The last big news we heard about BN.com was in the fall of 2003:

“In a surprise move, Barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN) has stopped selling eBooks. The online retailer is in the process of e-mailing its affiliates to let them know of the program’s demise this week.”

That was written by a blogger, Rick Aristotle Munarriz, who like so many e-pioneers was sent reeling by B&N’s pullout from a nascent e-book industry.

“With Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) as BN.com’s majority stakeholder,” Munarriz continued, “one has to wonder if the company is missing the high-margin potential of the medium or if the sales just aren’t there. Or, for the budding conspiracy theorists out there, is BN.com simply refusing to promote a niche where its parent company can’t partake or one that promotes a level playing field in an arena where publishing house suppliers are used to the advantages of size? eBook fans would like some answers. Unlike its warehouse-shipped forefathers, an immediate answer would be welcome.”

Well, maybe not immediately, exactly, but six years later Mr. Munarriz has his answer. BN.com is being resurrected, and this time we think it will be here to stay. Four months ago the world’s largest print-book chain acquired Fictionwise, the world’s largest e-book retailer in a $15.7 million deal we declared to be a game-changer. “With this single stroke,” we wrote, “B&N comes roaring back into a business it abandoned in 2003.

“Of far greater significance is that B&N is now catapulted back onto a competitive footing with amazon.com in the all-important e-book arena. Though Barnes & Noble doesn’t boast a Kindle or any other proprietary e-book reader, there is a host of devices now available or soon to come on stream capable of carrying the immense body of e-book content that Fictionwise has aggregated.”

Barnes & Noble is already billing itself as twice as big as Amazon (700,000 titles vs. 330,000). Of course, most of BN.com’s title list will consist of public domain books. Motoko Rich, reporting on the deal in the New York Times, points out that “More than 500,000 of the books now offered electronically on BN.com can be downloaded free, through an agreement with Google to provide electronic versions of public domain books that Google has scanned from university libraries… Currently, Google’s public domain books cannot be read on a Kindle.”

So most of BN.com’s books will be public domain – big deal! 700,000 books is the kind of scaled-up inventory that industry old-timers (circa 1998) said had to be achieved before the chain reaction became self-sustaining. And don’t forget that public domain is the very kind of inducement that Freemongers have been advocating to stimulate e-books over the tipping point. The interaction of all those downloadables with the 1.2 million hard copies offered by Barnes & Noble’s website is as tipping-pointy as you can get. (By the way, right now if you click on bn.com you get flipped to barnesandnoble.com, but in time BN.com will be a discrete e-book website.)

There are lots of issues to be worked out before launch such as pricing and compatibility with various devices. As to the latter, right now the company is trying to be device-agnostic but there’s lots of talk about it teaming up with the as-yet unnamed (will it EVER be named?) Plastic Logic reading device scheduled for release in 2010. Whether that gadget would become B&N’s Kindle, we don’t know, but we’re not sure why anyone would want to close out any e-readers, especially Sony and Apple. Publishers Lunch pundit Michael Cader says “BN said they have made ‘a strategic commerce and content partnership with Plastic Logic’ and ‘will power the eBookstore for the Plastic Logic eReader device.’” Cader adds that “In further explanations BN said they will be the exclusive vendor of ebooks for Plastic Logic.”

E-book aggregators are weaving garlands to strew on BN.com when it opens for business.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Nicholas Carlson, employing a full complement of fingers and toes to perform his calculations, estimates that “it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead,” according to his posting in The Business Insider. In all fairness to Mr. Carlson, he does say that asking its subscribers to switch to Kindle is not “anything we think the New York Times Company should do.”

If you want to check his math you can take your abacus in hand and click on Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle but here’s how he arrived at his bottom line. First, using some publicly known financial information, he estimated the Times’s delivery costs at $644 million per year. Then…

“The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: ‘We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.’ Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million — a little less than half as much as $644 million.

