We’ve linked to stories about BookMooch – a website that allows book lovers to swap books free of charge – before, but here’s a more in-depth look at the site and its creator, the young high tech millionaire John Buckman.
Even though BookMooch is free to members, the site generates an estimated half-million dollars in annual book sales for Amazon because of a browser plug-in called the Moochbar, which matches members’ book wish lists to Amazon’s retail inventory. For every 25 books swapped on BookMooch, at least one person buys a new book on Amazon through the Moochbar. BookMooch collects 8.34 percent on each of those Amazon sales.
“We’re making money by accident,” said Buckman, who spoke recently at a technology luncheon near his home in Berkeley, Calif.
[…]
What’s more, within the next nine months, Buckman expects to have the inventory of books–distributed among its members–that would rival that of the largest book wholesaler in the United States. BookMooch now has an inventory of about 480,000 books among its 70,000 trading members, but at its growth rate it should rival Ingram Book Company’s 1 million books by early 2009, Buckman said.
An online price war for books has broken out, pitching Amazon against some of Britain’s biggest publishers.
Amazon is angry that Penguin, Bloomsbury and others are discounting titles on their websites, encouraging customers to buy direct instead of using the online retailer.
As nice as it is to see an online book retailer getting a taste of its own medicine, the end result will probably not be good for books:
There are fears that Amazon may retaliate by regarding a publisher’s online price as the recommended retail price and applying its trading terms to that. If a publisher discounts a £20 book to £15 online and Amazon has a contract for a 50 per cent discount on the full price, Amazon would pay the company £7.50 instead of £10. Publishers say that this would be unfair and could ultimately drive up prices.
Library Thing, a social networking website for booklovers, is offering, for your browsing pleasure, the libraries of such luminaries as James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, and Adam Smith, mostly compiled from collections held by museums and estates.
Some libraries provide few surprises: for instance, Ernest Hemingway had about a million books on hunting, bullfighting, and the first World War. But on the other hand, there’s something very touching about picturing Tupac Shakur settling down with a nice cup of tea and The Diary of Anaïs Nin.
Penguin has just launched We Tell Stories, a series of online digital fiction, in collaboration with alternate reality game designers Six to Start. They’ve asked six authors to try to harness the capabilities of the Internet in the name of storytelling.
From the Penguin website:
Over six weeks writers including Booker-shortlisted Mohsin Hamid, popular teen fiction author Kevin Brooks, prize-winning Naomi Alderman and bestselling thriller authors Nicci French will be pushing the envelope and creating tales that take full advantage of the immediacy, connectivity and interactivity that is now possible. These stories could not have been written 200, 20 or even 2 years ago.
The first story, Charles Cumming’s 21 Steps, is a thriller set in Google Maps. The text of the novel is gradually revealed in blurbs as you use Google Maps to track the footsteps of the protagonist, first through the streets of London, and then further afield.
Coinciding with World Book Day, celebrated yesterday in the U.K., Faber and Faber publisher Steven Page added his voice to the chorus of supporters of new technology, in an op-ed piece in The Guardian. But unlike most Web 2.0 evangelicals, Page brings to the debate the ornery tone of an old-school pedant and snob, arguing in his somewhat muddled rant – in which he deftly drops a pitch for Faber’s new line of print-on-demand titles – that the digital future is a chance for serious, thoughtful writers to reclaim the publishing landscape from grubby Joe Public – with his incorrigible taste for celebrity gossip and “misery memoirs.”
“Technology, often feared by the bookish world, is a growing friend,” writes Page.
Global communities are gathering around common interests online, just as intellectuals gathered in cafes in 1900s Vienna. They are gloriously beyond corporate control and naturally antipathetic to the reductive mass market. We are only at the beginning of this social revolution. I am not an advocate of the life led online, but as broadband reaches all generations, genders and income brackets, so this will develop usefully…. Literature can thrive in these places.
And while Page’s overall perspective is fairly astute, it does read as though he is still somewhat flabbergasted by this newfangled Internet thingy: “We must provide content that can be searched and browsed, and create extra materials – interviews, podcasts and the like.”
