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Wednesday, July 17, 2002
e-Publishing and POD TidBits from 'Cites and Insights'
- Xlibris now offers color print-on-demand (PoD) publishing, but it isn?t cheap: Setup takes a few months, the book length is limited to 24 to 60 pages, and the author pays $999 to $2,499 before the first PoD "book" appears.
- The column ends with a striking number for the healthiest (and least "e") part of digital book distribution: Xerox printed 20 million b&w PoD books last year? and is demonstrating a $200,000 full-color PoD system. Twenty million in 2001: that?s a real business.
- Also, Bowker wants to do PoD as a form of test marketing for outof-print books?and Powell?s Books is getting into the PoD business with the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission, using Lightning Press for fulfillment.
- It?s always fun to see market forecasters "distancing themselves" from their earlier forecasts. A Reuters piece posted May 8, 2002 includes the following from David Card of Jupiter Media Metrix: "We haven?t issued forecasts for the [ebook] industry in two years, because the market?s going nowhere. E-books were a dumb idea. I am very negative on this market." And a Simon & Schuster VP says "everyone who works in this industry did not really think" that the aggressive sales forecasts were "what the future held." Naturally enough, S&S won?t disclose ebook sales but says that they?re "meeting its own internal forecasts, with year over year growth in the double digit percentage range."
Why Freight Management and Logistics Are Important to Small Publishers
I continue to believe effective freight management -- rate shopping, aggregation, multi-carrier options just like the "Big Boys" -- is an important competitve advantage to small- and medium-sized publishers.From M.J. Rose' column in Wired News?
Summer means discounts: Free shipping and discounted books are heating up at online bookstores.[Wired News]Amazon.com is offering free shipping on all orders of $49 or more (down from the usual $99), and discounting almost all titles usually listed over $15 by 35 percent.
Some Buy.com bestsellers are 50 percent off. Free shipping is also available on some of these books. And orders of $99 or more that weigh less than 20 pounds are shipped for free.
Barnes&Noble.com is offering free shipping when two or more items are purchased.
How can a small publisher break through when shipping a $15 book costs the buyer $4-$7?
Today, the vast majority of POD books are shipped from print facilities that have little to no experience in handling advanced logistics. They may have enough volume to get a UPS discount, but it's unlikely they can even come close to the rates that an Amazon or B&N.com achieves by using a mail consolidator such as DropShipExpress. Besides low rates, DSE can provide tracking numbers and certified delivery via USPS -- just like UPS or FedEx.
Granted, major shippers get significant discounts from UPS and FedEx, but they get significant advantage by aggregating thier shipments with consolidators and optimizing shipping with low-cost carriers. A POD provider who can do the same can offer e-Publishers a direct-ship model with similar benefits, while bypassing the inventory and discounts required by the major distributors and wholesalers.
Such sales will not supplant the in-store sales of the major retailers or the big on-line merchants, but it does give the independent a better shot at competing.
e-Book News and Views
Gary Frost tracks trends and changes in the book industry at Future of the Book. I've only begun browsing his site, but he seems to stay pretty much on-topic (is there a lesson for me there?) and both provides and points to some excellent resources.The piece below points to a PDF file that is really good reading. If you're interested in what is happening in the e-book/e-publishing/POD arena you should check pp. 10-13 of ...
Cites & Insights. Walt Crawford picks up a number of items in the August Cites & Insights ebook column indicating the quiet realignment of the ebook revolution as it shifts toward a Print on Demand (and future of the print book)agenda.[future of the book news]
Will FTC Investigate Congress
Hmm, while Congressmen hide away crafting all manner of ill-advised legislation for the precise purpose of protecting Hollywood and the recording industry from competition, FTC chairman Muris says that's a no-no for states. Do ya think?!
