Tools of Change, Chicago

I enjoyed reading the tweets from the one-day conference in Chicago the other day, so I thought I’d summarise just a few of them and share them here.  You can see the full range on Twitter at #tocchicago

Children’s Books

How to handle the friction between children’s ebooks and the desire to reduce screen time?
For many children, picture books are their first introduction to art.

Re childrens ebooks: what’s useful? What’s a gimmick? Engaging without distracting is the tricky part
What helps readers understand? What is engaging and motivating? What disrupts learning? Good questions generally, not just for children’s books.

Poetry

http://Pf.org Mobile poetry app: built to target folks standing in line. Works in single servings, which causes more poems to be accessed. Includes a fun “spin” browsing feature + mood categories.  Has increased exposure for poetry foundation. Reach up 300% while overall engagement has gone down.

Repackaging existing content helps expose it to new audiences.  Context may be just as important as content.

Uses of and representations of poetry online is the nexus of many online issues: Digital formatting can play havoc on poetry, where formatting is everything.

poetry will continue to have to compete agains Angry Birds & Pinterest but it will also thrive

Maybe the http://pf.org data suggests that print is the best home for poetry. Is that too radical? Hmm.
Maybe not:  Catherine Halley’s talk got me to give poetry a chance via Poetry Foundation’s app http://www.poetryfoundation.org/mobile/

The paradox of attention span: should lead toward shorter content, but poetry often requires more attention & time than prose

Crowd  Publishing

Distance.cc, a quarterly journal devoted to long essays about design. Funded by Kickstarter.

First Kickstarter effort by @nickd: cadence.cc, a book on design.  Sold out print run last year, still available as eBook. “my book wasn’t published by me, it was published by my audience.”

Readers are out there but you have to meet them on their terms on their devices.

“The more time you spend running around freaking out, the less time you spend building the future.”

“We need to stop thinking like publishers, and think more like software companies”

Distance Authors getting good visibility. An editor helps writers think through ideas and people take them more seriously.  A key feature is editing. “difference between an essay and a rant is that an essay offers an actual solution.”   prefers well-written and passionate writing to just passionate writing (Wants fewer rants, more essays)

Distance’s business plan included keeping it’s owner eating three burritos a week: “If either of those goals proves untenable – paying writers or eating burritos – the project is a no-go.” Ha!
Supply-chain issues still essential to authors. Self pub created closer connection to work, audience.

Information

“Seek information, not affirmation.”

We are creating a new form of ignorance that’s killing us. It does not distinguish between highly informed and well informed.  We’re not suffering from information overload, we’re suffering from information over-consumption.  What are healthy levels of information consumption? schedule your various channels/forms of information consumption; don’t consume right now just because you can

“Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they’re right?”   we’re a more polarized nation now b/c no matter what crazy thought you have, there’s a media outlet to tell u ur right.  The desire to be right frames our mass media. “Opinion tastes better than news” and pizza tastes better than broccoli.  We’ve industrialized our media for poor consumption habits the same way we have with fast food

Content

Content trapped forever in your CMS is the new content trapped in your CD-Rom.
Big question 1: can I get my data out in an open, easily-readable format?
Question 2: Can I get my data out for the same price I paid to put it in?
Question 3: (most important & overlooked) How much time will it take for me to get my data out?

people put themselves in data jail all the time

Have we gone fr “information wants to be free” to the 2nd half of that quote “or it wants to be expensive”?

Content is not a commodity. Data is a commodity. There are no sensationalized 5-day weather reports.

The idea that you should wake up and be a producer instead of a consumer changes your relationship with information.
Still thinking about writing 500 words every morning before 8am. Thinking about other changes too.

Show your work when publishing; empower readers to make up their own minds.  Not to do that is disrespectful.
instead of saying “this is great content,” think about WHY it’s great for your audience.

Libraries are the first line of defense against piracy.  This is an interesting question.

Credits

Thanks to #tocChicago Tweeters: @nelltaylor, @petdance, @theanalogdivide, @digipub. @aburke8  et al

and the speakers they Tweeted: Junko Yokota, Doug Siebold, Nick Disabato, Clay Johnson, Brian O’Leary.
Here are some of their slides:

http://nickd.org/log/nickd-oreilly-toc.pdf
http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/bfoleary/using-content-to-acquire-new-members

 

Ebook sales? Not telling you.

