miniTOC Portland provides an opportunity for Portland’s publishing and tech luminaries to share how they are forging ahead in the publishing/tech/content space. The best and brightest of PDX’s art, business, craft and technology leaders will be gathered for a day of collaboration and connecting around their shared love of the bookish.

If you’re in the area and want to attend, regular admission is $99, or $25 if you’re a student.

Via Joe Wilkert’s Publishing 2020 Blog

This is from an article by Nick Ruffilo:

Why won’t ebooks save publishing? E-books represent a format, just like hardcovers and paperbacks. Because they are a different format, they require different pricing. Things that are consumed and priced differently do open themselves up to a new market but unless that new consumption method is revolutionary, the growth (new readers) to the market cannot be large. E-readers will never be purchased by non-readers in the hopes of becoming readers (until they reach an extremely cheap price-point). The iPad is one such device that can create new readers. Its conceivable that someone who would buy an iPad and is not a book buyer, but because they can do so while sitting in their La-Z-Boy, will buy a book. If they like that book, they may even buy another. Ok. Now re-read that last statement. “If they like that book, they may even buy another.” If they don’t like the book, their sentiment of “this is why I don’t buy books” will be solidified. Another non-book-buyer remains a non-book-buyer.

According to Jamey Graham, Distinguished Research Engineer at Ricoh, RI’s technology is similar to that of QR codes, but uses the natural patterns of an object or a page as opposed to a barcode. "Over the last few years we’ve developed algorithms for indexing & recognizing visual patterns. Using an Android or iPhone device, readers can snap a picture of a region on the page (text or images, or a combination) and they will be presented with online material just as if they’d scanned a barcode."

Their first app will be paired with Matt Stewart’s novel The French Revolution from Soft Skull Press, but Ricoh has loftier goals in mind than just adding on-line annotations to novels.

TOC reports the company hopes to work with the Gates Foundation to create an app for Where There Is No Doctor, a village health care handbook, and distribute a smartphone containing the app along with a physical copy of the book to villages that have no doctors themselves.

McGuire started Book Oven with the goal of building books “in the cloud”, so that online collaboration would be easier, and the book would be more portable to different devices. But while pitching his system he encountered suggestions that “It would be great to have a tool that’s as easy to use as WordPress.”

That started him thinking. WordPress is familiar to most writers who blog, stable, open-source, and infinitely customizable. And pre-existing plugins already do much of what a book-publishing system would need.

But the system is more than just theoretical—it turns out that the Master of Publishing class at Simon Fraser University put together such a WordPress-based system and used it to create The Book of MPub, a collection of student essays available as a print-on-demand book or freely downloadable in PDF and EPUB formats.

A WordPress-based tool does have a number of advantages, including being open-source based (though the MPub students did also tie their system into the professional package InDesign for crafting the printed book), economical, and easy to learn to use. Hannah Johnson at Publishing Perspectives wonders whether its perceived “hacked-together” nature might be a turn-off to larger publishers, however.

There are far too many interesting observations to summarize, so I’ll just pick out a few to mention here.

Early on, Kroszer points out that “all publishing is already digital”—insofar as manuscripts are by and large now submitted electronically, rather than as typewritten or handwritten pages. But publishers are still using an old-fashioned print-based workflow, and there is room for some savings by going to a more streamlined digital workflow instead.

Later, Kroszer talks about emerging markets around the world. Piracy in these markets, she says, may indicate that there is a demand that is not being served—which is an opportunity to develop a viable marketplace in those markets. “I firmly believe viable marketplaces are the first line of defense when it comes to piracy.”

Near the end, she notes a distinct lack of participation by major trade publishers. Their representatives are attending the conferences, but not making the sorts of presentations on innovation or new initiatives that the smaller publishers are.

I get the need for big surprises and playing cards close to the vest, but as I lead into my final point, I think the fact that large trade publishers aren’t sharing information plays into a larger industry criticism. Where is the innovation? Where is the leadership? Individuals and small publishers are openly sharing their work, but where are the big publishers?

