Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Gigaom.com, reports a unique strategy for combating the practice known as “showrooming”.

In showrooming, customers enter a bookstore, browse, then select (or scan the barcode of) the book they want to purchase, walk out of the store and order it from an online bookstore. Which makes the independent store a mere display space for customers to order books from its competitors. Last Christmas Amazon actually promoted the practice, outraging indy stores. One got so mad it stopped doing business with the behemoth. (See Can You Survive without Amazon?)

Barnes & Noble, the highest-profile target of showrooming, is now in a position to fight fire with fire. Microsoft’s investment in B&N’s Nook business gives the bookstore chain the potential for a showroom that loops back to its own inventory via the Nook.

“B&N CEO William Lynch says that the company plans to embed NFC (near field communication) chips into Nooks,” reports Owen. “Users could take their Nook into a Barnes & Noble store and wave it near a print book to get info on it or buy it.”

It’s an interesting concept, but there’s a big flaw in the reasoning.  Showrooming enables customers to scan a high-priced book in a brick and mortar store, then buy it at a discount on an Internet store.  In other words, if you scan a $20.00 book in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, then go to B&N’s online store, you’ll be able to buy it for, say, $16.00.  Then why, you will ask, can’t I pay $16.00 inside the bookstore?

For a showroom to work properly you need two components: a physical space with physical books to browse; and a virtual space to actually buy them. Think of a library where physical books are on display for browsing only. Customers choose the titles they want, swipe a credit card, and wait a short time while the book is printed on an Espresso-type printer.

We’ve been buttonholing readers with this mad scheme for years, and you can see some of our postings about kiosks here.

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Showdown for Showrooms

Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books about the interrelationship of social and technological networks, was interviewed by Findings.com on the subject of social reading, the act of sharing books with other individuals and groups. Shirky’s views coruscate with insights and epigrams. But like a thriller movie that grips you while you watch it but does not hold up subsequently, some of Shirky’s glittering observations don’t quite withstand analysis.

But first the epigrams:

“Publishing is not evolving,” he says. “Publishing is going away.” As for the act of publishing itself, the complex and costly enterprise that brings books to readers,  “That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button.” That act “doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.” Given that digital technology enables us to print out the PDF of a book in our home or office, the only raison d’etre for the publishing industry today is to save its own jobs. “Publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand.”

Shirky is at his most interesting in addressing social reading, which stems directly from the universal need for readers to talk to somebody after reading a book. Until now, if you noted a thought-provoking passage in a book, your underline or highlight or marginal exclamation held no interest to anyone else – because it was unlikely it would ever be seen by anyone else. But now digital technology empowers us to communicate our response to scores, hundreds, thousands of people by simply enabling the social default on your e-book reader so that others reading the same e-book can see what captured your attention.”By switching to default public,” he says,”the aggregate value of that information is so much larger than anybody believed it would be in the 1990s.”

It’s on this point, however, that the thrust of Shirky’s bon mot engine starts to sputter. For, in order for a publicly shared comment to mean anything it’s vital to know the source of the comment. Take “Miles to go before I sleep”, an iconic line that is undoubtedly on every poetry lover’s bucket list.  If it was highlighted by undergraduate Joe Shmoe does that tell me anything about Frost’s poem? About Joe? Does it make me think differently about Robert Frost?

But if I were to learn that line was highlighted by, say, Dick Cheney or Angelina Jolie or Mike Tyson, I would certainly pause to wonder about the association.  “Cowards die many times before their death” is a Shakespearean cliche, yet when we learn that while imprisoned in South Africa Nelson Mandela wrote his name beside it we utter a thoughtful “Hmmm.” In March 2011 a symposium on “association copies” of books owned or annotated by famous authors provoked many such utterances when we learned what Abraham Lincoln said about Alexander Pope, or Walt Whitman about Henry David Thoreau. (See Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in Margins.) It’s only because it’s Lincoln or Whitman that the marginalia makes us sit up and take notice

But all in all Shirky is right: by making your own responses to a passage visible to all readers, you are “extending the radius and the half-life of its value.” Another gem of an epigram to take away from a thought-provoking interview.

