I sent it to them nearly three and half months ago, so I’m fairly certain they’re not going to respond at this point. To me, it’s a perfect example of how a local bookstore can fail at building a relationship with local customers who want to shop locally but prefer ebooks over print.

Here’s what I wrote:

I briefly stepped into McNally Jackson this past Saturday, and although it was too crowded for my tastes, before I left I glanced over a couple of tables at the front of the store. I found a trade paperback of science essays titled Future Science that I wanted.

But here’s where the problem comes in, and why I’m writing to you: I wanted it in ebook format, because if I bought books in print these days I’d essentially turn into a third Collier brother. But I couldn’t figure out a way to buy it in ebook format while in your store.

I looked up at the register to see if I could ask about this option there, but there was a line of about five customers waiting to buy printed books. That’s great news for you, but not so much for me since I already wanted badly to get out of there.

I thought about asking the woman at the Espresso Book Machine, but she seemed busy, and not at a register.

I looked around for some sort of signage or instruction about how to buy a Google Books digital edition from within the store, and I couldn’t find it (maybe I overlooked it?)

So here’s what I did. I left the store, and literally before I crossed Mulberry Street I’d used my phone to buy the Kindle edition from Amazon.

Now to be clear, I didn’t buy the Kindle version because of price, or because I hate bookstores, or because I’m naive about the financially precarious state of indie booksellers. I’m pro-McNally Jackson, just not to the point where I’d buy a format I don’t actually want or need just to help a business I don’t own.

I wanted to share some thoughts about this with you:

• I wanted to buy the book right then, while it was fresh on my mind, not later (for instance not from your website when I finally got home hours later).
• I’m not a Kindle fanatic. I know how to strip DRM and I can easily adapt most of my ebook purchases to suit my needs.
• I’m price conscious but, unless there was a price difference of 50% or more on the Google Books edition over the Kindle edition, I would have bought the Google Books edition as a show of support for your store. (It turns out, the price for both digital editions was the same.)
• It was the physical, face-to-face encounter with the trade paperback that prompted me to make the purchase, so I feel that you should have received that sale.

So I’m at a loss as to how I can help support you. I’m a frequent book buyer, and I want to support McNally Jackson, but there’s no real place for me as a customer in your store right now so far as I can tell.

I realize I’m probably still in the tiny minority of your current customers, and this isn’t meant to be a rant. But if you can figure out a way to let people like me browser [sic] the merchandise and then leave your physical store with a digital edition instead of print, you’d be my first and pretty much only bookstore in Manhattan from now on.

Here’s what I got in response:

And that’s why I don’t feel bad for buying my ebooks from online retailers that aren’t connected to this bookstore.

But then—even though Amazon’s promotion was aimed more at big box retailers—the crazy publishing industry types had to get involved.

If you want to see the collective mind of U.S. bookselling culture at its lockstep worse, first read Farhad Manjoo’s provocative article at Slate where he praises Amazon’s Kindle initiative and disparages local indie bookstores. Then take a deep breath and read the comments. No, wait, the comments are filled with stuff that’s too easy to dismiss as weird nonsensical ranting, like the commenter who claims authors don’t get royalties from Amazon sales. Go instead to the The New York Observer and follow some of the links in that summary.

For example, The Observer describes New York bookseller Dustin Kurtz’s response to the Slate article as a “play-by-play excoriation,” and it’s being praised and passed around the Internet by what I can only assume are people with rabies. Although it looks at first like a methodical takedown of Manjoo’s arguments—the kind of written fistfight I love to dive into—it’s actually just a string of increasingly emotional and sarcastic insults. A true counterargument would rationally dissect each of Manjoo’s statements and show how he’s wrong to dismiss the local bookstore model; Kurtz just goes for emotional outbursts, as if the average customer will be swayed by the party that displays the most contempt.

