It all started when Amazon removed the “Sales Rank” from all gay & lesbian books (apart from homophobic books which now appear at the top of an Amazon search for “Homosexuality”).  The story is covered in detail on Jane’s Dear Author blog.

This got picked up in a blog, then spread like wildfire across Twitter under the hashtag AmazonFail with just over 27,000 posts last night.

Amazon finally responded and blamed it all on a “glitch”.  A “glitch” implies a technical mistake, but Amazon had already replied to author Mark Probst saying that this was their policy. It’s not a technical glitch and to try to pass it off as such is an insult to Amazon’s customers (and the customers know this).

So what does Amazon need to do?

• Immediately reverse this policy change.
• Explain truthfully why it happened.
• Apologise.
• Make sure it will never happen again.

Amazon will have lost some customers permanently due to its actions – it can’t reverse that.

Trying to pass the whole thing off as a computer glitch is just insulting.  It’s clearly not a computer glitch – it’s the result of a human decision based on personal bigotry. The person who made the decision needs to be fired.

Rebuilding Trust and Reputation

Then Amazon needs to work hard at rebuilding trust and reputation with the people it’s pissed off.  One way to do that would be to prominently promote the very books that were affected.

The big problem for Amazon is that, in a world where an online petition can get nearly 10,000 signatures in less than 12 hours over a weekend, they should have done all of this yesterday.

Another follow-up post, this time following up my post on Self-publishing your art books on Lulu.

From http://www.lulu.com/content/2709735:

“Dear Lulu” is a test book researched and produced by graphic design students and Prof. Frank Philippin at Hochschule Darmstadt, Germany, during an intensive two-day workshop with London-based designer James Goggin (Practise). The book’s intention is to act as a calibration document for testing colour, pattern, format, texture and typography.

Exercises in colour profile (Adobe RGB/sRGB/CMYK/Greyscale), halftoning, point size, line, geometry, skin tone, colour texture, cropping and print finishing provide useful data for other designers and self-publishers to judge the possibilities and quality of online print-on-demand — specifically Lulu.com, with this edition.

The book’s price is set at Lulu.com’s exact printing cost per unit.

The paperback version (96 pages, 5.83″ x 8.26″, perfect binding, full-colour interior ink) is £10.47 and the ebook version (62501 KB) is downloadable free-of-charge.

A great resource to see the quality of printing that Lulu.com can offer the artist wanting to self-publish books of their artwork.

Every week I seem to read some nonsense spouted by ill-informed journalists regurgitating a press release from the music industry.  This week it was Dan Sabbagh in The Times condemning “…the traditional net libertarian nonsense that feels good if you want to live in a world in which there are only pub bands with pages on Bebo or some other social networking site”.

Dan was obviously ignoring the phenomenal success of new business models made well-known by pub bands such as Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails etc.  But hey, he’s only a journalist repeating what he’s been told by the music industry. (The thrust of his article was that the draconian nonsense of having your broadband connection limited was better than the draconian nonsense of having it cut off completely – it’s not like he was intelligently investigating viable alternatives).

Anyway, poorly thought-out press pieces like that frequently incite commentators such as myself to write long, detailed explanations of why the original article is wrong.  Not anymore. Nope – I’m officially giving up on the nay-sayers in the music & publishing industries and their pet journalists.

There’s now more than enough theory published on the web about the viability of the new business models available to musicians, writers and artists.  The argument is never going to be won by an endless succession of arguments and rebukes.  The argument is going to be won by the success of musicians, writers and artists using these new models.

To facilitate this I’m going to concentrate in this blog on writing practical articles about how musicians, writers and artists can use the new business models rather than debating theory.  I’ve been moving towards this position over the past few months so it’s probably no big surprise to regular readers, but I thought I’d be clear and open about it.

But you know what I’d really love?  A website where innovators & commentators could record practical tips for musicians, writers and artists in using new business models.

Imagine a website where the likes of Chris Anderson, Mike Masnick, Kevin Kelly, Seth Godin et al (and numerous not-so-well-known commentators and innovators) could post practical articles for musicians, writers and artists.  That would be more powerful than any argument.

Would this be a useful resource for you?

Lauren Simonutti is a Baltimore-based artist/photographer. Having been told that her work didn’t “fit in” in the US (and having more positive experiences in European and Australian markets), she turned to the web—more precisely, to self-publishing her artwork in print-on-demand books through Lulu—in order to reach her audience.

