University Presses Give Short-Form E-Books a Try

Short-form e-book programs have been attracting attention among university presses as a way to provide in-depth, quality content in a brief format. Princeton, following the lead of Amazon’s Kindle Singles format, launched Princeton Shorts last year, with Stanford and the University of North Carolina presses getting into the business this past spring.

It’s hoped the shorter works will hook readers into buying the original, much longer version. The titles could also be a useful format in course adoptions where instructors want to assign chapter-length reading material. Or it may show how university presses can stay ahead of the technological curve, according to a post by the American Association of University Presses.

While it’s still too early tell, short-form e-books have so far not stopped people from buying the complete work. at least not at Princeton.

“The paperback of [best-selling economics book This Time is Different] has been selling well and steadily since its release not long before the release of the short,” said Rob Tempio, editor in charge of the Princeton Shorts project. “Did sales of the Short drive that? Doubtful. Did sales of the Short detract from the sales of that? Almost certainly not.”

Judge Agrees to E-Price Fixing Settlement

Despite plenty of objections, federal district court judge Denise Cote has approved the settlement reached by the Justice Department and three of the five publishing houses in the e-book price-fixing case.

The settlement mandates that Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster discontinue current e-book sales agreements for the next two years and pay $69 million in damages to customers who purchased e-books between April 1, 2010, and May 21, 2012. Apple has said it will appeal the judge’s decision. The ruling means retailers can set their own prices, regardless of publisher pricing.

Amazon has indicated it is ready to resume “aggressive” e-book pricing.

The judge dismissed all objections, finding those concerns to be unreasonable. However, she also sided with the NACS position that e-textbooks should not be part of the settlement.

“While disappointed that the settlement agreement was upheld, we are pleased that the judge agreed in her ruling with our opinion that e-textbooks are not covered by the final judgment,” said Charles Schmidt, director of public relations for NACS. “By making this distinction, we hope that competition and innovation in the higher education textbook market continues.”

What's Next with E-Book Pricing?

While Penguin, Macmillan, and Apple continue the e-book pricing fight with the Department of Justice, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster have decided it’s better to pay $69 million now than risk further damage to their reputation and possibly even higher fines that could result from losing a court case.

The three agreed to give refunds in the form of account credits or checks, ranging from 25 cents for each non-bestseller sold to $1.32 for books that appeared on The New York Times bestseller list from April 1, 2010-May 21, 2012. Just don’t expect your refund any time soon.

“Consumers aren’t going to see any payouts right now,” Laura Hazard Owen, a reporter covering e-book publishing for paidContent, said to The Boston Globe. “There’s still a lot of waiting ahead.”

The Globe article goes on to predict consumers could see e-book prices drop as much as 30%. Amazon said it would lower prices when the initial settlement with the Department of Justice was announced in April and other e-tailers will likely follow suit to keep pace.

“When retailers or manufacturers conspire to set prices, consumers lose,” said Edgar Dworsky, founder of consumer resource guide ConsumerWorld.org. “So this is a good result.”

The three settling publishers also agreed to change the pricing of their e-books, but that’s where things could get a little murky, according to Billy Pidgeon, analyst at M2 Research.

“The devil is in the details,” he told the eCommerce Times. “There’s a lot of issues with the price of digital media. There are expectations that digital should be priced more cheaply as there are no manufacturers. But this really hasn’t been the case.”

Could Watermark Provide DRM Solution?

Publishers can’t be blamed for trying to safeguard their assets with digital rights management protection on their e-titles, particularly against large-scale file sharing.

The problem is DRM does not really deter anyone determined to share files, which led Dana Robinson, a adjunct professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law and partner with Techlaw LLP, to propose a solution in an article for Digital Book World. His solution would be to create e-books with a watermark place throughout the book.

The e-book’s buyer would have to provide personal information for the watermark by agreeing to terms and conditions that would prohibit the resale or distribution of the title.

“The point of making a watermark that shows the user’s personal information is to create a disincentive for the user to pass the book along to unknown third parties, deputizing the user to act as a gatekeeper, protecting the book from wrongful distribution,” Robinson wrote, adding that removing the watermark could then be a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Robinson points out that his watermark solution would not prevent people from sharing their book with family or close friends, but that they’ve always done that with printed books. His watermark is aimed at individuals trying to gain financially from someone else’s work.

“What e-book publishers need is a way to distribute e-books with as little hassle as possible, while ensuring that the publisher can sue pirates and stop e-book sales, rental, and large-scale sharing,” he said.

Change is coming to E-Book Market

The Department of Justice recently filed a motion asking that its settlement with Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster in its e-book pricing lawsuit be approved in federal court. No surprise there.

