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Archives for February 2013

Nook News

February 26, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

Barnes & Noble may be getting out of the e-reader business:

Riggio, the chain’s founder, largest stockholder, and chairman of the company’s board, is looking to buy both the Barnes & Noble Booksellers brick-and-mortar business and Barnesandnoble.com, according to an SEC filing.

The company’s e-book, e-reader, and tablet division, Nook Media, would apparently be spun off or possibly even shut down if the deal comes to pass. The Barnes & Noble board’s strategic committee must still review the plan and the company said in a statement that there is no timetable for that happening yet.

I still don’t own an e-reader, but of all the devices on the market I thought the Nook Glowlight was a big step in the right direction. The lesson here is not simply that you should be careful which product you buy among competing manufacturers in any market segment, but that there are long-term risks inherent in adopting a proprietary device-and-service solution for your e-reading habits:

There has been no word yet what might become of the Nook division, or what this move could mean for Nook device and app users who have downloaded books, magazines, and apps. Microsoft currently owns 17.6 percent of Barnes & Noble’s Nook subsidiary. The software giant did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It may well be that the iPad and Kindle will dominate their respective markets, but that doesn’t mean they’re without similar risk. If you’re sinking money into digital copies of anything, make sure you have the right to take those copies with you to a new device if the device you’re currently using goes under. Because sooner or later, all devices go under.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: e-readers, Nook

CreateSpace vs. Bing — Fail Update

February 21, 2013 By Mark 5 Comments

My quest to get Bing to be able to see two e-store pages on CreateSpace.com remains at an impasse. (You can see the pages here and here, and you can see Bing fail to find them here and here.) The robotic email tech-support droids at CreateSpace insist that everything is fine on their end and that the problem is with Bing. The robotic cut-and-paste email tech-support droids at Bing insist that CreateSpace has never submitted a sitemap by which they can index that site, and have repeatedly given me instructions on how I can do so even though I have repeatedly explained to them that I am not the site owner.

Now, I know there’s no joy quite like the joy of being crushed between two monolithic and ruthless companies like Amazon and Microsoft, each of which is 100% committed to pretending that it is customer friendly as a means of owning all internet traffic and content throughout the known universe. So it’s not as if I don’t appreciate how fortunate I am to still be alive at this point.

Having said that, if you’re Microsoft, and you’ve launched a search engine to compete head-to-head with the best search engine in the business — which, oddly enough, seems to have no problem finding the two e-store pages that Bing is resolutely blind to — you would think you might have a better approach to maximizing the efficiency of your search engine than adamantly insisting that people register and log into your Bing Webmaster Tools site so you don’t end up looking like an idiot.

(Have I mentioned that I’m not actually the webmaster or owner of CreateSpace.com? I keep forgetting whether I’ve mentioned that or not.)

If you’re Amazon, and you’re interested in making your CreateSpace.com site available via the smaller of the two dominant search engines in the US, it seems to me that at some point you might actually go ahead and submit your sitemap to Microsoft’s Bing search engine, even though you hate Microsoft as much as you hate Google and Apple combined. And if one of your customers wrote you multiple times to say that they couldn’t find their e-store pages via Bing search, you might actually do a proactive check on your own to figure out what the problem was, and work with Bing to resolve it instead of dumping it back in your customer’s lap.

Having put in multiple hours trying to get this problem resolved over the past week I am now giving up. A week ago I would have given CreateSpace an unqualified recommendation to anyone looking for a print-on-demand publisher. Now I’m taking a second look at other options myself, and I would encourage you to do the same. Having not used Bing at all since it launched I haven’t really had an opinion about it until now. My opinion now is that Bing seems to be incapable of doing the one thing it was designed to do.

Update:

As of 2/24, searching for my grandmother’s title on Bing now returns the correct link. My short story collection is still MIA.

Later Update:

As of 3/12, after several more tech support emails to and from Bing, the Bing search engine can now also reliably find the page for my short story collection. I have no idea what the problem was or what I specifically did to solve the problem. My only advice to anyone having similar problems is to be both persistent and patient.

