Confirmation: Macmillan e-book prices no longer set by publisher

Confirmation: Macmillan e-book prices no longer set by publisher

Yesterday, when I was telling you about a bunch of bargains with Amazon apparently price-matching Barnes & Noble on the latter’s half-off sale on top NOOK Books this weekend, I noticed that many of them were Macmillan and suggested that perhaps Macmillan and Amazon had renegotiated terms after the former settled on the Agency Model. Whew, that was  a long sentence! Let me catch breath…okay, to go on…

I’ve checked several Macmillan books this morning, and the line that “This price was set by the publisher” is now gone.

If you’ve been tracking books at

eReaderIQ

which is a great free service that will send you an e-mail when a book you are tracking drops in price an amount you specify, you may have gotten some pleasant surprises in your Inbox.

Macmillan has a number of imprints (specialized lines of books). If you were tracking something from one of these, you may have seen the change:

• Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• First Second
• Henry Holt & Co.
• Nature Publishing Group
• Palgrave Macmillan
• Picador
• Quick and Dirty Tips
• Scientific American
• St. Martin’s Press
• Minotaur Books
• Thomas Dunne Books
• Tor/Forge

What does this mean for the future?

We should start seeing Macmillan books discounted at Amazon, including being featured in Kindle Daily Deal and  100 Kindle Books for $3.99 or Less. I’ll certainly be interested in seeing how things are affected when I run my next Snapshot on May 1st. It’s possible the average price of a New York Times bestseller hardback equivalent may drop, for example.

So, where are we on the Big Six US trade publishers and the Agency Model at Amazon?

• Simon & Schuster: can be discounted
• Hachette: can be discounted
• Macmillan: can be discounted
• HarperCollins: can be discounted
• Penguin: can not be discounted (still under the Agency Model, but they have settled…we need to wait for the new terms to be worked out)
• Random House: can not be discounted (still under the Agency Model…they will be bound by Penguin having settled, if their merger with Penguin is approved)

It will take some time after the Agency Model is gone before we really see the impact, because we have to get back into price competition between sellers. I think we might really see an impact this holiday season, though.

Here is a search for books published by Macmillan (this won’t cover all of the imprints):

Macmillan titles in the US Kindle store

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Round up #153: Hydra deal changes, Tim Cook may be deposed

Round up #153: Hydra deal changes, Tim Cook may be deposed

The ILMK Round ups are short pieces which may or may not be expanded later.

Cook-ing the E-books in Court

What’s is Apple’s most important asset? The iPhone? The iPad?

How about Steve Jobs’ mystique?

I think that’s what might get Apple to finally settle on the Agency Model before they end up in open court.

CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Tim Cook has been ordered to testify in the Department of Justice case against Apple for conspiring with five publishers (all of which have settled now) to raise e-book prices:

Reuters article

Apple’s not happy about that, and for very good reason. Eleven Apple employees have already been deposed or are scheduled to be deposed and, hey, Cook wasn’t even in charge when the deals were made.

No, but Steve Jobs was, and the DoJ argues that Cook may be able to testify (during a four-hour session) as to what Jobs said about e-books and e-book pricing.

If I was Apple, that’s the last thing I’d want. I don’t want Tim Cook to be involved in anything that might hurt Steve Jobs’ reputation.

Apple users love Steve Jobs, and not without reason. If Tim Cook has to deal with negative allegations about Jobs, Cook can only lose. If the current CEO affirms bad things about the old CEO, it makes it look like Apple is now disconnected from the Jobs magic. If the current CEO vigorously defends the old CEO, it looks like Apple can’t grow in a new direction. If it comes out as neutral, Apple looks rudderless.

They do not want that happening in the public eye.

This first thing is a deposition, so that’s different from open court.

I actually think Apple might settle if it looks like Cook might end up on TV in the actual trial messing with Jobs’ public image.

Apple already settled in the EU. Settling doesn’t look so bad…part of the agreement could be that they don’t admit to any wrongdoing.

I really hand it to Judge Denise Cote, who has made things happen very quickly in e-book cases…while we’ve waited years for Judge Denny Chin to do things in the Google settlement.

Random House redoes the Hydra deal

I recently wrote about Random House’s new digital imprints, including Hydra, and how the S.F.W.A. (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) and its President had publicly expressed their dissatisfaction with the offering.

Random House has now changed the terms:

A SPECIAL MESSAGE FROM HYDRA, ALIBI, LOVESWEPT AND FLIRT

Let me address two things here. First, the fact that it changed, and second,how the new deal looks.

I had suggested that S.F.W.A. President John Scalzi using the “F word” in a personal blog post about the Hydra terms was likely to be counter-productive.

I still think it may have been.

