Some News About Munro Books and Observations on Independent Book Stores

My July 12 edition of the Globe and Mail newspaper has an article about Munro’s Books, an independent bookstore in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada.  This is a notable independent bookstore, as it first opened in 1963 when Canadian writer Alice Munro was married to Jim Munro.   Alice Munro has since won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for her lifetime output which tended towards connected short story anthologies, such as “Lives of Girls and Women” and “Who do you Think you Are?”

It turns out that Jim Munro is leaving the bookstore business after 50 years.  That’s not surprising, given that the article states that he is 84 years old.  When asked whether he would advise anyone to follow him into the book business, he is quoted as saying “Don’t do it.”  Essentially, he chalks that up to how difficult it is to run a physical bookstore, given the competition from online bookstores and ebooks.

He is passing the store on to four senior employees, starting this September.  They will pay him rent for the 4500 square feet of space, but other than that, he is basically giving them the store and the inventory.  The inventory is said to “hover around 30,000 books at any given time”.

It is hard to say how to even evaluate an inventory of 30,000 print books these days.  A decade or so in the past, they might have each been a potential $10 profit (or more) to a book seller, meaning at least a quarter million in value.  But the way things are, they might not fetch even a small fraction of that on the open market.

It’s the same for the goodwill of the business – in the not too distant past, the goodwill of a 50 year old going concern would have been worth a lot.  Note that goodwill are all those intangibles that an established business has – steady customers, relationships with suppliers, reputation in the community and so forth.  But when readers are transitioning to ebooks, all of those intangibles are worth a lot less than they used to be, even though the Munro name is now connected to the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature (so now it will forever have a place in literary history).

The inventory of 30,000 books is a key part of the problem.  How can a store compete with Amazon or the other e-retailers, when they have a nearly boundless inventory, in the millions?  Even physical bookstore chains, like Chapters and Barnes and Noble have trouble competing, and their stores can easily exceed 100,000 books.   It’s the same with knowledgeable staff, who can make good recommendations and who know how to special order less popular and rare books.  How do you compete with

·        tens of thousands of Amazon reviews (provided free by customers),

·        Also Bought recommendations (a very clever algorithm which has persuaded me to buy a lot of books and DVDs I didn’t even know about before it brought them to my attention),

·         and an inventory that can satisfy the vast majority of niche interests (and is growing bigger and more varied every day)?

In my own hometown of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada we have seen one very prominent independent bookstore close down over the past year or so (late 2012 to be exact).  That would be Greenwood’s Books, a fixture in the popular Old Strathcona area of Edmonton since the late 1970’s.  This was partly precipitated by the death of one of the owners, who was the key business mind behind the store.  The others (family) didn’t think they could make a go of it without his business acumen. But it was probably no coincidence that they made that decision when they did – i.e. just as the ebook revolution was getting seriously underway. 

The remaining big independent in Edmonton is Audrey’s books, also long a fixture, in the downtown area.  I can recall special ordering a computer book there in the mid-1980’s.  It was where you went for that sort of service back then (Audrey’s or Greenwoods Books).  The book was called “Simply Dbase II”.  Interestingly enough, it is still available on Amazon (as a used paperback) – a simple Google search was all it took to find that out (see the image below).  It makes me wonder who would pay nearly fifty bucks for an old obsolete software manual, but there must be a market.  Collectors maybe?  It’s amazing what people will collect.

I guess that tells you something about business disruption and technological transformation.  In this case, Amazon is the preserver of one sort of heritage (the book Simply Dbase II, still available), though it might eventually be the cause of the loss of a different sort of heritage (the physical bookstore).  That’s the long tail in a nutshell (to mix metaphors).

I have been back to Audrey’s on many occasions since then, of course.  In fact, I was recently  downtown to take a course in Social Media Analytics (that’s worth a blog itself, someday soon), so I dropped into Audrey’s over lunch one day.  It is still there, on 108 Street and Jasper Avenue, at the same location and about the same size as ever.

I bought a couple of books, as a birthday present.  I also made the following notes on the inside of one of them (Survival of the Nicest by Stefan Klein, $12.98 today on Kindle, $31.95 three weeks ago at the bookstore), while having lunch a few minutes later at a nearby restaurant:

·        Audrey’s Science Fiction: 8 sets of shelves X 4 shelves per set X 20 books per shelf = 640 SF books.