Muris said he formed a task force to study the matter and found that "there are many regulations that, although adopted ostensibly for one purpose, had the effect of protecting existing brick-and-mortar businesses from new competition in the Internet."FTC: E-biz curbed by some state laws. ZDNet Jul 17 2002 5:20PM ET [Moreover - Online legal issues news]
More Technology Moving East
Internet router moving headquarters from Seattle to Atlanta. AP via New Jersey Online Jul 17 2002 6:06PM ET [Moreover - Atlanta news]
Anticipation...
Now waiting with baited breath for Release 1.0...
liveTopics 1.0 release iminent.Okay I've said it before, but barring major incident liveTopics should be released before the end of the week. My current target is thursday since I move house on Friday and I'm not sure what my connectivity is after that. Or, maybe that's not a good time to release... :)
Oh well, damn the torpedo's, full steam ahead! [Curiouser and curiouser!]
Update: googleBox How-to
3. You do need to create an account with Google to get the key that's required by the Radio and Frontier glue They have a limit of 1000 calls to their server per day per user. For the applications we have in mind this should not be an important limit. And it's good that they've put the limit there, so that they can at some point make this a commercial for-pay service, which we believe it should be.4a. Radio 8 users: Update Radio.root. Bring the Radio app to the front and choose Quick Script from the Developers sub-menu of the Tools menu. Enter google.init () and press Enter. Then choose Jump from the Developers sub-menu of the Tools menu and enter user.google. You should see an item called key. Click in the second column, enter the key you received from the Google website.
First, the instructions for Radio.
<%google.macros.box ("your name here")%>
This renders as a box, like the one you see on Weblogs.Com in the right margin, or on my Radio weblog, here.
Here's a list of parameters to google.macros.box:
1. searchterm is the only required parameter. It's the search string you would enter through Google's HTML interface.
2. ctResults, a number, default 10, indicates the number of results you want to see in the box.
3. tableWidth, a number, default 191, says how wide the box is.
4. frameColor, a string, default #000000, it's the color that the box frame is drawn in.
5. boxColor, a string, default #FFFFFF, the color of the inside of the box.
6. helpLink, a string, is the url of a page that explains what the box is about. Default is a page on the Radio site that doesn't exist yet.
7. textClass, a string, default the empty string, is the CSS class for all text in the box. If it's the emtpy string we enclose all text in a element with a size="-1" attribute.
Update: I found this thread on googleBox parameter examples along with a note from Phil Wolff on passing the name of a category to the macro. Neat idea. No resolution shown.
How About a Personal Library App
Maybe it's just me, but I never understood how Amazon was going to be profitable until they took over the e-Commerce and web operations for Borders. When I saw that it dawned on me that Amazon's Path-to-Profitability may well lie in its excellent web and infrastructure services.This latest web services API and SDK seem to fit that vision, and I think it is a very smart thing the company does in stirring up the developer community this way. How it turns out is anyone's guess, but it's an interesting approach to leveraging their infrastructure superiority.
What I want to know is this:
Can someone use this SDK to write a personal library application?
I want to buy an inexpensive, hand-held barcode scanner, plug it into my PC, scan the ISBN codes on my hundreds of books, and let some software package run about the web building a database of all the critical info about the book.
I have thousands of dollars worth of books and if my house burned tomorrow I'd have no hope of recovering even part of it from the insurer. But a personal library program could sure help.
Any of you software mavens out there want to write such an app?
Search Amazon from Python. DiveIntoMark has written a piece of software that combines two things I love: Amazon and Python. (Makes sense, right? You expected to find Pe(a)rls in the Amazon?)[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]Mark has written PyAmazon, a Python wrapper for the just announced Amazon web API. [...]
Crawling Before Walking with KM
Another good post from James, and comments from Denham, with key highlights for starting slow and growing up strong.
Walking before running. I've just spent the day in Canberra, doing some consultancy work for one of the government departments. With the plane[Column Two]
Uh-Oh, Our Idiots Meet Their Idiots -- This Can't Be Good
I realize our representative republic form of government is the best of the multitude of flawed governing systems, and I know I should try to show a little respect. But, well... Damn! they are just absolute idiots when it comes to the Internet, privacy, copyright, commerce, or anything else that is remotely related to technolgy. And getting the Euro-idiots together with our idiots just doesn't strike me as a good thing. But I guess it has to happen...
