A Reader’s Rumination

Michael Jensen | 02/22/2010

I had the pleasure of staying with my in-laws over the recent Christmas holidays. My father-in-law’s house abounds in books. After 35 years as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist church in Lincoln, Nebraska, he “retired”— and hosts a weekly book review show on the public television station, writes book reviews for the local paper, and still reads as if he’s studying for his profession of thoughtful observer of the human condition.

Consequently every coffee table and settee had some kind of recent intellectual apparatus: The New York Review of Books, the New York Times sections in all their literate forms, clippings from papers and magazines, and small stacks of intelligent, thoughtful journals.

I reveled in all that paper.

The printed matter allowed a kind of browsing I’ve done too little of, of late. I’ve been shifting gradually toward the digital-only for more than two decades, and now do virtually all of my professional browsing online.

But among that printed material, I was able to enter the world of letters again. Of literate bon mots, and pithy quotes. Of implicitly demonstrating how well-read one is, not how well one can Google. Of thoughtful, researched conclusions; of thoughtful, deep expertise in matters literary and philosophical.

It’s something I realized I’d been missing, online. Sure, there are marvels of analysis available digitally—and most of what was on that paper at my father-in-law’s is also available in digital form. But I’ve had no online hours that provided anything as distilled as the material I could randomly pick up around his house to read. I could delve, and browse, and read in-depth, and skim, and discover—and almost *everything* I picked up was interesting. It had been pre-distilled, pre-limited… it was only the good stuff. Even the ads were interesting—reminders of quality intellectual content from publishers of quality.

That whole ecosystem is something we may be losing,  because competition for online eyeballs doesn’t encourage textual constraints. And economic constraints make buying ads in the NYRB, or the NYT Book Review, or Harper’s, increasingly difficult to justify. And fewer people are willing to subscribe to paper artifacts every year. And book review sections are disappearing throughout the country, and literary reviews are in decline, and independent bookstores, like the main one in Lincoln, are closing nationwide.

My father-in-law often resold books he chose not to review to the community’s secondhand and independent bookstores, much to my chagrin as a publisher. But that’s part of the ecosystem too—and a way of giving books a longer life. Without that segment of the ecosystem, there’s less of an incentive for him to write reviews, since such writing pays piddling amounts….

The entire publishing ecosystem is tattering, because the new ecosystem of glibness, volume, repetition, search engine optimization, element-based monetization, transitory reputation, personal brand, virus-of-the-moment, and utter surfeit of raw material changes the nature of the competition. In that ecosystem, I must judge whether an article is worth reading… by reading it. In the old paper-based one, I could almost be sure an article was at least worthwhile.

I hope the best of what I experienced in my father-in-law’s literary space can be part of the human experience, as we shift to a mostly-digital intellectual ecosystem—characteristics such as assured quality, concentrated value, and distilled expertise. That runs counter to today’s Web rhythms, even as it runs parallel to what many people want.

However, the Web’s rhythms wax and wane, and it may be that—not unlike the decline of blogging (because there’s too much out there already)—curated content will make a resurgence in response to overabundance of information and underabundance of time.

As the flood of barely curated content becomes overbearing, we may shift back to where editorial oversight is valued again. If so, the products will still be increasingly electronic—but people will be more willing to pay for the value of curation. And we as publishers will still be able to pay our salaries.

My father-in-law’s children all went in together to get him a new Mac Cube to replace the clunker he’d been experiencing the Web through. So who knows—perhaps next Christmas there won’t be so much paper clutter around the house. But for him, I doubt it.

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New Year’s Resolution: Re-read These Articles

Michael Jensen | 01/04/2010

As I reflect on 2009’s events in e-book publishing—the release of Android, the rise of the handheld user experience, the next iteration of the Kindle (and the competitor Nook), the establishment of .epub as the de facto open e-book standard, the decline of newspapers, the dominant rise of Facebook, the explosion of strategies to attempt to control the releases of e-books (delayed, simultaneous, and pre-press), the attempts to control access through Digital Rights Management regimes, the continuing confusion and consternation over Google Book Search, Amazon’s Big Brother-like intrusion into 1984-holding Kindles across the US, the shifts in user habits seemingly inexorably toward brief distractions rather than deep dives into immersive experience—I’m somewhat astonished.

E-books became for the first time more substantial than print for a major publisher (O’Reilly), late in the year. Amazon reported bigger e-book sales than p-book sales in the few days before Christmas.

Much humming and humbugging was made about data points, advances, and what they did or didn’t signify… there was much sound and fury, perhaps signifying something (but nobody’s sure just what, yet).

