Why, in a world in which choice and personal preference are highly valued, would any college want to create such a mandate? Because it makes a bold statement about the importance of moving education into the future. It is, in a sense, only a step removed from saying, “We no longer accept theses on scrolls, papyrus, or clay tablets. Those artifacts do still exist in the world, but they are not the tools of this institution.” Or: “In this institution we have abandoned the slide rule. Those who find it useful and/or comforting can, of course, use it, but not here.”

Prensky describes a process of transitioning a university and its students from rigid books to essentially an enhanced reading and studying experience, citing the many additions to a text that are possible with ereading, from web links and multimedia, to commentary on text and/or its preparation, to networked discussions.  It would be the professor’s job to decide what enhanced material was useful and relevant to their students and curricula.  He describes the process as transformational as well as educational, as significant as moving from the slide rule to the pocket calculator in the late 20th century.

Also notable is a comment about the outgoing technology, books, that I’m not sure I’ve heard put this way before.

Third, and I believe this to be the greatest advantage, ideas would be freed from the printed page, where they have been held captive for too many centuries. In addition to being a dissemination mechanism and an archive, the physical book is, in many ways, a jail for ideas—once a book is read, closed, and shelved, for most people it tends to stay that way. Many of us have walls lined with books that will never be reopened, most of what is in them long forgotten.

A commentary worth checking out in its entirety.

This old model for publishing was modernized with the addition of cryptographic assurance layers by cryptographers John Kelsey and Bruce Schneier, who started their examination of intellectual property business models with a deep pessimism about the long-term technical viability of digital rights management systems. Kelsey and Schneier dubbed their system “the street performer protocol” in tribute to a friend who friend who had travelled Europe earning money with bagpipe performances. Presumably, the friend found that he could earn more money by passing the hat before or during a performance rather than after.

Street Performer Protocol is a fund raising method designed to support the free release of a creative work. The creator agrees to release the work only after a threshold amount of money is pledged by supporters. For this reason, the method has been termed a “threshold pledge system“. Kelsey and Schneier describe how a third party, who they term the “publisher” can provide supporters with a layer of assurance that the creator will live up to his end of the bargain if the threshold is reached; otherwise, pledges are refunded to the supporters.
Another term that has been used for systems of this sort is “ransom publishing”, which is particularly apt when an author gives away the first few chapters of a novel, but holds the rest of the chapters hostage until a suitable ransom is paid by readers who want to read the cliffhanger ending.

Somehow I doubt that a cryptographic assurance layer would have helped much with Mozart’s concertos. Nor do I think that Mozart would have had much success giving out the first movement before asking for contributions.

What might have helped Mozart a lot, however, would be a market.

Markets function by bringing together many buyers, many products, and many sellers. If Mozart had been able to offer subscriptions to every music lover in the world, and those music lovers had easy access to all the composers in the world, Mozart would have been a very wealthy man.

Web sites that attempt to create markets for creative work around threshold pledge systems are definitely a trend. Kickstarter is perhaps the best example- They provide opportunities for creative people to solicit support for worthy projects. In many cases, the creators provide benefits for people who have supported their work. Another example is FashionStake, a website which lets ordinary people support fashion designers by pre-ordering designs before they hit stores. Supporters of successful projects thus get special access and special prices for the latest designs from the world’s top designers.

Kickstarter and FashionStake share several characteristics. The number of projects available for support is not huge; there are selection filters that have a side effect of preventing significant competition between projects. Also, there is an assumption that projects will not be executed if the threshold funding is not reached. The incentive to keep the threshold price low is that projects priced too high will not achieve their support threshold, and thus won’t receive any funding at all.

I’ve been thinking about how to apply threshold pledge systems to the sponsorship of open access for ebooks. I believe that with some modest but essential innovations, a sort of threshold pledge market could become a powerful economic force in many segments of the ebook business.

The first innovation would be to create a market that covered ALL books. According to the Google Books team, there are over 100 million books that can be identified in the world; a relatively small fraction of them are out of copyright, and an even smaller fraction of them are available as open-access ebooks. Why not let people sponsor any and every book they cared about?

Note that these books have already been written and published, so the sponsors are not being patrons of artistic creation, as in Kickstarter, FashionStake, and Mozart’s concerto subscribers, instead, they are posting a reward for conversion to open access. It’s wrong to think of this as “ransom publishing”- a parent doesn’t kidnap their own child! A better way to think of it is posting a “bounty” for the delivery of the ebook into a Creative Commons compatible license.

A second innovation follows from the first. If you allow the posting of a bounty on any book, then a lot of books will get only minimal sponsorship. Many of these books may be “orphans“, without known rightsholders for the public to purchase ebook rights from. The only way to keep sponsorship dollars from sitting unused is to allow them to be posted to many books at once. The first book to claim a bounty would take home the money.