It is the actions by those trade publishers that we hear the most about—for example, when Macmillan’s insistence Amazon change its pricing model caused Amazon to pull Macmillan’s books. They are the ones who essentially make the news. Why aren’t they saying more at these conferences?

I suspect the answer has to do with what Charlie Stross said in one of the “misconceptions about publishing” posts I linked yesterday. The trade publishers are by and large run by (and hobbled by) megaconglomerates who hardly know the first thing about publishing.

They don’t have as much freedom to innovate as the more flexible, independent presses—therefore, they don’t have as much innovation to talk about. And since nature abhors a vacuum, it is the presentations by the companies that do have things to say that fill the gap.

This piece is an interview with Richard Nash, a theater-director-turned-publisher who has now launched a “social publishing” start-up called Cursor. Nash talks about Cursor and its goals, then goes on to discuss some of the broader implications of publishing meeting the kind of “Web 2.0” interactivity that is a hallmark of today’s Internet.

It’s a fascinating article, and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. After the jump, I will discuss it and bring up some supporting examples.

A Collaborative Cursor

As Nash explains it, the intent of Cursor is to create the sort of peer-review writing circles that should be familiar to anyone who has written amateur or fan fiction on the Internet. So far, these circles have more or less evolved naturally, when a ‘net writer finds a few fans whose opinion he trusts and starts circulating his material by them for opinions prior to releasing it. (I’ve been part of several such groups, as writer or reader.)

What Cursor plans to do is to make it possible to create that kind of collaborative environment—essentially, to identify or build a community around a writer’s work, then get that community as involved as possible in every aspect of creating that work.

There is scope, definitely, for more classic collaborative writing. We’ll certainly permit that. But our instinct at the moment is that most writers want to write what they write individually. That collaboration is certainly useful here and there. It’s a great writing workshop tool.

But basically, it’s designed to help individuals to write individual works. Part of what a lot of writers want is two or three or eight people, who they really trust, to be in an informal kind of writing group. We want to enable that for people. We see that as pretty key.

Monetizing Cursor

What the interviewer, James Turner, poses as the “$64,000 Web 2.0 question” is how to monetize this effort—and Nash points out all the ways that traditional publishing is failing to monetize what it is doing now, because they “capture such a limited amount of the demand under the demand curve.”

In other words, by selling only at the standard hardcover and paperback price points, the publishing industry is ignoring both people not willing to pay that much for what they see as disposable media, and people who would be willing to pay more for “special editions” and other benefits.

Though Nash does not mention this, and may well not even be aware of it, this lines up very well with what TechDirt calls its “CwF + RtB” business model, for “Connect with Fans (and give them a) Reason to Buy”. TechDirt lists a number of user donation tiers ranging from $5 to get a special badge on the user’s profile page up to $100,000,000 to “silence TechDirt” for a year. (I get the feeling they’re not entirely serious with the latter.)

A Reason to Buy

The model came about after observing similar practices that musicians Trent Reznor and Josh Freese used with releases of respective albums: tiered pricing schemes to purchase not just the music but a variety of extras (including, in Freese’s case, some rather zany ones). Checking Freese’s current blog entry (note: I couldn’t find a perma-link, so sooner or later that link will expire), it seems to have worked out fairly well for him:

I was having lunches, floating in sensory deprivation tanks, giving drum lessons, giving tours of Disneyland, writing songs/making videos about people, letting strangers take clothes out of my closet, giving haircuts, etc…

It really consumed me for a long time and got to be a bit much but just when I started to think "this is getting out of hand and why the hell am I doing this" I’d quickly remind myself that it was ME that got ME into this damn mess and that it’s actually a pretty cool job and worth all the hype and free publicity that I got while releasing my record (which was the whole point of it!)

So, getting back to Nash, there certainly is ample precedent for that kind of monetization scheme at the high end. And at the low end, as Nash points out, digital media has zero marginal cost, which means it is possible to make digital items available at a much lower price than traditional media.

And this, too, has been done before. The most obvious example is the way Baen prices most of its Webscription e-books at $6 each, or a whole month’s worth for $15—but a more recent, extreme example was DriveThruRPG’s giveaway of $1500 worth of gaming-related digital media in return for a $20 charity donation for Haiti.

