They're At It Again

According to The Guardian:

"A class-action lawsuit has been filed in the US alleging that Apple and five major publishers "colluded ... to illegally fix prices" of ebooks."

Here we go again. The big publishers, in this case HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster are accused of conspiring with Apple to set prices and force Amazon out of its 'cut prices to win market share and expect the publisher to take the hit' business model.

The complaint centres on the agency model – used by Apple for iTunes and by most major publishers for ebook sales – in which the publisher, rather than the retailer, sets the retail price of ebooks.

It's interesting, because what they say about the agency model makes it sound as if the publishers are calling the shots. Not so.

Here's the way it works. Normally, we set the cover price and the retail discount level, and retailers can sell the book for whatever they want. Makes no difference to us if they make any money on it, we still charge them the same wholesale price.

But with agency pricing, we set the end user price, and the retailer, in this case Apple, takes their margin out of that. Essentially, their retail margins are protected by the fact that they tell us how much profit they want and we then have to price the book to allow us, and the author, to make some money too.

So agency pricing is not in the publisher's interests at all. Nor the authors. Guess who it benefits? Oh yes, Apple.

We have an iPad. Most of the time, iTunes doesn't work, and iTunes is the only way to get anything onto the iPad. The latest problem was a continuous loop of having to verify an email address that prevented logging into the iTunes Store. It seems that Apple's attitude is that their products are perfect, therefore everyone wants one, and all content producers want to work with them.

We don't like Amazon's cut price policy any more than anyone else does, except of course readers, who are always on the lookout for a bargain. But we protect ourselves against a financial loss by setting our retail discounts accordingly. In the past, we mistakenly joined Amazon's Advantage program. Guess who it's an advantage for? Amazon. On two books, we made a loss thanks to their non-negotiable 60% discount.

So now we treat Amazon like any other retailer, and everything works well. Customers still buy books, we get our wholesale prices, the author gets their royalties, and Amazon have to make a living like everyone else - by not abusing their suppliers.

Of course, in an agency pricing world, if we were to start talking to Apple and agreeing to fix prices, which would only happen if we were a really big publisher, then that wouldn't be fair at all. It would mean that Apple wasn't treating its supplier relationships fairly and equally. Could you imagine such a thing?

The lawsuit alleges that "the five publishers "feared" Amazon's move to price ebooks at $9.99 – a figure considerably below physical book prices. The pricing "threatened to disrupt the publishers' long-established brick-and-mortar model faster than [they] were willing to accept", and to set low consumer expectations for ebook prices."

Oh, shame. Don't we all feel sorry for them?

Amazon Kindle - Winning the Content War?

We received an email this week from our Apple content distributor. Here it is:

As the demand to get content distributed and sold on Apple's iBookstore continues to grow, [distributor] is striving to meet our publisher partners' needs in the most efficient manner possible. In order to help plan and meet expectations, we'd like to ask your assistance. Please e-mail the number of titles that your company plans to distribute to Apple for the remainder of the 2011 calendar year to [someone's email address].

Is this true? Unlikely. It is more likely that Apple are pushing their distributors for sales forecasts, to test the impact on the market of their decision to prevent app developers from selling content direct to the actual person who owns the iPad outright and should be able to do whatever the hell they want with it.

Here is our reply:

In response to the email I received asking for [distributor] projections, I would like to say that I will be publishing 8 books between now and the end of the year, however I am supporting the Amazon Kindle platform as a priority because of the unexpected and unnecessary cost and complexity of supporting iBooks.

Specifically, I went to great lengths to ensure that my first iBook was fully compliant with the epub standard, only to find that Apple themselves don't comply with it, so I had to pay for [distributor] to make the conversion, and your technical people couldn't actually tell me what was wrong with the original, so I have no chance of correcting these errors myself, of which I am capable given the right information. So Apple have enforced a standard that they don't comply with, and they guard the information that is required for me to fix the problem, and I am not prepared to pay to have you convert every book for me when the conversion process for Kindle is quick, easy and reliable.

