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Occupy
I hope you don't mind me putting these thoughts here. I don't have a good alternative outlet for them. I want to say what I think is going on with the Occupy protests on Wall Street, outside St Paul's and elsewhere. Hopefully you've seen the protests in the news. Depending on where you get your information you might think they're scroungers or treehuggers or extremists or perhaps you think they're standing up for our rights. Of course they're not a single movement; they're lots of people annoyed about lots of different things who don't see a better way to make their point. And I think they might be right about that.
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Et tu Penguin?
Finding the iPad Kobo app to be a roadblock on the e-book highway (see previous post) I thought I'd try buying the book I was after direct from the publisher. Which in this case was Allen Page, which is now the faintest echo of an independent imprint within the Penguin site. Signs of shoddiness everywhere on the Penguin site, to my way of thinking at least, and the hardback version of the book I was after gave a publication date of Thursday (two days ago) but also claimed it was not published yet. However the e-book was available!
Their purchasing process was also a bit on the shoddy side and required a couple of attempts to get through it. But at last I had the opportunity to download my e-book. Except that the file when it arrived was only 1kb. What? Oh right, it's an Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) file which, when opened by the application of that name, will download the actual book. Wasn't expecting ADE. It just said EPUB on the purchase page. So will I be able to read this thing using an EPUB reader on my iPad? From what I can tell, the answer is 'no'. Will I be able to read it on my laptop - which of course I don't really want to do? Well, in theory you can, but the Adobe Digital Editions website where I can download their software tells me "Sorry, but your system doesn't meet the minimum system requirements". That must be because I'm using a two-month-old Mac with the latest version of everything. Or maybe there's no such thing as Adobe Digital Editions and this is all an elaborate con and the ghost of Allen Lane is in on it. So far not much to show for my £11.99. Certainly nothing to read (if you don't count error messages).
Anyway, you can imagine how likely I am to want to try the Kobo route (previous post) or the Penguin route again. If the remnants of Allen Lane had released the e-book I want in the States as well as in the UK this week then I would have been reading it for the last hour instead of wandering through a maze of shoddy interfaces and incompatible standards (admittedly Amazon have incompatible standards too, but they have working readers for everything, so far as I can tell. Everything. So it hasn't caused me a moment's bother.) We really had better hope that Amazon are the good guys, because you'd be mad to shop for e-books anywhere else, at least based on my recent experience.
Update: I cracked it. There's an Adobe page for people who can't install Digital Editions software on a Mac. Instead of scanning your system and telling you that it won't work it just lets you download and install a copy... which works.
And that's the point at which I did something bad. I'd read a few dozen blog posts about people wishing they could read their ADE EPUBs on their iPads. And lots of people explaining how to do it... if you didn't mind making a few shady deals in dark alleys. And I did it. I cracked the DRM on the ADE version, and transferred it to the iPad to read in the Apple iBooks reader. I wonder how much trouble I'm in. I paid my £11.99 to Penguin but now I'm reading it on the wrong piece of machinery. What should my punishment be? (also note: the method I chose to use only works if you start with a legally purchased copy that happens to be in an inconvenient format - though I suspect I could upload my hacked copy and anyone could read it now - which I won't do, of course.)
And incidentally - or maybe not incidentally at all - it took less time to research the hack, download all the relevant software and get the EPUB ready to read on a device it wasn't authorised for than it did to pay my money and get to a position where I could read it on my laptop (yuck!). Another argument in favour of the Kindle store: Amazon is quick, piracy is slow - we just have to make sure that Amazon alternatives aren't slower still.
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Kobo. Grrrrrrr!
I just spent ten minutes in the Kobo app on my iPad trying to figure out how to buy a book. I couldn't do it. I decided to stop after ten minutes so I could share my experience. Plus I was a bit cross. I know I succeeded once before because I managed to buy Caitlan Moran's wonderful book. (Normally I buy all my books through the Amazon Kindle US store, but they didn't have that one - doubtless for terribly good reasons that in the end come down to a lost sale.) I did find what seemed like four or five ways I could share what I'm reading on social media (not that I'm reading anything because I can't buy books, but theoretically I could share). I also had lots of messages about features, at least two settings buttons, and a page of awards I'd received (I actually do think they were for me not for authors I was reading (not that I'm reading any, etc, etc)). But I could not find a link to a book store or a way to get more titles. Maybe you'd like to have a go yourself. Click on the thumbnail above to get a full-sized picture and then tell me what you'd do to find a bookstore. And if anyone knows the answer, please remind me in the comments.
