I’ve been reading a couple of things lately that could restore, if you were in need of such a thing, your faith in print, and in the vitality of scholarship and publishing in the digital age. The publishing industry is in crisis—well, nearly everything these days seems to be in crisis—but you would hardly realize that from reading these two publications.

The first, Europe Between Oceans, by the renowned archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, is a masterful work, combining history, archaeology, geography, anthropology, and a smorgasbord of other disciplines in explaining the transformation of human culture and society in Europe from prehistoric to the dawn of the modern, encompassing a ten thousand year period from 9,000 B.C. to 1,000 A.D. Cunliffe writes with erudition and clarity, never oversimplifying, but without the befuddling writing designed more to impressed than to illuminate that is so common in academic circles. The publisher, Yale University Press, is clearly at the top of its game here: the layout is splendid, with plenty of pleasing white space, yet full of helpful maps, photos, and charts. Europe Between Oceans covers much familiar ground, but drawing from the latest research in a multitude of disciplines it provides strikingly new insights.

The second is Lapham’s Quarterly, a literary journal edited and published by former Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham. I wasn’t enough in the cognoscenti, I’m sorry to say, to get on board for the first issue, nevertheless I’d learned of the journal’s existence by the second issue, had subscribed by the third, and purchased a gift subscription for my parents by the fourth. Published quarterly, each issue covers a theme—thus far War, Money, Nature, Learning, Eros, and the current issue, Crimes and Punishments. Lapham mixes and mashes genres and primary sources in his investigation of each theme, from ancient to modern, employing excerpts of stories, essays, poetry, art, charts, and photography. Imagine Herodotus and Lazarillo de Tormes slapping high-fives to Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler because they made it into the latest issue. Reading Lapham’s is like being an observer to the musings of an accomplished collector gripped by bibliomancy during an extended weekend visit to his abode.

Both of these works, at the apex of modern publishing, might cause one to wonder how they could possibly be improved upon in electronic form. Surely they prove the point that e-books could never fully replace print. And yet, and yet…

Jumping just a bit into the future, let’s grab our podkinfliptop, with its color touch screen and multimedia capabilities, and run. Placing the cursor next to an unfamiliar term in Cunliffe’s book, like Bosphorus, brings up its definition. Clicking on the place-name of Tyre deploys Google Earth. Maps of migrations or empires, instead of static, depict the spread and flow over time. Instead of a single picture depicting the ancient city of Miletos, or a bronze warrior god from the 12th century, a gallery of photos is embedded in the e-text. Links lead to further scholarship or modules about topics of particular interest to the reader. Cunliffe’s tome is a big book, nearly too hefty to curl up in bed with comfortably for a nice reading session, but in its e-format it poses no problem on the podkinfliptop, which you read while touring the Aegean region with your family. At the ruins of the Byzantine fortress in Anadolu Kavagi, you take a striking photo and instantly upload the photo to the book’s gallery.

With Lapham’s, the electronic version might explore the theme over the course of a few months with a daily or weekly segment, loaded automatically onto the device, instead of a quarterly publication. Links abound between and among volumes; users add links to other content in order to further illuminate the theme, sharing the links with other users. The podkinfliptop version includes old newsreels, film segments, Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” or Johnny Cash at Folsom, a poem read by its author.

All of these capabilities exist today, in one form or another. A central question is, of course, who pays for all of this? I’m not optimistic that many publishers can, with a positive ROI, create both a beautifully laid out print version and a link- and multimedia-rich electronic version, but nor is it yet clear that many electronic-only publications are financially viable. As I point out in my recent article, larger publishers like Cengage or Pearson certainly have the resources to create resource-rich electronic publications for higher education, and a number of non-profit initiatives, like Connexions or Yale Books Unbound, are underway. But while readers may not balk at forking over $35 for the beautiful hardcover Europe Between the Oceans, customers seem to expect a lower price for electronic versions. Perhaps instead of selling 20,000 copies at $30.00 each of the hardcover, and dealing with returns, YUP could sell 250,000 copies at $10.00 of the e-version. Lapham’s could get a larger number of subscribers at a lower price, or offer it free under a government grant, or corporate or foundation sponsorship. The “publisher” provides the platform and content, encouraging the community to contribute additional links and resources, building on the “book.” I have to remain optimistic that this type of publishing can survive and prosper in the digital age. The University of Michigan Press seems to be betting on it.