Euro lawmakers discuss Net issues with Congress. U.S. officials, European Parliament meet to align on Internet security, privacy[InfoWorld: Top News]
A Choice Paul Shouldn't Have to Make
Paul Holbrook, who figured out how to shorten the RSS feeds in Limiting RSS Summaries to First Paragrah, has found his solution wanting and gone back to allowing full stories in his feed. I don't blame Paul. He doesn't like writing like a journalist -- head, deck, story -- and finds that sometimes his readers miss an important point.Or maybe even Paul doesn't know what the one most important point will be to his readers, and by filtering to his first paragraph he risks focusing on the wrong one and failing to get his readers all the way through.
I know. It happened to me.
But that doesn't mean I want to view Paul's entire story in my News Aggregator. And I should have the choice of how I want to get Paul's feed. The only way I can get through all the feeds I track is to do a quick scan. I currently have 60 news sources (I know, that's overkill) and I add a couple a week. Using "Mark Paschal"'s Kit News Aggregator keeps the display filtered down to a reasonable size, but if all my feeds included full stories it would still be too much.
The beauty of News Aggregators is the ability to provide a quick scan summary of the day's news, and I enjoy being able to scroll quickly through the list to see what I should pursue. I know that even if I miss something, someone else in the blogplex will pick it up. With full stories I can't get that quick scan, and I lose the spontaneity that is important to me.
But what is right for me isn't right for everyone. As Jon Udell says in RSS Truncation Shouldn't Be An Either/Or Choice, the reader should be able to choose how to get the feed. Paul shouldn't have to make an either/or decision about what his readers want.
There should be a simple mechanism for allowing readers the choice of having a full or truncated feed. "Jenny Levine" has accomplished this using some server-side scripting, but it's over my head until I can learn something about cgi and php. Paul also suggests a mechanism where the author could choose what to place in the feed on an item basis. Either of these is better than the situation now.
Until Paul gets his item-by-item feature, I hope he'll consider offering a dual feed, ala The Shifted Librarian.
I'm not going to truncate this feed anymore.After championing truncating your RSS feed to the first paragraph, I'm going back to an untruncated RSS feed. Truncation works very well if you write like a reporter. If you get everything important into that first paragraph, folks can decide if they want to click further. But sometimes I feel more like telling stories than reporting the news. And in that case, it's very hard to get everything you want to say into that first 'graph.[...] [Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
Rebuild The World Trade Center
A nice website showing the six concepts currently under consideration for the World Trade Center Area. I guess there are a few who just want a memorial built there, no buildings.I disagree. We rebuild. A memorial to the dead is appropriate, and maybe we don't reproduce the Trade Center towers, but we rebuild. We're human and that's what we do.
"Direct Link to Info on the 6 Concepts Being Considered" [Daypop Top 40]
I Hate Typos -- Radio Blogging from MSWord
Using LiveTopics to beat typos. I hate typos, and I haven't the time or the inclination to figure out little accesso-checkers like MicroSpell. I'm sure it's great, and all, but I just don't have the time.So I was looking at Matt Mower's blog today, checking out the TopicRoll, and saw a link to Radio Blogging from Word (there's a Mac version, too.)
It is pretty technical for a pseudo-geek wannabee like me, and I have almost no tolerance for stupid MSWord tricks (I can't even make it do a decent outline) but if I can make this work, reliably, this will be a good thing.
I'll let you know how it goes.
Update: Well, this does work. It runs a little slow on my PIII 733 machine, but it does carry over links, colors, and basic styling just like Simon Fell said it would. Neat. Now we'll have to see just how useful.
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This Page was last updated: 2/9/2003; 11:17:15 AM
