By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

From Feb­ru­ary 2, 2012
Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days through the kind (and brave) benev­o­lence of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

The fog of war (Grandinetti, Owen, Bosman)

Just ask Ger­aldo Rivera. No, don’t ask him. He might give away the strate­gic loca­tion of that spe­cial Ama­zon ship­ping facil­ity, the one ful­fill­ing an offer of a free Prime pitch­fork with every copy of Join the ePub­lish­ing Gold Rush.

I’m going to shoot up a flare to illu­mi­nate the past week’s events for you, the ones lead­ing up to that dec­la­ra­tion of all-out hos­til­ity we’re now wit­ness­ing. I love the smell of Ether in the morning.

Omi­nous, wasn’t it? — I’m sure you remem­ber the rum­ble of dis­tant artillery last week dur­ing the Dig­i­tal Book World War Coun­cil + Weaponry Expo. We heard it on 25 Jan­u­ary. About 9:15 a.m. in New York, 1415 Zulu.

Things shook a lit­tle. Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti had just told us what a great time it is for read­ers. Espe­cially if you’re the child of a Kin­dle Fire owner, per Jeremy Green­field’s report.

Those faint salvos? Late in the day before, our best scouts had come back into camp with the word that Houghton Mif­flin Har­court would pub­lish the print edi­tions of Amazon’s pub­lish­ing divi­sion run by Larry Kir­sh­baum.  Laura Haz­ard Owen hypoth­e­sized about it at paid­Con­tent in her arti­cle Well, Here’s How Ama­zon Pub­lish­ing Will Get Its Books Into Barnes & Noble. This New Har­vest imprint could be Amazon’s way to breach its “Barnes & Noble prob­lem: Barnes & Noble has said it will not carry any titles in its bricks-and-mortar stores that it can­not also sell as ebooks.”

Was a chal­lenge being issued? And would it be taken up?

As the NYT notices there’s com­pe­ti­tion between AMZN and B&N, the world won­ders “Where ya been?” http://t.co/JrSPuj5m

Sat­ur­day 28 Jan­u­ary 12 16:46 via Tweet­DeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@DonLinn

Don Linn

On the 28th, three days after the brass and their staffers decamped DBW, the able Julie Bosman at the Times ran her story The Bookstore’s Last Stand, an inter­view with B&N’s CEO, William “Custer” Lynch Jr.  He was pic­tured before a pha­lanx of loyal Nooks and talk­ing tough, even as Bosman laid out the stark facts: B&N – at that point – was val­ued at some $719 mil­lion, Ama­zon at $88 bil­lion. ” Lynch was unperturbed.

Our stores are not going anywhere.

By article’s end, Bosman wasn’t rolling ban­dages yet, but some gauze was being stacked up in clean corners.

With­out Barnes & Noble, the pub­lish­ers’ mar­ket­ing propo­si­tion crum­bles. The idea that pub­lish­ers can spot, mold and pub­li­cize new tal­ent, then get some­one to buy books at prices that actu­ally make eco­nomic sense, sud­denly seems a reach…What pub­lish­ers count on from book­stores is the brows­ing effect. Sur­veys indi­cate that only a third of the peo­ple who step into a book­store and walk out with a book actu­ally arrived with the spe­cific desire to buy one.

So they go to browse, do they? As in a show­room, right? Hold that thought.

I’ve met peo­ple senior to me in pub­lish­ing who never remem­ber my name even though we’ve met 5+ times. I’ll never for­get that.

Wednes­day 1 Feb­ru­ary 12 16:03 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Ginger_Clark

Gin­ger Clark

Pub­lish­ing: The gath­er­ing clouds (O’Leary, Linn)

So by the 30^th, we all sat in those cof­fee shops attached to the brightly lit sell­ing places for books (they act like show­rooms, they quack like show­rooms), feed­ing on the heal­ing pro­bity of Brian O’Leary’s ministrations.

He wrote of abun­dance, in Why pyra­mids?

Most of us came to pub­lish­ing, to libraries, to book sell­ing, to writ­ing because we love what this busi­ness could do in the world.  Now’s the time to make that a sus­tain­able reality.

