Copyright Clearance Center's Beyond the Book program explores issues facing the information content industry and helps creative professionals realize the full potential of their works, while encouraging respect for intellectual property and the principles of copyright.
BTB #152: With E-Books, Take Time & Be Sure
In the middle of the e-book hurricane, it may be time for some calm thinking – along with a little debunking. Founder of Unlimited Publishing and book industry analyst Danny O. Snow tells Chris Kenneally now is a good moment for publishers and authors to stop all the rushing about.
“Having observed what happened in the music business ten years ago, we are on pins and needles not to be left in the dust of technology,” Snow says. “Actually, publishers are very lucky to be behind the curve, which is kind of surprising, but we can learn from the mistakes, and the good things, that are done by others.”
Without denying that the time has definitely come for book publishers to take e-Books seriously, Snow seeks to debunk some of the more prevalent myths about e-Books under current market conditions and technological realities. These are:
- Myth #1: e-Books: will soon overtake tree-Books in the marketplace
- Myth #2: EPUB format is a cure-all
- Myth #3: e-Books Will Always be Hard to Publish
- Myth #4: The Market for e-Books is Peaking
A senior research fellow of the Society for New Communications Research and a board member of the Independent Book Publishers Association, Snow admits that e-Books solve serious problems in traditional publishing, nevertheless, and that those benefits virtually insure continuing growth for e-Books.
BTB #151: OnCopyright 2010, Where Ideas Collide (Not People)
When it comes to typical conferences on the topic of copyright, four forces – technology, society, law, and the arts – interact to generate a charged debate. Conference organizer Bill Burger tells Chris Kenneally that OnCopyright 2010 will be different. For this “Collision of Ideas,” there will be a conversation rather than a confrontation.
“Many people get very charged up about copyright issues, and I think that leads to the stalemate that we’ve been witnessing,” says Burger. “It’s a little like what we see in Washington. People are unable to have a real conversation because they get their defenses up.”
Presented by Copyright Clearance Center, the all-day program comes to New York City’s Union League Club Wednesday, March 10, 2010, and features appearances by Google’s Bill Patry; author David Shields; and Australian video artist Pogo, among many others.
“Pogo is going to talk about his ideas around creativity and the art of appropriation,” Burger says, explaining that the artist creates challenging but entertaining videos (such as the one below) from well-known Hollywood films. “His work has the market effect of making people want to see the original work – it certainly has done that for me.”
Registration information for OnCopyright 2010 is here.
BTB #150: Electric Literature Is Shiny New Home for Fiction
Tired of hearing that literary fiction is doomed in the digital age? Well, Scott Lindenbaum and Andy Hunter, were – in fact they became so tired of hearing that Kindles and computers were killing literary fiction, the pair from Brooklyn College started an online literary journal with a twist: They charged real money for it, and they paid the contributors.
Today, Electric Literature publishes its third issue. As before, the quarterly features five pieces of short fiction for which the editors have paid the writers $1,000 each. Readers can subscribe in every viable medium: paperback; eBook; Kindle; and iPhone editions are all available, priced from $3.95 to $9.95 each. The enterprising approach has even caught the attention of old-line media at the New York Times.
Then, last fall, Electric Literature sponsored a literary first – and generated controversy, too – by publishing a novel through Twitter. “Each tweet came out every ten minutes for about three days,” Lindenbaum explains. “It was a micro serialization, if you will.” It was also not entirely a success, but not a failure at all either, as he tells Chris Kenneally.
BTB #149: Bringing Data to the Debate on E-book ‘Piracy’
As e-readers and e-books gather momentum in the early days of 2010, some book publishers find themselves on the horns of a marketing dilemma. Do they join the new e-book club to capture sales, or do they stand back to keep their content safe from online “pirates”?
In a conversation with Chris Kenneally at the recent Digital Book World in New York, media industry consultant Brian O’Leary discussed his firm’s research on the effect on sales when a title finds its way into an unsanctioned online market. The findings – a significant jump in sales – have surprised many in the business.