Please do pass this on, because I'm sure I'm not the only publisher with this problem. 

Cast your mind back a few years... What killed off Betamax in favour of the technically inferior VHS? Content. The studios licensed their content to the consortium of VHS developers, not Sony's Betamax. People couldn't get films, so they didn't buy the machines. Sony learned quickly, and bought Columbia Pictures so that they would never be denied content again.

Random House recently announced that they are putting their entire catalogue of 17,000 books onto the iPad. But for any publishers who don't deal direct with Apple, the Kindle is a much easier and more reliable option. Will this fragment the market? Or will it polarise the market into serious readers who will see the Kindle as a clear winner, or people who primarily want to play games and waste time on Facebook, and dip into the odd ebook here and there, who will go for tablet PCs. Note: Tablet PCs, not necessarily the iPad.

About 20 years ago, the mobile phone companies realised that whoever owned the device in your hand owned what you saw and heard. But wireless Internet is moving the goalposts again. That device could be any one of a number of things, from your phone to your tablet PC, even your television. This favours the content distributors.

Apple have played a very risky strategy; giving content and app development over to third parties, and then trying to control them with restrictive, unfavourable contract terms, based on the belief that Apple owns the world, therefore the developers have no choice but to comply. You want to sell your products? You have to play by Apple's rules, because they control the market.

Except, they don't.

They have scored some early wins by getting customers to fall in love with their products, but this will absolutely not last forever. How do we know?

When Ford's iconic XR3i ruled the suburban backstreets, every product had an 'i' on the end of its name.

When Sony's Walkman ruled the subways and classrooms, every product had 'man' on the end of its name.

When McDonalds ruled the world of crap jobs, every crap job became a McJob.

When Yahoo became My Yahoo, every website became 'My' website.

When the Internet came into the home, every tenuously related product had an "e" at the beginning of its name.

When Apple's iPod took the Walkman's crown, every product had an 'i' at the beginning of its name.

Apple is tightening its grip on the market. And what can you expect to happen next? The tighter Apple squeezes, the more of that market will slip through its fingers.

Unbound: A Threat to Publishers?

According to The Bookseller, the new self publishing service, Unbound, is the beginning of the end of traditional publishing, or at least a business model that will accelerate the demise of the printed book. Or the ebook. Or neither.

The Bookseller says, "Unbound, a publishing platform that allows readers to choose what is published, was devised as a response to the “difficulties of the existing publishing model”, with the programme aiming to get 35 to 40 projects off the ground in its first year."

Here's the idea; instead of self-publishing, you pitch your book idea to a social network of readers. If they like the idea, they invest in it to cover the publishing costs. In return, they get anything from a 'goodie bag' to lunch with the author.

If an investor puts in more than £1,000, they might get a royalty share of book sales too.

Whhooooaa! £1,000? How much are they saying it costs to publish a book?

Oh, of course, I forgot. We're talking about a traditional publishing house trying to muscle in on the ebook and self-publishing market.

"Supported by Faber, the platform was created by “QI” writers John Mitchinson and John Pollard, and Crap Towns author Dan Kieran. Authors are required to pitch their idea to readers on the site, and have 50 days to attract support through readers pledging money to fund the publication of the work. If enough money is pledged, the work will be published, primarily as an e-book or “beautifully bound, limited edition hardback”, or both, with each pledger’s name inscribed in the back of the print edition."

In the old days, there were publishers and there were vanity publishers. A publisher buys the licence to print your book and in return pays you a pittance of a royalty. They use your book to market their business, and if they really go to town on marketing, you make some money. But not nearly as much as the publisher, and quite rightly so, because they've done all the hard work in marketing and getting your book onto the shelves. Which they control.

Vanity publishers just charged you to print your book for you.

