Shatzkin recapitulates the recent history between Amazon, the Big Six publishers, and the bookstore chains. Amazon is in the process of inspiring much fear and loathing in the publishing industry by luring away the big celebrity writers whose megahits subsidize less popular works. Meanwhile, it continues to be able to undercut physical bookstores like Barnes & Noble on price, gradually stealing away their business.

B&N’s decision seems to me like the right move for them. Most very regular bookstore customers aren’t really surprised if any particular store doesn’t have any particular book. Indeed, the impossibility of stocking everything anybody might ask for in a store is part of the reason that online bookselling is such a useful service. In this day and age, most people who want a particular book don’t go to a bookstore to buy it; they just order it online. They go to bookstores to browse and shop and choose from what is within the store. So, yes, there may be some disappointed customers if B&N doesn’t have a high-profile Amazon title, but I don’t think that disappointment will be widespread.

On the other hand, authors and agents who might have considered an Amazon publishing deal will have to think twice if they know very few bookstores will carry it. Amazon can do some remarkable things to sell books to their mammoth online customer base and that won’t change. But there is both a practical and a vanity aspect to getting store display that will still be seen as indispensible by many authors and agents who otherwise might have taken the leap to sign with the newest big checkbook in town.

He draws a parallel to Random House’s original decision not to join the agency pricing cartel—puzzling industry observers at the time. Shatzkin said then, as now, that Random House was essentially taking advantage of Amazon’s largesse to turn a short-term profit, while its competitors raised their prices and cut their royalties.

Whether the move was sensible or not, I expect Amazon will probably not be hurt too badly in the long term—especially if it decides to open a chain of boutique stores where it can hand-sell the books itself. Will more authors think twice about signing with Amazon, or will they figure that the giant e-tailer’s marketing clout will make up for the lack of physical store placement? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Over the next few months, Cringely will be reposting the entire book to a blog, and inviting reader participation to help him update it for the final e-book form.

Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use in part to update the work when it later appears in eBook form.  What happened to these people?  What stories do you remember? Where did it go from here?

Once the entire book has been serialized, my friend and eBook expert Parampreet Singh (he of the Toronto Singhs, of course) and I will pick the best of these reader annotations along with several thousand words of new material I’ve been saving-up and publish what ought to be an enormous number of electrons — Accidental Empires Rebooted.

And the e-book promises to be interesting, as well: Cringely talks about giving readers the ability to flip back and forth between the original 1996 version and the newly-updated one. Cringely can do this because the original contract from 1989 didn’t mention e-book rights, thus leaving them with him. (Hopefully his print publisher won’t try to pull a HarperCollins.)

This promises to be an interesting experiment, and I will certainly read right along—leaving all e-book experimentation aside, it sounds like a very interesting book in its own right.

(Found via Slashdot.org.)

After buying the Kindle, she discovered she liked it so much she has used it it constantly ever since—though mostly for travel and commuting, where a slim device that can replace a ton of books is most useful. She will “always choose a ‘proper’ book” for reading at home.

Parks does not have an “emotional attachment” to her Kindle, but acknowledges that some generations might, and thinks that it is a good thing that something has moved non-readers to start reading.

It’s true this isn’t really “news”, but it’s nice to see that at least some e-reader skeptics can be swayed enough to enjoy the device for its advantages without assuming it’s going to “kill” reading.

A fundamental legal question involved in construing a contract is what the parties intended at the time the contract was made. The intent must be manifest in some form in the written agreement. A secret intent by one party that the word tomato also includes avocado won’t bring avocados into the contract.

The classic formulation is that there must be a “meeting of the minds” of the contracting parties or else there isn’t a contract or the contract is limited to only those subjects for which the minds met.

A big problem HC has with its case is even showing an intent by both parties to include what we recognize as ebooks today into the 1971 contract in the absence of any language that points to an ebook.

Passive Guy points out that later contracts still have the same problem. Some try to future-proof themselves by adding a “whether now known or hereafter discovered” clause, but the problem PG finds is that implies a meeting of the minds about something neither party knew anything about at the time they signed the contract.

And even though the Julie one wasn’t, a lot of these contracts were drafted after e-books or similar information-retrieval systems were known to exist. One such system, Lexis, was very big in the legal world in the mid to late 1970s, finding its way into law schools in the 1980s and eventually every lawyer’s office—the same lawyers who wrote contracts for the publishing industry. Yet none of the publishing contracts from this era bother to mention it or anything like it.

