In their ruling, judges Ocariz, Gutierrez and Campillo said that “..since ancient times there has been the loan or sale of books, movies, music and more. The difference now is mainly on the medium used – previously it was paper or analog media and now everything is in a digital format which allows a much faster exchange of a higher quality and also with global reach through the Internet.”

Judges Liken P2P To The Ancient Practice of Lending Books

Everybody in the publishing industry knows that Amazon’s Kindle files can only be read on the Kindle and its various apps, and that Apple  has similarly restricted its iBooks files to the iPad (and soon, the iPhone), but many are wondering if there will ever be an industry-wide standard that lets readers keep their eBooks—no matter what device they read them on.

What can you do to avoid losing your eBooks when you change eReaders?

For now, you can only do your research before making a purchase and choose one of the many eReaders—Sony, Kobo and Nook among them—that will let you read your eBook across a multitude of platforms. Don’t lose hope, though. We will very likely see device restrictions open up within the next few years.

The reason that the Kindle and iBooks files can’t be shared with other devices is simple: they don’t use Adobe DRM like the majority of their competitors. Apple, who has declared war with Adobe by removing Flash capabilities from all Apple products, has opted for their own DRM file encryption system called FairPlay, and Kindle uses its own format as well, which they’ve simply called Kindle DRM. Kindle’s protection seems to elicit the most outrage from users, since there is currently no way of finding out how many times an eBook can be downloaded before it expires.

People are still adjusting to the idea of purchasing the rights to an eBook rather than owning the product itself.

However, most eReaders and eBook stores sell ePUB files encrypted with Adobe DRM. These files can be shared across any devices that use the same encryption system, while still being restricted to a limited number of downloads and licensed devices. And while Adobe may not be the industry standard yet, it’s well on its way. If they could just resolve their turf war with Apple and get them on board, both companies would have it made, and could probably eventually overpower Amazon to the point where the Kindle might even be forced to comply and adhere to the same system, too.

Google Editions aims to eliminate the problem of choosing a device built on proprietary formats and DRM by adding an interesting dimension: “Books in the Cloud”. By storing eBooks in cyberspace, Google will allow readers to access their eBooks anytime, anywhere, on any device—as long as their device of choice connects to the Internet.

1984...meet DRM by jbonnain (CC 2.0)

Since I own a non-wireless, non-3G device (my current eReader of choice is the Sony Touch Edition), this doesn’t work for me. Frankly, I prefer a file I can download and store. Sometimes I just want to read in the middle of nowhere. And I don’t like the creepiness of Amazon being able to suck books away, or track what passages I’m highlighting; I prefer to keep my reading habits to myself, and keep the eBooks I’ve purchased, thank you very much.

And I certainly don’t need the distractions of Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader while I’m in the midst of a good story.

Eventually someone will capitulate and start a domino effect, and all eBooks will be encrypted with the same system, so that readers have more flexibility with their purchases. There’s too much pressure from bloggers, readers and publishers for that not to happen.

Remember Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD? Eventually someone had to win and someone had to lose.

Readers simply won’t stand for it when their eReaders start to break, it’s time to buy a new one, and they’re stuck purchasing from the same company every time in order to maintain their eBook library.

Of course, we could always take a lesson from the Spanish judges who ruled that P2P sharing of ebooks is equivalent to lending your book to a friend, and get rid of DRM restrictions altogether…

Emma Cunningham is an ebook geek, digital marketer and publicist, and avid reader. Currently working as the Production Coordinator for the Digital and Internet department at Harlequin’s Toronto headquarters, Emma is lucky enough to be immersed head-first in the changing industry. She is also a STOTT PILATES Certified Instructor.

In April, we wrote about the possible implications of Apple’s then just-released iPad. Sixty days and two million units later (that’s one sold every 3 seconds), the new tablet device has undoubtedly changed the publishing industry’s focus on eBooks, but whether it’s the catalyst for a permanent shift remains to be seen.

So let’s examine the topics we feel are most important in arming publishers for the new media opportunities afforded by the iPad.

1. eBooks vs. Apps

Before the iPad, most publishers were content to produce basic eBooks for the plethora of devices available. Now, however, many seem to feel that apps developed specifically for a particular publication might be better. App development is more costly than eBook production, since it involves custom programming; they’re also not portable between platforms (e.g. iPad and Android), meaning additional development costs for multi-device support.

The dilemma facing publishers is whether the on-screen presence that an app provides is worth the cost, versus simply being an eBook in the iBookstore. There are now over 225,000 apps available in the App Store, approximately 8,500 of which are dedicated to the iPad. It will be difficult for publishers to differentiate their apps within such a large ecosystem, although some print-based apps have broken through (e.g. The Elements, Alice, Wired Magazine).

2. Enhanced eBooks

Along with the eBook vs. App discussion, a great deal of attention is being paid to the topic of enhanced eBooks. What constitutes “enhanced” is subjective. In general, enhanced eBooks include functionality beyond simple page turning, such as annotation and dictionary lookup. They might include links to websites, or embedded or linked audio and video. Developers such as Aptara have methods for enhancing eBooks based on the ePUB standard using HTML5, which allows audio and video to be included within an eBook and played/displayed without leaving the iBooks app. The upcoming release of iPhone OS 4.0 (now known as iOS4, to include the iPad and possible future devices) will also make enhanced eBooks simpler to use, since multiple apps can be open at one once (although only one can be fully active).

3. The Common Platform

The iPad has become a common platform for other eBook retailers to sell their products. Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Kobo, among others, have released apps that allow iPad users to purchase, store and read their proprietary eBooks. This is an interesting strategy since the aforementioned booksellers also have individually branded eBook reading devices. Industry analysts will be watching to see whether the creation of multi-platform apps will increase eBook sales without significantly cannibalizing sales of reading devices.

As a side note, Borders has also jumped into the eBook reader market, but instead of marketing their own reading device, they are selling several different devices with various price points. And Google will be launching Google Editions shortly which promises eBooks that are stored in the cloud and can be read anywhere, on any device with a browser.

4. ePUB Update

The IDPF (International Digital Publishing Forum) has chartered a working group to update the ePUB standard to allow for more functionality and interchange of eBook data. There are 14 main improvements that the working group is tasked to address including language support, enhanced support of metadata, rich media, navigation, mathematics, annotation, and interactivity. The working group is chartered through May 2011 with drafts due to be released between September and December 2010.

At this point, the devices/platforms are several steps ahead of the ePUB standard in terms of functionality.  Hopefully, the next version will enable standardized ways to create enhanced publications (books, newspapers, magazines, etc.) across devices and eliminate the need to develop proprietary extensions.

5. Getting eShelf Space

Many medium and small publishers continue to encounter barriers in getting access to the various eBook stores. There are many reasons, including exclusivity requirements and revenue sharing agreements, to name a couple. These publishers are looking for partners to assist them not only in preparing eBooks, but also in getting them into online outlets. Some outlets are looking to aggregators to act as intermediaries between themselves and smaller publishers and self-publishers. As more and more online outlets emerge, the role of these aggregators will increase, possibly creating a new service category within the eBook publishing industry.

How Far We’ve Come… in Just Two Months

Below are updates on some of the statements and speculations we made immediately following the iPad’s launch:

• “It appears that Apple’s iPad can provide a one-stop-shop solution to content publishers through their online store, reader software and DRM − which can only serve to simplify mobile content delivery.”