·        Many of these were well known backlist titles: Prachett, Toklein, Jordan.  There wasn’t much that a novelty seeking SF reader would find intriguing.

·        Compare that to Amazon, which had 163,000 SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) titles in July of 2014, of which 74,000 were Science Fiction.

·        In one niche category alone, Romance – Science Fiction, the Amazon Kindle store had over 4,000 titles.   It is difficult to see how any store could compete with that.  Granted, that also makes it hard for writers to be discovered, but that’s life in an open market.

·        The lower floor of the store was completely devoted to children’s books and toys.  I would say at least half was games and plush toys.  I can recall picking up a poetry anthology by Ted Hughes a few years earlier in that location.

·        There was nothing like that now at Audrey’s (that I could see, anyway), though I noted there were plenty of anthologies by Ted Hughes on the Amazon Kindle store today, many quite reasonably priced.  To be fair, though, I didn’t look very hard for the poetry section at Audrey’s on that visit.  Also, to be fair, it only took me a few seconds on the Amazon search engine to find dozens of his anthologies.

·        I noticed that a lot of the bookshelves had books “cover out”, rather than “spine out”.   That makes those books more prominent to the eye, but it also covers a possible shortage of inventory.  You can make a smaller number of books seem to go further, if they are cover out.

·        The store didn’t look down at the heels or anything like that.  It was clean and pleasant, and the staff seemed to be happy enough.  So, you never know.  They might be doing ok.  I hope so – it is still nice to have a bookstore to drop into, when I am downtown.

Anyway, those were my latest field observations concerning the health of the print book store, with special emphasis on the independent bookstore.

Where the Apple Falls, free on Amazon Wednesday to Sunday

As part of the kickoff to Amazon Unlimited, Helena Puumala's short fiction piece Where the Apple Falls will be free on Amazon this week, as a Kindle ebook.

This short story (approx. 6500 words) focuses on the complex and somewhat troubled relations between children, parents, and grandparents. It also revolves around the mysterious forces of the universe, including the various notions of the divine held by the people in the story, which sometimes conflict, much as they do in the world in general. An Easter service and a freshly planted apple tree draw the parties together, over one fateful Easter weekend.

The story is set in a Northern Ontario lake community, and continues to explore the setting and characters introduced in “Love at the Lake” and “The Boathouse Christ”, also by Helena Puumala.

http://www.amazon.com/Where-Apple-Falls-Easter-Story-ebook/dp/B00JSDW6XY

The Boathouse Chist, free on Amazon Wednesday to Sunday

As part of the kickoff to Amazon Unlimited, Helena Puumala's short fiction piece The Boathouse Christ will be free on Amazon this week, as a Kindle ebook.

A teenage girl inadvertently materializes the image of a Christ on the Cross on the outside wall of her parents’ boathouse, at their cottage on a Northern Ontario lake. She spends hours praying to the figure while her parents and their neighbours express their distress. Then it is discovered that the girl, Terese, also has marks on her body, recreating the wounds of the Christ.

What is to be done?

A neighbouring girl offers her help, along with that of Terese’s psychic grandmother, demonstrating to her parents that she, indeed, as she gently claims, has some interesting talents, although Terese is the one who has truly rare abilities, but ones that she is afraid of. The families of both girls learn something about themselves, and about each other during the uncanny events of one (or perhaps two) October weekends, including Hallowe’en.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Boathouse-Christ-Helena-Puumala-ebook/dp/B00JBRD90Q 

Thoughts on the new Amazon Kindle Unlimited Subscription Service and The Long Tail

Amazon has just come out (July 18, 2014) with a program known as “Kindle Unlimited”.  As of now, it only applies to the U.S. site (Amazon.com), but if successful it will no doubt be rolled out to other Amazon sites around the world.  It is not clear to me if the program applies to non-Americans who have accounts on Amazon.com.  The basic idea is that for $9.99 per month, the subscriber gets unlimited access to all of the books in the KDP Select pool, about 600,000 titles at this time.   They can download up to ten titles at a time, but have to read or delete one or more of these titles before they can download another one.

Note that any Amazon book can still be purchased outside the Kindle Unlimited program, in the “regular” Kindle ebook store.  This could be the case for people who want to “own” a copy of the book rather than rent it or who simply don’t want to sign up for a monthly subscription fee.  Amazon Kindle Unlimited subscribers can still purchase books at full price, if they prefer.

