The Justice Department‘s antitrust suit over eBook price fixing is as deeply befuddling as it is important to the future of publishing. 

Reuters

A lengthy Wall Street Journal analysis of the Department of Justice price-fixing case against five publishers and Apple features a photo of Picholine, the swanky restaurant (Zagat calls it “one of the best restaurants in town”) where, according to the government, the alleged conspiracy took shape. The lawsuit asserts that “meetings took place in private dining rooms of upscale Manhattan restaurants and were used to discuss confidential business and competitive matters, including Amazon‘s e-book retailing practices. No legal counsel was present at any of these meetings.” In all that has been written about this case, nothing seems to have made a deeper impression than the image of the executives in a private room called “The Chef’s Wine Cellar” agreeing to challenge Amazon’s policy of deep discounts on e-books.

Personally, I find the notion of an exclusive cabal among the bibulous publishers intent on joint action far-fetched, although experts say it probably would have been better to have a lawyer present to assure antitrust guidelines were being followed.

All of the publishers, including the three that have settled — HarperCollins, Simon Schuster, and Hachette — insist they have done nothing wrong. And that is doubtless their sincere belief. Those that accepted the Justice Department’s terms said they did so to avoid a protracted and expensive litigation. Penguin, Macmillan, and Apple are ready to press their defense in the court battle that will now follow. What really did happen at Picholine, and in the other sessions where Amazon’s overwhelming dominance of the digital book market was discussed among competing CEOs? Only those present know for sure, and considering the status of the government’s case, they are in no position now to make any detailed statements. So, the rest of the publishing community and media commentators are engaged in a spirited debate about how to respond to the Justice Department’s serious charges.

Based on my reading of the lawsuit, news articles, columns, and publishing industry blogs, what seemed a strikingly simultaneous accord among the publishers with Apple could reasonably have aroused questions in a Justice Department Antitrust Division on the lookout for potential targets. These agreements, reached in a matter of weeks with Apple in early 2010, had the effect of changing the long-standing business model of their dealings with retailers to “agency” pricing, which would enable the publishers to set the prices of books and pay the booksellers a commission, set at 30 percent. Under the “wholesale” model, which is still followed in most transactions with bookstores like Barnes Noble and the independents, publishers sell their books to retailers at about half their listed price, and retailers then set their own prices.

What justifiably alarmed publishers and other booksellers was the prospect of Amazon’s overwhelming position in the emerging e-book market. At its peak in 2009, Amazon’s dominance of the marketplace was about 90 percent of digital sales because of the early success of its Kindle reader and the $9.99 price it set for bestsellers and new releases. Ironically, the comparison most often made at the time was the way Apple — through iTunes, the iPod, and charging just $0.99 per song — had so completely taken over the online music market that, in a few years, national stalwarts such as Tower Records and Sam Goody’s went out of business as album sales declined by more than half. Conceivably, with the experience of Apple’s music strategy in mind, the Justice Department chose to preempt the possibility of anything like it happening again by dissolving the publisher’s agreements. Of particular concern to the government as evidence of price fixing were the so-called “most favored nation” (MFN) provisions that assured that no prices would be lower than Apple’s. “Instead of an MFN designed to protect Apple’s ability to compete,” the complaint alleged, “this MFN was designed to protect Apple from having to compete in price at all.” Sharis A. Pozen, the outgoing assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, in a valedictory speech at the Brookings Institution, said that the case is “most importantly . . . about lower e-book prices for consumers.”

For the time being, the long-term impact of the Justice Department’s case on the publishing industry remains unclear, but Amazon certainly comes out ahead, with its position as the leading retailer of e-books reinforced, which also benefits its role as a major seller of traditional print books, self-published books, downloadable audio, and now also as a publisher. Microsoft’s surprise announcement Monday that it will invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Barnes Noble’s Nook division adds yet another major component to the electronic book market and assures that competition will intensify. Ultimately, with so many factors to consider, I agree with Senator Charles Schumer (D.-New York) who said, “I feel absolutely befuddled by the lawsuit. For the Antitrust Division to step in as the big protector of Amazon doesn’t seem to make any sense from an antitrust point of view. Rarely have I seen a suit that so ill serves the interests of the consumer.” On the other hand, according to the Wall Street Journal (in the piece illustrated with a color photo of Picholine), a consensus of antitrust experts agreed that the Justice Department had reason to believe the publishers were acting together. “Price fixing is kind of the first-degree murder of antitrust violations,” Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the University of Iowa said, and the government had to act on “what appears to be a strong set of facts that if true, are one of the most central of antitrust violations.”

Lawyers and judges on the trial and appellate levels will have to resolve this dispute, and that could take years. Geoffrey Manne, an antitrust expert, told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that “one of the big problems with this suit as with others in the tech realm is that by the time it’s concluded, the market is likely to have changed so much that it will become irrelevant.” Until that happens, developments in the Justice Department’s case are crucial to publishing’s future.

