What Programmers Can Teach Publishers

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“If publishers had zero tolerance for repetition and boring administrative tasks,” Bibliocloud CEO Emma Barnes asks, “what would the industry look like? And how would publishers’ organizations reflect that internally?”

Barnes learned how to code only after founding a small press, and she says the experience has since made her a better publisher.

Programmers, according to Barnes, tend “to get bored easily. We would rather spend a week writing some code to automate a ten-minute task than repeat it every week for a year.”

In other words, being a good programmer means always look for new ways to innovate. “Programmers naturally hone and whittle and constantly improve,” Barnes adds. “They automate the dull stuff so they can think about the bigger picture.” And there’s no shortage of those in publishing today who believe the bigger picture needs rethinking.

Much more.

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Barnes & Noble Narrows Losses for a Shrinking Nook (Pub Lunch)
Reporting its fourth quarter earnings for fiscal 2015, the bookseller says at Nook are down 40% for the quarter over the same period the previous year and 48% for the full year, but the declining ebook business is reducing its losses. Publishers Lunch (which has a thorough breakdown of Barnes & Noble’s latest financials) sums it up this way: “By doing less, Nook loses less.”

Amazon’s Royalty Change a Boon to Authors? (Fortune)
While it’s been roundly criticized by some, Amazon’s switch to paying authors by pages read on its subscription platforms could offer a leg up to some of the least-known writers, one industry watcher argues, in turn helping “make the market for new books healthier.” In this view, Amazon is “trying to figure out the right mix of incentives that will encourage authors to produce what it wants, which is books that sell and that readers enjoy. This may offend writers who don’t want to think of their books as retail products, but it’s a perfectly reasonable approach for Amazon to take.”

Hoopla Digital Adds DC Comics (DBW)
In a deal with DC Entertainment, the digital content platform for libraries expands its offering of digital comics with popular titles in DC’s catalog. hoopla digital, which added ebooks to its platform only last month despite launching two years ago, says its active user base has grown more than 200% over the past year.

Trajectory to Distribute Image Comics Titles (PW)
The digital content distributor and analytics company strikes a global distribution deal with Image Comics covering more than 300 of the publisher’s digital comics, including front-list titles.

Draft2Digital Adds Indie Titles to Oyster (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
Oyster will soon offer authors whose ebooks are distributed by Draft2Digital the option to make their work available to its subscribers. Draft2Digital currently distributes around 50,000 self-published ebooks, all of which will be eligible for inclusion on Oyster Unlimited, the company’s subscription-based ebook platform.

Can Open Analytics Improve Authors’ Writing? (Futurebook)
A new project by Comma Press, called MacGuffin, takes a quantitative approach to the by now common practice of crowdsourcing writing-in-progress. Currently in beta, the platform lets authors upload text as well as audio recordings of their work being read, then publicly shares with content creators and consumers alike precisely where other readers and listeners lose interest and drop off.

Children’s Book Start-up Raises $ 9 Million (The Bookseller)
UK-based publisher Lost My Name, which lets customers personalize children’s picture books with the names and genders of young readers, pulls in $ 9 million in a funding round headed up by Google Ventures. The company plans to use those resources in order to help it expand globally.

Ebooks Creep upward in Germany (Pub Perspectives)
According to recent data, ebooks now comprise 4.3% of Germany’s book market, even though growth for the format is slowing down as it is virtually everywhere. The average price of ebooks has also fallen over the past few years as ebook pricing models have shifted and self-publishing grows.

Alibaba Tries Local Services, Too (TheStreet)
The same week Angie’s List sues Amazon for allegedly stealing information in order to launch its local services program, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announces a similar venture of its own, starting with food delivery.

Amazon Sets ‘Alexa’ Loose (TechCrunch)
Just after putting its Echo “voice assistant” on sale, Amazon introduces an API for the voice-recognition software it runs, dubbed “Alexa,” allowing external developers to add support for the virtual assistant in their own apps and devices. Amazon also launches a $ 100 million fund in order to help encourage that development activity.

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New Deals around Subscription Content

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Two deals announced yesterday reflect some of the changes afoot in the market for subscription ebooks.

Newcomer Playster, whose app is still in beta, adds 50,000 audiobooks to its subscription catalog through a partnership with the digital content distributor Findaway. And separately Scribd announces it’s acquired the social e-reading platform Librify.

Both moves can be seen as efforts to develop the most robust possible content offering and e-reading experience for subscribers in a market whose contours are shifting.

Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited rolled out a new royalty model just last week. Meanwhile, Scribd and Playster remain confident that multiple forms of media can coexist on the same platform, while competitors bet otherwise. Oyster, in the ebooks-only camp, has launched an ebookstore alongside its subscription catalog and added light-sensitive technology to improve night reading.

More on the latest two deals here and here.

Related: Audiobooks Lead Ebooks in Still-Modest Subscription Market

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Millennials Lag as Ebook Buyers (The Bookseller)
A recent Deloitte study of media purchasing and consumption habits among millennials in the UK suggests younger readers are among the least likely to buy ebooks despite consuming video and TV at a rapid clip. In a report based on the findings, researchers conclude that “authors, publishers and retailers must do more to appeal to younger audiences in order to remain commercially relevant.”
Related: More Research Points to Millennials’ Print Preferences

W. W. Norton Offers Ebooks to Libraries (Pub Lunch)
The publisher has reached separate agreements with the leading library distributors to make its complete trade and professional ebook catalogs available to U.S. libraries beginning later this year. The terms of those deals and the pricing models under which libraries will be able to lend Norton titles to patrons hasn’t been disclosed.

South American Countries Battle Amazon for ‘.amazon’ (WashPost)
U.S. lawmakers rush to the e-tailer’s defense amid an escalating push by several South American countries, including Brazil, Peru and Argentina, to prevent the company from acquiring a domain name they believe should remain more geographic than commercial.

“Don’t Stop Marketing” and Other Tips (Pub Perspectives)
The founder of a book marketing consultancy for authors says the days of a book launch–centered marketing strategy are over (something we’ve heard from other experts as well). Here are more tips and tactics geared to the current, crowded digital marketplace.
Related: How Audience Research Can Minimize Marketing Missteps

Angie’s List Sues Amazon Local (ABC News)
The new program Amazon launched this year in order to connect customers with local repair and home service providers now has legal trouble from Angie’s List, which charges Amazon with having “chosen the shortcut of surreptitiously accessing and misappropriating Angie’s List’s proprietary information” in order to set up shop.

Tough Love for Publishing Start-ups (Futurebook)
“It is very, very hard to make money,” says Bibliocloud founder and Digital Book World contributor Emma Barnes. There’s hardly a single publishing start-up around today that would disagree with that statement. The bigger question, though, is how to make money in spite of the many, sometimes overwhelming challenges to doing so. Recounting her own experience as a publishing entrepreneur, Barnes offers field-tested advice for other contenders.
Related: Publishing Start-ups Sound off on Failure, Pivoting and Failing to Pivot

About that German Erotica Curfew… (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
Recent reports that Germany would begin enforcing a ban on selling adult-themed ebooks before 10pm appear to have overstated the case. While the law in question remains very much on the books, ebook retailers will reportedly only need to verify customers’ ages rather than restrict their sale of certain titles to after dark.

Penguin Consolidates Mass Market Lines (PW)
Berkley Publishing Group will absorb the New American Library, two Penguin divisions dedicated to mass market paperbacks, a category in which sales have charted a steady industry-wide decline in recent years.

Alibaba Expands Anti-Piracy Commitment (Tech News Today)
Building on an earlier agreement, Alibaba establishes a framework with a Chinese anti-piracy organization in order to improve the e-tailer’s procedures for identifying and eliminating digital content being sold on Alibaba in violation of copyright protections. Piracy remains a concern for global ebook publishers and distributors eyeing China’s vast book market.
Related: Weighing Opportunity in China

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Going to ALA? Get Ready for the CODEX Hackathon

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This weekend in San Francisco, the CODEX hackathon will tackle a variety of book-related innovation projects, including KINDLR, a dating app around books.

