The Open Author

Note the sandwiches

I’ve been invited to speak at the Book Academy Conference at Utah Valley University on September 30th. My topic will be how authors can leverage social media to their own selfish ends. Actually, I think the official topic was a bit more altruistic sounding.

Actually, note that I didn’t say how authors can use social media to market their books. Social media does oh-so-much more than just marketing. In fact, if you’re using this medium to do more than 10% marketing, then your doing it all wrong. :)

Anyway, if you’re in the area, I highly recommend you drop in. I’m presenting in one of the first workshops, and Robison Wells is presenting at the end. So it’s kind of like getting a how-to-write sandwich with Wells and myself as the buns.

And who would want to miss that? Not you, that’s for sure. So go sign up!

I’ve been invited to speak at the Book Academy Conference at Utah Valley University on September 30th. My topic will be how authors can leverage social media to their own selfish ends. Actually, I think the official topic was a bit more altruistic sounding.

Actually, note that I didn’t say how authors can use social media to market their books. Social media does oh-so-much more than just marketing. In fact, if you’re using this medium to do more than 10% marketing, then your doing it all wrong. :)

Anyway, if you’re in the area, I highly recommend you drop in. I’m presenting in one of the first workshops, and Robison Wells is presenting at the end. So it’s kind of like getting a how-to-write sandwich with Wells and myself as the buns.

And who would want to miss that? Not you, that’s for sure. So go sign up!

I came across this story after I’d already published the latest news for the week, but it’s too juicy to wait for next week. Could next generation Kindles have color and touch-enabled e-ink?

Amazon Market Share. Is it 80%? 61%? Nobody knows.

Is this an example of brick and mortar being completely beaten by its online counterpart? Some speculation that Amazon will be the likely buyer of the Barnes & Noble book store.

A lot of Amazon news this week. . .Is Amazon moving into other kinds of hardware in addition to the Kindle?

A mass romance publisher decides it’s time to go all digital.

Great writeup of the current state of the market.

Very interesting article where a guy puts the Kindle, an iPad, and some print materials under a microscope.

I’m trying to do several things with this blog. One is to monitor the state of the e-book revolution. Another is to publish my thoughts on how e-books affects me and fellow authors. Part of all this involves scanning news around these topics, and doing a quick writeup of them. If you drop by on Sundays you’ll see a few select articles from the previous week.

However, I’m going to stop posting on speculation around the $99 Kindle. I’m seeing so many reports now that I’ll sound like a broken record if I continue. So if I start to hear something different, I’ll let you know, but for now, rest assured that all the digital publishing pundits are all betting on a $99 Kindle in time for the holidays.

When I worked at the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, members of our group created a way to put thousands of books on a disk, and then set up a mobile printing press of sorts. The idea was that you could take your portable printer, laptop, and book binder anywhere in the world, and print books for kids, schools, or libraries that had a hard time finding books. I still have two books made from the first such printing press.

Well, now it looks like a former Amazon executive is taking it one step further. David Risher founded Worldreader, provides Kindles to students in parts of the world where it can be hard to get print books. From the article:

““There’s a huge difference between being able to read from a selection of the 10 books that you happen to have — or that somebody donated — versus being able to get your hands on a book that you are really interested in,” says Risher. “When you combine that with very very low distribution costs for additional books and falling technology prices, these are ingredients for doing something really special.”

“Risher says he thinks e-books will let the developing world skip the paper stage, in much the same way cell phones have helped countries skip the landline stage. E-readers, he says, are more akin to cellphones than laptops — and are well designed for the developing world because they don’t consume much power and they use the universal GSM network. “Computers play a great role, but e-readers really solve the reading problem much more direct and simple way,” says Risher.”

A great example of using technology to make the world a better place.

I hung out at my brother and sister-in-law’s house last Sunday. My sister-in-law mentioned she’d been reading my blog. She said something to the affect of “I like all the information, but I want you to tell me what it all means. What’s going to happen?”

She asks a fair question. It’s one thing to talk about trends, it’s another thing to make predictions. I don’t know better than anybody else, but there is no reason I shouldn’t engage in a little speculation, right?

The advantage we have in the publishing industry is that we can look back to how the the music/television/movie industry handled the transition to the digital world.

So when I blog I’ll try to be more predictive. I thought I’d start with an easy one: what is going to happen to print books?

There are two ways to look at this. First, let’s compare print books to CDs. In the mid 90s, music, with the help of mp3s, went digital. Increased storage space and high speed internet combined to make obtaining, sharing and storing music very simple. Look around your home town. Do you know of any CD stores that went out of business? I do. It’s just too convenient to go digital. I have over 250 hours of music, and over 500 hours of podcasts on my mp3 player. I still buy music, but I will likely never buy another CD.

So that means books are dead, right? Print books are going the way of the LP and 8-track, right?

Well, now let’s compare print books to music itself. During the mid 90s, when all the music sharing was going on, CD sales actually went up, as did attendance at concerts. This is important to note, mp3s didn’t kill music, they killed a revenue stream. And to be honest, they only changed a revenue model, at the same time they provided many new ways to market, promote, and sell music. In a very real sense, mp3s brought music to life.

So are print books more like the CD, or are they more like the music itself?

My best guess is that print books fall in the middle. Right now we’re seeing a surge in the sales of print books. It’s hard to pin down exactly why this is happening, but it’s possible that people are discovering authors through e-books and then buying p-books because they want more. But just as we saw a surge in CDs right before the went out of style, I think we’ll see a surge in print books, but that ultimately e-books will win out. Think about it from a consumer’s standpoint.

Imagine you’re going on a trip. How many books do you take? You have a book that you should be reading because it’s going to help your professional development. Then you have that classic you’ve meant to read for years. Then you have your guilty pleasure, but you think with the long flight you may need a second in that category. So you’re already up to four books. Four books take up space, especially if any of them are hardback.

Instead of taking four books—all of which you may decide you didn’t really need, and instead should have brought the one on your nightstand—why not take 2,000 books? It’s hard to argue against convenience like that.

I just moved. I probably carried 15-20 boxes of books up and down a set of stairs. Many of these books I’d never get rid of. I know I can get any Jane Austin book at the library, but I bought a very nice edition for my wife a few years ago. I have several hard-to-find editions of one of my favorite authors, Frederic Brown. I can’t part with them.

But the majority of my books are easily replaced. I have an incomplete set of The Great Brain series. We can get all of these at the library, so I’m not ever going to buy these books again. But if I could get the entire digital series for $9.99, and know I’d never need to buy them again, I’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s a new revenue model. Of all the books in my library, I’d probably replace well over half of them with digital copies just for the convenience.

And there is the kicker. More and more authors will realize what many musicians already have—that you can bypass the establishment and hook up directly with fans. Not only that, you can make a comfortable living at it. Sure, I’d love a print contract, but I may be able to do just as well with a strictly e-book strategy. And part of that strategy is to undercut the big publishers. I don’t have their overhead, so I can sell my book for $2.99 instead of $12.99.

Once these things happen, books will eventually go the way of the LP. Which by the way, is not the way of the dinosaur. I was at a thrift store last week, and there were hundreds of LPs to choose from. There will always be a market for new and used p-books, but the size of the market in the next five years is about to shrink drastically.

Cory Doctorow is somewhat of a pioneer in the open model as it applies to authors. He convinced his publisher to allow him to put digital copies of his books on his site to be downloaded for free. The result is that he’s sold tens of thousands of print books, and continues to preach the open model of publishing.

He recently approached several companies and asked if he could make his books available without DRM, as well as encouraging his readers to visit his site and share the books for free.

Why would a company do this? People would buy the e-book through Amazon, realize they can get the rest of his books for free, and not return to the store. A company would be crazy to allow this, right?

In the end, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo allowed him to do just that, while Apple and Sony did not.

What Amazon, B&N, and Kobo get is that digital copies are a means to another end. Many people will buy a Doctorow book, and never come back. Others, however, will enjoy the book and decide they want print versions. There is a good chance they’ll come back to Amazon or B&N to buy that print version. They’re giving away the razors hoping that some will comes back for the blades.

In the article, Doctorow raises a very good point, and reminds authors that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal for even copyright holders to crack the DRM on their own works. From the article:

“At that point, DRM and the laws that protect it stop protecting the wishes of creators and copyright owners, and instead protect the business interests of companies whose sole creative input may be limited to assembling a skinny piece of electronics in a Chinese sweatshop.”

So Cory, what do you really think? :)

If you’re an author interested in the open model, it sounds like Amazon, B&N, and Kobo are the way to go.

Thanks to Trent Cameron for the heads up on this article.