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Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/confused-ebook-lawsuit-everyone-else-170705874.html

Ingram writes that “It doesn’t matter what e-books cost to make,” and Masnick follows with “Nobody Cares About the Fixed Costs Of Your Book.”

But nobody cares about the fixed cost of your car, either. And yet, it matters, in theory as well as in practice.

Ingram:

But as author Chuck Wendig notes, what e-books cost to manufacture or distribute is irrelevant to everyone but the publishers themselves. All that matters is what book consumers are willing to pay for an e-book — and the same principle applies for any form of digital content.

In fact, an ebook’s production cost is directly related to the decision to make it at all. Just as buyers may decide that a $12.99 ebook is too dear, sellers may decide that any price below that level doesn’t justify the cost of writing, editing, and publishing it.

If demand were all that mattered—reader heaven—ebooks would cost 99 cents and you could impulse-buy them like an iTunes song. In book-business heaven, ebooks could charge some big number, and readers would have no choice but to pay up.

In reality, as in theory, the market for books is only so big—we only have so much time—so a 99-cent price point might move a lot of units but not enough to justify the cost of production. Obviously, a $50 price point would crush sales and also bring in much less revenue overall.

With either, the ultimate outcome would be a hollowing out of the books economy. With far less prospect for making back their upfront costs, publishers would only bankroll sure winners, and even those would make less money than before. Writers would have less incentive and less ability to write books. Authors who are capable of producing quality books would do something else.

The fixed-costs-don’t-matter argument hinges on your conception of the nature of the product.

Wendig likens a book to fast food:

An e-book is a digital good. Ephemeral and intangible. Sometimes we don’t even have access to the e-book itself in the form of a file — in the case of Amazon, we’re just “renting” the e-book the same way you rent Taco Bell food. You bought it. It’s inside your device. But if Amazon decides you don’t need it anymore, one snap of the wizard’s fingers and the e-books are poof, gone, siphoned from your reader like gas from a gas-tank. E-books have no supply — if I buy one, it doesn’t reduce how many remain, because theoretically infinite copies remain. No cost to reprint. No cost to remake. It just… sits out there, attempting to be the very embodiment of the Long Tail.




This is what the audience sees and believes.

It matters little what the e-book actually costs.

It only matters what the audience thinks they should cost.

If you want to buy fast food, though, you have many options. If you want to buy The Big Short, there’s only one.

This is a fundamental disagreement over the value of cultural production, in the end. We think it’s intrinsically valuable and believe cultural consumers do, too.

Let’s take another example, this time in software:

If I want to buy a copy of Final Cut Pro X, for instance, Apple will sell it to me digitally through the Mac App Store for $299. The marginal cost of that copy—what Apple pays to shoot the 1s and 0s over the intertubes—is almost nothing. Apple charges $299 because it believes that’s the sweet spot in the market and, presumably, because video editors actually buy it at that price. If you don’t like it, you can go buy Adobe Premiere or Avid’s Media Composer, steal the software and live with the potential consequences (and your conscience), or do without.

If “the pricing on the individual item is entirely about the marginal costs,” as Masnick says, Final Cut would cost 99 cents. But it doesn’t, and it sells.

The marginal-cost-is-all argument also fails to take into account copyright law, which essentially grants each new work a sort of miniature monopoly. If I write a book about something, you can’t republish it unless I give the okay, or unless it’s 70 years after I kick the bucket and the copyright expires. You can argue about whether copyrights are too long or too restrictive, but we grant them so creators and investors do the creating and investing they otherwise would do much less of if anyone could profit off their work. Just because a product is digital doesn’t mean it’s infinitely abundant—as long as the law is enforced.

That doesn’t mean it’s right for big publishers to get together with Apple to fix prices in a market, if it turns out that’s what happened. But it’s worth noting, as I’ve written, that they were responding to Amazon’s distortion of the ebooks market via its willingness to use predatory pricing to preserve its ebooks monopoly. Rather than ham-handedly setting prices at $12.99 and $14.99 (and, importantly, making less money than they did from Amazon’s system), the book industry should have used the agency model to individually price books at their own price points and let readers’ purchases help them decide where to end up.

At base, copyright holders have the right to ask what they want to get for their work (which is why they were so concerned about Amazon selling ebooks at a loss). If they set the price too high, nobody will buy the book and they will lose money. If they set the price too low, lots of people might buy it, but they will still lose money.

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Article source: http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/whats_the_right_price_for_eboo.php

Ebooks have transformed the experience of reading — everything from interactive fiction, where readers choose the outcome of a story, to books with embedded links to video or audio is possible. But ebooks have also caused a sea change in the publishing business model.

“There are great things that are happening, but the revenue isn’t following,� said Robert Ballantyne, associate publisher of Arsenal Pulp Press and president of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia. “What’s happening now is just turmoil and uncertainty. Where we will be in five years, you can’t tell.�

Former Vancouver Public Library city librarian Paul Whitney said the fact that many bookstores are disappearing doesn’t help.