It’s about as close as the book world ever gets to hosting a sports event: a hackathon!

Press release follows:

SAN FRANCISCO:  The first ever CODEX Hackathon will take place June 26-28, 2015 in San Francisco during the American Library Association conference to innovate on the future of reading, publishing, libraries and literary technology.

Sponsoring and partnering organizations include HarperCollins, the New York Public Library, Goodreads, Dropbox, Macmillan, Wattpad, The Knight Foundation GitHub, Mailchimp, Stanford d.school, Publishers Weekly, Gitbook, Shelfie, Bowker, Ingram Content among many others. (A full list of sponsors and partners can be found at codexhackathon.com)

Participants — about 100 selected through an online application process powered by Submittable — are coming from all across the United States, in addition to Mexico, Great Britain, and France. They represent a mix of publishing and tech talent — including employees of the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington DC, Google, the One Story literary journal, Macmillan, IDEO, The New Yorker, Twitter, and Chronicle Books, as well as students from MIT and Stanford.

The talent base includes iOS engineers, writers, editors, designers, community organizers, and retailers. Well over $ 10,000 in stipends, raised from sponsors, is being distributed to help defray travel costs.

The theme of the first CODEX hackathon is “connecting” — connecting around books, connecting around reading, connecting readers and authors, connecting libraries with books.

One of the projects in development was inspired by an April Fools Joke by Goodreads, KINDLR, a dating app around books. Other projects include Macmillan’s internal Bookmaker tool set, which the publishing company is trying to open source and make available more general use; Harvard Book Store’s book club infrastructure, and Project Gitenberg, a version-controlled repository of over 40,000 public domain books.

Other sponsors are issuing prompts to stimulate ideas in areas they are tackling. HarperCollins is asking participants, “How can we drive more engagement with our author’s books – how can readers easily respond, share (both digital text and digital audio) and augment something meaningful they have read or listened to?” Little Brown, a division of Hachette Book Group, is asking, “How can we help readers discover new authors based on ones they already like.”

The CODEX Hackathon schedule includes:

• An opening reception at GitHub headquarters in the Soma neighborhood of San Francisco featuring a Recovering the Classics pop-up gallery and the musician Daniel Park.


• The hackathon Saturday-Sunday at Code for America in Soma.

New tools will be released or made available for participants include:

• Wattpad’s new beta API, which has not been officially released, but allows for writing to Wattpad. (Contact: Matthew Chan <matthew@wattpad.com>)


• Shelfie’s Optical Character Recognition API where a client can upload an image of a shelfie and get back a list of ISBNs of the books  detected in the shelfie. (Contact: Marius Muja <marius.muja@bitlit.com>)


• Zola’s book recommendation engine (Contact: Matt Goldfarb <matt.goldfarb@zolabooks.com>)


• Pinterest’s new beta API, which requires approval to get access.


• Cloudstitch.io, a Y Combinator company which allows control of a website with the ease of a spreadsheet.

In addition, Mailchimp, Dropbox, and Readium engineers will be on hand to help with their tools. (A more complete list of tools is available online).

Among the data to be made available for teams: a selected group of Publishers Weekly starred reviews and metadata; novellas from Nouvella, an independent publisher dedicated to the novella; short stories from Plympton’s DailyLit, four of which were noted in the Best American Short Stories of 2014; covers from the Recovering the Classics project.

A Kickstarter publishing representative will also give a presentation about successful publishing projects on the crowdfunding platform.

Prizes will include literary merchandise from Out of Print and Litographs, as well as bestselling titles from sponsors.

Another CODEX Hackathon is planned for New York City.

CODEX was organized by Plympton, a San Francisco literary studio which innovates around digital publishing. Its projects and collaborations have included Recovering the Classics book design project with the NYPL and the White House; the Twitter Fiction Festival; the Rooster mobile reading service; and the CODEX Hackathon.

The post Going to ALA? Get Ready for the CODEX Hackathon appeared first on Publishing Perspectives.

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Understanding Ebook Production (and Why You Might Want to)

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With the ebook market basically stuck in neutral, some ebook developers are doing a bit of soul-searching.

In one view, the profession may be losing some of its appeal as publishers pare back their investments in digital production and talented coders seek fatter paychecks in other industries. And it doesn’t help that acquiring professional-grade production skills is often time-consuming and expensive.

But much as others believe a working knowledge of digital publishing technologies is becoming more essential for non-practitioners, Joshua Tallent argues that understanding ebook production is critical for publishers fine-tuning their businesses for the current market.

“Determining what kind of production knowledge best suits your goals,” Tallent writes, “can be a helpful point of departure, even if you aren’t considering a career as an ebook developer.”

Much more.

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KDP Changes: The End of Short Fiction? (Pub Perspectives)
One indie author reflects on Amazon’s switch to paying writers who place their titles in its subscription programs (Kindle Owners Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited) by pages read, saying that while the change is likely to “have a devastating effect on my current income,” she welcomes the renewed focus on reader engagement. One result of the new royalty model, she predicts, will be the retreat of “scam and junk” short fiction meant only to trigger payouts after clearing the 10% reading threshold Amazon is phasing out.

KDP Changes: The End of Long Nonfiction? (The Atlantic)
Another author muses that “big, kitchen-sink projects will become even less sustainable unless people start truly reading every page” under Amazon’s new royalty model for KDP Select authors. But long works of nonfiction—which many tend to buy but not read all the way through—were never Kindle Unlimited’s bread-and-butter anyway. More apt is the observation that the new “sweet spot…must be books full of cliffhangers that keep people flipping the pages.”

Amazon Overhauls Customer Reviews (CNet)
The e-tailer introduces new machine learning technology to its system for surfacing customer reviews, which weights now more heavily those that are likelier to be relevant for particular users over time.
Related: Facing Down Discovery Challenges in a Reader-Powered World

All Is Fair in Love and Publishing…Right? (Futurebook)
What counts as “gaming the system” in a publishing landscape dominated in so many ways by Amazon? There’s no shortage of authors, publishers and other stakeholders willing to weigh in on the ethics of reading, writing and publishing. But one observer considers Amazon’s antitrust probe in Europe alongside the company’s new payment model, to ask, “Is chopping a novel into chapter-by-chapter pieces to get more per-borrow sales from Amazon’s borrowing programmes technically forbidden? Perhaps no more, it would seem, than an MFN [most favored nation clause] is technically forbidden.”

Erotica Ebooks: Only after Dark, Says Germany (TNW)
Germany begins applying to ebooks a law that prevents booksellers from selling adult-oriented titles before 10pm. Passed in 2002, the measure is designed to shield children from media that’s deemed potentially damaging to them.

Amazon’s Web Clout Outstrips Competitors’ (24/7WallSt)
One recent estimate puts Amazon’s current online audience at 186 million unique visitors, more than twice as many as Wal-Mart’s, whose e-commerce business one industry watcher sees as still primarily designed to attract customers to its physical locations.

Children’s Reading Paces at a Glance (GalleyCat—Infographic)
A children’s book retailer offers a look at the average times it takes kids to complete a range of classic children’s titles. It bears mentioning that the figures in this infographic don’t represent data from an empirical study, just the average reading speed per grade level calibrated to the various lengths of the books included. Still, it’s a helpful gauge of the various time commitments reading content demands of young readers who are increasingly distracted by other media.
Related: Inside New Trends in Children’s Apps

Visualizing Dyslexia (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
As publishers continue to think through accessibility issues, one graphic designer has come up with a compelling way of representing a common reading disability. This typeface approximates how a dyslexic reader might perceive a passage of text.
Related: Five Typographical Tips for Ebook Publishers

Digital Book World

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Penguin Random House Inks Amazon Deal

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With Penguin Random House announcing a new multi-year distribution contract with Amazon, all Big Five publishers have now come to terms with the e-tailer.