I’ve been interested in using print-on-demand for some time, so I contacted Lauren who kindly agreed to answer my questions about her experiences (and for me to publish her answers here – thank you, Lauren).

Lauren, how did you go about promoting your books on Lulu?

“sorrow…and the end of sorrow” by Lauren Simonutti – available on Lulu.com”

Promotion is always difficult for me. I would rather work than spend time on marketing and I have very few outside resources so I have to find them myself.

Initially my promotion always begins with imagery/layouts that I create and post on deviantart and flickr. The majority of my sales have come via deviantart.

My work seems to hold much greater appeal in Europe and Australia than it does in the States, and in my home city of Baltimore I have been refused for every single thing for which I have applied and just this week was actually refused as a volunteer to work a photobooth at an arts festival (Artscape).

It’s become rather amusing but I have been told in no uncertain terms that here I simply do not fit in.

I mention all this because that is what brought me to the web in the first place. I make considerably more sales in prints or handmade artists books but Lulu.com does provide an alternative.

How easy was it publish your book with Lulu?  What did the process entail? Were there any problems?

Lulu is free which was its first appeal as I have no money.  The process of signing up was simple, it is best to give them a PayPal account for revenue payments as they are faster and require no minimum amount.  I had no problems.  I am adept at design so while it was time consuming that was because of my pickiness.

Now here’s the main issue.  When I signed on and for my two extant books there was the issue of starting with a blank slate – a simple white or black page.  Your picture placements were somewhat limited but not beyond reason and I opted to include the text into my JPEGs as opposed to using their text option.

They have since changed their options to themes – they have pre-ordained themes from which you can not alter page colour or even have a blank background.  This also leads sometimes to unwanted cropping.  I wrote them about this change (they do answer questions quite readily) and replied that the themes were greatly preferred by their clientelle.

Now keep in mind they keep good records, they pay revenues directly and without fuss and their Calendars which I make seasonally are really very nice.

After trying another option I have since gone back to Lulu and believe that using their ‘Portfolio’ book option I can get what I want, it will just take some tweaking and again the text will have to be incorporated in the JPEGs.  But I think it will work and there is the option of hardcover.

Important Note: I have noticed, not just with Lulu but with overnightprints.com and a few others that you should lighten your JPEG in levels about 15 to 20% lighter (using the midtone arrow) than you want them to look.  Digital printing tends a little towards the dark side.

So that has been my experience.  I am working on the new portfolio book selection at this time.  Again, there is no financial outlay and no obligation and if you use the themes it is very fast and easy.

You can see Lauren’s work on her deviantArt account, her Flickr account, and, of course, her Lulu account.

In my first post on this blog I wrote (critically) about ACAP – a thoroughly wrong-headed attempt by some publishers to enforce stringent limitations on the way search engines index the content that publishers make public on their websites.

Today ACAP is completely dead in the water.

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (see those links for details) today jointly announced their backing for the existing Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) which comprises robots.txt, the Sitemap protocol, and individual page meta elements.

The people behind ACAP are probably still claiming that they have the backing of the world’s 4th largest search engine Exalead, but in the words of Bill Hicks “Yeah, maybe, but you know what, after the first 3 largest armies search engines, there’s a REAL big fucking drop-off.”

The decision by the three big search engines to back the existing REP standard—and to clarify exactly how they implement it—is a great example of these three competitors working together to the benefit of both website owners and searchers.

UPDATE – 4th June 2008: I just heard from a colleague that the whole ACAP debacle could have been avoided.  ACAP was primarily conceived as a way to convey rights/permissions metadata when feeding data from one partner organisation to another (for example, from a publisher to Amazon).

For some unknown reason the people behind ACAP decided to try to roll it out as a website technology.

This was obviously a huge strategic error, and it backs up my belief that the people behind this technology just don’t get the web. As a protocol for communicating permissions information from a publisher to Amazon or Google Books (not Google Search!) in a data feed it’s probably fine.  But ACAP has no place on the web.

What prompted the people behind ACAP to try to force it onto the web is unimaginable.  This ill-conceived idea was doomed from the start, especially when combined with their secretiveness (they have a forum on their site, but it’s hidden from view and they only give out logins to selected partners) and their attitude when replying to the tidal wave of criticism they received from bloggers.

Free distribution of digital content (music, books, visual art) is embraced by—and benefits—customers because it gives them access to a much wider range of content. This is because the restrictions on the amount of content they could get—based on how much they can financially afford—is eliminated.

