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Randy Cohen: Ethical Fail

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When the New York Times says it’s okay to steal content, you know it’s not going to be a good day. Before this afternoon I’d never heard of Randy Cohen, who apparently writes a column called The Ethicist for the NYT Magazine section. After today I have to question his qualifications for passing judgment on ethical behavior.

Here are the first three graphs of today’s column, in which he responds to a reader’s question. (Am I copying and pasting too much of the NYT’s content? Or am I allowed to do so because I already paid for that ethical right when the NYT subjected my eyeballs to their online ads?)

I bought an e-reader for travel and was eager to begin “Under the Dome,” the new Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, the electronic version was not yet available. The publisher apparently withheld it to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y.

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

What Mr. Cohen is arguing is not simply that you have a right to make a back-up copy of content already purchased, you also have the right to port purchased content to any other medium you choose — and to have others aid you in doing so, even if by doing so you or they also profit, and even if by doing so you or they profit at the expense of the legal copyright holders of that content.  [ Read more ]

Weekend Reads

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There is much I want to post about, but between working on my short stories and other projects I’m running short on time this week. Rather than leave a blank spot on the web, I’m going to attempt to fill that aching void with links to articles of interest.

More original Ditchwalk content will be coming soon to a screen near you. And it won’t require flash! Until then…

  • Only Branding Can Save the ebook Industry

    Jay Garmon at The New Sleekness throws down on an important question: how do publishers make themselves relevant in the digital age? I’m not sure I buy all of his arguments, and I’m somewhat convinced that a publisher’s branding is of little or no interest to consumers. (I’m entirely convinced that branding has itself been distorted beyond all meaning. Next time you visit your doctor — whether to fight the onslaught of aging or to set a broken leg — you will quite likely be told that the cure is good branding.)

    Garmon raises good questions, though, and they’re questions any author should be aware of. Publishing and self-publishing are not stable businesses, which means there is a good deal more risk baked into these activities than other things you might do with your time and money. Consider yourself warned.

  • Do I need the middle?

    Brian O’Leary at Magellan Media Partners picks up on Garmon’s post to make a related point:

    If the average e-book sells for $10 with a royalty of 25% of net, the average author earns about $1,900 a year. If that same author strikes an agency deal with Amazon … well, she or he need sell fewer than 300 units to break even.

    As I’ve noted before, the big question for mainstream publishers these days is deciding who their customers are. Back in the day (say, five years ago), publishing’s customers were retailers — both online and brick-and-mortar. Now that the internet has broken publishing’s lock on distribution and production, product is bypassing the old checkpoints and being sold to readers directly. Should publishers make readers their new customers? Authors? All of the above? Where’s the life-sustaining return on investment?

    O’Leary reverses the argument and asks why authors should care about publishers. And by the way: you should be reading Brian O’Leary regularly.

    • [ Read more ]

Acronyms From XHTMLHELL

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For my own reference, as well as that of readers who are in the same boat, I pulled together the following links to help make sense of the alphabet soup inherent in self-publishing solutions. My objective is simply to provide a single post that will replace the repeated searches I’ve been running whenever I can’t remember how XML is different from HTML is different from XHTML.

  • Brian O’Leary, in a post titled Alphabet Soup, tackles the issue head on. If you get confused by XML, HTML and XHTML, this is the post for you.
  • In a post titled Web Standards for E-books, Joe Clark dives deeper. There’s a lot here and I’m not sure I understand or agree with all of it, but it definitely wrestles with the issues I’m wrestling with.
  • Gizmodo leads with a tabloid headline: Giz Explains: How You’re Gonna Get Screwed By Ebook Formats. Despite the hype the article is still worth a read, in large part because it projects all these tech issues onto the current marketplace. Again, I’m not sure I agree with the conclusions, but the article frames the right debates.
  • Jedisaber has an .epub eBooks Tutorial that I found extremely helpful. It includes a list of tools, with commentary about same, as well as many other useful bits of information. If you’re thinking of creating an ePub file, this is the place to start.

