Last fall I interviewed John Maxwell, Associate Professor in the Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Vancouver, BC. As John pointed out, SFU offers the only masters program in Canada, and they graduate some very bright and capable students. The Master of Publishing program was set up in the early 1990s at a time when the Canadian publishing industry was stable and profitable. The program was immediately successful because it invited participation from a wide variety of people in the industry. “At that time we saw the purpose of the program as training people into the existing industry,” says Maxwell. ”We took direct input from the industry as to what they needed in new personnel.”

The other force at work is the students and their view of the kind of education that will provide maximum value (the courses are not inexpensive: over $14,000 for 4 semesters at SFU). “Over half of the students want to be literary editors when they first join the program,” Maxwell points out. “But then they get hired for marketing jobs or to solve data problems because that’s where the demand is. The publishers don’t know exactly what they need. They hire someone to solve an immediate problem, and that person may go on to play many different roles.”

Digital is changing publishing and the MPub course is responding. “We’ve been through the early days of digital publishing, where things look awful compared to printed books and magazines, but I think that’s starting to change,” Maxwell says. “As my colleague Roberto Dosil likes to point out, right now we’re in a period where technology is moving ahead and it’s outpacing craft. We’ve seen this happen before. Eventually craft catches up again. I think we’re trying to help pull the fine craft tradition of publishing forward into the new technological environment.”

The goals of the program have changed. As Maxwell sees it ”our original dream in the program was that the graduates would rise to the top of major publishing houses. These days our target is to help them see themselves as self-sufficient agents — perhaps as employees, or as freelancers, or as entrepreneurs — in a rapidly changing world.”

Microsoft can buy whatever it wants whenever it wants for any goddamn reason in the world. (Though before you make too much fun of Microsoft repeat after me: “Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion and gained 13 staff and no direct revenue.”) Conjure up any reason you like to explain why Microsoft might toss a billion or so more into the same trash can as its other recent investments.

Barnes & Noble has sold about 10 million various Nook devices: more than 10 times the number of Surface tablets sold by Microsoft. Perhaps Microsoft can capitalize on the sales channel. Apple has had enormous success selling iPads through company-branded stores: maybe Microsoft can take advantage of Barnes & Noble’s nearly 700 trade bookstores and 700 college bookstores. Amazon, Apple and Google all operate online e-bookstores — perhaps owning the second most popular online bookstore could catapult Microsoft into some sort of driver’s seat. It doesn’t matter.

If you had $70,000 in the bank you wouldn’t think twice about risking a thousand. More so if you knew that next year your earnings after taxes would add another $15,000 or so to your nest egg. Particularly if your parents were constantly nagging you: “I don’t know why you don’t invest some of that money. It’s not liked it’s earning anything in the bank.” (A few weeks ago Apple capitulated to that harangue and agreed to return $100 billion to shareholders.)

Playing financial games with Barnes & Noble has become a complex enterprise. For starters Barnes & Noble is really three different companies, even more depending who’s counting. There’s the general trade bookstores, a total of 677 as of January 26, 2013. Add 1 and you’ve got the 678 company-operated college bookstores, “serving more than 4.6 million students and faculty members at colleges and universities across the United States.”

Then there’s the Nook business. Until recently Barnes & Noble’s great light and hope, it’s become a drag on earnings: time to eject. Because the all-digital Nook remains slightly sexy to some suitors; Microsoft currently the most handsome at the prom. But the Nook business includes both hardware and digital content. It’s the hardware that’s losing ground fastest to Amazon, while digital content sales keep Barnes & Noble in the #2 spot behind the undisputed champ.

PublishersLunch dissects the sloppy work at TechCrunch but their analysis is behind a firewall. A big part of the confusion is that Nook Media LLC is an improbable collection of enterprises: it was established with the Nook hardware, the online BN.com revenue and the revenue of the college bookstore division. That means selling t-shirts to teenagers, among other things. Oh yes, and some textbooks, the value of which is projected to drop from $4 billion in 2012 to $173 million by 2017. Some people mistake Barnes & Noble as a player in the shift to digital textbooks. It’s not. The market is dominated by CourseSmart, Chegg and a few others, not by Barnes & Noble or by Follett, its #1 competitor specifically in college bookstore operations. Does Microsoft want to run 700 college bookstores?