What those terms consist of, though, remains to be seen in the case of the world’s largest trade publisher, which declined to confirm whether it, too, had agreed to a version of the agency model of ebook pricing its four counterparts have attained.

But the prices of Penguin Random House titles in the Kindle Store should soon offer some indication.

Reports that Penguin Random House UK was on the brink of a standoff with Amazon last month appear to have been overstated; the publisher’s titles never vanished from Amazon’s catalog, as some suspected they might. Others now wonder whether the antitrust probe Amazon is facing in Europe helped speed the deal.

More.

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Smashwords Widens Preordering (DBW)
Previously the self-publishing platform Smashwords has required users to upload final text and cover image files to its system in order to begin offering preorders to readers. Since preordering has become such a crucial sales mechanism for Smashwords authors, though, the platform changes its rules to make preorder capabilities available up to twelve months before final ebook assets are available.

Ebook Subscription Services Adjust to French Law (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
Several of the leading ebook subscription services in France—excluding Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, about which no word on the matter has yet been reported—are said to have adjusted their models to bring them in line with a recent ruling requiring publishers to maintain control over the prices of their ebooks, including on subscription platforms.

Cengage Focuses on Digital as Sales Fall (PW)
A year after emerging from bankruptcy, Cengage Learning finds sales and revenue both down at the end of its fiscal 2015, which ended March 31. Two bright patches were growth in international sales, up more than 10%, and digital sales in the U.S., which grew 13%. One of the company’s stated priorities for the year ahead is doubling down on digital product development.

Marvel Expands Amazon Partnership (FastCo)
Marvel adds more than 12,000 of its individual issues of its digital comics titles to the Kindle Store, making new releases available the same day they’re published. The deal builds on and extends Marvel’s partnership with the Amazon-owned ComiXology.
Related: Marvel Adds Digital Comics to Kobo Catalog

ICYMI: The Hard, Crucial Fight for Customer Relationships (DBW)
Publishers are making great strides toward building relationships directly with their readers after decades of considering retailers their sole customers. As IPR License’s Tom Chalmers explains, doing that successfully starts and ends with recognizing that the reader now “holds all of the power…thanks to the Internet and the various forms of social media.”
Related: Discovery Challenges Mount in a Reader-Driven World

New Framework for Rights Statements (Library Journal)
A working group comprised of leading organizations in the field devises a common framework for international rights statements, much of it drawing on the language for licenses Creative Commons, which participated in the initiative, has developed for web content.

Publishers Push to Protect Greek Book Market (The Bookseller)
As Greece lurches toward a possible exit from the Eurozone, the International Publishers Association calls on finance authorities to impose protections on the economically battered country’s fragile book market, which has reportedly shrunk by 40% over the past five years.

India Widens Access to Digital Education Content (Times of India)
A slate of programs spearheaded by the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and designed to widen public access to digital educational resources like ebooks, digital textbooks, audio and video content is set to launch later this summer. “The idea is to bring publishers, free as well as commercial, and schools…together,” one of the initiative’s developers says. “For students it will reduce the burden of physical books and [allow] easy access to structured resources created by schools.”

Digital Book World

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Oyster Ups the Ante on E-Reading Experience

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If the e-reading experience were better, would more people pick up the habit? Oyster is hoping they might.

Much as Kobo aims to convert print devotees with its latest e-reader, Oyster intends a new feature to make e-reading “more comfortable and enjoyable for our existing users” as well as to court “readers who might have been skeptical about reading on their phones and tablets,” as the company’s CPO Willem Van Lancker puts it.

Called Lumin, the technology adjusts the color and intensity of light emitted by mobile devices in order to reduce eye strain in dark environments. Oyster says a large share of its users read after dark.

The question now is how much that user experience counts.

Recent figures suggest subscription ebooks are still a small slice of a flat ebook market. Scribd had already branched out into digital comics and audiobooks before Oyster went beyond the subscription model by launching an ebookstore earlier this year.

Much more.

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Kindle Launches New Paperwhite E-Reader (DBW)
The latest model of Amazon’s popular Kindle Paperwhite features a screen resolution that’s twice as sharp as its predecessor, at 300ppi, plus typographical improvements to make for a better e-reading experience.

New Funding for Pronoun, Formerly Vook (DBW)
A month after pivoting and relaunching as Pronoun, the company once called Vook secures $ 3.5 million in new funding in order to develop its data analytics technologies. Hoping to tap into widespread dissatisfaction among authors with the traditional publishing model, Pronoun wants to “empower” authors with a slate of free services and offer them 100% of their royalties.

Canadian Publisher under Fire from Authors (PW)
Authors and illustrators charge the Vancouver-based children’s publisher Simply Read Books with failing to pay royalties on time and violating contract terms. Some of those complaints, which Publishers Weekly details in-depth, have piled up over a number of years.

Amazon Considers Making Couriers of Customers (The Verge)
Amazon is said to be working out the details of a program that would let ordinary customers to make local deliveries on its behalf. One observer comments that “merely executing on this idea and keeping things running smoothly would be a daunting task.”

Growth Obscures Challenges for Children’s Content (Telegraph)
According to one UK-based literary agent, the recent growth in children’s titles belies a difficult discovery landscape in which budget cuts for schools and libraries is making it hard for young readers to encounter new content, especially those in families who aren’t avid commercial book buyers themselves.
Related: Weigh in on the Latest Trends and Challenges in Children’s Publishing

Which Publishing Experiments Work and Why? (The Shatzkin Files)
“After years with basically the same business model and workflow,” Digital Book World Conference Chair Mike Shatzkin observes, “publishers are trying new things all the time now without knowing exactly how to make them commercially beneficial.” Figuring out which of those experiments work—and by what measures—is just one thing industry leaders will gather to discuss in coming weeks in order to generate programming to share with attendees at next year’s Digital Book World Conference + Expo.
Related: Ten Ways to Make Digital Pay

Outsize Payoffs for Basic Metadata Fixes? (Pub Perspectives)
One industry insiders says publishers are still falling short on basic metadata best practices, a problem that amounts to leaving money on the table. It may not universally be the case that simply by inputting information like the language a book is written in can lead to double the sales (which likely doesn’t much apply to English-language publishers anyway), but it remains true that rich metadata has never been so critical in the digital marketplace.
Related: Comprehensive Resources on the Latest in Metadata for Publishers

Google Inching toward Free App Promotions? (Forbes)
A “Free App of the Week” program in the Google Play Store raises speculation that Google could be testing temporary free app promotions in order to “address one of the key selling points of its biggest Android store competitor”—Amazon.

How Amazon Offsets Free Shipping Costs (Supply Chain Digest)
Amazon has steadily expanded its free shipping program, recently waiving shipping fees for small items under $ 10. While the e-tailer is notorious for its razor-thin margins in the interests of cultivating a large, devoted customer base, one way it’s begun offsetting the costs of free shipping is by selling ad space on its boxes.

Digital Book World

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Pronoun, Formerly Vook, Gets $3.5 Million in Funding

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After completing a strategic pivot and rebranding as Pronoun last month, the self-publishing platform formerly known as Vook pulls in $ 3.5 million in new funding from Avalon Ventures.

Drawing on the assets of the short-form ebook publisher Byliner and the data analytics service Booklr, two properties Vook acquired prior to rebranding, Pronoun offers a free publishing platform that it says “uses technology and data to empower authors to create, distribute, and market their books while controlling all intellectual property rights and keeping 100 percent of earnings.”

Pronoun’s announcement of the new funding is short on details, but the company mentions developing its technological and analytical capabilities as one area of focus.

It remains to be seen how and whether Pronoun will stand out in a crowded field of self-publishing solutions offering free or low-cost services to authors. But it seems clear the start-up is hoping to tap into the widespread dissatisfaction many authors feel with the traditional publishing model. Addressing that issue separately, the Authors Guild today launches its first look at the “especially egregious contract terms” the organization will be picking apart in a new initiative to help authors better understand and negotiate agreements with publishers.

Pronoun also appoints new leaders to its Board of Directors and Board of Advisors, including former Amazon executive Stefan Pepe, to serve on the latter.