Multiple commitment of sponsorship dollars has two interesting effects. First, it magnifies the impact of sponsorship dollars. An commitment ratio of 100 to one allows 10 million dollars of support to look like a billion dollars offered to rightsholders. Smart rightsholders who participate at the right time could walk away with sizeable rewards. Second, multiple commitment puts rightsholders in competition with each other for sponsorship dollars. If two books share many sponsors the bounty for one book would go down significantly when the owners of the other book decide to accept their posted bounty. Rightsholders are thus discouraged from waiting too long for sponsorship dollars to build.

None of this will work if sponsors don’t get something for their money. It seems to me that the released ebooks should include some sort of recognition text, but maybe just loading the sponsor’s devices automagically with released ebooks would be enough. Given some format validation, the released ebooks would slide easily into Google Books, OpenLibrary, Feedbooks, other places- LibraryThing, GoodReads, WeRead, GetGlue and devices/apps- Kindle, Kobo, Nook, iBooks, Ibis Reader. Perhaps most importantly, the released ebooks could be curated and preserved by libraries around the world, something that can’t happen properly with today’s copyright system. That alone would be enough to get me to participate.

Mozart would approve, I think.

Editor’s Note: I’m pleased to welcome Eric Hellman to TeleRead.  Eric is a technologist, entrepreneur, scientist and writer. After 10 years doing research at Bell Labs, he founded Openly Informatics, a linking technology business that was acquired by OCLC in 2006. Over the last year, he has been blogging about ebooks, libraries, and technology at Go To Hellman. PB

Online piracy of ebooks has been a persistent worry for book publishers who look at the successes and failures of other media that have moved to digital forms. A surprising number and variety of ebooks are easily availabile on file sharing websites and peer-to-peer networks that use bitTorrent and similar protocols. The possibility that this availability will cut into sales of licensed ebooks and even print books is a scary one for an industry that has had many decades of relative stability. At Digital Book World in January, Brian Napack, President of Macmillan, “delivered a passionate call to arms for publishers to fight piracy in the ebook space or risk permanent damage to the underpinnings of publishing as a commercial enterprise”.

Adding to the ebook piracy hysteria have been studies of the prevalence of ebook piracy produced by Attributor, a company that sells anti-piracy services. I’ve previously written critically about Attributor’s report that purported to find evidence that “Online Book Piracy Costs U.S. Publishers Nearly $3 Billion“.

In their most recent report, Attributor has taken a rather clever approach to the measurement of ebook piracy. Instead of trying to track downloads, Attributor has begun to use Google Trends to gain an understanding of consumer demand for ebooks. Although there are many potential difficulties in using Google for this purpose, Google Trends is a powerful and useful tool for gaining insight into the things that web users around the world are looking for.

Attributor presents their data along with an alarming narrative of growing and pervasive ebook piracy, and points to the iPad as a contributing factor to an increase in demand for pirated ebooks. After playing around with Google Trends for a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that Attributor has narrowly selected data to fit their narrative; taken as a whole, Google Trends data broadly supports a rather different narrative: that the growth of consumer interest in pirated ebooks slowed significantly in 2009 and stopped in early 2010.

To understand how Google Trends informs the debate about the prevalence of ebook piracy, it helps to understand what activity is being measured. Google Trends measures the frequency that search terms are used. A consumer looking for a free copy of a particular work will typically search on the book title, adding terms like “free” or “download” or “pdf” to locate downloadable files. A more sophisticated strategy, one that is quickly learned, is to add the name of a preferred download site. If the user prefers peer-to-peer networks, the word “torrent” can be added to locate “seed” files for the item. The file sharing sites most commonly used for this purpose are currently RapidShare, Megaupload, 4shared, and Hotfile. To use Google trends to measure the demand for a pirated ebook, you give it keywords that reproduce these searches. For example, demand for Stephanie Meyer’s book Breaking Dawn can be assessed with a query such as this one.

To assess the overall state of ebook piracy, I used data from this query. Note that since the search is for ebooks generically, there’s no telling for sure that the ebooks being searched for are really pirated; for the purposes of this study, I assumed that none of the ebooks being searched for are legally available on these sites. Calling them “pirated books” may be inaccurate, but I’ll use that term anyway.

Some features of the data are immediately apparent. First of all, searches for pirated ebooks have increased a great deal over the past 5 years. It’s worth noting however, that the most intense interest measured by Google occurs in India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, and eastern Europe. Less than half the search volume comes from the US. It’s also easy to see seasonal peaks that obscure the shorter term trends. The peak periods for pirate ebook seeking are the December holidays and the beginning of September, presumably because of the start of school.

To eliminate seasonal variations, I computed the year over prior year growth of pirate ebook search activity. The resulting plot is quite smooth. After a few years of 100% per year growth, 2008 showed a clear slowing of growth. This slowing of growth continued up to the beginning of 2010, and then flat-lined. Since February of 2010, the growth of interest in pirated ebooks has stopped completely.