Instead of money, the bottleneck becomes the time required to find content they’re interested in – this is where Google leads the field by providing an ever-improving and expanding search facility for finding the content, whether it’s webpages, books, news, academic articles, images etc.

Free distribution of digital content is slowly being embraced by—and will benefit—creators (artists, musicians, authors etc.) because it allows their work—and reputation—to be distributed to a much wider audience.

Musicians such as The Charlatans and Nine Inch Nails are making headlines with new ways to make money while giving away MP3 files of their music for free (and unsigned bands have been doing it for years).

Authors such as Suze Orman and Dan Solove are giving away free ebook versions of their books, in the knowledge that the wider distribution this gives them helps to sell more paper copies of their books.

So where does this leave publishers? The book publishing companies and music companies seem to have been left out of this equation. You could argue that they’ve left themselves out of the equation by desperately attempting to pretend that the business model of content creation hasn’t changed while vainly suing fans for the crime of being early adopters of a new economy.

Actually, there is a role for clued-up skills-rich publishers. It’s just a slightly different role than they’re used to. The clues can be found when you examine the new business model summarised above and look for the holes. That’s what I’m going to try to do now (but not exhaustively – I’ll leave that to people much smarter than me).

Publishers can provide instant attention

As mentioned above, one of the biggest benefits to both creators and consumers is that content is more widely distributed and available to all. But in a world where a huge amount of digital content is free, finding that content is hard – it’s like finding a few choice needles in a field of haystacks.

Obviously search engines provide front-end interfaces for finding that content, but that’s not enough. Search engines such as Google need to interpret the searcher’s requirements and display the most relevant results first. Google’s algorithm relies on correctly interpreting the relevancy and reputation of each piece of digital content in order to give their users the right results.

Publishers can provide a huge amount of relevancy and reputation because Publishers’ old-business-model reputations have been translated into high rankings for their websites.

A record company specialising in hip-hop music has already built-up a reputation and many incoming links from hip-hop-orientated websites, whether they’re sites belonging to hip-hop musicians, fan-sites, hip-hop forums, etc.

A publishing company specialising in a particular niche—whether it’s an academic subject area, a particular genre such as science fiction, or a particular service such as news & current affairs—will have built up a reputation (and the accompanying relevant incoming links) from other websites in their particular niche. If I was publishing this blog post in the Freakonomics column of the New York Times then the chances are that it would get a lot more attention!

This reputation and the resulting links are incredibly valuable because they’re both numerous and extremely relevant, and can take years to build up. So Publishers are already well-positioned to take on the role of distributing instant reputation and relevancy to creators. After all, that’s one of the things they’ve been doing for centuries.

So publishers need to revalue their business models so that the bestowal of reputation and relevancy (and therefore attention) is seen as a major service that they can offer to creators. In order to better leverage this service, publishers need to work closely with relevant communities. That means actively engaging in conversations with their niche communities on email lists, discussion forums, social networks, and blogs (and in the non-digital world at conferences, gigs, book-signings, etc.).

Publishers can provide quality control and specialist technical expertise

Creators are not perfect, and most are grateful for help.

An author’s work frequently benefits from the skills of their editorial team, which is why you’ll often see the editor thanked in the author’s acknowledgements in the front of their book. The book production team use their amassed knowledge of design and typography to turn a word-processed manuscript into a professionally laid-out book that is a pleasure to read.

Musicians benefit from the editorial and technical skills of the producers & engineers who spend a huge amount of time coaxing the best performances from them, then expertly mix the raw sound into a polished—or artfully unpolished—finished track.

Moving back to the web, authors or musicians are unlikely to be their own web team. I’m not just talking about being able to throw a website together, I’m talking about a full web team consisting of ecommerce programmers, web developers, web designers, SEO experts, and emarketing strategists. Sure anyone can put a small website online (and that’s one of the great things about the web) but as the web has evolved the skills necessary to create and maintain a good website have both multiplied and increased in their complexity.

Any content creator—author, musician, or artist—can’t be expected to have all these expert skills, and hiring them individually (and project-managing the coordination between them) would be expensive and a huge consumption of valuable time and effort that would be far better spent doing what the creator actually excels at: writing, composing, playing, or painting.

That isn’t to say that the author or musician shouldn’t be directly communicating with their fans – they should. But managing the framework that enables and amplifies this communication is a job for a dedicated team.