A few days ago I was riding home on my Xootr push scooter—yes, it’s a tough commute—when an old Ford Falcon pulled up next to me at the light. I noticed the undercarriage splotched with rust, the tires baring their sole, but what struck me most was the backseat, brimming with books, magazines, and yellowed newspapers, the entire car sagging from its gallant effort. A mobile library, indeed, though best of luck finding a book at the bottom of that pile. I’m no stranger to messy cars, in fact, I once found a certificate of appreciation from the local 4-H to my father, from 1974, when I was borrowing my Dad’s car during a trip home in 1999–and it was in the third car he’d had in those twenty-five years. But I digress.

What also stuck me, besides the exhaust, while wondering at that car in the intersection, was that the iPod Touch in my pocket had at least thirty books on it, even though I’d had it for about a month. Say what you want about e-books, it’s not the same as paper, right, but try carrying 100 books in your pocket, or in your car, let alone the 1.5 million that Google is already providing for mobile devices.

I enjoy learning about technology, and take a keen interest in how it affects learning, networks, and society. Still, I’m not really much of a gadget guy, that is, I don’t feel I have to go buy every gadget that comes along. No video game consoles in my house, an ancient yet hardy stereo, no cable TV. My DJing rig is laughable. Traveling around South America, to use one example, tends to wean one from over-consumerist tendencies, not to mention thinking seriously about the condition of the planet and some of its possible futures.

So it’s been with both a sense of wonder and a bit of trepidation, perhaps, that I’ve been able to start playing around with both the iPod Touch and Amazon’s new Kindle 2. I remember reading about a study that tracked over time people’s attitudes about what they thought were necessities, versus what they considered luxuries. Things like cell-phones, iPods, and flat screens keep getting added to the list of necessities, but nothing ever comes off.

The iPhone and Touch portend much more the future than the Kindle. While the Kindle works great as a reading device, accomplishing that feat with panache, I don’t think that enough people really want a reading device, and a separate talking device, and a writing device, and so on. Do I want to carry around all that stuff with me, or take four or five devices on a trip? The Kindle will indubitably evolve more toward the direction of the iPhone than the reverse. Doubtlessly Apple, Amazon, Sony et al. have in mind to create a device slightly bigger than the iPod Touch that combines facets of the cell phone, iPod, Kindle, Flip camera, and laptop. Let’s call it a Podkinfliptop. There is, of course, more than a little speculation already that Apple is on the verge of such a release. Its educational potential, in particular, are enormous. With thirty million iPhone/iPod Touches in use already, and the huge success of the App store, Apple seems natural to expand its dominance with a netbook type device, but many others will follow.

On the surface, one wouldn’t immediately think of the t-shirt as a great model for web collaboration and community, often referred to, either fondly or derisively, as Web 2.0. But Threadless has managed to carve out an interesting niche, uniting designers, fans of great design, and t-shirt aficionados (many members are undoubtedly all three). For anyone unfamiliar with the site: designers submit designs for t-shirts, which are scored and ranked by members, and each week the site releases winning designs as limited edition t-shirts. The site provides ample means and incentives to participate: members post photos of themselves in Threadless shirts (for points), designers and members blog, comment, etc., Threadless sponsors contests and uses other means to attract and maintain interest. All in order to produce, and sell, t-shirts. (And now, naturally, spin-off products, like wall art, prints, and other merchandise.)

This makes me wonder how much of this model is applicable to publishing. There are already some entries into this, such as Harper Collins’ Authonomy, Smashwords, CompletelyNovel, Amazon’s CreateSpace. I haven’t seen any yet, though, that quite come close to the level of participation, excitement, and cool/hip level as Threadless. But I think it’s possible, and even probable, that someone will, sooner rather than later.

In the academic space, I find that Common Ground publishing, which runs the International Journal of the Book, has an interesting business model and process. They run ~15 conferences, on subjects in the humanities and science, each with an associated journal. When you present at one of their conferences, as I did in October, you receive a year’s access to the associated journal, and you can submit an academic paper to the journal. When you submit your paper through the journal’s peer review process, you also agree to peer review two to three papers for the journal. Common Ground also is able to implement a striking balance between technology (everything is submitted and approved online) and personal touch (you always have a sense that there are real people involved). They also encourage and offer opportunities for collaboration and participation.

