The New York Public Library recently added some of their collections to Flickr including Albert Fernique photographs of the Statue of Liberty, some amazing Civil War era photographs, and the work of one of my all-time favorite photographers, Bernice Abbott.

Is it just me or does this feel major?

Penguin is generating a lot of buzz on Flickr for their gorgeously designed classics. Will more publishers start posting book jackets/ interiors on Flickr?

photo credit: Abbott, Berenice: Low winter sun
illuminates Seventh Avenue and the harbor brightly, buildings along
avenue almost silhouettes. Repository: The New York Public Library. Photography Collection, Miriam
and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs.

Kiwa Iyobe is a Trend Analyst & Brand Strategy Consultant at SUITE 2046, LLC

How much does packaging matter for books?

The old adage of “never judge a book by its cover” is becoming totally irrelevant. As the Kindle and other e-reading technology goes mass (yes, it is inevitable), what you’ll see is a polarization of the book-reading experience. Just as mp3’s killed the CD but oddly enough revived records and mixtape nostalgia, books will split into two camps: the cheap digital format to satisfy our need for disposable convenience, and the increasingly rarefied format of ink and paper to satisfy our need for beautiful objects and “authentic” experiences. The aesthetics of the physical book are increasingly important because it’s becoming fetishized. Like have you seen the hardback Penguins designed by Coralie Bickford-Smith? Just gorgeous.

Research shows that women represent about 70% of the book buying market. Why do you think that is and how can publishers target men more effectively?

One of the most obvious reasons is simply that women are more socially communicative, so they do things like join book clubs, and tell other friends about what they’re reading. I think this is changing somewhat due to online social networking. Not many men will join a book club, but what they might do is add an app like iRead or Visual Bookshelf on Facebook and passively (and selectively) communicate to their friends what they’re reading.

I’ve also noticed that a lot of men are very interested in the Kindle and e-Readers. Not just because it’s a gadget but because the convenience and privacy of it is very appealing. I think the fact that you can be reading it anywhere without a flashy cover displaying what it is you’re reading is actually a big advantage for guys who tend to be more shy about sharing their lit predilections in public. I mean, you don’t necessarily want everyone to see you’re reading a self-help book or a lesbian vampire novel! I’m Japanese and it’s interesting to me why more people don’t cover their books here, because in Japan any book you buy at the bookstore is covered for free at the register. I know it sounds like a marketing disaster, given that you’re covering up free advertising, but I feel like there’s something to that. Reading is a very personal activity for most of us.

Someone once said “hiring a consultant is like paying someone to tell you what time it is- with your watch. Only after the project is finished, they walk away with the watch.” Should publishers enlist the services of firms like McKinsey / BCG to hone their strategy?

There are so many consultancies out there with different approaches to problem-solving, it’s hard to say without getting more specific. In general, if you’re talking about fixing the way publishers run their business from an operational perspective, I would think that the services of a management consulting firm could be beneficial. The number of books returned to be pulped is outrageously wasteful and the astronomical advances for certain authors have proven to be unsustainable in light of falling sales. And while I recognize that everyone is tightening their belts now, the extended run of freedom that publishing people had with their corporate Amex was completely out of touch with the realities of running a profitable enterprise—remnants of a glamour-industry approach that was long obsolete! I don’t think you needed to be a management consultant to see that something was rotten, but really taking a scalpel to it oftentimes requires external intervention because it can be so painful. And to your point about walking away with the watch, I definitely think that consulting fees need to come way down for the relationship to make sense.

Can you point to any one marketing campaign for a book that particularly stood out as being excellent?

To be honest, I really can’t think of a single book marketing campaign that has really stuck with me.

What can publishers do to make books “cool” to a younger generation? 

Assist the Obama administration in its efforts to improve education. You can’t brush your teeth if you don’t have running water.

-Julia

Public Radio International CEO Alisa Miller came in recently to brainstorm marketing ideas for our Studio 360 book on creativity by Julie Burstein. Needless to say we had a lot of fun. Afterwards I checked out Alisa’s TED talk which presents a shocking (and absurdly funny) map of the world based on news coverage. (No surprise, Anna Nicole was one of the leading stories in 2007.) But this is what really got me: Except for one person ABC mini-bureaus in Nairobi, New Delhi, and Mumbai, and there are NO NETWORK NEWS BUREAUS in all of Africa, India, or South America. Check it out:

Throughout your career have people warned of “the death of print” and, if so, how is this time any different?

