Trade eBook sales hit $5,100,000 for November 2008, a whopping 108.3% increase over November 2007, according to Michael Smith, Executive Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). Smith cited stats gathered by the Association of American Publishers. Calendar Year to Date Revenue is also up a robust 63.8%.

The figures obviously reflect a Kindle boost, but what is even more encouraging is that in a month in which pre-holiday print book sales slumped miserably, e-books flew high.

Just a reminder that:

* These are wholesale revenues reported from 13 participating Trade Publishers
* This data represents United States revenues only
* This data represents only trade e-book sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
* This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
* This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
* The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
* The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is “All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices”
* The IDPF and AAP began collecting data together starting in Q1 2006

The stats we’re all waiting for are December, when we’ll know just how e-book sales fared against book-books during the gloomy holiday season.

RC

The Nokia cellphone you buy will Come With Music. The capital letters are intentional: purchase of the phone entitles you to unlimited downloads from a catalogue of more than five million tracks, according to Eric Pfanner of the New York Times. “Comes With Music” is the name of the benefit that comes with your purchase.

This is the latest ploy in the music industry’s war on pirates, and of course we’re not necessarily talking about an organized cabal of evil offshore thieves, but also about garden variety citizens who simply can’t understand what’s wrong with ripping a CD, even though the accompanying text has one of those funny (c) symbols next to the song title, composer or performer.

Does this mean the music business has finally surrendered to the Music Wants to Be Free Army? Not at all. When you buy that Nokia, the price of the “free” music is built into the price of the gadget. “Two thousand nine should be the year when the music industry stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb,” Pfanner quotes Feargal Sharkey, head of UK Music, a trade group for the British music industry.

The Nokia scheme is just one of a number of strategies employed by the music industry to counter piracy. You can read about others in Pfanner’s Music Industry Imitates Digital Pirates to Turn a Profit.

The same issues confronting music are operative in book piracy, and the Nokia approach may be appropriate for manufacturers of e-book reading devices as well. But it is the polar opposite of what might be termed the “King Gillette Strategy”. Gillette, the genius who invented disposable razor blade and founded the shaving products business named after him, exhorted emulators to give away the razor and sell the blades. Nokia is selling the razor and giving away the blades.

Which is the better business model? Though disposable and electric razors rendered the question moot, when it comes to music and literature I’m with Gillette.

Richard Curtis

Though I’ve done my best in my Publishing in the 21st Century blog to explain the arcane practices of the publishing industry and the mysteries of the creative process, I don’t think I could produce a better or more succinct (3 minutes 37 seconds) summary than the one displayed on YouTube ascribed to Macmillan’s digital staff. Nor do I think I could produce anything wittier. It’s so so completely deadpan you can’t spot the bulge of the tongue in cheek.

April Fool’s Day three months early, but who cares? A great spoof is a great spoof any time.

RC

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!

- William Wordsworth

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!–Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,
When most intent on making of herself
A prime Enchantress–to assist the work,
Which then was going forward in her name!
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise, that which sets
(As at some moment might not be unfelt
Among the bowers of paradise itself)
The budding rose above the rose full blown.
What temper at the prospect did not wake
To happiness unthought of? The inert
Were roused, and lively natures rapt away!
They who had fed their childhood upon dreams,
The playfellows of fancy, who had made
All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength
Their ministers,–who in lordly wise had stirred
Among the grandest objects of the sense,
And dealt with whatsoever they found there
As if they had within some lurking right
To wield it;–they, too, who, of gentle mood,
Had watched all gentle motions, and to these
Had fitted their own thoughts, schemers more mild,
And in the region of their peaceful selves;–
Now was it that both found, the meek and lofty
Did both find, helpers to their heart’s desire,
And stuff at hand, plastic as they could wish;
Were called upon to exercise their skill,
Not in Utopia, subterranean fields,
Or some secreted island, Heaven knows where!
But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us,–the place where in the end
We find our happiness, or not at all!

William Wordsworth – French Revolution

You just attended a screening of the film made from a spy thriller you’d written several years earlier. You were, of course, not so naïve as to believe the adaptation would be absolutely faithful to your story, but you were scarcely prepared for the monstrous perversion portrayed on the big screen that evening. Except for the basic premise, the producer had thrown out every idea, every tasteful scene, every line of dialogue in your book. Surrounded by friends and family, you slunk out of the screening room humiliated to the very core of your being. In a black rage, you phoned your lawyer.

Do you have a case? You may.

