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original mac screen fonts, from folklore.org
There’s a battle going on in the e-book field, one of the few media businesses that’s truly booming these days.
At stake: what these non-thing purchases will cost you.
In one corner: Amazon. The Seattle e-commerce king and Kindle e-book machine seller wants to set its own e-book prices (with most mass-market titles at $9.99), no matter what publishers want.
(Amazon also wants to eliminate the “hardcover window,” the early months of publication in which only the high-priced deluxe version of a book can be bought. Specifically, Amazon wants to sell e-books of a title the same week as that title’s dead-tree version first comes out.)
In the other corner: Five of America’s six biggest publishers (HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster), plus Apple (in a third corner?). The publishers have publicly proposed a different pricing structure, which they call “the agency model.” Under this scheme, publishers would set e-book retail prices. The e-book selling sites (Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc.) would keep a 30 percent margin from this price.
Early last year, Macmillan threatened to withhold its titles from Amazon’s Kindle e-book platform until Amazon capitulated to the “agency model,” which it did; but only after Amazon threatened to withhold selling Macmillan’s physical books from the main Amazon site.
Now, a Seattle law firm has filed a class action suit in a California U.S. District Court. The suit alleges the five publishing giants and Apple have conspired to drive up e-book prices. The law firm names two individual consumers, in California and Mississippi, as the case’s official plaintiffs.
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With all this going on, William Skidelsky at the Guardian asks what’s the “true price” of a book as a written and edited document, rather than as a physical object.
Skidelsky quotes ex-Billboard editor Robert Levine, who’s written a forthcoming tract entitled Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. Levine, as you’d guess, takes the side of the intellectual-property industry, including the book publishers.
Levine (as quoted by Skidelsky) states that it only costs $3.50 to “print and distribute” a hardcover book.
Thus, the argument goes, e-books should be just that much cheaper than physical books, no more.
However, it’s not that simple.
First of all, the whole pricing structure of physical books is about the design, manufacture, shipping, warehousing, and retailing of the object; including big margins to the retailers and wholesalers (who still sometimes have trouble keeping afloat). When all that’s reduced to the storage of some megabytes on a server, that whole pricing model goes away.
And much of the publisher’s share of a book’s price includes an allowance for the industry’s tremendous physical waste. If a copy shipped to a bookstore doesn’t sell, it gets sent back. All those copies are either re-shipped at clearance prices (more likely for coffee-table picture books) or destroyed. With e-books, none of that happens.
You will note that, aside from Levine, we haven’t mentioned authors.
What would an e-book pricing structure look like if it were based on the people who actually make what’s being bought?
Take the current royalties for a book’s authors and illustrators.
Then at least double them.
Not only do the creators deserve it, but such a step would acknowledge that, since e-books are cheaper to get out, there will be more titles out there scrambling for readers’ bucks, and hence each individual title might not sell as much.
Then add in a budget item for the work-for-hire participants in a book’s making—the editors and designers and cover artists and licensors of agency photographs. Again, they’d be higher than for traditional paper books, to make up for lower expected total sales.
There’s still a role in the e-book realm for what we call “publishers.” They put up the money. They arrange promotion and advertising. They put authors, artists, and editors together. In many cases, they organize the transmutation of a vague idea into a saleable product.
Once these parties all have their pieces of the pie set into a fixed wholesale price, e-book sellers could charge as much or as little as they think they can get away with.
That’s one potential e-book pricing model. There are others.
One is that of Take Control Books, for which I’ve worked in the past. They sell their e-books directly on their own site. Half the retail take, minus a cut for the company’s e-commerce provider, goes directly to the authors. (Take Control sells its e-books as .pdf files, which can be transferred with greater or lesser ease to all e-book reading devices.)
Another is self publishing, that past and present refuge of the artiste with no perceived commercial potential. Only in the e-book age, some authors are actually succeeding this way.
Earlier this year, bestselling thriller writer Barry Eisler said he was walking out of his “handshake deal” with St. Martin’s Press. For the time being, all books written by Eisler will be published by Eisler.
Of course, Eisler has an established “brand” for his works; much like Radiohead had when they released a download-only album. And Eisler has experience in the Silicon Valley startup world.
A more realistic role model would be that of Amanda Hocking. She’s young. She’s photogenic. She writes in a popular commercial-fiction genre. She’s sold a million e-books without a corporate backer (she’s got one now, though).
The business side of book publishing, as I’ve carped here for years, has been a moribund, tradition-obsessed infrastructure of waste and lost opportunity.
E-books represent the biggest chance in decades (since the rise of the big-book bookstore chains) to fix this.