“The bottom line is it’s a mess and everybody’s worried because they can’t yet see the end game,� said Whitney, who has written a number of reports about ebooks as a consultant.

The book publishing industry in Canada is a $2-billion business, according to Statistics Canada. In B.C. alone, the book publishing industry has annual sales in excess of $150 million, according to a recent report on B.C.’s creative industries.

While a Canadian breakdown is difficult to come by, figures provided by Whitney to the The Sun show ebooks capturing 18 per cent of market share in North America in 2011, a year dominated by ebook growth.

Noah Genner, president and CEO of BookNet Canada, which monitors book supply, said there is not a concise picture of the ebook market share in Canada, but his organization is working on it.

“Our educated guess is that it is around eight to 10 per cent, but we don’t have the numbers,� Genner said. “The number has grown significantly over the last two years and was almost non-existent, or at least too small to be important, pre-2010.�

In January, Amazon announced that their ebook sales exceeded paperback sales, while in February, the New York Times added separate ebook bestseller lists to their book review pages.

Ebook numbers are likely to keep growing as more people make the switch to digital books, but the prices might go down: a lawsuit in the U.S. claims that Apple Corp. colluded with book publishers to set ebook prices higher than those set by Amazon. If Apple and the book publishers are found guilty, a similar class-action lawsuit underway in Canada will probably mean Canadians who have bought electronic books in the past two years could be compensated.

The Apple price-setting model allowed publishers to determine the selling price of a book, and has been dubbed the agency model. With Amazon, as with bricks-and-mortar bookstores, the publisher sells the product for a wholesale price and sets a suggested retail price, but the retailer decides the selling price.

While the lawsuit sounds like good news for consumers, it’s possible it could be detrimental for publishers and authors who could be forced to sell their products for even lower prices to compete with Amazon.

“We hope it doesn’t lower prices, because that would harm revenues for publishers — and by extension authors — and we’re going to end up without any books,� Ballantyne said. “With retail [business] crashing, publishers don’t need the lower prices�

Amazon, the massive online retailer with worldwide revenues of $13.18 billion in the first quarter of 2012, is a leader in the ebook market after jumping out of the gate early with its Kindle ereader in 2007. As a comparison, in Canada, the Kobo was not released until 2010.

Jesse Finkelstein, chief operating officer at Vancouver publisher Douglas McIntyre, said some of Amazon’s deep discounting of book prices would’ve meant the company was taking a loss on some books, but they were willing to do that to encourage people to buy the Kindle ereader.

“A loss leader approach is understandable if you’re trying to make sure that your device and your retailing venture is the one that wins out in the long term,� Finkelstein said.

The more book prices are cut, consumer expectations for cheap books increase and book publishing becomes unsustainable, Finkelstein said.

While bookstores and publishers may see Amazon as a formidable competitor who could swallow them whole, some authors say Amazon has removed the gatekeeper and enabled them to publish their books quicker and easier than through traditional publishers.

Sunshine Coast author Lars Guignard has published three books on Amazon, starting with Lethal Circuit, and says he is making a good living on ebooks alone. He makes about the same amount whether he sells a book in electronic or traditional format. The terms of payment for authors who use traditional publishers depend on their contract, which will be split between the publisher, the bookstore and the author.

Vancouver author Timothy Taylor said he would not consider giving up his relationship with his publisher (Random House) to create a self-published ebook because he values the editing and promotion provided by a traditional publisher. Self-published authors can either put a book up on Amazon unedited, or pay someone to edit their work.

The changes in publishing have meant readers have many more books to choose from, he said.

Taylor said that despite his reservations, he is excited about the creative potential for ebooks, as well as the potential to reach readers who might not have otherwise discovered his work.

“It almost feels like we could open up new markets — people who aren’t buying physical books might buy ebooks,� Taylor said.

D M published an enhanced ebook app of David Suzuki’s The Legacy in 2010, but found it tough to compete against other apps, because most apps are sold for extremely low prices. Although the project was very positive for the publisher in terms of technical production experience and experimentation, consumers were not prepared to pay much more than the cost of the ebook for the experience.

“I don’t believe consumers are willing to pay a premium for enhanced ebooks. The market is not there yet,� Finkelstein said.

There have been some notable examples of writers who have self-published an ebook and later received either critical acclaim or commercial success, such as Amanda Hocking, who writes paranormal books, or the Julie and Julia cooking blog that was later made into a movie. Atop the New York Times bestseller lists for ebooks is Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel that gained popularity as an ebook and has since been published as a paperback. Right now, books that are viable as ebooks alone tend to be books that are written either by a well-established author or those written in a popular genre, such as romance, which have dedicated, voracious readers, Whitney said.

Margaret Reynolds, executive director of Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, said it’s important to remember that the success stories of self-published ebook authors are the exceptions.

