Too many restrictions

About a week ago, a study about ebook buying and reading habits reported that teens find current ebook platforms too limited when it comes to social sharing:

The E-Book Market for 13- to 17-Year-Olds

• Teens lag behind all other age groups in e-book adoption. Sixty-six percent of 13- to 17-year olds say they prefer print books to e-books, 26 percent say they have no preference and only 8 percent prefer e-books.
• One reason for this resistance: Teens like using social technology to discuss and share things with their friends, and e-books at this point are not a social technology. An increasing number of teens surveyed says there are too many restrictions on using e-books: 14 percent said so in 2011, compared to 6 percent in 2010.

That’s been my overall takeaway, too, while test-driving these various social reading apps recently. There are just too many restrictions to make the experience enjoyable.

But “too many restrictions” is a pretty general complaint. What about some details? Okay, here are two fatal flaws I see in the social reading experience right now:

1. The ebook landscape is too fragmented.

From retailers to technology companies to publishers, every company involved in ebooks today is spending a massive amount of resources trying to simultaneously lock in customers, block competition, and thwart piracy. None of these goals serves the needs of the customer. In fact, progress in any of them makes it increasingly harder for an individual to use his ebooks freely.

2. DRM ruins everything.

I know, it’s always so easy to bash DRM, and how else will you prevent customers from making copies etc? But when it comes to social media, DRM truly is a lethal additive. Social sharing requires a frictionless environment to work–think Instagram or Pinterest–and DRM is almost pure friction.

Imagine the ghostland that Instagram would have become if you had to authorize and unlock each photo, then sideload it into the Instagram app before uploading.

See the restrictions in action

My favorite social reading app of the moment is Subtext, and yet unless those two issues are resolved soon, I fear Subtext is a non-starter, along with every other social reading attempt currently being tested or developed.

Why? Because right now, to use Subtext you have to:

1. Own an iPad.
2. Buy your ebooks from an exclusive subset of retailers such as Kobo and Google Books.

Let’s look at the fragmentation problem: You can’t use Subtext on your smartphone or on an Android tablet. You can’t use Kindle or iBooks or Nook or library ebooks with it. You can’t even review your notes and highlights on the web, for instance from a regular computer or laptop. And about that pesky DRM: If you do buy ebooks that work with Subtext, they won’t work on any Kindle devices or apps, and your notes won’t carry over to Kobo or Nook or Overdrive.

Why would a teenager go through so many hoops, and deal with such an unnecessarily hamstrung “solution” just to talk to her friends about a book? For that matter, why would an adult? Why would anyone? Life’s too short for that sort of nonsense.

I still think social reading apps point out an interesting future for, say, book clubs and classrooms, but until the industry kills DRM for good and stops trying to carve up exclusive little corporate fiefdoms, it’s going to be too much trouble to bother with.

(Photo: niallkennedy)

I’m not going to comment on the software, as I’m still downloading it as I type this entry. And other sites are doing a great job of covering today’s Apple press conference, so I’m not going to give Apple more free PR if I can help it. I mean, unless they want to pay me.

But I would like to point out one important catch. The fancy new textbook authoring software that Apple is giving away, iBooks Author, comes with a big restriction in its license agreement, and it’s that you can only sell your textbook in Apple’s iBooks store. (Click image for full-size screenshot of the license from the App Store page.) If you want to give your new textbook away for free, Apple has no problem with that. But if you want to sell it yourself or use some other retailer, no dice. You go through iBooks, meaning through Apple, and you give Apple a cut of the profits. Or you don’t use iBooks Author to make your fancy new digital textbook.

That, of course, is why iBooks Author is free. It’s sort of like if the company started giving away Pages, but required that all novels typed with the app belonged to the Apple Store.

So download it, play with it, learn from it. But take a good look at the terms before you invest any real labor in using it, because whatever you end up producing is going to be under Apple’s control for a long, long time.

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…)

As some of you are aware, every November is National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. If you’re a NaNoWriMo DoRk–and I can use that term because I’ve been one myself in the past–then you know that it’s incredibly difficult to squirt out the minimum required number of words every day for 30 days straight. (I never made it past day 3.) Most likely, the last thing you need at this delicate point in your quest is to be interrupted by a bunch of writing advice. What you need is caffeine, snack items, and another big helping of willful idiocy self-abuse.

But these titles probably won’t be free much longer, so try to sneak over to Amazon and grab them before they go away. Then, come December, you can peruse them at your leisure over a snifter of brandy while you relax by your hearth; I’m pretty sure no writer worth his salt would sit by a regular fireplace.

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.