My article on “Innovation and the Future of e-Books” was recently published in The International Journal of the Book. My premise is that the development and acceptance of e-books today parallels incunabula in the 15th century. The paper considers three examples of innovative e-books to illustrate the potential and pitfalls of electronic publications. This peer-reviewed paper is now available on the RAND web site (free download):
http://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP1385/

The virtues of print on demand (aka POD) are well known.  Publishers no longer have to store books in warehouses, waiting for an order to come in.  Instead, systems are set up that take advantage of digital files.  When an order comes in, a copy of a book is printed.  This arrangement reduces the cost of carrying inventory and has made it possible to make many books, old and new, available even in the absence of a strong, ongoing market.  This is an instance of Long Tail publishing, and it is hard to find anything about it not to like.

There is another, emerging POD, however:  purchase on demand.  While print on demand (I will be careful about using the abbreviation here, as it can lead to confusion in this context) changes the economics of book production, purchase on demand changes the economics of book consumption.  Both forms of POD are likely to grow in the next few years and their development will increasingly be linked.

Consumers are used to purchasing things on demand, so what’s the fuss?  Someone walks into a bookstore, eyes a copy of The World Without Us or Sense and Sensibility, picks it up, and steps to the cash register, where it is purchased–on demand.  In this situation, the burden of maintaining the inventory lies with the bookseller, not the consumer.  The bookseller provides the necessary aggregation (the huge stock of titles in a bricks-and-mortar store), and the consumer plucks one copy out of that aggregation for purchase.

Not all books are sold one at a time, however; in not all instances is there a bookseller or an equivalent who is willing to bear the cost of carrying inventory.  In academic publishing, for example, one marketing practice is the standing-order plan.  For this kind of service, libraries fill out a profile (”Send me all books on American history, but do not include titles from the following list of publishers”), which is filed by a wholesaler.  The wholesaler then ships all books that fit the profile to the customer.  In this instance the cost of carrying the inventory is borne by the library, which receives hundreds, even thousands of titles, none of which have been individually examined by a librarian.

Purchase on demand arises when a subscription service such as a standing-order plan is already in place.  The aim of the purchaser is to disaggregate the subscription and pay only for specific titles.  This practice, which is just now beginning in the book industry, shifts the inventory risk from the library back to the wholesaler–and the wholesaler may in turn shift it back to the publisher.  The full economic implications of this are not known, but it is likely to result in fewer books being published, fewer copies of books being printed, and higher prices for the books that do get published.

Subscription bookselling is not new (think of the Book of the Month Club), but in a digital age, it is becoming more common.  One growing practice is the sale of digital aggregations of books to libraries, for which Oxford Scholarship Online is the model.  If OSO were to be moved to a purchase-on-demand program, the many titles in the collection would not be paid for until a library patron actually wanted to look at them.  Many publishers are now launching services very much like OSO’s, and Google is arranging to market even larger aggregations as an outcome of its recent legal settlement with publishers.  Will libraries want to acquire the entire collections, or will they determine to pick and choose, letting patron demand drive purchases?  It’s useful to ponder what purchase on demand will mean in the context of the recent Google-publisher settlement. 

For a library to move to purchase on demand, it will have to make a comprehensive catalogue available to its patrons, with instructions on making requests (”only two purchase requests per patron per week,” etc.).  The catalogue will serve as a front end to book acquisition (and it should be noted that many of the acquired books will be printed on demand).  There is no catalogue in existence today with sufficient information to support the various requirements of purchase on demand.  Amazon’s catalogue covers too much territory  for academic libraries and lacks summaries and other essential metadata; the catalogues of the wholesalers themselves are highly compressed; the catalogues of individual publishers are not aggregated in a single place.

While these examples are from institutional markets, it is likely that some of the same forces will apply as consumer subscription services are established.  We have already seen this in the music business, where consumers have gleefully been disaggregating the collections of songs stored on a single CD.  For producers of intellectual property everywhere, it is useful to bear in mind that digital technology can be applied to every point of the supply chain.  The use of bits over atoms does not put an end to the economic jockeying of producers, distributors, and customers.

OK, here’s an optimistic observation for publishers.