Headdesk Update:

Or not.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: CreateSpace, fail, Microsoft

Self-Publishing, CreateSpace and Bing

February 19, 2013 By Mark 1 Comment

If you’re a self-publishing author, one of the important chores you can do to avoid having to actually write anything is to see how the two most popular search engines report back on you and your work. The dominant US search engine is of course Google, with about 66% of the search market, while Microsoft’s Bing makes up most of the remainder. (Bing powers not only the Bing.com site, which is 16% of US search, but also Yahoo.com’s search engine, which accounts for roughly 12 percent.)

If you’re not already obsessed with your personal and professional rankings on search engines and social networks, the good news is that you don’t have to become your own favorite celebrity in order to make sure people can find you. All you need is a basic understanding of how search engines work, and how people may try to find you using various words and phrases — like, say, your name or the title of something you wrote.

While it may seem as if all search engines see the internet the same way, that’s not actually the case. In order to return hits for any search you conduct, the search engine you’re using must have already visited the page you’re looking for in order to point you to it. This process of scouring the web for content is done automatically by what are called web crawlers, which follow links from one page to the next. In general web crawlers do a good job of indexing most of what’s available on the web, but depending on how often a search engine crawls a particular site there can be some lag between when a page is published (or updated) and when that page is indexed.

To get around this lag it’s possible to go to most search engines and submit pages and sites directly so search engines know where to find new content. Since this is a bit of a chore you can also use various aggregating services to submit new pages or sites to most of the popular search engines at once, albeit often for a fee. In my own experience it’s almost never necessary to submit URL’s to search engines yourself, and in no case would I pay to have this done. In a relatively short amount of time almost any new content will show up after the web crawlers make their next sweep.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: CreateSpace, Google

Storytelling and the Evolution of Mediums

February 14, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on several previous posts about mediums and how mediums affect storytelling, I recently ran across an article that illustrates my claim that stories exist apart from the mediums we use to communicate them. From PCMag:

Just like soap opera characters wake up from years-long comas or return from beyond the grave, two cancelled daytime dramas are getting revived.

Prospect Park today announced that All My Children and One Life To Live will in fact get a second chance as the anchor programs on The Online Network (TOLN).

In a sense this development probably doesn’t even seem evolutionary, let alone revolutionary. And from the point of view of the end user it’s probably neither. You fire up whatever glowing screen you want to look at, you input a few commands, and voila: content. But consider what this means for television itself.  [ Read more ]

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: internet, iPad, medium, television, TV

Kickstarter Caution

February 11, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

A reminder today that however intrigued you are by Kickstarter, it is by now almost certainly a festering cesspool of scams and con games designed to take your money and give you nothing in return. Consider this particularly clumsy example:

Asking for $500,000 in capital funding, the collaboration with Jam Entertainment (Anderson’s company) promised to deliver a challenger to EA’s popular NCAA Football video game franchise. Perks for investors included dinner with “co-owner” Jamal Anderson, a chance to play-test the game, or a signed helmet from former Ohio State greats Archie Griffin, Eddie George, or Jim Tressel. The promotional copy suggested the game would be different from EA’s offering, thanks to the participation of former college and pro football players, and would feature every college football team—including NAIA squads—and the highest-quality 3-D models ever seen.

That is, of course, if you believe the Kickstarter page, which asserts that the graphics actually come from the game. They don’t. In fact, the funding campaign was canceled earlier today, shortly after we spoke with Anderson. He told us he had nothing to do with the project and no connection to Dirty Bird Sports.

Kickstarter acts as a match-making service only. They guarantee next to nothing, and to whatever extent they police projects on the site they do so primarily to preserve their own reputation, not your bank account. If a scam or con game gets funded and ultimately bears no fruit for the people who ponied up money, Kickstarter still gets its cut. You get to feel like an idiot.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: ~ Tangents Tagged With: fraud, Kickstarter

E-book Price Fixing Update

February 10, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two years after the heavy hitters in the publishing industry colluded with Apple in order to fix the price of e-books, most of the legal dust has finally settled. Today Macmillan threw in the towel on anti-trust charges brought by the U.S. Justice Department:

A small firm that is also known as Holtzbrinck Publishers LLC, Macmillan was the lone holdout among five publishers that the government sued in April 2012. Three publishers settled immediately and the fourth, Pearson Plc’s Penguin Group, settled in December.

The Justice Department will continue to litigate conspiracy allegations against Apple Inc, the department said in a statement. It accuses Apple of conspiring with the publishers to raise prices and fight the dominance of Amazon.com Inc.

