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…)

I'm a book pirate! (Photo: Stuck in Customs)

1. By not releasing official digital copies of works online.

Consider the work of Karen Blixen, the author of “Out of Africa”. Under the pseudonym Isak Dinesen, she published the short story collection “Seven Gothic Tales” in the 1930s, and the collection “Anecdotes of Destiny” in the 1950s. She’s a little obscure, but not forgotten; her short story “Babette’s Feast” and her novel “Out of Africa” were both adapted into Oscar-winning films in the 1980s, and she’s a widely acknowledged and praised artist.

Her work, however, isn’t available in ebook format on the Amazon Kindle store, the Sony ebook store, or fictionwise. If I want to read her work on a digital device–and I do–my only recourse is to scan a printed copy, convert it to a digital copy, and create my own digital version.

This digital version will exist entirely outside of the official publishing world; whoever holds Blixen’s copyrights will never see revenue off of it. By contrast, if either collection was available on any of the three ebook stores I mentioned above, I would have already bought it.

It’s not just a problem for dead authors, of course. In May the New York Times pointed out that a digital copy of J. K. Rowling’s “The Tales of Beedle the Bard” appeared on the website Scribd earlier this year. What’s more telling is that a reader wrote, “thx for posting it up ur like the robinhood of ebooks,” on the Sribd page. That’s not the cackling of a pirate, but the enthusiasm of a fan.

Rowling is famous for refusing to release her books digitally, and yet I can locate and download all seven Harry Potter books, plus the Beedle the Bard collection, in less than an hour. There are readers clamoring for her books in digital format, and they’d be more than eager to pay for the privilege; instead, she’s allowed piracy to dominate her online sales.

I would argue that every time a stubborn author or publisher refuses to release a popular book digitally, she contributes to the wider problem of piracy by helping normalize both the procedures by which one pirates a book and the behavior of reading unauthorized copies. That’s right, all you midlist authors afraid of your income drying up; you can thank Rowling for helping the ecosystem of pirated books grow larger by the year.

2. By crippling content so that it only works on one device, or only works if the reader is given permission by a retailer or publisher to open the file.

When I first bought an Amazon Kindle, one of the first frustrations I experienced was that my ebooks were tied to the Kindle device for no good reason. (Well, for no good consumer reason.) I had other devices that would display ebooks just as well, including a Nokia smartphone and an Asus netbook, and depending on the day I might have any combination of the three devices with me. What I discovered was that in order to read the ebook when I wanted to using whatever I had nearby, I would have to crack the encryption that locked the ebook to the Amazon Kindle.

But note that by doing that, I would be creating a new, unlocked version of the work that existed outside of the publishing industry. What’s worse, it would be in a standardized format (like ePub or PDF) that would be more popular and more robust than the locked Amazon format–which means it would be more attractive to other consumers should I ever put that new file online.

3. By creating substandard digital editions.

There are two problems here. The first is when publishers release digital copies that are missing the small-but-important touches like cover art, or that contain typos and formatting errors. The second is when ebook resellers release low-quality software that interferes with the overall enjoyment of an ebook edition.

Jane at Dear Author has a great post about why it sucks when publishers treat ebook purchasers like second class citizens:

The important thing for pubs to remember is digital consumers are not undiscerning. We just prefer a different format. Being on the internet doesn’t change our affinity for visual stimulation. If anything, we’ve become more accustomed to interesting graphics and interactive multi media now that we use the internet as our primary source of information.

As far as the second problem, consider Kathy Griffin’s recent autobiography “Official Book Club Selection”. I recently bought the encrypted ePub version of this book from ShortCovers to read on my iPhone. It turns out that every chapter has photos, which I only knew about because as I read it on my iPhone, I kept coming across captions for missing images. Later I opened the file on my PC using the Adobe Digital Editions reader and discovered that the photos were indeed in the file, but hadn’t made the transition over to the iPhone version.

This is really ShortCovers’ fault for creating a bad iPhone app that can’t handle the full breadth of an ePub file’s content capabilities. But on a deeper level, it’s the publisher’s problem. Imagine if a supermarket stocked Coca-Cola but poured it out of the original 2-liter bottles into homemade plastic bottles. Coca-Cola would rightly insist that the supermarket sell the product as intended or stop selling it immediately.

The solution? To crack the DRM on the ShortCovers file and then read it on my iPhone using a higher-quality app like Stanza. Unfortunately, this once again creates a new, unlocked digital version that exists completely outside the publisher/author revenue stream.

4. By thinking piracy is a solvable problem instead of a manageable one.

A New York Times article today notes,

“We are seeing lots of online piracy activities across all kinds of books — pretty much every category is turning up,” said Ed McCoyd, an executive director at [The Association of American Publishers]. “What happens when 20 to 30 percent of book readers use digital as the primary mode of reading books? Piracy’s a big concern.”

This is comically wasteful worrying; we will never get rid of digital piracy. Worrying about it is like worrying about death, or whether you’re starting to show your age. Yes, you will die some day; yes, you’re looking older; yes, piracy will always exist online because it costs nothing to create duplicates of digital files and pass them around.

So the question becomes, can you prevent piracy? Well, if you can stop people from digitizing your content, then yes you can. But music, movies and books are amazingly easy to digitize, so unless you can un-create a work in one of those mediums, odds are one of the first big fans of your work is also going to be one of the first “pirates” to create an unauthorized digital copy of it to share with a friend. Or to format-shift it to a new playback device. Or to archive it. Or to mash it up with other beloved works.

I suggest the unthinkable: that publishers release digital editions of books before hard cover editions, but at a premium price point that is equal to the hardcover price. After all, prices are elastic, and you can always drop the ebook price to mass market or lower later. (In fact, you’d better if you don’t want consumers to feel cheated, because you can imagine what that will lead to.)

And may the gods help you if you start suing consumers for downloading pirated books. As soon as you help a consumer think of you as an unfair industry that wants to hurt fans–and seeking punitive damages has nothing to do with concepts of fairness and everything to do with deterring similar behavior–you will drive that consumer into the world of digital piracy.

I used “recalcitrant” at the start of this post for a reason. The word usually implies someone resisting authority, or being disobedient, and yet historically in publisher/consumer relationships the power dynamic has been in favor of the publisher. That, of course, is not how it works with digital content, not when today’s average PC has enough binary horsepower to rip a song, decrypt a DVD, or scan and convert a text, and then share the resulting file with the world. It only takes one semi-industrious consumer to put the file out there, and then consumers everywhere can join in.

So the balance of power has not only shifted, but flipped. Publishers who stubbornly continue to believe that they maintain control over content in the digital sphere, while forgetting that the average consumer now shares that control, are only hurting themselves.

Update: Be sure to check out this quick essay on the three classes of illegal downloaders over at teleread.

(Photo: Stuck in Customs)