[Press Release]

Pronoun Raises $ 3.5M from Avalon Ventures to Empower Authors

New York City – Pronoun, the digital book publishing platform for authors, announced today a $ 3.5 million investment from Avalon Ventures. This venture capital financing closely follows the announcement of Pronoun’s new book publishing platform, which uses technology and data to empower authors to create, distribute, and market their books while controlling all intellectual property rights and keeping 100 percent of earnings.

With this financing, Pronoun is further developing its technology and data analytics, creating a viable alternative to the exclusions and restrictions of traditional publishing as well as to the complexity, limitations, and high costs of self-publishing for authors.

“At Pronoun our mission is to put the author at the core of everything we create,” said Josh Brody, Chief Executive Officer of Pronoun. “This funding allows us to continue building a team of people who sincerely value authors and their books, and to deepen our commitment to providing authors with free and meaningful tools, resources, and capabilities.”

Major media companies, brands, and bestselling authors, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Jon Krakauer, Jodi Picoult, and Nick Hornby, have published more than 7,000 titles on Pronoun’s digital book creation and distribution platform. Pronoun’s proprietary data and analytics engine, which tracks performance, customer behavior, and pricing statistics on more than 5 million books each day, helps authors find and reach their audience for the lifetime of their books.

Pronoun joins Avalon Ventures’ successful investment portfolio in digital media, which includes Zynga, Simulmedia, Tapad, and Bookbub. Avalon Ventures partners Rich Levandov and Brady Bohrmann join Pronoun’s Board of Directors in conjunction with leading this investment.

“Book publishing remains a multibillion dollar industry and an important part of our media culture, but its infrastructure and business model is trapped in an analog world. We believe there’s a massive opportunity to rethink how publishing works and operates,” said Rich Levandov, Partner, Avalon Ventures. “As an investor, I look for companies and teams that are not only willing to be first movers, but that stand up for, and empower, creators. We invested in Pronoun because, like us, this team believes the future of publishing will be driven by technology, data, and a model that puts authors first.”

In addition to Rich Levandov and Brady Bohrmann, Elisabeth DeMarse, Chairman and CEO of TheStreet, joins Pronoun’s Board of Directors. DeMarse also sits on the board of AppNexus, and brings with her more than two decades of operational experience in traditional and digital media. Pronoun also welcomes Amazon veteran Stefan Pepe to its Board of Advisors. Pepe formerly served as Director of Amazon’s North American books division, and held executive roles at Ideeli, Gilt, and Zynga. He is also a board director at Domino Media Group.

“I spent a decade at Amazon as digital technology transformed the publishing landscape,” said Pepe. “I am excited for a new phase of innovation, and Pronoun’s emphasis on technology and data, paired with the team’s unparalleled focus on the author, uniquely positions the company to create a better model for book publishing.”

About Pronoun

Pronoun is a digital publishing platform that empowers every author to create and distribute beautiful digital books, own and control their work and their rights, and receive 100% of their earnings – all for free. Pronoun is based in New York City. It is backed by several leading venture capital firms, including Avalon Ventures, Floodgate, Tribeca Venture Partners, VantagePoint Capital Partners, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, Founder Collective, Felicis Ventures, Baseline Ventures, and SV Angel.

Learn more at: www.pronoun.com

About Avalon Ventures

Avalon Ventures is a venture capital firm that has founded and/or funded more than 100 information technology and life sciences companies. The firm is passionate about backing talented entrepreneurs seeking to build market-leading companies. Throughout the firm’s 30 year tenure, Avalon’s long-standing and successful focus has been on seed and early-stage companies. All Avalon partners are seasoned entrepreneurs with experience in company formation, operations and value creation in the life science and tech sectors. Avalon’s current fund of $ 200 million, launched in 2012, continues the firm’s tradition of pursuing disruptive ideas in ever changing markets.

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How Book Publishers Can Outlast Book Publishing

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“The book was a very sensible solution to a lot of problems for a long time, until it wasn’t,” says Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis.

“Today it increasingly isn’t.”

MacInnis is among those who believe the traditional publishing model is under threat from “fast-changing customer expectations” to which publishers can’t always adapt quickly enough.

Unlike other instances of disruptive innovation, though, “publishing’s problem isn’t a single competitive technology,” MacInnis writes. “Rather, it’s the hundreds of small software companies that rise from the cracks to nibble on the feast of available problems to which the book is no longer the best possible solution.”

In order to survive the death of the book (in all its formats), MacInnis contends that “every publisher must find its path to reinvention as a software company or else decline into irrelevance.”

Much more.

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EU Antitrust Head Explains Amazon Suspicions (Bloomberg)
Margrethe Vestager, the European Union official spearheading the recently announced antitrust investigation into Amazon’s ebook business, says her agency worries the company has “grown so big that they think they can use their strength to close competition, to close the road to innovation.” Nevertheless, Vestager has promised to determine empirically whether that concern is well-founded.

Skeptics Question New Kindle Unlimited Model (Melville House)
One independent publisher says the new author compensation model Amazon announced this week for Kindle Unlimited, its ebook subscription service, doesn’t add up. Taking a close look at Amazon’s hypothetical arithmetic under the new system, in which authors will paid based on how much users read, she concludes that “it’s unlikely that most authors will make $ 10 a page.”

Hachette UK Buys Nicholas Brealey (PW)
By acquiring Nicholas Brealey Publishing, including the UK-based publisher’s two U.S. imprints, Hachette’s UK division adds to its offering of global business, travel and other nonfiction titles.

Facebook Is Testing ‘Buy’ Buttons (The Motley Fool)
The social network is expanding a pilot program for merchants who sell via the e-commerce platform Shopify, allowing them to add ‘buy’ buttons to their posts inside Facebook. One observer explains why, in his view,“Amazon has reasons to be wary, but nothing truly to fear” just yet.

Kobo Adds Bait to Hook New Users (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
Kobo updates its iOS app to allow readers who aren’t yet Kobo customers to preview limited samples of ebooks available on its platform, giving mobile users a feature similar to one on its website.

Amazon Wants to See Your Ears (BidnessETC)
Amazon files a patent for technology that would recognize users by the unique shapes of their ears, which some have speculated could make its way into the next generation of the Fire Phone, as a way of unlocking the device for its owner. One commentator points out that that application is limited (you don’t have to input a passcode to answer an incoming call), but it could compute the distance to a user’s ear in order to adjust volume controls.

Fine-Tuning Social E-Reading (Talking New Media)
UK-based ebook start-up The Pigeonhole aims to offer a curated social e-reading experience by serializing content and connecting users with authors and like-minded readers. The company’s founder explains The Pigeonhole’s vision for making the digital world an intimate, personable environment for readers.

Subtler Forms of Censorship in China (NYT)
China’s guest-of-honor status at this year’s BookExpo America drew protests from free expression advocates last month. According to one industry insider, though, “a mere poem rarely lands anyone in prison,” and much of the time, neither does an article or even a full-length book. But self-censorship abounds, and “the social cohesiveness of the literary establishment, rooted in traditional Chinese attitudes toward authority, is far more corrosive to Chinese writers’ artistic independence than the state itself.”
Related: Key News and Ideas from BookExpo 2015

How Nonprofit Presses Shape the Academic Market (The Scholarly Kitchen)
One industry leader points out just how unusual it is that in the academic sector for-profit publishers must compete with not-for-profit counterparts, and the pursuit of missions and profits alike influence the market overall. Among other things, that dynamic is impacting how digital innovation takes place in the academic space.

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German Book Market 2014: Nonfiction Up, Overall Sales Down

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By Ingrid Süßmann

At the annual press conference on June 9th 2015, the German Publishers and Booksellers Association presented economic data and key statistics about the German book market in 2014, which, despite a slight decrease in overall sales, remained stable and even showed a few bright spots. Nonfiction sales jumped up by 5.4%, and brick-and-mortar bookstores gained market share over other retail channels.