More here and here.

The lone holdout, Apple, is probably betting that its haughty image and cultural cachet can keep it from becoming associated with yet another revolting act of corporate brutality. The Apple vs. Amazon battle is of course a deeply cynical dispute in itself, with both companies striving to dominate (meaning, monopolize) the distribution of digital content. In years to come it won’t be surprising if Amazon finds itself the target of anti-trust investigations on multiple fronts, including, ironically, attempting to monopolize both the sale and resale of digital content, thereby effectively allowing it to fix prices.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: Macmillan

E-book Revolution Update

February 7, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

The writing is on the wall page display:

“We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting. After five years, e-books is a multi-billion dollar category for us and growing fast—up approximately 70 percent last year,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said in a statement. “In contrast, our physical book sales experienced the lowest December growth rate in our 17 years as a book seller, up just 5 percent. We’re excited and very grateful to our customers for their response to Kindle and our ever expanding ecosystem and selection.”

Touting growth in percentages is always misleading when comparing new products to mature ones, but there’s no question that e-book sales are cannibalizing print sales as expected. Given that Amazon is positioning itself as the dominant e-tailer for all digital media it’s also not surprising that it would be facilitating this transition, and willing to take a short-term revenue hit in order to grow long-term market share.

For authors, the question is not whether e-books are good or bad. The question is how e-books can best be used to help you reach your intended audience. Economics will always play a part in that calculation, but given that it’s now possible to produce and widely distribute content with little or no up-front capital I think every writer should feel good about that.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: e-books

Personal Publishing, Micromarkets and Meaning

February 4, 2013 By Mark 1 Comment

Toward the end of last year, as a holiday gift, I put together a self-published book for my family. The manuscript was originally written by my grandmother (1910-2009) when she was in her eighties, and brings to life teenage trips she took to visit her eldest sister, who lived on a Wyoming homestead. To that original document were added photographs from the trips, a short page about the author, and a cover.

My grandmother originally intended her manuscript as a young-adult title. She submitted it to a few publishers, but after finding no interest she rewrote it as a more personal family memoir. In putting a book together based on that text I was conscious both of the work’s history and of her intent, but even more so of the responsibility of presenting her fairly and well. Fortunately, she did most of the heavy lifting with her own words.

What surprised me most about producing such a work was the impact the physical book had as an object when I finally held the first proof in my hands. The words had been around for decades, the pictures for decades more, but merging them into a book created something greater than the sum of its parts. And this feeling was shared by members of my family as well.

There is, obviously, something about a book as an object that confers a sense of importance about the contents. However that book came to be, and whatever the quality of the contents, at a bare minimum someone took the time and effort to assemble it — to create a new object from various pieces of source material. The result might be the functional equivalent of a scrapbook or personal journal, but the fact that it can be held and shelved alongside other tomes gives it a familiar, almost universal purpose and place that it would otherwise lack.

The question of an object’s worth — of a book’s worth — often devolves to critical and commercial assessment. At the same time, however, most people recognize that living a life dominated by (if not determined by) money and the artistic judgment of others leads to an inevitable corruption of self. If you can make a living pounding out words or creating images or raising and lowering hemlines that’s fine, but who are you when the crowds go away and you’re alone with your millions? (You may care about your money, but your money doesn’t care about you.)

To the great, brutish publishing industry this tiny little tome has no value of any kind. If traditional publishing cast even a glance my grandmother’s way it would do so only to sputter and spit about vanity publishing, as if I was trying to sneak past the industry’s desperate gatekeepers in order to make a buck or a name for myself without first coughing up whatever percentage they feel they deserve. But this simple book was not created to get around anyone or anything. It was created as an act of love, to honor someone who lived a full life and gave as much or more than she got.

I own a fair number of books, some of which I love for personal reasons and some of which I love because of the invaluable information they contain. My family is and always has been bookish. My grandmother probably read more books in a year than I read in a decade. But of all the books that have come through our collective lives, it would be hard to say that any of them are more meaningful to us now than this little self-published title that sprang from the hand of a woman who did so much for us all.

The fact that this book is a personal work aimed at a tiny micromarket says nothing about its inherent value and everything about how important self-publishing can be.

— Mark Barrett

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: books