AAP reaches agreement with Google

 | By Philip Jones

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google have reached a settlement agreement over the long-running row over Google’s book digitisation programme, bringing an end to the litigation but leaving other parties out in the cold to pursue their own settlements separately.

It is the second such settlement, and resolves a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Google in October 2005 by five AAP member publishers. Unlike the original Google Book Settlement this deal does not need a court to ratify it. And unlike the first settlement agreement there is no indication that Google has agreed to pay out compensation. “Further terms of the agreement are confidential”, the two parties said.

According to a press statement, the settlement “acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders”. US publishers can choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitised by Google for its Library Project. Those deciding not to remove their works will have the option to receive a digital copy for their use.

Under the agreement, books scanned by Google in the Library Project can now be included by publishers within Google Books, which allows users to browse up to 20% of books and then purchase digital versions through Google Play. Apart from the settlement, US publishers can continue to make individual agreements with Google for use of their other digitally-scanned works.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Publishers and Apple want delay in settlement agreements

16.08.12 | Philip Jones

Publishers and Apple fighting the US’ Department of Justice over agency pricing have hit back, with new filings submitted to the Southern District of New York on Wednesday afternoon (15th August) calling on the trial judge to deny the government’s efforts to ratify the settlement agreements, or defer ruling on them until after trial.

Though it is not clear how much these latest briefs will sway Judge Denise Cote’s decision-making, the submissions do add new colour to the proceedings, with Penguin’s response beginning: “The Emperor has no clothes.”  Interestingly, though Judge Cote had previously asked the parties to set out their opposition to the settlement agreements during the public comments period, they have done so in these new submissions in response to the government’s request for the court to wave through consent.

Most serious is Apple’s assertion that its agency agreements with the settling publishers— Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group USA, and HarperCollins—cannot be terminated without a trial: “The Government is seeking to impose a remedy on Apple before there has been any finding of an antitrust violation.”

But Penguin and Macmillan also argued against “consent” being given, claiming that the new deals were not in the “public interest”. Penguin said the settlement agreements were “far from typical and reach beyond its claims against the Settling Defendants to impose a regulatory scheme on industry participants who have nothing whatsoever to do with the claims in this litigation”. Macmillan argued that the DOJ’s analysis was faulty, suggesting that the “DOJ’s cavalier assumption that its settlement terms will not result in re-monopolization is also mere ‘speculation’”.

Central to their arguments was the view, as put forward by Penguin, that the DOJ was “cherry-picking” e-book pricing data to support its case and ignoring wider market data. Macmillan argued that the government had “Failed to Consider the Negative Consequences of the Proposed Final Judgment” [sic].

Both Penguin and Macmillan maintained that there was no evidence that e-book prices rose during the period that agency existed, as had been the DOJ’s contention. Macmillan said that the government had not provided “a single economic study or analysis showing why its mandated pricing scheme is necessary to undo the effects of the alleged collusion, or why it is in ‘the public interest’.”

Click here to read the rest of this story

Microsoft to launch tablet

 |By Philip Jones

Computer giant Microsoft is to launch a tablet device competing head-on with Apple’s iPad, for the fast-growing tablet market. The Surface, which offers a slightly larger screen than the iPad, will “be priced like comparable tablets”.

The new device was unveiled by Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer at an event for journalists last night (18th June), though some seemed disappointed by the lack of specific details, including a launch date or price.

The move could, however, provide a fillip for Barnes & Noble, which went into partnership with Microsoft earlier this year. The tablet will operate Windows 8, on which B&N is providing the e-reading platform and store-front.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Self-publishing: ‘under 10% of authors earn living’

 |By Philip Jones

Self-published writers who have an agent, or who use the DIY route to get a traditional deal, earn much more than the average self-published writer, according to a survey of more than 1,000 self-published writers. But only a minority (less than 10%) make enough to live off their earnings.

The survey, conducted by the Australian publisher and authors’ services business Taleist, found that just 97 of the 1,007 respondents indicated they could live exclusively off their royalties. In fact, half the respondents failed to reach $500 in royalties in 2011, with a quarter of the books facing the prospect that they will not cover their production costs.

On average, the respondents earned just over US $10,000 from their self-published books in the year. However, the survey also found that a “two-track economy” existed, whereby a small group of self-publishing authors were earning about 75% of the reported revenue. Two-thirds of these “top earners” were women, and though they are roughly the same age as the average self-published writer (roughly 40), the data showed that they had been taking writing seriously for slightly longer than the rest of the group.

Nearly three times as many top earners had an agent (29% as compared to 10%), but most did not. While having an agent was not a necessity for the majority of self-published writers—even those who earned the most money—the survey found that having an agent was associated with earnings more than three times higher than unrepresented peers.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Tor UK follows US in abandoning DRM

 |By  Philip Jones

Tor UK is to follow its US sibling by taking Digital Rights Management (DRM) off its e-book titles. US science fiction list Tor become one of the first mainstream imprints to say it intended to put its books out without DRM. Tor, Forge, Orb, Starscape and Tor Teen—all parts of Macmillan USA—said that from July 2012, its entire list of e-books would be made available DRM-free.

The move to abandon DRM on e-books has built up recently with industry observers believing that such a move could help to break Amazon’s hold over the fast-growing e-book market, while enabling e-book lovers to shift e-books more easily between devices.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Fallen agents – how everything just changed

By Philip Jones

The Department of Justice’s lawsuit against Apple and five of America’s biggest publishers begins like a John Grisham novel, talking of Apple’s “aikido move”, violations of anti-trust law, and tens of millions of dollars having been overspent on e-books. But in reality the document is a 49-page slasher-novel that leaves no-one in the industry unscathed.

