“Better Books” is a many-part conversation between publicist Dan Wagstaff and Monique Trottier, which looks at the book publishing industry’s challenges, successes and promises from a technology perspective.

If you’re new to this conversation, or want to catch-up, here’s what we’ve been discussing.

Introduction, where we outline why the series is called Better Books. “Despite the industry’s many challenges, the greatest is to produce better books. Better in terms of quality, but also in terms of distribution, format, discoverability. Better … define it how you wish.”

Part 1. What market challenges does the Canadian book publishing industry face.

Part 2. Dan and I debate the merits and demerits of comparing the music industry and the book industry.

Part 3. We go on a bit, discussing what we’ve learned.

Welcome to Part 4

Last week we were talking about ebooks and POD (print on demand). The question this week is

Could (or should) ebooks be something publishers offer directly?

Quote: Dan says:
Honestly, I don’t see the point in offering books to download until there’s a really good way to read them, and, more importantly, there’s evidence that consumers actually want to be able to do this!

I think our discussion in the last two weeks has shown that there is a desire to read ebooks, but not a desire on the part of publishers to make new releases available in that format.

Quote: Dan goes on to say:
Anyway, if there’s the demand, I would expect that downloads will be provided by online bookstores not by the publishers directly. I mean publishers could supply books to their customers directly now if they wanted to, but they don’t have the desire or infrastructure, etc. I don’t see this changing any time soon.

Dan and I then disparaged the publishing industry’s lack of innovation and revolutionary thinking. We might have been a bit harsh so I’ll let you speculate about what we said.

Here are my half-baked thoughts.

Quote: Monique says:
Publishers should be investing in technology that improves discoverability of their titles–on their own sites and others.

I’m particularly interested in the publishers who are investing in technology that allows them to make their titles available in search inside the book formats from their own websites.

If publishers want to create online community and drive sales to stores, I think it’s good money spent by investing in technology and getting your flipping titles up on your website. Go digital. Offer PDFs, which can be read by any computer, most hand-held devices including Palm, Blackberry, Sony Playstation Portal (PSP), etc. At least start some form of ebook publishing and experimenting with the production, costs, distribution, formats, market desires.

Google and Amazon offer Search Inside the Book. Those are two great options. Publishers should participate in both, but they also have to offer something on their own sites and on their own terms. You want to own your digital identity and part of that is archiving, storing and distributing your own books online, as well as planning, measuring success and improving. Market knowledge isn’t going to come to those who are afraid of being early adopters.

Next week we’ll talk more about publishers offering titles directly and what impact that has on booksellers.

I’m presenting next Wednesday at the Editors’ Association of Canada, BC Branch Meeting on the top tech tools for editors with small businesses, freelance gigs and/or other contract editors. These are tools for business from an editors’ perspective. Below is the session description.

If you have a favourite work tool, post about it in the comments and it may make it’s way into the presentation.

Wednesday, May 16, 7:30 pm
Welch Room, 4th Floor, YWCA Health & Wellness Centre
535 Hornby Street, Vancouver
Tried, Tested, and True: Top Tech Tools for Business

Web-based tools allow for simple, cost-effective ways to access information from any computer. In this one-hour presentation, you’ll learn about the top web-based tools used by one small-business owner, Monique Trottier, to:

* organize and share files with clients and project teams
* manage multiple clients’ contact information, project documentation, and correspondence
* track time, and subcontractors’ time, against each project
* create invoices and track payments

Although the discussion focuses on web-based tools, alternative desktop applications will be discussed, and audience members will be invited to share their top tools with the group.

You’ll leave with a better understanding of how to assess and use web-based tools in your business.

Please join us! Admission is free for EAC members. Non-member admission is $10 at the door ($5 for students with valid ID). Light refreshments will be served following the program.

editors.ca/branches/bc

Our discussion of the comparison of the music industry and the book publishing industry continues this week with

Question 3: Is there an opportunity to learn from the format that has been developed for music in downloading content?

The comments from last week’s Better Books: Part 2 certainly suggest that there is a great opportunity to be had from looking at the business models that work with music and those that work with books.

Victor from Bookyards points out that
Quote: The main difference between music and ebooks is the time component. A song lasts a few minutes, a book will take longer to consume. But even with this difference, ebook popularity has been steadily growing.

He goes on to offer some interesting insights into the number of book downloads from his competitors’ websites.