We have to be careful about cause and effect. We can’t say that Scalzi’s post caused the change. We can say that the change followed Scalzi’s post.

I was fascinated by the way Random House indicated the change happened:

“In response to recent constructive discussions with authors, agents and writers’ groups, including the Horror Writers Association…”

Notice that they didn’t mention the S.F.W.A.

As far as I know (I checked their website and did a quick Google search), the H.W.A. didn’t take the dispute public, or use words like “onerous”.

I know my own prejudice is that treating someone else with respect is more likely to get them to modify their behavior than publicly disrespecting them (I don’t have data that proves that, and certainly, different tactics may apply in different situations), but I will say I’m happy that it changed.

The new deal gives authors a choice of two options (and I think choice is good).

Either the author splits the profits 50-50 with the publisher, or the author gets 25% of receipts.

The profit one means that the costs of producing the book have to be met first; that’s not true with receipts. The second one also offers an advance, which was a sticking point for the S.F.W.A..

In either case, they are still licensing rights for all territories, which I think is a good thing and something I’ve predicted before. It just makes sense in a digital world that you don’t have to enter into separate negotiations for the USA, Australia, the UK, and Japan (for example).

They’ve also addressed the issue of the rights being for the length of the copyright term (which did seem ridiculously long). Now, if (after the first three years) the book fails to sell 300 “copies” in a year, the author can request reversion of rights.

Then there was the issue of derivative works, which Random House seemed to suggest they would have rights to do automatically in the first deal. In the new deal, it’s an additional negotiation if they want to, say, make a video game.

All in all, it seems like a great improvement.

Netflix stock rises on new social element

The feature I would most like to see go away in Netflix is the “recently watched” element.

Our adult kid and I both use one Netflix account, and honestly, it always seems a bit strange to see what the other person has been recently watching.

I don’t have any problem adding something to our Instant Queue to be able to pick up where I left off…I don’t need to know about something that our kid watched and finished. At least, that should be optional.

However, I am from a generation that was more concerned with privacy. My kids generation is much more open about sharing.

I’ve been repeatedly saying that Amazon would benefit from having the option to make our reading more social.

According to this

New York Times article

and many others, Netflix is teaming up with Facebook so that people can share what they’ve watched with others (it’s more than that).

Netflix stock saw a big bump following the announcement.

Now, you might think that’s just because Netflix is teaming up with Facebook (the third largest “country” in the world, by population), but remember, Wall Street doesn’t like Facebook much.

I don’t think Amazon needs to align with Facebook to get social, although they could.

January bookstore sales up 5.5%

This brief

Publishers Weekly article

says that bookstore sales in January in the USA were up 5.5%.

There are a couple of interesting things to tease out of this, even though it is fewer than fifty words.

First, yay! Bookstore sales are up.

However, they weren’t up as much as entire retail segment, which rose 6.1% in the same period. The recovery may be related to broad economics, in which case the headline could have read, “Bookstore sales lag behind”.

The other thing was the definition of a bookstore: “…all sales from stores that generate at least 50% of their revenue from books”.

I wonder if that includes Barnes & Noble.

I know that might seem odd at first, but B&N stores sell a lot of things besides books, including magazines, toys, shirts, coffee, and of course, the relatively expensive electronics (including the NOOK tablet line).

My guess is that their revenue is probably still at least 50% from books, but I’d also bet that the ratio has changed dramatically in the past ten years.

The eyes have it

By this time tomorrow, we may know that the Samsung Galaxy S IV has been announced, and that is has an eye-tracking feature:

engadget article

I’ll just say, now that it seems like eye-tracking (which I’ve written about before) is close, I really want it! I commonly do part of my morning Flipboard read with my Kindle Fire HD 8.9″ 4G LTE Wireless 32GB in its cover, sitting on the towel bar in the bathroom (with a towel under it…better traction), while I exercise. Several of my exercises make it hard to touch the screen to choose articles or “turn pages”. Those are times I’d love to have eye-tracking! I think we’ll all have the option to have it within a few years, and I’ll be interested to see just how robust the feature is on the GSIV (if it exists at all…I expect it will, but it is all just strong rumor at this point).

Update: here’s the video of the razzle dazzle Galaxy S IV announcement:

Unpacked Video

Start at 40 minutes, 30 seconds into it…the rest of it is just vamping for an intro.

What do you think? Does Apple want to protect the Steve Jobs’ image the way Disney protects Walt’s? Would that impact their deciding to go to court or not, in a case which has reportedly produced eight million pages of evidence…so far? Is the Netflix stock bump because of the social aspect, or because Netflix is showing innovation…including with House of Cards? Is the Hydra deal good? Did John Scalzi help make that change happen? Should I be more referring to it as the Loveswept deal? Were you surprised to hear bookstore sales rose? Feel free to let me and readers know by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Hydra vs. the S.F.W.A.