It’s fine to have an emotional tirade in private, where you invent new obscenities to heap upon Amazon and lay a series of elaborate curses upon Bezos’ family tree. But the rest of us don’t care about that. The only thing that I, by which I mean a Random Customer, want to know is why I should support a local bookseller even if it can never compete on price or selection. I want the bookseller advocate to show me facts that I’m too inexperienced or blinkered to see on my own.

Instead, we get stuff like this. Manjoo writes that bookstores used to have the advantage of letting customers sample books before buying them, but that this “advantage has slipped away. Amazon and Barnes & Noble let you sample the first chapter of every digital title they carry, and you can do so without leaving your couch.” Kurtz’s response:

This guy. Okay first, publishers do that as well, and Google. We would, too if competing with Amazon didn’t mean we couldn’t afford a better website. But more importantly, IS THAT THE STANDARD BY WHICH YOU WISH TO JUDGE A SUCCESSFUL IMPLEMENTATION SIR? Because do I have a chamber pot to sell you.

So if I’m reading Manjoo correctly, he’s saying that bookstores have lost a competitive edge—book sampling—now that the ebook infrastructure has matured. Manjoo explicitly points out that this isn’t just an Amazon feature. Kurtz responds that publishers and Google also offer this, which in fact supports Manjoo’s original statement. He then sidesteps the issue to complain that Amazon’s existence has prevented him from creating a good website. I can’t disprove that statement, although based on my experience building websites over the past decade it sounds foolish. I can, however, show Kurtz this sample page from a local indie bookseller [update: I think it's his own store, in fact] that uses a Google affiliate account to provide free digital previews. Yes, I just helped Kurtz counter one of Manajoo’s statements with actual evidence. You’re welcome, furious bookseller.

I don’t even understand the final part of Kurtz’s response in the quote above. I mean, I think Manjoo is saying that previewing a book is a good thing, and that any bookseller would want to offer it to customers. So yeah, I think it’s absolutely appropriate to include it in a comparison of what retailers offer to consumers. And…Kurtz doesn’t? What? At any rate, I don’t need a chamber pot, although I do think the term “night soil” is pretty awesome.

The whole piece is like that. Kurtz argues that bookstore employees are better at making recommendations to customers than a recommendation algorithm, and that a bookstore can order a book and have it ready for you to pick up in the same time it would take you to receive it from Amazon. The first statement doesn’t accurately describe the real world shopping experience, and the second one misses the point about what makes for a competitive advantage.

When it comes to recommendations, what booksellers aren’t willing to acknowledge is that Manjoo isn’t talking solely about Amazon when he notes the competitive advantages bookstores have lost in recent years. Manjoo’s point is that when you buy a book online, you have access to a vast amount of data that a physical bookstore can’t provide on its own. If I pick up a new paperback by a well-known thriller author in a bookstore, I have, at best, less than a handful of data points to help me decide whether to buy it: the back-of-book summary and any promotional blurbs, a quick skimming of the opening pages, a personal thumbs up or down from the employee, and in rare cases the feedback of another customer. If I look at the same book online—and not only when I’m shopping on Amazon, but at any time when I’m near a computer and remember the book—I can visit Goodreads, look at Amazon and B&N customer reviews, grab an offline sample to read later when I’m ready, search for author interviews and professional reviews. And it’s not just that I have more points of data, but that more of them are impartial. On top of all that, the Internet lets me comparison shop for my preferred price/format combo.

As for Kurtz’s claim that a bookseller can order a book for you in the same time you’d get it from Amazon, assuming that’s a true statement (I don’t know of any evidence one way or the other), it doesn’t address other competitive disadvantages for a local retailer like pricing or the limited recommendation tools I just described. In fact, it actually highlights those disadvantages, which works in the online retailer’s favor.

