The Objections

Among the objections to publishing on the Kindle are as follows.

1. Financial Reasons – the publishing companies just can’t make enough on an ebook compared to a print book.
2. Technical Reason – you just can’t execute the experience that you want on the Kindle.
3. Plain Old Stubbornness – publishers have made their money for centuries on a dead tree model and abandoning that while it is still viable and making money (although not as much as it used to) for a nascent technology that is selling a fraction of the numbers just doesn’t make sense. If you’re a member of the old guard and still cranking out best-sellers you’d likely rather stay entrenched.

Let’s look at each of these in more detail

The Stately Book Publisher

The last item on this list is unlikely to change anytime soon, so let’s tackle it first. The resistance to ebooks because they are, well, electronic books is largely a matter of changing a way of life and a belief system that has long dictated how the stately publishing industry makes their money.

Somewhere along the way, publishers got themselves confused with printers and typesetters. That is easy to understand because beyond maybe an editor or two and the author (who isn’t really an employee), most of the personnel at a publisher is concerned with taking words and putting them on paper, getting that paper to a store (be it by sales, marketing, warehousing, and shipping) and then getting people to buy that paper. The gap between people who care about the words on those pages – the author and reader) is populated with hundreds if not thousands of members of what is largely an assembly line. Those layout-techs, sales people, marketers, warehousers and shippers are unlikely to have even read any given book that is in their care. Publishers spend a lot of time and attention to streamlining this physical book creation process to squeeze out every last dime. Telling them that they should scrap all of that to deliver what is effectively a Word document rocks their world.

There is, however, sufficient momentum driving ebooks into the mainstream and publishers will eventually come around. It is just a matter of time. We have seen this process repeated in the music industry, the movie industry and now the newspaper industry (unfortunately, too late for many companies and employees who have lost their jobs in the process) and like it or not, it will happen to the book publishing industry. The best thing Amazon can do to drive this change is to sell more kindles and to get more ebooks into the marketplace. From that perspective, an Apple tablet and a B&N Nook are good things. It validates the ebook market both to the publisher and the consumer. Furthermore, if you think that a publisher is going to forsake the Kindle, to go exclusive on an the Apple tablet, you’re kidding yourself. How many record companies have made exclusive deals with Apple? How many companies would tell Wal-Mart to take a hike for the sake of selling through a boutique? Not many. More ebook devices only helps get more publishers involved and helps move Kindles and Amazon has a distinct advantage when it comes to selling books.

Publishers Make Less Money on eBooks

The standard argument that people make when talking about ebooks and price is that without the cost of paper, printing, warehousing and shipping, ebooks should be substantially cheaper for Publishers to produce and therefore should cost less for the consumer.

Presumably, the savings is passed on to the consumer rather than the publisher or reseller because the consumer is accepting an inferior product. As this market progresses, there will likely be room for debate (I personally prefer reading book son a kindle).

This argument is valid in theory and in a vaccuum. The truth of the matter is that the assembly line approach to book production involves a lot more moving pieces than these four elements and as long as you are creating a single book, the line runs anyway. Those items that you are eliminating by producing an ebook are all items of scale. You save money on printing and paper with every additional book that you produce. The truck runs whether you print 1000 books or 20,000. You don’t tear down the warehouse if it isn’t filled to the gills. Until you are creating exclusively ebooks and foregoing paper altogether, the difference in price just isn’t that straightforward.

At the end of the day, the ebook market is just too nascent and publishers don’t really know what the economic impact and opportunity cost of selling an ebook at a fraction of the cost of the printed book.

Based on back of the envelop calculations, for mass market paperback publishers, it is likely a no-brainer, the standard $9.99 Kindle book price is only a few bucks off the cost of their product an they likely do see a boost on not having to ship to every single store on the planet. The Kindle purchase model is largely an impulse model (cheap and easy) and that aligns well with what their current sales model.

For higher-end reference publishers it is a different story altogether. Take computer books (I could write another equally lengthy post on the topic, but will try and be brief here.). Here you have a product that is perfect for the Kindle…in theory. The core computer book audience these days is technical and generally populated with early adopters (they buy devices like Kindles). They are information hungry and used to spending a good deal of money on attaining knowledge as it can directly influence their income. The content is generally used in chunks and search can be absolutely critical. The idea of a small portable device populated with authoritative information on every relevant topic that can be rapidly accessed in a non-linear fashion is the stuff of wet dreams. Unfortunately, these books don’t sell at the same scale as mass market paperbacks. They sell primarily through a handful of resellers, and face much less uplift from the economy of scale. They also must be produced quickly in order to be relevant to the market as it stands today. For those reasons, they cost $40 – $80. For a computer book publisher, you have to sell a whole lot more Kindle books at $9.99 to make up for the potential loss of printed book sales. Try and sell a Kindle book at $40 and you lose that impulse purchase benefit that makes the device really shine.

Additionally, most computer book publishers saw demand for ebooks early and began work on their own solutions. Virtually all computer book publishers are part of Safari Online (a subscription based ebook service accessed via the web), so not only do they risk cannibalizing their paperback sales, but they erode at the sales of another channel from which they get to keep a much larger part of the profits.

So if you’re Amazon how do you make the Kindle more appealing to these publishers and in turn and better yet these consumers? Give the publisher a bigger piece of the pie. Give the publisher an extra $2.00 per book and maybe, just maybe the Kindle looks more attractive and less like a threat. It may not be the answer, but it is quick enticement whose lasting impact may outweigh the loss in revenue for Amazon.

The Kindle Doesn’t Do What I Want

For publishers at the other end of the spectrum of the assembly line inclined, the Kindle may be a little too close to the printed book. Amazon has done an admirable job of creating a product that matches very nicely what it is like to read fiction on paper. The problem is that it falls way short of what an always connected interactive reading device can and should do. Yes, it has note taking and highlighting capabilities, but, they are a bear to use and you can’t really do anything with the notes and highlights once you’ve made them other than revisit them on your computer. It seems like a device like the kindle has the potential to do much more.

• What if I could print a recipe from a cookbook?
• What if I could copy a line of code from a computer book and send it to my PC?
• What if I could take a highlighted section and send it to a friend?
• What if a college professor could see what parts of a text students found salient?

There is a lot of power that can extend the reading process and make it much more of an interactive activity. Something that a paper book could just never do. For reference and text book publishers, this can be really impactful stuff and can make a really compelling experience for the customer.

Amazon has already shown a desire to get into the textbook market with the introduction of the Kindle DX. By creating an SDK, they make it possible to extend books from simple reading material to an interface to the classroom. It also allows the professor to integrate texts even further into the curriculum by getting a better understanding of how students use the text. It also allows for greater flexibility with the device and for changes to be made on the fly (right now they do an occasional firmware upgrade, but that’s it). With an SDK, they can push new features and even outsource them to third parties to provide. That means the push back that they have gotten from the academic market based on accessibility for the visually impaired can be addressed with software and not new hardware and may be addressed by third-parties or the schools themselves.

Thanks to the Apple app store everyone assumes that apps on the kindle will be games and tip-calculators, but electronic reading devices ultimately are going to be transformative to the reading experience and it will be apps along those lines that will really make these things shine. Sure there will be gimmicks and add-ons, but for publishers who really care about the reader experience and how they can extend that experience beyond the page, the Kindle SDK is the first step to what is going to amount to a revolution.

The prospect of the Apple tablet is very exciting (heck, I’d buy one now sight unseen), but it – like the iPhone and PCs – is likely to be a multi-tasking device on which reading may be one activity. To assert that Amazon would be basing their Kindle strategy on a rumored technology product when there are already comparable multi-tasking devices in the market seems somewhat short-sighted. If they really were viewing this as competition, why wouldn’t they start adding other features of PCs? It is because Amazon’s goal is to create a great reading experience and to get as many books available on the Kindle as possible (just as the goal of iTunes is to get every song possible available for download to an iPod). It eliminates barriers to entry for consumers. To do this, Amazon is going to have to hone their strategy, and the functionality on the Kindle to appease publishers. I don’t think either of these announcements were entirely unexpected in the big scheme of things. Just as if Amazon were to announce the introduction of a color screen, it would not be a reaction to the Apple tablet, but again, a step towards creating a better experience for the customer and the publisher.

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Weightwatchers.com has a feature in their meal tracker that allows customers to track important metrics each day – things like taking a vitamin, drinking 8 glasses of water, and participating in a fitness activity. Many of these like the 8 glasses a day allow you to track multiple instances of the same item. What confuses me is that for some of these items, the requirements for nursing mothers (and in some circumstances for people over certain weights) are higher than those for than for the average Joe. In these cases, the developers include enough instances of the item in the interface to accommodate the high-end of the number.

Okay, I get it, it is better to serve the high-end than the low-end, since you can just leave some blank, but that requires that you read the instructions in the tool-tip (which usability studies will show you is an activity very few people undertake). I am also sure that Weight Watchers has a larger share of nursing mothers and people over specific weight thresholds than almost any other site on the web, but I would still have to believe that these are edge cases and arbitrary ones at best. What about diabetics and those with eating disorders, why not design to their needs as well.

It is clear that Weight Watchers has put a lot of time and thought into their site design and functionality (and it has certainly come along way in the last few years), but it is usability oversights like this drive me absolutely batty. They collect a significant amount of information when customers register. Why not leverage that to customize their interaction with the site? It would be clear from a quick glance at my info that I meet neither criteria for the expanded quantities and they could simply be hidden on my screen.

Maybe I am just overly sensitive to this stuff. What is the best practice in cases such as this?

1. Go whole hog and leverage existing user data to customize for all cases.
2. Extend your functionality to cover a handful of minorities, but for the most part rely on a catch-all technique.
3. Go for the lowest common denominator.

I don’t really know which is right, but I am pretty sure that landing in the middle is not the answer.

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• The summer garden went in early this year just to provide me with a hefty supply of crisp head lettuce and arugula (which don’t do well during the warmer months).
• I upped the number of eggs that we get from the local CSA group to assure that I always have fresh mayo on hand (I use a couple of recipes from Ruhlman’s newest book, one for a pinch and one for more involved recipes).
• I have also been dabbling in some different bread recipes including a wheat and a sourdough on top of my favorite no-knead recipe.
• Even the tomatoes which are ample in Indiana in the summer got an early start.

I have a number of other different ingredients going in the garden as well so I can mix it up with squash, peppers, basil, etc. The big sticking point is the cheese, which I figure will likely come from a local farmer (Carpiole goat cheese can be had at the farmers market – another benefit to being in Indiana) or a stab at making some fresh mozzarella at home.

Of course there will be other food stuffs that emerge from the garden and the bounty of the CSA and the farmer’s market, but at the end of the day it is the sandwich that drives me. It’s a bit sad, too, because my wife doesn’t have the appreciation for the sublimeness of a well made sandwich and to me, there is no bigger gift you can give someone than food that you have nurtured from seed and lovingly prepared into a meal. I suppose that we should all have a bit more appreciation for our farmers with that thought in mind.

On another note, Ruhlman’s new book Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking is the finest cookbook (if you’d choose to call it that) that I have ever used. It transforms your kitchen into a pantry with basic stables and endless possibilities. Every serious cook should treat it as their bible.

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I find the changes taking place in the agriculture business to be really promising. I, too, am a vegetarian and couldn’t fathom eating goat, but I think diversification of the American pallet and a focus on producing really high quality small scale products is a good thing.

I am excited to see where all of this goes. Part of this whole economic conundrum that the world is going through is due to the fact that manufacturing and production (even physical labor in general) has been dying off as knowledge workers take over, and yet the bulk of knowledge work has been built around manufacturing and production (all those white collar jobs that the car industry is currently cutting). One of two things are going to happen (or more than likely both): we are going to change the way we think about paying for things and what we are willing to pay for no longer tying value only to a physical object, and there is going to be a return to craftmanship and a willingness to pay more for items that are well-crafted and thoughtfully produced. It seems that the food industry is on the leading edge of the latter as people are pushing back on mass produced and chain restaurants and focusing on fresh, small, and local.

The numbers of well-educated, former knowledge workers who are heading to the fields and workshops to focus on creative production work are increasing and I think that is a good thing for the well-being of our nation as a whole. This is a subject that deserves a lot more attention than this post and is something that I hope to revisit soon.

Addendum: There has been no bigger advocate for reforming the food that we as Americans grow and eat than Michael Pollan. In particular, he points to the fact that agriculture is currently more dependent on oil than sunlight. Jason Kottke raised the question recently as to whether either of our presidential candidates were aware of these issues and what their intent would be in addressing it. Today, he points to an article that indicates that it is in the very least on Obama’s radar. Pollan’s concerns may be found here and I highly recommend his books The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.

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A final similarity, in the words of R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at Cal Tech, is that both textbook publishers and drug makers benefit from the problem of “moral hazards” — that is, the doctor who prescribes medication and the professor who requires a textbook don’t have to bear the cost and thus usually don’t think twice about it.

The drivers are right in this market to start seeing some drastic changes and it seems some professors are leading the way be it by foregoing traditional publishing for electronic versions and print-on-demand, and even going so far as presenting courseware as wikis. (Link).

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With this diet metaphor in mind, I want to, if you like, start eating better. But, I also want to start growing a tastier tomato — regardless of how easy it is to pick, package, ship, or vend. The tomato is the story, my friend.

This doesn’t mean I’ll be liveblogging a lot of ham-fisted attempts to turn “everything” off. But it does mean making mindful decisions about the quality of any input that I check repeatedly — as well as any “stuff” I produce. Everything. From news sources to entertainment programming, and from ephemeral web content down to each email message I decide to respond to. The shit has to go, inclusive.

Merlin mentioned recently that he has been reading Here Comes Everybody. A fact that I find interesting since the concept of applying some heavy reverse osmosis to both what we take in and put out as denizens of the web is not really within the core concepts of the book. What Clay Shirky does do is provide meaning and a greater purpose to the work that is being done on the web. The inclusion of the word “work” is key to the concepts here since what most of us seem to be doing is playing. We do things because we can and because it’s there and for the most part because it’s free. At the end of the day though, it’s about producing high quality content that is of value to others and contributes to this collective effort that we are all just beginning to figure out. The concepts here apply well beyond the web, so even if your are not the habitual internet app tire kicker that I am, there is a lot to the It’s All Too Much mentality. Enough that I think this falls into the category of being well worth sharing.

What does this mean to me? That’s something that I intend to explore and share here a bit over the coming weeks.

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Mr. Bento is a tremendous modern (and Japanese!) replacement for the lunchbox: a bullet shaped container with four sub-containers that holds ample food and keeps them hot or cold depending on your needs. The problem with Mr. Bento is that there are four (and only four) containers within the outer container. It’s not really a problem, because it forces me to think about what I take to lunch and I try and match my dietary needs to these containers: fruits, vegetables, proteins and carbs in some variation. The questions is what happens to the excess (and for me the excess is the cheese to go with the crackers or the dressing to go with the salad)? Add them before the day begins and something is inedible and soggy when meal time rolls around. Dedicate salad dressing to one of the vessels and (gasp), I get deprived of food.

This is a plight that I have battled for some time. I even toyed with buying the massive (3500 count) of condiment cups sold at Costco to hold those miniscule repositories for, well, ‘damp stuff’ that I don’t want intermingling with my ‘dry stuff’. While this is a problem that I felt was unique to me in reality it is not. Mr. Bento is a commercial product that is sold by Amazon and other major retailers. Other people surely have this problem, but it’s not like I can go t a Mr. Bento support group and since they are a Japanese company, the web-based forums (if they exist) are not likely to be much help. This is truly a niche-community based issue. Although, it’s not likely that there are specific online communities dedicated to practical solutions to Mr. Bento shortcomings, so how to solve this problem?

In actuality, the solution came to me. And, it came to me in a community that I never would have expected. Today, in discussing Mr. Bento with my co-workers (it is quite the conversation piece), a co-worker pointed out to me that there was a “Mr. Bento Porn” group on Flickr. The group consists of decidedly G-Rated pictures of meals that people have packed into their Mr. Bento. The meals are impressively gourmet and packed with absolute precision – all 5,000+ of them. Among these 5,000 are more than a dozen solutions to my problem of separating wet from dry, from the aforementioned condiment cups to custom hello kitty containers. Problem solved.

It seems that every time I get comfortable with the resources the online world has to offer, something new springs up, some new way of looking at things, some new way of crowd-sourcing solutions. In this instance, the photo contributors had no idea that they would solve my problem. Hell, they weren’t even trying to solve a problem. They were just contributing information (in this instance a proud display of their perfectly packed lunch) and it helps someone in need (so to speak). And to think, 15 years ago, I would have had an owner’s manual (in Japanese) and a phone number (in Japan) to help me. AH, the magic of the interwebs, delicious, delicious interwebs.

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Reverse osmosis (RO) is a separation process that uses pressure to force a solution through a membrane that retains the solute on one side and allows the pure solvent to pass to the other side. More formally, it is the process of forcing a solvent from a region of high solute concentration through a membrane to a region of low solute concentration by applying a pressure in excess of the osmotic pressure.

This seems to go to my assertion, bearing in mind that gravity is a force in excess of osmotic pressure. Therefore I feel totally justified in my indignation.

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This is because the issue that I have encountered is so mind boggling, that I simply must address it. The issue is that Apple, masters of the user interface, seem to have left off the “working” icon. Apple pretty much invented the concept of a visual indication that the system is working on a request when they introduced the original Macintosh and an image of a watch showing the process. Virtually every computing system since has had some form of confirmation of a click and process in action.

