eBooks Without DRM?

DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. If you have an iPad and your beloved has a Nook, DRM is what keeps you from sharing between the two devices. With a print book, you can donate it or lend it to your sister. Currently, you can't do that with ebooks. But times may be changing.

Science fiction publisher Tor, an imprint of Macmillan USA, is making its entire ebook list free of digital rights management (DRM) as of July this year, along with sister imprints Forge, Orb and Starscape.

The article in Forbes claims that the time is overdue to remove DRM because DRM is "a meagre fig leaf of protection against piracy because anyone who really wants to copy a book will find that circumvention is trivially easy." (Course, that "anyone" doesn't include me since I can have trouble turning on my iPad, let alone messing with the inner workings of an eBook or digital device.)

There have been times that I've downloaded and read a book on my iPad that I know my husband would like. But I don't even know how to share it to his iPad.

What do you think of removing DRM from eBooks?

Lending E-Books

I was reading an article on the Ventura County Star website about the struggles between libraries and publishers over e-books. The Camarillo Library has a collection of over 1,400 digital books. They're treated pretty much like print books. Only one person can check them out at a time and when the loan period ends, the book disappears from the renter's e-device. Then the next person can check it out.

Problem is, the big six publishers are not liking the idea of libraries lending e-books. Four of them refuse to open their e-catalogs to libraries. The other two are charging extra money or limiting lending. At one point, Random House tripled its prices to libraries.

A recent study from the Pew Internet and American Life Project found 28 percent of American adults own a tablet or e-reader, with ownership nearly doubling during the last holiday season. 

 The article noted that libraries are wrestling with how much to spend on e-books since they don't actually own them.

A Kindle owner can buy Jonathan Kellerman's "Victims" for $12.99, for example, but a library must pay $84 to lease access to the same e-book through Overdrive…

 Plus, libraries can't share the e-books among facilities. And they can't accept e-books as donations.

I'm thinking librarians know how many times a print book can be checked out before it is too worn to be kept on the shelves. Why not apply that number to e-books? Say, if the average print books can hold up to 30 readings before it is too damaged to lend anymore, then an e-book can be lent 30 times before it disappears and the library buys a new one.

 What ideas do you have on this?

Kindle Sales

 Virtual Strategy Magazine had a recent article about Best-Selling Paid Kindle Books in March. I'm going to highlight some of the article highpoints. In talking about these 16 books, they included "only paid units and do not take into consideration borrowed or free units."

More than 100,000 books are now available in the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, including over 100 current and former New York Times Best Sellers. 

 In March, each time Kindle owners borrowed a KDP Select book from the lending library, the author received $2.18, leading to significant increases in income for independently-published authors. 

Debora Geary was one of the top 10 KDP Select authors in February, and 51% of customers who borrowed one of her books from the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library went on to buy one of her titles. 

L.J. Sellers, author of the Detective Jackson Mystery/Thriller series, saw that 25% of customers who borrowed one of her books also bought one of her books, all of which are also available in the lending library. 

 T.R. Ragan is the best-selling thriller author of the Lizzy Gardner Series and was the number one KDP Select author in February. She earned over $11,000 from the KDP Select fund, and her royalties from paid sales of her books increased by more than four times from January to February.

Clearly, the article was an endorsement of the KDP Select program. But it also shows that the program has been beneficial for a lot of writers. [Shout out to L.J. --Yay!] If any of you have your books currently available through the Kindle lending library or would like to provide your own stats or just want to leave a comment, please join us in the Comments section.

Children’s Books

NPR had a recent post on The Future of Children’s Books. Did you know that “Consumers buy $3.1 billion children's books annually”? Those numbers may go up with the explosion of e-books and apps. The post is a transcript of a conversation between host Mary Louise Kelly and Dan Poynter, consultant and publisher at Para Publishing, and Roxie Munro, an author and illustrator of more than 30 children's books. Before you link over to read the full transcript, here are two snippets:

Poynter: “…11 million parents have purchased an e-book and 19.6 million parents plan to buy an e-book.”

