Yesterday’s story about Bowker’s doomed efforts to measure the ebook market through ISBN registrations reminded me of a related story which had been languishing in my draft folder.

Just about everyone agrees that indie authors generally don’t use ISBNs on their ebooks. I’ve been pointing that out for almost four years, and it’s not hard to find a dozen posts why authors shouldn’t bother with ISBNs.

But have you ever considered the case_for_ ISBNs?

An ISBN is effectively a serial number for a book. A print book must have an ISBN or it can’t be sold in most bookstores (nor even on the bookstore’s website), but Amazon and the other major ebook retailers don’t require that an ebook have an ISBN, and so some indie authors think an ISBN has no value.

In some ways they are right, but at the same time they are also wrong.

Yes, few distribution channels require an ISBN, but at the same time revenue from those distribution channels can justify the cost of buying ISBNs.

Author Karen Myers presented a business case in favor of ISBNs a few weeks back in the comment section at The Passive Voice. She bought a thousand ISBNs from Bowker for $1,000, and has so far used 80 of them.

Myers has argued that one should buy an ISBN as a way of future-proofing, but also that there is a business case to justify the expense.

Here’s what Myers wrote about future-proofing in 2014. It’s all about controlling one’s identity because otherwise Amazon, Kobo, et al will control you:

Consider the following situation:

• I publish a book, digital only. I don’t bother with an ISBN number.
• I distribute it on Amazon, which assigns it an ASIN number, an Amazon product code.
• I distribute it on Barnes & Noble, which assigns it an EAN number, a B&N product code.
• I distribute it on Kobo, which assigns it an ISBN number owned by Kobo, so my book will appear to be published by Kobo, not me.
• I distribute it on Smashwords, which assigns it an ISBN number owned by Smashwords, so my book will appear to be published by Smashwords, not me.

With the exception of Smashwords, none of these identifiers appear within the eBook itself.

And now, let twenty years go by… Barnes & Noble and Smashwords are out of business. Amazon changes its product code conventions and no longer uses ASIN numbers. There is no searchable database made available by Amazon for the old ASIN numbers. Kobo, which owns the ISBN it provided, controls what the Bowker Books In Print or successor database contains and updates the information about your book in ways you would not approve of, and since you have no ISBN number of your own that’s the only record of your book in Books In Print. Someone who chanced across a reference to your book based on an old copy from Barnes & Noble can’t find it because the B&N identifier is no longer alive, and may or may not connect it with a Kobo record in Books In Print which has a completely different identifier.

That is a cogent argument, and so is Myers' point on the cost-benefit of buying ISBNs.

Yes, everyone says that authors don’t need an ISBN to reach the vast majority of the ebook market, but as it turns out that is an over-generalization. It may be true for the market as a whole but it is not necessarily true for an individual author.

Myers revealed over on TPV that:

Print is 21% of my units sold, and more than half of that is from physical stores and other vendors requiring ISBNs. All of my audio sales are through a distributor that requires ISBNs. About 5% of my ebook sales are through distributors that require ISBNs, and that includes libraries.

Those are modest numbers — about 16% overall — but those are all sales that would not have occurred without ISBNs.

So a one-time, $1,000 investment has enabled 16% of Myers' units sold. I can’t speak for you but that strikes me as a good return on the investment.

Myers has shown that buying ISBNs is on par with hiring professionals to edit and finish a book. The two are similar in that authors theoretically don’t need either an ISBN or paid assistance, but a judicious investment can pay off in increased revenue.

That may not win over those who argue against ISBNs on ideological grounds, but any author who approaches book publishing as a business needs to look past the ideology and look at the figures.

The math says that buying ISBNs can pay off, so to hell with the ideology.

For the longest time Amazon has offered two distribution platforms for books. Publishers could use KDP to sell ebooks in the Kindle Store, and they could use Createspace (and before that, Booksurge) to distribute POD books.

Now Amazon is testing a combined interface where publishers can manage both their ebooks in the Kindle Store and their POD books in Createspace.

The new feature is called KDP Print, and according to the comment thread at KBoards this feature has been available to a limited number of KDP users since July 2016.

