Publishing – Page 27

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 ]

Site Seeing: Authonomy

August 31, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

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

August 28, 2009 By Mark 10 Comments

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

August 26, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

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

August 25, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

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