Seeing as the Bookseer is about books, and data, and openness, I thought I would share some of the early stats with those of you who are interested in such things. This is all based on the first few days’ traffic up to June 13th. (Whilst launched before then, we announced in on June 9th.) As well as being fun, I think that the data is a mild demonstration of The Long Tail in action.

Visitors

• We’ve had 19,716 page views, across 4,403 page titles, with 15,181 unique page views.
• Visits are 7,123 with uniques at 6,602. Which suggests about 10% of people asked the Book Seer for advice on more than one title. (Or, if you felt generous, 90% of people got the answer they were looking for. Personally, I’m not quite that optimistic – if that were true, then we really should have set up an affiliate account on the referrals to Amazon… although I think that violates the non-commercial terms of service on the API.)

Pages

• The home page was the most popular, but only bounced 30.5% of visits. Which seeing as much of the referred traffic was from StumbleUpon, I think is pretty good – they are hard people to entertain. Having said that I find it really hard to see what StumbleUpon has said about a site or even to find a referring link.
• There are only two pages on the site- the home page, and the results page. The results page has the name of the book written into the URL (and the title) so we can tell from the logs what books have been looked at the most. If that URL had included the ISBN or something else abstract – we wouldn’t know anything. Nice work James. As a result we can tell which titles have been the most popular requests of the seer.

Books

And so the next bit is the fun bit. We have 4,406 different page titles, and 3 of those were the home page (we collected data when the site was codenamed “My Next Book”). All the other 4,403 are questions for the seer.

Here’s the top 20 – and it provides a fun overview of people’s reading habits. Note that some – not all – results are skewed by the fact that bloggers linking to the bookseer linked directly to a results page. So Stumbleupon appears to have linked directly to the Dave Eggers, What is the What page, a link which resulted in 166 of the 269 page views for that title. Still, What is the What remains a popular book among people who come to consult the Bookseer – or, looked at another way, one that people in aggregate find particularly hard to follow up to.

Top 20

Note that the links in the list below are ones I have made on the title only. Requests for an author only (e.g. Dave Eggers, without “What is the What”) are met with a demand for better information.

1. The Book Seer | What Is The What- 269 [This is slightly unfair as it is one of the pages linked to by StumbleUpon)
2. The Book Seer | Twilight - 116
3. The Book Seer | Harry Potter 74 [Note - Librarything has a lot of problems with this request]
4. The Book Seer | 1984
5. The Book Seer | The Road 55
6. The Book Seer | Neuromancer 52
7. The Book Seer | Atlas Shrugged 30
8. The Book Seer | Pride And Prejudice 27
9. The Book Seer | The Bible 26 [some great left-field recommendations for that]
10. The Book Seer | Outliers 24
11. The Book Seer | Enders Game 23
12. The Book Seer | On The Road 23 [Note the difficulty Amazon has compared to Librarything when no author is entered]
13. The Book Seer | The Catcher In The Rye 22
14. The Book Seer | ウェブ進化論 22 [No idea, sorry, but from the recommendations, looks pretty cool]
15. The Book Seer | Infinite Jest 21
16. The Book Seer | The Secret History19
17. The Book Seer | The Stand 19
18. The Book Seer | American Gods
19. The Book Seer | The Book Thief 18
20. The Book Seer | Catcher In The Rye 17

Whilst the top 20 is interesting, what I love is that the full list of titles is so broad. The vast majority of books only get one search on them; the bottom of the list is Q E D.

Titles 4000-4015 in the Bookseer list

Observations

• I think this is pretty cool, although I don’t know why. Taking aside Neuromancer – James’ test title – is it a really interesting zeitgeist of what people are reading? Or their favourite books? Or the books they find hardest to followup? Or the first book that comes to mind? Twilight, Harry Potter – OK, these may demonstrate a paucity of imagination as much as they show a teenage visitor set. But Infinite Jest?, What is The What? Atlas Shrugged? The Road? Whilst in the news, these aren’t exactly bestsellers. When Russell* linked to Rogue Male, I think the favourites is a good guess.
• Oops. We should probably strip out “The”, “A” and other prefixes to avoid duplicates such as [The] Catcher In The Rye.
• The Bookseer works much more accurately if you put in an author as well as a title, although James does a lot of clever things in the background (stuff learned from projects such as Bkkeepr for a start) to make up the difference.
• LibraryThing handles “title only” requests much better than Amazon. Amazon gets confused by “The Bible”, or rather, the number of titles in its database that include “The Bible”.
• LibraryThing gets confused quite often. Sorry Tim – do get in touch if we can find better ways to do this, or to query Unsuggester items (although part of me thinks the beauty here is in the simplicity).