Kurtz is just one bookseller. He was having a fit, and I sympathize with that. But wait, here’s writer and editor Judy Berman at Flavorwire: she not only mocks Manjoo for rationally preferring to shop at the retailer with the best prices and recommendation tools, but she also dismisses book consumers who share their thoughts online as stereotypical basement nerds:

I find it sad, actually, that Manjoo — a generally sharp and smart technology writer — finds clicking around on Amazon to be more fun than browsing the shelves of a real-life bookstore where (gasp!) one might actually interact with other book lovers. It also seems specious to argue that Amazon customer reviews are more useful than the advice of an independent bookstore employee or owner, who presumably has more knowledge of and enthusiasm for literature than your average unknown dude typing angrily in his parents’ basement.

Then there are the absurd exchanges like this one on Twitter (you can see a screen capture here), where a Penguin executive insists that self-publishing and the current “singles” trend in e-publishing existed well before Amazon, but refuses to acknowledge the massive transformation the Amazon Kindle has forced upon the marketplace despite the continuing resistance of traditional publishers like Penguin—a transformation that has so far benefitted every sector of the industry but one: physical bookstores.

The real issue here is that there’s a false technological divide, one booksellers (and their traditionalist fans as well as many publishers) have created to their own collective detriment. They demand to know of you, the consumer: Do you support humans or robot overlords? Do you support small business or faceless corporations? (But please ignore those corporate behemoths who provide our merchandise—we need you to hate only this specific evil corporation.) Berman even pulls out the old political us vs. them values deceit, writing that “We would also prefer to see our cash go to small business owners (and their employees) whose values are more in line with our own.” Quick, someone bring the two major political parties into this dust up, because I think we just went there.

STOP, LOCAL BOOKSELLER ENTHUSIASTS. JUST STOP. Reading your outbursts reminds me of when a family member of mine was diagnosed with diabetes, yet refused to acknowledge it or change her diet. Look, there actually are things local bookstores can claim as authentic competitive advantages against online retailers like Amazon:

• You can lease an Espresso Machine and offer true instant gratification to your customers. At the same time, start pushing publishers to make more new releases available on the Espresso platform, and push Xerox and On Demand Books to continue improving the quality of the final Espresso product. Consider ways to use the machine to provide local self-publishing services and classes. Unless you’re a publishing elitist, the idea of helping regular people read and write and exchange one-off, custom books and journals should be bookseller nirvana to you.
   
• You can keep developing the concept of the local bookstore as the only place to meet authors. Figure out unique, site-specific variations on the old-fashioned book signing, like how Housing Works Used Book Café in NYC had a live band join Jennifer Egan at a reading earlier this year. Find ways to increase the personalization of the traditional book reading. Perhaps you could collect questions from local customers ahead of an author’s visit, and offer those whose questions are answered at the event some special perk, like maybe a smaller “private” Q&A with the author before or after the event.
   
• You can send the marketing of local authors into overdrive, and market your store as an integral component of the very fabric of your local culture. You want customers who shop with you to feel a visceral sense of pride and connection to local history when they step through your doors—it’s a value proposition no online retailer can offer.
   
• You can find better ways to sell ebooks. Figure out how to intercept price-conscious customers before they leave the store, not so you can guilt-trip them into buying from you but so you can make them special offers, or you can teach them how to buy ebooks from your website so that you still make a little revenue.
   
• Finally you can learn to respond to market threats positively, at least around ebook customers, so that they instinctively want to be on your side. When I wrote a thoughtful, knowledgable email to the owner of a local bookstore in NYC earlier this year explaining how their current ebook strategy was losing them customers (you can read it here), I received no reply. Zilch. Crickets. By comparison, do you know how many indie software developers have personally responded to my random bits of feedback over the past five years? All of them. Seriously. Even the Symbian game developer in Russia, whose English was not so good (although a lot better than my Russian). Indie developers know that every customer matters, and that the next useful insight could come from anywhere. If they resented my input, they didn’t show it to me.

Why more local booksellers aren’t aggressively pursuing these strategies, or ones similar to or better than them, instead of throwing fits online about an article that’s at least 65% accurate about the shrinking value prop of the local bookstore, is beyond me. I guess ultimately I just like books more than they do.

