Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson gave a presentation in London today where he demonstrated some books/applications–I’m not sure what you’d call them technically–that Penguin plans to sell on the iBook store when the iPad launches later this month. Penguin is doing some pretty inventive stuff with its content, judging by these demos, and I think it points a clear path toward how publishers can provide new offerings that printed books can’t match.

Included in the demo:

- A children’s book that includes interactive activities for the reader: at one point, the child may be asked to help the main character color in a picture before swiping to the next page of the story.

- A reference book based on DK’s The Concise Human Body, where users can tap illustrations to zoom in for a detailed view, then tap again to transition to animated 3D models.

- Networked, community-driven editions of books from the Vampire Academy series, where a reader can both read the book and interact with other readers.

- Travel books that allow readers to develop itineraries and make use of interactive maps.

- An astronomy book that uses GPS and the iPad’s motion sensor to display constellations that match up with the sky above you.

It’s all quite impressive–I especially like the Vampire Academy books, which allow you to read the book traditionally but also extend your level of interaction through a built-in, attractive social network interface.

Makinson suggests that the ePub format can’t handle some of the more advanced content they’ve come up with, so the publisher is planning on releasing apps in many cases. I think this is one area where publishers can claim a huge amount of revenue in the digital book marketplace; it’s a lot harder for an independent or writer to develop a high-concept app than it is to self-publish a “traditional” ebook, and I suspect customers will gladly pay significant amounts of money for books that do more than just display text.

“First Look: How Penguin Will Reinvent Books With iPad” [Moconews.net]

When it comes to ebook pricing, I’ve changed my position on the matter almost weekly; sometimes I side with publishers, sometimes with retailers, sometimes with consumers. But I think this week I may have finally realized something that forces me into a more permanent point of view on the matter. It’s this:

Most publishers, in fact, are trying to intentionally slow the uptake of ebooks by consumers. I think that’s what the whole pricing issue is really about–driving away customers as much as possible, because ebooks don’t easily fit into the existing business model of the average publisher.

Last week, an industry insider circulated talking points among publishing types, instructing them on how to frame the debate in the media in order to convince consumers to accept higher ebook prices. This in itself is offensive–if your approach to innovation is to act like a political group, and to deliberately strategize how to abuse language so that you can confuse the issue, you’re sending a clear message that you don’t want to have an honest conversation with your customers.

In response, I posted a piece on Consumerist.com that explains the issue in plain language for publishers: if you want to raise prices, make the ebook worth the price. It’s that simple. Add value, raise the price.

I also pointed out four things that publishers should take under consideration immediately, instead of memorizing talking points:

• Stop calling consumers cheap; they want fair value.
• Stop hiding behind industry inefficiencies. Innovate.
• Stop asking consumers to trust you; demonstrate that you want the ebook market to grow, or be honest and admit that you don’t.
• Stop saying lower prices will destroy author incomes and modern culture; it derails any meaningful discussion.

Most complaints you read from publishers commit at least one of the above four sins. Why, take a look at this email I received from a publisher earlier this week when I suggested that she might sell more copies of a novella (a novella!) if she would price the Kindle version lower than $10 on Amazon:

What I think consumers don’t understand is there is still a decent amount of cost & time we as publishers have to put in to offer a book on Kindle (or B&N, etc.)…So, it wouldn’t be fair to us or the author to charge much lower. All publishers struggle to make ends meet and the majority of our authors certainly aren’t making a living off their book royalties, so for this reason I don’t think we can discount books — print or ebooks — any further.

Look at that: she implies Kindle customers are being cheap (as opposed to asking for fair value), she blames the industry for barely being profitable as it is, and she says authors won’t be able to make a living. Three in one paragraph!

So I finally get it. When publishers say they want to maintain a competitive marketplace, or they don’t want ebooks to cannibalize print sales, or they need to recoup the cost of publishing, what they’re really saying is simply: we want to make sure ebooks don’t take off, because we have no idea how to make that work within our current business model and we’re reluctant to try to innovate.

