Rocket Bomber - publishing

UPDATED 23 September 2010:

I’m changing my mind about the colour e-reader that I think will be out before Christmas: not color e-ink, but Qualcomm’s Mirasol

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/qualcomms-mirasol-display-hopes-to-create-e-reader-tablet-hybrids/

original article follows
##

Starting with a year-old article:

electronicdesign.com, William Wong in an interview with Sriram Peruvemba, Vice President of Marketing for E Ink Corp.
11 November 2009

What is the future direction of ePaper? ePaper displays have enjoyed tremendous success in the eBook application (over 40 models launched world wide) and moderate success in a whole host of other applications including wrist watches, smart cards, electronic shelf labels, signage etc. The eNewspaper application is emerging (larger displays, favors flexible display product) and is likely to be a significant market opportunity. I believe that the killer application will be eTextbooks for students. This trend has already started and with the arrival of flexible displays and color ePaper in 2010, that market is likely to ramp quickly. Flexible Active Matrix (because the segmented SURF displays are already flexible) and Color ePaper are the future trends.

When is color coming? We have demonstrated color ePaper and are scheduled to mass produce them by the end of next year. Here is what was said about our color ePaper:

“Then there was E-Ink Corp., which blew me away with a color e-book prototype, a flexible display no thicker than a laminated piece of paper and large-form e-ink displays that would make for low-power, high-contrast signage. Maybe I’m swayed by the newspaper industry’s need for technology like this, but if the future of e-books is as colorful and flexible as what I saw at SID, and if it gets here soon enough, the future might not be so grim for this industry after all.” By Omar Gallaga for NPR

##

Prototypes and projected release dates don’t mean a whole heck of a lot.

Business deals, parts numbers, production samples; that’s slightly more promising:

Joint press release from E Ink Corporation and Seiko Epson Corporation posted to businesswire.com
18 May 2010

TOKYO—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Seiko Epson Corporation (“Epson”)(TOKYO:6724), a global supplier of imaging products and semiconductor solutions, and E Ink Corporation, the leading developer and marketer of electronic paper display (EPD) technology, today announced a new jointly developed display controller IC. The S1D13524 is a high-performance EPD controller with a built-in color processor for E Ink’s Vizplex™-enabled electronic color paper displays. Targeting color and very high resolution B&W applications, the new IC is based on the same powerful engine as the first two models, the S1D13521 and the S1D13522, but also includes a color processor that allows simple customization.

Found in most major electronic reader devices, Epson EPD controllers and E Ink’s EPD low-power consumption screen technology have been key factors in the rapid growth of the eReader market and the expanding range of mobile applications, such as eBooks, eNewspapers, tablet PCs, laptop secondary displays, eNotebooks, and eDictionaries.

The new Epson display controller includes a high-performance color engine that can be easily configured to match customers’ color and CFA needs. It has a built-in dither function to minimize host overhead, and can be connected to any host processor through a 16-bit parallel or TFT LCD bus.

“IC” for those who don’t know or can’t recall, is an “integrated circuit” – a chip. The new colour chip is built on the same architecture as chips used in today’s e-readers: indeed, in a device you may already own.

This new chip has a part number. Read the rest of that press release; samples of the new chip have been available for developers/prototypers since June, and “Production quantities will be available in Dec 2010.”

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A quick look at E Ink’s Corporate Website reveals that the largest screen they’re currently pushing in the Vizplex™ line is a 9.7” 1200×825px with 150dpi (and given that screen sizes are diagonal measures… hand on a sec, need to run the pythagorean and assuming a rectangular display based on the golden ratio) looks like it’s awfully close to 5×8 — 5.15 × 8.3: same size as your manga, or a common trade paperback.

Mechanical / Dimensional – 9.7” Display
Pixel Count: 1200 × 825 (SVGA)
Active Area: 202.9 × 139.5 mm
246.38 mm (9.7”) diagonal
Display Thickness: 1.2 mm
DPI: 150

That’s the screen size, add a bezel and the whole unit would be about the same size (top to bottom, side to side) as a hardcover book, but only 50 pages (50mm) thick — the same thickness as your current e-reader, just about, as all the internal electronics are upgraded [level up!] but essentially the same.

##

Same tech, same manufacturers, slightly larger form factor; and of course the innovative twist is colour.

Make the whole thing a touch screen and I’ve built a category killer: E-reader in a hardcover-analogue-size in colour with a full-screen touch screen, built on existing e-reader architecture and sourcing components announced six months to a full year ago with projected “production” quantities available in December 2010.

Plenty of time to prototype a unit, write the software, test it, and get units out before 25 December.

Hi, my name is Matt, I’m a bookseller and a blogger. I drink a lot. [you have no idea…] — *I* figured this out, this afternoon, just by looking stuff up on the internet. Granted, I went to Georgia Tech, so my knowledge base has more tech-y bits in it than your average-bear bookseller, but this is neither brain science nor rocket surgery:

If there isn’t a touch-screen, full colour, e-ink/digital paper e-reader announced in the next 6 weeks by a major corporation then a whole cohort of junior execs and senior engineers seriously dropped the ball.

(and someone needs to start picking up my bar tabs and hire me as ‘research’ staff right quick)

Heck, put in an order for, say, a half-mil to a million components and pay in advance and I’d be willing to bet Epson and E Ink would be deploying burly men and haughty women with whips to make sure the plants beat those December delivery dates.

I think the telling fact here is that E Ink hasn’t really said anything more about colour since May (their last major press release was about the pearl b&w screens, 1 July, ~2 months ahead of the Kindle 3 announcement/release) — any exclusive deal would handily explain the long silence on colour e-ink.

##

Apple has the iPad: and it’s all that, a bag of chips, and guaranteed salvation for your immortal soul — so no new Apple reader this year, or next.

Amazon is doing the incremental-improvement-thing: folks seem to like the Kindle, and the new Kindle is all that folks like and more, with the thinner, slimmer form factor and fancy new black-and-while high-contrast e-ink screen. It’s a lovely unit. And, also, it means there isn’t going to be another Amazon game-changer before 2011 (or 2012).

While the gap between the two (colour touch screen and low-power e-ink) was previously insurmountable, well, this is the future and engineers solve impossible problems before breakfast, most days.

Call it the Rocket Bomber Reader: exterior dimensions 6 × 9 x .25”, screen 5.1×8.3” color e-ink, full touch-screen, android OS (since whatever-Amazon-is and iOS4 are precluded) — and while I have no idea who is going to release it, someone has to — and they’ll likely make a lot of money.

Newspapers & especially magazines have been waiting for this platform — actually, reverse that: Magazines and especially newspapers, as most mags would be quite happy with iPad and Web distribution if they could figure out how to make money off it.

I’d price the Rocket Bomber Reader at $249 (not sure of component & manufacturing costs, but half-an-iPad seems like a good entry point even if I have to subsidize it) and pitch it as a textbook/artbook/comic/magazine reader — though I haven’t seen the colour tech myself.

Re: Colour, Though… we all loved 4-tones-of-spinach-green when the original GameBoy came out (even washed-out E-ink colour might succeed, if it’s the first-and-only-option) — though the Gallaga-NPR quote from that first link points to something special with this new tech.

Subtitle: A short trip through Wikipedia to investigate the many, many ways we have attempted to communicate with each other, from cave painting to ebooks.

see also: Form, content, copies, rights, & Plato

additional note: in my opinion, music predates spoken language; though sign language may predate both.

##

cave painting
voice & music
speech & language
the oral tradition
writing
musical notation
scriptoria
solfa/solfège
paper
modern musical notation
moveable type
illustration
printing press
typeface
rotary press
linotype
piano rolls
wax cylinders
offset printing
acetate
vinyl records
photo-typesetting
magnetic tape [let’s all try to forget about 8-track]
Analog to digital: word processing
Analog to digital: CDs
audio books
MP3
HTML & world wide web & web publication
ebooks

Anyone can say just about anything about the ebooks, and make it stick, and get retweets and link backs in the echo chamber because no one does their homework.

“Oooo: ebooks are new and flash and a Game Changer™! Books will never be the same again!”

[*pfsh*]. please.

I personally think of ebooks as more of an evolutionary, transitional format, as opposed to be a total game changer and its own Whole New Thing — particularly when ebooks are compared to web pages. [psst: ebooks are nothing but gimped, DRM crippled web pages]

Go back. Read a bit; Wikipedia has its own flaws and problems, but most of the articles linked above are pretty good. Let the History of Communication soak in; try to readjust your world view — Books are not [just] physical commodities to be bought and sold: books are one way, one of many ways, we transmit culture to future generations. Obviously, I both enjoy and support the free-market-supported system we currently have, where books are bought and sold and creators get compensated for their work — but this was not the earliest model and is not guaranteed — indeed, creator compensation isn’t even guaranteed in the free-market-supported model, though more folks get paid (& more reliably) today than at any time in the past. Yes, even with digital piracy:

The biggest fear should not be getting pirated, but in being unknown, or forgotten. Piracy has been with us since the beginning; in fact ‘piracy’ was once the only distribution model. [that’s one of the points I made in this post]

Before you tell me ebooks are the “answer” I insist you do some research, and be sure you’re asking the right questions.