“That’s one in a million. It’s not going to happen for everyone,� Reynolds said.

On the other hand, “if you have an exceptional work, you will be found,� Ballantyne said. Ballantyne cited DOA frontman Joe Keithley’s pictorial history of the band as one notable ebook project taken on by Arsenal Pulp Press, with support from Apple.

While the potential of reader-controlled storylines — like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the ’70s and ’80s — or other forms of interactive books filled with podcasts, visual effects or music is limitless, some readers might prefer the quiet of reading a traditional book. Whitney said part of the appeal of reading is avoiding other distractions, such as email.

“I think the born-digital generation will be seeking out offline time,� Whitney said.

Hal Wake, artistic director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, said he thinks there will always be a place for print books as well as ebooks. “There will remain the desire to use one’s imagination completely and utterly and there will be others who say, ‘let’s see what we can do.’ They’re both potentially equally valuable,� Wake said.

Sun Books Editor

tsherlock@vancouversun.com

Article source: http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Publishers+read+industry+future/6608205/story.html

Google sent out copyright infringement letters to the 20 authors featured on the Web site, explaining that the May 4 post by Dubois about her new book “Intimate Art” had been removed pending investigation.

Dubois, who uses a nom de plume to protect her privacy, was named Adele at birth. “It’s my legal first name,” she told me, and added that she had it before the British pop star.

The e-mail from Google stated, “Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others.” The e-mail lists the copyright owner as Sony, the copyright work description as “Adele + Exitos” and the “location of the infringing material” as the post by Dubois, which was removed by Google Blogger.

Who instigated the complaint remains a mystery. A “sworn statement” at the end of Google’s e-mail simply says “[private]” under the signature. The statement says, “I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”

Adele the singer has a recording contract with Columbia Records, which is owned by Sony Music Entertainment. Although names cannot be copyrighted, they can be trademarked. And Adele is trademarked, according to the Trademark Electronic Search System.

Confusing the matter is what the e-mail from Google lists as “the location of the copyrighted work,” a URL that leads to “Guilty Survivor,” a nonfiction memoir about Tamerla Kendall, a survivor of the Bosnian war, by Marianne Stephens, who owns the copyright to the self-published book.

Stephens, the author of six novels and two nonfiction books, is also the owner of the Romance Books ‘R Us (soon to be trademarked, she says) Web site and blog.

Stephens spent more than hour on the phone, trying to reach someone at Google who could help, without success. She’s also contacted the Authors Guild, hoping for assistance. Dubois spoke with a lawyer and has sent a response to Google, disputing the claim. Google has 10 days to investigate. Dubois wonders why Google couldn’t “get to the bottom of this” before pulling the post. Meanwhile, she has a new book to promote.

“I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong,” Dubois said. She doesn’t understand how there’s a problem since Sony sells her books on its ebook Web site without complaining about her first name.

“I feel like the ant,” she said, referring to the new movie “Marvel’s The Avengers,” which she saw Sunday. A recurring theme in the movie is the ant and the boot. “But I left the movie feeling hopeful.”

Several bloggers and forums are taking up Dubois’s cause.  Author Liz Crowe posted a tongue-in-cheek response to the trademark war. Just this week, she had come under attack for the use of the word “Realtor” in her erotic romantic fiction series about real estate agents.

The use of the word “Realtor” is one I can understand. I remember those weekly Associated Press style quizzes in News 105 at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and my surprise that the term was trademarked by the National Association of Realtors.

But we all use brand names to denote common products in conversation. Do you blow your nose with a Kleenex or a tissue? Get thirsty for a Coke or a soda (or pop in my corner of the Midwest)? Put a Band-Aid or a bandage of your child’s skinned knee?

Frankly, when a brand name becomes common usage, I think it’s a compliment to the popularity of the product. “Building your brand” is the mantra of those in publishing and other businesses, relying on social media to generate buzz about products, whether they be novels or teabags.

On the other hand, trademarking the name of your product will help protect you from imitators and counterfeiters. Musician friends of mine trademarked their moniker, Homestead Pickers, years ago to keep anyone else from going by the same name. Yet it does seem like there’s a difference between Homestead Pickers and a common name such as Adele, ranked 524th out of 4,276 names in the 1990 U.S. Census.

If Princess Diana were still alive, would the legal rights to my own first name belong to someone else?

Diana Reese is a freelance writer in Kansas City. Follow her on Twitter at @DianaReese.

Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/is-adele-dubois-the-romance-writer-infringing-on-adele-the-singer/2012/05/14/gIQAT32WPU_blog.html

“In the past two years, interest and usage of ebooks has increased exponentially in our community,” Tony Tallent, director of literacy and learning, said in a news release. Downloads of music are popular, too.

RCPL will have 4,000 new titles on the new system.

