Textbook Evolution?

Have you ever leafed through your child’s textbook and sympathized with them? I’m sure the experience varies from student to student, but for those of us to who don’t find it easy to stay focused, textbooks can represent a black hole of frustration. In short, they message something contrary to excitement in learning.

They’ve improved since my days in school. And I’m not really faulting the textbook industry. After all, they’ve been limited by a one dimensional format, didactic and inert. I’ve always been endlessly distracted by sound and movement. Put me in a quiet room with no other living thing and I might have a chance at success in comprehending. But that isn’t the nature of the classroom, or even home. We live with other people who move around, talk on the phone, watch television. To many, that movement and those noises are invariably more interesting than the static black print before them that is supposed to teach.

My interest was pricked when the announcement was made last month introducing Apples iBook Author application, a program for designing multimedia, interactive textbooks. You can drag and drop almost anything you have access to. One of the major limitations--you need a MAC (OS X), and only iPad users have access to the textbooks. But I happen to own a MAC, and allegedly 25 million or so iPads have sold, so my curiosity has potential. They’ve partnered with the three biggies in the industry, Pearson, Houghton Mifflin and McGraw Hill. This is no small potatoes. I can imagine the process of building a textbook to be quite exciting and creative with the ability to utilize videos, photos, and 3 D diagrams. The user can highlight, take notes and generate flashcards. After building it, you simply upload to the iBookstore. Somehow, it goes through a review process. (hmmmm, I’m curious as to how this works and who performs them) And then, like mainstream publishing, the company gets a cut of sales and has exclusivity to the product.

Audrey Watters, in a Mind/Shift article regarding the Apple announcement, stated “Considering the involvement of the three largest education publishers — a group that currently controls 90% of the textbook market — I don’t think we can pronounce the textbook industry “digitally disrupted.” Maybe not, for the time being. But it’s just the beginning. We will keep moving toward a major shift in teaching techniques. We have to. We can’t go backwards with technology.

I submitted to McGraw Hill in 2006. They replied that my approach had merit and would maybe fit into their line in “the future” Well, this is that future, and I don’t need to wait for their acceptance any longer. That’s pretty exciting. And if we just imagine that of the 25 million iPads sold, 20% is for use by children (I think I'm being conservative), and of those 5,000,000 children, a mere 1% would purchase my iBook, that’s 50,000 books sold. I would say that’s a better chance than waiting for “the future”.

Submitted by Fran McDowell

Surprise! Or Not? Amazon Enters Publishing, Part I

By Carol Baicker-McKee

amazon.com logo

The book world is chattering away about this recent New York Times article, "Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal" (10-16-11). That Amazon was entering the publishing business was not really news - they've been gradually adding imprints in niche genres like romance novels and sci-fi books and helping authors self-publish and sell e-books for a while - it's more that the pace, scope and implications of their efforts are becoming more apparent.

This fall, the bookseller will publish 122 books, all in both electronic and physical versions, across a broad array of genres. It has hired an industry veteran, Laurence Kirschbaum, to head up the program, and it has been signing up (with big advances) some big names like Tim Ferriss (of the Four-Hour books) and most recently, Penny Marshall. And it recently introduced the Kindle Fire, a tablet for Amazon books and media, with Jeffrey P. Bezos, Amazon's CEO, calling Kindle an "end-to-end" service.

So what does this mean for authors? For publishers? For agents?

Russell Grandinetti, a top executive at Amazon, downplayed the threat to traditional publishing, but compared the change to the introduction of Gutenburg's printing press, noting:

“The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”

 From comments to the article and around the blogosphere, clearly lots of folks argue that even writers and readers also have both risk and opportunity in this changing publishing/bookselling climate.

I encourage you to read the NY Times article yourself, as well as other pieces like this one in Forbes Magazine (from 2008, to give you a sense of how long folks have been worrying about Amazon's expanding role) and check out the comments to the articles and on book sites, like Verla Kay's Blue Board (you have to be a legitimate book person and join to read the comments there). But today I will summarize the main comments I'm seeing in support of Amazon's foray into publishing - tomorrow I'll review the criticisms and worries.

Cheers

Basically, Amazon increases competition and opportunity which can be good for both authors and readers. Also Amazon has a history of being good to authors.

• Traditional publishing has always been too rigid a gatekeeper, shutting out many good, publishable manuscripts that can now make it to market and find readers (and then make money for their authors). This change will particularly benefit niche genres (like poetry or fan fiction) and hard-to-market formats (like short fiction and collections). 

• In the wake of vertical integration, traditional publishing firms have been gobbled up by media/entertainment conglomerates, making the bottom line all important. Publishers are thus less willing than ever to develop new authors, take risks on unusual or more literary books, or invest marketing in midlist books. This has led to a narrowing of choices for readers as well as limiting opportunities for authors. Amazon's entry into publishing may shake things up and force publishers to change or perish.

• Traditional publishing is too slow, unresponsive, and controlling. Few houses are open to unagented work, it can take six months or more to hear back about submitted manuscripts and years to get an accepted book to market. Authors have little influence over many crucial decisions, like covers and even titles. Amazon offers a faster, author-controlled process with its self-published ebooks and at least for now appears to be more author-friendly with its emerging traditional program.

• Authors get too small a share of revenues under traditional publishing. Amazon's e-publishing program allows authors to retain a much bigger share and their traditional publishing one seems to be promising both large advances and bigger percentages, which they can afford by cutting out unnecessary middlemen. This will ultimately benefit both authors and readers, by making a writing career more realistic and appealing for more good writers.

