Arguably the first instant book in modern history was First American Into Space by Robert Silverberg. It was published in 1961, when “instant” was measured in months and not moments. They were called “crash” books then, but they were glacial compared to today’s headspinners.

The story of its creation is an entertaining one. After plans were set to send the first American astronaut into space, Charles Heckelmann, editor of a paperback publisher called Monarch Books, devised a plan to publish a book to celebrate the event. He hired Robert Silverberg, a reliable paperback novelist who has long since gone on to fame, fortune and honor, to write it. Filling – some would say padding – his manuscript with the history of rocketry, astronaut training, biographies of the astronaut candidates for the flight, etc. etc. Silverberg delivered everything but the last chapter. The book was set into type and while Alan Shepard rode a capsule for fifteen minutes before parachuting back to Earth, Silverberg typed the final chapter, taking it right off the television set in real time. He rushed the chapter to Heckelmann who in turn rushed it to the printer. “The flight was on a Friday,” Silverberg reminisces, “and I seem to recall they had the book on sale by the following Monday or Tuesday.”

Three or four days to produce and release a book? That now seems like an eternity, especially after reading Jeremy Greenfield’s posting on DBW, Jeremy Lin Hits E-Bookshelves With Quick Turnaround Book, Linsanity. For those of you who have been living in a coal mine for the past month, Jeremy Lin is the New York Knicks point guard who went from just-hatched to giant-killer in two weeks, taking New York and the media by storm – and engendering several instant books that were truly instantaneous.

Greenfield is right that the Lin instant books signal “new realities in the book business.”  It’s hard to believe that a headline-driven book that comes out four or six months after an event will find much traction or make a lot of money when the e-book and vook producers can get their editions out in a matter of hours. Indeed, an editor told me today that he’s been flooded by proposals for Jeremy Lin books and he’s told the authors and agents to forget about it; the window closed a week ago!

While Jeremy Lin was electrifying fans on the basketball court, agents for Amanda Knox, cleared, after a sensational trial, of murdering her housemate, signed a book deal for $4 million. It will take months for Knox and her collaborator to write the book and months more to edit and publish it.  By the time it’s released, what newsworthy information will be left?  Before you answer that question, click on this page of Amazon listings for books about Amanda Knox.

We think the Linsanity story has a lot more legs than Knoxsanity. But the truly big story is that digital media have in all likelihood closed the window on the instant book of yesteryear.

See our piece about the “instant” book created after the ditching of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, Not a Quickie, Exactly, More Like a Slowie.

Richard Curtis

Note to readers: Digital Book World has invited me to post my blogs initially on its website before releasing them on E-Reads, and this content is re-published with DBW’s permission. Click here to view the original posting.

S&S Royalty Statements - Before

S&S Royalty Statements - After

In September of last year we took Simon & Schuster to task for its overweight and excessively detailed royalty statements. “Bloated” was the term we used. “The weight of the package has been known to induce hernias in even the stoutest of mail room clerks,” we observed, urging the publisher to reform its profligate ways. (See Simon & Schuster’s War on Trees)

What a difference one semi-annual royalty period makes. Our criticisms, reinforced by those of authors and literary agents including a committee of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, inspired Simon & Schuster to review its reporting practices and overhaul them from top to bottom. In the first week of March the publisher has opened its “Author Portal,” a dedicated, password-activated website containing PDFs of all statements and offering download and printing options. Furthermore, the statements have been “substantially redesigned” and streamlined.

One author’s statement shrank from 41 pages to 8, and an agent praised the new format as “concise, comprehensive, uncluttered, and easy to understand.” Our agency’s own statements slimmed down from 977 pages – two reams of paper – to 323. But we now have the option to print out any given page or produce a compact digital file to archive and/or email to authors. And because so many of those statements have had zero activity for years, the savings on our resources – and the environment – are tremendous.

Credit should be given where credit is due, and we take our hats off to Simon & Schuster for responding so thoroughly and swiftly to our challenge.

Richard Curtis

Note to readers: Digital Book World has invited me to post my blogs initially on its website before releasing them on E-Reads, and this content is re-published with DBW’s permission. Click here to view the original posting.

Book by book, author by author, venue by venue and investor by investor, the Espresso print on demand machine is picking up momentum as the paper book publishing mode of the future.