Hydra vs. the S.F.W.A.

No, this post isn’t about a spin0ff of Nick Fury.

In this case, Hydra is an imprint of Random House for e-book publications.

The S.F.W.A. is the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, an organization whose mission is to “…informs, supports, promotes, defends and advocates for its members.”

The former is new.

The latter has been around since 1965.

They have recently been in a very public dispute (I’m typically not very comfortable with those).

Hydra’s terms for authors are different from Random House in general’s terms. One can reasonably say that they are offering different terms because the e-book market is different.

That could be okay, of course.

However, due to those terms, the S.F.W.A. says that being published by Hydra is not enough to get you into the organization as an Active or Associate member.

To meet those requirements, you have to have sold stories (one short story for Associate, three short stories or a novel or a professionally produced dramatic script) that qualify.

Think of it a bit like Actors’ Equity or the Screen Actors’ Guild, although this isn’t a union. You can’t just declare yourself an actor and quality for Equity: you have to have done work they accept as proof of being an actor.

I remember when a friend of mine got into S.F.W.A.: we thought it was a big deal (I think it was for a short story in Perry Rhodan, but I’m not sure).

The S.F.W.A.’s rules include that the organization who bought your work has to meet certain requirements also. Those include paying an advance, for one thing.  The S.F.W.A. specifically said on March 7th:

“SFWA has determined that works published by Random House’s electronic imprint Hydra can not be use as credentials for SFWA membership, and that Hydra is not an approved market. Hydra fails to pay authors an advance against royalties, as SFWA requires, and has contract terms that are onerous and unconscionable.”
–http://www.sfwa.org/2013/03/random-house-imprint-hydra-not-a-qualifying-market-2/

So, at this point, you can’t get into the S.F.W.A. by just being published by Hydra.

Since authors want to be part of the S.F.W.A., that disadvantages Hydra in trying to license a book from an author.

I have a few thoughts about this.

I’m not going to take one side or the other…I honestly don’t know enough about the Hydra deal sheet and how it compares to other situations to declare it fair or not (although wanting to have the rights for the length of the copyright terms seems unusual).

I want to get this out of the way first. I find public exchanges like this, while enlightening for the public (and I certainly read them)…I guess unseemly is the best word.

This appears to be the timeline for the public part:

• 2013 date unknown: Random House announces the new digital only imprints
• February 28th: Victoria Strauss in the Writer Beware blog publishes this post questioning Hydra’s deal sheet
• March 6: S.F.W.A. President John Scalzi published this NSFW (Not Safe For Work…it includes the “F word”) post on Hydra
• March 7th: the S.F.W.A. publishes the above statement.
• March 7th: Victoria Strauss responds to and reproduces an open letter from Random House about the S.F.W.A.’s stance

This is my own prejudice, but I tend to side with the person who is being more polite. I know that shouldn’t be the case…a person expressing themselves in a negative way doesn’t automatically mean that their ideas are bad. John Scalzi’s post includes (not censored the way I am going to do) “Are you effing kidding me?” Now, I don’t believe that was made as an official statement of the organization (it appeared in Scalzi’s Whatever blog), but I would not want someone who represented me to the world acting that way. It doesn’t seem beneficial, and if it was the President of the company for which I work, I would honestly think people would be acting towards removal. Any member of an organization can express themselves like that: an outward facing officer should be able to get the point across in a way likely to bring about change, not to make it more difficult to achieve (in my opinion).

I may just be old-fashioned in that one, though.

Update: I want to clarify here that it isn’t just the use of the “F word” that concerns me in that post. If it had simply said, “Are you kidding me?” it would still seem counter-productive to me. It wouldn’t be the same, but it would still start out the exchange on a negative footing. For example, if a CEO or President endorsed someone’s offer by saying it was “Effing awesome!” (not using “effing”, but using the whole word) that would still be unprofessional, as far as I’m concerned, but wouldn’t put the group in an antagonistic relationship with the other entity.

The other thing is that I wonder if the S.F.W.A.’s rules are too based on an old system. I’m not saying here that they are wrong in this case. My guess is that Random House is trying to attract people who are currently self-publishing, not  people who in the S.F.W.A. already. Again, on the surface, their terms seem extreme to me, but someone might opt for that in order to get published.

What I’m wondering about is the inclusion of process specific requirements, rather than goals. People often confuse the two.

I remember when people were really upset that the Kindle didn’t have page numbers (it didn’t in the beginning). They wanted page numbers! Well, actually, they didn’t, but didn’t realize it. They wanted what page numbers gave them.

That may seem subtle, but it’s an important difference.

