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.

Joe Esposito

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MITE to Study University Press Marketing
The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education is currently studying marketing practices and strategies for university presses. This study has been funded by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation. The principal investigator is Joseph J. Esposito (miteupressproject@gmail.com). Participation by university press personnel and other interested parties (librarians, book wholesalers, online bookstores, etc.) is invited.

Background

It is widely acknowledged that university presses have, as a publishing segment, been struggling. Many presses have been forced to scale back their operations. Most presses have not had the means to enter new areas of activity (e.g., list expansion, digital publishing) to the extent that they would like. The question this study is attempting to explore is, Is there a way to assist the presses to sell more books, which would in turn improve their financial picture and thus help to fund other projects?

Scope

While the questions under examination potentially apply broadly to academic publishers in general, this project, at least in its initial phase, will focus exclusively on university presses with American operations.

The project is narrowly focused on press books; journals, data sets, and other forms of publication are not part of the study, except insofar as the other forms of publishing are explicitly linked to the sale of books (e.g., an author’s Web site that provides information that may lead an individual or library to purchase a copy of a press book). While the project is agnostic as to medium (an ebook can be as valuable or more than a printed text, provided that it has gone through the same editorial process), the primary focus is on print books (including print on demand) for the simple reason that this is the primary focus of most university presses. The investigation is not intended to lead to editorial determinations–that is, the aim of selling more press books will not lead to recommendations for the press to publish different kinds of books because they are believed to be “more saleable.” The key question is, Can a press sell more copies of books that it already publishes?

All presses sell books in bricks-and-mortar channels and through various online venues (e.g., Amazon). The study will be weighted toward the use of online sales channels to sell printed books, but will include a review of traditional “physical” sales methods and the marketing of electronic formats.

Principal Questions

The study will focus on three primary questions:

• What are the current practices for the presses in the marketing of books? How are these efforts divided between bricks-and-mortar and online bookselling?
• If the presses were to compile a “wish list” for marketing, especially for online marketing, what would be on it?
• What do the presses think about the feasibility and effectiveness of creating a shared online resource to assist in the marketing of books? Such a resource would be, at a minimum, a comprehensive catalogue of press titles, customizable by the individual presses in various ways, including the assertion of the individual presses’ brands, and optimized for effective Web marketing (e.g., search-engine optimization).

Methodology

The study will primarily be conducted as a series of telephone interviews with senior press personnel, supplemented by discussions with other interested parties.

Contact Information

All communications concerning this project should be directed to Joseph Esposito at miteupressproject@gmail.com.

     The Kindle is a watershed event in electronic publishing.  It is not the first ebook device, and it may not ultimately be the one that will prevail (it could of course be one of several). But its appearance marks the point where ebooks move from theory to actuality.  Whether the leading device is the Kindle, the Sony electronic book, a cell phone platform, or some variant on an iPod, ebooks are here to stay.  In discussing the Kindle, then, I am thinking about ebooks in general.

     Not a few people have been waiting for “the ebook moment” for years.  The arguments in favor of ebooks are many and include: efficiency in the supply chain (because there are no atoms to move around); the ability to store multiple titles on one device (a boon to travelers); and the added value of links, bookmarks, and adjustable text size.  We should add to this a very important aspect of ebooks: the coolness factor.  I read a post recently by a woman who extolled the virtues of the Kindle, which she took to bed with her.  She could have taken a print book to bed, of course–she could have dragged into bed the entire Oxford English Dictionary (think of all the dirty words!)–but that would not have been as cool.  We love some gadgets precisely because they are gadgets.

     One of the unintended consequences of the Kindle and its brethren (desirable for readers, more woe for publishers) is that it will reduce the number of books that are actually sold. This will happen not because of piracy (with the proprietary Kindle, piracy may be a small problem, though ebooks built with open standards may pose larger problems for publishers), but because the architecture and business model for the Kindle support a “buy only when you need it” frame of mind, aka “just in time” inventory management.  In the hardcopy world, where many books (no one knows how many) are bought “just in case,” the number of books purchased exceeds the number of books read.  The Kindle will remove the excess, adding to the legions of misfortunes of publishers and authors.

     Let’s back up to the bricks-and-mortar world to see why this will be so.  When John Doe steps into a bookstore, he browses a bit.  He may buy a specific title that brought him to the store in the first place, but he also may buy something that happened to grab his attention. He buys that second book with the intention of reading it after book #1 is completed or perhaps for some future time–that upcoming vacation in Aruba–where, blessed with time, he will immerse himself in a book.  Book #1 is just in time, #2 is just in case.

