Transplanting a Seattleite

I've blogged before about how startled I am that people are willing to admit that they go into physical bookstores, browse for books, then buy them online. On the one hand, hard to imagine a better justification for the Barnes & Noble business model.

Here is a Tacoma newspaper covering the Borders liquidation:

http://www.thenewstribune.com/2011/07/21/1752819/borders-end-to-have-ripple-effect.html

I have no particular complaints about the author or even the coverage, beyond the stunning comment from Simba (and I think Anderson made a plausible decision to include the quote). Forrester's McQuivey says B&N might get 10-15% of Borders former revenue once Borders is gone and the liquidation is over (in the meantime, big sales at all the closing stores is a problem). Then:

"Simba Information senior trade analyst Michael Norris disagrees, saying that a world without Borders might actually decrease sales of e-books since there are fewer places for people who buy e-books to browse and research new titles physically before they buy electronically."

It's just hard to know what to do with such an assertion. On the one hand, I've found a lot of evidence that people _do_ browse physical bookstores but then buy online.

On the other hand, I don't hardly ever set foot in a bookstore anymore -- and I buy more books than ever before.

More relevantly, Amazon's original business model was really simple. Hey, look! People! On the Internet! In growing hordes! Let's sell them something they don't need to feel up to feel okay with buying.

I'll probably add to this if I find a longer piece by Norris explaining the rationale. Anything that looks like that in summary is likely to get even better in detail.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/16/us-amazon-kindle-spam-idUSTRE75F68620110616

This Reuters piece by Alistair Barr (who, unless there's more than one of them, seems to write for MarketWatch fairly often) has gotten heavy secondary coverage. I've poked fun at the Amazon (Will) Suffer(s) From Spam!!!! meme before; this is probably the most legitimate attention the meme has thus far collected.

Here is the subhead:

"Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc's publishing foray."

Does the kindle store feel "clogged" to you? With spam? How about the bookstore in general? Does _anyone_ seriously think that the spam issue poses a "threat" to Amazon? Amazon's publishing arm? The kindle platform?

The next few short paragraphs describe how to engage in spammage on the kindle platform, helpfully supplying a product suggestion: "Aspiring spammers can even buy a DVD box set called Autopilot Kindle Cash that claims to teach people how to publish 10 to 20 new Kindle books a day without writing a word." Not unlike writing an article about vandalism and then telling you the brand of the best spray paint; you sort of have to wonder who this article is really aimed at.

[ETA: Ooooh. Apparently an error ridden description of where to buy spray paint.

http://bozonessinc.ca/2011/06/dear-reuters-re-autopilot-kindle-cash/

So if you were thinking this was a really clever case of guerrilla marketing, it's not.]

There is a brief foray into intellectual property theft (specifically, someone republished a novel under a different name, it was detected and a stop was put to it), which strikes me as largely unrelated to the spam issue -- _and_ a much more serious issue, altho trivially addressable in more or less the same ways we put a stop to people taking manhole covers and selling them for scrap when commodity prices are high.

""It's getting to be a more widespread problem," said Susan Daffron, president of Logical Expressions, a book and software publishing company. "Once a few spammers find a new outlet like this, hoards of them follow.""

http://www.logicalexpressions.com/lebooks.htm

Yes, that seems to be a picture of her up in the corner. There's probably a line between the business Susan Daffron engages in and the spamming that the article (and Ms. Daffron) deplore(s). Probably.

More how-to-do-it follows, this time credited to Paul Wolfe, an "internet marketing specialist".

I'm pretty sure this is Paul Wolfe:

http://www.onespoonatatime.com/an-open-letter-to-jeff-bezos-please-stop-the-kindle-spam

Are you noticing a trend here? I'm feeling like these quotes about spam are coming from people with a really solid interest in protecting their Spam Space from New Spam.

Perhaps the most fascinating (hey, it's a looooowwww bar in this article) bits are about Nook and Smashwords not experiencing spam on the same scale as Amazon. Wonder why that is? "but it might just be that the Kindle's huge audience is more attractive to spammers, Forrester's McQuivey said."