It should be noted that this stabilization has occurred during a period of strong sales of ebook reader devices, including Kindle, Nook, and the iPad. Indeed, the unveiling of the iPad was coincident with the stabilization of demand for pirate ebooks.

It’s hard to know for sure what’s happening, but one interpretation of these patterns is that a broad increase in consumer-friendly availability of properly licensed ebooks over the last 2 years has squelched the growth of demand for ebooks from illicit sources. In that light, the remaining demand can be interpreted as a sign of poor availability for appropriately priced ebooks on college campuses and in developing countries.

While this data has to be seen as an encouraging sign for the book publishing industry, it’s too soon to know if it will last. It’s entirely possible that too-high prices, cumbersome DRM, or new technologies could reinvigorate the demand for illicitly shared ebook files. For the moment at least, the book publishing industry can exhale.

We will experience 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century, if today’s rate of information technology change continues. Information technologies double their price performance over a single year. Moore’s Law, baby! Communication technologies, biological technologies, are all increasing. The size of the internet in terms of bandwidth usage and pages hosting is exploding as well. Kurzweil predicts that we’ll put screens into our eyeglasses and view screens at any magnification we choose, looking at eContent, augmented reality applications, and web content.U.S. education expenditures have increased exponentially too, which Kurzweil connects to more of an investment in training on technology. (I must disagree with him on this. Schools have very poor technology investment in general. And expenditure increase has not seen any connection to increase in performance or graduation rates, so throwing more money at the problem won’t help. We need to fundamentally change our approach to education.)

People are still asking for more text-to-speech capabilities, books read aloud to them, and more flexibility. He demo-ed Blio, an eBook Store with a million free eBooks: http://www.blio.com. It’s out for the PC now, and they’re building iPhone & iPad, Android, and Mac versions now. Looks a lot like other eBook Stores with covers, reviews, publisher info, etc. Downloading the book preserves the original format, page by page — anything with a rich graphical format benefits from this. You can preview pages, turn the pages and they flip as with a printed book, use reference tools, magnify, etc.

There needs to be a social compact that people will respect intellectual property rights. The technical means to break them exists, but the respect to not break them is the key. Kurzweil stresses that “it’s not cool to take intellectual property without paying for it.”

The graphs from Kurzweil’s presentation on the evolution of many things can be found at http://www.KurzweilAI.net/pps/KurzweilPowerPoint/

The subscriptions for iPad launched by La Repubblica and Il Corriere della Sera (to only mention the firsts) represent a publishers’ attempt to explore a new market, trying to gain new readers by taking advantage of the commercial potential of this touch tablet. That is the reason why this year several newspapers (and also magazines) became iPad-ready, so that now we are able to purchase a digital edition, delivered to our device. Although this is not a local phenomenon, but a worldwide trend, there are two facts I would like to point out, in order to better analyze the effectiveness of “iPad system” in Italy.

The first consideration deals with the “audience” of iPad editions. An iPad costs 499 euro (at the least), not really a cheap mass solution to read newspapers, except for those who already use this tablet for other purposes. Furthermore, the Italian public opinion is largely shaped by TV, making the demand for news very “passive”, except for those who actively search for alternative information out of mainstream logic. There is no doubt that going on the iPad is an inescapable fact for traditional newspapers, but iPad subscribers already are part of the “active” portion of digital consumers: in other words, they are people who probably read newspapers everyday, or definitely quit paper editions to autonomously assemble the news they look for.

Those people certainly are the real target of the iPad editions, just because they could have the willingness to browse newspapers in a new way, without forgetting that digital subscriptions are cheaper and easier than paper ones. But to what extent can this lead to a sales increase? If we think that early iPad adopters already buy newspapers (also on line), they won’t significantly contribute to increase newspaper sales, but rather iPad sales. The fact itself that iPad editions are “revolutionary” is worth discussing. In fact, even if the Apple tablet could potentially offer great chances of evolution for journalism, on the other hand current iPad editions are still too close to paper ones in their form.

The second consideration deals with the idea of “application” and its relationship to e-newspaper circulation. We know that Apple incessantly reinvigorates its huge “applications walled garden” by releasing new applications for its customers. Thus, an e-newspaper becomes an application designed for one device, and once again we could assume that any evolution of newspapers driven by iPad would only take place in the Apple walled garden, among people who own iPad. If the Italian newspapers will not start to think their digital editions more opened and “global” for portable devices (such as smartphones and e-readers), not restricting their business to only one platform, they will only promote the Apple model without gaining a significant growth of their revenues.

Bring newspaper readers into a walled garden is not the ideal solution to create a mass market for digital editions in Italy, just because reading on iPad is a new experience for advanced consumers, not for common readers. When this “explorative” phase will end, Italian publishers will have the necessary elements to work for standard applications to distribute their contents.

The real revolution is yet to come.