You could require that store where you shop to have hitching posts for your horse. Later on, you get a car…and they don’t provide parking places. You still have the hitching posts, but you don’t have what you really wanted: convenient access.

In the case of an advance, is it the advance, or the ability to make a living as a writer?

Now, I completely understand that you can’t say in a requirement that an organization has to give writers the ability to make a living. It’s just too hard to enforce, too subject to interpretation. It’s easy to say, “Hitching posts? Check.” It’s harder to say, “Convenient access? Check.” It’s just tougher to prove one way or the other.

To be really clear, I think the S.F.W.A. has the right to set their requirements for membership. I think they just have to be careful that those rules are keeping up with the times (and still protecting authors).

The Oscars have these requirements (among others) for Documentary Features:

“Screenings during each of the qualifying runs must occur at least twice daily and must begin between noon and 10 p.m.  The motion picture must be exhibited for paid admission, and must be advertised during each of its runs in at least one of these major newspapers in each city: The New York Times, Time Out New York or The Village Voice (New York); Los Angeles Times or LA Weekly (Los Angeles).  The film must have a movie critic review in either The New York Times and/or Los Angeles Times.  A television critic review will not be accepted.  Advertisements must have minimum dimensions of one inch by two inches and must include the theater, film title and the dates and screening times of the qualifying exhibitions.  Advertising must begin on the first day of the qualifying run.”
-http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/84/rule12.html

My thought right away is what happens if the L.A. Times or the NYT stops publishing? Obviously, the Academy would have to revise their rules.

The public exchanges between the S.F.W.A. and Hydra are interesting…but I kind of wish I wasn’t seeing them like this. I would have been fine with the S.F.W.A. first writing to Random House to question the deal (in private), Random House responding in private, and then, if it couldn’t get resolved, the S.F.W.A. going public. Give somebody a chance to deal with it quietly before making it a public spectacle.

What do you think? First, I am interested, especially if you are an author, in what you think about Hydra’s deal. That goes both for people who are in the S.F.W.A., and somebody who is still wanting to get published for the first time. Am I being ridiculous about being concerned with John Scalzi’s language in a private blog? Is public exposure the only way to bring about change? Does outrage deserve to be heard? Is politeness more likely to affect change than vituperation? Feel free to let me and my readers know what you think by commenting on this post.

Update: according to this

Huffington Post article

Random House has changed the terms, offering an authors a choice of two plans. I think it’s worth noting that in this

Random House statement

they mention the Horror Writers Association, but not the S.F.W.A.. To my knowledge (I checked their website and did a quick web search), the HWA did not call out Random House publicly. My intuition suggests the possibility that the S.F.W.A. was not mentioned in this statement due to what I have referenced above. It’s reasonable to suggest that John Scalzi’s stance had an impact on the change, although we don’t know if it was that or the “recent constructive discussions” Random House mentions (or a combination of the two).

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Macmillan settles with the DoJ over the Agency Model

Macmillan settles with the DoJ over the Agency Model

Ding dong, the Agency Model is dead!

In this

press release

the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) announces that it has reached a settlement agreement with the last of five publishers against which it took a legal action over a pricing structure referred to as the Agency Model.

The four other publishers had already settled. Random House (the other publisher in the “Big Six”) will also be bound by the agreement that Penguin made, presuming that their merger is approved (and the settlement is approved).

This settlement won’t happen instantly (there is an approval process, and then it takes a bit of time to make new arrangements with the retailers, like Amazon).

Once that all happens, though, the “This price was set by the publisher” line will have disappeared from Amazon’s website.

However, the DoJ’s announcement does say that Macmillan agreed to allow price discounting immediately. I don’t see the price drops yet, and the price-setting line is still there…might happen soon, though.

While I don’t think that all New York Times bestseller hardback equivalents will drop to $9.99, I do think we’ll see specials on more books, and that the NYT list average will go down. Part of that may be driven by the return of competition between retailers on these books…and Amazon’s price-matching policy.

John Sargent, Macmillan’s CEO, had been public during the dispute with Amazon in first implementing the Agency Model (it didn’t get any messier, publicly, than it was between Macmillan and Amazon).

In this

statement

Sargent says

“I like to believe that we would win at trial. But outcomes are hard to predict with certainty, particularly in a civil case with a low burden of proof. And so we agreed to settle with no admission of guilt. As with the other settling publishers, retailers will now be able to discount Macmillan e-books for a limited time. This change will take effect quickly.”

The statement clearly suggests that they will find other ways to fight in the future, referring to this as a “round” (as in a boxing match).

Apple still has not settled, and may actually go to court in June of this year. Unlike Macmillan, Apple can probably afford to fight for a very long time…although it’s worth noting that Apple did settle in the European Union.

