Tenebris

Product manuals from Stok Software

Lulu storefront of the day for Moday, April 18, 2005: Stok Software, Inc.,  provider of tele-communications software (and documentation printed on demand).

One author's adventures in self-publishing

A writer named David St. Lawrence is in the process of publishing his own book and the record of his adventures seems to have stirred up the blogosphere a bit on the subject of self-publishing. You can read his remarks on marketing a self-published books, among other things, on Lawrence's blog, Ripples, as part of his series on self-publishing.

I cringed when I read that he was waiting for the printer to get copies of his new book (and taking pre-orders in the meantime). People sometimes ask me why they should go through Lulu to publish a book rather than doing the whole thing on their own. There is more than one reason, of course, but I am often tempted first to ask them if they've ever dealt with a printer on their own. Printers are not set up for business-to-consumer work, which is why there is still a big demand for Kinkos-esque copyshops. Lulu, if nothing else, offers the easiest front end for a commercial printer ever developed.

O'Reilly: a self-publisher who grew up?

There's an interesting thread going on over at the blog Signal vs. Noise in which the authors have solicited comments on the pros and cons of publishing their new book independently: "What do you think about self published books? "

As you would expect, there is the usual mixture of smart interspersed with clueless observations. Falling notably into the 'smart' category are a couple of comments by Tim O'Reilly, founder of O'Reilly Press, who describes himself as a "a self publisher who grew up into a real publisher." A real publisher, eh? Ouch. He's obviously gunning for some new business and, as he lays it out, the only two options consist of variations on setting up your own publishing/distribution company or surrendering control to a conventional publisher. I chime in towards the end of the thread with a modest, 'Au Contraire!'

Let's hope they know about Lulu. Perhaps they should talk to the guys at Spiderworks, who continue to make excellent progress down the independent publishing road.

San Francisco Stories

Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, April 15, 2005: San Francisco Stories, by Derek Powazek. Derek-- who is the co-editor of JPG Magazine and the founder of Fray, among other things--has republished his book of San Francisco stories through Lulu. HIs SFstories web site also features reader submitted stories set in SF, which happens to be one of my old haunts. I should really sit down and record a story or two for my own sake as that lively period recedes in the mirror. My best yarn from San Francisco is probably "The Tale of Two Kisses," various versions of which my running buddies have heard many times.

Google courts content creators

A quick but important update to my post earlier this week responding to the NYT story on Amazon.com's purchase of Booksurge: Google has announced that offering a search engine for video is not the end of its ambitions; it also plans to allow the creators of video content to upload, and even sell, their work  through Google: See "Google Preps Video Distribution Service."

Sounds awfully familiar,  if you haven't been following the official Lulu blog lately.

Here's a link to the Google video uploader. On a side note, when I published the print version of the Gutenberg Project's Underground City, by Jules Verne, I also submitted it to the Google Print program using the Google book tool. So far it hasn't shown up in search results.

Get Published

Lots of people, not surprisingly, want to get published. The community web site 43 Things offers a way to find them.

Life in a Chinese Laundry in the South

     

Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, April 14, 2005: Amazing Grace in a Chinese Laundry in the Deep South, by John Jung, a book about his "family, the only Chinese in Macon, Georgia, [who] survived operating a laundry for over 20 years during an era of staunch segregation before moving to San Francisco." Mr. Jung maintains a web site on this topic, although for reasons unclear to me it doesn't look as if he has linked it to his book yet. I hope I'm not jumping the gun by promoting it here. I used to know a Chinese American national account executive at the healthcare company where I used to work whose family had a similar story. She used to talk about writing a book herself.

JPG Magazine, Issue 2

Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, April 12, 2005: JPG Magazine, Issue 2: Lost. Great stuff. You can also check out the JPG Magazine community at Flickr.

Introducing Donut Magazine

Lulu storefront of the day for Monday, April 11, 2005: Donut Magazine, the inaugural issue of a periodical with the slogan, "creativity, broadly defined."

NYT on Amazon's foray into POD publishing

Bob Tedeschi of the New York Times offers a bit more analysis of Amazon.com's acquisition of the print on demand company BookSurge in today's Business section: "Amazon Expands Into Book Printing."