So, publishing companies should be positioned to provide services that greatly enhance both the book/music and the online presence of the author/musician.

Again, this is already something that publishing companies do, but they need to emphasise this aspect of their service and market it as a suite of valuable services that they can provide to creators.

But publishers need to make money

Obviously publishing companies will want to be paid for providing these professional services – they need to make a profit. At the moment they get this money by charging for content, but as more digital content becomes free then this particular revenue stream will start to dry up.

I think that paper copies of books will continue to sell, as will CDs & DVDs. Returning to Nine Inch Nail’s recent release of Ghosts, even though Trent Reznor made the first 9 tracks available free of charge, he also released various paid versions from a full digital download of 36 tracks for $5 to a $300 ultra-deluxe limited edition package.

The $300 Ultra-deluxe limited edition package has already sold out, despite there being multiple cheaper (and even free) versions available. This utilises the generative of “embodiment” coined by Kevin Kelly which I’ve already talked about in a previous blog post. Hardback bindings of paperback books are another long-standing example of this strategy.

So higher-quality (higher revenue) non-digital formats are one revenue stream that could be added to sales of non-digital content in “standard” formats (paperbacks, CDs etc). This strategy can also be expanded to cover revenue from supplementary material such as subscription elearning software for textbooks or t-shirts and posters of musicians. Again this is something that is already happening (especially within the music industry) so the groundwork has already been done.

But to offset this, expensive traditional marketing (direct mail advertising, broadcast television ads) is going to have to be drastically reduced. I can’t think of any way to recoup the huge amounts of money spent on direct mail and mass-market broadcast ads in this newly emerging marketplace – it’s just not viable. Certainly not when you can better reach a more carefully-selected market (i.e. with a much greater percentage of potential customers) by spending much less money online.

The traditional marketing model of throwing a huge amount of cash—in the form of TV ads, billboards or direct mail campaigns—at an undifferentiated mass of people can only be sustained when you (artificially) control the scarcity of your product. When your product loses that scarcity (i.e. it can be easily copied and redistributed online) then you simply can’t keep following this old dogma. I’m not going to go into more detail about this because it’s been explained before by the likes of Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelly, Michael Masnick, and Umair Haque (amongst many others).

Unfortunately this is where many companies in the publishing and music industries “don’t get it”. They do understand the ideas of new revenue streams and the benefits of free content, but they can’t imagine not having to shovel vast amounts of cash into the raging furnace that is the traditional (obsolete) marketing system – they don’t understand that the potential cost of their marketing is plummeting for exactly the same reasons of efficient distribution and connectivity.

Once they accept this (and realign their marketing strategy accordingly) then the equation will balance and they’ll see the profit.

In every industry I’ve worked in, people have been obsessively concerned about underpricing their products.

Underpricing, they say, devalues the products (because, as Chris Anderson pointed out recently, they make the mistake that “the only way to measure value is with money”).

This “underpricing=bad” argument might have some mileage for products made of atoms, but when your products are made of ones and zeroes it becomes obsolete. That’s why it’s a nonsense to charge the same price for your ebook as you charge for the paperback (or, even worse, the hardback).

Of course, the ultimate underpricing is to make something free. Making something free doesn’t devalue it. I find a lot of value in Google, Flickr, Slashdot, numerous other websites and blogs, the Kubuntu installation on my computer, Mozilla Firefox, the WordPress software this blog runs on, PHP5 & MySQL, the NHS, Channel 4, free-entry to the collections at the Tate Modern (where I can gaze, without paying, at the Bacons, Picassos, Matisses…), even the free copy of the Metro newspaper I read on the bus every morning on the way to work. I value these things.

Telling people that you believe some things should be free can generate some aggressive criticism (as you’ll know if you’ve ever read the comments on, for example, Chris Anderson’s Long Tail blog). You can feel like you’re being accused of being a communist/hippy idealist with no idea about business models in the real world. I’m sure that those naïve hippy idealists at Google—who are making a killing with their business model in the real world—would disagree.

Why is it that so many people who see themselves as “traditional hard-nosed business” types are completely clueless when it comes to the internet, especially the more recent trends in social networking?

Because they’re desperately trying to impose yesterday’s business models on today’s business. Umair Haque points to the twin obsessions of “product” and “monetization”:

When you try and “monetize your users”, you accept the almost obscene assumption that people are meant to be pimped out, sold to the highest bidder, resources to be slashed, burned, and exploited.