And finally apologies to anyone using Internet Explorer 6 (and to my horror, this includes about 3.5% of visits and several large UK publishers) – you may have issues. Not sure what that says – we tried really hard to support you.

Visit the Bookseer

* [Russell - I'm with you. I recently re-read Rogue Male and loved it. I also gave my copy to David Simon, fan boy-style, because I read that he is apparently making a film based on Man Hunt, the Fritz Lang movie based on RM. He hadn't heard of the book, and wasn't very impressed by my gift.]

Mad Men is brilliant for all sorts of reasons, but one thing it does very well is show the cracks emerging in a society as it shifts from life as it always was (men working, women having babies, men drinking, women having problems, men having affairs, the women having to get rid of those babies etc) to life as it will be.

In this case, life as it will be is shown the by occasional hipsters that Don Draper (our conflicted, everyman hero) encounters – and who occasionally prick his bubble. The hipsters don’t get him – in fact they loath him and his suits, three-martini-lunches, and despotic capitalism, selling more stuff to people who don’t need it. Instead the hipsters are into reefer, jazz – and literature.

In season one we saw DD join one of his mistresses (the illustrator, and more interesting one, IMHO) and her stoned, goateed beatnik friends go to a beat poetry night. The drama here was that Don didn’t get it at all – and by implication, lost his mistress to the new world – and retreated back to the world he knows and feels safe in: the world of newspapers and truth, rather than literature, poetry and ideas. (Don is always pictured with newspaper, never a book.)

Yet – in this week’s episode, Don is lunching alone at a bar (shirking his work responsibilities) and the guy next to him is reading a book. It turns out it’s a book of poems, rather than (as I thought) a play. The guy (borderline beatnik) tells Don, after looking at him, that he “doesn’t think he’ll like it”. Don buys the book, and the episode closes with him in voiceover reading from it, whilst posting a copy to (we assume) one of his (other) mistresses:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

Clearly, Don is in trouble.

A few things strike me. The first is that (as we saw with Lost), producers seem to enjoy referencing real books into their plots, letting the viewers go to town on doing the reading, albeit between the lines. (I anticipate a slew of articles this week (as there were for Lost) talking about the massive hike in sales for the book – Meditations in An Emergency – as a result of a recommendation by Don. Let’s hope the broadcasters don’t try to actually publish the short stories that the juniors of the office are competing with each other over getting into the Atlantic.)

The second is that, in this context, liking poetry is used as short hand for Don’s psychological turmoil. Don is not only reading poetry, but he’s sending it to someone whilst thinking of them. Don may read a novel here or there – something manly, crime, and hard-boiled, perhaps Chandler – but nothing that disrupts his world view. Clearly, if he’s reading poetry, this season is going to show Don’s issues coming to the surface.

But I think the book is also used as a symbol for our – as in modern – psychological turmoil: I was struck by how the book, in another context (a contemporary drama) would look anachronistic. Here however – for all the turmoil it signifies to Don – it became, and was possibly used as, another nostalgia trigger. Like much else in the series, the book provides us with a window into a simpler life – although we are also warned that life didn’t feel any simpler for Don, or indeed Mrs, Draper.

One thing is for sure; it’s pure nostalgic indulgence for anyone in publishing to watch a series where books are portrayed as cool, counter-cultural – and dangerous, rather than geek-fodder.

Update:

Since I wrote this, I’ve seen a few articles talking about exactly this – not least Freakonomics! Oops. Here are some links:
Freakonomics:

I clicked over to Amazon to check the book’s sales rank a few minutes after Draper read the book. A rather mediocre No. 15,565. This morning, at 8:30 a.m., the book was ranked No. 161. That probably represents only 50 or 100 copies sold, but it’s a pretty fantastic leap for a 50-year-old book of poems.

AMCTV: Evolution of an ad campaign (shows Don with Newspaper)

The Ampersand

AMC’s buzzed-about drama Mad Men launched its second season last night. Aside from the attention to detail, clever writing and sharp acting, one of the things that stands out about the series – and makes it sing – is its subtle nods to literature.

They also clear me up on Don’s reading material: Exodus by Leon Uris and:

The Best of Everything, a 1958 novel by Rona Jaffe about a group of young women working in a publishing company

New York Magazine: Don Draper’s Bookshelf

Clearly, Mad Men isn’t just nostalgic for the days when men tossed back Scotch — but for the days when they tossed back Scotch and read books too!