How We Will Read: Clay Shirky

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as NYU’s Clay Shirky: “Publishing is Going Away”

Wired recently rated the leading eInk e-book readers and set off a storm of snarky comments that may be more enlightening, and are certainly more entertaining, than Wired‘s analysis itself.  But more of that in a minute.

The analysts were in agreement about how far e-readers have come since the first generation (or second, for the Rocket Book predates the Kindle by almost a decade). “Entry-level e-readers have become better, faster, and more stylish,’ they note. “Considering their low cost, featherweight portability (6 to 7 ounces), battery life (up to a month per charge), and superior readability, it’s easy to justify having an e-reader and a tablet. Also, the lack of distractions on a dedicated reader is nice.”

Weighing the comparative merits of the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch, Sony PRS-T1 and Kobo Touch, the team reviewed such features as the gadget’s price and depth of its bookstore. They also seized on the flicker factor.”Some e-readers flicker more between pages than others,” they write. “If you think a flicker is slightly annoying in the store, it will drive you absolutely nuts by page 200 of that Murakami novel.”

They rated the reading devices on a scale of 1 to 10:

1.  A complete failure in every way
2.  Barely functional; don’t buy it
3.  Serious flaws; proceed with caution
4.  Downsides outweigh upsides
5.  Recommended with reservations
6.  A solid product with some issues
7.  Very good, but not quite great
8.  Excellent, with room to kvetch
9.  Nearly flawless; buy it now
10. Metaphysical product perfection

We won’t keep you in suspense, but the top-rated e-reader turns out to be…the Kobo Touch, with a rating of 8 (Excellent, with room to kvetch): “Our surprise winner is the most natural e-ink reader we’ve ever used. Its touchscreen is the fastest and most responsive, yet it’s also smart enough to ignore unwanted inputs (a common failing in this class of devices). The shopping experience isn’t as personalized or directed as Amazon’s or Barnes & Noble’s, but the store’s pricing and selection are catching up.”  The kvetch? “No hardware buttons for page turns. Limited selection of periodicals. No Twitter integration.”

Alas, the Sony Reader merited only a 4: “Poky, cumbersome user interface. Disappointing store options. Expensive for what you get.”  For all reviews click here. But when you’re through, keep going.  The responses from readers started at vitriolic (“Is it too much to ask for basic relevance?”, “Brevity is no excuse for a level of incompetence on display here,” and “I already was pretty sure that you were a brainless blatherer when you name dropped Murakami. Then you confirmed it with ‘No Twitter integration’”) and descended to:

“Welcome to Wired…You are surprised by this ‘journalism’? You must not come here often. They have a bunch of kid contributors who are probably getting paid no better than the kids across the Pacific. Either the editors are non-existent, or they simply don’t care. It really seems sometimes these kids can write anything they want to and it just gets published.”

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.

Can You Resist Temptation? Probably Not

We don’t need the New York Times to confirm something we’ve been saying for years but it’s always nice to be validated. Julie Bosman and Matt Richtel, writing in that august journal, describe growing concern that tablet computers have too many distractions to keep readers immersed in books they are reading on those devices.

We’ve been saying so for years, but now it’s official. “People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad,” the reporters write, “are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.” “’The tablet is like a temptress,’” said a Forrester Research analyst, citing such seductions as YouTube videos and popup email alerts. In response to a Forrester survey, only 31 percent of publishers “believed iPads and similar tablets were the ideal e-reading platform.”

Three years ago we expressed concern about the allure of tablets. A former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience, wrote that “people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent… Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.”

Her comments are particularly true for children. Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain.” But “my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).” (See The Medium is the Screen. The Message is Distraction.

Professor Gloria Mark, deeply concerned about the distractions engendered by screen media, expressed her own preference: “I’d much rather curl up in an easy chair with a paper book. It’s not only an escape into a world of literature but it’s an escape from my digital devices.”

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.

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

“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