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Wednesday, July 17, 2002
e-Publishing and POD TidBits Pulled 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]
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. [...]
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