Issues in Publishing

The End of an Era

2011-11-17T20:19:00.005-05:00

Congratulations to Don Collins on his retirement from the University of Chicago Press!

I don't even know how many years Don has been involved in University Press Publishing, but if I had to guess, I'd say it was more than 40 years. I do know that since 1986, Don has been at the University of Chicago Press.

Given the direction to 'make it work or shut it down', Don is best known for taking the university's distribution center (CDC) from a single client to 102 distribution clients today. However, I dare say that everyone in university press publishing has an opinion about Don. To call him a lightning rod is a vast understatement. Some think he's a blow hard, others a visionary. Well known for his long monologues on how to handle thorny issues, Don's persona is much larger than his stature.

But, as my wife would say, Don is a campfire marshmallow. Crusty on the outside, gooey on the inside.

Few know or understand how loyally devoted Don is to those close to him, and vice-versa. This past Wednesday evening, the warehouse at CDC was transformed to a party room as Don was feted by close to 100 colleagues and friends. Current, and past colleagues from the press as well as a handful of friends from over the years came to celebrate Don's illustrious career and to wish him well in the next chapter of his life. [In the picture above, Don is giving his 'thank you speech' at the party.]

This is truly the end of an era in university press publishing. I can't imagine it will ever be the same without Don. I hope you will join me in wishing my friend nothing but the best going forward!

Our Challenge is Disruption itself

2011-11-15T10:51:00.003-05:00

When I was a young aspiring baseball player, my Dad would hit me ground balls so that I could learn to field them. Whenever I'd botch one because I was caught on my heels, he would yell, "Play the Ball, don't let the Ball Play You!"

In essence, he meant that when the ball was coming toward me that I should charge forward and meet the challenge rather than simply wait for it to come and potentially overwhelm me. This advice has served me well in many aspects of my life, and it seems good advice for our embattled publishing industry.

After seeing Brian O'Leary give his talk about Abundance at the Internet Archive a couple of weeks ago, and reading follow up commentary from my friend and colleague, Don Linn, as well as the response by Bill McCoy of IDPF, I'm been inspired to add my own two cents to the conversation.

Brian made many points during his talk - which I encourage you all to read. One point that resonated with me was when he referred to disparate initiatives in publishing by saying "If we don't hang together, surely we will all hang separately". Don extends this point by talking about there being too many trade organizations and standards bodies - a point I wholeheartedly agree with. (and one that I will address in a future post)

But, in thinking about this a bit more, I can't escape the question: How did we get here, and what ground ball are we trying to field?

The problems we are facing today are but the latest in a constant surge of disruption that has been going on for at least 30 years. Since the early-to-mid 1980's improvements in computer hardware and software have radically changed the throughput of published materials from author to reader.

In the 1980's, computer systems led to supply chain improvements, which (it could be argued) led to the formation of chain stores. The internet and the ubiquity of browser technologies in the 1990's enabled an innovative company named Amazon to be a first mover in disrupting the world of bookstores. Computer to Print, and Print on Demand technologies have radically changed inventory strategies. Constant improvements in computer hardware and telephony have enabled discovering and reading ebooks a reality. The simple process of creating ebooks have encouraged authors, agents, and retailers to become publishers. Now, social networks have once again upset the apple cart and have changed forever how we will choose the books we read. Social networks are also evolving and its certain that collaborative reading and writing will become a normal human endeavor before long.

With each disruption, some of us have "charged the ball", while others "let the ball play us". Groups were formed, sometimes officially, sometimes not, to work together to solve whatever the latest challenge was. Most of these groups were formed because either they didn't acknowledge that other groups existed, or were impatient with the incumbent's speed in addressing the challenge. Many were created for very good reasons, some, well, not so good.

Now we are in a state where we have more trade and standards organizations than you can count, many with the same parties involved. We're all trying to come up with standards and practices that address 80% of the problem. Many of these organizations are vying for financial and human resources from the same constituency. It's not just the disruption that we're all fighting, the problem is that we are fighting ourselves over who owns what solution, and we're all thinking that we're more relevant than the others.

It's ludicrous that to be involved in the technology end of the book industry, you need to be a member of five or six trade organizations.

I say it's time we get all of these groups to huddle together, pool their resources, and get back to work on fielding the grounder that we all face: disruption itself. The disruptions are only accelerating.

It may be a pipe dream, but, "If we don't hang together, surely we will all hang separately!"

Learn to be a Reader Again

2011-06-20T13:51:00.004-05:00

Last week, Don Linn, wrote a couple of very practical blog posts entitled "What Men (and Women) Talk About When They Talk About Publishing". In those posts, Don advises how best to focus management attention and move organizations forward during these early days of ebooks.

Don has hit the nail directly on the head with his posts, but from my perspective, there is still a piece missing. While Don has laid out "what" publishing executives should focus on, I have a few tips on "how" they should start to do it. In offering these tips, I must acknowledge that these come from some very savvy publishers who are already doing this!

1. Understand the Consumer's experience. As a company executive, you should OWN many different devices, a Kindle, a Nook, an iPad, a Kobo Reader, and any other device you can get your hands on. You should be BUYING books from different retailers (all around the world), downloading them to your device or devices and READING them. BUY books from your own website and from the websites of other publishers. This is a relatively small investment of money compared with the insights you will receive in doing so.

2. Become at least as "tech savvy" as your readers. Read books that have DRM applied and those that don't. Understand the difference in the user experience. Download a book or two from a "Pirate" site. Try to borrow a title from your local library. Try to lend a title from your Nook.

3. Where ever your titles or discussions of your titles can be found, you should be there. If your house is using NetGalley for disseminating review copies, join NetGalley and request your e-ARCs. If you house is using Edelweiss for electronic catalogs, get on the distribution list. Join GoodReads. Join LibraryThing. If your publicity department is putting up facebook pages for certain titles, visit them.

4. Ask lot's of dumb questions internally. Understand your internal processes. Understand why certain groups work differently than others. Understand what kinds of stresses and strains producing ebooks puts on your staff. Understand how production quality breakdowns occur. Understand how rights are managed.

As you progress down this path you will come to understand many things, and your experience and training as a leader will help your company break down many barriers.

The moral of all of this is, that as publishing executives, you cannot delegate understanding how your products AND the products of your competitors are consumed in the marketplace.

Good Luck!

Ebook Files and Metadata need to travel together

2011-04-14T12:13:00.004-05:00

At the London Book Fair this week, I found myself talking to several publishers about the topic of ebook content distribution and metadata distribution. On at least four occasions I repeated: "I don't care who does it, but the same company that distributes your files, should distribute your ebook metadata".

Full disclosure: we at Firebrand Technologies distribute ebook content and metadata for publishers. So, of course, we would love for publishers to use us for both metadata distribution and file distribution. However, it's also true that it is a lose-lose-lose situation when a publisher uses one "vendor" to distribute files, and another to distribute metadata for those files. And we have decided to not to distribute ebook metadata only for any more clients. Here's why:

1. The ebook supply chain is fundamentally different than the print book supply chain.

With print books, retailers were happy to receive metadata from publishers even though the books were not yet available. They were happy to take files with incomplete records, until the publication date of the title. Retailers, wholesalers, and data aggregators have systems in place to deal with data files with thousands of records, and they are all run to automatically upload the files.

In the ebook world, none of the above is true - at least not universally. ebook retailers only want metadata records for which files are also coming at nearly the same time. Most only want the record once, and it better be complete. Most ebook retailers don't have the systems in place to upload the kind of volume that print books do. Ask anyone who has ever tried to upload thousands of titles to Apple's transporter. You can do it, but you better allocate hours of babysitting time after you manually log in and start the upload process.

2. When something goes wrong, problems are often very difficult to track down, and often go unresolved.

I related this story to a few people at the fair. Let's say that the person at the publisher who is responsible for data delivery (let's call her Jean) gets a phone call from her boss, asking why a book - that should be - is not in the iBookstore. This phone call spurs Jean to call her contact at the metadata partner AND her contact at the content file partner. Both of those contacts in turn start an internal investigation as to what when wrong and unreported. If each contact is at a loss, and then imply that the other vendor is to blame, then Jean is left sitting in the middle with a dilemma of who to believe. The bottom line is still an unresolved problem. Even if both vendors did their job, then the problem might lie with the retailer. Jean doesn't have that relationship, the vendors do, so Jean calls them both back again to find out if the retailer knows anything. Both vendors call different people in the retailer with the same question, causing two more investigations.

This is a nightmare of wasted time and resources. Everyone in this chain loses. And support is the highest cost element of the relationship for each of the vendors. And, Jean is left not knowing who she can trust if this ever happens again.

In conclusion, streamline your processes. Keep one point of contact who can track down problems. Managing your ebooks through one "vendor" or "partner" is far less expensive in the long run than managing multiple relationships.

Good luck out there.

Publishers, Authors, Agents, Retailers - One in the Same?

2010-11-05T07:37:00.004-05:00

I woke up this morning thinking about all the hoopla lately about the changing dynamic between authors, agents, publishers, and retailers. Authors going straight to retailers, agents going straight to retailers, publishers coming up with direct-to-consumer strategies, retailers starting self publishing organizations. The landscape that once was clearly defined in a world of physically printed materials, is being turned on its ear in a world of electronic content.

As my mind twisted around these dynamics, it became clear that there really is no distinction anymore. All of these (self proclaimed) groups have really the same objective to find content that the market will pay for and make as much money from it as they can. That's it. That's what they all want. The only difference is how much risk they are willing to take, how they go about it and what work they are willing to do.

There is no way to generalize what one group or another is willing to do. Some authors are willing to do everything, others don't want to do more than submit their manuscript and be left alone. Some agents are willing to cull slush piles looking for the next great novel, and hire editors to help polish up a manuscript, others only want to deal with rights deals from established brand name authors. Some publishers are willing to do the hard work of creating markets, while others are only willing to push a work through their established processes. Some retailers are willing to leverage their community and the author and the work in every way possible, and others only want to hang out a shingle and wait for customers.

This really wasn't different in the print-only world - especially before digital production - except that publishers were the only ones who invested in all the processes that brought a work from concept to product on the shelves. Publishers were clearly the group with the largest risk, and hence fairly expected the lion's share of the financial return.

In the electronic world, there is the belief that this is no longer true. The risk is not as great, the need to invest in scalable processes not as necessary. This may be true for the briefest of periods, but as virtual retailers pop up everywhere in all kinds of forms, and works of all quality levels are brought to the virtual shelves, my belief is that this pendulum will once again swing in the other direction.

But, until then, we have a very disrupted ecosystem. It's interesting and exciting times in the publishing business! The companies to watch are those that are investing in scalable operations. From my perspective those companies don't fall under any of the aforementioned groups.

Digging Deep

2010-01-19T15:47:00.003-05:00

Many of you who know me know, I’m rather proud of my twin sons for their participation in Karate. This email came in over the weekend, and I found it quite inspiring:

Dear Dojo Family,

It's only been a couple of weeks since so many people gave themselves to long, sweaty, dusty hours to make our new dojo a reality. But already, circumstances have moved me to ask you all to mobilize yourselves to an even more profound undertaking.

You certainly don't need to me tell you about the massive humanitarian crisis going on just a few hundred miles off the shore of our country. The Red Cross estimates that as many as 50,000 people were killed by this week's earthquake in Haiti. In a country where daily existence was already a struggle for so many, an unthinkable amount of rebuilding will be needed for them to even return to that status quo.

What many of you do not know is that some very dedicated students of ours, the Groder family, run a mission in Haiti. Kevin Groder is Pastor to, and adminstrator of, Mission of Hope Haiti (missionofhopehaiti.net). In addition to providing thousands of pounds of food to families in need, Mission of Hope also runs schools that educate 1,000 children who otherwise would go without, and was in the process of building an orphanage. That planned orphanage now lies in ruins, along with a number of school buildings. Two teachers died.

Our Tokyo Joe's community can help Mission of Hope rebuild what was lost. So we are organizing a "kickathon" fundraiser that will give 100% of its proceeds directly to that undertaking. As of this writing, Kevin is on 24 hour standby for the next military cargo transport out of Springfield that has room for him. As soon as he is on the ground and able to assess the full scope of what's happened to Mission of Hope, he will give us a concrete project that can benefit from our efforts.

Think of this: if every student in our school can find ten friends, neighbors, relatives, coworkers or classmates to donate just five dollars; $10,000 can go to this rebuilding effort. And while that does not go too far (speaking from recent experience) in construction costs here in the U.S., it can make a mountain of difference in the impoverished nation that is Haiti. And as that money is put to work, you will be able to see it happening thanks to members of our community who will be there.

Here's how a kickathon works:

Starting Monday, every student will be able to pick up a pledge sheet, and begin gathering sponsors. Between February 15 and 19, each student will be given 60 seconds to throw as many kicks as they can. The participants can use any kick, and either or both feet. Feet must touch the ground between each kick, and the instructor who times the participant will have final say as to whether the kick meets the level expected of that student. Sponsors can either give a set amount of money per kick, or pledge an overall amount.

Caroline and I would like to extend our thanks for your participation in this by offering some incentives. Any student who collects $50 dollars receives a free patch. A total of $100 or more gets a special tee-shirt designed for this occasion. The top donations for each student in our Panthers, Dragons, Junior, Teen, Adult and Kickboxing levels gets $100 in "dojo dollars" that can be used for any item or service that we sell.

And the greatest prize: turning the horror and empathy that we feel watching the images that emerge from Haiti into concrete action, and watching as concrete results are achieved. I could not issue this call to action to a greater group of people.

Yours Gratefully,

Sensei K

All of us here at Firebrand have a few traits in common, one of them being that we try to help other people where possible. The devastation in Haiti is unbelievable. The numbers I heard this morning are tragic, estimates of 200,000 dead. About all I’ve been able to do is text “HAITI” to 90999 a few times, but who knows where that money really goes?

What was inspiring about this email for me was 3 things:

1. It’s a very specifically targeted place to help,

2. We can keep the money out of the hands of middlemen, and get it directly to the mission, and

3. With all the dead, there are probably a lot more orphans in need than there were before the quake.

What Firebrand is going to do is this: donate 2.0% of our top line revenues for the next 3 months to the Mission of Hope orphanage in Haiti.

This will be a strong challenge for us, but not nearly as difficult as many people are facing in Haiti. We have faith that our customers will support us during this effort. We also hope that our efforts on behalf of the Mission of Hope will inspire other friends and colleagues to find their own way to help.

Why Scott Lubeck will be good for the future of the Book

2010-01-11T06:05:00.007-05:00

In my opinion, one of the bigger pieces of news in the book industry last week, passed by very quickly and very quietly. The appointment of Scott Lubeck as the new Executive Director of BISG barely made a ripple in Twitter and the Blogosphere. But, I'll bet that two or three years from now, when we look back at this appointment, we'll all understand how important a date it was.

In this huge industry transition that we are all feeling, many of my colleagues in the industry have attempted to define what publishers are and why they are important. Most of these arguments center around editorial and marketing value added services. While I agree that these are hugely important, I have not yet read anything that talks about how publishers are the managers of the content supply chain.

The content supply chain is a dirty, ugly, frustrating, and expensive part of the business that facilitates the movement of money and product. Ordering, billing, shipping, status, returns, and product information movement, are things that publishers and readers simply take for granted. But without it, there is no business, and no money for anyone.

Until very recently, the content supply chain meant only the movement of physical product, and the processes involved were largely sorted out among the key industry players. For the last 25 years, publishers, distributors, retailers, wholesalers, and data aggregators have scratched and clawed at standardizing almost every piece of this complex operation. Much of the credit for this accomplishment belongs to BISG for facilitating standards and driving consensus among its members.

But now we are in a new era. The product being supplied is still physical, and it is also electronic. The number of partners involved in the content supply chain is exploding to include many who have never been involved in books before, and have no knowledge of standards used in the book industry. Many believe that the cost of doing business should be far cheaper as there are no "trucks" or "warehouses" or "printing" involved. True, BUT, there are now no standard processes for content delivery, or storage, or distribution, or security or display. It's a complete "wild west" again, and most of what's happening now is largely manual, very time consuming, and very expensive.

All of this means that the book industry needs to largely re-invent the content supply chain, and we don't have 25 years to do it. This means that we need to bring together people who are familiar with the old supply chain, with people that understand the issues involved with the new supply chain. This is where Scott Lubeck comes in.

There are many people in our industry that are regularly seen as pioneers. People who see the future run out ahead of the rest of us, and start clearing a path for the rest of us to follow. Often those pioneers get wounded or killed in the process, but the best of them keep on moving forward.

If there was ever a pioneer in the field of digital publishing, it is Scott Lubeck. Now, my guess is that many of you have never heard of him, but this is a man who has been working diligently in and among us for a very long time. A man who has held senior publishing and technology positions inside publishers and for publishing services companies. He's been an editor, a press director, a CIO and a General Manager.

One need only look down the list of his resume to see his legacy as leader and entrepreneur in a culture of change. He has been on the leading edge of digital publishing technology as far back as 16 years ago when he was the director of the National Academies Press - where they were the first press to put their full publications online for free.

Scott may not have a pedigree from the current locus of big publishers and big retailers that have determined the current supply chain best practices, but I think that this is a real advantage during this time of great change. There is no doubt that the locus of publishing is moving, and right into Scott's wheelhouse. BISG will need to bring in a whole new set of constituents, and once again hammer out the unglamourous details of how to make money and product move smoothly and efficiently, and to bring down costs.

I applaud the BISG board for recognizing this trend and recognizing that they need a leader who has a skill set that is different from prior directorates - one who will be able to build on what BISG has built and lead it into new directions that will better serve the entire industry.

Is BEA Reinventing Itself?

2009-05-20T11:01:00.004-05:00

Lance Fensterman's blog post this morning came to my attention as I was writing this. It seems interesting to me that the people running the show are concluding that the show needs to change even as it is changing right before our eyes.

The industry is in transition - duh. The economy is down - duh. The internet is changing everything - duh, duh, duh.

BEA is a giant Sales Conference, why not just acknowledge it and take advantage of the venue to use it that way?

The past two months have been among the most interesting and exhilarating in my professional career. Via twitter, we have tapped into the collective energies of a whole new community of book enthusiasts who have never had a formal role in the industry before. Call them "lit-bloggers", call them "Social Media hounds", call them "twitterers", call them whatever you want, but they are a true force that just might #savepublishing! They have energy and enthusiasm about books and publishing at a time when all of the pundits are projecting doom and gloom.

For us, the signals of this new energy started with the planning of our Follow the Reader Blog at NetGalley.com. We had the fortunate opportunity to hire Kat Meyer (@katmeyer) and Charlotte Abbott (@charabbott) - a self described odd couple - to be our writers. Kat and Charlotte independently are conduits to both new-school and old-school publishing ideas. And, together on Twitter, have created a weekly conversation, called #followreader, which discusses issues related to the new publishing paradigms - that are literally being created before our eyes.

Independent of Follow the Reader, Kat took on the responsibility to organize a party for all these folks, called the BEATweetup, which has absolutely taken on a life of its own. We jumped on the opportunity immediately to help sponsor this after working with Kat on a similar adventure at the Tools of Change conference last February. The RSVPs for this party are now well over 300, and it seems like its a mini-BEA all by itself. In all deference to my friends at PGW, I think there is a new sheriff in town when it comes to BEA parties!

The latest signal came when we decided to offer some of our booth space over to "lit-bloggers" as a way to have them meet some publishers and some of their fans. What started out as a parody of the "author signings" so prevalent at every BEA, our "blogger signing" idea has threatened to overwhelm Firebrand's entire presence at the show. Three weeks ago, I leaned over to a colleague and said that I thought we would be doing well if 10 bloggers decided to take us up on our offer. Now we have 44 and we have a waiting list.

I would contend that these signals indicate that the show has already started to reinvent itself - without any help from the organizers. It is no longer (and hasn't been for several years) a show about selling books, as much as it has turned into a giant sales conference.

What is changing the most in our industry is the way that consumers are influenced to buy books (in whatever format). They are influenced by personal recommendations from people they trust. (Charlotte did a great job of describing this changing landscape in her post the other day). Publishers still need sales people to go into all of the traditional channels, but they ALSO need to coopt the 'new influencers'.

The BEA is the perfect mechanism to do this. Publishers should take note of all that will be going on next week and meet as many of these influencers as possible. Throughout the course of the year, they should cultivate these relationships, so that next year, BEA will have a strong and positive direction.

Blogger Signing

2009-05-08T16:06:00.005-05:00

(An update to this post 5/20/09: For a complete listing, please see the Follow the Reader Blog entry or simply click here. There are now 44 bloggers registered!)

As of Friday afternoon, we have 26 Bloggers signed up for our signings at booth 4077, including:

Name

URL

Book Reviews by Jess	bookreviewsbyjess.blogspot.com
Beth Fish Reads	bfishreads.blogspot.com
Booking Mama	bookingmama.blogspot.com
Booksquare	booksquare.com
Janicu's book blog	janicu.livejournal.com
Jenn's Bookshelf	jennsbookshelf.blogspot.com
Literary License	litlicense.blogspot.com
Personanondata	personanondata.blogspot.com
Reading the Past	readingthepast.blogspot.com
Reviewer X	reviewerx.blogspot.com
Beatrice.com	www.beatrice.com
Book Club Girl	www.bookclubgirl.com
Books on the Nightstand	www.booksonthenightstand.com
Books on the Nightstand	www.booksonthenightstand.com
Follow the Reader	www.followthereader.wordpress.com
Follow the Reader	www.followthereader.wordpress.com
Café Literati	www.literatihall.com
Literary Kicks	www.litkicks.com
Maw Books	blog.mawbooks.com
The Olive Reader	www.olivereader.com
She is Too Fond of Books	www.sheIsTooFondOfBooks.com
Smart Bitches Trashy Books	www.smartbitchestrashybooks.com
The Book Maven	www.stilllifewithbookmaven.com
Teleread	www.Teleread.org
Stephanie’s Written Word	www.thewrittenword.wordpress.com
Wands and Worlds	www.wandsandworlds.com/blog1

This is a great start. We'll be publishing the schedule next week. If you see any of your favorite bloggers NOT on this list, please have them get in touch with me at fran [at] firebrandtech [dot] com

Blogger Signings at BEA

2009-05-06T16:14:00.003-05:00

Because of our interest in the professional reading community, we decided to try something new and fun this year at BEA.