Comment threads on the Createspace and KDP support forums confirm that  most users don’t see new feature, but there is also a report on Self Publisher Bibel that users are seeing the option in Germany. That suggests that the testing has gone international.

Details are still scarce, but what we know now is that users can generate sales reports in KDP which cover both their print and digital books.

The following screenshots were made by Emily Martha Sorensen:

Amazon is trying to keep this program under the radar, so we don’t know much at this time. The retailer has published a couple KDP help pages with more detail, but those pages can only be viewed by eligible users.

If you can see them, congratulations; you can use the new feature.

We know from the KDP Support Forum discussion that the new feature is less about tying a publisher’s existing POD and Kindle books into one interface than about getting KDP users to create print editions of their existing titles.

There’s no mention in the public discussions of importing data from Createspace or tying in an existing account, but KDP users are invited to upload a new file which will be turned into a POD book. PDF is preferred, but doc, docx, html, and rtf are also accepted.

It does not appear, however, that Amazon is automatically converting existing Kindle ebooks, and that is a good thing – they would look like crap.

O O O

When this program more widely available, it has the potential of upsetting POD and the print book market.

Amazon has long offered a POD service through Createspace, and in fact they will also distribute your Kindle ebook from a Createspace account. But as we know there are many authors who have only produced ebooks and have previously passed on print due to the hassle, low sales,  and the fact that key genres (romance, thriller/mystery, and SF) have largely gone digital.

This new feature in KDP will make it easy for authors to produce a POD book, get it onto bookstore websites, and possibly even get it into Walmart stores.

This has the potential of disrupting the print book market by injecting millions of new titles. If authors thought it was hard to get their book on to store shelves last year, just wait – the competition is about to multiply.

But will it generate a huge amount of sales?

POD books are considerably more expensive than most paper books. That will reduce demand, but a small number of print books sold is still an improvement over none at all.

Plus, KDP Print will encourage authors to release their books through more channels than just the major ebook stores.This gives them a chance to reach more readers, in particular the ones who are sticking with print.

Earlier this year I brought you news of the Little Bird, a Bluetooth-enabled smart vibrator which gave stories a buzz. Now word of a second smart vibrator has crossed my desk.

The Vibease is a vibrator that works with audiobooks. When paired with the companion app running on an iPhone or Android smartphone, this device lets readers participate in the story.

Here’s a quote from the makers:

Imagine listening to Fifty Shades of Grey, when the voice says "I’m touching you softly," it vibrates softly and when the voice says "I’m touching you hard," it vibrates hard. Like in the real intimacy, the user will experience surprises and anticipation.

Owners can use the Vibease with an audiobook from Vibease’s fantasy store, or they can use it as a regular vibrator.

Initially funded in an Indiegogo campaign in 2014, the Vibease is now available in two models and retails for $119 and $139.

Bustle

The Chinese ereader maker Onyx and its Russian retail partner MacCenter have just unveiled the Prometheus.

This ereader runs Android 4.0.4 on a single-core 1GHz CPU with 1GB RAM, 16GB storage, and a microSD card slot. Its 9.7″ display has a screen resolution of 825 x 1200 along with a frontlight and capacitive touchscreen.

In term of connectivity, it has Wifi and Bluetooth. Unlike the related German models, there’s no speaker, headphone jack, or microphone (also no electromagnetic touchscreen with stylus).

Weighing in at 450 grams, the Prometheus measures 9.5mm thin and packs in a 3Ah battery. It is available tomorrow with a price of 23,990 rubles, or about $384 USD, and comes with a sleepcover.

Onyx-Boox.ru via The-eBook.org

When Amazon launched Prime Video, the service offered a comprehensive selection of movies and tv shows which could take years, if not decades, to work through. In the past couple years, however, the selection has been pared back to make Prime Video more of a teaser for the paid videos (this is why I let my Prime expire).

Now Amazon is launching a similar Amazon Prime teaser service for reading material. The retailer announced on Wednesday that Amazon Prime members in the US could now access a library of 1,000 free ebooks, magazines, short works, and comic books.