     Prior to departing on that trip, however, something may have come up.  A friend recommended another book (worse: a friend wrote a book, signaling a requirement to read it), or something broke in the news that demanded attention in the form of a book, or Doe’s mood has changed, or any of dozens of other reasons.  The result: Doe now has in his hands book #3.  This is also just-in-case.  If Doe is compulsive, the number of just-in-case books grows and grows; if Doe’s house is like mine, the number of not-yet-read books greatly exceeds one’s life expectancy.

     With ebooks you don’t purchase a title to have it waiting for you when you get time to read it.  You purchase at the very moment you are going to read it.  There is no reason to purchase it sooner, because it is always available: there, in the Cloud, living 24/7 on Amazon’s servers.  What the Kindle does is introduce digital accountability to book publishing and purchasing.  It saves consumers money, but it does so at the expense of publishers, whose income statements for decades have been propped up with the sale of things that ultimately do not get used.

     Digital accountability has already reached into many corners of the publishing industry; in this respect, the nefarious implications (from a publisher’s point of view) of ebooks are nothing new.  Retailers have computerized inventory systems that, when they are working well and are properly managed, help to cull slow-selling stock.  Librarians review Web statistics for online journals, canceling those that are not used.  And publishers have always reviewed their own sales records in order to help determine what new properties to invest in. What’s different about the digital accountability brought about by ebooks is that it does not simply result in one title being chosen over another; it results in the wholesale reduction of the total number of books sold.  It is an industry-killer–or, if that language overstates the case, an industry-diminisher.

     What’s at issue here is that publishers who look to ebooks for grand sales opportunities are in fact taking steps that reduce the overall market.  There are exceptions to this, however.  College textbooks will likely sell more copies in electronic form, since many students currently fail to purchase expensive hardcopies at all.  And in the developing world, it is possible that digital texts may find markets that print never could (assuming the digital infrastructure can be put in place).  But for consumer books in the developed world, ebooks shrink the market.

     Not that publishers have any choice.  If consumers want their books in digital form, a publisher would be foolish not to satisfy the demand. After all, if HarperCollins decided to be print-only, it would lose sales to Simon & Schuster, if S&S decided to be both print and digital.  This is a fight for market share, however, not a strategy for growth.  Publishers who have hoped that ebooks could be a vehicle for growth will have to look elsewhere.

I think most of the E-Ink ebook readers in the market are doomed to failure. They don’t do enough, and what they do, they do poorly. The world gave up on monochrome screens some ten to fifteen years ago; even the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal started printing color pages about then. E-Ink displays are kind of like dancing bears — it’s not great dancing, but it’s remarkable that it dances at all. Amazon’s Kindle is an interesting exception, because it’s not really about reading. It has several features which distinguish it:

• An always-on no-subscription-fee Sprint EVDO connection. This means that it’s always connected (or at least tries to be that way), and that connection is part of the sale price, not something extra to sign up for. No WiFi hotspots to hunt for, pay for, and sign on to. How much is Amazon paying for this? I’m told that access to Sprint’s EVDO network for unlimited data transfers is on the order of $50/month — surely Amazon has negotiated a deal here…
• But still — how do they pay for that EVDO? Perhaps with the fact that the Kindle serves as an always-connected consumer-carried sell-me-something terminal for Amazon. Think of this: the consumer carries around with them a sales terminal which only connects to your store, and makes buying something very very easy. What’s more, it’s big enough that it preempts any other retailer’s similar store-in-your-pocket. They sell one big flat-screen TV and they’ve recovered the cost of the Kindle. Do they give a cut to the EVDO provider?
• Amazon has moved agressively into the book market, both with paper books and then with ebooks, buying both Mobipocket and Audible.com, the big seller in the spoken book market. And any of these can be purchased from the Kindle (and then “read” on the Kindle). Book purchases are not an important factor for Amazon here, but the fact that it’s a book reader is. This gives the consumer an excuse to carry it around, a critical factor for success as a impulse-purchase terminal.
• The Kindle has an “experimental” web browser, email support, a keyboard so that you can type into it. In fact, it’s sort of like a butterflied laptop with a bad screen — looks a lot like those old Alan Kay DynaBook mock-ups. So Amazon is pushing into the “Internet tablet” space; this isn’t really just an ebook reader. The apps are not great, and the keyboard is pretty stiff, but at least they are there.

