Fishing Where There's Fish

The news that Nintendo will add book content to their DS product platform may have publishing executives humming the refrain from the King and I - Getting to Know You - as they jet off to Tokyo. I wonder if this isn't an ominous event for content owners: Content producers may run the risk that their content won't be valued adequately by the target users. While the content will be paid for, it is very cheap. The content on offer isn't new (frontlist) but the aggressive pricing will establish a price expectation in the minds of the consumer. It reminds me of the inclusion of 'free' encyclopedia content on early personal computers which destroyed the market for paid versions. Remember, the content at the heart of Encarta didn't approach that of WorldBook or Brittanica but it didn't matter to the users.

The deal with the company that bought us DonkeyKong and SuperMario will deliver the Harpercollins 100 classic book collection. The package of titles includes titles from Shakespeare to Jane Austin and will be sold for £20. (As an experiment, I can't help wondering how successful/indicative this is going to be since the titles are available universally for free download and the target market will know that).

The Nintendo platform has more in common with the iPhone than it does with the dedicated e-Book readers from Sony or Amazon. No one is likely to buy a Nintendo DS for the book content alone but the addition of book content supports Nintendo's strategy for broadening the possible audience for their products. My complaint is that the typical Nintendo user will attribute value to the console and the purchased games but not to the other stuff - even if there is a patry entry fee.

My argument doesn't preclude delivering content via the Nintendo platform (or similar) and I think in the right circumstances it should be encouraged as another distribution option. In truth, while I second guess the tactical implementation I don't disagree with the strategy. Assuming there is a 'phase 2' of the Harpercollins experiment I hope value is communicated effectively in the offfer.

Firebrand Ink A Deal With NetGalley

Firebrand Technologies and Rosetta Solutions, Inc. today announced the creation of a joint venture, NetGalley LLC. The agreement passes development and operational responsibility of NetGalley, an innovative online connection point for book publishers and professional readers, into the hands of Firebrand, but retains the core NetGalley team responsible for launching the service. NetGalley helps publishers promote new books and authors through the professional channels that recommend and purchase new titles.

“We have felt for a long time that NetGalley and Firebrand are natural partners,” said Fran Toolan, Chief Igniter of Firebrand Technologies. “We are committed to making this service successful, to helping publishers better manage the costs associated with printed galleys, and to making it easier and less expensive for publishers to disseminate information about new titles.” Firebrand Technologies is a leading software and service provider to the publishing industry. Over the course of the next year, Firebrand has plans to completely integrate the NetGalley service into its offerings.

“Firebrand is a natural partner for this venture,” said Michael Forney, President of Rosetta Solutions. “Their publishing expertise and experience will contribute positively to NetGalley’s vision, adoption and long-term success.”

Since its launch at BookExpo 2008, NetGalley has made considerable inroads. Publishers Weekly and ForeWord Magazine announced that they plan to use NetGalley to manage the influx of titles for review, and major publishers are actively experimenting with the service. Professional readers from all segments—reviewers, journalists, media, booksellers, bloggers, librarians and professors—are enthusiastic about the service’s ability to deliver digital, pre-publication content. (There is no charge for professional readers to use the service.)

NetGalley delivers digital galleys and promotional materials to professional readers and helps promote new and upcoming titles. Using NetGalley, publishers can build communities, invite contacts to view galleys and promotional materials, and track who has viewed their titles.

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 48):

The sale of Reed Business Information is rumored to be close to resolution with Bain Capital as the buyer. Apparently according to sources they are the only remaining potential buyer. Reuters quotes the Independent On Sunday as suggesting the price is $1Billion with Bain evidently taking advantage of their 50% off coupon. There is a long 'expose' of information publisher's Moodys, Standard and Poors and Fitch's in Sunday's NYTimes. This issue was raised earlier this year, and McGrawHill for one saw a big dip in its share price on suggestions that S&P had been lax in their coverage and ratings of debt offerings. The article points to the cozy relationship between the debt sellers and the debt rating companies. A reminder of the general casualness of the various interlocking financial relationships between banks and investment banking. Holly Brubach had an entertaining profile of Ludwig Bemelmans (Madeline) in the NYTimes TMagazine.

Fortunately for readers, he wrote some 40 books, of which 15 are for children and several are novels. The rest fall into a genre now known as autobiographical essays, a classification misleading in these times of me-generation diarists and bloggers documenting the afternoon’s shopping spree. As a first-person narrator, Bemelmans is completely devoid of the ego that prompts so many authors to occupy center stage. In fact, he barely appears onstage at all, a witness whose testimony is so transparent that he might easily vanish from our awareness were his presence not implicit in the things he sees and the way he recounts them. A career bon vivant, Bemelmans lingers at the table and refills the reader’s wineglass. In my experience, he falls in the same category as A. J. Liebling and P. G. Wodehouse: once you’ve read one of his books, you want to read them all.

Many of his stories revolve around hotels and while I have some funny stories about living in a hotel they could never be as interesting as Bemelmans' material. An RFID experiment in Japan with an interesting statistic (Link)

Unsold books returning from bookstores is an unwanted reality of the publishing business, especially since many of the returned volumes are destined to become waste product. Shogakukan estimates that if just 25 percent of the books returned to publishers in Japan are designated waste, the financial loss would be the equivalent of $1.5 billion U.S. dollars.

