I spent the early part of the week at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. I can attest that despite all of the bad news in book publishing these days, there are still a lot of inspiring people making great things happen. I’d highly recommend watching the videos. Standouts for me are Corey Doctorow, Jason Fried, Sara Lloyd and Tim O’Reilly.

Biggest take-aways from the week (besides DRM is dead) are:

1) Content should be customizable. The free version, premium version, phone version, etc. can all exist together. Let the customer drive the format and delivery and tell you how they want their content. Listen to your customer. Content needs to travel with a lot of functionality and social potential. Mobile reading is going to explode. Phones are everywhere.

2) Free and paid can co-exist. Don’t get caught in the “nobody will pay” mentality. People are paying for access to information. The internet is not free! People pay for basic service. “Paid is coming back big time.” — Tim O’Reilly We have to reinvent what it means to add value. As American Express says, “Membership has its privileges.”

3) Curation still matters. The job of a publisher is to confer status.

4) The tribalization of business is extremely powerful because it’s letting humans behave the way we were built to behave. Communities done right are self-perpetuating and don’t need ads or marketing. They will recruit on their own, are passionate, and want to be with others.

5) If you have an IT department that can’t make it happen the next day, you’re in trouble.

6) How do you NOT find time to be on Twitter? (Tim O’Reilly)

7) Don’t just make announcements. Talk about issues that matter to you.

8 ) Share what you learn. Be disclosive.

9) Read the Digitalist blog.  I have been a fan, but when I saw Sara Lloyd speak on Manifesto 2.0: What Does the Future Look Like For Publishers, it was a profound experience — not to mention that 8 out of 10 of her top TOC list would have been the same as mine  had I not gone to read her blog before I wrote mine. Now I can add a few others.

10) “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Tim O’Reilly

There are a handful of billboards in Manhattan that are branded into our minds. We take these visual signposts for granted until one day they’re gone (I’m thinking of the Coca-Cola ad in Times Square, or the DKNY ad in Soho). Recently, I did a double take on Houston Street: That purple, blinking Yahoo billboard, the one above the gas station, had been supplanted by one of Pepsi’s new ads. Much has been written about the Pepsi campaign (see Gawker and Businessweek). Critics have claimed they ripped off Obama’s logo, though this mind-blowing internal document suggests otherwise.

I found this particular ad on Houston Street so compelling I actually snapped a photo: Could there be a more of the moment message for a billboard downtown, (one that no doubt costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent) than….POP? That it replaces a long standing Yahoo ad makes it all the more brilliant. Good work guys.

- Julia

Rich Mintz is someone who understands the Internet. As a Vice President of Blue State Digital (the team who handled Obama’s now-famous online campaign strategy), he’s a good person to talk to about how new technology is forcing the book industry to evolve. Yesterday, we asked Rich what he thought about the recent New York Times story on the Kindle and here’s what he had to say:

Why should e-books cost the same as physical books, just because some publishing company’s profit model would be disrupted otherwise?

As a heavy consumer of books (and a former independent bookstore owner), I’m not particularly interested in what publishing executives tell me books should cost — what matters to me is what the market tells me they actually do cost.

If the market as a whole can produce and distribute printed books profitably for $27.99, it seems to follow that it can produce and distribute e-books (which are logistically much simpler) profitably for $9.99. Empirically, the market is doing so now — and, over time, the prices of e-books will fall further, as book distributors figure out (as Apple did) that lower prices will result in higher volumes, revenues, and profits.  Simon & Schuster, and everybody else, will either get with the program or be left behind.

I’m afraid that the publishing industry is at just about the point where the music industry found itself in 2004: insisting on an old pricing model, even as the rest of the world routed around them and created a new one. There’s nothing magical or eternal about the old economics of book publishing, any more than there was anything magical or eternal about horse-and-buggy transportation, or the telegraph.  When a new model came along that the market decided was better, the new model won.

None of this is to say that the coming adjustment won’t be difficult or disruptive or painful.  But, on principle, I have no sympathy for business executives who tell me that the price of something “should” be higher than the market says it is.  Amazon is already selling enough e-books at $9.99 (presumably without losing money either for itself or for the publishers) to demonstrate that e-books can be sold for less than hardcover retail; ergo, they will be.  End of story.

In the traditional questioning model of HarperStudio, Bob doesn’t entirely agree:

I agree that e-books should be priced lower than physical books.  But I don’t agree that being profitable at $27.99 translates to being profitable at $9.99.  It only costs us about $2.50-$3.00 less for us to publish the e-book, not $18.00 less.  The right price is certainly one that a consumer will pay, but we won’t have books for them to buy if authors and publishers can’t make any money.  So we need to find the right pricing somewhere between the hardcover list price and the money-losing $9.99 that Amazon is teaching consumers to expect.