If accepted, sometime around the middle of September, retailers will be able to set their own prices for e-books, at least from the three publishers in the settlement.  The settlement allows the agency-pricing model that came under DOJ scrutiny to remain, but the provisions of the settlement make anything resembling the current agency model highly unlikely.

While the settlement allows retailers to set the sales prices, publishers can prohibit discounts on their books. That provision comes into play when the total sales of a year exceed the margin the retailer has earned, according to an analysis of the agreement in The Shatzkin Files.

However, the article also points out how easily that discount prohibition may be sidestepped. For instance, a retailer such as Amazon may choose to cut e-book prices way below its costs during a specific time frame, such as the upcoming holiday season, figuring to make up the margin over the next nine months. In the meantime, other publishers who may still be clinging to the agency-pricing model may have to lower its prices just to stay competitive.

Which is exactly what many in the bookselling industry feared all along.

University of Minnesota Creates E-Book in 10 Weeks

The University of Minnesota launched its online open-text catalog at the end of April in an effort to give students access to textbooks online for free, or printed for a small fee. Now, university faculty and staff have created a 317-page e-book in 10 weeks.

Cultivating Change in the Academy: 50+ Stories from the Digital Frontlines at the University of Minnesota in 2012 is a compilation of contributions from 57 faculty members, 51 staffers, 17 graduate students, and five undergrads, all of whom volunteered their work so there would be no cost to producing the title, according to Ann Hill Duin, professor of writing studies at the Twin Cities campus.

The book was released July 9 to the University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, which serves the online open-access repository. The conservancy also provided a permanent web address for the book.

“We really want to maintain access just like we do with our print,” said Lisa Johnston, research services librarian at the Twin Cities campus and co-director of the conservancy. She contributed to a chapter on the conservancy’s role in curating digital research. “We are a service that makes information available to the public via the web.”

The book focuses on “ideas for transforming teaching methods, solutions to specific classroom problems, examples of campus leaders providing direction and support for these efforts, and ways the university is spreading innovation off campus,” according to a report in Inside Higher Education.

“The e-book is far greater than the sum of the parts,” said Duin. “It’s connecting people with the innovative, imaginative, creative, collaborative dynamic work under way.”

The book is already attracting a following. Abram Anders, assistant professor of business communications at UM-Duluth’s Labovitz School of Business and Economics, reports more than 4,000 views so far of the chapter he wrote about his work with Google Apps script.

“I can see that we’re getting some people coming to our site from the press release that the school put out, some people coming from e-mail links, some people coming from Facebook,” he said, adding that people are also finding the site through Twitter posts.

Onlyindie.com Turning Heads

Onlyindie.com, an online e-bookseller, has been in operation just a few months, yet its business model is turning heads in the publishing industry. The privately owned company calls itself the world’s first dynamically priced e-book store.   

Onlyindie actually gives away the first 15 downloads of the title. Each e-book downloaded after that increases in penny increments until it reaches a maximum price of $7.98, where it remains until 24 hours pass without a download. At that point, the company uses an algorithm that over a period of time lowers the price back to zero again.

Writers receive 50% of the sale price on books priced up to $1.99. That increases to 75% for books priced $2 to $7.98. Although authors are permitted to set their price limit lower than $7.98, they cannot increase it. Authors are paid via Paypal with no minimums and no waiting for the check.

The web site got a big boost when Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban agreed to have his book, How to Win, sold using Onlyindie’s model, even besting the price-busting Amazon for some time. The bookhowever, is no longer on the web site.

As of July 13, 2012, Onlyindie.com had 20 free e-books available and 31 at varying prices below $7.98. The e-book categories were typical for the trends this year, including some vampire tales, adult fiction, advice and how-to, science fiction and fantasy, and short stories.

E-Books Are Getting into Your Head

Companies selling electronic readers and e-books are tracking the reading and spending habits of users with an eye to helping authors and publishers better understand what readers want, according to an article in The Wall Street Journal. Books for the Kindle and Nook, as well as tablets such as the iPad, can record the number of times a reader opens a book app and how much time they spend using the app, and then provide that information to retailers and publishers.

“The bigger trend we’re trying to unearth is where are those drop-offs in certain kinds of books, and what can we do with publishers to prevent that,” said Jim Hilt, vice president of e-books at Barnes & Noble, in the WSJ article. “If we can help authors create even better books than they create today, it’s a win for everybody.”

The article details how e-book social networking site Copia, which has 50,000 subscribers, collects information including age, gender, and school affiliation, as well as how many times a book was downloaded, opened, and read, and shares that data with publishers that request it. Kobo, with a stock of 2.5 million books and more than eight million users of its devices and services, tracks the hours users spend reading a title, while Scholastic uses online feedback from message boards and interactive games to shape its 39 Cluesseries.