Just how close is that future? The machine needs to get smaller, faster and cheaper, the investors more open-handed and the installations more abundant. Above all, the concept needs to sink into the mentality of a publishing industry that lives in denial that the distribution system that prospered in the 20th century is going to survive in the 21st. With the erosion of traditional bookselling through store chains and independent shops, the handwriting is on the wall for a system built around trucks – trucks that not only deliver books from printers to distribution depots to stores, but carry the unsold books back to their doom in a pulping vat. The number of copies returned can exceed 50% of the number distributed.

With the alternative distribution system of e-books in place, the idea of returnable books, or at least books returnable in stomach-turning numbers (e-books are actually returnable, but the percentage of return is miniscule), has become a preposterous anachronism. The “handwriting on the wall” is actually eInk.

Print on demand on demand is another form of digital publishing, except that the end product is tangible. That publishers do not yet embrace this simple truth is part of the tunnel vision endemic on the part of book industry leaders.  It’s easy to understand why it is so obdurate: distributing books into stores via fossil-fueled vehicles generates most of the cash that flows through the publishing industry. But the unprofitability of that system, compared to one in which printed books are manufactured at the point of purchase, is appalling.

The paradigmatic shift of the book business from the current distribution model to a POD-based one is inevitable. What is delaying it is a lack of imagination on the part of industry leaders. Though they have dipped a toe in the water by issuing backlist books in POD, none has yet dared to abandon the long print run and the returnable distribution model.

All this is preface to an article by John Tozzi in bloomberg.com about progress in the installation of Espresso print on demand machines, On Demand Books Bets on Self-Publishing, which we urge you to read. It describes the efforts of On Demand chairman Jason Epstein and his investment partners to gain acceptance for the Espresso throughout the land.

At the dawn of the digital book industry, a trade publication named Jason Epstein one of three “Grumpy Old Visionaries”.  Over a decade later his original vision seems a lot fresher than that of many book industry executives half his age (he summed it up compellingly in an article published in 2010).  We wish him the gift of time to see his vision achieved and profit handsomely from it.

(And if you’re curious to know who the other grumpy old visionaries were, you may click here).

Richard Curtis

As digital technology evolves, the practice of bundling – packaging physical books with their e-book counterparts – is now coming into focus as a commercial option for publishers.  Though the goal of one-click delivery is far harder than advocates wish – as Rachel Deahl makes clear in a recent Publishers Weekly article Is the Time Right for Bundling?, the technical and commercial challenges will eventually be overcome.  When they are, we will be faced with the question, How much to charge for a print/e-book bundle?  In an effort to start the dialogue, one industry leader, Bloomsbury USA’s Evan Schnittman (describing the bundle as an “enhanced hardcover”), suggests a price of 25% over the price of the hardcover.  “The consumer wins,” he says.

We’re far from sure about that, and we also wonder if anyone else wins, either. In the summer of 2010 we raised the question in Bundling: Publishing’s Next Battleground.  We re-post it here to push the dialogue where publishers may not want to go.

Richard Curtis

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The following question is deceptively simple, and we urge you to take your time responding. How much time? Three or four months. You’ll need that much. A lot rides on your answer.

Here’s the question:

When you purchase a print book you should be able to get the e-book for…

• a) the full combined retail prices of print and e-book editions
• b) an additional 50% of the retail price of the print edition
• c) an additional 25% of the retail price of the print edition
• d) $1.00 more than the retail price of the print edition
• e) free

The subject of this little quiz is bundling, a common marketing tactic in which two or more products are packaged and sold at a single price. In this case the package is a printed book plus its e-book iteration.

As simple as it sounds, bundling is shaping up to be the battleground for clashing publishing philosophies, and the time will soon come when publishers will have to choose one of the above strategies and put it into effect. Misjudging consumer attitudes could prove to be a big mistake and possibly a ruinous one.

The essence of bundling is to offer customers a discount for selecting the combo instead of the individually priced components, so choice a) above is a non-starter. But choices b), c) and d) reflect just how aggressive a discounter wants to be and the various thresholds at which consumer resistance is expected to melt. A good argument can be made for each and as the bundling issue warms up you can expect to hear them all endlessly debated.

Yet even the cheapest package – a dollar or even less than a dollar over the cost of the print edition – may not suffice to capture the consumer’s fancy. Why? Because many people believe they’re entitled to get the e-book free with purchase of the print book. How large is public support for that position? We need to take a poll to find out, but if anecdotal reports are any indication, they may be in the overwhelming majority and they are unquestionably the most vocal. You will certainly hear their outpouring of joy when one publisher steps up to offer a print and e-book combo for the price of the print edition alone. Our own prediction? Free will become the standard, and even ten cents above free will be a competitive disadvantage.

