BEA begins
I didn’t get a chance to stop by BEA yesterday — there was too much to do around the office. (Plus, I couldn’t for the life of me find a list of the panels on the website beyond the sparse “Events at a Glance” PDF.) Which was a pity. But fortunately, Publishers Weekly was there, so I’m linking to their coverage.
Here are some panels that caught my eye:
Combating Print and Digital Piracy of Publishers’ Works (AAP)
Giving it Away: When Free ebooks Make Sense — And When They Don’t
I’ve been very interested in finding out more about ebook giveaways — on the one hand, you’d think that a free ebook would lead to fewer sales, but that hasn’t seemed to be the case. Or has it? Peter Balis, director of online sales at Wiley, and Brent Lewis, v-p for digital and Internet at Harlequin, discussed “rules” for giveaways and talked about cases in which free ebooks have both helped and hurt sales.
Richard Nash, formerly publisher at Soft Skull Press, and Dedi Felmen, formerly a senior editor at Simon & Schuster, discussed their new venture, Round Table, a mash up of sorts of a subscription service and a social network that gets writing to readers.
I’ll be heading up to the Javits Center later on today — it’s shaping up to be a busy afternoon (and evening).
The ebook question
As a book publicist, I spend a fair amount of time pondering ebooks. Will ebooks really catch on? (For all the talk about ebooks, anecdotally, I’d say pretty much, well, no one actually owns an ereader.) How much should publishers charge for them? Will the “iTunes of ebooks” emerge or will we still be reading ebooks in half a dozen formats? Will publishers continue to struggle with DRM (Digital Rights Management) to protect files from being pirated or will we throw caution to the wind? When will book publicists be able to promote upcoming titles with egalleys and ebooks? How do booksellers feel about ebooks? Why can you preorder thousands of (tree) books on Amazon, but when it comes to Kindle books — which would seem like natural candidates for preorders — only 118 not-yet-published titles are available? These are the issues that keep me up at night. (Actually, nothing keeps me up at night as my college roommate will attest, but that line sounded good.)
At any rate, these are the issues that are keeping a lot of people up during the day. Last week on Talk of the Nation, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg debated the cultural effect of the Kindle. And All Things Considered considered DRM. On Monday, Oxford University Press executive Evan Schnittman (quoted in the ATC story) posted about the economics of ebook publishing on his new blog Black Plastic Glasses and tackled a question oft bandied about by ebook fanatics: why aren’t ebooks free? The piece was picked up in short order by Teleread and GalleyCat and garnered dozens of comments.
Meanwhile, as publishers and readers work through the thorny issues that have hamstrung digital publishing — and while we all await Apple’s rumored ereader — don’t forget your Smell of Books. (And no, this is not an April’s Fools Joke. Or is it.)
Amazon, Kindle and iPhones! Oh, my!
I was scrolling through my New York Times yesterday morning when lo! Amazon releasing a Kindle application for the iPhone? With alacrity I set about downloading said app — a painfully slow process, what with the wonky Edge in the concrete bunker of an auditorium in which I was sitting.
On the subway ride home, I tested out my Phindle. Although I found it amusing that I could simultaneously enjoy Kanye and Stephanie Meyer on the very same device (and by “simultaneously enjoy” I mean “be equally distracted by” since I can’t quite imagine how Bella swooning over Edward makes us harder, better, faster, stronger), it’s no Kindle killer. For the iPhone users among you, it’s adequate and convenient, but pages must be turned with a flick and you can’t view them horizontally. Plus, the iPhone battery is, well, an iPhone battery. Still, I’m guessing that somewhere at Apple heads are rolling.
As a human being, ebooks interest me because I live and die by my gadgets. As a book publicist, I want to know more because I’m starting to get more requests from journalists for review copies of books in an electronic format. I would love to shoot off PDFs of our books to reviewers — saving time and money — but that of course raises the concern that nefarious deeds could be committed with a PDF easily resaved as text.
Sarah from Soho Press blogged the other week about emailing a book to a reviewer. As Sarah points out, this saves loads of time, money and trees. Not to mention space — some of the massive tomes we publish are simply begging to be categorized under “Weapon, lethal.”
As a book publicist, how do you feel about distributing ebooks to reviewers rather than mailing hard copies? As a journalist, would you want the flexibility of an electronic copy of a book? For those book publicists who have sent out ecopies of books (or for those folks who have provided free downloads of a book in an attempt to promote it), how do you ensure the book — or large parts of it — cannot be easily reproduced? Do you care? Weigh in at will.
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Yesterday when I updated my list of freelance book publicists, I did (or didn’t do) something idiotic and a lot of people couldn’t access the document. I’ve made a change so this revised revised list should be viewable whether or not you have a Google account or are signed in. Also, if you haven’t already seen it, Bella Stander maintains a list of freelancers too. Her list is smaller because she only lists people with whom she has worked (and whose work she recommends). I took the other route and listed everyone who submitted information, so I think you get the best of both worlds.
Tips for Kindle users
I met up with a couple book publicity colleagues for lunch and, perhaps not surprisingly, our conversation turned to the Kindle vs. Sony’s eReader at one point. I returned to the office to find an email from Sarah Weinman, from Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, alerting me to the Kindle Tips blog (just in time too, now that Amazon is back in stock). Although there are many ebook blogs out there, this one is written by two literary agents — Shana Cohen and Stuart Krichevsky — so it’s geared more to the publishing industry.
