Mastering the Mysteries of Metadata

Okay, hotshot, so you want to be an e-book publisher? Piece of cake. All you have to do is provide your retailers with the following information about your books:

• eISBN
• Title
• Contributors
• Description
• Publisher
• Language
• Territorial Rights with Country Code
• Suggested Retail Price with country code
• Publication Date
• BISAC Code
  

Collectively, this information is known as Metadata, and unless you provide it for every title and in a format that is usable by retailers, the stores will not carry your e-books. And every retailer has its own format requirements.

Take the simple matter of book titles. What is your retailer's protocol for designating them? Do they prefer "The Grapes of Wrath" Or "Grapes of Wrath, The"? And how about the byline? "John Steinbeck"? Or "Steinbeck, John"?

Or take suggested retail price. Which currency are we talking about? US dollars? Canadian dollars? Australian dollars? British Pounds? And do you know the Country Code associated with the currency?

Then there's the matter of territorial rights. There's a code for every country in which you have the right to sell your books. Do you know the country code for Lesotho? Cameroon? Mozambique? How about the USA? Canada?

You'll need a 13-digit eISBN for each and every e-book. Do you have them? Know where to get them? Are they free or do you have to buy them?

And of course you'll need BISAC codes, the numbered subject headings organized to help retailers display books by topic. Are you publishing a fantasy? What kind of fantasy? Contemporary (FIC009010)? Historical (FIC009030)? Paranormal (FIC009050)? (You can read all about BISAC Codes here.)

What about your covers? What's the retailer's convention for image files, .png or .jpg? What's the minimum pixels per square inch? Minimum width in pixels?

There's lots more -- pages and pages of definitions, specs and tolerances in fine print provided by each retailer.

Still think any bozo can become an e-publisher? Do your Metadata homework and get back to me.

Richard Curtis

Comic Book Heroes Frozen as Amazon Turns Off Buy Buttons

Amazon has neutered the Buy buttons for all comic book and graphic novel publishers distributed by Diamond Comics Distributors, according to Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly. But this is not a trade dispute like Amazon vs. Macmillan, but rather "an effort to correct the glitch that caused the wild discounting of graphic novels on Amazon.com," writes Reid, who adds that "there has been speculation that the glitch was caused by Diamond."

Frozen in time, space and commerce are such leaders as Marvel, IDW, Dark Horse, Archaia, Image Comics, and Top Shelf. Reid explains that "Amazon has to do an audit to figure out which customers got books and at what prices."

When will the buttons be turned on again? It will take a superhero who can see into the future. "There is no timetable for when this will be completed," one source was quoted in Reid's news story.

Pictured is a sculpture by Mark Newman of Bobby Darke, a.k.a. Iceman, one of the original members of Professor Charles Xavier's X-Men.

RC

Book Ripped Off? Who You Gonna Call? Pirate Sinker!

Tag - You're IT!

That's the banner that Hank St. James's brandishes as he hurtles into battle with a book pirate. Only that's not what he calls them. His name for them is "parasites".

St. James is a piracy exterminator for hire. For a fee he monitors pirate sites and when he finds a client's book on one he emails a takedown notice to the bad guys. "Sometimes this entails as many as nine emails to get one book taken down from one site," he informs me. "They use some sites where they upload too and that site then re-ups to seven or eight other sites automatically."

He claims a high success rate, about 98% getting links removed within 1-3 days. "I've cracked most of the larger ones," he says.

Like anyone else in the law enforcement field, St. James's job is fraught with danger. "I have been threatened by one clown in Holland connected with [an underground website] when we had a five day running battle to get one of my authors works removed from his site. I've picked up viruses from some sites which my software has caught. Fifteen of those viruses are in quarantine, however, as there apparently is no antidote for the strains that infected my computer. So, the virus software simply isolated the virus."

Is Pirate Sinker cool and dispassionate? Hardly. "It is very frustrating, anger inducing work," he says. "Recently, John Simpson had a new book come out and that same day it was on [another underground website] which kinda sent me into a blue rage. These shoplifting parasites have no shame."

For more information you can reach him at piratesinker@gmail.com .