In short, I think the Kindle may have a future, despite its technical shortcomings, because it directly supports Amazon’s very agressive selling (books and otherwise) business plan. I expect the Kindle to evolve as technology does, perhaps a bright color OLED screen, possibly with a touch surface, coming eventually. This seems to be an example of a perceptive and forward-looking business strategy, perhaps somewhat hampered by relative inexperience in consumer product design.

Note the similarities to the iPhone: always on, point-of-sale terminal for iTunes music and movies, agressive moves into the music and movies businesses, Internet tablet apps. Different design points, to be sure; Apple had to go with bright color to sell movies, and “it’s a phone” is the excuse for the consumer to carry it. I wonder if the bright color screen, plus the woeful state of current battery technology, dictated a pocket-sized phone rather than a larger tablet — would a big screen wear out a small battery too quickly? MacBook Air and iPhone 3G reviews suggest as much. Or was the “phone” necessary as the excuse for the consumer to carry it?

The competition isn’t exactly head-to-head here; one can’t buy soap or basketballs from Apple (yet). However, as a point-of-sale terminal, the iPhone has a number of differences from the Kindle, most of which seem to be advantages:

• Both products have high-dot-pitch screens (163 dpi for the iPhone, 167 dpi for the Kindle), which gives a crisp sharp detail to the edges of text. However, the Kindle screen is limited to 8 (4?) shades of gray, and relatively slow to update (to save on battery life), while the iPhone appears to be 32-bit color, and updates quickly enough to play movies and games. In addition, the iPhone screen includes a backlight, so it can be read in the dark without additional lighting. Perhaps most importantly for a retail device, the iPhone can display mouthwatering full-color alpha-blended photos of products for sale, while the Kindle has to settle for that 2- or 3-bit grayscale. The iPhone’s screen is a fair bit smaller, 320×480 (3.5 inch diagonal) versus 600×800 (6 inch diagonal) for the Kindle.
• The “excuse” of buying a phone, rather than buying a dedicated ebook reader, is much more palatable for many many people. As I explained elsewhere, a dedicated ebook reader competes with much cheaper and more durable book technology, while buying a cell phone has become a standard practice for many people, and is subsidized by the phone companies. What’s more, Apple has reversed the income flow for connectivity that Amazon must be paying; the consumer pays Apple (indirectly through the phone company) for connectivity, rather than the other way around! Beautifully done, Apple.
• The iPhone fits in a pocket; for most pockets, the Kindle doesn’t.
• The iPhone is designed as a communication device; the Kindle isn’t. This seems to me to be a huge advantage for the iPhone; human beings are natural communicators, and they flock to anything that gives them cheaper/better/different ways of talking with each other.
• A consumer can “watch TV” on the iPhone (which should speak for itself).
• The iTunes App Store opens up the iPhone to other uses, and to other retailers. Fictionwise has already released an app to sell books in eReader format from their bookstore. Stanza connects a reader to a huge free backlist of out-of-copyright (or open source) books, stories, and articles. A variety of free applications connect readers to news stories and RSS feeds, and the full-color standards-compliant Web browser is there for other sites. You can even shop Amazon from your iPhone. Where’s the Kindle equivalent of this?
• What’s more, the App Store creates an incentive for developers to imagine and then create new uses for the iPhone. This makes it more useful to consumers, thereby increasing sales. Nice market penetration strategy. Apple keeps 30% of the sales price for their efforts, and sends the other 70% off to the developer.
• The iPhone handles HTML, PDF, Word, and Powerpoint formats. The Kindle supports HTML, PDF, and Word through its mail-us-your-document conversion service, which installs the document in Amazon’s proprietary AZF format, but this is a problem — corporate clients would like to be able to convert their reports and presentations in-house, or better yet not convert at all. The iPhone now supports that mode of operation. Neither device has a good strategy for managing collections of documents or syncing documents.
• The Kindle has a hardware keyboard; the iPhone doesn’t. This seems an advantage for the Kindle.
• The Kindle supports an SD memory card; the iPhone doesn’t. The iPhone has a camera (which supports communication); the Kindle doesn’t.

(Looking at these differences, I’m very tempted to assign Myers-Briggs personality profiles to each device. But I’ll leave that up to our readers; what do you think the personality of each is? :-).