O’Leary was again putting for­ward his idea, backed months ago when we Eth­er­nauts were younger by Don Linn in A Tragedy of the Com­mons, a con­cept of a uber-organization, a con­clave embrac­ing publishing’s major mili­tia, its myr­iad fac­tions, the great armies, and maybe even your more coop­er­a­tive guerrillas.

O’Brien sees this body funded by a pub­lish­ing com­mu­nity worth $40 bil­lion for just $80 mil­lion —  to give us all what he terms “a fight­ing chance to remake our indus­try and our­selves in a way that reflects, to bor­row the phrase, our bet­ter angels.”

And … it should be mea­sured by out­comes that improve the extent to which con­tent is use­fully con­sumed.  The objec­tive here isn’t just effi­ciency (though that is impor­tant); it’s ulti­mately our goal to place read­ing at the cen­ter of a social and civic con­ver­sa­tion. Build­ing some­thing big­ger than our­selves can moti­vate in ways that a litany of con­fer­ences, trade shows, and con­fabs never will approach.

How could any right-thinking lover of lit say no to this? Before we could col­lect the answers to that one, the bunkers were heav­ily hard­ened, the reserves were called up, I think I heard Gen. Press­field men­tion mar­tial law…and Han­ni­bal in the Alps.

@Don­Linn com­modi­ties went fully global in the early 1980s, for exam­ple. “Global” to book pub­lish­ers seems to mean “owned by Europeans”

Tues­day 31 Jan­u­ary 12 12:17 via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@brianoleary

Brian O’Leary

Pub­lish­ing: To arms (Wein­man, Owen, Stone, Nazaryan)

Sarah Wein­man at Pub­lish­ers Lunch was the first voice I heard sound­ing the alarm, bricks and mor­tar shells, incom­ing. It was the 31st: No, Barnes & Noble Won’t Stock Ama­zon Pub­lish­ing Titles in Their Stores.

Laura Haz­ard Owen sprang to the wire­less and raised  Businessweek’s Brad Stone.  She worked Google+ up one cir­cle and down another, to decode the state­ment B&N was issu­ing. And in her story Barnes & Noble: We Will Not Carry Ama­zon Pub­lish­ing Titles In Our Stores, it became clear how seri­ous a moment we’d reached when we read Barnes & Noble’s bel­li­cose prose.

I’ll excerpt here for you the gravest invec­tive of B&N’s chief mer­chan­dis­ing offi­cer, Jaime Carey, empha­sis mine:

Our deci­sion is based on Amazon’s con­tin­ued push for exclu­siv­ity with pub­lish­ers, agents and the authors they rep­re­sent. These exclu­sives have pro­hib­ited us from offer­ing cer­tain eBooks to our cus­tomers. Their actions have under­mined the indus­try as a whole and have pre­vented mil­lions of cus­tomers from hav­ing access to con­tent.

There’s more.

It’s clear to us that Ama­zon has proven they would not be a good pub­lish­ing part­ner to Barnes & Noble as they con­tinue to pull con­tent off the mar­ket for their own self inter­est.

This is village-burning rhetoric, aimed as it is by one major cor­po­rate entity at another, much more com­bustible than stan­dard B2B trash talk.

Of course, there was the pre­dictable reverie in cer­tain quar­ters — the “Fight!” boys on the play­ground jumped right in.

For exam­ple, there’s the Daily News’ story from Alexan­der Nazaryan head­lined with typ­i­cal restraint, Barnes & Noble to Ama­zon: Drop Dead!

Like read­ing The Onion, no?

Nazaryan does get off one good point, despite the high rag con­tent of his newsprint:

Never mind that Barnes & Noble killed off plenty of smaller book­stores dur­ing the good years of the 90’s, when a healthy econ­omy and the real estate boom that fol­lowed allowed it to expand with seem­ing aban­don. Per­haps this is sim­ply a case of just desserts for the dimin­ished bookseller.