Umair is certainly not against businesses making money. In fact he highlights the fact that many businesses’ attempts to make money on the internet can’t make any sustainable income (because they are so clumsily contemptuous of their customers in the pursuit of profit).

Actually he summarises his argument most succinctly while replying to a comment on that same post:

as for figuring out how to capture value – the point of the principle is that when we figure out how to capture value, we must do it in a way that doesn’t destroy any value we create.

How long would Google remain the search engine of choice by such a huge margin if it sold out its users and “monetised” its clean, clear, front page (which must be the primest piece of real estate on the net) by cluttering it with ads?

Meanwhile earlier this week Trent Reznor just grossed $1.6 million in the first week of sales of Nine Inch Nail’s new album. My friend Barry examines the pricing policy in more detail, but the pertinent point here is that Reznor gave away a 9-track download of the new release for free.

$1.6 million says that his fans didn’t think that the free tracks devalued his music…

I spent my last post looking at Publishers, ebooks and what successful strategies could be used to make money. I want to return to that briefly, as I’ve just read in the Sunday Times that two publishers have got it completely wrong.

Random House and Hachette, which together control just over 30% of the British book market, are to offer downloadable versions of titles by authors ranging from Delia Smith to Ian McEwan and Michael Parkinson. Every other major publisher is drawing up plans to follow suit, pitching the books at just below the price of a hardback.

The bold emphasis is mine – to highlight the catastrophic error of history repeating itself (when the recording industry finally started trying to sell MP3s online, greed got the better of them too. They priced the files far too high. Now, their profits devastated by their rapacious pricing strategy, they’ve been forced to accept more realistic—i.e. much lower—prices).  Let’s make this clear: you’ve only got a viable business strategy if your ebook version costs less than your paperback version.

Another alarm bell rings when Fionnuala Duggan, head of the digital division at Random House, makes a passing comment:

“We hope that there will be inter-operability,” said Duggan, “in other words, that the ebook will work on any device.”

It’s simple, Ms Duggan: don’t release them in proprietary ebook formats and/or shackle them with DRM.

A PDF with a simple digital watermarking system (to be able to trace any “pirated” copy of an ebook to its “pirate”) is enough to fulfil all your requirements. You will only have inter-operability problems if you choose a proprietary ebook format and/or DRM.

With Chris Anderson’s next book “Free” due to be previewed on the front cover of Wired magazine next week, there’s a lot of chatter about how the way to make money in the future is to give stuff away. That’s a gross simplification of the “economics of free“, but it basically sums it up.

Kevin Kelly argues that since the internet makes it easy to copy digital content (whether that’s writing, music or anything else) then you can no longer rely on charging for that content (or, to be more precise, you can no longer charge purely for the content). That’s certainly something that the majority of the music industry has been finding out for the past few years (although the RIAA refuses to accept it, and is trying to build a business model out of suing music fans).

Kevin proposes eight areas (he calls them generatives) where you can make a living if your content is free (I won’t explain them in detail here – he does a much better job on his blog post).

The whole theory behind this is that since digital content can be copied and redistributed an infinite number of times at a near-zero cost then trying to charge for it is increasingly futile. In the words of the new economists, there is an abundance of digital content, and when you have something in abundance then its financial value approaches zero – you can only make money out of scarcity.

Everyone usually uses the music industry as an example, but I’m going to use the (book) publishing industry instead. Firstly because I’m contrary, and secondly because that’s where my day job is.

In the dim and distant past (by which I mean the 1980s and earlier) book publishing companies converted type-written manuscripts into neatly arranged, carefully edited, professionally typeset words on paper, bound them between two covers, and used expensive printing machinery to mass-produce their books. The process and materials cost a lot, so they had to spend even more money on marketing (brochures, getting well-placed reviews etc.) to recoup the costs, make a living and pay the original author.

Once exposed to modern technology, that scarcity is removed – an ebook can be infinitely copied and distributed.

Publishers have tried to artificially impose scarcity by shackling the ebook files with DRM (and trying to forget the inconvenient fact that every variety of DRM gets cracked within a couple of weeks by a bored 15-year-old).