Microsoft in Education

Apple gained a focus on the education market very soon after the first Macintosh computers shipped in 1984. The strategy has been a solid win for Apple, even with Google now coming on strong. Apple VP Phil Schiller has been widely quoted as saying, “Education is in Apple’s DNA.” Certainly the iPad is solidifying Apple’s presence in schools.

By 1997 Microsoft also identified the education market as a key to its success. In 2008 Microsoft announced plans to invest $235 million (over five years) into its Partners in Learning program, which provides software and training to students, teachers, and schools. The funding was renewed in 2012 along with an additional $75 million aimed at increasing digital access to educational materials in Africa.

If you want to use Microsoft’s Cloud Platform Windows Azure for teaching purposes, you can apply for a “Windows Azure Educator Grant” which offers a 12-month free subscription to Windows Azure for faculty, and a 6-month free subscription for students.

Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 has nary a mention of Barnes & Noble. A blog post by Microsoft employee Ray Fleming on “How education partners can make the most of the 2013 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference” doesn’t include a mention of Barnes & Noble.

A search for “Barnes & Noble” on Microsoft’s news site is revealing. The first result returned is of course the announcement of Microsoft’s $300 million investment in April, 2012. The second item is the March, 2011 press release describing how Microsoft “filed legal actions…against Barnes & Noble, Inc. and its device manufacturers, Foxconn International Holdings Ltd. and Inventec Corporation, for patent infringement by their Android-based e-reader and tablet devices that are marketed under the Barnes & Noble brand.”

A Lawsuit Makes for Strange Bedfellows

Barnes & Noble is no stranger to the courts of commercial law. Two of the most expensive lawsuits the company has fought involve the College division and, separately, Microsoft patents launched against Android technology.

On August 11, 2009, Barnes & Noble announced that it had bought the Barnes & Noble College division from chairman Len Riggio for nearly $600 million. Few people were aware that the college stores were then owned privately by Len Riggio and his wife. And so the public company that he controlled purchased the private company that he owned for what many thought a princely sum. Barnes & Noble ended up in a lawsuit with shareholders (including the Louisiana Municipal Police Employees Retirement System). Noting a “fishy smell” surrounding the deal, Judge Leo Strine allowed the lawsuit to proceed.

How convenient.

When Barnes & Noble accepted Microsoft’s investment, just over a year ago, it managed to validate the purchase price of the Barnes & Noble College division at the same time that it offered B&N a dignified manner to capitulate to Microsoft in some very nasty and expensive patent litigation. A win-win, as it were.

Barnes & Noble’s chairman Len Riggio has proven himself a skilled player in both the boardrooms and the courtrooms of America. Microsoft has repeatedly proved itself an extremely wealthy chump. Don’t let these players play you for a fool by pretending that the money they toss around has much to do with their day-to-day business. There are other games afoot and some masters at work.

May 13, 2013: A report in the credible Insider Monkey splashes some pretty cold water on the rumor du jour. So how about a quick recap: On May 8 TechCrunch said it had obtained “internal documents”. Pretty specific internal documents. For example “the documents [TechCrunch] has seen values B&N at $1.66 billion.” Yesterday “we at Insider Monkey received word from a highly placed source inside Microsoft Corporation…who said that the story was only a rumor.” But it wasn’t a “story” per say, it was a report on a set of documents that were seen by two reporters at TechCrunch. Are we to believe that someone forged documents in a manner convincing to two tech reporters (and presumably their editor)? I imagine that the documents were real, but represented a plan recently considered that has subsequently been revised or abandoned.

There are several stories here. I could waste a little ink on how often these days unconfirmed reports get magnified and broadcast by a page-view-hungry media. But this only happens when a story is in play. Barnes & Noble is in play. You might even say Barnes & Noble is a playful company: it makes so many plans only to soon change them or lose interest. But Microsoft continues to hold the #1 High-Tech Attention Deficit Disorder Award, as it has for many years. This is a company that has played with and discarded more technologies than Carter has Little Liver Pills. Remember it has already commanded and abandoned the ebook business in the U.S. between 1999 to early in the new century.