The writer or publisher gets paid a fee every time one of his or her books is downloaded and read up to the 10% mark.  That’s the point at which a customer is assumed to have committed to the book, similar to the 10% sample available on the regular Amazon kindle website.  This ensures that readers don’t load up their kindles with books that they never get around to reading, and thus don’t drive down the unit price per download unnecessarily. 

The writer’s cut is based on dividing his or her downloads into overall  pool of money  e.g. if the pool of money was $2 million, and there were 1 million downloads, each download would be worth $2.  If an author had 10 downloads that month, he or she would receive $20.  Presumably, the pool will be based on the number of subscribers to the program.  The details of that are still unclear, but for this July the pool is set at $2 million.

To be eligible for the program, books must be enrolled in a program called KDP Select – that program requires the writer/publisher to be exclusive to Amazon.  Any book that is in that program is also automatically enrolled in Kindle Unlimited.  So, for example, if one wants to enrol a book in Kindle Unlimited that is currently published on Kobo or iBooks, that book would first have to be “unpublished” on the competing site.  By the letter of the contract, you shouldn’t even have the story available for free on your own blog or website.  It’s up to the writer/publisher, whether or not to enrol a book in the program.  On the one hand, it is another revenue stream from within Amazon; on the other hand, it means you can’t make any money on other ebook retail sites and can’t make your book available to people who use those sites.  In our case, for example, it would mean taking books off Kobo, where we know we have some loyal readers.

One interesting wrinkle of the program is that any book downloaded and “read” would be worth the same amount of money to the author/publisher, regardless of length.  So, a 25 page (10,000 word) $0.99 short story ebook would pay the writer as much as a 500 page (200,000 word) $3.99 epic length novel.  In the non-subscription part of the Amazon store, the 99 cent short story would pay the writer/publisher about 35 cents, while the $3.99 novel would pay about $2.80.  So, depending on what the fee per download of the subscription service ends up calculating out to, it would probably be more profitable for the writer/publisher to have short books downloaded by subscribers, but have longer books purchased by non-subscribers.  But, that’s clearly something outside of the writer/publisher’s control.  Readers will do what is best for them, depending on whether they think they will save money in the long run by going subscription, or whether they think they would be better off buying books on a one-off basis (including downloading free promotion copies, when available). 

One wonders how long Amazon will maintain the 5 days out of each 90 days that a writer/publisher can offer books for free, if enrolled in KDP Select.  The free days obviously represent no value to Kindle Unlimited subscribers – they can get as many books as they like for “free” anyway, as long as they pony up $9.99 per month.  Free still has value for non-subscribers, though.  It seems to me that it would be to Amazon’s advantage to drop “free” in the near future, as that would encourage cost-sensitive voracious readers to sign up for Kindle Unlimited.  As long as “free” is a possibility, voracious readers may want to stay out of the new program, and just read free books as they come up.  Note that if Amazon does abandon “free”, it will probably be done incrementally, in stages over a year or two.

Putting on my strategic thinking cap, it seems to me that Kindle Unlimited is an effort to further monetize the “long tail” in the ebook market.  The long tail constitutes that vast majority of books that are not hits or best-sellers (i.e. that don’t sell in the hundreds of thousands to tens of millions).  That’s anything from the solid mid-list books, purchased in the tens of thousands to the niche books that are only purchased by a few dozen people.  Amazon has already been quite successful at making money from the long tail – they basically created that market via the development of the kindle and their independent publishing outlet KDP and they have made a lot of money doing that.  But I suspect that they think that there is a lot of value left in that long tail market, that is currently being siphoned off by free books.  I think they want to turn that into cash.

The other strategic consideration for Amazon is to get writers to commit to being solely available on their store.  That would put the other retailers at a competitive disadvantage, being unable to offer a selection as large as Amazon’s.  And in a long tail world, large selection and an effective user-generated referral system (like Amazon reviews and Also-Boughts) are the keys to success.  That’s why the big box print bookstores (like Chapters or Barnes and Noble) beat the small scale shopping mall book stores during the 90’s and 2000’s, and that’s why the ebook retailers are prevailing over the big box print stores in the 2010’s, in their turn.