The little understood law governing this situation is known as droit moral. It may be written into your book contract; it is likely to be written into your movie contract. Written or not, it may nevertheless govern legal actions arising from the humiliation of having your work altered by your publisher or film producer.

Read about it here.

Not long after the dawn of the Digital Revolution, Project Gutenberg began digitizing books that had fallen into the public domain and, relying on volunteer help supported by contributions, publishing and making them available online free of charge. As of this writing there are over 27,000 free books in the project’s online book catalogue. Among them are several versions of The Bible. When you go to the Project Gutenberg website you can read the words of The Bible. But you can’t see The Bible.

Soon you will be able to see it as if it just came hot off the printer’s original press. This Gutenberg Bible is not sponsored by Project Gutenberg. It’s a digital facsimile of Gutenberg’s original edition, undertaken by the Morgan Library. The Morgan has no fewer than three copies of the 1455 Mainz edition, described by Julie Bloom in the New York Times as “the first significant printed book in the West.” When the digitization is completed, you’ll be able to view all 1,026 pages of the Bible on the library’s website.

If you have never visited New York City’s Morgan Library you owe it to yourself to go there. J. P. Morgan’s original mansion library, shown in the illustration with a copy of one of its Gutenbergs displayed, is one of the most breathtaking rooms you will ever see. And if you are a bibliophile it will bring you to your knees.

RC

The drama began in November when Leonard Riggio, Chairman of Barnes & Noble, Inc., announced that holiday sales were shaping up to be the worst in memory. In the subsequent installment, we wondered why, if things are so terrible, is someone (media mogul Ron Burkle) buying a big stake in the bookstore chain? Then we wondered why, if things are so wonderful, is someone (William Ackerman of Pershing Square Capital Management) dumping an even bigger stake?

The story now takes a dark turn with the announcement. reported in Crain’s New York Business.com that B&N is eliminating close to 100 corporate positions. CEO Steve Riggio (Leonard’s brother) notes in the release that, “The business climate in which we are operating is unprecedented.” The company’s holiday sales were down more than 5% over the previous year.

Refreshments will be served in the lobby while we wait for a scenery change.

RC

It started as Book-of-the-Month Club. After merging with a number of rivals it became Bookspan, and now it’s called Booksonline.

Is the name the only thing that’s changed? As a matter of fact, the brilliant – some say diabolical – principle on which BOM was founded, has been abandoned some 83 years after it was created by a marketing genius. This according to the deluxe edition of online book trade newsletter Publishers Lunch.

The formula was called the negative option. I described it in a blog about book clubs.

An enterprising merchandiser named Harry Scherman founded the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1926. He perceived that an enormous potential audience, particularly in rural areas, had inadequate access to bookstores in towns and cities. Mail order, which worked so successfully for many other products purveyed to rural people, ought to work with books, too, Scherman reasoned. And he was right.

Scherman, however, put a twist on this concept that made it a dramatic departure from the Sears, Roebuck approach. It’s called the “negative option,” meaning that unless members expressly indicate that they do not want the latest selection, the club will assume they do want it and will send it to them. Scherman’s insight into human nature was almost diabolically shrewd. Perhaps he didn’t trust that members would buy books simply because they were good, and he counted on such human foibles as laziness, guilt, and confusion to make members default on their obligation to return their cards in time to prevent clubs from shipping selections to them.

Whatever the motives of Scherman and subsequent book club entrepreneurs, the clubs caught on fast and hard, sweeping the country.

How do today’s book clubs work? Book Clubs Online has this to say:

There are two basic types of book clubs: commitment book clubs and continuity book clubs.

Commitment book clubs feature attractive introductory offers containing several books for a symbolic price (for example 6 books for 99¢ or 4 books for 1$ each) in exchange for a commitment to buy a few more books at the regular club price within a certain timeframe; usually this means 2-4 books within a year or two. The club price incorporates a considerable discount, which can be anywhere from 30-80%, in some cases even more.

Commitment book clubs send their members a catalog (either printed or electronic version) every 3-4 weeks, along with a card which includes the title of the Featured Selection – a book chosen by the club’s editors as a must-read of the moment. Members are not bound to buy the Selection though; they can opt for a different book (or several books) instead, or skip the offer altogether. Note that the Selections are no longer shipped to members automatically, as was the case until recently; now, members need to request/order the desired book. [italics mine: RC]

Once the obligation is fulfilled, the membership can be canceled at any time. Typical representatives of commitment book clubs are Doubleday Book Club, The Literary Guild, Book-of-the-Month club etc.