Munro: “I think within one generation - maybe 30 years - very few houses will have bookshelves and few people will have libraries just like they collect art or stamps or fine prints.”

It’s not a long piece, so click over if you’d like to read it. My question for you today is, since kids today are so used to iPads and other e-readers, do you think moving to e-books will be easier for them than it is for the older generation?

Who Will Survive?

Hilary Melton-Butcher sent me the link to an interesting blog post written last month by Kirsten Winkler. Winkler discusses the future of libraries and bookstores. She feels bookstores and libraries are becoming the collateral damage of the eBook revolution. She, like most of us, hope they survive.

Winkler notes that a lot of libraries are lending eBooks. Personally, I like that. It will help them stay relevant. I still worry about bookstores, though. She talks about those stores where the owner or employee knows books and can direct you to exactly what you’ll like. We used to have stores like that. My favorite was owned by the wonderful mystery author, Jan Grape. She was that kind of person. She knew mystery and she knew (and still knows) every big mystery author in the U.S. But she and her husband retired. Unlike Winkler, I don't know of any big chain stores now with that kind of personnel. Certainly not B&N or the other big names.

And I really don't like Winkler’s idea that if I buy an eBook in a bookstore for my iPad, the publisher can track me via my cell phone. She sites it as a possible way for bookstores to make money:

For the economic model, there could be revenue share based on location, e.g. if a customer decides to buy an ebook when he is inside a bookstore or library, the device would know this due to GPS and location awareness and therefore the publisher would share revenue the same way as with physical books.

'Course the publisher could probably track me via the iPad, too, as I sit in my living room dowloading. I harken back to the days of Down With Big Brother, which didn't work then and won't work now.

Link over and read the article. There’s also a video to watch. Both of them have some interesting points. Thanks Hilary!

Casualties of War

The war between Amazon and Barnes & Noble is heating up. Not unexpectedly, you and I, the readers, may be the casualties. I was reading an article by John R. Quain on FoxNews about the war and had a sinking feeling that readers will be the ones who take the hit in this fight.

Amazon is coming out this Fall with its Amazon Fire, an eReader with color (think iPad). They’ve made a deal with DC Comics to be the exclusive reader for about 100 graphic novels from DC Comics. As you might have guessed, Barnes & Noble was not happy about this exclusive deal and immediately pulled all of those titles off their shelves in their bookstores. As John Quain noted:

If publishers are going to enter into a format war based on exclusive arrangements with specific booksellers, why should the company dedicate its valuable shelf space to books that its own customers can't buy on its Nook device?

On the other side of the issue, Barnes & Noble has exclusive deals for titles, like the interactive Peanuts books. And on another side of the issue, some publishers such as Macmillan and Simon & Schuster don’t let libraries lend their e-books.

Already, writers are struggling to get their books ready for a widespread array of formats. One is hard enough, let alone multiple formats, although there are some sites that will format for several different devices.

So here you’ve got this war going on between the big boys and, in the end, readers are likely to be the casualties. What happened to the idea of having an e-format that was readable on all eReaders? That was my hope – probably just a wish in the wind. This battle may continue until one company crushes the others or someone leads the giants into compromise.

As a writer, what do you think of this war? As a reader, how does it affect you?

Are Publishers Irrelevant?

According to an article in The Bookseller, former Borders UK chief Philip Downer seems to think publishers may be becoming irrelevant. At a meeting in Frankfurt, he urged them to act before that becomes a reality.

 Downer said he was concerned that publishers could go the same way of chain booksellers if e-book prices were driven down and the new technology damaged "supplier diversity".

He urged publishers to join together and set the agenda rather than allow Apple, Amazon and Google to determine the future. He also advised publishers to create a free e-book reader so that once again the content is what excites readers, not the device.