A number of publishers and organizations like Associated Press and The Financial Times have turned to a company called Attributor. Though not as dashing and glamorous as Pirate Sinker, Attributor boasts solid and respectable chops. "Attributor’s FairShare Guardian is the world’s first web-wide monitoring and enforcement platform," says the company's website. One of the its customers is Hachette, publisher of such imprints as Little, Brown and Grand Central Publishing. (See Hachette Hires Anti-Piracy Hammer.)

Richard Curtis

That Was Fast! Vooks Go Mainstream

If you're under the impression that vooks, the book/video hybrid, are the e-book equivalent of a garage band, check out John Makinson's vision for them. Makinson is CEO of Penguin Group, a company that reserves its garage for executive limos. Makinson recently demonstrated before a London conference how his company's books could spread their digital wings on the iPad. See a video below.

Penguin "will be embedding streaming audio, video and gaming into everything that we do," he told the conferees. "We'll be creating a lot of our content as applications."

Which means they are forsaking epub, which "is designed for narrative text but not this cool stuff that we're talking about now" and "for the time being at least we'll be creating a lot of our content as applications."

When an august publishing personage like John Makinson starts talking about "cool stuff," you know the revolution has seized the mainstream.

For more about vooks, read If They Asked Me, I Could Write a...Vook?, and for more about ePub, check out What is ePub and Why It's Important to You?

RC

Are You Futured Out?

Until now, most folks returning from the annual Tools of Change conference have come away inspired and energized as the flint of old thinking met the steel of innovation. But this time publishing industry blogger Don Linn reported symptoms of future weariness. "We are in the midst of a bucketload of 'Future of Publishing' conferences and there is an element of conference fatigue setting in," he writes. "There's not much new under the sun: In the 2 1/2 days I was there, I didn't see or hear anything startling or revolutionary that hasn't been discussed in other conferences or even at previous TOC's."

His weltschmerz may be shared by others who attended the Digital Book World Conference in January, TOC in February, and face an intimidating gauntlet of convocations celebrating the future. Their common theme is that the future has arrived.

Well, if the future has arrived, can we get a discount on our registration fees? They're really starting to pile up.

Here's Linn's analysis which, in all seriousness, offers some cogent takeaways.

Richard Curtis

Shopping for Free E-Book? Here's Your Chance

This is Read an eBook Week, with thousands of titles available at no cost, offered by many publishers in the hopes of attracting permanent devotees of downloads. E-Reads is a participant with a Warren Murphy "Destroyer" adventure and a Highlands historical romance by Hannah Howell. If the spike in visits to our website is any indicator, thousands of bargain hunters are endorsing the program. There is no better bargain than gratis.

Smashwords founder and blogger Mark Coker has interviewed Rita Toews, whose brainstorm seven years ago led to this annual tradition. "I hope to introduce electronic books to people who have been skeptical about them in the past," she tells Coker on Huffington Post. "I also hope to give Joe and Jane E. Author a place to get their writing noticed. Now that the traditional publishing houses have shown an interest in e-books it is hard for the unrecognized author to spread the word about their books."

RC

What Publishers Can Learn From Cablevision-ABC Feud

When the publishers of #1 bestselling hardcover Game Change windowed the e-book edition rather than issue it simultaneously, Kindle owners protested by deliberately downgrading the book in their Amazon reviews. Their action, which fell somewhere between populist revolt and temper tantrum, elicited an editorial by Publishers Lunch's Michael Cader urging publishers to do a better job educating the public. "Publishing people who care about these pricing discussions need to get in the online forums and start issuing press releases and find other ways to address readers honestly about price," he said. We agreed with him.

We've changed our minds.

What made us change our minds was the confrontation between Cablevision and ABC over how much the cable provider should pay ABC to carry its programs. Held as hostage was the Academy Awards, one of the most watched shows on the annual television calendar.

The reaction of subscribers was identical to that of Kindle owners deprived of Game Change. They didn't understand the issues, nor did they give a damn who was in the wrong. They wanted their Academy Awards, and they wanted them now. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, said this about the blackout: "When pulling a signal becomes the nuclear option in negotiation, it inflicts collateral damage on consumers who pay their bills and have done nothing wrong. Someone needs to be speaking up for them in this dispute and those like them, and make no mistake, this is the latest example of consumers getting caught in the middle because the high stakes incentives created in these negotiations are not working for the average customer who just expects their programming to be there when they want it."

