Blogs on Publishing and New Media

The following is a list of blogs concerning the publishing and new media industries. I'll keep adding as I find more:

- Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog
- Tools of Change for Publishing
- Steven Poole's Blog
- Mobile Read

Students Angrier Than Ever Before About the Price of Textbooks

There is an interesting New York Times article that talks about how students are now sharing text books via sites like Pirate Bay. Now the key point is that it takes considerably longer to scan pages of a large text book to share with others. And the fact that students are going to such great lengths to share text books implies that they are really upset and aggravated by the attitude of text book publishers and their pricing policies. As the article puts it,

"Consider the cost of a legitimate copy of one of the textbooks listed at the Pirate Bay, John E. McMurry’s “Organic Chemistry.” A new copy has a list price of $209.95; discounted, it’s about $150; used copies run $110 and up. To many students, those prices are outrageous, set by profit-engorged corporations (and assisted by callous professors, who choose which texts are required). Helping themselves to gratis pirated copies may seem natural, especially when hard drives are loaded with lots of other products picked up free."

"The students who create and give away digital copies are motivated not by financial self-interest but by something more powerful: the sweet satisfaction of revenge."


But this also represents an opportunity for text-book publishers. Again, according to the article,

"Used book sales return nothing to publishers and authors. Digital publishing, however, offers textbook publishers a way to effectively destroy the secondary market for textbooks: they now can shift the entire business model away from selling objects toward renting access to a site with a time-defined subscription, a different thing entirely."

Are text book publishers listening?

Press Partiality - Another Nail in Newspaper Publishing's Coffin?

Thad McIlroy has written an interesting article which argues that the modern problems of press credibility: celebrity journalists, bogus exposes, owner interference - are in fact speeding up the demise of the newspaper publishing industry. He also points to an article by Chris Hedges which says, "The Internet will not save newspapers. Although all major newspapers, and most smaller ones, have Web sites, and have had for a while, newspaper Web sites make up less than 10 percent of newspaper ad revenue. Analysts say that although Net advertising amounts to $21 billion a year, that amount is actually relatively small. So far, the really big advertisers have stayed away, either unsure of how to use the Internet or suspicious that it can't match the viewer attention of older media."

A Quick Review of Shelfari

Quick Update - After I wrote this blog-post, the folks from Shelfari wrote in with some responses to the points raised in my blog post. I was actually quite amazed by their responsiveness and in-particular, by the promptness of their community manager - Amanda. Now, if all companies were this focused on consumer opinion, it would be a perfect utopia :) Amanda's email to me is followed by my original blog post:

"

Hi Vikram,

Thanks for the feedback on Shelfari (via your blog posting). I wanted to follow up with you and answer a few of the questions that you had. First, our search box allows you to search for books by Author, Book title & ISBN search (using the default "Books" search). Author results, as opposed to listing their books, is something we'd definitely consider for the future. Second, under the title of each book is the author's name(s) and each name is a hyperlink to the Authors Unbound page. Occasionally there is an author's name missing from the book details and members can edit the book and request that the correct author's name is linked to the book (we have an approval process for these requested changes). Third, we want the Authors Unbound pages to be a place where both authors and readers can connect and share their knowledge about an author. For this reason, the pages are editable by anyone. To handle potential abuse, we have included the option to "report abuse" from the page history, revert to previous versions of the page and the ability to blacklist users from contributing to the Unbound pages. Also, I notice you tested our author linking and I wanted to let you know that each request for linking is processes by myself or another Shelfari employee to ensure that the real author is requesting the link.

Some of the unique features that Shelfari provides are our widget (includes a pop-up with the member's reviews, ratings), reading timeline, group discussions, ask other users (or the entire community) for book recommendations, tagging, and the ability to virtually represent your bookshelf for sharing with friends or for organizing.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or suggestions on how we can improve our site.

Kind regards,

Amanda
"

My original blog post:
This is a review of Amazon.com funded Shelfari - a social networking site for book-lovers. There are many other sites for book lovers including:
1. iread - a facebook app.
2. connectviabooks
3. librarything
4. Good Reads

But these Shelfari guys are always in the news and are written up by every blogger. Perhaps it has something to do with their PR guy ? Just speculating :)

Anyway, onto the review ...

