The End of an Era

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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

(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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.