Digital zooms, yet profits decline

Well, that is the news from Bloomsbury, including the astounding tidbit that over the past six months e-book sales have increased eighty-nine percent.

Bloomsbury reported results for the six months ending August 31, with continuing pre-tax profits falling 40 percent to £0.9 million, even as sales rose 2 percent to £43.5 million. With recent acquisitions the academic and professional division now comprises 28 percent of company sales, though "academic sales peak at the beginning of the academic year, in September and October."

And the Harry Potter fall-out has had a dire effect on children's book sales.

 

Sales at the adult division were flat (and down 5 percent before acquisitions), while children's and educational sales fell 23 percent and operating profit in that segment disappeared, blamed on the comparison to last year's Harry Potter sales tying in to the final movie.

BUT eBook sales for the period grew 89 percent to £4.5 million, comprising 10 percent of all sales and 15% of adult sales.

 

Read the release to see what the company has to say.  An upbeat quote: "With our Academic acquisitions over the last 16 months, our global restructuring in 2011, our ongoing innovation in digital and our continuing strong balance sheet, the Group continues to progress with its strategy and is well positioned for the future."

 

The market, it seems, isn't listening. Bloomsbury's stock is down over 5 percent today on the earnings decline.

Is a combined Random House/Penguin the publishing future?

A combination of two powerful publishing houses?

GalleyCat and Beattie's Bookblog (link to the right), discuss news that is going to shake the global publishing industry to the core.

Today Pearson (the corporate parent of Penguin) confirmed that the publishing company is considering “a possible combination of Penguin and Random House.”

Pearson had this statement: “Pearson confirms that it is discussing with Bertelsmann a possible combination of Penguin and Random House. The two companies have not reached agreement and there is no certainty that the discussions will lead to a transaction. A further announcement will be made if and when appropriate.

So what has impelled this sudden revolution in thought? The strategic challenges of the booming e-book business, apparently. Together, the two publishers would have enormous clout, holding sway over a quarter of the US market.

According to early analysis, Bertelsmann (the corporate parent of Random House) would end up with a bigger than 50% share.  Is this enough to give Penguin cold feet?

Only time will tell -- but that time is likely to be soon.

And when ... if ... it happens, how will it effect New Zealand? Bertelsmann have a special interest in our beautiful and very literate little country, and so when ... if ... the merger goes ahead, I predict that something noticeable is very likely to happen to our local industry.

Nora Roberts ... and her 200th novel

This girl must be swimming in money

A full-page ad in the NYT?

Why?

Because it was the NRoberts novel # 200

Mind you, that is counting the ones with the author's name rendered as "J.D. Robb".

According to the advert, there are 400 million copies of her books in print ... and at 10% of whatever the cover price may be, that is a helluva lot of moolah.  She is definitely a millionaire.

Apparently, writing several books a year doesn't use up all her time and energy. In 2009 she and her husband opened a B&B in Boonsboro, MD.

It has eight rooms.  Each is named after a famous loving couple.  Rochester and ... ?  I guess you all guessed Jane. But Percy and Marguerite?  You have to be pretty ancient to remember The Scarlet Pimpernel, perhaps -- but it is an indication of Ms. Roberts's bookshelf. And then there is Eve and ... WHO? A couple of characters in a Roberts novel, apparently.

There's an interesting NYT story about the romantic inn.  It includes the tidbit that -- oh, dear lord -- it was opened on St. Valentine's Day.  But, as it also indicates, it's a lot more affordable than you might expect-- $220-300 a night.

And children under 12 aren't welcome. 

The booming self-publishing industry

Respectability works:  There are more Indie Authors than ever

Digital Book World quotes facts and figures from the Bowker market report that testify to a self-publishing boom

In 2011, there were about 235,000 self-published titles in the U.S., and about 87,000 of them were e-books.

While most self-published titles are still print books (some 63%), the e-book category is growing faster. E-book self-publishing production is up 129% since 2006, versus a gain of 33% for print over the same period.

