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.

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.