So, I ask you: If you could get an eReader for free and publishers embraced eBooks and sold them at a competitive price, would that save the “book”? It also asks the question, would authors stop the mass exodus to self-publishing? Or would publishers have to come up with a more lucrative deal for writers?

I ask that last question because at the same conference, literary agents are also discussing the eBook, according to another article in The Bookseller.

Robert Gottlieb, chairman of the US literary agency Trident Media Group, warned that power is shifting from publishers to authors.

Publishers are frightened to death of the e-book market, because they see the opportunity for authors, that they did not have before.

Will publishers embrace the change? Will they offer authors a higher eBook rate? Are they too late to stop the tsunami of authors moving to self-publishing?

BookStats

If you haven’t already read the report by the Association of American Publishers and Book Industry Study Group of BookStats, you’ll want to link over to an article in Publishers Weekly that talks about it.

Here are some of the more interesting, I thought, conclusions and stats.

Total estimated revenue for all publishers rose 3.1% in 2010, to $27.9 billion, following a 2.5% increase in 2009. E-book sales across all publishing categories rose 29.4% in 2009 and 38.9% in 2010, and accounted for 5.8% of total industry revenue in 2010.

Hardcover sales, after rising in 2009, fell 6.6% in 2010, the same pattern shown by trade paperback.

BookStats data show what other reports have found—retail stores losing ground to online e-tailers in the trade segment.

While online e-tailer's sales rose 88.8% between 2008 and 2010, it was actually mass merchandisers that had the strongest gains, with sales jumping 553.2%, to $218.5 million, an encouraging development for trade publishers … 

Check out the full article, which includes charts with a breakdown of categories, industry sales, trade sales by format, and trade sales by channel.

Is this bad news for print publishers? Is is good news for readers? 

Changing Times

I was reading an article in The Wall Street Journal called “Borders Succumbs to Digital Era in Books,” when I came across two lines that said so much about the state of print publishing. The article focuses primarily about how the demise of Borders bookstores is changing more than just the lives of readers for whom the local Borders was the only bookstore nearby, although that aspect was addressed with this line:

The closures will make Barnes & Noble the only national bookstore chain in the U.S., leaving some Americans to drive long distances to find the largest collections of new bestsellers or wile away the hours among the stacks.

But to me, the real telling line that affects writers was this one:

Publishers, already grappling with seismic shifts in their business, including the demand for e-books, now are trying to gauge how many fewer books they should print, both in terms of physical copies and the number of new titles.

A writer’s advance is most often associated with how many books the publisher thinks you can sell. Fewer print stores mean fewer print sales. If there’s no store near you, you’re more likely to buy via an online store or not at all. And fewer convenient bookstores will most likely lead to higher sale of eReaders, which lowers print sales.

What do you think? Will remaining bookstores focus on high-selling celebrity books? Who will get hurt the most -- midlist authors, newbie authors, small press authors, or …? Will this lead to more eBooks and eReaders or possibly more online bookstores?

Bookstores are Adapting

Some of you may remember a bit of a rant I went on about Bookstores last month. In that post I said:

if bookstores want to stay “the primary vehicle for book discovery” they need to totally revamp their thinking.

Well, people listened to me! Okay, they never even heard of me, but some bookstores ARE taking the initiative to save themselves. Yay! I love bookstores.

Publishers Weekly has an article about how some bookstores are developing new concepts of what a bookstore is. They are reimagining their stores.

"I think there's hope," said events director Karen West of Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif., which is considering adding an Espresso Book Machine to offer self-publishing to those at the store's writing conferences.

HugoBookstores, which has three locations in greater Boston, will begin testing knitting next month. … co-owner John Hugo decided yarn could be the right sideline.

Bluestockings in New York City, for example, has begun commissioning cards from local artists, while [Words] in Maplewood, N.J., stocks T-shirts from all nine local elementary schools.

At McLean & Eakin Booksellers in Petoskey, Mich., manager Matt Norcross does tech seminars for customers to show them how to download a digital e-book and associate e-books with his store.