Fortunately for the average customer, the dispute was settled in time. (Actually about 18 minutes late, occasioning the wry observation by New York Magazine's blogger that subscribers blessedly missed the egg laid by co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.)

The moral of Cablevision vs. ABC as far as the publishing industry is concerned is that consumers have no patience for such arcane issues as windowing, loss leader pricing or agency business models. They expect their book when they hit Download and they want it at a reasonable price. Educational initiatives are a waste of time. We need to get our pricing act together. Though there is no Academy Awards show to bring us to the brink of catastrophe, the e-book industry will not realize its full potential until we provide our products reliably and at prices that make sense to customers.

Richard Curtis

E-Book Week at E-Reads: Free Downloads from Warren Murphy and Hannah Howell!

To help promote E-Book Week (March 7-13th), E-Reads is making two of our favorite books available as free downloads in PDF format, exclusively from our website and for one week only!* We know you'll love these two titles and come back to read more titles available from E-Reads. So, enjoy!

Highland Hearts by Hannah Howell (Romance)

A villainous rogue abducts Contessa Tess from her uncle's castle in the Scottish highlands, and when he reveals her uncle's terrifying plans, she follows him into a whirlwind of adventure and realizes that there is a hero beneath his criminal facade. (This title and others are also available in other e-book formats and paperback by Hannah Howell at E-Reads.)

To download PDF, click here.




Ship of Death (Destroyer 28) by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir (Action/Adventure)

Beware Greeks bearing gifts - especially when it's billionaire Demosthenes Skouratis selling the biggest pleasure cruise ship ever built to the United Nations for their headquarters. CHEAP! Over three times the size of the QE II, this huge vessel has everything from high tech offices and communications equipment to luxury spas, casinos, restaurants and palatial apartments. But the deal doesn't include a dozen dead bodies and a hull full of bombs being rigged to explode the night of the opening gala! And Remo Williams, the Destroyer, plans to crash the party. Tipped off the plot when CURE director Harry Smith is getting beaten up by some tough crew members, Remo and Sinanju master Chiun blast full steam ahead, drowning the sleazy rats and save the UN from a watery grave. (This title and others are also available in other e-book formats and paperback by Warren Murphy at E-Reads.)

To download PDF, click here.


To learn more about E-Book Week, visit the website ebookweek.com to find other special promotions by E-Book publishers.

* Terms of Service: These two titles are available for free to end-users only when downloaded from E-Reads.com. All distribution rights are reserved and they must not be redistributed in any way or form. Please do not link directly to these PDF files.

A Film and a Novel Illuminate the Book of Kells

The Secret of Kells is a surprising dark-horse candidate for an Oscar for best animated feature. It's the story of a boy, living in a Celtic abbey, whose imaginative adventures inspire the creation of the Book of Kells, the Thirteenth Century illuminated manuscript that is one of Ireland's priceless cultural treasures.

E-Reads has a Book Of Kells of its own, a fantasy novel by R. A. MacAvoy, author of such acclaimed works as Tea with the Black Dragon. In MacAvoy's book, a meek artist named John Thornburn and a warrior--like woman, Derval time-travel to ancient Ireland to avenge a Viking attack. Packed with fascinating details of historical time and place in Irish history and delicately balanced on the border between realism and fantasy, the story centers around that very Book of Kells.

E-Reads has a complete collection of MacAvoy's distinguished backlist. Click here to see it.

RC

Engadget Leaks MS Courier Tablet

Nilay Patel has posted on Engadget a preview of the excruciatingly long awaited Microsoft Courier tablet. It could well give Apple's iPad a run for the money.

" We're told Courier will function as a 'digital journal,'" writes Patel, "and it's designed to be seriously portable: it's under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn't much bigger than a 5x7 photo when closed. That's a lot smaller than we expected...The interface appears to be pen-based and centered around drawing and writing, with built-in handwriting recognition and a corresponding web site that allows access to everything entered into the device in a blog-like format complete with comments...Most interestingly, it looks like the Courier will also serve as Microsoft's e-book device, with a dedicated ecosystem centered around reading."

No news on price or release date except a vague "Q3/Q4". Below is a video demo. For the full Engadget article click here.