Another interesting aspect of Kindle Unlimited is that, as of the date of the writing of this blog (July 21, 2014), none of the “big five” publishers have signed on to the program (Penguin/Random House, Harper-Collins, Hachette, MacMillan, and Simon and Schuster).  That primarily leaves books produced by the mid-size publishers to independent/self-published writers.  Will that stifle the program?  My guess is that Amazon thinks not.  The kind of “long tail” consumers that they are after are often voracious, experimental readers who are content with Indies – indeed they may even prefer them to the safety of the big publishing houses.  Plus, not all of the biggest best-sellers are published by the big five.  For example, Hunger Games is published by Scholastic and it will be in the program, as will the Harry Potter books.  So, the new program will have some big name draws, even without the Big Five.

Some Indie writers have worried that Amazon and other retailers may eventually push them into an Indie and self-published ghetto, where they will languish, since they assume that most readers will automatically go to the part of the store dominated by the big name publishers and writers.  Other Indies have expressed what amounts to a “bring it on” attitude.  They think consumers don’t care about the publisher, and only want good books at a good price.  Since Indies have far lower overhead costs than big publishers, they think a lower priced Indie section would attract plenty of readers, especially their coveted loyal, voracious readers.

Indeed some of the big publishers have lobbied for just such a development. They may be getting their wish.  At this moment, it looks like Kindle Unlimited may be a de facto Indie section.  How that plays out is yet to be seen, however.  It may be that it is the big publishers who will be forced to cry uncle and sign up with Kindle Unlimited, if a significant part of the Amazon book buying public chooses to sign up with the subscription service.

So, there are a lot of interesting possibilities for readers, writers, publishers and retailers coming up.  Everyone will be trying to figure out what this new Amazon program portends for them.  Readers will be trying to calculate whether it will save them money, or cost them money to enroll.  Writer/publishers will be trying to estimate whether they will gain more from downloads than they lose in sales, on Amazon and other sites such as Kobo and Nook.  Other big ebook retailers, such as Kobo, will be trying to determine how they can best respond, in a strategic business sense.  And Amazon, as always, will be watching their data carefully, refining their algorithms and adjusting their business strategies in the manner that they feel best advantages them.

As for our little venture, Dodecahedron Books will enrol some of our shorter fiction in Kindle Unlimited, hoping it gets some downloads and drives some business to the longer books, like the Kati of Terra series and the Witches’ Stones series.  Other than that, it is a matter of observe, write, publish and try to enjoy the ride, which is all that anyone can do in the long run or the long tail J.

Love at the Lake, free on Amazon Wed August 23 to Sunday Aug 28

Amazon has come up with a new subscripton program, called Amazon Unlimited.  I will blog about the details of that later, and my thoughts about it.  But, as a result of this new development, we have recently re-enrolled three of Helena Pummala's short fiction works in KDP Select.  So, Love at the Lake, a romance, will be free to download from Amazon later this week (Wednesday to Sunday).  So, enjoy it free, or via the subscription program, if you have signed up for that.

http://www.amazon.com/Love-at-Lake-Helena-Puumala-ebook/dp/B00IPSZKLS

Astrophysics Corner Part 10 - The Face on Mars, a Dolphin on Jupiter and George Washington on a House For Sale Sign

Pareidolia - The Face on Mars, a Dolphin on Jupiter and George Washington on a House For Sale Sign

Update, May 2019
Here's another nice bit of pareidolia, taken by the Juno orbiter at Jupiter:

“There’s a Christ on the Stanniks’ boathouse,” Miles said at lunch, one fine mid-October Saturday.

“Come again?” Hannah said to her son who was spooning up soup with the hearty appetite of a growing twelve year old.  “There’s a what on the Stanniks’ boathouse?”
“Christ,” Miles responded, between mouthfuls.  “A picture of the Christ.  On the Cross.  On the outside, back wall of their boathouse.”
http://www.amazon.com/Boathouse-Christ-Helena-Puumala-ebook/dp/B00JBRD90Q

 Helena Puumala’s short story “The Boathouse Christ” centers around the appearance of an eerie likeness of a crucified Christ, on the side of a boathouse located in a lakeside community.  In the story it becomes clear that something truly mysterious is going on, but as we know, that’s not usually the case.  Most of have come across the phenomenon of eerie facial likeness in our daily lives.  In fact, it is a common enough that it has a name - pareidolia (I am indebted to astrophysics PhD student, soon to be PhD, Scott Olausen, for pointing this out).