As I understand it, the Agency Model is now gone in the USA for e-books through December 2014 (at least). That’s long enough to change the pricing in the market, and to make it so that the conditions that first engendered the Agency Model are not in place at that time.

I suspect Macmillan’s investors will be happy to hear this, since fighting the court battle has been expensive.

When I start noticing price drops on Macmillan books, I’ll let you know.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Bookish.com launches

Bookish.com launches

Back in May of 2011, I wrote about

Bookish.com

a site being launched by Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin, and AOL/Huffpo to provide readers with book discovery…possibly as a bid to provide an alternative to Amazon.

Well, it has now finally gone live.

I’d suggest that you check it out, and see what you feel about its  usefulness  to you.

So far, I’d say it looks good and seems to work well mechanically.

One big feature is the Recommendations search (which is still listed as being in beta…test mode).

You type in a book you love or one that you’ve recently read, and it makes recommendations based on that.

For example, when I put in The Transparent Society, it made at least one of the same recommendations Amazon has made to me based on it (Engines of Creation). That one makes sense: it is talking about the impact of nanotechnology, which is a theme of The Transparent Society. It also recommended two books by Vernor Vinge, another science fiction writer. It’s fourth recommendation was for a book on the Crimean War…I don’t quite see the connection.

Nicely, though, I could click a “more like this” link under any of them. Doing that under The Engine of Creation worked, giving me more of the same sorts of books.

The only real problem for me was that Engines of Creation is not available for the Kindle…which basically means I won’t buy it. Again, I think Amazon did the same thing.

At Bookish, though, I had already told it (you don’t have to create an account, but I did) that I read Kindle format books.

I also explored the site a bit.

Part of what is going to matter on this site is the editorial staff. The site will have its own material and flavor, and that’s going to help decide if people will want to take a trip away from Amazon to come here.

I will say that the brief bios seemed somewhat similar…I don’t think there was an editor over 50. I don’t hold that against them (there’s no reason, in my mind, that a twenty year old can’t like the books that a seventy year old does), but it indicated a possible homogeneity of hiring.

There were some clever articles. For example, there was one on

Standout Redheads in Sci-Fi and Fantasy

Neil Gaiman had a contribution as well…that’s all good, giving us a reason to visit.

Hm…digging into this more, I like the site more.

Clicking on a book let me to a lot of information on it, including reviews, which can (if you want) be separated into critics and readers.

You can buy books through Bookish…but it doesn’t look to me like I could buy them to read on a Kindle easily. It looks to me like they use EPUB as their format.

Update: a little more experimentation showed me that I could click the Buy link, and from there click another link to buy the book at Amazon, so that’s not an issue.

Well, this is it…battle lines are drawn.

This list of partners:

• Abrams
• Hachette Book Group
• Harlequin
• HarperCollins Publishers
• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Inner Traditions
• Independent Publisher Group
• Kensington Publishing Corp.
• Macmillan
• New Harbinger Publications
• Perseus Books Group
• Penguin Group (USA)
• Random House, Inc.
• Scholastic
• Simon & Schuster
• Sourcebooks, Inc.
• USA TODAY
• John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
• Workman Publishing Company
• W. W. Norton & Company

is directly challenging Amazon on sales to consumers.

I’m going to get back on my soapbox for a minute and say again that Amazon should get a lot more social. This site is using elements of Pandora, but also MRQE.com (the Movie Review Query Engine) and others that pull in both editorial and crowd sourced reviews. I recently recommended that Amazon set up something like BookAnd (where customers could set up their own “bookstores” to suggest titles to others). Bookish is much better executed than I thought it might be, but I do think people would rather continue to go directly to Amazon if they could get equivalent content.

Soapbox. Me. Stepping off now.

Check out Bookish, and feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

BookScout app introduced…by traditional publisher

BookScout app introduced…by traditional  publisher

As I’ve written before, I think Amazon should get a lot more social on the e-book side.

Books should be as much a part of our lives as TV shows or songs. That’s going to be a bit controversial to say, I know. For many people, books (certainly some books) are an intimate, private thing. I recently wrote about whether or not it was good that strangers can’t see what you are reading when you are using an EBR (E-Book Reader).

However, in a world in which people freely share personal details that would have previously only been seen in their medical records, there are many folks who want to share what they are reading.

I think part of that is that we have to interact with and through technology so much that we want there to be a human side to it. If you had to sit down to spreadsheets for eight hours in a day (not that spreadsheets can’t be fun) with no possibility of that time including human beings, you’d be much less likely to do it. If you can do a quick e-mail, chat, or even just see strangers on YouTube, it much more closely fits what we Homo sapiens are comfortable doing.