According to Robert Holt, BookSurge's managing director, the company has created proprietary software programs that automate the printing process to the point where even single-copy print orders are profitable, even though the book's final price is comparable to that of books produced through traditional means.

"For a print run of 10,000 or 50,000 books, the manual costs can be spread out," Mr. Holt said. But for smaller print runs, he said, labor costs kill the economics of the operation.

While lean manufacturing technology has existed for years at companies like BookSurge and Lightning Source, a division of the book distributor Ingram Industries, other elements have helped bring these services more squarely into the cross hairs of publishers and authors.

Print quality has improved considerably, said Lorraine Shanley, a principal at Market Partners International, a publishing industry consulting firm. "You can now use color in a book, and produce hardcovers as easily as paperbacks," she said.

And perceptions about on-demand publishing have also changed. Previously, many writers rejected the notion of so-called vanity publishing - the province of aspiring authors who spend tens of thousands of dollars to see their name on books collecting dust in the basement.

With costs down and quality up, though, self-publishing has become more acceptable.

This is a disappointing article void of any real insight into Amazon's move, although to the journalist's credit he at least demonstrates some curiousity. Tedeschi chose to quote only the usual suspects, the moribund iUniverse and the hucksters at AuthorHouse, neither of which are exactly on top of this trend. The point made in the article about improved print quality is right on the money.

Like many journalists, Tedeschi seems skeptical and a bit bewildered by the idea that self-publishing could be taken seriously, digressing into an anecdote about some misguided authors who paid BookSurge to do a run of 500 books and who have yet to make back the money. Sigh. I wish he had called me. I would have sent him to talk to a Lulu author who paid $0 to publish her book and who made $26,000 last year, or to a small group publishing ebooks that earned the same amount on half a dozen titles in the space of a month. The examples in articles like Tedeschi's tend to miss the point by trying to use conventional publishing terms to describe the efforts of independent publishers who are, by and large, a much more diverse lot.

The NYT of all institutions should keep in mind the lesson offered by blogging as a phenomenon. POD is a technology that is changing book publishing by making it accessible and affordable, and new technologies that solve problems and eliminate bottlenecks always warrant serious consideration. A company like Lulu makes it as easy to publish a book as the original Blogger technology made it to publish a web site. And what followed was a shift in the media landscape, nevermind the trivial nature of most blogs. Present company excluded, of course.

There are journalists who feel that the "on-demand book market" is too insignificant to pay attention to, but that perspective has now been undermined by the fact that Amazon is apparently willing to put money on the table to venture into it. What skeptics are missing is that the arena of conflict from Amazon's point of view is not the on-demand books market alone, but something much broader--the long tail market. In this arena Amazon continues to compete with Google and eBay and Yahoo. Google's most recent foray into this particular aspect of the fight is Google Print. Amazon counters with on-demand media production that will soon include video on-demand. Google, by contrast, recently launched a beta version of a video media search engine. The obvious difference of course is that Amazon is trying to control the distribution channels while Google is agnostic--it simply seeks to be the gateway to all channels. Lulu's interests, in my mind, lie more on the Google side of this fight.

Chris Anderson has added a couple of excellent posts recently on the topic of whether or not the increase in available products fueled by companies like Lulu and BookSurge leads to more consumption or less--pitting the expanding market argument against the argument that "the scarcest commodity is attention." Both posts are well worth reading as Anderson records the progress of his efforts to attach real data to all the shifts taking place in the distribution and consumption of media:

See: "FAQ: Does the LT increase demand or just shift it?"  and "The economics of variety"

Book bloggers unite!

Here's an interesting notion:

What would happen if a bunch of your favorite literary blogs got together four times a year and picked a book from obscurity, an overlooked literary gem that we'd get behind as a group and bring to your attention, flogging it ceaselessly both here and on our respective individual blogs?

Introducing the Litblog Co-op.

It's a (Hairless) Dog's World

Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, April 8, 2005: Hairless Dog World, a new journal published by Jennifer Young, the founder and former director of the International Hedgehog Registry.