Daffron wants Amazon to charge to upload onto DTP. Otherwise, spammers win and Amazon loses. I can't speak to the spammers, altho it seems real clear that Daffron is losing as long as it's that cheap to publish via Amazon.

It's hard to imagine that Barr is silly enough to not realize that his sourcing on this article has such a profoundly self-serving slant. Hard to imagine, but not impossible. Perhaps he's already on vacation.

Hey, call it what it is, right? Dvorak is accusing Amazon of lying in their recent press release.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385683,00.asp

Here are some of his arguments:

"Of all the people I know, only two have Kindles. I never see them on airplanes, and I check every time I fly."

Makes you wonder, right? Is he walking up and down the aisle inspecting everyone's devices? Polling flight attendants?

He asks Amazon to release further details, "numbers". I'm not sure how this would help; he doesn't believe what they did tell him, so why would further data from a source he doesn't trust change things? Here's why he's asking:

"This all looks like a publicity stunt if you ask me. The numbers should have been released since this is a major shift in societal trends.

It would affect the reading public, printing companies, book publishers, Amazon competitors, corner bookstores, public libraries, and schools. If it's true, everything will change. But where are the numbers?"

First, duh, it's a publicity stunt. This is the week leading up to BEA, you silly man. It's a _press release_. It's for _publicity_. However, that does not mean it's not true. I _love_ the argument that if it is true, Amazon has some sort of moral? ethical? common interest? reason to divulge details -- "since this is a major shift in societal trends". I haven't figured out where I'm going to recycle this argument, but I'll think of something, I'm sure, and I'll make a point of citing Dvorak when I do. You have to tell me! It means there's a major shift in societal trends!

I was astounded that the column actually got sillier as it went along. He asserts that people are using the contents of their ereader to seek status, and that the 50-100 books they display are largely unread.

He saves the best for last:

"But if Amazon is selling more ebooks than print books and if I were a big brand publisher, I'd be jumping out of a window right now. I do not see that happening either."

Here, I'll break it down for you.

The US is a huge fraction of the world book market. Amazon is a huge fraction of the US book market. Amazon says more than half of its sales -- by units not revenue -- is now ebook. If I were a publisher and this were true, it would be my Doom. That conclusion is unacceptable, therefore, Amazon is lying.

Denial in action. It's a beautiful, scary, dangerous, hilarious and wonderful thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/business/media/15libraries.html

HarperCollins changes its ebook library lending policy:

"Last week, that agreement was upended by HarperCollins Publishers when it began enforcing new restrictions on its e-books, requiring that books be checked out only 26 times before they expire."

That's sort of interesting. HarperCollins' explanation is straightforward (dude, we didn't realize anyone would buy ebooks; now that we know they will, we don't intend to let people just _give_ them away). The article notes that not all publishers make their ebooks available to libraries for lending. There's some additional description/background in the article which, towards the end, includes this:

"But e-books have downsides for libraries, too. Many libraries dispose of their unread books through used-book sales, a source of revenue that unread e-books can’t provide."

I almost don't know what to do with this. I guess the first thing I would say would be that virtually every library book sale I've ever heard of or encountered was run not by the library but by the Friends of the Library, non profit organizations separate from the library in every way. Libraries dispose of books they no longer want to keep in a variety of ways. There are buyers that will cherry pick. There are buyers that will buy everything. You can hand it off to the Friends. You can hand it off to Got Books and similar. You can set up a website and try to sell them. There are public libraries in places like Sarasota Florida that run a little bookshop within the library; I'm uncertain whether these are run by Friends or by the library itself.

But the source of books for these sales is not primarily the shelves of the library. The source is primarily donated books from the community, and it is a distinction with a variety of implications. First, people who donate books to the Friends sometimes believe those books will end up on the shelves and can get a little pissy when they see them going for a buck-a-bag for the last hour of the quarterly sale in a small town library. Second, the library switching to e-books is not what might cause that source to dry up. The community of book buyers switching to e-books is what might cause that source to dry up. And it turns out that the source drying up is the last thing libraries need to worry about.

