booktwo.org

I wanted to post this quickly, before it gets lost in the weekend. Authors and publishers who use Print-On-Demand printers in the US have recently been hearing that Amazon will only continue to carry their works if they switch to Amazon’s own POD property, BookSurge. WritersWeekly has the full story.

This is a pretty big deal. Amazon has around 15%-20% of the total book market (in the UK), but the vast majority of the online book market, which is growing all the time. Meanwhile, POD has been turning from a vanity publisher’s niche into a mainstream printing option - Cambridge University Press recently passed the 10,000 title mark (pdf news release) with Lightning Source. Big publishers are increasingly turning to POD to support backlist titles, while new publishers use the technology to bypass the industry’s traditional (and traditionally expensive) high print run, warehousing and return mechanisms (and yes, this is personal: an upcoming project of mine uses POD extensively - and not BookSurge).

Have no doubt that POD is only going to grow. 50% of all books printed are never read - that figure, coupled with the growth of ebooks (another potential monopoly for Amazon), ensures that POD will account for the majority of books published at some not-too-distant point in the future. At the moment, there are price and quality issues, but these are rapidly changing.

What Amazon is attempting to do is build a print/bookseller monopoly as POD enters the mainstream. As Amazon is the largest online bookseller, POD publishers are going to have to use BookSurge even if there books are sold in plenty of other places. And using BookSurge involves higher costs, and being locked into Amazon’s crippling discount rates. Some may say it’s time to boycott Amazon, but most won’t have that option.

It’s an incredibly retrograde step. All our recent talk about mass customisation entirely depends on open, independent manufacturing and distribution platforms - the opposite of what Amazon is trying to force on its suppliers. I have to say that we did see this coming, but it doesn’t excuse a clearly monopolistic and unethical action on Amazon’s part. We’ve yet to hear anything in the UK, but we’re going to be watching developments in the US with a keen interest.

UPDATE: I’ve already heard from one POD publsher who has 30,000 books with Lightning Source, and an exclusive contract. Over a third of their sales are through Amazon, so if this happened to them…

UPDATE 2: The same POD publisher has been back in touch, and according to Lightning Source UK, Amazon hasn’t done anything on this side of the pond yet, and they “don’t think” they will, which isn’t terribly reassuring.

UPDATE 3: Teleread’s up with it’s usual high standard of analysis.

UPDATE 29/3/07: In the comments, an anonymous POD publisher says they’ve had the buy-button removed from their Lightning Sourced books by Amazon UK. Anyone else?

So, it’s finally here, and damn, it’s still ugly. Really, really ugly. Go watch the video demos (short one at the top, longer one lower down). But it has some things going for it.

There are a lot of touches I really like, like easy ordering of low-price ebooks direct from Amazon without having to be near a computer. Online back-up of your books is very smart - one customer losing their whole library after dropping one of these in the bath would pretty much kill it. The big page-turner paddles on the side will be good for peoples’ frequently contorted, curled-up-on-the-sofa reading positions, and the dog-ear bookmark is nice and friendly, although the purists will probably hate it.

But there’s a lot not to like, even beyond the let’s-party-like-it’s-1989 styling. E-ink just still isn’t good enough: there’s the ‘black flash’ as you turn the page, and the snail-like refresh speed means they’ve had to put in that scroll-wheel barometer thing in the side, which is not good. The whole feeds thing is a misnomer: you have to pick ‘your feeds’ from an Amazon-approved list (currently numbering 308), which is great if you just want Boing Boing and the NYT, but pretty rubbish if your tastes are more eclectic - and you don’t want to pay 99 cents for the privilege (is that a one-off or a subscription?). And the killer for me is that you can only read your own documents by emailing them to Amazon, who’ll convert them and add them to the Kindle ‘for a small fee’. Whoa. That’s just stupid. It’s also such a waste of the rather clever connectivity hardware they’ve packed in there.

Still, Amazon aren’t making this for me - they’re making it for regular, heavy readers, who are book- and not computer-focussed, which is an excellent decision - they will certainly please more people - and explains the video endorsements from Toni Morrison, James Patterson and others. It’s not for techies. We’ll see if the $400 price tag is attractive to non-techies.