So, an aspiring author had two choices; take their manuscript around all the publishing houses, facing rejection, or pay to see their book in print.

In today's world of ebooks and print on demand, anyone can get their work into circulation for a very small amount of money, but, is it any good? And will it sell?

Today's author is faced with the choice of taking their manuscript to the traditional publishing houses, as before, self-publishing and now, getting the readers to buy the book in a limited print run before it's even written.

"As The Bookseller went to press, of the five ideas currently on the [Unbound] site, author Terry Jones’ idea for “a darkly funny set of linked tales” had received 2% of its required funding, while Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s idea, an iPad version of his book The Cloudspotter’s Guide, was still on 0%."

We presume they're both well known authors, so these figures either show that the Unbound concept is in its infancy, or it's a silly idea.

As a business model, it is very similar to the 'micro loans' concept that hit the headlines a few years ago. The idea was that I go to a website and post a request for some money, then some other people offer to lend me various amounts which together give me what I need. I then pay them back, through the website. Each micro investor makes a return, I get a loan, the website makes a profit off the top.

Unbound is not a new concept in publishing, it is a simple and blatant attempt by an existing publishing house to shuffle the risk around - so that it lands anywhere but at their door.

Light at the end of the Apple Tunnel? No it's Another Train Coming...

We previously posted our experiences of getting a title up for sale on the Apple iBookstore, and at that point we thought that we had reached the end of that long, winding and painful road.

How wrong we were.

We stripped out all of the extraneous formatting from the raw html file and it passed both epubcheck and preflight verifier. Those are the tools that Apple say must verify your file in order for it to be accepted into the iBookstore.

But, guess what? Although Apple insist on your epub file passing the epubcheck formatting standard, Apple don't follow the standard properly, so when your file passes all of the checks, Apple still reject it.

Worse still, they don't actually tell you why.

If we wanted to find out, we would have to buy an Apple Mac computer so that we could run the Apple software that talks to the Apple iTunes store. And, not surprisingly, we're not keen on that idea. So we had to get our distributor, Ingram, to rebuild the file from scratch. They know how to get the file to pass Apple's entrance exam, even though they can't tell us how to do it or even explain what the problem was.

Money for old rope, as they say.

Amazon Kindle is Dead... Long Live the Tablet PC

We had an iPad for a year and now we have an iPad 2. It's about £150 cheaper than the original for the same spec and a lot of the original design flaws have been solved - you can actually hold it, and the smart cover works very nicely.

The original iPad's back was shaped like an oily banana and while it looked sleek, it was impossible to hold on to, so we added a leather case that just made the thing so bulky. Yes, you could prop it up to watch videos or type, but far from ideal. Like putting disabled hand rails on an Aston Martin to make it easier to get out of.

The new iPad 2 has a smart cover - £60 for a leather one! - but worth it because it is so neat and tidy, and as the iPad2 has a flat back, it folds away neatly when you're using the iPad. You can have a £30 plastic version, but the colour range is the same as B&M have chosen for their silicone spatulas. Not classy.

What has this got to do with Kindle?

Well, for £111 you can buy the Amazon device. The battery lasts a long time, and all it does is read ebooks.

The iPad was £480 for the 32Gb wifi version, from Tesco, or any other retailer thanks to Apple's price fixing.

To be honest, the iPad 2 doesn't do anything the iPad didn't do. It's just better at it.

The Kindle's battery last for weeks thanks to its e-ink screen technology, very handy for your holidays, if you're staying somewhere that has no electricity, I guess. I think most people could manage to charge their tablet computer overnight, along with their mobile phone and mp3 player.

And there's the problem. Wherever you go, you have other devices that will need charging almost every day, so is it really a problem to charge your tablet computer? Especially when you will also be reading your emails, watching videos and listening to music on it?