Oh and every time I fire the app up it puts a popup in my way asking me to review it in the app store. One of these days I'm not going to be polite enough to decline.
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Perfectionism
This is more of a personal, philosophical musing (oh great!) than a Snowbooks thing but I've been thinking a lot about perfectionism lately. When I worked in big business they tended to think in terms of Voltaire's suggestion that "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien." Only, because they'd really taken that to heart (and had no idea who Voltaire was) it tended to get mistranslated as "The great is the enemy of the good" which admittedly scans better in English. There was also much talk of the 80/20 rule, which no one could ever really define for me (are you spotting a theme yet?), but which I think came from Pareto's principle that 80% of effects (sometimes) come from 20% of the causes. Thus 80% of the benefits (maybe) come from 20% of the work. Which was taken as a warning that you might have to enormously extend the length of a project just to get a final few percent benefit at the end of it. In theory, if Pareto's principle held, you could get 80% of the benefit on five different projects in the same time you could get 100% of one project ( 5 x 20% = 1 x 100% ).
Perfectionism in most of the large organisations I've worked with was considered to be a species of idealism, which is something that purportedly sits down the opposite end of the spectrum from hard-headed, practical, commercially-viable pragmatism. Not only was perfectionism a way of getting less benefit from your efforts (see above), it was suspected of being an excuse for never delivering your project at all.
I come across the same thing sometimes when I talk to people about writing. The variously-attributed epigram that a work is never completed, it is merely abandoned comes from the idea that we would tinker until doomsday if we weren't forced, by some external deadline, to hand over what we've done.
And all of that is probably true, but I think there are one or two things that also need to be taken into account. One is that criticism and praise are not always assigned in comparable ways. Drawbacks can carry different weights from benefits. I see this most often in customer service: getting a hundred tiny things right can be completely erased by getting one thing wrong. In many situations, zero failures is the most important statistic; doing something impressive is irrelevant until all the negatives are erased. This is as true of good service and public relations as it is of air traffic control.
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Recommend
Spauda in Lithuania have just completed their first print job for us. The quality of the work is simply excellent - colour balance is so finely done as to make a grown man weep, binding is gorgeous, paper stock quality is stunning, timeliness was spot on, price for a 2000 unit run was superb. Mind you, they've had enough time to perfect their business: they started in 1574. Don't hesitate to drop me a line to get the sales manager's email address. Hooray for Spauda!
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Amazon below cost?
I said when I talked about the Kindle Fire (=Amazon's lower-price cousin of the iPad) that Amazon weren't shy of selling at or below cost. They do it with regular books and e-books, so it would probably appeal to them to do it with the Fire. Well, Amazon's profits are down 73% for this previous quarter despite sales being up. Sales up but margin down could imply serious capital investment (though I think the timing would be peculiar) but it has to include lots of below cost selling too.
That's slightly worrying because it represents a gamble. Why would you sell e-readers, and perhaps e-books too, at a price that loses you money? Because you plan to make it all back - and more besides - once you've cornered a chunk of the market. If Amazon weren't planning to establish at least a partial monopoly and then extract monopoly profits I can't see why they would have allowed their margin to drop like this. Apple, by contrast, don't pay you to buy their iPads - they make a good profit on every one, so when their sales are up, so are their profits.
It seems clear to me that Amazon are intending to control a fat chunk of the e-book market. I still have no suggestions for how that control might be loosened a little, but it's probably worth spreading the word about it while there's time to plan a response.
And to be clear, I think a lot of the reason for Amazon's success is that they do a better job and are smarter than their competitors. But I think they want to be the only game in town and I want us to retain some choice (which might also help us retain some profit margins).
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Why you need to be a computer expert
I'm not unsympathetic to those who struggle with computers and software and the web, but my question to you is this: what are you going to do about it?
