For your weekend perusal, here is another installment of Friday Links

➻ Calvin Ried’s coverage of the BISG’s MIP (The Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay Conference) 2013: A New World of Big Data, Complexity and Collaboration for Publishers Weekly yesterday was a treasure of interesting insights:

BISG executive director Len Vlahos gave an overview of “The Digital Consumer” using data from its “Consumer Attitudes Towards E-book Reading Survey,” in particular looking at the behavior of “Power Buyers” or consumers who buy at least one e-book a week. They represent about 17% of all e-book buyers, they are likely to be a women aged 55-64, and are “grown not born,” he said, noting that they buy physical books and e-book interchangeably and have grown into being “power” e-book buyers over time. Vlahos also noted that while 80% of Power Buyers shop at Amazon, 40% shop at B&N and 30% buy or use libraries/OverDrive to find the e-books they buy. And while dedicated e-readers continue to dominate, their dominance is slipping (and the use of iPads for reading is growing) and Power Buyers generally own tablets and e-readers (though they prefer dedicated e-readers for reading).

That is just one bit of the fascinating data provided in the Ried’s coverage. But what does it all mean for those that write, publish, and sell books? What, if anything, does that data do to the way we move forward as an industry? If anything, it shows that we must continue to work together:

Ken Michaels, president of Hachette Book Group and chairman of BISG, closed the conference with a presentation on change and adaptation, noting that “the world is changing more rapidly than we realize.” In particular he noted that the former linear supply chain in publishing—the familiar publisher to distributer to retailer paradigm—has been replaced by a crazy and complex constellation of financial interests and sevices surrounding one central figure—the reader. He also used this new paradigm to promote industry collaboration, like BookStats.

“We see complexity as an opportunity,” Michaels said, “not because we can figure it out in isolation, but because we can participate togther in organizations like AAP, BISG, IDPF and others, without which we couldn’t educate ourselves about the best practices in this new world.”

And speaking of collaboration, this time internal, the BBC went inside HarperCollins in London to see how their covers come to life in a cool little video, Cover to Cover: How are book jackets designed?

➻ Taking a look inside another literary institution, Julie V. Iovine of the Wall Street Journal writes that The Library’s Future Is Not an Open Book. It’s a great overview of a paradigm shift taking place in libraries throughout the country and shows that libraries continue to be some of the most dynamic, forward thinking institutions in the country. The piece deserves a full read, but this excerpt should begin to give you the gist of the article:

Branch libraries have long served as community hubs offering book clubs and after-school story times. But central libraries, dedicated to the care and maintenance of weighty collections within ornately crafted and lofty spaces, are having to recast themselves. Thanks to the shift of emphasis to online resources over hard copies, the prevalence of mobile technologies and changing approaches to studying and learning, libraries have a different social purpose. “I used to be greeted by a sea of faces with questions like how to spell ‘Albuquerque,’” said Amy E. Ryan, a career librarian since the 1970s and now president of the Boston Public Library. “That’s all over. It’s now about providing an experience.”

That experience still includes books, but more importantly for our true education and the health of our civic life, it includes the serendipity of discovery, of the unexpected, of the other and the unfamiliar—something I think is less prevalent as algorithms dictate who and what we see and read in our lives online.

I also believe that if the world were a perfect place, libraries would become the central, not-for-profit wireless providers in their communities. There are a number of models that could be explored, and the for-profit businesses we have providing this public service now are 1: dead last in most customer satisfaction polls, and 2: lagging behind much of the developed world in providing hi-speed service and capacity. The best ideas they seem to be able to come up with is to charge their most loyal customers more and to tier their services, which explains the public’s low esteem of them.

➻ As always, while the Amazon continues to be depleted, Amazon the company just keeps growing. In the news this week, Joanna Stern wrote about Amazon Introducing Amazon Coins—Virtual Currency for Buying Apps and Games, Greg Bensinger reports that Amazon Is Developing Smartphone With 3-D Screen, the Guardian‘s Ian Griffiths and Simon Bowers have Fresh questions for Amazon over pittance it pays in tax, and Dave Jamieson tells us about Amazon Warehouse Workers Suing Over Security Checkpoint Waits, all while Amazon employees strike in Germany. From Melville House’s Kelly Burdick on that last point:

An Amazon spokesperson said the strikes will not affect shipments in Germany.

That said, the action is significant—it’s the first meaningful labor action against Amazon anywhere in the world and an ironic mark against Amazon, a high-tech company suffering from the “distinctly old world malaise of industrial action,” as the FT puts it.the action is significant — it’s the first meaningful labor action against Amazon anywhere in the world and an ironic mark against Amazon, a high-tech company suffering from the “distinctly old world malaise of industrial action,” as the FT puts it.

I would suggest that, if Amazon doesn’t want to deal with the “old world malaise of industrial action,” they should probably not rely on old world industrial labor conditions.

➻ Over at Salon, Ted Heller says Goodnight, sweet print, asking “Are words on paper gone forever?” At the same time Fast Company‘s Addy Dugdale tells us that Qantas Urges Passengers To Ditch Their Kindles For A Paperback Book

A collaboration between Hachette and Droga5 is attempting to get Qantas’s passengers to turn their tablets and e-readers off, and turn instead to paperbacks.

Stories For Every Journey is a collection of bespoke books aimed at the airline’s frequent flyers. Each of the 10 volumes has been written to allow travelers to devour it, front to back, within the flight time–longer flights allow the passenger to devour a meal, throw back a few glasses of wine, and settle down for some sleep, with enough time left to finish the book.

In the Christian Science Monitor, Donna Bryson explores A ‘novel’ idea for spreading literature in Africa: The cellphone. And taking a look at a fascinating new book from Simon & Schuster, Claire Kelley wrote yesterday that Jaron Lanier offers to save the book business, but even his own publisher doesn’t listen:

In her review of his new book Who Owns the Future?, Janet Maslin adds another descriptor, calling Lanier a “mega-wizard in futurist circles. ” But she could have also called him a “book publishing strategist.” In the final chapter of his book, Lanier lays out his thoughts on the future of books and offers a money-making scheme to save the book business:

It amazes me that traditional book publishers don’t understand the emotional value of paper… To survive, the book business has to define a product for the upper horn, for the rich… there should be hyper limited editions of books like this one, hand copied by monks onto handmade paper, using organic fair-trade inks, and sold only in VIP rooms at parties where almost no one can get in. Listen up, publisher, you are with these very words publishing the advice that could win you a fortune, but you are choosing to ignore a way to get through these tough times.

Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Who Owns the Future? was apparently unwilling to take the leap. Seemingly resigned to the inability of publishers to heed his warnings, Lanier offers possible outcomes once the book industry has been completely overhauled by Silicon Valley.

Man… with the physical book disappearing, maybe it’s a good thing so many of us practice Tsundoku.

➻All of these links make my head hurt after a while, which brings me back to the ideas of Simple: Conquering the Crisis of Complexity.

➻ You may too old for summer camp, but if you’d like to take two weeks away from home this summer to build new relationships and “a new online thing,” check out the Summer 2013 Seth Godin Internship.

➻ Do you realize that we’re floating in space?

➻ Scientific American had a post I missed last month about The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens. And it seems that despite the recent surge in e-book sales, our brains still prefer the physicality of the page.

In the U.S., e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade book sales.

Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people’s attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

“There is physicality in reading,” says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, “maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new.”

And if you’re worries about getting your book wet in the bathtub, here is an 8-year-old’s invention for keeping books dry in the bath.

➻ Of course, Nicholas Carr would concur the reading on digital devices does not encourage the same level of comprehension, and The Shallows: cartoon edition can show you why in 3 minutes and 45 seconds.

Of course, I’m sure Carr would still prefer you read the actual book.

➻ But we shouldn’t be too quick to dismiss the internet as the cause of all our ills and think an internet-free existence is the solution to our problems. As Paul Miller shows in a review of his year spent offline, I’m still here: back online after a year without the internet, it isn’t what the internet is doing to us, but what we are doing on the internet and what we are doing ourselves that makes all the difference:

I’d read enough blog posts and magazine articles and books about how the internet makes us lonely, or stupid, or lonely and stupid, that I’d begun to believe them. I wanted to figure out what the internet was “doing to me,” so I could fight back. But the internet isn’t an individual pursuit, it’s something we do with each other. The internet is where people are. [...]

When I return to the internet, I might not use it well. I might waste time, or get distracted, or click on all the wrong links. I won’t have as much time to read or introspect or write the great American sci-fi novel.

But at least I’ll be connected.

And there is certainly something to be said for that.

➻ Getting back to books, Alexander Nazaryan has some thoughts in the New Republic about When Celebrities Take Over Publishing Companies …

Every age gets the publishing industry it deserves, whether it’s Babylonian scribes etching the Epic of Gilgamesh into stone tablets, medieval scribes toiling away at illuminated manuscripts or Maxwell Perkins laboring over the sentences of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Which is why, I suppose, today we have imprints from the comedienne Chelsea Handler, the rapper 50 Cent (Handler’s erstwhile beau, but I wouldn’t read too much into it), the chef Anthony Bourdain, and actors Viggo Mortensen and Johnny Depp, not to mention mystery writer Dennis Lehane and former Men’s Health editor David Zinczenko.

All these are small imprints, usually folded into publishing conglomerates and producing only a few books each year—and always announcing the celebrity affiliation with unabashed pride of the sort that must make the wise old men of the publishing world, the two or three still left, cringe. All were founded in recent years, as the publishing industry has searched ever more desperately for a solution to its chronic, worsening woes. They suggest, to me at least, that the business of discovering, editing, publishing, and promoting a book has become little more than that—a business, on par with hawking energy drinks or endorsing restaurant chains. Yes, publishing has always been about making money. The rise of the celebrity imprint indicates that it is now about little more than that.

I don’t know that I agree with that, or that there’s a huge difference between books written by celebrities and imprints presented by them (other than celebrity imprints show that said celebrities are interested in sharing voices other than their own which seems commendable), but if there is an undeniable truth in the article it is this:

The most depressing aspect of this whole celebrity imprint business: not what it says about publishing, but what it says about ourselves. In their own crass, slick ways, these imprints are indicative of the cult of personality that grips our culture, the facile worship of figures who somehow escape the critical examination we reserve for other aspects of our lives.

That said, I would want to read the “long-lost novel by Woody Guthrie, House of Earth, with an introduction by the historian Douglas Brinkley” whether it was published by Johnny Depp or not. And if these celebrities can get more people reading, then like Oprah Winfrey, I say more power to them. And from a marketing standpoint, I find it far more annoying (as Sally and I have been discussing for years) how publishers present books by women authors, which is why I love Coverflip: Maureen Johnson Calls For An End To Gendered Book Covers With An Amazing Challenge so much.

➻ And we’ll leave you with this…