And that was before Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle by one sixth to $299, which makes the case for Kindle vs. paper even more cogent. And if that’s not cogent enough for you, Carlson points out that “a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we’re so low in our estimate of the Times’s printing costs that we’re not even in the ballpark.”

Carlson’s bottom line? :”As a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.”

Thanks for telling us all this, Mr. Carlson. Now if it’s okay with you, we will now return to our laughably inefficient but utterly informative, entertaining, absorbing and indispensable paper edition of the New York Times.

Richard Curtis

Publishers Lunch‘s Michael Cader has commented in depth on Amazon’s yanking of unauthorized uploads of two George Orwell books, 1984 and Animal Farm. Cader’s views are particularly cogent. In fact I’ve seen a lot of cogent commentary. What I haven’t seen is a contrarian viewpoint defending Amazon. Amazon needs defending? Read on.

Despite all the e-ink spilled over Amazon’s seemingly high-handed act of reaching into everyone’s Kindle and vaporizing their Orwells, nobody seems to be trying to understand Amazon’s motivation let alone support it. Amazon certainly didn’t help by failing to apologize or even explain, thus turning a heavy-handed gaffe into a public relations black eye. Nevertheless, we owe it to Amazon to imagine what they – or their lawyers – might have been thinking when they sent down the order to zap the Orwells.

I said lawyers and that’s the key. If I were Mr. Amazon (hmm, who could that be?) I would be gravely concerned about my company’s liability for infringing on someone else’s copyright. Furthermore I would be concerned that those who purchased the copyrighted work from my website might be liable as well, and my actions – simply offering the books for sale – might be responsible for my customers getting sued. Were these infringements inadvertent? Sure. Would that exculpate you and me from a legal action brought by an aggrieved copyright owner? Not necessarily. Ignorance of the law has never shielded the innocent from being drawn into lawsuits. Would you like to be named as a John Doe in an infringement suit? I don’t think so. Would I (Mr. Amazon, that is) want to show good faith to the copyright owners by recalling the unauthorized product? My mouthpieces say Yeah, do it now and apologize later.

I haven’t seen the communications between Amazon and Kindle owners informing them their books had been yanked, but had Amazon emailed customers saying “We’re doing this for your own good so you don’t get sued,” it might have gone far to snatch some good will from the jaws of intense embarrassment. As it was, Amazon’s conduct was lead-footed clumsy, and offering credit towards another purchase just didn’t make up for the sense of violation most Kindlelach felt when they woke up to discover their Orwells had vanished. It’s still not too late for an explanation (I’ve just given them one) and apology.

There. I’ve defended Amazon. But it was damn hard work. Can I go back to picking on them?

Richard Curtis

What We Talk About When We Talk About Amazon

Last week was a bizarre one in the annals of Amazon-dominated news, closing with Friday’s Orwellian removal of unauthorized editions of two books by the actual George Orwell from a small number of Kindle owners’ libraries.

Among the things I find interesting about the story:

* Internet outrage began with an incorrect blog post on the NYT’s site from columnist David Pogue who shot first without asking: “Apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved,” Pogue wrote. Bear in mind that Pogue has made a substantial amount of money as both author and co-publisher of computer books, but he assumes the worst of publishers from the outset.

* Amazon’s open-publishing platform for Kindle (and the popularity on the device of free and very cheap public domain works) requires more vetting/monitoring than it has received to date. As Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener explained on Friday: “These books [unauthorized editions of 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded by MobileReference according to customers] were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third party who did not have the rights to the books.”

While this is the story that wound up making news, customers posting on Amazon’s discussion board have reported seeing other unauthorized editions available–including Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (“yes, illegal copies actually made it through for all of about an hour here on Monday.”)

* Famous for putting the customer first–at least in the service of selling other people’s physical goods–Amazon is encountering a number of challenges as producer/seller of their own device and in the new world of selling physical goods. In the case of the unauthorized Kindle books,
“when we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers.” That’s what ignited the real firestorm from Kindle customers.

