E-Reads is giving away Kobo Reader gift cards worth $25.00 to two lucky winners. To enter, all you have to do is sign up for the E-Reads newsletter.  The offer ends July 4th.  Winners will be selected at random.

Kobo is a global e-book retailer offering over 2.3 million e-books to readers in over two hundred countries. The company supports ePub and enables readers to read its e-books on their smartphone, Sony Reader, laptop, or any other device they choose. About Kobo’s recently released eReader Touch Huffington Post raved, “…Makes massive ultra-modern leaps…”

Click here to participate.

In connection with comments about literary agents who also operate publishing ventures, digital book industry authority Mike Shatzkin said this about E-Reads:

It is worth noting here that there’s one dog that hasn’t barked. Richard Curtis was the first ebook publishing agent. He set up his E-Reads business over a decade ago. He also pays 50% royalties. Richard did not create E-Reads to compete with publishers on royalties but because when he did publishers just wouldn’t do the ebooks. He has built his enterprise since that time to nearly a $1 million annual business (meaning that he’s delivering half-a-million a year to authors for properties that, at least until very recently and perhaps still, would never have been put into ebooks by a publisher.) But his name is noticeably absent from the chorus using higher ebook royalties as a public prod to bedevil publishers.

For the complete article click here.

This is Book Expo America Week. Though it has traditionally been a celebration of printed books, more and more attention is paid by exhibitors and fans to electronic books.  The following article, published on the Clarion Blog, is adapted from Richard Curtis’s 2011 keynote speech at the Writers Digest Conference.

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Since the Kindle was introduced in 2007 we’ve seen scores of rival gadgets, all touted as Kindle Killers. The Nook can do this and the iPad can do that and the Sony can do the other thing. And it’s true, they’re all wonderful in their own way. But I want to talk about a reading device that I’m crazy about that I think has been neglected in this tidal wave of hype.

Behold, emerging from 500 years of beta testing, the real Kindle Killer.

To continue click here.

Richard Curtis

Since the Kindle was introduced in 2007 we’ve seen scores of rival gadgets, all touted as a Kindle Killer. The Nook can do this and the iPad can do that and the Sony can do the other thing. And it’s true, they’re all wonderful in their own way. But I want to talk about a reading device that I’m crazy about that I think has been neglected in this tidal wave of hype.

Behold, emerging from 500 years of beta testing, the real Kindle Killer. Like so many other reading devices it’s got a cutesy name. It’s called The Book.

Let’s review some of its features.

* It’s really sleek. At five inches by eight inches, the Greeks would have appreciated the perfection of its dimensions.
* It’s light. It weighs 15 ounces, placing it between the flimsy-feeling Kindle and the weighty iPad.
* It’s flexible: you can roll it up without damaging it.
* Its operating system is 50-pound paper stock bound on the left-hand seam.
* It has no battery that we’re aware of, nor are we able to locate anything resembling a wireless antenna.
* Its graphic interface is ivory-white and its surface packs so many dots per inch that we are able to read eight- or even six-point text clearly in ambient light.
* There is no pixilation whatever.
* How about surface reflectivity? Unlike the Apple iPad, whose mirrorlike surface will blind you at the beach, the surface reflectivity of The Book is negligible.
* It’s almost impossible to smudge. You can press your thumb onto the surface but you won’t see a hint of fingerprint.
* You can drop the book on a concrete floor but when you pick it up it will still operate perfectly.
* Bookmarking is a cinch. You just insert a small card to mark your place, and when you’re ready to resume reading you pick up where you left off without a moment’s delay.
* Pagination? Instead of a progress bar, this gadget reckons your progress in consecutive numbers. Just like the Kindle.
* The Book smells great.
* It sound great, too. When you activate the page-turning feature (the technical term is “flipping the pages”) you will hear a satisfying pffftt. Just like the iPad.

There are admittedly a few design flaws. The Book is not backlit and requires supplemental lighting in a dim room. such as a light bulb. Another small problem is that it must be operated with two hands, one to support it and one to activate the page-turning mechanism. And dictionary and thesaurus lookup are a little clunky, requiring offsite reference texts.