Let’s say more and more real book readers find, “you know, reading on this iPhone, Android, smartphone I have is pretty good…” And the marketplace for reading on the phones grows quickly. Plenty of skeptics for that idea, sure. But not impossible. (Keep this in mind: three doublings make ebooks 8% of the market. Will that happen in 3 years? It certainly couldn’t take as long as five…)

Let’s further say that iPhone does not end up owning the world, and iPhone and Blackberry find themselves competing on everything — including “aps” and, of course, including books, with Nokia, Dell, Google Android, etc. And let’s say that (at least for a very long time) each device and screen and market channel creates enough need for some proprietary tweak that we add admin, tech, quality control, and a host of sales and marketing issues to be dealt with by the publishers and distributors. Seems like’s what’s happening.

And let’s say that multiple developers will create competing platforms to run on all those phones. We know about Stanza and Scrollmotion Iceberg for the the iPhone right now. Amazon bought Mobipocket specifically because it was multi-system compatible, which at that point meant it could play on both Microsoft dot lit and Palm PDAs. We already have a complicated distribution system with Ingram Digital and Content Reserve as the principal distributors to get publishers to online retailers and libraries, but not really putting you on Kindle or iPhone.

Just seems to me that ePub can’t solve all these problems automatically. I’m sure it will be a big help, but opportunities to complicate things are arising faster than standards can be created to keep up with them.

If sales of digital files become significant AND they are maximized only by managing the technology, deals, and marketing at a wide variety of major accounts, it is a good thing for publishers and for DADs (digital asset distributors). And, parallel to the physical marketplace, it will be interesting to see what tradeoffs develop between handling an account through a distributor and managing it directly. No doubt the technology pieces will prove to be best handled by an aggregator or consolidator, but the quality control and product marketing opportunities will be aspects publishers will want to control.

Why is this good for publishers? Because the key way publishers ADD VALUE is by managing a complex set of revenue opportunities. To the degree that almost all the sales take place in Barnes & Noble and Amazon, plus what you can get from Ingram and Baker & Taylor, it weakens the publisher’s core competitive and value proposition. If ebook sales take off in a highly fragmented way, which now seems to at least be a possibility, it will drive the standards and interopability and efficiency wonks absolutely crazy, but it will give a lot of publishers some very constructive work to do.

Empires, by definition, begin their decline at their peak.  Today Amazon bestrides the publishing world like Caesar, and it may seem far-fetched to think of this company slipping from its dominant position.  There is some doubt, however, that Amazon can continue to augment its control over so many facets of the industry.  Although there may be more growth ahead, the environment Amazon operates in is evolving and rivals may force their way through cracks in the fortress.

When Amazon started out, we knew little of all the things Amazon subsequently taught us, things like the ease of ecommerce, the technology of user authentication and online processing of credit cards, the value of superb customer service, and that unique characteristic of the Web, the ability to create a storefront that could claim to hold truly comprehensive inventory in a particular domain.  While not all organizations do these things as well as Amazon today, and none do them better, the fact is that Amazon has taught us well:  more and more of what Amazon does is now available to rivals.  It is no longer necessary to build your own shopping cart, and if you are stumped by the risks involved in taking an order by credit card, there are vendors lined up to take this problem off your hands.  The gap is closing, and for Amazon to stay ahead of the pack, it must continue to innovate at a breathtaking clip.

Unfortunately for Amazon, other Web services are coming up with comparable innovations.  Amazon built a community around its offerings, but the Amazon community is nothing compared to those found at MySpace, Digg, or Facebook.  And Amazon created what may be the first credible ebook device, the Kindle, but already the possibility of reading etexts on the iPod and iPhone is making the Kindle seem like an unlikely winner.  We can imagine a Dr. Frankenstein of ecommerce rummaging in the graveyard for body parts to cobble into the monster that will resemble nothing so much as Amazon:  A second-best shipping system, a second-best shopping cart, a second-best print-on-demand service–but in the end, a credible alternative to Amazon’s systems:  not good, but good enough.

Where Amazon continues to trump all pretenders is in the breadth of its inventory–The World’s Largest Bookstore was its original claim.  It would be very, very hard to replicate this inventory (or, rather, the online catalogue that represents that inventory, which may be warehoused at Amazon or at Amazon’s many vendors).  It may no longer be necessary to catalogue and support all titles, however, if a new online merchant could dominate a particular subject area.  Mike Shatzkin has argued persuasively that the infrastructure of online bookselling marks the end of general trade publishers, which will be replaced with “verticals” in particular fields, abetted by tapping into online communities built around particular topics.  In time the science fiction vertical or the ancient history vertical or any number of other subject-specific sites could incorporate ecommerce activity and pressure Amazon at the edge of empire, relying on the intensity of community involvement to strengthen their marketing proposition vis-a-vis the industry leader.  Amazon tries to be all things to all people, but a niche site must simply be everything to a self-defined group of people.  The intensity of focus becomes the merchandising weapon of choice.

