Category Archives: Digital Publishing

Bookstore Ideas, Bookstores, Digital Publishing, Publishing Industry News

Five Things I Want From My Local Bookstore

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Not ten. Ten is too many. But five is doable. I was shopping this weekend and stopped in a few local indie stores. They had nice tables showing “NY Times Bestsellers” and the like, all of which was great, but didn’t help me at all. So here I offer you five things that I want from my local bookstore. I’m hoping that, as a bookseller, you don’t mind learning new things and I’d like to encourage you to “hire a geek’. Book nerds and geeks are becoming great friends these days.

1. Keep event calendar online. Make it mobile-friendly. Better yet, use LibraryThing. Things have changed too much in the past 10 years to keep your book-signings and book-groups calendar held captive on the wall behind the register. Have it on your site, add it to LibraryThing local and please please please KEEP IT UP TO DATE.

2. Use Twitter correctly. Don’t give it to a kid. Do it yourself. Learn. It works. There is value there. You should have a Twitter presence before a Facebook page. Seriously. Yes, the part-time college kid can tweet, blog, text and email all with one hand… simultaneously. But they don’t have your working knowledge of your customers, the authors and what books you need to move. Folks on Twitter do want to follow their local bookstore and they want to talk to you and they want you to pass along calendar events on Twitter. Please please don’t just post links to your website or Facebook page. That’s missing the point and customers will not respond.

3. Have a working knowledge of digital options. Work deals with publishers. Offer bundles. If I have a eBook version, give me a reason to come to your store. Digital books are here to stay. Don’t be afraid. Work it into your product knowledge. If you sell books by local authors partner with them to run the text through free converters and bundle it with the printed product. Find small publishers who will work with you so you can offer bundle and discount deals to add value to the book you physically have in your store. At a minimum, you’ll begin to see what all the craziness is about and begin to start figuring out solutions for the indistry.

4. Know the value of a printed book. Don’t romanticize it for me. Know why I should buy that hunk of gorgeously bound paper at your store. With every purchase I make I weigh the pros and cons of print vs. digital. There are reasons I choose some categories as digital and others I will always buy the print version. You should know these, for yourself and your customers. There are reasons I will drive across town to buy a book. You should know them. Value is more than just price.

5. Organize your community. You should be in touch with the pulse of readers in your area, both online and off. Do you help start bookgroups? Of course you do. You have good bookstore. Ever hosted an “online event”, such as a book group or author chat? You should. It would make you a great bookstore. There is no reason your shop can’t become the center of the book universe for your town, both online and off.

    Book Talk, Digital Publishing, E-Books, iPhone, On the Web, Publishers, Publishing Industry News, Technology

    Bundling eBooks and Digital Products

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    It is almost 2010 and despite the rose-colored glasses being handed out by the Amazon PR team, eBooks and print-to-digital products still have a ways to go before becoming mainstream and major streams of revenue. This post is also serving to round out some views I’ve passed along via Twitter recently and in reply to V.Sandbrook.

    Publishers need to bundle their products. Period. It’s simple and can require very little extra cost (production wise) beyond putting together a printed book. There are too many services and tech solutions to name, so I’m going to put forth just a basic outline of a bundling option that a publisher might offer. Bundling accomplishes two things:

    1. keeps the customer first; it allows the reader to access the content how they prefer
    2. it increases the margin of every book sale, ever so slightly

    So, I think publishers should really start to look at their product offerings and seeing if they can’t offer something like the following.

    1. Print Book – been around for hundreds of years. Everyone knows the business model. Amazon seems to discount much of publishers’ backlists by 20%-30%. So if possible the publisher should discount their books on their own direct-to-consumer website by 25%.

    2. Print Book + Digital Edition – This bundle would be made available on the publisher’s direct-to-consumer site. Basically, you’re selling the printed book and a “smaller file size” version of the pdf you sent to press. So no more work is created, in offering this. A consumer is then faced with the following decision: do I buy the print book for 25%-off and have it delivered to my doorstep in two weeks or do I simply pay cover price for the print book, which is what I would pay in the bookstore, which gets the book delivered in two weeks, but I can also immediately download the pdf and start reading now.

    3. Enhanced Digital Edition – This is a $9.99 offer designed to compete with device-dependent eBooks. The publisher would basically be selling their “to press” pdf, but with color photos, a hyper-linked TOC, maybe added audio snippets, an extra “links on the web” section, video, etc. Anything you can add to a current pdf to add value to it, to justify the higher price for a pdf-only download. Your readers deserve it. You have the content. Get it off the edit-room floor and add value to the digital book.