But these are petty annoyances, especially when you hear the price. Fully loaded, how much would you expect to pay for this baby? Three hundred bucks? Five hundred? Would you believe $14.95?

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I may be a pioneer in the e-book business, but as far as I’m concerned the printed book remains the perfect reading device, and anyone who thinks it’s nothing but a fifteenth century artifact is in for a big surprise.

Right now we are totally infatuated with reading on screens, and there’s a lot to be infatuated about. Everyone I know who has a Kindle adores it. And the Apple iPad is a miracle of modern technology. But a time is coming when we’ll rub the fairy dust out of our eyes and discover serious shortcomings in the use of screens for the purpose of reading. And some of those shortcomings are pretty serious. When we realize that they are, we will take a new, good long look at printed books and we will realize that there is simply nothing comparable.

I can hear you saying, “Yeah, but by the time we do realize it, the book industry will be over.” Well, the book industry that I grew up with and that many of you grew up with – that industry may well be over. In my own lifetime I have seen the number of viable trade book publishing companies shrink from around one thousand to around one dozen.

The remaining houses have been granted a stay of execution by digital technology, but even they will be unrecognizable a decade from now, because the paradigm shift will have completely altered the way printed books are published and distributed. So let’s remind ourselves about how they are published and distributed.

As I just demonstrated, there is nothing wrong with books themselves. No creation of science and technology can match it for sensory pleasure. It completely satisfies four out of five of your basic senses – visual, audial, tactile, and olfactory. I’ve never eaten a book, so I don’t know how they taste.

It’s not just the books but the culture of books that I am so enamored of. From the collegial relationships of book-loving men and women to the wheeling and dealing to that unique blend of commerce and culture known as the publishing lunch – the environment of the old publishing world cannot be duplicated by that solitary enterprise known as self-publishing. The narcotic excitement of discovering a new voice, of sharing it with others, of deal making – converting literary value into dollar value, seeing those great reviews and watching your discovery climb on the bestseller list, the adventure, the surprises, the fun, the love – many of my colleagues have described it as better than sex.

But I’m not going to overly romanticize that world, because beneath the surface of all that glamor and money, a disease has been eating the book business.

I said there’s nothing wrong with books. That’s true. But everything is wrong with the way they’re distributed. About eighty years ago publishers and booksellers made a Devil’s pact making unsold stock returnable for full credit. That worked for a few decades, but after World War II the rate of returns began to soar. Today it’s not uncommon for 50% of any given printing to be returned to the publisher, and the industry never solved the problem of what to with returns. Now, you tell any business person that you’re in an industry where for every two units of a product you manufacture you have to eat one of them and they’ll look at you like you’re insane. And the fact is, the publishing industry as we have known it is collectively…insane!

Preprinting hundreds of thousands of copies of a book on spec, knowing that you’re going to sell half of them – and you don’t even know which half – could anything be madder? Shipping them on trucks around the country, storing them in warehouses the size of supertankers, returning them on more trucks, remaindering them at a fraction of your manufacturing cost or dumping them into a paper pulper – surely if an alien from another planet looked at our publishing industry he’d return to home base and report there is no intelligent life on that planet (as happened in a story I wrote called Pulpscape)

The returnability of books has poisoned the publishing industry, causing untold numbers of publishers big and small to merge with or be acquired by more powerful houses, leaving us with that handful of behemoths I told you about. And yet those behemoths are still hemorrhaging cash because the return rates continue to run as high as 50%. What’s worse, the returnability problem has seriously damaged literary endeavor. The big publishers want books that will guarantee low returns, and that means celebrity autobiographies, the sexier the better. So, if you want to know why you can’t sell your Great American novel, it’s because your publisher has just paid $12 million for a collection of spaghetti recipes by some notorious serial murderer. The return rate on that book will be 10%, while the one on your Great American Novel will be 75%.

