Lisa Gabriele wants some VC money to market her book.
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The first time I visited Good Egg — 267 Augusta Ave in the Kensington Market –  I queried the owner if they hosted book signings. She said she supposed they would if the right opportunity came up. It was unclear to me if the store considered itself a bookstore or one for cooking. Their inventory was half books at the time. That was last year. I popped into the store again a few weeks ago and was pleased to see it bustling with shoppers and a list of events was scribbled on their blackboard. Apparently Kathryn Borel is having a seminar on food writing on march 25th and they also host classes in knife skills and other foodie-gasm topics.

We have lost great independent bookstores in the last few months. Pages is gone. Ballenford and Mirvish closed long ago. McNally is still operating just not in Toronto. People that love books are rightfully saddened by this, but when I shop at Good Egg or Swipe I wonder if they are the answer. A mix of books and merchandise isn’t so bad. Targeting, cornering, and servicing the hell out of a specific audience is what the experts are counseling the publishers to do, so why not bookstores too?

Follow Mika Bareket from Good Egg on Twitter.

Lawrence Lessig nails the core problem with the Google Book Search deal. A few weeks ago, Lessig was interviewed for the show On The Media on NPR. He tells the story of taking his daughter to hospital and doing some research on what might be wrong with her…

And I got to the critical point in the article where they had a table that was going to tell me whether I needed to worry or not. And when I looked to where the table was, there was a little passage that said, the rights holder has not authorized the reproduction of this table in this digital form.

His point is just because you can license every single part of a written work doesn’t mean you should. He quotes Peter Drucker “There’s nothing so bad as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Being selective and discrete is not something we as a species are good at, but he does offer a solution or two.

[We need to] think about what the balance should be between free access to culture and metered access to culture, because both extremes are mistakes, either the extreme that says everything is free because then lots of people won’t create because they can’t cover their cost of creating, or the regime that says everything needs to be licensed, because in that world there’s a whole range of creativity – think of kids producing stuff on YouTube – that can’t begin to happen because the cost of negotiating and clearing those rights is just so extreme.

That sounds about right to me. I highly recommend you listen to this segment. It is by far the best explanation I have seen of why regular people should be against this settlement.

Crossing the Streams (of Data)

I attended PodCamp Toronto this year and sat in on a presentation by Montreal’s Jerome Paradis on semantic shopping. Jerome is working on a start-up (that is quasi-stealth) in the shopping space.

Paradis presented a vision of the future of shopping where the consumer is in control. Imagine sitting down at your computer to buy something. You open up a generic shopping application that pulls in streams of data from several retailers at once. The data can be filtered in a way that is personal to the user and the application can be customized to show the user info the way they want to see it. Essentially this amounts to an RSS reader for semantically marked-up products.

Three major things need to happen before Paradis’ vision can become a reality — 1) there needs to be a standard for how suppliers tag their products 2) a generic shopping platform would need a generic payment system 3)  suppliers and retailers need to recognize the value of and then develop an API.

This last point is one that caught me off guard. In his presentation, Paradis referenced the MacMillan/Amazon fracas. The controversy over how to price books takes on some needed clarity in a universe of competing APIs. Book publishers could simply bypass the middleman while still giving the consumer the benefits of an aggregator. My question is do book publishers have the imagination to see the potential of an API? Would they be too afraid to create one when they don’t know where their data would ultimately go and how it would be used? It is early days yet but it is about time book publishers became promiscuous data sharers.

As more houses — particularly the smaller ones — redo their sites, are they hiring someone full time to maintain them? Investigating this design had me wondering if it was being updated in-house. Anyway if anyone from Annick reads this, I would love to know more.

When I discovered BookGlutton in September 2008 I thought it would be cool if there was an open, transportable standard for marginalia. It looks like some folks in the Netherlands — Marc Köhlbrugge and Joep Kuijper are building just that. *OpenMargin was started a year ago. The site is thin on details but I am super excited to see what they come up with.

On one level what I am talking about is evident in the lack of outbound links in any of the news stories in The Globe and Mail or The New York Times. It is 2010. The simple hyperlink has yet to catch on in big media. WTF?

On a more fundamental level, legacy media companies still only understand content-as-product. After all the talk of abundance and of monetizing your audience and of adding value through filtering, the iPad is only being understood as a conduit to sell sausages.

Speaking as a consumer/producer, I want more. But alas, I am too pragmatic to say this is a bad thing.

Good luck to Esquire and Wired and the other properties that are jumping on board early. I just find it fascinating that things are swinging so forcefully back in the publishers favor. With all the excitement it is like the last ten years never happened. As a group, they have been slow to innovate, they have fought against change, they’ve done little to invest in servicing their end customer, all the while they have been smugly confident that they will come out on top. And maybe they will — those that control the content are king. Assuming of course, that that content is the best. Maybe.

Wind Mobile — a company backed by Egyptian money — set a precedent earlier this year when it was allowed to set up shop in this country in order to foster phone-market competition even though its  structure flies in the face of Canada’s foriegn ownership rules.

It is news because it means Amazon could dominate on-line sales of general merchandise in Canada. The Bay and Canadian Tire would be screwed.

It is news because it would mean Canadian Heritage would finally clarify the ownership provisions in the book trade that have been fuzzy ever since Simon and Schuster set up in Canada and Little Brown Canada went away.

But it is huge news because it gives Heather Reisman — owner of Indigo/Chapters and Coles — the opportunity to sell her chain of ‘cultural department’ stores thereby, dodging the bullet everybody knows is coming.

Think about it.

The chain has too much square footage and it inherited some bad leases during the Chapters merger. It is in a sector with low margins and insane returns. Attempts to diversify have been mixed –  toy sales have been successful but Pistachio has failed. The online book business has been hemorrhaging money. And the digital wave hasn’t even hit yet. If Tower Records and Blockbuster are any indication, big-box bookstores need to prepare themselves for the day when the customers don’t come in anymore.

If Reisman wanted to sell (she isn’t getting any younger) no Canadian in their right mind would buy. The chain is an extension of her personality so the price would likely match her sense of what things are worth rather than what they really are, and her shoes would be too big to fill. The place basically operates in her image. None of her peers would take that on. That leaves foreign investment or a sale.

And getting out now would be perfect timing. EBooks are still less than 10% of publishers sales. The iPad has yet to land. Canadians are still reluctant online shoppers. Indigo is probably worth the most it ever will be right now.

The only unknown is Reisman’s own commitment to the company. She doesn’t have to sell. She has the money to turn all the Indigos into Dean&Deluca-style emporiums four times over (your Jamie Oliver cookbook with the knife-set and the cooking pans).  She likes hosting salons and being at the centre of the book scene. Can she give up being culturally relevant? I think she can. She is shrewd enough to walk away. On the other hand, her husband owns a whack of cinemas in this country. If moneymaking was the only thing that mattered to them, the couple would have dumped that stake long ago.

Canada Heritage — your move.

I cried a little when I saw they were hiring a customer support specialist for ebooks. Indigo’s ebooks are provided by their own Kobo service — one of the easier services to use. But it makes me think that when you need to hire someone to explain to your customers how to use your product, then your product is probably broken. This isn’t Indigo’s fault but it reminds me, we as an industry have a long way to go with this ebook thing. Hopefully in six months, when the contract position is set to be renewed this person won’t be needed. #wishfulthinking

I laughed when I saw Indigo is hiring a social media specialist. That isn’t the funny part. I think it is overdue. I even was a little thrilled when I complained on Twitter about the lack of inventory of a particular book and they got back to me. That is all good. What made me laugh was the person they want to oversee their presence on Twitter and Facebook needs seven years experience. Yes seven years of online marketing experience is required for a non-managerial role. Social media isn’t even seven years old. Not to mention the candidate needs analytics, SEO, copywriting, a/b testing, and customer service experience. They need to be able to “generate editorial content at a moment’s notice” and a “working knowledge of photoshop, html and video editing (is) an asset.” Are you kidding me? A person with that kind of experience is either running your online marketing department or else she is 17 years old and is cruising chatroulette with her  friends. There are tons of smart and savvy marketing people out there that would be awesome at this job. It is a shame Indigo is scaring them away with this job description.

Last November I spotted a review at the National Post for Wanda St. Hilaire’s The Cuban Chronicles: A True Tale of Rascals, Rogues and Romance. A travel memoir about being seduced by Latin men isn’t my thing but there was one curious thing about it that made me pay attention — it was self-published. At the time I figured Lisa Monforton, the reviewer, must have been Hilaire’s friend and had submitted the review to the Canwest newswire as a favour. As a rule self-published books don’t get major media attention. Not that they don’t deserve it, it is just a hold-over from the days when being self-publishing was stigmatized. Then I wondered if the review was a sign The Post had gotten over the stigma. It seems it has. Earlier this week it published a review of  Nicole Chénier-Cullen’s I Found My Thrill on Parliament Hill, also published by iUniverse. I am probably late to spot this trend in the general press, but I see it as a good sign anyway.