Overall, I’d say that the iPhone 2.0 firmware release, and the iTunes App Store, has raised the bar a good deal in this competition for the pocket of the consumer. I expect to see a competitive release from Amazon in the near future, but I wonder how they’ll compensate for the shortcomings of the E-Ink screen?

I’ve spent the last few days in New York, and had the pleasure of meeting with various interesting folks. About which more anon, separately.

Many of the conversations revolved around digital books and the future of publishing — what form will books take? Would they be downloadable objects, or eventually migrate to a fully networked book? The consensus was that ultimately the book would live on the cloud, and as network access becomes ubiquitous, the implicit assumption that more and more of the content a reader will “license” or acquire will not be something that he has any direct physical ownership of, either in bits or paper. Maybe those options will cost extra; maybe they won’t be available. We will read our books on iPhones and Androids, via iBooks and Google Book Search; on Kindle v2 and the Amazon Book Shop.

This may have a profound impact on interpretations of the Fair Use privilege; generally licenses obviate the ability to assert Fair Use because non public domain network assets are usually governed in their use by contract. If, for example, Google Books settles with publishers in the AAP and AG suits, the ability to reclaim Fair Use will become sadly pivotal.

One of the other interesting casualties of this transition will be the existing book identifier schemes. Already, publishers are making a single EPUB digital book package, and then leaving the proliferation of more discrete ebook reader formats to intermediaries, distributors and wholesalers. Ingram will make the XYZ, Amazon will make the Kindle format, etc. The publisher is only responsible for one file, the .epub package.

This was a design goal of the IDPF, of which I am a board member. It relieves some of the work for publishers. What was entirely expected was that this leaves the publisher making one electronic product; what was not thought about as much was that this leaves the publisher with one ISBN for the digital book.

We are rapidly jerking forwards into a near term future where ISBNs will be assigned for derivative digital book products by intermediaries, not publishers. As an astute colleague observed in New York, the ISBN becomes a product SKU.

There are many disadvantages in this; one is that it will become increasingly difficult to find the “book” in the tangled weave of various digital instantiations. Perhaps no longer will we be able to ask how many copies did EduPunk 2020 sell.

And even this problem may be transitory. For as books move to the cloud, from digital bundles to network assets, we will not be counting “things sold” but link hits; not things shipped, but pages accessed. As some forward thinking publishers like O’Reilly have already demonstrated, the bookshelf will be not only virtual, but increasingly transitory in composition.

Whether we will be able to successfully rethink our conception of identifiers is a problem that lays beyond us just far enough that we are even uncertain what the contours may be.

No one can doubt that digitization and the Internet together with various factors intrinsic to the publishing industry will radically transform the distribution of books: books can now be transmitted like e-mail directly from writer to reader eliminating nearly the entire traditional supply chain along with much of its cost and infrastructure. Publishers of the future will function much as agents do today, depending upon free lance editors and publicists, and serving their authors as business managers.

Research materials, technical data and the contents of dictionaries, encyclopedias, atlases, manuals, journals and so on, which are often obsolete upon publication need no longer be printed and bound but transmitted on demand to users screens either for a fee per use, by subscription, or free. This process is already far advanced.

But for books that embody the ancient and ongoing dialog that constitutes our civilization and without which we would not know who we are or where we came from or where we may be going, the format of printed and bound sheets is optimal and irreplaceable. I am not a Luddite. I have been responsible for major and disruptive innovations in our industry beginning with the introduction of trade paperbacks fifty years ago. My Readers Catalog in the mid eighties anticipated on line bookselling and I saw the revolutionary implications of digitization soon thereafter. But the market for hand held readers will, in my opinion, be marginal, serving mostly recreational readers and by no means all of them. The inference that because content can now be transmitted electronically books will necessarily be read on electronic screens overlooks such factors as cost,convenience, reliability and human nature as well as the peculiar nature of books. My philosophical friends used to say “for example is not a proof,” but the failure of such devices so far to find a compelling market may suggest more than that the market for them is still unripe because publishers have not released their full digital catalogs. Had the market for e-readers responded as the market for the iPod has, publishers, for all their notorious caution, would by now have responded accordingly.