Piracy and DRM

Nash has an interesting point of view on piracy, which would seem to put him at odds with a fairly significant portion of the publishing industry recently:

One of the depressing truths of piracy, in consumer books at least, is how little pirated our stuff is. I think it’s a terrible sign that there’s no piracy. It basically indicates there’s not much demand.

This reminds me of a piece that I covered a year ago—the Guardian technology blog suggesting e-books had not taken off yet because they had not yet had their “Napster moment”. In other words, there was not enough e-book piracy yet (though from the recent publisher uproar over piracy, I suspect they would beg to differ).

Regarding DRM, Nash notes that it is a problem when it causes hassles for the consumer—but if it doesn’t cause a hassle, the consumer by and large does not care.

So far, book DRM has been pretty crappy when you compare it to the seamlessness of the iTunes experience. The only people that really complain about iTunes, it seems, are people who have a deeper ideological position in terms of intellectual property, which I get, but it’s not shared by the average Joe on the street.

I have to agree. This is why I generally buy DRM’d e-books exclusively in eReader format—even when I know that I could (in theory) crack the DRM on other formats. I’d rather not have the hassle when eReader’s DRM simply does not get in my way.

Authors and their Fans

The next section of the article talks about how available authors should be to fans, and how much use they should make of fan assistance and collaboration. Nash feels that authors should pick one or two ways to stay in touch with fans and then draw firm boundaries, because it is possible to spend all their time interacting with fans but then not actually get any writing done. (Henry Melton would agree.)

Then he talks about “crowdsourcing” and to what extent writers should be influenced by reader feedback.

I think that the writers that are worth being passionate about, the writers that are worth being a huge fan of, are writers who listen carefully but not too literally to what their readers or editors are looking for. They respond to their readers out of some deeper personal instinct, that has a richer truth than the two-sentence comment that a reader or an editor like me might give them.

One thing I do note in all this is there is not any discussion of the sort of problem that can be caused by “listening too much” to the fans: most notably the cases of Marion Zimmer Bradley, who lost a book due to a conflict with a fan over fanfiction, and J. Michael Straczynski, who had to scrap a Babylon 5 script for a similar reason.

There seems to be a consensus among a number of writers that being exposed to a story idea from a fan opens you to a lawsuit if you should write anything in the future that happens to be similar in any way. It would seem that this would tend to put the dampers on much of that sort of “listening”. I wonder what Nash would say about that?

Disintermediation and Versioning

Next, Nash touches on one of the ideas (or perhaps pipe dreams) that has been getting a lot of attention: that authors could self-publish and be matched up with readers by recommendation services or critics rather than needing the services of a publishing house. Nash thinks that it could be possible, but there is not enough critical mass of books yet to give growth to the necessary ecosystem for those new recommendation services.

Traditional publishing, he notes, started out as a useful business of “putting books on shelves”. But as there became more and more books and less and less shelf space, it became much less effective and more wasteful.

So yeah, we have to figure out what it is that we are doing to deserve the reader/writer’s money. And fundamentally to my mind, that is about matchmaking. Okay, a chunk of it is editorial: developmental, copy editing services, classic old-school services. But those are basically services that I think of as being fee-based, rather than I-get-a-percentage-of-the-action based.

The conversation next moves into the possibility of pushing corrections and revisions to consumers even after an e-book has been published (which I touched upon here). It’s an interesting discussion. Nash feels there is value to preserving drafts of books so that readers can watch the evolution of the completed work. (Having read both the first draft and the completed versions of Sharon Lee and Steve Miller’s Fledgling project, I definitely agree it can be fascinating.)

Beyond that, Nash talked about what he was expecting to see at TOC, and how exciting it was that we were finally starting to reach a point where people were beginning to realize that some kind of change is necessary.

The Anti-Curmudgeon

Here’s a four-minute video from the TOC site of Nash himself talking about the nature of publishing and the web community. You’ll soon see why TOC calls him “the anti-curmudgeon”.