Dan makes a similar comment in this week’s “Better Books” conversation:

Quote: Technology has the potential to revolutionize both the music industry and book publishing — I just think it’s a mistake to assume that the outcomes will be the same. It doesn’t logically follow that we’ll want to download books because we like to download music.

Listening to music and reading a book are very different kinds of activities. On a very basic level, listening to music is often a passive experience; reading requires some kind of engagement.

Dan goes on to agree with my point from last week (a la Cory Doctorow) that the music industry has seen much greater change than the publishing industry in terms of the driving forces behind format.

Quote: Music has constantly evolved in terms of how we listen to it,- we have gone from vinyl to tapes, tapes to CDs, and CDs to MP3s in my lifetime,- because people wanted better sound quality and more convenient ways to listen to music. By comparison, books have hardly changed at all. The print quality has improved, but the format — the book itself,- was always a pretty handy (and cheap) way to read things so it has stayed the same more or less.

And, it’s not just that there isn’t a good way to read books digitally as yet (although I’m sure our kids won’t be as squeamish about reading digitally as we are), there are lots of great things about digital music that just don’t apply to books — downloading single tracks, shuffling songs, creating playlists etc etc. For now, most people still want to read books (especially fiction) cover to cover in the sequence in which they were published.

Dan does mention that “I can see that textbooks and manuals are going to have to go digital, but I would argue that this has more to do with competition from the likes of Google and Wikipedia than to music downloads.”

I differ on Dan’s opinion to some extend but more or less agree.

Paper is a damn good technology, and I suspect that we will see widespread use of ebooks when we no longer have trees to make paper.

But I disagree about there being no good way to read books digitally. I read all sorts of materials (long materials) online.

PDF is a great format. With my MacBook most text is quite easy to read for long periods of time (font on PCs really does suck). And although it’s difficult to drag a laptop to the beach or the bathtub, that’s not where I do most of my reading. It’s easy reading when you are propped up on the couch, in bed or at a desk.

For me the choice between digital and paper is about longevity. How long do I want to have ownership or access to a particular piece of work. There are some books I have to own. There are others that I’m happy to read online and, because I have a lowsy filing system, I’m sure to lose or misplace them without a care.

Short stories, poetry, reference books, recipes, trashy novels, I’m happy reading it online.

And, being in a university setting the last couple of months for the occasional guest speaking gig has shown me, quite clearly, that reading assignments, however long, are preferred in a digital format by students. It’s not our children, it’s the people who are 5 years younger, 10 years younger who are embracing this format.

I agree with Dan that textbooks and manuals are already digital. My point is that university students have no desire to buy and carry around textbooks. If they can read it online, they are happy to. There’s no question about it. Certainly some still want to highlight pages, but overall students have a totally different attitude to books for school. If it’s required for school, put it online: articles, novels, textbooks.

Reading for pleasure is the only category that really isn’t seeing advances in digital–again, Cory Doctorow would argue differently, “science fiction is the only writing that people are willing to steal online.” He releases everything for free from his website, gets hundreds of downloads, and enough sales of physical copies that his publishers are happy.

Doctorow argues that the challenge is not about losing physical sales because of free or almost free digital copies, but rather the challenge for any author is obscurity.

We’ve probably said enough, but Dan and I like to go on.

Dan points to Scott Pack, the Commercial Director of publisher The Friday Project and former head buyer for Waterstones bookshops. Scott recently posted his ideas about the comparison of the music and publishing industry on his blog Me and My Big Mouth.

I recommend subscribing to his blog.

And because we like to go on and on, after batting around ebooks, Dan and I drifted off into POD-land, Print on Demand.

Quote: It seems to me that there is also a good case to suggest that print-on-demand (POD) is really the future of publishing not downloads. British journalist Bryan Appleyard wrote a fascinating piece for the Times newspaper about it last year.

Honestly, I’m currently fascinated by the idea of POD, or at least a printing process that can respond quickly and cheaply to demand. To my mind this is where the industry should be looking,

It’s true, Bryan has an interesting perspective on POD being the wave of the future, but here again is a problem with technology.

The technolog exists to make books on demand. The technology exists for ebooks.

The problem is with quality.

The POD systems I’ve seen tend to have challenges printing full colour book covers. The interiors are ok but sometimes the binding isn’t as great as it could be.

Sure the technology continues to improve and even in the last 2 years I’ve seen a difference, but the costs have not come down the way a publisher would hope.

If it costs me as a publisher $6-10 dollars for a POD book and $3 for a traditional printed book then I’m going to go with the lower unit price and gamble on estimating the market demand for the book.