RC

Cory Doctorow Steers Clear of Roach Motels

Since Cory Doctorow began writing a monthly column for Publishers Weekly (see What Can Publishers Learn from Cory Doctorow?) we've been monitoring it, because he never wants for fresh insights into publishing processes that jaded denizens of the industry take for granted.

In the latest Cory Doctorow column in Publishers Weekly he shines his beam on the mysteries of book and e-book pricing, a swamp into which many have waded recently but few returned with any insights.

His particular focus is what he calls price discrimination, "the idea that you make more money by segmenting your customers based on how much they're willing to spend...In publishing, price discrimination is accomplished through 'windowing.'" To put it simply, windowing is the practice of starting with an expensive hardcover edition for the well-heeled and the impatient; then, in time, releasing cheap editions such as mass market paperbacks or e-books.

Price discrimination, says Doctorow, is balanced by what he calls "demand elasticity." Instead of starting with a high priced edition and stepping down to cheaper ones (and making many customers wait), you start out with a low price to begin with in order to attract the largest audience in a concentrated period of time.

The crossroads of these two concepts also happens to be the crossroads of traditional publishing and digital publishing. The exigencies of the traditional require a stepped rollout of editions from higher priced to lower. But the economies generated by digital enable a publisher to slash list prices. The latter means a lower profit margin per unit sold but that's made up by - more units sold! And that happens to be the retail model practiced by Amazon with the Kindle.

That works great for customers and it sure as hell works great for Amazon, says Doctorow. But, as the recent shooting war between Amazon and Macmillan demonstrated (see Publishing's Weekend War: 48 Hours That Changed an Industry), that model represents a grave threat to traditional publishing.

"That's because the Kindle is a 'roach motel' device," says Doctorow. Its terms of sale "ensure that books can check in, but they can't check out. Readers are contractually prohibited from moving their books to competing devices...It means that e-book customers can't break with Amazon without jettisoning their digital libraries."

As is so often the case, Doctorow's views are colored by personal experience. "Amazon refused to allow any changes to its terms for my last book, both in the Audible edition and the Kindle edition, refusing to allow me to offer the book with some introductory text affirming readers' rights to move the books to devices that Amazon hasn't approved."

For this reason, Doctorow is not buying into the Amazon business model, no matter how many other benefits the company offers."Amazon has done an incredible job of figuring out how to cross-sell, upsell, and just plain sell books. They have revolutionized bookselling over the course of a decade. As a reader and a writer, and as a publisher and a bookseller, I am constantly amazed at how good they are at this. But I don't believe in benevolent dictators. I wouldn't endorse a lock-in program run by a cartel of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Mohandas Gandhi. As good as Amazon is at what it does, it doesn't deserve to lock in the reading public. No one does."

And by "no one," Doctorow includes Apple. "Don't hope for a better shake from Apple, either," he says. "Apple's longstanding love-affair with proprietary formats and lock-ins will very likely make the iPad every inch the roach motel that the Kindle is."

You can hear Doctorow on the topic on BlogTalk Radio.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

Dream of Bundling E & P Closer Thanks to B&N

Barnes & Noble to Test Bundling e-Books, p-Books, reports Jim Milliot in Publishers Weekly.
"Barnes & Noble will begin testing the sale of bundled print books and e-books in the next 60 to 90 days."

That means that if you buy a print edition at a B&N store you'll be able to add the e-book at a discount. "Providing e-books and print book bundles is just one way B&N hopes to use its retail footprint to increase sales of e-books while maintaining its lead position as the nation's largest bookseller," says B&N.Com president William Lynch.

Bundling has long been a dream of digital technologists hoping to satisfy the needs both of print and e-book readers and offers a rare exception to the proverb that you can't have your cake and eat it too. B&N's plan may kick off yet another round of pricing debate when pundits and consumers question whether the e-book shouldn't simply be thrown into the bag free with purchase of the printed book. In any event, bundling gives B&N an advantage over some retailers that are not in a position to sell a print book and an e-book in a single transaction. Amazon's response to B&N's gambit will be interesting to see.

Lynch also discussed adding print on demand to B&N's roster of core services, and hinted that it might even buy into a POD company. More likely, for the near future, B&N might experiment with installing Espresso POD machines on the premises of certain stores.