The Problem

One problem with selling ebooks is that it’s very hard to know exactly how many copies other titles have sold.  This means there is no best-seller list and very little data on the relative success of different genres.  It’s almost impossible to do a comparative analysis of the market as a whole, of the kind that magazines like the Bookseller do for print books on a regular basis.   As an ebook distributor, I only know how many copies my titles have sold, and I can’t compare their performance with sales of similar titles from other publishers.  Unless we are a publisher with huge lists across multiple genres, we can’t get a balanced picture of the market.

The Reason for the Problem

The reason for this is that there is such a small number of retailers selling ebooks in large quantities.  All the sales data for printed books is collected from the retailers, who report to Nielsen how many copies they’ve sold of each title.  Because there are so many bookshops giving this information, you can’t tell how many copies any one shop or company has sold.  The problem with ebook sales is that they are concentrated in so few retailers who are reporting their sales to Nielsen, that if those figures were published, it would expose their individual sales figures to the public, because by looking at the different formats (Kindle or ePub) we could deduce who had sold what.  As this kind of  information is normally considered confidential, the figures have not been released.

Will the Problem Go Away?

I hope that this problem is just a symptom of an immature market, and that it won’t be long before so many bookshops are selling ebooks that none are identifiable from the aggregated data.  However, as long as Amazon remain almost the only  retailer selling Kindle versions, their anonymity is never going to be protected, unless the format information is left out of the data.  That would again limit the usefulness of the data to publishers, who need to be able to make informed decisions about formats as well as topics and overall figures.

Maybe One Day

The news (on Moco News) that some publishers are opening up their book sales data to authors,  saving them from having to wait for their six-monthly royalty statement may well (as Laura Hazard Owen hopes in her article) prompt calls for greater openness about sales generally, and pressure to find a way round the commercial confidentiality risks of reporting ebook sales in particular.

Sherlock Holmes with sound effects

I’ve just started reading Sherlock Holmes: The Adventure of the Speckled Band which is the UK’s first  ebook with its own sound track, published by Booktrack a couple of weeks ago.  This Telegraph article promises driving rain, thunderclaps and blood-curdling screams, so I’m not sure how I’m going to read it on the train, or in bed, which is where I do most of my reading!  Better get my head phones out.

Here’s a little clip of the ebook in action:

Waterstones eReader next Spring

I’ve been longing for Waterstones to bring out an ebook reader and a better ebook shop, so I was intrigued to hear what James Daunt would say about his plans.  He was interviewed on You and Yours (BBC Radio 4, Friday 9 September), when he also explained some of the rationale behind ending Waterstones’ 3 for 2 offers.  Here are my notes of what he said on Friday.

James Daunt on a Waterstones ereader:  “We want one and we will have one, and our new owner has the means to invest in it”.   He’s been wanting to face the challenge posed by Amazon and the Kindle:  “We can do so many things better than Amazon”.  As Barnes and Noble and the Nook have proved, digital sales combined with a physical bookshop is a powerful combination that makes perfect sense.

He said Waterstones’ ereader would be at least as good as Amazon, and preferably substantially better so Waterstones will give customers a better buying experience for physical and digital books .  Timescale: Spring.

What is he reading?  Anna Funder, All That I Am, which is “fabulous”.  He loves having a job where he has to read wonderful novels, although he reads more books he needs to know about than books he chooses for pleasure.

James Daunt on the 3 for 2s:  Waterstones are not ditching the 3 for 2 “as a concept” but don’t want to penalise people who just want to buy one book.  The trouble is, that type of offer encourages “all sorts of strange behaviours other than focusing on buying the best book”.

But books only got into the 3 for 2 offer “if cheques are written” which was bad news for authors who were not subject to those deals.  Much more stimulating bookshops will result, that are not the same all across the country because bookshops should be run by their managers, not centrally.  Central buying of offers etc strangles the individuality and passion in local shops.

Is he trying to remake the Waterstones chain in his own image?  In James Daunt’s own words:  “We’ll see”.