Let’s not blow it.
(Thanx and a hat tip to Michael Jacobs for suggesting added angles to this story.)
2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue
Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.
illo from macgazette.net
Be restful this evening, fellow Mac users.
The newest version of Mac OS X, version 10.7 (code named Lion) isn’t out yet, despite rumor sites that claimed it would be out by now. You don’t need to clog Apple’s servers to download it yet.
And don’t wait in line outside an Apple Store. This OS update will be sold exclusively as a download.
Why are you supposed to want it? For the “250+ New Features,” of course. Documents that auto-save themselves. Instant full-screen mode. Updated apps for mail, web browsing, address-book, networking, chatting, video calling/conferencing, security, backups and more. A “Launchpad” interface that looks like the iOS (iPhone/iPod/iPad) menu screen. A Mac App Store, just as convenient (and as censored) as the iOS app store.
But take this waiting time to prepare yourself.
Back up everything, just in case.
And check your applications folder. Thoroughly.
You see, Lion not only runs only on Macs with Intel chips, but it only runs applications written to be run on Macs with Intel chips.
It won’t run apps written for the previous, PowerPC-based Macs.
If you’re still using any Mac software that you haven’t updated since 2005-2006, you’ve got something to fret about.
Christina Warren from Mashable has a handy guide for checking if you’ve got soon-to-be orphaned apps on your Mac. It involves the System Profile utility, found at the “About This Mac” menu item.
If you don’t replace those apps with fresher versions (or substitutes) before you dump the current Mac OS from your ‘puter, you’ll still have your documents. But if those documents are written in the proprietary formats of orphaned apps, you won’t be able to read or revise them.
Unless, of course you set aside a bootable external hard drive, or a partition on your Mac’s internal hard drive, with the current OS X on it.
According to my iTunes directory, you’re…
After months in the making, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has finally issued forth its paid-subscription based (albeit free for the first two weeks) online “newspaper,” christened The Daily. It’s only available via an iPad app, though I suspect versions for other platforms will roll out in time.
First complaint: I am a veteran of, and remain loyal to, the Daily of the University of Washington. To me, no other enterprise will ever deserve the name “The Daily.”
Second complaint: After all this planning by one of the world’s biggest media companies, the thing’s a flimsy mess.
It feels like an awkward mix of USA Today and the New York Daily News (archrival to Murdoch’s own New York Post). It’s full of stunning color wire-service photos, but its news stories are short and superficial; many are rehashes of stuff an online news geek would have already read.
Mitigating factors: It’s not as rabidly stupid as Murdoch’s Fixed Noise Channel, nor as puerile (or as fun) as his NY Post. The opinion section has a few intriguing, and eminently readable, guest essays. There’s no overt political agenda.
But overall, it’s an over-processed, over-formatted, over-packaged hunk of commercial middle-of-the-road blandness, being sent out into an online America that seems to not like that sort of thing.
Just before the end of the previous year, I wrote here that Seattle has become the home of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre.
Seattle had already been one of the two U.S. hubs of the video game industry, which had been America’s fastest growing media genre the previous decade.
This is a vital, though potentially only temporary, shift.
To explain it, let’s start by going back to the allegedly good old days of the U.S. lit biz.
Books were more of a cottage industry during the first half of the previous century. That’s because they were far less popular than they are now.
Yes, less popular.
The masses read slick magazines and pulp magazines (and, later on, mass market paperbacks). “Real” books, the hardcovers and the coffee table editions, were sold in boutiques or boutique-like settings within department stores, to a target audience of educated but careerless women. They were commissioned and curated by small offices of tweed-suited gentlemen in New York and Boston.
The smallness of the market ensured that the established publishers and distributors could maintain profitable market shares, so long as they kept issuing saleable works.
The few new authors who could break into the rarified world of “trade books” (usually from the fiction sections of the “better” magazines) knew they’d be promoted and nurtured by their publishers, as big fish in a very small pond.
This is the milieu that “people of the book” nostalgize about. I dunno ’bout you, but I’d have hated it. Too stifling, too restrictive, too frou-frou.
Then the industry got big.
The GI Bill fueled three decades of growth in college lit programs.
Trade paperbacks, and original (non-reprint) mass paperbacks, helped bring the book racket into supermarkets and discount stores.
Chains opened full-line bookstores in shopping malls, succeeded by bigger chains opening big-box bookstores in every town and suburb.
Global conglomerates bought, sold, and combined publishers, bringing in cadres of corporate bean-counters in the process.