(Photo: go ask alice…)

That’s the good news. The bad news is that those old print-biased territorial restrictions have made the site somewhat useless for anyone in the U.S. or Canada. Gollancz, the publisher behind SF Gateway, notes that only about one third of their titles will be available for customers in those two countries. Yes, once again publishers, agents and authors have managed to prevent sales of books to customers and simultaneously encourage piracy; it is truly a remarkable industry.

However, I noticed a weird thing this morning on a title I randomly selected. Here are the SF Gateway and Amazon pages for “The Swords of Zinjaban” from L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Cook de Camp:

• SF Gateway
• Amazon

I’m in the U.S., and SF Gateway tells me it can’t sell me this ebook, but what appears to be the same edition is available to me on Amazon. In other words, if you find something on SF Gateway you want and it’s not listed as available where you live, try the standard online retailers just in case. This could just be a temporary error with Amazon’s listing, but it’s worth a shot before you hit up the file sharing websites.

I’m sure it’s more complicated than I understand, but right now it sounds a lot like the type of page and asset caching that Opera uses (used?) for its mobile browser, or that some cable companies use to reduce download times for customers.

Since Amazon Silk essentially routes all of your web browsing on the Fire through Amazon’s servers, it also raises a significant privacy question, but so far today I haven’t seen many mainstream media types address that. After all the dorky excitement over consumer technology dies down, I imagine we’ll start seeing headlines like “Do you trust Amazon with your web browsing?” and “Amazon Silk lets Bezos watch your every move”.

Update: The Amazon Silk Terms and Conditions agreement mentions that you might have the option to turn off the Amazon server caching and browse the web as you normally would, but since the word “generally” pops up several times in that section, I don’t think Amazon is making any legally enforceable guarantee to absolute privacy. (And that’s if you can turn off the Silk functionality on the Kindle Fire at all—there’s some confusing wording in the Terms that suggests the Silk browser may be on a “computer” instead of the Fire tablet when this feature is offered.)

Unfortunately, even the best fanfic content usually remains underground, shared among fanfic communities but never distributed at the mainstream level, both for copyright reasons and because plenty of authors and publishers hate the idea of strangers swooping in on their creations.

UK sci-fi/fantasy publisher Angry Robot Books is taking a different approach: this fall it will launch WorldBuilderOnline, where anyone can submit pretty much any sort of Creative Commons-licensed original content based on specific works published by Angry Robot. The best submissions will be repackaged in anthologies and published professionally, “with most of the proceeds going to the creators” according to Angry Robot’s blog announcement.

It’s not just about writing, either. Publishing Director Marc Gascoigne says in the comments to that post that they’ll accept “pretty much anything germane to the world – fiction, articles, maps, gazeteers, encyclopedia entries, faux advertising, music, poetry, and of course artwork and designs of all kinds.”

The first title to be opened up to fans will be the forthcoming “Empire State” by Adam Christopher, which the publisher describes as a prohibition-superhero-noir novel set in an alternate New York City. (You can read an excerpt at Tor.com, and ask Amazon to email you when it becomes available.)

The WorldBuilder site will be managed by Mur Lafferty, a writer and editor who is probably best known for her podcasts over the past seven years (including an audio anthology of short fiction in 2006 featuring stories read by the authors). She’s also got her own superhero novel called “Playing For Keeps”, so she’s especially suited for the launch title of WorldBuilder.

There are other communities where fans are being enlisted to help world build, like

• Baen’s Grantville Gazette based on the works of Eric Flint;
• The Mongoliad, a serialized epic where the original fiction is being provided in part by Greg Bear and Neal Stephenson;
• and Runes of Gallidon, which works a lot like WorldBuilder but sprang into existence without a seminal work.

On the other end of the world building spectrum is J.K. Rowling’s Pottermore, which is intended to provide an immersive online world for fans of the Harry Potter series, but which doesn’t welcome user-generated content.