As suggested in a recent post, it’s always a good idea to look for work flow examples that you can copy or emulate. You may not agree with all of the other person’s choices, or need to follow their examples word for word, but anything is better than reinventing the wheel.

Where the rubber meets the road for me in all this jargon is getting my content distributed. I am concerned about embarking down a technological path that either dies out or takes my content hostage. I don’t want to have to keep changing native file formats, or create new documents for new services or sites that use proprietary tools as a means of also holding customers hostage. I’m interested in flexibility and utility and portability, and I’m constantly judging tech solutions by those criteria.

Update: Keith Fahlgren has a post about ePub and CSS that’s worth reading, if only to give you an idea of what’s coming in terms of compatibility issues. In the comments to the thread, Liz Castro says, “It’s browser wars all over again,” and I fear she may be right. My one hope is that the maturity and deep pockets of many of the market players will keep the insanity to a minimum.

— Mark Barrett

The iPad and Me

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Whatever you think about Apple and its products, it’s hard to deny that their marketing machine does an excellent job projecting the company as both a technological leader and cultural trend-setter. The latest gizmo to get the full Apple-hype treatment is the iPad, which has been variously described as everything from the greatest invention since sliced bread to the greatest invention of all time.

As a piece of technology, I don’t have an opinion about the iPad. It lies outside my interests, and there’s no scenario in which I see myself needing one or buying one.

What’s most interesting to me about the iPad is how the book business has both embraced and distanced itself from the device, as if it’s critical to publishing’s aims. To the extent that the iPad creates pretty portable pictures, I can see how that might serve the aims of an art book, but when it comes to text I see no inherent advantage in the iPad over any other e-reading device.

More to the point, as a content creator I see the iPad as essentially meaningless. The works I create are almost completely described by text (no images, little formatting), and my goal for that content is to make it device independent. Because the ePub and PDF file formats already allow me to do that, the existence or non-existence of the iPad (and any other similar device) is a non-issue for me.

I’m not waiting for the iPad to make my work viable, portable, deliverable or readable. If it sells like hotcakes, great. If it doesn’t, great. Apple’s market share is nothing I care about, and the same goes for Amazon, Sony, and anybody else who intends to enter the e-reader marketplace. I’m taking my content directly to readers one way or the other, and nobody’s going to get in the way of that. Anyone who tries to do so by controlling the technology will be undermined by the competition. Anyone who tries to do so by controlling the market will be side-stepped and cut down by the internet.

— Mark Barrett

Five Days

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Catherine Ryan Howard of Catherine, Caffeinated fame put up a nice series last week titled Five Days to a Self-Published Book. The five days are metaphorical, but if you’re just now looking at the daunting task of creating your own content that’s probably a relief.

The full series can be found here.

Update: The series references CreateSpace, but I’m not recommending it on that basis. Rather, I think it’s an excellent work flow example to follow, and I believe it was intended as such. (On the subject of CreateSpace, Lulu and POD, see also this recent comment from Joel Friendlander.)

Later Update: Mick Rooney has an interesting post up about Lulu. I asked Mick a few follow-up questions in the comments, and I found his answers illuminating. Anyone considering Lulu.com for self-publishing should give his post a read.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Levi Montgomery

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What do I value most in a web site? Honesty.

When you go to a commercial site (Apple, say), you know going in that everything you see and read was massaged by corporate drones to fit a corporate theme aimed at corporate profits. Whether you buy into the theme or not, it’s all a lie. It might even be a fun lie, like Disneyland, but it’s still aimed at your wallet.

This tendency infects almost everything, particularly in the U.S., because we’re a business culture. Whether you’re a top-flight CEO or a sole-proprietor, who people think you are and how they respond to that image will probably determine whether you get to eat or not. (Okay, maybe not so much with the CEO.) It’s not objectively wrong to put your best foot, face, cheek or assets forward — although how you go about doing so may say more about who you are than you intended to reveal.