Authors became in-demand guests on TV and radio talk shows; their facility with these appearances (or lack thereof) often greatly affected their career prospects. Even in
Then came Amazon.
Instead of the extremely inefficient bookstore world, whose crippling (for publishers) return policies became ever-more abused by ever-bigger big box chains, there was one massive retailer who bought to order, and who tracked every sale with a staggering array of useful statistics.
Within a decade (a mere trice in this traditionally snail-paced industry), Amazon became the big publishers’ best frenemy.
As the big chains had eased out many smaller booksellers, Amazon took market share from the chains. When the great recession struck all retail sectors, the book chains suffered more than most.
Then came Kindle.
After more than a decade of attempts, electronic books finally took off thanks to Amazon’s marketing clout.
With no physical product for publishers to have manufactured, Amazon has wound up with even more leverage in the delicate dance of supplier and seller.
Amazon doesn’t even have to sell all its own hardware, with Kindle-format ebooks playing on PCs, tablets, and smartphones as well as Amazon’s own branded devices.
I’m not the only observer to see Amazon having a clear upper hand in the industry, if not its fulcrum of clout.
It had subsumed some of the biggest media companies on earth (while imposing its will on more than a few smaller publishers along the way).
And now, Amazon’s put its valuable sales-metrics data on a handy online dashboard widget thang. It includes data about industry-wide sales of a publisher’s titles, not just those made through Amazon.
With this information at hand, and without the need to invest in print runs or suffer the bookstore chains’ consignment policies, the financial barrier to book publishing (on a serious commercial level) continues to plummet.
It’s easy to imagine more authors becoming self-publishers, hiring their own copy editors, publicists, etc. instead of working for corporate publishers who have those operations in-house. (Already, in the comics world, ebook sales favor indie titles more than comic-book-store sales do.)
Who needs a royalty-sucking edifice in Manhattan, when an author can deal with Amazon direct?
The Jet City, once thought of in lit circles as little more than a strong book buying market and a gateway to Montana, has become Book City U.S.A.
For now, at least.
Thing is, the brave new book world is a faster place. A much faster place.
Enter Google Ebooks.
And Google Ebooks’ strategic ties with local indie booksellers.
That’s something Amazon just isn’t set up to offer (though the fiscally troubled Barnes & Noble is)—a physical, real-world presence, with friendly neighborhood book-lovin’ experts guiding buyers’ individual reading pleasures.
Then there are the authors and publishers who claim not to need Amazon or Google. They just sell direct, from their own websites. These include the new OR Books and my own sometime ebook publisher Take Control Books.
It’s going to get messy and complicated. When and if the dust clears, I expect Amazon will remain a strong player in both “e” and non-“e” books.
But it won’t be the only one.
Seattleites, enjoy your collective symbolic stance as capital of the world of words while it lasts.
A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.
As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.
I know a LOT of people who are spending this day and upcoming night wishing a good riddance to this epic fail of a year we’ve had.
The economy in much of the world (for non-zillionaires) just continued to sluggishly sputter and cough. Thousands more lost jobs, homes, 401Ks, etc.
The implosion of the national Republican Party organization cleared the way (though not in this state) for a wave of pseudo-populist demagogue candidates who only appeared in right-wing media, because those were the only places where their nonsensical worldviews made pseudo-sense. Enough of these candidates made enough of a stir to take control of the US House of Reps., which they have already turned back over to their mega-corporate masters.
And we had the BP spill, continuing mideast/Afghan turmoils, violent drug-turf wars in several countries, floods in Pakistan, a bad quake in Haiti, the deaths of a lot of good people, and a hundred channels of stupid “reality” shows.
Locally, a number of ballot measures were introduced to at least stem the state’s horrid tax unfairness, while staving off the worst public-service budget cuts. They all failed.
And the South Park bridge was removed without a clear replacement schedule, the Deeply Boring Tunnel project continued apace, the Seattle Times got ever crankier (though it stopped getting thinner), and our major men’s sports teams were mediocre as ever. Seattle Center bosses chose to replace a populist for-profit concession (the Fun Forest) with an upscale-kitsch for-profit concession (Chihuly).
Alleviating factors: (Most) American troops are out of Iraq. Something approximating health care reform, and something approximating the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, both passed. Conan O’Brien resurfaced; Jon and Stephen worked to restore sanity and/or fear. The Storm won another title. The football Huskies had a triumphant last hurrah; the Seahawks might get the same. Cool thingamajigs like the iPad and Kinect showed up. Seattle has emerged as the fulcrum of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre. The Boeing 787’s continued hangups have proven some technologies just can’t be outsourced.