The alternative tactic was to refuse to create an ebook version of a book, in order to prevent the book becoming digital content in the first place. This tactic has been slightly more successful than the music industry’s attempts, since creating an ebook of a book was much more time-consuming than creating a set of MP3 files from a CD. I say “was” because a work colleague sent me a link to a news item earlier today about a book ripper that will convert a 500-page paper book to an ebook in about an hour. Sure, the technology costs $3600 at the moment, but as my colleague commented, that’ll drop rapidly over a couple of years.

So, faced with their content becoming infinitely abundant, how can book publishers make money?

Books can come with additional online supplementary resources. There are a multitude of ways in which these resources can be made to generate money, including (but not limited to) subscription charges, ad revenue, and licensing. The supplemental online resources model is most visible with textbooks, but even a novel could come with online extras (an author’s blog, background on “the making of” the book, etc.) supported by ads.

Another, more traditional, answer is in hardback books (or cloth-bound books, as they’re called in the US). Given that the hardback version of a book usually costs twice as much as the paperback, why on earth do people buy hardbacks? Why does putting 300 pages between two sheets of thick card cost £15.99, when the same 300 pages sandwiched in thin card costs just £7.99?

One answer is immediacy. The hardback binding of a book is frequently published before the paperback binding, and customers who really want that book as soon as possible are prepared to pay the premium. However, when the “book ripper” technology mentioned above becomes cheap and abundant, then the immediacy value of the hardback binding will cease.

Another reason for the increased value of hardback bindings is what Kevin Kelly calls embodiment:

PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good.

As an artist who has a fascination with texture, tactility and books as artwork (altered books, handmade art books, etc.) I can immediately understand this. While a typical hardback binding of a book isn’t bound in gilded leather, its weight and solidity makes it feel somehow more special.

I’m wondering whether expensively tooled and gilded book-bindings will make a comeback when the written content becomes infinitely abundant. It reminds me of a passage from a (wonderful) book by Gene Wolfe called The Shadow of the Torturer where the protagonist Severian is listening to the reminiscences of the old blind Librarian, Master Ultan:

“I was sitting there, as I said, and had been for several watches, when I came to me that I was reading no longer. For some time I was hard put to say what I had been doing. When I tried, I could only think of certain odors and textures and colors that seemed to have no connection with anything discussed in the volume I held. At last I realized that instead of reading it, I had been observing it as a physical object. The red I recalled came from the ribbon sewn to the headband so that I might mark my place. The texture that tickled my fingers still was that of the paper in which the book was printed. The smell in my nostrils was old leather, still wearing the traces of birch oil. It was only then, when I saw the books themselves, when I began to understand their care.”

His grip on my shoulder tightened. “We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no trace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with the thickest gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.”

And so, Ultan’s blindness (which creeps up on him later in his narrative) proves no obstacle to his profession of caring for the books (and therefore the understanding of their value), which does not require the ability to read them, but rather an appreciation of the book as a tactile objet d’art.

Marginalia: literature fans will recognise that the blind Master Librarian Ultan is a reference to Umberto Eco’s blind librarian Jorge of Burgos from The Name of the Rose, who in turn is a reference to the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. But I digress…

Books bound in kraken-skin or cased in exotic alien woods are, unfortunately, somewhat beyond the means of publishing companies at the moment, but a return to the application of tactile aesthetics to book packaging may well come soon (note also the increase in the analogous use of textured cardstock Digipaks in audio CD packaging).

However, the main worry for publishers would be whether the sales of these much more expensive bindings would compensate for the explosion of free digital content (free content which would satisfy most of the customers who currently pay for the cheaper paperback bindings).

The answer is “probably not”, although I think there would still be a market for paperbacks for some time. Tim O’Reilly’s seminal blogpost Piracy is Progressive Taxation.. seems to agree:

The availability of free online copies is sometimes used to promote a topic or author (as books such as The Cathedral and the Bazaar or The Cluetrain Manifesto became bestsellers in print as a result of the wide exposure it received online). We make available substantial portions of all of our books online, as a way for potential readers to sample what they contain.

… Interestingly, some of our most successful print/online hybrids have come about where we present the same material in different ways for the print and online contexts. For example, much of the content of our bestselling book Programming Perl (more than 600,000 copies in print) is available online as part of the standard Perl documentation. But the entire package—not to mention the convenience of a paper copy, and the aesthetic pleasure of the strongly branded packaging—is only available in print. Multiple ways to present the same information and the same product increase the overall size and richness of the market.

But eventually, as ebook-readers become better (think full-colour e-ink displays) and more commonplace, I think the paperback market will start to decline.