To begin with, the site has excellent home page design with a very clean opening layout shown below:



The sign-up process is a little annoying since there are 2 unnecessary steps to help you find your friends on Shelfari and to intimate your friends about Shelfari ...

You then enter a book that you like and Shelfari brings up the book. You then add the book to your "Shelf" and find other people who are reading, have read or plan to read the same book.


Following are some improvements needed on the Shelfari site:

1. There is no search for authors.
2. There is no hyperlinking of authors names on the books.
3. The author's profile and details can be edited by anybody ... and thus gives scope for vandalism.

The site is still in the process of finding large scale adoption. The problem really is that it does not do anything more than that which is already possible within Amazon.com's ratings and reviews. In fact, Amazon.com is better in that there are book recommendations and ways to find people with similar interests. It beats me as to why Amazon.com made the investment in this site. There probably are a few folks who find it very useful.

A Review of Zipidee.com

This is a review of Zipidee.com. The site is built on Microsoft technology. It has an Alexa rank of 75,000+. The site is venture-financed and says that it is the leading marketplace for digital goods. There is a wide selection of obscure videos and a smaller selection of ebooks and audio-books. The purchase process was smooth and I was able to rent an Aikido video for 10 days for just $1.99. For purchasing one can either pay via PayPal or directly by credit card. Once you rent it, you view it online itself (I did not try the Zipidee player which is an option to view videos offline.)


Now let's review the actual act of publishing and selling content on their site. There is a limit of 200MB on content that you upload via HTTP. If your content is greater than 200MB, you can use their FTP upload tool shown below.


Once you upload your content you can add the meta-data for your book, video or audio including description, rating, tags, thumbnail image and preview time.





You then set the sales price for your particular revenue model. Revenue models available include:

1. Online rental
2. Download (which is optional)

If you choose the download option, you can opt for the DRM option. This means that people can view the content only inside the Zipidee player (this is why people hate DRM :))

Zipidee takes 20% of the sales price as the processing fee with an additional 5% going towards the payment processor. Overall, the creator or copyright owner gets to make about 70% of the sales price of the product.

A nice effort overall by Zipidee.

The Environmental Impact of EBooks

Americans buy more than 3 billion books a year, using up 20 million trees. And according to an article by the Bosacks Reporter, we actually throw away seven magazines for every 10 that we print. That equates to a billion dollars a year in the dumping grounds of America. Erika Engelhaupt has written an excellent article that discusses the environmental impact of e-books. According to her, if you substituted 20 physical books and 2 newspapers daily with a electronic version of the same, you would save almost one tree. It was also surprising to learn that Americans consume an average 1500 lb of paper annually!

With regard to paper textbooks, she quotes a leading edge researcher - Greg Kozak - who found that "over its life cycle, a paper textbook created 4 times the greenhouse gas emissions of an e-book reader and several times more ozone-depleting substances and chemicals associated with acid rain. Conventional books also required more than 3 times more raw materials and 78 times more water consumption than e-books."

It will be interesting to see if e-books make a significant impact on improving the environment over the next few years ...

Quick Facts and Figures About Book Publishing Industry

I came across an interesting site called Eco-Libris. About 20 Million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone and the percentage of recycled paper currently used by U.S. book publishers in the production of books is between 5% and 10%. Eco-Libris helps readers of books to voluntarily balance out (and even exceed) their consumption of trees by planting compensatory trees in developing countries in association with planting partners (it costs about $10 to plant 10 trees.)

What caught my eye was a consolidated set of book industry statistics. While the statistics are rather dated, they are still a useful guide to the publishing industry:

• Number of new titles published annually in the U.S.: 172,000 (2005 figures)
• Number of books produced annually in the U.S.: 4.15 billion (2006 figures)
• Number of books sold annually in the U.S.: 3.09 billion (2006 figures)
• 55 percent of fiction is bought by women, 45 percent by men
• Annual revenues of U.S. book publishers: $26.8 billion (2004 figures)
• Annual revenues of European book publishers: Euro 22.3 billion (2004 figures)
• Number of book publishers in the U.S.: more than 80,000