“Prime is the best deal in the history of shopping and today it got even better,” said Greg Greeley, Vice President Amazon Prime. “Prime members can now enjoy an awesome selection of books including The Hobbit, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Man in the High Castle, plus magazines and more with Prime Reading – all for free on any device.”

The service is called Prime Reading, and it is included free in the $99 a year Prime subscription. And unlike Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, Prime Reading works on the Kindles apps as well as ereaders.

“This is a new and exciting way for our premium brands to reach and engage with Amazon’s Prime members,” said Monica Ray, Executive Vice President of Consumer Marketing at Condé Nast. “Prime readers can now keep up with all the latest news, trends, tips and so much more with the rotating selection of our magazine brands.”

Compared to the millions of works now available as ebooks, a thousand titles is merely a drop in the bucket. That makes this a teaser service which Amazon is hoping will get more people buying books (print or digital – Amazon isn’t picky).

Comixology  followed in the footsteps of its corporate parent on Tuesday when it announced a Comixology Originals, its line of exclusive digital-only comics for the Kindle and Comixology.

The Amazon subsidiary has cut deals with leading comic book publishers like Boom Studios and Valiant and with the estate of the legendary Harvey Kurtzman for exclusive distribution rights.

“Our mission is to make everyone on the face of the planet a comic fan, and with comiXology Originals we’re excited to offer a range of content by diverse creators,” said comiXology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger. “It’s fantastic to be working with publishers across the spectrum to deliver great comics to comiXology and Kindle, offering fans stories that they can’t get anywhere else.”

Debut titles include an Adventure Time tie-in, an X-O Manowar prequel set in his high school days and titled Valiant High, and a graphic novelization of  Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

All 3 titles are up for pre-order today on Comixology and Kindle, and are due to be published next January and October.

Amazon still won’t comment on yesterday’s story about it pulling titles from Kindle Unlimited in Japan, but the usual anonymous sources aren’t so reticent.

The Japan Times and the WSJ each cite unnamed sources which say that Kindle Unlimited was a victim of its own success.

While most of the ebooks in Kindle Unlimited earn a royalty based on the number of pages read, Amazon sometimes offers sweetheart deals to publishers which have popular titles. The Harry Potter series was added to Kindle Unlimited under one such sweetheart deal, and so were other titles including ebooks published by Kodansha in Japan.

As part of a deal to attract customers to the service, Amazon made contracts with Japanese publishers to pay them a premium through the end of this year when a customer read at least 10% of a book or other content, publishing company officials said. The goal was to get publishers to offer popular content.

It worked—too well. Since it’s easy for readers to get through the first 10% of a magazine or photo book in just a few minutes, Amazon quickly found itself on the hook for large payments, a person at one publisher said.

A person at another publisher said Amazon made an overture for talks in September saying it had hit its budget limit for the payments to publishers and wanted revisions to its contract with the publisher.

But rather than negotiate, Amazon pulled Kodansha’s titles.

While we only have the statement of one publisher and a few anonymous sources, this is a plausible story. And setting the inevitable anti-Amazon FUD aside, it is also a relatively benign story.

Amazon found that the ebooks were costing it too much under the contract with publishers so it pulled the titles from Kindle Unlimited. That type of activity is so run-of-the-mill that you would have to start with the assumption that Amazon is evil before you could spin it into a sinister act.

Of course, that isn’t going to stop anyone from trying.

image by jo.in.pink

Many sites are reporting that Amazon is banning the dastardly practice of giving away free samples in exchange for reviews,  but they are missing about two-thirds of the story.

This is about eliminating the competition, not cleaning up the reviews section.

Here are the revised rules, the announcement, and Techcrunch’s take (which is mostly on target):

Amazon is making a significant change to its Community Guidelines, announced today, which will eliminate any incentivized reviews, except for those that emerge from within its own Amazon Vine program. This program allows Amazon – not the seller or vendor – to identify trusted reviewers, and has a number of controls in place in order to keep bias out of the review process.

…

Amazon says that, going forward, the only incentivized reviews will be those from Amazon Vine. These don’t work the same way, however. For starters, Amazon selects who will be allowed to review products, and it does so mainly to boost the review count on new or pre-release products that haven’t yet generated enough sales to have a large number of organic reviews.