All of which is preamble to introducing you to Levi Montgomery. Over the past six months, in reading Levi’s blog posts, I haven’t had a single moment where I thought Levi was shading his opinion for later advantage. Granted, that’s easy enough to do if you’re just shooting your mouth off, and there’s no shortage of such people on the web.

But here’s the thing. Levi’s involved. He’s part of Self-Publishing Review, he recently pointed me to and recommended The Self-Publishing Review (which allowed me to find HPRW again), and he’s walking the walk himself as a writer.

I don’t always agree with his reactions and opinions, nor he I’m sure with mine, but the thing is, he meets a critical bar. He rationally explains his opinions, instead of blithely assuming that anybody who doesn’t ‘get it’ is a dweeb. Take his decision to remove his work from Smashwords, including his view that the PDF file-type should be the e-reader standard. I disagree, but then I also know that Levi is interested in retaining more control over the look and feel of his work than I am. (I’m crazy big into transparency as an aspect of craft.)

There just aren’t a lot of people who say what they think and explain what they mean. Levi Montgomery is one of those voices. Add to that the fact that he’s not sitting on the self-publishing sidelines, and you’ll understand why I consider him a must-read.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: How Publishing Really Works

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How Publishing Really Works (HPRW) is a [now-archived site] I’ve found and lost several times, as well as the gateway to several other interesting sites. I’m adding it to the blogroll because I’m tired of spending frustrated hours trying to find my way back.

Run by Jane Smith, HPWR aspires to make the complexities and absurdities of the publishing world a bit less obscure, particularly for people who have an interest in writing themselves. A sister site to HPWR — and here I will beg your keen attention for a moment — is The Self-Publishing Review (TSPR), which should not be, but easily could be, confused with Henry Baum’s Self-Publishing Review. On TSPR Jane reviews self-published works using what I think is very fair and useful criteria:

What’s the catch? I’m an editor, and expect published books to be polished. I’m going to count all the errors I find in spelling, punctuation and grammar and when I reach fifteen I’m going to stop reading. I’ll work my way through up to five pages of boring prose or bad writing before I give up. And I’ll list on this blog every single book I’m sent, including the books I’ve not completed, along with how far I got through each one.

TSPR, like SPR, engages the most important question hanging over (and being lorded over) the self-publishing movement: are self-published writers creating works worth reading? HPRW attempts to pull back the curtain (if not the wool) on the publishing industry, which also helps would-be authors decide how best to approach the self-publishing movement. As to how Jane Smith manages to keep multiple blogs going while also finding time to write, I have no idea — but I am taking notes.

Update: It’s with mixed emotions that I’ve killed my blogroll link to this site, on the heels of [a now defunct] this post by Jane. We can all agree to disagree, but honestly I can’t square Jane’s condescension on her HPRW site while also respecting the work she’s done reviewing self-published authors on her Self-Publishing Review site. If, as she says in a follow-up post —

…while “good enough” can be a little difficult to define, “not good enough” is very easy to spot: almost every single one of the self-published books I’ve been sent for my self publishing review blog has slotted into this category, some far more easily than others (and bear in mind that I’ve got a backlog of book reviews waiting to be scheduled for publication, and most of them didn’t make the grade).

— then I’m hard-pressed to understand why she’s wasting her time. If, as she argues, unpublished writers are unpublished because their writing stinks, why in god’s name is she defying her own logic and reviewing self-published books? Simply to prove her own logic? If that’s the case, what kind of legitimacy can her reviews really have?

Honestly, I liked Jane’s posts on both of her sites. But having this bit of ugliness spew forth feels like a revelation of the worst kind. It colors everything of hers that I’ve read, and make me wonder what other hostile sentiments have been left unsaid.