I’ve been haranguing publishers about this for thirty years and it’s clear they can’t change this crazy business model, or they don’t want to. And besides, it’s too late now, because there’s a new and better one. It’s called print on demand, and most of you understand the concept. Instead of printing books first and hoping to find customers, with print on demand the books aren’t printed until the customer has paid for it. The return rate on that business model? How about zero percent? Go ask that businessperson friend of yours which model he prefers, the one with 50% returns or the one with zero. He’ll give you a one word answer: “Duh!”

Why am I telling you this? Because the print on demand industry is growing at a gallop.

David Taylor, President of Lightning Source Inc., arguably the largest POD press in the world, reported last spring that business was growing at a rate of 20% to 30% each year. Lightning prints, binds and ships 10,000 copies a day on machines that run around the clock. And that’s just one POD company. There’s another big one. It’s owned by a little outfit called Amazon. And while POD is soaring, bookstores sales are soft and getting softer. Borders is bankrupt and Barnes & Noble revenues are down. In the next couple of years you’re not only going to see bookstores close, you’re probably going to see whole chains close.

So, that’s one reason why I’m not writing off printed books. They’re just fine, thank you. But more and more they’re going to be coming to you from a print on demand facility and less and less from a bookstore. Oh, you’ll still be able to buy a book in a store, but it won’t necessarily be a bookstore. As we refine print on demand technology the POD presses like the Espresso will become more and more compact, and in time you’ll start seeing them in drugstores and supermarkets, Wal-Marts and Costcos and Starbucks. You’ll go up to a kiosk, select from a million books, swipe your card, have a cup of coffee and go back to collect your book, still wet and warm from passing through the birth canal. In fact, given how rapidly technology is able to miniaturize machinery, I wouldn’t be surprised if a day came when a print on demand press is reduced to the size of fax or photocopier.

There’s another reason you should continue to be high on print. A growing body of research indicates that people, particularly students, either don’t like to learn on e-book devices, or suffer focus, learning and retention problems. This is particularly true in the field of text books, where students have serious issues navigating reference e-books as easily as they do printed ones.

So, what’s the problem with screens? Anyone who’s spent more than ten minutes reading on one knows how easily distracted we are. Screens mean watching. We’ve grown up watching stuff on screens, websites and videos and movies. Now you look at text on that screen, just plain old black on a white background, and you say to yourself, Is that all there is? No color? No interactivity? No instant gratification? Maybe I’ll just check out YouTube to see if there are some kittens walking on a piano or corgis running on a treadmill. Now, if you feel that way, you shouldn’t be surprised that your kids do, too, and their falling grades reflect that doing schoolwork on an electronic reading device isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Whether you’re an adult or a child, you want to immerse yourself in a book. It’s hard to immerse yourself in an e-book. It’s the difference between reading a book and watching one. Have you watched a good book lately? Not the same thing!

There’s no question that the e-book revolution has arrived and arrived with a vengeance. Thanks to the convenience and low prices, the print book industry has taken a big hit. But it’s still a 24 billion dollar business, and e-book sales represent only nine percent of the total. There’s plenty of fuel left in print, and once the new model of business takes hold, one based on preorder and prepayment, a day will come when you’re as likely to see someone on a bus or train reading one of these devices called The Book as you are to see them reading a Nook or Kindle.

Richard Curtis is President of Richard Curtis Associates, a literary agency, and CEO of E-Reads, an e-book publisher. He blogs on www.ereads.com.

“The e-reader’s days are numbered,” writes HuffPo’s Amy Lee. Despite millions of e-book readers sold in the last couple of years, Lee foresees obsolescence for Kindles and Nooks as tablets take grip and ultimately take charge.

Her surmise is drawn from prestigious technical and media research firm Forrester, who project that by next year tablets will outsell e-readers, and in less than four years there will be twice as many tablet owners as e-reader owners.

The reason is simple: history proves that that given a choice between a dedicated device and a multifunctional one, it’s multifunctional every time. “As the demise of the Flip camera suggests, consumers are increasingly trading single-purpose devices for multifunction gadgets. Especially as the price of tablet computers continues to fall, experts predict users will drop e-readers for tablet PCs that offer web-browsing and video capabilities alongside e-books.