At Village Books in Bellingham, Wash., co-owner Chuck Robinson has begun selling iPads through an agreement he worked out on his own with a local Apple dealer, who built a kiosk in his store.

What ideas do you have to keep bookstores relevant and in business?

Are You Kidding Me?

I’m zipping around the Internet when I come across an article titled, “Barnes & Noble Successfully Markets ‘Simpler’ eReader to Women.” I skid to a stop and think, “What?”

The first line in the article is: “Why do women hate technology so much?”

I’m now asking, “What women?”

The article quotes Jeremy Peters in a New York Times article:

"So what about the small fortune that publishers have poured into developing tablet editions that dazzle the senses with sleekly produced animation, live video and audio? They’re fine for the men, but a lot of women think there is nothing wrong with plain old words and pictures."

Okay, now they’re just pissing ticking me off. There are indeed people who just want to read; it’s not just women, like Peters is implying. And to say that women hate technology and want simple devices to read simple books and magazines is a slap in the face.

What women have they been talking to? Not my generation. Not even my mother’s generation. Sheesh. Are you kidding me?

An Author Takes a Test Drive

We’ve heard from and about the big name authors like Barry Eisler and J.A. Konrath and Dean Wesley Smith. All of them discussing the move to e-books and how their sales are increasing their income. But most of us, me included, are not big names with big followings and monster sales.

Ann Summerville alerted me to a blog post by an author like most of us (thank you Ann). This author, Carol Denbow, writes nonfiction and has quite a few out. Like the big name authors, she did an experiment. Her books, listed on Kindle for either $4.99 or $2.99, were doing okay. She said she was selling about 20 a month. But she did a month-long experiment “to see if it would be better to list the books at .99 and sell more copies than at the higher price and sell less.”

The post about her results were interesting. Here’s something she noted about Kindle:

At $4.99 a book (actually, any price over $2.99), Kindle offers the author/publisher a 70 percent royalty. But if you lower your list price to under $2.99, they only give you a 30 percent royalty.

Over the month, she sold more copies, but because of the lower royalty, she made less money. But that’s not the end of her story. You’ll want to link over and find out why this experiment increased not just her e-sales but her print-sales, why her ratings went up on Kindle and how this will affect future sales, and why, despite the lower income, she intends to keep the price low for a while longer. She’s giving her test of Kindle another month.

You might want to follow her to keep abreast of her updates on her Kindle experiment.

Google Buys eBook Technologies

Google Inc. has bought eBook Technologies. If you’re wondering what eBook Technologies is, here’s what Internet Retailer said about it:

 ... a company that sells technology used to operate digital reading devices, along with related publishing tools and software.

This comes 5 weeks after Google opened its ebookstore with over 3 million free books and hundreds of thousands of other titles, downloadable to many devices.

Dmitriy Molchanov, a analyst who covers e-books for Yankee Group, estimates that:

 … U.S. consumers by 2013 will buy 381 million e-books each year, four times the amount purchased in 2010. Annual e-book sales will reach $2.7 billion within the next three years, he says, even as the average price for an e-book falls to $7, down from more than $9 in 2009.

If you’d like to see the Google ebookstore, you can find it here. In the header of the home page, they list that books are downloadable to: Android, iPhone, iPad, iPod, the Web, Nook & Sony.

Anyone downloaded a book from Google’s ebookstore?

Ads in Books

Putting ads in books is not a new concept. It’s been tried before. Now, however, it seems almost inevitable. According to the Wall Street Journal, marketers are now testing ads in e-books.

Marketers are exploring a variety of formats, including sponsorships that give readers free books. Videos, graphics or text with an advertiser's message that appear when a person first starts a book or along the border of the digital pages are also in the works. Ads can be targeted based on the book's content and the demographic and profile information of the reader.

Wowio Inc., a digital-book store, is already doing it. They’re selling ads in e-books downloaded from sites for reading on laptops or Apple’s iPad or Amazon’s Kindle. The ads you might see could be two or three pages of advertisement or some kind of freebie.

