But even so, most of the remaining booksellers don’t seem to subscribe to the gloom and doom going around that e-books are going to kill bookstores altogether. They think they have at least a good chance of sticking around for years to come.

The article discusses the possibility of holiday sales giving independent bookstores a boost, and actions bookstores are taking to try to alleviate some of the most pressing non-Amazon problems facing them (such as high parking rates that don’t give shoppers sufficient time to browse). It also goes into ways bookstores are looking at surviving in the long term, such as diversifying their inventory to add non-book items.

Of interest to telereaders is a section on how the bookstores are dealing with e-books, which a number of stores are finding their customers are starting to buy.

But meeting the new demand for e-books isn’t straightforward, says Frances Smith of Warwick Books and Kenilworth Books, who thinks independents need far greater support in their efforts. "We should be able to sell e-books but no one has been able to tell us how we can physically do it, or how we can make any money. At the moment it’s just not worth the candle." Jo de Guia of Victoria Park Books agrees that the days of independents selling e-books are some way off. "We’re far from technophobes and we’ve looked at it very closely, but the profits as they stand are tiny and the upfront costs make it totally impossible."

Apparently for UK bookstores, selling e-books alongside print books could be some distance away.

The bookstores also report seeing “hit and miss” support from publishers, complaining of the discounts publishers offer to the bigger chain stores, and the higher prices that result (so that publishers can offer those discounts and still make money). Others report having good relationships with and support from publishers, however. The stores seem to have similar mixed feelings about the Booksellers Association, which seems to have to support the supermarkets that are causing them problems as well as independent shops.

The article closes with ten survival tips for independent bookstores, which mostly seem to center around getting involved with customers and learning what they want, then stocking it.

We are in a time of transition for bookstores of all kinds. It’s hard to predict how many of them will survive, or what they will look like if they do. One thing to consider is that the UK seems to be at least a couple of years behind the US in development of its e-book market. I would expect that if UK booksellers want to know what the future holds for them, they should be looking west across the Atlantic to get some clues.

An excited author of mine downloaded the Nook PC app and bought a copy of his e-enhanced book this weekend and was hugely impressed (The London of Sherlock Holmes hyperlinking to Google Maps). I tried to do the same, and indeed also tried to download the exciting new Nook iPad app too so I could see how the new book works on the iPad. Apparently the world according to B&N doesn’t stretch too far.

Barnes & Noble’s North America-centrism has also caused problems for self-publishing authors who live outside the US. Diane Duane would have published some works through B&N except that “I can’t publish directly into the Nook store because I don’t have a US bank account, so the heck with you until you sort yourself out, B&N.”

One would think that, as much as bookstores have been financially struggling lately (including B&N itself, which tried putting itself up for sale but couldn’t find a buyer), Barnes & Noble would be trying to expand into international markets before its competitors could completely own them. But I suppose the company must know its own business best.

Nigel Roby, m.d of The Bookseller Group, said: “It is not that TBD’s acquisition creates a sudden, new, anti-competitive position; it is rather that it is the straw that broke the camel’s back. If Amazon is in a stronger position to demand better terms from publishers, this could also have a knock-on effect for independents and smaller chains if publishers seek to maintain revenues.”

Via The Bookseller

This time last year, there were reports that nobody was going past the registration page (not even print subscribers with free access), with one person guesstimating that less than 30,000 readers had subscribed to the website or the iPad app.

Although this may be good news for The Times, it’s not necessarily proof that such a strict model is the best business strategy. By contrast, The Financial Times—which lets you read 10 articles before paying—a year ago reported 149,000 subscribers; last month, it claimed to have 224,000 digital subscribers.

(Photo: nicksarebi)

Fletcher calls back to the Metro article on piracy I mentioned here, and suggests that high pricing might be a contributing factor. He brings up the example of a Jeffrey Archer novel that is priced at £9.99 (£11.99 MSRP) for the Amazon Kindle e-book—but £5.39 (£7.99 MSRP) for the paperback.