What do you think?

In the meantime, found a good laugh on the Thingology blog.

Whenever we post a blog about e-books, people comment that they should cost just a few dollars, or even be free — so I asked Bob to please explain the publisher’s costs:

There seems to be a common refrain in many discussions of e-books, the idea that publishers should charge next to nothing for e-books because it doesn’t cost publishers much to produce them.  This reflects a lack of understanding of a publisher’s costs.  The cost of manufacturing a book is only the final cost in an extensive process.  Whether a book is printed on paper and bound or formatted for download as an e-book, publishers still have all the costs leading up to that stage.  We still pay for the author advance, the editing, the copyediting, the proofreading, the cover and interior design, the illustrations, the sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity, and the staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible in these stages.  The costs are primarily in these previous stages; the difference between physical and electronic production is minimal.  In fact, the paper/printing/binding of most books costs about $2.00…so if we were to follow the actual costs in establishing pricing, a $26.00 “physical” book would translate to a $24.00 e-book…and while I agree that e-books should be priced at a greater discount to hardcovers than $2.00, we need to move the conversation beyond the idea that e-books “don’t cost publishers anything to make.” — Bob

We’re a little late to the party, but here goes…

1. We spent an enormous amount of our first few weeks as a group buying and then rejecting a series of coffee machines.

2. Our copier breaks down an average of ten times a day.

3. Our working title for a book with Heifer International, suggested by Julia, was “For the Love of a Cow.”

4. We are trying to eat more healthfully, but Katie’s mother keeps sending us See’s Candies from California, which we polish off within seconds of arrival.

5. Debbie always has her laptop in front of her, even during meetings. She is capable of sending as many as fifty e-mails during a half-hour conversation.

6. Despite allegedly representing futuristic publishing, Bob has others post his blogs and only recently learned how to copy and paste.

7. Sarah Burningham could give Martha Stewart a run for her money

8. We prefer yelling down the hall to meetings.

9. Katie Salisbury speaks Chinese.

10. After working on Green Porno with Julia our intern Yitz said “I’ve never had to write the word penis so many times in my life.” 

11. Ezra Miller has been known to call Julia “J-Rod”

12. Debbie’s office is unofficially called “the clubhouse”

13. At HS Twitter is a noun, a verb, and a way of life.

14. For Christmas, Bob baked from scratch, hundreds of little gingerbread loaves for all of our colleagues and authors; Sarah and Katie wrapped them up like little elves; Julia and Debbie did nothing but sheepishly say “you’re welcome” to all those who thanked us.

15. We eat most lunches in the office (aka “the clubhouse.” See #12) — but try to invite one new interesting person up every day to dine with us. For many months we ordered the same thing from the same place: ‘Wichcraft. We’ve just started to venture beyond the ‘Wich.

16. We have 3 fabulous interns who work for college credit: Yitz, Kathryn, and Martha.

17. Before we started our blog we spent a month sending each other practice blog posts. Debbie’s posts often got vetoed by Bob. Bob’s were too long at the beginning — but now we call him Blogger Bob because he’s got the hang of it. Sarah and Julia’s were always perfect.

18. Before we post a blog, we email it to each other and all hold hands and agree that it’s ok to post.

19. We’ve just moved into new offices – still on the 26th floor – which means this is Debbie’s 4th office at HarperCollins, Bob’s 3rd, Julia’s 3rd and Sarah’s 4th.

20. Debbie has become the office online “news” master and often knows about breaking news before the news-breakers themselves.

21. Bob tells us that he plays the cello, but we’ve never actually seen it.

22. Katie loves PIX. And DAM. And Telescope. And CDW. All of which are separate systems to route various elements of each book.

23. Sarah and the web developer don’t even introduce themselves on the phone anymore. They talk that much.

24. Katie is the floor fire warden, and Debbie is the “bathroom checker” in case of emergency.

25. Bob is obsessively on time. The rest of us aren’t. Therefore we usually go to meetings separately.

Photo courtesy: New York Times

“This is what it means to be a nurse in oncology, a no-win situation where compassion routinely gets hijacked by grief.” - Theresa Brown

We were all moved by Theresa Brown’s recent Q&A Can Nurses Care Too Much? on the New York Times. Theresa is working on a book for us, CRITICAL CARE: One Year on the Floor, and brings such an honest, personal element to the question of what it really means to care about your work, and ultimately for another person.