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Souvenirs and southern cooking I couldn’t make it to the Tools of Change conference, but last week I had the pleasure of hearing one of the speakers, Phil Zuckerman, give a guest lecture to a graduate class in publishing at Emerson College. Phil is the founder and president of Applewood Books. Applewood has been around since the 70s, and at first glance, they seem positively Luddite. Their web site says they’re “fully Y1K compliant” and offer “an old-fashioned personal experience . . . serving up wisdom and entertainment from America’s Living Past.” You imagine a wood stove, a manual typewriter, a rotary phone. But Phil’s a savvy businessman, and owes his much of his success to ignoring the traditional rules of the publishing game.
• Applewood revives titles that are long out of copyright (everything from Thomas Jefferson to Tom Swift), avoiding royalties and typesetting costs.
• They aggressively target markets that mainstream publishers dismiss as marginal, such as gift shops, museums, and sales to schools and corporations. The retail book trade is a relatively small segment of Applewood’s business, so they enjoy a very low rate of returns.
• A large share of their sales comes from their backlist, so they manage their portfolio like the best university presses. Perennial best-sellers are printed by traditional offset for lowest unit cost. Slower-selling titles are printed digitally so little capital is tied up in inventory.
Another speaker at the 2008 TOC, marketing pundit Seth Godin, expressed the opinion that people don’t want books for information or entertainment any more, because they can get those things faster and cheaper on a computer or iPhone. People still want books, Godin says, but only as souvenirs to remind them of the experience. That may be a devil-take-the-hindmost view of publishing’s future, but it’s surprisingly compatible with Phil’s publishing mission. After all, what is “wisdom and entertainment from America’s Living Past” but another name for souvenirs?
The traditional content supply chain is a one-way sequence from author to publisher to bookstore to reader. Phil broke that chain long ago when he killed his authors. (Okay, he didn’t kill them, they were already dead.) Then he made the traditional bookseller an option rather than a necessity. And on a new web site, he’s turned himself into a retailer for other publishers’ books (excuse me, souvenirs).
One of Applewood’s evergreen titles is What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Southern Cooking, an 1881 collection of recipes from the American south, and it has become the flagship of a list of over 100 titles ranging from Camp Cookery to Manufacture of Liquors, Wines & Cordials. As an offshoot of this list, Phil launched Foodsville.com, where you can buy books about food and cooking from Applewood and other publishers, but where you can also read Applewood’s
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cookbooks for free, post your own comments or recipes, and share them with other Foodsville users. It’s not revolutionary, but it completes the deconstruction of the old-school publishing model: The publisher is a bookseller, the reader is an author.
Posted by PublishingMojo
Labels: books as souvenirs, print on demand, publishing, special markets
Getting it right away, getting it right The Guardian recently wrote about a study titled Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future, published in January 2008. The report was written Dr. Ian Rowlands and colleagues at the Centre for Information Behaviour and the Evaluation of Research. They must have been up all night coming up with a name that fit the acronym CIBER.
The study was commissioned by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee, so it’s no shock that the report emphasizes what libraries must do to ensure their survival in the face of other media competing for the researcher of the future’s dwindling attention span. The report’s authors display admirable reserve (they’re British, after all), but they tip their hand on the title page, with a big photo of a child staring at a computer screen with nostrils flared, teeth bared, and for good measure, mad-scientist hair.
Research libraries rightly fear becoming obsolete if search engines and online information resources outperform them at their own job. The report defends the library by suggesting that readers, in their desire to get information right away, often fail to get it right. It argues first that online researchers find good information, but they don’t read it. “Around 60 per cent of e-journal users view no more than three pages and a majority (up to 65 per cent) never return. . . . The average times that users spend on e-book and ejournal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively. . . . users ‘power browse’ horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins.” I admit it, I’m busted. I didn’t read every word of the report. But I was power browsing in college back in the 20th Century. Surely it’s no surprise to Dr. Rowlands et al. that researchers often stop reading after they’ve found the information they need, even when they’re using hard-copy sources.
Expanding on the subject of what we don’t read, the report laments the tendency of academics to “squirrel away content in the form of downloads [but] there is no evidence as to the extent to which these downloads are actually read.” This is another bad habit that folks had centuries before the Internet made it easy and
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cheap. Most book-filled homes and offices contain scores of unread or partially-read volumes. The second argument the report advances is that content found online is less reliable than that found in libraries, or that users can’t tell the difference. “Users assess authority and trust for themselves in a matter of seconds by dipping and cross-checking across different sites and by relying on favoured brands (e.g. Google).” Traditional scholarship has always been backed by the guarantee of peer reviews—“peer” in this case being the author’s peer, not the reader’s. Readers of the Google generation are too quick to trust the imprimatur of their own peers, but libraries won’t lure researchers back into the stacks by impugning all web content. In academic and professional circles, the web is evolving its own equivalent of peer review, and intelligent readers quickly learn to recognize the writers with sound ideas, and to ignore the quacks and hacks.