Right now, publishers are stinging – or as Fraser more succinctly puts it gouging – eBook customers. I completely understand that there’s costs involved to produce an eBook version of a work. However, when you’re no longer smashing together some (entirely physical) pulp, pressing ink onto it, and shipping it some place, the idea that a premium should apply simply fails logic. The idea of paying substantially more for a digital copy of the exact same text can only be one set up by a publishing house who’ll next year announce stagnant eBook sales – most likely as a result of people looking to buy digital texts thinking “Screw this, I’ll buy the paperback cheap” or resorts to nefarious means.

He suggests that to avoid piracy, publishers should launch books globally from day one (the Harry Potter books do prove it’s possible), and they should be priced commensurately with paper versions. (Publishers had promised this was going to happen when they imposed Agency Pricing, but there seem to be a lot of cases where they just aren’t hitting that goal.)

At the moment, some British publishers do permit library lending (via e-book lending distributor Overdrive), others do not, and HarperCollins is “not ruling out” the same sort of 26-loan limit that its US division has imposed. Some UK librarians have said they would really like to be able to offer the sort of Kindle-based lending that Amazon recently announced for US libraries.

The place e-books have in UK libraries is complicated by the fact that the Public Lending Right—the UK government-funded system that pays authors whenever a library lends one of their books—has not yet been extended to e-books. (In fact, the PLR was a target for elimination in the UK’s latest round of budgetary discussions. It survived, though not without cuts.) So if someone “checks out” an e-book, the author is not paid, whereas he would be if they checked out a printed book.

It remains to be seen just what place e-books will end up having in libraries as printed books diminish, but these talks could be important in determining how they go over the next few years.

Interestingly, one of his supporting arguments does not involve e-books, but the inverse—companies that sell print books, like Amazon or the Book Depository, are cheerfully shipping print books around the world in response to Internet orders, meaning that local publishers can lose out on sales to publishers from other parts of the world.

He believes trade publishers must learn to buy and sell works globally “in order to manage the global portfolio and optimize sales and author royalties. Without this change, the book may indeed be dead –- with it, then long live the global book.”

The piece ends up by suggesting “that young kid with the specs and funny mark on his forehead on Bloomsbury UK’s list might have an answer.” Indeed, the Harry Potter series was bitten by this trend early in its release, as American fans who couldn’t wait weeks or months for the next book to come out in America imported it from the UK instead. Consequently, starting only a couple of books into the series, the books were released simultaneously world-wide.

But even now, some American fans will continue to import the UK editions, since the US versions feature some Americanizations that purists find annoying (starting with the decision to change “philosopher’s stone” to “sorcerer’s stone” in the first one).

Regardless, it’s nice to see a publisher (and a fairly major publisher at that) acknowledge that the current territorial model needs to change. Perhaps sooner or later it will.

Benedictus suggests that some defenders of libraries might be doing so less out of a belief in libraries’ intrinsic beneficence than a moral obligation to defend endangered species, and many of the benefits of libraries can be found in e-book readers.

The talk of a future in which children cannot access books is also not just wrong, but backwards. E-readers—already available for £52, and falling—offer an incomparably more convenient way for anyone to find good things. While defending libraries, surely there is also time to promote the fact that, thanks to Project Gutenberg and Google Books, every child in the country can now download virtually any out-of-copyright book for nothing. (Piracy will doubtless do the same for most in-copyright books too, as may digital lending, though this is less cause for celebration.)

I know that my Dad—a former librarian himself—was astounded by just how many books are available via Project Gutenberg, and I have little doubt he will get more than the worth of the $60 he spent on the Kobo out of reading books from that vast repository.

I’m a little hesitant to suggest that e-books can replace vanished libraries, but part of that might just be my respect for a long-lived existing institution talking. I know that I’ve gotten to the point where I view paper books as unwanted shackles to a reading experience I would rather have on a portable device or a computer screen, and I’m a lot more likely to let a library book I’ve requested and checked out sit around for weeks unread than I am to take the time to read it.

Sites like Project Gutenberg help to replace the “classics” section of a library, but the new-titles section is a bit harder. As Benedictus notes, peer-to-peer can make up for it, but only to people who are willing to undertake the risks and complications associated with using it, and to the detriment of writers.

Perhaps some kind of digital lending library could be created after the Overdrive model, that would lend books to people regardless of geographical location, but I have a hard time seeing publishers going for that—especially if the “26 lends per purchase” model adopted by HarperCollins gains traction with other publishers.