I’ve had those conversations with employers who want to block all access to the internet (and personal phone calls) when employees are working. In my opinion, that’s a huge mistake. If people consider their “personal lives” part of their work lives, and vice versa, they’ll spend a lot more time on work. If you spend half an hour a day at work on family and friends, I can pretty much guarantee you that you will spend more than half an hour a day on work when you are at home. If a company draws a hard and fast line, the employee may not want to spend any time at home on work.

So, if we want to be social while we are doing other things online, I think it’s natural.

Companies can work with that truth, and make book reading (and therefore buying) part of our social lives and vice versa.

Let me give you an example (that some of you will likely reflexively hate).

When I managed a brick and mortar bookstore, and especially when I was a customer in many of them, there would be times when conversations would begin in an aisle. One person might ask another person for advice on making a choice, or maybe say, “Oh, I love that author! Have you tried this one?” I’m sure that lifelong friendships (and romantic relationships) were begun that way.

Of course, you didn’t start taking to someone until you had checked out their body language to see that they would be okay with it.

What if, while you were shopping for a book on Amazon, you had the option to chat with someone else looking at the same (or similar, but that would be more difficult) book at the same time? That person would have to have chosen to be visible. Maybe you would see that there were two hundred people looking at that same book at the same time. Perhaps you could see where they were geographically located, and you might see them making comments (like overhearing them in a store). You could chose to privately or publicly chat with them.

You would see their screen names (like we do in the Amazon forums). If they wanted that to be their real names (I use mine), that’s fine, but it could be something else, which might indicate an interest in common with yours (“PlatypusOfDoomFan42″, “NutsAboutKnitsInMacedonia”).

I think people would spend more time hanging out at Amazon…just as they spent time (sometimes every day) in my brick and mortar bookstore.

Would there be risks? Sure. It’s easier to pretend to be someone else online for nefarious purposes. Might somebody spam you? You bet. It’s the exact same risks we have in the Amazon forums, and there are methods to report “abuse” which could be similarly used.

One way to do deal with that would be to have, as I have recommended, “circles of friends”…maybe “book buddies”? “Kindle Klubs?” that you have previously designated, and only see them.

That’s just one idea.

Random House, which has often led the way among tradpubs (traditional publishers), is releasing an app tomorrow called BookScout.

The New York Times article

I think this was the standout quotation for me:

“The app is the culmination of months of work by Random House’s digital marketplace development group.”

See? A tradpub with a “digital marketplace development group”. While I suspect they may not be eating lunch at the same table as editors who have been there for decades I think that’s a sign that some tradpubs will figure out the new market and do just fine.

It’s also important to note that this isn’t just an app about Random House books…it will include discovery for books from other publishers.

That’s another key point for me in business: you don’t have to eliminate the competition if you can grow the overall market. More people reading is good for Random House (as long as it maintains decent marketshare), even if they are sometimes reading books from other people. Social interactivity can increase the penetration of books into our lives…a “rising tide that floats all books”, so to speak.

Will I be using the new Random House app?

Nope…it’s Facebook dependent, and I don’t use Facebook. I have nothing against Facebook (the third largest country in the world by population), it’s just that I have this feeling it would be like taking on another full time job for me.

Amazon could increase discovery among Amazon customers…and all of their customers already are that.

What do you think? Are you going to use the Random House app? Is your reading experience already social enough, thank you very much? Have you ever started a relationship (of any kind) with a stranger from meeting in a bookstore? Should Amazon have their own “bookstore clerks” who are available for live chat on the product pages? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

Update: thanks to reader and frequent commenter Tom Semple for pointing out an error in this post which has now been corrected.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Open Road: reviving your favorite reads

Open Road: reviving your favorite reads

One of the early selling points for the Kindle was Amazon’s stated desire to have “every book ever written” available for the device.

Notice that they didn’t just say “that will be written”…they were looking backwards, and that’s where I think a lot of reader’s minds went at once when they thought about e-books.

They wanted to be able to replace their old copies of p-books (paperbooks) with this new digital version. They also wanted to be able to easily get their old favorite reads, even books which were out of print.

Traditional publishers were slow to lock down the e-book rights to backlist titles. Before the market was clearly there, they didn’t want to enter into negotiations and commit money to something that was, well, unproven.

Back in 2009, Motoko Rich wrote this

New York Times article

about

Open Road Integrated Media

a well-funded company headed by Jane Friedman, who less than two years earlier had been the President of HarperCollins.

I’ve written about Open Road before, but I wanted to take this post to point out some of the books which they have made available as e-books. Some of these titles may be ones that you enjoyed decades ago and remember fondly.