Economic factors aside, consumer negativity toward double-charging is a contributor to piracy. Comments sent to us in response to postings about piracy strongly suggest that the public expects digital versions of books to be tossed in for nothing when a printed book is sold, and if it isn’t tossed in, many of those customers will feel no compunctions about downloading an unauthorized copy. They simply feel entitled to it. Libertarian spokespeople like Cory Doctorow have articulated this sense of entitlement, and though some feel that their arguments go too far, there is a solid core of realism in their position. We can condemn the immorality of consumer attitudes ’til the cows come home; and we can (quite reasonably) complain that if people were willing to wait for the paperback reprint they should be willing to wait for the e-book reprint. It makes no difference: the public’s sense of entitlement creates an environment susceptible to the allure of piracy.

With so many sound arguments in support of heavily discounted bundles, why have we seen so little of it in book marketing? The answer is that it is harder to assemble print/e-book packages than it looks. Publishers that control both formats are in the best position to do it but the technology is not yet in place. Customers purchasing the latest James Patterson or Nora Roberts novel in a bookstore have no simple way to download the e-book in the same transaction. The publisher might offer a discount coupon but that requires a number of steps and clicks that discourage a quick and easy procedure.

What is wanted is a one-click experience: “Click here to order the print and e-book.” Such a deal might best be offered by a publisher on its website. However, the price of that bundle might undercut the prices offered by retailers or e-tailers for the individual components, and for publishers to compete with their own retailers is to cut their own throats.

Amazon is in a good position to offer print/e-book bundles but hasn’t done so yet, probably because it recognizes the complexity of the issues. Book pricing is already fraught with so much angst that adding bundling to the debate will undoubtedly induce cardiac infarction among book people already near apoplectic with worry.

For the record, we at E-Reads strongly support the position that the e-book version should be included free of charge with the purchase of one of our print editions and are working to overcome the technical obstacles to implementing our conviction.

We invite your comments and look forward to seeing the debate over bundling heat up on the next stretch of road to the future of books.

Richard Curtis

Throughout history speculative bubbles have whipped people into such a state of euphoria that they lose all prudence and set themselves up for the collapse of their dreams and fortunes. It happened with investment as disparate as tulips in Holland, England’s South Sea Company, dotcom madness and American mortgage derivatives.

Ewan Morrison, describing the self-publishing craze in The Guardian, thinks this phenomenon perfectly fits the classic signposts of an incipient bubble.  He even suggests it smacks of a Ponzi scheme. “There is now,” he writes, “a boom industry in ‘How to get rich writing ebooks’ manuals, as well as a multitude of blogs offering tips and services, and a new breed of specialists who’ll charge you anything from $37 to $149 to get your ebook into shape. This all seems like a repeat of the boom in get-rich-quick manuals and ‘specialists’ that appeared around blogs and etrading.”

Drawing on the economic theorizing by twentieth century economist Hyman Minsky, Morrison develops parallels between such bubbles as the US stock market of the 1920s and the one shaping up in self-publishing. The following are direct quotations from Morrison’s article The self-epublishing bubble

Stage One – Disturbance.  Every financial bubble begins with a disturbance. The creation of Kindle led to a new generation of ereaders which, with Apple, launched an economic boom in a previously non-existent market.

Stage Two – Expansion/Prices Start to Increase. The ebook explosion is coupled with the rise of the e-reader… A brand new market of consumers for these products has appeared from nowhere. The change to cheap ebooks and self-published ebooks is a “change in underlying fundamentals”.

Stage Three – Euphoria/Easy Credit. Every financial bubble needs fuel; cheap and easy credit is that fuel. Without it, there can be no speculation… “Easy credit” in this case relates to the plummeting costs of digital content… The whole point of self-epublishing is that the market “brings in people who would not normally be there”. Like the promise that we can all have an affordable home with a cheap mortgage, we are being told constantly by digital businesses and the media that we can all be writers and even be successful as writers.

Stage Four – Over-trading/Prices Reach a Peak. As the effects of cheap and easy credit dig deeper, the market begins to accelerate. Overtrading lifts up volumes and spot shortages emerge. Prices start to zoom, and easy profits are made. This brings in more outsiders, and prices run out of control.  This is the point that amateurs – the foolish, the greedy, and the desperate – enter the market.”