Editor’s note: I am very proud to add Alessandro Cecconi (pictured above) to our growing list of international contributors. Here is his bio:
Alessandro Cecconi was born in 1981 and graduated in 2006 in Communication Sciences from the chair of Multimedia Publishing of La Sapienza Università of Roma, discussing the thesis “E-book: the state of the art”. He continued to do research on e-books, and together with Valerio Eletti in 2008 published the manual “Che cosa sono gli e-book”, starting to teach lessons and seminars for La Sapienza Università di Roma, Palermo University Medieval Department and AIE (Italian Publishers Association). After a M.S. in Instructional Technology for Distance Education, earned from La Sapienza and Nova Southeastern University of Fort Lauderdale, he currently works as instructional designer.

My autumn Levenger catalog was received with bright-eyed fanfare this week and borne with anticipation over to ‘the writing couch‘. I reserve a few quiet moments each season to drool over the immaculately-designed, perfectly-balanced pens and muse inwardly on the various notebooks and book bags for which I harbor strong inclinations of purchasing. This particular catalog is always so craftily put together… and so in a way that lifts it out of the ‘everyday’ category into the realm of Elegant Enticement Merchandise. The layout folks garner a good chunk of my respect as I browse the pages for the scenes pictured are not ‘perfect’; the neatly-organized desks therein harbor a bit of scribbled notepaper or a whimsical stack of books in partial disarray, complete with a set of spectacles as if they were just discarded on the way to answering the front door… things which speak to business-folk, writers, readers and casual shoppers alike.

However, this issue was distinctly different than those I’ve previously thumbed through, mainly that in among the books, pens, notebooks and leather office accessories I spotted no less than ten iPads. Some of the uber-svelte devices lay on lap-desks, reposed on custom ‘charging stations’ or peered out from the rounded edges of book-bags. I also saw one cell phone, two blackberry-type devices, an unknown eReader and a Palm in a pear tree. Aware already that iPads are top on many folks’ Christmas lists, I still wondered if the sheer number of the devices present in the catalog wasn’t a visual symptom of “If-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em-itis, causing the pen-touting company to attempt to marry ePens and ‘real’ pens into one, solid literary consortium. The Levenger website also has a tote/bag section devoted to the device, titled “iPad-friendly“.

Whether the iPad will continue to be quasi-universally accepted or not, I admit that the device sure looked like it belonged on the desk next to a stack of books and a comfy chair, its bright screen peeping coquettishly from a messenger bag (the one I’ve had my eye on since last year) it’s ready-to-move packaging–next to the traditional comfort of sitting with a book–silently invoking a quandary for the viewer, rather reminiscent of the 80′s song “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”

Curious, I looked around the Net for more catalogs in which the iPad showed up recently, especially where no device had ever been featured as prominently. Apple must not had made a deal with Pottery Barn as I found naught but generic laptops and desktops pictured on their ‘home office’ webpages; I found the same went for Sears, World Market and Target, though the latter did picture an iPhone-like device on a desk in a charger. I looked all over the IKEA website for an iPad but still no dice; perhaps they pictured one on the IKEA app… if not, then I’d call that delightfully ironic.

Apple may be missing out on influencing present and future consumers by limiting iPad catalog cameos. Perhaps REI or Campmor would feature iPads for campers if Apple came out with a solar-powered charging station that had some rugged/waterproof qualities to it. Nothing is quite like hearing a story read aloud by the ol’ campfire, making young children inadvertently forget about the dark scary woods encircling the camp and listen with rapt attention. My father read ‘The Lord of the Rings’ to us from a worn, fabric-covered set of paper books instead of on a battery-powered gadget, but the times they are a-changin’.

If I ever purchase an iPad, I might buy a well-built desk to go with it, if said item comes with a device-charging station built in… or, I may just use that same money to buy some Levenger items (one good messenger bag, two excellent pens and five quality notebooks) and still have money leftover for a new battery-pack (for my yet-functioning laptop) a warm coat and winter boots on eBay, enough organic seeds for the spring planting and one hundred hardback books via a year of yard sales.

Via The Author’s Weblog

Take ereaders. Ereaders like the Kindle, Nook, and Kobo are popular right now. They are nifty. You can download books, you can click from one page to the next using buttons instead of fingers. They are lightweight if you’re the sort to carry a library with you. But is that it? I found the Kindle’s note-taking functions disappointing, especially when I wanted to transfer my notes to my computer. Turns out, proprietary concerns over copying content take precedence over the provision the simplest of digital functions, copy-paste.

When doing research, I need to capture and tag web content; I can do that using Delicious or Zotero. I want to do the same when reading newspaper and books. I might have a great idea when driving my car or talking with a friend; audio recordings should factor in. Video content will be useful when watching television, attending a concert, or walking in nature. Software needs to answer back to these original complex needs defined in the physical world.

