Books-A-Million has chosen CoverCake to help them track book talk over a variety of social media networks. The effect social media has on sales has long been a mystery to publishers. Sure there could be a lot of people talking about a book or topic or author on twitter, facebook, etc. but that doesn’t mean anyone is buying it. CoverCake is offering a solution to that and Books-A-Million, one of the few big bookstore chains still standing, is taking full advantage.

This news doesn’t seem too surprising based on the New York Times article yesterday that said Barnes and Nobles was about to enter the fight for its life as well as the life of the brick and mortar bookstore, or based on the idea that it is only a matter of time before print media as we know it, and print media in general, become completely obsolete. Books-A-Million is hoping to thwart that notion, at least for a while, if not forever. Even with the help of CoverCake, it may not be possible, but who knows. Maybe it can be done. Maybe, despite Amazon’s best efforts, there will always be a place in this world for bookstores.

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With the invention of e-readers and therefore e-books, e-magazines, and e-newspapers, the trees are rejoicing, but are some of America’s most steadfast print/paper companies nearing their end? Barnes and Nobles, The United States Postal Service, Verso Paper, and Quad/Graphics are/were some of the largest companies in the US. Their influence, power, and success seemed endless, but times are changing and the more things change and become digital the more companies that thrive off of print media suffer.

In a recent post on Dead Tree Edition the current predicament of each company is explained. The prediction being that one of these four companies will go bankrupt in 2012, but which one will it be? If we’re talking about the extinction of print media we have to consider which form of print media is still absolutely relevant.

Personally, of the four companies, Barnes and Nobles is the most relevant to me. I don’t have an e-reader and I have no intention of investing in one, so a store like Barnes and Nobles still holds significant value to me. But my opinion and outlook on physical books is most likely the minority. Most people enjoy the efficiency, light-weight, and purchasing opportunities that e-readers and e-books offer. So while it stands to reason that physical books may never become extinct (pretty please?!), the necessity of a big bookstore chain like Barnes and Nobles may diminish.

So what do you think? Which one of these companies will file for bankruptcy in 2012? Or do you think none of them will? Is there hope for these companies to adjust and remain standing? Or will we see a gradual decline of print media, until everything is digital and the trees throw a party?

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In a recent opinion piece on the NY Times website, authors and other prominent figures in the literary world get a chance to respond to Amazon’s recent app. For those who don’t know, the new app allows people to go into book stores and scan a product’s bar code, giving amazon a chance to prove that the item is priced lower on their website and shouldn’t be bought from the retailer. Simultaneously, it gives Amazon some pretty incredible competitive research. Anyone who did this last Saturday received $5 off up to three items, other than books, that are sold in bookstores.

While publishers, authors, literary agents, and other bookstores can’t deny Amazon’s presence in the literary world, they can and do feel a bit stunned by Amazon’s actions. More and more it’s become clear that Amazon’s agenda is to oust all other book sellers in the process of becoming the biggest and baddest. But what Amazon appears to be doing most, is cutting any human element out of bookselling.

It used to be that you went to a bookstore and a sales associate helped you locate a book or could make a recommendation based on other books you’ve read. Now Amazon does all that for you and you don’t even need to have a conversation. Just type in a few words and search. The shopping experience may be faster, easier, and cheaper, but it’s certainly not the same.

Authors remember when they first started and the audiences at their book tour readings were solely those who worked at the bookstore. Amazon, though able to sell books like hotcakes, could never provide the kind of support and community that many bookstores have over the years. After all, a computer can do a lot of things, but it can never fully replace an actual human being.

Amazon’s presence may change the landscape of book publishing and selling forever, but many could and would argue that it hasn’t changed for good. For more interesting insight on this hot button issue read the NY Times opinion piece.

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Amazon is no longer just a bookseller. Amazon is a seller of everything under the sun. And now they’ve become creators. They create tablets and e-readers. They publish books. And they create apps so people can do competitive research for Amazon and get more discounts on the things they love to shop for. I think it’s pretty clear that Amazon is looking to take over the world.

Amazon’s eBook pricing structure is such that it devalues print books, which is good for consumers but bad for authors, publishers, and book sellers. So how do people react? What do publishers and other booksellers do to prevent this kind of mass takeover? They make moves that’ll force Amazon to raise their prices. When Apple arrived on the eBook scene, much later than Amazon, they wanted to find a way to compete with Amazon’s pricing structure. According to the European Commission, 5 publishers have formed an alliance with Apple that forced a restructuring of the eBook pricing model. The European Commission is investigating this alliance on the grounds that it’s an alleged conspiracy engaging in anti-competitive practices.

Regardless of the truth in the alliance, no one can deny that there may have been just cause. Amazon is growing and fast. There seems to be no limit to how far they will go and no limit to what measures they will take. As a consumer it seems ideal. Who wouldn’t buy a book that’s been marked down 40%? But as a publisher, an author, a competitor, Amazon’s tactics seems to be destructive. It’s hard to know where it will end, but one things for sure, as far as Amazon’s concerned the end it nowhere in sight.

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History, tradition, and an overwhelming amount of cases all point to needing a traditional publisher to sell big. But, as Amazon takes a slice of the publishing pie, we see the dynamic shift and the old traditions slipping through the cracks to a place where they may soon be forgotten.The article “Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal” on the New York Times website reports that Amazon will be publishing 122 books this fall, some as e-books and some physical books. This number puts Amazon in competition with the publishing powerhouses. Though they’re remaining mum about the amount of editors they’ve hired and books they’ve acquired, this number suggests they are about to challenge the structure of publishing as we know it. Amazon executive Russell Grandinetti, quoted in the article, basically says that the only people that matter in publishing anymore are the writers and the readers. So what does that say about the publishing houses, whose sole purpose is to act as the stage between writers and readers? What does that say about the future of the publishing business? Read “Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal” to find out.

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Yesterday the New York Times posted an article about the death of (yet) another bookstore: The Barnes and Noble on 66th and Broadway near the Lincoln Center in New York City. It’s an enormous building, stuffed to the brim with books, and it’s all going the way of the record player. The article interviews independent-street-side-used-book-seller Charles Mysak, who laments the death of books in general, a phenomenon he has noticed in the last ten years as Apple Products and Kindles become more pervasive. The article spends a lot of time genuflecting on the loss of readers, and print books, and how sad it is that people are getting more stupid. And by people we must mean kids, because the younger generations are the majority of the gadget-buyers and the target audience for the New York Times is older and will understand the John Donne literary references from the columnist.

At the end of the article, Mysak comments:

It is apparent that we have a real serious issue, that the life of the mind has been in decline for some time now. [. . .] Ignorance and indolence is the primary problem. If you take care of the mind, everything else follows.

You can and should go read the article for yourselves. There are a lot of interesting comments on the article, most following in the usual vein: “It’s true, the loss of the print book is sad and terrifying, these fools and their gadgets don’t notice anything around them or know how to think for themselves.”; “OH, THE SMELL OF PRINT BOOKS! IT’S THE BEST SMELL IN THE WORLD! DON’T LET THEM DIE!”; “People are just reading on those gadgets, get over it, technology is here to stay!”; “Literary types are just as absorbed as the tech-types, no one has room to talk.”

Our publisher also offered his comments on the article, which are pretty interesting and insightful:

This is a fascinating article as it describes a reality - not based on statistics or corporate financial newsflashes - but based on a personal and very vivid experience which for many of us is becoming clearer and clearer every day: people are too busy with digital gadgets to focus on our surroundings, they are too focused on quick soundbites rather than longterm absorption of (reading)knowledge.

The question is if this is fundamentally different from moving from horse & buggy to cars -which most people would agree was inevitable and positive for mankind’s mobility and development - or are we moving to a world resembling sci-fi movies such as Idiocray and Minority Report, where people no longer care about the fundamentals of life & civilisation, and are pre-occupied by technologically driven entertainment.

Who knows for sure, but an important question also for the NYT to pursue further in their reporting.

I agree to an extent. But the real-life experiences reflected in the Times are from those who are uninterested in what technology and these admittedly distracting gadgets can do. Perhaps children are losing their attention spans and college students refuse to read anything that doesn’t come in the form of a text message. But I’m young enough that I was a partial product of the technology era, and I read in both print and digital formats, and while I can find myself distracted by Twitter and Facebook and blogs, here I am also disseminating information to a slew of people by those very same means.

It goes both ways; which I think all the dissenters know well enough. Technology is a tool, and how we choose to use it is what’s important. People lament the loss of print books and their smell and texture and the feelings they invoke. Well, I propose this. If it’s the physical book that’s making you feel all warm and fuzzy inside then you have no business reading and claiming to be a great lover of books. It should not be the physical product that warms you; it should be the content of the book. That’s what’s important, that’s what changes people, NOT a cover with some musty used pages.

There are upsides and downsides to reading in print and digitally. Print doesn’t die from a used battery or become unusable because of a smashed screen. But you can’t carry an entire library of print books with you on vacation, either. The fact that the loss of one bookstore or the inattention of some people who wouldn’t be reading anyway is not a reason to think that people are stupid or books are dead. Books are more alive than ever in more formats than ever. Publishers, readers, gadget-users need to broaden the definitions of the terms they use and realize that the tools they have can be valuable in multiple ways.

I know that this is going to be an on-going conversation and that others have expressed the same feelings more poignantly, but I think it’s a conversation that still needs to be had. I don’t think there’s going to be a reversal of technology or that people will go back to the old ways. But we can influence how technology is used and whether we’re going to become more knowledgeable and cultured because of it, or let reading and books and everything they stand for fall to the wayside.

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Digital Book World’s Guy LeCharles Gonzales blogged last week about why we should still be excited about books, about publishing, about the who book industry during a time of such rapid change and development, more rapid than any other the publishing industry has ever seen. He interviewed leaders in the publishing and bookselling industry, asking them to simply state why book still excited them.

You can read all the responses at the original post, here.

Cosimo’s own publisher commented on this post, and here’s what he has to say about books and the written word: WHY it still matters.

“The written word has changed the world from pre-historic to historic.

Guttenberg has changed the world from very limited information access to wide availablilty.

The Internet & eBooks will change the world from reading somewhere, sometime to reading whatever, whenever.

The written word & books will keep informing and inspiring humanity.”

To read more comments and leave your own, check out the original post, or leave a comment on twitter with the hashtag #whybooks.

Feel free to let us know why you’re excited about books, too!

Read more at DigitalBookWorld.com: Why Books? 9 Reasons to be Optimistic | Digital Book World

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No, I only want to read your books! “When it comes to books, we Americans have author loyalty (I can’t wait to read the new Lorrie Moore novel), and bookstore loyalty (I will only shop at local independent bookstores, like Visible Voice or Mac’s Backs). Both forms of faithfulness offer perks, often intertwined…”

Read on…www.good.is/post/book-clubs-and-the-future-of-publishing/

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This weekend Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, contributed an op-ed for The New York Times about the company’s book-scanning project. In “A Library to Last Forever,” he writes:

Because books are such an important part of the world’s collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.

Last May, Brewster Kahle, chairman of the Internet Archive, a not-for-profit digital library, wrote “A Book Grab by Google” for The Washington Post attacking Google’s proposed legal settlement in obtaining the right to digitize books. A key paragraph from Kahle reads:

We’ve wrestled with high-tech monopolies in the past — IBM, AT&T, Microsoft. The lesson was that such strongholds restrict innovation and competition. In those cases, the courts stepped in to address the inequities. Now, we have a proposal for monopolies to be created by the courts.

Cosimo publisher Alexander Dake echoes Kahle:

People should consider whether they want a future where genes in our food are owned by a private company, financial services only provided by one or two mega-banks, their political choices limited to one party, and the world’s historic archives controlled by one, albeit positively intended, search engine; or rather have multi-party democracies, a truly free market where many smaller companies provide a wide variety of services and products, and public goods not monopolized by giant corporations? That is the question, and the answer seems pretty obvious.

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UPDATE June 4: We’ve just come across an astonishing essay by Benjamin Hoff — author of The Tao of Pooh — in which he decries “publishers who seemed dedicated to opposing at every step the new ideas and forms of writing I was trying to bring to the literary world.” His conclusion is as disheartening as it is extraordinary:

The variety is constantly diminishing as corporate committees of book-ignorant, conservative-minded decision makers reject ideas and rework manuscripts they consider too new and untried, not in harmony with a particular point of view or political ideology, or lacking the potential to quickly and sensationally bring them large amounts of risk-free money. Literary quality and intelligence are being lost as well in the relentless corporate dumbing down of literature and numbing down of readers. And authors.

How many wise, inspiring, entertaining, or even basically well-written books can possibly be produced by an industry that treats authors like dirt on the corporate floor? Literary creativity and professional integrity cannot survive in such a deadly atmosphere.

Please read the entire essay — “Farewell to Authorship: And Why We’re Losing Literature” — for one author’s story about how corporate publishing has failed us. And Hoff is a highly successful, bestselling author who has made his publishers lots of money. Imagine how much worse the situation must be for writers without his track record.

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Google is preparing to sell ebooks, cutting Amazon and its Kindle out of the loop.Celebrity nonreaders proudly publish “books”… at corporate publishers who are proud to sell them.

In 2008, for the first time ever, the number of print-on-demand titles published in the U.S. has exceeded the number of traditional books produced…

…which makes the self-publishing powerhouse AuthorSolutions — which encompasses such companies as AuthorHouse and iUniverse — the biggest publisher of books today.

A thoughtful, provocative piece in The Nation considers the state of the book and the publishing industry in light of the current cultural and economic situation. A few choice excerpts:

Do books still have their power? Over the past twenty years, as we’ve thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we’ve been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren’t necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression.

A key element in the dissemination of books, independent of publishers and booksellers but essential to both, is the press. The simultaneous collapse of the business model for newspapers and magazines is a gruesome fact of life, and we book people keenly feel the pain of a sister print-on-paper industry, to put it mildly. All citizens should be alarmed by the loss of such a vital necessity to a democracy. But the hard numbers and socioeconomic exigencies of journalism’s huge crisis differ greatly from those of book publishing’s smaller one (though they are often conflated). Here I want only to stress that the loss of so many book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects of our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and criticism were fundamental to the old model of book publishing and to the education of writers; Internet coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, does not begin to compensate for their loss.

As the megapublishers tightened their grip in the 1980s, I was dismayed to see a number of once good firms of markedly different publishing style or literary taste make foolish, overpriced mistakes; they seemed to be losing their bearings as they paid ever more money for ever more questionable properties, entrusting the sewing up of these sow’s ears to not very experienced practitioners. I asked Jeremiah Kaplan, founder of the Free Press, a once autonomous and brilliant publisher of serious social science, how things could go so wrong. Besides the obvious motive of greed, he thought it simple. “Businessmen never learn from their mistakes because they always find someone else to blame for them,” he said. “Businessmen only learn from their successes. Except publishers can’t do that.” He smiled. We both knew well that you couldn’t foreordain a bestseller, no matter how wisely you handled every detail. And the necessary skills were disappearing. “Since our successes can’t be replicated, publishers learn nothing! Nothing!” Roger Straus, too, a skillful practitioner if ever there was one, understood the chanciness: “Aw, a blind pig can find a truffle,” he’d say, deflecting praise for publishing a good book well. Yes, a lot of it was blind luck.

The stifling excess of lucrative junk is, naturally, galling for literary artists unknown or only slightly known to the mass market, whose talents are perhaps not suited to it; they want or need the filthy lucre too. Their ever more powerful agents have successfully decoupled the size of the royalty advances they receive from any estimate of the books’ eventual earnings, and routinely assure them that if Knopf or Norton or Morrow fails to earn back the upfront money, it’s because their masterpieces were badly published, not because the advances were implausibly high. This is cheering, of course; writers’ egos are always shaky, and they tend to forget the sage warning that you should disregard compliments extended by someone whose income derives from your own. Also, they won’t acknowledge that literary quality may decline as advances increase; only rarely is a writer liberated into confidence-inspiring freedom by following advice from greedy publishers about Pleasing the Crowd. Willa Cather wasn’t the only fine writer who refused advances for being, in her view, unethical, nor was D.H. Lawrence the only one who found them demeaning. The agents have much to answer for.

There’s much, much more, and it’s all worth a read. The gist of it, though, is that the woes of traditional publishing have been long in the making, and are yet another symptom of the same disease that ails our global economy on the whole: thoughtless arrogance, greed, shortsightedness, and a valuing of quantity over quality.

Dystopic futures aside — does anyone with a brain really doubt that the nightmare of Idiocracy something truly in the realm of fantasy only? — what can literary people, readers and authors and publishers alike, hope for? AuthorSolutions may be the largest publisher by quantity today, but it does not vet its books at all: it exists merely as a conduit for anyone who wants to write a book, regardless of quality or even coherence, to get that book out there. Flexibility and freedom is a good thing, but won’t be merely drown in even more junk than is already throttling us?

Are we going to have to redefine the book to encompass much more than “a finite number of pages bound into a relative portable package”? Or will the sense of what we know as a book today cease to exist, and soon?

We at Cosimo find ourselves right in the middle of these conundrums. We publish print-on-demand books and sell them online, and we love the freedom and the flexibility that gives us to introduce readers to books that have been overlooked by traditional publishers, because they don’t fit into the very narrow, corporate-minded paradigms those publishers have constricted themselves into over recent decades. But Cosimo isn’t an AuthorSolutions-style vanity press, either: we don’t publish everything that crosses our desks.

But if Cosimo isn’t actually alone in this new category of publisher, we’re in a very tiny minority in trying to cope with the new reality of publishing by finding a middle ground between the two wild extremes we’re seeing today.

What is the future of books and bookstores? Or readers and reading? If you’re an author, what do you expect from publishers and the publishing process these days? And where is nontraditional publishing and bookselling going to take us, as readers and as a culture?

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