The CIBER team sees a tidal wave of suspect information threatening to drown the libraries, so they throw them an anvil. “Libraries are handicapped here by a lack of brand . . . Publishers are better able to offer something here with their strong commercial and academic brands and their rapidly expanding ‘walled garden’ information products, and strategic partnerships should be considered.” The publishers can’t stop this particular deluge; they’re already in it far over their heads. And anyway, they’ve already created a brand—books–that Google regards as the gold standard for “highest-quality knowledge,” as Sergey Brin said last year in a New Yorker interview.
Google lets readers get information right away. Often they get it right, too. But Google has no interest in preserving information for readers of the 22nd or 23rd Centuries. No business can wait 200 years to see a return on its investment. That’s why libraries won’t, and mustn’t, become obsolete. Their stakeholders are not just the power-browsing scholars of the present, but those of the future. Nobody finds current information better than Google. But someday Google will be just a footnote in a volume of history, and it won’t even be that unless someone is preserving volumes of history. Nobody does that better than the British Library.
Posted by PublishingMojo
Labels: Google, information, libraries, peer review, The New Yorker
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The Stinehour Press and the end of delight The late August Heckscher, a prominent figure in the arts and an aficionado of fine printing, once gave a lecture at the Boston Athenaeum in which he compared letterpress printing to wind-powered boats, both antiquated technologies that people cling to just because they like them. “They have passed out of the economics of necessity,” he said, “and into the economics of delight.”
We printers in the marketplace of necessity face a steady erosion of our trade by the Internet and cheap foreign labor. But the Stinehour Press seemed to exist on another plane, the marketplace of delight, serving the customer for whom nothing but a book, and a well-made book, will do. The closing of the Stinehour Press, inevitable as it may be, is heartbreaking. It’s like watching the last sailboat sink.
Posted by PublishingMojo
Labels: press closings, Stinehour Press
Eat hot lead, varmints! Posted by PublishingMojo in General Discussions, 20 Jun 2009 — 9:00am
I just learned about Noel Loomis, a popular author of Western novels, who launched his literary career in the mid-1950s while employed as a Linotype operator in Minneapolis. His books weren’t just set on the Linotype—he wrote them on the Linotype!
Here’s how Bill Gulick describes him in his book, Sixty-Four Years as a Writer: “A feisty little guy with a black mustache, Loomis dealt in hot lead both figuratively and actively, for he heated up the lead pot each morning, straddled a stool shaped like a saddle, and composed on the Linotype while wearing black cowboy hat, spurs, boots, and at times, I suspect, a holstered six-gun or two.”
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Dream gift for the transcendentalist typophile Posted by PublishingMojo in General Discussions, 13 May 2014 — 8:54am
My fiancée surprised me with a just-because gift that blends her passion for New England history and literature—especially the Transcendentalists—with my love of the book arts.
It’s “Spirit & Matter,” selections from Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Ktaadn with commentary by Elizabeth Hall Witherell, printed in an edition of 100 by Carolee Campbell at Ninja Press as a festschrift for the bicentennial of Emerson’s birth in 2003. The paper is English Charter Oak, printed from handset Garamont and Erbar types, and sewn into a cover of handmade raw-flax paper. I’m one happy typophile.
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Punctuation pugilistics & lovely lettering Posted by PublishingMojo in General Discussions handlettering, 25 Jan 2013 — 7:44am
I like this sign in Lowell, Massachusetts. It’s hand-lettered in the old-school way, with a relaxed grace that speaks of years of discipline. I like the story it tells, too. I didn’t know people could defend their views on such arcane matters as punctuation with physical force. Now that I know, the first person who looks at this handlettering and asks me what font it is will get a knuckle sandwich.
Hrant, 25 Jan 2013 — 8:50am
that’s so pretty typography!!!
hhp
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5star, 25 Jan 2013 — 10:35am
Ahem ... what font is that handlettering?
PublishingMojo, 25 Jan 2013 — 12:54pm
tmac, 25 Jan 2013 — 1:56pm
I would like to know who won the fight. Old Bill is sly, if not underhanded, while at this point Jack was a corpulent momma’s boys. So ... do you know who was defending the Oxford comma?
PublishingMojo, 25 Jan 2013 — 2:31pm
I learned to use the Oxford comma (or the serial comma, as I was taught) from Sister Agnes Virginia, who, with her trusty ruler, could have beat the crap out of Kerouac and Burroughs one at a time or both together.
charles ellertson, 25 Jan 2013 — 2:45pm
RE: the Oxford comma -- sometimes it’s absolutely necessary, as in “We offer Corn Flakes, Cheerios, and Wheaties.”
5star, 25 Jan 2013 — 3:06pm
Ah, Catholic ...that explains everything.
oldnick, 25 Jan 2013 — 3:51pm
Well, of course Catholic! That always explains everything…
PublishingMojo, 26 Jan 2013 — 7:22am
John Waters (of Pink Flamingos fame) went to the same high school I did. Apparently it messed up his head even worse than it did mine.