Absent any contractual mention of ebooks or electronic books or a reasonably detailed description of an ebook reading and distribution system resembling one the lawyers knew intimately, the only reasonable conclusion is there was no intent to include ebooks in publishing agreements of that era.

Just sayin’

I look forward to finding out how the Julie case unfolds. It will be interesting to see if the judge’s preliminary ruling bears any resemblance to that from the RosettaBooks case so long ago—and whether HC similarly drops the case if it appears not to be going its way. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

According to their sources, Amazon is going to roll out a retail store in Seattle within the next few months to test the waters and see if a chain of such stores could be profitable. “They intend on going with the small boutique route with the main emphasis on books from their growing line of Amazon Exclusives and selling their e-readers and tablets,” Good E-Reader’s Michael Kozlowski writes.

As a small boutique, the store will stock mainly high-margin or high-end items—such as Kindle readers and accessories. It will also carry Amazon’s own published books, which will in part counteract the major chains’ decision not to carry them.

The store is expected to open before the end of the year to capitalize on the holiday season.

Interesting news, if true. But one swallow does not make a summer, and one store does not make a chain. As a commenter on a previous article noted, Amazon does a lot of experimentation. (I recall that its delivery drop lockers first rolled out in Seattle too.) But not everything that it tests necessarily goes on to see the light of day.

The popular BioWare video game series Mass Effect has had a series of spinoff novels, depicting events that take place elsewhere in the game universe simultaneously with the games. The first three of those novels were written by one of the games’ writers, Drew Karpyshyn. I’ve read them, and they told some very interesting stories, part of which formed backstory that was brought up in the first game.

But for whatever reason, the most recent novel, Mass Effect: Deception was farmed out to William C. Dietz, a writer who seems to write a lot of video game tie-ins. And all indications are that he did a poor job—fans of the game have compiled a 13-page list of inaccuracies, some of them rather major—in addition to inaccurate depictions of various alien worlds and species, one character entirely loses her autism, and another changes sexual orientation.

Subsequently, Christ Priestly, community coordinator at BioWare, issued an apology to fans for errors in the books. “We are currently working on a number of changes that will appear in future editions of the novel,” he wrote in a post to BioWare’s Mass Effect forums.

Though how they will do that without totally rewriting the book from the beginning is a headscratcher. As Gamertell writer Jenni Lada points out:

I honestly have no idea how Del Ray and BioWare are going to make this right. It’s not that there are just a few factual errors. There are whole scenes that would have to be rewritten to make things right. Gillian’s character might have to be re-examined in every scene to adjust her behavior. Either that, or a more plausible explanation will have to be provided for why she’s suddenly a normal teenager. I do get the feeling that it will be the last Mass Effect book written by Dietz.

As Lada notes, whatever BioWare does, the errors won’t be fixed until the next printing of the book. Of course, for the e-book version, those errors could be corrected as soon as BioWare finishes correcting them, by re-issuing the e-book—they wouldn’t have to wait for the book to sell enough to merit another printing. (Indeed, with the negative publicity and rash of one-star reviews, it’s hard to imagine anyone being willing to buy it now.)  It could even replace the erroneous versions customers already have, as was done with Neal Stephenson’s Reamde. It’s not clear when or whether BioWare will do this, however.

It’s really puzzling how a book with this many errors made it past BioWare to begin with. Even if Dietz couldn’t be bothered to do his research, didn’t anybody in BioWare familiar with the game world background actually vet the thing? Or was it treated more like a movie novelization where the important thing is to get the book cover out there to advertise the impending new game? Regardless, with BioWare already having to push the release date of Mass Effect 3 back repeatedly, the company probably didn’t need this additional black eye.

The Globe and Mail article characterizes this as a “setback” for Amazon, and quotes the Wall Street Journal that this is “sending a signal” to authors, agents, and publishers who might have been considering signing such agreements. It refers to authors “whose upcoming work will become inaccessible to the majority of North American book buyers.”

Say what? “Inaccessible”? “Majority”? I don’t think that those words mean what you think they mean. Going by Foner Books’s sales statistics, Amazon did more book, music, and DVD business in 2011 than Barnes & Noble, the late Borders, and BN.com put together. Seems like the “majority” of North American book buyers shop Amazon.