Stay tuned. Another raft of unconfirmed reports and internal documents sighted just ahead.

5 men discuss how royalties drive metadata

“Building Efficiency & Transparency in Royalty Reporting” was the topic for Weitzner’s five-man panel and it provided essential clues for those who seek to understand how music metadata really functions. Follow the money. Or at least try to find some evidence along the metadata usage trail. Then, with luck and by sometimes wielding a heavy stick, money will trickle into the various royalty collection agencies and things might feel hot.

Of course money is at the heart of industry metadata efforts, but money is not the whole story. On the first day of the conference Ian McEwen of MusicBrainz.org offered a cheerful if rambling account of his non-profit group that “collects music metadata and makes it available to the public.” The group has lofty aspirations: “Like Wikipedia, MusicBrainz is maintained by a global community of users and we want everyone — including you — to participate and contribute.”

Why is it that popular music became nerd heaven, able to inspire hordes of volunteers to spend endless hours documenting music metadata with a goal of becoming the “ultimate source of music information.” There’s an affiliated group called BookBrainz, notable mainly for its lack of activity. In the film world we’re stuck with the merely reasonably good Internet Movie Database (IMDb), owned by Amazon since 1998. Music stands alone in its astounding ability to commandeer volunteer labor.

In fact part of the metadata challenge in every content industry is that there are a couple of 800 lb. gorillas making a pretty good living out of controlling that industry’s metadata, not at all enthused about the raucous joy of open source communities. And while collecting copyright fees might make metadata sexy, the metadata gatekeepers can get their rocks off just by knowing that they’ll be able to command a toll to link to its source.

These tollgate keepers are an august group, dedicated professionals, folks who believe in the value of crystal pure data. Bowker, established in 1868. Nielsen, founded in 1923. The music industry, younger than book publishing, reports mostly to Rovi, founded in 1983 as Macrovision, and to Gracenote, founded in 1998, now part of Sony.

It’s an accident of history and of timing that our creative industry titans saw these companies more as vital partners than as spigots choking the rate of data flow. It’s tough to argue that the Creative Commons would easily improve on the metadata structures of our content industries. But it’s easy to find fault with some of the more arcane practices of the tollgate keepers, the most arcane of which is the economic necessity to ask indies and the self-published to pay tolls to have their metadata made discoverable.

And so the debate continues, much more lively these days because of the hard work by Bill Wilson and his team at NARM/digitalmusic.org.

A never-before seen collection of high-level working sessions and talks about very practical issues, this 
two-day summit is designed to both inform newcomers about the importance of managing information 
through metadata — the “plumbing” that ensures digital tracks are labeled correctly in online music 
stores — and provide a forum for music industry executives and associated technologists to discuss and hash out solutions to key issues in the information systems of the future of the music business.

“Maintaining accurate and standardized metadata isn’t necessarily the first thing that springs to mind when one thinks about the top issues currently facing the music industry, but it is one of the most critically important,” said Bill Wilson, VP of Digital Strategy & Business Development at NARM/digitalmusic.org. “If we want people to consume more music, we need to make it as simple as possible for them to find and discover what they want, and ensure accounting is accurate and expedient. Establishing and maintaining a proper information infrastructure is the only way to do that at scale.”

As someone working in metadata for book publishing for the last few years the event is a revelation. I’d guess there were a couple of hundred in the room; it was standing room only. The title of my presentation was “You Are Not Alone: Metadata Lessons from the Book Publishing Industry.” All I could think was: I’m the one who was all alone. Who would have imagined hundreds signed up for a 2+ day program on metadata. Yes, it was widely acknowledged that the event was a step forward, unthinkable until recently. In book publishing we’ve never pulled together a sizeable metadata crowd except for a single session.

An executive who gets it.

Michael Frey, chief executive at Sony DADC New Media Solutions, led off the morning with an anecdote designed to illustrate just how little he knew about metadata. I feared the worst but he surprised the heck out of me: Not only did he know what he was talking about, he expressed his knowledge in a clear and lively fashion. Perhaps he didn’t know his DDEX from his ISRC but he was well-versed in what matters most about metadata: its strategic value for a content publishing organization (I use “content publishing” as a catch-all. He was speaking mainly about music but the lessons extended far beyond).