We are going to holding "Blogger Signings" at our booth (#4077). "Blogger Signings" is a bit tongue-in-cheek, as it is meant as a parody to the many "Author Signings" that are hosted either by BEA directly, or by individual publishers in their booths each year.

People that review books and blog about them are enjoying a significantly growing voice in influencing book buyers. And those that blog about the industry in general are having a strong influence on the rate of change our industry is undergoing. Many book bloggers enjoy a very strong following for their work, while others are not as well known.

Our hope is that we will get most of the bloggers who were already planning on attending BEA to sign up and be at our booth for an appointed time during the show. We will publicize the schedule of all who do sign up via Twitter and Blog posts, so that their 'fans' can come and get their 'autograph'. We'll even have a decidedly low-tech easel up at the booth identifying the times when bloggers will be present.

For bloggers interested in participating, please email me at fran [at] firebrandtech [dot] com. I'll send you some information about what is next. Several have already expressed interest, and now we're making it formal.

We will be giving away two (2) Sony Readers at the show. Every blogger that comes to the booth (to sign autographs) is eligible for a chance to win one of them. Every person who comes to the booth to visit a blogger is eligible to take a chance to win the second one.

As added encouragement, our bloggers on the Follow the Reader blog, Kat Meyer (@katmeyer) and Charlotte Abbott (@charabbott) will be on hand. Kat and Charlotte will be interviewing bloggers during a few of the time slots, and those interviews will be posted on the Follow the Reader site, (like the post today with Colleen Lindsay, and the one the other day with Bethanne Patrick).

We're hoping that all publishers take note of this so that their publicity people can meet the people they work with virtually, in person.

We're looking forward to a great show. Between this, and the BEATweetup, the online community will certainly be getting together for some fun in person. Hope to see you all there.

Farewell to a Friend

2009-03-02T13:47:00.007-05:00

As reported by Michael Cairns and others in the blogosphere, it is with great sadness that I report the passing of Stanley Greenfield. Michael's blog has a biography of Stanley, and information on where to send cards and condolences. The picture above was taken last April.

I reported on this blog last December that he was hospitalized. He claimed at the time that it was an incorrect mixing of medications that was causing his maladies.

Stanley was one of the classiest people I've ever met. Ever upbeat, ever persistent, and ever very gracious. I spoke to him last about three weeks ago, and he was asking for excerpts!

Our prayers and condolences go out to his wife, Betty, and to the rest of his family.

Please add your comments and remembrances here if you like.

Time to Review our Mission Statements?

2009-03-01T08:43:00.003-05:00

The pace of change in the publishing industry is almost as eye-popping as the changes themselves. The playing field is being re-leveled much more quickly than most of us ever believed it would. Every single day - sometimes multiple times a day - we're seeing the evidence of these changes... A newspaper or magazine stops printing, a new electronic reading device is announced, traditional roles that have been in publishing for decades are obsoleted seemingly overnight.

Some of these changes are painful to watch, and some are very exciting to watch. But, one thing is definitely true, we're in the midst of major changes. I don't think anyone can really predict where this all going. We all try, but we're all really guessing. Our predictions are all based on trend lines that don't have enough data points.

A blog post by Seth Godin about how trade guilds seem to be trying to defend the status quo, sent my head spiraling in a number of directions. (Thanks again, Mike, for the recommendation) Why is Mr. Godin correct? It seems to me that it's all about the missions of those organizations. They are in place to protect the interests of their constituents.

In a time of great change, that mission seems almost laughable, because the interests of the constituents are changing daily. How can a trade guild possibly keep up?

It was all the rage in the 80's and 90's to come up with mission statements for organizations that would last for years. It was a great concept, but during a maelstrom of change, it fails. In order to survive organizations need to react to both the opportunities and threats that present themselves. And, in publishing, they are presenting themselves every day!

At Firebrand, we reviewed our mission last year when we re-branded the company. I think it's time we review it again, to insure that it is still relevant to our constituents during this turbulent time.

Contrarian view on DRM

2009-02-28T10:29:00.003-05:00

At the recent Tools of Change conference, the idea that publishers should protect their electronic products through the use of DRM (digital rights management encryption) was universally poo-poo'd. Speaker after speaker got up and put down the practice. Blogger Cory Doctorow had the most popular quote of the conference, "If content is a river, DRM is a urinary tract infection, delivering the flow in a painful drip".

This morning on Twitter, one of my 'virtual mentors', Mike Hyatt, highlighted a blog post that asks why book publishers are following the same path with Amazon and DRM that music publishers did with Apple (iTunes) and DRM. It uses that logic to put down the use of DRM.

I hadn't really thought about that question that way, but it made me think about what Apple did to the music business - from a consumer perspective (NOT the music publisher perspective). iTunes brought order to a very chaotic music market. Before iTunes we were in the age of Napster, and other file sharing services. In that age, people were freely sharing music files and feeling no compunction about the ethics involved in it.

When I was in college it was a pretty common practice to bootleg music by recording off the original LP. We all had our bootleg cassettes, and while we did it, we all knew it was technically illegal. File sharing in a way was simply using technology to bring bootlegging to a whole new level - one which had a pretty dramatic effect on the producers of the music. A key difference was that no one really felt it was wrong.

During the 'Napster age', I personally chose not to participate, because I thought it was wrong. I (as a consumer) felt that I could afford to pay for the music, hence I should. When iTunes came along, I loved it. I could feel good about downloading music because I paid for it. To me, iTunes brought order to the chaos of the time. I didn't care about the music business, I was simply caring about my own participation in being fair to the copyright holder.

Now, it can also be argued that the 'Napster age' of DRM-less music did eventually benefit the copyright holders and the musicians in a far more lucrative way than through royalties. It can be argued that increased popularity of concerts (even at vastly raised ticket prices) was brought about partly because there was a whole new market of listeners who found the music because it was free.

The point I really want to make here is, publishers should understand that there is a segment of their market that like to know that they are doing the right thing by paying a fair price, getting content that is protected through a trusted vendor in a reliable way.

So, does the argument of DRM need to be answered in a Yes or No way? I think there is room for both. Maybe that should be the lesson from the music industry. Both ways have some validity, finding the balance is the challenge.

NetGalley Update

2009-01-28T08:23:00.003-05:00

Since Firebrand took over operations of NetGalley back in December, we've been very busy coming up the learning curve about what the product can do, and can't do, and how it should or could overlap with other Firebrand offerings.

What we have found is that the concept of NetGalley is very exciting and compelling. We have also found that product (like all products and services) is still missing some features that it needs to be the breakthrough product that we all know it can be.

This week we did an informal survey of registered readers about their recent experiences and some common themes were expressed.

In general:

All of the responders are very interested in the concept of NetGalley
Most found the system to be fairly easy to use, but...
We need Better Search tools – searching by genre, pub date
We need More Books!
We need to facilitate reading galleys Offline—ability to download to reading devices
We need to insure that Requests are followed up on by Publishers, and need for more acknowledgement that requests have been received

We are now on a monthly release schedule for NetGalley, and promise to continue to work on all of these issues in the coming months.

If you are interested in checking us out, please see the website and register!

Random Thoughts for 2009

2008-12-16T08:02:00.001-05:00

Living at the intersection of Book Publishing and Technology, I live in an interesting place. In some ways, it feels as though I live right on a giant fault line. Two tectonic plates are colliding creating a seismic disturbance the likes of which have not been seen before (at least not in my career).

With all that’s going on, I have been giving a lot of thought to what might shake out of all of the tremors. In general, I think this is going to be a great year for small and nimble companies. Here are some random thoughts:

1. People will either be very busy or looking for work. Many people are already out of work, and I don’t think that trend is over. The people that remain employed will be asked to do even more than they did before, and the people out of work are going to have challenging times finding a new place of employment. I think this is going to affect many things, including what people read, and how they get their information.

2. Given the above, I think the price of general fiction will decrease, while there may be some room for modest increases in prices for non-fiction. There is just a glut of fiction work available in the market now, and no shortage of writers (and self-publishers) adding to the supply. Fiction is generally read when people have time and want to escape. The ‘employed’ won’t have the time, and the unemployed will be looking to re-tool for other opportunities, so the demand will be lower. On the non-fiction side, with all of the information sources available on the internet, the need for authoritative, reviewed, edited works of non-fiction will be in greater demand. Publishers that can make their non-fiction products available in the ways these consumers want will see better price elasticity.

3. There will be a rise in the mini-celebrity. Technology is making it simpler to define a market space, find a leader, and build communities around those leaders. Creating author websites and marketing their expertise has never been easier. Creating electronic communities is also becoming easier and easier.

4. Smaller, independent publishers have a great opportunity, and larger, multi-imprint publishers are going to be more greatly challenged. Publishers that focus on a community, and whose brand represents a mission to serve that community will develop reputations that may rival their key authors. Their inherent ability to focus on doing a few things very well as opposed to doing many things only partially well will also help them outperform the larger houses. Unless the larger publishers really reorganize themselves as a group of small businesses with a bootstrapping attitude, I fear they are in for major destruction.

5. Independent retailers will finally embrace the internet (instead of fighting it), and use it to their advantage. Independent retailers have built in communities, and embracing electronic technology can help them keep their local clientele local. All the major retailers sell to their customers in whatever way the customer wants to buy, either in store, or online. The technology is available now and affordable even for small independents.

6. People will continue to read more and more books, magazines, and research material online, or on e-reading devices. Sometimes they will want the e-product for quick answers and then keep the printed text for future reference. The proliferation of product forms and management of the same will be a major challenge for publishers. This points to another solid year for supporting technology companies (such as content management, and yes, workflow companies), and print-on-demand companies.

7. Design of information delivery will become almost as important as the information itself. Finding what is needed as quickly and intuitively as possible as well as being pleasing to the eye will make the difference between customers choosing one data published work over another.

All-in-all, I think it’s going to be an interesting year coming up. What are your thoughts?

The New Leadership Paradigm

2008-12-12T00:05:00.003-05:00

Please read this blog post by Kat Meyer. It really got me thinking not only about the ‘leadership vacuum’ in publishing today, but more importantly how the internet is changing our notions of leadership. Specifically, it got me pondering the notion of how internet communication mechanisms – whether they be social networks, chat rooms, blogs, Twitter, or whatever – are changing the entire paradigm of leadership.

If you think about it, we in society take leadership from fairly rigid hierarchical structures. The structure may be your family or your church or your place of employment, or your city, state, or federal government. In some of those structures we may be leaders and in others we may be followers.

Leaders tend to be ‘in charge’ of leading very specific groups of people, and they tend to become leaders because they either started the structure (like a family or small business) or they were elected or promoted into it by people further up the hierarchical ladder.

On the internet, leaders are no longer bound by these traditional structures. What emerges on the internet are ‘thought leaders’ – people we want to listen to and follow by virtue of the fact that we are in alignment with their ideas. Leaders in this paradigm are made in the most egalitarian way – they are made because we choose to follow them, not because we exist in a structure where the leadership is defined for us.

Thought leaders don’t require a pedigree, or any special training. They only need ideas that other people think are interesting and insightful. Anyone who has the courage to speak up on the internet can be a leader. It doesn’t matter whether a person is scrubbing bathrooms at the local McDonalds or the CEO of a major corporation. The only thing that gives a leader power is the people that choose to follow them.

Another thing about leadership on the internet is that leadership is no longer hierarchical - its relational. There is no one single individual who sets the direction of the masses following them. People follow many people all at the same time often on the same topics. They then choose the best ideas from all of them and come to their own conclusions.

I believe that this truly free society is why we are seeing the crash in mainstream media, like television, radio and print news organizations, as well as magazines and other structured information services. There is a quiet revolution going on. People are rebelling against the notion that others are making decisions about what they read and listen to, and what stories are important to them. Instead they are looking for the new voices of reason; the new leaders to point them in a direction and help them find the things that are of the most interest.

The new leaders act as information filters, helping the people that follow them sift through the myriad of information floating around and pointing them toward new ideas – and possibly even new leaders.

So, as I see it, the traits of the ‘new’ leader are:
1. The courage to stand up and take a leadership role
2. A Platform from which to lead (a blog, website, or social network page)
3. A message that consistently resonates with other people
4. The understanding that they exist in the service of and at the pleasure of the people that follow them
5. They are comfortable not being the only leader, and actively promote the ideas of other leaders
6. They are comfortable with the idea of power without authority
7. They are comfortable with the idea that there are no boundaries to their leadership

Anyone care to stand up?

NetGalley LLC

2008-12-08T04:35:00.007-05:00

Today is huge day in the history of Firebrand Technologies! Today, in cooperation with Rosetta Solutions, we are formally announcing the formation of joint venture company called NetGalley LLC. For more information about this joint venture, please see our press release.

NetGalley is a product that was created by Rosetta Solutions to help publishers manage the 'galley' process in an electronic way. Galleys are books that are printed in advance of the formally published book. Generally, they are sent out to reviewers and key customers prior to their formal publication so they can be reviewed. NetGalley is a tool that manages this process electronically, by creating a secure environment where reviewers can either read or download electronic versions, or request a hardcopy of the 'netgalley' and then post their reviews online.

The product was formally launched last Spring during BEA. Since then it has garnered much attention, but has not made a significant impact in the market. At least not yet... We are definitely hoping to change that!

The concept of NetGalley is a very exciting one for everyone in the industry who recognizes how much wasted money there is in the current 'galley process'. Publishers waste significant money sending galleys out via the mail to people who either never get them or never read them. Reviewers are often inundated by publishers to review their books, and need to create makeshift tools to manage their workload.

To, me, there is a tremendous opportunity to help publishers save money in this process. The amount of money wasted on sending galleys to bad addresses is enough to make any publishing CEO wince! By providing reviewers with rich bibliograpic data (which of course is Firebrand's forte), they can choose to opt-in to either read a galley electronically, or have one sent to them. Savvy publishers will connect this system directly to their print on demand printer of choice and have a galley custom created for the review.

In later entries, I'll be talking more about this, and how we intend on:

Making NetGalley completely integrated with Firebrand's Title Management and eloquence databases.
Improving the workflow for both publishers and reviewers
Changing the business model from a price per title to a subscription model

Stay tuned!

Give Books This Holiday

2008-12-06T10:36:00.003-05:00

This post has been simmering for a long time. But the events of the past week have finally stirred me to write this. The book retail market has been in trouble for a long time, and the publishing industry is really challenged, especially at the moment. But, I'm not going to spend alot of time on that topic here. There was a good summation of publishing's ills done by Lynn Neary of NPR yesterday.

We, in the publishing industry, don't have the luxury of just sitting idly by and waiting for the axe to fall. We each can find a way to support the industry that supports us - by giving books this holiday season!

Many of us already do this, but I don't think many of us are promoting that we do it.

I could swear that a month or two ago, there were many blog entries (or maybe they were twitter feeds) about people trying to start a movement for buying books this holiday season. However, a casual search of both the web and twitter came up almost empty. It's time to re-energize the movement!

Here are two ideas:

1. Add something to your email signature. This idea comes from some friends at Ingram Publisher Services. Recently, in their email signatures, they had a simple and tasteful logo:

When I first saw it, I loved it, but never said anything about it. I hope they don't mind that this will now become part of my email signature as well. Maybe we can get everyone in publishing to add it to their emails also. Please feel free to copy it.

2. Subscribe to and become a follower of Buy Books for the Holidays 2008 blog, and add your logo to your own blog. Maybe if we all band together, we can make a difference.

Me Too Strategy?

2008-12-04T20:07:00.003-05:00

It has been a horrible week in the book world. And, I apologize in advance if this post sounds just a bit cynical.

There is no question that the book business is in a world of flux. Between yesterday and today, I've read no less than 30 different accounts of layoffs, salary freezes, hiring freezes, and warnings about all of the above, in the book business.

Some, there can be no doubt, are legitimate business moves made in light of the current economic climate. But I wonder if some publishers didn't just see the opportunity to make cuts because they heard others were about to.

I raised this question with a colleague on the phone today, and he said that he was thinking the same thing. Isn't it a little suspicious that all of this took place in a two day period? How could it be that Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Putnam, Thomas Nelson, Bowker, and of course, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt all chose this week to cut staff. Even HarperCollins got into the act by announcing a salary freeze. At least Macmillan made their announcement about a hiring freeze a few weeks ago.

Now, I don't think that there was any collusion going on, but I do think that there was a lot of communications between these houses and that rumors abounded long before we were made aware of the situation.

One bright spot - Hachette announced that they were giving out bonuses this year!

Can't wait to hear tomorrow's news... it's got to be better than the last two days.

One of our Own

2008-12-01T09:02:00.003-05:00

I hope you all had a great holiday weekend!

For those of you that read this blog and are in the 'metadata business' like we are at Firebrand, I wanted to let you know that Stanley Greenfield is in the hospital. They are not really sure what's wrong with him other than he has some type of infection.

His wife, Betty, called last week to let us know. I spoke to Stanley very briefly on Saturday, and of course, if you know Stanley, he was upbeat and asking for excerpts. But, uncharacteristically, you could tell he was very tired (or sedated), and the call was no more than 2 minutes long. He said that he may be in the hospital for 2 - 4 more weeks.

Stanley, who runs the company, Dial-A-Book, is one of the most spry octogenarians I know. He is very proud of his 3rd place finish in the U.S. National Squash Championships in his age category, and quick to acknowledge that only three contestants over 80 showed up!

Please keep him in your thoughts and prayers. Stanley is at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital for those of you who want to call or write to him. I'll update this blog as I know more.

Productivity

2008-11-25T09:53:00.002-05:00

Why are we so productive when we get super busy?

I am in a crazy-busy period, yet I seem to be taking care of lots of little things that have been sitting around my desk for months. I'm trying to understand it in order to tap into it in less busy times.

- is it just adrenaline? if so, I know I can only keep this up for so long
- is it that I'm just not thinking so much about the task, and just doing it?
- I find myself filling in free minutes with "Priority B or Priority C" things that have been nagging me - am I just trying to get these off my mind, so I can concentrate on the important stuff?

whatever it is, it tracks with other times when I've been consumed by a project, and have been energized. I love it, but I wonder how long I can keep the pace....

It also tracks with a saying that someone told me a long time ago - "Give your most important projects to your busiest person." - well that's me at the moment...

fpt

CPSIA - Sneaking up on us?

2008-11-24T13:16:00.005-05:00

On Friday we received a rather interesting email from Amazon related to the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act - which was signed into law last August. Here is what was so interesting:

I hadn't even heard of this before - and haven't heard anyone speak of it, or its implications for book publishers.
Amazon sent this email out to publishers on Friday, and wanted a response the same day.
Last week (and even this morning) the BISAC Metadata committee had a virtual discussion about some of these issues, and are trying to rush putting 'hazard warnings' into the standards for ONIX - the standard that most publishers use to communicate product information to Amazon and others.
We didn't receive any notices like this from any other retailers.

I wonder how anyone will comply with all this in such a short timeframe. Here is the text of the email:

Dear Amazon Vendor
This message outlines the steps Amazon.com will require vendors to take to confirm their compliance with new product safety regulations affecting childrens products.

We will need your response via e-mail on two issues by November 21, 2008: (1) product safety cautionary statements regarding choking hazards of childrens toys and games, and (2) lead and phthalate limits that will be phased in on all childrens products.

These issues are described in further detail below, along with information about what you need to do to ensure that the compliance of your products offered on Amazon.com.

Background
The U.S. House and Senate have passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (the Act), and on August 14, 2008, President Bush signed the Act into law.

We expect that all Amazon.com vendors will ensure that their products are compliant with the Act in accordance with all applicable effective dates. Specific provisions of the Act discussed in this letter are for ease of reference only. Specific provisions of the Act discussed in this letter are for ease of reference only. Further information on the Act is available on the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) website at http://www.cpsc.gov/.

Vendors are responsible for thoroughly familiarizing themselves with all the requirements of the Act. We would, however, like to take this opportunity to draw your attention to two issues of particular importance to Amazon.com.

1. Cautionary Statements in Internet Advertisements
Section 105 of the Act requires manufacturers, importers and distributors to provide retailers with appropriate cautionary statements relating to the choking hazards of childrens toys and games. These cautionary statements are defined in Section 105 of the Act and Section 24 of the Federal Hazardous Substances Act. They must be displayed on the product packaging and in certain online and catalog advertisements.

What you need to do
You are responsible for determining if a cautionary statement applies to the product. This can be verified by contacting the product manufacturer or checking the product packaging. Amazon.com has created a data field for such cautionary statements among the product attributes supplied to us by vendors. In order to enter cautionary statements applicable to each of your products, please download the spreadsheet CPSIA Vendor Spreadsheet in the Resource Center of Vendor Central. Follow the instructions located in this file to download your items from Vendor Central, complete, and return as an attachment to an e-mail addressed to cpsia-books@amazon.com. Vendors must supply Amazon.com with an appropriate cautionary statement (or certify that no such statements are applicable) for each applicable product no later than November 21, 2008. Cautionary statements that you select will be displayed on the product detail page.

If none of your products are subject to a cautionary statement, reply to cpsia-books@amazon.com the following statement We, [Vendor Name], certify that no cautionary statement under Section 105 of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 is applicable to any product sold or furnished by us.

Please include your vendor name in the subject line of your e-mail to us when you respond in any case. Any products for which the applicable cautionary statements are not received (or certified as non-applicable) are subject to removal from the Amazon.com site, and Amazon.com will be entitled to return any inventory of such products to you for a full refund.

2. Product Content Limits
The Act prescribes strict limits on the content of certain materials in products intended for children, including lead and phthalates. In particular:
Effective February 10, 2009, the Act prohibits the sale of childrens toys and child care articles with concentrations of more than 0.1 percent of di-(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), dibutyl phthalate (DBP), benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP), diisononyl phthalate (DINP), diisodecyl phthalate, (DIDP), or di-n-octyl phthalate (DnOP).

The Act mandates a phased-in ban on lead in substrate for all childrens products, requiring that lead levels be reduced to a maximum of 600 parts per million by February 10, 2009; 300 parts per million by August 14, 2009; and 100 parts per million by August 14, 2011. Electronic devices and inaccessible component parts will be subject to rules to be issued by August 14, 2009.
The Act also reduces permissible lead in paint content from 0.06 percent to 0.009 percent (effective August 14, 2009), which may be lowered further by administrative action.

What you need to do
We expect that vendors will familiarize themselves with the effective dates of each applicable limit. In order to minimize the difficulty of tracking multiple versions of the same product through the supply chain, it is highly advisable for manufacturers to promptly eliminate or phase-out product offerings which do not or will not comply with the most restrictive limits described above, well before such limits take effect.

If all of your products are compliant with the lead and phthalate limits according to the table below, reply to cpsia-books@amazon.com with the following statement We, [Vendor Name], certify that all of our products are compliant with the lead and phthalate limits effective as of August 14, 2011 as defined by the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008.
If some of your products are not compliant by any of the dates below, you must complete the spreadsheet located in the Resource Center of Vendor Central, as stated above. Only one spreadsheet needs to be completed.

As of each date set forth in Column III of the table below, each vendor must confirm and report to Amazon.com that all of your childrens products (i) in Amazon.coms inventory, as reported to you in Vendor Central as of such date, and (ii) in transit or shipped to Amazon.com on or after such date, will comply with applicable limits set forth in Column I.

I	II	III	IV
Limit	Effective Date of Limit per the Act	Products shipped to Amazon.com must comply by	Noncompliant products are subject to return to Vendor
Lead 600 ppm	February 10, 2009	November 30, 2008	January 10, 2009
Phthalate ban	February 10, 2009	November 30, 2008	January 10, 2009
Lead 300 ppm	August 14, 2009	April 14, 2009	July 1, 2009
Lead paint 0.009	August 14, 2009	April 14, 2009	July 1, 2009
Lead 100 PPM	August 14, 2011	February 14, 2011	July 1, 2011

Please put your vendor name in the subject field of the email when you respond in any case.

If you do not provide the information requested by the dates provided in Column III, you are representing and warranting that all of your products shipped to Amazon.com prior to such date are fully compliant with the applicable limits. Amazon.com will be entitled to rely on such representation. Nevertheless, any childrens products for which you have not provided affirmative confirmation of compliance are subject to removal from the Amazon.com catalog at any time, and Amazon.com will be entitled to return to you for a full refund (including shipping costs) any non-compliant products which remain in our inventory as of the dates in Column IV above.

In order to minimize difficulties in inventory compliance tracking, any products which are altered to comply with a limit described in the Act must have a distinct SKU number from previous versions. These changes must be reported to Amazon.com along with a return authorization for any Amazon.com inventory of previous versions.

The Act provides that the CPSC may issue regulations providing for further limitations on the content of childrens products. Vendors are responsible for tracking and complying with any regulations issued by the CPSC.

We are confident that you share our commitment to ensure the full compliance with the Act of all of your products sold on Amazon.com.

Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.

Sincerely,
Amazon.com

2008-11-22T11:14:00.001-05:00

I’m usually a person who keeps his own council. I don’t often seek out the help of others when I’ve got decisions to make or research to do. But, recently, I’ve been working on a very complex project, one that has many implications for both me and my company. And, this time, I enlisted the help of a great many people. It was such a great experience that I thought I’d share a few of the insights I got from it:

1. Asking people’s opinions helped me clarify my questions. As I struggled with some rather complex questions, simply trying to figure out how to ask for someone else’s opinion gave me great insight. And the more people I asked the more clear the issues became.

2. Most opinions were non-committal, but they were extremely helpful. It was interesting to me that of all the people I spoke with, no one said, “You should do this”. Most of them were very helpful in identifying factors to consider, both positive and negative, but few offered any strong ideas about what I should do.

3. Most people really enjoyed being asked for help. Maybe it’s because I don’t ask for help very often, but I was really impressed at how willing people were to give me their time, and sincerely help me evaluate what I was doing.

4. Several folks referred me to others that I would not have thought of myself. As they listened to my questions, if the person I was speaking with didn’t feel qualified to answer, they usually had someone in mind that was, and offered to connect me.

5. Other people can really help your productivity. I had reached a point several times on this project where something needed to be done – quickly – and I didn’t even realize that I was stuck. It was only after I accepted someone’s offer to make a phone call on my behalf, did I realize that that phone call was the most important thing that needed to be done at that moment.

6. Asking for other people’s help gave me confidence that I was covering all my bases. Whether or not the decisions I make will be good ones won’t be known for quite a while, but feeling that I thoroughly thought through the situation, gives me confidence to take action.

Thanks to all who helped me with this project. You know who you are. I’ll let you all know the outcome very soon.

Amazon Honors Distributors

2008-11-20T12:34:00.002-05:00

Today, Publishers Marketplace had a very interesting news item - at least to me! It is copied below:

Amazon Honors 3 Distributors
Apparently Amazon recognizes distributors of the year, and this year they are honoring Macmillan, Random House Publisher Service, and IPG. Criteria include "the shortest and most consistent receive lead times" for books, "actively growing" Kindle availability, using Amazon's print-on-demand, providing correct ONIX data, and strong search inside the book participation.Amazon books vp Russell Grandinetti says in the announcement, "By working together, we're able to improve the rate at
which their books are in stock on Amazon, lower prices through lowering
operational costs and help customers find, discover and buy great books....
We're proud to work with such great distributors on behalf of their client publishers."

What was so interesting (to me) is that Macmillan, and IPG are Firebrand customers and use our Title Management database to help manage lead times, and determine which books will be in the Kindle program, and the Search Inside Program. They are also eloquence customers, and eloquence is the service they use to create and distribute their ONIX data.

It's nice to be behind the scenes of an award like this!

The above news item was copied from Publisher's Marketplace because you need a password to have access to their content. Publisher's Marketplace is a great source of daily news about the book publishing world, and I would strongly suggest signing up (it's free), to get their daily emails.

Amazon's CloudFront

2008-11-19T15:57:00.004-05:00

I've sort of filed this one under "innocuous little email that one day may have a profound impact on my business".

This morning - because I'm on a mailing list - I received an email from Amazon Web Services. For those of you that don't know what a web service is, it is a tool that programmers can use to access information from someone else (over the web) on demand. We use Amazon's web services to access information from Amazon's database (like titles, and author names, and page counts etc.) so we can compare it to what is on our database.

The email I received this morning was a little different from the normally very geeky ones I get. It was announcing a beta-platform for a new service called Amazon CloudFront. With CloudFront, programmers can now ask for and retrieve "content" that is in Amazon's database, not just the structured information (mentioned above).

It's a little vague about what it means by content, but from what I can gather, it looks like images. That's cool by itself, but if you consider that when Amazon shows you pages of a book in their Search Inside the Book tool, and all of those pages are stored as individual images of a page, then this new little tool starts to have some very interesting implications.

I'm still not sure what it all means yet, but this much I do know: Amazon, Yahoo, and Google, are the three largest creators of web services. There is a whole group of individual programmers out there that do some very creative things with these services, by building what they call mashups. Mashups are little pieces of code that when "mashed together" create some very cool applications. In fact there is a whole group of these folks getting together right now at a conference (or better called an unconference) called MashupCamp, which is run by a friend of mine named David Berlind.

When Amazon first created their webservices, these mashup developers went crazy and built some really cool things. I can't wait to see what some of them will come up with.

We may have to get into the act ourselves.... as I said, this could have a profound impact on my company!

Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

2008-11-17T09:18:00.004-05:00

This is a paraphrase of a quote from the Steven Hunter's book, The Point of Impact, which was also turned into a movie (Shooter) starring Mark Wahlberg. The book is about a sniper, or more accurately, the mind of a sniper, as he prepares to make shots upwards of a mile in length.

“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast” is also a quote that I have found myself saying to people around me a lot lately. In my context, it is analogous to the old carpenter’s adage: “measure twice, cut once”. Essentially, I mean, if you do something right the first time, you save yourself a ton of time and trouble in the long run. It also means that you spend at least a little time considering your next course of action before committing yourself to it.

In our ultra high paced society, we are all under stress to experiment with new methods, make quick decisions, and to get things done more quickly than has ever been expected in the past. This is especially true in book publishing, as publishers struggle with using new technologies and creating new business models. However, under this pressure, we all often fall prey to “leaping before we look”. And, the notion of “slow is smooth and smooth is fast” seems somewhat counter-intuitive.

Everyone has heard the story that it took Edison over 1,000 experiments before he perfected the light bulb, but has anyone ever put forth the notion that any of those experiments were not planned out? I think that the notion of ‘experimentation’ has become synonymous with the idea of “Just do it” (a commercial slogan designed to get people exercising.) Ill planned experiments can have disastrous results, wasting time, money, and other resources, especially in business. And, once the resources are gone, we can’t do any more experiments.

We need to move quickly in today’s society, but we must also move with some consideration of the implications our actions.

On another plane entirely, I hope our Treasury Secretary considers that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast” when doling out our $700 Billion. We certainly can’t afford for this ‘experiment’ not to work.

Only A Passion for Ideals will Save Publishing

2008-11-14T16:42:00.008-05:00

When I think about leadership of any kind, the first trait that comes to my mind is passion.

It seems to me that leaders achieve their position because they project a passion for ideals that are greater than they are. It doesn't matter whether the leader is a presidential candidate, or a programmer in a small startup company. They become leaders NOT because they aspire to lead but because they inspire people to follow their ideals.

The best and brightest people I work with are all passionate about what they do. They care about the minute details. They pontificate about philosophical approaches to problems. They might not always be right (who is?) but that doesn't really matter, we (less passionate) will follow anyway as long as we feel the leaders motivations are aligned with our own.

Looking back, I first fell in love with the book business in the mid 1980's because it was an industry passionate about its role in bringing information, education, and entertainment - thought provoking ideas - to society in a cohesive form. As a whole, the industry had passion for this mission, and was a societal leader. I wanted to be a part of it. It inspired me to start my business to support them in their mission.

But, it has lost its way. Certainly, one reason for our waywardness was the rising imperative that publishing companies be as financially successful as any other type of business. That notion caused a lot of bad blood in the 1990's, but we collectively got over it, and trudged on. Society as a whole has moved toward a superstar mentality where only the thought leaders that have a proven track record have room for success. So, now publishing is following society (because that's where the money is) instead of leading it. It's as though we all gave up, believing that making a profit and bringing thought provoking ideas to society are mutually exclusive paths.

Now it seems that the industry is thinking that technology will possibly save it from the demise that seems to be looming. But using technology to simply do the same thing better, faster, and cheaper is like a band-aid on a stab wound. There is value in stemming the bleeding, but the bleeding will not stop.

In order to turn ourselves around, and again become a leading force in society, we need to remember our mission, and get back our passion for bringing thoughts and ideas into a cohesive form. Books - as we know them today - either printed, or electronic, are but one form. Technology is enabling other forms, and will continue to develop new ones going forward. But, to take advantage of these new enabling forms, publishers need to re-think they way the produce, organize, market and deliver ideas, not just printed products.

Some publishers are starting to think this way, and are moving toward the idea of branding ideas, not just works. But, the industry as a whole is not moving as a cohesive unit. It's moving in pieces. But the reason its moving is NOT because of its passion for the original mission, its moving because of its pursuit of profit.

It's only when we get passionate again, that this industry will again attract the brightest minds who can find creative ways to tackle the challenges that lie ahead. In my ideal of the future, the pursuit of profit and the mission of bringing thought stimulating ideas to society are mutually INCLUSIVE and lie on the same path.

What do you think?

Challenging Times call for Focus

2008-11-13T14:18:00.004-05:00

Obviously, these are challenging times.

One of the things that makes them challenging is the uncertainty that surrounds all of us. What's happening to my savings? What's happening to my job? What if the sky falls? What are we going to do about 'X'? What if, what if, what if???

Mike Hyatt, President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers - whose blog has become required daily reading for me - has two posts that address some of the challenges we face. In the first post, he describes what leaders must do in turbulent times. In second post, he writes about the 10 benefits of a recession.

These are great posts that I hope you all read, as they offer concise, practical advise for facing adversity and determining what is important to you.

It is interesting to me to watch how the stress of uncertainty affects us. Some people completely lose their focus and tend to anxiously flit about doing lots of things that don't matter, thinking everything is important and must be done at once. Others, have a laser-like focus on the most important things and tend to excel under stress. The people in the former group seem to lose all sense of time management, while the people in the latter group seem to become time management gurus overnight.

How does this happen? With some people it's like their internal compass has had a magnet applied to it. It just spins and spins. How can you stop it and get focused?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Breathe, just Breathe. Close your eyes, think of the Karate Kid, breath in through your nose and out through your mouth, nice and slow. Try to clear your mind of everything. Set a timer, do it for three minutes. It will seem like an eternity. This will slow your heart rate and calm your mind.

2. Ask yourself the question, If there was only one thing I need to have, or do, before ___________ (the sky falls), what would it be? This is the thing that is most important thing for you to do right now.

3. If the answer to your question is something like a project, in that it has many steps or dependencies, then pull your time frame into a one day increment. Ask yourself, if I only had today to get this project done, what would be the most important piece to make happen? Now the important stuff is coming into focus.

4. Make a commitment to yourself to make it happen. If you are truly committed, nothing can stop you.

5. Get started with a baby step. Of the stuff that (now) needs to get done today, what piece of it is the easiest to get done? Accomplishment is the best tool for action. Crank out a few easy things; get your momentum going.

6. Avoid the temptation to stop before you are done with what you committed to do. Don't let yourself down. This is discipline. Sometimes it takes strong discipline to get a task across the finish line.

7. Reward yourself for your accomplishment. Even if it is just giving yourself a silent 'atta boy' and getting a cup of coffee.

8. Repeat.

Focus leads to action, and action leads to focus. Sometimes to focus is not natural, but that doesn't mean you can't have it. During these challenging times, take one day at a time, and work on the things that are most important. Before you know it, the challenge will be past!

Thank You!

2008-11-11T22:41:00.003-05:00

I was just trying to catch up on all my RSS feeds, and I was struck by the surprising lack of a topic today - at least in the feeds I subscribe to. Most of my feeds are book publishing related, but still I would have thought someone would have said something about the significance of the day.

Today, is November 11th - Veteran's Day. It is a day to think of all of those who have served on our behalf. In this era, virtually everyone knows of or directly knows a veteran. We pass them as we travel through airports, we see their pictures in our local papers. And yet, there are so many that we don't know about. Those that never call attention to themselves, those that fought in wars and skirmishes that we as a society would rather not remember.

So, before the day actually passes, I wanted to 'virtually' extend my thanks to all of you.

I was fortunate to have been only 17 when then draft for the Viet Nam war was stopped. So, I missed all service. But, many others stood in my stead, and I am grateful to all of you for that.

On a happier note, I just did a search of blogs that contained the term "Veteran's Day", and got back 110,000 hits. I wonder why none of them were in any of the publishing blogs?

Are Retailers getting in the way of Customers?

2008-11-09T18:15:00.004-05:00

Last Sunday night, Carolyn Reidy, President of Simon & Schuster addressed a large audience of publishers gathered outside of Chicago. The event was the Evangelical Christian Publisher's Association, PubU conference.

Last year, Jane Friedman - then head of HarperCollins - gave a riveting address, and so the room was primed and ready to hear what Ms. Reidy had to say. Ms. Friedman's talk was mostly about leveraging content, and experimenting with new business models. By contrast, Ms. Reidy's talk was more tied to the age old issue of finding customers.

Ms. Reidy's talk was refreshing from the point of view that she bucked a lot of conventional wisdom related to the decline of reading among younger generations. However, (I think) she shocked the room a bit by suggesting that ECPA's member publishers focus on where the customers are, and not where the retailers are.

Ms. Reidy's address was a bit too well prepared, but her points were salient. She suggested that specialty retailers, like Christian bookstores, were part of the problem in selling Christian titles. Don't Christian people shop in secular establishments? Most of these retailers are small, and cannot compete with larger competitors on price. She also argued that big titles in the Christian market, are just plain big titles. When a book title sells more than 1 million copies, its a big book by any one's standards. (Immediately prior to Ms. Reidy's speech, the ECPA publishers had just celebrated 14 titles that eclipsed that mark, and two that eclipsed the 10 Million copy mark.) So, why would a consumer of such a large title buy it at a specialty retailer, when they can get it at Walmart or Costco 20% - 40% cheaper, and also pick up a gallon of milk or tires for their car at the same time?

There seemed to be a collective gasp from the audience at this notion, but most had to acknowledge the truth in it. Every publisher in the room now depends on Amazon (the most secular of all retailers) for a major piece of their sales - but they sort of see that as a special case.

In another conversation I had this week with the SVP of Marketing for a major trade house, I was surprised to learn that numbers bear out Ms. Reidy's point. About 10 years ago, it was fairly common for publishers to say that independent retailers were responsible for about 20% of sales, yet took up approximately 80% of the marketing and sales budget. Now, the numbers are that independent stores make up 10% of sales and take up 90% of the budget.

In a down economy, how long can publishers continue to support these retailers? (Some presses, I have heard are off by as much as 30% this year.) Independent or specialty bookstores are about as important a part of publishing history as the printing press, but are they, too, becoming an anachronism? (I have to say it feels somewhat sacraligious to write this, as I love independent stores.) Are these stores, which remain a destination retail establishment getting in the way of customers finding books? I think the answer to that last one is an obvious no, but then again, they are not doing anything to help their customers with other needs they might have as well - like saving time and money.

Maybe some smart retailer will partner with one or more of the big box retailers, and create a brand name specialty store within the store.... There are Starbucks in Target locations, why couldn't there be a Jabberwocky in every Walmart?

A mission for 150 years

2008-10-29T17:49:00.004-05:00

We've been hearing a lot about Google's mission lately - to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

In Louisville, Kentucky, there is another organization with a very similar mission, except for a rather interesting twist. The organization is the American Printing House for the Blind and their mission is to: To promote the independence of blind and visually impaired persons by providing specialized materials, products, and services needed for education and life.

Since 1858 the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) has been creating unique products for people who are visually impaired, blind, or deaf blind. APH products are designed for infants, preschoolers, students, and adults, both in education and in daily living.

In other words they are trying to organize the worlds information and make it accessible to the sight impaired. In some ways this task is easier than Google's, and in other ways, it is far, far more difficult.

This organization is a little hard to appreciate unless you go visit them. I was in Louisville today for a big status meeting (more on that later), but the more interesting part of the day was a tour of their "printing plant" and their museum. I have visited maybe 20 printing plants in my career, but I've never seen anything, and I mean not even close, to anything that resembles what I saw today.

APH generally (and lets be very liberal here, because they do lots of other products too) takes books that were published by other publishers and creates Braille and/or Large Print editions - on demand - for the sight impaired. Contractually, some of these Braille editions still need to be created on plates, and others can be done electronically. In either case, they need to be translated into Braille first before they can be printed - or I should say imprinted. Braille is essentially an embossing process for every character. Any production person I know will tell you how much embossing just a cover of a paperback book costs. Imagine every character. Each page needs to be printed individually from plates!

The plant is a strange combination of 19th century technology and 21st century technology. There are machines in that plant that I swear are more than 100 years old. All I could think about was the guy whose job it was to keep them running. There were machines in this plant that I have seen only in Antique shops. Yet they were still running, and being run by people who literally endangered their hands every second of their shift.

Then there were sheet fed machines that were were running side by side to create materials (again) one page at a time.

To appreciate this, I want you to imagine a 384 page text book with color illustrations - let's say a high school physics book. Imagine that the reader can't see any of the diagrams. The translator now needs not only to produce the textual translation, but also needs to try and literally interpret and describe the graph or picture. What an incredibly daunting task. I was told of a tragic story today of an AP Physics student who needed a Braille translation, but couldn't get it - and therefore couldn't take AP Physics - because they couldn't find a translator. It wasn't because it was going to cost $30,000 to translate that one book, it was simply that there weren't any translators available who knew physics and braille.

Now, assume that 384 page book could be translated. How many pages is that in braille? I have no idea, but I think a safe assumption would be at least 768. What an unbelievable mission!

This company labors on, under everyone's radar... since 1858.... doing what google has been doing since what? 1998?

We have had the great fortune of have APH as a client for about nine months now, and today we were able to preview the new Louis database portal (which we developed) as well as their new e-commerce site and Title Management database (again a Firebrand product), working together to help the people looking for sight impaired products - find them.

After seeing the incredible job APH has taken on for themselves, our little contribution seems like a pimple on the butt cheek of an organization with an incredible mission. To learn more about APH you can check out their website, or check out the "current" Louis database - but be aware it will be much improved probably around the beginning of next year.

Damn the Economy! Full Speed Ahead!

2008-10-16T12:09:00.003-05:00

I've had to do a lot of soul searching recently. The economy continues to head south, and our company, Firebrand Technologies, is experiencing unprecedented growth in both client acquisition, and in revenue. But, in business, you can only grow so much before you have to invest in more infrastructure, and, (gulp) more people.

Since early in the year, I've been watching the team here at Firebrand grow more and more taxed by our recent successes. And, during that time, they have done an incredible job of taking it all in stride, and giving it everything they have. This year, in addition to our client acquisition growth, we've also developed our most ambitious new set of applications, launched two new websites, ran a user conference, and even re-branded ourselves. We've also made significant investments in both internal and external IT hardware and software.

Then the economy started to tank.

As you can see from a very recent blog post - my initial inclination was to "hunker down", bank some cash, and wait for better times before hiring new staff. But now, I see that as a recipe for disaster. We have completely maximized the capacity of our team - no matter how many tools we throw at them to make them more efficient. If we don't get some new staff, we won't be able to support (to our own service level standards) all the new clients who have come on board. This could cause a whole host of bad things to happen, including putting a serious break on our growth.

So, to parody John Paul Jones - Damn the economy! Full Speed Ahead!

We've already made one strategic hire this week (announcement to be made in about two weeks), and we're looking for people in support, QA, and development. We've got some big things happening in 2009. We can't let the economy slow those plans, its very difficult getting the positive momentum that we currently enjoy. He have to keep it moving forward!

Is anyone else out there in this position?

We're nothing without others

2008-10-15T07:53:00.003-05:00

I was pretty moved by Mike Hyatt's blog post yesterday - and I'm not completely sure why. What he wrote is what I "think" about all the time, and is sort of my basic life philosophy. I think that the mere fact that he wrote it all down is what made it so moving. Thanks, Mike, for doing that.

There have also been, in just that past few days, several personal examples of the just how much stronger we all are because of our strong connections with all of the people in our lives. We are all like strands in a tightly woven fabric. Whether it be my brother calling with an offer of baby clothes for my granddaughter, or my kids pitching in with the grocery shopping and dinner while my wife is away, or the people here at work who have been putting in an extraordinary effort, they all have one common theme: self sacrifice for the good of others.

As the economy becomes more challenged, this "people fabric" is going to be stretched in new and different ways. All of us are going to need to "stretch" in order to keep the fabric from ripping.

To completely mix metaphors: perhaps the silver lining in our dark economic cloud is that we might just take the time to appreciate the little things - things that maybe we've taken for granted for a while.

Hunker Down and do what you do Better!

2008-10-08T22:59:00.002-05:00

The economy is in the tank, and the prospects of a recovery seem very far off.

Virtually every publisher, distributor, wholesaler, or retailer I've spoken to in the past month or so has been moaning about sales this year. Based on my anecdotal evidence, this could turn out to be a very difficult year for all of us.

The good news is that books have generally been considered 'recession proof' as they are a relatively low cost of entertainment. But this recession seems to have different characteristics than others I have known. It seems to be hitting consumers last instead of first. There are still stadiums full of fans often paying north of $100 a ticket to see major sporting events. It's still just as hard to get a table at your favorite restaurant. It's only the financial markets that are in a shambles. Maybe when we all get up the nerve to look at our 401(k) plans, consumers will start cutting back, and feel the pinch.

In these hard times, though, companies need to focus on net profit more than sales. Being profitable means staying alive to fight another day under better conditions. The only way to hold our profits is to hunker down and do what we do better. We all have inefficiencies in our business. We need to route these out, and save time. Efficiency reduces costs, we all know that, but in stronger economic times, we ignore that in lieu of improving our sales. It's time to start paying attention again.

Now is a good time to look at your current workflows, to examine your management practices, your list management, and obviously anything that has an impact on costs. Now is the time to look hard at the way you feed the supply chain, and especially the way you lay down new titles. (It has long been established that most titles sell more copies in their first three months than they do for the rest of their shelf life - so it's important to make those first months as smooth as possible.)

Efficiencies can be gained simply by paying attention to the little things as well. How many of you do mailings where you know your contact lists are not in good shape? How many of you don't even know if you have rights in a certain market, or e-rights to some of your best selling titles? If you were trying to make a reprint decision, how many of you really know how many copies already exist in the channel?

So, during this time of economic morass, clean house a little. When the economy comes back, you will be poised for growth!

Making a comeback

2008-10-06T16:55:00.003-05:00

Hey all,

After more than a few subtle hints, I'm committed to re-joining the blogospheric chorus.

Tomorrow, I'll start posting real things again, but for today, I simply want to acknowledge a few of you fellow bloggers.

I not only stopped blogging a few months ago, I completely abandoned the blogosphere. So, in making a comeback, my first order of business was to try and sift through the 800+ RSS entries that I haven't read. Of course, I didn't read them all, but I was able to get a pretty good sense of things.

The most overwhelming sensation I got from this review was profound sense of respect for those of you who continue to show discipline and perserverance in your writing. Keep up the good work!

The next major feeling I got in 'sifting' through was how this 'underground media' was so much more personal and meaningful than the 'mainstream media'. Acknowledging your personal slant on things and being proud of that slant gives your work more credibility. Whether I agree with your point of view or not, I have to respect it.

Thanks to all of you for your efforts and inspiration. I especially want to thank Joe Wikert, Michael Cairns, Seth Godin, and Tim O'Reilly, whose blogs I read more than skimmed.

see you tomorrow. fpt

Blinding Flash of the Obvious

2008-06-02T09:46:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, it's a blinding flash of the obvious that makes your head spin with new insights.

Manga is arguably the fastest growing genre in publishing today. These companies are hot. Traditional publishers often druel openly as they watch the manga titles fly off the shelves, while theirs just sit (or worse, are returned). The conventional publishing wisdom says that manga's success is due to manga publishers creating the types of books that kids want to read, and that kids today have shorter attention spans and want more illustrated works.

OK, that makes a certain amount of sense when you look through the lens of a book publisher.

But, yesterday, near the end of a very quiet day at BEA, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jeremy Ross, the director of new product development at TokyoPop. And, as casually as you might ask about the weather, he threw out a nugget that took a moment to register in my brain. He said, "we are not a publisher, we are media company, who happens to sell books".

Later, when I was out to dinner with Doug , the implications of that simple line for our business and for publishing in general began to flood over me like a wave.

The publishers who have been successfully transforming themselves in the face of the new digital day, have gotten this concept to some extent, but I believe Jeremy's simple statement goes even further. At the PMA Graduate School on Thursday both Andrew Savikas, and Mike Shatzkin spoke to the publishers about building communities around their niche markets, and supporting their books by serving the reader with all they need, which might include the book, but might include other ancillary materials as well. All really good points, and as more publishers take those concepts to heart, they will transition into a new style of company.

However, in their hearts they will still be book publishers who happen to build communities, and not media companies who happen to publish books. It may sound like a fine line, but I believe it is one of the keys to why manga in general, and TokyoPop in particular have been so successful. They are not limited by the traditional publishing lens. Hence, they are not 'transitioning', they are just 'being' different.

How long will the BEA survive?

2008-06-01T22:09:00.002-05:00

The almost complete absence of non-exhibiting attendees to the Book Expo on Sunday afternoon should be a real wake-up call to the Reed Exhibitions people. The show's use as a way for publishers and authors to interact directly with customers has been waning for several years, but this year seem incredibly weak.

That rasping sound of packing tape, that is not supposed to be heard in the hall until the official close at 4pm, could heard throughout the hall by 11:30am. What's going on?

Most publishers I spoke with, anticipated a 'light' show, and sent fewer people. Many expected this simply because it was in Los Angeles. But I think the 'lightness' was even 'lighter' than many expected. The publishers I was speaking with were openly questioning why they come at all, and all vowed to send even fewer people and take less space next year.

But we've been hearing those sounds for years. Maybe next year, back in New York, the attendance will be different. But will it be buyers and librarians, or simply more publishing people? If the 2009 show in NYC does not have a dramatic rebound from this year, then I think the 2011 show in Las Vegas will be doomed.

I personally love the BEA. I get to see all my clients in one place, rekindle many old connections, and make some new ones. While grueling, it is also generally a very gratifying experience. But my role there is different than most. My customers are the exhibitors, not the attendees. If they stop showing, so will I.

Innovation - 5% Planning, 95% execution

2008-05-10T08:14:00.004-05:00

Thomas Edison might not appreciate my application of his famous quote about invention, but I do think that invention and innovation are very similar concepts.

For the past two years, dozens of conferences like today’s BISG Making Information Pay (MIP) event and the ECPA Leadership Summit earlier this week, and our own event a month ago, have been focusing on the interesting changes being made in the publishing industry by a few key companies. Looking back now, it seems that those few have been very impressive on multiple fronts. Not only did they focus on an innovative idea, they acted on it, and made it real. The simple fact that they planned and executed the development of an idea seems to be the real victory. Virtually all of the speakers at MIP today were speaking about things that they had DONE, not things that they were planning to do.

And execution seems to be what separates the successful from the unsuccessful. In my estimation, successful companies have a culture of execution. They don’t just talk about doing things, they actually do them. And then, they review the results and improve the process. In today’s MIP event, Carolyn Pittis explained that this was certainly the case at HarperCollins.

Size doesn’t matter in this either. O’Reilly Media, self considered the third largest computer book publisher, is widely viewed as the most innovative publisher in the business. The reason isn’t because they simply talk about their ideas; it is because they demonstrate them! Michael Cader of Publisher’s Lunch and Publisher’s Marketplace showed in today’s MIP that very few resources are really necessary to create very innovative services.

Other publishers we work with like Island Press, The University of Chicago Distribution Center, the University of Nebraska Press, and Southern Illinois University Press, also have cultures of execution, even though they have limited resources. These companies continue to drive themselves forward, not worrying about whether others are or not. This type of self reliance is refreshing and exhilarating to be around, and I applaud these companies for their efforts. They are truly Firebrands!

What I think is so impressive about these companies is that execution of a new idea can be a nerve wracking and risky move. When we launched Firebrand, I was privately wondering right up until the night before the launch whether it was a good idea. Fortunately, by that time the plan had so much momentum that my private worries were overwhelmed. Now looking back, I’m very pleased that was the case!

Consumerism vs Discipline and our personal satisfaction

2008-05-04T21:24:00.005-05:00

Andy Crouch, the editorial director at Christianity Today gave a very interesting talk tonight at the ECPA Leadership Conference, on how he thinks our culture is shifting from one of consumerism to one of creationism. If I was to boil his talk down into one sentence, I would say that his long view of things is that we as a society are becoming less and less satisfied by the short term "thrill" we get from consuming products, and are starting to move toward the longer term "thrill" of earning things.

Andy interestingly correlated satisfaction over time, and seemed to make the point that "high point" in our satisfaction comes either at the point of acquisition of a consumer product, or very shortly after. Then satisfaction drops precipitously. This causes us to want to consume more in order to keep ourselves at a high satisfaction level. I think that Andy is spot on in this assessment. I would also add that the more we consume, the shorter the thrill, and so we end up in a bad spiral. Any parent who has lovingly bought presents for a child at Christmas can appreciate this as they watch the kids discard things often within minutes of being opened.

The other interesting point that Andy made was that there is what he calls a 'discipline curve'. In the discipline curve, general satisfaction is very low at the beginning but grow substantially over time as we gain skill and strength at some ability that it takes time to cultivate. Andy used the example of learning to play the piano, and how difficult (and unsatisfying) it was in the beginning, but after years of discipline, he has come to be proud of his abilities, and his high level of satisfaction lasts for years and years.

Andy tried to correlate money to these two seeming opposing forces, and I don't think I agreed with his assessment that the consumer does not spend very much on his long term satisfaction after he or she has attained a certain level. His own example of spending @25,000 on a grand piano seems to contradict that argument, as he probably didn't spend $25,000 on lessons to achieve his ability. In my experience, what I see is that people tend to try and balance their dissatisfaction with their early abilities (on the discipline curve) by consuming related products, to make themselves feel better, or to feel as though they will come up the curve faster.

This is where I really see the economic opportunity. If we are going to learn new things and create new things, then we will probably buy things surrounding that area of interest.

What does this mean for books and media? I think it spells great opportunity for products that teach us things, or enhance our learning experience. In our 24x7 world, people need help at odd times, and do not often have the luxury of regular schedules. Anything in the online learning space that is available as self serve, whenever the consumer needs it is going to do very well.

The Facebook Experiment - Checkpoint #1

2008-05-02T07:55:00.006-05:00

At our user conference a couple of weeks ago, we introduced to our friends and customers the idea of creating a community. At the conference, this idea was very well received, and I'm completely jazzed by the possibilities that exist not only for growing our business, but for growing the book industry as a whole.

The word "community", however, is a way over-used term in the tech world today. And it is one that has many subtly different meanings to people.

Our first experiment in the creation of Community, was to put a "Wiki Page" together for the conference. In the weeks leading up to it, we know that site got a very strong amount of traffic, and the feedback we received from it was very good.

Our next experiment was to put a "Group Page" together on Facebook. We even put a link to it on our new website. This page allows us to post articles, manage threaded discussions, post pictures, and even contact one another privately. A lot of nice functionality at no 'monetary cost'. But, the 'cost' is that you have to join Facebook, and put your 'real' self out there on the internet. I'm fearing that I may have underestimated that cost to some people.

As of this writing there are 47 members of the Firebrand Technologies Facebook Group. Not bad, but not that great either, when you consider that 16 of us work for Firebrand. I'm sure we can nudge that up in a couple of weeks as we start to post some videos and other things that we have planned. but that still doesn't get us into the numbers I was originally expecting.

But the numbers are really a secondary issue for me at this point. The numbers would surely rise if the page was used more by its members - and the discussions became as dynamic as I think that they can. Again, as of this writing, Doug and I are the only people who have posted anything out there. It seems like everyone who has joined, is watching to see what will happen. (We are, obviously, too). Doesn't anyone else have an opinion?

I guess we'll all keep watching.... I'll blog another checkpoint in a couple of weeks.

Meanwhile, the Firebrand Community Management Plan continues to be developed, and I'm extraordinarily excited by the possibilities. The issue is not what to do, but what to do first!

More to come on that in the next couple of weeks as well.

If anyone has any ideas, please comment here, or, better yet, join our group, and comment there!

Hot and Sour Soup

2008-04-11T09:58:00.006-05:00

I'm back!

What a long, strange trip it's been....

As Doug Lessing so eloquently describes in his blog, 'Up the Mast', we have done it! We have re-branded our company as Firebrand Technologies. We've got a new website, we've got a new look, and we've got a new mission. Our mission now is to harness the power of the community of Firebrands that we are creating to move our entire industry forward. It's pretty ambitious stuff for a simple software company.

Not only have we re-branded, we pulled off an incredible conference here in Newburyport, and our development team launched a wholly new piece of software so flexible, that many of the big internet companies should be jealous (read salesforce.com). What an unbelievable couple of months!

Now that its all done, I was trying to think how to put into words, how I was feeling. Maybe because our family went to a Chinese restaurant for dinner last night, the metaphor that comes to mind is 'hot and sour soup'. (You might have to like hot & sour soup to appreciate this metaphor).

In that context, I would label my feelings, 'Pride & Humility soup'.

For me, hot and sour is a misnomer for the soup itself. The name leaves out the fact that there is something sweet and tangy intermixed with spices and tartness. This combination sends my taste buds in multiple directions at the same time, with the result being an extraordinarily vibrant and pleasurable experience.

In the same way, Pride & Humility soup is a misnomer. It leaves out the notion of a heavy smattering of Gratitude. This combination sends my emotions in multiple directions at the same time, with the result being an extraordinarily vibrant and pleasurable experience.

I am very proud of how our team, including our extended team at MicroArts, planned and executed our launch. I am humbled by the way everyone reacted so positively to everything that we did, and at what lies before us to fulfill our mission. And, I am grateful for all of the hard work, and participation that made it all go so smoothly.

I don't know when I'll get to taste Pride & Humility soup again, but now that I've had it, I guarantee it won't take 20 years for me to taste it again.

Thanks everyone - for everything. fpt

Blogging Hiatus

2008-02-18T10:46:00.002-05:00

It's been a while since I've posted anything. At first, I could 'blame' it on a vacation. It was a great one, too. Very little possiblity of internet access or cell phone service.

That vacation gave me time to think, and I came back with lots of ideas to share. But, for the past couple of weeks, I've been completely consumed by another project - the organizing of our first ever, user conference.

I'm extraordinarily excited by this conference, and our team has been putting a lot of time into its planning. As of this writing, we're closing in on 100 or so publishing professionals who have committed to joining us on April 8th and 9th in Newburyport, MA.

The themes of the conference are Community Building and Reinvention, and these themes really seem to have struck a chord with our customers, and several others who have signed up to come.

For more information about the conference check out this http://wiki.qsolution.com/index.php?title=2008_Open_House_and_User_Conference_Wiki

In Defense of Reading Books

2008-01-24T23:05:00.000-05:00

I was surprised that Steve Jobs comments last week at Mac World about people not reading books anymore didn’t garner more reaction in blogosphere. There were only two, one from Joe Wikert, and one from David Rothman that showed up in my RSS feeds.

Fortunately, doing a search of blogs using the keywords "Steve Jobs reading books" brought up several thousand reactions. Until I did that search though, I thought that I was the only publishing person to feel angry. Now that I know I'm not alone, I feel much better. But where are my book publishing friends on this issue? Are we just going to stand by and take this crap?

Is the quiet out there in the book publishing community the result of people fearing that Steve Jobs is right about so many things that he must be right about this? Or, is it that most book people actually agree with him? I would have expected a reaction similar to that about the weapons of mass destruction that never were, but instead there was relative silence. Did his comments ring so true as to strike a sense of futility about the books future into the hearts of all who work to bring them to life?

I think that there is a much more worthwhile discussion to be had about what the word ‘book’ means in the digital age, but to write the book off as an obsolete form is about as arrogant as a person can get.

I am biased about this subject, hence my anger. But, what has surprised me so much about this situation is not Steve Job’s arrogant ideas, but our acquiescence to them. Isn’t it possible that even a superstar ‘prognosticator of hip’ can strikeout once in a while? It feels like we as an industry seem to just want to roll over and accept our obsolescence. What a bunch of wimps!

The book industry needs to change – to reinvent. Change is scary, change hurts. We need to stop worrying about creating so many titles and start worrying about how to make books relevant for a generation where kids talk on the phone, IM, connect on MySpace, listen to music, and do their homework all at the exact same moment.

To transform our industry and keep it vibrant and alive, we need to understand the very core of what makes a book (especially one of fiction) so special. Then we can take on the task of how to adapt that to technology’s new world order.

Here is a list of 10 things (in no particular order) that make books – for me - stand out as not only relevant, but necessary to society:

Books invite us in.
Books offer our imaginations a place to roam.
Books do not judge the reader
Books that are published are subject to editing and severe scrutiny before they are released.
Books provide a safe haven for the reader.
Books inform and educate us.
Books allow us to project ourselves into the action, or stand by and watch from the sidelines.
Books show us situations from a point of view that we might not have considered before and allow us to debate with ourselves.
Books prepare us for real world situations.
Books help shape our personal philosophies about life.

Perhaps a few of you who read this might offer up your own lists as comments to this post. If 10 people offered up 10 important traits of a book, we’d have 100. Then in the next week or so, we can start to explore how those traits can be matched to the superfast paced, multi-faceted, technology dependent, world that is here now, and will only become more complex in the future.

Perhaps, if we work together, we can regain a hold of our industry’s destiny and continue to educate, entertain, expand, and enlighten the minds of our society.

eBook Buzz and Fright

2008-01-24T16:07:00.000-05:00

If any book publishers still have their heads in the sand with regard to eBooks, it's really time for them pull them up!

I have two small anecdotes that underscore this:

1. Two nights ago, I ran into the proprietor of our local independent bookstore at (of all places) our local video store. I mentioned to him that I had a Kindle, and told him about my experiences thus far. He asked me to bring it in for him to see, but I could tell that he really doesn't want me to. He was visibly shaken when I mentioned how easy it was to download eBooks. His reaction was so strong it took my breath away. And, I could tell that he was trying to hide his reaction.

2. Today I had to come to NYC for meetings with clients. Whenever I come to the city, my local office is the nearest Starbucks, so that I can have wireless internet access. Today, I had the pleasure of residing in three different Starbucks for some period of time. IN ALL THREE, there was chatter going on around me about e-reading devices. Chatter to the positive and chatter to the negative - but none the less, there was a lot of chatter. Chatter that I've never heard before in any local office!

The book publishing industry is going through monumental change right now. e-Reading devices are becoming a mainstream conversation pieces. And, still only 90,000 books available for the Kindle when there are over 3,000,000 available in print?

What is that great sucking sound I hear? That is quite a vacuum being created. I think its the self publishers who will be filling the void if the big publishers don't get their acts together quickly.

When a Good Idea Meets Good Timing

2008-01-21T19:56:00.000-05:00

Just before Christmas, I sent out an email to many people in the QS community to announce that we were going to put on our first user conference on April 8th and 9th. This was just an informal ‘save the date message’, designed simply to let people know that we were planning something and to mark their calendars appropriately. The response was immediate and incredible.

Directly and indirectly we heard of people who were planning on coming to the event. Some people we haven’t heard from in a long time, and others who we have spent a lot of time with in recent months. All were excited, and all were willing to come way off the beaten path to Newburyport, MA.

In all my years in business, our ideas have either been way ahead of their time, or way behind. But with this user conference, it seems that we have hit the timing curve right on the button. When we initially came up with the idea, we thought that maybe 50 people – if we were lucky – would want to attend. Now its looking like 2 to 3 times that number are interested in what we have to say.

Since then, I put out another email about the conference, asking people to participate in a survey about what they wanted to accomplish during those two days. Again, the response was astounding. The response rate thus far is about what a surveyor might hope for; we are up to about 15% of those surveyed responding. Amazingly though, 86% of those responding to the survey said that they were planning to attend.

Now, it’s up to us to deliver. Our community has spoken. They have told us loud and clear that they want to be brought together and brought into the conversation about where we are and where we are going.

This strong, positive feedback is very invigorating. Everyone on the QS team is charged up and looking to put their best foot forward. I have no doubts this will be a memorable experience for all involved. So, when a good idea hits good timing, the results are more positive than you can imagine.

Up the Mast!

2008-01-21T09:33:00.000-05:00

I'd like to welcome my friend and QS colleague, Doug Lessing, to the blogosphere.

His new blog, Up the Mast will focus on issues similar to those that drive me in this one, but with his own unique (and if you know Doug, you know what I mean by unique) flair and perspective.

Please put this in your RSS feeds and favorites list, as I'm sure that you will be informed, entertained, and generally moved by Doug's passion. Please also comment on his posts, often, as we all need a little encouragement sometimes.

Enjoy!

A Sad Day in Publishing

2008-01-12T10:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, all of the electronic industry ‘rags’ (I guess we’ll have to come up with a new term for this) were abuzz with the news that the San Diego office of Harcourt Trade Publishers will be closed by June 30th. The news articles don’t say it specifically, but allude to the fact that most of the 65 employees who work in that office are being let go.

The news articles all go on to say that this was ‘no surprise’ considering the recent news that Dan Farley (President of Harcourt Trade) was being let go at the end of January. Well, from a pure, cold hearted, business perspective they are right, it’s no surprise. It is just how a consultant would write it up on a white board. But, from a position of knowledge, I’m shocked.

Harcourt Trade is one of our clients and has been for about seven years. This is a company that is one of the most organized and best run trade publishing operations that I have ever known. Whenever we talk to a prospective client, we use them as the example of what can be achieved in terms of operational efficiency in the publication process. They are a team of people that through their dedication to their processes and attention to detail know how to make money on lists of books that any other publisher (I know) would not be able to support. I am frankly worried that these titles will not survive very long under the new management.

Harcourt Trade was one of the first companies to realize the importance of bibliographic metadata, and to work (very hard) to improve their publishing processes so the data about their titles was excellent throughout the pre-publication life cycle of the title. When Barnes & Noble first instituted their EDRP system, Harcourt was the first to score ‘100’ on those monthly reports. Harcourt’s performance on those reports proved that the bar set by B&N for publishers with respect to metadata could be met. In a very real way, Harcourt vindicated B&N’s stance on insisting that publishers improve their metadata practices. And, by extension, as I have said many times before, this insistence has resulted in a vast improvement in bibliographic metadata in the entire book publishing industry.

My sincere hope is that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt will use the next six months very wisely, and take the time to understand the processes that Harcourt had been using. Unfortunately, processes alone to not make a better publisher. I also hope that they recognize that there are many very talented individuals working in San Diego, and work to secure them in the new company. It is through those individuals’ talents that this small trade division has become the gem that it is.

Kindle Ships!

2008-01-08T21:14:00.000-05:00

After my rants over the weekend, it looks like the machines are moving again.

I got a phone call tonight from Denise of the Quality Solutions team, who reported that the Kindle has been delivered to her home.

Unfortunately, I'm travelling on business this week, so I won't see it until Monday, but I'm very excited to finally get my hands on it!

Its not a hoax after all.

When will Kindle Ship? Is it a Hoax?

2008-01-05T09:06:00.000-05:00

Like any self-respecting blogger, every day I look at the analytics of my page to see how many people read what I have to say. There aren't many of you, and my relative anonymity lets me be pretty free with my words.

However, lately, or more precisely, since Christmas day(December 25, 2007), the change in these analytics has been astounding. Prior to Christmas, there was a pretty even distribution of people coming to this blog either directly, or they clicked through from another blog, or they found it through a search engine. Today, that distribution is completely skewed. Since Christmas, the vast majority of readers have come via a search engine with the key phrase, 'how many kindles sold'. What they are finding is a previous post of mine with that same title. (Joe Wikert recently reported this in Kindleville). The numbers reading this post outstrip any other posts by a factor of 4 - 1. Pretty impressive considering about 3 people read it when I first posted it.

I can only surmise, that these people are (like me) waiting for the Kindle that someone gave them as a Holiday gift. And, Amazon is completely mum on when these are going to be shipped. As Joe would say, very 'Un-Amazon-ish'.

It's got me thinking, is this whole Kindle thing a hoax? Is there a great guffaw echoing from the top of the Veterans Hospital in Seattle? Is this the great practical joke of 2007? Obviously, they don't have them, or they would have been shipped already. What gives? Maybe they just wanted to give all of us, 'pundits', something to distract us while they moved in another direction.

Or, alternatively, did Amazon bet the farm on the assumption that the Kindle would fall flat on it's face? Was Kindle only introduced as a mechanism to shake up the book publishing industry and show them all how foolish they have been to eschew digital distribution?

Well, in any case, my initial excitement about getting a Kindle is turning to anger. And, as anyone who knows me will tell you, I'm a pretty patient guy. I imagine that there are many angry people out there, which is another reason in the 'massive' uptick in finding my old blog post. People have plunked down money and there are no goods coming. It's as simple as that.

And, unfortunately, it is very 'Amazon-ish' to not have any 'person' to go to. It doesn't seem that there there is a real responsibility taker anywhere in the entire operation. It's all computer systems. And when the systems don't work correctly, no one has to take personal responsibility.

It would be ironic if this 'Kindle debacle' single-handedly destroyed Amazon's (well earned) reputation for under-promising and over-delivering. Maybe then, a 'person' might have to eat some humble pie, and someone might (God forbid) have to take some responsibility and lose a job.

2008 is Going to be Great

2008-01-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year, and welcome to 2008! I am very excited about the year ahead for our company, our customers, and the book publishing industry.

Michael Cairn's blog today lays out some interesting prognostications about our industry. While I'm not thinking at the same level as Michael in my exuberance, many of our thoughts dovetail. I particularly agree with the line, "In the not-too-distant future, we may look back on 2007 as a significant transition year for the media business." I made a similar statement in a post I made in December.

So, here are a few of my own prognostications:

I think that 2008 will be a 'wildfire' year in terms of the use of technical devices (pc's, ebook readers, cell phones, pda's etc.) for the purpose of reading. I say that with my XO pc sitting next to me, and thinking about all of the children that will be introduced to technology who don't have access to printed materials. I think that in general, 2008 will be the year that ebooks go 'mainstream'.
2008 will be the year of infrastructure building for book publishers. The new digital paradigm requires a much different infrastructure than the traditional print paradigm. Most book publishers spent at least part (if not all) of 2007 creating strategies and figuring out what the infrastructure should look like, and 2008 is the year to make all that a reality.
I agree with Michael that the 'squeezed value chain' from author to consumer is going to challenge many book publishers. But, I am very excited about what I see as potential opportunities in those challenges (more on that in a future post).
In 2008, both Google and Amazon are going to do something that knocks our socks off. I have lots of ideas about what could happen, but I won't speculate here. I'm willing to bet that they both spent a lot of time in 2007 planning to release something big this year.
In 2008, the killer app is going to be the one that helps consumers identify the content that they want to read and cull out the content they don't want. Peter Bloom used the term 'separating signal from noise' at the AAP Annual Meeting last year. There is so much content available to read, that even with RSS feeds, and subscriptions, there is too much to sift through. Software and people that provide that kind of service will surely hit the market in 2008, and continue to get better and better in the future. I especially see an important role in this for social networks, libraries, and bricks-and-mortar retailers.
I think that blogs will continue to grow and improve in 2008, and will become an increasingly important aspect of online communication. Minimally, they will be used to keep ecommerce sites fresh with content, but more and more, you will see them used as instructional tools, and dialog starters. I especially like what Seth Godin had to say the other day about how it doesn't matter whether a blog only gets a few hits, as long as they are the 'right' hits. (Unfortunately, I couldn't find that entry again, so I can't link to it, sorry!)
The lines between all forms of media are going to get blurrier and blurrier. 2008 will see a continued trend toward simplifying our abilities to move between (and interact with) audio, video, and text based medias. I expect many new types of hybrid products being experimented with in 2008.
In 2008, I think that there is a real possibility that consumers will become overloaded by the amount of content pushed at them, and look for ways to eschew some technologies and simplify their lives.
Unfortunately, I also expect that in this year of very rapid change, some of the more monolithic companies are going to feel some pain, and may even be toppled because they couldn't adapt fast enough. (I never thought I'd think of Microsoft as a monolithic company!) Publishers that don't get very entrepreneurial this year are going to find themselves in big trouble by 2010.

That's probably enough for now. Times of change are always good for Quality Solutions, and I am sure that the roles we play with our customers will only grow in both size and importance.

Here's to a great 2008!

Someone's gonna have to explain this to me

2007-12-27T15:28:00.000-05:00

I just spent an hour on the treadmill at the local gym watching the story of Benazir Bhutto's assassination in Pakistan.

Ok, sorry, this is not an issue in publishing - at least until next week. This is an issue in life.

Whether or not you agree with her politics, policies, or even personal habits is irrelevant, the cowardice and stupidity displayed today against a person who was a world leader, is beyond my comprehension.

My most sincere condolences go to those who loved her.

It feels a little like 1968 when Bobby Kennedy was shot. No one will ever know the real reasons, and its possible, that in death, she will achieve more power than she ever could have in a race for the premiership.

Kids reactions to OLPC/XO

2007-12-27T10:02:00.000-05:00

Christmas morning in our home was extraordinary. It seems as though everyone was thrilled with their gifts and general mood was absolutely wonderful.

Brian and Nick, our 8 year old twin boys, were the recipients of the XO machines (with one left over for Dad to play with). My reasons for this approach were detailed in my last post.

I was fully prepared to be absolutely wrong about my assumptions, but it looks like I was right about most of them. And there were a few surprises as well. You should read the last post about the details of my family, but to say that we had mayhem on Christmas morning is a bit understated. So, I couldn't really keep track of what everyone was doing, and I did lose track of what Brian and Nick did initially with their laptops.

I do know that Nick opened the box and promptly 'poured' the XO out of the open end onto the floor! Well, the first test passed... whew... it had no impact on the operation. When Brian saw that Nick got a 'laptop', he promptly dived under the tree to find his - nearly knocking over the entire tree.

About an hour later, I found both boys up in their room, 'playing' with their XO's. With absolutely no help from Dad, they were chatting with each other, and had already made a little video of themselves! I was more than a little impressed, in fact I was blown away! I guess this is pretty intuitive.

Being 8 year old boys, they were pretty easily distracted, but have spent a fair amount of time with the XO. They showed me some things I failed to find, on my first pass of the machine (and I've owned a software company for 20 years and have a computer science degree!). Now, it seems to have fallen into that lull place, but I think that has more to do with some other gifts they received, than to do with a lack of excitement about their 'laptops'.

My impressions as to why the older kids wouldn't want these machines were also born out. In fact, when I tried to explain the 'philanthropic' nature of the OLPC project, the older guys seemed somewhat unimpressed. I did think that they would 'get' that, and it might make them more interested in owning one, but alas, they didn't 'get it' at all. They thought it was cool that Brian & Nick got their laptops, and figured that without AIM, iTunes, and Word, they wouldn't use them anyway.

When I get a little more time, I'll post my own impressions. But, the take away for me is that kids can really use this machine with little or now help from adults. I read in a CNN story yesterday that there were concerns that the kids would overwhelm the teachers in developing countries. I can really see how that could happen. These are impressive little machines whose technology will provide some wonderful opportunities to the worlds children. I think that Nicholas Negraponte should be a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. I wouldn't be surprised to see that come up in more blog entries in the next year!

First Reactions to the OLPC

2007-12-24T11:56:00.001-05:00

Last Friday, a big box was waiting on my doorstep when I got home. The 3 XO's that I had ordered on November 12th, finally arrived.

We have 6 kids, 5 of whom are still living at home. My original intentions were that the three laptops I ordered were going to be for the three older ones (18, 16, 14). But after opening one up, and playing with it for a while, those thoughts have been thrown out the window.

It now looks like our twin 8 year old sons are going to be the recipients, and we'll figure out what to do with the third one later. The little guys will be out of their minds excited, about everything related to this machine. And, I can't wait to learn more myself in order to help them learn and take advantage of all this has to offer. There are lots of great comments to make about this machine for younger kids. However, I'm a little disappointed that the older guys won't be getting these as gifts.

So, here is what brought me to decision not to give them to the older kids:

1. I knew they were very cute - from all the pictures - but I thought that this would be 'mitigated' for teenagers by the 'coolness' of being part of the solution. My impression now... No way... it is too cute. And the keyboard is so small and toy like that it is not something a teenager would be caught with.

2. the keyboard - as mentioned above - is very small, built for kids hands, not adult hands. I tried to write this blog entry on the XO, but eventually had to give up, as it was just to hard to type.

3. The 'Sugar' interface. Sugar is the operating system on the XO, and it, too, is very cool, but it is slow, and not intuitive for the hardcore windows and mac users. It is just not as advanced an operating system, and it is clear that it was built by developers for developers. Teenagers are into usage. They only care that they can do what they want, and fast.

4. While the internet is available, and the browser is not bad, some pages come up as inaccessible - and I have yet to figure out why.... It's almost as though it sees them as a popup, but there are not tools on the browser to help configure those types of things.

5. The screen is so small as to prevent larger web pages to be displayed without scrolling up and down, left and right. Definitely a problem in a 'myspace world'.

6. These machines won't support the major apps that the teenage kids use. In our house, the major apps are, AIM, AIM, AIM, iTunes, iTunes, Microsoft word, and powerpoint... in addition to the internet. The chat feature on the XO is cool, but won't allow 'cross chatting' with other systems. I just don't think the teenagers will be able to get past this one, no matter how cool, or cute the machine is.

7. There are some really basic things that 'normal' pc users can do, that I haven't been able to figure out on the XO, yet. For example, I can't figure out whether there is a file system, or if there is how to use it, and manage it. I have no idea how to tell what kind of disk space is available or how to save things. This is probably just my own learning curve, and something I'll eventually get by, but I fear the kids won't give it that type of perseverance.

Having said all this, there are some really great things that the 'unburdened' eight year olds will really enjoy:

1. If you are not a hardcore windows or mac user, then the Sugar interface is clearly designed for a kid. I can't wait to prove this when the boys start using them, but my impression is that this is just their speed.

2. the application loading speed won't be an issue for the little guys, since they have no expectations.

3. the fact that the mesh network can let them chat with each other (and hopefully friends) will be a source of endless delight.

4. some of the included apps will be alot of fun for little guys, and help them with math!

5. If I ever figure out the file system, it looks like tools are available for me to teach them how to program!

I guess that's it for now.... I'll post more after the kids start to play! Merry Christmas!

A Zany Amazon Prediction for 2008

2007-12-24T11:08:00.000-05:00

It's just too much fun trying to predict the moves of one of the most important players in the book industry.... I guess I'm officially one of those 'pundits'. there is no price to pay for a wrong prediction, so why not throw a few out there, right?

Yesterday, I went to the local Apple Store to purchase a gift for a family member (who must remain nameless for a couple of days). Their primary 'Christmas product', the iPod Nano was set up in stacks, with an express checkout assembly all setup to maximize the sales of these little wonders.

This morning, I was reading Joe Wikert's Kindleville, about the fact that Kindles haven't been shipping... and bam... these two disparate ideas clanged, and I couldn't help but think that maybe Kindle will take Amazon into the Bricks and Mortar world. Is it really too hard to imagine, an Amazon store tucked in with all the other upscale stores in every mall and in every major city? The picture of Kindles stacked up like nano's seems very plausible to me.

After all, I may be wrong, but isn't this the first Amazon Branded product? Could the Kindle simply be a test to see whether the Amazon brand is ubiquitous enough to be placed on different types of products? Can the virtual brand float into the tangible world? The voices highlighting this aspect of the Kindle have been pretty weak... I'm sure someone has made this connection, but I haven't read about it.

But a leap from branding to bricks and mortar? I know it may seem a bit far fetched, but then I'm reminded of all those huge distribution centers Amazon built a few years back. Were they really designed to be just to facilitate mail orders to online customers? Their geography seems to be designed more like supporting retail distribution.

Anyway, enough punditry for now.... We'll see what 2008 brings. Whatever it is, I'm sure we're in for a few surprises. You can almost feel them in the air.

2007: The year we embraced Technology

2007-12-18T05:47:00.001-05:00

When book publishing historians look back at 2007, there will be much for them to remark on. But, in my view, the overwhelming theme of this year in the book industry is that 2007 is the year that technology (in general) went from being feared to being embraced.

And, as I think through this, it didn't just happen in one place. It happened at all levels of the 'value chain'. It happened at the publisher level, at the author level, at the retail level, and at the consumer level.

Let's consider some of the following:

At the beginning of 2007, how many of you knew what a social network was? (I didn't really)
At the beginning of 2007, how many of you either wrote or read (or even considered) blogs as a main source of information? (not me)
I'd love to know how many self publishing service companies there were at the beginning of 2007 compared to what seem like 'hundreds' now.
How many of you had your entire concept of personal technology design turned on it's ear by the iPhone, even though you knew it was coming?
How many publishers are actively converting titles, and changing their workflows for digital distribution now, as compared to last year?
How many would anticipate at the beginning of 2007, that an e-reading device would DOMINATE the industry dialogue? (I would have laughed if someone suggested this)
How many of us thought that the One Laptop Per Child or $100 Laptop (OLPC) was just wishful thinking, and couldn't possibly expect that hundreds of thousands of them would be shipped into EMERGING MARKETS?
How many thought that there would be realistic - as opposed to theoretical - conversations about new publishing business models?

I have to admit that I didn't see most of this coming, but now that it has, it's not too hard to see where it might lead us.

So, what caused all this? Well, I would argue that it was just a handful of vanguard companies that started down their individual roads with their ideas a couple of years ago. And this year, they came together to show (the rest of us) that this is no longer science fiction - it is real stuff.

Some of the credit needs to go to all those publishing conferences this year. In an earlier post, I complained about there being too many of them, but looking back, it was really what we all needed. Starting with the Google Unbound conference at the NY Public Library, and progressing on through the O'Reilly, 'Tools of Change' conference, and even to the ECPA's Publishing University in November, the dialogue dramatically changed from denial, to grudging acceptance, to foregone conclusion. Book Publishing is at a cross roads, and, our very survival as a relevant industry is hanging in the balance.

All in all, it was really a year that book publishing historians will look back on as one of the more important in the industry's evolution.

2007 in Review: Let's Discuss!

2007-12-18T05:36:00.000-05:00

This is the time of year when all the book industry trade publications start naming their top picks for the best books of the year. There are so many different top ten lists that I can't keep up with them all.

For me, though, it's the time of year when I look back at the major trends in the business, and try to look forward to what might happen next year. So, for the next couple of blog posts, I'll explore these topics. I hope that whoever reads this will chime in with some ideas of their own, and that perhaps instead of a monologue, this blog can start to become a dialog.

Please post some comments, even if they are anonymous. Thanks. fpt

Can the e-Galley idea make a comeback?

2007-12-12T15:11:00.000-05:00

Joe Wikert’s post the other day about Simon & Schuster's internal use of e-reading devices got me thinking about the possible resurgence of the idea of electronic galleys.

Two years ago, I personally phone surveyed about 30 book buyers from stores all over the United States. To a person, they all told stories about their love-hate relationship with galleys. They loved them because it gave them advanced understanding about the books that they were buying, so that they could decide whether or not to recommend them to their customers. They hated them because a. they couldn’t sell them, and b. because they were hard to store and eventually recycle. They seem like such a waste of paper.

One of the huge take-aways from that informal survey for me was that independent bookstores that survived the age of the internet, and survived big-box retailers, and chain superstores, did so by embracing the new realities, and directing their attention to things they could do that the competition couldn’t. It was interesting that many actually made their businesses far more successful than they had ever been before the large threats came along, simply by better engaging their communities.

Now booksellers (of all types) are facing another huge challenge, the possibility that e-book reading devices will gain real traction in the marketplace, and that sales of e-books may cut into sales of print books. As I have mentioned in another post, I believe strongly that the 'indies' need to have a role in the e-book world. The way it looks from my perch, it’s time again for booksellers to make a survival decision: be stalwarts against the new invader, or embrace the new reality and use it to their advantage.

My money is on those that will embrace the new technologies, and figure out how to leverage them into revenue. I’m not sure what those business models will look like yet, but I suspect my friends at Ingram Digital have some notions about that topic. But, one thing I do know from my years in ‘change management’, there are two necessary ingredients to developing a new business model: 1. completely understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of the new product or service, and 2. Use the product or service yourself before offering it out to others.

And so, one way for booksellers to embrace and understand the new technologies are to to use them themselves. Using them for reading electronic galleys would be a great start to this process. There would be many advantages, not the least of which is the ‘green’ angle. Think of all the paper that could be saved, and the recycling that wouldn’t have to be done. It seems like a such a logical win-win situation for the publisher and the retailer.

I also think this is an opportunity for the American Booksellers Association to take a real leadership stand. Perhaps they could start to work with Sony, iRex, and other purveyors of e-reading devices, and get a few samples to pass around to their constituents to ‘test’. It would be a great first step in having a centralized approach to having bookstores (who want to survive) start selling the e-reader devices in their stores.

Food for thought.

I’m getting a Kindle, I’m getting a Kindle!

2007-12-12T13:15:00.000-05:00

Last Friday night at our company Christmas Party, my team presented me with a ‘notice’ that they had purchased a Kindle for me. Shocked and excited, I must admit to a kid-like anticipation of its arrival. Of course, no one knows when that will be.

Now I’m hoping that Amazon’s ‘under promise, over deliver’ style is going to kick in, and the new Kindle will be arriving very soon.

Having seen one first hand, I’m very curious about using it for real reading. As stated in a previous post, I’m reading more now than ever, and I look forward to organizing my time around it’s use.

Thanks to all my friends at Quality Solutions for their generous hearts. This is a gift that I would not have bought for myself. It’s a little pricey for my blood, but getting it as a gift is a great thing!

e-Books are a Whole New Canvas for Authors

2007-12-11T17:50:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that in all the hand-wringing about the end of printed books, there is an important opportunity not being discussed at all.

The printed book is a closed system. It stands completely alone, and interacts with only one reader at a time. It is, as an old mentor of mine would say, "perfect".

By contrast e-books are open, and can possibly interact with many people at one time. So, I guess they are "imperfect".

But authors haven't had this much creative opportunity since the book of Kells. Perhaps that is what all the hand-wringing is about? Are the authors afraid of the challenge of dealing with such a vast canvas?

They shouldn't be. And, neither should editors, or agents, or publishers. No one has to use the entirety of the canvas yet. Just push out the borders a little... create some alternative endings... link to a few websites that have additional information about the topic you are writing about... set up some links to wikipedia.

As the borders get pushed a little here and a little there, I am sure that reading experience will become enhanced, and the reading public will reward the creativity by buying more works (notice I didn't say books).

In some ways it feels like book publishing is where television was when color TV sets were first introduced. At first they were just for the 'early adopters', and the programming wasn't any different, it just used color film. I still remember our first color TV. (We were not early adopters). As consumers of the media, we were amazed and enthralled with the new paradigm. That interest eventually fed into the creativity of the television studios, who invested more and more in the technology, and the 'creative pallet'.

I think the next 10 years will bode the same thing for 'books'. We'll always call them that... at least for a few more generations.

A Random Thought about Reading & Writing

2007-12-10T11:45:00.000-05:00

I've had a weird little bout of writers block for a few days.

What is weird about it is that I have had plenty of ideas to write about, but one idea that doesn't seem nearly worthy enough to post keeps getting in the way. It's as though I can't write anything else until I get this out...

Since I heard Joe Wickert of Wiley speak at Publishing University last month about blogging, I've been inspired to keep it up. And to do so, I've found that I am doing an amazing amount of reading. And it's not just in the blogosphere, but that has been significant, it is everywhere in my life. Since committing to writing, I've become an almost insatiable consumer of the written word.

Some I skim, and some I savor, but I think that I've read more in the past month than I have in the past two years!

I'm not quite sure where to go with this notion. It's probably something that writers - of all kinds - have experienced forever. But, it is a new concept to me. I have to believe that there is some lesson for our education system here.

When I was coming out of college, everyone 'said' you had to have good written communication skills, but, if you had a major like mine (Computer Science/Math), no one really worried much about your writing skills. Since the advent of email, however, we've all had to sure them up. And, with the rise of social networking, it seems that this requirement has taken another quantum leap.

Extrapolating out my reading and writing experience, it seems that the more we as people in a society want to be part of the blogospheric dialog, the greater demand we are going to place on written content. This has to bode well for publishers...

Well, now that this is out of my system, maybe I can get back to writing about other things. Thanks for taking the time to read this!

Reading Amazon's Tea-leaves: a fool's errand

2007-12-06T16:06:00.000-05:00

Michael Cairns posted an insightful piece this morning that really humbled me. In his opening paragraph he talks about an audience he had with Jeff Bezos in 1998, and how wrong he was at the time about trying to project where Amazon was going.

This reminded me of a similar experience I had with Mr. Bezos. It must also have been in early 1998. Jeff Bezos was the keynote speaker at a publishing conference hosted by the University of Virginia, held at the Library of Congress. At a cocktail reception after his keynote, I actually had a one-on-one conversation with him for about 10 minutes, until the host ushered me away. At that meeting I gave him my original business plan for eloquence.

About 2 months later at BEA, several people from Amazon descended on our small booth, and demanded a meeting. Now remember, this is pre-ONIX, pre-everything related to bibliographic metadata. When I arrived at their booth for the meeting, they produced the business plan that I had given to Jeff a couple of months earlier. It was highlighted and underlined, and obviously well read - by somebody.

In the meeting, however, they only wanted to talk about one thing. About 10 pages into the document I wrote about the collection and dissemination of rights information. That paragraph was circled, highlighted, and starred. They wanted to know how I could do it. Whatever my answer was, I don't remember, but it was obviously not compelling enough for them to continue the meeting. They ushered me out, and that was the last I heard from them.

What I was left with was a strong sense that Amazon was not going to be what it appeared to be. They were looking way beyond where they were. In 1998, they were a small, US only, website for books. They knew then that they had to try and tackle the issue of rights one way or another to be the international power that they are today.

Michael's story was further corroborated today by a couple of other interesting items that came to my attention today. Unfortunately, due to confidentiality, I can't share them here. Suffice it to say one had to do with asking publishers for a specific type of content, and the other had to do with Amazon's use of the EVDO platform for purposes other than downloading content.

I guess the bottom line for me is that we are all wasting our time trying to figure out what Amazon's next move is. There are many very smart people there, and they are thinking two or three moves ahead all the time. In this age of 'now', it seems difficult to get our heads around the notion that a company is thinking and acting in a long term way. Clearly, if the past is any teacher, Amazon's Kindle launch is just a baby step in a much larger plan, that will be revealed when they want us to know it.

On Kindle and e-books and much more...

2007-12-05T16:27:00.000-05:00

On Monday, my friend, David Berlind, who is an executive editor for ZD-Net interviewed me about a pretty sweeping array of topics related to Kindle and the book publishing industry. He wrote in his blog today, and even published a podcast of our conversation.

For anyone who has been following this blog, it should be interesting. Thanks, David for saving me a ton of writing.....

Amazon’s Kindle: Much needed revolution or book industry power play? by ZDNet's David Berlind -- Like Apple’s iPods and the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) from which they can so effortlessly acquire content, the transparency of the automation and infrastructure that makes Amazon’s Kindle work so effortlessly with the Amazon.com Web site is a marvel in terms of the user experience. But the same technology under the hood that makes [...]

Will Kindle help Amazon Command the Self Publishing Marketplace?

2007-12-04T17:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday a friend asked me about the proprietary nature of the Kindle. "Why would Amazon want to only have content in its own format?" I didn't have a good answer. My first inclination was that the use of only proprietary formats of ebooks might be simply a functionality prioritization, and that in a later release, Kindle will be able to handle other forms of e-content.

This afternoon I was cleaning up my desk and ran across the business card of someone from BookSurge - and that got my gears grinding.

BookSurge is an Amazon company that helps people self-publish their books. They offer editorial, marketing, and print-on-demand services for people who (for whatever reason) won't get published by an established publishing house. This is a burgeoning market and one where BookSurge has many competitors.

In fact, according the the Under the Radar Study by BISG back in 2005, aggregated sales of books from publishers who (individually) have less that $1 Million in annual revenue, is estimated to be nearly $3 Billion per year. That's a pretty big market to service, especially if you have way of taking a significant chunk of that $3 Billion for yourself.

From BookSurge's website, they even say the following:

Not only can BookSurge help you create a high-quality, highly marketable book, we can also provide you with exclusive tools and resources to help you gain exposure, develop an audience, and build readership for your work.

Exclusive tools? Like maybe we can distribute your titles through Kindle, and we won't take any from other self-publishers? That's a pretty big exclusivity factor for an author thinking of self-publishing.

food for thought.

How many Kindles were actually sold?

2007-12-04T11:37:00.000-05:00

Does anyone really know? I've been scouring the web everywhere, and can't come up with a number.

There are tons and tons of articles talking about how the first 'lot' sold out in 5.5 hours. Truly amazing, huh? I guess we're all assuming that the there were 'a lot' of units in the first 'lot'. But, how many is 'a lot'?

Is it just a marketing ploy? To some extent it must be, otherwise, Amazon would have shouted the numbers from every rooftop in Seattle. Creating artificial demand by manipulating the supply is a good way to justify the big price tag.

I am personally very excited by the Kindle, and the effect it will have on book publishers. I think this is the type of shot in the arm the book publishing industry really needs. I will even go on to say that I want one, and I think Amazon did a masterful job of PR. I'm just a bit bothered by the lack of, even ball park, figures.

When I look and see stories like yesterday's about the XO, and the news that Peru has signed up for 260,000 units( and another 50,000 to Mexico!!!), it seems a stark contrast to the lack of any numbers from Amazon.

A Discussion of Book Publishings Future

2007-12-02T09:26:00.000-05:00

There is an interesting blog post this week, that I had a chance to participate in. Both the content and context of this post are interesting to me.

The post written by Ajay Jain, in a blog called Techgazing, asks the Question, "Will Kindle send book publishing the music industry way?" Please take the time to read it.

What I find interesting here (besides the obvious that he included my opinion in the post) were several things:

1. The post was 'built' by using a feature of the LinkedIn social network, called Q&A. I'm not even sure I understand all the magic here. One day, I logged into LinkedIn, and there was a 'question' about the book industry that was just too tantalizing to pass up. So I answered it. It was clear that mine was one of maybe 50 answers. I thought to myself at the time, that this was an interesting method to write a piece, and after I answered, I didn't think anything more of it. All of the people who answered were in the LinkedIn network.

2. The post was more of a survey aggregation than something written by the author. If you notice, aside from the opening 3 paragraphs, the author lets other people do all the talking. This is both interesting, and powerful. We don't need to 'trust' exclusively in the opinion of the author, and the fact that there are so many voices in the piece, I think, helped turn this piece more into a discussion forum than an editorial like piece.

3. The post generated (as you can see), many many comments - and obviously touched a nerve. The content, obviously found a place where people have strong emotions, as have all the pieces in the past few weeks about ebooks. I find this very encouraging for our society. If we can take this type of discussion into the world political arena, perhaps we could all become a little more tolerant of each other.

4. While definitely a 'geek' perspective on the world of books and publishing, it is a 'world geek' view, not just an American view. It seems that one very interesting thing is that social networks eliminate territorial borders. The author was from India, but many of his participants were from places all around the world. Again, sociologically speaking, I find this to be very encouraging.

My kudos to Ajay for pulling this piece together, not only on the topic, but for how he did it. This type of 'facilitation' is very interesting.

Sometimes the best thing about Social Networking is the People

2007-11-27T17:49:00.000-05:00

I made a post last week talking about my adventures in social networking. In that post, I bemoaned the number of social networks and how I was having trouble keeping up with all of them.

One of the networks I mentioned was Zude. In my last post, I had pretty much mentioned that it was not going to make the cut. Well, it's time for an 'about-face' on that issue. The reason is very simple: they saw my post, and reached out to me.

After a couple of emails to setup the time, we actually spoke on the, er, um.. telephone.

Steve Poppe, marketing director, and Matt Wulkan, self-designated, Zude-Denali, spent the better part of an hour on the phone with me, walking me through some of the simpler things that I never took the time to read. (Who reads directions anyway?) And, I'm in. Now I'm able to keep all my social network connections in one place, and get to them very easily!

It's sort of like creating my own 'favorites' pages.... and I can have as many as I want.

I know that I have only barely scratched the surface of what this software can do, but I'm excited to try - whenever I have a few spare minutes.

I want to thank Steve and Matt for taking this beginner through his paces. Having been in the computer science field for as long as I have, I should probably know this stuff, but have to confess, I'm probably my own worst enemy. Sometimes, some old fashioned hand-holding is really necessary.

So, check out this cool video, get your own Zude account, and look me up. Happy zuding!

OLPC News!!!

2007-11-26T14:54:00.000-05:00

In his blog today, Larry Dignan extrapolates that perhaps 490,000 XO laptops will be ordered by the end of the year. His post also goes on to ask the question, "can this be considered a success?"

Well, I believe it is! I am thrilled with that number, and as Larry points out, all the 'ripple effects' that go with it.

Since my post, and David Berlind's post that challenged other employers to put matching policies in place regarding the One laptop per child project (OLPC), I've sort of felt like John Belushi's character in Animal House. You know the one, where he is dressed in a toga and he tries to lead the fraternity on a charge after they have been given double-secret probation.... Well, if you don't, no one follows him....

Oh, and by the way, this should be a big boost for book publishers and e-books, too! Imagine the e-books that could be downloaded to 490,000 reading units?

Why Kindle is a Watershed event for e-Books

2007-11-25T08:25:00.000-05:00

I don't know where the term 'watershed' came from, but to me a 'watershed event' is one that we can look back on historically and identify a real turning point in the evolution of a certain cause.

I think that the launch of Amazon's Kindle reader is a watershed event in the cause of e-book adoption.

What I think is very interesting about e-books is that they are probably more reviled by real bibliophiles than they are by those of us for whom books are just another part of our lives. It's not that we don't love them - far from it - it's just that we are more interested in the content than the form. Thus, it seems the battle for e-book adoption seems to be us against ourselves - a civil war of sorts.

So, when I think about e-book adoption, a military metaphor comes to mind. It seems that for generations those that have revered the hard bound, printed tome have held the high ground. Over the centuries they have repelled many intruders. Paperbacks, both 'trade' and 'mass market', have tried to win the top of the mountain, but have had to settle for 2nd tier status. While those formats didn't win, they did inflict casualties and win some converts, reducing the numbers in the high ground, but not reducing their power or position.

Then along came audio books. Although strong for a brief period, they never were able to pose any serious threat to anyone above them, nor form alliances with other forms that could pose any threat to the high ground. Eventually, audio books found their own small place on the mountain side away from everyone else.

For the past 10 years, e-books have been trying to work their way up the mountain. Because there numbers were small, and relatively weak, they were easily repelled by both tiers of books at the higher ground. In fact, it seemed that all books were in union to repel this latest invader.

The e-book generals continued to throw weapons and soldiers against the ramparts, but have failed to make any real break through. There were times when the e-book army thought that they had the weapon to break past the fortifications of the higher ground (like the Sony reader), but alone, it was simply not enough.

But, the tide seems to be turning for the upstart e-books. e-Book forces have been consolidating (aligning on standards). And, a new 'armies' have come to join the battle - handheld devices, like iPhones and other PDA's can now display e-books. Search programs, like Google Print and Microsoft Live Book are developing new online reading followers. And with it's introduction, probably the most powerful new army is joining the fray - the Kindle army.

Kindle has the power to convert a whole new population of book readers into foot soldiers. The marketing power of Amazon almost guarantees that many, many of these devices will sell.

What appears to me to be happening is that many of the second tier landholders are re-evaluating their loyalties to the high grounders and starting to side with the e-book armies and Kindle. The high grounders are starting to feel the threat as is evidenced by their vociferous pronouncements about why the e-book revolution will fail, and the hardcover will never go away. This is a major shift in the battle, and why I think the Kindle launch is a watershed event.

While it will be a while before the results of this latest onslaught are in, one thing is for certain, defenders of the print book world are taking casualties, and the e-bookers are gaining ground. Additionally, the paperback book forces are seeing a weakness at the top, and attacking the hardcover as well.

However this battle ends up, there is good news all around: the number of readers will grow, and the opportunities to have a work published will grow as well. Instead of fighting among ourselves, we should welcome each other and try to figure out the best ways to work together to take advantage of these new market opportunities.

Thank You, Thank You

2007-11-22T07:27:00.000-05:00

I started writing this post after an incredible evening back in late September, but never finished it. For this Thanksgiving day, it seems appropriate to share, now...

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Last night, I had one of those magical moments...

On a whim, and at the encouragement of my wife, I went for a sail by myself after work. I own a 1976 Catalina '27, and I don't get out on it often enough.The weather has been spectacular lately, and I got to the boat at about 5:30pm. It takes me about 45 minutes to get out of the river to the ocean.

So, about 6:30pm, I was exiting the mouth of the Merrimack, and I put up my sails.There was a gentle, 7-8 knot breeze and the swells were only about a foot. As I cut the engine and let the wind take the boat (which in itself is one of my favorite moments in life), I couldn't help but be choked up by the beauty of it all. The sun was a big orange ball setting off my stern, and to starboard a half moon was rising. All around me, the skies were multi-hued orange and purple.

About 3 minutes later, Natalie Merchant's, "Kind and Generous" played on the radio, and I felt completely overwhelmed by how lucky I was. And, as Ms. Merchant sang, "Thank you, thank you - thank you, thank you", it was hard not to think about how incredibly fortunate I have been in my life. I have a great family and wonderful friends and coworkers. Compared to most, I really want for very little.

-----------------

My wish for you all on this Thanksgiving day is that you put aside the battles and recall one of your magical moments. Maybe you will even have one today! Then take the time to thank God for all your good fortune.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Read Michael Hyatt's blog!

2007-11-21T08:50:00.000-05:00

I spent a lot of time thinking about Michael Hyatt's blog entry yesterday. There are so many different things to say about it, that it is probably fodder for about 10 different blog posts.

At the end of those thoughts, the most succinct comment I can make is read it!

It is so refreshing to see a publisher of Michael's stature say the things that need to be said about our beloved industry. We are so wrought with inefficiency, and it goes right down to individual people in individual departments inside the publishing houses. (Don't let me get started on book production...) Some of it may be inescapable, but the fact that Michael admits it means -to me - that he is ready to transform his company to mitigate risks associated with that inefficiency.

Bravo!

ps. I just went out there again to grab the link, and the number of comments to Mike's blog are astounding.

Adventures in Social Networking

2007-11-19T21:10:00.000-05:00

For the past few months, I've been attempting to get a handle on social networking. My reasons were both personal and professional. On the personal side, I got myself a MySpace account just so I can log in and see my daughter's page. I don't go there very often anymore, but occasionally if I want to see if anyone has put anything 'untoward' on her page. So far, no one has.

On the professional side, my predominant reason was to try and understand how social networks work, and what value they have for publishers. So much was being written about travelling widgets and other marketing tools, and, while I could understand it theoretically, I wanted to understand it through experience. So, I opened a Facebook account.

That's what I thought the extent of social networks were, Myspace and Facebook. I thought this was all about the young and hip - of which I'm neither. Then for fun (and personal pleasure) David Berlind turned me on to a site called Zude. Another social networking site with some intriguing technical capabilities - most of which I haven't quite figured out how to work yet.

Then I started notice things, and light eventually dawned... All these sites include 'friends', and they all want my personal address book. Hmmm interesting. I hadn't put it together before, but then I started to realize that Plaxo and LinkedIn were also social networking sites. I'd been involved in those for quite a while - invited by 'friends' that I wouldn't consider young and hip. I thought Plaxo was just a way to keep contact information up to date.... little did I know...

What I've come to find is that there are social networks where you can pretend to be anyone you want (MySpace and SecondLife come to mind) and others where you can really develop a list of contacts by seeing what contacts your friends have (Facebook and LinkedIn come to mind). It's been intriguing and somewhat exhilerating to have people accept my invitations to be connected online. I have hooked up with some people that I haven't seen in 20 years. Pretty cool. Most of that has happened on LinkedIn.

On Facebook, I find the usability a little more challenging, but the power far greater. The concept of groups is really powerful. By joining groups that I am interested in, I find that I am making a much richer definition of who I am than anything I could or would write about myself in a profile. I am also finding out a lot of interesting information about my 'friends' that I never knew.

But all of this comes at what I think is a pretty steep price. Being online, and checking all this stuff out takes a ton of time, and it's pretty addicting. So, if you have a procrastinating nature, like I do, you can really procrastinate to your hearts content. The other price is just keeping them all synchronized. Now that I have Plaxo, LinkedIn, and Facebook, I have different friends in each, mostly because I am too embarrassed to ask people to join me on three (or four or five) different platforms. I might be willing to waste my own time, but I don't want to waste anyone elses.

Each of these platforms has their own value equation - and cater to a different market. And, as you might expect, the more powerful the features, the greater the learning curve. I'm personally at the point where I need to consolidate. For me, it's going to be LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn is a very powerful tool for connecting with people you already know. Facebook offers more opportunities for connecting with people I've never met, but who share similar interests. Now, that's just me. You can't blast my daughter - or any of her friends - off of MySpace with a cannon.

For my book publishing friends the conundrum is larger. They have to be everywhere there customers are, and if I was in charge of marketing, I'd be looking hard at MySpace, Facebook, and SecondLife to put my marketing dollars.

Oh, and just how does blogging fit into this whole social network thing?

good luck out there.

Is Kindle the Bowmar Brain of this generation?

2007-11-19T10:54:00.000-05:00

Well, it is certainly not the only wish I had for Christmas that won't get delivered....

It's official. Kindle is here. Here is a link to the Amazon Press Release.

Now that it is here, I do hope it turns into a watershed event for our beloved publishers. Other devices have not done so well because they haven't had the marketing power and enthusiasm that Amazon can bring.

I expect it to sell moderately well for Christmas - there are lots of early adopter people out there. Then I think it will go into a bit of a lull while the first users really bang on it. By this time next year, I expect Kindle 2.0 to come out, and then it will be on a lot of Christmas lists for 2008.

Parallel to the 'device' development, publishers (of all media - not just books) will respond. Amazingly, backlist books - the same ones it was too hard to convert - will get converted to Mobi format. More and more newspapers, magazines, and journals will find ways of being presented on the device.

Let's fast forward a couple of years, and let's look at the next generation of readers. If Kindle can really take off, it will be like the calculator was to me in High School. I remember when my parents spent an incredible amount of money on my first calculator from Rockwell International. Other kids that year got Bowmar Brains. The concept was so new, that we weren't allowed to use them in school. (In fact, I still couldn't use them in some college engineering classes.) Calculators now, are given away ... and are so ubiquitous as to be required in school, by little kids.

I imagine the same will hold true for Reading devices. At first, just a few 'wealthy' kids will have them. Then some college somewhere will require them of all incoming freshmen. Then someone will donate a bunch to a high school somewhere.... and so on.

They will get better and better, cheaper and cheaper - as seen with the OLPC (sorry, I had to slip that in). They will become so ubiquitous as to be required in school, by little kids.

I was thinking this morning about when my daughter has her own kids and what will be in their backpacks - if that innovation still exists. Instead of telling stories of how many miles we had to walk to school, she will be telling her kids about how heavy her backpack was because of all the books she had to carry. The kids just won't get it.

Can Jeff Bezos be Santa Claus?

2007-11-17T21:15:00.000-05:00

subtitle: My Christmas Wish

All the news about Kindle, and my own very high hopes for the XO Pc got me thinking... wouldn't it be nice if.....

Picture the setting, the W Hotel in Union Square in NYC. One of the hippest locations in town. It's 9:30am on Monday, November 19th. Some nameless PR person from Amazon is providing a colorful introduction for the main speaker, Jeff Bezos, President, and resident big kid at Amazon.

With his trademark guffaw and his huge smile he approaches the podium with a big cardboard Amazon box. He puts the box down on a small table beside the podium. He looks at the crowd, and gives them another of his 'billion dollar grins'.

He reaches into the box and pulls out the Kindle, and triumphantly holds it up over his head, and says nothing. The crowd starts to clap, there are obligatory smiles all around the room which is crowded not only with members of the press, but with big dignitaries from all manner of companies, not the least of which are book publishers.

This goes on for a full minute, and Mr. Bezo's guffaws start to drown out the room. The first words he says are, "You all thought I was going to announce this today, didn't you?". The room goes silent, then the murmurs of people whispering among themselves grows to the sound of a loud air conditioner. More guffaws.

Mr. Bezos goes on, "No, everything you read is true. It still looks like a B2 Stealth bomber and still has a few software glitches."

He puts the Kindle down, and reaches back in the box. He pulls out an odd looking green and white laptop. He opens it, flips up the little bunny ear-like antennae and laughs again.

He says, "Now this, is ready, and it is sooooo cool!"

"What I am here to announce this morning is that Amazon is going to put its full marketing and distribution muscle behind the One Laptop per Child Program!". The crowd is stunned - most don't even know what the program is.

"In fact, we are putting on a promotion, for every $100 book order, we will send you one of these XO pc's, and the OLPC people will send another to a needy child in a third world country. We at Amazon believe so much in this program, and have a goal of providing 20,000 of these to the world by January 30th."

Another big grin, and he continues, "Just think how many of the kids that will use these machines will make their first online transaction from Amazon.com? These machines are so cool, that I haven't been able to stop playing with it since I got it."

Its fun to dream...........

Kindle Rumors Abound

2007-11-16T06:30:00.000-05:00

It seemed like yesterday, everywhere I turned, I was hearing another rumor about Kindle.

Kindle, Amazon's promised ebook reader, has gone through the rumor mill many times before, but never with the ferocity of the past couple of days.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet wrote a piece furthering the rumor yesterday afternoon. A press conference has been scheduled for 9:30 am on Monday from Amazon, to be given by Jeff Bezos, but the contents of the announcement remain mysterious.

From independent sources, I know that several heads of book publishing houses have been invited to attend. That fact alone, points to something related to books.

Having the press conference the Monday before Thanksgiving is a sure fire indication that whatever is being announced is timed to attempt to maximize sales for Christmas.

So, my money is on a Kindle announcement.

What I'm more skeptical about is how it will sell.

Amazon almost single handedly squashed ebook sales when they bought Mobipocket and decided that other formats would no longer be welcome on their retail site. So, not only do they have to sell a device, they need to draw back the ebook reader market. My guess is that we will hear about that plan on Monday also.

Amazon certainly has the content, and a selection of ebooks to sell and/or package with their new device. I know several publishers that have given Amazon the go ahead to create Mobipocket ebooks from the .PDF files used for the 'Search inside the book program'.

The question remains, can they ramp this up quickly enough to have an impact for Christmas. If they can, then it will be the galvanizing event that will force publishers to start getting their digital strategies together. If Amazon can't make a good Christmas out of Kindle and ebooks, then I fear that most -not the enlightened ones - will simply defer their digital plans until next year.

One Laptop per child and the Tipping Point

2007-11-15T08:39:00.000-05:00

Where is Malcolm Gladwell when you need him?

My wife and I were chatting (what I really mean is that we were exchanging words as we moved in multiple directions - herding kids out the door and getting ready for work) this morning about the One Laptop Per Child, and David Berlind's blog post (Thanks, David!) on the subject last night.

"I think that the tech community will probably be the only one to get behind this. What we really need is some big celebrity endorsement to force a tipping point", I said. She was skeptical.

For some reason the story of the Toyota Prius came to mind. As a society, we had been clamouring for a realistic alternative to the standard gas guzzler, and Toyota provided it. But, even though many of us looked upon the car with wide eyes, we all sat on the fence and didn't do anything. Then some Hollywood types started driving them around, and then not only did they represent the right thing to do, they were instantly "cool" too. Sales skyrocketed.

I think that the One Laptop per Child program has similar characteristics. It is the right thing to do but it is not yet "cool". Maybe someone out there in the blogosphere knows some big named person or company who can make this "cool".

A Major Milestone

2007-11-14T09:43:00.000-05:00

We, at Quality Solutions, hit what is for us, a major milestone this week - one that I couldn't even have envisioned just a few years ago. And, one, that would be simply wrong not to acknowledge in public.

This week, with the receipt of a signed agreement from Standard Publishing, we now have 50 direct, active, clients. The words 'direct' and 'active' are critical in that sentence. In 'active', I mean that these are clients with whom we have had payment for our services in 2007. 'Direct' is a little more complicated. As many of our clients distribute books for other publishers, the actual number of publishers we serve is well in excess of 2,000.

For those of you reading this, 50 may not sound like much. But, it is huge for us. Only seven or eight years ago, we had 5 direct, active clients. All of those were very large companies, and we were a bit of a puppet on a string. Our fortunes either soared or (more often) plummeted based on the whims of just a few people.

At 50, we are in a much more stable situation. This year we weathered a 'perfect storm' in that we had four of our clients got acquired by other publishers (and one more is in progress now). Fortunately, in all four cases we were able to either keep or expand our presence in the new parent organization, but for a while there, in each, it was touch and go.

I cannot begin to say how proud I am to be part of this team at Quality Solutions. It's just an incredible group of people who are completely dedicated to making our publishing clients more successful. Their hard work and dedication are certainly an inspiration to me.

Given our current momentum, the next milestone, 75, looks quite attainable. It's just a matter of time.

One idea of Independent Retailers and ebooks

2007-11-14T09:22:00.000-05:00

Almost an immediate answer to my post yesterday about bringing Independent book stores into the ebook supply chain, check out this post this morning about an Austrailian bookseller who installed an eBook kiosk.

I can't wait to hear how they do.

More on One Laptop per Child

2007-11-14T09:08:00.000-05:00

In a post today on Teleread, they outlined the extra incentives for purchasing 'many' laptops:

Trying to be helpful, take a look at the new and improved Give Many XO plan. Gone is the tiered pricing of $299, $249, and $200 depending on order size. Now anyone, who can get through to One Laptop Per Child, can order 100+ XO laptops at $200 per computer and direct their donation:

Give 100+ @ $200 per laptop
Donor designates where 60% of laptops are sent;
OLPC sends 40% of the laptops to children in a country of our designation.
Give 1000+ @ $200 per laptop
Donor designates where 80% of laptops are sent;
OLPC uses 20% of the laptops to children in a country of our designation.
Give 10,000+ @ $200 per laptop
Donor designates where 100% of laptops are sent.

With the low $20,000 donation threshold and $200 per laptop price point, there should be a few more people excited and able to Give Many this Christmas.

Bricks and Mortar Retailers need to be part of ebook sales

2007-11-13T15:03:00.000-05:00

The overwhelming lack of reaction to my post yesterday got me thinking that perhaps, just perhaps, ebooks pose a threat to one of the crucial players in our industry.

It occurred to me that if I was a bookseller, I might not be too thrilled about the prospect of large quantities of ebooks being downloaded from the Internet, and bypassing my shop - and cutting into my sales. I certainly wouldn't want to hear about new devices that would enhance those opportunities.

Bricks and Mortar retailers play a hugely important role in the book publishing ecosystem. Aside from the obvious, that they sell books, retailers are responsible for starting much of the viral marketing that occurs around new titles and new authors. They take the time to read many of the new works in print, and tell other retailers about them. They create "buzz" where none existed and where publishers did not have the resources to make it happen.

Booksellers know their customers better than the publishers do, and are a critical link in the author-to-reader chain. They are also actively involved in the marketing of authors, providing venues for authors to meet their readers via book signings and lectures.

Ebooks offer great promise to everyone in the book ecosystem, except physical retailers. Even libraries have figured out how to use ebooks to their advantage.

If ebooks are ever going to be a truly viable economic opportunity, book publishers should really think hard about how to help booksellers be a part of the equation. I think that the publishers themselves should take some responsibility here.

Retailers have had to struggle with many threats in the past, most notably chain superstores, and online only retailers. Those that have survived those threats have learned to adapt the the changed playing field. And, this will continue... but, I'm sure that they could use a little help!

And, how can we attack a problem like literacy, if we are not all working together?

One Laptop per child

2007-11-12T08:39:00.000-05:00

Here is a case for blogging!

This morning I read a blog about the One-Laptop-per-Child program that blew me away. I cannot imagine a more pragmatic way to enhance literacy on a global scale than this.

I was so stirred to action that not only did I buy 3, I gave an incentive all the people in my company to do the same. We are just a small company, but imagine if some big ones followed this lead... wow. I CHALLENGE EVERY BOOK PUBLISHER TO OFFER A SIMILAR INCENTIVE TO THEIR EMPLOYEES.

Here is the email that I sent to my team -

I don't know how many of you are aware of the One Laptop per child initiative. It is an initiative that was started a couple of years ago by Nicholas Negraponte, the founder of Wired Magazine and one of the first true Internet gurus.

His scheme was to endeavor to build a $100 laptop, and to outfit children all over the world, especially in impoverished countries with the tools to get to the internet and work.

As I said this has taken years, and the laptop now costs $200.

I had been watching this, and knew that the time was imminent for production to start. However, what I read this morning, sort of blew me away.

They are offering to sell these for a price of 2 for $400. One will go for free to an impoverished child and the other one is yours. This is a brilliant scheme, and one that is time sensitive. This offer is only until the end of November. Additionally, people buying these get a $200 tax write off.

I encourage you all to look at this very closely. In fact that I want to incent you all to look closely at this....

QS will pay any of you that get involved with this program $200 per laptop you buy. That means that you will only be out of pocket $200, and you will get the Tax incentive as well.

I'm putting in an order for 3.

for more information, please look here: http://www.laptopgiving.org/en/index.php

Fran Toolan
President
Quality Solutions, Inc.

http://www.qsolution.com/
http://www.eloquenceweb.com/

Do you want to help me fight cancer?

Book Publishing is like Major League Baseball

2007-11-11T08:04:00.000-05:00

Joe Wickert's blog entry about my friend and neighbor, David Berlind, sparked this blog entry. But this entry is nothing about DRM.

Living in Massachusetts - at least in suburban Boston - if you like baseball, it's almost impossible to not be a Red Sox Fan. I, myself, was converted during the 2004 season, when this woolly, rag-tag, bunch of baseball misfits, started mounting a serious challenge. For my whole life, I had been a rabid Yankee fan. I grew up in New Jersey, and idolized Micky Mantle, and all of his team mates from the great teams of the 60's. (On a side note, if you are a baseball fan from that era, you have to, have to, read October 1964 by David Halberstam!) My conversion has now put baseball on the same plane as religion and politics as far as discussion items go with family members and extended family members of my paternal household. You don't talk about them unless, you are looking to create dissonance.

Anyway, the Boston Red Sox are, since John Henry bought the team in 2003, arguably the most successful franchise in all of US sports. I don't think that they are quite on par with Manchester United (in the UK), but they are getting there. This being with their small, anachronistic, 100 year old stadium, and a media market that is no where near the size of New York, LA, or Chicago. It is not unusual now for the Red Sox to play an 'away' game, and find that the number of Red Sox fans in the stands are equivalent to the number of fans their to root for the home team.

How did this happen?

In my opinion, they focused on, and do two things extremely well: 1. They put a great team on the field, and 2. They make it easy, and fun, to be a fan.

Look at this team. With the exception of Manny Ramirez - whose huge contract was in place before 2003 - the Red Sox have a team of players that have either come up through their farm system, or were considered expendable by their former teams. Did anyone even know who David Ortiz was when he was with the Minnesota Twins? Arguably, the most exciting players on the team are Kevin Youkilis, Dustin Pedroia, Jonathon Papelbon, and Jacoby Ellsbury - all players who came up through the Red Sox Farm system. The key thing is that all these players came into a system where they were helped to thrive, and, become part of the team with a tenacious winning attitude fostered by their organization.

And who among you, if you are a fan of baseball, has not heard of Red Sox Nation? Red Sox Nation has taken the whole concept of 'Fan Club' and turned it on it's ear. Red Sox Nation is everywhere, it's incredible. Near the end of this season, they even had a televised presidential debate - for those campaigning to be the president of Red Sox Nation - that was moderated by Tim Russert.

Ticket prices in Boston are probably the highest in Major League Baseball (yet they sell out every game), and so we don't go to too many games, maybe one or two a year. But, I still get an email almost every day from the Red Sox, keeping me up to date with the latest news of the team, pointing me to players blogs, and generally, pumping me up as a fan. These emails obviously allow me to buy tickets, but you really have to search for that button. The point is, they come after me, and keep me engaged with the team, long after my personal interaction has faded into memory.

Ok, so how does this relate to publishers, and publishing?

1. Think of the analogy of authors as 'players'. This fits on many levels. Authors have agents, players have agents. Authors either 'fit' with a house, or not, the same as players. Authors have coaches - both personal and professional (editors), the same as players. Interestingly, though, there is no organized 'farm team' for authors? Wouldn't that be an interesting concept for a publisher to take on - developing talent? Most publishers would argue that they do this, but none that I know of have any formal program for building talent.

Furthering this, publishers should give the authors the platform and tools to become superstars in their own right. The individual players on the Red Sox all have their own fan bases in addition to that of the team.

Lastly, why can't authors be made into a 'team', especially for promotional efforts and philanthropic causes. Why does every author event have to be about a single individual. Wouldn't it be less grueling (for the authors and publishers), more productive, and less costly to create an author tour with 4 or 5 of your leading authors for the upcoming season?

(Isn't it interesting how that word 'season' pops up in both baseball and publishing.)

Now, about us fans. I'm sure that you have figured this one out - we are readers. I also get emails almost everyday from Barnes & Noble, and Borders, but they are all about price and discount, so I hardly ever read them. If I have an interest in baseball, and have proven that through my purchases, then why don't I receive emails that specifically target that interest, and tell me what's going on in that area, and point me to blogs that cover it, - and oh, by the way, we have a great new baseball book coming out. Why aren't publishers and retailers, trying to help me find what I want to learn, instead of trying to push their products down my throat?

This is what I referred to in my last post as 'Reader Services'.

I also think the time is right for publishers to try to 'brand' themselves again. Many have dabbled in this before, but few have made it work. There are a million bloggers out their that will disagree with me on this, saying that no one buys a book because it was published by an individual publisher.

Well, I think that publishers have the opportunity again, if they develop a farm system of authors, have specified mission, work their authors as a team, and are the conduit for engaging the fans. Maybe, if we take this analogy one step further, you can think of ticket prices the same as book prices. The Red Sox sell out every game at a premium price with nary a discount in sight. Wouldn't publishers love to replicate that model??

good luck out there.

The King is Dead! Long Live the King!

2007-11-10T09:12:00.000-05:00

In his book, Print is Dead, Jeff Gomez, an industry insider, argues that technology is transforming the publishing process in ways that we haven't seen since the printing press was invented. (Ironically, the e-book version of this book does not exist yet.) I can buy that argument to some extent, but there was also this thing called a 'paperless office' that was promised at the advent of business systems - starting back in the 70's - that hasn't yet occurred. The use of the paper and printing has been transformed, but I still carry a lot with me, and HP still sells a ton of printers.

In talks given at both BEA, and at Tim O'Reilly's Tools of Change Conference, Brian Napack, President of Macmillan, presented very insightful comments - that I have been repeating to whoever will listen - that publishers need to transform themselves from 'Title Development' companies into 'Author Services companies'. This argument was borne out from the fact that they have understood that the vast majority of their sales come from a very low percentage of their authors. So, investing in those 'superstars' and developing a stable of up and coming 'players' is what a publisher needs to do. I get it. I agree, but.... I don't think its far enough. Brian also said that publishers need to look at how people are reading - and he quoted studies that showed how the 'book buying public' was just a small percentage of the 'reading public'. So, he says, they want to leverage technology to be where the readers are.

I would argue that publishers need to become - or re-emerge as - 'Reader Services companies'. They need to facilitate the styles and habits of the reader in whatever form or fashion that reader is, and to lower the barriers that exist between the brain of the recipient and the ideas of the author.

Why do I think the role of the traditional Publisher is dead? Well I think they are because the very premise of their existence is what is really being transformed by all the new technology - the markets they serve. this whole transformation in publishing today is about markets transforming not the products .

In the 70's, 80's, and 90's as book publishing companies converged and became behemoths, they did so mostly under the premise that their markets - Education, Trade, Mass Market, Religious, STM, Professional, etc. - were stable and definable. Their products all followed similar distribution mechanisms, and publishers could grow by gaining economies of scale in back office functions such as accounting and fulfillment. And the largest publishers had a finger in all those markets - and they still do.

But since the late 90's we have seen how those markets have caused major schisms in publishing houses as the needs of those different 'divisions' become more and more obvious. From my personal experience, I see this all the time, where the 'front office systems' needs of different divisions are so different, yet they all need to get on the same tool. Look at the major houses, Random House, S&S, and HarperCollins - all got out of the education business in the 90's - as it was so different. Pearson erected a Chinese wall between their education group and their consumer group. At Harcourt and Houghton, the Trade division is considered a 'necessary evil' - there it seems to bring some brand identity to the larger parent. Elsevier and Kluwer focus on the similarities between education and STM markets. Even University Presses are developing more and more 'trade-like' books.

Then there is the role of the publisher in the overall media conglomerate... but that could be a whole post unto itself.

Now these markets are no longer stable. Today's technology is definitely blurring the lines between them and transforming them. We don't even really know what the markets are anymore in some cases. That is considering only today's technological innovations. What will tomorrow's technology do? I dare say it won't bring them back to where they were in the 70's.

Publishers have always followed the needs of their markets, and they will continue do so. It's just that now those needs are really going to go off in different ways, and the schisms in the large companies between the divisions is only going to grow larger and more acrimonious.

In my view, we are going to see more divestiture, as these schisms become irreconcilable. At the same time, the smaller, nimbler, companies will be the leaders in identifying and monetizing the markets developing new products and business models as they go. I expect that to last for maybe another 3 - 5 years. Then the tide will change, and the need for economy of scale will cause another period of consolidation, with many of these smaller companies getting sucked up into larger parents.

The question that remains is who will do the consolidation? Will it be the 'Media' companies, the 'Content Hungry, Technology' companies, the 'Financial community', or some other player that is just starting to emerge....

My money is NOT on the Media business.

The King is dead! Long live the King!

ebook readers

2007-11-09T12:08:00.000-05:00

I don't understand hardware. I admit it - I'm a software guy.

Can someone answer for me this simple question: If the one-laptop-per-child laptop computer can be sold for $200 each, then why do ebook reader devices have to cost more than $300?

Build your Foundation before you build your digital house

2007-11-09T09:24:00.000-05:00

The "digitalization" of the book industry is happening so fast and on so many fronts that many publishers are throwing a ton of resources at trying to figure out where to go, and who to follow. My guess is that today's announcement about HarperCollins and the iPhone will only stir this pot more.

But, from my perspective, many publishers aren't (yet) in a position to seriously approach the issues of the digital world. They haven't yet even gotten their product publication workflows straight yet, and still look at very basic things like getting their product information out into the supply chain as unimportant.

The larger publishers, and some other more 'enlightened' publishers have been honing these basic foundational requirements for years. So, they are in a position to move forward to test and experiment with new technologies and delivery methods.

But, many, many publishers are not there, and, unfortunately, they don't even know they are not there yet. We have one customer (who shall remain nameless) who was using more than 75 different spreadsheets and 3 different databases to manage their upcoming titles. They were pushing their bibliographic data out to the trade once a season - and letting it go at that. And, they are not a small press!

Happily, this publisher is now jumping in with both feet to rectify this problem, but it will still take more than a year before they can even think about getting into the digital mix.

Publishers need a foundation before they get caught up in all the hoopla about digital publishing. There are two areas that they really need to have down pat with their print books before they try to go wild on the digital ones:

1. Existing titles, already published - become intimate with the requirements of the supply chain. If a retailer can't get your book it won't sell. period. Larger retailers and wholesalers have fairly hefty requirements and are extremely important conduits, so if you are not aware of what to do, or think its too much of a bother, then find yourself a distributor who can handle this for you.

2. Not Yet Published titles - get your act together and have one source of truth for all your title information. Having 3 or 4 or 6 versions of your pub date flying around is a sure fire way to kill sales. Here too, you need to feed the supply chain as well with advanced title information, and most want it six months ahead of publication.

Thinking that the content of the book is what will sell it is down right wrong in a market with more than 3,000,000 active titles to compete against.

good luck out there.

Ok, Ok, I'll try again

2007-11-06T21:00:00.000-05:00

I have to say that I find trying to keep this blog up to be a challenging effort. I know that - at least a few - people read it, as they tell me about it. One would think that to be motivation enough, but it hasn't been in my case, and the blog has "sagged".

This past weekend, I was privileged to speak at the ECPA Publishing University. While there, I was also privileged to hear Joe Wikert from John Wiley speak about blogging. And, to me what was the most motivating about Joe's talk was to hear about how he kept his blog going. I have definitely fallen prey to many of the common blogger afflictions - according to Joe. "It takes too much time". "I can't think of anything to write today". "Is this worth it?". But hearing Joe's how-to's have inspired me again. Thanks, Joe.

To summarize what I heard him say:

1. set yourself up with RSS feeds from other blogs and online news feeds that get your brain going on a number of new ideas.

2. if it takes you more than 15 minutes to come up with an idea to write about, don't write anything that day.

3. don't spend more than 15 minutes writing.. keep the posts short - no one wants to read that much.

This makes it seem like a very 'do-able' task. Hopefully I'll keep it up, but if it slips will someone please nudge me along?

Holtzbrinck Name Change

2007-10-09T09:21:00.000-05:00

I had done a tongue in cheek post on the topic of Holtzbrinck's name change to Macmillan but took it down when someone asked me (nicely) to do so.

But it still gives me a chuckle to think about how long this name will last, and more so to ask the question, how long will many of us simply call them "the publisher formerly known as Holtzbrinck"?

The Summer is over - What's Next?

2007-09-06T09:00:00.000-05:00

Today is the first day of school in Newburyport, and, after a great summer, the kids are all excited and anxious about starting up again. Lot's of big smiles - and some bouncing off the walls - this morning. My guess is this will last through next week as the new schedules become more routine.

This whole transition at home has me thinking a bit about the transition in book publishing systems. Last Spring, and right up through July, many of us were skipping from conference to conference trying to understand the term, 'digital strategy'. We were pondering widgets, and Internet marketing techniques, and 're purposing our content'. And, then it seemed as though we all decided that we needed a break and took the month of August off.

So, now it's September - time to get back to work. And for me, the open question seems to be, as an industry, what are we going to do with all of this collective knowledge that we gained earlier in the year?

My guess is that we are going into a quiet period. The industry leaders all had strategies before the Spring, and they are (now) working on executing those strategies. The next tier of publisher is taking all the collected knowledge from the Spring and putting together strategies. And the last group is simply waiting to see what shakes out from all of this.

I think it will be very interesting to see what gets rolled out in January and February next year by the leading publishers. Oh, we might get a few minor announcements before then, but my money is on the big roll outs happening in the beginning of the new year - after the Christmas season is over, and before the 'Trade Show/Publishing Conference' season starts up again.

What I do expect to hear about is Fall is more consolidation. These new technology innovations are expensive, and generally out of reach for small to midsized publishers. Much like the expensive technology barrier for physical distribution, the high cost of developing electronic marketing and distribution systems is going to encourage the small and midsized publishers to 'partner' with the bigger guys.

I expect that we will see alot of fluctuation in business models as the larger 'entities' figure out how best to 'partner'. Competition to gain economies of scale (to make all this investment worthwhile) is going to be fierce among the top organizations, and the race will really be on to woo publishers into their respective folds.

I use the term 'entities' loosely as I think that there will be some shakeup in who we have all traditionally thought of as leaders. Some will rise and grow, and I believe that others will self destruct. It wouldn't surprise me if there was another 'PGW-like' collapse already in the making.

So, like my kids, I'm excited and anxious about the year ahead. I suspect that this time next year, I'll have a completely new perspective!

What do you call "Digital Strategy"?

2007-07-26T20:17:00.000-05:00

So, what's your answer?

Having spent a significant amount of time talking to publishers about this recently, I'm really surprised at how diverse the answers to this question are. Maybe its the word "strategy" that throws people... But, many of the answers I've gotten to this question, seem alot more tactical than strategic.

I was discussing this topic with a colleague over lunch the other day, and he likened this situation to when 'Content Management' was all the rage, but everyone had a different definition of that as well. But, as the technology started to mature, the definitions for Content Management and Digital Asset Management seem to iron themselves out.

So, I guess we're just not their yet on this question. As with Content Management, it will probably take a few years before everyone is on the same page with 'Digital Strategy'. One thing is for sure though, Digital Strategy is a hot topic these days, and an elite group of individuals in the industry is working very hard to come up to speed and establish standards for the rest of us to follow.

Most of the "tacticians" I've spoken with, seem to focus on creating XML, as if that is the entirety of a digital strategy. Others focus on simply getting their print products into digital form. Some really don't have any idea what their strategy is, but they think that they need to archive their backlists and store them in some type of repository, so that when the market reveals itself, they will be prepared to spring. Others simply think that producing ebook versions of all of their printed product is a viable strategy that someday will pay back something.

But the true strategists, like my friend, Fritz Foy, from Holtzbrinck, think of the technology in a much broader context.

In a meeting with Fritz today, he reiterated Holtzbrinck's strategy to use digital forms of their content as a way to attract the online reading public - which, he points out, is much larger than the 'book reading public'. Fritz was elaborating on a theme that his boss, Brian Napack, has discussed during two recent presentations, one at BEA, and the other at the Tools of Change conference.

Speaking of Tools of Change, the folks at O'Reilly seem to have several strategies related to 'digital products'. Having heard their presentations a couple of times now, my best description of their strategy is to use their content to create and empower technology communities who will spend big money on other services (like conferences).

It seems amazing to me just how different 'strategy' feels compared to 'tactics'. The tactical companies seem to be taking approaches that inspire very little creativity or excitement. The strategic companies seem to open up all manner of ideas and opportunities, and they are very exciting. So exciting - to me - that I think they may even transform our industry in such a positive way as to save it from the slow but relentless decline that it has been facing.

So, one last time, what's your digital strategy?

When distant colleagues pass

2007-07-13T11:16:00.000-05:00

I was hit hard today by the obituary I read in Publishers Weekly today for Perry Knowlton.

It's impossible to say that I knew him well, or that we were ever close. In fact, I don't think I've seen or heard of him in more than 15 years. Yet, today's news inspired feelings similar to what I felt when a close uncle recently passed away.

When I first started Quality Solutions in 1988, about the only mechanism I had for marketing our services was to attend BISAC meetings. After being involved with BISAC for about a year, Carol Mann approached the BISAC committee seeking a solution to the nagging problem that author royalty statements were all so dissimilar, and usually impossible to believe.

Having just spent the better part of the preceding four years building royalty systems for the likes of Random House, William Morrow, and Prentice Hall, this was an area where I thought I could help. So, the BISAC Royalty Statement Subcommittee was formed, and I was it's first chair.

It was through this work that I met Perry. Perry, and Curtis Brown were kind enough to host our meetings. While I was 'technically' the chair of the committee, there was no doubt who was in charge of the meetings. For a young man (at the time), Perry was larger than life. He inspired an incredible level of respect from everyone around him. I remember distinctly how it seemed like everyone who worked at Curtis Brown would stop what they were doing when he passed through a room. It was like something in a movie from the 1950's.

In the PW obituary, Perry's son, Timothy, was quoted, "To his family, friends and colleagues, he was always a dedicated mentor, advocate, enthusiast and enabler. He was one of the few true ‘renaissance men’ I've ever known." I've never met Timothy, but what he said here is more eloquent than anything I could ever come up with. Perry was all of these things - to me, personally - during that brief period of 2 or 3 years when the committee hammered out the first version of the standard royalty statement.

After that first version of the royalty statement standard was completed, I left the committee in the capable hands of Judy Appelbaum, and I had no further reason to be in contact with Perry or anyone else on that committee.

My sincerest condolences go out to all of Perry's family. I am sure that everyone who ever had the pleasure of working with him would agree that Perry was one of those individuals who make society stronger, just for being part of it. The world is a bit weaker today for his passing.

Amazon going underground?

2007-06-26T16:03:00.000-05:00

This blog was never intended to be a report on Amazon, but there have been some disturbing trends coming from Seattle in recent months. In my last entry, I wrote about the issues related to descriptive copy issues that arise when a publisher changes distributors. In this entry, I'd like to talk about two other Amazon related things that have come up recently.

The first issue is related to Amazon's EDI initiatives. To their credit, Amazon wants to automate every aspect of communication with the entire supply chain - from product information to payments. But, a couple of weeks ago, several of our customers received emails from Amazon asking if they could provide the EDI 832 transaction. (I know I just lost every non-technical reader, but I'll explain). The '832' is an industry standard for product information that pre-dates ONIX. Given the rise in adoption of ONIX as a standard for product information, the '832' has almost become extinct as an electronic communication tool.

So, why bring it back? And why go to IT departments behind the backs of the account managers? For years, in account review meetings, Amazon has been telling their publisher vendors to use ONIX, ONIX, ONIX. Now, someone on the operations side of Amazon is asking for the '832'? The reason the industry went to ONIX in the first place was because of the inadequacy of the '832' to convey proper product information. The other issue here is that EDI transactions usually emanate from legacy order processing systems that have shortened titles and relatively little product information compared to Title Management tools (like the kind we supply). Product data in order processing systems is generally not regarded as good for anything but internal documents and EDI transactions, where abbreviated titles and author names are fine for labeling purposes.

So, we posed these questions to Amazon, and predictably, there was no response. To, me, this means that we hit a nerve. Amazon never even acknowledges emails when we discover an issue in their processes.

The second issue that has come up recently happened just last week. We received an email stating that Amazon was once again re-organizing it's catalog department. However in this email (which looked like a form email sent to all publishers who supply ONIX), we were told that our personal contact in the catalog department would no longer respond to our emails. We were told that if there were any data issues that we should fill out the online form, or if it was a process issue we should send an email to a generic email address.

For background, 15% of Amazon's book product information comes from our office in the form of weekly ONIX feeds. On average, we send about 5 - 10 emails per week to the catalog department to help investigate issues. These emails relate to a very small percentage of the titles we send them. Almost all are due to an unforeseen publicity event, or other extraordinary happening that requires some immediate assistance. To date, our contact in the catalog department has been incredibly helpful, and has kept the gears of the 'ONIX machine' well tended. Without a real person tending the machine, I'm am sure that it will bog down and collapse much more often than it does now.

Most of you have heard me rail against the online form. Changes made there become 'sticky' - to use Amazon's terminology. This means that once the online form is used to fix a title, then that title can NOT be updated via electronic feeds in the future. And, if publishers start using the online form instead of funneling the changes through us as they have in the past, the quality of the product information in use at Amazon will deteriorate rapidly.

I guess Amazon just doesn't care. They have 'gone underground' (credit goes to my wife for that metaphor). They are saving a head in the catalog department and that is more important than vendor relations.

I certainly hope that as publishers go through their account reviews, that they complain about this. After all, for years, Amazon has used that forum to complain to publishers about using ONIX.

Or, maybe we should just go back to the '832' and watch everyone's sales go down the toilet.

Amazon's Descriptive Content

2007-05-22T12:52:00.000-05:00

Ok, well, now I've been told by two people that they actually read this, so I better get moving...

About six weeks or so ago, we discovered an interesting issue when we send data to Amazon. The issue is related to updating descriptive content (such as Book Descriptions, Author Bio's, etc.).

First, some background. Amazon uses the ONIX files we send them in two separate processes. The first, is what they call the bibliographic update, and the second is the descriptive copy update. Bibliograhic information - for the purposes of this entry - refers to Title, Author, price, status, Publisher, trim size, etc. This is an important distinction to make as I wouldn't want anyone to walk away from reading this thinking that the problem is bigger than it really is.

What we have found, however, is that if a Publisher changes it's Distributor (ie. vendor of record), then the Descriptive content (ONLY) cannot be updated automatically via ONIX records anymore. This is a big problem now that so many publishers have shifted distributors in the recent past.

We found this problem when several of our customers complained (independently of one another) that when they uploaded new descriptions to us, they weren't showing up on Amazon's website. Tracking through these problems and discussing them with Amazon's catalog department, only gave us the answer that these titles would have to be updated manually through the online form.

This problem has probably been around for a very long time, but it has flown under the radar - until now. Why? Because, one, publishers didn't move around very much. And, if they did, that distributor did not send data to Amazon via ONIX. Second, how often do book descriptions change after the book has been published? Not too often, but when they do, it is usually for a reason that there is some type of new publicity associated with the title, like a big endorsement, or movie tie-in. So, handling these one-offs through the catalog department was a manageable alternative to fixing the system.

But now, it's not. This is a conundrum for the publisher on three fronts:

First, publishers (at least those who use our services... plug, plug) have never had to worry about which titles they updated before. They just updated the information in the database and went about their business. The systems did the rest - identifying which titles have been changed, and which needed to be resent out to the trade via ONIX. Now, they need to track which titles have come from publishers who were distributed by someone else previously, and keep track of precisely what change was made to the record.

Second, once a publisher uses the online form to make a change to a title, that title is given a status in Amazon's systems saying it was manually updated. Amazon considers that a 'sticky' change. In other words, once a title is changed manually, nothing on that title can be changed except through the online form. So, that means that what was a descriptive copy problem now becomes a bibliographic data problem as well. So, if a publisher updates the price of a book, and that title is 'stuck', then the price update will not go through (at Amazon).

Lastly, Amazon does not have any way to give us, or any publisher a listing of which titles they consider to be 'stuck'. The only way that we can find out is to query the catalog department on a case by case basis.

So, essentially we are left with a situation where we don't know whether our ONIX updates will update Amazon's site or not. This puts all the weight back on the publisher to check and see whether Amazon really updated the information. Some of our publishers send 2000 - 5000 changes a week! There is no way to check all that!

Emails to Amazon's people about this issue have gone unanswered and unacknowledged. Hopefully, as the questions start to flood into the catalog department, now that so many publishers have changed distributors in the past 6 weeks, they will see the problem as critical enough to address. Otherwise our friend in the catalog department - who is incredibly responsive, and helps us out tremendously - won't be able to get anything else done.

Blog Restart

2007-05-10T22:10:00.000-05:00

Last week, I had an interesting experience. I was trying to arrange a meeting with another company who I had never crossed paths with. Nothing new in that, but what was interesting was they already knew of me because of this blog!

I was shocked and delighted that anyone had read any of my entries. I still don’t know whether they agreed or disagreed with my perspective, but just the fact that my entry came up on their radar screen is indication enough to me about the awesome power of this media.

So, I guess, I’ll have to get back on the blogging circuit. I had it going for a while, but then lost my way. Now, I’m back! So, for anyone out there catching a whif of this, thanks! I’ll be talking to you soon. fpt

Too Many Book Publishing Conferences?

2007-03-26T11:32:00.000-05:00

I just need to ask the question: are there too many conferences in our fair industry?

It seems that there was an opportunity every week so far this year to attend some type of conference on the state of our industry. I've attended at least 6 or 8 so far this year. But, that is the nature of my job - I need to be where my customers, and potential customers are. So, in a way, its a blessing, and in another, it's a curse.

Some have been very interesting and highly topical. Others have lacked. Most have included someone from a high tech company, and others have just gotten down to brass tacks.

And, the calendar seems rife with more to come. The London Book Fair, BISG's Making Information Pay, and the BEA seem like hits on everyone's list. Then there is the Canadian Book Expo, and the AAUP Annual Meeting for me. Then fortunately, everyone acknowledges that the summer is not a good time or conferences, and we get a break until September.

We live in a competitive, yet collegial environment. And, conferences at their best, inspire and teach us about ways we can improve our business. At worst, they often suck up an entire day or days that could otherwise be devoted to taking care of the issues at hand.

Does anyone have any comments?

In a Digital World, Should Bookstores & Libraries Collaborate?

2007-03-13T08:39:00.000-05:00

In the non-digital world (5 - 10) years ago, independent bookshops and local libraries, peacefully co-existed, albeit separately, each with a seemingly separate mission. Each had it's own resources, and was somewhat limited to what those resources could supply to their communities.

Libraries are (generally) public institutions - founded for the greater good of all the citizens of a particular community (city, town, college, etc.). Bookstores are (generally) private entities, peddling their wares to individuals of a particular community (city, town, museum, market demographic).

The main difference between them though, seems that one is about providing entertainment and information for free, and the other is about providing entertainment and information for a price (note the lack of the word, 'profit').

Aside from that, however, they have many things in common. They provide similar types of materials to their patrons. They help and recommend items to their patrons. They are both under tremendous financial pressure. Neither really knows how to embrace the digital age. They both work with the community to foster reading and literacy. They both have the same suppliers (publishers), and they both 'curate' their collections to serve their communities.

At the AAP General meeting last week in NYC, I heard Ann Moore, CEO of Time, Inc. say that in a digital world, content from 'trusted providers' will be where the public turns. I also heard Peter Bloom use the word 'curation' to describe how 'trusted content providers' will be appreciated.

If you think about it, bookstores and libraries are, in their heart of hearts, curators of a certain collection of product. And, it is this concept, that they each curate on our behalf, that makes them so beloved by their communities.

So, is there a collaboration between libraries and bookstores possible? Well, my personal opinion is that they had better, or they will fall even further behind in the public's list of trusted content providers. Part of this opinion comes from the FACT, that this type of collaboration is happening already, except that it is being done by a publisher!

I am very intrigued by what I heard (and have since, seen) about what Tim O'Reilly is doing at oreilly.com. Working for a community that has never been particularly well served by either bookstores or libraries, O'Reilly has seemingly taken the best of both worlds and created a 'Library for Profit' space on the internet. O'Reilly provides tools for programmers and other technology aficionados. Note the word 'tools'. I didn't say books. I didn't say research material. And, I didn't say source code. However, he does provide all of that.

He helps programmers figure out what they need themselves by providing lots of free content, and lots of free contextual metadata. He allows educators to put custom course packs together. He provides (for a price) access to his entire library of collected works. He even allows them to comment on works in progress. And, of course, he sells books - and lots of them.

This sounds a lot (save the point about works in progress) like what bookstores and libraries do.

Now, I don't know the answer to the question of how libraries and bookstores should collaborate. What I do expect, though, that in the next few years, if they don't, we will see far fewer of them both in our communities as their individual missions will seem too anachronistic for the public to support.

In the World of POD, Is the Printing Number Relevant?

2007-03-11T20:48:00.000-05:00

This was an interesting question that came up at the AAUP Financial Managers Meeting in San Antonio yesterday. At least that was how I interpreted the discussion.

During the meeting we heard a couple of presentations about Print On Demand technology from Caty Millar, CFO, Johns Hopkins University Press, and from David Prentice, Account Executive, from Lightning Source. David calls it Print to Order, but both were extolling the virtues of keeping books in print by keeping only virtual revenue. The key elements of the Lightning/Ingram program are:

Books in the program are given an artificial inventory level of 100 copies at Ingram, so Amazon's website will read that the book can ship within 24 hours.
Orders that come in for the book are printed within 8 - 12 hours after the receipt of the electronic order.
Only the number of books ordered are printed. None go onto a shelf. (This is a huge difference from the ultra short runs they used to do).
List price and Ingram Discount is set by the publisher.
Publisher receives a monthly report along with a check for the price received, net Ingram's discount, and Lightnings printing costs.
Books that work in this program should sell more than 13 per year, otherwise the storage charges will bring the entire cost structure negative for the publisher.
Books in this program need to fit into one of the 12 standard trim sizes offered by Lightning.

This was all very compelling for the audience, as they see no cost of goods, no WIP, no Inventory, and maybe more importantly, no work for their production departments. It was clear from the conversation as well that the technology for POD (or PTO) is getting better and better, and that for scholarly texts, they could change the entire publishing budget plan for some books. It is possible to see a day, where the book is never done on a web or sheet fed press, ever.

This kind of print on demand has a few flavors, all in the category of digital printing. There is Print-to-Order (PTO), meaning one copy at a time. There is also ultra short run digital printing(USRDP), which for the sake of discussion should mean 2 - 10 copies. Lastly, there is short run digital printing (SRDP), which for the sake of discussion means 250 - 500 copies.

Now for some scholarly books SRDP is a good strategy for the first printing of a book that is not expected to sell well. While the unit cost is high, the overall cash exposure is relatively low, and if the books take off, then going to a web press is still an option. But, for most books, all the different flavors of digital printing are happening mostly on the second and subsequent printings. And this brought us to an interesting dilemma. Do we increase the "Printing Number" every time the book goes back for a reprint anymore? If a book is in the PTO program and sells 20 copies, does that mean it went back for 20 printings?

These question cropped up during the discussion of the AAUP annual Survey, where it was clear that a) there was no consensus on this topic, and b) it looked like most of the publishers felt that there was a clear distinction between the PTO model and the USRDP and SRDP models except that they didn't all make the same distinctions I made earlier - in terms of quantities. Here were the results:

out of 63 presses reporting, 20 considered each printing of POD or PTO as a unique printing, while 37 thought that SRDP should be considered a unique printing, and 43 thought that USRDP should be a distinct printing number. The only explanation I have for these results is that people didn't use the same definitions.

In the old world of four years ago when everything was printed in traditional methods, the "printing number" meant something. If a book was in its fourth printing, that was important for marketing bragging rights, as well as for citation purposes. If the book is cited in a scholarly paper, the footnote always displays the printing number of the book so as to distinguish it from earlier versions.

Also in the old world there was always a correction cut in to the film, minimally on the copyright page, but often on many other pages as well. In the digital world, the text is fixed by the publisher, and a new PDF is sent to the printer. But with USRDP/PTO, it is not always clear that new files are sent in advance of the printing. So the copyright page isn't updated. So is it really a new printing?

Bill Lindsay of Harvard University Press said that they rarely ever put printing numbers on the copyright page anymore, and they haven't seen any citation issues. Lain Adkins of Southern Illinois University Press was pretty vehement about the citation problem, and that a book can't be called a new printing if the underlying digital file hasn't changed. As the discussion continued, it appeared that the word 'printing' was the problem.

From a financial perspective, in the old world, printings had to be 'closed out'. Final costs had to be reconciled against the original estimates, WIP systems needed to be updated, and Inventory valuation had to be adjusted for the new books in the warehouse. How do you close out a printing without an estimate, without inventory, and without an invoice from the printer? Plus if a publisher has to close out 20 PTO printings a year, the overhead in the production department would cost more than the actual printing, binding, and shipping costs of the title.

This discussion never quite got finished, but it was clear that no consensus was possible on this day, and the discussion was put on the agenda for next years meeting. And I think more than a few of these CFOs are going to be wondering if they need the same production staffing levels in the future, if all the accounting, and overhead of producing reprints gets dramatically easier.