Vine reviewers are invited to join the program only after having written a number of reviews voted as “helpful” by other customers, and tend to have expertise in a specific product category.

“We do not incentivize positive star ratings, attempt to influence the content of reviews, or even require a review to be written,” explains Chee Chew, VP, Customer Experience at Amazon in an announcement about how Vine controls for bias. “And we limit the total number of Vine reviews that we display for each product,” he adds.

In addition, vendors don’t have any contact with Vine reviewers, nor do they get to influence which reviewers will receive their products, which are submitted directly to Amazon for distribution.

First, let me cover the one point which readers of this blog are most interested in: the new rules don’t cover books. (Of course, with Amazon deleting reviews based on suspected relationships between reviewer and author, book reviews are already a mine field.)

That said, one detail that most if not all of the stories missed is that this policy is hypocritical. Amazon gives out free Fire tablet, Echo, and Kindle review units all the time, and does not plan to stop.

Furthermore, here’s something else that everyone may have missed:

Amazon charges manufacturers for access to the Amazon Vine program.

I’ve heard from a couple different companies (who don’t want to be named, for obvious reasons) that Amazon collects coop fees for the Vine program. If the manufactures don’t pay what Amazon demands then they don’t get access to the high-value reviewers who can help build buzz by posting early reviews.

That detail changes everything, doesn’t it?

Suddenly this isn’t about cleaning up the review process; the new info makes it clear that what Amazon really wants is to force manufacturers  to stop dealing directly with reviewers. Now they are going to have to pay Amazon for the privilege of giving away samples to get reviews.

image by Robert Scoble

One of the hot stories this past week were the protests against a new law in California, but according to legal experts the protests are merely a tempest in a teapot.

Governor Brown signed a bill which, if you believed the protesters, would make it difficult for anyone to sell an autographed book in the state of Calif. The law required that dealers maintain records and issue a certificate of authenticity for every item of memorabilia they sell. Dealers are now required  to track who signed the item and when, and they also have to track who they bought an autographed item from.

That’s not a bad idea on the face of it, but San Francisco-based Eureka Books has come up with a worst case scenario where the new law makes selling autographed books an incredible hassle:

Let’s say you like to go to author events and get books signed. Eventually, your shelves fill up, and you want to trade books in at a shop like Eureka Books.

Guess what? Remember that Certificate of Authenticity that sounded so reasonable? Well your name and address has to go on the certificate of authenticity because I (as the person issuing the COA) have to say where I got the book. This applies to signed books, artwork, and any other autographed items you own.

…

Consider bookstores that do a lot of author events. Let’s imagine that Neil Gaiman does one of his typical massive booksignings in February for his forthcoming book, Norse Gods. Say 1000 people show up and buy books at $25.95. The bookstore either has to issue 1000 COA, or risk being sued for $25.95 x 1000 x 10, plus attorney’s fees. Call it $300,000.

This sounds terrible, yes, but the problem with all these scenarios is that they are all figments of a fevered imagination.

According to the legal blog Scrivener’s Error, almost everyone who is protesting this law screwed up by not actually reading the law first.

They don’t like the law, but they also point out that it only applies to dealers, which are defined as "a person who is principally in the business of selling or offering for sale collectibles".

Guess what?

Authors who sign the book as well as online marketplaces like Amazon and Ebay are excluded from the group defined as "dealers", and since the vast majority of bookstores aren’t "principally in the business of selling or offering for sale collectibles", this law won’t impact them either.

Or as Scrivener’s Error put it:

None of the recordkeeping requirements for "collectibles" (defined in § 1739.7(a)(2) as "an autographed item sold or offered for sale in or from this state by a dealer to a consumer for five dollars ($5) or more") apply to anyone except "dealers." Not to private citizens reselling stuff from their uncle’s estate. Not to individual artists who sign their paintings or postcards or prints or sculptures. More to the point here, not to authors who sign books for fans at conventions or bookstores… or to bookstores that happen to have a few author-autographed copies lying around, or even that offer — amongst all of their other business — to have a book personalized by the author for a holiday internet order.