So, where are the Indie authors heading to produce all these books?

It seems that a few larger players dominate the e-book self-publishing market, according to the report. Author Solutions (47,094 titles, now owned by Penguin) and Smashwords (40,608 titles) led the way but Lulu wasn’t far behind (38,005). Outside of these three and Amazon’s CreateSpace, which dominates the print side of self-publishing, no other company has more than 10% market-share.

And authors are winning. In the past year, these self-publishing operations and smaller competitors have been battling for the favor of authors, offering lower prices, better services and other goodies to lure them to their platform.

FastPencil, one of these smaller competitors, just announced that it would offer some of its authors the opportunity to be printed and distributed via Barnes & Noble. Author Solutions offers authors 100% royalties on books published and distributed through the site, making its primary service free for many of its customers – this promotion was to end on July 4 but was extended indefinitely due to its success. The company also recently launched BookStub, a service where authors can sell their e-books in person using a credit-card sized voucher with a picture of the book cover on one side and a product code on the other. A new company called Your Ebook Team just launched and says that it offers authors “360 degree” service, from editorial to distribution. Lulu recently launched an “author advice” tool.

Digital rights

Digital pitfalls in your publishing contract

More people than ever are reading books on dedicated e-readers.

On the latest two Sydney-Wellington flights and the intervening cruise, I noted far more people reading on tablets and Kindles (Kindles in particular) than on actual books.  At a rough estimate, e-readers outnumbered print books and magazines two-to-one, but any error would be on the e-reader side.

People just love their e-readers (again, Kindles in particular), and the plus side of it, for both publishers and authors, is that it means that more books are being read. This digital development also means, however, that for authors there are new hazards to watch out for before signing that contract.

In the current New Zealand Author there is an excellent article by MAGGIE TARVER, discussing these pitfalls.  Point by point, this is what she covers:

TERM. It's a rapidly changing environment, and no one knows what the digital publishing scene will be like in two or three years. Don't sign away your digital rights for the full term of the contract. They might be worth a lot more money (ie., a bigger royalty share) next year.

ROYALTIES. Publishers typically offer about 20%. Don't take less than 25%. And specify the term.

AUDIO E-BOOKS. Watch that the digital rights clause doesn't impact on your audio book rights, which are typically worth a 75% royalty.

E-PUB AND MOBI. Make sure your contract stipulates that the digital format will be compatible with all e-readers. PDF just doesn't hack it, these days.

DIGITAL PUBLICATION DEADLINE. Give your publisher a deadline for putting out your book in e-format. As I know to my cost with the Wiki Coffin mysteries, you can wait, and wait ... and wait for your book to be available on Kindle et al, while the fans agitate and the publisher pays no attention.

OUT OF PRINT. Make sure that your book is officially OP (and therefore ready for you to reclaim) when the PRINT edition is no longer being issued. Don't find yourself in an Island of the Lost-type trap, where the publisher still deems it in print even though only the digital version is available. And, of course, just as in the old days, make sure that you have the right to reclaim the book as soon as it is deemed OP.

APPS. I still find this rather mysterious, but Maggie Tarver recommends that you make sure that all apps are negotiated separately. As far as I can tell, it's rather like the clause covering comic book rights in the old days.

Do you want to lend your e-book?

One of the frustrations of buying e-books is that you can't lend them to friends -- or borrow theirs.

Because of the DRM restrictions advised by Amazon when publishing on Kindle, this is usually impossible.

Now, according to this report from Digital Book World, DRM might be coming to an end.

Amazon Customer Inspires Wave of Anti-DRM Sentiment An Amazon customer who has not identified herself has alleged that Amazon has shuttered her account and removed access to her content without a good explanation. In response to the buzz on the Web, Amazon posted a short statement on its customer forum that casts some doubt on the original story. (Update: Reportedly, access to the account has been mysteriously restored. No word on that from Amazon yet.) Either way, the incident fomented some anti-digital-rights-management sentiment on the Web, with many on Twitter and email lists discussing how DRM makes the alleged action by Amazon a possibility and ways of getting around it. Some even went so far as to advocate breaking DRM and taking the files out of the Amazon ecosystem. Major publishers have been slowly taking steps in recent months to test what their business would look like without DRM. Macmillan has opened a DRM-free e-bookstore with its Tor imprint and HarperCollins recently launched a social-reading app that pushes customers toward a DRM-free e-bookstore. The incidence and effect of piracy on the e-book market is thought to be lower than in other digital media; expect to see more experiments like this from large publishers soon.

Bronze age writing to be deciphered

Breakthrough in world's oldest undeciphered writing

By Sean Coughlan

BBC News education correspondent

Experts working on proto-Elamite hope they are on the point of 'a breakthrough'

The world's oldest undeciphered writing system, which has so far defied attempts to uncover its 5,000-year-old secrets, could be about to be decoded by Oxford University academics.

This international research project is already casting light on a lost bronze age middle eastern society where enslaved workers lived on rations close to the starvation level.

"I think we are finally on the point of making a breakthrough," says Jacob Dahl, fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford and director of the Ancient World Research Cluster.

Dr Dahl's secret weapon is being able to see this writing more clearly than ever before.

In a room high up in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, above the Egyptian mummies and fragments of early civilisations, a big black dome is clicking away and flashing out light.

This device, part sci-fi, part-DIY, is providing the most detailed and high quality images ever taken of these elusive symbols cut into clay tablets. This is Indiana Jones with software.

It's being used to help decode a writing system called proto-Elamite, used between around 3200BC and 2900BC in a region now in the south west of modern Iran.

And the Oxford team think that they could be on the brink of understanding this last great remaining cache of undeciphered texts from the ancient world.

READ MORE

Amazon's next project

From Wired.com...

Facebook knows who your friends are. Google knows what you’re interested in finding on the internet. Amazon knows what you’ve bought, and has a pretty good idea of what you might want to buy next.


If you were an advertiser, which company’s data sounds most valuable to you? If you had a product you wanted to sell, which of those things would you most want to know?

In a digital economy where some of the internet’s biggest companies and the country’s richest people have built their fortunes on the ability to more precisely target ads, one company sits on a trove of data it has barely started to exploit. In internet advertising-speak, visitors to Amazon.com are further down the purchasing funnel than visitors to Google or Facebook. “The opportunity is huge,” says Marcus Pratt, director of insights and technologies for Mediasmith, a San Francisco digital ad agency. “With rich data on its users, Amazon is uniquely positioned to match advertisers with shoppers.”

In a recent note to investors, analysts at Baird Equity Research said they estimated Amazon would generate anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion in advertising revenue this year. Amazon won’t break out those numbers, and the estimate doesn’t put Amazon anywhere near the tens of billions Google makes from ads every year. But for a company whose main business isn’t selling ads but selling stuff, a billion dollars is far from nothing. And Amazon is just getting started.

READ ON

Obama learns from Julia

Or so it seems.

President Barack Obama “hammered” Mitt Romney in the second debate, as Julia Gillard famously did to her opposite number in the Australian Parliament last week.

Even pro-Obama commentators were very unhappy with his previous lack-luster performance, wishing aloud that he would take a few hints from the fiery Aussie Prime Minister.

And that is what he did, attacking Romney on his corporate past, presenting a different appearance entirely on stage at New York’s Hofstra University.

Philip K. Dick-inspired SF movie a hit

It’s all action in the theaters

Action, SF and outlaw thrillers have dominated the box office this week.

Liam Neeson’s action film “Taken 2” – the sequeal to his 2008 hit – is zooming to the top, closely followed by SF-action film “Looper,” which has earned over a million in Australia alone.

Aussie-dominated film “Lawless” is not doing badly, either.