I see some trends in this direction. Here are three examples. One, an application called OneNote is Microsoft’s attempt to create a unified repository for multiple sources and formats of information, both on and off the web. My first question is whether it allows for integration of non-Microsoft products. Two, Ricoh’s Visual Search and iCandy application allows users to point their device at a print medium and extend it with digital information. It looks very cool. Three, and perhaps most compelling, a study by Latitude (2010) asked children 12 and under to suggest new digital technologies. Thirty-eight percent of the children’s innovations called for more immersive content experiences, or seamless integration of digital and physical spaces.

These ideas and technologies are intended for a complex world, one in which digital information is understood to be a complement to other physical formats like print, human conversation, and natural phenomena, and in which speed and efficiency are complemented by quality and depth and integration of information in its many forms. Rather than trying to replace physical interactions and artifacts with digital ones, people are trying to make connections between digital and physical modes. It is a step forward.

Editor’s note: the above is reprinted, with permission, from John Miedema’s blog. PB

In December 2009, however, she tried something different: she self-published her new book The Merry-Go-Round, which had at one time been in the hands of a large publisher (more on that below), through Amazon’s Kindle Store. Now it’s also available through Smashwords, BN.com, Apple’s iBookstore, and KoboBooks, and a print version could be hitting Amazon’s virtual shelves as early as this month.

I spoke with Fasano about her experience with self-publishing, where suddenly the author has to do everything from prepress to customer service, and whether she plans to do it again.

Why did you self-publish The Merry-Go-Round?

[In the mid-2000s] I sold Where’s Stanley? to Harlequin Next, and my editor liked it so she bought two more women’s fiction novels. It took me some time to write those two novels, and The Merry-Go-Round was one of those. The other manuscript was called Hindsight.

By the time I finished those two manuscripts, the Harlequin Next line had folded, so they returned the rights to me. But this took about a year’s worth of time because they purchased a lot of inventory, and they were trying to slot some of the books and put them in other places [within Harlequin's lines].

For many authors, like myself, the books didn’t quite fit anywhere else, so they returned them to us. I was trying to decide what to do with the book and didn’t like the idea of it sitting gathering dust, so I decided to try Kindle.

What did your agent think of this move?

He read The Merry-Go-Round and Hindsight and he said they were too… they were written for Harlequin, they’re women’s romance fiction novels, and Harlequin is very specific in things like word count. When women pick up a Harlequin, they know what they’re getting. So he felt that he wouldn’t be able to sell them anywhere else, unless I did a lot of work to them. And I liked them just the way they were.

So I didn’t ask my agent. I just did it. I mean, he freed me up, he said he didn’t know where to send these, so he was okay with me doing whatever I wanted to do with them.

So how did you choose Amazon and what was that experience like?

I knew absolutely nothing. I probably Googled “upload my manuscript as a Kindle book” to try to find some information somewhere, and that’s where I learned about Amazon’s DTP [Digital Text Platform].

It took quite a bit of time because I had to read two different formatting guides. I had to do everything. You know, formatting, cover, blurbs, everything, which is very different for me. A writer usually just writes the manuscript and sends it in, and then starts thinking about the next book.
Then I learned about Kindle Boards. [Kindle Boards is an online community of Kindle readers and writers. -Ed.] I went there and the writers there are just wonderful, just so helpful and supportive, and that’s where I learned about Smashwords, and that through Smashwords I could offer my book for sale in other venues.

When did you do this?

I believe I uploaded my book to Amazon in December ’09, and I did absolutely nothing for several months just because I didn’t know what to do.

It was after that, probably in January or February that I found Kindle Boards, and slowly but surely I have been improving the marketing of the book. I’ve changed the cover twice and worked on the product description a couple of times, and I’ve done interviews for blog writers. I feel so out of my element because I don’t do this part, I’ve never done this part. It’s been very exciting but very different and difficult.

This explains the different covers I’ve seen depending on the store.

The evolution of a cover, December 2009 to July 2010

Yes. The very first cover is the orange one, and that was my very first cover that I made and I was very proud of it. (Laughing). But the book was not selling, and a Kindle Board author–Karen McQuestion, who just had her book optioned for a movie–said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I don’t want to be insulting but I’m wondering if your cover is hurting your sales.” She explained that at first glance it looked like a children’s book. So I licensed a couple of pictures and put another cover together, and it was much better but I don’t think it was professional looking. So the cover with the large carousel horse and the couple in the oval–that’s the newest one. And it’s brand new.

Have you been able to measure how the different covers have impacted sales?

Well it’s difficult to tell, but I can tell you that once I took the orange cover off and put the second cover on, my sales tripled. However, it’s difficult to say that it’s just the cover because I also was contacting all these blogs and offering reader copies for reviews and I just started to do things, I started to do marketing.

How did you handle tasks like copyediting, layout and design? Were those things already pretty far along because of the past deal with Harlequin Next?

Actually, Harlequin hadn’t edited it, so I read it and had a writer friend read it.

[As for formatting,] Smashwords has a formatting guide and Amazon has a formatting guide, and also there’s a Kindle Board author named Edward C. Patterson who has a formatting guide, and I read that too.