There's very little in the world of publishing that doesn't directly involve computers - and all of it indirectly does. There's a bit of decision-making that might be done without a computer present but that's about it. Even the arty stuff - like cover design or layouts or writing the books themselves - is done using software. 'Books' are really data files until they reach the printers. E-books are data from start to finish: a Word file meets a Photoshop cover design, becomes an InDesign file, maybe turns into a PDF or an EPUB and then maybe ends up as a Mobi file. Your statutory and management accounts are data files, manipulated using software. Most of your correspondence is e-mail. Your marketing involves lots of e-mail or web-sites or sending off print-ready data files. And increasingly the world only finds out about your books because ONIX files get sent out to all the organisations who need to know. If you can't perform some of those functions because you don't know your way round the right piece of software, you're holding your company back. And what about looking after all those computers and the files they contain? If your hard drive fails, have you got backups? Can you set up a replacement computer with all the software and files you need to keep working?
You can pay someone else to do some of these things for you - even most of them. But the time is approaching when you might find yourself paying someone else to do everything for you. And that would be bad, right?
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The Dread Pirate Bezos
A few days back I linked to that accidentally revealing post by an ex-Amazon employee about how awful Amazon is to work for and how scrappy their whole setup is. That guy, Steve Yegge, wanted to balance things out and share a mainly positive story about Amazon - and specifically Jeff Bezos. If you're interested in what sort of man he is - given that he's about to take over the world of books - here's the link.
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The Fades [updated]
My last post was a hasty recap of what screenwriters have to say about storytelling (albeit my interpretation based on my limited knowledge). I wanted to consider a particular example of storytelling in this post by looking at the very interesting and also slightly flawed drama The Fades, which has been showing on BBC Three for the last five weeks. There's one more episode to come, at the time I'm writing this, and I don't think there's any way for me to talk about the show without spoiler-ing it, so be aware there are heavy spoilers for eps 1-5 ahead.
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Theories of storytelling
All this talk about the trade side of publishing - maybe it's time to think about the authors and readers out there. I'm going to ramble on for quite a long while exploring some of the 'rules' of storytelling. Assuming that there are rules - which is something else I want to think about.
About ten years ago, when I was first interested in how to construct a story for a novel, I read a few books on the subject and none of the advice they contained seemed like it was addressing what I was stuck on. Then I switched to books on screenwriting and found a deluge of advice: rules and guidelines and sure-fire processes you had to follow. Many of the advice-givers acted like the planning of movies was closer to engineering than art. According to the handbook writers, movies have acts even if the viewer isn't aware of them. In order to make the story compelling and satisfying, the plot would want to pivot through a major change of direction where act one meets act two and then again where act two gives way to act three.
I can imagine some of you may be wriggling in your seats at the thought that any of this could apply to novel-writing. Writing a novel, like raising a child, is something you're supposed to be allowed to do in whatever weird way you want to. And of course that's true. But I'm someone who likes to read thrillers and a thriller is a novel with a specific job to do, so it's not unreasonable to think that it might have to tick certain boxes and conform to certain expectations. That's the thing about genre: write something that defies too many of the conventions and you may find you haven't written a genre novel at all. So if some novels do have rules - or at least expectations that need to be met - it might be helpful to drag them into the light.
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The dawning of the new KF8
There's a vague but misleading Islamic reference in the title of this post. Please ignore that. 'KF8' is nothing to do with the establishment of a pan-Islamic state; it's the new e-book format Amazon are planning to adopt as a replacement for 'Mobi 7'. There's a marketing-y overview here. KF8 is based on some subset of HTML5/CSS3. Which is, as I hope you know, what the web uses too - at least the most modern bits of it. And it's similar to how EPUB works too. You kind of turn your book into a little website with lots of webpages (=chapters) and stylesheets and then you zip the whole thing up and call it an e-book.