• Publishers do less and less for most authors, while Amazon has been doing more and more for them, giving them access to sales figures, ways to interact with readers, and the possibility of hanging onto a larger percentage of sales. Amazon already has opportunities that make marketing easier and less expensive for authors, so why not go with them right from the start?

• Publishers have been entering the bookselling market themselves for years now; it's hypocritical of them to criticize Amazon for crossing into their territory. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

 So what do you think about the possible benefits of Amazon's entry into publishing?

Tomorrow: Jeers and Fears about Amazon's Publishing Program
Later: Questions Related to these Developments
(Added 10-20-11: You can view Part II here)

Of Filters, Risks, and Torrents

by Cynthia Light Brown

Susan (see post below) got me to thinking about filters. You can filter data in Excel, parents can filter out objectionable material on TVs and computers, your body filters in and out all sorts of things.

One of the oldest types of filtering is in water.

Water filtration has a couple of similarities with the quality filtration in traditional publishing. For the maximum—best—filtration, you have the following:

• It normally passes through the filter at a very slow speed. (There are two speeds in publishing: Slow, and VERY SLOOOOOOW.)
• It passes through several stages of filtration. (Can you say agent, acquiring editor, executive editor, marketing personnel, acquisition committee, copy editor?)
• You have to have good quality filters to get good quality filtration. (aka you get what you pay for, or a good editor is worth her weight in signed, first edition Harry Potter books.)
• Filtering can remove beneficial constituents (in water, stuff like fluoride; in books—read on.)

I fully believe that traditional publishing will still play a big role in how we choose our books. I love my physical books, plus I’m a traditional gal at heart.

But traditional publishing also filters OUT a lot of good stuff. If you’re a writer who’s been seriously writing for any length of time—even if you’re well published—you know what I’m talking about. I wrote a picture book a few years ago that I still love; it landed me an agent, an editor who loved it, and it went to acquisitions at a major publisher. The marketers on the committee just couldn’t quite picture the illustrations. The manuscript is now in a drawer, keeping company with lots of other manuscripts. How many authors have heard that the editor loves, loves, loves the story, but it’s not quite edgy enough or is in between middle grade and YA or is too literary or too quiet or is a little too close to another book on their list or is just too too too?

Please don’t think I harbor any ill feelings towards the industry because my story isn’t in full color in Barnes and Noble. They’re a business like any business and very good at what they do. But they respond to the market, and a big part of their decisions is about risk, not about quality. The risk of new authors, the risk of a book that doesn’t quite know which shelf it should be on, the risk of something that would have a following, but maybe not a big enough following. In other words, yes they filter out a lot-lot-lot of stuff based on quality, but they also filter out a lot of stuff based on other factors.

Here’s the thing: the risk for publishers is not fully aligned with the risk for authors, or even for readers. Partly aligned, yes, but not fully. And authors need to figure out where we differ.

If you’re a writer with a quirky book, or a book that needs to sit on an in-between shelf, or may have a limited following, then your book represents a high risk for publishers, but not for you.

And if you’re a reader, when traditional publishing filters out books for reasons other than quality, your risk of not finding a book you want is higher than it is in the e-publishing world.

Except for the fact that earthquakes cause tsunamis. E-publishing is at least a 9.0 on the Richter scale of upset in the publishing world, and we now have torrents of books (and yes, I mean torrents in both the flooding sense and the internet sites for downloading illegal books sense). So even though a reader might be able to find the perfect book in the e-world that wasn’t available in the traditional world, how do they find it?

Forgive me for continuing with the water metaphor, but I think what is needed is perhaps more channeling than filtering. Getting the right book to the right reader. And the more finely divided those channels can be, the better. Part of that can be a filter for quality—sorting out the real dreck—but even more it’s style, genre, sub-genre. Not just a “it’s high quality” but what about the book makes it great. Then, as a reader, I can decide if those criteria are important to me. Because things that are important to me may not be important to other people. That’s always been tough to figure out, and with the sheer number of books coming out now, it’s even more daunting. I have some thoughts on specifics, that I’ll post in Part 2, sometime in the next week.

Brave New E-Publishing

We sometimes like to think otherwise, but publishing is a business. That’s not a bad thing, or a good thing, it’s just a thing.

If you are trying to earn money through writing, then you’re a business (if you’re not trying to earn money, then you’re either a poet or possibly a children’s writer and you have my sympathies). I’ll leave it up to you whether you’re a good thing or a bad thing.

I’m in business. The hardest thing to do is to get and keep customers. You can pay other businesses to do it, or do it yourself, in-house. If you pay other businesses, they may be better at it than you are, but they’re not doing it out of charity for you. Let’s say you make widget-toys and you get Widgets-R-Us to sell them for you. If kids stop buying your widgets, the store is not going to keep selling your widgets because they think there’s a chance you’ll come up with a new best-selling widget, or because they think your widgets are good for kids. On the other hand, if you try to sell your widgets yourself in your own store, you’re going to have less time and $$ to make the widgets in the first place.

But here’s the thing: people aren’t going to widget stores as much anymore. So a bunch of them are closing. And Widgets-R-Us might go bankrupt.

Writers have one thing to decide. What’s the best way to connect with customers?

The answer might be many ways. Or one way now and another way later. Things are changing. Keep your eyes open. You could find yourself drowning in a mud puddle, or maybe…Singing in the Rain.