A reader sent me an email saying she found seven or eight typos in there, so I fixed those typos and then re-uploaded it. So it’s an ongoing process.

Are you going to offer it as a printed book at any point?

Yes. I just uploaded The Merry-Go-Round to CreateSpace. In fact, the proof copy is in the mail to me.

So it should be available in a month or two?

Oh, it won’t take that long at all. I was absolutely shocked. I just uploaded that book this week and the print copy is already coming. I just have to go in and click a button if the proof is okay, and then they’ll put it up for sale. So it may be within days.

Looking back, it seems you’ve been in a crazy, compressed learning phase for the past six months.

Yes I have!

How would you describe it?

It was fun. It was exciting. (Laughing.) I am very lucky to be married to a man who earns enough money so that I am able to do this, because the money’s not anything like the money that I made at Harlequin.

But have you seen ebook sales trending up each month?

Very much so, yes.

Does this mean you’re prepping Hindsight for self-publishing as well?

Yes!

In fact, I’ve gone further than that in that I have contacted Harlequin and got the rights reverted to my first eleven books. [Usually, after a book remains out of print for a certain length of time, the rights revert back to the author. -Ed.] But I don’t have electronic files of those books so I’m scanning them in and turning them into Word documents. I’ve never done anything like that before either, so I’m learning all kinds of new things.

I’m going to do everything. (Laughing.) I’m going to do it all!

Having experienced all this, do you think you’d go back to a traditional publisher in the future if the opportunity was right?

I haven’t thought about it. (Thinks.) If I could sell both, I would. I’m not in a place right now where I’m creating new stories. But I could see myself [in the future] submitting my work to a publisher. I love publishers, and having somebody else do your marketing for you is great! And proofreading, and editing–all of that.

How did you settle on a price for it?

I started out at $1.99. J. A. Konrath on his blog said that was a good price. There are some indie authors who sell their work for 99 cents, but because I have twenty years’ experience and I know I can deliver I felt it was worth a little more than that.

So I started at $1.99, then Amazon changed their royalty payment schedule, so I increased my price to $2.99. [On June 30th, Amazon announced an opt-in royalty program that provides much higher royalties on Kindle books, but requires a minimum price of $2.99. -Ed.]

I’d love to jump 10 years into the future and ask a writer whether running the business side of things has a negative effect on creative output. Is it too early for you to gauge that right now?

It probably is too early, but I can tell you that I spend a lot of time [on non-writing activities]. The readers on the Amazon discussion forums and on the Kindle Boards, they don’t want me to just go in and say, “Hey, buy my book!” They want me to come in and chat and get to know them.

And can you do that?

I’ve been doing that, but if I didn’t currently have [extra time], I wouldn’t have very much time to write. I could spend all day online, because there’s Goodreads, and LibraryThing, and Kindle Boards, and MobileRead. You know, everywhere you go, there are readers!

Finally, do you own a Kindle? If so, what’s your experience with it been like?

Oh, yes! And I have about 50 books in my TBR pile.

I love my Kindle because it enables me to carry all my books around–all the time. I’m a big reader and I have always carried a paperback everywhere.

I love books! I love the feel of a book in my hands. I love the tactility of turning the pages. Books just feel warm and inviting and comforting. That might sound strange, but books were an escape for me when I was a kid.

At first, I didn’t think I was going to be able to get used to the metal of the Kindle. But I found a way around that–a leather cover. (Laughing.)

I believe there will always be a place for print books. But I also believe that, in these techno-savvy times, the e-book is here to stay… and it is destined to grow. I’m very happy to be a part of this new… hmmm, not sure what to call it. Age?

Editor’s Note: this is reprinted with Chris’ kind permission from his blog Kindlerama. We previously published an article about Donna here. The offer in that article still stands. PB

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights just finished meeting in Geneva. One of the main topics of discussion was a treaty proposal that would standardize copyright exceptions around the world to benefit blind readers. While there was strong support for the treaty by NGOs and many national governments, there were also competing initiatives put forth by the US and the European Union. Apparently the meeting ended in something of a stalemate.

While the stated goal of the treaty is laudable – readers with disabilities should have equal access to the written word as non-disabled readers – there has been little discussion of how copyright exceptions might impact the ebook market. The premise of the treaty is that publishers are not making books accessible to the disabled, so other organizations should be able to do so without the permission of the copyright owner (see the Chafee Amendment for the US exception), as well as share books with other countries, which the US law doesn’t address.

Concurrent with all this, disability advocates are pushing for commercial ebooks to be accessible (there are several Teleread posts on this). And the DAISY Consortium, which promotes accessibility, is now fully intertwined with the IDPF, and thus ePub (note: there is a piece of assistive technology for the disabled called EasyReader that now reads unencrypted ePub aloud). So the question becomes, is an international treaty that promotes copyright exceptions in conflict with the desire to see the commercial ebook market become accessible?