If the formula ain’t broken, why is Booksonline fixing it?

Apparently it is broken: “No books are shipped to members automatically anymore,” Lunch quotes from the announcement. “In this day and age of commercial overabundance and enlightened consumers armed with access to a boundless pool of information, it just couldn’t fly anymore.” In plain English, that seems to mean that Americans are too savvy to buy into a sales gimmick that plays on ignorance, laziness and confusion.

Well, it was fun while it lasted, but now the clubs’ books will have to sell on their own merits and on bargain pricing. Luckily for the clubs there’s plenty of that to carry them for the next four score years. Book clubs are fundamentally a good thing for all the reasons on which they were founded, and they should continue to thrive relying on a new and cleaner business model.

RC

There was no such title as “CDO” – Chief Digital Officer – until Simon & Schuster brought Ellie Hirschhorn aboard to bring the company into the 21st century.

The first fruit of her Chief Digitizing is a complete overhaul of S&S’s website, now visitable though still in beta. The SimonSays.com URL has been retired.

With the site goes a new viewpoint and a new branding strategy. The URL “focuses entirely on consumers (and for the most part highlights the overall company brand rather than individual imprints),” says online pubtrade newsletter Publishers Lunch. “Hirschhorn notes much of the emphasis of the new site design is ‘giving our authors the red carpet-like, celebrity treatment they deserve’(carried through questionnaires, feeds of news and blog mentions, videos and audio clips, and more) as well as aiming ‘to immediately engage the visitor, better enable search, and foster discovery.’”

In view of the recently reported conference introducing editors to the joys of XML, it’s certain that more editorial types will soon be hauled, willy-nilly, into the 21st century. You can look for “CDO” titles to be conferred at other houses and maybe some even more exotic ones – EFAM (E-File Archive Manager)? MLPS (Markup Language Protocol Supervisor)? XW (XML Wrangler)? Suggestions welcome. And while you’re at it, any ideas about what the sower in the S&S logo, drawn from the famous Millet painting, might now be seeding the soil with in the Digital Age? Zeroes and ones?

On the other hand, as it’s accepted wisdom that S&S’s sower is sowing ideas, maybe we should leave the logo alone. Ideas are publishers’ stock in trade, valid for this or any other century. Looked at it that way, the logo ain’t broke and we should not presume to fix it.

RC

They may not merit a Nobel Peace Prize but the organizers of the “StartWithXML” conference in New York deserve kudos for bringing together two cultures that have been reluctant dance partners in the past: trade book publishing people and representatives of the technical world. The subject was XML, the markup language for documents containing both content and instructions for identifying such structured information as footnotes, captions, tables, headers, and the like.

Obviously this is not the kind of language that book editors are comfortable with, but as digitization casts a longer and longer shadow on every aspect of their daily activities it’s clear they can no longer leave such matters to Joe the Geek.

So, the Book Industry Study Group among other industry sponsors invited both camps to participate in a daylong tutorial. People from such book houses as Hachette, Wiley, Simon & Schuster, and Oxford University Press mingled, listened to panel discussions and heard presentations by representatives of Magellan Media Consulting Partners, Klopotek North America, Cengage Learning, Firebrand Technologies and codeMantra. Attendees were treated to discussions of such XML-facilitated functions as style sheets, efficient rights management, digital production workflow, digital marketing, content licensing, and multi-format publishing. If they wished they were back in their cubicles blue-penciling action adventure thrillers, they gave no sign of it.

Futurist and book industry consultant Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company gave an introductory speech, then turned the proceedings over to David Young, CEO of the Hachette Book Group. As reported by Publishers Lunch Deluxe, the book industry’s online trade newsletter, “Young started the day by touting the flexibility, possibilities and cost savings of an XML-driven process while at the same time promising that the transition may not be as dramatic as it strikes some. At the fundamental level, Young said, ‘there is one difference – the difference between tagging a digital file and manually marking up a physical manuscript.’” Young definitely got everyone’s attention when he stated that XML could eliminate printed galleys, which he described as a “major money pit.”

“Like all evolutionary shifts, it will take time,” Young concluded, but he expressed confidence that the transition to an XML-driven trade book industry is “a no-brainer.”

Perhaps in time it will be, and no doubt everyone in the room thought it should be, but for those who only recently crawled out of the primordial ooze and mastered the difference between RTF and PDF, the challenge of XML remains, for now, very much a brainer.

RC