Social Media Week

I’ve long ignored this blog, partly because I worry from time to time that I chose not to make it anonymous. It sure limits what you can say sometimes! But anyway I though the turning of the year called for some kind of update.

I went into Toronto on Thursday for a book publishing panel for Social Media Week. I’m not sure what I expected, but I think something with more discussion from the audience. Which, of course, is not the fault of the panel but of the audience. It didn’t help that I was late. I wrote the time down as 2:00 for no good reason, so although I was there almost on time, I was wandering Queen St. killing time until it “started.” Three fabulous and knowledgeable women on the panel answered questions put to them by a moderator who mentioned his own writing WAY too many times. I had no idea who he was (maybe I should have), but he sure did.

I’m perhaps not being fair to him, but he did seem to monopolize a lot of the conversation and I would have liked to have heard more from other players in the room. He ignored one person repeatedly who had his hand up. Ultimately he left.  The panel had great ideas for promoting fiction on social media, and I’d love to think more about some of them. I hope there’s a recap somewhere. I really wanted to get into the idea of different kinds of publishing, coming from the academic side, but it was all trade fiction. Another session, another day, I suppose. Something for Book Camp. But who would come? I’m all alone…

The only comment I did make was about YA reading, which is booming right now, although I don’t know if it ever stopped. We just know more about everyone’s habits these days, I think.  I know something about this, so although I didn’t want to sound negative about e-books, because I really like the possibilities they hold, it’s been my experience that kids read in every format: online, on their phones, iPod Touch, etc., but that they are still very much invested in books, getting those books signed, carrying them around in their backpacks, swapping them back and forth, etc. I’m not so sure that will go away any time soon or that we should even be promoting e-books to kids except to enhance their reading. Something to ponder. A paper book doesn’t vibrate when your best friend is trying to get hold of you or pop up that you have a new message on MSN. I’ve known my daughters to go into their rooms with books and not emerge for hours. They don’t hear my call them for dinner or anything. That kind of focus I don’t think could be sustained using a multi-purpose reader. I’m not sure what to think about that.

Julie (Book Madam) observed that she reads mostly non-fiction on the Kindle. Deanna says she doesn’t take her Sony Reader to bed but reads in on her commute. I am different. I first downloaded a couple of non-fiction titles on the Kindle, but found I wasn’t interested enough to explore them. Then I downloaded a novel I wanted to read and I did take it to bed, just like a book. The non-fiction remains unread. My intern, however, who is a technology, SEO guy we were able to hire with a BPIDP grant, was thrilled with the features the Kindle offered him for snipping and exporting. I’m not sure I would ever use them.

Of course the big news this week is the iPad, and I do believe it will revolutionalize e-reading. It’s bigger than both the Kindle and Sony reader but just a bit, and it runs all the Apple aps that have become so popular on the iPhone. Nobody has really talked about the back-lit screen being a downfall. I like the e-ink for ease on my eyes, but seriously, I spend so much time on my computer anyway, I’m not sure it’s worth the fuss. And the opportunities for enhanced books (and this is where I see kids’ non-fiction really benefitting) are really great.

So those are my thoughts for this Saturday morning. Now back to editing a book about youth and technology!

Reading on a Small Screen

I’ve just returned from holidays and spent some of the time playing with my daughter’s new iPod Touch, so that I could figure out the ease of reading a book, look at different reading applications, and think about how we could apply this to our e-book publishing. For one thing, the iPod is much smaller than the Kindle or the Sony Reader, and it is back lit so you can read in the dark but is harder on the eyes. But it’s so easy to use the touch screen that I found navigating my way around books a breeze. She has Stanza, the most popular reading application, plus she has some stand-alone books that she purchased as apps. She doesn’t like those, though, because every app has its own icon and they clutter up the screen.

After watching her navigate this little device I think that there are a lot of people out there fooling themselves that this is not the way of the future. She can turn it on, enter her password, and find the application she wants without even looking at it. She can switch back and forth between applications at lightening speed, and search something in a book before I’ve even finished reading the first page. Perhaps the tablet that Apple is said to be releasing soon will be handy, but I can’t see it replacing this little gadget that does everything and fits in my pocket.

This post originally appeared on my workplace blog.

Clutter

I don’t know about the rest of you but the clutter in my brain surrounding e-books, e-book readers, textbooks, Kindle vs. iPhone vs other, etc. is getting to be too much! How on earth is anyone supposed to know what to do first? Or next?

Our books have all been converted to e-books (PDF) for years now and sold through Net Library and other library vendors. A bunch of books are now being converted to ePub for sale through Shortcovers. But so much more is needed. We just got a hefty grant through OMDC to move our digital publishing along, but there is so much infrastructure that has to change (on our website, in our office, etc) that it boggles my mind. Some days I want to wrest control from those who have it and get on with it, and other days I’m glad I’m not making the decisions.

Ah well, I’m off for a few days camping with no e-anything.

Scribd

Scribd is an online document service that I find intriguing. On one hand it’s very convenient for finding things like sheet music and interesting articles. On the other, I worry about piracy and who exactly is getting my hard-earned money (if the documents are not free). We (at the press) uploaded our latest catalogue there and I’m not thrilled with the quality. I’ve created an account and uploaded some of my personal writing. Here’s one from many years ago.

View this document on Scribd

Online e-books

Today at work I attended a webinar hosted by iPublishCentral, a company that is offering a deal to university presses to host and sell their ebooks. It is a very slick presentation and I found myself sucked in to all the features. Really cool widgets, a sales page that you can customize, and all kinds of analytics.