For customers, however, it was a reminder that they are licensing the right to view a file rather than owning it. And it showed how the cool Whispernet–which downloads books “in 60 seconds or less,” can also make those books disappear just as quickly. In this, Amazon appears to have overstepped the provisions of its own terms of service. (The NYT wrote, “Amazon’s published terms of service agreement for the Kindle does not appear to give the company the right to delete purchases after they have been made. It says Amazon grants customers the right to keep a ‘permanent copy of the applicable digital content.’) Of course for all of us, it’s also a reminder of one reason why ebooks are “worth less” to customers: they come with fewer privileges.

Hence spokesman Herdener’s additional comment: “We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

* But Amazon’s customer service left customers disappointed in other ways, too. When the unauthorized files were removed, the explanation was less than candid. In e-mails reproduced on the company’s forum, customer say they were told via e-mail only that “we recently discovered a problem with a Kindle book that you have purchased.”

* That customer service failure echoes a story from earlier last week that got dramatically less national pick-up even though for the affected customers it’s a much more serious issue: the lawsuit filed by one customer (seeking class action status) regarding a cracked Kindle they allege was damaged by the cover.

All of this is interesting viewed against the first Amazon-driven story of the week–also continuing this week: the fight over the $9.95 price point, and publishers’ strategic questions about release windows for certain ebooks. (Clearly anything Amazon/Kindle related is now receiving disproportionate attention from mainstream press–and those stories are going to focus on battles and failures more than anything else.) To echo one of our themes from last week’s pricing post, Amazon is suffering by not being completely candid with their customers; publishers should avoid the same mistake and tell the truth, and the complete truth, about their pricing concerns.

At the same time, if you are not both watching and participating in Amazon’s abundant Kindle customer forums, you are missing out. There are customers who understand (and regularly track) the $9.95 price fallacy–but they don’t know whom to blame for the “bait and switch.”

Watch the Kindle bestsellers and you’ll see that right now all of the top 5 ebooks are free–as are 7 of the top 10, and 15 of the top 25. When publishers talk to the press about pricing, you should mention all the ebooks you give away, as well as all of the titles that are published simultaneously with the print edition. (Meanwhile, despite all the supposed resistance to paying over $9.95 for an ebook, one of the top paid titles on the Kindle bestseller list remains Breaking Dawn, selling at $11.38, now after “352 days in the top 100.”

For still more on pricing, both Mike Shatzkin and Evan Schnittman are looking at some of the issues on their blogs.

Seas of Ernathe was Jeffrey A. Carver’s first novel, and the first full-length tale of what was to become his popular Star Rigger Universe. Set farthest into the future of all the Star Rigger stories and thus sixth in the internal time sequence in the series, Seas of Ernathe sets the stage for a new cycle of history. A touching story of love and personal discovery, it leads the way to the rediscovery of the mode of star travel that once knit galactic civilization together.

E-Reads has published a number of Star Rigger titles as well as his Dragon novels. Each book is a complete and satisfying novel in its own right, so you can take them up in any sequence. But here’s how the author has ordered them in time:

Panglor (Star Rigger 1)
Dragons in the Stars (Star Rigger 2)
Dragon Rigger (Star Rigger 3)
Star Rigger’s Way (Star Rigger 4)
Eternity’s End (Star Rigger 5 – free ebook from Starrigger.net)
Seas of Ernathe (Star Rigger 6)

And, to set them all in the context of Carver’s grand vision, you’ll want to read his e-essay, “Of Consoles and Dragons’ Claws”.

Subsequent to the Star Rigger and Dragons books Carver launched The Chaos Chronicles for Tor. The latest in the other series is Sunborn, and the author has transformed into the auteur of a beautiful, lilting, mysterious video to promote it. Not only did he take a hand in every aspect of the production but that’s his voice narrating it as well. How are we going to keep him at his desk when Hollywood beckons? View the video and you’ll see what we mean.