My personal resolution in 1/1/11 and days beyond: To find myself a post-freelance, post-journalism career.
One Craig Mod (apparently his real name), a Tokyo-based book editor and graphic designer, has plenty of detailed and well-expressed opinions about “Books in the Age of the iPad.”
His first proclamation: E-books mean the impending end in print of “disposable books,” the “throwaway paperbacks” with ephemeral interest and limited artistic achievement. Or so Mod believes.
I disagree, natch.
To me, commercial ephemera is America’s greatest art form. And it comes close to being Japan’s greatest art form.
What Mod disdains as the “dregs of the publishing world” are the darlings of eBay, the stuff of occasional legend. They include everything in between magazines and trade paperbacks. They are the literature of their specific times and places.
They include the beautiful Dell “map back” mysteries, teen fan books, fashion and hair guides, comics collections, pretty much all science fiction/fantasy, decades of progressively-more-sexual romance novels, giveaway cookbooks, Scholastic Book Club titles sold in schools, “adult reading” novels with “good girl art” covers, and pretty much any reading matter issued since 1930 that is or ever was popular.
Mod is wrong about this point. But I believe he’s right about some of his other points.
Like when he mentions that publications designed for the iPad or other ebook readers could be categorized as either “formless content” (straight text) or “definite content” (material that relies upon text/image juxtaposition or other design elements).
And when he notes that iPad books don’t have to conform to print-centric “page layout” design metaphors.
And especially when he chides both Apple and Amazon for leaving out essential typographic tools from their ebook software platforms.
My main question about the Apple iPad is apparently answered “yes.” Developers will be able to use custom fonts in iPad applications, including print-media publications sold as apps.
Seattle’s own branding and logo-design hotshot Tim Girvin offers his own historical thoughts about Apple, Steve Jobs, and the road to the iPad.
My own thoughts:
A diarist at Daily Kos, using the nom de web Devilstower, alleges that when (and if) the rumored Apple Tablet is finally announced this Wednesday, the result will be a new online-media dichotomy:
It’s not Apple vs Microsoft anymore.  It’s not even Apple vs Google. It’s Apple vs the Web. Just as the web replaced earlier systems, Apple is building an alternative ecosystem that uses the Internet’s backbone covered with their own cross-device platform. …When this wave has passed, there’s every chance that a lot of people will make their way through the Internet without ever seeing the letters “www” again. It won’t be the web. It’ll be the Orchard. What doesn’t Apple have in the Orchard? You. They have a massive presence in the media realm, but they don’t have anything to offer that competes with the freewheeling world of blogs and the rapidly changing social media space. They don’t have it yet. And maybe they won’t. But, fellow resident of Dinoville, I wouldn’t bet on it.
It’s not Apple vs Microsoft anymore. Â It’s not even Apple vs Google.
It’s Apple vs the Web.
Just as the web replaced earlier systems, Apple is building an alternative ecosystem that uses the Internet’s backbone covered with their own cross-device platform.
…When this wave has passed, there’s every chance that a lot of people will make their way through the Internet without ever seeing the letters “www” again. It won’t be the web. It’ll be the Orchard.
What doesn’t Apple have in the Orchard? You. They have a massive presence in the media realm, but they don’t have anything to offer that competes with the freewheeling world of blogs and the rapidly changing social media space.
They don’t have it yet. And maybe they won’t. But, fellow resident of Dinoville, I wouldn’t bet on it.
Elsewhere in the piece, Devilstower refers to the “dinosaurs” of old closed-system online networks such as Prodigy and the original America Online, and implies that’s what Apple’s trying to re-create.
I see something else going on here.
The Web, for all its vast expandability and universal, gate-free access, has severe limitations as a presentation tool for professional, packaged content. It doesn’t allow for real typography, at least not without a lot of complex workarounds. It doesn’t allow for standardized page sizes or complex graphic design. Web-based content can’t command a price from readers because (among other reasons) readers subconsciously don’t perceive it as a place for works of value.
The Apple Tablet platform can be all these things that the Web isn’t, or has a hard time being.
The Web won’t go away any time soon. If it ever does, it will be succeeded by something that does what the Web does best, only better.
By “what the Web does best,” I’m thinking of chats, social networking, discussion threads, blogs, real-time information, and the whole ongoing mashup of different media from different places and times.
But fully integrated, depth-heavy works of the communication arts will be better served by the Tablet platform. Until something better succeeds it.
I was in the downtown library yesterday with my MacBook (which doesn’t get out much anymore, now that I have an iPod Touch).
