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’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.

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.

[via eReaderIQ.com]

If you’re a supporter of indie publishing and want an easier way to find new authors to try out, you might want to take a look.

There’s a catch, however. In addition to pitches for unfinished work, Amazon will consider content that’s already published on the Kindle Store, but will reject anything that’s been published elsewhere. The content also can’t be available for free on the web. In other words, Amazon is attempting to build up a stable of exclusive content that its competitors can’t offer, which makes the Kindle Singles similar to what a magazine or book publisher does with new content.

Check out the Kindle Singles submission page for more info.
(Photo: Nemo’s great uncle)

The tl;dr summary: it’s only fast if it’s warmed up and working properly; there’s lots of older content and public domain stuff in the database but not enough frontlist material being offered; the search interface sucks; publishers (and Google) need to take metadata more seriously, because it’s crucial for discoverability in an increasingly crowded marketplace; and the machine’s profit centers are blank journals and small print runs for a local organization, plus self-publishing one-offs.

Be sure to grab a drink and some popcorn and read the comments after the article, too. There are a couple of inflexible traditionalists who loathe the Espresso and everything they think it stands for, and they pull out every bad comment thread/discussion forum trick in the book short of referencing Hitler.

“The Good, the Bad, and the Sexy: Our Espresso Book Machine Experience” [Scholarly Kitchen]
(Photo: sukisuki)

That, in a nutshell, is one of the reasons why Sidney Williams recently teamed up with Crossroad Press to republish his older novels as well as new works.

Williams published his first book in 1989 through Pinnacle, and in the years since he’s written horror, young adult novels, and graphic novels like “The Dusk Society”, as well as an audio adaptation of “War of the Worlds”.

But like many midlist and genre authors his titles have all but disappeared from brick and mortar bookstores, even though there’s still an audience for them.

While the early novels involve werewolves, vampires, and—in the case of “Gnelfs”—malevolent children’s cartoon characters, his latest book, “Midnight Eyes”, is a more realistic suspense thriller about a Louisiana serial killer, a dangerously ambitious newspaper editor, and a sheriff who must ask his estranged son (and former FBI agent) for help if he wants to prevent more deaths.

I asked Williams about his decision to publish through Crossroad Press, and his own experience with ebooks so far.

Booksprung: In your bio and in other interviews, you’ve said that you were a journalist for eleven years, and among other things you covered crime. Was that the genesis for “Midnight Eyes”?

How did you decide to publish digitally, and why did you choose to go with Crossroad Press?

What’s your writing process like, and has it changed much over the years?

What was the first ebook you read?

How was that experience?

Do you have any “guilty pleasures” that you find are easier to read in ebook form?

The cover art for your earlier paperbacks from Pinnacle are definitely of an era, but there’s no denying they were striking and attention-grabbing. What do you think about the role of cover art in digital publishing?

I like cover art a lot. I miss record albums because you had such beautiful big artistic opportunities for covers. I am kind of fanatical about my mp3s. I try to get all the cover art right on my iPod, or my iPhone now, and I still like covers, I like seeing them on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, wherever.

As far as covers with Crossroad, its been fun to have a second edition of my books out and kind of see new directions with them.

It’s challenging to get cover art. David Dodd did “Blood Hunter” and I thought he did a great job. I can remember being on the phone with—you know you didn’t get a lot of input on covers in the old days, and I remember being on the phone with my editor talking about what the cover should be. My original idea was of a moss-covered arm or claw reaching across the cover, but instead we got a swamp scene and a young girl looking through the trees on the original cover. I thought David Dodd did a great job of capturing the setting for the story without giving much away.

Neil Jackson did the new “Gnelfs” cover, and I really like that. The original “Gnelfs” cover is very 80s/90s, and I thought Jackson kind of captured the mood and the flavor of the story without giving too much away or spoiling letting your imagination form the monsters in that one.

You know when you download a book, it usually defaults to the first chapter, and I go in on my Kindle and reset it so that the cover is the first page until I start reading it, because I like even the monochromatic covers.

You have an unlimited budget and a crack team of designers and engineers. What does your ideal ebook device look like?

What are your thoughts on ebook lending and resell rights? How do you think those two issues should be handled in a way that’s fair to all parties involved?

Do you have any preference for print or digital books?

And finally, who are your favorite authors?

Sidney Williams is currently working on a literary thriller as well as a fantasy novel, and he’s re-editing his vampire novel “Night Brothers” for the forthcoming ebook edition.

“Midnight Eyes” is available on the Kindle Store and in multiple formats from Crossroad Press.

Visit Sidney Williams at sidisalive.com

(Photo: treyevan)

Here is the original article that started the current round-robin of blog posts, thus leaving me in a bad situation where if I ignore it, I’m not being topical, but if I write about it I’m being as ridiculous as the rest. Oh well. I’m usually even more ridiculous.