That was just an acorn, Chicken Little; the sky is not falling today.

image by Ozzy Delaney

A Kindle hack has crossed my desk which tempts me to finally hack my Kindle.

There are hacks which add the option to change fonts, or read new formats, and hacks which let you play apps and games.

But the one hack I am most interest in is called LazyKindle. Published last week on MobileRead, LazyKindle builds on the late-generation Kindles support for USB Host and uses it to add support for a wireless presentation remote.

This is a very basic type of remote which can be used by someone giving a presentation, but plug it into a hacked Kindle and you can use it to change the page or alter the brightness of the frontlight:

Right now the hack only fully works with the PW3. The page turn buttons work for the Oasis and Voyage, but not the brightness. but that should change in the long run.

If you want to give it a shot, you’ll need a presenter remote like this one and a USB converter plug so that the remote’s receiver can be plugged into the Kindle.

The total cost is under $20.

MobileRead

B&N Education may have promised in March that it was replacing Yuzu, its abortion of a digital textbook platform, but from what students are saying that simply has not happened.

The new school year started about a month ago, here in North America, and over the past six weeks numerous college students have shown up in the comment section of this blog to to share the news that Yuzu is still being promoted by B&N Edu, and to extol Yuzu’s virtues.

The short version is the same as the last two fall semesters: it ain’t got none.

Students are reporting that it doesn’t work at all. "Yuzu is still having problems. Yuzu webreader will not load," one wrote. Another agreed: "I purchased the digital version of my graduate college textbook and I haven’t being able to open YUZU reader. I have dues on assignments and need to move on," before adding the consensus opinion that "This platform sucks. Don’t buy digital versions from B&N."

Other students noted that even when it does run it is still missing basic features. "Search feature doesn’t tell anyone where the word is inside the page. This makes you read the entire page until you find the word in the paragraphs."

And another student complained that even though he was using the app on an expensive Surface tablet, he still couldn’t open a textbook without being online. "So far…so bad. Definitely not a fan of YUZU. I’m on a surface so unless I have WiFi I can not access any books. So, unless I’m on campus, I’m pretty much SOL on accessing my book."

Basically Yuzu is still as nonfunctional as when it launched over two years ago.

So after three years of development, and after being inflicted upon three crops of college students, Yuzu still sucks. For those seeking alternatives, stylusworlds.com offers a more reliable digital textbook experience.

And yet B&N Edu is still recommending Yuzu to students. For example, you can find it on the digital textbook page for the George Mason University bookstore.

You can find the same page on just about every college bookstore run by B&N, and that makes this pundit which possibility is more likely:

Do you think B&N EDU actively hates college students, and is trying to sabotage them, or are they simply indifferent to the fact that they are providing an inferior service which simply does not work as promised?

Kobo officially opened a local ebookstore in Taiwan on Friday. It isselling the ebooks and ereaders itself from tw.kobo.com.

“We are pleased to offer Kobo’s localized eBookstore service in Taiwan, making it easy for booklovers to build digital libraries stocked with all their favorite titles,” said Michael Tamblyn, CEO and President of Rakuten Kobo. “We work closely with Taiwan’s vibrant publishing community to bring the best content to our Chinese language reading community here and around the world.”

Kobo was already selling ebooks in Chinese; one of the founding investors was based in Hong Kong. Now it is doubling its direct sales efforts with an expansion into Taiwan.

Kobo

Is anyone in the mood for poetic justice?

Then you’ll be pleased with the latest announcement from the AAP.

On Thursday the Association of American Publishers released its latest Statshot report on revenues of the US book publishing industry.

Trade book sales for the 1,200 odd publishers who submit their data to the AAP were up 3.4% for the month of April, but still down 4.5% for the year.

Paperback and audiobook revenues increased the most in April 2016 (21.5% and 20.4%), respectively) while sales of hardback books were up 2.6%. eBook revenues were down 22% for the month of April.

For the first four months of the year, ebook and hardback revenues were down (21.7% and 5.2%), while paperback revenues were up 9.9% and audiobook sales were up 31.4%.