One thing I find interesting about this is that, if you think about it, e-books - both EPUB and now Kindle - have a lot more in common with your website than with your InDesign or QuarkXPress files. I mean, no wonder it's so difficult getting an EPUB book out of InDesign. InDesign uses carefully positioned frames for everything and only within those frames does it allow anything to reflow or move around a little - a very little. The first thing you do when using a DTP package like InDesign is to say exactly what size bits of paper you're about to typeset for. But the two main e-book formats are much more loosey-goosey, exactly like a webpage. When you don't know whether an e-book is going to be read on something tall and thin and tiny, with only six fonts (like a smartphone screen) or wide and huge (like a computer monitor) you need everything in the e-book to be good at moving itself around or reflowing onto the next page - and you'd like all that reconfiguring to work in a sensible way to retain readability and acceptable aesthetics.
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Here to help
Dear Amazon, in your Kindle app you have given me the ability to highlight text and share it with my friends on Facebook or Twitter. I have yet to come across a piece of text in an e-book that I want to share with my pals. However, I would please like to be able to share all the typos and mistakes that I'm highlighting with the publisher of the e-book. If you added this as an option, you would be improving the quality of the e-book market as a whole and helping save money for your publishers (who are going to need that money soon). I already have several books marked up ready for you to add this feature. Anyone who edits for a living will probably provide this service for you for free because when we see a mistake we itch to correct it. So you'd even be helping your readers by offering this function.
Thanks,
Rob
Update: There seems to be a bit of a trend in the comments that proofreading is beyond the lay reader. It is best left to professionals and should always occur before publication. OK, then. Shall I revise my suggestion that Amazon let me share highlighted typos with the publishers; instead, what about the idea that I enlist the services of master ninja hackers so that when I highlight a typo, it also gets highlighted on every other Kindle screen? The ignorant are thus educated about bad spelling and grammar, and sloppy publishers are shamed into seeking out the finest paid proofreaders forever more. (Though secretly I still prefer my original idea. It's more neighbourly.
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Ewan Morrison: Are Books Dead?
To continue the unrelenting book-related gloomfest: I'm not sure how I missed this polemic by Ewan Morrison, in the Guardian, as part of their Edinburgh International Book Festival coverage. Why not have a read, if you haven't already. I'll wait here. Link. Strong stuff, right?
He lays out his stall pretty well, though I would counsel you not to set too much store by estimates of piracy from within an industry. (To my mind, the MPAA and RIAA are both guilty of a frenzy of double-counting. If I download an album illegally, listen to one song, and hate it, they'll decide I stole the full retail price of the album from them - even if I were never going to buy it. If I like what I hear and go and buy the CD to play in the car, they'll still count my download as theft.)
I don't agree with any of his suggestions at the end. I mean, who decides who 'professional writers' are and thus who gets paid? And he also makes little of the fact that an author might get as much income from selling twenty thousand self-published e-books at £1 each as from selling two hundred thousand paperbacks via a publisher at £8 each. Surely the former scenario is much more achievable than the latter. But ultimately I agree that the golden age of writers, musicians and maybe even movie-makers is over. It seems very likely that those industries will contract, fewer people will create art as a way of making a living - but, for what it's worth, there'll be more and better books, music and movies available than ever (because some people will still make a living at it and many will do it for reasons other than the money). I think the key thing to realise, though, is that (as Mick Jagger pointed out) no one said that your industry, be it music, movies or books, owes you a living.
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Chatting with Alan
I thought I'd move the comments from my recent rant about Amazon into a post all of its own. Alan Baker, one of our fabulous authors, made some very interesting remarks in the comments section and since I felt they both captured views common in the book trade and were also ideas that I wanted to address, I've relocated them to here. (Alan, I hope you don't mind. If you want to say more on this subject, just comment below and I'll add it into the main body of the post. Everyone else should of course feel free to comment as well.)
Alan: Interesting post, Rob. From what I've read over the last year or so, no one really knows what to do about it - least of all the big publishers. And the matter is further complicated by the fact that more and more writers (in most cases, I use the term loosely) are self-publishing straight to Kindle and bypassing publishers altogether. Even big-name writers are doing it.
Nevertheless, publishers remain (and should remain) the gatekeepers in terms of ensuring a certain standard of quality; and even those writers (how many? Two?) who have hit the big time after self-publishing success on Kindle have been offered traditional publishing deals on the strength of it.
