The thing about Scribd [Laina]

I’ve been reading about this whole Scribd copyright issue for the past couple of months, and I thought it had died down unresolved, but maybe I just had my eyes on the Book Fair. Today, I read this piece by Tammy H Nam, Scribd’s Vice President of Content and Marketing and, linked at the end of the article, seven questions from Peter Cox of Litopia to Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd, dated April 17th.

I listened to the Litopia After Dark show when Trip Adler was due to speak to Peter Cox live on air, because I wanted to see what he’d say for himself and expected a balanced debate, but to be honest, the tone was disturbing before it even kicked off. I know Litopia is a writers’ place; I know that copyright violation is not ok and that essentially downloading copyright protected texts from Scribd is stealing income from an author, and that Peter Cox was mad about it. But his opinions were voiced in a snide manner and when Trip Adler didn’t answer his phone, frankly, I wasn’t surprised. I won’t quote from it, because one listen was enough for me, but you can hear it here. What resulted from Adler’s absence was a long voicemail and an invitation to call back any time for an open discussion. I have serious doubts that anything resembling an open discussion could have been possible under the circumstances.

Let me be clear: I’m not standing up for Scribd or Adler, nor am I bashing Cox, or Litopia and the point that Scribd’s opposers are making. But read Peter Cox’s seven questions. He calls Adler by his first name seventeen times in a nasty, faux-friendly, aggressive kind of banter. What’s the point? Why is there a need for this kind of sniping? Cox is a well-known and -respected figure and he has a community of people who rely on him for information. A sneering letter to a 26-year-old, practically spitting the questions at him, doesn’t fit the image, and has put me off reading anything else he might have to say on the matter.

Whose views is Cox representing anyway? I read a lot of blogs, and I’ve heard a lot of savvy publishing folk speak at conferences, and whenever I come across the notion of ‘piracy’ met with a sort of gung-ho, ‘Let’s stampt it out!’ attitude, I tend to be cynical. I know the future’s a bit murky and uncertain, and we can’t tell how popular ebooks will be and whether free content online will take more of  a toll later than it does now. But take for example the keynote digital speech at the LBF: Tim Hely Hutchinson (Hachette UK) said himself that he’s somewhat removed from the digital generation, and although he spoke well and I have great respect for him, I felt that Victoria Barnsley of HarperCollins UK seemed more at home with the idea of ebooks and the implications of piracy on them. She seemed resigned to the fact that piracy will happen, and that the way forward is to add value and make it really easy for genuine customers to get the content they want in the format they want at a price they see as reasonable. If that means adding value, to the consumer’s mind, that’s what she plans to do. The point is that Barnsley knows that if you spend all your resources trying to stamp out piracy, and if you spend half your budget in fighting pirates in court cases as Hely Hutchinson and perhaps Gail Rebuck of Random House plan to do, you won’t get very far.

There’s also the argument that giving it away for free online helps print sales rather than cannibalising them. Mike Shatzkin has been talking about this, and speculating that this may not be the case in years to come when reading on a screen is a more popular option than reading a physical book. But for now, Paulo Coelho and Cory Doctorow and a whole heap of other authors are quite happy to put their work out there online and watch the copies fly out of shops. It’s a big gamble, of course: all you have is content, and giving it away is counterintuitive when you’re used to what is still, in most cases, the dominant print-first business plan.

But these are all things to think about. Scribd says its working on filtering out copyrighted content; they don’t want it on their site. Whether you believe them or not is up to you, but I wouldn’t rely on their biggest critics for a balanced version of events, or for a rational critique of the site and its CEO.

The Future of Book Pricing [Ewan]

I’m approaching the home stretch on the dissertation front, so let’s blog!
Things I’ve been thinking about…

How publishers can best make use of the resources available to them.

I started writing about the fairly bold proposal of merging bookshops with the libraries (by incorporating the library’s stock for browsing and lending as per, and POD systems for printing new titles to sell). This is reliant on many impossible things coming into fruition – a fully digitized catalogue of all the books, some fairly massive construction projects, and the purchasing of many thousands of POD machines. It was my way of encouraging a ‘literary culture’, boosting jobs, having my own pet PFI – all the good political stuff. We would also have to reconcile corporate and civil interests under one roof – although the systems would run separately. It would create some kind of super service for readers but it wouldn’t really benefit the booksellers any more than the current system. So it won’t happen
Tim Hely-Hutcheson, the CEO of Hachette Livre, fairly described this plan as ‘too hard’.

This was a dreamer’s plan but what it does bring to mind is that, no one seems to be talking about what will happen to the libraries after the ebook revolution has taken hold. At the moment companies are trying to cash in without, as Clay Shirky put it, ‘breaking the wheel’. I’m personally against Chris Anderson’s ‘free’ model being applied universally, and I’m wary of advertising models, so that leaves rental as a profitable model for providing content of varying worth. Be it in the form of virtual libraries or subscription apps.