It is a remarkable document that details dinners in private rooms for chief executives, clandestine phone-conversations, not-so private email exchanges, and gestures of solidarity among the world’s biggest publishers in the face of Amazon. All bizarrely caught on camera, and now laid-bare for anyone to read about.

There are some choice passages:

 

Click here to read the rest of this story

How Pottermore cast an ebook spell over Amazon

Digital magic ... JK Rowling at the launch of Pottermore, the website created to sell ebook versions of her Harry Potter books. Photograph: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

…And why Harry Potter’s move into epublishing is digital magic

By Philip Jones

Take a look at Amazon’s ebook site and do a search for Harry Potter books and you will see something genuinely marvellous. Something that will warm the cockles of every publisher in the land, and perhaps even a few booksellers too.

Well, for a start, you will see that for the first time since the series began in 1997, official ebook versions of all seven titles in the Potter series are being sold.

But something even more remarkable has happened. In bringing these books to the digital marketplace, Pottermore, the business created to sell the ebooks, has forced Amazon into perhaps the biggest climbdown in its corporate history.

Instead of buying the ebooks through the Amazon e-commerce system, the buy link takes the customer off to Pottermore to complete the purchase, with the content seamlessly delivered to their Kindle device. It is the first time I’ve known Amazon to allow a third party to “own” that customer relationship, while also allowing that content to be delivered to its device. Amazon gets something like an affiliates’ fee from this transaction, much less than it would expect to receive selling an ebook through normal conditions. Schadenfreude doesn’t even come close.

 

Click here to read the rest of this story

The book was great and the typos weren’t very bad

By Philip Jones

Last night I received an email from Rob Heinze, who has self-published 14 novels. His latest The Swarm is now riding high on the Nook and Kindle charts. “Reviewers are calling me the next Stephen King,” he tells the email list. This is one of many such emails I receive from authors telling me of their indie success – almost daily.

This morning I read too that self-published crime writer Kerry Wilkinson was the biggest selling Kindle book on Amazon.co.uk in the final quarter of 2011. According to his Amazon page, the Daily Express has described him as “The Hottest New Author In Britain”. Not bad for an author who has yet to find a publisher.

These are just the latest examples: before Heinze and Wilkinson, there was Hocking and Konrath, Locke and Leather, Eisler and Edwards.

This list represents a growing worry for traditional publishers, but it is also one often overstated. According to an analysis by Publishers Marketplace of the NYT bestseller lists last year, just 11 self-published authors made the charts, and since they were selling at a fraction of the price of other books they were earning a fraction of the income. However, as Joe Konrath points out here, or Lexi Revellion here, they do not need to earn grand sums of cash in order to maintain a living at this (and damage the reputation of those publishers who should be publishing them).

For years the publishing industry has ignored self-publishing and dismissed those companies helping authors reach the market as vanity operations. The authors themselves have been pilloried and left to languish on the slush-pile. It’s little wonder so many of them seem pissed off with publishers.

But the world has moved on, Amazon has created a huge freemarket for “published” content where there is little or no differentiator based on quality, or other suitable algorithm. I’m not always sure the big publishers have moved with it. The reaction of some publishers is still to be airily dismissive of self-published writers, as was evident in the recent Guardian piece “Ebooks are being driven by downmarket genre fiction”, or Profile founder Andrew Franklin’s view, expressed at the London Book Fair last year, that at dinner parties you turn away from self-published writers.

Click here to read the rest of this story

Wylie: 50% royalty rate ‘to be the norm’

Andrew Wylie

By Philip Jones

Literary agent Andrew Wylie believes a 50% digital royalty rate will become widely accepted by publishers once the digital “shake-out” settles down.

Speaking to The Bookseller from the Frankfurter Hof, Wylie said digital publishing should be a more profitable means of publishing and some of that profitability needs to reach the author. “Publishers should pay a 50% digital royalty and digital distributors should not be charging 30%—zero would be attractive,” he said.

Publishers had tried to control their costs during the rush to digital, leading to many holding a firm line at 25% of net receipts, Wylie said, but there were indications that this was beginning to change.

“Publishers were suitably careful about how they covered their costs in that transition period, but after the shake-up—which is probably still a point in the future—it will become obvious that a higher digital royalty is appropriate. It is happening a little now and it will come to be the norm,” he said. Wylie said the launch of his own digital imprint, Odyssey Editions, a year ago had had “an effect” on these negotiations.

…read more

The book is not dead: but long live the book

   Submitted by Philip Jones

The Guardian has of late taken a peculiarly hostile approach to book publishers. Two recent blogs (here and here) have asked the question whether the professions of writing and publishing can survive the transition to digital, an argument which seems to emulate the views of the author Graham Swift, who told Radio 4 that he too feared for the future of professional writing as the industry shifts to digital.

At times it seems that every journalist or news editor want to break the news that the “book is dead”, rather than reporting on the slightly more complicated reality that the book is evolving. That reading is in rude health, but the supply chain from author to reader is being disrupted by, as you’d expect, the growth in a new medium.

In his book Start It Up maverick investor Luke Johnson argues that these views reflect the world of journalists themselves who are becoming increasingly gloomy as a result of their own trade being threatened by the internet.

There is clearly some truth in that, but as Joe Esposito writes in his blog published on The Scholary Kitchen website, the doom-mongers have always been with us. “Eschatology is the defining meme of this industry wherever it is practiced. Gloom and doom, gloom and doom: it is the prevailing narrative, and it has been at least since I got into this business 30 years ago.” He is right – the death of the mid-list, the decline in author advances, the demise of independent bookshops are stories that keep on giving. But they rarely tell the full truth about an industry that ironically cannot be painted in black and white.

…read more