Disgo's Tablet 6000 costs only £98 from play.com - that's £13 less than Kindle. Yes. it's only got 2Gb of storage built in and the screen resolution isn't a patch on the iPads but you can read your emails, watch videos, listen to music, browse the internet and read ebooks for less money than a Kindle.

Of course, there are more expensive tablet PCs too, running Linux or Google's Android OS. However, the price plummet of Apple's iPad 2 will force down the price of clones too. We'll see a whole flock of sub £200 tablets on the market by the summer, we reckon.

As a publisher, the devices that people read ebooks on directly affects the adoption of ebooks. ebooks might be a wonderful evolution of the publishing industry, but if people can't conveniently read them, they won't catch on.

We think that buying an Amazon Kindle is like buying your children a Vtech laptop. Why would you? It's more expensive than a real laptop, and it doesn't do anything useful!

But wait, you say, a VTech Super Student Laptop is only £50. It has a matchbox sized black and white LCD screen and doesn't do anything that you actually want your children to learn, such as how to order stuff off ebay with your credit card.

And you can't even buy a laptop for £50, can you?

Yes, you can. £50 buys you a very nice second hand laptop from the wonderful department store in the sky, ebay.

What about the cost of software?

Load the bargain laptop with the wonderful, free Ubuntu, a user friendly version of Linux, the absolutely free and fabulous operating system. Free office software, free everything. Does more than Windows. More reliable. Free. Easier to use. Free. Did we mention that it's free?

You have absolutely no excuse for not getting your children a real laptop, so why on Earth would you buy an Amazon Kindle just to read books on?

Sorry Amazon, considering that you fancy yourselves as a market innovator, you are five years late to market with the Kindle.

Our prediction is that the Kindle will go the way of the Sinclair C5, the Tandy TRS-80, the Psion palmtops and pretty much any kitchen appliance that you bought from QVC.

Only buy a Kindle if you want to show your grand children the product that killed the mighty Amazon.

ebook adventures

We've been working long and hard to get two new ebook formats into production; Amazon's Kindle format and Apple's iBooks format. They're similar but different enough to create a whole host of file conversion problems.

Some of this post is rather technical, which is aimed at anyone who is having similar problems and understands what we're babbling about.

Our first ebook release is The Pitching Bible by Paul Boross. It's a 70,000 word book with around 100 images, so it was quite a challenge to format it correctly.

ebook readers such as iPads, Kindles and a whole host of less popular devices as well as software readers for PCs share a fundamental design principle; they display text. Because the file format used for web pages, HTML, is a ubiquitous and simple text formatting language, it's perfect for use in ebook readers. An ebook is essentially a mini website stored locally on the ebook reader. Whilst Apple's iPad is a complex product capable of displaying many different file formats on its high definition screen, Amazon's Kindle uses e-ink technology. Its power consumption is tiny, giving you enough battery life to last through your summer holiday, but it can only display text and greyscale images.

The majority of ebooks are text only, so support for images in an ebook format is actually quite messy.

Here's the meandering and torturous route that we took to finally get everything working.

First; Amazon. Amazon like to hold their cards very close, so they let you upload a 'raw' HTML file which they kindly convert for you. A helpful hand? Maybe, or another way to look at it is that all Kindle conversions go through Amazon which means that they have total control over distribution and therefore royalties. You can't load an ebook onto your Kindle without going through Amazon. Whilst we could debate Amazon's business practices, from a technical point of view, this ebook was relatively easy to set up. The only downside is that you can't fiddle with the formatting; once it's uploaded, you have to wait for it to be approved before you can then upload a revised file, so if the formatting isn't quite right then it's easier just to leave it alone. Amazon don't make life easy when you're a perfectionist.

Apple's iBooks are far more complex. Apple use a 'standard' format called epub which, apparently, is the future of the ebook format. It's much more complex, so what can it do that good old HTML can't? So far, we can't find anything. It is, however, much more difficult to set up.