While it is true that content publishers do have a new market outlet, it resembles Amazon’s and Barnes & Noble’s. Whether delivery is simpler still remains to be seen.

• “Aptara is in the process of examining the iPad SDK (software development kit) to fully understand the iPad’s impact on eBook applications. We will keep you updated as our evaluation continues and we have more information to share.”

Aptara is now helping publishers bring their content to life by developing interactive iPad apps, as well as enhanced eBooks for the iPad (and other eReaders and smart phones). In fact, some of the most successful apps being produced, by Aptara and others, are those based on content that had previously appeared only in print. See above for more information on eBooks vs. Apps vs. enhanced eBooks.

• “Some have predicted that the iPad may be the textbook of the future. Until Apple releases more details about the capabilities of the iBook and iBookstore it’s hard to know for sure what the possible applications might be.”

Many educational institutions have ordered iPads for their staff and students, including Illinois Institute of Technology, Seton Hall University, George Fox University and Abilene Christian University.  These institutions are being closely watched to gauge whether the iPad is indeed the textbook of the future (some of these universities previously attempted to integrate the iPhone and iPod Touch into classes, with varying degrees of success).  The hope is that the iPad’s larger screen will enhance learning aids and therefore the learning experience.

In comparison, a previous study to evaluate the Kindle DX at Princeton found that regardless of the form factor, “learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes”.

Speed was also an issue with the Kindle.  While the iPad is fast, has a color screen, and thousands of apps, its iBook reader does not support most forms of physical interaction just described.  (NOTE: At the recent WWDC 2010, Steve Jobs announced updates to the iBooks app that will allow for bookmarks, highlighting and notes, as well as for support of PDF within iBooks. The iBooks app will also be available on any device capable of supporting iOS4, including the iPad, iPhone 4, iPhone 3G and 3GS, 2^nd/3rd generation iPod Touch.)

Other reader apps do provide some of these abilities, but cannot open the Apple DRM files. Some eTextbook apps are starting to emerge, but are priced based on a limited-time subscription.  Once the subscription expires, the book is no longer available, though personal notes are.

The bottom line is that the iPad’s app capability presents an incredibly large and clean slate for exploring how static content can be brought to life as new and powerful learning aids, though apps are significantly more expensive and less portable than converting textbooks to e/iBooks.  This reality, combined with the results of the Universities’ testing, will significantly influence the ultimate use case for iPads in schools.

• “Undoubtedly one of the most promising aspects of the iPad announcement is their impending growth in size and scope of the eBook market − thanks to the power of the Apple brand.”

There is no question that the eBook market has many new entrants (consumers and publishers) thanks to Apple’s new device. After just two months, more than 5 million eBooks had been downloaded from the iBookstore.

So Where to From Here?

As Bob Dylan said, “The Times They Are a-Changin’.”  The publishing industry is evolving before our eyes on several fronts (devices, standards, business models, etc.).  Who could have predicted the rate of adoption and change we’ve witnessed in just the past two months? The next few months will likely be a continuum

Bring your seat forward, put your tray table up, ensure that your seat belt is securely fastened, and enjoy the ride!

As CTO, Samir Kakar is responsible for Aptara’s technology products and processes in support of key customers such as Cambridge University Press, Random House and Amazon, and Oxford University Press.  His technology portfolio includes the patented web-based XML authoring solution, PowerXEditor, and eGen, Aptara’s eBook Production Platform.

The launch of the iPad and iBooks and the tremendous stream of one-off demos reimagining publishing have made it extremely difficult to understand what technologies for enriched content are available to publishers today. In particular, I’ve seen a lot of confusion about what HTML5 might actually mean and what specific opportunities it might bring for digital reading.

To try to shed some light on some complicated work, I’ve pieced together a very incomplete introduction to some of the new things that HTML5 and related specifications might bring (remember: they aren’t finished or implemented everywhere).

Seven concrete areas of opportunity:

New semantics

HTML5 adds a bunch of new elements that might help publishers represent their content more clearly.

• section, article, header, and aside should be very useful wrappers for real-world content.
• Older web browsers will safely ignore unknown tags, but some ereaders that aren’t based on browsers may exhibit unexpected behavior. Also, typically, semantic tagging alone won’t drive a lot of sales.

Drawing

HTML5 adds a canvas element, which allows for (really snazzy) complex drawing and animation. Mark Pilgrim’s chapter in Dive into HTML5 offers not only the hairy details but also an example of how embedded HTML5 can change instructional materials (view it in Safari).

• This might replace some of what we think about when we say ‘Flash’ casually. It might allow for more interactive elements to be included in content.
• There are no easy-to-use tools that generate canvases — they must be coded by hand (Although it sounds like some basic tools are close).

Video

HTML5 adds a video element, which offers the first standards-based way to embed video in a web page. Similarly, an audio element has been added.

• Seamlessly embeddable video may offer new ways of assembling and delivering multimedia content.
• Licensing for the actual encodings of the video content (the way that they’re compressed and stored) is unbelievably messed up and getting worse.

CSS3

A related set of updates to the Cascading Style Sheets specifications, CSS3, is often discussed alongside HTML5.

• CSS3 may bring a range of delightful updates for content creators, from better support for font-faces on the web to animations and transitions that may (along with canvas) allow alternatives to Flash for flashy stuff.
• Licensing solutions for fonts on the web are still in-progress. Authoring tools non-existent; support not complete across browsers.

Geolocation

Updates to a JavaScript API alongside HTML5 allow for users to reveal their physical location.

• There are probably a lot of opportunities to connect reading, readers, booksellers, and where people actually are.
• Very little support on desktops or more basic phones.

Offline Applications

A set of specifications related to HTML5 make it possible to create web applications that run without an active internet connection.

• Offline web applications can offer many of the features that standalone iPhone and Android Apps have and do not have to go through any App Store. They may also be more portable, as they don’t have to have a separate set of software for each platform. [Explicitly: This is the part of HTML5 that allows Ibis Reader to behave just like a normal App on iPhones, iPads, and Android phones.]
• Offline web applications are typically slower than standalone apps, although this will become less important as faster devices like the iPad become more common. Support on platforms is not uniform; Firefox doesn’t seem interested in supporting the current database specification.

Microdata

Another related specification that provides way of adding machine-readable annotations to content.

• One use of microdata might be to embed content licensing and other details inside pages.
• Yawn. Some of these features have been around in microformats for years and haven’t really taken off, although this could be very important for specialized content with regularly-structured content (cookbooks would be an easy example).

Sadly, HTML5 support (on any of the above) in Internet Explorer (even the unreleased IE9) is woefully incomplete and IE is still the most ubiquitous browser. Look at the number of red Xs in the right-hand columns of this support chart: http://www.findmebyip.com/litmus/

Does the above inspire you to try out some of these new opportunities now that you can pierce some of the HTML5 hype?

Please let us know, as we’re actively seeking publishers and authors interested in innovating and experimenting with actual content to develop short- or long-form examples that take avantage of these new possibilities for enthralling, educating, and entertaining readers.

This post was originally published on the ThreePress blog, and has been reprinted with Mr. Fahlgren’s permission.