Some dude I’d never met before came up and started talking to me. At the downtown library, this happens rather often. But this guy wasn’t trying to sell me a bus pass or tell me a long story that would start by asking for directions and end by asking for money.
He just wanted to alert me to something he’d seen on an Apple rumors site. It was another variant of the long-rumored Apple tablet device. “It’s like a MacBook without the keyboard, or a big iPod Touch. It looks great!”
Now I’ve seen one of these new rumor articles. And I must say I like the specs the article mentions. This is almost exactly the device I’d dreamed of earlier this year, when I speculated that the future of the online written word (including journalism) lay in .pdf documents formatted for tablets and netbooks.
(My caveat: While I’m intrigued by the concept of an Apple tablet as a full-page-size iPod Touch, I suspect many users will also want to use it for more traditional home-computer functions, including functions at which the iPhone OS and its available apps are still insufficient.)
Meanwhile, closer to home, other tech rumor sites are spreading an internal Microsoft video, demonstrating the features of what might be that company’s next-gen tablet computer concept, code named “Courier.” Like the rumored Apple device, the rumored MS device wouldn’t run a regular home-computer operating system. Instead, it would operate its own integrated suite of apps, based on the metaphor of an “infinite journal” where the user could clip and paste anything from/to anywhere.
The warning here is that MS has whole teams of “futurists” and conceptual designers working full-time on the personal-tech version of “concept cars”—items that, in their initial iterations, will never see a sales shelf, but which are used to work out ideas that may eventually find their way into real products. Courier might be one of these.
…before pay-per-view cable channels, championship boxing matches used to be telecast exclusively on “closed-circuit” feeds to movie theaters and arenas. For home audiences, the promoters would license one TV or radio network to broadcast a studio-based show, in which an announcer would read round-by-round descriptions of the action transmitted by teletype from the fight venue.
This is the closest precedent I can think of for “live blogging.”
One of the chief live-blogged events every year is Steve Jobs’s keynote address at the Macworld Expo, Apple’s chief vehicle for announcing new products.
Yes: An event that’s all about the latest, greatest, and shiniest electronic media devices gets its first communication to the outside world by the modern equivalent of telegraph-era technology. Guys with WiFi-equipped laptops sit in the audience and type out brief descriptions of what they hear and see.
(Apple used to try live online video streams of the Jobs speeches. But they never mastered the bandwidth issues. Online video is better suited for recorded content and niche audiences than for a lot of people watching the same live thing.)
So, like thousands of the Mac faithful, I went to Mac news-and-rumor Web sites to read about what Jobs was saying while he was saying it, accompanied by the occasional still digi-pic.
I’ll let other sites explain what Jobs said and showed. As many sites predicted, there’s a new really thin laptop computer, online movie rentals (some in hi-def!), and software updates to the iPhone, iPod Touch, and Apple TV. There’s also a new wireless external hard drive. All the live bloggers gushed in insta-print over all the stuff.
But they disagreed with the show’s closing entertainment. Jobs trotted out one of his celeb pals, Randy Newman. He performed “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” his return to his old snide singer-songwriter act after several years of toiling in the family business of soundtrack composing.
One live-blogger, Jason Snell, was apparently only used to Newman’s movie songs. Here’s Snell’s comments, reconfigured into chronological order:
“Randy’s singing a song about America, the president, and comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. USA! USA! USA!!!!!“’It pisses me off a little that the Supreme Court is going to outlive me.’†What the crap is he singing about? We have no idea. We think he’s gone nuts. ‘The first song’s over, but now Randy Newman’s just riffing about random stuff. The next song is from Toy Story. Randy says he wrote another song to go with the love scene between Buzz and Woody, but the scene was cut. This guy is blowing our minds right now. “Holy crap. Who knew Randy Newman, the guy who makes the songs your kids play over and over and over again, would sing such crazy crap about our government?”
“Randy’s singing a song about America, the president, and comparing them to Hitler and Stalin. USA! USA! USA!!!!!“’It pisses me off a little that the Supreme Court is going to outlive me.’†What the crap is he singing about? We have no idea. We think he’s gone nuts.
‘The first song’s over, but now Randy Newman’s just riffing about random stuff. The next song is from Toy Story. Randy says he wrote another song to go with the love scene between Buzz and Woody, but the scene was cut. This guy is blowing our minds right now.
“Holy crap. Who knew Randy Newman, the guy who makes the songs your kids play over and over and over again, would sing such crazy crap about our government?”
My question is different: Who knew such impolite but lucid talk about the end of the American empire would find an outlet at a Fortune 500 company’s PR show?