Out of all the me-too posts that sprang forth from the Great God Internet’s loins over the past few days, this is the best one in terms of supplemental original research:

And here are a few thoughts about the topic, noisily claptrapped out on my keyboard with annoyance this morning because I’d rather find something more fun to write about.

1. This isn’t a new phenomenon. As I mentioned above, people who actually follow this market have been making a similar point since at least last November. The reason this is a story in June 2011 is because a mainstream media (MSM) outlet took an interest in it. Today, for reasons both practical and irrational, there remains a large trust gap between blogs and MSM news organizations, with most information flowing unilaterally from MSM to blogs. For a topic to be taken as newsworthy by most MSM orgs, it must first be identified, (hopefully) researched, and publicly presented on a peer’s news platform—by Reuters, in this instance.

2. This is an undesirable state, but it doesn’t break the Kindle store. In my experience, and I bet I spend more time on the Kindle Store than the average consumer, I almost never come across these spambooks. I’d rather just say “never,” but it’s possible such titles have shown up in the past and I’ve forgotten, which is a clue that they clearly don’t register as an annoyance with me yet. (And I’m easily annoyed; look how irritated I get over a low-level news cycle about a legitimate topic.)

In my opinion, Amazon isn’t doing enough to combat the problem internally, but for now at least there are so many third party websites offering what are essentially free curating services (like what I do with the Amazon Bargains posts, for example) that spam titles aren’t just easy to avoid but actually difficult to find unless you’re diving deep into the Kindle Store. Publishers and authors also kick in a little curation mojo to promote real titles, and barring a massive pandemic of reader stupidity, no spambook will ever crack the two main Top 100 lists on the Kindle Store.

The spam problem is gross because it reminds one that many people are nasty little scavenger beasts who will happily jump onto a carcass and try to drag away a bit of viscera. But if you blog, you see this sort of scavenging all the time anyway from jerks who steal your content, so it’s not new.

And more relevant to this topic, it’s not like I’m having to delete spam from my Kindle each morning. It’s a real issue that in practical terms remains a non-issue.

3. No one has a good solution to prevent it yet. Casey Johnston at Ars Technica mentions one commonly offered solution: that Amazon should charge money to publish on the Kindle. I’m surprised Amazon hasn’t already implemented a fee, but it seems to me that as of right now, Amazon finds it more profitable to let vendors come on board for free and hand over a cut of every sale.

On thing worth noting, however, is that Apple has always required a nontrivial $100 fee before you can submit your apps, and it seemingly hand screens every app submission before allowing it on the App Store, and yet the App Store is lousy with crapware, including public domain content wrapped in a hastily devised iOS shell.

In other words, a $50 fee to publish on the Kindle store, even if it’s refundable, may end up being nontrivial for some real self-publishing authors, but a justifiable expense for a spammer who plans on excreting 150 private label rights ebooks to the store over a two day period.

If Amazon charged the fee for each title submitted, that might have a more effective result—but it would remain a very real obstacle for legit authors too, a perfect example of punishing the honest to try to get at the dishonest.

4. It’s not always so easy to tell what’s fake content and what’s just badly written or ill-conceived content. Sure, the examples in the articles above are easy enough to identify. But unless Amazon/Apple/RetailerX wants to get into the official gatekeeping business—you know, like a real publisher—it’s going to be hard to manually comb through submissions and make a judgment call on whether every “how to improve your finances” title is just a bad purchase or actually spam.

5. This highlights the need for an independent content monitoring tool that authors, publishers and retailers can use. For now, this might look like Amazon’s problem, but it’s a problem any time a retailer opens the submission doors to the public. And private label rights ebooks are only part of the problem—there’s also the issue of people stealing published content and reselling it. Worst of all, unless it threatens to take over a store’s most public areas (which is unlikely), it’s a bigger problem for authors and publishers than for retailers—which means retailers may ultimately say to authors and publishers, “You deal with it.”

It’s hard to root out this sort of theft, and although I suppose there are businesses cropping up to sell you monitoring services, it would be healthier for the publishing industry to create a standalone body to do it. Assuming the key players in modern publishing will never be able to work together to achieve such a mutually beneficial common goal, I think Google or Amazon should create it and then sell it to other businesses as well as individuals.

I assume that publishers would do everything possible to sabotage such a tool unless they were the ones to develop it, probably by arguing that it violated their copyrights. So for the near future we’re stuck with spammers on our ebook stores, and as with spam in email, spam on Twitter, and spammy websites, your best strategy is to simply avoid them when possible, report them when you can, and ignore them the rest of the time.

(Photo: t3rmin4t0r)