Alternate Title: Before you destroy a thing you should know just what it is you mean to destroy.

##

A lot of forecasts & assertions & spin & PR & words have been dropped all around this new thing, e-books, but to me it all smacks of pipe dreams and snake oil.

I’m a numbers guy, just give me the numbers.

…

…and it’s a whole lotta numbers: 60 months of data from Publishers.org, the website of the Association of American Publishers. — I’d list a link to each month of data but thankfully there’s already an index at the AAP site

Of course, it took a while to pull everything together into a spreadsheet, but hey, somebody had to do it.

##

So, let’s set a baseline first. Total book sales, by month, for the last 60 months. [July 2005 to June 2010.] For this calculation I’ve included college text-books but excluded the el-hi (elementary to high school) text book market.

Here it is kids: this is bookselling.

• bookselling is seasonal. Everyone knows this, I guess, as all retail is seasonal. Some books are bought as gifts, in fact, though I think a lot of the December bump is folks buying gifts for themselves after mall trawls and selective skirmishes into discount retailers: a hot cup of cocoa and a little something to curl up with on a cold winter night. (maybe that’s just me)
• textbooks are bookselling – and a big ol’ chunk of bookselling at that. Some observers (myself included) raised an eybrow at the B&N/B&N College merger – but just look at that graph: every August & September is like Christmas all over again, except for two months, and while not nearly as many units are sold, the ones that do sell are selling at text book prices. The college business is that big (just look at the graph) and maybe buying B&N College for a half billion was cheap at the price.
• even at it’s worst — Feb, Mar, Apr each year — books sell in the hundreds of millions monthly. And sales of close to 1.5 billion each December doesn’t hurt either.

Obviously textbooks are a destabilising factor; let’s run the same chart without them:

Here we see something much more interesting. Returns of textbooks to publishers each March and October actual drag down total sales. That, and the peak for books isn’t December (that’s just kids gearing up for second semester) — the real season for book sales is Autumn, peaking each Sept-Oct, months before holiday retail.

Bet you didn’t count on that! Heck, I work retail (& I’m a bookseller) and we do gobs of business each December but it never occured to me (until I made that chart) how much of that isn’t books: calendars, greeting cards, gift wrap, board games; everything and anything but the books (though we sell books, too.)

I haven’t even hit my main points yet and I’m already learning something. Research is it’s own reward.

If you hadn’t already guessed, I’ll be slowly adding more and more lines to this graph just to illustrate what the book business is and where it’s going — slowly, to give your brain time to assimilate the info. Next line is e-books, and given where e-books currently stand, it’d be easy to use this as a punchline:

Even with double- and triple-digit growth year-to-year, ebooks are, well, just a footnote. So Far. I’ll get back to e- before the end of this post, and we’ll adjust the scale so we can more clearly see just how the e biz is doing for books. But given the scope of the rest of publishing, even without the text book market? just a blip.

##

Amazon recently reported that they sell more Kindle books than hardcovers. Woot. Yay. I find it interesting, however, that this news only comes out after the spring (which as we can see in graphs above is a seasonal low-point in book sales) and only compared to hardcover books sales… well, since I have those numbers, let’s analyze it. I’ll even give Amazon the benefit of the doubt, and combine adult and childrens hardcover into a single number

Amazon has at least 80% of the ebook business but only 13% of overall book sales [per my most recent analysis] so growth in the former combined with a seasonal- and recession-related drop in the latter makes for a good headline.

But what does it actually look like?

The “explosion” in Kindle sales didn’t seem to affect hardcover much. Indeed, Amazon sells a lot of books (2 billion dollars worth in 2009, by my count) but that still isn’t enough to move the needle: Publishing and bookselling seem to be doing fine, and doing their own thing, even after 15 years of Amazon (and 5 years as charted in detail above)

I think you can see the overall trends, so let me add the last two threads:

The “Trade” paperbacks [the purple line in the graph above] don’t follow the same trends as hardcover, and the “mass market” paperbacks [teal] seem immune, even to seasonal trends. Even at this scale, I think we can see e-books eating more into mass-market paperbacks (the closest format to e-books in price) than any other publishing trend.

Of course, we’re in a recession, so it’s hard to say just what’s going on, or what will happen.

Let me adjust the scale, so we can see better:

With a bit of focus, we can see e-book sales steadily growing throughout 2009, with a definite spike after the 2009 holiday season: ebook sales suddenly doubled, and seem to have reached a new plateau just shy of $30 Million monthly. Great for e-books.

Ah, yes, but what changed from January of 2009 to January of 2010? Was it something that Amazon did, or was it the entry of Barnes & Noble into the e-book market, and the introduction of Apple’s iPad?

I invite you to draw your own conclusions, but I’d put forward that no matter what Amazon’s strength in the e-book market, they are still just a marginal retail player, and folks hadn’t even heard about e-books until Steve Jobs did an iPad demonstration and all of a sudden it was on every local-tv-broadcast-news telecast (you know, 1950s technology) coast to coast.

Amazon certainly benefits from the buzz currently surrounding e-books, but they didn’t generate it.

##

In my last post I tried to figure out just what share Amazon had of the book business; I estimated they currently hold $2 billion (plus or minus $200 million) — that’s about 15% of the trade book business [somewhere between 12 and 18% – you can quote 20% if you really feel like but it it’s much likely to be less] but less than 10% of the total book business when textbooks are included.

If we hold to the best guess, $2 billion (& 15% of trade) then a safer estimate of Amazon’s actual total book share is 8%

That’s… actually pretty darn good. One of the throwaway statistics I generated in that last post is that Game Stop, acknowledged market leader in it’s segment, only sells 7% of all new games (of course, they make gobs of cash off of systems and a billion plus annually on used games, but that wasn’t the calculation I ran).

For comparison: for the fiscal year ending May 1, 2010 [pdf] Barnes & Noble reported retail sales (Stores + BN.com) of $4.974 billion, with an added kicker of $800 million in sales through their college stores.

B&N sells more than books. There are CDs, DVDs, magazines, board games, stationary, gifts, greeting cards… but if all of that adds up to more than a billion dollars I’d be surprised. Even if 40% of B&N’s business were non-book, they’d still be selling close to 3 billion dollars worth of books each year.

Just like I had to make a guess at Amazon’s share of the book business ($2 billion out of $5.964 billion in “media” sales) I’ll take a stab at B&N: I’m going to say $4 billion of that $4.974 billion of “retail” is books and I’m going to leave their college segment out of it.

In fact my best guess is 3.5-3.75 billion dollars, but once again, that’s without the text books: $4 billion is a nice round number and is as “accurate” as my Amazon estimate.

If you like my math and (informed) assumptions, then you might be excused for thinking B&N handles 25% of the trade book business and 16-17% of all book retail. This seems to match other estimates which should make me a smug bastard but all the guess work and really big numbers and potential errors of, I don’t know, a billion dollars either way make me less confident.

##

Let’s go back to e-books. Here’s the e-book numbers on their own, without the massive rest of the industry pressing down on top of it:

Here the growth trend is much more pronounced.

Growth is the key word. Yes, the book business is huge, billions, but it’s also largely static. I posted charts showing five years of sales and there’s a nice, repeating seasonal pattern. Reliable. While no one knows which books are going to sell, the industry as a whole is going to sell some books.

But none of the other book categories is growing.

I need at least another 6 months of data to see where e-book sales are trending; my guess is it’ll hover around $30 million a month for the rest of the year, and then after Holidays 2010 (and a whole new batch of e-readers given as gifts) we’ll see e-books climb to the next plateau. E-books will do $360 million this year, fairly easy. Will it be $500 million in 2011? Will e-books continue to cannibalize sales of mass-market paperbacks? Will it affect other paperbacks and hardcovers as well?

Is the growth of e-books also growth for books? Or are we just shifting beans around to different columns without changing the book & publishing total?

In a separate post, I’ll go into my opinions on why e-books are hitting the mass market paperbacks first.

[if you want a conclusion to the ellipsis in the title, skip down to the end]

I really like the numbers posted by the Association of American Publishers at publishers.org

The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the U.S. book publishing industry. AAP’s more than 300 members include most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies—small and large. AAP members publish hardcover and paperback books in every field, educational materials for the elementary, secondary, postsecondary, and professional markets, scholarly journals, computer software, and electronic products and services. The protection of intellectual property rights in all media, the defense of the freedom to read and the freedom to publish at home and abroad, and the promotion of reading and literacy are among the Association’s highest priorities.

All really good stuff, that. Plus: numbers! I love numbers.