The 3M Cloud Library offers a system of digital content, in-library hardware and apps for borrowing and reading, with equipment being provided at no cost to the library, the news release said. The company expects to make the service available for Macs and Kindle eventually.

To access the new service, see www.myRCPL.com/3M or search “cloud library” in the app store of your mobile device.

Dawn Hinshaw

Article source: http://www.thestate.com/2012/05/16/2277511/patrons-can-get-ebooks-on-several.html

Question: Did First Edition Design Publishing get started as a self-publishing company or did it start out with software application development?

Answer: The company dates back almost three decades. Its roots go back to graphic design. That was at the dawn of the internet, web site development and so forth. Early on, we became Apple Developers and Microsoft Solution Providers. With digital technology expertise well in hand, we were well positioned as we grew into the burgeoning ebook industry. Our past experience and relationships enabled us to establish a massive global distribution network. Our background is what moved us into position as publishers, aggregators and Master Distributors.

Question: If someone has an ebook on Amazon already and just wants a distributor and more attention for the book, what does First Edition Design Publishing have to give?

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Answer: As Master Distributors, we submit authors’ books to over 100,000 distribution points in over 100 countries including on-line retailers, libraries, schools, colleges and universities. In addition to Amazon, we submit books to Apple, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Google, Kobo, Diesel, 3M, Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Nielsen, EBSCO, and scores of other on-line booksellers. We do provide a comprehensive list, which is constantly growing, at http://www.firsteditiondesignebooks.com/html/distributionchannels.html

Question: What does your company offer that its rivals don’t?

Answer: As mentioned–unequaled distribution. On top of that, we provide awesome customer support and the best cost to value in the industry for services.

Question: I know First Edition Design Publishing offers fiction and non-fiction. Are there any categories of books that you and others in your company are particularly excited about?

Answer: Children’s books is an area we have always served, but we are now experiencing a tremendous surge in that department. Academic books are another growth area for us.

Question: I understand that comic book authors have an easier time publishing their illustrated work as ebooks. Can First Edition Design Publishing accomodate authors with pictures, graphs, etc.?

Answer: Yes and no. If you submit your file with color pictures and the e-reader which many are black and white; the picture will only appear to be black and white to the reader.

The availability of color e-reader devices has greatly improved over the last year or two with the proliferation of the Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s Nook Color, Apple’s iPad, smartphones, and others, all of which support color graphics. You also have to keep in mind an e-reader is smaller than a printed book. Therefore, viewing any details of a picture will be very difficult for the user.

The format of the picture cannot be wrapped around any text. The picture must reside either at the top or under a block of text. If you submit your book with graphics and the picture is not formatted properly, we will move the picture to the top or bottom of the corresponding text area.

One other option is to remove the picture and provide a link as to where the picture resides. You can set up an html page with your pictures, upload the page, right click on the picture and copy picture link. Insert the link instead of submitting the picture. The text of the link should be “picture”. The reader will know to tap on the “picture” link to view.

Question: What’s new in First Edition Design Publishing?

Answer: We had another ebook release, Daria Rose and The Day She Chose by award-winning Children’s Book Author Yvonne Capitelli, hit Amazon’s bestseller list last week. This month, we also further expanded our ebook distribution in Japan, Australia, Canada, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. We also added MBS Books, Textbooks.com, Feedbooks, OnlineBookPlace, SmartEbook.com, Starland Books and Eguidebooks to our distribution list along with three more Christian book outlets, Mardel, Parable, and Berean. There are a few other dynamic projects in development that we will announce in the upcoming months.

Question: What is the biggest mistake a self-published author can make?

Answer: Since you asked, the biggest mistake would be for an author to not contact us before submitting their manuscript to us. It can save them a lot of unnecessary heartache. With that said, (another big mistake) is not having their work professionally proofread and copy edited. We see so many “rookie errors” in writing style by indie authors in addition to the usual grammar faux pas. It can really kill a book.

From a book marketing standpoint, I see distinct areas for failure. The first is setting unrealistic goals and having expectations for far greater than what the author and book content can generate. With or without high expectations, most authors don’t put nearly enough time or effort into marketing their book. Authors always want marketing advice… but many don’t apply it and follow through. Another area is poor book cover design. We have had some really awful covers submitted. By the time it gets to the submission point—some authors are emotionally attached to their cover. They don’t (or will not) see what a good art editor or designer sees and the author doesn’t want to part with it. It’s just another area where knowing what the market expects, in addition to skill and wisdom, that pays a dividend.

Question: Any advice for people specifically interested in publishing a POD book?

Answer: Be sure your manuscript is error free before submitting it. Typos, misspellings, misused words, etc. can get costly to change later, or disastrous, if you’ve ordered copies and they contain errors. You will have no one to blame but yourself. Don’t worry about interior design. A good self-publishing service will set it up for you and provide a proof to look over for your approval before it goes to the print house.

Question: Would you recommend that a POD author buy about 25-50 copies of the book and sell them at in event, such as a book fair?

Answer: Book fairs, BOR (Back Of Room) sales at author talks, and book signings are all great ways to promote a book. An author should always have some copies on hand, but how many is the question. That’s the beauty of POD (Print On Demand). With First Edition Design Publishing’s service, authors don’t have to order large quantities, unless they want to. A minimum order for print books is only five. Most authors will see that they have the potential to sell many more books on-line. That’s where the value of a Master Distributor comes in.

Question: I have seen a lot of book trailers on You Tube that are nothing more than the author reading from the book in front of a camcorder. What makes an exciting, enticing book trailer, in your opinion?

Answer: Like anything else that’s audio-visual—it needs a hook. You have to grab the viewers’ attention in the first fifteen seconds. It has to have energy.

Question: Is there anything you want to tell me that I haven’t asked?

Answer: The whole ebook publishing industry is in a fluid state. Major announcements are being made on a weekly basis. As a company, we’ve been able to view the evolution from a slightly different angle. As I said, we were on the digital scene well in advance of the ebook arrival around 2007. Authors who shy away from adding an ebook version to their already published print book, or new release, are giving away a big market share. After all, it’s about giving readers what they want and delivering a book in the way they want to read it. And again, it’s about availability through wide distribution.

Amazon has been selling more ebooks than print books by a considerable margin. Border’s Books sat on their corporate hands when ebooks rolled out. They viewed it as a passing fad that would never catch on. The rest is history. What more do you need to know? Ebooks aren’t the future; they’re the present. Authors and publishers have to respond to the market demands.

I was on a flight last night and looked around. I counted seven people reading ebooks on a variety of ereader devices and one person was reading a paperback. Okay—so that’s a small random sampling of the population, but it says a lot. Authors, and future authors, who rail against ebooks, are only kidding themselves. Then again, there were people who couldn’t accept changes in transportation when the automobile started to become popular 100 years ago.

Want to know more about First Edition Design Publishing? Click here: http://www.firsteditiondesignpublishing.com/

Article source: http://www.examiner.com/article/the-best-edition-meet-first-edition-design-publishing

Google sent out copyright infringement letters to the 20 authors featured on the Web site, explaining that the May 4 post by Dubois about her new book “Intimate Art” had been removed pending investigation.

Dubois, who uses a nom de plume to protect her privacy, was named Adele at birth. “It’s my legal first name,” she told me, and added that she had it before the British pop star.

The e-mail from Google stated, “Blogger has been notified, according to the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), that certain content in your blog is alleged to infringe upon the copyrights of others.” The e-mail lists the copyright owner as Sony, the copyright work description as “Adele + Exitos” and the “location of the infringing material” as the post by Dubois, which was removed by Google Blogger.

Who instigated the complaint remains a mystery. A “sworn statement” at the end of Google’s e-mail simply says “[private]” under the signature. The statement says, “I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.”

Adele the singer has a recording contract with Columbia Records, which is owned by Sony Music Entertainment. Although names cannot be copyrighted, they can be trademarked. And Adele is trademarked, according to the Trademark Electronic Search System.

Confusing the matter is what the e-mail from Google lists as “the location of the copyrighted work,” a URL that leads to “Guilty Survivor,” a nonfiction memoir about Tamerla Kendall, a survivor of the Bosnian war, by Marianne Stephens, who owns the copyright to the self-published book.

Stephens, the author of six novels and two nonfiction books, is also the owner of the Romance Books ‘R Us (soon to be trademarked, she says) Web site and blog.

Stephens spent more than hour on the phone, trying to reach someone at Google who could help, without success. She’s also contacted the Authors Guild, hoping for assistance. Dubois spoke with a lawyer and has sent a response to Google, disputing the claim. Google has 10 days to investigate. Dubois wonders why Google couldn’t “get to the bottom of this” before pulling the post. Meanwhile, she has a new book to promote.

“I don’t feel like I’ve done anything wrong,” Dubois said. She doesn’t understand how there’s a problem since Sony sells her books on its ebook Web site without complaining about her first name.

“I feel like the ant,” she said, referring to the new movie “Marvel’s The Avengers,” which she saw Sunday. A recurring theme in the movie is the ant and the boot. “But I left the movie feeling hopeful.”

Several bloggers and forums are taking up Dubois’s cause.  Author Liz Crowe posted a tongue-in-cheek response to the trademark war. Just this week, she had come under attack for the use of the word “Realtor” in her erotic romantic fiction series about real estate agents.

The use of the word “Realtor” is one I can understand. I remember those weekly Associated Press style quizzes in News 105 at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and my surprise that the term was trademarked by the National Association of Realtors.

But we all use brand names to denote common products in conversation. Do you blow your nose with a Kleenex or a tissue? Get thirsty for a Coke or a soda (or pop in my corner of the Midwest)? Put a Band-Aid or a bandage of your child’s skinned knee?

Frankly, when a brand name becomes common usage, I think it’s a compliment to the popularity of the product. “Building your brand” is the mantra of those in publishing and other businesses, relying on social media to generate buzz about products, whether they be novels or teabags.

On the other hand, trademarking the name of your product will help protect you from imitators and counterfeiters. Musician friends of mine trademarked their moniker, Homestead Pickers, years ago to keep anyone else from going by the same name. Yet it does seem like there’s a difference between Homestead Pickers and a common name such as Adele, ranked 524th out of 4,276 names in the 1990 U.S. Census.

If Princess Diana were still alive, would the legal rights to my own first name belong to someone else?

Diana Reese is a freelance writer in Kansas City. Follow her on Twitter at @DianaReese.

Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/post/is-adele-dubois-the-romance-writer-infringing-on-adele-the-singer/2012/05/14/gIQAT32WPU_blog.html

Vancouver Sun

VANCOUVER – There’s a revolution in reading filled with innovative and exciting possibilities underway, but whether the book industry will be able to sustain itself remains to be seen.

Ebooks have transformed the experience of reading – everything from interactive fiction, where readers choose the outcome of a story, to books with embedded links to video or audio is possible. But ebooks have also caused a sea change in the publishing business model.

“There are great things that are happening, but the revenue isn’t following,” said Robert Ballantyne, associate publisher of Arsenal Pulp Press and president of the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia. “What’s happening now is just turmoil and uncertainty. Where we will be in five years, you can’t tell.”

Former Vancouver Public Library city librarian Paul Whitney said the fact that many bookstores are disappearing doesn’t help.

“The bottom line is it’s a mess and everybody’s worried because they can’t yet see the end game,” said Whitney, who has written a number of reports about ebooks as a consultant.

The book publishing industry in Canada is a $2-billion business, according to Statistics Canada. In B.C. alone, the book publishing industry has annual sales in excess of $150 million, according to a recent report on B.C.’s creative industries.

While a Canadian breakdown is difficult to come by, figures provided by Whitney to the The Sun show ebooks capturing 18 per cent of market share in North America in 2011, a year dominated by ebook growth.

Noah Genner, president and CEO of BookNet Canada, which monitors book supply, said there is not a concise picture of the ebook market share in Canada, but his organization is working on it.

“Our educated guess is that it is around eight to 10 per cent, but we don’t have the numbers,” Genner said. “The number has grown significantly over the last two years and was almost non-existent, or at least too small to be important, pre-2010.”

In January, Amazon announced that their ebook sales exceeded paperback sales, while in February, the New York Times added separate ebook bestseller lists to their book review pages.

Ebook numbers are likely to keep growing as more people make the switch to digital books, but the prices might go down: a lawsuit in the U.S. claims that Apple Corp. colluded with book publishers to set ebook prices higher than those set by Amazon. If Apple and the book publishers are found guilty, a similar class-action lawsuit underway in Canada will probably mean Canadians who have bought electronic books in the past two years could be compensated.

The Apple price-setting model allowed publishers to determine the selling price of a book, and has been dubbed the agency model. With Amazon, as with bricks-and-mortar bookstores, the publisher sells the product for a wholesale price and sets a suggested retail price, but the retailer decides the selling price.

While the lawsuit sounds like good news for consumers, it’s possible it could be detrimental for publishers and authors who could be forced to sell their products for even lower prices to compete with Amazon.

“We hope it doesn’t lower prices, because that would harm revenues for publishers – and by extension authors – and we’re going to end up without any books,” Ballantyne said. “With retail (business) crashing, publishers don’t need the lower prices”

Amazon, the massive online retailer with worldwide revenues of $13.18 billion in the first quarter of 2012, is a leader in the ebook market after jumping out of the gate early with its Kindle ereader in 2007. As a comparison, in Canada, the Kobo was not released until 2010.

Jesse Finkelstein, chief operating officer at Vancouver publisher Douglas McIntyre, said some of Amazon’s deep discounting of book prices would’ve meant the company was taking a loss on some books, but they were willing to do that to encourage people to buy the Kindle ereader.

“A loss leader approach is understandable if you’re trying to make sure that your device and your retailing venture is the one that wins out in the long term,” Finkelstein said.

The more book prices are cut, consumer expectations for cheap books increase and book publishing becomes unsustainable, Finkelstein said.

While bookstores and publishers may see Amazon as a formidable competitor who could swallow them whole, some authors say Amazon has removed the gatekeeper and enabled them to publish their books quicker and easier than through traditional publishers.

Sunshine Coast author Lars Guignard has published three books on Amazon, starting with Lethal Circuit, and says he is making a good living on ebooks alone. He makes about the same amount whether he sells a book in electronic or traditional format. The terms of payment for authors who use traditional publishers depend on their contract, which will be split between the publisher, the bookstore and the author.