In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Lemuel Gulliver visits the airborne island of Laputa, inhabited by so called projectors – what we today would call inventors. The projectors were growing quantities of cucumbers on the plausible but incorrect assumption that because cucumbers absorb heat and energy from the sun they can replace traditional sources of heat and light: biofuels 300 years avant la lettre. Gulliver also wonders why Laputan coats fit so badly until he visits a tailor and finds himself being fitted by quadrant and compass.

The new kindle from Amazon, like its several failed predecessors are Laputan biofuel technology and tailoring. Take for example Kindle’s price of $400: the first book downloaded will cost the reader $410, assuming ten dollars per download. The first twenty books purchased will cost $30 each and the first forty, say a year’s supply, will cost $20 each, by which time the device will probably have failed, been lost, or replaced by a newer, perhaps cheaper model. But if the next version sells for about$160 the price of the new Sony model, amortization will remain an issue. Or consider function. The designers of handheld readers aim to approximate as nearly as possible the characteristics of a physical book -including I am told pages that actually feel like paper and in the case of the new Sony device a leather-like cover. But why bother when the physical book already embodies these characteristic to perfection?

The practical solution to the presentation of digital content is not a handheld reader posing as as a book but an actual library quality paperback that has been printed, bound and trimmed automatically, at low cost in a matter of minutes at point of delivery by a machine like an ATM designed for that purpose. In the interest of full disclosure and not as a solicitation, test versions of this machine sponsored by On Demand Books of which I am a founder, are currently making books in several locations in the US and abroad. A commercial version will be ready later this year.

Recently, the University of Pittsburgh Press has announced that it is working to make its entire back catalog available online, free of charge, through Pitt’s University Library System (ULS). New titles will be added to UPP Digital Editions, part of ULS’s D-Scribe program, after the books have been in print for two years.

The reason this is extraordinary is that it violates the basic economic principle of book publishing, namely, you lose money on frontlist and make money (sometimes) on the backlist. Pittsburgh’s program will over time (it won’t happen overnight) erode backlist sales, reduce the Press’s income, and thus make it more difficult for the Press to underwrite new books. (I don’t know the specifics of the Press’s financial situation, but if it is like most other university presses, part of its operations are subsidized by its parent institution. Having said that, revenue from book sales, especially of the backlist, is surely part of its overall economic picture.)

Backlist sales are the bedrock of book publishing economics, and they are tied to an important corollary: Good books backlist, bad books disappear. (Yes, the term “backlist” is a verb as well as a noun. Publishers are not always the most zealous guardians of the language.) It may be that Pittsburgh is not concerned about the erosion of backlist sales because they don’t have any. If so, then what appears on the surface to be an open access initiative may in fact be the outcome of undistinguished editorial judgment.

There is a fundamental difference between book sales and the subscription sales of academic journals. Most revenue for journals are for current issues. Thus many journal publishers now make their backlists or backfiles, as they are called, open access after six months or one year; sometimes this form of open access is mandated by funding agencies. The revenue loss to such journal publishers is likely to be negligible. The economics of book publishing and journal publishing are precisely the reverse of one another. It would make more sense for a book publisher to post new books for free online for six months and then charge for them thereafter. (The ratio of frontlist to backlist sales varies by publisher, subject category, author, and publishing segment.)

This is not to say that open access cannot be used to help to sell books. One of the real innovators in this regard is a contributor to the Publishing Frontier blog, Michael Jensen of National Academies Press. NAP has done extensive testing of the relationship between open access material and the sale of books, whether in print or digital form. Shrewd publishers can and should learn from NAP. I advise all my clients to test various forms of open access as a form of product sampling. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Pittsburgh has put into place the various marketing techniques that have enabled NAP to experiment with open access and still manage its operation responsibly.

The AAUP uses the word “innovation” in its story about Pittsburgh. Wrong word, I believe. Somewhat paradoxically, the Press’s initiative is a bet that digital media don’t matter. I believe the opposite, that digital media matter very much and that the flirtation with hybrid models that marry print to electronics is a useful but transitory phase; in the end (I won’t predict when that will be) all publishing will be digital. Pittsburgh is counting on print and electronics occupying parallel universes forever, where one medium does not effect the other (except, perhaps, positively, but this is wishful thinking). This is myopia, not innovation.