In other words, the Big Five are having some success in shifting ebook buyers back to print, but they are still being stymied by Amazon’s decision to drive down the price of hardback books last summer.

Amazon is still keeping prices down, and that is depressing the market. That is a win for both consumers and for pundits who want to gloat at publishers shooting themselves in the foot.

 O O O

Press release:

Trade books grew 3.4% in April, with double-digit growth in April 2016 vs. April 2015 in Childrens/YA (12.8%) and Religious Books (13.7%). Despite that, publishers’ revenues were down 7.0% in April 2016, and 4.3% for the year-to-date vs. the same timeframes in 2015.

Overview

• Publishers’ book sales for April 2016 were $729.6 million, down 7.0% from April 2015.  These numbers include sales for all tracked categories (Trade – fiction/non-fiction/religious, PreK-12 Instructional Materials, Higher Education Course Materials, Professional Publishing, and University Presses.)

o   Year-to-date, sales were down 4.3% to $2.85 billion vs. the same four months in 2015.

• Trade (consumer) books sales were $534.7 million in April 2016, up 3.4% from April 2015. Year-to-date, trade is down 4.5% compared to the same time in 2015. Trade numbers include Childrens/YA Books, Adult Books and Religious Books.
• In April:

o   Adult Books had $383.3 million in sales, flat (+ 0.1%) from 2015

o   Childrens/YA Books had $118.0 million in sales, up 12.8%

o   Religious Presses had $33.4 million in sales, up 13.7%

Trends for Trade by Format

• In April 2016 vs. April 2015:

o   Paperback books grew 21.5%

o   Downloaded audio grew 20.4%

o   Hardback books grew 2.6%; interestingly, there was 24.2% growth in Children/YA and a 6.6% decline in Adult Books

o   eBooks were down 22.7%

• Year-to-date, paperback books (9.9%) and downloaded audio (31.4%) are the categories with the most growth.

Educational Materials and Professional Books

• Educational Materials were down 13.0% for PreK-12 Instructional Materials and 81.6% for Higher Education Course Materials, in April 2016 vs. April 2015. Year-to-date the numbers are more representative, with a decline of 3.6% for PreK-12 and growth of 3.7% in Higher Ed.
• Professional Publishing was down 9.0% in April 2016 vs April 2015. These categories include business, medical, law, scientific and technical books. University presses were down 8.7%.  Both categories show declines year-to-date as well.

image by pedrik

Here’s a rumor which I don’t find plausible but is still too juicy to ignore.

The Taipei Times reports that a rumor is circulating to the effect that Apple is working on a dual-screen smartphone similar to the Yotaphone 2:

Shares of E Ink Holdings Co yesterday rallied to an almost four-year high on speculation that Apple Inc might introduce a dual screen in its next iPhone model using E Ink’s energy-efficient e-paper displays.

The stock price of E Ink surged 3.62 percent to NT$24.35 yesterday, retreating from an early gain of 5.53 percent. The closing price was the highest since Nov. 2, 2012. Turnover was the largest in a month at 34.74 million shares.

…

The rally in E Ink’s stock price was prompted by a report by the Economic Daily News that Apple has requested E Ink to send products for sampling and certification after Yota Devices’ dual-screen YotaPhone 2 impressed the US consumer electronics giant.

“We are aggressively exploring business opportunities to use our e-paper displays as secondary screens on mobile phones,” an E Ink public relations official said by telephone yesterday.

The official declined to comment on information on any single customer.

As per Apple’s usual pattern, they would be launching a product which had been tried before, with little success. There are a number of products which add this type of functionality to an iPhone, and several dual-screen Android smartphones have hit the market.

Popslate and InkCase, for example, have released cases which add an E-ink screen to the rear of the iPhone.

Yota Devices has released two smartphones, and so have several Chinese smartphone makers. And E-ink is working on just the kind of solution Apple would want (and so is Microsoft).

None of those products worked very well or had much commercial success, but Apple has in the past shown that they can copy an idea, improve it, and make it work for the first time.

But as much as I would like this rumor to be true, I suggest that you take it with a grain of salt.