Keith Fahlgren is a Publishing Technology Consultant with Threepress. He specializes in helping publishers create effective and engaging digital content and is the co-developer (with Liza Daly) of the first HTML5 ebook platform, Ibis Reader™. His contributions to the digital publishing ecosystem include developing the ePub output for the open-source DocBook-XSL Stylesheets and spearheading the development of OPDS Catalogs, an attempt to make web-accessible ebooks more discoverable as part of the BookServer project. Keith has spoken widely and was formerly at O’Reilly Media, where he helped design and implement many of their digital publishing workflows.

Over 25 years, Apple has earned the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to their tribe. They can get the word out about a new product without a lot of money because one by one, they’ve signed people up. They didn’t sell 300,000 iPads in one day, they sold them over a few decades.

–“Secrets of the biggest selling launch ever”, Seth Godin

The iPad reviews are in, and whether positive, negative or on the fence loaded with caveats, the most common underlying thread is that Apple has created a device that could eventually change the way we acquire, consume and interact with digital content.

This potential change is important to publishers of all kinds, but particularly to those of books as the eBook experience on the iPad is arguably one of its weakest features.

While iBooks, Kindle and Kobo (the three eBook apps I tested) are all solid readers with varying appeal, replicating the reading experience of a print book via static EPUB files (on a device that weighs twice as much an average book!) is like driving a Porsche to the corner store for a six-pack of Old Milwaukee. While test-driving eBooks on the iPad, I limited myself to free books, samples, and in the case of Kindle, ebooks my wife and I have already purchased for her Gen 1 device (which she loves, BTW, despite the limited inventory of books she actually wants to read), and I wasn’t terribly impressed by any of them.

I also downloaded a variety of other apps, all free, and NPR, Epicurious and Disney’s Toy Story each demonstrated the real potential for delivering a truly engaging, innovative reading experience that leverages the iPad’s strengths and comes close to aligning with Apple’s marketing of it as a “magical and revolutionary” device. The Marvel Comics app (powered by ComiXology, whose multi-publisher inventory is impressive) is also a notable step towards realizing Jim Fallone’s compelling vision for digital comics, and if Graphic.ly delivers on the promise suggested by its private beta, the iPad could truly be a game-changer for comics.

As Eric Freese noted in his iPad review, there is the very real possibility that the higher eBook prices some publishers have fought for, using Apple’s entry into the market as leverage, could backfire on them, and soon:

Next to its screen size and capacity, herein is perhaps the biggest benefit of the iPad as an eReading device − its ability to purchase and download eBooks from any retailer (assuming Barnes and Noble releases their app soon).

This might actually drive prices down since the iPad enables direct head-to-head competition between eBook retailers.

And therein lies the problem for regular eBooks, and by extension, their traditional publishers.

Why pay $9.99+ for a single eBook, when there are far more compelling apps available for much less money, all based on familiar brands, that take full advantage of the $500+ investment in the device? At $9.99, eBooks are competing with everything from Netflix, which allows you to stream unlimited movies for $8.99/month, to well-known games like Scrabble, Need for Speed, Command and Conquer, and Civilization Revolution, all of which are $9.99 – $14.99.

An interesting, and seemingly unrelated announcement came out this week via Deadline Hollywood that should give everyone in the publishing food chain something to think about:

I’ve learned that a significant All-Boards meeting for the Producers Guild of America took place tonight. Sources tell me that the members voted on a series of amendments that qualify individuals as professional producers. More importantly, for the first time in the guild’s history, they voted on and ratified a new credit — that of the Transmedia Producer — which had been shepherded by such Hollywood names as Mark Gordon, Gael Anne Hurd, Jeff Gomez, Alison Savage, and Chris Pfaff.

This Guild-wide adoption is unprecedented as it will allow executives who expand storylines of franchises onto multiple platforms to receive official credit on these projects as “Transmedia Producers”. These producers develop cross platform storylines on Film, Television, Short Film, Broadband, Publishing, Comics, Animation, and Mobile — and now, they’ll be credited with an official title. I’m told this is a historic move for the PGA because the guild rarely backs new credits. “These amendments demonstrate how the guild supports producers making and changing the game,” a source told me tonight.

The definition of transmedia is up for debate, but the one I prefer focuses on the storyworld first, distribution channels second, with the latter determined via a collaborative process that puts the author’s creative vision at the center. Most so-called transmedia projects are really just cross-media marketing initiatives and/or brand extensions, driven by licensing deals and a parceling out of rights in a manner that often includes loss of creative control by the author. Star Wars is the go-to example of a transmedia property, and while it has definitely evolved into a legitimate one, it didn’t start out that way.

The recognition of “Transmedia Producer” by the PGA is important as it potentially shifts power away from literary agents and publishers whose sole focus is on the book, print or electronic, instead of the underlying story, its creator and the varied platforms now available to storytellers, whether fictional or truth.

If the iPad fulfills its promise of changing the way we interact with digital content, the question of territorial rights for eBooks and the temptation to split eBook rights from print deals could become even thornier as the book becomes just one of a variety of platforms available to authors in a transmedia world, and “Transmedia Producers” become the preferred gatekeepers.

While there are some in the publishing world who appear to have seen this shift coming — including Open Road Integrated Media, Movable Type Literary Group, and Random House — developing new business models to take advantage of cross-media opportunities, can any of them compete with a truly collaborative approach that’s a far more natural fit for film producers?

Where does the book, and the publishing supply chain devoted to it, fit in a transmedia world?

Guy LeCharles Gonzalez is the Chief Executive Optimist for Digital Book World.

First of all, a disclaimer:  While I did own the only Apple ][ in my college dorm—and wish I’d bought Apple stock when it was $40 and my financial adviser didn't think it would go much higher—I am not an Apple fanboy.  Only recently did I cash in airline miles for an iPod Touch so I could hone my eReading skills (and of course, score cool points with my kids), so don't expect a gushing "this is going to change the world" review.

My iPad arrived bright and early Saturday morning.  I was running errands so it languished in its box for several extra hours after its trip from China.  Once home, the unboxing was quite the attraction as my kids crowded around me begging for the opportunity to use it first.  Fortunately, Dad wins in these situations, so I went about downloading free apps, books and songs to give it a good test drive.  I work for an eBook production company, so I was particularly interested in the device’s eReader capabilities (which I'll get to shortly).

For starters, the iPad just feels good in your hands.

At 1.5 pounds, it’s light enough to carry, though I wouldn’t want to hold it out in front of me for long periods of time.  Steve Jobs was spot-on in describing it as "beautiful" in a geeky sort of way; I felt like Captain Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise as I walked about the house.  The screen is crisp and clear, and the iPad-specific apps look terrific on the large screen.  Most of the iPhone apps look pretty good as well, though some lose their clarity when expanded to fill the larger screen.

I downloaded the iBook app, as well as a set of books my company uses to demo eReader units; they all loaded as expected.  The screen brightness automatically adjusts based on ambient light conditions, so the reading experience was fairly good sitting in my living room and downstairs in my office (aka man cave).  Output brightness can be adjusted, which is ideal if you have a bed partner who is as sensitive to light at night as mine is.  But outdoors was a different story, as predicted.

The glare and reflections from the highly reflective glass made it very difficult to see the screen on a sunny day.