Where POD really can play a role is with books that would otherwise go out of print.

Like ebooks, POD is finding a market with out of print, obscure or copyright free books. Not so much with new releases.

It’s a big topic and one we aren’t going to completely cover today. I’ll stop there and say that next week we’ll look again downloading books, POD and the choices the publishing industry faces.

“Better Books” is a many-part conversation between publicist Dan Wagstaff and Monique Trottier, which looks at the book publishing industry’s challenges, successes and promises from a technology perspective.

Introduction
Part 1
Part 2

Our Monday installment of Better Books will be published on Tuesday this week.

I’m out of town and my computer does not want to play nicely with the wireless here.

Hope everyone had a nice weekend.

Compact florescent light bulbs use less energy and last longer than standard incandescent bulbs. Great but they are a big problem when we do throw them out.

Florescent bulbs are hazardous waste and need to be dealt with appropriately. Very few facilities exist to do this and yet we’re now all on the band wagon with florescent bulbs.

Why don’t we just make incandescent bulbs that last longer? We know from the book Made to Break that this is possible. That during times of war we did make better bulbs. Why not now? Where’s our War on Waste.

Hello culture of waste. Let’s make good decisions, not half-hearted ones in the name of environmentalism.

Look up recycling florescent bulbs.

Dan Wagstaff, publicist extraordinaire over at the Raincoast blog, and I have been having an ongoing conversation about books and technology. In this series, Better Books, we’re looking at the book publishing industry’s challenges, successes and promises from a technology perspective.

Here’s what you missed:
Introduction
Part 1

New this week:

Question 2
There have been comparisons between the music industry and the book industry,- diminishing placement, payment for placement, digitalization of content — in your opinion is this an accurate assessment?

I say sure. But I also say compare apples to apples. The music industry has seen much more dramatic change in the last 100 years than book publishing. Cory Doctorow talks about the music wars and how each stage of technical advancement had some type of cannibalizing effect on the old format. (I’m paraphrasing and likely missing a lot of steps here. Old Doctorow article with some of these thoughts.)

He rightly points out that the music industry was mainly sheet-music publishers.
Hiring a live pianist gave way to the piano roll.

Quote: From Doctorow: The player piano was a digital recording and playback system. Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands — the hundreds of thousands — the millions. They did this without a penny’s compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!

Composers and music publishers were in an uproar, and this repeats every 10 or 15 years (the uproar part, but also the technology shifts).

– Records, 8-track, tape, cd, mp3
– Live music, sheet music, piano roll, radio, iTunes

The motion picture industry is a better comparison to the music industry: vaudeville theatre to theatre house to home movie to BitTorrent.

With books — we have books. I know there are ebooks, there are digital downloads. But for whatever reason we are still cutting down trees, making paper and buying bound formats instead of digital books.

So can we compare the music industry to the book publishing industry. Sure, but there are complications and historical parallels and divergences. We should be careful about only comparing the apple bits to the apple bits. (Subtle plug for Mac and bits and bytes.)

I think Dan agrees with me. I should have let him go first.

Quote: The similarities between the music industry and the book industry tend to be overstated. Sure, there are some superficial similarities – they are both creative industries right? But I’m sure part of the reason this has become a popular notion is that HMV owns Waterstones bookstores in the UK. Admittedly HMV often behave as if there is no difference between music and books, but it’s not exactly working out for them and in general I kind of think it is a slightly sloppy comparison.

Dan’s British. He says things like sloppy and rubbish.

There are far smarter people who’ve compared music and books. I’m going to go read them and we’ll be back next week with more about download formats for books. I’ll make slightly sloppy references to other smart people and Dan will say smart things. You’ll love it. Please come back.

Happy BC Book and Magazine Week.

I’ve been doing some work this week for Whitecap Books and author Jamie Young on his dog food cookbook Grrrrowlicious Food for Hungry Dogs.

I was interested in the project because Jamie has a great website, www.GRRRR.com.au, the book looks amazing, and the recipes have me drooling.

What’s been surprising to me is people’s reactions to the pet food recall. I think every pet owner has taken notice. Some are taking action by switching up their pets’ food to different brands. And others are making full-scale changes, in particular by making their own pet food.

The challenge, of course, is figuring out what your dog or cat should or should not eat, and figuring out how to create balanced meals that are easy and affordable.