Video, slides and tran­script of my #ibt12 pub­lish­ing ana­lyt­ics and book mar­ket­ing talk http://t.co/DMFd25IP

Thurs­day 2 Feb­ru­ary 12 12:48 via Twit­ter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@gunzalis

Peter Collingridge

Pub­lish­ing: Whose side is the Author’s Guild on? (Gonzalez)

More curi­ous is a piece from the Authors Guild. In Publishing’s Ecosys­tem on the Brink: The Back­story, the Guild finds itself aligned with Barry Lynn’s lament over monop­o­lies in Harper’s (here is an excerpt). Lynn quotes the unnamed “head of one of the largest pub­lish­ing houses in the U.S.” say­ing that Jeff Bezos is “reck­less” and “dan­ger­ous.” Another unnamed hon­cho, this time of a small pub­lish­ing house, pouts, “Ama­zon is a bully.” The Guild arti­cle, in fact, seems rather embar­rass­ingly monop­o­lized by Lynn’s story.

The Authors Guild — which appar­ently sees no need to byline the author of its own essay here — ends up in painful com­par­isons of pub­lish­ing to chicken proces­sors and microbrewers.

But what may be the most remark­able thing about this piece is that the Guild seems to have missed out on about a year of dis­cus­sion in our fair com­mu­nity. As Guy LeCharles Gon­za­lez writes in If not read­ers… on Google+:

There’s a lot wrong with this heav­ily biased and sur­pris­ingly myopic look at the sup­posed “back­story” of the pub­lish­ing indus­try, but per­haps the most galling line in the whole thing is this state­ment: “the rel­e­vant mar­ket isn’t readers.”

Here’s what he’s talk­ing about the Guild say­ing. I did a double-take, too:

For book pub­lish­ers, the rel­e­vant mar­ket isn’t read­ers (direct sales are few), but booksellers.

Say what? When all is connection-with-the-reader and fra­ter­nité and break­ing bread with the lambs and lying down with the con­sumers? And what of the holy cru­sade for cus­tomer ser­vice? Gon­za­lez again, empha­sis his:

Ama­zon has always under­stood that read­ers are the most rel­e­vant mar­ket and that’s why they’re in the posi­tion of power they’re cur­rently enjoy­ing. Do they wield their big stick aggres­sively? Def­i­nitely. And so did B&N and Bor­ders before them, and pre­sum­ably whomever the boogey­man was prior to them were guilty of the same thing. One could argue…that pub­lish­ers them­selves have been sim­i­larly as guilty in their deal­ings with authors.

The Guild writes, “Ama­zon com­mands about 75% of the online mar­ket for print books, and 60% of the ebook mar­ket.” Shall we then bite that hand so very hard? And on behalf of the authors who feed from it?

Say it with me, Guy, #cmon­son.

Authors Guild says, “For book pub­lish­ers, the rel­e­vant mar­ket isn’t read­ers.” They are so VERY wrong. http://t.co/QuztIkjv #dbw

Thurs­day 2 Feb­ru­ary 12 08:24 via Hoot­SuiteReplyRetweetFavorite

@glecharles

Guy L. Gonzalez

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.

About Porter Ander­son

Porter Ander­son, BA, MA, MFA, is a Fel­low with the National Crit­ics Insti­tute and has done spe­cial read­ings in the psy­chol­ogy of the arts at the Uni­ver­sity of Bath, UK. As a jour­nal­ist, he has worked with three net­works of CNN (CNN USA, CNN Inter­na­tional, CNN.com) and was on the lead devel­op­ment team for CNN.com Live. He also has worked on The Vil­lage Voice, Dal­las Times Her­ald, D Mag­a­zine, Sara­sota Herald-Tribune and other out­lets. He writes the weekly (Thurs­days) WRITING ON THE ETHER col­umn at JaneFriedman.com. Ander­son also is a reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tor to WriterUnboxed.com and to Dig­i­tal Book World’s (DigiBookWorld.com) Expert Pub­lish­ing Blog. He has been posted by the United Nations to Rome (P-5, laissez-passer) for the World Food Pro­gramme, and served as Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer to INDEX: Design to Improve Life in Copen­hagen. He is based in Tampa and his pri­mary medium is Twit­ter. Fol­low him @Porter_Anderson

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