Here’s what Publishers Weekly had to say about Sunborn:

The long-anticipated fourth entry in Carver’s Chaos Chronicles (after 1996′s The Infinite Sea) is space opera at its most agreeably and classically science fictional. Someone or something is plotting murder on an interstellar scale, and a small company of exiles led by human John Bandicut may be the galaxy’s only chance of salvation. The prospective victims are sentient stars living in the Orion Nebula; half the challenge is simply opening communications. Luckily, Bandicut’s allies and sponsors include robots, noncorporeal symbiotes and the incredibly ancient multidimensional entity Deeaab. With such a large cast and a parallel plot involving a threat to Earth itself, character development is necessarily sketched broadly. Some may find the narrative overly stage-managed, but Carver skillfully rotates viewpoints and weaves the choreography directly into the plot. This installment is a cut above the earlier books and will be entirely accessible to any reader who appreciates high-powered stellar and n-dimensional physics blended with old-school space-faring.

Those of you fortunate enough to have enjoyed what Andy Warhol coined fifteen minutes of fame know that celebrity is too intoxicating to relinquish after so brief a time. Like a single crystal of an addictive drug, a mere taste makes most of us long for immortality. It’s just that most of us don’t want to work that hard to achieve it.

There is, however a shortcut: have a famous author name a character after you. All you have to do is outbid the competition. Frederick Forsyth, author of such blockbusters as The Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War, is inviting offers for naming rights to a character in his next novel, according to Guardian.co.uk. The money will go to a charity.

But wait! Before you reach for your checkbook, shouldn’t you be asking whether the character is good or evil? In Forsyth’s case, it will definitely “be a goodie rather than a baddie, representing the forces of law and order!” But if you want to appear in a Stephen King novel, you take your chances. A few years ago a number of famous authors including John Grisham, Dave Eggers and Neil Gaiman agreed to auction off naming rights on behalf of The First Amendment Project, a free speech organization. King was among them. But, he warned, “Buyer beware.” The novel, Cell, “is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cellphone signals that destroy the human brain. Like cheap whisky, it’s very nasty and extremely satisfying. Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I’ll require physical description of auction winner, including any nickname.”

If the bidding is too rich for your blood (Forsyth’s minimum is pegged at £990) there’s a far cheaper alternative, but one that guarantees your name will appear in a branded author’s book. It’s called SharedBook™, a publishing platform that enables you to customize and personalize books.

Founded in 2002, SharedBook™ “sprang from the founder’s early belief in the collaborative nature of the web,” the company’s website informs us, “and his realization that the user’s interest in having control over the type and method of content he consumed would require an adaptable and powerful application.”

Our trade publishing partners use SharedBook to provide consumers with the opportunity to make their favorite books even more valuable and special through the addition of personalized pages. These custom creations maintain the artistic and creative integrity of the underlying work while allowing the reader’s affinity for the work to increase with the new version, an on-demand one-of-a-kind rarity. One example: the addition of a personalized dedication page to the Golden Books classic Poky Little Puppy in our store devoted to personalized titles for children.

E-Reads has teamed up with SharedBook™ to produce 20 novels by such bestselling authors as Greg Bear, Janet Dailey and Hannah Howell. Fans can order them to be printed with their own unique dedication messages and photos.

Unique dedication pages are one thing; having an author name a character after you is quite another, requiring the author’s permission, and it will no doubt cost you a pretty penny. But the technical part of it is a piece of cake thanks to the SharedBook’s innovative applications.

Richard Curtis

It’s a story about the music industry but the implications for the book business are obvious. Eric Pfanner in the New York Times reports that most of those who copy music from pirate and file-sharing websites would not do so if there were a legal and convenient way to buy it.