Mike Masnick’s Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free states that you should “set the infinite components free” (in my example, the words of the book) and realign your business model to “charge for the scarce components”. In Masnick’s example of music, the infinite (-ly reproducible, and therefore abundant) component is the MP3 file. The value of scarce components will rise:

Concert tickets are more valuable. Access to the band is more valuable. Getting the band to write a special song (sponsorship?) is more valuable. Merchandise is more valuable.

So returning to my example of book publishing, author events—readings and signings—should rise in value and (if authors catch on) will be far more ubiquitous in bookshops around the country. I’m sure other scarce components could be identified.

One mistake I hope the publishing industry doesn’t make is the disingenuous “calculation” made by the music industry’s army of lawyers: that every free mp3 file downloaded is a “lost” sale.

People are far less discriminating when consumption is free. If every show on television was pay-per-view then I wouldn’t automatically switch it on when I got home from work – my viewing would be far more discriminatory (and massively reduced). Similarly file-sharers report that their downloading of pirated MP3 files isn’t happening instead of them buying CDs, but rather in addition to their music purchases – they’re trying before they buy, free-sampling a much wider range of possible purchases before choosing those for which they are prepared to pay for an embodiment in the form of a CD (with its physicality, cover-packaging and booklets).

So, an abundance of free ebooks should vastly increase the potential market for the added-value paid-for scarce components. But this will only work if the publishing companies (and the authors) have positioned themselves to make money out of those generatives.

OK, well I’ve spent some time reviewing this new specification.

It’s a mixture of a couple of useful new qualifiers to the old robots.txt standard and a lot of anally-retentive control-freakery written by people who still don’t get “the internet”.

The good points:

• Extends robots.txt to allow site owners to define sets of folders/files by regular expression and apply instructions to bots “en masse” – nice idea.
• Extends robots.txt to add time-based crawl permissions (e.g. you can specify that the folder “/news/2007/” is only indexed until the end of 2007 – after which you’d want search engines to drop the last years news from their indices and start crawling the 2008 news instead

The bloody terrible points (control-freakery and lack of understanding):

• Tries to introduce a new protocol to disallow an aggregator site (e.g. Google) from displaying a thumbnail of a page – Why?!?
• Tries to introduce a new protocol to disallow an aggregator site (e.g. Google) from displaying a snippet of content – Again, why?!?
• Tries to introduce a new protocol that allows publishers to set the exact length (to the character) of any snippet shown on an aggregator site. Oh dear god, why are publishers so anal about this!
• Tries to introduce a new protocol which demands that aggregators don’t parse the content they’ve crawled outside of a specific context. No, no , no!
• Tries to embed take-down notices to crawlers within robots.txt. Oh, FFS – this is publishing at it’s most over-controlling (and therefore self-destructive).

Thankfully there is no legal requirement that the search engines take any notice whatsoever of this new “technical framework”.

I kinda hope that the tech community takes the good points out of this spec (pattern-matching, time constraints etc) and just upgrades the good old robots.txt standard, ignoring the worts excesses of control-freakery that the publishing industry have slipped in.

a bit of blog reaction to ACAP:

• Lauren Weinstein – “…Boiled down to the bottom line, I can’t help but sense that the intended shift in responsibility that appears to be associated with ACAP could lead to an entire new wave of litigation and possible information restrictions — enriching lawyers to be sure — but quite possibly being a significant negative development for Internet users in general.”
• Ian Douglas (Daily Telegraph) – “…The new protocol focuses entirely on the desires of publishers, and only those publishers who fear what web users will do with the content if they don’t retain control over it at every point…ACAP might well be adopted by a lot of publishers (although not, so far, by any search engines anyone has heard of), but we’ll all be a little poorer as a result.”
• Martin Belam – “It seems like a weak electronic online DRM – with the vague promise that in the future more ’stuff’ will be published, precisely because you can do less with it…”

In the interests of fairness I tried to find a positive article about ACAP, but there’s absolutely nothing.

Luckily this ACAP protocol does not have the support of the search engines and so is likely to fail and die.

The ACAP site does brag that “Major search engines are engaged in the project. Exalead, the world’s fourth largest search engine has been a full participant in the project.”

Exalead? Who the hell are they? If you can’t claim the involvement of Google and/or Yahoo if any search-engine specific project then you’re dead on your feet.

And in the case of ACAP, I’m glad.