TOC is a rather odd duck in that I don’t think it quite knows who is eating its eggs. It is a mixture of low level, in the trenches, stuff and very high level thought pieces. This makes many of the sessions suitable for the worker bees and mid-level managers (for example those on copyright, the workshops on the first day). The dichotomy comes in when TOC goes with its keynotes. These are very high level sessions that are more suitable for upper management (for example the interview with Ray Kurzweil or Law is Not a Business Solution) who are more concerned with larger issues such a strategy and planning. The two don’t really meld.

The overall message being sent by the conference was inconsistent this year. Throughout the sessions publishers were being told that innovation was the key to success. Do things differently, do new things, think in new directions. But the message of the final keynote by Tim O’Reilly was that publishers will never win in the technology race and they they should do what they always do, but just do it better. Not what everyone else was saying.

Should you go next year? On the whole I would say yes if you are in management up to the mid-level. I do know from talking to attendees that people make a lot of contacts here, so if you are in a small business it might just be the place for you to meet one of the big guys you haven’t been able to get ahold of or to be able to find contacts to help you in the operation of your business.

As to specific presentations, three stand out in my mind as head an shoulders above the others. The first is Peter Meyers 10 Ways to Enhance Your iPad Books. This really was an eye opener when it comes to how to think about really enhancing books, not just enhancing them by adding a video. Second was Perseus Books Groups 10 Secrets of Digital Publishing No One Will Tell You. Some good stats and also some real insider info about what it was like to really do an enhanced book. It isn’t easy. And the third, which really should have been a keynote instead of a session was Michael Mace’s Check Out My Scars, Seven Lessons From the Failure of Ebooks in 2000. His discussion of the tipping point should be required reading, especially the part about how the publishers’ increase in ebook prices will bring the tipping point closer, as opposed to putting it off. They are inadvertently hurting themselves.

O’Reilly has been putting the sessions on the web and I would suggest you go to the O’Reilly site and see if the three I mentioned above are on line.

It’s not easy to be found in this new world. Big haystack. All of the top blogs today are publishers and publishing with one of these will get writer more visibility that they can get on their own. Even iPhone apps are having a haystack problem. Given this there will always be a role in society for aggregators, and this should be a core competency for a publisher. Getting authors known and distributed. Publishers must be excellent distributors. Publishers must have the capability to create products in new formats and sell it into new channels. Publishers extremely weak in SEO.

Social media marketing: you gain and bestow status based on those you associate with. More important to build your status rather than trying to push product. Use social media to build the status of your authors rather than just to push product. Just like with Google, a new breed of social media analytics are coming on board and should be used in designing your social network. There will be ebook analytics as well. An ebook knows it is being read and this will lead to a lot of interesting tools.

Should be doing a lot of pricing experiments to find what works. One nice thing about the agency pricing model is that it allows the publishers to experiment with pricing rather than distributors.

Social media is not about trying to sell something but is about trying to add value to community who cares about what you card about. The more you create value for your community the more value will redound back to you.

Arab publishing market behind western publishing, and its lessons also applicable to other emerging economies. 60,000 titles published every year. Arabic market is the size of the US.

Problems: distribution is still very primitive, In Egypt, 80% of books only available within 5 kilometers of publishing house. Censorship is still a problem. Three kinds: on purpose, self censorship and unconscious censorship. No viable OCR solution available in Arabic. International standards are a problem. Nobody uses ISBN numbers. They have them but don’t use them or any other international standard.

Industry is ripe to be entered and needs the major players. Mobile phones are everywhere, villages won’t have a library or bookstore, but will have 4 mobile phone stores. Would be an excellent book distribution system. PoD would work wonderfully in Arab countries and also to bring Arab books to the US.

Academics still want independent verification of quality, editing, typesetting, curation, branding. Pressures on academic community: expanding academic ecosystem and need more publishing services, governments and foundation wants to see impact for research they are funding. Pressures on academic publishers: technology driven changes require investment in time of global downturn, authors still want services and royalties and want “free at point of use”.