Anybody who has “access” to the Internet has access to Amazon. (Or, for that matter, BN.com, where Barnes & Noble will carry Amazon’s books.) And those who don’t should still be able to check the books out from the local library, which might lead to liking them enough to order them.

(Granted, there are some people who don’t—every so often in my day job I run across the proverbial little old man or lady who doesn’t have a computer or the Internet and so can’t download the manuals for our TVs from our website. But they’re considerably in the minority by now—and even if they don’t have Internet at home, they could place orders from a library or Internet café if they wanted it badly enough.)

Of course, there is something to be said for being able to run across the books while physically browsing a store. Losing that will be a disadvantage for Amazon, which might be part of why it’s rumored to be considering its own chain of brick and mortar stores. But on the other hand, the high-profile authors Amazon is courting will have a high level of demand independent of accidental browsing discoveries, which could help render that loss irrelevant.

(Found via The Digital Reader.)

Are there any services or business models in which one can trade paperback or hardcover books for digital books, without having to pay full price again?

After typing my answer, I thought it was interesting enough to repost here:

Not that I’ve ever heard of—or no model that is legitimate under copyright law, anyway. The idea has been suggested by a number of people as something that publishers should do as a way of getting a resalable physical artifact in return for giving out electrons that don’t cost anything to produce. They could then turn around and resell the used books and get compensation for them—the thing that doesn’t happen when second-hand-book stores resell them. Or they could destroy them in order to reduce the number of used paper books still floating around; whatever floated their boat.

Of course, there are a number of complicated rights issues surrounding this, so it’s not just as simple as publishers thinking it would be a good idea and starting to do it. They would have to renegotiate their contracts with the authors of the works in question to allow this, so I doubt it will ever actually happen. But it’s certainly a tantalizing idea.

In Japan, there are a number of commercial scanning services, called jisui, that will destructively scan paper books for consumers, then send them the e-book while discarding the paper. In such a space-starved nation, this method of reducing clutter has become a viral sensation though it is, technically, a copyright violation.

(The results in previous court cases suggest you have the fair use right to "space shift" your media if you do it yourself (though this has never actually been proven universally in court—an appeals court said it was all right to rip CDs to MP3s, but the record labels didn’t appeal this to the Supremes so no nationwide legal precedent has been set), but it’s definitely not legal for someone else to do it for you commercially. (Disclaimer: I’m a layperson, not a lawyer.))

Another drawback is that you do not receive an actual commercial-quality e-book; you receive the results of the optical scanning process, which can be far from perfect.

Unsurprisingly, Japanese publishers and authors have sent threatening letters to over 100 jisui operations demanding they halt operations until the matter of author compensation had been settled. In December, 7 renowned Japanese novelists and manga authors filed suit against two jisui companies.

One jisui company, Bookscan, expanded its operation to American shores under the name 1DollarScan. It is unclear whether any American publishers or authors have contemplated any action against it yet.

Meanwhile, a lot of consumers feel entitled to download illicit electronic copies of print books they already own, considering it to be the same thing as the space shifting they do of their CDs. Even a New York Times ethicist said it was kosher. (I wonder how many people actually know that CD ripping has never explicitly been declared legal in a way that binds the whole US?) But that’s not a business model, and it’s not clear whether we ever will even get one.

There’s a Books a Million store in Joplin, Missouri, and I stopped by it a few months ago. I wasn’t particularly impressed. Unlike Barnes & Noble, the store does not offer free wifi for its customers—you have to pay for it. (How last-decade.)

Meanwhile, Jason Calacanis reports hearing from “a very credible” (but anonymous) source that Amazon is going to launch its own brick and mortar retail stores. While the rumor has been around before, and on the face of it seems absolutely crazy, Jeff Bezos has done crazy things before and look at where he is today. And as the New York Times Bits blog points out, before 2001 the idea of Apple launching retail stores seemed far-fetched, but look at them now.

Jason throws out some ideas on what Amazon might do with the floor space—show you demonstration models then have you order the product from Amazon for shipping to your house, or perhaps provide a physical library for Amazon Prime subscribers in addition to the electronic ones. Whatever he does, it will probably have the same sort of unusual twist to it that has characterized a lot of Amazon’s new ventures.

