Bill and Ted's Offset Adventure

Somebody stole Ben Franklin and brought him to the future! where he learns all about modern printing and communications methods that make his paltry "newsletters" and "declarations" seem boring, lame, and expensive to produce. I bet he sure feels insignificant, now that today we can print out hundreds of thousands of "Buy one get the second ½ off" coupons for Burger King in a matter of minutes. I know, Kodak isn't a content producer, but I think a lot of people are on the same page as Kodak and think any message, prettied up by expensive printing methods, is better than ever. In reality, the message is more important than the message, unless the medium is used really well, but that's rarely the truth. The video is one produced by Kodak to lead students and other prospective employees into the printing business:



Getting serious, though, one statistic from the video stands out: an expected 14% growth in bindery jobs. Today, binderies rely heavily on books and magazines for their business, two segments of the print industry that are lamenting their approaching deaths. What are these binders going to be binding? They must know that, even if the editorial end shifts, somebody still has to stitch and glue the spines. As I've said before, the death of publishing isn't going to be an end of publishing, but a death of how publishing companies have been run, $120 dinners and all.

Getting In The Phonebook

A GIS-browsing phonebook cover designer had the courtesy to use CreativeCommons attribution when borrowing a photo for this year's edition:


They even had the courtesy to contact the photographer and ask his permission. I'm impressed with the diligence of a phone book publisher, who usually aren't seen as the highest level of publishing excellence. It does show that the environment of the professional photographer is being encroached upon; in the old days there were complex licensing processes to get in contact with and permission from a pro photographer to use his or her images. CreativeCommons isn't a copyright-replacement that most people believe it is -- it's a simplified licensing process for behaving as both an amateur and a professional, which lets anybody with talent show off their work and get published without having to work too hard at it.

Dear Lulu...

Dear Lulu is a book, but a very special book -- it's a test of printing quality, intended to push the "print on demand" high-speed Xerography/laser printing that Lulu uses to produce its books. Verdict: They do quite good for a new technology competing against the offset equipment that's been perfected over the past fifty years. Want to see the book itself? You can own a copy.

Forgotten Books and New Media

Over at The Infomercantile, I posted an ad I found in a library-industry magazine from 1968. Race relations were definitely at a head, and the ad was promoting a "forgotten" list of Negro-focused books, many of which from the 19th century (I believe they were public domain even in 1968). I found that most every book listed in the ad is still available today, many of which for free from various sources.

Back in '68, there was a firm structure for how books were published and distributed -- it left a lot of control in the publishers and distributors, and less in the hands of bookstores and customers. With the advent of the internet, two sides are benefiting most: publishers and customers. Publishing has become enormously cheap, provided you look at new technology models (eBooks, POD), and customers can ask for and receive most any publication they'd ever want. As you can see flipping through LuLu, quality is all over the board -- but that's not bad according to capitalists; you need the wide range of quality and value in order to have a truly open market. Middlemen, of course, dislike open markets because it reduces their influence over what's sold and for how much. Markets which can circumvent salespeople has a huge negative impact on those middlemen, and when publishers say the new market hurts them, it's largely because the impact on distribution has climbed the chain and they had no other plan. Distributors go under, inventory is lost or siezed, and that results in loss for the publisher.

Bookstores, as is lamented so many places, has received a large brunt of this new technology impact. People love bookstores for their cultural and social aspects -- but the ability for customers to get books from other places, the problem of how to carry sellable books out of so many available, has quashed so many sellers' operations. Figuring out how to continue to provide the societal value of a bookstore, despite diminishing value as a seller of books, is the toughest aspect for bookstores to overcome. It requires a niche, fulfilling a need.

The original ad, however, does have a purpose: there was a need in the marketplace, and the publisher saw the niche to fill and took it. They made it easy to stock African-American focused books without requiring the stereotypical white, female librarian to do much research. Publishing today has a similar need: publishers are running full-force into meeting the needs and niches they saw twenty years ago; I can't say we've been the most successful at it, but there's a need for a certain type of publishing business today...it might not be the same as the publishers remember from fifty years ago (which is good) and it might not be the same as the business model that once supported independent bookstores (which is bad), but there will be a need for books, whether it was 1968 or is today: books are here, used, and needed...somehow, a model for book distribution will evolve that will profit businesses and writers, but it's scary now and hard to believe that someday people will look back and wonder how the book business stayed afloat in the 20th century.

Short and Free Books Bring New Readers

Since I'm a small-time publisher, this topic is of interest to me: how do people learn about new books? When I say 'new,' I mean new to the reader, not just recently-street-dated books. When I think back to some of my more favorite books, they came from a small number of sources:

• Browsing a bookstore;
• Recommended in school;
• Recommended by friends.

