House of Cards

Netflix purchases the rights to stream movies and television shows. If the owners of the rights decide to significantly raise prices or to not do business with Netflix the existence of Netflix streaming is in jeopardy  One strategy that Netflix is employing to address this problem is to create their own content. They spent $100 million to fund the series "House of Cards."

By owning the content Netflix can protect itself in different ways. The price cannot be raised for content they own and they can also keep content away from their competitors. Netflix is a subscription service and unique content can be used to draw new customers to the service.

In regards to ebooks libraries have similar problems to Netflix. Some publishers refuse to make ebooks available to libraries while others have significantly raised cost of accessing ebooks by libraries.

What if libraries had a "House of Cards?" If a consortium of libraries purchased the exclusive rights to a book they could draw users with this content. The book would not have to be restricted to the ebook format. Libraries could also have the book in print as part of library collections.

Penguin to Expand E-Book Lending

Major book publishers and libraries have been sparring for months over acceptable terms for making e-books available for lending. From time to time, they find some common ground.

The Penguin Group plans to announce on Monday that it is expanding its e-book lending program to libraries in Los Angeles and Cleveland and surrounding areas though a new distribution partner. In a pilot program that will begin this year, Penguin has worked with Baker & Taylor, a distributor of print and digital books, to start e-book lending programs in the Los Angeles County library system, which will reach four million people, and the Cuyahoga County system in Ohio.

Full article

E-reading still quite feasible without steady power supply

Teleread story about using an ebook reader due to the power outage caused by Hurricane Sandy.

I came home from the Charleston Conference with a couple of new thoughts

Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin has this commentary after attending the Charleston Conference: I came home from the Charleston Conference with a couple of new thoughts

Librarian ‘Rules for Reading’ from 1937

Librarian Christian Sheehy posted some “Rules for Reading” she discovered in library archives from 1937.

Why Knockoffs Are Good For The Fashion Industry

Piece on NPR about knockoffs and the fashion industry. 

During New York Fashion Week, designers will present looks that you might find in a department store next spring ... or, as knockoffs at Forever 21. That's because copying fashion designs is perfectly legal — and that's a good thing, if you ask Kal Raustiala.

Raustiala is the co-author of a new book called The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation. He talks with NPR's Renee Montagne about who copies fashion designs, why it's legal and how copying ultimately benefits the consumer and the industry.

Your friendly logger says, "Buy the real thing - real books printed on real paper."

In 2000 Microsoft put out a timeline predicting what would happen the next 20 years with ebooks. It is now 2012 and you can see the prediction for 2012 below.

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2000- Microsoft's Reader software for PCs and laptops ships. Customers buy more than one million eBook titles the first year it is available.

2002- PCs and eBook devices offer screens that are as sharp as paper, with 200 dpi physical resolution, and an effective resolution of about 500 dpi with ClearType.

2003- eBook devices weigh less than a pound and run for eight hours on a charge. Costs run from $99 for a simple black and white device to about $899 for the most powerful, color magazine-sized machine.

2004- The Tablet PC becomes a mainstream option for computing. It is a pad-sized device that supports writing as well as eBook reading, and runs powerful computer applications in a slate form factor. More than half of all eReading is done on PCs and laptops, but dedicated eBooks, handheld machines and now Tablets account for the other half.

2005- eBook title and ePeriodical sales top $1 billion. Many serial publications are given away free with advertising support that now also totals more than $1 billion. An estimated 250 million people regularly read books and newspapers on their PCs, laptops, and palm machines.

2006- eNewstands (kiosks) proliferate on street corners, airports, etc. As usual, airlines offer customers old magazines on the flight, but the magazines are now downloaded to eBook devices.

2008- eBook titles begin to outsell conventional volumes in most countries. The price of a new bestseller title is about $8-$10, but unit sales are much larger than average paper sales for similar titles a decade ago.

2009- Several top authors now publish directly to their audiences, many of whom subscribe to their favorite authors rather than buy book-by-book. Some authors join genre cooperatives, in which they hold an ownership stake, to cover the costs of marketing, handle group advertising sales and sell "ancillary" (that is, non-electronic) rights, including "paper rights." Major publishing houses survive and prosper by offering authors editing and marketing services, rather than arranging for book printing. Printing firms diversify into eBook preparation and converting old paper titles to electronic formats.

2010- Popular eBook devices weigh eight ounces, run for more than 24 hours, offer beautiful non-backlit displays, are available in flexible/foldable form factors, and hold more books and magazines than most university libraries. They cost less than $100 and are often given away free with the purchase of several books or a magazine subscription.