But then I started thinking like a customer and waited for the part where he talked about the formats you could download. Instead he pointed out all the reasons why reading on the desktop was so great. When he referenced the off-line function, I thought, a-ha, but, no. The off-line reader is also owned by the company and syncs with the online. All search terms in both are logged for the publisher to access, which would certainly be helpful in terms of determining keywords for ads and customer interest generally.

So there’s no mobile access. I mean, sure, I guess you could access the web page with your iPhone, but how well would that work? Not. As a consumer, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to pay out good money for something I only had access to. I want to own it, share it, and transfer it to the device of my choice. If, like the recently departed FreshNotes, the company goes out of business, just what have you purchased? Recent adventures with the Kindle have brought up the same issues.

I do think that the idea of a low price for a few days access might somehow be useful, but guess what. They have that for free elsewhere. It’s called a library.

All in all, I can’t see investing in something that feels like a stepping stone to the inevitable no-DRM formats that the consumer wants. Thoughts?

Don’t Count Out Traditional Media Yet

Something happened at work the other day that made me realize that for all the fuss about new media and online social networking, all of which I’m very fond, there is still something to be said for traditional publicity. In the spring we published a book of Canadian nature poetry. A lovely book. We had a few successful launches and sales have been good (keeping in mind we’re talking about poetry). This past weekend the book was reviewed very positively in The Globe and Mail and we and the editor were thrilled. That review will go a long way toward getting the book noticed. Then, yesterday, we got a call from a catalogue put out twice yearly by the independent booksellers. It’s a very strong marketing tool and publishers pay to get in it. We were being offered a spot because of the Saturday review (not free, but nonetheless a spot).

So things do affect other things in a good way and sometimes “new media” has nothing to do with it.

Blogging at Work

Don’t blog about your product. Give your readers content they’re not getting elsewhere and make them want to return.

Such is the advice (and I believe it to be good advice) of expert new media gurus about corporate blogging. But it’s incredibly hard to do.

Blogging about publishing in general is all over the web. As is blogging about new media, new technologies, the trend to “free,” etc. How on earth do I make my blog interesting and different enough so that people tune in on a regular basis.

For the time being I do blog about the books, because the blog page is more flexible than our web page and I can talk about them in more detail. I always look for opportunities to tie a book in with a breaking story, and it doesn’t happen very often.

This week I got lucky: a story in the news about breastfeeding, a new book on breastfeeding, and an author who understood that when I asked her for  a comment I didn’t mean next week when all her marking was done.

Because the blogging, facebooking, twittering, etc., is just one part of my job but seems to take up an inordinate amount of time, my goal is to do some planning. How many posts per week. What subjects interest me. Can I work some audio/video into the posts (a whole other time-sucking feature).

I’m envious of a colleague at another press who was doing such a good job they made her job all about online media. Bigger company, though, and it’s not going to happen to me.

So I plug away and hope that people are reading.

Free?

So the big debate this week, with the release of Chris Anderson’s Free is whether publishers will be expected to provide their content for free, an argument that makes people very, very nervous in the circles in which I play.

Anderson uses the music industry as an example of an industry that has thrived since people starting sharing files. And I think that’s great. Although I usually fork out the ten bucks to buy albums on iTunes, it’s still better than twenty bucks for a CD and I have been known to find the odd track for free. Then I do all the things that people say I will do. I go to concerts, I buy the odd t-shirt, etc.

But how do we apply this to the book world? How many times do people read books? If we give the whole thing away will the book still sell?  Cory Doctorow, popular author of, among other things, last year’s Little Brother have proven that this model does work. But that’s fiction. People still seem to want to own fiction. My press publishes non-fiction for the academic market with some crossover to trade and some textbooks. The textbook market is definitely changing, with students trying to save money and preferring to access information in a mobile device, whether that be as large as a laptop or as small as a cell phone. If we give that away for free, why would anyone buy the book?

And who pays the author and the publishing professionals who acquired, edited, and marketed the book? It’s not that I am resistant to the idea of getting things free, I truly don’t know yet how it’s going to change our industry, and where that will leave academic publishing.

Last year at the annual AAUP meeting there was a lot of talk about a Green model and a Gold model. I haven’t completely grasped the difference so I’ll use a clip from another website, Ercim News.

Types of Open Access
OA can be delivered in two ways:

• ‘green’: the author can self-archive at the time of submission of the publication (the ‘green’ route) whether the publication is grey literature (usually internal non-peer-reviewed), a peer-reviewed journal publication, a peer-reviewed conference proceedings paper or a monograph
• ‘gold’: the author or author institution can pay a fee to the publisher at publication time, the publisher thereafter making the material available ‘free’ at the point of access (the ‘gold’ route). The two are not, of course, incompatible and can co-exist.

These models generally refer to the publication of scholarly articles such that you would find in journals and the call for open access here is in direct response to the astronomical fees charged by some of the bigger journal publishers. Stevan Harnad, who supports the green model, figures some new model will emerge after the current model collapses and the universities are saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in cancelled subscriptions that they can now use to finance publication.

This is all just musing. I have no idea what will actually happen, but I can see just in our business that the dramatic fall in the economy in the United States is already having an impact on purchasing decisions and anything we can do to give people more options is a good thing.

More to come.

Because I Need More to Do

I created this space so I could learn to blog about publishing in a more relaxed fashion than I do on my official blog. I hope practice here will lead me to become a better blogger for the press and that the research I do for that blog will lead to some more interesting investigations here. That’s it for now.