His stories illustrated many of the real-world challenges faced by a large content organization that trades, in part, in data. Frey said that SONY DADC supplies 840 different fields to 56 territories: “in music half our data deliveries are just metadata…. the metadata piece really slows things down,” he said. “We might deliver 100,000 price changes in a day.”

Frey offered a simple but clear illustration of where metadata can become a bottleneck in a way not faced by book publishers: Sony can’t launch a song in Russia if they don’t have a description of the song in Russian (with a book, there’s not much point in describing the text in a second language: either they read English or they’re not in the market for the title).

All-in-all a fine presentation that set the stage perfectly for the program that followed.

To be continued…

Towards the end of 2012 a “real” publisher, Simon & Schuster, the fourth largest of the current big six, insinuated itself into the ebook bestseller ecosystem by awarding a hunk of cash to this tremendously successful self-published author. All of this cash was awarded just for what some see as the detritus of the current publishing process: the print version of a hugely successful ebook.

Hugh Howey describes his backward saga to conventional publishing respectability in detail on IndieReader. All I could think was “good for you, Hugh!”

Flash forward a few months.

Yesterday I was in the Houston airport on the way to the PePcon conference where I’ll be talking about BOOKISHNESS.

In an airport bookstore I found Wool, bright red, front and center on the rack. For 15 bucks. OK. That’s not a tall price for a paperback. But what was I going to get for my $15? About 550 printed pages that mirrored the ebook. Plus a two-page Q&A with the author. (Who, we could note, has commanded elsewhere enormous quantities of press for his publishing coup.)

Which one is the print version?

This $15 paperback is commanding a little over $8.50 online, while the ebook goes for $5.99 both on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble.

So, Simon & Schuster. So, Mr. Howey. Should we accept that just because it’s print it’s worth between 40% and 250% more than the ebook? Is that how you’re trying to pull us in?

Wasn’t there something you could do with the paper edition of a hugely-popular novel that would remind the reader what print can do that digital can not?

The obvious feature would have been adding text features to the print book. I don’t mean changing the words in the core text. But how about an interview with the author describing exactly why he wanted to have a print version, in cloth and paper, and what that means to him. There’s lots of money on the table here: how about commissioning a set of illustrations that would appear exclusively in the print version for, let’s say, 6-9 months before they’re offered online. Of course there can be reading group extras, a well-established tradition, and extras for the classroom.

Come on! This is BOOKISHNESS! Let’s make an ebook fluid and digital and a print book solid and stalwart. That’s publishing.

The signed and numbered edition of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 is limited to exactly 111 copies. The front and back covers are printed on Somerset, a 100 percent cotton archival paper, using a Swiss-made 1963 Gietz Art Platen hand-fed letterpress. The covers were handprinted by Justin Knopp at Typoretum. Text pages printed and bound by Graphicom, Verona. The text design by Jim Smith.

The making of the books was predominantly manual with the front and back covers of each book printed by hand (by letterpress artist Justin Knopp) then bound onto the book blocks. The three edges of each book were hand-coloured before the books were placed into a slipcase, numbered and finally wrapped and sewn into a cloth covering. They are accompanied by a numbered certificate of authenticity carrying the Harvill Secker limited edition seal. The author has signed every set by hand and each time with a slight variation on where the signature is situated or what pen has been used. As a result of this multi-layered process of hand production, every single one of the 111 sets has its own unique characteristics. No two sets are the same, making this a truly special limited edition artist’s book.

People could easily assume that with the designer’s and publisher’s great attention to detail, their preciousness, this limited edition of 1Q84 is very bookish indeed.

Not in my books.

As I considered in my first post on BOOKISHNESS, the primary responsibility of the physical design of a book is to accentuate and amplify the message of the text. Everything else is ornament. In my second post I highlighted lovely artist’s books: books as art, or book arts. As beautiful and creative as they can be, they’re a different creature than BOOKISHNESS.

The retail price of the Murakami limited edition was £750 (about $1150). It’s now offered online at prices up to $8,000.