What they’re not saying is that they’re taking authors or readers into consideration. There may be a more profitable model out there for publishers and authors–one that includes lower prices for consumerst, in fact–but it won’t be discovered by one of the existing big companies. And the next time you read a publisher’s complaints about ebook pricing, make sure you’re not just being fed talking points.

“Consumerist: If publishers want more money for e-books, they should offer something worthy of the price” [Consumerist]

RELATED
Read more comments on this topic at the following two posts:
“Consumerist: If publishers want more money for e-books, they should offer something worthy of the price” [Teleread]
“Book Publishers Circulating ‘Talking Points’ To Counter Arguments That Ebook Prices Need To Go Lower” [techdirt]

(Money photo by aresauburn™)

Two of the best explanations I’ve found come from published writers who have an obvious interest in what Amazon and publishers end up doing:

Read “Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight” by Charles Stross

Read “Why my books are no longer for sale via Amazon” by Tobias Buckell

Bonus! Read “Kindle Numbers: Traditional Publishing Vs. Self Publishing” by Joe Konrath for an alternate take on earning money from ebooks if you’re a midlist writer.

Set aside 10-15 minutes and read these two (or three) guys for some great insights, for example on Amazon’s reasons for holding to the $10 price point (hint: it’s not really for our benefit), on how much it costs to publish a high quality ebook, and on how to price more efficiently to take advantage of what different customers are actually willing to pay (hardcore fans are usually willing to give more support to their favorite authors).

This post originally appeared on Kindlerama.

(Photo: kretyen)

To test it, I shipped an out-of-print book from my library and paid for only the most basic, nondestructive scanning service. (You can drop the per page cost to 8 cents if you don’t ask for the book back.) Davide Bianchini, the co-founder of Blue Leaf, says that they use a custom built overhead photo-based scanner, as well as an industrial page-fed scanner for the cheaper, book-gets-destroyed option.

After ordering it and paying via PayPal, I bought a padded envelope and shipped the book via media mail. Eight days later I received an email with a link where I could download the files, and two days after that the physical copy of the book was back in my possession via USPS Priority Mail.

As for cost, I spent just under $29, including shipping, for one 288-page hardcover. That should make it clear that the service isn’t being positioned as an alternative to buying e-books from publishers; it seems more suitable to the rare or out of print titles in your library (or for authors with out of print books they’d like to sell digitally–more on that below).

You should also know that Blue Leaf raised its prices since Teleread’s first mention. The base fee is now $17.95, and the per page fee is 5 cents. If I repeated this experiment today, the total cost would be $33.91.

The company offers a menu of additional-fee services: if you want a text-to-speech file, a Kindle-ready file, or a backup on disc, you can buy it separately. To provide these additional services, the company maintains backups of the original scans for at least six months. If you’re not keen on the company keeping a backup copy, you might want to check first; Bianchini says that they “usually comply” with archival opt-out requests.

As far as quality goes, you can see for yourself. Below are portions of two pages from the PDF file Blue Leaf sent to me. The book I sent included photos and maps, so I’ve included one of those pages as well. (Although this is in greyscale, color scanning is offered).

Click the images to view full-size.

And here are the results of the OCR process.

You can see that mixed language texts are problematic for Blue Leaf’s OCR software. Bianchini says the software can recognize 186 different languages, but it has problems if you combine them. The usual suspects cause trouble–things like diphthongs and accented vowels. Bianchini says that they’re looking into improvements to the OCR engine, but for now you can expect good results with single-language texts, and not so good results with the random foreign word or character.

Skewing remains a problem, although this certainly isn’t unique to Blue Leaf. I found one page within the file that was unreadable because it was so distorted, so I contacted customer service and asked them to investigate. I was concerned that I’d have to send the book back for re-scanning, but they were able to correct the problematic page using their archival copy and return a corrected file in less than 24 hours.