It is, without doubt, the best ebook reader out there because it has the iTunes-like connection to all the books you can get, built in. That’s the USP. But I still don’t think we’re going to see mass ebook take-up any time soon, not until e-ink improves and we sort out a format that can move seamlessly between different devices, like mp3. If I can read it on this, I should be able to read it on my laptop, phone and even TV too.

And could someone please explain why they used ‘profligate’ (adj. utterly and shamelessly immoral or dissipated; thoroughly dissolute, recklessly prodigal or extravagant.) as their example word from the dictionary? Reminds me of this story.

UPDATE: For more on the Kindle, you could do worse than Buzzfeed’s roundup.

The Internet Archive recently released a demo version of its new Open Library project, about which we are very excited.

We’re great fans of the IA, due to the wonderful Bookmobile and the all-encompassing awesomeness of their main site, the largest collection of its kind of publicly-available text, images, audio and video, as well as the world’s largest history of the web. So when we heard they were turning their attention to paper books, we were looking forward to seeing what they came up with.

Their mission statement is worth reading in full:

What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—a key part of our planet’s cultural legacy.

First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.

Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.

But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply “free to the people,” as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open. [Source]

But what’s it like, beyond the rhetoric? Well, it’s a collection of listings for every edition of every book that’s ever made it into library classification (or at least, that’s what it will be), as well as scans of those editions which have already made it into the Archive’s copyright-free library.

If:Book has some quibbles about the presentation, but I’m far more interested in what this means at the level of data and metadata.

For starters, Library data is not free. The OCLC, the world’s largest supplier of library data (and recent receiver of much Charkin-praise), is a non-profit which charges for it’s data feeds. The Open Library plans to build futurelib, an open, universal book catalogue, which will contain all books, not just those which arrived recently enough for the increasingly outmoded ISBN classification, or which belong to organisations hooked in to the OCLC’s network.

Secondly, an Open Library can consolidate and clarify all these data structures, not enslaved to the horribly outdated Dewey Decimal system, the increasingly subjective and unwieldy Library of Congress Classification system, the publishers’ proprietary and unworkable BIC and ONIX systems, or even the tag-based user-generated systems of the new wave, but providing a translation point between them all, as well as serving as a rallying call to create new and better schemas.

They plan to consolidate all the information surrounding the book too - imagine a place to go and search out books that contains not only the book itself, its various classifications and summaries, but also reviews at every level, from Amazon one-stars up to scholarly monographs, references and antecedents, cover art through time, location and author data… the possibilities are almost limitless.

So too are the commercial applications, with print-on-demand of scanned titles planned, with the trade-off of open sourcing the software driving the library. It will be interesting to look back in fifty or a hundred years to see how static this project (or a similar one) has become. If ebooks take over, will a project like the OL become a true archive, indexing only the past? Even if this is the outcome, it only strengthens the case for such a project. We look forward to following its progress.

Sorry it’s been quiet around here. With London Lit Plus in full swing for the last couple of weeks, and a new job, it’s been a little hectic. However, we do have one important announcement.

Lit+ (litplus.com) is a new booktwo.org project: taking the London Lit Plus ethos - an open-access, distributed literary festival - and turning it into a template that anyone can use to set up their own festival. We’ll be using the same kind of tools - the power of the internet and free software - to create a resource for all.

We’ve already had plenty of outside interest in London Lit Plus and we want to use the momentum to build new and exciting literary cultures. We’ll need your help, so stay tuned.

Images courtesy of Yaniv Golan and Robert Brook, via Creative Commons.

Despite my repeated entreaties, no one bought me a ticket for O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference, on this week. It looks like a lot of interesting people, talking about important stuff.

Pleased to see that Manolis Kelaidis’ bluebook project, which I wrote about last year, has made an impactful appearance, and I suspect there’s a lot of similarly cool stuff being discussed.

Places to find out more: there’s the Conference blog, Andrea Laue’s jusTaText seems to be on the ball, as does Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead, and there’s always Jeremy’s excited Twitter. If you know others, do let me know.

In the meantime, I’ll be over at London Lit Plus…

Of interest to very few, I imagine, but I’m attending the BBC/Yahoo Hack Day at Alexandra Palace this weekend. Probably only the Sunday, as I’m also attending Interesting 2007 on the Saturday. Busy, busy, busy.