Blogs now give advice to start-up writers, telling them to give their work away for free to gain audience share and get reviews, and only then attempt to raise their prices. The zooming prices here refers to the zooming down of prices. For example self-epublishers are now giving books away for free – see the Kindle Top 100 Free books. Furthermore, in this ecstatic push to self-epublish, there are hundreds of thousands of new ebooks for which there are almost no readers at all because they have zero visibility.

Stage Five – Market Reversal/Insider Profit Taking. Warnings sound that the boom will turn to bust; that the models on which success is based are unrealistic and overblown…The models of Doctorow or Hocking are misleading to say the least. For the hundreds of thousands of newcomers to self-epublishing to believe that they can become as successful as [Doctorow and Hocking] is a dangerous delusion, and one capitalised on by companies who have an interest in maximizing internet traffic and selling e-readers and internet advertising.

Stage Six – Financial Crisis. Just as the euphoria consumes the outsiders, the insiders see the warning signs, lose their faith and begin to sneak out the exit. Whether the outsiders see the insiders leave or not, insider profit-taking signals the beginning of the end. Already the stars of self-epublishing are leaving the system that launched them. Hocking signed a deal with Macmillan that gave her a $500,000 advance on four separate books in a series – a total reversal from the way self publishing is done (with zero advances being paid and all work being done on “spec”)… And then comes the collapse – if you work for free and have to slash your costs to be competitive – to, say, undercut the vast 99-cent market…, then your chances of ever seeing a return on all the free labor you’ve put in diminish accordingly. Add to this the fact that hundreds of thousands of others are competing with you in this pricing race to the bottom and the possibility of any newcomers making any money from self-epublishing vanishes. The bubble bursts.

Stage seven – Revulsion/Lender of Last Resort. Panic starts and euphoria is replaced with revulsion. Outsiders start to sell, but there are no buyers. Panic sets in, prices start to tumble downwards, credit dries up, and losses start to accumulate. After a long year of trying to sell self-epublished books, attempting to self-promote on all available networking sites, and realising that they have been in competition with hundreds of thousands of newcomers just like them, the vast majority of the newly self-epublished authors discover that they have sold less than 100 books each… They come to see self-epublishing as a kind of Ponzi scheme – one created by digital companies to prey on the desires of an expanding mass of consumers who also wanted to be believe they could be “creative”. The “Lender in the Last Resort” cannot really step in to save the “investors”, as these are the hundreds of thousands of hopeful and now-disappointed first-time epublishers.

Richard Curtis

“We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems.” an Apple executive recently told a reporter. “Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

That says in a nutshell what many American corporate leaders are privately saying if not publicly admitting.  One leader who said it out loud was Apple’s Steve Jobs, and the person he said it to was Barack Obama. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs reportedly said to the president at a Silicon Valley dinner in February 2011.

“The president’s question touched upon a central conviction at Apple,” write Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher in a penetrating New York Times analysis. “It isn’t just that workers are cheaper abroad. Rather, Apple’s executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”

The reason why is illustrated in a telling anecdote. “Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul,” Duhigg and Bradsher report. ” New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.”

Though the human price for such ant-like efficiency is dear – Apple’s Asian workers live in conditions close to indentured servitude – the moral downside of manufacturing success does not seem to tip the scales for American corporate leaders. “Companies once felt an obligation to support American workers, even when it wasn’t the best financial choice,” a Labor Department economist told the reporters. “That’s disappeared. Profits and efficiency have trumped generosity.”

Rather than wring their hands, American business and government leaders need to focus on the kinds of jobs that Americans can perform profitably – and with dignity – inside their national boundaries. If some domestic industries need subsidization by the government to be competitive, our lawmakers must channel support to them and even erect some tariff barriers. If that tilts our economy towards state socialism, so be it. It will balance the unfair advantage that many foreign governments have taken of America.

Details in How U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work

Richard Curtis

Sony, one of the earliest companies to recognize the future of e-books, has been a retail partner of E-Reads for many years and a solid contributor to the royalty stream of our authors. We hope they will continue to be, but we’re concerned about speculation by Martyn Daniels on the Bookseller Association’s blogsite that the corporation may be getting out of the e-book game. The most visible reason is the $2 billion loss the firm took in the last quarter of 2011 for all of its operations and a projected loss for the year of $2.8 billion.