“Over the past year,” Pfanner writes, “as sales of CDs have continued to fall and paid-for downloads from services like Apple’s iTunes have fallen short of hopes, record companies have moved to embrace casual file-sharers. Legal services offering free, unlimited streaming of music, rather than downloads, are proliferating. According to a survey published last week, they are taking some of the wind out of the pirates’ sails.

‘Consumers are doing exactly what we said they would do,’ said Steve Purdham, chief executive of We7, a service that says it has attracted two million users in Britain in a little more than half a year by offering unlimited access to millions of songs. ‘They weren’t saying, “Give me pirated music”; they were saying, “Give me the music I want.”‘

The result is a sharp decline in the number of teenagers who downloaded unauthorized streamed music, according to a British poll. Pfanner’s conclusion? “Rather than cannibalizing existing digital businesses, they say, the new services are often attracting people who previously shared files illegally.”

The key to profitability of the service is either a cheap subscription, advertising revenue, or a combination of both. We’ll be watching these services closely to see if they make money or if, instead, human nature reverts to the something-for-nothing mentality that has driven so many well-meaning people into the arms of pirates.

Read Music Industry Lures ‘Casual’ Pirates to Legal Sites and see what you think.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Karen Mender, co-founder of the Self-Publishing Book Expo (SPBE – I think they’re calling it “Spibbee” for short) has announced that the conference – the first of its kind ever – will take place at The Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers (811 Seventh Avenue at 53rd Street)from 10 AM to 5 PM on Saturday, November 7, 2009.

Mender says it “will bring national focus and attention to the fastest-growing segment of today’s publishing industry. Unlike any other book exhibit, the Self-Publishing Book Expo will be the only event of its kind to highlight the books of self-publishing companies and their authors, and give them the prominence and prestige they deserve.”

Booked for panels are such prestigious names as Janet McDonald, VP Client Acquisitions at Ingram Publisher Services, Inc.; M.J. Rose, who launched her mainstream career as a self-published author; Eric Kampmann, President of indie distributor Midpoint Trade Book; and Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.

For registration, exhibitor, panel and other information, visit the SPBE website.

RC

Hyperthought recounts the adventures of a young man who trusts an unscrupulous doctor to enhance his brain function, and of a young woman who tries to save him. You can read it in this completely absorbing science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick Award winning author M. M. Buckner, about whom Hugo-winning author Robert Sawyer writes, “M.M. Buckner is the first clear-cut new star of twenty-first century SF.”

The year is 2125, and the Earth has undergone drastic climate change due to global warming. People crowd in sealed underground habitats to avoid the stormy, toxic surface. Feisty little Jolie Sauvage leads extreme surface adventure tours for rich executives. Her friend, Dr. Judith Merida, is peddling a new cosmetic neurosurgery, which she claims will wake the brain’s latent, unconscious senses.

Jolie introduces Dr. Merida to one of her wealthy tour group clients, Jin Sura, an arrogant but troubled young man with a terrible desire for knowledge. That proves to be a disastrous mistake.

E-Reads is proud to reissue this extraordinary writer’s first three novels. Check them all out.

Big Brother is alive and well and living inside your Kindle.

Technology blogger David Pogue informs us in the New York Times that Amazon reached into everybody’s Kindle and snatched back George Orwell’s classic novels “1984” and “Animal Farm.” “This morning,” he writes, “hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by [Orwell] had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.”

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “owned.” In the good old days it meant you had paid for it and possessed it. But, like so many other definitions in the digital era, like “Free”, this one seems to have gone by the wayside. Amazon at least gave everyone that paid for the books a credit. To buy what? Books that can be taken back again?

Are owners bewildered and outraged? Here are their comments. But it would be hard to top Pogue’s own: “As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

To understand why and how it happened, read Pogue’s Post.

What’s puzzling to me is, aren’t Orwell’s books in the public domain? I couldn’t find them on Project Gutenberg, but a google search for 1984 and Animal Farm brought them up quickly, easily and…free!

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.