You can think of it this way. Once upon a time, people bought cassette tapes of pre-recorded music to listen to (I know, kinda hard to believe. That's why I'm not mentioning the 8-track tapes). Many times, these tapes were used up by the original owner (possibly by them breaking and littering a highway median with shiny brown strips). But some of these tapes were still listenable when the owner was sick of owning it. These tapes were sold, sometimes, or donated (like, to a library), thus generating a small amount of revenue. As the earliest adopters of CDs switched from tapes to CDs in their car decks, they unloaded cassettes at a time when other people were still buying them new. But when the people who borrowed or bought used or recorded off the radio or whatever wanted to unload cassette tapes, they discovered that they couldn't even give them away anymore (even to libraries, which have signs saying they won't take them any more).

We're living in a world in which people buy hardcovers and softcovers and e-books. We may be in a world in which people are unloading physical books as they decide to switch to e-books, but right now, there's still a lively used market, both for out-of-print and for cheap(er) copies of books that people might otherwise buy new in another format. There will come a day when most people who are buying new books aren't buying paper books; they will buy e-books. But that won't be a world in which libraries are hurting for finding books to _sell_ to raise money. That will be a world in which you can't even give books away.

Judging by the experience with cassette tapes, anyway. (Exceptions for out-of-print, of course.)

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=jep;view=text;rgn=main;idno=3336451.0013.209

I have to say the worst thing about electronic publishing (at least in a journal about same) is that people go on and on and on.

This guy is imagining the world of 2020, a world of climate change and peak everything. How will that affect University Presses? Yes, that's the first question I would ask, too. (<-- Sarcasm.)

Here are some highlights:

"So, let me posit two dystopian economic/scholarly publishing futures, and explore what they might mean for university presses.

In both scenarios, on the positive side, by 2020, I expect to live in digital ubiquity, where digital “devices” are as quaint as a vacuum-tube stereo, since we each have a digital presence that simply surrounds us. My personal engagement with the digital world is by now facilitated by the systems’ knowledge of the activities, interests, concerns, and enthusiasms of the other seven thousand people just like me, who are each also “one in a million.” We will have almost forgotten that once upon a time we had to ask a question with “key words.” Walls and kiosks and foldable screens and NetSpecs will provide access to whatever degree of content bandwidth we desire, for whatever purposes we choose."

Someone has read _Neuromancer_ and its ilk several thousand too many times.

This is funny: "For university presses, in both scenarios, I expect to see routine “smart crowdsourcing” of peer review". Okay, that might not be funny. I like Amazon's reviews, and I have a pretty good sense of how to interpret them. I know there are some real issues with peer review as it works today. But I have a bad feeling about "smart crowdsourcing peer review".

"In both scenarios, tenure and review remain necessary elements of scholarly validation, and the desire for high-quality, high-touch, high-authority products, produced by publishers and facilitating authority for that validation, remain high." Words fail. Tenure not going anywhere, even if the world goes to shit. Ya gotta love that kind of bedrock certainty. Most of the rest of this dystopian scenario makes absolutely no sense, however, this will give you some flavor:

"Publishing innovation, in this scenario, will be nearly all reactive, a sort of whack-a-mole tamping-down of the next unexpected problem. By 2020, when it is crystal clear that repair of the physical world is nearly impossible (and/or when geoengineering schemes have caused massive “unintended consequences”), the economic contraction will be staggering. Beyond that, there be tygers."

The rest of it made so little sense that I sort of gave up. Good luck if you give it a shot.

There's actually some reason to suspect this author has real competence at electronic publishing, and just has a real fanciful bent to his personality, particularly when brainstorming about the future. It's always nice to find someone who can find the funny in the truly appalling.

I've been reading the Journal of Electronic Publishing, and I haven't laughed this much since, oh, the last time I was reading stuff over at Cafe Press that you can find by searching on keywords like asperger's.

