Andrew Savikas

This post from Publishing Perspectives about publishing in Africa came in over the break, and it's worth a look:

Five years later, [Muhtar] Bakare is still a confident believer in the power of the internet to revolutionize the African publishing industry. “The internet is our own Gutenberg moment,” he told the Oslo audience. “The internet is going to democratize knowledge in Africa.”

As the Web moves to becoming a primarily mobile media, it expands global access to knowledge and information (while obviating the historical geographic barriers around physical markets). Publishers taking a long view should be sure to pay attention to what's happening in Africa and the Middle East. We'll have speakers from both regions at next month's TOC conference.

O'Reilly sells apps in both the iPhone App Store and the Android Market. Most apps (for now) are just app presentations of our ebooks, built using ereader apps popular on each platform (Stanza on iPhone, Aldiko on Android).

That means many of our apps are essentially the same on each platform, so any difference in sales can be at somewhat correlated to the relative market share of each device/market. It should be no surprise that we sell more apps on the iPhone than in the Android market.

But what was surprising about a recent look at the data was just how quickly the Android sales are growing relative to iPhone. The last time I checked about two months ago, Android apps were tracking at about 10% of iPhone sales for the same title. But a look at the past two weeks of sales across 200 apps available on both platforms shows a striking uptick in Android share, to 22%:

I was an early skeptic of Android, clouded by how much I love my iPhone. But I've since come around, and though I still believe iPhone will retain its top spot among smartphones, the market and platform from all of those Android devices put together will be a very big story in 2010 (especially if Google makes some sorely needed improvements to the Market -- a 30-character limit on app titles? Really? And how about a non-Android Web view of the market -- Google of all companies should know the importance of linking).

We just released 17 O'Reilly books as standalone iPhone Apps (The Twitter Book looks fantastic -- and as a bonus #hashtags in the text are clickable), and so I've been looking at various options for monitoring sales and popularity (AppViz, AppFigures, and MajicRank have proven quite useful), and was eager to find something I could use right from my iPhone.

I was happy to find MyAppSales, but because the App technically spiders the iTunesConnect site, it violates the Apple Terms of Service, you won't find it in the App Store. But rather than just give up, the developer has gotten creative -- he'll sell you access to the source code for $15, and you can compile the App yourself to load onto your own devices:

Unfortunately due to section 3.3.7 of the SDK Agreement I will never be permitted to sell this app on the App Store unless I rip out it’s heart and usefullness. But you can purchase a license to look at the source code, compile it yourself, put it on all the devices you like. For just $15 you can do anything you like with the source, just not sell it or use in any other way commercially.

Doubtful he's getting anywhere near the exposure as he would from the App Store, but it's a clever workaround until and unless Apple revises their approval process.

The document-sharing site Scribd has launched a new "Scribd Store" selling view and download access to documents and books. As part of the launch, there are now more than 650 O'Reilly ebooks now available for preview and sale in the Scribd store, and all include DRM-free PDF downloads with purchase. (Scribd will soon be adding EPUB as a format, and we'll make that available as soon as possible.)

Many publishers (including O'Reilly) have kept Scribd at arm's length because the service was often used by people posting copyrighted material without permission. Though Scribd was reasonably responsive to takedown requests, that puts the onus for monitoring on the publisher, a whack-a-mole scenario that will consume as many resources as you throw at it if you let it. But Scribd has implemented a new system that uses the ebooks provided for sale to identify (and remove) any other unauthorized versions of that material, as well as prevent future unauthorized uploads. Like any technology it's far from perfect (for example, I suspect scanned images are more difficult to test than standard PDFs), but it's good enough for us to be comfortable participating, and is as good an example as any of turning lemons into lemonade.

For a publisher (and I use the term loosely) the terms for the Scribd store are impressive -- publishers set the sale price directly, and keep 80% of the revenue (compare that to Amazon's DTP program, where the standard terms are that Amazon gets to set the actual price, and the publisher only gets 35% of their "suggested" price). There's also an interesting "automated pricing" option in Scribd, which uses an (unspecified) algorithm to set the sale price. But the pieces of the Scribd store I'm most excited about is the real-time reporting (compared with a lag of a month or more with most ebook resellers, including Amazon), the option to easily provide free updates to existing content, and the variety of adjustable display options -- like preview amount, refreshingly optional DRM, and purchase-link images. Administering and understanding your sales in Scribd is downright delightful compared with the same for Kindle.

A service like Scribd further reduces the barriers to content creators interested in self publishing digital material (and again offers much better terms than Amazon's DTP program for Kindle), so in some ways absolutely a threat to existing publishers. But we also view it as an opportunity to get our books in front of interested readers, and a promising sign that the market for ebooks is large enough to continue attracting startups like Scribd who bring needed diversity and competition among resellers.

