Tom McCluskey

Pigs in Space!

I think the misguided focus of most publishers’ websites is due to people still, even 15 years after the rise of web commerce, not really understanding how to use the internet. It doesn’t fit neatly into the business models that people are used to, which means that the web becomes the problem of someone who’s mostly worried about other things. I imagine the general train of thought is essentially that the web is probably not the responsibility of editing, or acquisitions, or even design, and it’s surely not accounting’s problem, and since it deals with communication and ads and things, we might as well just make it marketing’s problem. Marketing grudgingly accepts this responsibility, shrugs, and move on, doing the same sorts of things online that they do offline: trying to sell books. They look around and see that pretty much everyone else is doing the same type of thing, and they look at Amazon and see how much potential for profit there is in connecting directly to readers, and they think “Well, that must be what we need to do.” So they carry on trying to sell books online.
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One of the most challenging things about new technology is having to adapt to it and not being able to predict how it will influence things. I’m particularly interested in RSS feeds in this regard. Feeds are great, because they make it really easy to check a number of blogs that you’re interested in, without having to actually go to the site in question to check to see if there’s new content. It’s incredibly convenient; I subscribe to almost 30 feeds, some of which are only updated once or twice a week, and others that give me 30+ new articles a day. That’s great for site owners, because it means that they know there are people regularly reading the stuff they write.
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The growing dominance of Amazon in the bookselling and publishing world is bound to have an impact on the world of books, but that impact will be different for different sectors of the industry. Bookstores will be the hardest hit by the competition with the internet giant; Borders, Barnes and Noble, and Books a Million are all down in sales for the holiday season, while Amazon is doing fine. This trend will probably continue, at least as long as our current economic woes do. Amazon tends to be cheaper than any of the big box stores, even if you end up having to pay for shipping, which makes it the more economical choice. A big part of a physical bookstore’s appeal is the ease of browsing around through the shelves and finding little treasures that you didn’t know you were looking for, and that kind of browsing is something that people in an economic crunch will be less likely to do. For the bookstores, then, Amazon is a real problem.
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While poking around O’Reilly’s TOC blog, I came across a review of a pretty interesting new site. Or service. Product, maybe? It’s called Shortcovers, and it’s from the people at Indigo Books and Music, a large Canadian retailer. Essentially, it’s an iPhone app (though one would assume that they will also be looking into making their service available for other smart phones) that combines the content delivery of a iTunes with the community orientation of a site like goodreads. When the site goes live next month (their iPhone app is still making its way through Apple’s approval process), after getting the app you will be able to download the first chapter of any number of books for free. Chapters beyond the first will be available for a fairly low price–about 99 cents. As Walt Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal points out, that will be a real boon for people looking for just part of a travel book or a business book. You will also be able to buy the whole book through Shortcovers, or even order the print book along with (and often bundled with) the eBook. eBooks bought through Shortcovers will typically sell for about half the publisher’s list price, according to Mossberg.

In addition to buying eBooks, people will be able to use Shortcovers to recommend books, talk about them with their friends, rate them, and even make “mixes” of chapters of different books and upload their own writing. It’s this community focus that intrigues me most about Shortcovers. People like to talk about the books that they like, and combining book selling with discussion groups seems like a very sharp move

So I’ve been thinking a bit lately about fantasy and sci fi and how they differ–particularly about the kinds of stories they allow us to tell and the kinds of things they allow us to talk about. On the surface, they’re both pretty similar forms; they aren’t particularly connected with the “real” world, and there are all sorts of strange new things. There are those who will argue that the difference is that sci fi is based in reality and is just an extrapolation of what we already know, while fantasy is purely imaginary and not based on anything in particular. I would disagree, though–fantasy has just as much internal logic as sci fi does, and sci fi has just as much imagination as fantasy does. Read the rest of this entry »