The movie site Fandango is … giving Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," with three pages of Fandango promotions, to people who buy tickets on the site to the Jack Black movie "Gulliver's Travels," which opens on Christmas.

Advertisers believe that consumers will accept the ads if it means they get the book for free. Wowio charges advertisers between $1 to $3 for each book downloaded. Does any of this money trickle down to the writer? That’s up to the publisher.

Will you, the author, have a say-so over whether and what kinds of ads go in your book? Probably not, but Stuart Applebaum, a spokesman for Random House, said:

"It's a nonstarter here without their assent, regardless of format," he says. "However, if our authors were ever to be agreeable to it, it might have some traction."

This definitely affects authors. So right now, at the beginning of this idea/trend, what do you think about it?

Publishing for Kindle

If you’re thinking of e-publishing (perhaps that NaNo you’re working on now?), here’s an article that might be helpful. It’s called “How to Publish a Kindle eBook.” The post is on Blog Kindle, Daily news About Kindle, eBooks, eInk and other related topics.

Step 1: Create an Account
Step 2: Format your eBook
Step 3: Upload Your Book
Step 4: Promote it.

Within the article, you’ll find some basic tips, such as do your editing before you upload your book – Kindle will NOT edit for you.

Also, he recommends “Unencrypted Mobipocket” as the “ideal” format for Kindle.

He even tells you how to “test” your book, save yourself some trouble, and see how your book will look on the Kindle, before you upload it.

Easy, right?

E-Reader Users Read More

According to Information Week, people who use e-Readers, in general, read more than those who read print books. Here are some of their stats:

 ...10% of Americans use one and another 10% are likely to purchase one in the next six months…

…among those who have an e-reader, over one-third read 11-20 books a year (36%) and over one-quarter read 21 or more books in an average year (26%).

… in August Amazon said sales of its latest Kindle in four weeks had surpassed the entire sales of its previous e-reader generation.

… users of e-readers are more likely to purchase books. "One in five Americans (21%) say they have not purchased any books in the past year compared to only 8% of e-reader users who say the same …

I know that my husband who has a e-Reader, reads more books now. They’re so easy for him to download and have ready, plus they travel compactly.

What about those of you who have some sort of e-Reader, whether it’s a Kindle, an iPad, a cell phone or whatever…are you reading more now?

Are We Reading More?

Recently, The Wall Street Journal took a look at reading habits. It wasn’t based on a huge number of people, but it did show some interesting trends.

A study of 1,200 e-reader owners by Marketing and Research Resources Inc. found that 40% said they now read more than they did with print books.

The study by Marketing and Research Resources Inc. looked at three devices: the Kindle, the iPad and Sony’s Reader.

You might argue that 40% is not a big deal, but consider that a 2007 study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that about “half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.”

Forrester Research estimates that “11 million Americans are expected to own at least one digital reading gadget by the end of September.”

Thriller author Michael Connelly has the same attitude as my husband:

"There is the advantage of being able to carry multiple things. I travel a lot—believe me, I notice the weight."

There’s a lot more to read in this article – including ebooks and libraries, the number of male reader vs female readers of ebooks, and the problem with page numbers in ebooks.

Do you have an eReader? Do you read more?

Emerging Technology

According to Jonny Evans, who blogs at Computer World, three companies are defining the future of publishing: Amazon, Google and Apple. He starts by saying, “Apple is reinventing the electronic planet.”

Evans points out that other eReaders are moving toward the iPad model.

 Barnes and Noble today introduced new versions of its Nook-branded eReading software for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Nook is also available for PC and Android systems.

The free app joins Amazon's own Kindle app, Apple's own iBooks app, both Marvel and DC's big comic-reading apps and a bevy of smaller eBook-reading apps on the iTunes store.

Apple will soon be selling 7-inch iPads, in fact. They’re designed primarily for text books and will appeal to schools. Apple is also extending its presence to new markets overseas.