But Angry Robot’s WorldBuilder concept stands out to me as something fresh for the way it plans to formalize the best fanfic, by publishing it traditionally alongside the original work and then compensating the fans who created it. This in turn may help market the official book, and it could help build an audience for future titles in the series. We won’t know until sometime next year, but maybe Angry Robot has figured out a path forward where fans, authors and publishers can all profit by working together.

Update: If you have specific questions about how WorldBuilder will work, you can ask “Empire State” author Adam Christopher over at his official blog.

I especially like Hodgman’s second suggestion:

JON: So what — what is the alternative to this?

HODGMAN: Well, instead of hosting readings, why not host exciting live writings? Bring the author in, tie him to a desk, and make him write a novel to order. Customers can shout out their own ideas while pelting the writer with $4.00 scones. It’ll be fun! George R. R. Martin not finishing that new “Game of Thrones” book fast enough for you? Well maybe some hot chai latte down his neck will speed him up.

It reminds me of this bit from Monty Python about Thomas Hardy writing for a live audience:

But it also reminds me of Misery, which somehow is just not as funny:

If you don’t want to sit through Comedy Central’s ads or can’t stream it in your country, Jon Cog at beyond-black-friday.com has transcribed the Hodgman segment for your reading pleasure. I think he left out a joke about how Internet shoppers masturbate, but otherwise it’s pretty complete.

In case you need a recap of what this is all about, the Google Books Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) was a proposed agreement arranged by some publishers, authors, and author groups as a way to create a compensation and licensing system for Google Book Search, which uses the full text of copyrighted books to provide snippets in search results. Some authors and publishers claim that what Google is doing with Book Search amounts to widespread copyright infringement instead of fair use. For those authors and publishers who had sued Google, the proposed settlement would have protected them from the risk of losing on fair use grounds if the suit proceeded. More controversially, it would have also implemented an opt-out system (instead of opt-in) for authors, and an arbitration system that favored Google and publishers at the expense of authors’ rights. From a competition perspective, it would have also shielded Google from more lawsuits, while leaving competitors unprotected.

U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin rejected the ASA this past March, noting among other things that it went too far in giving Google special privileges (especially regarding orphaned works), and that the opt-out system was unfair to authors. While that pretty much left it dead in its current state, it also left the door open for Google and the plaintiffs to amend the agreement and try again.

But with yesterday’s rejection of a settlement in Freelance, it looks like there’s no possible way for the ASA to proceed.

Freelance is a class action case from the 90s (actually Tasini v. New York Times), and it involves freelance writers who claimed newspapers didn’t have permission to post their work online without compensation. Its relevance to the ASA is that in both lawsuits, the plaintiffs tried to create a single class out of all authors who might be affected by the issue, and yesterday’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals said that was more or less impossible:

In a 2-1 ruling, the second circuit yesterday held that the district court which approved a settlement between freelance writers and publishers in the class action case known shorthand as Freelance “abused its discretion in certifying the class and approving the Settlement, because the named plaintiffs failed to adequately represent the interests of all class members.”

In really plain language, essentially the judges who rejected Freelance‘s settlement yesterday acknowledged that getting all authors to agree to the same thing is like herding cats, and therefore you can’t put all authors in a single class and claim to represent their collective best interests. There may indeed be no such thing as “collective best interests” when it comes to authors.

So what happens next for Google Book Search? The plaintiffs could move forward with the suit, but it’s a considerable gamble because if they lose, then they’ll have inadvertently expanded the definition of fair use. Personally I think that’s great for society, but it’s not necessarily so great for publishers’ business models, hence their outrage at Google.

Another possible byproduct of the death of the ASA is that Google’s competitors can move forward with their own digitization projects. They’ll be assuming the same risk of lawsuits over copyright that Google is now facing, but at least they now know that Google isn’t about to carve out a special protected arrangement that will give it an unbeatable competitive edge.

(Photo: Aviruthia)