From publishers.org back in February, Year End 2009 net domestic [U.S.] sales by category

Adult Hardcover: $1,600 million, +6.9% [year-to-year]
Adult Paperback: $1,400 million, -5.2%
Adult Mass Market: $775.6 million, -4.0%
Children’s/YA Hardcover: $765.1 million, -5.0%
Children’s/YA Paperback: $577.7 million, +2.2%
Audio Book: $177.2 million, -12.9%
Religious Books: $588.7 million, -9.0%

University Press Hardcover: $58.2 million, -3.0%
University Press Paperback: $61.8 million, -0.1%.
Professional and Scholarly: $766.4 million, -2.9%
Higher Education: $4,200 million, +12.9%.
El-Hi [elementary to high school, K-12]: $3,500 million, -13.8%.

E-books: $169.5 million, +176.6% over 2008

In 2009, ebooks sold less than all other trade categories (even audio books outsold ‘em, dollar wise) and while the university presses didn’t post a stellar showing, text books [for all ages, 5-25] are totally rockin’ the hell out of the print business. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. The trade business (including e-books) is a scant $6.05 billion while text books and the scholarly set are at $8.59 billion.

[puts the acquisition by B&N proper of B&N’s college division into a whole new light]

That’s an oh-my-gods $14.6 billion dollar industry (though the U.S. Census Bureau in parallel reports bookstore sales over the same period at $16.7 billions, so I guess our gross margin is 15% or so) more than half of which are text books [which don’t have e-book versions yet] and to convert that into comparable numbers: 14.6 billions are 14,600 millions, and e-books are all of 1.14% of that.

Most [including Amazon] like to ignore textbooks and so report e-books as a percentage of trade book sales, but still were only at 2.8% — and you can exclude bibles and other religious books, to get to 3.1%, and exclude children’s books as well and inch the percentage of e-books to 4.3% [of a specified class of books, a subset only equal to two-sevenths of the total]

And duh: the segment is growing. But, um, [and it hurts me to point this out] manga was growing by double digits 3 years ago; enough to grab the attention of major retailers and publishers both. How’s that working out these days? Note: present performance is no guarantor of future growth.

numbers go up, numbers go down; for the most part though, there are trends in place and no matter what the markets or consumer demand: A billion is a billion is a billion. E-book sales might hit that mythic, mystical One Billion Sales mark in just 2 years, if current growth can be extrapolated and sales are in fact tripling year-over-year [it’s actually just a tad slower than that, and the market could saturate — with the accompanying flattening of that growth curve — faster than you can blink] but even if e-books hit their billion in December 2012 [that date sounds familiar…] that is still only 6-7% of the total market and I shouldn’t have to remind you: e-books sales are also book sales so the growth of e-books means a larger book market in general: One Billion Dollars of e-books, combined with inflation, growth of retail markets related to increasing U.S. population, e-books as an extension of the book market into populations who don’t buy [physical] books, and a massive increase in backlist sales made possible by e- editions of all kinds of books, from the popular backlist to formerly out-of-print books [nothing is out of print when it’s e-] and suddenly we could see the book market explode

up to $20 billion, or $25 billion in 10 years: and yet, with a core of $15 billion in text books, regular print hardcovers and paperbacks. That is to say, while all the growth in publishing [and it looks to be spectacular growth] is going to be an e-volution as both new books, midlist, backlist, the marginalia and the oldest of the old books all come to the new digital marketplace: there is at least one generation left that likes the feel of actual print books and so I predict not the death of publishing, and the bookstore, but a wealth of knowledge and an embarassment of books on top of the current national chain bookstores and remaining independents.

##

Now let me point out that one shouldn’t conflate my use of historical numbers in the first third of the post with the conclusions presented after.

This is a common trick, where a wave of real (or real-seeming) numbers are then used to hand-wave guesswork and conclusions.

I’m not presenting investment advice, analysis, or prognostication. I’m just pointing out that $15 Billion Dollars in Book Sales is a massive number, and that my impression of e-books so far is that yes, they present the main growth potential in the industry but I don’t personally feel e-books are going to cannibalize other book sales to the degree some gloom-and-doomers [or overenthusiastic internet CEOs] would have us believe. Yes, the bestseller lists are going to get hit, and hit hard. Yes, the popular backlist will either transform or move ‘online’ wholesale. But the long tail, paperbacks from 30 years ago, used books, collectible first editions [which only get more collectible with smaller print runs], people using bookstores like libraries [with our wifi, and laissez faire attitude toward the theft of electricity and the costs of housekeeping & babysitting your ass while you camp out all day] — Amazon can’t do this and never will. The bookstore is a lot more e- and internet-proof than folks give us credit for.

A ‘revolution’ could change the whole game overnight, but so far e-books are just… books… and at the moment only 1-4% of the business anyway.

Yeah, yeah, I know: most of the time I’m too clever for my own good.

Let me explain 4 of the 5 components of the article title before we get to specifics:

• A Price War is “a term used in the economic sector to indicate a state of intense competitive rivalry accompanied by a multi-lateral series of price reduction”
• Betamax is a video format “generally considered obsolete, though it is still used in specialist applications by a small minority of people.”
• Snake Oil – “applied metaphorically to any product with exaggerated marketing but questionable or unverifiable quality or benefit.”
• and the Razor Blade reference is actually to the Razor and Blades business model, “the concept of either giving away a salable item for nothing or charging an extremely low price to generate a continual market for another, generally disposable, item”

And I’ll make all this work, I promise.

##

Last point first:

Razor Blades.

Seth Godin [wiki, official site] is a big-idea-guy; he posts boggling (in the good sense of the verb ‘to boggle’) ideas almost daily to his blog. A couple of weeks ago (7 June) he posted an article titled Paperback Kindle directed at Amazon but of note for any potential market player. He posited 4 new business models for an ebook reader:

• no frills, rock bottom price (Seth calls it at $49) – get people to buy into your ecosystem with a heavily discounted chunk of hardware, knowing they’ll be buying e-books from you for years. This is Amazon’s current business model, except they wanted to charge you $259 $189 for it.
• Again, the razor and blades model, cited as such by Seth but pitched slightly differently: Buy, say, 8 e-books and get the reader for free. —actually, both the ‘paperback’ and ‘razor’ are fine examples of the freebie model, just different ways to sell it to customers. Alternately:
• A subscription service, with subsidized hardware, just like a cell phone. Tie your customers into a contract but make it sound like a Book of the Month Club — sure, the e-reader is free, but you just opened yourself up to ‘push’ marketing, where the book each month (a fine book, I’m sure, but…) is not the selection of editorial staff but rather the winner of an auction, whomever was willing to pay most for access to your eyeballs.
• …and lastly, something fairly Seth-specific that may be important to business, social networks, and New Media types [like, say, bloggers] but doesn’t quite jive with traditional publishers.

My extensive linking to and gloss upon the words of Godin is only meant to highlight one point: the money is not in the e-book appliances, but in the continuing and ongoing sales of e-books. $10 a pop for a file? iTunes was only charging 99¢…

Snake Oil

I’m not going to debate the $9.99 price point — except to note here that it’s about $5 too low for a brand new book about to be released in hardcover, considering the non-print production costs that get discounted or ignored by most ‘experts’ who look at publishing as a dinosaur and e-books as the only answer.

— And e-books themselves are not the ‘snake oil’ that I feel salesmen are trying to foist on an ignorant public. Books are books, e- or otherwise, and they are the most important thing to me, in both my life and career (I’m a bookseller) and everything that I am and aspire to be was either found in or is founded upon books. I love the damn things.

That said: I recently looked into the ePub format and lo and behold: e-books are digital files.

Yeah, I wasn’t really shocked either.

Here’s the thing: ePub formatted e-books use XML, XHTML, a subset of CSS and honestly, No One needs a new chunk of hardware to read these things. Adobe could add ePub functionality to it’s PDF Reader tomorrow, and a creative coder could have extensions for Chrome or Firefox up by the end of the week.

ePub e-books are merely formatted text, a damn sight less complicated than, say, PHP scripted web-pages served up, dynamically, from a MySQL database. —that is to say, e-books are less complicated by many degrees from My Blog, This Very Web Page You Are Reading Right Now on Whatever Phone, Netbook, Tablet, Laptop, or Desktop Computer Screen. Rocket Bomber — indeed, any blog — is magnitudes more complex than an e-book. [so far, no one has complained about blog browser compatibility]

E-Books are [barely] formatted text, and the web has been reliably serving text since 1993. E-Books are easy.

So, the Snake Oil: Amazon (and it’s copy-cats) are trying to convince us we need a new appliance to read text. “Brand new thing, this, the book, never mind the Gutenberg behind the curtain or that sticky-cable thing — if you want to read books, well, step right up! I’ve got what you need [*slap*] right here!“

—

There’s nothing wrong with a book, or plain .txt files, or HTML, or browsable web pages.

So, um, why pray tell do I need another screen to read your ‘e-books’ when it would have been just as easy to read them without proprietary controls and locked-in business relationships? Hm?

Amazon (and its copy-cats) want you to buy their e-book appliance because then [presumably] it ties you in to their system and you end up buying just their flavour of e-books for life. This is the double-damnation of the Kindle — as yes, in fact, if you buy an e-book from Amazon you’re doomed to Amazon-sanctioned readers for life — but other vendors are just as culpable — as everyone selling ebooks may pay lip service to open standards and “you buy it, you own it” rhetoric but the truth is: I, you, and everyone else are just one hard-drive-crash away from having to re-buy everything: music, books, computer games & applications included.