Sometimes change simply signifies change. We have yet to see what the landscape will be for book publishers—because the book-publishing (and book-exporting) ecosystem is still exceedingly unsettled. Will it settle in 2010? I suspect not.

Instead, 2010 will see continuing experimentation, exploration/ exploitation of new markets, and attempts to retain old markets. Being willing to experiment is the only way to stay with the waves of change.

2010 will be an interesting year—and thoughtful perspectives will likely often be drowned out by breathless next-now-next reportage.

Here are a few key articles that can help with developing “thoughtful perspective,” well worth rereading. If you haven’t read these yet, they’re a great way to start the year—pertinent to the future of publishing either directly or indirectly:

A smart, canny, nuanced analysis of ebooks as a cultural artifact, with imperatives of their own:

Wall Street Journal:
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write by Steven Johnson
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123980920727621353.html

Two of the most influential and connected members of the new media environment, on the megatrends of the Web and society. These themes are what we as publishers must compete with, as well as work within:

Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle
Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On
http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/public/schedule/detail/10194

And finally, Canada’s digital conscience, Cory Doctorow, in his seminal presentation to Microsoft Research on Digital Rights Management. Five years old, and still fresh and pertinent, true, and pretty much undeniable:
http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

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Smashing

Michael Jensen | 12/04/2009

A recent announcement by Smashwords (www.smashwords.com) of a sales partnering arrangement with Amazon (and B&N, and Sony, and Shortcovers) raises a number of key questions.

Smashwords is a self-publishing and small-publisher-assistance site that uses “affiliate” promotion, and distributes and sells only ebooks. It’s a hands-off intermediary, a “non-publisher publisher,” that presumes authorial promotion and engagement—Smashwords just provides a platform for distribution and sales, somewhat like other “new intermediaries” (like Scribd and others).

For trade publishers, the following explanation from the founder should be food for thought:

—extract—
“Smashwords pays authors [or publishers] up to 85% of the net proceeds from the sale of their works. Net proceeds to author = (sales price minus PayPal payment processing fees)*.85. Authors receive 70.5% for affiliate sales. Our generous royalties mean if an author has a book they might otherwise publish via a traditional commercial publishers as a $8.00 mass market paperback with a 40 cent royalty, they could publish the same book at Smashwords as an ebook and earn $6.45, or 16 times more.  Or, they could price their ebook on Smashwords for $4.00 and make nearly 8 times the per unit amount of selling a traditionally published print book. The economics are equally advantageous for publishers.”
—/extract—

Further:

—extract—
“It’s free to publish on Smashwords. There are no hidden fees. We earn our revenue by taking a cut of all net sales on the site. The cut is 15% of the net for sales at Smashwords.com or on Stanza, 15% of the net proceeds from our retail partners, and 18.5% for sales that were originated by affiliate marketers.  If your book is purchased via one of the major online retailers we distribute to, you can expect your royalty to be approximately 42 percent (or higher) of the suggested list price you determine.”
—/extract—

Currently, then, as a publisher, you could use Smashwords as a distributor to Amazon, Shortcovers, B&N, and others, for very little besides a bit of up-front investment in .epub format. Smashwords eschews Digital Rights Management, though the “partners” could add a DRM envelope.

Thus, by using Smashwords to export and distribute e-versions of your publications, you could point directly to Smashwords from your own website, and get a higher rate of return per sale than via Amazon.

And while that’s great (and worth exploring further), Smashwords also is an indicator of a new pressure in the publishing ecosystem: the non-publisher publisher.

As Mark Coker, Smashwords founder, writes elsewhere:

—extract—
“Any self-published author or small publisher, anywhere in the world, now has the opportunity to instantly publish their book at Smashwords and reach a worldwide audience, and all at no cost.

“In the next few years as ebooks rise to account for an ever-increasing percentage of all book sales, more and more authors—including big name authors—will starting asking themselves, ‘What can a publisher do for me that I can’t do for myself?’”
—extract—

What a publisher can “do” is selective acquisition, promotion/marketing, quality assurance, and much more, of course. But especially with the organizational “partnerships” being made between digital players, and the substantially higher royalties paid directly to authors, for trade publishing in particular, Smashwords represents a new kind of competitor, appealing directly to authors (meanwhile Amazon is promoting a similar author-publishes service as well).

Should we be taking advantage of this opportunity, by using these “non-publisher publishers” as e-book resellers—or should we do our best to delegitimize this threat by treating it as “self-publishing,” and avoid conferring status to them by listing “real” publishers’ work on them?

Your answer to that question will vary depending on how you publish, what you publish, and what your publishing mission is—but regardless, “non-publisher publishers” are venues to watch.

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