UK writers think that a new publicity campaign is needed to educate people on why “stealing” books is wrong. (Clearly they’ve observed the success that those obnoxious, patronizing PSAs Hollywood has tacked onto theatrical movies have had—because naturally the people who pay to see movies are actually all thieves, who will stop their stealing if only asked in the most insulting way possible.)

And then there’s this little gem:

Novelist Chris Cleave, author of The Other Hand and Little Bee, agreed. “I don’t blame anyone. They don’t do it [download books illegally] because they are evil but because they don’t understand,” he said. “In the music industry, when the price of music went down to zero – as it arguably now is because of filesharing – artists didn’t mind that much. My music friends love it because they can make money through gigs and merchandising, they can put their faces on T-shirts. But I’m not a rock star and I don’t have that as an option. If readers lose the habit of paying me for my work, I can’t work. Writing is how I make my living.”

The price of music is now “zero”? That must come as news to iTunes, whose 99-cents-per-track music sales have made it the biggest seller of music in the US (or even the world?). Indeed, since music became available at a 99-cent-per-track price, one study has shown that the rate of music piracy has actually plummeted by comparison to other media piracy, making up only 10% of overall BitTorrent traffic (by number of files, not bandwidth). That’s not likely due to any publicity campaign, or even necessarily the RIAA’s habit of filing thousands of file-sharing lawsuits, but because people can now buy what they want in high quality at a reasonable price. (Hey, publishers, are you listening?)

Of course, the same study shows that books make up only 1% of content on BitTorrent.

And piracy is okay as long as it happens to music but not books? I don’t think it’s exactly fair to say that “artists didn’t mind that much” either. Remember the Metallica “Napster BAD” backlash?

To be fair, writers have been seeing fees decrease over the last few years, what with the decline in advances, agency pricing reducing their take-per-book of e-books, and budgetary crises chipping away at the Public Lending Right (which doesn’t cover e-books and audiobooks as it is). But not every, or even necessarily most people who download a book would have bought it (or will even necessarily ever read it).

And some publishers and authors tar second-hand book stores with the same brush. Any time one of their already-sold books changes hands perfectly legally, they’d like to be paid. I would like to see authors get paid for their writing (I have some good friends who are writers!), but I just don’t feel this sort of thing helps the publishing industry’s image. Lest we forget, the depiction of record labels as a bunch of money-grubbing bastards contributed immeasurably to peer-to-peer users’ feelings of entitlement to pirate.

Perhaps most interestingly for the UK publishing industry, 61% of the people who got e-readers for Christmas had downloaded a paid-for e-book, and the average new owner bought 5.9 e-books. This suggests that 10 million e-books could have been sold in the UK since Christmas—compared to 18.6 million print sales. That’s a lot larger chunk than the 5% of the market e-books have been said to occupy, but the level of sales will probably decline and average out over the rest of the year as some new owners decide e-books are not for them.

On a larger scale, market research firm Yankee Group expects global e-reader device sales to grow from $1.9 billion and 11 million unit sales in 2010 to $8.2 billion and nearly 72 million units in 2014, with the total worldwide installed base of e-readers doubling each year—12 million in 2010; 127 million in 2014

Furthermore, the firm suggests the average price of e-readers will drop from $182 in 2010 to $114 by 2014.

Of course, analysts’ guesses are often not worth the electrons they’re printed on. Still, whether the specific figures are accurate or not, it was already pretty obvious that e-reader sales are set to grow explosively over the next few years, so these predictions are not exactly a big surprise.

Jane Streeter, President of the Bookseller’s Association, notes that wholesalers could have an important part the process by providing the “back office” functions of managing the actual downloading process and helping retailers improve often-obsolete websites. When Google Editions launches in the UK, it could be the indie bookstores’ salvation.

[Indie bookseller Patrick] Neale, who is a former Waterstone’s manager like so many UK independents, said he had been “wowed” by what the ABA has done with Google and will now be lobbying the BA for it to do the same. “Thanks to the agency model, price is less significant -– so why shouldn’t you buy an e-book from your local indie? It’s opened the door for us and we’re very excited. I’ve now banned anyone who works in the shop from saying “I prefer print. It’s more a case of there being a good time for each format.”