Right now, in the realm of e-books and e-book appliances, there is both a format war ongoing and a price war on the horizon.

Both make little sense. (You might have already guessed why I think so, but I’ll cover the other points first before my conclusions)

##

Betamax

At one point in time, Betamax and VHS were competing formats. [both are obsolete now; one more object lesson in the e-book technology discussion]

Betamax is more notable in the modern day-and-age for the lengths Sony was willing to go to support the new technology [see: Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.] and that’s a debt we all owe Sony and for which I myself will be eternally grateful, as the SCOTUS ruling on the Betamax case re-affirmed & established a whole new class of fair use and the internet you all so enjoy today may or may not be dependent on it, but your TiVos and Netflix most certainly are.

Anyway. In this article, Betamax (no matter it’s virtues) is cited as a cautionary tale: it was a proprietary format which never garnered enough users to persist after it’s corporate sponsor abandoned it.

I’ll let you Kindle owners puzzle that last bit out.

—

Are there cases where the ‘proprietary’ format won out over the market and became the standard? Why yes, I think there may be — but only after patents expired and ‘proprietary’ became open domain.

It’s a long process and between Sonny Bono and the speed at which technology advances in the present day, there is a large disconnect — not just between ‘rights’ and ‘the public domain’ but a cognitive disconnect where ‘rights’ are now assumed to continue into perpetuity. There is no innovation, no standing on the shoulders of giants — only a klatch of greedy gollums hoarding their ‘Precious’ forever, no matter how it might damage us, or them.

The open [I’m tempted to put that in quotes but the format is Open even if it falls short of full implementation of that ideal] ePub format helps… but only if the motives of market players follows up on the promise of Open Formats —

That is to say: Books are open formats; just open a book. All this e-book nonsense hasn’t proven itself — and one can argue e- is better (and in many ways, it is) but unless and until we figure out this rights-and-perpetuity-thing I quite honestly hate e-books.

My fear is that once the opportunity to make money on an e-book expires, so does the e-book. No permanent record, no addition to the corpus of human knowledge, no appeal and no recourse: Once the economic viability of a book is gone, there is no [apparent] need [to a business-type] to support the e-book and make sure it persists.

I shudder. Business models suck and they’ll suck us all down with them.

Open Source was the best idea of the last century, as important as the Scientific Method was in the 18th and 19th centuries — and if we can be sure Open Source interfaces with what used to be the Public Domain, I for one will be a lot more confident about our future as a species and our ability to solve all our current and any future problems.

This may make me some sort of hybrid Scientist/Socialist/Communist/Pirate, where I feel ideas must be shared. If so, I welcome that label. And I will stoutly defend my new niche against those who would use the same arguments to obtain popular entertainment iterations for free. Dude: free exchange of ideas is one thing, making sure the wealth of human knowledge is available to future generations — that’s great; admirable, even — but my intellectual argument does not guarantee you access to the latest chapters of Naruto or the most recent episode of the Bleach anime.

That’s merely entertainment.

I’m arguing books. Ideas. Social models and actionable suggestions for transforming our society.

Confuse the two at your peril. At best, you are uninformed and intentionally ignorant; at worst you are part of the problem and only provide fodder to those who seek to clamp down on ideas and innovation because there is no profit in it, and to whom the very idea of a ‘free’ society is just another legal fiction that can be ‘fixed’ if enough lobbying dollars are funnelled into respective legislative bodies world-wide.

##

If necessary I’ll expand on that argument but I’m already off-topic.

##

Price War

The first news article I saw [cnet] was time-stamped 6AM: from B&N $149, Wi-Fi-Only Addition to NOOK Family… NOOK 3G Available at $199

So: Nook as we knew it now $60 cheaper, new model [not yet in stores, but announced] for $110 cheaper than the previous established ‘standard’ e-reader price.

New Chapter.

Didn’t take long: by the time I sat down to lunch, Amazon had their PR up: AMAZON KINDLE NOW ONLY $189 [emphasis Amazon’s]

Yeah, now we really are seeing a competitive e-reader market, and given the realities of the Razor and Blades model: prices will go lower. The point of this mess is not to sell e-reader appliances, but to gain market share.

The retailer with the largest base gets to dictate terms to not only the customers, but to the publishers.

[And I haven’t even mentioned Apple yet. This is going to get real messy before Christmas.]

Speaking of Apple, Joe Wikert posts a dissenting view, on why bookstores (meaning B&N and Borders) should abandon e-reader gadgets right now, in favour of the iPad, as posted here

key quote:

“Seriously, have you seen the ‘Nook specialist’ at the front of B&N stores?  This poor employee has the unfortunate job of pulling you over to the Nook display with the hopes of wowing you with the device’s many features.  It feels like the teenager serving orange chicken samples on toothpicks in the mall food court, only more awkward.  Imagine the buzz the store would generate if that employee was showing demos of the iPad, featuring the store’s app and books.  I guarantee you it would drive a lot more interest than the Nook display (or the almost completely abandoned new media section at my local Borders store, where they try to sell Sony Readers).”

My current employment as a B&N manager restricts me from commenting further [though you might infer something from the fact that I posted that quote to begin with].

##

Apple Pie

There’s no law that says you can’t take advantage of your customers.
There’s no law that says you can’t traffic on ignorance.
There’s no law that says you have to be altruistic.
There’s no law that says you have to care about, or even serve the needs of, your established customer base.

In fact, there is an established, centuries-old tradition of deceiving your customers, hobbling potential competition, perpetuating unfair systems that happen to be unfair in your favour, lying, cheating, stealing, and generally being a total dick

in fact, being a total dick [in a business sense, and perhaps elsewise] is as American as Apple Pie.

So I can scold Amazon for it’s dick-moves, but my own employer is just as guilty and I’d like to point out one last time:

e-books are just files — many different ways to open files; & you didn’t need to buy a $500 $259 $199 $149 $49 new device at any price to read text. The web is free, and a hell of a lot more complex that these new “e-books”.

I’m conflicted, and confused. I really want to rant and rave against ebooks [and have, over multiple posts] but I’m also trying to understand where my reader base is going – & is this e-book-thing a format they’re adopting, or just a distraction and annoyance?

So, I was trading comments on Twitter with @Yuricon aka Erica Friedman of SocialOptimized, ALC Publishing, Yuricon, Okazu and many other administrative hats, over the topic of ebooks.

Erica Lamented [over consecutive tweets]

Here’s the thing wrong with all the various comics/manga digital formats right now – they are all various.

The thing about books are, you don’t need new anything to read them. Pick one up – start to read.

I don’t think I’m unreasonable to want to be able to just read my manga without having to have a new anything.

In response, some brought up the ePub format, citing it as an emerging ‘single standard’ and the e-book supported by nook, iPad/iBooks, Sony, and others.

Here’s the thing:

From Wikipedia

Basically, EPUB internally uses XHTML or DTBook (an XML standard provided by the DAISY Consortium) to represent the text and structure of the content document, and a subset of CSS to provide layout and formatting. XML is used to create the document manifest, table of contents, and EPUB metadata. Finally, the files are bundled in a zip file as a packaging format.

So, um, the ePub format uses HTML and CSS? Pardon, but what the flying flip is wrong with, say, using HTML and CSS, raw, straight up, no chaser?

ePub is specifically hobbled for no good reason, when apparently if it weren’t for the slight of hand in file extensions and a few things that aren’t kosher html, we could just read these things in a browser…

…A browser on any screen we already happen to own (and we own a lot of screens that support web browsing).

Hm? Publishers? Amazon, Sony, B&N? Anyone care to mention why you’re using tried-and-true open source code and standards but are trying to hide the easily comprehensible, utterly familiar bits behind this ePub screen. “Pay no attention to the open source code behind the curtain!”

Say, how long would it take someone to kludge together a Firefox and/or Chrome extension to read ePub-formatted “e-books” in browser with very little in the way of effort?

[who says Google isn’t already working on that for Chrome? Google Editions, anyone?]

Manufacturers, publishers, and Google are all likely scared stiff that we’ll figure this out on our own. There is nothing new about e-books; in fact even the fancy e-container is nothing new, as anyone who can use Wikipedia soon realizes:

E-books are web pages! [and Soylent Green is made of People!] The trick, apparently, is restricting access to web-ready text, keep us from copying it, and making it seem new and special and something that requires new hardware, when in fact we’ve been reading text on screens for a couple of decades now. Why sell us a system when you could just sell us a book: device agnostic, HTML/CSS configured, browser ready — just the file, dammit, why all the shenanigans?

With a simple browser extension or update, ePub is even worse (in a business sense) than MP3. MP3s require some sort of plug-in or app; text requires a pair of eyeballs (— sorry, didn’t mean to be discriminatory: a single eyeball, or a sensitive touch and knowledge of Braille will also do the trick) and everything we do on the web already supports that text function. The ‘T’ in HTML is text; this goes deep into the bones of the web we all already know.