“When people hear what we have to say, [they think] I might be saying … I don’t worry about piracy when in fact, what I’m saying is, I don’t worry about piracy that helps sell more books,” O’Leary stressed. “I just don’t know the difference between the piracy that hurts, and the piracy that helps,until we study it.”
BTB #148: In Soho, A Digital Start-up From the Book World
When Jane Friedman and Jeff Sharp first became business partners several years ago at HarperCollins, they sought to join the eye of a Hollywood film producer for a striking image and the ear of a publishing executive for evocative language. The pair have since carried that approach forward with the creation late last year of Open Road Integrated Media. Today, the setting is a Soho loft, though, and not a midtown tower, so the not-so-surprising foundation for ORIM is the new world of electronic book publishing.
Ahead of her own presentation to this week’s Digital Book World, Open Road’s Chief Marketing Officer Rachel Chou tells Chris Kenneally that for ORIM the coming book publishing revolution will not mean that reading gets interrupted by a movie. “ We don’t really want to interject – all of a sudden— the author talking… For us, it’s really about understanding what makes powerful marketing materials and the ebook is at the center of it.”
With the emphasis firmly on successful marketing, Chou plans to be data-driven. “The past decade has been about analytics in terms of getting the data, and I think this next decade is about analyzing that data. Is it worth your time? What are we getting out of it?… Where is your audience? And then finding that correct connection.”
BTB #147: Journalism Doesn’t Pay
The self-supporting journalist, making a living from assignment to assignment, is an endangered species. James Rainey, who reports “On the Media” for the Los Angeles Times, has recently documented the decline of freelance writing. Payment in the low-two figures is a joke no more. In fact, that would be considered living high for many reporters.
“It is not uncommon at all now for those who are offering writing jobs to suggest that the payday will come somewhere down the road,” Rainey tells Chris Kenneally, a former freelancer. “They love to say this is great exposure for you, this is great experience, you can put this on your website. And somehow, the payday is always going to come from some other publisher or website… [But] if you’ve already published something somewhere, either for free at a low rate, others aren’t necessarily going to want to step up and then pay you a real living wage to run the same material.”
But with a glut of news online, it’s no surprise that the value has crashed like the 1929 stock market. What worries Rainey and many others, though, is that writing that calls itself “news” may not be the real article. “So many people are very triumphal about the Web and the wonders of it and they often cite information to me that I know to be false… Increasingly, there’s a buyer beware, reader beware [attitude] that we all are going to have to have about this information.”
BTB #146: At Digital Book World, A is for ‘Audience’
Next week, the two-day Digital Book World conference gets underway in New York City at a moment when – for better or for worse – the digital tide may become a tsunami for the book publishing world. Ahead of the first-time conference, Chris Kenneally spoke with Conference Chair and industry pundit Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company and his DBW colleague Guy LeCharles Gonzalez for a special preview.
“Publishers have great tools to compete, but they can only succeed if they know what the game is,” Shatzkin observes, stressing that this new game for publishers – identifying audiences – isn’t as obvious as it sounds.
Gonzales, a poet, F+W executive, and DBW blogger, adds, “The year 2010 will undoubtedly be the year of ‘e,’ but it’s not going to stand for e-book; it will stand for experimentation. Experimentation with contracts, rights, formats and distribution channels; experimentation that will certainly include e-books, but not only e-books.”
DBW speakers scheduled to appear include many recent Beyond the Book guests, including Michael Cader of Publishers’ Lunch; Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah; and Peter Clifton of FiledBy.
Mythconceptions: Debunking the E-Book Hype with Danny O. Snow
The following is a preview of an upcoming interview with Danny O. Snow, founder of Unlimited Publishing, who promises to debunk several myths about e-publishing. The podcast will be released on Monday, February 8, 2010.