Below are some additional key findings presented last week about the German book market:

Sales dropped by 2.2% for the overall book market, accumulating to a general turnover of 9.32 billion euros (2013: 9.54 billion Euro, up 0.2% over 2012).

Brick-and-mortar bookstores maintained better sales performance than online bookstores for the second year in a row and even gained a higher percentage of overall book sales (49.2% of book sales in 2014 compared to 48.6% in 2013). Online bookstores saw a significant decline of 3.1% in terms of market share (1.51 billion euros), as did stationary stores.

Digital publishing became more popular: at 4.3% of the general turnover, ebook sales rose 0.4% compared to last year.

While fiction experienced a slow year, nonfiction was extremely successful: sales rose by 5.4% with the share of turnover shifting to 10.1 %, compared to 9.4% in 2014. This is due to a significant rise in the guidebooks and travel category.

Sales of fiction, traditionally the strongest category on the general market, dropped by 6.7% in 2014, the reason for this being the absence of major bestselling titles. The top 10 bestselling fiction titles generated 20.2% less turnover compared to the previous year.
German publishers, once known for the high numbers of new books they put on the market each year, have finally stared to cut back: the number of new books released last year sank from 81,919 in 2013 to 73,863 titles in 2014.

Rights and licenses sold remain stable: 6,443 licenses were sold worldwide in 2014 (by comparison, 2013 saw the sale of 6,466 German licenses). China came in first place as buyer of German books with 983 licenses, followed far behind by English-language titles in second place t 450 licenses. As always, children’s and young adult titles were most sought after with 2,362 licenses sold (36.7%), followed by fiction with 1,197 licenses (18.6%).

Chairman of the German Booksellers and Publishers Association, Heinrich Riethmüller, said: “It was a good year for us, even though those strong bestsellers were absent.” Alexander Skipis, Managing Director, added: “Germany is a nation of readers. As the second largest book industry in the world, the German market functions as a role model for both quality and diversity, and market performance is generally stable. We are eager to maintain and expand this state of affairs.”

The post German Book Market 2014: Nonfiction Up, Overall Sales Down appeared first on Publishing Perspectives.

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Four Digital Publishing Questions for Gareth Cuddy

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BookExpo America 2015, held in New York City last month, served as focal point for questions about digital discovery, authors’ roles and outcomes in the publishing ecosystem, publishers’ relationships with readers and the speed of innovation.

Conversations on those and other issues are ongoing within the industry, but which ones are publishers most in need of having right now?

We sat down with Gareth Cuddy, CEO of Vearsa (formerly ePubDirect), to find out. Here he weighs in on the view of the landscape offered at BEA, explains why publishers are doubling down on data and expands on his earlier observations about innovation and the threat of disruption that publishers face.

What was your impression of BEA this year? Did anything in particular jump out at you?

The floor seemed much smaller than previously, as though there were far fewer exhibitors than in previous years. I felt the meshing of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)’s Digital Book 2015 conference and BEA didn’t work that well, with mass confusion and many missed sessions.

It was similar to the most recent London Book Fair, in the sense that there was an acceptance of the slowdown in ebooks, but there was also a sharper focus on data and innovation, which was great. I named and sat on the keynote panel, “Innovation and Data: The Promises and Pitfalls.”

There were other, similar sessions offering the bigger picture–view of book publishing as well.

You recently wrote that the publishing world has yet to experience its most dramatic disruptions. If you had to speculate, what aspects of the current industry are the most vulnerable and why?

I think publishers themselves face the biggest risk of disruption. Between the rise of the self-published author and more efficient methods of content creation and distribution, the value of being “published” is diminishing year by year.

One of the key issues here is publishers’ inability to engage directly with their readers—something that was debated widely at the Digital Book 2015 conference and is key to the industry’s future success.

Why did ePubDirect rebrand as Vearsa? How are you a different company than you were twelve or eighteen months ago, and where are you headed?

I think as a company we are increasingly focused on delivering data-driven solutions for our publisher partners. When we launched our ebook analytics in 2014, the immediate response made it clear that helping publishers navigate the huge amount of data points out there in order to be able to make smarter decisions would be crucial going forward.

Rebranding as Vearsa gives us the ability to build out multiple products and create a real, meaningful brand that our publishers love to engage with.

What’s one thing publishers are getting right and one thing that, in your view, they’re getting wrong?

I think a lot of publishers are beginning to focus on internal efficiencies and experimentation. They’re doing this without sacrificing or impinging upon their love of books and storytelling, and that is critical. And I think innovation is being discussed more broadly, which can only mean good things for the industry.

However, I think we need to face up to the fact that the commercial landscape in publishing will change significantly in the next few years in ways that we can’t anticipate. One thing publishers can do is begin storing their content in flexible ways digitally. You need to be able to store your content in multiple ways in order to be able to capitalize on new business models as they emerge and to maximize, over the long-term, the return on each of your book investments. Getting this right is underrated yet critical.

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Data, Innovation and Future-Proofing

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“Between the rise of the self-published author and more efficient methods of content creation and distribution,” Vearsa CEO Gareth Cuddy says, “the value of being ‘published’ is diminishing year by year.”

If that’s the case, though, Cuddy doesn’t believe it dooms publishers to obsolescence.

“I think a lot of publishers are beginning to focus on internal efficiencies and experimentation…without sacrificing or impinging upon their love of books and storytelling, and that is critical.”

But Cuddy still predicts there’s tremendous disruption yet to come (others aren’t so sure). And in the meantime, publishers must learn make smarter, data-backed decisions and invest in storing their digital assets more flexibly “in order to be able to capitalize on new business models as they emerge.”

Much more.

Related: Are Publishers Too Slow to Innovate?

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Kindle Unlimited Overhauls Payment Model (Pub Lunch)
Having weathered criticism that its model unfairly compensates authors who participate in its subscription ebook platform, Amazon switches to paying authors based on the number of pages users read, rather than offering a certain rate for each ‘borrow.’ Since consumers’ buying patterns often differ from their actual reading behaviors, Publishers Lunch says the move represents “the most radical change in book business economics yet” for Amazon.

BookExpo America 2015: The Highlight Reel (DBW)
There’s really no way to decide which news stories and ideas from last month’s BookExpo America were the most ‘important’ or even the most noteworthy—that depends on who you are and where your interests lie in the publishing ecosystem. So we didn’t try. Instead Digital Book World has compiled a special, mid-month issue of the just-launched “DBW In Brief” series that offers a selection of coverage from the conference, featuring news and insights on discovery initiatives, readers, authors’ contracts, innovation, start-ups and much more. Download your free copy here.

Amazon Says It Shields Customer Data from U.S. Government (IBT)
According to the first transparency report it has ever released, Amazon says it has never participated in the controversial PRISM program operated by the National Security Administration, as several big tech companies like Apple and Google are said to have done. Amazon also says it sometimes refuses to comply with government subpoenas for customer data it considers to be “overboard.”

Simon & Schuster Reshuffles UK Sales Team (The Bookseller)
The publisher’s UK division merges children’s and adult trade sales forces, with distinct teams for bookstores, online and digital sales and for special and mass market sales, respectively. Several top-level staffing changes come with the reorganization.

Thomas Nelson Launches Christian Youth Imprint (PW)
The Christian publisher joins with the publishing division of Passion Conferences, an event series geared to college students, to establish an imprint that will release print and digital titles based around Passion programming.

Eyeing Amazon, YouTube Launches Gaming Platform (Time)
YouTube beefs up its offering for gamers with new video content and live-streaming features in a bid for the Google-owned company to better compete with Amazon for those users. Amazon purchased the video streaming platform Twitch for $ 970 million last August, beating out Google for it.

Alibaba Wants in on Video, Too (The Verge)
Make no mistake—video is hot. The China-based e-tailer Alibaba is reportedly developing a video streaming platform similar to Netflix, HBO and their ilk. Like those offerings, Alibaba says its own program will also include some original content.