Vancouver author Timothy Taylor said he would not consider giving up his relationship with his publisher (Random House) to create a self-published ebook because he values the editing and promotion provided by a traditional publisher. Self-published authors can either put a book up on Amazon unedited, or pay someone to edit their work.

The changes in publishing have meant readers have many more books to choose from, he said.

Taylor said that despite his reservations, he is excited about the creative potential for ebooks, as well as the potential to reach readers who might not have otherwise discovered his work

“It almost feels like we could open up new markets – people who aren’t buying physical books might buy ebooks,” Taylor said.

D M published an enhanced ebook app of David Suzuki’s The Legacy in 2010, but found it tough to compete against other apps, because most apps are sold for extremely low prices. Although the project was very positive for the publisher in terms of technical production experience and experimentation, consumers were not prepared to pay much more than the cost of the ebook for the experience.

“I don’t believe consumers are willing to pay a premium for enhanced ebooks. The market is not there yet,” Finkelstein said.

There have been some notable examples of writers who have self-published an ebook and later received either critical acclaim or commercial success, such as Amanda Hocking, who writes paranormal books, or the Julie and Julia cooking blog that was later made into a movie. Atop the New York Times bestseller lists for ebooks is Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel that gained popularity as an ebook and has since been published as a paperback. Right now, books that are viable as ebooks alone tend to be books that are written either by a well-established author or those written in a popular genre, such as romance, which have dedicated, voracious readers, Whitney said.

Margaret Reynolds, executive director of Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia, said it’s important to remember that the success stories of self-published ebook authors are the exceptions.

“That’s one in a million. It’s not going to happen for everyone,” Reynolds said.

On the other hand, “if you have an exceptional work, you will be found,” Ballantyne said. Ballantyne cited DOA frontman Joe Keithley’s pictorial history of the band as one notable ebook project taken on by Arsenal Pulp Press, with support from Apple.

While the potential of reader-controlled storylines – like the Choose Your Own Adventure books of the ’70s and ’80s – or other forms of interactive books filled with podcasts, visual effects or music is limitless, some readers might prefer the quiet of reading a traditional book. Whitney said part of the appeal of reading is avoiding other distractions, such as email.

“I think the born-digital generation will be seeking out off-line time,” Whitney said.

Hal Wake, artistic director of the Vancouver International Writers Festival, said he thinks there will always be a place for print books as well as ebooks. “There will remain the desire to use one’s imagination completely and utterly and there will be others who say, `let’s see what we can do.’ They’re both potentially equally valuable,” Wake said.

Vancouver Sun

Article source: http://www.canada.com/entertainment/Publishing+industry+thrown+loop+ebooks/6619184/story.html

The larger part of the cost of clinical-stage drug development comes from clinical trials. According to Timothy Scott, president of the U.S.-based pharmaceutical chemistry development organization, Pharmatek Laboratories, Phase II costs can range from $4,000-$20,000 per patient. So, the last thing a drug developer wants is any kind of interruption of a trial, or to have to start a trial all over again, and this makes the reliable supply of clinical trial material (CTM), whether manufactured in-house or outsourced to a contract manufacturing organization (CMO), absolutely critical.

“An interruption in the provision of the clinical trial material … could require that trial to be conducted over again,” Scott says. “And … there is the cost of missed opportunity in the marketplace. If the drug being developed has the potential of being a billion-dollar drug, that is nearly $3 million in lost revenue every day the drug is not on the market.”

Clinical trial supply isn’t just an issue for investigational drugs. Some clinical trials compare the study drug against a placebo; however, others, particularly those for serious diseases for which it would be unethical to withdraw active treatment, compare with a marketed drug or another investigational drug. Other trials combine an investigational drug with another drug in a combination therapy. It’s vital for these trials that there is a constant supply of the comparator or combination drug as well as the investigational drug. Maintaining this kind of reliable clinical trials supply needs a robust supply chain. “This requires complex planning to orchestrate the various elements that need to be brought together to have the right supplies ready in the right place at the right time,” says Gerry Hepburn, chief operating officer, vice president and general manager, clinical supply services, Catalent Pharma Solutions. Click here to download the full ebook — Suzanne Elvidge (email)

Article source: http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/download-our-ebook-supplying-global-clinical-trials-keys-avoiding-costly-de/2012-05-14

More: Android

TERTIUS PICKARD, Getty Images

Joanne Chianello writes that the residents of this city owe the Friends a debt of gratitude, but the focus now must be on guaranteeing that Lansdowne lives up to the promises made by OSEG and the city… Here’s a news f …

May 1 2012, 6:41am CDT

Full article at: Ottawa Citizen

Topics: Apple Inc., Barnes Noble Inc., Clive Palmer, tablets, Windows 8

Quote:
“It gives them a much larger partner with deeper pockets, it gives them increased reach … In the last two years they’ve had their backs against the wall.”

Source: Ottawa Citizen

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Article source: http://www.i4u.com/2012/05/clive-palmer/microsoft-invest-e-reader-nook