##

It’s not gloom and doom, though: Where a hit song can take up 3 1/2 minutes of your time, and a whole album (no matter how epic) seldom takes up more than 77 minutes, a book requires hours of your time and attention. That’s not to say people won’t pirate books — I think it’s fair to say people will pirate anything — but there is less of a potato-chip-factor to books [justonemore] as there was in the early days of downloading music.

Though I suppose that only applies to long works of fiction and literature; comics (particularly 22-48 page pamphlets) may be screwed and 200pgs of manga take, in my experience, about an hour to read the 1st time through. (Obviously I take more time on subsequent re-reading, though not all fans are plumbing books for depth of meaning and appreciation of the art)

But, still, after 15 years (Napster launched in June of 1999 — and only operated for two years — and Napster would have been impossible without the acceptance by so much of the user base of the .mp3 encoding and format, introduced in 1995)

Actually, I need to interrupt that thought — Please note, MP3 came first: small enough to be portable, good enough for most uses, widespread years before Napster. It wasn’t file sharing that “killed” music (if that is your corporate or legal position; and it’s a position that is debatable) it was the music files that made the sharing possible and piracy inevitable.

Anyway, after 15 years, digital music settled down into a new pattern and apparently, someone [*cough* Jobs, Apple *cough* *cough*] figured out how to make money off of it, and we currently enjoy a DRM-free music environment where we buy things and they’re ours, so long as we don’t lose the file. (I’ve lost more music to friends, borrowing my CDs and never returning them, then I ever will to hard drive crashes)

First comes the format, then the user base, then the tools, then the pirates, and then the new sales ecosystem. We’re still waiting on the ebook format for comics (raw image files don’t quite cut it) (and the ebook format for text is already out there: you’re reading a blog that uses it) and while we haven’t seen great tools or ‘mainstream’ piracy a la Napster, yet, I think we all know this is coming.

The trick is to leapfrog the mess and lost revenue and legal hassles and skip ahead to the stable, legal sales ecosystem.

Closed formats, DRM, and “walled gardens” are going to be part of that process. In fact, it’s the part that is currently trying to charge you $100-$250-$500 (and up, for some iPads) for a dedicated e-book reader. And honestly, much like the lawsuits and massive piracy, it’s a step most of us would be willing to skip.

There are just too many businesses, participants, and players out there looking to squeeze money out of the old system or cash in on the new system. This isn’t an open market; this isn’t free-market capitalism yet. People, customers, are going to get screwed over. Business, heck, whole industries may go under before the dust settles and the solution seems obvious.

##

What pisses me off most is this assumption that borders on religious belief, that the old system and old players are somehow sacrosanct, and will always be able to stay in business, stay at the top of their business, and no matter what changes they are guaranteed a place at whatever new table gets set up.

In short: No.

And that’s how things work: Past performance is no guarantor of future success, all investment carries risk; innovate, adapt, respond, or die.

##

So, I’m a bookseller, the endangered salamander of the old ecosystem, soon to die and not likely to stay open through next year, let alone the re-alignment to come.

Oh, really?

[image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chanc/2558304478/]

Say, combine this recent post by Seth Godin with my post of 10 months ago — hm. It seems I’ve a business that has nothing to do with ‘books’ and everything to do with the way you people *already* use my bookstore. So what if the books are only decorations, and you buy coffee while connecting to the internet through a portal on which I can sell ads — it’s not much, but the major payroll expenses are restocking and selling the books; if no one is buying books we can do more with less. (While also selling books online – oh, yeah, I’m thinking about this 5 different ways, including some I haven’t posted about yet) Don’t worry about the store; we may end up as nothing more than a fancy coffeeshop, but I’ll make out.

And new books will be released. Maybe not as many, to start with, but good content will win out.

The question, then, between 1970-publishing-and-retail and 2015-publishing-and-retail is how much bullshit they [“they” being corporations who control—but do not create—content] put us through and how much cash they con us out of, before we find the new model book paradise just past the horizon.

[This started out as an editorial to the lead story for this week’s Geek Biz Report; about 10 paragraphs in, I realized this would be it’s own column.]

So, the news: Borders gets it’s sh!t together, investors shrug: stock price goes up a whole 10¢

[editorial]

here’s the breakdown: Borders isn’t going out of business. Yet. So, there’s that. Invest if you want to.

But: no matter who throws money at Borders or what kind of wet dreams they have about a Borders/B&N merger to form The One True Book Retailer, it’s still not going to happen. If you buy Borders & think BGP can buy out BKS — hell, if you have that kind of money you could rebuild Borders from scratch. And B&N isn’t shopping right now, so a BKS x BGP merger is even less likely. In fact, B&N is still busy digesting the College division, launching a digital division, and generally flopping around – waiting for someone to tell them what the e-book answer is.

There is no e-book answer. There wasn’t an e-book question.

& Just because Amazon shows up late and comes up with a half-assed, proprietary approach to a “problem” which already had a solution, thanks and manages to dupe people into buying yet another device (no matter how spiffy) doesn’t change the fact that e-books aren’t any newer than a paperback. Books are books.

oooo… there’s a new format and a new business model and Publishing Will Be Changed Forever! — yeah, yeah, whatevs. Check that wikipedia article I just linked to on ‘paperbacks’: 75 years ago there was a new format, and new business models. You know what happened? More people could read more books, for cheaper.

That’s about all that happened.

yeah, there was some business stuff, and book retail moved out of stuffy, out-of-the-way bookshops and into the mainstream. This is the embarrassment of riches you currently enjoy: some shops closed but nationwide mall chains, followed by the major big-box retail booksellers, arose from that mess and these days you can drive 5 miles to buy a book, just about any book, today — or, upon asking, have it in a scant 100 hours – so long as a copy of the book still exists somewhere on the market.

That is what’s amazing, if you ask me.

Books are still being published; hardcover books are still being published. “But, but, why would anyone pay $27 for a hardcover when they can get it as a $15 paperback?” Good damn question. The answer, of course, is that publishers introduce artificial scarcity: the paperback isn’t available yet. Buy it for $27, or wait a year.

Why this isn’t applied to e-books, right now and retroactively, is a mystery to me. Just tell Amazon No. Tell ‘em to sit down, shut up, and go sit in the corner. Amazon is a parasite; gaming the system for their own profit. Amazon is perfectly within their rights to do so: there is no law that says you can’t take advantage of a decades-old multi-tiered distribution system designed for nationwide retail sales, lay down some internets on it and squeeze it for profits. But, Dear Amazon, there is also no law that requires publishers to gamely take a reaming up a nether orifice just because you have some market share that you’ve had for a couple of years now and that you think is yours by right and into perpetuity:

Amazon, What do you do when they say ‘no’? When e-books are fully integrated into the system, what makes you think you’ll have access to all titles, all the time? — what, just because you’re Amazon? Hubris, much?

##

There are a number of readers—the true book lovers—who actively follow new releases and published reviews and favourite authors, and this number is proportional to the overall population (and so is growing slowly, along with population) but is for all intents and purposes static. Only so many readers.

The publishers, so long as they were in control, knew and pwned this market. First the hardcover, for the critics and libraries and collectors, and then the paperbacks for book clubs and the mass market. And this works: not every book merits a paperback reprint, and the reception of the hardcover informs the way the book is released (and occasionally re-introduced) in paperback formats. There are the book awards. There’s the occasional ‘break-out’ title. For the most part, it’s a meritocratic system (once one makes it over the curb—the steep curb—into actual publication) — the market decides the bestsellers, those worthy of paperback reprints and eventual acceptance into either heavy-bookclub-rotation or inclusion on school reading lists.

Parallel to the ‘literary’ track: some books go direct to paperback, skipping the hardcover release because it’ll do better as a ‘pulp’ anyway. 99% of Harlequin releases are pulp paperbacks — 110 new titles a month, shipping world-wide — so there is already another publishing model out there, past Amazon’s wet dream of ‘all e-book, all the time’ and the traditional publishing most of us are used to.

If Amazon were smart (and not just big and full of themselves) instead of attacking and emulating all of a clunky, internally inconsistent, and thorny publishing market as a whole — they’d just buy Harlequin: built-in catalog, built-in subscriber base—who are more interested in reading stories and not so much the book-as-artefact—and an established content-producing-engine that churns out 200pg books by the metric tonne yearly. Take out printing costs and the $3.99 e-book is handily the successor to the $5.99 pulp paperback and you don’t have to pretend you’re anything you’re not — and you’ve also bettered your strong conviction of $10 as an e-book price point by better than half.

It’s not that $10 is a bad price, or the wrong price — but it shouldn’t and honestly can’t be applied to all books, willy-nilly, just because you’d like it that way, Mr. Bezos. Books aren’t widgets. Books aren’t “content”, at least not in the internet-sense where content can be produced by skimming web-bots or tricking your users into writing ‘reviews’ for you.