“Sony once aimed its sights at being a big player in digital publishing,” writes Daniels. “It created its own ebook format,…was an early backer of the ePub format and of course introduced several eInk ereaders. It even entered into one of those ‘exclusive trade deals’ with UK retailer Waterstones. However it failed to deliver the list, did not develop a plausible platform and lost the eInk world to Kindle. Some five years on and how times have changed. Sony were around at the beginning of the digital reading chapter, but this may be one ebook that will remain unfinished and is in danger of slipping from the front list and going out of digital print.”

Daniels’ conclusion? “Its hard to see Sony making a comeback into digital publishing and its offer would require some serious investment and change of fortunes at a time when the business obviously requires to focus on its core operations.”

But Sony has replaced its CEO and we hope the new commander will set the ship on a profitable course once again, including the company’s e-book program.

Are Sony’s Days in E-Books Numbered?

Richard Curtis

That will be $9.99 plus tax, Mr. Bezos

This website tries not to traffic in rumors but the one that Michael Kozlowski, writing on trade blog G00d eReader, posted over the past weekend is too titillating not to mong (and yes, “mong” is a legitimate verb).

“Amazon sources close to the situation,” writes Kozlowski, “have told us that the company is planning on rolling out a retail store in Seattle within the next few months.”

Amazon’s purpose is to explore the profitability of physical bookstores, which would carry Amazon e-readers and related products, as well as books from the various Amazon imprints (but not likely anybody else’s). Though described as a “boutique,” it would undoubtedly be a cross between an Apple store and a Barnes & Noble superstore. “The company has already contracted the design through a shell company”, says Good eReader.

Not so fast, Kozlowski.

For one thing, the world of bricks and mortar is as far from the world of digital as the 18th century is from the 20th. Though Amazon’s automated warehouses are state of the art, bookstore retailing calls for many disciplines outside Amazon’s comfort zone.  More significant is Amazon’s aversion to paying taxes.  The company has moved heaven and earth to minimize state and local tax liabilities, something that will be all but impossible to achieve with physical stores.

So, for now we’ll relegate this story to the rumor bin.  But if there is any truth to be told we won’t hesitate to mong it.

Amazon in the Process of Launching a Retail Store

Richard Curtis

Despite the gloomy talk about the death of the book it’s pretty clear that printed books serve an essential function in our culture and will always be with us. For those who greet this statement with skepticism, we reiterate that there is nothing wrong with printed books – just the way they are distributed.

The big difference between the past and the present is that for the first time in history, printed books are optional. The implications of this fact are profound.

Until very recently the only mode for publishers to introduce content was print.  Printed books defined publishers. With the advent of digital technology, however, a new breed of publisher arose that can if it chooses publish a book originally in digital format and postpone the print edition or skip it altogether.  Well into the present decade traditional publishers like Random House and Simon & Schuster and Macmillan clung to the imperative to issue print volumes before releasing them as e-books.  Eventually they yielded to the exigency of releasing the e-book simultaneously with their print edition.  Issuing e-books without having to do print editions at all, however, is not a measure to be taken lightly.

One reason is commercial. Original e-books put traditional publishers at a serious competitive disadvantage. Whereas those houses currently pay 25% net royalty to authors, most independent e-book publishers pay at least twice that much, and self-published authors can get as much as 70% royalty by direct uploading of their content. The Hachettes and Harpers and Penguins can reason that they are adding value and brand-name prestige, but that argument doesn’t hold water for many authors who are simply in the game for money.

More significantly, by electing not to print a book at all, these so-called legacy publishers put themselves in danger of losing the very thing that defines them. What profiteth a publisher to gain the world and lose its soul? Today Random House is a completely different species from independent e-book publishers like Open Road.  But by becoming a pure e-book publisher, the playing field is leveled, and the difference between Random House and Open Road becomes simply one of scale.

When we talk about the death of printed books we are really talking about the death of printed books distributed in bookstores.  With the death of a Borders and the announced reduction of Barnes & Noble’s  bookstore floor space by 25%, print on demand, a business model that does not depend on store sales or the returnability of books the way traditional bookstores do, increasingly becomes an option. If publishers elect POD for all their books they will not only continue to make money from printed books but could potentially rescue their identities, and maybe their souls as well.

Richard Curtis