Recent Posts:

Stanza: ebooks for iPhone
Harlequin: Enriched
The iPod Moment for Books

Recent apt Studio work:
Granta Magazine: The Magazine of New Writing
James Frey: Bright Shiny Morning
Stephenie Meyer: “The next J.K. Rowling”

However, I don’t think a lot of people in publishing (or in magazines, perhaps?) can possibly do the same. It’s still sadly the case that when one says “RSS” in meetings, one gets a lot of head nodding and enthusiastic approval, and glazed eyes.

I subscribe to – quick head count – feeds from about 200 different sources. I get maybe 300-400 new items each day, which quickly backs up if I’m busy or away from RSS. I’m about to go on holiday and anticipate the 3,000 – 5,000 deluge I had last year (and which I only cleared recently).

This means I scan articles in my RSS reader (Vienna, since you ask). Which means that useful headlines summaries get read – useless ones don’t.

Given the amount of time and energy that goes into building any web site, I am amazed to see poor experience design in RSS. For example, the New Yorker – the New Yorker! – has an “everything” feed that is very hard to read in RSS:

For all I know (and I’m sure I can think of at least one reader who will correct me), this is correctly formatted RSS. And I know that RSS (and support for standards in RSS readers) is emerging, and relatively early. But this is still bad experience for me for the following reasons:

• It’s ordered alphabetically. This is the only feed I can think of that has this type of ordering – although this maybe because:
• All items have exactly the same publication date (Today at 05:00). And there are no articles between this week’s articles, and last week’s. (At least the Guardian has the decency to stagger their “Weekend” articles over the course of the weekend). As a result, listing “by Date” (my preferred view so I can see what’s most recent) is pointless.
• This one is the worst transgression and the one that provoked me to write this. Their headlines are so abstract, I have *no idea* what they are about. How would I know that “La Vida No Loca” was a review of Coldplay’s new album – without engaging my brain? Above and Beyond? What does that mean? I defy any of you to look through this list and just know what the article is about. Other than the cartoons one.
• They only summarise the articles. I subscribe to a number of other New Yorker articles – The Book Bench; Sasha Frere-Jones; – and these (in a way I agree with, although I am sympathetic to the page-view ad model they need to encourage) extract the article in full in RSS.
• Some articles don’t even have authors. They could at least just put “The New Yorker”. It looks a bit broken.
• It could be my reader – I’ve had problems with Vienna whilst testing properly encoded feeds on our new Granta site – but the character encoding is causing quite a few errors. Or maybe they just have authors with very odd names.

As a point of comparison, here is the Guardian’s Technology feed (one of the few on this site to extract articles in full):

Much better, no?

I don’t even mind the ads being served in the RSS, but I was pleased that even the Guardian couldn’t get a click-through to work either – we had the same problem whilst trying to serve ads in RSS feeds using OpenX. (The problem is that OpenX depends on cookies. If anyone has a solution, please let us know in the comments below).

Finally, a feed that wins my current “worst of” prize.

Not only does the feed include test articles – which is forgivable – but the headlines and articles themselves are truncated to the point of being illegible without clicking through.

Sour Grapes aside – My point?

Increasingly, we experience web presences and (web) publishers in a variety of formats. It should be as important to you to insist that you test the experience of engaging with your site in RSS (even if you don’t understand what it is) – as it is to test it in Internet Explorer and Firefox, and on Mac and PC. You should also test it on mobile devices, and text readers – if visitors on mobile phones and with impaired vision (or search engines) are important to you.

It’s the details of using a site which make all the our experience, and increasingly these experiences happen in places other than the web site through a browser. I may not unsubscribe from a site with a bad RSS feed, but I may think a lot more of an organisation that bothers to make a good one.

Such a sexy, “converged” device would surely corral latent consumer desire to read books on a screen rather than a page – even if just through the force of Apple’s “halo effect” – surely?

eBook iPhone or not, my concern is (still) that most publishers haven’t yet got a range of ebooks to market in preparation for any such device. Devices are available (read Alex’s blog on reading nothing but ebooks for a year), but consumers have to work very, very hard to get copyrighted material onto them.

I don’t know if this is because publishers haven’t sufficiently sorted out their digitisation strategy and process yet – whether it’s a question of formats, DRM, or even the basics such as rights and royalty clearances. Or it’s the absence of a decent channel, or what. (Certainly most of the big houses have been making noises about expensive digitisation processes for at least a year if not two.)

If this is the case – that in the light of consumer demand, there is actually very little supply – then surely an “iPod for books” moment could actually be a disaster for the publishing industry, forcing keen and hungry consumers to find their electronic content from other (possibly illegal) sources – as with happened with the ipod moment for, um, music?