Amazon seeks to dominate print on demand

Continuing its strategy of dominating as many distribution channels as possible, Amazon.com announced yesterday its purchase of Booksurge, a print on demand (POD) company headquartered in a strip mall in Charleston, South Carolina (see Google news feed below).

While the news wires lit up in the hours following the announcement, one can almost hear some of the reporters scratching their heads. In my experience, (more often than not) reporters who cover these topics find themselves struggling with the perceived banality of "self-publishing" as a concept (see previous posts). The analysts quoted in the press on the Amazon/Booksurge announcement seem to have gotten it right for the most part, pointing out that publishing to niche markets is very much the future of all media.

One good, albeit brief, story from The Book Standard notes that Amazon.com is far from the only gorilla hunting these grounds, describing "a trend whereby publishing companies are aggressively looking for ways to tap into the POD market. Simon & Schuster recently announced that it will start selling its backlist titles directly to consumers through its website. Perseus, one of the largest independent publishers, also announced its purchase of Client Distribution Services (CDS), a company that distributes titles by indie publishers, such as Harvard Business School Press."

More evidence that the big guys are struggling to come up with business models that can take advantage of the long tail, and more evidence that Lulu will continue to shake things up with its creator-to-consumer model for content distribution.

MacNewsWorld

Amazon to buy BookSurge Miami Herald, FL - 6 hours ago Amazon.com is buying BookSurge, which prints books on demand. It has more than 10,000 titles, many of them out of print. BY RICH ZAHRADNIK AND GREG WILES. ... Amazon Buys BookSurge Red Herring Amazon Buys On Demand Player BookSurge InternetNews.com Amazon Buys Private BookSurge Reuters InternetWeek.com - New Ratings - all 127 related »

SkyWest ups Bombardier order The Wichita Eagle, KS - 8 hours ago ... Amazon.com Inc., the world's largest Internet retailer, has acquired BookSurge LLC for an undisclosed amount to enter the print-on-demand book business. ...

In the papers 5 April ElectricNews.net, Ireland - 5 hours ago ... The Wall Street Journal says that Amazon.com has acquired BookSurge, a company that provides print-on-demand services and sells foreign language and out-of ...

Amazon Taps into POD Publishing Book Standard, NY - 17 hours ago By Rachel Deahl. Online book retailer Amazon.com has purchased BookSurge LLC, a book printing and fulfillment business based in Charleston, SC. ...

SCE&G settles on base-rate proposal The State, SC - 6 hours ago ... Monday. Terms of the deal with BookSurge LLC were not disclosed. The company offers an inventory-free book fulfillment network. ...

White Nile waits for Sudan deal
Guardian, UK - 13 hours ago
... Amazon.com said yesterday it had bought the privately held firm BookSurge, which maintains a catalogue of books that users can print on demand. ...

USA Today on Independent Publishing

USA Today sticks a foot into the "long tail" fray today (without mentioning the long tail theory specifically, mind you) with this article on the revolution in independent publishing: "Making Mini-Spielbergs,"  which comes with a helpful infographic and mini-story that should be all about Lulu, but for some odd reason isn't: "Self-Publishing Made Easy."

I'm glad this topic has gained momentum recently, and I'm still waiting for Time or Newsweek to take note of the fact that Bob Young, the man who first rode the open source phenomenon to riches, is now applying the same principles to publishing. But on the other hand, the niche-publishing angle (see this recent piece on Noveau Niche in the newsletter Trendwatching) is not entirely new. One of the best reports I ever heard or read on this topic was a series that NPR reporter Rick Karr did three years ago called "TechnoPop: The Secret History of Technology and Pop Music."

By the way, Chris Anderson wrote an op-ed for the LA Times on the Grokster case this week that defended the interests that independent artists and publishers (whom he describes as "creative amateurs") have in open distribution systems like BitTorrent and Grokster:

The Amazons, EBays and iTunes of the world have broken through the distribution bottlenecks. Increasingly, their endless aisles of shelf space hold not just the manufactured hits of the traditional media and entertainment powers but also the remarkably diverse output of countless niche producers. Each may not sell a lot, but together they represent a cultural force that can rival the mass market.

Anderson also mentioned it in his blog, which as usual drew some good comments.