The University of Pittsburgh Press has started down the slippery slope. While it may receive some support from its parent now, over time that support will grow until all the costs for the Press must be covered by the parent. The parent may then decide, as many universities have already determined, that the support for the Press is too great. Support gets cut back, the number of books published then drops, and scholars everywhere lament the fact that there are fewer and fewer outlets for their work. No one should be surprised when commercial publishers increase their presence in academic publishing, picking off the most profitable programs. This is not a way to build a university press, nor is it a harbinger of a bright future for scholarly communications. Open access is not an innovation but one aspect of a complex marketing program. I wish the University of Pittsburgh Press had such a program in place.

I’m pretty sure my demos sold three Kindles this weekend. I am more convinced than ever that the overall value proposition here — easy connectivity and the fast and direct acquisition of many of the books it would occur to people to want — will create success despite the real flaws in the product design.

I made the leap long ago to reading books on a hand-held device, currently a Palm Pilot. The always-with-me aspect combined with the back-lit screen for reading in bed in a dark room created book-reading opportunities no paper book could fill. And I learned to like the small page and short line width; I have come to notice when reading something forces my eyes to move and to have to work to find the beginning of each new line on the left. Doesn’t happen on the Palm. Or the Kindle.

For straight narrative reading, there are two serious disadvantages to the Palm, both solved by the Kindle. One is the purchasing and loading experience, which for the Palm is time-consuming and often frustrating. You shop either at Powells.com, which isn’t bad, or EReader.com, which is atrocious. Then you download to your computer, open the file, and load it to your Palm by hot-synching it. Failures can occur at every step. The other issue is the battery life. I can only read the Palm for a couple of hours before it starts needing juice. And I have other things I need the Palm to be functional for. So it isn’t a good tool to provide airplane reading for a trans-Atlantic flight.

The Kindle gadget itself is actually pretty seriously flawed. You have to get used to holding it while you read in a way that avoids inadvertent page advances. The “cursor” and selection wheel is limiting and, consequently navigation is over-involved. If using the iPod and iTunes defines elegant, using the Kindle and Amazon through it defines clunky. And yet…

Once you get used to keeping your fingers off the page-turning bars, reading on it is just fine. I hate right-justified lines, which it’s got (and why no way to choose out of it?), but the page width and depth are very paperback book-like. I’m fine with the default type size, but changing it to a larger (or smaller) one is two clicks. It’s lighter to hold than a book and advancing through pages is no harder or more distracting than with a paper book. Halftones and line drawings are okay — not great. I have a feeling, as I’m reading it, that I’m missing a lot of visual elements in the Stephen Colbert book. Like maybe they just left them out of the Kindle version. But I don’t read that many books that have visual elements.

It is solving my two prior ebook complaints: ease of title acquisition and battery life. And it is adding something fabulous: Amazon offers quick-loading samples of every book that are free. What you get in the sample, which you have about ten seconds after you click for it, seems to be all the front matter and a chapter or two. In an otherwise busy week, I’ve downloaded about ten samples, bought two books (and read big chunks of both of them) I’ve only had the device for ten days, but it looks to me like I will actively be reading two different books on devices from now on: one on my Kindle and one on my Palm. Which I’m reading at any time will be a function of circumstances and, of course, the urgency of reading the next chunk of one book or the other. The Palm is in my pocket all the time; the Kindle will travel in my laptop case and be with me at home, at the office, and in my hotel room and in transit when I’m travelling.

When I show people the device, they’re intrigued. When I show them the reading experience, they’re satisfied and accepting. But when I show them the buying procedures, they’re entranced. Amazon’s core competence ain’t devices, but they sure know how to maximize the shopping experience.

As you’ve read elsewhere, the Kindle takes you quickly and directly to Amazon, where you shop selections (bestsellers or new and noteworthy) or search the site in the normal way. Then you get the full Amazon data set, including those reviews they have. And you are offered an opportunity to buy or download the sample with a click.

I didn’t know the price of either of the two books I have bought when I bought them, so quick and seductive is the purchase button. And, of course, I was “sold” because I had, in both cases, read the sample. But I was pleasantly surprised. Ken Follett’s “Pillars of the Earth”, for which the new paperback costs $11.99 at Amazon, and the cheapest used copy is $11.05, was $6.39 for my Kindle edition. And Stephen Colbert’s “I Am America (And So Can You)”, a current hardcover bestseller for which the publisher’s list is $26.99, the new book is $16.19 at Amazon and the cheapest used copy is $12.48, was $9.99 for my Kindle edition. Based on this very limited sample, savings (over Amazon prices) are $2-5 per book. If that holds up, it would take 100 or so books to repay the $399 (current) cost of the device (assuming one didn’t plan to re-sell the print editions after reading them.)