“Even Amazon, which helped make e-readers and ebooks mainstream, appears to recognize the e-reader’s impending demise and is rumored to be developing its own tablet device. The Barnes & Noble Nook Color has already been modified to run Android’s Froyo software, taking it into tablet territory.”

Lee quotes another tech firm that relegates the future of e-readers to a niche. 

A niche!

We’re not sentimental about our Kindle but this is one prediction we think is dead wrong. The compactness and utility of Kindles and Nooks (the original Kindles, the original Nooks) can’t be matched by tablets. More importantly, book lovers love to immerse themselves without distraction in their books.  They like their dedicated e-book devices to be…well, dedicated. So we’re betting against the house on this one.  Niche indeed!

You decide whether or not The ereader’s days are numbered.

Richard Curtis

Richard Curtis did not just witness the evolution of the publishing industry from print to digital, he had a significant hand in shaping it.  In a Digital Book World interview conducted by Rich Fahle, the agent and e-book publisher candidly discusses his role. The video may be seen below or on DBW’s website.

From the interview:

“Agents find themselves more and more providing services they never needed to render in the past: cover approval, correcting cover copy, editing, spellchecking authors’ manuscripts, marketing and other tasks that should be the publisher’s, but publishers either can’t or won’t do some of these things. They keep pushing the burden of responsibility back on the author. And if the author can’t do it or is helpless or doesn’t want to, the agent has to do it…

“Libraries make no sense in the future,” publishing consultant and futurist Mike Shatzkin recently said. “There is no need for a building.”

The building in which he made this pronouncement happened, unfortunately, to be a library. Obviously he was joking, but given the state of terror in which today’s librarians live, he didn’t exactly leave ‘em rolling in the aisles.

He subsequently felt compelled to amplify in all seriousness in a blog entitled It Will Be Hard to Find a Public Library 15 Years from Now, which I urge everyone connected to libraries – that means everyone, period – to read.

Poor librarians. They seem to be the victims of ham-fisted wisecrackers. I know because I made the same feeble attempt at wit several years ago at the dawn of the digital era. It was in the New York Public Library, and, like Shatzkin, there was a serious message beneath the kidding. Here’s what I wrote about that occasion.

Richard Curtis

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I take pride in my sense of humor, but sometimes it can get rather heavy-handed. That was demonstrated about ten years ago when I was invited to the New York Public Library to give a talk to librarians about the future of books.

The venue was the Map Room, an exquisite gilded salon that epitomized an age that revered the printed book. The attendees, solemn acolytes of the Dewey Decimal System, fit perfectly into the decor. My subject, you will not be surprised to hear, was the digital revolution, and to illustrate it I brought with me some CD-ROM discs. On the podium I had piled a large number of impressively thick tomes. I then produced the discs and declared that all the content of those books and more could fit onto a few of the slim shiny objects I held before them. I declared that a day would come when brick and mortar institutions known as libraries might become irrelevant. Whereupon I gestured broadly at the magnificent building and said, “I’ll bet this joint would make a great condo.”

One hundred librarians volubly sucked in their breath and gaped at me as I had torn a page out of Audobon’s Birds of America and blown my nose in it.

“Just kidding, folks,” I said sheepishly.

Actually, I wasn’t. As print media – newspapers and magazines and books – enter the endangered lists, so do the brick and mortar venues that service them: magazine stores, book shops – and libraries. The contents and catalogues of most libraries are accessible online from practically anywhere in the civilized world. The only reason patrons must go them is to check out and return their physical books. But as libraries acquire e-books, even that function becomes irrelevant. As I recently wrote, E-libraries don’t have a locus. Their patrons have no loyalty to a specific branch; they can traverse cyberspace to locate and download the e-book they wish to “borrow”. Yes, libraries (like bookstores) have managed to remain relevant in the digital age by offering a warm and vibrant social center for scholars, students and book lovers. And many provide computers for patrons to search the Worldwide Web even though they could do as much from their home, office, or a café in Paris.