MobileMe, however does not show processes (occasionally, a spinner appears when getting new mail) and leaves the user wondering whether their click has been registered at all. Click “delete”, and you are left to stare at a perfectly stagnant screen until (if you are lucky) the deleted item disappears. Double-click on the button and you are presented with an ambiguous error message explaining that the message cannot be found. Buttons don’t even have hover or click states! Say WHAT??? This is basic web design people!

I find it downright shocking that Apple of all companies would leave off something as fundamental as a feedback within their interface. It just shows how prematurely this product was pushed out the door.

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Academic publishing has been at the opposite end of the spectrum. Publishers rely on selling very large numbers of very expensive books and only every once in a while. They tend to sell to one buyer who makes a decision for an entire school system and delivers customers en masse. Lose an adoption in a given year either due to a pass or competition and your whole business is shaken.

For teachers, this means lessons are handed down from above and dictated my third parties. The content is either not time sensitive or is outdated. There is no way an educator truly shine under these circumstances.

Students, are forced to spend a fortune on books and haul around massive tomes that are not providing them with the optimal educational experience (I wonder what the weight of all of the wasted content that is either not correct, out-of-date, or simply not taught amounts to). To the extent that it has actually become a health problem. The necessary evil of that has arisen or the whole circumstance is the used text book which helps neither the publisher, book seller, teacher or student. Marked-up, torn, neglected, boogered. For anyone who has worked in publishing, it is a horrible sight.

So what could the Kindle text book bring to the party?

• Updated Content – The biggest crime of text books is that they become outdated and schools and students can’t afford to update every year. In some fields, every year isn’t often enough, content needs to be literally up to the minute. Electronic content is updatable and correctable. Errata can be eliminated and students can get an evolving and accurate product that is worth the purchase price. Truly forward thinking publishers will model on the software as a service model and maintain a continuous revenue stream that can mean a lower up front cost.
• Portable -I for one was well known for not having my materials at class. Heck, in college I would ride my bike to campus for 4 or 5 classes in a day, many of which required three or four books. In high school, I distinctly remember not having room in my locker for my books because books like my Biology text book attempted to capture the history of existence in a single 1800 page – hard cover! – tome. A Kindle could pack all of those materials into one compact device. Never mind the capacity to replace notebooks and handouts.
• Editable – Electronic content can be manipulated. That means that professors would be able to create a truly unique experience, integrating content from multiple sources, editing out content that does not apply to the curriculum and adding their own annotations. Notes could be integrated into the text on the fly.
• Searchable – The evolution of search has revolutionized how the web works and changed how we view information. It should have an equal impact on education. I had a Chemistry teacher who said it would be absolutely ludicrous for a professional chemist to rely solely on his memory and no other resources. For that reason, he allowed us any tool that we needed during our tests. Learning should not be about memorizing information, rather it should be based on researching information, processing that information and arriving at an informed result. With traditional text books, acquiring the information is often the bottleneck. Search allows for this to happen instantaneously, allowing the crucial processing to be where the work takes place.
• Integrated – Electronic content is interactive content. It is no longer a static part of the page. By integrating with the computer, students may combine information from multiple sources, and compile it into comprehensive works. Everyone of my generation is familiar with the dreaded bibliography, likely the most painful part of any project and entirely unrelated to the actual learning at hand. It seems like the application of high quality learning materials and some basic microformats could greatly facilitate this and would in turn make a teacher’s job much easier as well.

Of course, there are ample reasons why this concept scares publishers. Most of them fall under the headers of “piracy” and the protection of a precious business model.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about working in the publishing industry is the intrinsic belief that publishing is printing. There is a fear that when the relationship with the printer is compromised, the whole thing will go down the crapper. Publishers must understand that their job is in the production of high quality vetted content that provides the best possible experience for the audience. In the world of text books, ‘printed on paper’ does not fit the bill and the conservation of that business model hurts all parties.

With regard to piracy, paper is the worst of all DRM, while duplicating it is onerous, it is not impossible (hell, it is millennia old, I think everyone grasps how to take a word from one page to another). If you must have some form of protection here, it seems that a device like the Kindle, built explicitly with this challenge in mind would be the ideal route to go, layer that with a subscription model and you add another layer of protection.

The business model for text books has been broken for some time. A product like the Kindle could help solve some core issues and provide for a better experience for the student, academic institution, and publisher alike. The question comes down to whether the publishers will stray from their stately ways and embrace a tool that can truly serve the needs of their consumer.

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