Books are books, and books are special. If there is anything I hate ([gollum]hates hates hates it, Bagginses[/gollum]) it’s this idea that books are just another thing, to be bought, traded, commoditized, digitized, and sold sold sold.

Sure, e-books seem new, special, different — but they’re not so different. We’re actually arguing about the container, merely the outer wrapper —
iPad, iPhone, Kindle, ePub, PDF or just plain text: whatever the platform or filename, what’s inside is still a Book. This isn’t even a technological problem, just a cognitive one: how often do I have to repeat myself? Books are Books and almost by definition, books are not the internet.

##

Publishing is a dynamic business. Right up until the 1990s, in fact, there were precious few publishers who’d been in the game for a whole century; it was all 1890s and aughts & 1910s & 20s & 30s. Publishing as a whole (going to the etymological roots of ‘publish’: the act of making things public) is an extension of centuries and millennia of writing, printing, and culture — but the actual business units (as are currently extant) all seemed to spawn in a 50 year period prior to 1939. Someone with better academic chops than I should take that particular nugget and run with it; there’s a doctoral thesis right there just waiting to be written. And while a lot of brand-names are the same, actual ownership and management is not

Ownership has changed hands several times over, and many new publishers entered the field, and there was a time when no Major Media Conglomerate felt quite right unless and until they ate a major publishing house — consider Random House and it’s maze of imprints: many represent former competitors (Anchor, Ballantine, Bantam, Crown, Doubleday, Knopf, Pantheon) gobbled up over decades, and Random House as a whole was bought by the privately-held Bertelsmann group in 1996. This is a different business than it was 70 years ago; it’s big business. *Really* Big Business. And yet, there were no economies of scale to had in consolidation. The book business still hangs on by it’s fingernails, hoping for that next bestseller to pay for years of debut novels and careful editorial wagers — good books, all, for the most part, but break-even publishing at best.

The amazing thing: no one knows what’ll be that next breakout title. You, as an editor, pick books you like, you help the author polish her work, tighten it up, and then you release it into the wilds of the book market and see how it fares (while marketing the hell out of it). Sometimes, you get a Da Vinci Code or The Help. Sometimes, you sell just enough to break even. Most often, the book doesn’t even pay off it’s advance, particularly for a first novel. For years, decades, publishers didn’t sweat it; so long as the enterprise as a whole broke even year-to-year, great: keep going. A surprise bestseller would fund a publisher for a couple of years, a new opportunity to find new authors—deserving authors—and maybe, just maybe, the next surprise bestseller.

So long as the people making books also love books this system not only works it produces real gems – not the Da Vinci Code, but the smaller, exceptional titles that people love & that sell well, but fly just under the New York Times magical top 15.

Amazon hasn’t done their homework: they want to destroy the publishing business but haven’t thought about what the publishing industry is or does. Sure, you can look at King, Patterson, Steel, & Roberts, and say, “Hell, these guys don’t need a publisher… we’ll sell the manuscripts direct to the public as a digital file—no publishing costs—and share the profits and abandon the printed page for good!”

Sure, for an author that has a built-in fan base…

But how do we discover new books, new voices? And do you even know what editors do? It’s not just proofreading, I’ll tell you that.

Books are not files. Books are not widgets. Books are experiences, better than Hollywood, better than cable TV, sometimes better than real life.

And to succeed at publishing, or at book retail, One Must Love Books. Whole-heartedly, and with all our intellect and soul. Amazon can beat me on price, but Amazon can not create new readers. Amazon can index the entirety of the backlist, and the well-known names, and bestsellers — but Amazon does not put new books into the hands of customers, Amazon does not foster discovery and conversations, Amazon does not sell books. Amazon cannot put a book into the hands of a 5 year-old; Amazon can’t read that book to a child. If Amazon succeeds at supplanting book retail, they’ll also severely damage their own customer base, perhaps permanently. People turn to Amazon last, after talking to a friend or reading a review or following a link on a blog — or after going into a store. Amazon delivers the world to your doorstep, but can’t sell anything. Selling is a personal interaction; sales is a skill. Sales happens person-to-person, millions of times a day.

At the bookstore: We sell books — Amazon is merely an overgrown warehouse, a delivery system that ships the books after the hard job of selling the book is done. And like all parasites, Amazon is the only one that benefits, at the expense of the host.

When the host dies, what will Amazon do? And after Amazon kills off both book retailers and book publishers, then who the eff is actually still making the books?

Is this a good thing? I can publish to the internet right now, skipping retail, publisher, and Amazon: why do I need Amazon? Do they provide editors, or marketing? [editorial and marketing cost money] Do they put my book on shelves in stores, to be discovered by browsing readers? [Amazon has no brick-and-mortar storefront, let alone multiple storefronts, and e-books are hard to shelve in libraries] Does Amazon do anything, besides list the book, with a page & a search engine, and a “buy” link?

I can set up my own page, my own ‘buy now’ button. And there are at least three major search engines out there that not only index the web, but also occasionally are the best way to find something on Amazon.

Amazon does nothing that I can’t do myself. Heck, I could even print and ship physical copies of the book myself: Ask Howard how well self-publishing works.

##

E-books are new, and the future is uncertain. But, 75 years ago there was also a new format, and new business models. You know what happened? More people could read more books, for cheaper. And that’s exactly where we’ll be, 10 years from now. I don’t know how Amazon will cope, but if they want to provide books (either as a retailer or publisher) then they need to study the system they’re breaking, and spend the time, money, and effort to replace it.

If they don’t, we will, and we won’t need Amazon to do it.

[/editorial]

From Wikipedia: Buggy Whips

A buggy whip is a horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash used for driving a horse harnessed to a buggy or other small open carriage. A coachwhip, usually provided with a long lash, is used in driving a coach with horses in front of other horses. Though similar whips are still manufactured for limited purposes, the buggy whip industry as a major economic entity ceased to exist with the introduction of the automobile, and is cited in economics and marketing as an example of an industry ceasing to exist because its market niche, and the need for its product, disappears. In discussing market regulation, it is often held that the economy would be disadvantaged as a whole if the automobile had been banned to protect the buggy-whip industry.

Buggy whips are not entirely gone. A resurgence of interest in the international sport of combined driving and historical carriage driving, sports enjoyed by people of all ages, has allowed some buggy whip manufacturers to stay in business, serving this specialty niche market. Foremost among these is a company in Westfield, Massachusetts.

##

When the motor car (the automobile, the self-powered quadricycle, the horseless carriage, by whatever name) got an internal combustion engine, the game changed almost overnight.

Suddenly we could go further, faster, and without leaving dung in the roadways. It was a revolution in transportation technology. Several interdependent industries and networks developed to both support and take advantage of the car (not just car manufacturers: rubber & tire production, the transition of the oil companies from lamp oil to gasoline and the retail network that followed, car sales, and service stations) and our underlying social infrastructure was also forever changed: drive-ins, drive-thrus, motels, interstate highways, suburbs, exurbs, and sprawl — to say nothing of taking a date to a secluded spot, parking, and making out in the back seat.

The Car Changed Everything.

And no doubt, sometime between 1895 and 1910, some internet pundit was immediately on his telegraph key to broadcast to the web (such as it was, at the time) that the Day of the Horse was over, and the Age of Automobile had arrived.

Of course, this is a gross simplification of economic models, as the horse-as-transport is just one aspect of overall animal domestication [food being primary, then and now] and the horse was much more important in that day and age as the horsepower that drove agriculture — interstate commerce was largely done by rail (and rail continued to be important until the 50s, when Eisenhower lobbied for—and eventually signed—the legislation that would found and fund the US interstate system) and personal transport, back in the day, was trolley car, subway (what little mass transit there was at the time) — or shoe leather. Most commuters, as we now understand the term, wouldn’t be able to afford a horse — let alone a pair or team of horses & a carriage, to say nothing of the driver and footmen and grooms and stablehands, and feed and fodder and saddle and tack or harness — this was a major production, getting around by horse.

…which of course is why the car took off, after Mr. Ford manufactured ‘em in quantity and proved the business model and made the car affordable (after a fashion; a single horse was probably still cheaper but it didn’t seat four) — and hired assembly line workers and actually paid them enough to afford the machines they assembled. (Fair wages are Ford’s legacy, more than Model T’s and assembly-line-methods. Ford realized the first customers for his product should be the people working for Ford.)

The introduction of specialized tractors and combines for agriculture has done more than the car ever did to improve your daily lot in life — and did more to change our world — but this idea of car-replacing-horse has made itself a home in the public’s collective memory, and of course more people drive cars every day, as opposed to taking the train (to say nothing of riding a tractor to work)

In areas where dense urban centers had already formed, the impact of the car was lessened (while traffic became even more of a headache, the car was not an engine of geographic destruction) but for much of 50s America, booming with babies and with cheap money for new mortgages via VA Loans and cheap cars rolling off of the same assembly lines that had recently built jeeps and bombers, the modern suburb in all of its ugly glory was born.