Other companies are introducing new ideas. Nook has a LendMe feature, another step in eBook publishing.

While Evans noted:

Amazon recently claimed to have sold more eBooks than physical books, but few took this claim seriously -- the company is clearly pushing its own Kindle device.

He also said:

 Random House CEO, Markus Dohle expects eBooks to make up over 10 percent of the publisher's revenue by next year.

You can link over to see what Evans recommends the Kindle do to compete with the iPad and what the rumors are concerning the Android Kindle. What do you predict for the Book eWorld?

Are e-Readers Green?

That’s the question asked by Green Computing – just how green are eReaders and are they greener than print books? From what I gathered, this article was in response to an op-ed in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s monthly journal by Raz Godelnik, the president and co-founder of Eco-Libris.

Godelnik argues that e-Readers contain toxic materials and will contribute to the electronic waste stream. He also noted, “If you try to find out about the environmental impacts of Amazon's Kindle or B&N's Nook, good luck with that. Except for Apple, none of the companies that sell e-readers makes environmental data available.” Godelnik says that mobile devices will contribute to a “rapid growth in energy consumption and carbon emissions associated with so-called cloud computing over the coming years.”

Matthew Wheeland, the author of the Green Computing article, agrees that the iPad is not “a planet-saver.” On the other hand, he notes that book publishing has its own eco-footprint.

If you order a book online and have it shipped 500 miles by air, that creates roughly the same pollution and waste as making the book in the first place. Driving five miles to the bookstore and back causes about 10 times the pollution and resource depletion as producing it. You'd need to drive to a store 300 miles away to create the equivalent in toxic impacts on health of making one e-reader -- but you might do that and more if you drive to the mall every time you buy a new book.

Wheeland concludes by calling on both the print industry and the e-industry to do more to be green – with “greater energy efficiency, less toxic manufacturing, greater recyclability, and more responsible sourcing.”

Do you think print and e- publishers will ever reach a point where “green” trumps “sales”? Oh, and since you’re here, define “cloud computing” for me.

Remember Your Libraries

As authors, we focus on selling our books to readers, to bookstores, to online bookstores, to reading groups, to whoever will buy them. We sometimes forget that libraries buy books, too. And people check out those books and could become avid readers of other books by that author.

So, not only is it good to remember libraries, we should support them and pay attention to them.

To that end, I read a report in the Library Journal on the recent ALA 2010 in DC. ALA stands for the American Library Association. Like just about all of us, the ALA is having budget problems. Even attendance at ALA 2010 was down. The attendees -- 26,201 in total, with 19,513 attendees and 6,688 exhibitors – were upbeat and focused.

The Library Journal article is a long one and I urge you to read the full report, but here are just a few highlights:

Consonant with findings unveiled at the conference that the most important role for library computers is supporting job seekers, followed by access to online government information, Emily Sheketoff, executive director of ALA's Washington Office, noted that states use LSTA [Library Services and Technology Act] monies to pay for databases used by job seekers.

At the popular Top Technology Trends panel, hosted by ALA's Library & Information Technology Association (LITA), the topics included cloud computing, the impact of the iPad, and the ereader price war. If the latter leads to $50 ereaders by next year, as discussed, that could be disruptive to the book and library worlds.

As for a near-term trend, Dempsey suggested that as search platforms like Cambridge, MA–based Pubget's search engine for life-science PDFs make an increasing amount of a library's collection instantly available electronically, they will come to be seen as the primary way to access a library's materials.

Sacramento, CA–based information technology consultant Joan Frye Williams said libraries should work toward being the place that content creation happens, to "stop being the grocery store, and start being the kitchen," she said.

 You can also read how libraries across the country are multi-purposing their facilities and you can get ideas how you, as an author, could help both your library and yourself.

If you’ve spoken or taught a class or done something with a library, tell us about it here in the comments. It’d be fun to hear the different ways we can support libraries.