Pictured here is a bundling bed. According to Wikipedia, "bundling, or tarrying, was the traditional practice of wrapping one person in a bed accompanied by another, usually as a part of courting behavior. The tradition is thought to have originated either in the Netherlands or in the British Isles and later became common in Colonial America, especially in Pennsylvania Dutch Country. When used for courtship, the aim was to allow intimacy without sexual intercourse."

Sounds like the perfect metaphor for joining book and Nook.

Richard Curtis

At Least Plastic Doesn't Come Off On Your Fingers

Apple's new iPad tablet gives newspaper and magazine publishers an opportunity to claw back what they've given away: profitability. The potential for reading a newspaper on a screen of reasonable size and shape and in a format that actually resembles the paper-paper you hold every morning, has been boosted sky-high by the introduction of Apple's tablet.

Actually, for an inveterate reader of newspapers the format issue remains, whether you read one on a Kindle, iPad, Skiff (pictured above) or other device. If you hold the device vertically (portrait format) you see just one page at a time and thus lose the option of viewing at a glance what's on both sides of your newspaper, even peripherally. If on the other hand you hold it horizontally (landscape format) you can see both sides of the paper but cut the size down to an uncomfortable dimension. If this is the price we pay to shift from paper to plastic, I say so be it, but I say it with a big sigh. Because, dammit, I love my newspaper just the way it is.

But throwing a tantrum won't stop the clock, so we must expect a day when today's "paper" will be plastic, and reading the paper will become an anachronism as quaint as the "cc" in our emails that describes carbon copies. Newspaper publishers are rethinking their business model and considering a variety of solutions aimed at sealing the leak of content into the digital river from which all currently come to drink their fill free of charge. Last fall the Wall Street Journal started forcing news-hungry website visitors to become subscribers or miss out on breaking news. The New York Times has announced a similar initiative.

Though dropping today's news into e-book format seems simple enough to do, there are land mines, As Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford of the NY Times point out "Media companies may have to swallow hard before tethering their futures to any high-tech company, let alone Apple."

"Many publishers believe their economic health depends on finding a direct line to their customers, and it is not clear whether Apple — and other aggregators of Internet content — will allow that.

"Magazine publishers, for example, maintain sophisticated databases about their customers, which lets them cross-sell products, renew subscriptions and entice advertisers with statistics about their wealthy readers. A big part of the business is automatic renewals charged to credit cards.

"But when magazine publishers sell applications through the iTunes store, they do not get credit card information or even the name of the buyer."

To make sure they aren't jumping from the frying pan into the fire, Stone and Clifford report, some powerful magazine and newspaper publishers have formed a consortium that will operate its own online store, sell its own content, and collect its own consumer information.

You can read about it online here. Enjoy the pleasure while you can; the day will come when you'll have to become a subscriber to access this content.

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.

Can You Go to Jail for Uploading a Video?

Is Google a service provider or a content provider? Before you answer I have to read you your Miranda rights, because you can go to prison if you answer the wrong way, at least in Italy.

The Italian government says Google is a content provider, and an Italian court supporting that position found three Google executives "criminally responsible for content posted on its system," reports Rachel Donadio in the New York Times. Under Italian law, executives can be held responsible for actions taken by the companies they work for. The decision "suggests that Google is not simply a tool for its users, as it contends," writes Donadio, "but is effectively no different from any other media company, like newspapers or television, that provides content and could be regulated."

The case revolves around a video posted in 2006 that showed a group of teenage boys bullying an autistic boy. Prosecutors for the Italian government asserted that Google should have removed the video from its site faster than it did. It took two months after the incident before the Italian police formally complained to Google, but within two hours of receiving that complaint Google says it took the video down. Donadio writes that the response among Internet activists could be "likened to punishing the mailman for delivering a nasty letter."

Google has posted a blog arguing that the Italian decision contradicts a European Union directive protecting Internet service providers from liability for content hosted on their site. You can read it in full here.

Though it's hard to believe that the Italian ruling will not be thrown out on appeal, this incident is a wakeup call for Google and for anyone who believes he or she can simply throw a video up on a website without any consequences whatever. If the court decision is upheld it could have a catastrophically depressing effect on the Internet as we know it. As Google's blog said, "If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear."

This is not a war being fought on a foreign shore. It's one that is playing out beneath your nose. So, I respectfully suggest you take more than an intellectual interest in the outcome. Read the Times article in full here.

Richard Curtis