Before I get to specifics, I want to point out that Open Road does not block text-to-speech access. I consider their books to be reasonably priced, although that can be subjective (some of the higher prices you see will be for “bundles”, the equivalent of boxed sets…they will contain several novels). I do think of them as pretty customer friendly.

I think Friedman saw what many people at that level did not…the diamonds in the dustbins that were at best being neglected, and at worst ignored.

They now have over 2,000 titles in the Kindle store:

Open Road books in the USA Kindle store by average customer rating

Here are some that stand out to me:

Ellery Queen

They have fifteen titles (with a new batch being published February 5th which can be preordered now). When the Kindle first came out, these mysteries were among the books people asked about the most, from what I saw.

James Herriot

All Creatures Great and Small is the best known of these charming books about a country veterinarian, but they do have all of the books in the series (and a bundle of three of them).

John Lahr

I still have my paper copy and remember being moved by Lahr’s biography (Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr) of actor Bert Lahr. Rarely can a child understand a parent as Lahr did. You don’t need to be a Wizard of Oz fan to enjoy it…but who isn’t?

James M. Cain

Dark and sometimes harsh, be prepared to be torn apart. While they don’t have Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice, there are people who like Cain’s less known output just as well.

William Goldman

Marathon Man, The Temple of Gold, and Boys and Girls Together are all published by Open Road as e-books. How did a publisher with the rights to Marathon Man for p-books not make the move to secure the e-book rights? Through what I’m going to call “future blindness”, I presume.

Up the Down Staircase
by Bel Kaufman

While they do have other works by the author, I think this is the one that most people will remember.

Avery Corman

I’m guessing most people don’t know the name, but they certainly know Kramer vs. Kramer and Oh, God (which became the movie with George Burns).

Lost Horizon
by James Hilton

Arguably, this is the book that made the paperback a successful medium in the USA (when it was re-published as Pocket Books #1 in 1939). It’s intriguing to see it available as an e-book from this insightful company.

Those are just a few. Other authors include

• Octavia E. Butler
• Ron Goulart
• Lawrence Block
• Erma Bombeck
• Jimmy Breslin
• Helen Gurley Brown
• Pearl S. Buck
• Erskine Caldwell
• Pat Conroy
• Michael Chabon
• Stephen Coonts
• Lester Dent
• Lawrence Durrell
• Howard Fast
• Frederick Forsyth
• Alan Dean Foster
• David Halberstram
• Barbara Hambly
• John Jakes
• Susan Minot
• Iris Murdoch
• Ishmael Reed
• Ruth Rendell
• Dorothy L. Sayers
• William Shatner
• Terry Southern
• Muriel Spark
• William Styron
• Leon Uris
• Alice Walker
• Patricia Wentworth
• Timothy Zahn

and again, that’s only a sampling.

Never part of the Agency Model, always a part of making your literary life available to you the way you read now, I’d suggest you take a look at the books of this company which is truly serving readers.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Baen comes to the Kindle store

Baen comes to the Kindle store

In this

announcement

Baen announces that their e-books are available in the Kindle store for the first time.

Baen is a major publisher of science fiction titles (authors include Poul Anderson, Robert Asprin, Greg Bear, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and many more).

For years, they’ve sold directly from their own website.

Now, it becomes easy to get these books in the Kindle store:

Baen books in the Kindle store

That includes Ben Bova’s Cyberbooks (available as part of the anthology Laugh Lines), a remarkably prophetic book about e-books, which I reviewed here. I paid $6 for it more than a year and a half ago, and it is $6.99 now, which is pretty close.

Baen also says that the books will be released without DRM (Digital Rights Management) in the Kindle store, which is the way they were at Baen as well. That means that you could convert it to a different format, if you wanted to do that.

I also checked: while it looks like the Baen Free Public Library is currently being restructured, I did find at least one of the same books available for free and in the Kindle store (not for free there). That might surprise indies, but the deal we have through Kindle Direct Publishing isn’t necessarily the same for a traditional publisher like Baen.

Overall, I think this is good news. It certainly gets Amazon closer to their old “every book ever written” goal.

What do you think? Are you happy to be able to get these well-known books through the Kindle store? Does it feel like Baen “sold out”? Will it cause changes in the Baen Free Public Library? Would you pay $7 to get a book from Amazon you could get free somewhere else? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

It’s official: Penguin/Random House merger announced

It’s official: Penguin/Random House merger announced

I recently wrote about the possibility of Random House and Penguin, two of the world’s largest trade publishers, merging

Pearson (parent of Penguin) announced it today:

announcement

Unfortunately, they didn’t go with “Random Penguin” as a name, but with “Penguin Random House”.

This is truly significant news, and probably a relief to some Penguin authors. Another suitor for the “bird” was Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. In this

Guardian article

authors expressed their concerns, including the possible editorial policy at Penguin if News Corp’s offer was accepted.