Just How Big Is the Indie Market? (Futurebook)
Needless to say, this post won’t answer that question. But it does offer an adequate look at the all-but-intractable problem as it stands to date, with authors and industry leaders weighing in on the obstacles to quantifying that market and the relative likelihood of ever surmounting them.

What’s Lost When Bookstores Close (New Yorker)
As one commentator sees it, physical bookstores are important institutions in liberal societies, with roots in the Enlightenment and poor digital equivalents: “By atomizing our experience to the point of alienation—or, at best, by creating substitutes for common experience (“you might also like…” lists, Twitter exchanges instead of face-to-face conversations)—we lose the common thread of civil life.”

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Empowering Billions in Developing Markets to Publish Online

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With free open web tools, billions of new users in developing markets now have the ability to publish online, says Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Interview by Octavio Kulesz

Mark Surman (Photo: CC Joi Ito, Flickr)

It is undeniable that the mobile Web can help to reduce the digital divide. Developments in this field have allowed greater access to web content in numerous countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But what happens when it comes to creation and participation? How do we promote an open mobile web in which local users can be active players, rather than passive consumers? To discuss these issues, which are of vital importance for the publishing world, we talked to Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation.

PP: The mobile web is revolutionizing the way digital content is accessed in the developing world. How will this affect the lives of the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of the global South, not only in terms of access but also in creativity?

Mark Surman: The mobile web is allowing billions of new users to come online — by 2025, there will be five billion individuals online, many exclusively through their smartphones. But access alone isn’t the answer. To positively affect the lives of individuals in developing countries, we need to couple access with web literacy. When these users are able to create local content in their own language — like web pages and apps — it can lead to amazing social and economic opportunity.

Numerous international foundations are promoting initiatives to facilitate access to digital publications in resource-poor countries, either through free connectivity (Internet.org), donation of ebooks (Worldreader) or Zero Rating Services (Wikipedia Zero). What is your assessment of these types of projects?

There are many well-intentioned initiatives happening, but again: Mozilla believes access must be paired with web literacy education and open source tools that invite creativity and participation. That’s how you empower new users.

In a recent paper, you defined local content as “the canary in the coal mine,” that is to say, as a good indicator of the health of the domestic digital ecosystem. How might the production of local digital publications be encouraged in developing countries?

First, we need to promote the open Web in developing countries. Many individuals believe Facebook is the extent of the Internet — this locks individuals in a closed system where they must play by a specific set of rules. But when we successfully break down digital monopolies, individuals can play by their own rules online, not the rules of a select few companies. Then, anything becomes possible.

We can also encourage the production of local digital publications by deploying independent, open source tools for creating. Intuitive tools can allow users to create in minutes, even if they lack coding skills. It’s also key to localize these tools for a broad set of languages, like Bengali, Swahili, Hindi and others.

What are the main projects of the Mozilla Foundation in developing countries?

We’re launching Webmaker this summer, a free, open source and mobile content creation platform that allows users to build (and share) apps, web pages and other media in minutes. It’s a low-bar entry — even first-time smartphone users can become inventors. And Webmaker is localized in several languages.

We’re also expanding our teaching network to include Mozilla Clubs, which allow pockets of mentors and learners around the globe to get together and teach and build the Web. Details on Clubs, and our other web literacy initiatives, are at https://teach.mozilla.org/.

Since the emergence of the Web (and in particular of the mobile web), the book industry has undergone profound changes. Given your knowledge of the world of the Web, how do you see the future of the publishing industry at the global level?

Publishing has become increasingly democratic, and that trend will continue. Billions more users are coming online and discovering the open web — which means countless new authors now have a platform and audience to tell their story.

This article about digital publishing in China appears courtesy of Alliance Lab, on whose website it originally appeared.

Octavio Kulesz holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires. He has worked in the publishing world since the year 2000, when he created the publishing house Libros del Zorzal, together with his brother Leopoldo. In 2007 he founded the publishing company Teseo, geared to the publication of academic texts in print on demand and e-book format. He is the author of the report “Digital Publishing in Developing Countries” (2011), commissioned by the Prince Claus Fund and the International Alliance of Independent Publishers.

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Copyright Crises and Controversies

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The American Library Association (ALA) blasts a bill pending in Congress that would bring the U.S. Copyright Office out from under the auspices of the Library of Congress.

According to ALA President Courtney Young, the legislation, called the CODE Act, “does not address the longstanding problems facing the agency,” whose technological resources Young says are “woefully inadequate” for the digital age.

Late last week James H. Billington announced he would be stepping down as Librarian of Congress after nearly three decades in the role, amid a growing firestorm of similar complaints.

How to go about addressing them remains a subject of debate, though.

The Association of American Publishers says while it agrees with the ALA that the Copyright Office’s technological infrastructure is lacking, “libraries and the other stakeholders in our copyright system have much to gain and nothing to fear from an independent office.”

More.

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Amazon’s EU Probe in Context (Politico)
One observer frames last week’s news that the European Commission is opening an antitrust investigation into Amazon’s ebook business in the European Union as the latest front in an ongoing and, lately, increasingly global war to determine who should have the authority to set ebook prices.

Nook Scaling Back in Europe? (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
Barnes & Noble closed a Nook office in Luxembourg last week, shortly after buying Microsoft out of the venture. Speculating on Microsoft’s erstwhile hand in shaping Nook’s business in Europe, one industry watcher wonders whether the recent move hints at a broader retreat from that market.

Browser-Based Ebooks Move Beyond Niche (PW)
The Books in Browsers conference goes on hiatus this year amid a period of growth and change for browser-based e-reading. As the event’s organizer Peter Brantley explains, “In the last six years, the concept of reading books online has spread from a wide-eyed fantasy to the point where browser-based software libraries are common.”

Why Amazon Isn’t Killing Literary Culture (BloombergView)
Earlier this month best-selling author Ursula le Guin took Amazon to task for effectively dictating the sorts of content readers have access to. Since those sympathetic to that view and those who reject it have been engaged in a chicken-and-egg debate for quite some time (Did Amazon lower everyone’s tastes or just help us satisfy them?), it can be helpful to recall that the debate’s outlines predate Amazon: “The mass culture has been convicted of killing off serious writing for about as long as there has been a mass culture.”

YouTube Stars to the Rescue? (LA Times)
YouTube celebrities have been landing major book deals for at least a few years now, but the jury is still out on whether the large audiences for certain stars can be converted en masse into book buyers. This article asks whether authors culled from major video platforms can “save” publishing, but it’s uncertain whether the industry needs saving in the first place.
Related: Video Marketing for Book Publishers—How, Whether, When?

A Short History of Amazon’s Search Function (Internet Retailer)
Sounds rather arcane, doesn’t it? Still, search is at the center of how virtually every consumer discovers and ultimately buys digital content. Whether it’s optimizing metadata to better surface in search results or developing mobile-responsive websites that are more amenable to Google’s algorithm, that’s a reality publishers are coming to grips with more and more each day. Here’s a look back at the evolution of Amazon’s search technology that shows how the e-tailer learned and built on similar lessons.
Related: The Mobile Future Is Now and Amazon Is Winning It

UK Bookseller Group Led Push for Amazon Inquiry (The Bookseller)
The Booksellers Association, a UK-based trade group, confirms its involvement in the push to get European Union regulators to investigate Amazon on ebooks, with one leader at the organization saying, “This is the biggest lobbying job the BA has ever been engaged in.”

What’s Next for Digital Publishing and Children’s Content? (DBW)
We’re asking readers to weigh in on a handful of key questions relating to digital change in the children’s market and the publishing industry at large. Let your voice be heard. Take our digital publishing and children’s content surveys here.

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Bay Area Spotlight 2015: Digital Winners In the Bay Area

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No examination of the Bay Area publishing scene would be complete without highlighting the many digital publishing and distribution startups in the area.

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Do They Still Make Ebook Developers Like They Used to?

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Are talented ebook developers getting harder to come by? Some in the field believe that they are.