I set out in writing a dissertation to combat the discount culture that has taken over bookselling, what I realised is that publishing is haunted by inherent demand uncertainty in its pricing.

No reader can really put a price on the cultural, educational experience of reading a novel. The general public can only base their expectation of value on what is available. And the producer can only base their product’s prices on the expectation of demand.

This is why publishers and booksellers are making moves to establish a closer relationship between their readers and themselves. At the same time, moves can be made to capitalise on the uncertainty of books by making the channels to purchase easier. And this is why digitisation is so attractive to publishers, if a reader can be purchasing books with the click of a button (books that they will never read); and have them immediately; then the total number of booksales will rise. There is money to be made from both the mists of confusion that surrounds fiction and the closer relationships of start-ups like BookArmy. The problem for publishers is that they are the only party involved in the process interested in having high prices for the ebooks, they have both the most to gain and the most to lose.

My, this thing meanders… Have a look at BookGlutton and Readernaut for ideas on how communities are popping up around books online, and should help publishers clear some of my ‘mists of confusion’. *Embarassed for such metaphor addiction.

On brands and value adds [Laina]

Over February and March, I took a survey as part of my dissertation on branding. I asked 111 people a heap of questions about what factors influence them to buy a book, what jackets they recognised, and what logos they recognised. Then, I asked them what impressions came to mind when they thought of four named publishers, one of whom was Canongate. 93 out of 111 had never heard of them of had no impression. Of the rest, there were a few guesses; a few mentions of independence, Scotland and Obama and one very clever “A good defence system!”

Now, most of my respondents were in the UK and Ireland with a small handful from elsewhere (in retrospect I should have clarified a location to see where the unusual responses came from – the unlikely fans of Mills and Boon were few, but where are they?). And, in my opinion, Canongate are doing it all right at the moment, but it doesn’t seem to have any effect on increasing visibility amongst the general reading public, even with a list that includes Booker winners, Richard and Judy reads (a declining force by all accounts) and a President with what you might call the best branding campaign they’ll ever have. And they’ve got Boosh. AND The Wire. And Nick Cave in their back pocket, complete with seven and a half hours of audio for his new novel, and a soundtrack by his Bad Seeds. If that doesn’t get your name out there, I’m not sure what will. And despite the general obliviousness of the reading public to imprints and publishers, the more I write about it, the more I think it can be undone, and that recognition is not only possible but will probably be very necessary in future with the way the retail landscape is looking.

It’d be interesting to see whether Canongate’s club night, Irregular, gets them a new audience, or brings them closer to a segment of the market that’s well-suited to what they publish. They’re clever you see; they think about what we’re all up to when we’re not reading, and they get in there, as it should be when you know your market well. But Irregular actually puts them in a place most publishers don’t go: outside the office, in the world, with the readers, doing something different. The night is modestly priced at a fiver (or 3 pounds if you get yourself on the Facebook list), which included a free copy of Dreams From My Father and a shot of tequila, as well as a cracking evening of live music, readings and dancing. It wasn’t out of anyone’s reach either; no hierarchy existed wherein publishers and authors disappeared ‘backstage’ between performances. We sat on the floor and laughed at the funny bits, and Jamie Byng and the band and the poets and novelists wandered around with their pints and chatted to whoever happened to be looking their way at the time.

How did people find out about it? I don’t really know. The evening was in conjunction with Limbo, a weekly club night in Edinburgh, and it got some national press, but I suspect there were a lot of industry people there too, for the inaugural evening. Did the Limbo folk pick up on the Canongate presence? They couldn’t have missed it, although commendably, we were never bombarded with logos, shameless plugs or even the restriction of including authors only from the Canongate list (Joe Dunthorne read from Submarine, published in February by Penguin). It was about doing something special in the community and being involved as well as giving something out to reward the people that showed interest.

There seems to be a recurring theme in all the ruckus about ebook pricing (see here plus comments for one good set of coherent arguments) that the value system of publishers clearly differs from that of readers, that cost-driven pricing won’t work because the ebook market won’t tolerate upwards of a certain price point ($9.99, it would seem), and I think this is a good example of publishers taking the good stuff they’ve got, and giving it out at a price that, to me, seemed like fantastic value. Mightn’t have cost them anything to screen five minutes of Nick Cave reading from his new novel, but for people who admire him, or even have an interest, we were getting a sneak preview, six months ahead of the release, read by the author himself and set to a specially written soundtrack. And a free book. And a drink.

Anyway, end of ode to Canongate, but I’ll be watching them closely to see where the savvy kids in publishing are going.