Well, not to be rude, but duh! My time includes not only meat rationing but no television for about ten years, and after that huge, crate-like wooden boxes with 4″X4″ black-and white-screens, on which strange, target-like  test patterns provided a majority of programming.  Traditional publishing has, generally,  always provoked the same kinds of complaints and lamentations–see Mark Twain’s letters to his publishers about skimpy distribution, and the correspondence between Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer about the creative accounting required to record some of the razor-thin profit margins of Random House’s early days.  So no, while everyone has been telling the same evergreen stories about the dire state of publishing for centuries now, no one warned very loudly about the “death of print” until computer technology and the Internet evolved into a real threat. Ten years ago? Twenty at most, I would say–though science-fiction writers and visionaries like Ted Nelson may have foreseen this evolution earlier. Even though the e-Cassandras have been at it for a decade or two now, this will not turn into an evergreen story, unless somehow, miraculously, e-publishing subsides into being a mere a niche of traditional publishing, when the reverse seems to me far more likely. This promises to be a major structural and qualitative change, rather than simply new clothes for an old model.

Does a good editor have to have good business instincts?

Book editor? Yes–if she or he is to survive.  But since the success of books is for the most part such a random matter (as Nassim Taleb explains in “The Black Swan”), no matter what anyone tells you, “instinct” is the right word.  Because numbers and comp titles and previous successes and the state of the marketplace and current events and all the other supposedly rational factors that go into what is called “planning” in publishing, as with investing, will generally do the planners no better than throwing blindly at a dartboard made of book jackets,  in terms of prediction. But there are some people who do seem to have a “knack.” I won’t say who I think they are, but I will point to some recent examples among  popular music producers–Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler and John Hammond–who discovered Bob Dylan, who was referred to at his label, Columbia, as “Hammond’s folly” until he started setting one sales record after another.

In Leon Neyfakh’s recent Observer article “What Makes Moguls Believe They Belong In the Book Business?” Eric Wolff said he hoped publishing would “return to what it once was, and what it is probably best suited for: a prestige business for rich people.” What do you make of his statement?

It seems possible, for some boutique operations, but the huge electronic shift I believe is coming seems to me far more important to the dissemination of text of all kinds than does the continuation of “book books.”  E-readers will get to be really, really good in less than five years, I would bet.

Is there one book you particularly regret not having published?

Atul Gawande is the contemporary  writer I most regret not having been able to acquire.  Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, Lucky Jim, and Catch-22 are all books for which I would have loved to serve as a paraliterary (that’s what an editor is, essentially). Right now, an association with  Henry Hitchings’ “The Secret Life of Words” seems enviable.  I’m glad you didn’t ask me about books I regret publishing. Or perhaps I should say, having to publish.

What was the most difficult aspect of being Editor in chief at Random House?

The coffee in the pantry, the sun in my eyes from my panoramic river view–very annoying–and you, in your more stubborn moments.

Are you confident a younger crop of book editors will evolve into the Fisketjons and the Loomis’s of today?

Well, there will always be people who can help to make writing as good as writers themselves would make it if they were always writing at their highest level. That’s what I think good editors do, essentially.  And some of those editors, no matter what their medium is–print or pixel–will be supremely good at it, like Bob Loomis.

Why aren’t you on Facebook?

What is Facebook, again? 

Name three books that changed your life.

Paul de Kruif’s “The Microbe Hunters,” the aforementioned “Catch-22,” by Joseph Heller, and Theodore van de Velde’s “Ideal Marriage”  (which I purloined when I was ten). (or maybe my parents put it there on purpose. Probably. They resupplied  that shelf soon with a more up-to-date book called “A Marriage Manual.”)

Can you envision a future in which people would simply self-publish online without the help of an editor or publisher?