A few UK indie booksellers are more skeptical, however, pointing out problems posed by the market domination of major players like Amazon, and an expectation that e-books will only end up being a minor proportion of the overall book market. Others point out the odd irony inherent in the fact that agency pricing seems to be the old Net Book Agreement by another name—and that the very same print publishers who clamored for the NBA to be thrown out are the ones who’ve enacted it on e-book pricing.

I’m certainly in favor of anything that can save more bookstores, but I have to wonder whether the Google-style wholesaler/retailer arrangement will be the life preserver these stores are expecting—or just another straw at which to grasp.

However, critics are still skeptical. Labour leader Ed Miliband calls it only a “partial U-turn” (isn’t that kind of like being “a little bit pregnant”? A “partial U-turn” is just a turn!) and points out that the announcement is rather nonspecific, as it does not say anything about what amount of funding will be provided.

Hopefully the government and Booktrust will be able to come to a satisfactory arrangement to keep allowing the program to give books to kids and help support child literacy.

It has been no secret that funding for libraries and similar programs has been under siege in the UK as well as the US during the last year or so, and just now Neil Gaiman retweeted this unpleasant news from the website of Booktrust, the foundation behind Bookstart:

Booktrust had notification on Friday 17 December from the Department for Education that funding for all our English bookgifting programmes (Bookstart, Booktime and Booked Up) will be cut by 100% from 1 April 2011. Please note that this news applies to England only.

We are immensely surprised and disappointed by this decision and know that families, teachers, librarians, health visitors, our publishing partners and many others up and down the country will be sharing these feelings. We passionately believe in these programmes and the proven extraordinary transformative power of reading for pleasure.  We will be consulting with our partners and exploring alternative funding opportunities to do our utmost to make sure that every child continues to be given the opportunity to develop a lifelong love of books.

It is really disappointing to see the forces of literacy take another hit from the slings and arrows of the poor economy. Hopefully the organization can find other ways of continuing its mission.

The idea is that reading prose aloud tends to be more natural and conversational than simply reading lists of words, and also Mr. Tickle includes some words that have interesting variant pronunciations, like “mischievous” or “extraordinary”.

Readers can take part in the project at the British Library website, or by using an Audioboo mobile app. The website includes a downloadable or printable copy of the book, and instructions on how to tag the recording.

(Found via ReadWriteWeb.)

Doctorow writes:

Fundamentally, the question News Corp is trying to answer is: "Will the Times make more money with a paywall?" And the figures we’ve just seen do nothing to answer this question. Rather, the Times seems to think that the new figures prove something else: "People are willing to pay for their news." I don’t think that anyone has ever disputed that someone, somewhere, was willing to pay for the Times, though: surely the important question, from a business perspective, is, "Will adding a paywall increase your profits?"

Part of the problem is that the Times does not break down its digital-only subscriber figures to say how many of those subscribers are actually buying full subscriptions, and how many are only buying individual articles or trial months. About the only other figure the official spokesperson gave was that there were 50,000 current monthly subscribers, and that if someone had subscribed for 3 months already, they were 90% likely to subscribe for a 4th.

Doctorow comes up with a best-case and worst-case scenario for the number of subscribers based on what he was told.

I don’t know which one is closer to the truth, because the Times isn’t saying. But I do know that when there was a positive number – more than 90% renewal at the third month – the figure was readily available, which leaves the distinct impression that all the undisclosed numbers are less than stellar.

He also points out that site traffic to the Times’s web site has fallen off by about 99%, from 20,000,000 hits a month to 200,000. The Times thinks it can overcome this reduction in traffic with higher advertising rates, but it remains to be seen just how valuable these paying users are going to be to advertisers who tend to measure success in terms of total number of eyeballs. And The Times also isn’t saying just what those higher rates actually are, save to the advertisers themselves.

Overall, Doctorow is skeptical about how good the Times’s sales can really be, especially as reticent as they are being with their overall sales figures. (They even opted out of national, industry-standard circulation audits.) As for how good or bad the real figures are, Doctorow notes, “Only the Times knows, and they’re not saying.”