The iPad’s book reading experience is very similar to most other eReader devices; ePUB-based files displayed as expected.  In portrait mode, you see a single page at a time.  In landscape mode, you see two pages in an “open book” layout, though it doesn’t equate to twice as much text.  The animated page turn is a nice, but unnecessary, feature for a truer book-like experience.  The table of contents and book scroller make navigating within an eBook simple.

My most disappointing iPad experience occurred with perhaps its most highly anticipated feature – a component of its enhanced eBook capability.  When I clicked on a web link in my eBook, a message popped up asking me if I “want to leave iBooks and open this link?"  Well no, I didn't, but apparently I didn't have a choice.

When I clicked the link (to another eBook file) the browser then asked me if I would like to open the file—IN STANZA!!!

Because the iBook app depends on iTunes to manage its content, simple access to other eBooks is not feasible.  This clumsy and unexpected user interface is possibly a significant downfall in the iPad’s support for interactivity. Web links are frequently mentioned as a class of enhancements; having to acknowledge leaving a book every time a link is selected gets tiresome fast.

In an effort to run the device through all of its eReader paces, I downloaded the New York Times Editors Choice and USA Today apps.  Not surprisingly, the iPad’s large, high-quality screen provided a very good newspaper reading experience—including ads, which might provide a new revenue stream for the struggling newspaper industry.  Whether it’s enough to save newspapers is another story.

Next I downloaded Hachette’s Twilight graphic novel.  (When did they cease being called comic books?) I was impressed with how slick it looked and worked. Many predict that the iPad will increase graphic novel sales; I look forward to following the reality, since as a kid, one of the coolest things about comic books was trading them with my buddies.

I downloaded the Kindle app for the iPad and browsed through some sample books.  It felt very similar to reading on a Kindle device, except navigation through the book was done using screen swipes rather than pushing buttons (and doesn’t include the page turn animation that is in the iBook app).  However, to download previously purchased Kindle books, browse the Kindle store and make purchases, the app opens the browser to the Amazon site.  Assuming you have a Kindle account, you can direct the site to download your content to the iPad app.

Next to its screen size and capacity, herein is perhaps the biggest benefit of the iPad as an eReading device − its ability to purchase and download eBooks from any retailer (assuming Barnes and Noble releases their app soon).

This might actually drive prices down since the iPad enables direct head-to-head competition between eBook retailers.

Many suspected that Apple would block apps from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, abiding by their rule of not duplicating core functionality on Apple devices.  But when they announced that the iBooks app would not come preinstalled on the iPad, they opened the door to other apps.   The device’s interoperability with other eReader stores suggests that the iPad could replace the PC, and all other single function eReaders, as the dominant reading platform.

There is a notable difference in presentation between eBooks sold as apps and those sold through the iBookstore as EPUB-formatted books; the former are simply stunning.  I downloaded the Grimm's Fairy Tales app from Vook and the Disney Toy Story app.  Although I'm not sure what the videos contributed to the stories in the Vook app, it was interesting how video could be included in-line with the text of the story.

In the Disney app, however, I was simply amazed at the graphics and use of different layers within the images to produce an almost 3D effect.  My youngest child (8 years old) got the privilege of playing with the book/app; she loved being able to turn off the read-along feature, sing along with the songs from the movies, and color scenes from the book.

Since the iPad was announced, I’ve been wondering how practical it would be for activities other than reading.  Turns out it’s very handy for visiting websites or checking email from anywhere.  With seven children, our Sunday evening ritual is reviewing the upcoming week’s activities calendar against the family’s schedule.  The iPad’s large touch screen made it quick and easy to review the school’s website while standing in the kitchen and relaying calendar updates to my wife.

The iPad has been touted as a great media player for music and videos. The music player was indeed as good as the iPod (no surprise).  I checked out ABC’s app for viewing their TV line-up and the on-screen videos looked great.

I purchased the “Pages” word processing app and am writing this very article on my iPad.  While I’m not the world's fastest typist and by no means a touch typist, I’m pleased to report that I had few problems.  Landscape mode makes the keyboard roomier and learning the software was quite simple. The only challenge was keeping lazy fingers from accidentally resting on the screen-based keyboard, something I expect repetitive muscle memory to solve.

One of the biggest advance criticisms of the iPad was its inability to multitask.  Case in point: the iBook/browser experience.  I was able to listen to music while reading a book and typing this, but there was no way to control the player.  You must exit the eBook app in order to control the iPod app.  It’s understandable that the device is more responsive with this sort of restriction, but in this day and age, it’s a surprising omission.

I can do it on my Android phone (hint, hint).

UPDATE: Just learned that you can control the iPod app while running other apps by hitting the Home button twice to bring up the iPod controls

Another major criticism of the iPad is its lack of Flash support.  As such, many websites have been rebuilt or specially-built to reduce or eliminate the dependence on Flash; eg: NPR set up a site for the iPad that works and looks great on the device.   If after this weekend’s first wave, iPad sales continue to climb, I expect we’ll see many other websites following suit.

My top three iPad takeaways after 36 hours are:

1) Its ability to access any eBook from any vendor who provides an app.

2) The added innovation and excitement to the publishing world that it has ushered in, including stunning new multi-media possibilities.

3) Mine won't be showing up on eBay any time soon.

Am I dumping my desktop machine for it?  No (and not just because I need something to run iTunes on).

Will I travel sans laptop with just my Blackberry and iPad?  Maybe.

Will it save the publishing industry?  Doubtful. Though, I expect it will be a much needed booster shot for the healthy and nimble publishers. But for publishers that aren’t already preparing for electronic content distribution, a single device or platform is not going to be a magic bullet.

Is it the new eTextbook?  Maybe.  I’ve already heard it reported that some colleges are planning to issue students iPads with eBooks pre-loaded, in place of printed textbooks.

Does the iPad represent the death of the Kindle, Amazon, the Nook, Barnes & Noble or [insert device or retailer here]?  I don’t think so.  At this stage, the market is still taking shape; these devices and retailers still have sandboxes to play in, either as less-expensive alternatives to the iPad, or less-expensive sources of materials for their particular device.

Will the iPad be the “world changer” so many have predicted?  It’s the first step in a good direction.

Eric Freese is a Solutions Architect with Aptara, which provides digital publishing solutions that deliver significant gains in quality, time-to-market and production costs for eBook publishers.

If you’re a publisher of any size, you’re thinking, and possibly worrying, about ebooks. There is no doubt that the ever-rising tide of the Internet has turned publishing’s erstwhile paper hillsides into shorelines. Now the question is, what are you doing about it?

Common publisher responses are, first, denial and, second, panic. The denialist lines can be summarised like this: “Paper books are so wonderful, nothing will replace them.” Panic usually looks like this: “Ebook prices are too low, and piracy will kill us all!” Both are statements of opinion formed largely from anecdotal evidence and a human tendency to worry too much. Those of us who spend our lives thinking about ebooks soon move beyond denial and panic.

If you’re running a big company, making and selling ebooks can be really complicated. You have to manage numbers of books, authors, editions, records, contracts and staff so large that every decision about file formats, software, rights and distribution partners becomes something like trying to put a jumper on an elephant.

If you’re a small publisher, you have a massive advantage here, because you can make decisions in a heartbeat and experiment without having to justify your boldness, and generally your authors trust you more because they deal with you as a person, not as a big, faceless company. If you think like a businessperson: you can turn that advantage into market share while the big publishers turn their tankers around. If you think like an artist: you can turn that advantage into beautiful, functional content that will turn your readers into loyal fans of your work in all its forms, whether that’s crafted, niche fiction they can read anywhere or a mobile reference guide to walks in Cape Town.