We use OpenOffice for the actual writing and formatting, and export the book as a HTML file. Then we used a piece of software called eCub to convert the HTML book to an epub file. Then we used another piece of software called epubchecker to tell us everything that was wrong with the ebook. Finally, a piece of software called Sigil allowed us to make the changes to correct the errors.

We went through about 20 file conversions before realising that the strange and meaningless errors displayed by the iPad were caused by exporting the book from OpenOffice as HTML instead of the more complex XHTML, even though eCub is supposed to convert HTML to epub. An epub file is actually just a renamed XHTML file, with all of the supporting files such as images packed inside.

OpenOffice fills the exported XHTML files with an unbelieveable amount of junk; formatting and styles, peculiar 'span' tags that only contain apostrophes and other miscellany. This creates two problems. Firstly, all of this hidden text doubles the file size. Secondly, the hidden text isn't actually hidden. Whereas a web browser wouldn't display all of the formatting, the iPad displays lots and lots of empty space instead. So, we went through and manually took all of the unecessary formatting out. Perfect!

The next problem was images. We create images for books using Inkscape, a SVG drawing program. Images are output in .png format and imported into OpenOffice. Being lazy, I make the images bigger than necessary and size them in OpenOffice so that their resolution is always more than 600dpi for printing. The problem with this is that when OpenOffice converts the file to HTML or XHTML it exports them at full size with image 'width' and 'height' tags to resize them. On the iPad, the images looked terrible. The first solution I tried was to resize all of the images manually and then take out the width and height attributes of the 'img' tag, however this just resulted in the iPad not being able to display the book at all. So we bit the bullet and re-inserted all of the images back into OpenOffice at the correct size so that OpenOffice would format them at 100% of their original size. In OpenOffice, the images were tiny and most were completely illegible. Yet when exported to XHTML, they all displayed at the correct, glorious size. In future, we'll be creating images at just the right size in the original document.

Once we had the image size issue fixed, we went through the OpenOffice - eCub - epubchecker - Sigil sausage machine again and the iPad opened the epub file perfectly.

So, finally, we have our first working epub iBook. The next challenge is to get Apple to accept it into the iBookstore, so we'll keep you posted with our continuing adventures.

Ebook distribution options

We've just set up some new ebook distribution channels.

In addition to Ingram, who distribute through many of the major ebook retailers, we have added two large niche providers.

I say large niche, because of the ebook formats that they use.

The first is Amazon, who are advertising their new Kindle ebook reader aggressively on TV and in the press. Priced at £109, the Kindle device is an ebook reader, plain and simple. We've seen ebook readers come and go in the past and the key to success really has to be title availability. Kindle uses a proprietary 'AZW' file format, hence the niche position.

Unlike ebooks that come as ubiquitous PDF files, the Kindle format only works on the Kindle reader. Luckily, a software reader is available for a few other hardware platforms.

The second is the Apple iBookStore. Apple are rather more difficult to trade with because they only accept submissions to their AppStore and iBookStore via their authorized agents. Ingram have just signed up as an agent, and so we have signed up with Ingram. This means that you can get your book onto the Apple iBookStore through a professional and credible publishing imprint rather than one of the horrible imprints of some of the rather amateurish distribution channels that are available.

Apple iBooks use a rather stringent version of the 'epub' file format, so getting books published on the iBookStore is actually more complicated than getting a book into print.

One of the biggest problems is graphics; ebook readers are really designed for text novels, not for books with illustrations, so if your book has diagrams, charts and graphics in, we have to do a fair bit of work on the conversion. Also, if your book contains fancy fonts and formats for chapter headings or callouts, don't expect to see them in the ebook version unless you're talking about gold old fashioned PDF, where the ebook will look just like the printed book.

iBooks are available for iPads, iPods, iPhones, iMacs and probably anything else that begins with an 'i'.

The first title to hit Amazon Kindle and Apple iBooks will most likely be The Pitching Bible by Paul Boross.