I'm _pretty_ sure Katharine Wittenberg wrote this seriously, but I swear it reads like the people at Onion decided to take on academic:

"This R&D group will look and behave more like a research lab than a production operation. They will be directed to work with authors to develop new kinds of publications in a select number of fields that complement the areas of strength within a press’s host university. This group will play a critical role in helping the university press devise new models of scholarly publishing that will strengthen the press’s identity as a center of innovation."

I LOVE University Presses. Seriously. I'm happy to pay way more for a University Press book than an otherwise substitutable Big 6 book, because I believe the University Press offerings represent a better risk. But in absolutely no universe that I can imagine do university presses have an "identity as a center of innovation". It is to laugh.

Really, really hard.

Also, Wittenberg's theory about how R&D works in the corporate world is a complete and utter crock of shit. And given that she used to run the electronic publishing effort at Columbia U, and her departure and the program shutting down coincided, I have to suspect some really thorough-going incompetence. (They've since outsourced a bunch of stuff to, I kid you not, _Perseus_. I guess if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, right? Geez.) Honestly? This article makes typical ebook coverage look _brilliantly insightful_.

Lest someone come along and say, hey, aren't you being a little harsh on Ms. Wittenberg, here's what you can read over at Columbia University Press:

http://cup.columbia.edu/static/about

"The Press announced a plan to close its warehouse facility in Irvington, NY in the summer of 2009 and outsource its fulfillment operations to Perseus Distribution, a division of Perseus Book Group. This restructuring is part of an overall effort to improve print economics while facilitating electronic delivery.

The collaboration with Perseus will strengthen the print program of the Press and allow it to accelerate growth of digital offerings—not previously available through its operations—for its eleven distribution partners, particularly for short run digital printing, print on demand, and a suite of delivery services for electronic books in multiple formats. Columbia University Press will continue to concentrate on growing its core publishing operations including its recently launched Columbia Business School Publishing imprint, making them available in multiple formats."

I've been around when a division was supposed to produce something, and the day came and went and they didn't deliver, so the company had to go outside and buy it instead. And this looks a whole lot like that happened to Columbia University Press in the wake of EPIC and Wittenberg.

I can't _wait_ to read the next set of brilliant ideas about how to save university publishing. I would say I'm serious about this, but honestly, I've had to do a lot of deep breathing just to read the particularly hilarious bits out loud to R.

ETA: I think that EPIC got shut down during the general collapse of the economy in 2008, but Columbia University Press couldn't get around the knotty problem of needing to provide digital publication services. They probably fired up a laptop, and googled around and found this:

http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Perseus-Book-Group-Introduces-Constellation-Service-for-Independent-Publishers-50794.asp

Must have felt like every one of their prayers had been answered. Hope it works out for them; seems more likely to do so than anything involving their former director of epic.

http://www.examiner.com/literature-in-lexington/ebooks-make-it-to-the-ny-times-best-sellers-lists

This is an elderly article, dating from Nov 12. I'm trying to track down something R. told me, and failing, but stumbling across all kinds of other interesting things.

"Ebooks now account for a 15% share of the book market and are anticipated to rise to 25% or higher by 2012."

I wish that were sourced; now I'm going to have to find out what that means and if it is true. (_Which_ book market?) The last time I was seeing estimates of e-book share of book market, it was closer to 6%, and a whole bunch of the punditry Was Unimpressed. And this was less than a year ago.

Hmmm.

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/208654/amazon_extends_value_of_kindle_with_new_lending_feature.html

I've been adding tags to my blog today (you can really tell when I'm starting to catch up on my life; I have time to exercise my OCD in more frivolous ways), and one of those tags is on this entry: mocking e-book coverage. I do a lot of that, apparently.

I've been through a few kindles. The first kindle I had didn't charge, so it doesn't count. The second kindle I had for a while, and then I bought a kindle 2 when it came out. I loaned the original kindle out (loaded up with books), which as you can imagine, makes me roll my eyes everyone says you can't loan out your e-books. Sure you can. Just loan out a kindle with e-books on it. The library in Mayberry, where I used to live, does this. Population around 5000. You'd think if they can figure this out, other people could, too.