This of course is a sweeping generalisation, so I decided to actually look into it (a bit), and chose to compare last week’s Times bestsellers in the UK against which titles were (easily) available as ebooks. (Bearing in mind that neither Waterstones, Amazon, or Borders have a meaningful eBook inventory in the UK, and in the absence (cough) of a centralised eBook retailer, I turned to the respective publishers sites for this. Here are the results.

Top 10 Hardback Fiction

1 : The Front by Patricia Cornwell

Little, Brown site: No. (Search for “The Front in EBooks“. A search for “ebook” gets some results, but fails to pick up the “ebooks genre“. However they do have other Cornwell titles as ebooks, looking into it, so some points there.)

2 : This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
Penguin site: No. (Search for “This Charming Man ebook“) Whilst I was there, a Penguin search for “ebook” returns five books in different formats. And the ebook “Microsite” is broken in my browser/s).

3 : The Reapers by John Connolly
Hodder site: No site search at all.

4 : Flesh House by Stuart MacBride
HarperCollins site: No (Can’t link to HC search results, but a search for “ebook” only gives one result anyway)

5 : Revelation by CJ Sansom
Pan Macmillan Site: Yes!!! Sorry, No. (Search for “Revelation ebook” and indeed, just “ebook“) (I don’t think those links work to give you the results either).

6 : Hold Tight by Harlan Coben
Orion site: No. (Search for “Hold Tight eBook” throws an error and then gives this result)

7 Scream for Me by Karen Rose
Headline site: No (Site is a holding page)

8 : Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult
Hodder, again, so that’s a no.

9 : Nothing to Lose by Lee Child
Bantam Site: No. (Search for “ebook” also returned no results)

10 : The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir
Random House site: No (Search for “Lady Elizabeth eBook”; “ebook” just gives results like casebook, guidebook, notebook etc)

So, 0/10 on the Times bestsellers being available as ebooks in the UK. Because it’s been a newsy week, I also thought I’d try the fastest selling hardback novel in history – “Devil May Care ebook” on the Penguin site – nothing; and (Winner of the Orange Prize) Rose Tremain The Road Home ebook at Chatto: Nothing.

However, a search for all of the above on the (US) MobiPocket site shows that consumers can actually get 60% of these titles as ebooks by buying from a US etailer. Clearly the UK publishers are missing out on those sales. eBooks currently make a mockery of territoriality. If the US can create, market, and sustain an eBook store, why can’t the UK market?

What to take away from this: well, nothing that surprising. Maybe Apple will, despite Steve Jobs’ denials – themselves usually a great bit of doublespeak – , launch a brilliant ebook reader in the next iPhone, andsoup up iTunes, having successfully cleared rights, royalties, formats and DRM with the publishing industry without any leaks getting out. (And if he does do this, the industry is damned because they fail to get the spoils; if he doesn’t they’re damned because the spoils aren’t worth having).

Maybe Apple won’t develop it, but we’ll see some great third-party iPhone apps. (This will still keep the activity a marginal – both in terms of popularity and legality – exercise.)

Or maybe, both Apple and the publishing industry (like Microsoft) will hand the work to Google, who in their forthcoming, open-source Android mobile phone platform could not only include ebook software, but also integrate Google Books into the devices. In other words, Google could become the go-to store for ebooks rather than Apple, Amazon, Sony or anyone else.

None (that I know of, and on the strength of their sites) goes anywhere towards embracing how and why they could be using the web to do their jobs better, or easier….

This attitude – at a time when the book trade finally seems to be close to coming round to the idea that technology could be a good thing – seems a little short-sighted. As more and more trade is done online, search (and, of course, what is found) will become equally vital. Surely an agent’s priority should be in managing their clients’ representation in all media – and being in control of the #1 result page in Google would be one of my targets.

It’s all good that there is lots of debate being reported about piracy, future models, and other “big” issues. But the failure (to the best of my knowledge) of the industry to make any real progress on the ground, such as to define even what a fair royalty on a digitally sold book should be, doesn’t bode well for the actual, day-to-day implementation of “digital issues”. If they don’t hurry up and sort out digital rights, then there is a real danger of the digital book going the way of the song.

I’d love to see an example of an agency – small or large, old or new – doing a really good job online, and would welcome some examples. In the meantime, here’s a few thoughts about why agencies should use the web better.

• Representation

At my previous, and long-since-dead employer, Screenbase Media, I produced the site for David Higham Literary Agency. This was perhaps 2002, 2003.

Soon after launch, we noticed some pretty high traffic for the site, most of it drawn from Google. At one point, for example, a search for “Food + Italy” brought back Claudia Roden’s page on DHA at #1. (”The Food Of Italy” was her featured title at the time.)