— Mark Barrett

$4.99 and the Pipeline Pricing Problem

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Concluding a series of posts on that subject, I’m setting a price for that content today, subject to further modifications, complications, frustrations and disturbances in the time-space pricing continuum, as prophesied below.

$4.99. That will be the price of my short story collection on Smashwords*, where I’ll be making the work available as an e-book. To the extent that I have now answered this vexing question, I am relieved. To the extent that I have unwittingly uncovered a new and nightmarish parallel problem, I wish I had been born with no curiosity and wealthy parents.

Why $4.99? Well, I can’t point to any single determining factor. Rather, I took everything I learned over the past few weeks (and months) and tried to find a price that met the evolving criteria without contravening my basic assumptions, which included:

Particularly helpful was data from Smashwords CEO Mark Coker, which pegged pricing sweet spots at the $5 and $9 price points. Following the maxim that a lower price is better when profit is the same, I chose the $5 price point over the $9 price point because I thought it would spur demand, and because I thought $9 for an e-book was simply too close to the low end of current print-book and print-on-demand (POD) pricing.  [ Read more ]

Price, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series of posts on that subject, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Months ago, when I began idly wondering what my short story collection should sell for, I repeatedly found myself thinking in relative terms. In hindsight that approach seems to make sense given the rampant uncertainty in the e-book market , but it was more coincidence than prescience. I didn’t know how much I didn’t know, and I certainly didn’t know how much the industry didn’t know.

The comparison that popped up the most was what I took to calling hamburger pricing. Invariably this analogy would present itself while I was driving, because it’s impossible to travel anywhere in the United States for more than fourteen minutes without passing a hamburger stand. (I made that statistic up, but please feel free to quote me. The world can always use more urban myths.)

What I kept thinking at the time was that whatever my short story collection was worth, it had to at least be worth the average cost of an average hamburger at an average drive-up window. Without doing any research I pegged that number around $4, and in a lot of ways I felt like the idea made sense.

Which of course it doesn’t.  [ Read more ]

Quality, Fairness and Promise as Price

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I am publishing a collection of short stories as an e-book. Continuing a series from last week, I’m trying to work through the relevant pricing issues and set a price for that content.

Coming up on the end of a second week of thinking about how to price an e-book, I feel as if I finally understand the problem. I don’t have a final number yet for my short story collection, but I genuinely feel as if I have the tools to make that decision. (I know this kind of analytical obsessing isn’t as fun to read as gossip or flippant analysis, but if you’ve been reading along I hope you’ve gained some insight into these issues as well.)

Today and tomorrow I’m going to run down two perspectives I haven’t yet talked about. After that I’ll wrestle with the fact that setting a price in one place has an inevitable domino-effect along the pricing pipeline, and why I think that’s an indicator of problems to come. After that, I’ll pick my number and get back to the (relative) sanity of regular posting.

Fairness
Despite everything I’ve learned about the haphazard nature of pricing in general, and of e-book pricing in particular, I still retain a belief that there is some sort of fair value that can be applied to digital content. I know rationally that the marketplace will eventually come to define fairness as any stabilized price, but absent that stability I still find myself asking: what’s fair?

In the hard-bitten world of business this is obviously a naive view. What’s fair to most people is whatever they can get away with. If selling people into a mortgage or cell phone plan means using legalese to obscure relevant costs and fees, you do not hesitate to screw your customer. (To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, nobody ever made a hundred million dollars being a nice person — and that includes the messianic Mr. Jobs.)

Complicating things further, fairness is always a relative concept. Trying to be fair means trying to balance all factors involved, yet there’s no way to control for or even anticipate all of the variables. If I say a price is fair, who am I being fair to? A kid in Haiti who just lost his whole family? The rich, degenerate housewives on Bravo that are laughing all the way to your bank? Being fair in an absolute sense in any transaction seems a theoretical impossibility. In practice we rely on orderly (and regulated) markets to quantify fairness as a floating point between supply and demand, and that’s probably the best we can hope to do.  [ Read more ]