Imagine the Book of All Species: a single volume made up of one-page descriptions of every species known to science. On one page is the blue-footed booby. On another, the Douglas fir. Another, the oyster mushroom. If you owned the Book of All Species, you would need quite a bookshelf to hold it. Just to cover the 1.8 million known species, the book would have to be more than 300 feet long. And you’d have to be ready to expand the bookshelf strikingly, because scientists estimate there are 10 times more species waiting to be discovered.
It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life. On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million.
Harvard University has adopted a new policy that may jeopardize the future of academic publishing. According to a piece on Bloomberg.com, the school’s professors have now been afforded much more leeway to publish their research for free online.
Harvard’s decision lends support to the growing open-access movement in academia, an approach opposed by journal-industry representatives who say bypassing journals and their peer-review process may harm the quality of published research.
“This is a large and very important step for scholars throughout the country,” Stuart Shieber, a computer science professor who sponsored the motion to adopt the new policy, said in a statement released after the vote. “It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated.”
The article gets at the other side of the argument by quoting Ian Russell, chief executive officer of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers in the U.K.:
Russell, who represents both nonprofit and commercial publishers, said journals enhance scholarly work through the peer review process, the prestige they carry and links to previous work.
“Why should that be free? That’s value-added material that publishers are adding over and above the raw material,” Russell said. “It’s like saying you can dig silver out of the ground, and therefore silver knives and forks should be free.”
Now that the crisis over parity and pricing has eased somewhat – at least for the moment – we can again turn our attention to a more pressing issue in books: how can we get them for free?
The easiest way to get free books is to work in publishing (or at, say, a publishing industry magazine), but there are millions and millions of readers – or, at least, thousands and thousands – out there who are not so lucky, and who are thus still paying money for books. And so, for them, here is the latest in free book news:
On the CBC Arts site, Sarah Liss writes about a new startup from a B.C. software developer. Protagonize, she explains, is “an online community devoted to the creation of ‘addventures,’ round-robin-style fiction in which users create and develop interactive stories.” It launched late in December, and so far, writes Liss, most users are creating stories in the Internet-friendly fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres.
However, this probably doesn’t represent the future of writing or anything. Creator Nick Bouton says, “Fun is the entire aim of the site,” while Liss describes it as “more of a Facebook-style community-interaction hub than a locus for creative development.”
Perhaps in conjunction with the 10thanniversaryofblogging, Guy Gavriel Kay has a piece in this past weekend’s Globe and Mail Books section about the perils facing authors in the digital age.
Gavriel Kay has a strong Web following himself and has been known to write blog-like diaries in conjunction with book tours, but that doesn’t mean he likes any of it. Overall, he believes the proliferation of chatter online has led to a decline in privacy.
For some of us, no context is “limited” any longer. That is the point I’m offering for consideration. And “some of us” can be pretty extensive. This isn’t about Brad Pitt or Amy Winehouse. Ask any high school student whose pratfall is recorded by a classmate’s camera phone and posted to YouTube. Or the microcelebrity (a nice term I first saw in Wired magazine) snapped while at a party looking less-than-sober, with the photo online immediately, to derision-inducing effect.
We are, in other words, always “on” now, at least potentially, always in a wider public than might appear to be the case, and it compels adjustments, and some regret.
Here, for example, is how he reacted when approached by four Yale students “with questions about other writers and their books”:
And I looked at them and “saw” four blogs, with links to a plenitude of others. Given the ease of searching blogs now - for my name, or those of the queried writers - it was suddenly impossible to treat this as a quiet exchange of thoughtful literary opinion. I was as careful as a politician in a scrum, all of us with teacups in hand in a beautiful room.
Now, Gavriel Kay may have a general point about the erosion of privacy in the wired world. But it’s difficult to understand his timid reaction given the students’ benign and unpersonal line of questioning. After all, a writer’s “thoughful literary opinion” is unlikely to come back to haunt him, even if it is circulated online. As Martin Amis pointed out in a recent essay, “What you say about something is never your last word on any subject.” Fear of being overheard certainly hasn’t kept Amis from running his mouth.
The inanities of the internet have seduced a generation, and we live in a fragmenting culture where people read nothing and know nothing of the world, the new Nobel laureate novelist Doris Lessing warned yesterday.