Before going this route you should be aware of two other things:

And finally, if you’re an author with out of print books that you want to convert into a print on demand template, Blue Leaf offers a “publisher ready” service for $16. That gets you a formatted and cleaned up PDF file with standardized margins, embedded fonts, and other adjustments required by POD services like Lulu.com. However, it won’t correct “processing artifacts such as page skew,” notes Bianchini. I didn’t test the service.

Blue Leaf Book Scanning

This review first appeared on Teleread.org.

(Photo: UnfoldedOrigami)

The average time spent reading in the U.S. is 7.1 hours a week, says L.E.K. Ereader owners, however, average nearly 2 1/2 times that at 18.2 hours per week. Over a third of those extra books are considered “incremental,” meaning they wouldn’t have been read otherwise.

The study compares media consumption across all content channels, including TV (still the king), movies, music, and Internet. But the big news of the study is just how voracious ereader owners seem to be. Why? It seems to come down to these three benefits:

• Affordability – Ebooks are cheaper than printed books, and most people are on restricted budgets in this economy. One of the big media/marketing angles when the Kindle launched was that it would save the owner money over time. Although that may not be exactly accurate, the current ecosystem for ebooks lets a consumer spend less per book. You can stretch your book budget with an ereader.
   
• Discovery – L.E.K. is guessing at this one, based largely on the fact that many respondents said they felt there was a better selection of ebooks compared to other retail channels. I agree with L.E.K. that what they’re probably describing is the ability for ebook retailers to customize their inventory pages based on your past purchases and likes. I’d probably buy more books at a bookstore if there were a shelf up at the front that had titles hand-picked to appeal to my interests.
   
• Accessibility – If I’m using a Kindle or an iPhone or iPod Touch, I can finish a book at three in the morning and immediately purchase the next in the series, without leaving my bed or sofa. Hell, it’s even easier than ordering a movie through my Xbox or cable box. Here’s a real world example: two weeks ago, I was reading a preview on the subway on my way to a meeting, and I bought the book as I came up to street level and was walking down the sidewalk. It was a real purchase for the publisher, but practically an afterthought for me as far as fitting “shopping” into that day’s busy schedule.
   

“Hidden Opportunities” [L.E.K. Consulting via MobileRead]

(Photo: unfoldedorigami)

“A settlement isn’t the right way to settle this.”

New York Law School Associate Professor James Grimmelmann, who remained a largely non-partisan outside observer (although he has stated he thinks the settlement should be approved, with modifications), pointed out that a class-action lawsuit isn’t the right way to determine an issue like fair use under copyright law. It needs to be addressed by the government and not through private negotiations, he said, because it has huge societal implications.

Grimmelmann also pointed out that if the settlement goes through, it’s likely Google will emerge with a huge market advantage over any potential competitors, which may negatively impact any healthy competition in the marketplace.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild and a lawyer, argued that the risk of losing the lawsuit was too great: if the courts found Google’s scanning to fall under fair use–as Grimmelman and at least one other legal expert think it could–then others would copy Google’s scanning project. “In our view,” he told the hostile crowd, “It would be catastropic.”

Grimmelman responded that the proposed settlement wasn’t the only valid solution, and that there could have been other paths to a compromise.

“The settlement is overreaching, and probably untenable.”

Lynn Chu, an attorney, author, and book agent, was the most vocal opponent of the settlement, calling it an “outrageously bad deal as a financial matter” for writers and a “typical entertainment industry scam.” At one point she implied that the Authors Guild had been misled by incompetent legal counsel, which not surprisingly seemed to anger Aiken.

Chu pointed out that the business model proposed by the settlement has nothing to do with the original lawsuit, which was solely about fair use. “You glued a business contract to a waiver,” she told Aiken, and accused the Authors Guild of appointing itself as an agent to the world’s authors.

She also criticized the proposed Book Rights Registry, which is sort of an ASCAP for authors appearing in Google Book Search, noting that it would help Google shift costs over to authors by forcing authors to take care of administrative and publishing tasks on their own dime.