It is astonishing to think of how little a new, topically-based ecommerce site would have to do for itself.  Inventory can be drawn from Ingram or Baker & Taylor; ecommerce software can now be purchased off the shelf; fulfillment (once a big headache for warehouses that were not set up to handle orders to individuals) now has several suppliers; metadata for catalogue entries supporting the ONIX standard can be sent from publishers to the new site; and so on.  Part of Amazon’s position at the head of the pack derived from its willingness to invent new infrastructure and build it.  Now the world of ecommerce is being disaggregated, and the vertically integrated Amazon is beginning to look like it was built for an earlier era.

These thoughts, and the controlling metaphor, were prompted by a recent experience in my local, beloved used-book store.  I wandered among the idiosyncratically organized stock, the stacks of books of all description, the book spines whose lettering had worn away:  paradise.  There on a shelf I spotted the two-volume Modern Library edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  I hesitated before picking up the books and carrying them to the cash register, but I had promised myself to read Gibbon before I died.  I joked with the cashier that she wouldn’t see me for a long time because I had a very long book to read first.  She said that I would have to read quickly, as the store would close in a month.

Among other causes, Amazon had helped to put that store out of business.  But the proprietor has already begun his next venture, in online bookselling.  He is not himself a threat to Amazon (some of what he will do will be with Amazon’s many services), but he is one of many people and companies gradually coming to terms with the behemoth and finding new ways to find a customer, turn a profit.  It is an army of thousands and they are starting new ventures, testing new value propositions.  It could be said that if any of them achieve anything of importance, Amazon will simply buy them.  But Amazon can’t buy everything:  unlike the imaginative space opened up by a book, the balance sheet of even an imperial corporation is not infinitely extensible.

Is Amazon’s weakness its growing arrogance?  Perhaps.  Speak to the vendors who are now struggling with Amazon’s new Vendor Central system and you will find countless volunteers ready to bring down the tyrant.  Or perhaps Amazon, seeing the success of the iPhone and Stanza ebook reader, is getting desperate, as was suggested by one individual (not cited by name here as the comment was made in a private mailgroup); and this desperation has resulted in Amazon’s new insistence that it will only sell ebooks in the Kindle format.  Amazon would have us believe that resistance is futile, but the growing number of publishers studying alternatives to the Kindle suggest otherwise.

Amazon’s decline will come about because it will not be able to monopolize ebook distribution with the Kindle; because new business models (mostly based on subscription sales of aggregated content to consumers, not unlike Safari Books and similar in form to NetFlix) will challenge Amazon’s operating philosophy; because social networks organized around special interests will help to solve the problem of bringing traffic to a new or series of new online stores; because so many of the pieces necessary for an ecommerce site are available at modest cost from multiple vendors; and because many people are motivated to storm the barricades, whether for profit or just for the hell of it.

Amazon will not go quietly or quickly.  It is a great company and no stranger to risk or innovation.  But we are not likely to see Amazon continue to grow and increase its dominance of publishing and bookselling.  Sometimes it’s just time to go.

In a publishing listserv discussion, triggered by the planned shutdown of Washington Post’s BookWorld, I contributed to a discussion about how the franchise in The New York Times Sunday Book Review (TBR) could be preserved. One suggestion was that the section be spun out of the paper as a separate business which, it was hoped, could provide the focus and flexibility to enable it to thrive.

But, of course, TBR already does have a sale outside the Times itself, both as a separate subscription product and as a stand-alone purchase available in many, if not most, bookstores.

Distributing TBR inside the Sunday Times is “inefficient” in some ways because most purchasers of the Sunday Times don’t crack every section. So they’re printing (and distributing, although bundled with the paper, distribution costs are relatively low) many copies that don’t get read and that advertisers wouldn’t want to pay for. The dedicated subs and bookstore sales, on the other hand, are to an audience that is focused on the TBR content.