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Amazon and Irony

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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 ]

Site Seeing: Authonomy

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Imagine for a moment that you’re a publishing house. You’ve been putting book deals together for decades the old-fashioned way. You have agents you know and trust doing the heavy sifting for you, plowing through countless query letters from eager new authors. You have in-house editors working with a stable of developing and established authors, packaging titles for developing and established niches, and leveraging copyrighted content across developing and established mediums. You know, down to the last penny, what it costs to print a page, change a typo, or put a book on a shelf in any bookstore in the world.

And then the internet comes to town.

What do you do? Well, after a good bit of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, you would probably come up with something very much like Authonomy. (If you haven’t seen the site before, click over and take a look. You’ll ‘get it’ in about five seconds.) You might not do it as well as HarperCollins has done it, but you’d recognize the obviousness of the solution, and you would seize the opportunity.

By establishing an online community under the auspices of HarperCollins, and by promising members of that community a chance to get their work in front of editors at HarperCollins, Authonomy solves two persistent publishing problems in one fell swoop. First, it offloads part of the arduous and rarely-rewarding process of sifting through submissions — which is currently undertaken by agents around the world — onto an even less-demanding community. Second, it gives HarperCollins the appearance of being forward-looking, tech-savvy and internet-aware, when in fact they are simply replacing one system of mining writers with another system of mining writers.  [ Read more ]

Why the Book Biz Should Be Scared

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Next time you’re about to school someone on how the music industry is or is not like the book business, stop what you’re doing and locate a copy of Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age, by Steven Knopper.

While you should ideally read the whole thing, at the very least you should flip to Chapter 7 and read it in full before you wax intellectual about all things digitally downloaded. Here’s a key graph:

“These days, [Aimee] Mann uses recording technology that is cheaper than ever and makes licensing deals with major distribution companies simply to put her records in stores and post them on iTunes. She gets to keep control of her master recordings and makes every creative decision about what does and doesn’t go on the record. ‘A lot of artists don’t realize how much money they could make by retaining ownership and licensing directly,’ her manager, Michael Hausman, told ex-Talking Head David Byrne in Wired.”

Why is that a big deal? Because it makes clear that recording artists no longer need partners in order to produce music or deliver it to an audience. Between advances on the recording side, which have made CD-quality audio cheap to produce, and developments on the digital/internet side, which have made CD-quality audio cheap to distribute, there is no longer any obstacle between Aimee Mann and her audience.  [ Read more ]

Saturation Day

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One minute you’re skulking around a forgotten alleyway, looking at sights (and sites) that only a few intrepid explorers have ever seen. The next minute someone runs up laughing, slaps a satellite photo in your hand, points to the teeny-tiny, itty-bitty you standing in an infinite grid of similar forgotten alleyways — all of which have already been clearly marked by and populated with people just like you.

That’s Saturation Day. The day the exploring catches up with reality. The day the ground drops out from beneath your feet. The day you realize that the thing you’re trying to take in is bigger than you thought it could be. The day you begin to sense the forest for the trees.

(It’s also the day you’re really glad you didn’t do any exploring before you put up your site, or you just might have decided to go with Plan B: The Ditch in American Cinema — 1930 to 1975.)

Internet fiction is happening. I’m still trying to find a fiction site that really connects with me, but the long tail of independent effort is already established. People are writing fiction on the internet and other people are trying to figure out how to make a buck off those people. Which is pretty much how the internet ballgame works.

Tomorrow, I’m going to speed up the tempo and try to catch up with the things I’ve seen and thought about so far. Because I’m already getting a good idea about what I want to try, and I’m not seeing any reason to think about it a whole lot more before I take the leap.

— Mark Barrett

Site Seeing: Mobile Read

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While I’m on the subject of e-readers, you might want to take a look at MobileRead.com, including discussions in the forum. (It’s a site I stumbled across while reading in the WebFictionGuide.com forums, and if you follow that link you’ll see that several people almost immediately turn to the question of whether online fiction and e-readers are different animals. Such is life at the dawn of a new era.)

As you might expect, there are currently posts on the home page about Sony’s newly announced reader, but they also have a note up about nominations for the next Mobile Read Book Club selection, slated for September. Right now Agatha Christie and Charlie Chan are battling it out, but this is the kind of community-based activity that could also work for online fiction writers, unknown writers, etc. (At least until an astroturfing PR firm or publishing company starts gaming the system, which probably won’t take too long.)

The titanic two-front war currently being waged to control (read: own) electronic text and the devices that convey electronic text to users means that dedicated communities like Mobile Read will probably grow in importance as time goes on — at least until the battles are resolved. For individuals looking to write online or electronic fiction as a means of finding an audience, keeping abreast of the current (and coming) technology is an obligation made a little easier by sites and communities like Mobile Read.

— Mark Barrett

The Second Front

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Sony unveiled a new e-reader this morning. Here’s the lede from the L.A. Times:

Sony this morning unveiled its answer to the Kindle 2 — a wireless electronic book reader with a 7-inch touch screen that’s 17% larger than Amazon’s device.