New business model: website will go live in April. Put plain book content on line in HTML under Creative Commons. Will sell printed book and in Epub. Also sell enhanced ebook, content with extra content to be bought individually or by subscription. Going to create an experimental lab on line, with tools for collaboration, added value, cc licensing and monetization. Not sure where it will lead. Problem is that this doesn’t reduce first copy costs, duplicates the worst of the distribution issues with too many middlemen. Wants to find new pathways for money that is already there. Look at library budgets and take a small amount and aggregate and create an International Library Coalition for Open Access Books. Consortium will aggregate funds to pay for first copy costs and publishers publish as open access content and can make money on POD sales and formats, etc. Can get cost of monograph ot $2/copy for any library who participates.

Consumer attitudes to ebook reading. Ongoing project. Very fresh data, completed survey last week and this is the first release to the public. Looked a print book readers who are moving to ebooks. Respondents had to have read an ebook. 95% confidence level, about 44K respondents.

Purchasing behavior: #1 reason to buy an ebook is affordability

34% acquired their first ebook within the last sixth months

Purchasers of ebooks are buying fewer hardbacks and paperbacks

47% read ebooks on a desktop, 32% on the Kindle, 11% on iPhone, 10% on iPod Touch, 9% on Blackberry, 9% on a netbook, 8% on the Nook, 8% on the Sony Reader, 13% on other

50% buy ebooks exclusively

When asked what would make you pay more for an ebook, 3 of the top 5 items related to social network features

When asked what the major benefits of ebooks were the top benefits were low cost, availability of free/promotional books

When asked if they would be willing to wait 3 moths for the release of an ebook after the release of the hard cover, 30% said not sure, 32% said would be willing to wait, and 25% said would buy the hardcover instead

When asked if DRM would change their purchase decision, 42% said maybe, 29% said no and 29% said yes

How to reconfigure books the way that modern brains have been reconfigured by the web and technology. All this can be done with current software. These are ideas that can be used to “enhance” a book in new and different ways.

The Colonel Fitzwilliam problem: keeping track of many characters in a book can be tough. Put into each book a “tap” that will take you to a quick summary of the character whose nome you tapped on. Enhancing doesn’t have to mean super multimedia.

Give me back my notes: for note takers, the current tools make highlighting and note taking easy, but it isn’t easy to find them later. No easy way to browse notes on current reader. Build into the book a simple browser for all notes and highlighting.

Shiny, happy poems: for poems create an interface that is fun to play with by shining light on interesting content- need to see the slides to understand this. Makes sense when you see it on the screen.

Table of contents: current state of the art is that toc is boring and limited. Can use it to improve a books browsability, and inspire the reader to jump to interesting parts of books. Use the toc to draw the reader into the book rather than just provide info. Use an “inspire me” button, for example in a cookbook, to take reader to something new.

Create bite-sized entertainment: create “books” that are full of short stuff that are like reading Twitter and Facebook.

Tune in, next week: from the sitcom format publishers can take the “hooks” that drew people back time after time. Short story given away for free and then charge for a new story each week, like a continuing sitcom series. Combine stories and tweets, for example.

New media, new messages: how about IM-inspired fiction as a base for a book. Chat fiction.

Active scripts: developed a way to read a stage play with extra information flowing along side of the action.

Sidebars and footnotes: make this an active part of the book rather than a pain. Allow them to inject themselves into the text, for example a footnote challenging the claims of the author could push the author’s words off the screen and display an alternative view.

The point is to take “standard” elements of the book and use them on the iPad in ways that would be impossible in a normal book or on a plain text reader like a Kindle.

Surveyed their independent publishing clients. What is most significant focus in 2010: ebooks, social media and direct consumer were highest top 3.

What percentage of your titles will be ebooks in 2010: 30% less than 10%, 50% half or more made into ebooks.

What are barriers to your ebook entry: highest barrie is poor fit of titles with device capabilities 43%, piracy 37%, retailer pricing 37%, cost of conversion 35%, confusion about technology standards or processes 34%, poor handling of color 34%, cost of conversion 35%.

Planning on windowing? 43% plan to release e and p at same time. 30% wait and see, 8% window, 11% experiment with windowing.