The answer is yes, and one example as to why can be found in comments made during last years Kindle TTS blow-up. Several authors who opposed Kindle’s unregulated TTS pointed out that disabled readers already had ‘access’ to their works thanks to the US copyright exception. The point is, even though a particular book may not be available in an accessible format, authors had already donated the rights to do so – the ‘exception’ has become the rule.

As Telereaders know from experience, the ebook market is currently a crazy quilt, barely accessible to the average consumer. If readers with disabilities and their advocates want the ebook market to embrace them, they must embrace the ebook market, which may mean backing off the push for an international treaty. As indicated by the results of the last SCCR meeting, its not looking like they will be able to have it both ways.

Seems easy enough to grasp this concept doesn’t it? But the oligapolistic powers that dictate e-book prices seem to disagree strongly with this logic. In a heartless move which seems to only further stoke my anger against publishing giant Penguin, it has decided to price this e-book in a way which guarantees that it will see limited electronic distribution. If one wanted to read this book at Amazon it would cost $13.99, at Barnes and Noble $13.99, at Kobo $19.99. E-books are supposed to lower the opportunity costs for buying books, not raise them or maintain them artificially high. Fortunately, I read a paperback version of his book that I borrowed from my local library.

I am glad that I did. The ideas, histories and field stories that he brings forward are eye-opening and gut wrenching. I became quickly disillusioned as I read accounts of mothers tending to their children in Sub-Saharan Africa as they died of measles. A type of needless death which was even more heartbreaking to read about once he explained that it would result in the oral and nasal expulsion of intestinal worms. The power of his research is clearly there and should be read by as many people as possible. This is where lower prices are a boon, in their power to increase the potential for purchase, which in turn increases the likelihood of readers being spurred to action.

I quickly looked up a charity which he mentioned that combines the Internet’s informational capabilities and marries it with developed nations’ citizens’ ability to donate funds. This charity –which I strongly advise interested readers to look up- is called “globalgiving.org.” On their site you will find real world projects which you can directly fund, ensuring that the people whose dire needs most appeal to you are addressed. It is a simple idea which could gain even more attention if one of its most vocal advocate’s words actually reached readers. I have always opposed needlessly high prices for digital content on simple consumer grounds but must now extend my objections to include its ability to stop the dissemination of vital information. There must be a balance between honest profit making and obstructionism. I for one believe that there are certain works –such as Mr. Easterly’s- which must be read by wider audiences. Any pricing strategy which disregards consumers clearly stated pricing proclivities is an obstructionist one. I hate to repeat the mistakes of the past with the powerful tools at our disposal now and in the future. We have a powerful opportunity to bridge immense gaps with new tools which must not be so easily squandered. Unfortunately, Penguin’s pricing strategy indicates that they are clearly set on ensuring that this will remain the way things are done, for many years to come.

I’d like to think that I’ve matured, but it’s probably more likely
that I was swayed by social trends alongside getting older. I remember
being a kid and dreaming about having a house someday with a library
that would rival Neil Gaiman’s – that’s the motivation behind keeping
all that stuff, but now, as an adult thinking about buying a house in
the next few years, I dream about a Spartan dwelling wired with media
access devices, but no physical media.

And I don’t think it’s just me. People are embracing e-books, digital
downloads, streaming, and other non-physical methods of media access.
These things get more prevalent every day.

I think people are coming to realize that physical media, under all
that pretty, colorful packaging, is just a portal to an experience. If
you own a DVD, you own something physical: a plastic disc in a pretty
cardboard and plastic holder. If you watch a movie – you have an
experience. While plastic disc peddlers have done a damn fine job of
creating the link in our minds between the experience of a movie and
the movie’s physical media, the more digital becomes the norm, the
more that link is shattered.
And rightly so.

Maybe I just make a bigger deal of things because I like to believe
the world is a complex and interesting place. Maybe it’s not – it
could really be that digital is just cheaper and more convenient and
that explains most, if not all, of digital’s popularity. But I don’t
think it’s that simple. I think there is a paradigm shift in our
perception of what media is – and now, with digital getting more and
more popular, the notion that media is an experience (an event, i f
you prefer) is much easier to divide from the idea that media is a
plastic disc or a paper book. Maybe books are a slightly different
case because the act of reading is an important part of the
experience, whereas opening a DVD and loading in a disc is more
negligible.

But no matter what, you can never repeat an experience. Of course, you
can try by owning the media that gives you a portal to a quantifiable
portion of the experience.

But that time you watched Garden State with a girl and then kissed her
for the first time on her couch? Or sped down a dirt road in the
pounding rain with the windows down, soaked the to the skin, quivering
with young lust and listening to Coldplay’s Yellow? Or that sunny
cicada summer you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in
your car, eating hot french fries, after class and before you had to
go to work, in those glorious stolen hours?

You’re never gonna get those back even if you buy the physical media.

