I met Robert Meyerowitz, former City Newspaper music critic, at Cobbs Hill for tennis. I hadn’t played in ten years or so. I think the last time was with Pat Lowery from SLT. I held my own but really fell apart when Robert tried to show me how to serve. And I managed to knock a few balls over the fence. Robert drove here from Alaska and he may be headed to Washington to take some sort of government job.
We had a company ask us to look at their website because they weren’t happy with its performance. The site was designed by company in China and I spent about an hour there marveling at their graphic sense.
Peggi read a book review in Sunday’s paper for “Last Call, The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.” My grandfather ran a speakeasy in the city and the book sounded interesting so we tried ordering it on the iPad. We couldn’t find it at Apple so we went right to Simon & Schuster’s site and bought the epub version as a download but the only thing that was downloaded was an html document that launched in our browser and took us to a page with three lines of code.
We received an email confirmation from Simon & Schuster so the credit card part cleared fine but we didn’t have the book. We sent an email to them and they said we would hear from them in 48 hours. That never happened so I called and talked to a woman who took my name and number and told me someone would call. I said, “Really? Someone from Simon & Schuster is going to call me?” And she said, “Well, I certainly hope so.”
I let a few days go by and no one called so I called S&S again this afternoon and talked to Julius. He wanted to credit our account be couldn’t find our order number in their system. In fact he said,”I see no orders all for the epub version of this book.” I spent about a half hour on the phone with him while he tried to contact the guy in charge of downloads. He was unable to reach him on his Blackberry so I told Julius I had to get back to work. He promised he would get back to me. We went down to the pool for a dip and when we returned I found this email.
Thanks for contacting us. Unfortunately, eBooks purchased from SimonandSchuster.com require Adobe Digital Editions in order to be downloaded and properly viewed. At this time, Adobe Digital Editions is not compatible with the iPad. Because of the difficulty, I have issued a full refund for your purchase. Please allow up to 30 days for this to be fully visible on all of your credit card and/or banking statements.
I’m very sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.
Sincerely,
Stephen
SimonandSchuster.com
I know our friend, Martin, is deeply interested in this topic so I took notes.
5 Comments
You guys want to borrow my Kindle? You can get the book for $14.99. I spent a month researching the same ePub issues for my employer and it’s a mess, for sure. Everything will shake out in about six months to a year, though. Just like it did with MP3s.
or TV after WWII
Yup, there was a piece on PBS News Hour last night about the future of books with three publishing gurus. They were totally clueless, just like record execs a few years ago. One was from an indy bookstore chain and announced that maybe in 10-15 years print books would go away but bookstores are still really important. Did she not watch the entire record business disappear?
EBooks are suffering from total lack of standards. We’re trying to publish a half dozen at once and every distributor has different requirements. Apple won’t share theirs- you have to go through a third party.
Taunton put out an ‘electronic’ version of my kitchen book. It’s a giant PDF! Ridiculous.
Martin: If you’re willing to give up 25% of revenue, O’Reilly will distribute your company’s eBooks in every format possible. They’re the only ones who have multiple conversions down.
Rich, don’t they charge for the conversions in addition to the revenue share?
Apple opened the doors on Friday to indy publishers and authors right after I wrote the above comment. This demystifies things somewhat. I’ve been communicated with LibreDigital but I think we’re going to only offer on Kindle and iBooks. I think the rest are going to be marginalized including B&N and Borders, SONY, etc.
With Kindle App for iPad there is no reason to buy any other device. Apple apparently offers a 70% revenue share. Amazon has already announced they will follow. With my titles going for $9.99 that’s the number that makes things work for me.
BTW, I got into this because I had a book proposal out there and the offers and the marketing plans were lame. Publishers don’t know how to market directly to readers. They only know the distribution channels which are about to cease to exist. Interesting times to be a writer!