You might think that the regular edition was treated shabbily, no budget left to share. Hardly. The cover of the U.S. edition was designed by veteran Knopf designer Chip Kidd, considered one of the best book designers working today. Fortunately Kidd has talked about his ideas behind the design. You’ll be surprised at how much care was taken to ensure that the visual treatment amplified themes from the text.

Kidd describes the same process with a different emphasis in a TED talk he gave last year. It’s well worth watching the whole 17-minute video as a love song to cover design. He discusses 1Q84 starting at 14:10.

The effort paid off. Kidd explains: “[1Q84] debuted at number two on the New York Times Best Seller list. This is unheard of, both for us the publisher, and the author. We’re talking a 900-page book that is as weird as it is compelling, and featuring a climactic scene in which a horde of tiny people emerge from the mouth of a sleeping girl and cause a German Shepherd to explode…. Fourteen weeks on the Best Seller list, eight printings, and still going strong.”

According to the New York Times 1Q84 sold 210,000 copies in hardcover in the first six months after publication.

Publishers Weekly picked up on the improbable success of a long, difficult and expensive book. Rachel Deahl explains that the impressive print sales are “thanks, in large part, to an extravagant package that Knopf put together that has made the book the kind of object — beautiful and collectible — that readers want.”

And, as Chip Kidd notes, readers engaged in the text starting with the cover, through the endpapers, the opening page design, right through to the backwards page numbering on right-hand pages.

This to me is the essence of BOOKISHNESS — a design that engages the reader.

A few other design notes:

As is typical, the U.K. publisher commissioned its own cover for the book. The very capable Suzanne Dean took on the challenge. And failed. I don’t find her treatment particularly compelling even without the comparison to Kidd’s work:

The U.S. paperback of 1Q84 was also a premium effort: “The book [was] published as a three-volume set…. John Gall, the art director for Vintage, designed the paperbacks to be visible through a clear plastic box, fitting together to create one image.”

I’ll end with a thought from Chip Kidd. He explains in his TED talk how he came to understand the task of a book designer: “My job was to ask this question: ‘What do the stories look like?’… A book designer gives form to content…”

PS: I’ll be offering the first presentation of BOOKISHNESS next week at PEPCON: The Print + ePublishing Conference in Austin, Texas.

PSS: The always informative Jane Friedman interviewed the very capable Joel Friedlander about book design print and digital which reminded me that I’m being sloppy in this post by failing to make a clear distinction between cover design and interior page design. They are different beasts, and often demand separate designers. My emphasis here is on cover design. I’d far rather market a book with a mundane page design and a stunning cover than the other way around.

There’s a whole category of lovely artist’s books, or books as art, or book arts. As beautiful and creative as they are, they’re a different creature than BOOKISHNESS.

Look at this:

Mobi © 2013 by Jodi Harvey-Brown

It’s unlikely to bring you to a deeper appreciation of Melville’s work. Or this, The Accordion Book by Peter and Donna Thomas:

Clever, but tough to read on a plane. Those are both examples of “books as art”. They do not represent BOOKISHNESS.

Now take a look at Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret?

A stunning book, 533 pages, not yet in digital form, made into an equally remarkable Scorsese film. As Selznick writes: “Unlike most novels, the images in my new book don’t just illustrate the story; they help tell it.”

Consider Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a bestselling book that became a movie, generating a paperback design that merged the best of the first book design with the best of the film poster imagery.

Foer has gone on to work with the U.K.’s very imaginative Visual Editions to produce one of the most stunning examples of bookishness that I’ve ever seen: the Tree of Codes. Based on The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, Foer cut into and out of the book. In an interview Foer says: “This book is mine. His book is a masterpiece, this was my experiment. My story has nothing to do with his story… I’m not interested in experimentation for its own sake. But I’m interested in works of art that transport a reader. That send you to a different place—pure magic.”

Coming back down to earth I’ve been marveling also at how designers are approaching the challenge of creating book covers that attract a public hopelessly distracted by imagery, and as likely to shop online as in person.