Then I was looking at the kindle 3 and the book cover with the light. I bought a wifi one for a nephew (husband's nephew) who graduated from high school and was starting college. And I bought one for myself, because I felt so good about being generous I felt I deserved a reward (<--- joke. I bought it because I wanted it, and my gadget budget is rarely maxed out.). That meant I now had 2 functioning kindles I wasn't using, available for loan. Kindle v. 2 went to the nanny indefinitely. Again, loaded up with e-books.

Here's why I'm mocking today:

"So, what's the big deal with the new lending feature? There are plenty of situations where an employee or co-worker might need to use a given title, but not forever. Since the need is temporary, one Kindle edition can be purchased by the business and farmed out to employees on an as-needed basis."

That's just stupid. Because a _business_ doesn't have enough computers/smart phones/physical kindles all hooked up to the same account so they can use the generally 6 copies available of most titles? Lacks plausibility.

Pull the other one, Tony Bradley, contributor to PC World. It's got bells on.

Me, I'm getting a little concerned about all those kindles, and the MacBook, and the iPads and so forth. 3 kindles. 1 Macbook. 2 iPads. If I get a smartphone that lets me read kindle e-books on it, I'm going to be exercising that 6 copy limit. It will be a sad day when that happens. (<--- Sarcasm.)

Once again, h/t all of this stuff to The Digital Reader. Brilliant blogger. Okay, now to the embedded stuff.

http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/09/29/rushkoff-why-i-left-my-publisher-in-order-to-publish-a-book/

That's interesting. The biggest bummer I see in selling it exclusively over at OR is the difficulty of assessing the book via a reviews mechanism such as the one I am accustomed to over at Amazon. There are problems with Amazon reviews, but that's a devil I've known a long time. OTOH, Rushkoff is a relatively well known quantity, and the ebook being sold is readable on the kindle and DRM free -- that's damn fine, no matter how you look at it. Loss of curation, also an issue. Sort of a push; I haven't bought the book, but I might. Rushkoff's statements are not obviously flawed.

http://www.evilreads.com/blog/2010/10/2/rushkoff-most-books-sell-more-in-ebook-version-than-print-um.html

That didn't stop this blogger, however, from taking issue with the amazing statement by Rushkoff:

"Well, most books sell more electronic versions than print ones anyway, and Amazon already sells more of most books than all real-world retailers combined."

Evil's response is just innumerate.

"If ebooks outsold "most" print books in the numbers that Rushkoff is claiming, then they should have a much larger marketshare than 6-8%."

For all I know, the collective total market share of most print books is sub sub sub 1%, and the collective total market share of that same collection of e-titles is a bit more. Books are a classic long-tail plus bestseller arena. A million distinct titles might sell a total of 1000 copies. That same million distinct titles might sell a total of 2000 e-copies (2 e-copies for each print copy). And then there'd be the hundred or so other titles that sold millions and millions of copies in print, and somewhat fewer e-copies. Rushkoff could be right. I'm not saying he is; I'm just saying he could be right.

Evil adds:

"Amazon is the biggest North American bookseller, but they do not sell more books than "all real-world retailers combined."" Er. That's wasn't the claim. The claim was that they sell more of _most_ books than all real-world retailers combined. I would bet just about anything (not a person, of course) that this statement is true, and Evil has mistaken selling "more of most books" for "most books". Again with the innumeracy.

It has become increasingly clear to me that a lot of my blogging is complaining about bad rhetoric: stupid rhetoric, incorrect rhetoric, immoral rhetoric, bigoted rhetoric. There's a lot of stuff out there that I don't agree with, but I don't really blog about it. I blog about the stuff that gets presented badly.

I must be a very shallow person. (Altho I feel compelled to point out that in addition to this being sarcastic and not true, it also does not follow from the preceding paragraph. This is a really tough reflex to suppress.)

http://technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25783/

Some samples of the silly:

"In Clearwater, Florida, the principle of the local high school recently replaced all his students' textbooks with latest-gen Kindles - without, apparently, any awareness that formal trials of the Kindle as a textbook replacement led universities like Princeton and Arizona State University to reject it as inadequate."