These ruminations are reinforced in Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen describing the recent legal settlement of the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and a publishers group against Google, which since 2002 has been scanning millions of books into its colossal digital archive. Cohen suggest that “digitization of books is ending the distinction between circulating libraries, meant for public readers, and research libraries, meant for scholars.”

Cohen’s article ends on a hopeful note: “The digital-rights class-action agreement has the potential to make physical libraries newly relevant. Each public library will have one computer with complete access to Google Book Search, a service that normally would come as part of a paid subscription.” He cites an NYU professor, Thomas Augst, as asserting that Google is “creating a new reason to go to public libraries, which I think is fantastic. Public libraries have a communal function, a symbolic function that can only happen if people are there.”

Okay, you can hold up on the wrecking ball for now. But I have dibs on that 44th floor penthouse on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

RC

Buy one, get one free.  Buy three for the price of two. Buy two and get the third for half price. These marketing ploys are designed to overcome your resistance to buying more than one item at a time. They come under the rubric called bundling, a common sales technique in which two or more products are packaged and sold at a single price.

The tactic has commonly been used in merchandising every product under the sun including books. Now, accordingly to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal, it is being used more and more to move e-books too.  “Publishers are increasingly offering bundles of digital titles in a bid to generate buzz and to wring higher sales from the fast-growing base of e-reader owners,” writes Trachtenberg.

It is well known that the first book of a series outsells – often by a wide margin – the second and subsequent books.  Bundling helps to bring sales of those books up to par with the first.  Though you might be disinclined to buy all three titles in a trilogy for $8.99 each, totaling a bit under $27.00, you might spring for them if the combined price were $20.00. “By bundling titles at a discount we’re raising their visibility and making them more price-attractive,” Rosetta’s Arthur Klebanoff told Trachtenberg.

Not every publisher sees the benefit of bundle discounting. If a publisher knows that fans will buy every book in a series, it will not see any point in creating a bargain price for the bundle.

For e-book publishers bundling is trickier than it looks to the customer.  Each title in the package has its own ISBN identifying number. However. in order to sell, say, a trilogy at a special price, the publisher has to assign an ISBN number specifically to the bundle. As different retail formats may require their own ISBN number, the bundle may have as many as half a dozen.

Bundling e-books with other e-books is a lot easier than bundling e-books with their print edition. Though some publishers do it, the technological challenges have thus far proven daunting. (See Bundling: Publishing’s Next Battleground)

Richard Curtis

No matter how high and thick we build them and assiduously we police them, the barriers against content theft are crumbling as unscrupulous marauders find new and daring ways to rob authors. As overwhelmed carriers and retailers lose the struggle to screen their sites, an army of “content farmers” pours through the breaches, packaging and selling copyrighted works on a gigantic scale.

That’s the essence of a report posted on Publishing Trends on the great “Kindle Swindle”. It describes research by Impact Media’s Mike Essex.

“The Kindle Store allows anybody to upload identical content under multiple user names. Many ebook vendors don’t check copyright on works that are submitted, and Essex noticed that people are stealing content from the web, quickly creating ebooks about the same topics from multiple angles in order to target different keyword variants, and publishing them—some Kindle authors have ‘written’ thousands of books in a single year. The Amazon.com domain name gives these books an added boost in search results; royalty payouts are high even when a book is priced at $0.99, and reviews aren’t a surefire solution to combating the problem.”

Essex says that readers don’t know if the e-books they buy and read are legit or stolen.  But because the stuff is so cheap they’re not inclined to look too hard at whether it was written by the true author or someone who just slaps his name on the true author’s work. Screening content should really be the job of the carrier or retailer, but few of them bother. “If content holders like Apple and Amazon spent even one hour a day searching,” says Publishing Trends,”they would save customers a lot of money by removing bad content.”

Read Essex’s complete article  here.

Richard Curtis

Blogger “Andy” on AgnosticMaybe has posted the following proposed E-Book User’s Bill of Rights. Do you subscribe to it?
Richard Curtis

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The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

Every eBook user should have the following rights:

* the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
* the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
* the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
* the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.
These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

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