A 2006 NFB vid from Jo Meuris (via Kerry Clare)

The debate has somehow made me into a free market advocate. After peeling back the economic futurism about the industry and customer behaviour, at the core I think the controversy is about who should set prices. We have three choices — the retailers can set them, the publishers can set them, or the government can set them.

Simply I don’t think suppliers should force prices on retailers. If all retailers became agents of the publishers, consumers would be taken advantage of. New publishers would be blocked from the retail channel. The industry would stagnate and readers would go elsewhere.

I am not the first to say this. And I do understand the other factors in the debate so I don’t think I am being rash. It is simply a bad precedent.

If MacMillan wants price control, they can sell the books themselves. They can compete with other publishers for customers. They can do all the hard work that goes into serving the public. Amazon should not be their bitch. Yes I know, Amazon conceded. Did I also mention I think suppliers reserve the right to sell what they want, to who they want, for how much they want? That will have to be another post on another day.

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Dan — thanks for putting up with all the spelling mistakes on my first try at stating this position.

Alex Iskold at ReadWriteWeb calls out the poor metadata for most books and book reviews on the web. Great post. I checked the reviews at the National Post, The Toronto Star, and Globe and Mail. Before I looked, I already knew I wouldn’t find structured mark-up but I was surprised to find <no cache>, <no archive>, and <expires> tags at the Globe. The meta data at The Star and The Post is fine. It could be better. On the other hand the brain trust at the Globe is going out of their way to make their content hard to find. It is particularly frustrating because the internal site search at the Globe sucks. It is about time newspapers treated evergreen content like book reviews differently than news pieces in regards to both IA and meta-data.

As a point of interest The Globe’s page has 27 W3 errors. The Post page had 117 errors. The Star had 138 errors. (And I think the Star is the newest design — for shame.)

Peter Biskind talks about the decline of the Hollywood star system on this week’s episode of The Business. He points out the studios are unwilling to give stars 20% of the gross — as they once commonly did. Studios now manage their risk differently, gravitating to “safe” franchise movies or else downloading their risk to the star or the producer.

If you are a star and want a big pay off you now need to put major skin in the game.

As Richard Nash pointed out in his BNC interview, book publishers have accrued a disproportionate amount of risk over the last twenty years but have yet to download that to authors. I suppose it is just a matter of time. Eventually we will see more studio-like book franchises like 39 Clues and big authors will become co-publishers in the same way Tom Cruise is a co-producer.

I wonder if this shift will be driven by the publishers need to shed risk or if the shift will be driven big authors wanting more control of their properties (i.e., authors figuring out this is to their advantage). Probably a little of both.

Linwood Barclay has some production talent behind his latest trailer.

I am kind of bummed this video hasn’t provoked any reactions. If you didn’t catch the open title card, it is Mick Jone’s library on display.

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PaidContent has reposted a comment from a guy that has some opinions about Variety. It is an insightful post especially for anyone interested in the future of trade magazines like Publisher’s Weekly or The Quill and Quire. Here is a choice bit:

You are Variety. A great name. So where is the braintrust to kick everyone’s ass? Where’s the same attitude of the people you cover. The creativity. The work-at-all-hours people. The idea people.

I don’t know if I buy that. It makes sense that high-debt bearing companies like Canwest, Tribune, and Houghton Mifflin would burn first in tough times, but an innovation-to-debt matrix for non-tough times is the only way you could substantiate that correlation. Is there anyway to realistically capture the comparative debt load of the big publishers? Anyone out there on the lazyweb know if debt is reported accurately in annual reports?

The Market: the iPad won’t be successful. The market for casual media consumption is not big enough to blow the doors off the way iPhone did. But the A4 chip points to Apple’s possible dominance in mobile processing speed. And the cheaper data plan points to  the eventual ubiquity of Whispernet-like connectivity in every device, everywhere. And the inclusion of mouseless-productivity apps sends that dev area mainstream in a way that can only lead to good things.

The second generation iPad will be great.
An iPhone with an A4 chip will amaze.
iLife for Mac with iPad-influenced UI will be awesome.
An iPad running Google OS would rule.
I won’t be buying one.

iBooks: I don’t have enough info about the ebook story to have a full opinion about what this may mean for publishers, but essentially a new high profile ebook store is a good thing for book lovers. The launch of iBooks does however kill forever Big Content’s chance of  selling direct to consumer. From 2005 until today, publishers had a chance to own the primary interaction with their customer. Because they didn’t want to anger past business partners like B&N, Indigo, and the indies, book publishers ceded control to Amazon and Apple. Stupid.