The site has slipped down Google a bit since then, But if you take any of their clients at random (and there is a little widget on the site that will do this for you), a high percentage of them will have their page on the DHA site rank on the first page of Google results.

Now, without getting into the whys and wherefores of search engine optimisation (other than to say, hand-writing good, rich information on a regular basis really helps) – surely one of the most persuasive ways of showing an author whom you represent that you are looking out for their best interests – is to come #1 on a web search for their name?

• Obscurity

Authors and their works need to be found. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the recent example of PFD’s Caroline Michel deciding that the agency will handle print on demand sales for backlist titles that have fallen out of print.

This is, from some views, a genius decision; it simultaneously tells authors that their best interests will be looked after by the people who should be looking after them (i.e. agents); it also provides ammunition (in the form of sales figures) for agents when trying to sell publishers the rights for the titles that are out of print. And, of course, it provides a direct, unmediated revenue stream for agent and author. (It also suggests a future where agents bypass publishers through very similar means, but that’s not for here or today.)

But – the success of this initiative does depend on (1) an audience existing for the work in the first place and (2) the audience finding the titles in the available outlets. Which, in my book, means either handing the whole lot over to Amazon, (assuming PFD is happy to step to the Booksurge beat) or PFD doing some very competent and successful marketing of its clients and their books.

This second would be my personal ambition, and it looks as if PFD is about to launch a new website – so all eyes on that.

As far as well-known / established backlist classics are concerned, PFD can focus on generating good organic search to their site when it offers the POD sales; but for new / as-yet unpublished titles it will require some more creative (and pro-active work), which I for one will be intrigued to see. (An aside: I had a very brief meeting with Caroline Michel about creative POD ideas when she was at HarperCollins a few years ago: more on that another day…)

Whatever happens, one thing is sure – they’re going to need to have some pretty awesome SEO gong fu to make a success of this.

• Marketing

Authors move publisher from time to time. So what happens when one publisher has developed a web site for the author – and collected a large number of reader email addresses – and the author moves on? Who owns the data? What happens to the fans? Who owns the site?

This rather pertinent question was put to me by a very smart agent (whose agency, it has to be said, doesn’t believe in any of the above). If I were feeling unkind, I’d say that it’s kind of moot, seeing as most publishers (1) don’t create good web sites for authors and (2) don’t collect email addresses or (3) if they do, they don’t use them. But it’s still worth asking.

In my book, the smart thing to do (and which would be inline with the above) would be for an agency to take active responsibility for the author’s online presence, either bringing traffic into a sub-section of their own site, or to a dedicated site for the author. They should then either give willing authors the keys to the engine – allowing them to update the site as they want – or do the updating themselves in house.

I hope I haven’t been unfair to any agents who might read this – and welcome any comments or responses to the above.

(Incidentally, the genesis for this post was a lunch I had with David Miller of RCW about a month back; David’s views – “Lazy” literary agents must educate themselves about new media as a matter of urgency” have today been published by the Bookseller. He’s just emailed me to tell me that RCW have updated their website.)

]]> http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/03/31/why-agents-need-good-websites/feed/ 0 http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/03/14/the-end-of-the-wire/ http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/03/14/the-end-of-the-wire/#comments Fri, 14 Mar 2008 04:32:25 +0000 Peter Collingridge http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/03/14/the-end-of-the-wire/ I’ve just watched the last episode of season five of The Wire. If you don’t watch or know the show, my apologies – but for me, it’s almost (possibly even) as good as seasons 1-4 of The West Wing – those written primarily by Aaron Sorkin. In fact, all I want to do now is go back to season one and start again from the beginning.

But – my point?

Firstly – the script on this show is so damn good that you just don’t notice it. Or at least, I didn’t until Season Five, when the writers (David Simon in particular) couldn’t resist making a hero out of the sub-editor at the local newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. (It was the same on the West Wing in the early days: it was always the writers – Sam Seaborne, Toby Ziegler – who were the real heroes. Don’t they know the joke?). But it’s pretty awesome to watch something – I devoured the episodes back to back – and not flinch at something or other.

Next. After watching the final episode, I found myself in real need of some web community support. What I wanted to read were comments, as opposed to long bloggy rants.

My first stop was the Freakonomics Blog, where for the past 8 weeks, they have carried “interviews” with real “hoods” as to what they think of The Wire. Some of the comments on these interviews have been amazingly smart, some of the best, sustained, comments I’ve read on a site – not that surprising given the kind of visitor the NYT-hosted site attracts.

But, sadly, when I got there, I found out that the “hoods” had ducked out from reviewing episodes 9 and 10. Which was a bit of a cop out. So I found myself googling for reviews only pulled up blogs, but in this case I wanted some real, published journalism. I found the NY Times, the Washington Post, and (ironically) the Baltimore Sun. Of them all, The Washington Post gave me enough to iron out the kinks and confusions.

Finally. Quite a few of the comments on the Washington Post page talk about how, after a show is this good, the only way forwards is to “go back to the books”

Those of us lamenting the end of “The Wire” would do well to remember that it was the writing that made it so good. Check out the books of contributors David Simon, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Richard Price. I particularly commend you to the books of Pelecanos, who writes crime fiction set in the mean streets of DC.

From which I draw a couple of things: people think books (and specifically, the books of the show’s writers, published in some of the best UK independent houses, by the way – but I think they’re talking about books in general) are the place to go to get great stories (truth ‘dat); secondly, great writing really gets noticed, even if it takes years; and finally – I’m really going to miss this show.

]]> http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/03/14/the-end-of-the-wire/feed/ 1 http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/14/the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-200000-times/ http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/14/the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-200000-times/#comments Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:51:19 +0000 Peter Collingridge http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/14/the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-200000-times/ In 1999, I wrote a business plan for the company I was then working for, Canongate Books. The plan was for the Scottish Arts Council, and the idea I’d come up with was to make “pop promos for books” which would get a web and film festival showing, and drive traffic to the Canongate site – which was doing a great job of converting visitors to loyal customers. (If I’m repeating myself, it’s because I also blogged this a while ago.)

We got funding for five films, and the first one (for a book I was then editing, the collected lyrics and poems of Gil Scott Heron was produced in 1999, designed by Julian House at Intro.

Sadly, tho, it never saw the light of day until very recently. Why? We also completed our Life of Pi promo, which was a giant, 8 MB download (huge at the time). This got thousands and thousands of views a day, and tanked Canongate’s bandwidth limit. They had to start paying over the odds to keep the promo up there. (Ooops. You learn). As a result, both were taken offline until a “sponsor” for bandwidth became available, or until bandwidth became free, and by which time, I’d left the company, and we’d all missed the boat.

Anyway, along came YouTube and we put it up there in 2006. My reason for posting is that it’s just had its 200,000th view, which isn’t great shakes (the Pi promo had over 2.5m views on a number of different sites, but has had very few on YouTube – probably because it’s also a game) – but we’re proud none the less.

You can view it on YouTube here – and enjoy the pretty regular comments. Or you can look at the hi-res version below, straight from the source. (It’s quite old now – 8 years – so it can be a bit tetchy. Maybe easier to watch in a new window.

You can also see the Life of Pi promo introduction below, or here in a new window – again recommended.

If you’re interested in other promos we’ve done, try these:

The Baghdad Blog, Salam Pax
Hey, Nostradamus!, Doug Coupland
Lunar Park, Brett Easton Ellis
The Long Tail, Chris Anderson
For One More Day, Mitch Albom

]]> http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/14/the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-200000-times/feed/ 0 http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/13/free-pdf-vs-mp3/ http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/13/free-pdf-vs-mp3/#comments Wed, 13 Feb 2008 05:46:29 +0000 Peter Collingridge http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/13/free-pdf-vs-mp3/ In among all the recent interest in free I wanted to pick up on something I mentioned in passing (I think during a question) at RRO a couple of weeks back.

We have an increasingly broad range of options these days for electronic reading devices – be it the basic (phone, computer), dedicated (Kindle, Sony Reader), or phantom (iPhone / iBook etc).

But as publishers continue to founder around digitisation, formats, DRM and the like, we have a disconnect between the demand and supply of electronic files to go on these devices. Without a single, unified offering for content in the right formats (and at the right price) then where can readers go to get their writing?

They’ll go anywhere. If we look back to the birth of the MP3 platform, then it was very hard to get music in that format without resorting to “free” (or rather, pirate) sites. Napster was pretty much unchallenged from the late nineties until the launch of iTunes in 2003, which itself took a while to get the market share it has.

As a result, music fans – who really did want to get access to their music collections in the new format – flocked to illegal services, arguably because the industry couldn’t supply them with something that the community (who were ripping and sharing their own collections) could. (And the music business is still feeling the price of it: I heard a statistic on the radio the other day suggesting that for every song bought, five are downloaded illegally.)

And so it struck me that seeing as the most common file for distributing “books” in is either Word or PDF (but particularly PDF as it’s also used for grouping scanned images of pages as found on pirate sites) there is a valid parallel to that of MP3, which was a brilliant compression format. Compression isn’t so much of an issue in books, given that text is usually very lightweight, and that we have lots more bandwidth than we did 10 years ago. But the PDF is the format of choice for fans to share pirated books among themselves – and as such, could be tarnished as the perfect vehicle for transmitting pirated ebooks?

It’s a bit of a weak question really, I suppose. Of course it’s the perfect vehicle. That is what it was built for, it just hasn’t been adopted in quite the way Adobe possibly hoped, other than in the printing business.

But I wonder what comes next from the industry? Perhaps there really is a covert, unified, rallying movement under way from the conglomerates that will come out with a single channel (perhaps, say, a competitor to Amazon / audible) and in a month’s time, we’ll be astonished by the vision, prescience and execution by a troubled business of a way to draw hope from its future?

Or perhaps (should such an insatiable demand actually exist, and I can’t say we’ve been shocked by recent images of angry readers waving Kindles on the streets outside corporate publishing house head offices, demanding ebooks) we’ll see something else. Imagine if hackers got into the archives of one of the printers and “liberated” all those poor PDFs to go back into the wild, among readers, where they’d be happiest?

]]> http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/13/free-pdf-vs-mp3/feed/ 4 http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/11/free-conomics/ http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/11/free-conomics/#comments Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:06:22 +0000 Peter Collingridge http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/11/free-conomics/ We’ve long, long, long-since argued that giving books away for free online is a great way to market them.

However, not all – in fact very few, possibly close to none – of our clients agrees, despite some great anecdotal evidence from the like of Corey Doctorow, Seth Godin and now, as fate would have it, Paolo Coelho. All of these authors have given away their work for free, in its entirety, and agree that the benfits far outweigh the drawbacks. (For more detailed views on this, see this post on Freeconomics in Publishing in the light of Radiohead)

As we reported last week, [albeit only to RSS readers] Coelho has quietly pirated his own books over the past few years, seeding them on BitTorrent (and other) networks, and this is (in part) being attributed to the books’ success. (The TorrentFreak article suggests that he took matters into his own hands when his publishers refused to heed his desired to give his stuff away for free.)

Well, today, HarperCollins (US) has come out with a press release that might seem to suggest to the first-time reader that Paolo’s generosity (for he is published by HarperCollins in all of their controlling territories) was all a part of their master plan:

A key component of this program is the launch of a year-long promotion of bestselling author Paulo Coelho’s books. Each month an entire book will be available for free. The first book, currently accessible, is The Witch of Portobello.

HC has played PR sleight of hand here – they are giving away Paolo’s books for a month only, and even then, hobbling them to be of lesser use than those Cohelo has himself distributed,

the free electronic editions would be available only for one month, and readers would not be able to download them to laptops or to an electronic reader like Kindle from Amazon.com. The print function will also be disabled, but readers will be able to link to retailers like Amazon.com to buy copies of the books.

[Brian Murray, President of HC, quoted in the New York Times]

In other words – they are forcing reads to use the “Read Inside” Flash app on the HarperCollins site (a functionality I find it hard to not free-associate with the word widget).

Personally, I think that’s a bit of old world-thinking. First of all, putting it in the “Read Inside” app is understandable, but the music-industry parallel is that this is equivalent to wrapping it up in some form of DRM. And we know how that played out for the music industry. (My view is also that it’s already free – why not make the most of that and try to win traffic and page impressions to your site on the back of the publicity?)

Secondly – I’m not sure that a Google search for “Free Paolo Cohelo book download” will lead to a link to HarperCollins’ corporate site; I don’t think Google indexes pages inside “Read Inside”, and there’s nothing to suggest that HC is also submitting the books for the Google Books programme – but wouldn’t that be interesting?

As a result, there’s nothing on that Google search that prioritises HC’s pages over the pirated versions. Accordingly, in the long-term, such a search may end up leading to the pirated editions anyway, rather than directing readers to HC.com. And in losing those searches, HC is losing a chance to monetise interested readers in other ways (adverts, for example, or cross-selling other books, or audio books, events, that kind of thing – nothing too taxing). And losing the chance to get them as customers, in whatever format publishing becomes best at distributing in the future.

And thirdly, it seems like a bit of opportunism rather than the “pushing back the boundaries”. Don’t get me wrong – HC does some interesting stuff online (such as the imminent Authonomy). But announcing that you’ve making some already-free-books free, a couple of weeks after the web exposed them as free, and in a crippled format, for a month-only – it’s not exactly leading edge.

And particularly not when one of your UK authors, who knows about this stuff, (like a lot), and is keen to try to do the same thing himself, has just this past weekend blogged about being told by HC (UK) that there’s no way he can do the same with his book….

I asked my agent (I know, I know) to talk to Harper Collins earlier in the year letting them know I was going to try and boost sales via the blog as a bit of an experiment and asking them if they would be willing to a) let me give away the book online b) let me have copies to give away and/or c) sell me some copies at a discount so I could give them away. They got back to us a while ago and said a) no. b) maybe, a few and c) no answer.

[ From Russell Davies]

(Full disclosure: Russell was in part inspired by Cooking With Booze, which was written by James Bridle, who works at Apt.)

My point? All the evidence we have of this stuff is anecdotal. Seth, Corey – all these guys exist in a niche. If someone were to do it with titles in a level playing field, surely then we’d be able to see the impact of “free” on book sales?

Finally: James just showed me Alex’s post basically agreeing, but saying that reading on screens generally sucks:

This move by Harper Collins will enviably fall flat. Few people will read more than a couple of pages online, out of those (even though you can track the Amazon click-throughs), there is no way to tell if they buy a printed book in a store. The added costs in putting these books onto this proprietary service with barely any financial return will mean only the big hitters with guaranteed traditional sales will get a look-in.

and the BA’s Martin Daniels has pointed out some other flaws with the whole thing, mainly about the Flash-based interface being a far too literal home to the printed page, including blank pages.

]]> http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2008/02/11/free-conomics/feed/ 4 http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2007/10/11/radiohead-customer-service/ http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2007/10/11/radiohead-customer-service/#comments Thu, 11 Oct 2007 08:46:31 +0000 Peter Collingridge http://aptstudio.com/timesemit/2007/10/11/radiohead-customer-service/ I’ve always felt that customer service in e-commerce is vital – that you only get one chance to stuff up a relationship with a customer; that you’re competing with Amazon (who in my experience have crap customer service, but the perception is that they are the high water mark); and that you should do everything to turn potential “bad” word of mouth into “good”.

[For example, when I used to run the old Canongate web site, we had a decent and growing community of readers who bought books loyally and regularly. If an order ever went missing - or was claimed to - I'd get a duplicate sent out first class, along with a hand-written apology, and a "special" free gift, albeit something lying around in the office - Rebel Inc Playing Cards; Snowblind Ltd Edition credit cards, a catalogue or CD or something. I thought that would dispel any negative feelings and re-dispose customers to shop with us.]

So when I didn’t get my Radiohead login yesterday, I was a bit sad. The web was afire with everyone saying how amazing it is.

So I looked through my proof-of-purchase email to see if there was a contact detail for any problems: nothing.

I went to the site to see if there was any contact info, to be met with a login box only (which of course I could’t use). I googled “I haven’t got my radiohead login let” only to be lead to a 404 on the Radiohead forum.

Panic. (At this point all the subliminal fears I’d had – and read – about the site being a bit shonky came to the fore: maybe they didn’t have any customer service in place? And were too un-touchable to do support? Too cool for consumer rights?)

So I replied to the email politely saying what the problem was, half-expecting the email address to be DO-NOt-REPLY@waste.uk.com and getting an instant bounce. I got an instant reply – but it wasn’t a bounce:

Thank you for your message.
Here is some information which may answer your question….

If you are having problems placing an order please check that your cookies are enabled. You may need to try a new browser and you may need to use a new e-mail address if you failed to place an order with your original e-mail address. You can track successful orders by following this link.

http://www.inrainbows.com/Members

If you are yet to receive your activation code (please check your spam filters) or are having download problems please e-mail downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com

Please contact us again next week with any Discbox postal address changes.

Please do not e-mail us more than once. We are dealing with all
enquiries as quickly as possible.

Thank you

All@waste

So, I checked my spam filters – nothing.

I went to my webmail archive and did a search for “rainbows” and thought that if any spam-merchant wanted to get a really high click-thru rate this week, they should have timed a message with “In Rainbows Activation Code” in the subject line.

Nothing in my spam box.

So I emailed downloadinrainbows@waste.uk.com, and by return – by return! – got an automated response with a unique generated login for getting the album.

10 seconds later it was downloading at 400 kb/s and I was happy.

There was no validation, no email or reference number required – just an auto-reply with a link to a copy of the album. (I didn’t want to push my luck by trying it from an un-authorised email account, but my bet is it would work). In other words – Radiohead decided that no customer service – but instead a no-quibble “free” copy to any unhappy customer – is the best way to go. And I’m sure they’re right.

The moral? Well – it may be oblique, but Radiohead has, in the end, good customer services. The whole experience reiterated some interesting feelings about “trust” and how it is communicated in design and “experience” execution when it comes to ecommerce – and to be frank they didn’t win my trust on this, despite the outcome – but that in the end, it’s the outcome that matters.

I’ll go listen to the album now.

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