Here's the embedded link:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/k12/clearwater-high-prepares-to-hand-out-kindle-e-readers-to-its-2100-plus/1120428

It is clear from the embedded link that (a) the principal (spelling!) did not replace _all_ the textbooks:

"they'll find electronic texts for English, math, some science and novels, with plans to expand to other subjects next year."

(b) The principal has at least recently become aware of the kindle trials at the college level.

Students have the option of not using the kindle at all.

I have to wonder why this blogger is hostile to the idea. Kids backpacks are awful heavy, and textbooks are pretty useless anyway. Why not try something new?

"Then you have pundits like Nicholas Negroponte, founder of MIT's Media Lab, making statements..."

Dude, it is _Negroponte_. Have you been paying attention?

There are embedded links to things that I have mocked in the past: that ebooks "only" make up 6% of the book market. Also to efforts to de-emphasize just how big a player in the book market Amazon is ("only" 19% of the total book market). Silliest, however, is that he figures if Amazon has such a "small" part of the book market as a whole, and such a large fraction of the ebook market, that makes the ebooks outselling hardcovers on Amazon basically not that exciting, certainly not any kind of ominous portent for physical books or anything.

Mims may know a thing or two about technology (I don't feel like trying to answer that question in this post), but that conclusion betrays a fundamental -- and pervasive -- misunderstanding of how trade publishing makes its money. Or rather, _who_ it makes its money on. It's a tiny group of people who buy lots and lots of books -- and those people are switching fast. Given that switch is associated with a strong wind of disintermediation, it's hard to imagine a course change any time soon.

"The backlash against ebooks by those who aren't so in love with technology for its own sake has yet to begin"

So what was that year plus of commentary about loving the feel and smell of paper books?

Mims seems enamored of large format devices like the Kno. In an earlier post (which he links to in this one), this gem appears:

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/25590/

"In contrast, the attempt to cram a textbook onto a smaller screen is a primary reason that previous trials with replacing textbooks with e-readers such as the Kindle DX were abject failures."

Uh. No. That was _a_ problem, but by no means the main problem. There were issues with availability of texts (notably the lack of a french-english/english-french dictionary for the french class), the way annotating worked (and one professor who was concerned about comprehension as a result), and accessibility concerns for the visually impaired were significant problems. The Reed college experiment picked classes where color diagrams and pictures weren't going to be an issue.

Mims' argument concludes that people who love buying cheap used books (made even more plentiful by early adopters switching to ebooks and unloading their libraries) aren't going to want to pay $10 for a new ebook. That's a pretty fascinating argument. It sure doesn't help publishers of _new_ paper books out at all. I particularly love the idea that there's a segment of the book market that only buys paper books because they expect to be able to recoup part of that cost when they resell the book. I used to be one of those sell books to the used book store people, or trade them in for even more store credit. I buy _way way way_ more books now (paper and ebooks) than I used to then.

This is a much more detailed and comprehensive why-ebooks-aren't-going-to-take-over article than I think I've seen anywhere else (at least all collected into a single post/article). That's a fairly impressive thing all by itself. But it is basically quite silly. As long as the e-texts are available on multiple platforms (kindle text and ibookstore books can be read on multiple platforms, some of which are more friendly to the eyes and others of which are more portable and others of which are better at displaying color diagrams), and those platforms are available to students, the limitations of any one platform don't seem particularly important. Amazon has chewed the accessibility issues down to a point where the complaining groups are more or less satisfied. The last few months have demonstrated that people who only buy a few new books a year are perfectly happy going out and spending over $100 on a dedicated e-reader (and even more people are forking over for iPads). It would seem that the Reed College complaints about annotations represent the significant problem that must be overcome in an academic setting, and it is one that is largely irrelevant in the trade book market.

It'll be interesting to see if in fact:

"Finally, and most importantly, as a delivery mechanism, Ebooks are nothing like music or even movies and television, and the transitions seen in those media simply don't apply to the transition to electronic books."

I would argue that books have seen a lot more transitions than young'uns these days realize. One more transition, away from wood pulp, might be qualitatively different, but it certainly isn't unthinkable.