One of my readers and regular commenters, Lady Galaxy, had a great line:

“I’’d much rather have a Random Penguin than a Fox in the Penguin House.”

Well, it appears that Penguin went with the smaller merge, but one that might be more aligned with their current vision.

I do think of the two publishers as being distinct “personalities”. My first association with Penguin is with well-produced versions of classic works. When I managed a brick and mortar bookstore, Penguin classics were often the assigned version of, say, Shakespeare.

They were also truly significant in launching paperbacks, which were, in a sense, the e-books of their day. They were cheaper, easier to carry, and so on.

For me, Random House is associated partially with quality science fiction. Their imprints include Bantam (publisher of the Doc Savage reprints), Del Rey, Spectra, and Lucas Books. Of course, they are much more than that.

Random House is solid, and not afraid to stand alone. When the five other largest US trade publishers adopted the Agency Model in 2010, Random House chose not to do that (although they eventually joined a year later).

My biggest negative with Random House was when they adopted a policy of blocking text-to-speech access in all of their e-books; they were the first big publisher to do that, and led the way for some others. They have since changed  that policy.

If this deal is approved (and not in the least because of the size of the resulting company, that could be a bit of a challenge…I think it will be approved, though), the Big Six will become the Big Five.

For consumers, I don’t see an immediate negative impact. Book pricing, even without the Agency Model, doesn’t have a great deal of variation from one major publisher to another, I think. Penguin does have somewhat of a reputation for (ironically, in light of their origins) charging more, but I don’t think it’s massively and consistently true.

I would say this is more of a negative for authors, just because it reduces the number of competitors for their work. One could argue, though, that it also increases the ability of a tradpub to promote that same work. It might be that fewer authors are traditionally published…but that they get more services when they are.

Even without this merger, that would likely have been the trend, in my opinion.

Interesting times…

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.

Newsweek to go all digital in 2013

Newsweek to go all digital in 2013

“It is important that we underscore what this digital transition means and, as importantly, what it does not. We are transitioning Newsweek, not saying goodbye to it. We remain committed to Newsweek and to the journalism that it represents. This decision is not about the quality of the brand or the journalism—that is as powerful as ever. It is about the challenging economics of print publishing and distribution.”
–Tina Brown, Newsweek Editor

This one feels like a real sea (or should that be “e”?) change.

Newsweek, published since 1933, will continue to be published in 2013…but not in paper.

I think this puts pressure on Time.

Newsweek is well-known**, as is Time.

There has been this sense that those two magazines are in some way preserving traditional journalism by continuing to distribute on a dried and pressed matte of randomly interwoven wood fibers*.

By stopping physical distribution with the December 31, 2012 issue, Newsweek is saying that you don’t need to be paper journalism to be proper journalism.

I think Tina Brown does an excellent job of explaining it in this

announcement

in The Daily Beast.

The owner of Newsweek has actually been The Newsweek Daily Beast Company since late 2010.

I have to say this feels like a growing up, a maturing…like ending the paper edition is equivalent to putting away your childhood security blanket and embracing the future.

It still has to work; it has to be shown that a viable business model for good journalism can be fully digital. Brown says:

“At the same time, our business has been increasingly affected by the challenging print advertising environment, while Newsweek’s online and e-reader content has built a rapidly growing audience through the Apple, Kindle, Zinio and Nook stores as well as on The Daily Beast. Tablet-use has grown rapidly among our readers and with it the opportunity to sustain editorial excellence through swift, easy digital distribution—a superb global platform for our award-winning journalism. By year’s end, tablet users in the United States alone are expected to exceed 70 million, up from 13 million just two years ago.”

That’s where the money is…tablet distribution. People may not want to pay for much on the internet, but they’ll pay to subscribe to things on their tablets. They’ll do automatic renewal…you don’t need to put five fly-away subscription cards in every issue, and start wrapping the magazine in brightly colored, doom-saying warnings that “THIS MAY BE YOUR LAST ISSUE!”

Just like you could with paper, you can sell advertising and have subscribers both.

Kudos to Tina Brown for leading the change in distribution while respecting journalistic traditions.

What do you think? Does this surprise you, or are you surprised it hadn’t happened already? Does Time soldier on, or make a similar switch? Should The Daily Beast have just dropped Newsweek name? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

*I was amused by the Wikipedia description of paper, and have adapted a small part of it here

**I had originally used the term “highly-respected” for Newsweek and Time. A reader, jh, challenged the use of that term. You can see our discussion of it in the comments, but I took the suggestion and have edited the post to say “well-known”. My intent here was to suggest that Newsweek and Time might be seen as similar, and that Time might  be influenced by a decision Newsweek made

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog.