Black Plastic Glasses » Trade Publishing

Pass the Gestalt, Please

Evan — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:08:24 +0000

In the past two weeks I have heard forcefully stated pronouncements by agent Andrew Wylie and chair of the Society of Authors, Tom Holland, regarding ebook royalty rates. A 50/50 share between author and publisher is the only possible outcome they can accept, citing the tired and somewhat old argument we have heard before:

The publisher has little or no incremental out of pocket cost to create ebooks, therefore the income should be split in the same manner as subsidiary rights, which is generally 50/50.

The average person would be hard pressed to disagree—certainly in this day and age the digital file created to make a print book cannot cost much to...

The iPad: Gateway Drug to Digital Learning?

Evan — Wed, 05 May 2010 10:46:40 +0000

In my last post, What's Next in Digital Reading I explored my notion that there are three kinds of reading; extractive: immersive, and pedagogic. Extractive reading works in digital form as finding and extracting data and information is optimized by the power of digital. Immersive reading struggled to flourish in digital form until the e-ink screen went mainstream with the release of the Kindle. Pedagogic reading, the kind done when learning from a textbook, has yet to take hold as there hasn’t been a device and/or business model for delivering lesson-based reading that has gained any traction. However, this is all about to change dramatically because of the iPad. The iPad has been the...

I’m Coming Back!

Evan — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:36:48 +0000

Watch this space in early March for my return to blogging. I am taking suggestions here for topics you want to see me cover. I will be checking the comments section daily and take on all serious ideas. See you all soon!

Quo Vadis, Amazon?

Evan — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 10:20:51 +0000

Reading Nicholson Baker's long piece in the August 3^rd New Yorker while on the beach last week, got me thinking about the role of Amazon in the future of print book publishing. Mr. Baker, a novelist, is coming to terms with his new Kindle - its benefits and as well as its drawbacks. While I don't get a few of his observations (especially his preference to read on the much smaller and much harder-on-the-eyes LCD screen of the iPhone), one comment made about the Kindle struck me as particularly eye opening.

“If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top...

Demand Pricing for Ebooks

Evan — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 10:18:25 +0000

A stir was created recently when Sourcebooks announced the delay of the ebook version of a brand new title for fear of cannibalizing print sales. CEO Dominique Raccah said, "Hardcover books have an audience, and we shouldn't cannibalize it," adding, "It doesn't make sense for a new book to be valued at $9.99." Is Dominique Raccah making a smart decision? There are a lot of factors to consider. Amazon has claims that sales of ebooks are 35% of the same print titles on Amazon.com. If the hardcover is priced at $25 and the ebook $10, then one can see Dominique’s point quite clearly – delaying the ebook version could mean that demand for 35% of the...

Nuthin’ but Net

Evan — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:07:21 +0000

One of the truly inspiring thing about ebooks is that they offer endless opportunity to iterate and morph selling and access models. Technology drives change and innovation, which in turn allows for all kinds of new and interesting features. All kinds of selling and access models are floating around out there, some that allow extension of purchase rights beyond a single user. There are models that offer no specific items to download and hold on any device, models that offer real-time content updates, models that offer print plus ebooks, ebooks plus TTS audio, subscriptions to ebooks, and on and on and on. Innovation is not exactly something the book-publishing world is known for, so ebooks are a breath of fresh air...

Best of…

Evan — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:31:28 +0000

While I am finishing up the next piece for this blog, I thought it might be a good time to do a "best of my blogging" redux. By a "good time" I of course mean "I am not ready to post again and shouldn't go more than 7 days between posts." That said, I hope you enjoy some of the fruits of past labors: The following are what I consider the top 5 posts I have done on BlackPlastcGlass and OUPblog.

Number 5, on my list of top posts, was done for OUP's OUPblog: Do I Believe In Ebooks? Part one and Part Two . This series posited that the key to the ebook reader device market will...

TTS is Not a Four Letter Word

Evan — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:24:41 +0000

To be perfectly clear, this blog is not sanctioned by, endorsed by, or even remotely associated with, Oxford University Press, my fantastic employer. What I say here is my opinion and my opinion alone. This is especially true for this article as I am in no way representing the view of OUP. For reasons that aren't entirely obvious to me, the Text-to-Speech (TTS) debate continues to rage months after Amazon was forced to disable TTS functionality on the Kindle. Unfortunately, as with most things, the debate has devolved into discrete business or political vantage points. The Authors Guild sees TTS as...

Discounts Must Align to Risks

Evan — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:41:18 +0000

To be perfectly clear, this blog is not sanctioned by, endorsed by, or even remotely associated with Oxford University Press, my fantastic employer. What I say here is my opinion and my opinion alone. In my inaugural post, Why Ebooks Must Fail, I promised to follow up by exploring a variety of business models I believe could work in the long run for publishers of all sizes and shapes. This is the first part of a 3-part series in which I propose changes and new initiatives for ebooks that, I believe, will help ensure that ebooks don’t fail. I theorized that the book industry relies too greatly on advance sales and billing and that the predominant model of ebooks,...

Book Advances

Evan — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:47:51 +0000

MICHAEL MEYER has a piece in the Sunday NY Times book review section entitled "About That Book Advance ...". While it logically has the perspective of an author, it does point out some of the issues associated with the predominant model in current trade publishing. One part that I think doesn't quite compute is the following: "In 1971, for example, Viking sold paperback rights to “The Day of the Jackal” to Bantam for 36 times the $10,000 hardcover advance it had paid its author, Frederick Forsyth. “Agents realized that they should be the ones holding auctions for their authors and get advances more in line with the anticipated total value of their books,” Georges Borchardt, who brokered...