Most importantly, you can free a small part of your business from the clunky paraphernalia of physical book distribution and retail.

I always like to stress the following rather obvious point. The paper book is a marvelous combination of two quite distinct products: a story (or body of information), and a crafted, physical object. Once you can separate these two things in your mind, it becomes much easier to see how stories can be shared and sold distinct from their traditional, physical bodies. And, comfortingly, it’s easier to see how printed books will always be highly valued for their physical beauty. In consequence, the digital world both enables a rapid increase in story-telling, free from the costs of physical production, and increases the value of well-crafted physical books. Any successful publisher will find a way to make the most of this.

So, here are seven tips for small publishers adding something digital to their list.

1. Don’t think ebooks are only for technical folk: An ebook is nothing special, it’s just a document shared digitally. So, in that sense, anyone who’s ever created a Word document has created an ebook. Developing and designing a simple ebook is just the same as developing and designing a print book: write, edit, design, distribute, promote. The tools you use to create an ebook depend on the file format you’re going to distribute in, but you can mostly use the same tools for ebook and for print (Word, InDesign, Acrobat, etc.).

2. Don’t worry about security on your files. This is usually called digital rights management (DRM). One way or another, DRM costs more than you will lose to people sharing your books. (Not to mention the fact that, in the long run, word of mouth is your best friend: you want some copying, just like you want book clubs to buy and share your printed books.) You will usually pay for DRM by giving up a cut of your sales revenue, often as much as 30% of the retail price. So, only use DRM if (a) you honestly believe that 30% of your earnings is less than you’d lose to copying, and (b) you can live with the frustration DRM causes your readers when they can’t move books among their devices and computers, and you don’t think sharing books grows an author’s popularity enough to be worth allowing.

3. Find free online services for converting your books to good ebook formats. The best ebook formats are PDF and, even better for immersive reading, epub. Services like Scribd, Issuu and Exact Editions are great for sharing or selling PDF. Services like Smashwords or free software like Calibre are great for turning Word documents into the epub format. If free services don’t work, try outsourcing conversion to a conversion company, most of which are in India. You’ll pay about R500 ($68 USD; $45 GBP) for an average novel, and could save yourself hours of fiddling with unfamiliar software.

4. Find free services online for distributing and selling your ebooks. These services are all non-exclusive, so you can use them all at the same time, making it easier for a customer to find and buy your books. (Most people looking for your book will start with a major retailer, or search for the title or author on Google. You must be in one of those two places.) Often, each of these services will have different strengths and weaknesses, and this is where your ability as a small publisher to experiment is especially valuable. Scribd, Exact Editions, Smashwords and Bookglutton are good options, and will give you most of the retail price as earnings. (To sell on Scribd from South Africa, you can work through Little White Bakkie.) You’ll reach many more retailers if you open a free account with a distributor like Lightning Source (usually known for print-on-demand, but they do ebooks through their sister company Ingram Digital), though you’ll give up more of your earnings to pay for their mandatory DRM. During 2010, Google Editions may become available, turning the Google Books service into an ebook store you can sell from.

5. It’s not all about ebooks. Once you’ve gone to the effort of creating a stable process for creating and storing your books digitally, be on the lookout for ways to reuse those digital files creatively. Ebooks are only one, small example of how publishers can get more from their content. Many other opportunities arise when you start working with digital files rather than print books only. For example, in the education sector we should see publishers experimenting with textbooks being remixed by teachers (e.g see Symtext or Bookriff); schoolchildren getting homework help by SMS; libraries previewing books before purchasing them; books reaching schools more quickly digitally (e.g. see Paperight, which my company is developing); authors working collaboratively with editors and each other; or even with the public (e.g. forward-thinking media company O’Reilly uses collaborative writing tools). There’s a lot of experimentation happening with mobile phones (e.g. Random House Struik’s new K53 pass-your-learners cellphone application, an interactive version of their well-known print book; or see Cellbook); and universities are way ahead of publishers in providing digital systems for sharing content within and among their staff and students, who often use shared computer labs and internet cafes.

6. Think of your print books as a value-added version of your ebooks. There are any number of reasons a person might want a print version of a book they have or could get as an ebook, and often you can charge a premium for a printed book. Make sure it’s easy to find and buy your print books online immediately: link to a page for ordering your print books wherever you can, especially where you’re selling the ebook. And all of that vice versa. The more options you give a potential customer, the more likely it is you’ll offer one that suits their needs at the very moment they’re interested in your content. Amazon says that people who own Kindle ereaders buy more ebooks and print books than before they had a Kindle. In the latest figures (quoted in the NY Times) they say 3.1 times as many books. This happens because Amazon makes it very, very easy to buy, and often promotes print and Kindle editions side by side.

7. Read about digital publishing. Just like good typography or editorial best-practice, digital-publishing knowledge is a tool that you need in order to do your job properly. You have to buy it with a little of your time. The easiest way to do this is to find three or four experts who blog about digital publishing, and spend an hour over each week reading them. If you want a ready-made list of recommended reading, go to @electricbook and see who I follow there. Take ten minutes right now to click on a few people, and see if what they’re saying looks interesting. If it is, you’re on your way.

This article was originally published at ArthurAttwell.com and has been reprinted with Mr. Attwell’s permission.

Arthur Attwell is the co-founder and CEO of Electric Book Works, a digital publishing and R&D company. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, EBW finds and tests ways to apply digital-publishing best practice in developing countries. He is also a consultant for the Digital Minds Network.

You Are Not A Gadget: A Manifesto
by Jaron Lanier (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010; ISBN 978-0-307-26964-5)

Let’s just get this out of the way: I really like this book. This book changed the way I think about the Internet and intellectual property, and I think could change a lot of minds, but only if a critical mass of people start reading it and talking about it. So this is my Queen’s Gambit.

There are too many ideas in this book that I underlined and starred and ?ed and yes!ed to count. I’m just going to touch on a few, and especially the ones that made me think of books and publishing.

Probably the most interesting idea in this book, especially for the book world, is how the Internet’s push towards the hive mind (also known as the noosphere, a word so creepy that I almost become a Luddite every time I read it) has already damaged and threatens to essentially destroy art as we now experience it.

As Lanier puts it:

“The central mistake of recent digital culture is to chop up a network of individuals so finely that you end up with a mush.”

A thing, I’m sure we can all agree, that is not great for writing, which pretty much lives and dies by things like the strength and believability of an author’s individual voice.

“Authorship—the very idea from the individual point of view—is not a priority of the new ideology.”

Which is pretty well borne out by a quick glance at Wikipedia (an entity to which I am not opposed, by the way). The argument on behalf of the hive mind is that many many people working together will come up with a better answer, and faster, than individuals working alone. Lanier pretty conclusively demonstrates that this is not always the case, even for things to which humanity already knows the answer.

And what about novels, of which there is no clear question, let alone a clear answer?

Most interestingly, Lanier talks about how hive mind thinking has interacted with advertising to create an entirely new hierarchy of creativity on the web.