Digital production expert Laura Brady says there are probably several, interconnected reasons for that. For one thing, acquiring the necessary skills can be time-consuming and costly, and candidates who possess them can usually expect higher salaries in other industries.

This, in Brady’s view, suggests “that ebooks still aren’t an especially valued part of a publisher’s output and hence suffer from underinvestment in their workflows, especially since growth for the format has flattened out.”

And that could be discouraging would-be ebook developers from getting into the field. Still, there may yet be cause for optimism.

Much more.

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Amazon Hit with EU Antitrust Probe on Ebooks (DBW)
The European Commission launches an investigation into Amazon’s agreements with publishers, focusing in particular on contract clauses requiring publishers to disclose details of their agreements with other distributors to Amazon. Authorities will seek to determine whether those terms violate European Union trade rules and harm consumers.

European Distributors Weigh Digital Single Market (Pub Perspectives)
A trade organization of seventeen ebook distributors operating in the European Union is helping to establish a common framework for addressing a range of issues—from anti-piracy measure and tax policies to library ebooks and legal considerations—all with the ultimate goal of pushing legislators to create a unified market for digital content in the EU.

No, Wide-Scale Disruption Isn’t Afoot (The Shatzkin Files)
Countering arguments that major upheavals await the publishing industry in the next five to ten years—including one recently put forth on DBW by Vearsa CEO Gareth Cuddy—Digital Book World Conference Chair Mike Shatzkin says the fundamental model is likely to stay intact. We’ll probably see further consolidation, but in Shatzkin’s view the available data (such that it is) doesn’t point to impending change on the scale some have predicted.
Related: New Figures, Same Flat Ebook Market

UK Publishers Cheer Amazon Investigation (The Bookseller)
And no surprise there. Trade organizations representing publishers and agents in the UK say they’re happy EU authorities have chosen to investigate Amazon for anticompetitive practices, something more than one group has called for in recent months.

Amazon to Share Employee Demographics (The Stranger)
Amazon says it will publicly disclose annual demographic data on the number of women and people of color it employs. One commentator sees the move as “a big deal” considering how the tech industry still faces series diversity challenges, an issue it shares with the publishing world.

How to Raise a Baby Start-up (PBS MediaShift)
One leader at a digital media start-up compares getting the business off the ground to becoming a new parent, an experience filled with frustration, sleepless nights and lots of worry about the future. Clever parallels aside, this piece serves as an excellent reflection on the barriers to innovation that newcomers must surmount in order to gain traction in the digital marketplace.
Related: Do Publishers Innovate Too Slowly? Can Start-ups Help?

Kobo Updates Latest E-Reader (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
Kobo rolls out an update to the Glo HD, its newest e-reading device aimed at the premium end of the market, as well as the Kobo Touch. In addition to fixing some bugs, the update also expands readers’ search capabilities.

ICYMI: Five Acquisition Tips for the New Digital Market (DBW)
Now that ebook growth is for the most part flat, many of the strategies acquiring editors and marketers used to propel certain titles to success aren’t paying off like they used to. Here’s one digital publisher’s take on approaches to genre fiction that may be better suited for the current ebook market.

Best-Selling Author Tries ‘Pay-What-You-Will’ Ebooks (WSJ)
Paulo Coelho offers two titles (one in Portuguese, the other in English) free to readers on his website, asking them to pay what they wish if they’re so inclined. The model has been tried in other media before and, as one observer points out, is fairly common as a promotional tool among lower-profile authors.

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New Data, Same Slow Ebook Market

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Ebooks grew modestly in 2014, a year that saw a 4.6% uptick in revenue overall, according to new full-year figures from the Association of American Publishers (AAP).

But while the nearly 1,800 U.S. publishers who participated in the AAP’s latest survey say their ebook sales rose 3.8% on balance last year, the bigger story remains one of mostly flat growth for the format since 2012.

Called StatShot Annual, the program differs in a few key respects from the AAP’s monthly StatShot reports—for one thing, by including data on subscription platforms. While the subscription market remains small, digital audio titles appear to be beating out ebooks on the leading platforms.

The new data add another useful lens for understanding the broader picture, but it still bears repeating that that view remains sharply limited.

Much more.

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Apple Back in the Regulatory Spotlight (WSJ)
Apple can’t catch a break. But as state authorities in New York and Connecticut see it, that might be because the tech company has violated antitrust laws in its music streaming business. The attorneys general launching investigations into the matter are the same two who were involved in Apple’s antitrust case over ebook prices in 2013.

Self-Publishing’s Mainstreaming Continues (Pub Perspectives)
New figures from Nielsen show self-published titles capturing a solid 5% of the UK book market, a share that jumps to 15% in ebooks. As indie publishing continues to grow, one leader at Nielsen UK says many familiar of the distinctions between the traditional and self-published spheres are steadily collapsing, something earlier research has also hinted at.
Related: Reexamining Authors’ Paths to Publication

Got a Book Idea? Tweet It (DBW)
Inkshares, a crowdsourced publishing start-up, adds a feature allowing users to tweet their ideas for books, which can then be followed by interested would-be readers in the hope that authors will begin working on titles that potentially look the most popular.

Mapping the Children’s Market (DBW)
The jury remains out on many of the most fundamental questions about the future of digital children’s content: Are digital natives all that different from their parents when it comes to reading habits? If so, how? If not, why not? And where does that leave publishers? Weigh in here.

Amazon Offers Indian Merchants More Global Reach (Times of India)
The company launches a “Global Selling” program that builds on services it offers merchants who sell goods through Amazon and is aimed at helping expand the global customer base for those products.

Gender Imbalances Plague Academic Sector, Too (The Scholarly Kitchen)
As conversations continue around gender diversity issues among trade publishers, those in the world of academic publishing say they face a similar problem. One executive in the space advocates for a series of ongoing efforts rather than trying to “make a grand gesture and be done with it.”

Elsevier Fights on against Ebook Pirates (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
The publisher files a lawsuit against several websites and search engines it believes to be facilitating the illegal distribution of copyrighted material. Not only is Elsevier hoping to shut those sites down, it’s also seeking damages.

Yet More Experiments in Enhanced Ebooks (Digital Journal—Press Release)
One author claims to have blurred the line between film and ebook by publishing a title that’s enhanced with professionally shot footage representing scenes in the novel. It’s doubtful the project has invented a new, hybrid form altogether, but we’ll let you be the judge.

Library of Congress Head Departs amid Concerns (NYT)
James H. Billington, who turned 86 earlier this month, will step down at Librarian of Congress after 28 years in that role. Recently the Library of Congress was faulted by government reports alleging significant technological and other shortcomings and a failure of the institution’s leadership to address them.

Digital Book World

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Ebook Distributors Meet to Discuss Common EU Digital Market

Post from http://www.danieluk.net

In Madrid, top ebook distributors meet to discuss mutual challenges and the possibility of a common European digital market.

By José Manuel Anta, Managing Director, FANDE

José Manuel Anta

MADRID: Four years ago, in view of the important and rapid changes that are taking place in the sector of publishing and commercialization of digital publishing content, FANDE (Federation of National Associations of Distributors of Editions). In particular, one of its member associations, UDNE (Union of National Distributors of Editions), looked at the possibility of integrating companies which commercialize digital publishing content into an Association of Distributors for the first time.

From that day on and up to today, a total of 17 ebook distributors have been incorporated into this association. These include: Libranda, Versus, E-Libro, Leer-e, Esdecomic, Digital Books, Ulzama Digital, Bubok, Zonaebooks, Arvato Digital, Dawson Books, Lituralia, Bookwire, Arnoia Digital, Lektu, and Odilo y Tagus.

Each of these companies carries out their activities from different perspectives and follows different business models. Some of them have come from the technology sector, others from publishing, others have evolved from the distribution of printed books or POD.

What they have in common is that they all distribute digital publishing content, which while challenging, is also full of opportunities. It is a field in which current issues must be studied and dealt with in ways that are quite different from any other sector.