The fact that basic specs of the new reader are defined not in terms of utility but rather competitive advantage tells you everything you need to know about what’s going on in the e-reader arms race. A serious fight is on to see who produce the dominant reader, just as the fight is on to see who will become the dominant content provider for those devices.

Note also, however, that the two fronts in this global war to control the portable text industry are already deeply enmeshed:

Sony’s Readers have another feature that’s not present in the Kindle: All of the devices are capable of displaying digital books that have been borrowed from thousands of public libraries that lend electronic books. The Daily Edition goes one step further by finding local libraries with a digital-books collection and letting users wirelessly download the book for 21 days (provided they have a library card for that particular branch).

The machines enable delivery of more content: demand for more content drives sales of the machines. At some point in the not-to-distant future, this simmering symbiosis — backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing campaigns — is going to explode onto popular culture.

Which explains why Google is not simply trying to become the dominant content provider, but why they’ve also allied themselves with Sony, against the Amazon/Microsoft cabal. From Bloomberg:

In March, Sony gained access to more than 500,000 e-book titles for its readers through an agreement with Google Inc. The deal expanded Sony’s e-book store to about 1 million titles at the end of last month, compared with the more than 320,000 Amazon.com offers.

Sony gets content for its e-reader: Google gets a friendly device manufacturer for its content delivery system.

It’s going to be very hard to bet against a Google/Sony alliance, even against the combined might of Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and others. More on this here. (That link is to a Macworld.com article, because “the new Daily Edition comes bundled with Sony’s eBook Library software 3.0, which is newly Mac-compatible” [emphasis mine]. Whether Apple is thinking about getting into the device business as well — iBook II anyone? — or whether they’re simply throwing their lot in against Microsoft is anyone’s guess. But that Apple seems to be on the sidelines should not be taken to mean that Apple is on the sidelines.)

— Mark Barrett

The Iceberg in the Ditch

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I intended yesterday to follow up on a tease at the end of this post, but the more I thought about the issue the more I realized it was the tip of a very big iceberg. Apologies for the delay, and apologies in advance for what may seem a bleak assessment.

For several days now I’ve been visiting sites that contain internet fiction of various stripes. I’ve been reading and trying to get my mind around what’s good about internet fiction and what’s not so good. I’ve been trying to come up with a way of comparing apples to apples across different sites and different authors, yet all the while something has been nagging at me so quietly that it took a while to realize what it was.

I don’t like reading fiction on the internet. Assuming that my view represents a non-trivial percentage of the world population, as opposed to the ravings of an ugly American, this would seem to be a problem.  [ Read more ]

The Ditchwalk Name

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Naming a web site used to be easy. You thought of the name you wanted, you registered the name, you put up your site.

Then came the speculators. Search for your domain name of choice today, or your second choice, or third, or tenth, and you’re likely to discover that the name has already been registered by someone who has no intention of ever using the domain to establish a web site. Rather, they hope to sell you the name for a vastly inflated price and turn a profit in doing so. Because domain names are based on language, and there are a finite number of words in any language, the speculators know that if they buy up the most common words and phrases, someone will inevitably come knocking….

In the parlance of business, this is called ‘making a market’ for a commodity — in this case, domain names. Other well known examples of this entrepreneurial spirit include Enron’s electric power market, oil topping $140 a barrel and driving gas prices past $4.00 at the pump, and those sexy real-estate-backed derivatives that were based on inflated mortgage values, leading to the housing crisis and the worst American recession in seventy years. (Your free markets in action.)  [ Read more ]

Googlezilla vs. Micromonster (and friends)

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I don’t pretend to know the full story behind the battle that’s shaping up over Google’s plan to make millions of books (many of them out of print and hard to find) available for purchase online. I don’t even know all of the arguments so I’m going to dig into the issue more tomorrow.

There are two conclusions I can draw, however, based solely on last night’s lede from the New York Times:

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo are planning to join a coalition of nonprofit groups, individuals and library associations to oppose a proposed class-action settlement giving Google the rights to commercialize digital copies of millions of books.

First, whatever the outcome, after all the trials and suits and counter-suits are settled the landscape for writers will have fundamentally changed because distribution will have fundamentally changed. The current technological marvel and oddity that is electronic publishing will quickly become the norm, even if individual copies of these books are also made available in printed form.

Second, none of the musclebound corporate antagonists fighting to control this process is involved because they love writers and want to protect them from bad people. Profit motive is driving everyone’s interest, and the names of the tech-company titans who are squaring off should suggest just how much money is involved.

More soon.

— Mark Barrett

Getting Underway

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Launching even a small web site like this is both fun and frustrating. It’s fun because it holds promise. It’s frustrating because for every coding rule there’s an exception, or a variance necessary to coddle some third-party application or software or browser which steadfastly refuses to join with the rather blindingly obvious cause of standards compliance.

Still, at some point in the development process (which is itself a grand term for what I’ve been doing), the cobbled-together back end and the bells and whistles out front achieve a state of grumbling tolerance, and there’s nothing left to do but get on with it. Call it a shakedown cruise. Call it a public beta. Call it open-source testing.

All of which is to say that you’re going to find some glitches here and there as I continue to tweak this and that. If something doesn’t work for you, or displays poorly, please let me know.

— Mark Barrett