“The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”

In other words, we’ve decided, or been persuaded to decide, that original content is not worth paying for, very often with the justification that the corporations that mainly provide that content are dinosaurs who can’t keep up with technology or don’t distribute the money fairly anyway (both of which are valid points, sometimes). Ironically, though, we’ve also elevated the only artistic output of non-media corporations, advertising, to a sainted level. We expect ads on websites, blogs, nytimes.com and Pandora to pay for our content instead.

Eyeballs on content: worth less and less with every $9.99 e-book.

Eyeballs on banner ads: expected to prop up an entire Internet’s worth of information commerce.

This is something I wonder about constantly. Writing has never been a reliable way of making a living, as anybody who reads biographies will tell you. But there has always been the (somewhat) rational expectation that if you wrote something good enough that other people would enjoy reading it, or be enriched by it, somebody would eventually pay you for it. Very few people have ever gotten rich as writers, but many people have eked out a living.

The (d)evolution towards hive mind thinking and writing makes that more impossible with each passing day.

“This trajectory begs the question of how a person who is volunteering for the hive all day long will earn rent money.”

(As an aside, this is not just important to booksellers because we sell the fruits of creativity, although that’s not to be ignored. But also because what we do is something that has been increasingly crowdsourced, via Amazon’s odd algorithms and reviews, and a million other ways besides, including my willingness to share book recommendations for free on Twitter with people who have neither the willingness nor the ability to reward my professional expertise with a purchase. On my cynical days, I wonder where it all will end. Will we all be expected to work at jobs to which we’re indifferent so we can come home and do the things we love for free online? If creativity is at the heart of most careers that people love, how many of those careers will disappear as we make the group decision that creative talent is no longer something to be financially rewarded? Is this potential insanity something that can be avoided? Lanier seems to think that yes, it is. I hope he is right.)

There’s another quote in here that I think can be fairly well applied to independent bookstores, but would be interesting even if it couldn’t be. “No one’s ever been able to offer good advice for the dying newspapers,” Lanier writes, “but it is still considered appropriate to blame them for their fate.”  You could substitute publishers in there for newspapers, or independent bookstores, and the sentence reads fine.

This is not to say that newspapers and publishers and independent bookstores have all been taking advice well, certainly. Obviously, it’s not necessary for me to recount the many things that failed bookstores might have done to stay in business. But sometimes (again, on cynical days only) I wonder if even everything we’re doing at WORD, and these are all at the top of all thinking people’s bookstore advice lists, will be enough: having an online store, curating our book selection to suit our neighborhood, hosting grand events, special ordering out the wazoo, and free shipping over $50, and great customer service, and all the rest.

Can any of those things matter if creativity is no longer valued because the general belief is that the product of the group is superior to the product of the individual? I suspect they will not matter a whit if that is the case. And that is the case that Lanier worries we are heading for.

I’ll mention just one more thing that piqued my interest: the ways in which our creative culture has stalled since the prevalence of the Internet. I can’t put it better than Lanier when he writes:

“Certainly with enough time, culture will reinvent itself. But how patient should we be? I find that I am not willing to ignore a dark age…It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump.”

And it’s true that mash-ups and re-mixes have become one of the pre-eminent forms of art of late. Lanier points out that while most of the decades of the twentieth century have their own distinct musical styles, due to rapid leaps and changes in the possibilities of music over the course of the century, there’s very little that distinguishes that last ten years or so of music from the ten years previous. There’s a lot of throwbacks, a lot of retro music—and not all of it necessarily bad, and some of it quite good—but also not the overhauling quirks of imagination that propelled music forward several decades ago.

I don’t know that I agree with all the conclusions that Lanier draws from this observation, but I think it’s a very good point.

Again, it’s also echoed in the book world. For all the expansion of book technology, there’s been precious little expansion of writing formats. I’ve always wondered why the main focus of e-readers has been a fancier version of reading a .pdf one page at a time on a screen small enough to fit in my purse. Even things like the Vook seem to me like the offspring of a book and the jump scenes in a video game, to be honest. Emily Pullen at Skylight has written movingly about her desire to see the boundaries of this new medium pushed a little. Writing and storytelling themselves seem also to be at a relative standstill; “it’s all been done already” echoes off every bookstore wall and writing garret.

There are also a few things in this book that I disagree with; namely, Lanier’s characterization of (and subsequent dismissal of) social media rankles, for me.

Perhaps this is because I’ve had a uniquely good experience with social media, but I doubt I’m the only one. His main argument against its ubiquity? Its calculated personalities: we spend an absurd amount of time crafting our online personas, and there are few true friendships to be found in social media.

“A real friendship ought to introduce each person to unexpected weirdness in the other.”

It would take more than one person’s anecdotes to disprove his belief, I guess, but let me be the first to say that I have formed several true and important (and unexpectedly weird) friendships due to social media. This is partially because I experience it through the existing book community, and probably also because that community is full of fantastic people who I am predisposed to like. Nevertheless, here is a short list of people I never would have met, let alone shared booze and good times with, if not for social media spurring the whole thing: Jenn! Suzanna! Melissa! Michele! And for Pete’s sake, Josh and also Liberty, neither of whom I’ve even met in person yet, but who I would invite to my wedding if I had one tomorrow.

My friendships with these people are almost exactly like many of my real world friendships, except that we type with each other more than talk.

For those six reasons and many others, I feel that Lanier is wrong to write off social media as he does, although I understand why he does: like many of the things he talks about in the book, it’s a tool that is not always well-wielded. Which is not to say that everybody should use social media the way that I do, just that a lot of the anxieties and potential problems he sees in it are non-existent for me and I suspect a lot of other people. (Aside from the “favorite music” prompt on Facebook. I hate that section.)

This is an especially odd problem because Lanier so clearly draws a line between the capabilities of tools/means of communication and what people actually do with them elsewhere in the book, especially with his emphasis on the importance of the individual voice and authorship.  Different types of communication are best served by different forms of media, but a person can retain their individuality and sense of self in all of them if desired. Social media is still developing in that regard, but I think Lanier is too focused on the primary implementations of it.

In any event, I would recommend this book to anybody reading this review. If I were Oprah, I would pick this for my book club.

If you love technology and are excited about its future, you need to read this book, because there are a lot of things you and I haven’t thought about yet. You won’t agree with all of it, but at the end I think you will agree with me on this point: we are not hearing enough voices talking about human interaction with technology. We hear a lot of “it’s fantastico!” and a lot of “it’s an abomination!” and not much in-between.

For that alone, this book is very important.

So too, if you do not like technology, or are nervous about it, I think you should also read this book. Lanier is one of the first technophiles I’ve ever read who acknowledges and treats as valid many of the anti-tech arguments I hear on a regular basis. Primarily, I thought often of a point that Jonathon of Talking Leaves…Books made in a discussion about e-books at NAIBA in 2009. Though I didn’t agree with everything he said, I did agree when he cautioned everyone in the audience to keep an eye on who is the greatest champion of e-books, and what they have to gain from the success of e-books. (Obviously, this applies more to Amazon than Booksquare.)

This same idea—who gains from the current and coming technological changes, and what do they gain?—is a crucial underpinning of this book, and I will never regard digital advances in the same way because of it.