Sourcebooks is also incorporating reader feedback into print versions of some of its online serial titles.

“You very rarely get a glimpse into the reader’s mind,” said David Levithan, publisher and editorial director at Scholastic. “With a printed book, there’s no such thing as an analytic. You can’t tell which pages are dog-eared.”

But there are those who disagree with such data gathering. Privacy groups would like to see e-book users protected from having their reading habits recorded. California passed a “reader privacy act” making it more difficult for law-enforcement groups to access consumers’ digital reading records, legislation that the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), Google, and other organizations are also promoting.

“There’s a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else’s business,” said Cindy Cohn, legal director for the EEF. “Right now, there’s no way for you to tell Amazon, ‘I want to buy your books, but I don’t want you to track what I’m reading.’”

Renooking Your Passion for Reading

Instead of The CITE’s usual Friday video clip, here’s a cautionary tale for these times. No matter how high technology soars in communications, learning, and commerce, the low-tech stuff can still trip you up.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported on a Nook e-reader owner who decided to download a copy of Tolstoy’s hefty classic War and Peace. But in reading the e-book version, the man discovered some odd phrasing such as “a bonfire the soldiers had nookd on the road.” There were repeated references throughout the e-book to “nook” used in ways that didn’t make sense.

It turns out the publishing company that produced the e-book for the Nook reader apparently took its Kindle version of the book and used the Search and Replace All functions to swap out references of “kindle” with “nook.”

Of course, the purpose was simply to rebrand the e-book for a different market, but the responsible employee obviously didn’t consider how many times the word “kindle” might appear in a novel written before central heating was invented.

We Want Easy E-Book Loans, Say Libraries

Some of the largest and most influential public libraries in North America banded together June 5 to deliver a manifesto of sorts to e-book providers. The libraries are pushing to make borrowing e-books as fast and easy as borrowing p-books for patrons.

As recounted by Library Journal on The Digital Shift site, more than 70 library systems signed the ReadersFirst Initiative, which focuses on four principles aimed at lifting barriers and restrictions on loaned e-content. Two of the principles call for enabling library cardholders to download e-content in any format to any e-reading device they choose.

The other two principles clamor for integrating all e-book catalogs and all functional processes involving e-books (checkout, placing holds, paying fines, whatever) into one system, preferably the library’s, so that users can enjoy the same seamless experience they have with hard copies. The libraries feel it’s unreasonable to force users to pop in and out of each e-book provider’s catalog to browse and search for titles, and then jump through more hoops in order to borrow a title.

Some integration is already underway but public libraries, at least the ReadersFirst Initiative group, claim it’s not happening quickly enough. However, publishers remain leery of permitting their e-books to even be allowed in libraries at all, much less streamlining the process for borrowers.

Another Way for Publishers to Reach Consumers

A tech management and consulting firm has launched a web service that appears to make it easier for publishers to sell e-books directly to its customers.

The service, called skBookshop.com, helps publishers tap into the 900 million users on Facebook, plus provides a low-cost way to create mobile apps for Android devices immediately, with an app for Apple iOS gadgets coming later this year.

There are fees to use, but publishers are given a password-protected login to a site that allows them to create full-color catalogs with pages for author and book information that links back to the publisher’s web site. The service also provides detailed analytics and tracking information, can collect e-mail addresses, and allows publishers to easily create e-book promotions.

Justin Loeber of CarverTech, the firm that created the service, claims publishers can’t sell directly to customers from the site because rapid development in Facebook and mobile platforms make it difficult to keep up with the coding. At least not yet, and booksellers have to be wondering about the message being sent to visitors who can click on a “buy button” that takes them back to the publisher’s web site to make the purchase.

Apple, Publishers Fire Back at DOJ

A number of legal experts have said Apple will beat the rap when it comes to the Department of Justice’s price-fixing lawsuit over the agency pricing model of e-books (see the blog post from April 22). Now, the computer giant has weighed in, contending the case against it is without merit.

Apple refutes every charge, according to a report in MacNewsWorld, and argues it negotiated individual deals with publishers, which actually enhanced e-book competition. The company also claimed that Amazon created a monopoly in the e-book market and, by entering the field, Apple helped to spur the growth of e-book titles.

But Yasha Heidari, managing partner of the Heidari Power Law Group, seemed unimpressed.

“It’s just a way of trying to get away from the underlying merit of the case,” Heidari told MacNewsWorld. “The whole thing about antitrust law is, it’s very complex, and once you get very big and powerful, you’ll try to get around it. The question is whether or not Apple is trying to get around it.”

