A guest blog by publishing attorney Lloyd Jassin


NOTE FROM EUGENE: I have been gathering background on the recent Amazon change in POD order fulfillment policy and will be doing my own report on it next week. Meantime, I asked Lloyd Jassin, a publishing attorney and Chairman of the Executive Committee for the NY Center for Independent Publishing, for comments on the current debate concerning Amazon's new policy. He has provided the following as a private citizen-professional, and not in his capacity with the NYCIP. He can be reached at Jassin@copylaw.com.


As the market changes and we move from traditional distribution options to digital distribution options, I find Amazon's move both troubling and exciting. They want to be active all the way along the supply chain from production, to marketing to distribution. As Amazon gets more involved in digital production and distribution, it's not long before they figure out that there should be an Amazon-based publishing company. Well, on the audio side, they've already figured that out. That's the troubling part.

It's a brilliant move. You have to admit. By force of will, Amazon has become the digital asset warehouse and distributor of choice. And, how many digital asset warehouses / distributors do we need? This gives Amazon the ability to manage digital files for POD, ebooks, mobile phone devices, etc. The exciting part is that when Amazon takes this next step, it will create new revenue streams for smaller presses.

While it doesn't look like the cost of gaining access to the number one online bookstore has gone up, I'm concerned about their monopolistic tendencies. Their claim that they are not seeking exclusively (i.e., requiring POD titles be printed exclusively through Book Surge), seems to be a subtle bit of specious reasoning. Amazon's gain is the ability to monopolize the POD market. They are offering a single printer option. Your email makes that clear.

If I were a publisher, I'd look hard at the current industry model. You have the potential to get squeezed on both ends. For example, you've got the Barnes & Noble - Sterling combo with an increasing number of book sales being titles self-published by B&N. Same deal with Amazon and Audible, both of which are actively going after new product to self-publish. See Amazon's Createspace. To the extent publishers covet virtual shelf space at Amazon (with one-click ordering), Amazon's move makes them the leading POD publisher. Of course, there will also be a plethora of other digital opportunities, including e-reader, iPhone and other selling opportunities, that they should exploit for those whose files have been entrusted to them.

Their virtual warehouse of digital files can now be accessed for all manner of digital derivatives. If Amazon remains committed to the indie press segment, which has been allowed to grow to its present size due, in large part, to Amazon, that's great. Their favoritism to Book Surge, is a slippery slope that can easily decrease diversity. They are steering consumers to books that are produced by their owned and operated press.

So, as a general proposition, I think vertical integration is a bad thing. Perhaps, the market will correct itself, as publishers move over to B&N, and other digital asset distributors pop up. Likely, that won't happen. Book distribution is not sexy enough.

If I had to prognosticate, I'd say in the next 24-months Google buys Ingram (Googlegram?) and out-Amazon's Amazon, by creating the ultimate digital warehouse - distributor in the sky.

If Google were to exhibit digital favoritism, it would steer book buyers to its wholly owned Lightning Source. Amazon owns the store. Google owns the web. Amazon merchandises books. Google sells them contextually. Balance is restored to the planet.
 
-Lloyd Jasssin

Note: The impact of Google on the way we do business is really a by-product of much more significant culture change in the evolution of human society. Michael Cook, a Managing Director at AG Asset Management, a money management firm in New York City, who is also an essayist, gave me permission to share his thoughts with you. He can be contacted at mcook@ag-am.com.
—Eugene G. Schwartz, Editor at Large


Life as we know it depends on DNA to transmit information from one generation to the next. Until the appearance of the human race, this was the only way favorable adaptations were retained. Thus, only those adaptations that were genetic in nature drove the progress of evolution. With the invention of language, however, a new type of evolution could occur—what Julian Huxley termed “psycho-social” evolution. The DNA of this evolution is language, and with language came the ability for humans to transmit information from one generation to the next linguistically, as well as genetically. This meant that adaptations innovated by individuals not only could be continued and built upon, but also that individual learning could accumulate from generation to generation. This sped up the pace of evolution immeasurably.

The accumulation of social knowledge brought with it new dilemmas. After a period of time, the traditions and knowledge of the human species became so vast that storing it efficiently became difficult. Oral tradition depends upon memory, which is limited. The art of memory systems was developed by the Greeks to extend the range of human memory, and the poetry of Homer used rhythms, rhymes, and other patterns to aid the memory so that it could retain vast amounts of cultural information. But these techniques were limited: ultimately the problem of storing what we could loosely refer to as the psycho-social “genome” became serious. This problem was solved by the invention of writing systems.

However, to be useful, information must not only be stored, it must be retrieved. Fairly recently in human history it was possible to have every book ever written on your bookshelf. The invention of the printing press was a watershed event in the technology of writing, which ensured that this could not remain true for long! Nevertheless, the retrieval of information from the general store was still something that could be done in a fairly straightforward manner. Of course, centers of learning—monasteries, universities, libraries – developed to manage the growing base of human knowledge. But at some point, it started to become clear that the problem of information retrieval was becoming a roadblock to the continuing development of knowledge. It also became clear that computer technology was well suited to addressing the retrieval issue.

In 1965, J.C.R. Licklider wrote Libraries of the Future, which summarized a project he had undertaken at Bolt Beranek and Newman. In his book, Licklider predicted that all human knowledge would be available on a “fast, random access computer” by the year 2000. His vision seems to be coming true. In December 2004, Google announced a project in which the libraries of five of the world’s leading academic institutions are to be digitized and made available for search and reading online.

But still, even if everything is “available” online, how can relevant information retrieval be effectuated? This is the key problem that Google addressed, and its successful solution to it, although just a beginning, essentially created the “search” industry. Google’s initial solution is called the PageRank algorithm. It was the breakthrough that started delivering search results that are relevant to the user’s search. Before Google, this had really not been the case. Their insight was to use the link structure of the web—the fact that web documents “point” to other web documents - to measure how popular sites were, and to then trust the “wisdom of crowds” by using a site’s popularity as a measure of its relevance. This, in conjunction with the appearance of search terms on the site, proved to be a surprisingly effective ranking mechanism, and the first algorithm that consistently gave users results they found useful.

At present the search industry is evolving very fast—everybody seems to have incorporated Google’s insight into their algorithm, and the race is on to understand what users mean, and what they are intending with their searches. Google’s PageRank algorithm does not address semantic content: indeed, this is part of the genius of the solution—the way it neatly sidesteps this very difficult problem. The next generation of Web Search is yet to come! But the major breakthrough that made search results relevant was invented and engineered by Google.

So here’s the progression as I see it—the thumbnail sketch of the evolution of life on earth: DNA, language, writing, printing, computers, the Internet, Google’s search algorithm.

This is why I say that the future of search is the future of life on earth, and that Google’s algorithm represents a watershed event, analogous to the invention of writing, or the invention of the printing press.

Am I overstating my case? Perhaps. But I don’t think so.

—Michael Cook