Very interested in hooking up with booktwo-interested parties at either. Drop me a line if you’re coming… (Also available via the backnetwork as STML). Would love to hack something, but not much of a hacker.

Additional tags: interesting2007, hackdaylondon.

I love it when a plan comes together. A Sunday evening chat on Brick Lane about ways of opening up/gatecrashing/subverting the upcoming London Literature Festival has led very quickly to the creation of London Lit Plus, an open-access festival to showcase the best of London’s literary scenes:

London Lit Plus (LL+) is an open festival, which means anyone can participate, and anyone can hold an event. All you have to do to be included is to submit your event, and we’ll add it to the list on this website. We want to showcase all the wonderful literary goings-on in London that we can in a two-week period.

Booktwo.org is one of the prime movers (and I built the site in twelve hours flat, so please excuse (and report) bugs at this stage), alongside 3:AM Magazine and others. So come on, find out more and get involved.

3:AM Magazine, of which I am a co-editor as well as designer and site developer, today launched a new, Portuguese-language edition dedicated to writing, music and culture from Brazil: 3:AM Brasil.

I meant to write about 3:AM when we launched the redesigned site back in January, but didn’t get round to it. It’s a great example of a new kind of literary magazine, fully distributed (editors are based in the UK, France, the Czech Republic, the US, Canada and elsewhere), constantly updated and updatable, a Myspace sensation (with 3:AM Brasil hot on its heels), publishing new and established writers with equal commitment and holding offline events in a host of cities worldwide.

I’m really excited about this new venture, not just because of all the hot lit coming out of Brazil right now, which now has a central place to show itself off to a wider community, but because it shows how technology can be leveraged to readdress the shocking state of literature in translation in the English-speaking world (much back-and-forth between 3:AM’s sister sites is planned), and we can bring yet more new, exciting writing into the light. 3:AM Deputy Editor A. Stevens and new 3:AM Brasil Editor Elisangela Fracaroli deserve much praise for making this happen.

Unsurprisingly, 3:AM France and Japan are now in advanced states of planning - watch this space…

I just received some rather wonderful news. As a direct result of my recent talk at the British Council, one of the international publishers who was present, Anuradha Roy of Permanent Black in India, has set up a blog to talk to the world about their books.

http://permanent-black.blogspot.com/

Publishers of the finest work on South Asia’s history, politics, culture, and ecology. Run by Rukun Advani and Anuradha Roy. Located in Delhi and Ranikhet, India. View our full catalogue at www.orientlongman.com. You’ll find lots more.

According to the Internet & Mobile Association of India (whose physical address is on the wonderfully-named Readymoney Terrace), India had over 21 million active Internet users in 2006, with a current access base of 34 million, including 1 million in rural areas. This is is growing extremely rapidly, with a potential total of 243 million users in urban areas alone. (Source).

There is a current and growing trend for multinational publishing groups moving into and expanding within India - Penguin, Macmillan and HarperCollins among them - but it is initiatives like Permanent Black’s that should ensure that domestic publishers, even small ones, can continue to compete and thrive in a growing market.

UPDATE: For Anuradha’s own feedback, see this comment.

Something Twitterered, something new… Lots of interesting things come my way via other peoples’ Twitter streams, and this afternoon, via Tom Coates, I heard about Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger’s new book about “Digital Disorder” and “how we’re pulling ourselves together now that we’ve blown ourselves to bits.” Looks fascinating, and I’ll try and get my hands on a copy.

From the EIM blog, I imagine there will be some book-related stuff in there, not least that based on conversations about libraries and education and media literacy.

From a publisher’s point of view, the other neat thing I discovered was a website called ISBN.nu, which compares book prices from various online sources - a prime example of weathering the digital storm. I’m sure it’s not new and there are others out there doing the same thing, but it’s pretty handy. It’s particularly interesting that Amazon Marketplace listings get the same weighting as regular Amazon listings. I believe services like Amazon Marketplace are going to overtake established, large retailers fairly soon, once technology like this makes their listings as - if not more - accessible than other channels. I also think it will be the death of the RRP - already under discussion at the UK’s Booksellers Association conference - but that’s a subject for another post…