The term apophenia refers to the process whereby a fairly random stimulus is perceived as being significant, and facial pareidolia is a specific variant of that.  The human mind is wonderful at recognizing patterns in data, even when they aren’t really there.  It is especially good at recognizing faces or things that might be construed as faces, which is very useful trait for a highly social animal like a human being.  Apparently, this happens very quickly, at a subconscious level, before it rises to the level of conscious thought.  Neurological studies indicate that we seem to have a lot of neurons that are devoted to this task – we are hard wired for it.  It is theorized that this trait should have a great deal of survival value, so evolution has selected for it.  Not only do we quickly recognize faces, but we also quickly attach an emotional value to the face - whether it is happy or sad, angry of indifferent, potential mate or helper or potential rival or foe.

It turns out that computer programs designed to recognize faces also make false positive identifications, seeing “faces” in collections of shapes that only superficially resemble faces.  For example there might be two circles over another circle and a line, which the computer program “sees” as eyes, nose and mouth, so it calls it a face.   I suppose that’s to be expected, as computer programs are ultimately creations of human minds, so it is not surprising  that they might share our biases.

Below is an image of George Washington that I came across the other day, on my walk to work.  It was on the back of a “house for sale” sign and it immediately caught my eye.  Perhaps I was primed a bit, by the famous image of George Washington sculpted into Mount Rushmore, which I have included for comparison.  I should note that the Mount Rushmore picture is actually one I took myself a few years ago, during a visit to South Dakota, U.S.A..  I would encourage any reader to take a trip there someday - it is quite an achievement (tastefully done) and the surrounding area of the Black Hills and Badlands National Park are pretty amazing too.

 

In the case of the miraculous appearance of George Washington on the back of a House For Sale sign, it was a matter of the morning sun casting shadows of nearby leaves on bushes in just the right way to be reminiscent of George Washington, especially for someone who is very familiar with the Mount Rushmore icon, as I am.  In this case it was easy for me to establish that the image was merely a trick of the light, by interposing my body between the sun (low on the eastern horizon) and the sign.  The image went away immediately.

You can also read George’s state of mind quite easily – I think I can, anyway.  The House For Sale sign George Washington appears to be rather sad, in my opinion.  Even Mount Rushmore George seems a bit sad.  I guess being the father of a country is no laughing matter.

There have, of course, been many reports of religious iconography being produced in similar matters.  There was the famous case of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich, for example, shown below.  Eventually, that fetched 28 grand on eBay for the owner, when it was purchased by an internet casino.  God really does work in mysterious ways.  I can’t say I get it - the picture looks more like a silent film star to me.

Another famous case, and one that has a connection to space science and science fiction is the so-called face on Mars.  That’s a formation in the Cydonia region of Mars that has a remarkable resemblance to a face, at least when the light hits it from certain angles, as in the Viking probe picture below.  The effect is far less convincing in the Mars Global Surveyor picture, also shown below, though some still see enough evidence of geometrical symmetry to insist that it must be the work of intelligent agents.  Proponents of the theory that it is not a natural tend to link it with ancient Egyptian wonders such as the Sphinx, which is undeniably not a natural phenomenon. 

The case is also made that there are a lot of mathematical relationships within the face and environs, and that these cannot merely be coincidences.  Arguments like that tend to run up against problems related to statistical theory, mainly how to interpret results when one makes many post-hoc a-theoretical multiple comparisons.  Essentially, when you are analyzing data after the fact, and have a lot of data to sift through, you can find many spurious correlations, even in a randomly generated dataset.  So, one has to be very careful when judging these claims.

Ultimately, everyone will have to make up their own minds about the Mars feature, at least until NASA or some other space agency sends a probe to the area.  The more I look at the Mars Global Surveyor picture, the more it starts looking like a face.  But since I can’t stand in front of it, like I could with George Washington on a House for Sale sign, it may just be pareidolia after all.

Happy Bastille Day and happy birthday to Helena Puumala

France is one of the originators of democracy, and Helena is the originator of Kati of Terra, a tireless protagonist on behalf of democracy.  And, the blogger's wife.  :)