Lessing, described by the Nobel committee as “that epicist of the female experience”, has been in poor health, and the £750,000 Nobel prize for literature was presented yesterday in London, while a recording of her acceptance speech was relayed to the Swedish Academy hall in Stockholm. Her tone was profoundly pessimistic. Although she is still working hard at the age of 87, and she insisted the world would always need stories and storytellers, she also warned: “Writing, writers, do not come out of houses without books. We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned, and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing.
Though we’re fairly sure that well-educated know-nothings existed long before the Net, and though we happen to think that questioning certainties can be a very good thing, we take her point – especially when it comes to houses without books.
In publishing, where the problem has always been with books not selling, the hip, new trend appears to be not selling books. More and more authors are making their work available for free (sometimes with the expectation of a tip or donation), with the idea that, as with music, spreading the word(s) as widely as possible can only help build a writer’s profile. Paradoxically, it can even help sell books – Coach House Books used to post almost all of their new books, in their entirety, on their web site, with the assumption that few people would read an entire book online, but they might just read enough to order the ink-and-paper version. (More here.)
The latest to open the cage on her own work is Toronto author Sheila Heti, who has placed her entire first book, The Middle Stories, on her website, along with info on how to buy the real thing. (She’s even willing to walk to the post office to mail it.)
Given how short The Middle Stories is, it may work just as well on the screen as on the page. And we have to say, Heti’s clean, easily navigable scans of the book are a lot more readable than that Kindle thing.
In a sardonic post announcing his reluctant embrace of the blogosphere, Edmonton author Todd Babiak (The Book of Stanley, The Garneau Block) expresses his instinctive distaste for self-serving author blogs:
I used to make fun of writer friends who had websites and blogs. Given our busy lives, with families and jobs and leaves to rake and, most importantly, BOOKS TO READ, where was the time to express unconsidered opinions about, say, chocolate? Besides, it always seemed an embarrassing exercise in self-love. “Shoot me,” I remember saying, to my friend, William, “if I ever get a website. The sound of it: toddbabiak.com. Tasteless! Boorish! Actually, don’t shoot me. Stab me, with something that isn’t even sharp. Just press really hard, again and again.”
Three months later, I had a website.
Maybe Babiak is on to something here – after all, so few Canadian authors’ websites are truly compelling. That may be because, these days, the blogs people actually read tend to be more akin to news aggregators than personal diaries. All of the self-obsession of first-wave bloggers has generally migrated to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.
For now, though, Babiak shares his thoughts on chocolate, airport security, and watching a man throw up on a bus here.
As has been covered exhaustively in Q&Q and elsewhere, publishers have been spending a lot of time of late trying to make use of the promotional possibilities of Web 2.0 phenomena like YouTube, Facebook, and Myspace.
There are rules, however, as House of Anansi Press discovered when its Facebook profile was deleted without notice. Their crime? Facebook demands that each profile correspond to an actual person, and Anansi is, well, not a person. (Neither are some of the fictional characters who have created their own profiles on the site – such as a couple from Todd Babiak’s newest novel – but that’s another matter.)
Think of it like zoning: you can’t live in a mall, and – theoretically, at least – you can’t open a store in your living room.
In response, Anansi’s online content developer, Julie Wilson, has posted an “address to Facebook” on YouTube.
Authors and publishers who are still wondering what kind of information they should be putting on this thing called the Internet should take a look at the website D.F. Bailey has built for his new novel, The Good Lie (Turnstone Press). He’s got a detailed synopsis of the book, the first page of text, and book club questions – but that’s only scratching the surface. Also on the site are an essay about the genesis of the book, a “novel diary” with notes made during the years Bailey was writing the novel – including material that he cut from it – plus a bio of Turnstone editor Wayne Tefs, some of the e-mails that Tefs and Bailey traded regarding the editing of the book, and more.
He also links to Turnstone, though, sadly, his book doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the publisher’s own site. Sigh.
Anyway, Quillblog is impressed – blown away, even. And we have to wonder, if Bailey can do this without the support of a multinational publisher, why is a site like this one such a rarity?
We also can’t help contrasting such a generous, content-rich initiative with the recent embargo trend we’re seeing among large and medium-sized presses – the apparent desire to cling to information jealously.
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