I have seen Jeff Bezos quoted to the effect that ebooks should be cheaper because you can’t pass them around like printed books. On that basis, the price comparison above might not be accurate. But one of the people I showed the Kindle to, who travels a lot and reads lots of books and who does not re-sell her printed editions, did the arithmetic for herself about the same way I did above.

And the Kindle does more than deliver you cheaper books; it also, in a way most people wouldn’t use a lot but which can certainly be helpful from time to time, delivers the Internet.

The dynamic the book business needs to wrap its collective brain around is that the more straight text narrative books you read, the more useful Kindle is and, on balance, the less it costs. And once you have a Kindle, it will take some real reason to make you buy a book of that kind another way. This is fraught with implications, which will be the topic of another post.

What Doctorow doesn’t say, however, is that if the Kindle or its ilk (meaning useful ebook devices) becomes successful, Doctorow is going to have to come up with a new marketing trick.

Some background is in order. As a founding contributor of Boing Boing, frequent online poster, and established author of science fiction, Doctorow is something of an Internet celebrity. He is also a frequent commentator on that all-absorbing subject, How the Web is Intended to Work. And one way it works, he says, using his own fiction-writing as an example, is as a promotional medium for hardcopy books. Doctorow was among the first to experiment putting the entire text of a book online for people to sample, with the aim of then having that sampling drive the sale of hardcopy. It works for him; his sales are up. And, I should add, for every single example of similar online product sampling I have been able to study, it has worked as well. Free text on the Internet sells hardcopy books. There may be exceptions to this among reference titles (e.g., cookbooks, dictionaries), where viewing a short entry online may sate a reader, but generally, Doctorow is onto something, and he has personally profited from it.

Two important limitations to this marketing tactic, however. Since few current book-length works are available online at no cost, Doctorow’s free books are something of a novelty. If everyone took Doctorow’s advice and made the full texts of books available for free online, however, it would require greater and greater effort to call attention to individual titles: free online texts may drive hardcopy sales, but you have to find the online texts first. Thus if everyone followed Doctorow’s lead, few or none would prosper. Doctorow might have to go back to trying to get an appearance on Oprah.

More fundamentally, however, the great gamble that Doctorow is making is that the reading of a digital text will always be inferior to the reading of hardcopy. Print is better than digital formats for most people, especially those who read what have come to be called “long-form works,” which is supposed to call to mind something that looks like and is structured like a novel, meaning 200-1,000 pages long and organized more or less linearly. Sample a longish book online, sure, but read it all the way through? Not for most of us. Thus Doctorow’s business model: post texts in a “disergonomic” manner online and invite readers to get the better format through Amazon or your local bookstore.

Kindle and the Sony reader and some other devices, not to mention the many on their way, are making a different bargain, however: they propose that reading a digital text could be as satisfying as reading hardcopy; and on top of that, you get all the bells and whistles (search, bookmarking, etc.) that are peculiar to digital forms. Now we post the full text of a book online for free. Do we read it through a browser? Probably not. Instead we download it to our ebook device, where the text is displayed in a highly satisfying manner.

Thus, as ebooks get better (and Kindle is very good, if not what many observers were hoping for) the opportunity to use online texts to market hardcopy versions of the same books disappears. Doctorow needs a new marketing plan; he is battling with the giant behemoth of Amazon, IT innovator and marketer extraordinaire.

There is an intriguing implication here. Free text (also called Open Access content) is becoming more plentiful for a number of reasons, and one of them is the canny ability of marketers (Doctorow included) to begin to use OA as a marketing tool for other formats or services. Widespread use of ebooks may thus put downward pressure on the growth of OA texts, as the open content may come to be viewed as cannibalizing sales rather than promoting them.

Doctorow may or may not be aware that if many or most writers and publishers followed his lead, he might have to find another way to earn a living. It is a curious position to be in: To have the distinction of being a leader, but having a personal interest in having no one follow.

But I, at any rate, wish to follow, at least part of the distance. The noise Doctorow has made about himself and the virtues of free online texts has made me want to read one of his science fiction novels. So I am now browsing the used bookstores near my home. Buying a used copy is an article of faith, as it would be inappropriate for any money to find its way back to the author or publisher. Free means free. Cory Doctorow taught me this.