No, but I can and do see something closer to this than the model we have now, which appears at the moment to be breaking up like Arctic ice. I see consortiums of writers or single, bankable writers selling their books, e-books, directly–especially if the techies can come up with non-print-outable and non-forwardable texts–and paying editors and publicists and marketers to help them with editing and marketing. No more 15% royalties–each sale, at, say,  $9.95, might well mean $8 or $9 revenues for the author. Probably can’t happen exactly that way, though: bootlegging and all.

How would you characterize the state of contemporary fiction?

With the 2008 election as a touchstone and with notable exceptions like Aleksandar Hemon’s “The Lazarus Project,” generally Arkansas-esque.

-Julia

[photo credit: Nicole Bengiveno NYTImes]

When I first read the manuscript to Who is Mark Twain? * -  the collection of 24 previously unpublished pieces by Samuel Clemens we’ll publish next spring-  I couldn’t believe how contemporary it felt.  To that end it seems perfect to have the New Yorker publish the piece “The Privilege of the Grave” in their December Fiction Issue. New Yorker Fiction Editor Deborah Treisman said:

“We felt that the piece was both sharp and funny in its satire and timeless in its take on the notion of free speech in western culture. Coming at the end of a difficult election year, it seemed particularly prescient.”

 * In the piece “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture” a young Twain spies two men hunched over a poster publicizing his talk at Cooper Union. (Twain is terrified no one will show up.) The one guy says to the other: “Who is Mark Twain?” The other responds “God knows- I don’t!” Hence the title Who is Mark Twain?

Julia

 When I talked to McCann Chairman Nina Disesa recently I decided not to ask her about “the death of advertising,” both because the death of [fill in the industry] line of questioning feels old and tired, but also because it’s clear that advertising, like publishing, is not dying. It’s evolving. I was eager to check out the two companies mentioned in today’s article “Web Marketing That Hopes to Learn What Attracts a Click.” [NYT]

“ADISN is a next generation Digital Ad Agency that uses relationship data from the social web to enhance targeting I.E. we have a GRIP of 
technology. ADISN has proven that the aggregate of web conversations, web profiles, online blogs, and behavior create millions of relationships between seemingly unrelated topics. Our technology mines through those relationships and applies the strongest ones to enhance online targeting to the benefit of publishers and advertisers across the web. We call it Relationship-based Targeting.”

“The Tumri AdPod marries advanced targeting capabilities with a dynamic, interactive presentation layer, enabling advertisers to craft highly targeted marketing messages to consumers on-the-fly. The Tumri platform seamlessly deconstructs ad creatives into core sub-components (i.e. brand logo, background image, product image, offer/price, call to action, attention grabber, etc.), then allows advertisers to adjust each sub-component by targeting or performance parameters.

By delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time, advertisers and publishers can now cut through the clutter of irrelevant content that overwhelms consumers online today.”

I had a lot of fun hanging out on the set Green Porno last week. Sundance commissioned a second series based on the success of the first one. The theme: the sex life of marine animals! Like the first series, the films are scientifically accurate (though this batch will focus more heavily on the environmental effects of our consumption habits.)

Here Isabella is dressed as a shrimp, newly molted.

Green Porno is conceived, written by and features Isabella Rossellini. The films are directed by Rossellini and Jody Shapiro.
Photo credit: Jody Shapiro
Julia

Joi ito is an activist, entrepreneuer and venture capitialist.

1) Can you explain what Creative Commons is to people who might not know?

Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in the US with partners in 49 jurisdictions and relationships with groups in approximately 80 countries.

Creative Commons makes copyright licenses available without charge to anyone who would like to facilitate the sharing of their work. Authors decide whether the works can be used for commercial purposes or whether derivative works have to also be relicensed under a similar Creative Commons license. Once the author has made the choices, there is a simple tool on our website which creates the appropriate license. By pasting the code onto the website or embedding it in the work, the work is marked with a Creative Commons icon. When the icon is clicked, anyone wishing to use the content can see the Creative Commons “deed” which clearly shows what you can and can’t do with the work. This is what we call the “human readable” deed.The license also provides “machine-readable metadata” which get embedded in your work or website which allows services such as Google and Yahoo and various editing program to automatically understand which licenses are attached to which works and the original owner of each part of each work.