This is where I have been loving Jamie’s book. The recipes are absolutely delicious (I have wondered about making the recipes for myself–that should give you a clear indication of the “easy” and “affordable” factor):

Homemade Dog Food Recipes from Grrrrowlicious

– Rabbit stew
– Cooked sardines
– Chicken meatballs
– Fried rice
– Bacon and cheese cookies — PDF sample recipe

I recommend checking out Jamie Young’s website for sample recipes and videos from GRRRR TV, his online dog food cooking show. You can also peak inside the book.

Another article that caught my eye was in the New York Times, “Home Cooking for Pets Is Suddenly Not So Odd”

Quote: So it is no surprise, perhaps, that cookbooks for dogs and cats are enjoying an increase in sales.

According to Nielsen BookScan, for the week that ended March 25, after Menu Foods recalled more than 60 million cans of pet food packaged under numerous name brands and store brands, “The Good Food Cookbook for Dogs” sold 194 copies, compared with 42 the previous week. Other books with even more modest sales totals also showed sharp increases over the previous week: “Real Food for Dogs” sold 66 copies, up from 23, for example, and “Home-Prepared Dog and Cat Diet” sold 34, up from 8.

The NY Times article also offers some other dog food cookbook recommendations.

If you want to know more about Grrrrowlicious Food for Hungry Dogs, check out:
* the website
* recent press release about the book

A many-part series, “Better Books” looks at the book publishing industry’s challenges, successes and promises from a technology perspective.

Question 1

The Canadian book publishing market faces particular challenges:

What are some of the innovative ways for book publishers to meet these challenges?

Tough question. I’m making Dan answer that.

Quote: Wow. Where to start?

Technology does provide a lot of opportunities for publishers,- we always talk about Google Books and online retailers. Then there’s all that web 2.0 + wizardry that can help publishers connect to readers. BookNet gives them all sorts of sales numbers that weren’t available before… But you’re far more informed about this stuff than me.

Dan attempts to cop out of answering the question. No such luck.

Quote: In any case, I think the tech innovations are only going to work if the book industry does everything else better than it does already. I mean they don’t really address the underlying problems, you know?

Technology is only part of the solution,- it’s great and all, but it’s like thinking we can save the planet with a few wind turbines when it’s our everyday behaviour that needs to change! We all get over-excited about technology (that we don’t really understand because we’re all Arts majors) when actually we should be worrying about the way we do business,

Wait, I’m an Arts major!

I think Dan is suggesting that lots of people talk the talk but have never seen the walk, don’t understand the walk, and in some cases don’t even want to walk.

This is our collective demand for better books. Dan’s right that technology is a part solution. The technology is about changes to behaviour — publishers’ ability to track sales, to supply electronic data to retailers, to cut costs by creating digital assets instead of physical assets– but it’s not the be-all and end-all problem solver.

We still have a saturated book market. Technology can help us filter through the crap to find what we want, but maybe we just need less books, but also better books.

Technology doesn’t make Canadian geography any different. We still live in a country who’s commercial centres are spread apart. Shipping a book from Ontario to BC takes time. Vancouver to Halifax by truck–technology can’t really help you. It can help tell you where between those two points your package was last seen.

Diminishing in-store placement is still a problem. Stores’ websites don’t really mimic the front-of-store table in the same way. You can email me about new books. I can see them on the home page. I can see that people who liked x also liked y. But it’s not the same as walking into a store and seeing a huge stack of books. Glossy covers. Textures. Other people picking up books that catch our eye.

And then there’s diminishing book coverage in traditional media channels. Does it help that there are so many book blogs. Sure. But do people still look to mass media and bestseller lists. Yes, lots of people do.

But back to that wise crack about Arts majors. The best thing about Arts majors is our ability to think critically. Dan doesn’t want to sound like a “know-it-all-smartass-smarty-pants,” but, secretly, I assure you he is.

Quote: I’m a publicist not a CEO for heaven’s sake, I’m very low on the food chain, but for me a lot of the challenges come from our inability to get the basic stuff right… We’d rather pin unrealistic hopes on the internet and moan about all stuff we can’t change instead.

So what are those unrealistic hopes?

That with the right email campaign, or website or copy on Amazon, we can connect niche books to potential readers. The challenge Dan and I often talk about is that the resource allocations are not always spot-on and sometimes despite the best-laid plans, a book is just crap. Technology or a fine PR campaign can’t solve that problem.

We’re aiming for results not effort.

We want better books.

Dan and I will explore what better books means in upcoming posts.

Happy BC Book and Mag Week.