First, the good news…

Like Hulu, Next Issue Media is owned by several big media companies, and at launch they’ve made nearly three dozen titles available. The service’s pricing plans are simple: $10 a month for access to 27 monthly titles, or $15 a month for those plus 5 more weekly titles. Paying $120 to $180 a year for virtual magazine subscriptions isn’t a trivial matter, but the more magazines you like to read regularly, the better the deal gets; you’d pay about the same for individual print subscriptions to just the five weekly titles.

And now for the bad news!

Before you get too excited, there are of course some big problems, both in usability and consumer rights.

1. If you own an iPad, Kindle Fire, or Nook, you can’t subscribe. The Next Issue app is only available for Android tablets running Honeycomb or higher, although an iOS version is supposedly in the works.
2. It’s only being offered to U.S. customers.
3. The Terms of Service you’re forced to accept wholesale are abusive. This is the case with pretty much every sort of consumer offering these days, but that doesn’t make it ethical or fair. In Next Media’s case, the two biggest problems are:
   • Mandatory binding arbitration, meaning you waive your rights to sue even if the company does something egregious with the service or with your personal information.
   • Lifetime download limits for every issue: no more than 5 devices, and no more than 10 times total.
4. In addition, I can’t find any information about how long you can keep old issues, or whether you have access to them if you end the plan. (The only information I found on this topic said that Next Media reserves the right to remove any content at any time without warning.) This more or less aligns with the Netflix approach — consumers don’t expect to be able to save permanent copies of the movies they stream on Netflix — but it’s not traditionally how magazine subscriptions have worked, so make sure you understand this and you’re okay with it before signing up.
5. As you might expect from a magazine company, the privacy policy notes that they’ll use your personal information and activity with the service for advertising purposes. You can request that they remove your information from their system by contacting them at the email address in their Privacy Policy.

Next Media’s executives told All Things D that everything about this venture is an experiment at this point, so everything from the plan pricing to the platform availability may change by the time I publish this post. (However, based on current U.S. business practices, I have no reason to believe the fine print will get any better.) Still, as a former magazine addict who has been consistently disappointed by the digital magazine space, I think this is exciting news.

The real test, however, will be whether or not Next Media can reach all those iPad owners. If Apple okays the Next Media app later this year, it could prove to be a far better alternative to magazines than either Apple’s own Newsstand or the fairly expensive Zinio service.

The Potter brand is so powerful that Rowling’s team was able to push through some important changes in how the books will be sold. These changes are very friendly to both consumers and public libraries, so I hope Pottermore succeeds and becomes the model for best practices in ebook retailing.

The first big change is where the ebooks will be sold. You can only buy them through Pottermore, so for example if you go to Amazon and search for them, you’ll be redirected back to Pottermore. Futurebook, which is where I got most of this news, notes that Apple refused Pottermore’s terms, so you won’t see Harry Potter on the Apple iBooks Store. (Fortunately iBooks syncs unlocked EPUB files–see below–so your bookmarks and notes will still work if you read a Pottermore edition in iBooks.)

The second big change–and the one that I hope publishers everywhere seriously consider–is how DRM will work. Instead of locking consumers down with single-platform editions that can’t be transferred to another platform in the future (e.g. from Nook to iBooks), Pottermore will provide an unlocked EPUB file as well as let you directly push the book to your specific device, whether it’s a Kindle or a Nook or a Sony Reader. More important, at least when it comes to future-proofing your purchases, Pottermore will only use social DRM, meaning it will add a unique identifier to each copy so that it can track it back to the original buyer should it show up on a pirate sight. Futurebook says if you push the file to your Kindle or Nook, then Amazon or B&N will add their own encryption DRM to the file, which is something I haven’t tested yet but it doesn’t sound reasonable. (To my knowledge, Amazon doesn’t force DRM on any ebooks it sells; publishers have to specifically add it. In general, Amazon relies on its proprietary AZW format to keep consumers locked in.)

In plain language, this means you can read your Harry Potter ebooks on a wide range of devices without having to worry about DRM encryption errors.

If you’ve been following the awfulness that is the library ebook saga–where most of the major publishers have either implemented restrictive lending limits or stopped selling libraries ebook editions altogether–there’s some good news here, too. Pottermore is offering ebook editions to libraries under a five-year unlimited lending license.

The reason Pottermore can switch to social DRM and set fairer terms for public libraries is simple: because it’s selling the files directly, it can establish policies that are better for consumers while still great for the author/publisher. If Pottermore had to sell directly through retailers like Amazon or Apple, it would be forced to submit to those companies’ self-serving policies, many of which (like platform lock-in and DRM encryption) aren’t good for publishers or consumers.

To me, that’s the most important aspect to this story: that Pottermore is testing the viability of a real alternative to the current sales model. It’s too bad that the big publishers (excepting Random House) foolishly pushed an agency model–and exposed themselves to charges of collusion in the process–instead of trying something more innovative like this. Maybe, if Pottermore’s strategy proves successful, it will give all publishers hard evidence that there are better ways to approach ebookselling.

Via INFOdocket

(Harry Potter Cutout: Tess Milligan)

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.

[Via The Traveler's Steampunk Blog]

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