The key reason for using these licenses is to create an open and interoperable specification so that each time, for instance, that a professor from one university wants to incorporate works from another professor in their curriculum, a legal team does not need to get involved in reading the licenses of both works and negotiating a contract. If the professors have marked their works with the appropriate rights, for instance “as long as you provide attribution, please feel free to use without any other restrictions.”
 

2) Does Creative Commons have different implications for different forms of media? Would books be affected differently than music, for example?

Absolutely. One big difference relates to the underlying business models around the works. When you make the choices above, Creative Commons licenses end up in the form of six basic forms. The most permissive allows users to do anything they want as long as they provide attribution. The most restrictive licenses do not allow derivative works and commercial use or allow derivative works but force the derivative to also be Creative Commons licensed.

In the case of book publishing, we have seen a variety of different examples. The basic consideration is how much demand the book already has versus the potential demand that a free download version of the book might create. Clearly there is some cannibalization of sales if people who were going to buy the book end up reading it online. However, we have quite a bit of data which supports the fact that making the book available for free increases the likelihood that the book will get stronger coverage on blogs and word of mouth and also find its way into markets not typically marketed to by the publishers. If, for instance, one allows derivative works, a good book will often quickly get translated, whole or in part, which can drive demand in International markets.

3) With regard to e-commerce, you talk about the value of getting more money from fewer people as opposed to a little money from a lot of people. Can you elaborate?

Before e-commerce the cost of manufacturing, packaging, shipping and selling content in the form of books, videos and CDs was very expensive and cost intensive. It was very difficult for a musician, for example, to be in touch with their fans directly, especially from a commerce perspective. The way that a fan “touched” a musician was typically by buying a standardized sized and priced CD at some megastore, a majority of the cost going to the distribution and manufacturing system.

Now, with the Web and e-commerce, many of these restrictions are no longer a problem. For example, when Nine Inch Nails released “Ghost”, they made the music downloadable and available for free under a Creative Commons license. They sold a 2500 copy limited edition boxed set for $300. They also had a $70 luxury edition with a photo book as well as various other versions. They had very little transaction “friction” and were able to design the experience so that the fans were interacting directly with them instead of through a florescent lit cashier at a megastore. They were able to sell $1.6 million in worth of product in one week and sold out the special edition in one day. Prince also makes millions of dollars a year from fans who pay to be members of his website fan club.

We are now shifting from what I call the “delivery problem” to the “discovery problem.” Whereas the difficulty use to lie in the mechanics of getting the product to the user, now the challenge is getting the attention of the customer. How do I find the product that I’m interested in?  In the past we had the stack of best sellers at Border’s and MTV that helped create a mass demand on marketed product, but in the world of increasing choice and diversity, the discovery problem is a real one.

4)  What is the best business decision you’ve made?

My passion and my background is in main stream media – motion pictures, music, journalism and television. The best decision that I made was to become an Internet entrepreneur to help build the Internet which, increasingly, allows anyone to participate and innovate without asking permission. While this causes a variety of problems and risk for professional media, I believe that in the long run, it will greatly enhance the quality and diversity of our culture.

 I wouldn’t necessarily admit this at a cocktail party, but I’m a Milton geek. In fact I still remember the oh-my-god moment I experienced in Butler library reading Stanley Fish’s book on Paradise Lost. (I guess most people’s transcendental teenage reading experiences involve Bukowski or Kerouac?) At any rate, I had to clear the air when Stanley came in for a meeting recently to discuss writing a sort of updated Strunk & White which we’re going to call HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE. “This book changed my life!” I said, awkwardly hoisting a copy of Surprised by Sin in the air. “An oldie but a goodie” Fish replied (the book was written in 1967).

HOW TO WRITE A SENTENCE is a celebration of language and rhetoric drawing on examples from Hobbes to Scalia to Elmore Leonard. Fish is the author of the NYT “Think Again” column, and the author of over ten books. We bought world rights from Mel Flashman. I’m psyched.

 If I had a megaphone, (and if I could open the window in my office,) I would blurt it out over Fifth Avenue: I LOVE DAVID CARR.

Here Carr talks about the evolution of his relationship with Google and why, for example, Schmidt & co didn’t go to great lengths to publicize their new video chat function. In a line: “The most powerful form of advertising is to be exceptional.” [Google Seduces with Utility: NYT]