Now, both Penguin and Macmillan have also fired back. the two publishing firms have joined Apple in fighting the lawsuit and recently filed responses that dispute all claims against them, including the one suggesting the publishers met secretly over dinner to devise the agency model.

In the 26-page Macmillan rebuttal, CEO John Sargent claims he “dined once or at most twice with peers from certain other publishing houses, but these dinners were social in nature. No conspiracy was hatched over any such dinner.”

Penguin used its 74-page response to target Amazon, calling the online retail giant “predatory.” The publisher also claims it chose to cooperate with Apple because the iPad allows for enhanced books, which the Kindle does not and suggests the agency pricing strategy allows greater competition in the e-book market.

Can Kindle Ad Sales Lower E-Book Prices?

Amazon has turned selling items at a loss into an art form, particularly when it comes to books. But selling in-book advertisements on its Kindle devices just might put the company in an even stronger position with its competitors, according to a blogposted by Joe Wikert.

The retail giant has shown it is more than happy to lose money on the price of bestsellers. However, Kindle advertising could provide Amazon with the additional revenue to take e-book prices even lower.

“Make no mistake about the fact that Amazon would love to see e-book pricing approaching zero,” Wikert wrote, adding that the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library program is already approaching free e-books.

Amazon is already selling advertising on some of the Kindle models, offering those models at very attractive prices to consumers. There are even rumors that Amazon plans to sell ad space on its Kindle Fire’s welcome screen. Wikert adds there’s nothing stopping Amazon from using in-book advertising, while offering ad-free editions at higher prices.

Amazon will keep 100% of the ad revenue it sells on both device and in-book advertising, padding its bottom line and giving the company even more leverage when it comes to negotiating wholesale list price with publishers. Wikert says he believes other e-book retailers will not be able to sustain the losses to effectively compete.

“Why wouldn’t Amazon follow this strategy, especially since it helps eliminate competitors, leads to market dominance, and fixes the loss-leader problem they currently have with many e-book sales?” he asks.

Debating the Right Price for E-Books

There’s clearly a cost associated with producing an e-book, but does anyone, other than publishers, really care?

Author Chuck Wendig makes that case on his blog, terribleminds, while Matthew Ingram said e-book costs don’t matter in GigaOm and Mike Masnick wrote that nobody cares about the “fixed costs of books, movies, whatever” in his TechDirt blog. It’s not hard to see their point, considering Amazon’s aggressive e-book pricing policies, coupled with the assumption many consumers have that publishers have cut their manufacturing and distribution costs yet are still trying to keep e-book prices near that of a printed book.

But there are real costs of publishing that can’t be brushed aside so easily, according to Ryan Chittum, deputy editor of the business section in the Columbia Journalism Review. It’s a balancing act between paying expenses and offering a price consumers are willing to pay.

“In reality, as in theory, the market for books is only so big—we only have so much time—so a 99-cent price point might move a lot of units, but not enough to justify the cost of production,” Chittum wrote. “Obviously, a $50 price point would crush sales and also bring in much less revenue overall.”

The thing is, e-book pricing really isn’t different from any other pricing strategy. Consumers always look for the best price and a good value. It’s up to the publishing industry to find a way to deliver that value and make money at the same time.

Bad E-Book News or Just a Quiet News Day?

News from the e-book industry hasn’t been all that rosy of late. Profits are down at Harlequin, the Association of American Publishers announced numbers for e-book growth in February that were less than expected, Simon & Schuster digital sales continue to decline, and even sales of the Kindle Fire from mighty Amazon fell off in the first quarter of 2012.

Is this a harbinger of things to come, or just evidence of a slow news period in the digital market?

“I’m not hearing alarm bells from publishers yet, so I can’t say whether there is an overall softening or just unevenness in the data or just that each of these things is potentially explainable as due to circumstances specific to the players involved,” said James McQuivey, principal analyst at Forrester who covers the book industry, in this article from Digital Book World.

In the first place, those huge increases the e-book market was seeing could not last forever, said Kelly Gallagher, vice president of publishing services at Bowker Market Research. He also opined that the new group of e-book consumers may not be as devoted to e-reading as early adopters.

“The early-adopter, heavy book buyers who make up over 60% of volume of all e-book sales have continued to slow in their migration to digital,” said Gallagher. “Without the ongoing influx of these key buyers, the market is more reliant on a greater increase of casual to moderate buyers to move the needle.”

In addition, a recent study by the Book Industry Study Group suggests consumers are buying more tablets than e-readers, but are not buying e-books at the same pace as those who read on dedicated e-readers. Over the last six months, consumer preference for e-readers has slipped from 72% to 58%.

