On Futurebook.net, the digital blog launched by UK magazine Bookseller, Nick Harkaway just published two insightful pieces on digital publishing. Maybe I think they’re insightful because they speak to my own prejudices, but I do think he makes clear, logical arguments that address some of the more self-defeating behavior of publishers in these unsettled times.

What makes Harkaway’s ideas even more valuable, in my opinion, is that they’re not limited in scope to just the big publishers. Anyone who publishes, including self-starting indies and small niche presses, can and should take note.

Here’s what he suggests, although the paraphrased explanations that follow should be blamed on me:

1. Make your content available. Don’t window the digital release in a misguided attempt to boost hardcover sales; you’re wasting opportunities to sell to new consumers who wouldn’t or can’t buy the hardback.
2. Price wisely and think in tiers. Don’t charge a premium price for a substandard (i.e., typo-ridden or image-lacking) digital version. At the same time, add value incrementally to digital versions so that you can segment them into different price points. First, this will help you give the consumer the option to spend as much as he’s willing to spend (always a good thing for profits). Second, this will give you a way to “window” digital content in a useful way, by letting you release differently priced versions of digital content to correlate with the traditional release schedule.
3. Don’t cheat customers. Harkaway doesn’t quite use such strong language–he says customers don’t want to pay twice for the same content. But ultimately it comes down to feeling cheated as a consumer: if you paid for something, you don’t want to have to buy it again, and then again, each time you want to consume it on a different platform. Here’s an idea: if you really do want to charge a consumer on a per-platform basis, then you must drop the price to a “rental” level as an acknowledgement of how limited the access is that you’re selling.
4. Skip DRM. It adds cost to your production budget. It creates potential situations where your customer will feel cheated. It’s arguably ineffective. The people telling you that you need it are frequently the ones who are selling it. Most of the arguments for it are based on emotion, not business intelligence. If it’s too late for you–because there are higher-ups or board members who insist on it and are too slow/scared/suspicious to try something new, then at least start pushing for an exit strategy.

“DRM is not all that” [Futurebook]
“The Rules Of Harkaway Club: everything I think I know about ebooks, but probably don’t” [Futurebook]
www.nickharkaway.com

I like infoporn. I love to pore over traffic charts for websites, or look at survey numbers from opinion polls, or sit back and marvel at a really good graph, which is infoporn’s centerfold. One area where the data-crunching promise of personal computing has delivered is in capturing, assembling, and displaying this kind of labor-intensive data for easy access by the layperson.

It’s become ubiquitous, too: think about how every social network service presents some sort of low-level and instant feedback on itself, from Twitter followers to Facebook friends, Diggs to Google Reader Likes (also now in use on Google Buzz). Older Internet communication, like email or instant messaging, tended to focus on two-person relationships and relied on self-evident participation measurements–you could ask the other person if she received your email, or see for yourself whether she responded in your IM chat. As soon as more than two people are involved in communication, however, the measurement burden begins to grow, and the PC is there to start measuring and reporting on that relationship.

The promise of analytics–data presented in a way that helps you make more money, to put it crudely–is a component of this new publishing world that has the potential to dramatically empower authors and help them make money. On the other hand, like every other aspect of new publishing it’s also potentially disruptive, or at the very least distracting. Read the rest of this entry »

This whole issue of how ebooks are priced, what they’re worth to consumers, and how to make money off of them is actually pretty complicated. It’s also fascinating, at least to someone like me; for the first 18 months after I bought a Kindle I demanded that no publisher ever go above the $10 mark. (I’ve since softened my stance somewhat for new releases, although personally I don’t buy ebooks over $10 regardless.)

Two of the best explanations I’ve found come from published writers who have an obvious interest in what Amazon and publishers end up doing:

Read “Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight” by Charles Stross

Read “Why my books are no longer for sale via Amazon” by Tobias Buckell

Bonus! Read “Kindle Numbers: Traditional Publishing Vs. Self Publishing” by Joe Konrath for an alternate take on earning money from ebooks if you’re a midlist writer.