The original source, Economic Daily News, is so unreliable that I usually assume any of its rumors are false. In my experience they’re the Daily Mail of Taiwan tech news, second only to Digitimes in their willingness to publish any juicy rumor.

And even if this rumor is true, I would remind you that there is a huge difference between asking for specs and technical info and producing a device.

Requesting technical info (assuming it really happened) merely tells us that Apple is experimenting with the idea in their R&D labs.

We won’t know that Apple plans to follow through and actually make a dual-screen smartphone until the components, diagrams, blueprints, or other details start leaking at the factory.

So until that happens, I would not get your hopes up.

There are many commonly held beliefs in book world: that AAP stats reflect the entire industry, that Nielsen can accurately track ebook or print sales, that The Authors Guild represents authors, and that the American Bookseller Association is made up of and speaks for indie booksellers.

Two of these four beliefs have been conclusively disproven in the past few years; TAG has been discredited as a publishers' puppet, and almost everyone now understands that the AAP’s revenue stats reflect less than half the book publishing industry.

Now it is time to reconsider the assumption that the ABA represents indie bookstores.

I was reading a post about online book-buying today on Richard Hollick’s blog when he mentioned a post of mine before adding:

The DR’s objection is that the ABA are not really trying to sell books — but maybe that’s intentional. After all they are the organization representing independent bookstores, and they are quite explicit about wanting to “train” customers who visit the IndieBound site to go to an independent bookstore. I see no reason why they shouldn’t offer books to people at whatever price they want: their motivation is not primarily to sell, it’s to promote. If someone is generous enough to pay full price on-line, so what?

Richard repeats two common beliefs about the ABA, both of which are widely repeated but neither of which are true.

The first false belief is that the ABA speaks for indie booksellers. The second is that the IndieBound website is supposed to have something to do with indie booksellers.

Let’s take those in reverse order.

IndieBound is described as "a community of independent local bookstores", which is not a good description. Rather than a gathering of indie bookstores, the site will only help you find ABA members.

If we search the site for indie bookstores in my area, for example, IndieBound will miss the several bookstores which I know for a fact are open while at the same time returning results which include the college bookstore at Mary Washington University and the Hudson newsstand at Dulles International Airport. The former is not independent, and the latter is not a bookstore (it’s also part of a chain).

Both of these retailers show up in the search because they are ABA members and not because they are indie bookstores.

As I explained back in July, the ABA may brand itself as representing indie booksellers but it will accept just about any type of retailer as a member. We can see that in the membership stats. At least twenty of the 51 ABA members in Virginia are not independent bookstores:

Four college bookstores in Virginia are ABA members, including two stores run by Follett. The membership roll also includes two online booksellers (one is just down the road from me) and an online retailer as well as the Marine Corps Association, three national parks, a toy store in Staunton, a museum, a community center, a holistic store, and five Hudson News airport concessions (actually around a dozen locations in five airports).

With a lot of bookstores not members of the ABA, and 40% of ABA members not bookstores, it is past time that everyone accepts the fact that the ABA’s branding doesn’t match up with reality.

Really, the ABA represents indie booksellers the same way The Authors Guild represents authors. Both claim to do so and they have had some success in getting the uninformed to repeat the meme, but in reality the facts do not support the claim.

In the case of The Authors Guild, we have an organization which repeatedly took positions which supported the book publishing industry and went against its member interests. It also repeatedly remained silent on critical issues like Penguin buying Author Solutions and using the vanity press to exploit authors.

It is not clear who the ABA really represents.

If one examines the group’s past actions, in particular its long-running hostility towards Amazon, one gets the impression that the ABA actually represents the legacy book publishing industry. The ABA’s amicus brief in the Apple Supreme Court appeal, and the ABA’s support of the bogus antitrust complaint against Amazon, both reinforce that impression.

To be fair, it is entirely possible that some ABA members might hate Amazon as much as the ABA. But do you really think that the national parks, newsstands, museums, or other organization which belong to the ABA really care about Amazon?

I doubt it.

So with a lot of bookstores passing on an ABA membership, and a lot of ABA members not actually being bookstores, who does the ABA really represent?

You tell me.

images by vastateparksstaff, helicopterspy