Publishing – Page 26

All Things ISBN

September 10, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

[Since this post was originally published Bowker has changed their website, their marketing approach, and some of the business practices I objected to. Links which could not be updated have been removed and the text revised where necessary. — MB.]

I don’t know much about ISBN numbers (which is redundant, because the ‘N’ in ISBN stands for ‘number’), but I thought I knew their basic function, and I had some vague sense that I knew how they were doled out. Having hopped from link to link to here to here, however, I realized I was wrong about everything.

I don’t use ISBN’s* much at all, if ever. I’ve had a few friends request one from me regarding a book I mentioned, and I now know that’s the best way to make sure you end up with the same version of a book that someone else is talking about. It might not be the most recent version, but it will be the same, because ISBN’s are only given out once and never reissued.

But that little tidbit was only the first domino to fall in my head. I used to think that ISBN’s were given out in some way that was vaguely associated with the copyright process. Or maybe I thought it was in some way vaguely associated with getting a bar code. (Because it’s all so vague, I can’t remember.) [ Read more ]

Caught in the Middle

September 9, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

I don’t know anything about Quartet Press other than the fact that they announced today that they’re closing. And I mean nothing.

Reading the post about their closure, however, made me think of a similar note I’d read only a few days ago. This one was about Manifesto Games, a site/biz run by a friend in the interactive industry. The owner, Greg Costikyan, closed up shop in June, saying:

We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available.

Now, Greg knows more about the business side of the games business than I ever will, but I’m not sure that what hurt Manifesto was a marketing problem. And while I know nothing about Quartet Press or the reason for its demise, I’m struck by one way in which the two companies are similar. They were both third parties to the relationship that exists between content provider and content consumer. [ Read more ]

Taking Stock

September 9, 2009 By Mark 9 Comments

After three weeks of blogging and Site Seeing I definitely have a better handle on what’s happening out there, but I’ve also come to grips with the fact that I simply can’t keep track of it all. And that’s true even if I avail myself of all the latest tech, tech filters and social networks — which I would also have to spend a great deal of time reading about in order to achieve cutting-edge productivity.

(There’s a reason they call it the ‘cutting’ edge.)

In the end there’s too much to see and digest, let alone comment on, let alone act on. So it’s time to tighten the focus a bit, in anticipation of tightening it more in the future. Although this is an exclusionary process in some respects, I tend to think of it as irising in on something in the distance and pulling it into sharper focus. Simplification as zoom lens. Or sniper scope.

Traditional Publishing
I can’t really say the industry is dead, because it’s not dead. What I can say is that it’s broken, and I think everybody gets that. But I don’t think it’s simply broken relative to some newfangled process or advance (the internet), but rather that it’s inherently broken in ways that the internet is only now revealing. [ Read more ]

Digging In

September 8, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Many of the better bloggers out there are thoughtful people who also have the ability to slap multiple short, pithy posts and quirky links onto their sites over the course of each day. Unfortunately, that’s not me. In fact, the last time I took a cursory look at something was in high school when I was supposed to be studying algebra.

What I’m interested in, and what I hope you’re interested in, is depth. And I don’t just mean intellectual depth, in which everything is erudite and sophisticated and an allusion to something else that’s erudite and sophisticated. I’m talking about understanding things, and in particular, understanding the techniques and craft knowledge which allow for successful storytelling (by whatever criteria) in any medium. I’m completely, totally interested in that, but it’s not the kind of thing you can talk about in short posts or 140-character blurbs.

So on days like this, when I barely get a post up before the clock ticks to a new day, I hope you’ll forgive me. I’ve been burning through a massive amount of information in the past couple of weeks, trying to get up to speed on what’s happening in so many different and interesting storytelling arenas. It’s an amazing time, but I clearly need to sharpen my focus if only to keep from being swamped. More soon.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Smashwords

September 7, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

Visiting well-established e-book sites like Smashwords.com makes it clear that the possibilities inherent in the digital revolution are already being fully investigated. Here and on other sites I’m seeing every logical web-enabled expression of the middleman/publisher role in delivering content from creator to consumer. And in Smashwords I have to say that the clarity of this expression seems particularly good.

As someone who is interested in creating content that can be directly consumed by an audience, it’s still an open question whether I want to involve anyone else. If I was thinking about going that route, however, I would take a serious look at Smashwords because I think it gets a lot of things right. But you don’t have to take my word for it. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Scribd

September 6, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

I’m pretty much assuming I’m the last person on Earth to discover all these sites I’m looking at, but with Scribd I think that’s probably actually factually true.

Amazing. Prepare to lose a day, easy.

(On the off chance that I might be second to last, here’s the link.)

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: RNash.com

September 5, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Home to Richard Eoin Nash, RNash.com is one of those helpful sites with a high-speed shutter that freezes the blur of fast-moving cultural events. In a little more than an hour I was able to get my bearings on a host of issues, as well as place those issues in context.

For example, in a linked-to piece I found this quote from a front-line report on how the publishing industry is keeping pace with changes brought about by all things digital:

And that’s when moderator Deborah Schultz broke the news to us. We (the audience) were the ones who were supposed to provide the ideas.

“We’re here to learn about what you want.”

Without warning the panel discussion was turned into an impromptu focus group. A twist that was met alternately with skepticism, amusement, and open hostility.

Read the whole thing. I laughed myself silly. [ Read more ]

My Take on the Google Books Case

September 5, 2009 By Mark 6 Comments

Following up on earlier posts about the Google Books case and the proposed settlement with the Authors Guild regarding past copyright infringement by Google, and after reading Scott Gant’s take on the case, I now feel like I have a handle on what’s going on.

1) Google broke the law by scanning and marketing a bunch of books it didn’t have the right to scan and market. They weren’t the copyright holders, but they went ahead and did it anyway, and that’s against the law.

2) The Authors Guild — which is also a corporation with its own self interests — sued Google for breaking the law, even though it may not have had standing to do so. It did so on behalf of its members, but it also did so on behalf of itself. If Google could break copyright laws with impunity, then the Authors Guild would be meaningless as an entity. [ Read more ]

More Google Books Hilarity

September 3, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

In all the reading I’ve done about the Google Books class action suit, I completely missed this (from Reuters):

Under the settlement, authors have until the end of this week to opt out of the settlement.

Any time you have to opt out, it means the people opting you in have already won. As to the rest of the Reuters piece, it details an FTC letter urging Google to improve its privacy policy blah blah blah blah blah….

Please. Anyone who ever cracked open the bloody hatch on the political sausage machine knows that nothing matters except enforcement. And so far there’s nothing to enforce. Ergo Google will do whatever it wants and people will enjoy Google Books until SOMETHING BAD happens, at which point everyone will be shocked — shocked! — that there is gambling in Casablanca.

— Mark Barrett

Amazon and Irony

September 2, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

Speaking of Amazon’s outrage regarding Google’s class-action settlement, isn’t there a wee bit of irony in all this? I mean, Amazon’s core business — before it became the go-to site for spatulas and throw rugs — used to be…wait for it!…books.

Yes kids, that’s really true. Way back at the dawn of time (1995), Amazon’s great idea was to be an online bookstore, making pretty much every in-print book and many out-of-print books available nationwide. And it was a huge, huge success. So much so, that Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, decided to sell every product known to mankind in much the same way. [ Read more ]