    4. Device-Dependent eBooks – these are your Kindle, Nook, Sony eReader, etc. files. They need to be out there and in the catalogs. Let the device makers do the marketing for you. I really think these will come and go, but the amount of infrastructure in place here really makes it a great sales channel for 2010. Most of these are in the $9.99 price range.

    5. Mobile Apps – you have to start looking mobile. It doesn’t matter if you publish fiction or non-fiction. There are many ereading devices out there, but many people already have a device they love. And it fits right in their pocket, their phone. The mobile ereaders are getting better and better. So publishers better have a plan in place, if not already in the mobile space, by the end of 2010. Just check out some of the cool things that Stanza, Kobo,Aldiko and Vook are doing. They all rock. Publishers need to start seeing .epub, .mobi and .prc appearing somewhere in their workflow. The earlier in the publishing process those files appear, the better.

    So that’s it. A quick rundown of how a small publisher might offer one book to the world. It’s by no means a definitive list of the possibilities.

    But it does only get better. What happens if you have a “hot” book? Imagine if the book hits shelves in March, what would rabid fans or curious consumers pay for a pdf copy one month earlier? Would the same pdf be worth a higher price pre-pub and then a lower price after the book came out? Pretty cool topic for another post on some other day, I think. Not too mention what happens once you invite XML-tagging to the party.

    If you have any digital product strategies that are working for you or that you have seen and are a fan of, please share!

    Book Talk, Digital Publishing, On the Web, Publishers, Publishing Industry News, Technology

    Enhancing Magazines and Books

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    Experimenting. That’s what publishers are doing and it is very cool to think about what the near-future holds. This week I’m playing with two such experiments. One from a magazine publisher, the other from a book publisher.

    Enhance Print Media

    First, the print magazine. While many magazines are still reeling from economic and industry shifts, Esquire is charging ahead with quirky and innovative (though sometimes clunky) tech/design mash-ups such as an embedded eInk cover and the December 2009 issue featuring “augmented reality”. While, in my mind what the issue holds is not true augmented reality, it is 100% pure print enhancement. To enjoy the enhancements you need to:

    1. Have a computer and webcam.
    2. Buy the magazine.
    3. Download the Esquire reader/viewer software (for Mac and PC)
    4. Install and launch software. Once up you just hold one of the 6 encoded boxes up to the camera.

    AR Code

    On your screen you can see the image of the page, but the model on the page starts moving and talking. It’s pretty cool. Though much more fun with a webcam not embedded at the top of a laptop monitor. It’s hard to see around the magazine to see the screen, since you have to keep the magazine held up to the camera. If you rotate the page, it’s like changing the channel on a tv. As an example, the printed page has a single shot of a model. But if you hold that page up to the webcam, the model will don winter clothes if the magazine in upright, and Spring clothes if your rotate 90 degrees. Rotate another 90 and he swaps out for Summer, etc.

    While these codes certainly unlock more content than a basic QR code it is GREAT that publishers are starting to add things to their products. So if you get a chance, grab a copy of the magazine, play around and imagine what consumers will be enjoying this time next year.

    Tomorrow I’ll post about the new Zuiker book I picked up, “Level 26“. It’s a book penned by the guy who created the CSI series and ties in with pre-recorded video to move the story along. We’ll see how that goes.

    Digital Publishing, E-Books, iPhone, On the Web, Publishing Industry News, Technology

    Just try it — Reading on an iPhone

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    Seriously folks, let’s all give reading a book on an iPhone a try. I mean it’s free and eBooks and digital publishing aren’t going away. So, just try it. You don’t have to like it. In fact, you may not. Which is fine. But at least you’ll know.

    So, if you have an iPhone, just do this:

    1. Download the Amazon Kindle app, from the App Store. It’s free.

    2. Find a free book to download, I recommend starting with fiction. I read about five non-fiction books for every one fiction. But I have found that it’s easier to read on the small screen if the book is written to pull you along, rather than making you stop, think, take notes, etc. So for my non-fiction books I’m still a traditional pBook kinda guy. (I’m reading The Templar Legacy. Not exactly five-star, but it is fiction and free as of right now).

    And I know I do my fair share of not-so-fond of Amazon posting, but these steps are quick and painless. There are a ton of other eReading options as well. Here is a fantastic post about reading books on the iPhone. All of the apps mentioned in that post are worth your time to download and check out!

    Let me know what you think, if you give it a go.