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Monthly Archives: September 2011

  •    Ryan Block from gdgt reports that the new Kindle Fire (Amazon’s new tablet) is based on the RIM Playbook:
    Although Amazon did refresh the ID of their PlayBook derivative, I’m told that this first tablet of theirs is “supposed to be pretty poor” and is a “stopgap” in order to get a tablet out the door for the 2011 holiday season — which doesn’t exactly leave the best taste in my mouth. But it’s also not the most uncommon story, either: when you’re breaking into a new market, sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to get in the game. You may remember how crappy the original Kindle was compared to later models!
    It’ll be sad if this were true — I’m really hoping that the Fire would pan out – I’ve been doing a heck load of reading on my iPad recently, and a competent, reader-focused competitor can only be a good thing. #
  •    The New York Times reports that “In E-Books, Publishing Houses Have a Rival in News Sites”.
    Swiftly and at little cost, newspapers, magazines and sites like The Huffington Post are hunting for revenue by publishing their own version of e-books, either using brand-new content or repurposing material that they may have given away free in the past.
    The easier it becomes to publish ebooks, the more publishers we will see. #
  •    Obituary for Michael S. Hart – Project Gutenberg Founder. A giant died today. #
  •    Alan Cooper on independent bookstores in the age of Amazon:
    Rather than seeing Amazon’s strength as competitive, brick-and-mortar stores should see it as liberating: they no longer have to maintain such a large, expensive inventory of books or maintain distributor relationships to order requested books.
    Instead, the local store can offer something unique and desirable: a physical place for readers to go where they are supported and welcome, and where the books on view are personally selected, intimately displayed, and available for perusal. No internet company can provide that.
    It’s a beautiful idea — though I suspect there would be some overlap with the library model (which isn’t doing so well). Worth a read for the analysis on historic trends that’s brought us here. #

Be the Future?

September 4, 2011 – 1:17 am

Be the Monkey: Ebooks and Self-Publishing, a Conversation Between Authors Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath, by Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath. Reviewed by John Patrick Tormey.

No question: there’s a revolution going on here.—Barry Eisler

Best-selling spy novelist Barry Eisler and successful thriller novelist and self-publishing advocate Joe Konrath’s ebook Be the Monkey is a sprawling discussion as recorded on GoogleDocs; a loud cheer for what they call “indie-publishing”, and an autopsy of the publishing industry as it transitions from a paper-based model to one dominated by digital texts.

Indie-publishing is an umbrella title for everything from self-publishing to new publishing companies working outside the model established by the “Big 6/Legacy” institutions that have dominated the industry for decades, and how that may be coming to an end.

In the part one, the authors pivot off Eisler’s announcement that he passed on a half-a-million dollar advance from a big name publisher in favor of self publishing, claiming he made the decision for monetary as well as creative reasons, and was inspired in part by Konrath’s move away the world of legacy publishing and his proselytizing to other writers to make the same choice.

Konrath and Eisler argue that the paper book is now on the road to becoming a “niche market,” and writers and readers will be better off in the new world of the ebook. It is a convincing theory, one reinforced by Amazon’s announcement that in 2010 the company sold more books for the Kindle ereader than paper copies, along with the popularity of the Kindle, the Nook and the iPad, a point Eisler highlights early on. This means that writers will make more money while readers will pay less and enjoy access to a wider range of content. The numbers used to support the claim are pretty convincing:

Joe: the 25% royalty on ebooks [legacy publishers] offer is actually 14.9% after everyone gets their cut. 14.9% on a price the publisher sets.

Barry: a 25% royalty on the net revenue produced by an ebook equals 17.5% of the retail price after Amazon takes its 30% cut, and 14.9% after the agents takes 15% of the 17.5%.

Think of it this way: by publishing a novel or story collection as an ebook on Smashwords or B&N or Amazon, the author retains 70% of the profit from the sales of his or her work. That is a margin too wide to ignore, or as Konrath puts it, “in the long run a 70% royalty wins.”

The benefits of circumventing the legacy publishers don’t stop there. From the shortened time between when a book is finished to when it reaches the market, to the unprecedented level of creative control, plus a healthy—and growing—list of the indie-published authors enjoying healthy sales, Be the Monkey does, at times, make a very convincing case for going it alone.

Or as alone as possible. In some of the most informative and forward-thinking sections of the discussion, Konrath and Eisler muse on what the digital revolution in book-making will mean for the industry at large, beyond the realm of writers and readers.  They refuse to glorify or gloss over the substantial workload an author is shouldering by avoiding legacy route. The self-published author assumes the role of writer, editor, and copyeditor. They become responsible for cover art, front and back cover copy, the writer’s biography, formatting text, marketing and promotionthe list goes on.  Konrath believes this space may be filled by what he calls “E-stributorsa combination of publisher and manager” that will take over these tasks for a one-time fee or a percentage of the book’s profits, leaving the author to concentrate on what is his most important job: writing.

When I used the word “sprawling” to describe Be the Monkey, understand that what Eisler and Konrath have written isn’t an actual book; it is a series of conversations recorded over a long stretch of time that covered a wide swath of subjects.

Read more (estimated 4:29 mins reading time)

By Eli James | Posted in Guest Bloggers, Publishing, Reviews | Comments (2)
  •    Lev Grossman argues that we are losing non-linearity in the shift to ebooks:
    We usually associate digital technology with nonlinearity, the forking paths that Web surfers beat through the Internet’s underbrush as they click from link to link. But e-books and nonlinearity don’t turn out to be very compatible. Trying to jump from place to place in a long document like a novel is painfully awkward on an e-reader, like trying to play the piano with numb fingers. You either creep through the book incrementally, page by page, or leap wildly from point to point and search term to search term. It’s no wonder that the rise of e-reading has revived two words for classical-era reading technologies: scroll and tablet. That’s the kind of reading you do in an e-book.
    The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel.
    This is a very interesting, if odd, argument to make. I’ve always assumed that digital is as non-linear as they come. But Grossman may be wrong — he’s assuming that the methods for navigating an ebook will always be lousier than that of navigating a codex. That may yet change. #