What format do you use: 40% PDF, 20% epub, 30% all, 12% azw, 21% other.Piracy: 25% unconcerned, 20% fairly small problem, 20% dangerous, 20 % unsure, 6% requires a technical fix

iPad, what do they think: 40% too soon to tell, 37% will be a significant reading platform, 30% reading will be secondary on the platform

Agency model, do you prefer? 50% unsure, 25% yes at 70%

Price points for ebooks: no fixed pricing 41%, $10 to $15 30%, 20% $15 to $19

General presentation: Perseus has created a number of “enhanced” ebooks. Takes a huge amount of work and requires an incredible mix of talent. Large learning curve. If publisher uses third party developer can be extremely expensive.

Digital product can complement paper product; for example in travel books you can publish segments of the guide as stand-alone books. For example, from a France guide you can take out museums of Paris and issue this as a separate digital book. In travel books when did separate apps sold 10K in a few months.

Ebooks perfect for speed and timeliness so have digital books ready for breaking news.

On pricing must monitor pricing before and after publication, unlike old model when only looked at pricing before publication. Must consider version pricing and dynamic pricing. Pricing is no longer static.

Devices: devices will keep changing and even those that fail are important because they may have features that will succeed. Look at your ebook on various different devices because publishers don’t always consider what the consumer sees.

Quality assurance is the new editing and it’s 10 times harder. Test title on each device, test what happens to rendering at each font size, test each live link, test each functional action, test product discovery, test purchase, give it to a newbie and re-run, who will the consumer complain to if it doesn’t work properly?

Fail better: got to be willing to fail, the new is almost always unprofitable to begin with and will be inefficient in the early stages.

Some titles will resist digital: some books will never work in a digital format.

Kurzweil presentation on Blio: enabling factors in place for ebooks. Blio is free ereader with free and for pay books. With audiobooks combine audiobook with the text book. Can synchronize highlighting on the text with the audiobook. Can use text to speech to do the same thing if don’t have an audiobook. For textbooks include auxiliary website material directly into the book. Connect directly from a book to Wikipedia, dictionary definitions, highlight material, take notes.

Conversation: For Blio what is the authoring environment: have an authoring tool that makes it easy to put stuff in. Underlying format is web based. Will be a lot of magazines doing it and ads can change after publication sold.

Are there performance rights with TTS: expect few problems because publishers afraid TTS will take away from audiobook sales and here can combine the audiobook with the regular book. May be premium versions of books, just like with DVDs. Their DRM contract will allow user to use the book with multiple devices. Talking to some retail chains, manufacturers and publishers about incorporating Blio into books, themselves.

What’s your position on DRM: It’s up to the publisher. Blio will not take the lead on that. What will ebooks do in the future: will be radically new business models in the future. Blio has powerful ways to search for free material.

How about the pace of technology: Technology will continue to increase faster and faster and the pace will always increase. It is very predictable. Our intuition about the future is that it is linear, but the progression to the future is exponential. By 2020 the cost of a computer that can simulate the entire human brain will be $1,000.

Does the status of the book change when we have access to vast amounts of information in 20 years: book is not a matter of paper, but a way of thinking and presenting thought. That art form will continue for a long time.

What are your personal reading habits: favorite novelist is Gabriel Garcia Marquez who is a great example of hierarchical thinking. Read the classics in my field.

What’s it going to look like in 5 years: web will take over everything including our minds. Virtual reality will come to the forefront. Ultimately will be able to do virtual reality within our nervous systems using nanobots. Augmented reality happening now. Will routinely be on line all the time.

What are you thoughts on artificial intelligence if don’t understand regular intelligence: the exponential growth of knowledge about the human brain will give us the understanding we need fairly quickly. Hundreds examples of AI already exist – diagnosis, stock trading, JIT inventory contol. Started working on AI exactly 50 years ago. Health and medicine has become an information technology. Will soon be able to update the software in our genes. Medicine has been progressing linearly but now will be able to progress exponentially.

What about data gotten from ebooks: allow the capture of tremendous amounts of data about people and how they interact with reading. Books will be integrated into the body and will no longer be carrying devices around. Will happen in 5 to 10 years.