“Tablets will adversely affect the e-book business in that the tablet is a multifunction device and will therefore draw the reader into nonbook activities and therefore cause them to consume books slower and therefore buy fewer books vs. a single-function e-reading device,” said Gallagher.

Are Libraries Latest Threat to e-Booksellers?

Amazon has been the Goliath of the e-book battleground. Booksellers, publishers, authors, and libraries have all taken turns bemoaning the buying power and aggressive price strategy employed by the Seattle company. But that notion may not be correct any longer, according to Chris Rechtsteiner, blogger and publisher of the weekly newsletter Thinking Out Loud, who suggested four months ago that libraries were the real threat to e-book sales.

Now, Rechtsteiner, who is also the founder and chief strategist for research firm BlueLoop Concepts, says people simply not reading is now the biggest challenge facing booksellers, publishers, and libraries. They’re not reading because there are so many low-cost alternatives to capture their attention, whether accessed via television, tablet, or smartphone.

In a recent postfor digitalbookworld.com, he speculated that libraries have dealt with the issue of people not reading for quite some time and have been forced to adapt more quickly. Creating programs to lend e-books and e-readers is the sort of innovation booksellers and publishers have not been doing with the same sense of urgency.

Booksellers and authors are trying, but need help from publishers, according to Rechtsteiner.

“Publishers (both old and new) must step up and provide the platforms (and rights-management frameworks) for innovation needed by booksellers (all types of booksellers) and authors to push reading forward,” he wrote. “If they don’t, publishers will fall by the wayside as true innovation will be limited to a few (one?) large players investing on their own behalf (see Amazon, Barnes & Noble + Microsoft), while authors take their storytelling to completely new platforms that are altogether outside of the bookselling and library frameworks.”

Cool Hardware Won't Win Educational Tablet War

There’s little debate about the potential electronic devices have in the realm of learning. The problem comes in realizing that potential, says to Mehdi Maghsoodnia, CEO of Rafter, the parent company of BookRenter.com, in this guest post written for Forbes.com.

Cost is one large stumbling block to reaching that potential. At this point, the cost of the device and the educational content assigned doesn’t ensure a savings for students compared to printed textbooks, which is a primary reason why e-books remain less than 5% of all textbook sales.

There is also the issue of supporting the device and getting educators to use digital content effectively.

“Simply putting digital books on a device is not enough to truly digitalize education,” Maghsoodnia writes. “In order to make real inroads at colleges and universities, devices must be accessible for students, and adopted by their professors and administrators.”

Becoming the device of choice for education will not be a race to the coolest features or content. It will be a race to solve the problems of cost and scale to help institutions find their way into the digital future, according to Maghsoodnia.

E-Book Nation

This very cool infographic about the shift from print to digital reading material appeared at Online University.com. Scroll down to find who those e-consumers are, along with statistical information on e-reading habits. Americans seem to like e-readers when they want a book quickly, but still prefer print when reading to their kids or sharing the title.

Brought to you by: OnlineUniversities.com

March 4-10 is Read an E-Book Week

The Chase Calendar of Events recognizes March 4-10 as “Read an E-book Week.”  This week is to promote and engage in events that encourage reading with an emphasis on reading e-books, worldwide.  The events are supported by authors, publishers, manufacturers, distributors and retail outlets around the globe.  Read an E-Book Week encourages people to educate and inform the public about the pleasures and advantages of reading electronically through events that can include: public readings, library displays, reading challenges, school visits, newspaper and blog articles, chat show appearances, internet radio interviews, e-book giveaways, and banners on your website.  To learn and read more about Read an E-Book Week please visit this site http://www.ebookweek.com/

Canadians declare March to be "Read an E-book Month"

The Canadian Parliament passed a motion declaring the month of March “Read an E-Book Month.”

The Order reads:

That, in the opinion of the House, the government should: (a) recognize that the ePublishing industry has created economic opportunities for entrepreneurs, authors, publishers and e-reader manufacturers; (b) recognize that e-books present significant benefits for seniors and children; (c) recognize that e-books are an environmentally-friendly alternative to books; (d) declare the month of March as "Read an E-book Month"; (e) support the goals and ideals of "Read an E-book Month; and (f) encourage Canadians to observe "Read an E-book Month".

Canadians are leading the world in promoting e-books by recognizing not only the benefits to the readers and the environment but also sees e-books as opportunity for economic development for Canada.  This is something that is not emphasized enough in the U.S. and it is something that book retailers should recognize.  That is, there are new ventures that are being established in this industry and retailers should be thinking about ways to work with these potential partners.