##

I know I’m the only manga (or comic, or even book) blogger who gives a crap about urban planning and the future of our cities, so I’ll just have to ask that you forgive that last digression. But I do have a point, dragging a dead horse into a editorial on publishing [to be flogged, yet again, only this time not metaphorically]:

The car replaced the horse. Given.

So, all of our horses were converted into baseballs, glue, hamburgers, and fry oil decades ago and the only horses left are in zoos and [mounted and stuffed] in private collections? right?

Actually, no.

Between 59 and 100 Million horses are still employed daily: in sport, recreation, and yes, farm work [the number varies depending on which actual, quoted figure on horses you’d care to believe from the same damn wikipedia article, about six paragraphs apart]

Some people still own horses because they are the best way to do a particular job, even given all other options. Some own horses out of a sense of tradition. Some own them for sport or hobbies. Some own them because horses are beautiful, and there is a bond between us and horses that nothing else can replace.

There may be “better” solution out there, for most needs (but not all) —

but for those who value historical models, or who just aren’t on this tech track just yet, or for whom a technologic-one-size-fits-all solution still doesn’t quite fit: There is still some value in a horse. And it would seem that the Amish may provide a new model for publishing — just because we hadn’t thought about books in quite this way yet.

##

50 years from now, Steve Jobs has had his way, and was elected to 2 [non-consectutive] terms as US President and later appointed as Chief Justice to the US Supreme Court. Apple is the new default format; everything and I mean everything is available from the iWhatever store, we only get dissenting news via our inboxes or from RSS feeds, and the wild internets fills in whatever gaps might be left over from your corporate-government-Apple-spoonfed-feed.

The e-book will replace the book. Again, I’ll accept that as a given.

And again I have to say, yes… but no. There will still books.

A book requires no power, no backup, and no support past light enough to read by. There will always be situations where what you need is a book.

And in much the same way that the horse is still used in sport, Books will still be used as a way to convey Art. There may be a billion e-books, and only a scant hundred thousand books, published each year — but each and every one of those books will be worth something. Books will populate many private collections, as some books have intrinsic worth for what they are, and others are just a valuable for what they contain —

##

The e-book will replace the book, in the same way that the car replaced the horse.

Sure, if you want to phrase it that way.

But I also hope that even the most fervent e-book advocate will admit that there is still a value in some physical books. If nothing else, the last books will be much like Gutenberg’s first: a bible. No getting around that, no matter how pro-technology you are.

I can see moving almost all of my collection to an e-book format, if and when those volumes become available. Some things (newspapers, magazines) have already been handily supplanted by open web standards and the wealth of information available on the internet. Unless it takes hours to read, we’ve already moved past the printed page. And in time, I could adjust, from reading a page to reading a screen, if the user interface and display technology catch up just a bit more.

I might not miss physical books, just like currently I don’t necessarily miss horseback riding.

But the two experiences are not identical: e-books aren’t books. Riding in a car is no where near the experience of riding on a horse.

This is where publishing will go: the experience that can not be had on a screen.

##

And [in a thread I’ll pick up on in the next rethinking the box column] there is still a place for bookstores: there is still expertise, and enthusiasm, and atmosphere, and experiences to be had, even in a world without “books”

[image credit Ape Lad, from his Laugh Out Loud Cats, non-commercial CC licensed]

The original title of this post was “Recent bad news not new; just fallout from the Manga ‘Market Correction’ of 2009”

Yes, it’s grim. By the time I’d waded through years of backstory and got to my conclusion, though, I’d changed my tone: still cynical, still worried, but hopeful.

##

ICv2 produces some lovely charts and numbers, which go back to 2001 (Dec. of that year for graphic novels) and while the data is limited to estimates of Diamond sales through local comic shops, it’s better than nothing and I for one appreciate all the hard work they’ve done. (I only wish I’d thought to track something similar, using my methods, that far back.) (and that I had time. Maybe I should rethink being a store manager and settle back into something less demanding at the bookstore)

In fact, if you look at ICv2’s Dec ’01 GN Chart you will in fact find manga already on it. Later volumes of manga (Inuyasha 10, Dragonball Z 7) and also at $12.95, $14.95, and even $15.95 price points. (the third book charting that month was Dark Horse’s Dirty Pair)

So at the dawn of manga (or at least as far back as I’ve reputable sources) manga was a niche, it was expensive, it sold through the direct market, and while not a chart topper yet, Viz and Dark Horse were doing well enough with manga that each could put at least one volume into the Top 25.

Numbers from Feb. 2002 show Ranma 1/2 almost breaking into the top 10 (and already, at that point, at 19 volumes) and [I’m going to wear out the [em] tags in this post] the 6th volume of shojo staple Fushigi Yugi coming in at #20 — out of all graphic novels, mind, it outsold Blade and Spider-Man volumes that month — and this is a $15.95 shojo manga (and likely flipped, at this early date). It’s also worth noting that ICv2 bases these numbers on Diamond’s sales to the direct market, which were and are non-returnable — so your Local Comic Shop guy was seeing enough movement on shojo manga in 2002 to order it in quantity.

Mind blown yet?

In March of 2002 the number one graphic novel was Dark Horse’s Lone Wolf & Cub, already in it’s 20th volume — and number one. (Also in March ICv2 expanded it’s Graphic Novel Chart from 25 to 50 — and later extensions have followed over the years — so the picture becomes a little less fuzzy as time goes on. As the market expanded, so did their coverage. Thank several gods (and some eldrich powers) that Milton Griepp & his fine staff were on hand to think of this stuff 10 years ago.

With an expansion to a top 50, we also get to see how the first Tokyopop volumes were managing in the direct market, #38 Cardcaptor Sakura vol 6. Already $9.99 at that point, but also still flipped? as I recall, since unflipped 2nd editions of that series went on sale later.

And early shades of Naruto Nation are also in place, as new volumes of Lone Wolf & Cub each take the #1 slot on these GN charts until November 2002, when a couple of Justice League volumes finally knock LW&C (then up to vol 28) out of number one. It only managed #3 that month.

Eight months at number one. Not bad for those dinky little paperbacks.

By December of 2002, Tokyopop was cracking the top 10 (with Love Hina, not surprisingly) and the manga market, as we knew it, was well under way.

##

I could do play-by-play commentary on a decade’s worth of charts, but I’ll spare you.

If one was a fan back then, or if you knew your history — or you forced yourself to learn it — then taking an afternoon (say, a Saturday afternoon) to click through charts at both ICv2 and Comichron.com (The Comic Chronicles is kinda like Five Thirty Eight for comic books) then there’s a lot to learn — like, how far Graphic Novels have come in 10 years, with manga being a part of that but also the expansion of the ‘literary’ and biographical end of the GN market, and the collection and reprinting en masse of the whole 20th century newspaper comic strip corpus…

My point is, it’s a bigger pie — in fact, there are lot more pies out there these days — and so a slightly smaller slice of pie is still a feast compared to what was available 10 or 8 or even 5 years ago.

In April of 2005, again according to ICv2, Manga accounted for 29 of the top 100 titles, with estimated combined sales (in that market) of 53,000 volumes.

By April of 2010, manga seem to have slipped with only 15 titles in the top 100, and sales of a scant 20,000 or so units… via comic shops. The bookstore market is the new home of manga. But even ICv2 numbers can still provide insight: expanding from their top 100 to top 300, manga takes up 50 slots and total sales of 37,000 units — yes, in this one market it dropped, but still not bad for a format that has expanded well beyond the LCS, and is diluted by the wealth of other offerings available.

Those Fushigi Yugi Fans who bought enough copies to put shojo into the top 20 of an LCS sales reckoning in 2002 have long since moved on to Borders and other chain bookstores, and they were followed by a “generation” (I use quotes because, 3 maybe 4 years, c’mon) of manga fans who didn’t know there was any other way to read manga besides plopping down on the floor and clogging up the aisle at the local Borders or B&N. It certainly didn’t occur to a lot of these folks to buy it — which is of course part of the problem, and why quite a few stores are cutting back on the voluminous manga offerings that seemed our Tezuka-given right just three years ago. And we’re in a recession besides.

##

The total pie is a lot bigger; there are many more publishers interested in Graphic Novels these days:

in addition to stalwarts Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, and Legacy Houses DC and Marvel, and long-time syndicate reprinter Andrews McMeel, and long-standing dark horse Dark Horse, and creator-initiated Image — we’ve added First Second, Top Shelf, Boom!, Dynamite, IDW, Devil’s Due, SLG, HNA Abrams’s Amulet and ComicArts, and Scholastic Graphix —

and a mass retooling of some older imprints — Random House’s Pantheon, Three Rivers Press, Villard — and of course Del Rey; Disney’s Hyperion; HarperCollins’s Harper trade-paperback imprint and Collins Design; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt adding Comics to it’s “Best American” anthology series; Tintin via Little Brown & Co.; Macmillan’s Hill & Wang, Metropolitan Books, and St. Martin’s Griffin; Penguin’s Philomel, Plume, Perigee, and others; Simon & Schuster’s Alladin, Touchstone, and others — that now carry graphic novels as a matter of course, in addition to & alongside their other offerings —

and Last Gasp and Heavy Metal are still truckin’ and still putting out the weird and wonderful, just like they have since the 70s —

And while a number of manga publishers came and went in the past decade (ADV, Aurora, Broccoli, CMX, ComicsOne, Central Park Media, DramaQueen, DrMaster, Go!Comi) and a few seem on the ropes (Udon, Seven Seas, Netcomics, Media Blasters) and at least one seems like an anime co. afterthought (Bandai) we still have 5 viable manga publishers: Dark Horse, Del Rey, Tokyopop, Viz, and Yen Press. [edit: 5 large publishers; there are at least two smaller viable manga houses: Vertical and DMP. See the comments]

• Dark Horse was first, they will be last [in my opinion]. DH has a care for the material, a cautious business sense, an adventurous creative sense, and other things (Hellboy, Star Wars) to keep the company going even after a manga title tanks underperforms.

• Del Rey has the backing of Random House for marketing and distribution, a relationship with Kodansha that has survived thus far and looks safe, a reputation amongst fans built on Genshiken and other great titles, and a backup plan: a deal with Cartoon Network for things like Ben 10 and Bakugan — and yes, we scoff, but that TV-to-comic-book fluff sells like hotcakes and keeps my Shugo Chara in print.

• Tokyopop was about to go under, I feel — or at least be so far gone the brand would be sold to someone who wouldn’t mismanage it — but it looks like one lottery ticket bought: a massive bet on Priest and the heavy involvement of Stu Levy in same, might make enough money to not only save a lot of collective bacon, but to revitalize the brand, provide operating capital for at least 2 more years, and make Tokyopop relevant again (at least for the span of one media news cycle). Not all underlying problems have been fixed, but T’Pop is leaner, smarter; still has a marketing, distribution, and content deal with HarperCollins; and just seems meaner these days, though their rah-rah-cheerleader-bubblegum email updates need to retooled or scrapped. Seriously. And I’m not all that big on the Tokyopop Tour idea either, but that’s because I’m old and crotchety and I don’t buy into the ‘fan’ thing, I Buy Books. (I would say we’re an untapped market, but no, I’m close to tapped out, so yeah, go get some new fans.)

• Viz. is Viz. I can’t even begin… well, I’ll try. Viz has a longstanding arrangement with Simon & Schuster for bookstore distribution and marketing support — not that they need marketing support since Shonen Jump, the occasional cable TV anime, and established brands like Pokemon pretty much sell themselves. To its credit, Viz takes that money and returns with more product: Shojo Beat, SigIKKI, Viz Signature, the Ghibli Library, and massive extensions of almost-there-but-otherwise-wouldn’t-make-it properties like One Piece and Pluto. —no, really: who else would print dozens of volumes of One Piece after the initial sales fell flat? And who would have published Pluto at all? The VizKids line (Zelda, Pokemon) even without Naruto or Bleach would generate enough cash to run a manga publisher; Viz has an embarrassment of riches, but also the grace and poise (and massive available catalog) to pull it off with style.

• And Yen. Yen has the full backing of Hachette, who not only fronted enough cash to bootstrap Yen Press from nothing to 6 out of the top 10 NYT bestsellers in a scant two years, they paired that with the hire of Kurt Hassler (who in later years will be known as the [insert title here] of manga) and the commitment to at least two years of Yen Plus, an anthology magazine. Though the recession killed off Yen+, the imprint bravely soldiers on with an expanding catalog of manga and manhwa and begs the question: what if this kind of company had launched in 2004, rather than 2006?

In a decade: five manga publishers where there used to be two (just Dark Horse and Viz back in the murky pre-history of manga fandom)

I’d say, even given the current climate, that ain’t bad. It’s a 150% increase, in fact.

In the interim, a lot of product was put out — some of it great, a lot of it marginal, at best — and a lot was made of the inroads to ‘major’ markets (though 4 whole bookcases of manga in one of the major chains, while nice, do not constitute the mass market) and double-digit sales growth and the ‘sudden surge’ of manga — but I think, in retrospect, we can frame it thus:

• 1992-2005 saw a major expansion of comics (under the guise of ‘Graphic Novels’) — into new genres, new markets, new fan bases, and new appreciation of the form. I pick 1992 because of the Maus Pulitzer – though it was also the year Scott McCloud presumably started work on Understanding Comics [which actually first saw print in 1993] which has since become the primer and first source for a “generation” of both artists and critics (again, generation in quotes, and I don’t mean to slight Eisner in this context; it’s just that Eisner didn’t have the internet) (and I think the critics love to cite Scott more often – artist read it and take it to heart, critics [alas] use it as a framework to judge, to our loss) (that digression aside…)

• From 2001 to 2007 the US economy was growing (and more broadly, from 1983 to 2007 we experienced a general trend of growth, not recession and so consumer spending of all types, even pre-teen-on-an-allowance-spending, was going up.)

• 2003-2007 saw Kurt Hassler, and other bookstore buyers, buying manga. Yep. They bought it. It wasn’t a “major expansion” as no bookstore had ever really bought it before. (feel free to tell me about your obvious outlier: I’d love to know which bookstore stocked manga before Tokyopop) Here’s the thing: from zero to one guy at one chain showing an interest, to other chains matching to compete in a new market, and suddenly you go from a Diamond direct market also-ran to thousands of volumes shipped and shelved in the course of a year. This was a good time to sell manga. A lot of folks saw a good thing and thought they’d pile on. No one really understood the underlying causes, though, and few thought of the realities of selling to the bookstore market — sure, it’s fine when volumes turn (it’s a money machine) but as soon as demand slacks, for whatever reason, the stores use the returnablity of volumes (it was in the distro&sales agreements you didn’t read) to their advantage, and when the economy turns south, they use it with a vengeance.

The Manga market didn’t fail in May of 2010, the writing was on the wall after the Christmas of 2007. But publishing does not react quickly. Titles on sale for 25 December 2007 were in the pipe a year earlier, and after those tanked there remained other titles still in the pipe for release over the next 6-12 months. Manga publishers could see the problem but translators had already completed work, license fees were paid long-ago, and contracts with printers had been signed.

And the two past recessions had only lasted 8 months — the smart business move was to borrow cash, keep moving, and rely on the fact that things would be better next year. Then 2008… wasn’t kind.

We as fans didn’t see the immediate results of the recession, because contractual obligations meant books were made, printed, shipped, and shelved even after we had actually stopped buying them. Not only did this mask the coming market correction, it exaggerated it, as books shipped-but-not-sold weigh more and more heavily on the balance sheets of publishers.

The eventual backlash of massive returns from retailers shouldn’t have been a surprise coup de grâce but no one was planning for a downturn; all the graphs pointed Up Up Up… but the graphs only started in 2001-2002, at the very beginning of the last rebound. Some basic assumptions were quite wrong. Even given the two ‘minor’ blips (the eight-month recessions of 1991 and 2001) there was a 25-year trend of nothing but blue skies, with the occasional cloud, and even clouds seemed to have silver linings. No one planned for credit-default-swap-fuelled meltdown; no one knew what CDFs were. 2008 hit us in the back of the head like a lead pipe. In retrospect, yeah, we can kinda-sorta sort things out, but there was no way to plan for how consumer markets reacted.

##

So manga was a ‘thing’, a consumer trend right at the tail end of 25 years of an over-performing US economy.

Consumers would buy anything, and one of the coolest anythings around were manga and anime DVDs. In this overheated consumer market, a lot of companies tried anime and manga, a lot of product was licensed and released, and almost all of it was unsustainable.

Damn, it was a great time to be a fan. But companies were (even at these levels) just scraping by, borrowing money, making bets, & waiting for that Next Big Thing. If the next big thing had been something like Pokemon or Naruto, all bets paid off and the cycle started again. Unfortunately, for so many, the next big thing was the Great Recession.

We’re back to a baseline. Yes, of course I miss the market of 5 years ago. Those were heady times to be a fan, so many choices that you could afford to pick and choose the very best, and let the merely good rot on the vine. But it was never sustainable.

The legacy of the anime boom is that several major publishers (slow turtles that they are) decided to get into the manga business, and so in 2010 we have not two but five major players in the manga market, and all but one (the first, the last, Dark Horse) are backed by major book pubs or have longstanding agreements with them. And a number of imprints (or new start-ups!) are just waiting for the economy to improve, and for the fans to start buying again.

2009 was a market correction; in retrospect inevitable; regrettable but given the larger economy unavoidable.

May of 2010, when Viz announced layoffs, Go!Comi faded into that good night, and DC finally realized they owned CMX and then suddenly didn’t want to anymore — well, it seems like it all took place overnight but this has been building for years.

My hopes reside in not what happened then, but what happens next. When the economy does improve (and it may take 2 years for publishers to catch up) then what can the new, expanded manga base do for us? With a decade of experience, what can the anime localizers finally put out?

[*fingers crossed*]
(And here’s hoping Japan pulls out as well.)