The is a new report on the state of UK book retailing (Guardian Blog) and its main finding is that UK retailers have been giving customers too good of a deal. Deep discounting is killing the business they seem to say, which to many of us in the business this finding would seem obvious,

The report, commissioned by The Booksellers Association, found that UK booksellers have been making less money, seeing less market growth, and sacrificing more in discounts than booksellers in countries such as the US, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, and the Netherlands.

In bald terms it means that selling a £20 title - in the shape of Guinness World Records - for £10 has been bad business. This may seem obvious: "I wonder if the BA would look at what bears do in woods," was one of the comments that greeted the release of the report.

Having hooked the book buyer on the heroin (50% off and 3/2 deals galore) however with they break the habit?

Visual Journal: Writers Rooms

The BBC profiles Eamonn McCabe who has a project illustrating the working environments of novelists, biographers and poets.

Here.


As an aside, I wish the social tools on BBC where a little more advanced.

The End Predicted

Richard Curtis (E-Reads) has penned an interesting status report on the downward spiral of publishing:

Most of the resentment or suspicion that authors and agents feel toward publishers stems from royalty accounting based on returns. Authors, outraged that creative bookkeeping permits publishers to hold excessive royalties in the name of reserves against returns, consider the system fraudulent. Their viewpoint is easy to understand when you remember that returns are a manipulable form of currency. The temptation to manipulate them intensifies in recessionary or inflationary times when publishers seize upon royalty reserves as the most obvious source of cash to relieve their liquidity problems or earn some extra interest. Publishers cannot with impunity stop paying their printers, their landlords, their paper suppliers, or their employees. But by a stroke of the pen, raising the holdback on royalties from, say, 50 percent to 75 percent, a publisher can liberate enough cash to meet the urgent demands of all those other creditors - at the expense of authors. How, then, could authors, suffering liquidity problems of their own, not feel bitter? Nor is their mood improved to see their remaindered books, on which they receive little or no royalties, selling briskly in used-book stores.

Are there solutions to this dilemma? There are, but they all call for radical changes in the way we think about books, sell them, and account to each other for them. For any plan to succeed, it must: (1) allow publishers to print only as many copies as are necessary to fill orders, (2) put distribution on a nonreturnable basis, (3) enable publishers to make a profit, (4) encourage bookshops and chain stores to make money remaindering books on their own premises, and (5) provide authors with honest, easy-to-understand accounting. That's a tall order. Some gratifying attempts have been essayed, but they all failed because they were not radical enough, nor were they adopted on an industry-wide basis.

There is a great kick at the end.

Bloomsbury Buys Wisden

I think Richard Charkin will be walking around the Bloomsbury offices this morning with a big smile on his face. Wisden is the official almanac for Cricket and Richard being a big cricket fan as well as Chief Executive of Bloomsbury is going to be well chuffed since they now have their hands on it.

From AP:

John Wisden & Co was bought by the billionaire Paul Getty in 1993. Since his death in 2003, the company has been owned by his son, Mark.

Published every year since 1864, the yearbook is known among cricket fans for its mixture of statistics, features and opinion pieces.

Bloomsbury Publishing chief executive Nigel Newton called the acquisition "a landmark event in the history of the company and an important step in our strategy to increase our presence in reference and sport publishing."

Amazon Rents Massive Data Sets

Several months ago, I wrote a piece titled Massive Data Sets about the potential for increased access to very large data sets that historically would have remained ancillary to the reporting of research projects. While very important to the conclusions reported in research typically the data and primary research supporting the conclusions was inaccessible. From my post,

here could develop the next land grab for publishers and perhaps other parties interested in gaining access to the raw data supporting all types of research. As publishers develop platforms supporting their publishing and (n0w) service offers will they see maintaining these data sets as integral to that policy? I believe so, and I suspect in agreements with authors, institutions and associations that own these journals the publishers like Elsevier will also require the 'deposit' of the raw data supporting each article. In return, the offerings on the publisher's 'platform' would enable analysis, synthesis and data storage all of benefit to their authors. But the story may be more comprehensive than simply rounding out their existing titles with more data.

The original was triggered by an article on a Google blog post as well as a NYTimes article.

Yesterday, the NYTimes blog Bits reported that Amazon has begun hosting large data sets as an adjunct to their services offering. From the Times,

Amazon Web Services, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, has started offering access to large collections of data. Business customers and scientists can take the information, which ranges from census databases to three-dimensional chemical structures and the genome, and use it as the basis for computing jobs. By gathering and storing the information, Amazon says that it can save businesses the step of assembling and managing data on their own.

As the blog post goes on to say, there is the potential that the Amazon service can further eliminate (on top of the vast array of services Amazon already offers) significant expenses. Access to the Amazon service begins to push to zero the infrastructure cost and overhead that must be covered in any research project. This could have a material impact on the types and extent of all research dependent on the collection, storage and analysis of vast data sets. The economics have fundamentally changed for researchers enabling them to contemplate all kinds of new projects that otherwise may have been cost prohibitive. On the other hand, their research limitations could be more mundane in that they may no longer need to compete for data processing time or other technical limitations with competing projects.

Smart people are going to see an opportunity to buy or otherwise gather very large sets of data from groups or organizations who may not see the potential value. For example, buying the transaction data from all the EasyPass-like systems (RFID tags that let you pass through tolls) across the US, 'depositing' it with Amazon and then renting access to any urban planner that wants to analyze the info. The customer pays a fee and out of that fee the 'owner' of the data pays Amazon a service fee. A potentially painless way to an early retirement in Costa Rica. As I noted in my original post, this is a growth opportunity for publishers or others.