I think that Amazon will achieve an effective monopoly, but the question is, how long will that last before others (whether Google or Apple or whoever) decide to really get their act together and mount a serious challenge? Things look grim at the moment because this technology is still in its infancy; but further down the line, Amazon is bound to be challenged by other big players.
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Disintermediate like it's 1999
Back in the dot.com boom era there was much talk of 'disintermediation'. In case you don't know the word, you could think of it as meaning cutting-out-the-middleman-ation. In the late Nineties, the internet improved everyone's visibility of... everything, really. And sometimes you no longer needed a middleman to introduce you to someone you could do business with. Or, more importantly, perhaps you no longer wanted to pay for the privilege of what amounted to a Google search. This is the 'middleman as dating agency' role: matching buyers and sellers, clients to service-providers. In most cases, the middleman does more than just bring the two parties together. But how much more they do makes all the difference to whether they get disintermediated once buyers and sellers can find each other in other (usually internet-related) ways.
There's been a lot of talk recently of publishers being disintermediated by authors who self-publish, going direct to the retailers themselves. I don't think Amazon are the first to do the same thing from the other end, but given how they seem poised to take over the world - at least the book world (see previous post) - it's probably worth watching when they decide that part of the book supply-chain needs reconfiguring. The New York Times will give you the details if you're interested, but the gist is that Amazon are publishers now as well as... almost everything else (including sellers of sarcasm-inducingly expensive cables).
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Amazon hegemony
not a scary picture
I think the e-book debate is over. All those who said that paper books smelled better and were safer to read in the bath turned out to have underestimated the appeal of the new technology. Of course paper books will never die (nor would I want them too) and they won't even seriously wane in lots of areas until e-book technology greatly improves. But in the meantime e-books are taking whopping great slices of the text-only publishing pie (and that's at a time when they're still doing lots wrong and everything else badly. See my previous post.)
The ease with which it's now possible to buy a book is incredible. In fact I think I would characterise my most recent purchases as 'blithe'. You see an Amazon link to a book. Click once to go to Amazon. Click twice to select the Kindle version. Click thrice to 'Buy now with 1-Click®'. Now open your Kindle (either the app or the device) and wait for the book to load. It's rare for that whole process to take more than a minute - and despite what the reactionaries say, not only can you read e-books in the bath, it's pretty easy to buy them when you're there too. I speak from experience.
There's just one thing wrong in all of this: it's all Amazon. I thought the Kindle app was horrible until I tried the Kobo offering. It's perversely bad (I kept activating confusing features by accident and when I clicked on a footnote I lost my place in the book). Though it wouldn't make any difference if it were brilliant. Everyone has an Amazon account and when you think e-books, you probably think 'Kindle'. I saw on a friend's Twitter feed that WHSmiths are just about to start selling Kobo readers. Does anyone think this amounts to hitching your wagon to a star? I mean if WHSmiths are partnering with Kobo I take that as a bad omen for Kobo. (My personal belief is that WHSmiths are so badly run they're sometimes a danger to their suppliers.)
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Google rant
Steve Yegge
So, there's an ex-Amazon employee who now works for Google, called Steve Yegge, who wrote a firing-up-the-troops internal memo for Google and accidentally published it to the world. If you're tech-savvy, I recommend reading the whole thing because it's about the future of the web - though Yegge isn't really thinking beyond the future of Google. It's all about interfaces that connect all this amazing stuff on the internet to all the other amazing stuff, so that there truly will be an App For Everything in our future. But even if you don't care or understand about platforms vs products, you might like to read the first handful of paragraphs which, well, 'really slag off' is probably the right term, Amazon and Jeff Bezos to an impressive extent. And to my mind, Amazon is about to take over the world of books (see next post). Which is a shame if they really are jerks. link
Also, here's my favourite techy, snarky excerpt: "I'm just frankly describing what developers.google.com looks like to an outsider. It looks childish. Where's the Maps APIs in there for Christ's sake? Some of the things in there are labs projects. And the APIs for everything I clicked were... they were paltry. They were obviously dog food. Not even good organic stuff. Compared to our internal APIs it's all snouts and horse hooves."