The interesting thing to me is that, if this does happen, the big chain stores like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and of course Barnes & Noble could find themselves hoist by their own petards. They have been campaigning to strip away Amazon’s tax-free advantage. Having physical property—their retail stores—in those states in addition to their on-line presence means chains like Best Buy or Barnes & Noble have to collect sales tax on physical items sold on-line. Amazon hasn’t had to do that until now except in states where it has distribution centers.

But if they succeed in making Amazon pay sales tax everywhere, suddenly the only reason for Amazon not to put physical stores everywhere vanishes—and so does the one big advantage that the brick and mortars have: instant gratification. I bought a Logitech K360 wireless keyboard at Best Buy today for $30, though I could have gotten it for $25 from Amazon. (Well, $24.99, so I would have had to add another item to qualify for free shipping.) But if I bought it from Amazon, I couldn’t use it right now.

If Amazon stocks even just its more popular items in physical inventory, and offers bennies to Prime subscribers and other Amazon regulars, it could start to draw more and more people away from those other stores for immediate purchases as well as the ones that can wait. And as a fringe benefit, it would provide a place for online-ordering customers to direct their packages to be sent to so they could pick them up instead of having to be home for delivery—as Wal-Mart and Best Buy already do. We already know Amazon has had package pickup on its mind, what with the locker kiosks it has been placing in convenience stores in various locations.

Oh, and it would also provide a place where people could go to buy those Amazon-published paper books in person—the ones that Barnes & Noble and Books a Million are declining to carry.

Of course, there’s still nothing to suggest that this is anything more than another unfounded anonymous rumor. But if it does come to pass, wow. Amazon could shake the brick and mortar landscape as thoroughly as it has shaken the e-commerce one.

(Found via GalleyCat.)

Billy Ray Cyrus, singer of a particularly overplayed country song and father of Miley “Hannah Montana” Cyrus, has landed a book deal with Amazon’s publishing arm for his memoirs, GalleyCat reports. Publication date is expected to be spring 2013 in both hardcover and e-book editions. The deal was brokered by Trident Media CEO Dan Strone, who also arranged the $800,000 deal for Penny Marshall’s memoirs.

As that anonymous publishing insider lamented a few weeks ago, Amazon is lining up some pretty big names for its publishing arm. What with bookstores bound and determined not to do Amazon any favors by carrying its books, it looks like an immovable object vs. irresistible force confrontation may come to pass within the next couple of years. I wonder who will blink first?

McCrum discusses the dichotomy of paper archives and digitization. Thanks to digital copies of records, author Sarah Thornhill was able to do much of the research for a historical novel based on her ancestors without ever leaving her home. Her access was digital, but if the original records hadn’t been written down they wouldn’t have survived long enough to be digitized.

He also mentions the University of East Anglia’s acquisition of 50 boxes of written and typed matter comprising novelist Robert Edric’s archive of drafts and other material from the last twenty years. (I always find it interesting when that sort of thing happens. Apparently when you’re a successful writer, institutions will happily archive what you’d otherwise toss out.)

What about the paper-free society? My suspicion, reading Edric’s comments, is that many writers keep a personal archive of work-in-progress, and probably don’t throw away old laptops or hard drives. And the great archives, like the Bodleian and the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, now have departments dedicated to decoding digital material.

McCrum ends by suggesting Jonathan Franzen may be right about “the enduring power of the printed book”, but I don’t quite see that as following from the rest of McCrum’s piece. McCrum is suggesting there’s a future to look forward to for both digital and paper works, whereas Franzen is glad he’ll be dead by the time print is.

She also notes that teenagers lag behind other age groups in e-book adoption, pointing to a Bowker’s presentation that said teens like to do things socially and DRMed e-books are too restricted for the ways teens want to use them.

Nobody seems to have touched on one relatively simple explanation for why the percentage of e-book resistant seems to be growing—it’s that more and more people already have an e-reader, so the number of people who don’t want them makes up a greater proportion of those who don’t have them yet.