I’m sorry this review was so long and rambling. Scarily, it was originally twice this length! There’s just so much to talk about wrt this short little book. (On that note, though: a $23.95 hardcover for 200 pages about, you know, changing the way we look at the digital world? Wowza, would I ever have played that one differently). Anyway, one of the things I’m most excited to see in the coming months is the responses of many other people to this book and the ideas therein. I encourage all of you to get your hands on it, read it, digest it, and comment on it as well.

[This review was originally published at Bookavore.com and has been reprinted with Ms. Anderson's permission.]

Stephanie Anderson is the manager of WORD Brooklyn, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and a “voracious reader with a certain verbal attitude”.

By Marian Schembari, Contributing Editor, Digital Book World

Everyone in publishing has been talking about “change”, throwing the term “social media” around like a game of monkey in the middle, and more often than not, we fret about these changes and few seem to know what exactly to do about it.

The most innovative and daring among us, though, don’t fret; they take chances.

Sometimes they work out (Pablo Defendini with Tor.com), and sometimes they don’t (Don Linn with Quartet), but the old saying applies: “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

The best example of this at the 2010 Digital Book World Conference was the “Synergizing the Book and Web” panel, where we had a chance to peek into the minds of four very different people with four very exciting endeavors, each attempting to combine book know-how and web savvy to create something new.

The panelists were Will Schwalbe of Cookstr, Lisa Holton of Fourth Story Media, Hillel Cooperman of Jackson Fish Market and author Alison Norrington.

Check out what these incredible innovators had to say for themselves:

Cookstr

The enthusiastic and charming Will Schwalbe is the founder of Cookstr, having left his position as editor-in-chief of Hyperion after 11 years. Cookstr’s concept is essentially “recipes you’ll love, from cookbooks we trust.”

So far, 300 chefs and authors are registered on the site and every day an author and recipe is featured. With the ever-expanding amount of free resources available on the web, cookbooks are having a rough time of it, but Schwalbe is constantly playing with new ways to monetize Cookstr and compensate its contributors.

The website offers the option to buy cookbooks and also hosts a Wine of the Month Club, where you can sign up and get a cookbook and two bottles of wine delivered to your door.

Monetization also comes in the form of advertising revenue shared with the rightsholder (usually publishers) and Schwalbe pointed out that they are the only cooking site that pays content creators for their content.

Additionally, the Cookstr site isn’t the only place that content can be accessed. Schwalbe is slowly creating a syndicated experience and now has deals with Bravo, whose recipe search is powered by Cookstr, and has partnered with the Daily Beast.

A Story Before Bed

This brilliant idea came not from a publishing veteran but from a software developer, Hillel Cooperman, who wanted to create a space that allows absent parents and grandparents to read to their kids.

The idea of A Story Before Bed came from the fact that Cooperman and his family are based in Seattle, while his parents live in Maryland, “2,744 traveling miles away.” He tried Skype as a way for his parents to read books to his kids, but the video was low quality; then he tried to videotape his parents reading with a scanned copy of the book.

Cooperman showed a demo featuring his daughter reading The Three Little Pigs, and the entire audience melted into a puddle of toddler-induced goo. Watch the video here.

(The best part is in the first few seconds when you see it dawn on her that she can’t actually read!)

A Story Before Bed has a ton of amazing features that make those little things you do with your kids possible, even when you’re far away. The books are 3D and the kids can see both the video of their parent/grandparent reading and the book itself. Adding to the cool factor is that the pages of the book turn in sync with the reading.

As for compensation, Cooperman said they have contracts with individual rightsholders, and at $6.99 a book, a percentage goes to them. In a surprising twist, Cooperman pointed out that they didn’t take on any investors, saying investors and The Man are “the same dude.”

“With software. we can be a lot more aggressive with experimentation.”

Alison Norington

Speaking of experimentation, author Alison Norrington takes the cake. A bestselling chic-lit novelist, Norrington experimented with her most recent book, Staying Single, by telling the story through a wide variety of digital platforms. The book’s main site consisted of daily posts where readers could subscribe for free (about 800 subscribers total) and receive a chapter via email every day.

But Norrington didn’t stop there. Her protagonist, Sophie Regan, had profiles on a number of social networking sites including Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Second Life [Note: most of these profiles are no longer online]. She set up forums, interacted with readers and produced short YouTube documentaries featuring bad chat up lines, diving further into Sophie’s story.

Through this experimentation, Norrington learned a lot about what works in the digital world and what doesn’t. She thinks the genre might have actually held her back.

“With romance,” she said, “people don’t want to get involved. It’s not like crime; they just want to be told the story.” She also said she would have spent more time in preproduction and more time on YouTube, which apparently brought in the most blog traffic.

None of this was monetized as Norrington emphasizes it was all highly experimental, but she does want to try and sell the story as a book with the additional content.

The Amanda Project

“Fourth Story Media are doing very, very cool shit with transmedia storytelling.”

Ryan Chapman

The Amanda Project is a first of its kind transmedia experience – “an interactive, collaborative fictional mystery for girls ages 13 & up, told across a variety of different media including an 8-book series, a website that features games, writing, art & social networking, and a related series of blogs, satellite sites, music, and merchandise.”

It tells the story of Amanda Valentino, a mysterious high school student who “disappeared on the Ides of March,” and readers are invited to become a part of the story as they help the main characters search for her. Those stories become an integral part of the site, and some contributors have an opportunity to be published via a partnership with HarperCollins.

Lisa Holton, founder of Fourth Story Media, said, “everything is aggregated, from creating a voice to creating a sense of her character” and credits Our Stories as the “heart and soul of the site.”

Most recently, The Amanda Project partnered up with ModCloth to create a contest for Amanda readers. Girls used Polyvore.com to create a collage of clothes they thought Amanda would wear, and the winner received a $50 ModCloth certificate and a free signed book.

What an awesome and perfect example of synergizing the book and the web!

With initiatives like these, who could possibly worry about the future of publishing? Not me.

Marian Schembari digs social media and books. Usually at the same time.

My passion for metadata isn’t a big secret – since my days at Muze and B&N.com, I’ve witnessed firsthand how good metadata helps people find the books they are looking for, and how bad metadata prevents people from finding what they want.

Why is this relevant now?

Well, the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) showed us that there is a great interest in ebook readers – 23 of them debuted there, and an entire “Ebook Zone” was created. Apple is negotiating with publishers to sell content (books, magazines, newspapers) on the iPad. With all these digitized books, search becomes more crucial than ever – web search is the ONLY way people are going to purchase these digital products.

Discovery/review services like NetGalley – as well as all the ecommerce sites – are heavily reliant on metadata not just for listing titles, but also for search algorithms themselves. (You’d think that would go without saying, but it doesn’t.)

Whether it’s “semantic” search or a more traditional browsing hierarchy, search technologies rest on metadata. Tags, definitions, clarifications (“when we say ‘porcelain’ we mean fine china, not toilets”) are all necessary to guide users to the information they want.

This metadata may not come in the form of the traditional ONIX (ONline Information EXchange) feed. If a book file is marked up in XML (Extensible Markup Language) (whether via InDesign or anything else), the title, author, BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) and LC subject codes, price, publisher, and copyright date can all be easily derived from that book file – because those data points are defined in the file (usually in the front matter) with tags.

But just as with ONIX, what’s inside those tags has to be correct. This has a better shot at happening if the search engine is pulling from the book itself (the author name, for example, is not likely to be misspelled in the actual book).