In 2010, the long anticipated migration of periodicals from print to Web is undeniably underway. Major daily newspapers including the Christian Science Monitor are already replacing unprofitable (and environmentally unfriendly) print editions with leaner, greener, more timely online distribution. As much as newsprint is a beloved institution, most informed observers agree that the transition from paper-n-ink to bits-n-bytes for newspapers and magazines makes good sense in today’s world - and certainly in tomorrow’s. It’s a better match between form and content.
In the book world too, the word on the street these days is e-Books, e-Books, and more e-Books. The scuttlebutt among book publishers is that they must rapidly jump on the e-Book bandwagon, or risk getting left in the dust. Having observed how record labels were blindsided by music downloading over the last decade, most book publishers are taking this risk seriously.
One motive for publishers to embrace e-Books is that sales are growing exponentially. “Convert from print to digital distribution,” they hear, “and tap a booming new market while earning as much per copy as you did with tree-Books… maybe more!” But early adopters are now learning that this widely circulated notion may be overstated for the moment, as reported below.
Likewise, book publishers are told that the emerging e-Book industry standard EPUB format is a kind of silver bullet. “Convert your production files from PDF to EPUB,” they hear, “and your books will almost magically become marketable for reading on nearly every conceivable electronic device from the Kindle to the iPhone, and everything in between!” Like the misconception that e-Books are rapidly supplanting tree-Books in the marketplace, in 2009 the full promise of EPUB is still unrealized.
This report, without denying that the time has definitely come for book publishers to take e-Books seriously, will debunk some of the more prevalent myths about e-Books under current market conditions and technological realities.
A senior research fellow of the Society for New Communications Research and a board member of the Independent Book Publishers Association, serving thousands of publishers across North America and around the world, Danny Snow admits that e-Books solve serious problems in traditional publishing: overprinting; the cost of shipping books back and forth between warehouses and stores during a time of climbing fuel prices and growing focus on air quality; and the bad bookstore practice of over-ordering, then returning unsold books are all eliminated by digital distribution. These benefits virtually insure continuing growth for e-Books.
The world of publishing is changing in 2010, with real and lasting results after years of wishful thinking. Music, radio and TV, newspapers and magazines are already firmly shifting to online distribution. Books will follow soon, though no one yet knows exactly when, or in which of several possible directions… or whether e-Books will evolve as a separate market entirely.
The landscape for e-Book publishing is growing and changing by the day. It isn’t easy to navigate yet, due to a myriad of lingering uncertainties about hardware, software and market factors. But the future potential of e-Books is clear, and points toward leaner, greener and more efficient ways for publishers to reach readers in the near future.
Please return to Beyond the Book starting Monday, February 8, 2010, to hear this important discussion!
BTB #145: Screen Culture: Covering The World In Words and Pictures
In 1000 days – sometime in 2013 – 11 billion square feet of digital screen surface will exist on earth, enough to cover the planet’s surface almost 50 times. For Peter Kaufman of Intelligent Television, the potential exists in the emerging global “screen culture” to transform everyone’s lives for good. Kaufman says online video programming is quickly surfacing wherever content is found, and is about to transform all media – including book publishing – utterly and completely.
“Imagine the day that Wikipedia becomes video-enabled,” Kaufman muses. “And when the video on Wikipedia will be as easy to edit, manipulate, correct, annotate as the text is today, it will blow the doors off of everything.”
BTB #144: Aims & Aimlessness of ‘A Good Talk’
Don’t expect A Good Talk: The Story & Skill of Conversation to improve your conversation skills, though it just may. For his new book, published today by Twelve Books, Daniel Menaker set out not to write a “how to” but a “what for” volume. He finds the mysterious origins of conversation in pre-verbal ape behavior. And he reports that stress so effectively suffocates conversation that refugee camps are among the quietest places on earth.
A former Random House editor-in-chief (before that, he was a New Yorker senior editor), Menaker engages his readers with an examination of the aims and aimlessness of conversation between individuals who have just met. “This book is about people who don’t know each other very well, and are getting to know each other, and seeing if they want to have a stronger connection in the future.” He names four steps in such a conversation: survey, discovery, risks, and roles.
For more, check out this interview with (and by) Daniel Menaker:
