Break the Spine

Welcome to the Revolution! I'm Monique Trottier of SoMisguided.com and I'm tired of the book publishing industry not being able to en masse figure out how to create a free economy for books. By free, I mean libre not gratis. This is not about ebooks or giving away books for free. This is about how do we find a way for creators to make money creating, how do we manage a sustainable industry, how do we get books into the hands of readers. My definition of book can be different from yours. This is not a war of formats. This is a revolution (a full turn of the wheel) on how we think about the creation, editing, production, distribution and promotion of book content.

New! Shortcovers EPUB Conversion Program

Shortcovers announced last week that they’re now converting publishers’ InDesign and Quark files (and just about any other file type) into EPUB. The conversion is free if you list your books only on Shortcovers. If you want to list your ebooks on additional sites, costs start at $29 for a simple book with few images and no bibliographic references, $49 for a book with up to 12% images and some bibliographic content to $100 for a more complex book.  Publishers who pay for the conversion get the EPUB file back to sell from their own website or other third-party sites.

To get more information email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Book Industry Bailout

Bruce Batchelor, inventor of POD and founder of Trafford Publishing has started a campaign for a DIY bailout of Canada’s book industry. He’s crunched the numbers and figures that by ending returns, the Canadian industry could save $330 million a year. He argues that this will save the industry, save the environment (see Calculating the Shame), and, with our help, can be fully implemented within 6 months.

The Value of Book Publishers

Where is book publishing at and where is it going? Bernard Lunn tackles this question in his two-part article, Bits of Destruction Hit the Book Publishing Business, giving a fairly thorough overview of how digitization is changing the industry.

Lunn looks at the waves of destruction hitting publishing and how these waves are going to affect the multi-billion dollar market and the percentage everyone involved takes.

Is Amazon taking too much of the pie? Should authors be earning more? Do publishers have a role to play in this new publishing world?

While Lunn suggests that in the future, authors will play a bigger part in publishing their books, where does this leave publishers and the value they provide?

Register for BookCamp Vancouver

Are you ready to go to camp?

Registration for BookCamp Vancouver 2009 Unconference: Exploring New Ideas in Books, Publishing and the Future of Reading is now open.

The free unconference will be taking place on Friday October 16th at Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre campus in downtown Vancouver.

Sign up now. Tickets are going fast!

BookCamp Vancouver is a user-generated unconference that brings print publishers, educators, community builders and the tech community together - for free! BookCamp Vancouver is an opportunity to explore the present and future of books and book-like technologies. It’s open to anyone interested in the publishing industry and the potential dynamics of the reader/creator/publisher relationship.

Join us for a day of talking and doing – of rolling up the proverbial shirt sleeves and tinkering with the publishing mechanism. We’re inviting authors, typographers, designers, printers, technologists, booksellers, literary agents, publishers and geeks of every stripe to come along and consider if and how technology can transform and perhaps improve on The Book.

We’re encouraging BookCampers to suggest topics of discussion for the day and to suggest sessions that they would like to lead.

Full Details

Register

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Web Content Management Workshop

Need a strategy for managing all of your digital content?

Join us for an informative workshop on web content management, put on by
SFU Summer Publishing Workshops.

The workshop runs August 4 - 6 at SFU Harbourcentre. The cost for all three days is $500.

From the SFU Summer Publishing Workshop website:
“We’ll introduce you to web content management tools and what they offer. We’ll talk about book content, magazine copy, marketing messages, images and other media, and of course the web itself and the audience connections it makes possible. We’ll cover software and techniques; when it’s appropriate to manage content yourself and when it’s appropriate to contract an external Digital Asset Manager. Most importantly, we’ll focus on how to do all of this without breaking the bank.”

Panelists include Haig Armen, creative director of LiFT Studios; Geoff D’Auria site manager for The Tyee; Kim Elliott publisher of rabble.ca; Joy Gugeler publisher and editor-in-chief of orato.com; Brian Lamb manager of emerging technologies and digital content with the office of learning technology at UBC; Boris Mann entrepreneur and web strategist; Monique Trottier of Boxcar Marketing; and John Maxwell assistant professor in the Master of Publishing Program at SFU.

For full details go to the Web Content Management workshop page.

Download the PDF registration form here.

BookCamp Vancouver

BookCamp Vancouver 2009 Unconference : Exploring New Ideas in Books, Publishing and the Future of Reading.

Join Us on October 16 at SFU Harbourcentre for a day-long exploration of books, book-like technologies, and the future of the publishing industry.

We want to bring together the technologists and the book publishers, marketers, writers, librarians, media, and anyone else interested in reading, writing, publishing and gadget geekery.

Want to come?

Become a Fan on Facebook

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Registration details to come.

When Every Book Is Connected to Everyone

BookCampTO Session Notes for “When Every Book Is Connected to Everyone” by Peter Brantley

I’ve tried to sort these random thoughts into piles, hopefully not of poo.

What is a book?

The book is a machine to think with.

People want control of what they buy.

Doctorow says “nobody wakes up wondering, ‘how can I do less with this content?’ or ‘how can I do less with what I bought.’”

What is the role of the publisher?

As publishers, our goal is to crack stories, to enable, not to maintain traditions.

Book publishers think in terms of book publishing vs. the academic world where we rip apart academic papers and adjust and model data within the paper itself.

How do we market books?

We build conversations across the network.

Are their models we could follow? Shakespeare’s coffee houses where community gathered to talk and collectively produce work that may or may not be printed and distributed but shared nonetheless.

Maybe there’s not enough money in the current system anymore to support the overhead of the publishing business model? How do we propel ourselves into a new space?

Let’s look at what does work.

I think attribution works. We have generally accepted practices on attributing tweets to the original tweeter, linking to the original article, footnotes, bibliographies. Can we think about attribution in the context of DRM? Keeping in mind that DRM is not just about locking down content, but more about managing rights and business contracts on who has the right to make money off the audio book and how that’s affected (or not) by digital talking books and the relationship to digital rights.

I like to look at taking things that are easy and making them work better. Readers want to share materials, in particular book recommendations. Can we use embed code and attribution to allow for the free sharing of information?

Are we living in a branded environment where the trusted sources are not ones we’re necessarily loyal to but rather use to build up our own brand. i.e., I trust and like this and will endorse it by adding it to my personal brand.

What value does a book have?

Question: Do authors have a right to be paid and what are people willing to pay for?

Yes, this is a question we all want to answer. How do we get paid for work we do? Do we have a right to compensation? People buy experience. They buy rarity. They buy something they can own.

If an author doesn’t inherently have the right to payment then does the consumer have the right to unbridled, untethered access to that creative work?

What’s the value distribution? The handshake? The contract? The promise between writer and reader.

Mitch Joel says we are no longer interested in $20 worth of plastic (CD) but we are interested in $0.99 tracks, ringtones, iPods. There is a ton of money to be made in music, just not in plastic.

One of the big houses raised a good question that highlights a flaw in the system, “how do you move to a new business model when you are acquiring titles now for 2013?”

Does this mean that publishers are working in an agency model with huge overhead and hence markup?

As publishers we need to frame and position the value of the creative work. We also have to stop thinking of book as physical item.

Who’s watching the director’s overlay in DVDs? I think the point is not how many but how valuable is it to those who do watch it. And if you can make it available, why not do so, even if it only satisfies a small, geeky audience?

Can we give something other than the book aware for free? Books are not like music.

Let’s think about marketing and communication as the coordination of action.

Death by Bullets: Pitching Projects without Powerpoint Poisoning

BookCampTO Session Notes from “Death by Bullets: Pitching Projects without Powerpoint Poisoning” by Michael Tamblyn

When developing a presentation you need to know the desired outcome.

What goes into preparing? Some people start with a story, some with the 5 Ws.

Michael manscapes the presentation—he starts with something big and hairy and sculpts it down. He’s looking for shape.

As a presenter you need to be aware of time, of bringing people along with you, of the high point of the presentation when you need full attention and of interludes if required due to length.

Powerpoint suggests a broadcast mode. PPT doesn’t kill meetings, people with PPT kill meetings.

Clever use of images in a presentation helps make a point more concrete, says Mitch Joel.

Michael suggests studying good presentations:
* the Takahashi method
* the Lessig method

Other suggestions:
* http://www.duarte.com on creating visuals
* http://www.presentationzen.com on Takahashi and Lessig and other models
* Slideology the book
* Give Your Speech, Change the World by Nic Morgan

Michael Tamblyn on Twitter
http://twitter.com/mtamblyn

Going to BookCamp

bookcampto.pbworks.com

This Saturday in Toronto: A conversation about the future of books, writing, publishing, and the book business in the digital age.

Don’t worry Vancouver publishing folk. There are a couple of us going and we’ll come back and share the knowledge.