In recently-released recommendations to the publishing industry, Book Industry Communication (BIC) has stated: “Publishers must retain responsibility, wherever possible and appropriate, for the metadata of the products they publish, in all formats, print and digital.”

Another company, Giant Chair has built its entire business around hosting a metadata platform for publishers: “When equipped with the appropriate tools, publishers are naturally the most qualified and motivated source for metadata creation and enrichment.”

Which makes sense!

Except in the real world it doesn’t quite play out that way. In my career, I’ve seen lots of publisher-generated metadata. There’s a reason why NetRead, Eloquence, and other data-scrubbing services exist. There’s a reason why Ingram, Bowker, and Baker & Taylor have departments of data editors who normalize and standardize that data. There’s a reason why librarians spend countless hours re-cataloguing titles for WorldCat.

There’s a reason why BISG launched its Product Data Certification Program.

And that reason is: while publishers make the books, they continue not to pay sufficient attention to the accuracy of their data. While publishers are the definitive source of who the author is, what the list price is, what the book is about…they are not recording a lot of that information accurately. Because if they were, Fran Toolan and Greg Aden would have to find new things to do. Richard Stark would suddenly find himself with weeks and weeks of free time. Thousands of library cataloguers would be out of work. Ingram, Bowker, and B&T databases would be redundant. PDCP would not be necessary.

But good metadata IS publishers’ responsibility, fundamentally. They can outsource that responsibility, but ultimately it does all come back to the publishers. As our digital landscape explodes – as web search becomes not just one way but THE way readers find what’s next on their reading lists – metadata only becomes more important.

If your sales are dipping, it’s entirely possible that readers can’t find your books. Take a look at your data. The solution is probably there.

[This article was originally published on LJNDawson.com and has been reprinted here with the permission of Ms. Dawson.]

Laura Dawson is a 20+ year veteran of the book industry, specializing in its technology issues. She has worked at Doubleday, Muze, Barnes & Noble.com, SirsiDynix, and as an independent consultant whose clients have included R. R. Bowker, Chuckwalla, McGraw-Hill, the Book Industry Study Group, Ingram Library Services, Audible, IBS/Bookmaster North America, Harvard University Press, Yale University Press, Lexis-Nexis, Cosimo Books, and Dial-A-Book.

Brian Napack’s piracy plan made me laugh.

And then it made me excited because I figured it would make for an excellent rant. I heart controversy and what better way to spark discussion than to write about the president of Macmillan and the dumbest plan in the history of publishing?

Then I logged onto Twitter.

Well… That totally popped my balloon. Everyone was tweeting about it, and worse, everyone agreed with me. I thought I had made some incredibly insightful discovery; one that would catapult me into publishing awe. Apparently this was not the case.

Here’s a sample tweet:

redrobinreader: That’s the sound of NY pubs imploding RT @jane_l So to sum up, Macmillan’s digital strategy is to a) fight piracy and b) fight piracy…

Okay, so I wasn’t the only person to notice that Macmillan’s plan was lacking, and after a bitchfest with Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, I realized neither was I the first.

He pointed out that it was impressive for Napack to bring up a plan at all: “Usually these guys skirt around the issue and don’t put forth a solid plan.” Instead of playing the politician, Napack produced a concrete proposal of Macmillan’s next steps, regardless of its ability to actually be effective.

[NOTE: DBW Members can listen to the entire presentation here.]

Let’s go over Macmillan’s provocative strategy (you know, the one no one has ever tried before):

1. Target facilitators

2. Target pirates

3. Pursue legislation and enforcement

Apparently they’re going to hire people specifically to fight book thievery. The next generation of publishing wannabe’s will attend interviews like this:

Interviewer: What did you major in?
Wannabe: Pirate studies!
Interviewer: You’re hired!

(Let me just point out this puts my Facebook ads in a whole new light. That light looks like crap, by the way.)

What a supreme waste of time and energy. Not to mention money. Aren’t book publishers not really hiring? Isn’t big publishing in a bit of a pickle?

It’s not like taking down all pirated books is going to increase sales. People download illegal copies because they don’t want to shell out the dough for the “real” thing. If the illegal copy goes away, the “real” thing might as well not exist. So not only will Macmillan have wasted the money hiring someone to beat piracy, but now no new readers are finding their books.

I, for one, am much more likely to purchase a print book if I already know it’s going to be awesome. Most people (especially poor college grads like myself) don’t buy books to read them once. This is one way where pirated books can be incredibly useful.

4. Create a viable consumer marketplace

This is a much needed plan of attack that hopefully won’t have youth running for the torrent hills… and yet Napack spent a grand total of two seconds on it. This could have been an entire panel discussion. An entire conference.

We need more Netflix-type rental systems or something along the lines of eMusic where you can download a relatively unpopular song for something like $0.20. Oooh, and free trials! (Except see no. 6; not sure these two can exist in harmony.)

5. Protect content in-house

According to Napack, Macmillan has a little problem reigning in its employees as apparently many illegal eBooks are created from prepublication sources. He made it seem as if Macmillan employees are the biggest group of pirates around and didn’t even mention the fact that prepub copies are available to other people as well, for advance reviews to create awareness and increase sales.

That’s the whole point, right?

I find it very hard to believe that the lucky few in publishing who are still employed are going to not only encourage book piracy, but partake in it.

6. Protect content in the marketplace (basically limit free eBooks in whatever capacity – giveaways, galleys, etc)

Maybe these copies get leaked, but we can’t deny their effectiveness! Just last night I signed up for a free sample of Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing. The promotion went like this: I provided my email address; I got first four chapters delivered to my inbox. What’s not to love?

If bookstores continue to shut down left and right, readers have a limited ability to physically browse through books. Free chapters of eBooks = browsing in the digital age.

7. Engage in public education

If that’s not a euphemism for “scaring the shit out of kids who don’t know any better”, I don’t know what is. Here’s the image I have in my head: you know those commercials you see a lot in movie theaters? The one where some teen is downloading torrents and another is stealing a DVD?

Big booming voice: YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A CAR.

That’s the one. Here’s a favorite parody of mine: “YOU’D PROBABLY STEAL A WALLET… Regardless, this advertisement is annoying.”

Final thoughts

I’m not condoning piracy (sort of), but if major publishers are only going to look at the “legal” side of things and spend precious time and money fighting the inevitable, they are going to crash and burn.

I’m poor, I understand technology, and I guarantee I can find any book online, for free, in 10 minutes or less. You can delete and sue all you want, but at the end of the day the internet is a wide and limitless place, meaning it’s a waste of time, money and energy to fight it. Embrace the change and find another way to make money without a) annoying your audience, b) suing your audience, and c) losing you audience by wasting cash on completely ineffective “precautions”.

Instead, how about hiring people to create awesome new avenues of affordable, accessible and reader-friendly eBooks? Create a system where libraries can lend out digital copies as well as physical ones. My family gets books from the library all the time and we share them with each other until they’re due.

This is called lending, not thievery, my friends.

The whole point of a conference like Digital Book World, filled with over 500 book and tech nerds, was to create an environment to explore new possibilities. Possibilities no one has tried. Sir Brian, do you honestly think no one’s attempted anti-piracy plans before?

I guess we all know now which major publisher is going to tank first.

Marian Schembari digs social media and books. Usually at the same time.