So, how much of this is influenced by a publisher's advertising and review copies? The first one is probably the only one -- as near as I can tell, recommendation by authorities and acquaintances are the two primary ways everyone I know reads. While reading a review may have been handy, I can't think of a book I've bought based solely on a review. The 'browsing' one has gained a huge foothold in online stores like Amazon: you don't have to rely on what can fit into a cramped storefront or Borders' bottom line. Since online stores hold a heck of a lot more than retail, there's more opportunities to find something new.

So, how does a book improve its chances of being recommended? Neil Gaiman says free copies is a huge influencer -- the low risk to the reader lets them be more adventurous in what they read. If a couple people who got a free copy recommend a couple new readers, in theory the marketer has improved their customer base. A lot of publishers sell their remaindered books to discount chains, but we keep them here and send them out as review copies and, from time to time, do a mass donation to libraries around the country. While this reduces our bottom-line profit, one copy in a library has a chance of passing through dozens of hands -- or it might be sold at a FOL sale for four bits to someone who might not have otherwise bought it even for $2 at a discount store. Might those copies end up on eBay? Yeah, probably; but, again, if they're that valuable, our sales are better. If not, some eBayer is going to buy it for a buck plus shipping, again reducing their risk in the chance of reading something crappy. Big publishers, the tightest of publishers, probably spend a buck to print a hardcover with a dustjacket; do they give them away for free? Not a chance. Small publishers like us spend a couple bucks per TPB , but everything we've seen is that you get better exposure by giving away $500 in free copies than a dinky, two-color advertisement in the back of a magazine for $500. (by the way, if you're wondering how to get a free copy from a publisher, your best best is to ask -- you might have to claim to be a reviewer, but to avoid being called a liar make sure to write a review at Amazon or your blog when you're done).

That possible risk for readers is also a driving force behind the increase in shorter books. Although, from looking at the reasoning evidenced in the NPR story, the problem isn't that books are getting smaller, but that publishers have been driving for big-bucks with huge books. Go look at a paperback from the eighties or earlier: they're in relatively large print on small pages, printed all the way out to the edge of the paper, and they still can only hit 200 pages. And they used to release darn near everything in paperback form: novels, biographies, business advice, joke books. In an attempt to increase revenues from books, publishers started spending more money on acquiring writers who produce larger books that they can charge more for. And they did away with the small-format paperback, charging twice as much for the same content in a slightly larger shape. Readers, in return,balk at the time and money to devote to reading a $19.99, 550-page book when they would gladly have spent $4.99 on a 250-page book for an afternoon of reading fun. So, to improve flagging revenue, publishers give larger advances to proven writers, and get the writers to produce more and more....to which readers responds, "too long, too expensive." I'd say this is a balancing out of that cycle -- readers want to be entertained, and you can't be entertained if you're afraid of how you're going to afford it.

Lots Said In A Simple Cover

The book at the right is a bunch of things:

• A fine example of irony;
• A vote of 'no confidence' regarding its contents;
• Proof that a good cover is worth the money;
• A reason you don't want libraries rebinding your book.

Click here to see the whole cover, and then you'll see what I'm talking about.

(via)

Paper Burns, But Doesn't Crash

Mallary Jean Tenore wrote an article for Poynter about how she prefers paper, despite her reliance on the internetted world. My first thought was, "eh, it's going to just talk about paper, and nothing about the use of the paper," but she does, addressing that paper has its values and yet periodicals aren't using in an appropriate way for today's networked life. Tangibility, the thing I believe is the reason paper will stay around forever, isn't being used well when newspapers focus on the ephemeral aspect of their news. News that's here and then gone is something the internet does well; take a look at what paper does well and emphasize that. The newsing might have to change, but the medium will not.

I'll note that her 'pros' for paper, Tailorability and Manipulability, are two reasons I ignored a process my managerial predecessor at work hoped I'd continue. Employees used to write down their daily work on sheets, and when a sheet was full they'd turn it in to the manager, who's keeping track of productivity. The previous manager was working on an internet-based system, where users would log-in, enter their start-times and end-times, and fill in the amount of work they did.

From evaluating the previous paper-sheets, I knew the online version would only cause problems: tasks can't always be identified by a start time, an end time, and the production numbers. Things like 'checking for errors' and 'sorting things in numerical order' don't fit into the standard -- and what about unused time like a broken-down machine? To properly evaluate productivity, those odd notes were more useful than the regular statistics -- and most of the time I can get that data off the server anyway. Rather than going 'high-tech' to get rid of the annoyance of paper forms, I redesigned the paper forms to something more useful -- more room for comments, limited each sheet to one week at a time so that it's easy to find a particular date, and giving training on how to use the sheet. If I want to compare productivity, I can lay out all the sheets on my desk, lining up the days of the week, and see how the work lines up. This sort of stuff isn't done easily with a computer program.