“[The settlement] probably won’t survive an appeal,” she told the crowd, a sentiment that Grimmelmann seemed to agree with. Still, she cautioned, “There’s no reason to be apathetic.”

“The settlement isn’t really author-friendly at its core.”

Edward Hasbrouck of the NWU pointed out a worst-case scenario that could happen to an author under the terms of the settlement: You have a book included in the database, but your ex-publisher claims that because it has authorized a print-on-demand version of the book it still owns the rights, so you and the publisher agree to binding arbitration and you lose. Since the arbitration is legally enforceable, you will have permanently lost your claim of ownership over the digital copy in Google’s database.

Chu noted that Google reserves the right to audit the Book Rights Registry, but that the favor isn’t returned because Google claims trade secrets will be compromised. She also noted that authors can make their own deals with Google and don’t need to rely on the settlement.

Note: the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America hosted an online panel discussion this morning. You can read through it at http://sfwa.org/online-google-settlement-panel/.

(Photo: Robert Couse-Baker)

A lot of authors are having trouble deciding whether the settlement is good or bad for them, probably because it’s a little of both when you get right down to it. I tend to side with Google, but then, I tend to think that making every. single. thing. in. the. world. searchable is a Good Thing and should be done, and I have no faith it will happen in the next 20 years without a for-profit corporation getting involved. (And believe me, I am no sycophant of big business.)

I’ll be curious to see what people say at the workshop. I have my own opinions about what should happen here (and it boils down to: authors, don’t forget that you also have a duty to the world, same as any citizen), but I’m saving them until after I see what people say today. At least one of the speakers should be non-partisan, but I have a suspicion things will get heated. We’ll see.

(Photo: Robert Couse-Baker)

(Photo: Lip Kee)

Uh oh.

But wait! Before you dismiss Twitter as an also-ran in marketing, check out who Lovereading surveyed compared to who uses Twitter the most. As with all online communities, the only way to successfully connect is to figure out what kind of person participates in Twitter, and how he uses the service.

Who uses Twitter?

A study of Twitter users published last October by the Pew Internet Project looked at the periods between Nov-Dec 2008 and Aug-Sep 2009, and the big trend was that Twitter is skewing towards both the young and the highly-connected (in a wireless sense, not in a get-me-a-job-in-DC sense).

As recently as last April, Twitter was still considered to be leaning towards an older user group. That’s changed. Based on the Pew Internet study, the median age of a Twitter user is now 31. (By comparison, MySpace is 26, Facebook is 33, and LinkedIn is 39.) Around a third of Internet users between 18 and 34 use Twitter, while only about a tenth of those over 45 use Twitter.

Additionally, the more connected a person is, meaning the more types of devices he has that have wireless connectivity (e.g. a Kindle, a Nintendo DS Lite, a laptop), the more likely he is to use Twitter.

And finally (this comes from a different study), we can estimate that approximately 45% of Twitter users are men.

Now compare that info to the demographic breakdown of the Lovereading sample:

Clearly, the average Lovereading member and the average Twitter member don’t overlap much. If you want to reach the heavy book reader who is a member of Lovereading, yep, Twitter is probably a waste of time.

Okay, so how do Twitter users use Twitter?

But is Twitter useful for marketing to other groups? The Bookseller notes that there have been highly publicized sales spikes pegged to specific tweets on Twitter–Stephen Fry has a sort of “Oprah effect” on books he tweets about, for example. But this sort of organic celebrity-driven event is still an exception.

The thing about Twitter–and this is key to understanding how to use it–is that it’s primarily utilized as an ad-hoc news and gossip source. Even The Bookseller notes this in a quote from a publicist at Penguin:

“You find out about things first. I knew that thelondonpaper was closing before anyone else in the PR department, for instance, because I was looking at Twitter when it was announced. It seems to me the fastest news source out there.”

That’s a great example of how professional gossip spreads quickly via Twitter. Here’s a look at how news media content spreads:

Current events and news

Technology sites

Medical sites

Video game sites

Celebrity sites

How-To sites

There have indeed been interesting experiments with using Twitter in non-news ways, for example when the cast of the Broadway Musical “Next to Normal” presented an adapted version of the show on Twitter, posting updates in their characters’ voices. The Bookseller notes that Philippa Gregory and R. N. Morris tweeted serializations of their recent novels. It’s hard to directly measure the impact of Twitter on sales figures for these campaigns, however. More important, these sorts of broadcasting campaigns are antithetical to how Twitter is actually used, which means they’re being launched in what could at best be called an indifferent environment.

Finally, celebrities and tech-savvy authors already know that Twitter works well as a pseudo-direct line to your audience. You broadcast updates; your fans respond, although not with the expectation that you will answer them directly, and they also retweet your updates to their acquaintances. Like a Facebook fan page, Twitter can be used as a ready-made online presence for publicity purposes. But be careful: overtly self-promotional tweets drive away users, because what they want is new content from you, not ads for your existing work. Look at the tweets from Kathy Griffin and John Hodgeman, two book-peddling writers who mix personal gossip, jokes, and updates with alerts about their next book signing event.

Conclusion

There are a few other things to consider about how Twitter works, and its role in online communication at the start of 2010:

Twitter doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It pulls in URLs and images from elsewhere, and more important, Twitter status updates are often fed into Facebook walls or displayed on blogs. In general, social networking services are growing more integrated, not less, so a mention one place may turn into a mention many places.

Twitter is a cheap way to build a community with younger fans. When it comes to creating a community between an artist and his audience, Twitter falls somewhere between an email campaign and an online group chat (which, by the way are practically relics at this point). This makes it a good way to interact with your audience without sucking up lots of real-time resources. If you’re constitutionally unable to enjoy Twitter and tweeting–and you’ll find no judgmentalism from me on this matter–find someone who can do it on your behalf. But be wary of trying to deliberately mislead people; you don’t really control your reputation online once you’ve tarnished it.

Twitter may be more effective at creating awareness than at actually converting anyone into a customer. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything based solely on a tweet, but I certainly have found out about new songs, new books, and new TV shows because of Twitter. A real world example: I had never heard of the BBC series Gavin & Stacey before a Twitter friend mentioned it in an update about three weeks ago. But that good fortune relied on an old fashioned peer-to-peer recommendation, not on any sort of marketing campaign. If you can find a way to get users to spontaneously mention you in a tweet, you’re golden.

The demographic makeup of Twitter will continue to evolve, so don’t expect that what works/doesn’t work today will necessarily hold true in six months.

Twitter is mobile–it reaches people when they’re at work, in transit, or out shopping. This may not be the best time to encourage someone to go buy a book, but it might be a fine time to jog their memory that a book or author exists.

Don’t aim for viral hits, aim for seeding. This applies to everything online, not just Twitter. The more references to your product you can get out there, the more likely one of them will take root and produce a sale. And unlike ad campaigns, a lot of online “seeds” can stick around for years.

And finally, it doesn’t matter what social network service or status update service is popular right now; just shut up and use it. When the next service comes along, you’ll switch to that one. And so on.

(Photo: donjd2)

(Bird images: Lip Kee and donjd2)

(Photo: Nic's events)

You can listen to the half-hour show here; the first 10 minutes alone are worth it just to hear Diana Athill talk about the unique editing requirements of Updike, Naipul, and Rhys. But here’s a summary of key points from the full episode:

• An editor can help shore up a writer’s weaknesses. Some writers may be masters of language, but need help shaping something into a finished work. Other writers may be great writers but lousy at taking care of other essential life tasks, so they would otherwise never write or publish without someone’s help.
• An editor is a guaranteed, and perhaps the only, extremely attentive reader a writer will have. Diana Athill says, “What one learns when you’re working with an eidtor, is that actually very few peole get their books read extremely attentively by anybody. A writer is dying to have his or her work read with complete attention. And here is this editor person, and the one thing they have done is they have paid full attention to your work, which is very gratifying.”
• An editor may act more like an agent or a music producer. Some editors will work closely with writers to help them determine career steps, going so far as to advise on what sort of book to write next. Others, like Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish, will manipulate the original manuscript so much that their role becomes something more collaborative, or even borderline Svengali-like, as with music producers.

Open Book for Thursday, 31 Dec 2009 [BBC]
(Photo: Nic’s events)

I immediately wondered whether this was the answer I’ve been looking for to convert the small collection of books I have that aren’t available digitally. I’m too lazy to do all the book scanning by hand, as I suspect most readers are, so these books have remained on my To Do list for years now.

An affordable way to convert a personal library? MAYBE.

I decided to try out the service on an out-of-print book that the publisher has yet to make available as a digital file; in fact, it was never even published in the United States. I bought it from Amazon UK back in 1997, and physical copies of it now go for $50 or more on various websites. It’s listed on the Google Books site, but of course you can’t preview it or purchase it digitally there because so many authors and publishers don’t want Google to sell their books.

I deliberately picked a book that’s written in English but uses lots of accented characters and foreign names (it’s about Hungarian history), and that has photographic inserts, a bibliography, and an index. As soon as it’s returned, I’ll post a follow up about how well the service worked.

There are three things I realized as I clicked the button to proceed with the order, and I think they may impact how useful Blue Leaf can be for readers who want to convert their private libraries:

1. It’s emotionally hard to send off a physical book. I’m not a fan in any way of physical books, and yet I felt a twinge of fear as I slid my book into a padded envelope to ship to Connecticut. What if it gets lost? What if I never see it again? What if it’s returned in pieces? I know it’s irrational, but it’s what I felt.
2. I’m not sure I’m brave/foolish enough to try the service on the few books I do consider precious. I have an oral history of one of the few survivors of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978. I would love to have a digital copy, but I’m not sure I would ever be able to willingly part with my copy. Even with postal insurance, I don’t know that I’d be able to replace it if it went missing. I’ll probably have to scan this by hand myself or never do it at all.
3. It’s just too expensive to convert an entire library. To convert the <300 page book I chose, the total cost was just under $28, not counting the extra $5 or so I'll spend on shipping supplies and fees. I'm going to end up paying about $33 for a digital copy of this book. I have another one I wanted to try, but at 400 pages it became too expensive for my test. One could argue that if you value your free time at more than a few bucks an hour, Blue Leaf still works out to be far cheaper than doing it yourself. On the other hand, you can just leave those books alone and hope that someday they'll be made available in the marketplace

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve got a big pile of cash, Blue Leaf is best for special editions you just have to have in digital format.

An affordable way for authors to convert their own out-of-print works! YES.

The real beauty of the service may be for authors. David Rothman on Teleread noted that Blue Leaf offers an incredibly cheap way for individual authors to convert their own out-of-print titles into digital formats.

This could be a helluva a deal for individuals and small publishers. Talk about the potential for getting back lists into E and POD!

An average book would cost someone around $30-50 to convert into a basic PDF or Word doc that you can then adapt into various ebook formats. If you’re really anti-DIY, you can even pay Blue Leaf extra for them to create the device formats for you. (Note however that to get all the formats delivered on CD, plus an audio version using technology similar to Amazon’s text-to-speech functionality on the Kindle, you’ll be paying closer to $100.)

In fact, I hope the author of the book I’ve sent in for conversion takes note, and converts his book on his own for digital distribution. I’m sure services like Blue Leaf will continue to appear, and between those and various ebook retailers (yes, including Google Books), there’s no reason for any author’s older works to languish in “not for sell” exile.

[www.BlueLeaf-Book-Scanning.com via Teleread]