Set aside 10-15 minutes and read these two (or three) guys for some great insights, for example on Amazon’s reasons for holding to the $10 price point (hint: it’s not really for our benefit), on how much it costs to publish a high quality ebook, and on how to price more efficiently to take advantage of what different customers are actually willing to pay (hardcore fans are usually willing to give more support to their favorite authors).

This post originally appeared on Kindlerama.

(Photo: kretyen)

Blue Leaf Book Scanning Service (www.blueleaf-book-scanning.com) is a small Connecticut company that offers a mail-in scanning service for about 10.5 cents a page. Earlier this month, David Rothman at Teleread.org wondered whether it could serve as a viable solution for those with out of print or otherwise non-digital books, so I decided to try it out and document the experience.

To test it, I shipped an out-of-print book from my library and paid for only the most basic, nondestructive scanning service. (You can drop the per page cost to 8 cents if you don’t ask for the book back.) Davide Bianchini, the co-founder of Blue Leaf, says that they use a custom built overhead photo-based scanner, as well as an industrial page-fed scanner for the cheaper, book-gets-destroyed option.

After ordering it and paying via PayPal, I bought a padded envelope and shipped the book via media mail. Eight days later I received an email with a link where I could download the files, and two days after that the physical copy of the book was back in my possession via USPS Priority Mail.

As for cost, I spent just under $29, including shipping, for one 288-page hardcover. That should make it clear that the service isn’t being positioned as an alternative to buying e-books from publishers; it seems more suitable to the rare or out of print titles in your library (or for authors with out of print books they’d like to sell digitally–more on that below).

You should also know that Blue Leaf raised its prices since Teleread’s first mention. The base fee is now $17.95, and the per page fee is 5 cents. If I repeated this experiment today, the total cost would be $33.91.

The company offers a menu of additional-fee services: if you want a text-to-speech file, a Kindle-ready file, or a backup on disc, you can buy it separately. To provide these additional services, the company maintains backups of the original scans for at least six months. If you’re not keen on the company keeping a backup copy, you might want to check first; Bianchini says that they “usually comply” with archival opt-out requests.

As far as quality goes, you can see for yourself. Below are portions of two pages from the PDF file Blue Leaf sent to me. The book I sent included photos and maps, so I’ve included one of those pages as well. (Although this is in greyscale, color scanning is offered).

Click the images to view full-size.

And here are the results of the OCR process.

You can see that mixed language texts are problematic for Blue Leaf’s OCR software. Bianchini says the software can recognize 186 different languages, but it has problems if you combine them. The usual suspects cause trouble–things like diphthongs and accented vowels. Bianchini says that they’re looking into improvements to the OCR engine, but for now you can expect good results with single-language texts, and not so good results with the random foreign word or character.

Skewing remains a problem, although this certainly isn’t unique to Blue Leaf. I found one page within the file that was unreadable because it was so distorted, so I contacted customer service and asked them to investigate. I was concerned that I’d have to send the book back for re-scanning, but they were able to correct the problematic page using their archival copy and return a corrected file in less than 24 hours.

Before going this route you should be aware of two other things:

And finally, if you’re an author with out of print books that you want to convert into a print on demand template, Blue Leaf offers a “publisher ready” service for $16. That gets you a formatted and cleaned up PDF file with standardized margins, embedded fonts, and other adjustments required by POD services like Lulu.com. However, it won’t correct “processing artifacts such as page skew,” notes Bianchini. I didn’t test the service.

Blue Leaf Book Scanning

This review first appeared on Teleread.org.

Everyone who writes or publishes wants to know how to use Twitter as a promotional tool to drive sales, and to that end the British book reading website Lovereading–sort of the ugly UK cousin to Goodreads, only with a smaller membership and more directly tied to big publishing houses–just completed a survey of members to ask them about Twitter. The results weren’t favorable to Twitter as an effective recommendation source or promotional tool, with The Bookseller going so far as to write, “The book-buying public may be largely immune to suggestions from Twitter, Facebook and other sites.”

Uh oh.

But wait! Before you dismiss Twitter as an also-ran in marketing, check out who Lovereading surveyed compared to who uses Twitter the most. As with all online communities, the only way to successfully connect is to figure out what kind of person participates in Twitter, and how he uses the service.

Read the rest of this entry »