Bait 'n' Beer

It's summer and the always inward-looking, gossip-loving book biz is well into one of its periodic silly seasons. Others have written at greater length about most of these topics, but just a few thoughts on some of the events in the publishing world over the past week or two.
 

• L'affaire Wylie is but the latest in a series of the inevitable kerfluffles that will rear their heads with increasing frequency as the shift to digital becomes more pronounced. As I've said before, these fights are healthy as they help us sort out the very real issues that arise as we all enter uncharted territory. What's not particularly healthy is the hysteria that has accompanied the Wylie/Amazon deal and the pronouncements of apocalypse for one or more industry segments as we evolve. Words like 'outrage', 'condemn', and 'appalled' are appropriate for human rights abuses in the Sudan, not for office suites in Manhattan. Keep calm and carry on.
• My big takeaway from the whole Wylie brouhaha is that it's not good enough for publishers merely to assert their ownership of digital rights. If you're going to make such an assertion, you'd better be simultaneously exploiting those rights to the benefit of the author (or his heirs and assigns) or somebody else is going to find a way to do it for you.
• In a related matter, disintermediation is nothing new. It happens when businesses change so get used to it. Sears, Roebuck disintermediated the local dry goods store when it mailed its first catalog and it continues unabated in every sector...not just publishing and bookselling.. As Mike Cane has pointed out, there's a sad irony in watching independent booksellers ranting about being disintermediated by Amazon as they listen to music they downloaded to their iPods from uber-disntermediator, Apple iTunes.
• It's interesting and instructive that the new big things in the publishing world are identifiers/metadata and rights/subrights--subjects traditionally thought of as among the least sexy parts of the business. People are figuring out that (a) these things have sales and marketing implications, particularly in search, (b) as rights are further unbundled, the identifiers for each format or chunk of content become more important and (c) getting them right adds significant value to the organization. People like Laura Dawson, Michael Cairns and the BISG have been talking about them for years. Finally they're getting more attention than the latest unlikely-to-actualy-appear new e-reader.
• A quick thought on all the Amazon hate. Yes, they can be heavy-handed and it's always a concern when market power concentrates, but let's keep two things in mind. First, from a publisher or distributor's perspective, they sell a boatload of your books, they return almost nothing, and they pay on time. None of these is a bad thing. Second, as someone who lived in rural Mississippi for a time (where the closest decent bookstore was one hundred miles from my home), Amazon gave me access to books I would never have seen or heard of. Please remember that not everyone in this country lives within easy striking distance of a great independent, or even a strip mall - based Barnes & Noble.
•  Finally, does anyone really think traditional publishers are going to do a great job with enhanced ebooks? The skill sets required to produce a first class enhanced title are simply not resident in publishing houses, nor are those most qualified to bring those skills to the party likely to choose boiok publishing as the most promising career path. Because of this, if I were an agent or author, I'd be very careful about which rights (therre's that word again) I licensed to book publishers unless and until the publisher can demonstrate that it can take full advantage of anything beyond print, digital and audio.

It's almost August. Take deep breath, stay cool and keep reminding yourself that accelerating change is the new norm.