2011- Advances in non-volatile chip storage, including Hitachi's Single Electron terabit chip, allow eBooks to store 4 million books - more than many university libraries - or every newspaper ever printed in America.

2012- The pulp industry mounts its pro-paper "Real Books" ad campaign, featuring a friendly logger who urges consumers to "Buy the real thing - real books printed on real paper." 

2018- In common parlance, eBook titles are simply called "books." The old kinds are increasingly called "paper books."

2020- Ninety percent of all titles are now sold in electronic rather than paper form. Webster alters its First Definition of "book" to mean, "a substantial piece of writing commonly displayed on a computer or other personal viewing device.".

Getting books to #1 on Amazon

This book (Wicked Success Is Inside Every Woman) is currently #1 on Amazon. Amazon maintains a page of books that are movers and shakers and this book has moved up the most of any book I have ever seen. It went from a sales rank of 335,530 to 1. Amazon list this as an improvement of 33,553,000% increase.

A few things to note. The book is published by Wiley and at least once a year a motivational or get rich quick book published by Wiley jumps to #1 on Amazon. Here are two other titles that have done this in previous years:

Multi-Family Millions: How Anyone Can Reposition Apartments for Big Profits


Bailout Riches!: How Everyday Investors Can Make a Fortune Buying Bad Loans for Pennies on the Dollar

What surprises me is that they clearly have a system to kick books to #1 on Amazon. If they offered to sell this method it would be more useful than some of the fly by night get rich quick schemes being peddled by these books.

Like the other Wiley books the Wicked Success book has some similar characteristics. If you run searches online looking for media attention that might be driving the sales of these books you find none. One thing I have noticed with all these books is that they are able to go to #1 on the day they are released or the day before they are released. One of the other books mentioned above had gone to #1 and all you could do was pre-order it. I think the trick they do is order a thousand copies before the book is officially on sale on Amazon. This pushes the book up to #1 then they cancel all the orders. Amazon reflects orders into the sales rank within an hour or so of a sale so you would get the benefit of the sale for sales rank even if you cancelled the order. I am a little surprised that Amazon has not found a way to keep people from gaming the system like this.

Various models of a Netflix style book collection on Amazon

Some news reports have been announcing that Amazon is considering creating a Netflix style program for ebooks.

See:
Amazon eyes Netflix for e-books: A move to get more Prime subscribers

or

Amazon as a 'Netflix for Books'? How Reading Changes

I wanted to look at some of the options that Amazon could take in regards to creating a Netflix style book collection.

Model 1: Amazon would have a collection of several thousand books. People would pay a separate monthly fee to access this collection. If you pay the fee you have full access to the books in the collection. You could open and read any book in the collection while you are a member.

Model 2: Amazon would have a collection of several thousand books. People would pay a separate monthly fee to access this collection. You could access a selected number of books per month. Number you could access would likely be 2-3 books per month.

Model 3: Same as Model 2 but the 2-3 books you “access” would be yours to read in perpetuity on your Kindle. In Model 2 when you cancel your plan you would no longer have access to the books. In Model 3 the books you select you could continue to read after the plan ends.

Model 4: Amazon users that paid a monthly fee could access any two Kindle books per month including new releases. Example: You pay Amazon $10 per month. A new Kindle ebook is released and it cost $14.99. As a member of the plan you could read this book for no additional cost beyond your monthly subscription fee. Every month you could select any two books to read as part of the plan. Model 4 is different from Model 3 in that you would not be limited from selecting Kindle books from a specific pool but could select any Kindle book. I would assume that there would be some kind of limits. For example textbooks would likely be excluded from this plan.

Comments:
From some of the news stories I have read it sounds like Amazon is leaning towards Model 2. I am assuming that they are leaning towards this model because it would be less threatening to publishers.

I think that publishers would be fairly safe with Model 1 because you can physically look at only so many books per month. If you did not have access to the collection when you were not a member there would not be a fear about someone getting a 1 month subscription, downloading a thousand books, and then cancelling their subscription. On Netflix if you cancel your subscription you no longer have access to the collection. Models 1 and 2 reflect this Netflix style. (I would argue that Model 1 is closest to what Netflix currently has) Model 3 and 4 would allow having access to the books even after you were not a member. Neither Model 3 nor 4 allow you to download a huge number of books so there is not too much possibility for abuse.

Questions:

What model would you like to see Amazon adopt?

Have you thought of a model that is not listed?

What impact do you think this will have on publishing, book prices, and libraries?