I’d like to think people are seeing that idea – but maybe it’s easier
to Netflix something from the couch than to waddle down to the local
Wal-mart to buy a copy.

Hard to tell.

I had a thought today after reading of Barnes & Noble’s new iPad app, which allows customers to loan/borrow purchased books. I haven’t heard whether the annotations go along with the lending, but it strikes me that academics needing to cite locations in ebooks and those interested in annotation technology both need a way to refer to locations within electronic documents.

The problem for academics looking for citation conventions is that we’re all used to page numbers, which give us a way to identify a location manually by flipping through pages (or by hunting for a letter or other archival document within a file folder). Do we really need that sort of human-navigated location specificity? If we can search for text inside a document, we certainly don’t. But the reference format is needed, and I think there would be an easy way to create another convention that would serve both academic purposes and ereader technology:

371324/3/1346372044/139823463

What’s that, you ask?

location/file number (within envelope, 1 if no envelope)/file size/file checksum (using some conventional algorithm)

Given a particular edition (i.e., uncorrupted file in a recognized format with a file size and checksum), this would give a precise location. With a different edition, the approximate location within a file and the first part of the quoted passage should be sufficient for finding the passage quickly. Let’s call the three numbers a brief spot location reference and the numbers plus the quotation the spot location reference. What if you’re referring to a passage?

371324-375241/3/1346372044/139823463

I know I’ll be torn limb-from-limb by my fellow historians, until I point out the following:

371324-375241/3/1346372044/139823463/
When Patto/d her hat./
This passage shows the protagonist’s commitment to blah blah blah yadda yadda yadda./
Sherman Dorn/20100527080312-0500

That’s the range reference, the first and last ten characters of the (theoretical) passage, annotation text, annotation author, and timestamp of annotation. And there, ladies and gentlemen, is a format for annotating electronic materials. It does not require changing the EPUB format, just tracking a file of annotations and ereader software that can put the annotation in the right place (the start and end of the passage for disambiguation). They can be shared, accumulated, analyzed, etc.

There may be important reasons why this wouldn’t work, but I can’t think of them at the moment.

Editor’s Note:  this is reprinted, with permission from Sherman Dorn’s blog.  PB

(SEE earlier story).

Amazon Kindle forum members noticed the new Penguin Kindle books were disappearing from sight again, and this is the norm after an Apple-type “Agency model” agreement is made based on Steve Jobs’s arrangement with the Big5 publishers, a requirement for them to use his iBookstore, and their agreement is that no pricing at other online e-bookstores can be below Apple’s pricing with the Big5.

Before coming back online with the generally higher pricing on new books, Amazon servers must reflect new pricing on all Penguin e-books and Amazon will add a disclaimer on each Penguin e-book that the publisher now sets the price.

According to Publishers Weekly, “Penguin has settled its differences with Amazon and its frontlist e-book titles should begin appearing in the Kindle bookstore no later than Monday, CEO David Shanks and publisher Susan Petersen Kennedy confirmed in an interview Wednesday morning at BEA.”

DIRECT LINKS to PENGUIN and PENGUIN-RIVERSIDE ONLY:
Penguin Kindle Books
.  By Publication Date
.  By Bestsellers

Penguin-Riverhead Kindle Books
.  By Publication Date
.  By Bestsellers

PENGUIN HARDCOVERS
In the meantime, a few newer Penguin hardcovers that Amazon was selling for $9.99 until the newer Penguin Kindle books come online permanently (until the next pricing war) are still available too, probably for another day, since they priced them lower as a measure compensating for Penguin’s not allowing the Kindle-book versions to be available until the new contract was completed, but Amazon has begun changing some of these already.

Thursday night, the hardcover of Roger Lowenstein’s The End of Wall Street” has a full price of $27.95, and Barnes & Noble’s website is selling it for $20.12.  On Amazon, it’s $9.99 on 5/27 – $10.95 on Amazon.   The price went up immediately after I wrote this blog entry, so I’ve corrected it.  Strangely, it’s still less than Barnes & Noble’s pricing, so the Apple iBooks store must be at $10.95.
Or there’s Annie Lamott’s Imperfect Birds — $25.95 full price, $18.68 on Barnes and Noble, $11.69 $17.13 on Amazon.  The price went up immediately after I wrote this blog entry, so I’ve corrected it.

The hardcover pricing may not have to match the Apple Agency-model pricing by Monday, but I don’t know whether they’re part of the new book pricing model or not.  I do know Amazon lowered the pricing to make some newer books available to customers at a lower cost during negotiations on the new Agreement and will bring the pricing back up now that the Agreement’s been made.

So, if you’re interested in getting any Penguin or Penguin Riverhead (Annie Lamott et al) hardcover books at the lower prices, take a look.

Be aware that only a few of their hardcovers are priced as low as $10 though.

Again, here are links to hardcovers for just Penguin and Penguin Riverhead.