There's more details on the Labs blog, but timed with our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, we've opened up RDF metadata for all of our books, and have also brought the open source Bookworm ebook reader into O'Reilly Labs. It's a great way to read any of our ebooks (more than 400 are now available as ebook bundles from oreilly.com) online and from a mobile phone:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <om:Product xmlns:om="http://purl.oreilly.com/ns/meta/" 
              rdf:about="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:9780596521677.BOOK" 
              xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
              xml:lang="en">
    <dc:isFormatOf rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:product:955988693.IP"/>
    <dc:issued>2008-08-13</dc:issued>
    <dc:creator>
      <rdf:Seq rdf:ID="creator">
        <rdf:li rdf:resource="urn:x-domain:oreilly.com:agent:pdb:350"/>
      </rdf:Seq>
    </dc:creator>
    <dc:rightsHolder>David Pogue</dc:rightsHolder>
    <dc:description>The new iPhone 3G is here, and bestselling author David Pogue 
      is back with a thoroughly updated edition of &lt;em&gt;iPhone: The Missing 
      Manual&lt;/em&gt;. With its faster downloads, touch-screen iPod, and best-ever 
      mobile Web browser, the new affordable iPhone is packed with possibilities.
      But without an objective guide like this one, you'll never unlock all it can
      do for you. Each custom designed page helps you accomplish specific tasks for
      everything from web browsing, to new apps, to watching videos.</dc:description>
    <dc:extent>376 pages</dc:extent>
    <dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/PhysicalObject"/>
    <dc:format>6 x 9 in</dc:format>
...

The URLs are structured by ISBN13. Once you have the ISBN13 for an O'Reilly book, you can get the full metadata via HTTP request to:

http://opmi.labs.oreilly.com/product/ISBN13

To get you started, here's direct links to the public RDF for our current top-5 bestsellers:

• Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual
• iPhone: The Missing Manual, 2e
• iPod: The Missing Manual, 7e
• Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
• Photoshop Elements 7: The Missing Manual

You can also follow @oreillylabs on twitter.

As promised last month, O'Reilly has released 30 titles as DRM-free downloadable ebook bundles. The bundles include three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price. And for a bit more than the cover price, you can get the print version too along with the ebook bundles. Twelve of the 30 are also now available via the Kindle store, with the rest soon to follow.

Full details over on the TOC Blog.

Ebooks are certainly nothing new for us at O'Reilly. We've offered PDFs of hundreds of our titles for some time now, and as noted here before on Radar, until quite recently Safari Books Online (our online-publishing joint venture with Pearson) generated more revenue than was typically associated with the entire downloadable ebook business.

But it's clear that things are changing in the ebook market (though precise numbers are proving hard to come by), so we've decided to officially announce two new e-publishing programs that have been in the works for some time:

• First, through oreilly.com we will soon offer a select number of books as a bundle of three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price -- starting in early July. Since we began selling PDFs directly some time ago, we've given those customers free updates to the PDFs to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles. That also means that although the ebooks aren't yet available, if you buy the PDF now, you'll receive the EPUB and Mobipocket versions as a free update once they're available in early July. These files (like all our PDFs currently for sale) will be released without any DRM, though we are exploring some custom watermarking options. With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader (Sony announced in May that EPUB support is forthcoming in a firmware update for their Reader).
• Second, O'Reilly has agreed to sell select ebooks for the Kindle through Amazon. We hope to see those ebooks available for sale through the Kindle store in the near future.

Full details over on the TOC blog.

Amazon's March announcement that POD publishers would be required to use Amazon's own POD service BookSurge in order to sell books directly on Amazon's site predictably rubbed quite a few folks the wrong way. (Technically speaking, publishers can use alternative POD providers, but must then provide Amazon with an inventory of at least five books, and the ability to offer many titles for sale without tying up capital in inventory is one of the appeals of a POD model.)

Now comes word that one of those POD publishers, Bangor, Maine-based BookLocker, has filed a class-action lawsuit against Amazon, alleging violations of the "tying" provisions of the Sherman Act -- in short, that Amazon has improperly predicated sales on use of printing services. From the complaint (PDF):

For example, on March 26, 2008, Amazon representative John Clifford notified Plaintiff that Amazon would only continue to sell BookLocker’s POD books through the Direct Amazon Sales Channel if Plaintiff agreed to print its books through BookSurge rather than Lightning Source. The Amazon representative further stated that books printed by Lightning Source or any other competing printer would have their “Add to Shopping Cart” buttons removed. (Amazon has also informed POD publishers that they may keep the Direct Amazon Sales Channel active if they agree to enroll in a program known as “Amazon Advantage.” However, the terms and conditions of participating in that program are so onerous so as to preclude it from being an economically viable option for POD book publishers.)

Amazon has continued through the present date to threaten POD publishers that unless they convert their inventory to BookSurge printing, their Direct Amazon Sales Channel will be discontinued.

The acrimony between publishers and Amazon is seemingly growing by the day, and this is hardly a surprising development. But it's also another sign that Amazon may be drifting toward damaging the very ecosystem it depends on for survival.

Over on the Tools of Change for Publishing blog, I've reprinted a great exchange from the Radar backchannel addressing an author's concerns about seeing his books gain steam on PirateBay. Here's Nat's take:

Fantastic! There's absolutely nothing you can do about it, and unless you see sales dipping off then I don't think there's anything you *should* do about it. The HF books work really well as books, so at best the torrents act as advertisements for the superior print product (not often you can say that with a straight face). At worst most of your downloads are going to people who wouldn't have bought the book at cover price and who will, if they enjoy it, rave about it to others. [emphasis added]

So long as the royalty checks are strong, take BitTorrent as a sign of success rather than a problem. A wise dog doesn't let his fleas bother him.

Check out the full exchange here.