Therefore, over the past several years the Association has developed their own list of topics, which provided the framework for meetings and discussion. This framework covers the availability of information regarding the market situation; the provision of content for the library network; the digitization of textbooks, the legal framework for digital distribution (Law on Books and Reading, Intellectual Property Law, Law on Information Services, Data Protection Act, etc.); taxation (with different rates of VAT with respect to printed products); pricing; anti-piracy measures, and more.

One of the specific issues taken into consideration by this group of ebook distributors who form part of the UDNE, was the necessity to consider aspects related to international commercialization and the possibility of collaborating with foreign distribution companies, as well as in sharing their vision with respect to common difficulties and challenges.

Moving Toward a Common European Digital Market?

In the distribution of digital content, it seems to make little sense to try and limit the activity by following a merely geographic criteria, beyond the individual legislation which is applicable to each market. This is something that, within a framework such as the European one, it is necessary to take steps forward in order to create a more and more normalized sphere with the final aim of creating the much-proclaimed “common European digital market.”

For this reason, this starting point was what made us at UDNE and FANDE, realize the need to focus on the initiatives that are being developed in Europe in this area, especially with respect to the distribution of digital content, by analyzing their situation, the difficulties and challenges that they are facing, the different types of companies and the future prospects of the sector; as well as by promoting the collaboration between European companies in this sector.

The European Meeting of Digital Distributors in Madrid

With this premise, the 1st European Meeting of Digital Distributors organized by FANDE and UDNE was inaugurated in June 2014, with the invaluable collaboration of the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Foundation and the Directorate-General of Cultural and Book Industries. In this meeting, companies which were established in European countries and which specialize in the commercialisation of digital publishing contents with different models and systems participated. 

The meeting was attended by companies from Germany (Bookwire, Libreka and Tolino), Great Britain (ePub Direct, Gardners and Faber), France (Eden Livres, Numilog and e-plateform Editis), Italy (Edigita, Book Republic and Media Library) and Spain, as well as by the distributors of digital content which form part of UDNE.

At this first meeting, general presentations were made about the characteristics and commercialization of digital publishing content in the main European markets, as well as presentations of the different business models which are used in the sector in the different countries.

At the same time, the participants were able to share their experiences and there were opportunities for collaboration (networking) amongst the participants.

In view of the success and recognition of this initiative, in Spain, as well as internationally, FANDE is looking at the possibility of holding this meeting on an annual basis in Madrid. In fact, our second meeting is taking place today — where it will coincide with the Madrid Book Fair. The structure and content of today’s meeting is more ambitious than the last one, and will once more count on the collaboration of the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Foundation and the Directorate-General of Cultural and Book Industries.

Today’s Conference

Furthermore, this second European Meeting of Digital Distributors will be celebrated within the framework of Readmagine, the week of Innovation in Reading and Books which has been initiated by the Germán Sánchez Ruipérez Foundation. 

Our intention is to reflect, at each European Meeting of Digital Distributors, the main trends or news of interest that are currently taking place in the sector of commercialization of digital contents.

In this respect, we find the strategy of the digital platform Tolino in Germany particularly interesting, since they are competing with Amazon with respect to leadership in ebook sales, and they are maintaining a series of collaborations with European partners (in the Netherlands and in Italy) which deserves special mention. In order to address this topic, Frederike Freundt, who is in charge of digital development at Tolino, will be with us.

On the other hand, we will have international first-class speakers who will cover the different topics of the Meeting: Distribution in Digital Press (with the presence of the directors of the Dutch start-up Blendle, which is considered the “iTunes of Press” and has recently received significant financial backing from The New York Times company and Axel Springer), Library models (with library directors from the United States and Europe, at a round table hosted by Luis González from FGSR), trends in the commercialization of ebooks (at a round table with the participation of representatives of various types of digital distributors, hosted by Javier Celaya from Dosdoce, in which topics like subscription services, DRM systems and library supply systems are going to be discussed).

Finally, the evening session will be dedicated to the international sector, with the participation of José Henrique Guimaraes (CEO of the Brazilian online distributor Acaiaca Digital), since Brazil is this year’s “guest country,” and Rodrigo Rodríguez (CEO of Odilo), who will talk about this Spanish company’s experience with projects in the international market.

Moreover, there has recently been an important change at UDNE, namely the modification of the Association’s Statutes in order to accept foreign companies as well, which makes it the first International Association of Distributors (UDNE International Publishing Distribution Group), with headquarters in Madrid. This has taken place in response to the numerous requests from foreign distributors in the field of press distribution who wanted to form part of UDNE and have which have now been able to.

In this sense, we offer all European digital distributors the possibility to join UDNE in order to build a stable group which connects different public and private institutions (European as well as international ones) as well as to foster joint business opportunities and initiatives like the annual Digital Distributors Meeting.

The post Ebook Distributors Meet to Discuss Common EU Digital Market appeared first on Publishing Perspectives.

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The Publishing Problems Technology Can’t Solve

Post from http://www.danieluk.net

With ebook growth flattening out, many publishers are doing a bit of housekeeping.

It’s smart think about investing in automated production-editorial workflows and other digital solutions, Bibliocloud CEO Emma Barnes observes, but the reason many publishers “think they need a system is usually because of problems with process, not data,” she says.

For someone who operates a publishing software company, Barnes is perhaps surprisingly keen to caution publishers against rushing too quickly to invest systems like Bibliocloud’s.

That’s because, in her view, technology is often a tool for solving problems rather than a solution all by itself. Or as Barnes puts it, “configuring a system to support a particular process is the easy part. Figuring out what the process should look like, on the other hand, is the larger problem.”

Much more.

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Debate Continues on Proprietary Ebook Formats (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
Digital production expert Joshua Tallent’s post arguing in favor of proprietary ebook formats last week generated sometimes heated discussion on the topic. Ink, Bits & Pixels rounds up those conversations and weighs in on the debate.

Amazon Echo Taps into Audible (Slashgear)
An update to Amazon’s personal assistant device includes a function allowing the voice-activated Echo to read digital audiobook titles purchased through Audible, Amazon’s audiobook platform. Echo syncs with other devices in order to pick up wherever a user last left off.
Related: Audiobook Growth Among and Beyond Ebook Readers

Demand High for Amazon to Go Physical (Telegraph)
A recent survey of UK consumers suggests demand for Amazon to open physical locations is higher than for any other major e-tailer. While speculation that Amazon will ultimately get into bricks-and-mortar retailing continues to simmer away, others point out there are reasons why it hasn’t happened yet and may not for some time, if ever.

Indie Authors Struggle under New Tax Rules in EU (Guardian)
Authors are reportedly struggling to comply with the change European Union legislators implemented earlier this year, requiring taxes to be levied on goods sold online based on the location where they were purchased rather than on where the seller is located. Here’s a look at the administrative complications the shift poses and what further changes might come next.

Browser Tool Entices Book Buyers to Stay Local (Engadget)
A Chrome extension for UK readers, called Bookindy, displays listings inside Amazon product pages where the same title is available at local booksellers, including at what price and physical distance.

Closing Publishing’s Gender Gap (The Bookseller)
One author’s proposal for combating gender discrimination in the publishing world entails placing a moratorium on publishers releasing any books written by men in 2018, the hundredth anniversary of women’s enfranchisement in the UK. The idea has stirred debate around that persisting imbalance in an industry composed primarily of women.

China’s Long Road to Global Publishing Dominance (New Yorker)
One recent measure puts the number of Chinese titles published in the U.S. at just a sixth of the volume of American books published in China. With that in mind, and assessing China’s controversial presence at BookExpo America, one observer comments that the real story is “the failure of Chinese publishers to sell books abroad,” as the country struggles “to improve its public image and export its culture around the world.” Not everyone agrees.

Amazon Pushes Further into Gaming (The Verge)
Last year Amazon bought Twitch, the video streaming platform for gamers, in a move largely seen as being more about video than gaming. To date, Amazon has focused its efforts in the gaming space primarily on mobile products, but it’s now reportedly working on an “ambitious new PC game project using the latest technology.”

Digital Book World

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