The subject of copyright enforcement came up as I was listening to a panel of newspaper journalists discussing multi-media journalism on C-Span the other day. They were worrying about what would happen when various aggregators around the world start lifting their original news features wholesale without credit or compensation.

The discussion struck me as revealing how much more vulnerable to re-use, misuse and abuse intellectual content of any kind has become in the cyberspace world. And also how much of a commodity content has become.

In the "old days" you had to do some heavy lifting—even if it meant nothing more than picking up the book or photo or illustration and taking it to a copy machine, calibrating the machine so that you got a decent image, making sure it had paper, collecting the output and then having your way with it, whatever that would be.

Before the internet, and especially before desk top publishing, you pretty much had to work with physical copies of things, benignly borrowed (or taken) words and images on paper (or some kind of "substrate" as the term of art would be) for some immediate use. This imposed a variety of practical barriers that kept the leakage of rights to a minimum and concentrated its more substantial flow in the hands of professional thieves.

All of that has changed—and with the low cost and ubiquity of scanners, with cell phone cameras that can capture a Dali or a Rockwell, not to mention your hard-won framed shot of the Chinese Great Wall, and circulate it digitally for mash-ups and re-uses—gate-keeping the rights of images is like keeping a safe deposit box in a room with an open window.

Nonetheless, the publishing industry still relies on copyright law as the foundation of its economic viability. As all who read ForeWord well know, publishers have struggled to cope with establishing rights in an electronic world, and authors and agents have been pushing back while warily going with the flow (See Model Trade Book Contract and Guide, Including Electronic Rights Clauses, a valuable 64 page booklet published by the Authors Guild, Inc., www.authorsguild.org).

All of this leads to a book I'd like to recommend to any of you who are interested in the subject, and especially if you deal with pictures as well as intellectual property and copyright in general: Permissions, A Survival Guide. Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, by Susan M. Bielstein (0-226-04638-9. University of Chicago Press, 2006).

The author is the executive editor for art, architecture, classical studies and film at the University of Chicago Press. Let me disabuse you of any concern that as a consequence of her position, this short and engagingly written work is simply a compilation of the prescriptive by-ways of legal minutiae.

To the contrary, Bielstein has transformed the process of acquiring and dispensing rights into a challenging exercise of wit, ingenuity and perseverance—governed by both precise definitions on the one hand and improvisation on the other. She launches her work with history, overview and example before getting to process.

Early on she frames all that follows in image permissions: the distinction between copyright permission (for content not yet in the public domain—not as readily determined as one might think if the content is another's version) and use permission (getting and/or paying for a reproduction of any otherwise public domain subject, jealously guarded by the museum that owns it).

With these two variables, the search for permission can be as convoluted as the three variables of the mechanical, performance and authorship rights in the music business (not to mention transcriptions and versions).

After a brief excursion into the history and definition of copyright, and how it has struggled to keep up with media technologies of the times, Bielstein establishes that "the proprietary interests of copyright and free speech are not mutually exclusive. Both rights are granted by the constitution."

Nonetheless, she observes, the way some people conceive of copyright is as "a kind of giant First Amendment duty-free zone. And on the face of it copyright is not about free anything. In the United States, at least, copyright is about commerce and spurs to free enterprise." She supports this in a chapter that provides an overview of copyright conventions and concepts globally and historically.

We are then taken to the roots of today's dilemma in defining and seeking rights to visual works, "The day that Marcel Duchamp arranged for a porcelain urinal to be delivered to the 1917 Independents exhibition in New York City was the day that a number of closely held beliefs about art began to shift...the object didn’t even have to originate with the artist who claimed it. The thing was art if the artist said it was."

So, much of the book is concerned with the question she then raises, "Today, what are we to make of art that is virtual, not actual...or driven by social participation?" Bielstein defines the issues with numerous real life examples, and closes her work with practical advice about where to find public domain resources, free resources and how to go after images that require permission.

She provides sidebars on artist's moral rights and copyrighting architecture (and pictures of architecture), and on rights to images of ephemeral performances. She discusses the pros and cons of the sovereignty of the author and of fair use, including how and when scanning images of two-dimensional originals may fall into fair use.

The work is sprinkled throughout with illustrations of visual works and their permissions trails. For many, rights are easily acquired. But for others, not so simple. One example is a famous Brassai photo of Picasso's dog, Kazback, taken in Picasso's studio. The credit reads "(c) Estate Brassai-RMN (c) Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo credit: Reunion des Mussées Nationaux/Art Resource, NY." In order to reproduce the photograph in the book, Bielstein had to pay copyright fees to the Brassai Estate, the Picasso Administration and a use fee to RMS for the transparency.

The practical value of this work is that it draws on the author's experience and she takes you through the details of everything from choosing the size and format of digital files that you may be ordering to how to negotiate on price with museums. There is also a useful bibliography and a short list of image banks and artist's rights organizations.
 
The real meat on the bone of this work, however, is the author's blending of anecdotal experience, procedural advice and a critical effort to point the way out of the box that electronic reproduction and increasing layers of rights control are putting the users of creative assets – adding thickets of procedural obstacles and barriers of cost that lead either to shrinking use and availability or increasing use without permission.

She discusses the benefits and limitations of "flexible copyright" (copyright in advance with conditions) in the Creative Commons. She quotes Laurence Lessig from his book Free Culture that "there is no check on silly rules" on the internet because rights are enforced by code and by rote "not by a human but by a machine". She looks with favor on the practice introduced by Amazon that makes available used (aftermarket) books alongside of new works. She suggests that a similar central catalog allowing keyword search of both public domain as well as images requiring license would benefit both users and licensors.
 
Whatever the solutions, the problem is real and Bielstein lays out the dilemma. On the one hand, she writes, "Today in the new millennium...librarians at some of the major research institutions across America are on a rumble, rolling out a version of fair use in a push to make any and all intellectual property available without charge to what could turn out to be a potentially unlimited number of users."
 
On the other, she notes, the traditional freedom of exchange of a published work that passed from hand to hand "is challenged in the new coded environment, where every use of a work can now be monitored, counted and controlled, where a downloaded copy cannot be borrowed or transferred, edited or excerpted and certainly not resold."

I have always thought of words and sounds and images as arrows shot into the air as in the poem, and " they fall we know not where". But soon they become a part of the fabric of conversation, of thought and of the common language and culture. The artist by the act of publication and sale has begun the process of making his or her original work part of the common intellectual property of humankind.
 
Bielstein sees that as a "fragile ecology," and so gives voice to the soul of what we are all about. She provides much food for thought on the way to dealing with the dilemma of intellectual property in our time. This is a book that should be in every publishing professional's library.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

Foreword Magazine is celebrating their 10th anniversity and they asked me to write something on the changes I have seen in the past 10 years or so.

Many years ago I attended my first BookExpo conference in Miami. On subsequent visits ever since, the rows upon rows of independent publisher booths have both awed and discouraged me. I have frequently said to friends and colleagues that as a reality check anyone considering establishing a publishing company should attend a BookExpo before committing dollar one. For many (myself included), there is a romantic notion attached to publishing which isn’t entirely undeserved; however, a trip through the aisles will prove that the unique idea you thought you had for the ideal publishing house or list is represented multiple times perhaps even in the same aisle.

At Bowker I saw a relentless procession of new publishers adding their information to Books In Print. Each year we saw approximately 10,000 new applications for ISBN numbers and these applications were fairly constant between the mid-1990’s and 2002. At the turn of the century, the numbers of new applications began to grow inexorably and is most likely well over 12,000 by now. The growth in self-publishing and the democratization of the publishing process is to 'blame.'

In 2005, (if I recollect correctly from my Bowker years) 18 publishers produced almost 40,000 titles and 13,000 publishers produced 77,000 titles. (Including all titles the number published in 2005 was 180,000 give or take). On average, each of the 13,000 publishers published less than 10 titles per year. While these numbers reflect one year (2005) the data was proportionate to the entire Books In Print database of 5mm titles and 165,000 publishers. To emphasize the breadth of suppliers, I have heard Barnes & Noble say they order at least one title from 45,000 publishers in any given year.

All new publishers and existing independent publishers publish in every niche imaginable with lists ranging from one title to several thousand. Each publisher knows their market is intensely competitive and that titles will never be successful unless they are supported by an intensive focus on marketing and promotion. Naturally, some do this better than others.

There are significant challenges that small and medium publishers must overcome; getting their titles noticed is the greatest. At Sourcebooks, the company has adapted traditional advertising and marketing principles and applied them to the book industry. The results are instructive (and impressive). At the core of their business model is the understanding that each new title is a ‘product’ which requires a specific marketing and promotion plan. (Marketing’s four ‘p’s: product, promotion, price and place). At Sourcebooks, the difficult questions regarding how the title will be marketed and promoted are asked at the adoption stage rather than applied by rote as the book is being printed. Sourcebooks is a proven example that publishing can be done successfully by approaching the business less as an avocation and more as a market driven business. In order to be successful, more small and medium sized publishers will need to adopt similar programs to support their publishing efforts.

Other challenges abound. For example, we may begin to see the self-publishing model begin to impact the available pool of authors. Many authors may come to realize they can produce and promote their own title(s) and make more money rather than work with a traditional publisher. It has long been the case that the success of any title was dependent on the level of self-promotion provided by the author: As manufacturing and editing become commoditized, the author may wonder what a publisher’s value add will be if the titles’ success resides entirely on their promotional abilities. More authors may decide to do it themselves.

All businesses evolve and publishing is no exception; I see more and more independent publishers begin to adopt better financial controls, better marketing and promotion and make more astute title selections. While some significant challenges have occurred over the past 20 years—publisher consolidation, retailer consolidation, a reduction of independent bookstores—there have also been some impressive positive improvements. Opportunities represented by more effective use of technology, digital distribution and online advertising should all be experimented with, embraced and adapted to the publishing model. I also believe we will see more small and independent publishers seek out and work with some of the self-publishing companies (AuthorHouse, Lulu) where each supports the other’s business model. There remain opportunities in the independent publisher market.

Posted by: Michael Cairns

The annual one day conference on May 14 of the International Digital Book Forum (IDPF), provided evidence that the latest innovations and experiments in e-book publishing, marketing and distribution have permanence in the market and in the support of new technologies. They are here to stay and on the way.

Steve Potash, CEO of Overdrive and President of IDPF, opened this year's session as he has every year, with a confident forecast that industry efforts to develop an open and common eBook platform standard would pay off for everyone. This year, he was able to announce the successful release of the standards last year, and the introduction of the common XML file extension of ".epub" for reflowable books and publications.

These standards for digitally "packaging" and providing meta data and tagging content, have been accompanied by breakthroughs in publishing strategies, digital search, browsing tools (look inside, widgets), and most critically, portable reader technology.

The Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle and iRex Iliad have replaced backlighting, and use the reflective e-Ink screen that simulates the page turning and reading experience on paper, while providing the search, bookmarking, highlighting, and variable type size features of digital technology. Moreover, e-Ink only uses power when the page is changed, and not when the new page has come to rest. And the most user-friendly bump to the market—soon to be copied by other devices—is the Kindle function that provides a one click effortless wireless download of any book out of its browsable catalog.

The Google book search program—with more than one million books on line and growing, and Windows Alive's archive—are providing point and click opportunities for readers to go from their browse to the publisher to order the book—in print or in electronic version. Not to mention Amazon's ahead of the pack point and click, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, Borders,, et al.

Publishers are beginning to innovate in their e-Book offerings. Witness Harlequin's launch of two short subject romance series (Spice) and Random House's free give away of an e-Book (Suze Orman) that stimulated a new spike in print sales. Service providers such as Overdrive, Ingram Digital (including MyiLibrary and Vital Source) and Libre Digital, are providing publishers with large-scale digital e-Book and audio archiving, distribution and re-purposing services to broaden consumer choices.

Quietly working in the trenches, the all volunteer IDPF standards committee headed by eBook veteran Garth Conboy, President of eBook Technologies, designed and put through a meticulous process of review and release in the past three years for the three container and platform standards now being adopted by publishers and device manufacturers. They laid the groundwork for interoperability of e-books in this promising new marketplace. (If you are into technology, go to http://idpf.org/specs.htm for a summary description as well as for detail on the OCF (Open Container Format), OPS (Open Publishing Structure) and OPS (Open Packaging Format) standards).

This means that the publisher will need to produce only one format (xml based), from which various applications can be converted and distributed. To the extent that device distributors accommodate the platform standards, and publishers relax their content protection barriers—the reader will be able to make one purchase and use their e-book in multiple ways in an after-market environment.

Of course this will raise a new set of identification and numbering problems. Most publishers now provide a separate ISBN for each ebook plantform for the same title (mobipocket, windows, Sony, iRex, Kindle). By publishing one open eBook formatted .epub version, the publisher can get by with one isbn and will no longer need to track the various other platform versions serviced by their distributors. So, it will fall to the distributors to create distinguishing product numbers in order, in turn, to account for their different offerings, (There is no escape!).

The continued ubiquity of the book as a reading device has distracted our attention from the breakthrough in electronic readers and books for the general public. Slow in coming, authors, publishers, distributors and retailers have remained complaisant—worried more about the decline in book readers than the uptick in electronic readers.

Well, the electronic reader—in both senses of the word—has leapfrogged out of the early adopter stage into a growing mainstream of device-equipped business travelers, immersive readers, college students, professional field workers and audio book/multimedia users (both Kindle and Sony have audio capability).

After writing about e-Book developments for the past ten years, I have acquired my first readers: a Sony and a Kindle, and I am getting used to using them. For my most recent five day trip to Chicago, I down-loaded on my Kindle in about a minute, for $9.95, Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals, which took up no more space than a 5x7 notebook and rested in my palms with the comfort of a trade paperback

I still like to go to bed with a printed book – especially a paperback—that I can grab, flex, and earmark—my current victim is The Kite Runner—but on a flight and in a hotel room where I don’t have to take up space with the bulk of a printed book, I have to confess, I've been hooked.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

To know is to have power. Or, in a more muscular way, knowledge is power.

This old maxim, that I first learned in my high school Castillian Spanish class many moons ago, comes to mind as the world of words and pictures and intellectual property is being roiled about by the explosion of digitally based media and instant communication through wireless and the internet.

Do we really understand what it is "to know"? Does it make any difference what is true or not true? And if it does, is there some standard by which we can reach that conclusion? And, even if we are never certain that we know the truth, do we believe that it is knowable?

This is heavy duty philosophy on the one hand – but is also a very simple and practical question whose answer governs how we approach everything we do. It is certainly at the heart of how we see our mission as publishers – of what each of us chooses to publish and why.

Generations of human beings today are being introduced to information and ideas with the expectation that they will be instantly available and instantly validated by virtue of the number of unique visitors, eyeballs, hits, user reviews or comments that accumulate around a citation or a work on Google, Yahoo, You-Tube, Slate, Drudge Report, Huffington Post, Move On, Wikipedia, or you name it.

If enough people line up behind an idea or a fact, that becomes the metaphysical truth of the moment. If enough people desire to have unrestricted access to words or music or images, the wisdom of crowds will view barriers to access as elitism or Berlin walls to be scaled.

If Wikipedia says it is so, even if with a warning that more editing is needed, the information becomes the fact for the day – suitable for a term paper or inclusion in an essay or opinion piece.

These facts and truths of the day carry the enormous power of knowledge into the market place of human behavior and social action. Instant communities coalesce around  what later may turn out to be a misquote, a mis-attribution, a misplaced decimal point, an incomplete or out of context citation, a plagiarism or a made-up observation.

Gone are the days when one had to reason their way through an argument, support it with documented attributions, relate it to universal truths already known or hypotheses previously investigated. Buzz words, slogans, talking points and conventional wisdom pass comfortably among us as the stuff of conversation and dialogue. Ad hominem attacks against the messenger serve to invalidate or quash discussion of the message.

On the other side of the coin on the knowledge issue, Chris Anderson (of The Long Tail) has figured out that to offer content free can be a gateway to drawing eyeballs like flies to pop-up ads pre-targeted to qualified prospects. Cheering him on, the wisdom of crowds says that content should be free in the first place.

Global search disseminates knowledge to the widest audience – now a metaphor for the library of the universe. Because it has brought together at virtually no cost markets as small as one, not to mention markets of millions, and has empowered us with instant access to new knowledge, the wisdom of crowds says it is fair use to copy anything for search and from search regardless of the creator's wishes.

Rachel Donaido writing in the Sunday Times Book review on April 27 observes that "everyone has a story – and everyone wants to tell it." Hence, according Bowker, she reports, "a whopping 400,000 books were published or distributed in the United States in 2007, up from 300,000 in 2006."

This huge addition to the global archive of information and ideas is staggering in its dimensions. Book reviewers, librarians, booksellers and researchers despair at the challenge to seek out those titles worthy of referencing and spending time with.

So what does all this mean? We still have a collective memory (first-hand or passed along) of the analog era of the printed word when a publisher's imprint meant that some entrepreneur had put their assets at risk to bring out books they though were worthwhile.  

Relying on a marketplace to validate their judgements, this was a form of self-screening quality control. Editors, reviewers, librarians and researchers vetted manuscripts and fact-checked each other in a process that could take many months to  many years. There is the feeling that this process yielded up more literary merit, screened out the unfounded and properly labeled the opinionated.

Well, those of us who have been paying attention, know that it was also a process that excluded the unnoticed, unseen and unappreciated, and edited out the unpleasant or undesirable – with little transparency that needed to withstand the wisdom of crowds. In the realm of education and opinion it nurtured as much mythology as it did what we consider the truth of the matter.

What I come to in this brief musing on knowledge and power is to observe that because the power of knowledge drives all human judgement, understanding what we call knowledge and how we arrive at it is paramount to our survival as a species that needs to master its circumstance if it is not to be overcome by it.

Because we are all of us subject to error and mis-judgement, it is better to have many ways in which our findings and opinions can be challenged, as well as many ways by means of which people can bring their versions of things into the arena for examination.

Placing the dissemination of knowledge in the hands of  professionally trained and credentialed gatekeepers who earned their position by education, training and marketplace forces has the benefit of enabling us to rely on easily identifiable authority to validate the information and ideas we depend on.  But it also true that while these gatekeepers could more easily control what found its way into the market, they were also highly visible and it was possible to check out their sources and validate them.

The wisdom of crowds replaces these well-identified knowledge sources with a vast uncertainty as to the source of that wisdom – but because it is so much more diverse and readily challenged, untruths are more readily exposed and quickly become subject to challenge by those same crowds – and more new truths find their way into the marketplace.

The problem and the challenge as I see it is not 400,000 new books a year of uncertain credibility or the subjective wisdom of crowds passing judgement. It is that we are in a marketplace of ideas and information in which the challenges of absolute dogmas,  fundamentalism, and made up realities are not being met by an equally persuasive reliance on reason and philosophy as a means of arriving at truth and judgment and by a willingness to advocate for the importance of reasoned judgment arrived at independently,

The value of crowds is not to determine the truth, but to challenge its advocates to make their case without needing a crowd to validate it. Without advocates there is nothing for the crowd to challenge – so it creates its own truth by its sheer numbers and the lack of, or suspension of independent thought by individuals among its numbers.

Knowledge, to my way of thinking, comes about because of independent thought and reasoning. It is a cognitive function which, when applied is enormously powerful because it activates our creative and purposive faculties. And those faculties brought to bear in the coalescing of crowds now possible in cyberspace es muy poderoso - is very powerful indeed, if I have that right.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

For the past three weeks or so a lot of digital ink has been spilled weighing the pros and cons of Amazon's announced decision to require publishers to store POD titles with BookSurge if they want Amazon customers to rely on 24-hour shipment for fulfillment on demand rather than from inventory.

Let me say at the outset that there is a lot more here than meets the eye – and in my opinion under-utilized market forces that can restore confidence among publishers are still alive and well, and need to be dusted off and activated. Amazon's move may represent opportunity rather than threat.

What is clear so far is that conglomerate and mid-range publishers are not seriously affected by the Amazon move since very few rely on POD for book-at-a-time fulfillment; rather they follow demand printing and short run strategies. Nonetheless it is known that Amazon had been pressuring and/or negotiating with selected publishers to commit their pod lists to Book Surge.

It also seems to be the general consensus that along with this requirement publishers are having to negotiate unfavorable arrangements and uncertain quality without the option of a competitive choice or else place titles, at addtional expense, with more than one POD printer to gain the distribution advantages that might accrue.

Those who are – or will be – affected are smaller publishers, self-publishers and author-publishing services who have relied both on not having to maintain inventory and also on the shorter discounts they could offer, making it possible to keep their retail prices competitive or to increase their margins while absorbing the increased unit cost of print on demand. Of course, at this writing I have no idea who is in or out. Many are complaining, few are talking.

For the demand publishing community the wake-up call is that there are other online channels and retailers to which they can direct their customers – Barnes and Noble is probably the best positioned because of their full service B&N.com web site as well as their network of stores.

B&N provides the same transparent 24-hour shipping service to its online customers for any titles placed with the Lightning Source. POD publishers who no longer have the "order now" status with Amazon can be referring customers to B&N instead of to Amazon. Other retailers have an opportunity here to step into the breech.

There are at least a half dozen viable online retailers in addition to Amazon who can also create "in stock" arrangements with Lightning Source. There are at least a half dozen other significant digital demand printers who also serve as repositories for the title libraries of demand publishers or for long tail lists of conventional publishers. Online retailers should also offer sales fulfillment arrangements with these other POD printers.

In my opinion the publishing industry trade associations  – PMA, SPAN, ASJA, Authors Guild, AAP, AAUP,ABA, BISG – should create a working committee to develop a best practices code for keeping the internet marketplace open to POD fulfillment and to facilitate for other online retailers and digital demand printers who want to open up sales opportunities similar to the one that Amazon had been offering.

I think it would be a more efficient expenditure of funds for legal advice to activate such a group than going to court to sue Amazon.

There is no doubt in my mind that Amazon is improperly bundling its wholly owned printing service by limiting non-inventoried 24-hour POD shipment to publishers who place titles with Book Surge – especially as it is commonly known that they are doing this selectively and that they continue to drop ship direct from digital printers anyway when they need to.

I also think we don't have a fair trade situation in the retail distribution of POD titles generally. I am told that different kinds of deals are being negotiated with different publishers by Amazon that are not justified by variations in cost or other logistic considerations. Whether that is in fact so is hard to verify since there is no communication here. Nonetheless it is the demand printers like Lightning Source who determine the efficiency of service, not the small one-title or mid-range many-title publisher.

While Amazon remains opaque and elusive after a brief effort to explain itself and respond to the explosion of negative reactions from the publishing community –  I do not believe they are immune to market forces nor to the benefit of maintaining good relations with the people who produce the books they sell. (Of course I don’t have any evidence of this at the moment, since from what I have been able to discover they have been cherry-picking their publishing targets for BookSurge and make no plans public.)

For the moment they have the upper hand, earned by their success in building a fabulous marketing and sales channel for books, although they have been wielding it crudely and unilaterally. With the major exception of bundling their own printer selectively, their moves are within their rights to determine who they will do business with, what discounts they are willing to pay, and now they will ship.

The most efficient antidote is to activate immediate market alternatives such as I have suggested above. There are also longer term strategies. For example, Michael Cairns writes on his blog (April 1 http://personanondata.blogspot.com):

"Perhaps it is time for publishers to be more aggressive in becoming retailers as well as content producers. If so, it’s not as simple as setting up a store front that looks like a mini-version of the Amazon bookstore (obviously) since no one would switch. However, publishers do have the direct relationship with the author and can use this exclusivity to build a more robust presentation of the content. On Amazon you get the Buick version but on the Publisher site you get the Cadillac. None of the added or supplemental content would be made available elsewhere. What that extra content would be I don’t know. Maybe every author is twinned with an additional writer and site designer that builds/creates websites focused on the authors work but with far more expansive material about the works, process, background details, audio, video etc., any of which could be purchased by a consumer. This becomes the new marketing and promotions approach or the way to spend money that is traditionally allocated to print advertising, book tours and launch parties."

As Tim O'Reilly said recently, "Amazon has, so far, created huge value for the publishing ecosystem. Now, as they become more powerful, they need to be especially watchful that they don’t irreparably damage an industry on which they, too, depend."

In the past three weeks or so I have spent a fair amount of time networking with trade association people, industry analysts, distributors, wholesalers, publishers, digital demand printers and, yes, a few go-rounds with Amazon's Director of Corporate Communications, Patty Smith (psmith@amazon.com), until she fell silent.

In fact, falling silent seems to be the default position for the main actors in the demand printing and distribution chain. Until now, Amazon's powerful presence and occasional arbitrary moves had by and large been viewed in the industry with tolerant appreciation for the value it has added to the reach of booksellers and the search of readers.

The new silence is a self-imposed defense by major players in the distribution chain who have just seen how Amazon can wield its power at will and threaten the many business models built around its marketing gateway. Amazon sees it differently - as a reasonable move to improve efficiency and customer service.

Our trade organizations should rise to the occasion and collectively seize the initiative to activate marketplace options for an industry that seems for the moment frozen in fear, anger or frustration.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

A guest blog by publishing attorney Lloyd Jassin


NOTE FROM EUGENE: I have been gathering background on the recent Amazon change in POD order fulfillment policy and will be doing my own report on it next week. Meantime, I asked Lloyd Jassin, a publishing attorney and Chairman of the Executive Committee for the NY Center for Independent Publishing, for comments on the current debate concerning Amazon's new policy. He has provided the following as a private citizen-professional, and not in his capacity with the NYCIP. He can be reached at Jassin@copylaw.com.


As the market changes and we move from traditional distribution options to digital distribution options, I find Amazon's move both troubling and exciting. They want to be active all the way along the supply chain from production, to marketing to distribution. As Amazon gets more involved in digital production and distribution, it's not long before they figure out that there should be an Amazon-based publishing company. Well, on the audio side, they've already figured that out. That's the troubling part.

It's a brilliant move. You have to admit. By force of will, Amazon has become the digital asset warehouse and distributor of choice. And, how many digital asset warehouses / distributors do we need? This gives Amazon the ability to manage digital files for POD, ebooks, mobile phone devices, etc. The exciting part is that when Amazon takes this next step, it will create new revenue streams for smaller presses.

While it doesn't look like the cost of gaining access to the number one online bookstore has gone up, I'm concerned about their monopolistic tendencies. Their claim that they are not seeking exclusively (i.e., requiring POD titles be printed exclusively through Book Surge), seems to be a subtle bit of specious reasoning. Amazon's gain is the ability to monopolize the POD market. They are offering a single printer option. Your email makes that clear.

If I were a publisher, I'd look hard at the current industry model. You have the potential to get squeezed on both ends. For example, you've got the Barnes & Noble - Sterling combo with an increasing number of book sales being titles self-published by B&N. Same deal with Amazon and Audible, both of which are actively going after new product to self-publish. See Amazon's Createspace. To the extent publishers covet virtual shelf space at Amazon (with one-click ordering), Amazon's move makes them the leading POD publisher. Of course, there will also be a plethora of other digital opportunities, including e-reader, iPhone and other selling opportunities, that they should exploit for those whose files have been entrusted to them.

Their virtual warehouse of digital files can now be accessed for all manner of digital derivatives. If Amazon remains committed to the indie press segment, which has been allowed to grow to its present size due, in large part, to Amazon, that's great. Their favoritism to Book Surge, is a slippery slope that can easily decrease diversity. They are steering consumers to books that are produced by their owned and operated press.

So, as a general proposition, I think vertical integration is a bad thing. Perhaps, the market will correct itself, as publishers move over to B&N, and other digital asset distributors pop up. Likely, that won't happen. Book distribution is not sexy enough.

If I had to prognosticate, I'd say in the next 24-months Google buys Ingram (Googlegram?) and out-Amazon's Amazon, by creating the ultimate digital warehouse - distributor in the sky.

If Google were to exhibit digital favoritism, it would steer book buyers to its wholly owned Lightning Source. Amazon owns the store. Google owns the web. Amazon merchandises books. Google sells them contextually. Balance is restored to the planet.
 
-Lloyd Jasssin

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

Note: The impact of Google on the way we do business is really a by-product of much more significant culture change in the evolution of human society. Michael Cook, a Managing Director at AG Asset Management, a money management firm in New York City, who is also an essayist, gave me permission to share his thoughts with you. He can be contacted at mcook@ag-am.com.
—Eugene G. Schwartz, Editor at Large


Life as we know it depends on DNA to transmit information from one generation to the next. Until the appearance of the human race, this was the only way favorable adaptations were retained. Thus, only those adaptations that were genetic in nature drove the progress of evolution. With the invention of language, however, a new type of evolution could occur—what Julian Huxley termed “psycho-social” evolution. The DNA of this evolution is language, and with language came the ability for humans to transmit information from one generation to the next linguistically, as well as genetically. This meant that adaptations innovated by individuals not only could be continued and built upon, but also that individual learning could accumulate from generation to generation. This sped up the pace of evolution immeasurably.

The accumulation of social knowledge brought with it new dilemmas. After a period of time, the traditions and knowledge of the human species became so vast that storing it efficiently became difficult. Oral tradition depends upon memory, which is limited. The art of memory systems was developed by the Greeks to extend the range of human memory, and the poetry of Homer used rhythms, rhymes, and other patterns to aid the memory so that it could retain vast amounts of cultural information. But these techniques were limited: ultimately the problem of storing what we could loosely refer to as the psycho-social “genome” became serious. This problem was solved by the invention of writing systems.

However, to be useful, information must not only be stored, it must be retrieved. Fairly recently in human history it was possible to have every book ever written on your bookshelf. The invention of the printing press was a watershed event in the technology of writing, which ensured that this could not remain true for long! Nevertheless, the retrieval of information from the general store was still something that could be done in a fairly straightforward manner. Of course, centers of learning—monasteries, universities, libraries – developed to manage the growing base of human knowledge. But at some point, it started to become clear that the problem of information retrieval was becoming a roadblock to the continuing development of knowledge. It also became clear that computer technology was well suited to addressing the retrieval issue.

In 1965, J.C.R. Licklider wrote Libraries of the Future, which summarized a project he had undertaken at Bolt Beranek and Newman. In his book, Licklider predicted that all human knowledge would be available on a “fast, random access computer” by the year 2000. His vision seems to be coming true. In December 2004, Google announced a project in which the libraries of five of the world’s leading academic institutions are to be digitized and made available for search and reading online.

But still, even if everything is “available” online, how can relevant information retrieval be effectuated? This is the key problem that Google addressed, and its successful solution to it, although just a beginning, essentially created the “search” industry. Google’s initial solution is called the PageRank algorithm. It was the breakthrough that started delivering search results that are relevant to the user’s search. Before Google, this had really not been the case. Their insight was to use the link structure of the web—the fact that web documents “point” to other web documents - to measure how popular sites were, and to then trust the “wisdom of crowds” by using a site’s popularity as a measure of its relevance. This, in conjunction with the appearance of search terms on the site, proved to be a surprisingly effective ranking mechanism, and the first algorithm that consistently gave users results they found useful.

At present the search industry is evolving very fast—everybody seems to have incorporated Google’s insight into their algorithm, and the race is on to understand what users mean, and what they are intending with their searches. Google’s PageRank algorithm does not address semantic content: indeed, this is part of the genius of the solution—the way it neatly sidesteps this very difficult problem. The next generation of Web Search is yet to come! But the major breakthrough that made search results relevant was invented and engineered by Google.

So here’s the progression as I see it—the thumbnail sketch of the evolution of life on earth: DNA, language, writing, printing, computers, the Internet, Google’s search algorithm.

This is why I say that the future of search is the future of life on earth, and that Google’s algorithm represents a watershed event, analogous to the invention of writing, or the invention of the printing press.

Am I overstating my case? Perhaps. But I don’t think so.

—Michael Cook

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large

Conventional, self publisher, author services, subsidy press, or vanity press?

We are once again challenged to define what makes a publisher a “legitimate” publisher by the recent dust-up – as yet unresolved – created by the Romance Writers Association’s disqualification of Tsaba Press authors for its award competitions. It did so because it decided the Press is a “subsidy” house.

This writer is satisfied beyond doubt that Tsaba is the archetype of a small independent commercial publisher that fulfills all of the requirements for such a classification. It is neither a vanity, self-publishing or author-services enterprise. It does not charge authors a fee to be published. It is accepted by the Library of Congress for cataloging in publication (which does not accept subsidy publishers), and it is distributed by STL, the largest Christian publishing distributor in the U.S.

So, what is the problem? It may rest in the democratization of the industry due to technologies that have made it easy for thousands of new publishers to come on line each year and hard to identify their business standing.

There was a time, say twenty five years ago, when the book industry recognized in the main three kinds of business models: conventional publishing, self-publishing and vanity publishing. These in turn could be grouped as top tier commercial publishers (the “big ten” with revenues of over $500 million in today’s dollars) , second tier (the next 750 with revenues of over $50 million), and some 10,000 independents, non-profits and vanity with revenues from $50,000 to $50 million.

Vanity publishing was a no-no, and still is, as far as the commercial book industry is concerned: a no-no because the business model exploits authors who seek a commercial market by implying commercial outcomes that they can’t deliver, and by requiring large investments in pre-press and first printings with no screening for literary merit or prospects of reaching any market.

Self-publishing was, and is seen by some to be in a gray area of legitimacy because of the lack of an arms-length risk investment by a third party entrepreneur and of an editorial quality-control gateway that will critique an author’s manuscript without fear or favor.

The up-side that tilts self-publishing on the side of legitimate commercial publishing is that the self-publisher often engages professional editorial and design outsources, risks an investment and takes on promotion and marketing with the intention of commercial success, or the expectation of absorbing losses, and with full knowledge that it depends on his own promise . Occasionally a self publisher will also build a diversely authored publishing list around his or her titles.

Both self-publishing and vanity publishing are variants of “subsidy” publishing, along with author investments and partnerships that otherwise conventional, third-party publishers will occasionally make to bring costly works with limited sales potential into the market. These “subsidy” models, however, do involve host publisher risk, as they require the full devotion of the publisher’s infrastructure, and they also reflect upon the quality of the publisher’s overall list.

Now, in the era of electronic and demand printing, the barrier to entry has lowered substantially – it is possible to bring a title into print electronically with virtually no infrastructure investment or inventory – sell first and print later.

As a result, a significant industry niche has emerged in the form of author services or author-driven publishers such as Author House, iUniverse, Lulu, Book Surge, Infinity, XLibris, to name but a few. Their business models offer authors a complete publishing service at low cost, using the sell first print later model. They do provide a legitimate marketing and internet distribution model which is not exploitive. They have provided logistical backbone to the thousands of aspiring author/publishers who enter the lists each year, using professional outsource consultants and services, and joining PMA, SPAN or the many regional independent publishing groups for support and education.

They contribute to the flood of some 200,000 or more new titles published each year. (As staggering as this figure may be, good books do emerge and often later get picked up by conventional publishers. They also win book awards from time to time.)

So, one imagines that the Romance Writers Association, as sponsors of the RITA and Golden Heart awards, for published and unpublished writers respectively, would be concerned over how to screen in advance whether candidates had passed professional muster in the industry.

The RWA criterion for entry is that “Books must be published by a publisher that is a non–Subsidy, non-Vanity Publisher. An eligible entry must meet these criteria:” With so many new and therefore relatively unknown publishers entering the lists each year, an entry’s provenance may not be self evident relying simply on the entrant’s claim. So, in the case of Tsaba, RWA asked for backup demonstrating they Tsaba was, indeed, not a vanity of subsidy publisher.

Tsaba submitted a copy of its boilerplate contract which included the traditional provisions requiring authors to cover the costs of any artwork or additional manuscript copies, indexes, author changes to proofs, and revisions to a new edition if the author was unable or unwilling to provide the revision.

RWA classified Tsaba as a subsidy publisher on the basis of these provisions. A quick trip to the Authors Guild Model Trade Book Contract and Guide would have confirmed that provisions such as these are part of every standard publication agreement.

Tsaba’s grievance, beyond having its romance authors disqualified from competition, is that to be deemed a subsidy publisher by a reputable professional organization is demeaning to its business standing and its ability to recruit authors. As I have shown, given the way “vanity” or “subsidy” publishing is viewed by the industry, RWA clearly has good reason to impose its filter. Having exercised that right, RWA also has a responsibility to exercise it prudently and fairly. It does not appear, on the surface, that they have done so.

Various appeals have been made to RWA to reconsider its designation of Tsaba as a subsidy press, including one by this writer in behalf of ForeWord Magazine. It will be interesting to learn of their response when it is forthcoming.

Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large