As much as we like to make fun of “luddites” who hate e-books, the survey shows there are a significant chunk of people who feel that way, and they’ll be with us (and influencing the book sales market) for a long time,

Mr. Lynn makes the case that Amazon’s dominance isn’t just a story of an industry disrupted by online commerce and digital upheaval, it’s about the abandoning of New Deal era protections of retailers in 1975 (promoted by backers as a means to fight inflation, says Mr. Lynn) and what he portrays as a shift in 1981 in the Justice Department’s interpretation of antitrust law based on “Chicago School” theories of efficiency and consumer welfare. The upshot appears to be that non-consumer markets (business-to-business markets and labor markets) are often insufficiently protected from monopolies.

Chicken growers are largely at the mercy of the poultry processors who buy their adult birds, who have a number of means to dictate the growers’ business practices. In Silicon Valley, Google and Apple had a private agreement not to poach each others’ employees. Even the 1,750 beer microbrewers in the US mostly sell through two distributors that control 90% of the market.

Meanwhile, Amazon has such tight control over the lion’s share of the book and e-book market that even the publishers who are the most vehemently outspoken against it will not go on record with their comments. It regularly throws its weight (and the weight of its $6 billion in capital) around, and publishers who do things it doesn’t like are prone to have their “buy” buttons removed for a while.

Amazon has such a big chunk of the market, the Authors Guild notes, that even the disappearance of Borders did not drive as much traffic to remaining brick-and-mortar bookstores as one might have expected:

To understand just how precarious things are, realize that last year’s Borders’ bankruptcy represented an enormous reduction in browsing space, shuttering 650 stores. (B&N has about 700 stores.) One benefit of the loss of Borders should have been a short-term lift to B&N’s 700 stores and the 1,500 or so remaining independent bookstores. B&N’s sales were indeed up in the nine weeks before Christmas, Ms. Bosman reports. How much? Borders’ collapse led to a bounce of just four percent, compared to the prior Christmas. That’s what’s passing for good news in brick-and-mortar bookselling at the moment.

The Authors Guild paints Barnes & Noble as the one bright spot in the market, which has managed to claw its way up to a 27% share of the e-book market over the last two years (roughly half Amazon’s current 60% share) and, the AG argues, largely out-engineered Amazon in developing usable e-reader and inexpensive tablet technology.

As a number of comments below the article point out, the Authors Guild is not exactly an unbiased source, and that does show through in the slant from which the article is written. (For example, a claim that “Amazon wanted to price every Macmillan e-book, and indeed every e-book of every publisher, at $9.99 or less” is demonstrably untrue.)

But still, Amazon’s market dominance ought to be a little worrying even to those who currently like the company. Competition keeps companies honest—if Amazon does manage to kill off all its competition, it doesn’t have to be so nice to consumers anymore.

(Found via eBookNewser.)

So, Carey said, if B&N customers want Amazon titles, they’ll just have to order them online at bn.com. Um, what?

Look, guys, if you’re going to take a principled stand, go all the way. Decline to carry the titles on your web store too. I’m sure there are plenty of books stocked in the web store that don’t end up in brick and mortar stores just for lack of space.

B&N is making a lot of noise, but then turning around and trying to have its cake and eat it too. I predict this principled stand will last only until Amazon comes out with a best-selling title that everyone wants to get their hands on. Then watch B&N turn around and carry Amazon titles after all, “bowing to overwhelming customer demand” or some such excuse.

[Site founder Eric] Hellman says Gluejar is in part a reaction to the changing role of libraries in the U.S. “We’re excited about the possibility of using libraries as our way to reach people who are interested in reading and want to support the production of books,” Hellman told me. With many big publishers either withdrawing e-books from libraries or refusing to make them available in the first place, Unglue.it could be a way for libraries to directly contribute funds toward their patrons’ most-requested digital titles. The company is adding features that cater to libraries, according to Library Journal.

The site is in its early launch stages, and still polling users about what books they would like to see it try for. Although the article mentions such titles as To Kill a Mockingbird, A Wrinkle in Time, or Little House on the Prairie as examples of not-e-book-available works the site is meant to license, Hellman admits that any campaign for popular, well-known titles of that nature is well off in the distance—such a work would be so expensive that it would be something the site would need to work up to. The site will be starting with a few campaigns for lesser-known titles first.

I am a touch skeptical that such a new and unorthodox approach can succeed, but I will be delighted to see them try. It’s so crazy that it just might work. I’ll be looking forward to seeing just what books the site decides to go after, and how many of them get successfully “unglued”.