The first cover, designed by Jon Gray for Albert Espinosa’s The Yellow World, is particular audacious, a crudely drawn yellow circle, placed imperfectly on a blue background. That’s all. Says Gray: “I also thought it would stand out against other books and without type would make you want to pick it up and find out more.” Gray also designed the cover for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The second, The Flame Alphabet, was designed by Peter Mendelsund. Gray says of this book, “A simple idea beautifully executed in rich, warm colors… You want to hold it, own it and buy it for your friends.” The third, designed by John Gall, I selected mostly for its near-fluorescent green, even more powerful than the image of the vulnerable young deer.

A book I bought used a few weeks ago is a reminder that there are lots that can be done with trim, not all of it quite so obvious as this:

These then portray aspects of BOOKISHNESS. By carefully adding value to the design or manufacture of a physical book the author’s message can be more readily absorbed. By appealing not just to the reading mind but also to the eye and to the touch the book seduces its readers, pulls them in, welcomes them home. The last thing we want from print books is monotonous pages of cramped type: ebooks are preferable if that’s the best a publisher has to offer.

Soon I’ll look at ebooks through my BOOKISHNESS goggles. I don’t see ebooks as the less important invention. What they lack in design delights they can more than make up for with unique digital features. The BOOKISHNESS challenge for publishers producing both print and digital is making each edition uniquely valuable to the reader.

But before I get there I consider The Case of Murakami’s 1Q84.

I’ll be making my first public presentation of BOOKISHNESS next week at PEPCON: The Print + ePublishing Conference in Austin, Texas.

Ebooks continue their advance (Bowker pegs ebooks at 28% of the U.S. market in November 2012), taking dollars away from printed books. Bookstores are suffering. The market share of chains, post Borders bankruptcy, dropped from 32% to 19%, while online leapt from 25% to 44%.

Naturally enough my focus shifted backward (or was it sideways?) to printed books. It’s time for a reconsideration. Do we want to hold onto physical? Why? It can’t be for sentimental reasons. Barnes & Noble and 2,000 independents can’t survive on sentiment alone. There has to be a good reason for printed books to persevere.

The physical vs. digital debate makes for a very tired gathering. Each side shrieks its preference, ignoring the other. But by now everyone should realize that it doesn’t have to be either/or. Print books don’t have to disappear for digital to succeed. Digital doesn’t have to drown out physical. On the other hand the decline in print book sales is causing a disruption in the retail channel. While print books don’t have to disappear for ebooks to thrive, Amazon is sucking all of the oxygen out of the room. Barnes & Noble, the last remaining major U.S. book chain, is feeling the heat, closing stores and circling the wagons. Of course it was Barnes & Noble and Borders (R.I.P.) that crippled independent bookselling – now only 3.7% of total book sales. But that’s another story.

Printed books are an essential cog in publishing today because the retail display of books remains an essential part of how people learn about new titles and new authors. Publishers must decide if they’re going to continue to support printed books and the firms that display them. That’s what brought me to BOOKISHNESS.

The question I asked myself is what makes a book a book? And more specifically, what makes a print book one kind of book and what makes an ebook another kind of book. Sure, they both contain the same text. But the similarity often ends there. Print books communicate with a richer visual language than ebooks. Ebooks of course can take advantage of the online network in ways that are impossible for print.

Book design is sometimes needlessly florid. But more often the physical design of a book seeks to accentuate and amplify the message of the text. Whether it’s the typeface of the text or the image on the jacket, book designers make the author’s job a little easier by creating context for the content of book. This is how a book becomes bookish.

I want to set out the myriad ways that physical elements of design and manufacture can enhance the bookishness of a book. I eschew the ornamental to focus on adding context or meaning to the message. This is not about books as art. It’s about books as books.

The Bookishness of Printed Books

Dust jacket or Paper cover

• Image (including artwork, colors, inks)
• Substrate, visual aspects of material
• Substrate, tactile aspects of material
• Emboss, die-cut

Binding (and trim)

• Wire-O binding
• Deckled edges
• Endpapers
• Printed Case Binding
• Smyth sewing
• Thumb index
• Inserts
• Irregular trim size
• Lay-flat binding

Paper

• Paper – Interior – Weight
• Paper – Interior – Style, i.e. rag, spotted, etc.
• Paper – Interior – Color
• Paper – Interior – Inks
• Glossy stock for photographs
• Folded sheet for maps, etc.

