge?

- John

Mobile Writing

A couple of months ago, Richard blogged about Japanese writers creating novels on their cell phones. There's a more recent story that expands on the story and offers some startling information on how successful some of these writers are becoming.

I caught this story at TechCrunch, one of my personal go-to's for techie news with a business slant, and their source was a piece in Australia's Sydney Morning Herald. For a nice additional note of surreality, the date on the newspaper piece is December 3 and the TechCrunch coverage of that story is dated December 2. Gotta love the International Date Line and globe-spanning technology. This probably also means that from the point of view of all the nations in the Pacific Rim, us North Americans are perpetually living in the past, doesn't it? I'd never quite thought of it that way before. It may be more appropriate than we want to think about, too.

Anyway, not only are lots of people in Japan writing novels on their mobile phones, a goodly number of those writers are becoming bestsellers. The specific author interviewed in the story, 21-year-old Rin (a pseudonym for a nursery school teacher) initially posted the segments of her novel (Moshimo Kimiga--If You...) to a website as she was writing them but a publisher picked up the book, put it into print and has now sold 420,000 copies in just a few months. There's even a name for the phenonomon: keitai shousetsu (mobile phone novels) and one of the other stats quoted in the article is that a site set up seven years ago to help people write their mobile phone novels, Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), has accumulated almost one million of them.

An incidental side note of related interest is the mention in the story that a new translation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov has sold more than 300,000 copies so I suppose we shouldn't automatically despair for the collapse of classic literature, in Japan at least. I wish I thought there was even a slim likelihood of such sales occurring in this country in the same situation. Maybe if Brad Pitt and Keanu Reaves were to star in the movie...

In any case, smart and opportunistic Japanese publishers are jumping on the bandwagon and Miss Rin is not alone in her success. A book called Koizora (Love Sky) by "Mika" has sold 1.2 million copies since being put into print a little over a year ago. And, since we've been behind Japan on the mobile phone technology curve for years and years, maybe we should brace ourselves for the same thing to be happening here--around about 2011 or so.

- John

Amazon and the First Amendment

Thanks to Shelf-Awareness, a website and daily newsletter that covers many things book- and bookseller-related, for pointing me to this story. If you're interested in these topics, their daily email would be well worth your time. And, thanks, too, to Amazon.com for doing their part to defend everyone's First Amendment rights.

On November 27, Associated Press released a story about Amazon's run-in with a Federal prosecutor in Madison, WI who wanted all the records, including full customer information, on 24,000 transactions dating back to 1999. Seems the prosecutor was building a tax fraud case against a former Madison city official who, in his spare time, or possibly on city-paid time, sold lots of books as an Amazon affiliate. In their not-particularly-Constitution-minded zeal to find potential witnesses, they had no problem subpoenaing personal information on who knows how many thousands of individual customers. Unsurprisingly, Amazon chose not to comply with the subpoena and, hearteningly, one Judge Crocker supported their reluctance to reveal the information. Now that charges have been filed, the Judge, at Amazon's request allowed publication of his hitherto-sealed decision which led to the prosecutor's withdrawal of the subpoena.

Perhaps even more interesting is a related blog entry by Declan McCullagh, The Iconoclast on News.com, which contains a Q&A with Amazon.com's vice president for litigation, in which the litigator answers some questions about how often Amazon gets such requests and how they deal with them.

It's bad enough that the DHS is out there wielding gag orders so that bookstores can't even mention that they've been asked to reveal information when a question of terrorism is involved but when a prosecutor starts trying to subpoena wholesale quantities of private information, you have to begin to wonder if any of these people have ever read a small document usually referred to as the United States Constitution. If they have, it seems like maybe they're just using it as a set of guidelines for what new legalistic excesses to pursue.

-- John