Interior elements

• Type choices
• Type color
• Charts and maps
• Line art, b&w and/or color
• Halftones, b&w and/or color
• Illustrations, b&w and/or color
• 2-page spread

In the next blog entry I’ll consider some examples of truly bookish books and then reconsider ebooks in the shadow of “real” books – what they uniquely offer and what they leave on the book bindery floor.

I’m looking forward to presenting BOOKISHNESS a week from now at PEPCON: The Print + ePublishing Conference, in Austin, Texas.

The Great Wave by Guy Laramee:
Beautiful but not bookish.

Meanwhile Publishers Weekly dropped a gift in our laps a few weeks back as part of its Facts & Figures 2012 coverage: A 2012 ebook bestseller list! But not just any old list. A list with sales figures, lots of sales figures, everything from the 25,008 ebooks sold of Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness to the “15 million+” ebook copies sold of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and the 12.7 million ebook copies of The Hunger Games trilogy (detailed on a separate children’s books bestsellers listing).

I thought it would be interesting to plug Publishers Weekly’s revealing numbers into some of the 2012 bestseller lists. USA Today provides a combined print and ebook 2012 bestseller list which I chose as my benchmark, so I’d have a point of comparison to Amazon’s list.

Amazon actually offers two different ebook bestseller lists for 2012. The first list is only for titles published in the 2012 calendar year. The more useful list orders bestsellers regardless of year of publication. That’s what’s embedded below (or you can download it here).

The value of these numbers is that they’re as close as we can get to knowing how many ebooks Amazon actually sold. The “Qty. (PW)” in the third column is the total number of ebook sold in 2012 as reported by the publisher. The number includes Amazon’s sales. So, based on your best educated guess of what Amazon’s percentage of the ebook market is, you can estimate Amazon’s sales.

It’s not worth trying to back out the data for the very top bestsellers. There are too many variables in play. Head further down the list and start looking at the patterns.

Although the USA Today ranking is for combined physical and digital, Amazon’s ratings reveal a close correlation.

Broadly speaking romances don’t rank on Amazon as highly as they do at other outlets. Look at The Marriage Bargain by Jennifer Probst, #37 on USA Today and a no-show on Amazon. Or Beautiful Disaster by Jamie McGuire; #61 on USA Today; a no-show on Amazon.

Twenty-six titles appear in Amazon’s top 100 that have no place on USA Today’s list. Only two of those are Amazon Publishing exclusives. About half are self-published titles without a print equivalent, often available only through Amazon. The rest were titles apparently better suited to digital than to print. Nine of those are listed below the USA Today Top 100 under the heading “Other 2012 Amazon Top 100 Ebooks.”

Beneath that I offer “Selected Titles Reported by Nielsen UK” as detailed in The Guardian. As is often the case Jamie Oliver leads the pack. It’s somehow in keeping that trailing only slightly behind Oliver is The Hairy Dieters: How to Love Food & Lose Weight.

Finally I included a selection of bestsellers from Canada that appear only on Canadian lists (most of the titles on Canadian bestseller lists are published in the U.S. or the U.K.). The #1 bestseller in Canada in 2012 was, unsurprisingly, Quiet: The Power of Introverts (however the author and publisher are both American).

Lastly I looked at Digital Book World’s “Best-Selling Ebooks of 2012” (in the far right hand column). DBW works with Dan Lubart to provide an unusual inferred list. You can judge it here in relation to two other 2012 bestseller lists and against the volume sales numbers provided by Publishers Weekly.

Download (XLS, 36KB)

The Goodreads’ folks always struck me as decent people who genuinely care about writers and readers. I am surprised and disappointed. Perhaps even saddened.

I would imagine that Goodreads’ 30 pieces of silver are many, many millions. I think that they must have been well paid for this betrayal; the decision cannot have been easy.

March 29: All Things Digital reports that Amazon paid a base of $150 million, most cash (not that Amazon’s shares aren’t a solid currency) and may pay up to $200 million “if certain performance metrics are met.” It’s admittedly between difficult and impossible to say no to that kind of cash, especially if you can convince yourself that Amazon is keen on “continuing to grow (y)our vision as an independent entity, under the Goodreads brand and with (y)our unique culture. ” Hey it’s the same thing as Zappos, right?