What is a book worth?

Over the last few years as Smashwords gestated in my head, I spent a lot of time contemplating the furious changes to come as digital books make their way to the Internet.

In physical form, a book has characteristics that cause most of us to apply value to it - we may appreciate the cover art, its display is crisp and sharp, it's durable, it's portable, it has weight and substance in our hands, it looks sharp in our library, it tends to smell better with age, and simply reading it in public is form of self-expression.

Simply by transforming a book to digital form, we strip away the physical and have a product that is more ethereal. We also change the perceived value of the book in the eyes of the consumer. Now in digital form, a book is little more than words and images that must compete with all the other forms of information dissemination, knowledge sharing and entertainment, most of which can be had for essentially FREE on the Internet.

So what does this mean for authors and the future of writing? Are digital books moving toward free? Considering the Smashwords business model is predicated on taking a 15% cut of sales, I certainly hope we don't go all free. And as an author who put several hundred hours of work into my own novel, I admit I desire some form of monetary compensation.

Over the weekend, I posed this question to authors over at LinkedIn, asking if we need to broaden our definition of author compensation, and the responses are quite interesting (check them out). Most authors answered they want compensation in cold hard cash. The idea of alternate measures of compensation, such as fame or enhanced credibility, is anathema to most authors who have responded so far. Several have pledged to stop writing without compensation.

The debate is fascinating to me because for years, traditional print publishing - the ideal most authors aspire to as the sign of success - has failed to offer adequate compensation to all but a few authors.

What do you think?

Smashwords Launches Public Beta

We went live with Smashwords today, so a big hello to our newest members who join us after nearly two months of private beta testing. My gratitude goes out to our private beta testers who generously shared their feedback leading up to this public launch.

Smashwords to Launch Public Beta on Tuesday May 6

After several years of blood, sweat and cheers, Smashwords is finally launching its public beta this coming Tuesday May 6.

The idea behind Smashwords is simple: We help authors make their digitally published works discoverable by a worldwide audience.

------------------------------------------
The Smashwords Mission
------------------------------------------

I'm really excited about the opportunity digital books present to the world's readers and authors. For centuries, books have remained the gold standard for information dissemination, knowledge sharing and storytelling. Books have shaped the course of mankind.

I love paper books, and I hope they never go away, but print publishing has important economic limitations that limit opportunities for authors to reach their audience. Book printing and publishing is expensive, so book publishers are unable to publish all written works, and even if they could publish all written works, the vast majority of literate people in the world would not be able to find them or afford them.

Paper books are simply too expensive when you consider that 86% of the world's population earns a per capita annual income of less than $10,000 versus a $30,000-$50,000 per capita income level typical in developed countries. Or, consider that over one billion of the world's roughly 6.5 billion inhabitants subsist on less than $1 a day. Paper books are simply too expensive for most of the world.

By moving books into the digital realm, we can start to change the economics of book publishing, while at the same time making the work of great independent authors available to people of all economic backgrounds.

At Smashwords, we want to make publishing more enriching to both authors and publishers alike. Smashwords returns 85% of net proceeds from the sale of each book back to the author or publisher. This means that an author who might otherwise earn a per unit royalty of 40 cents by publishing a $7.95 mass market paperback can make 3.5 times as much per unit by selling the digital book on Smashwords for $2.00 (a 75% lower cost).

Smashwords economics creates a virtuous cycle: By pricing books low, Smashwords authors will expand the potential audience for their books while at the same time increasing their per-unit margins, sales volume and overall profits.

Are most Smashwords authors going to get rich? Definitely not. Although digital book sales today represent a tiny fraction of overall book sales, ebooks are one of the fastest growing segments of the book publishing industry.

Authors will get out of Smashwords what they put into it. Smashwords provides authors a free digital publishing platform and associated book marketing tools that help them build an audience and achieve their dreams. Authors simply upload their manuscript in Microsoft Word, assign sampling privileges and pricing, and we automatically convert it into multiple DRM-free formats.

We expect many authors to price their books at ZERO, and we welcome this. We recognize that most authors write because they have a story to tell, information to share or ideas to communicate, and these noble desires often trump the motive for financial gain.

I invite you to join our campaign to change the way books are published, marketed, discovered and sold.

Best wishes,

Mark Coker
Founder and CEO
Smashwords, Inc.
http://www.smashwords.com

Digital text vs. printed text

I just read two books from my Amazon Kindle (George Soros' thought provoking The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 from the Amazon store and the excellent World Voyagers from husband and wife Smashwords authors, Phil and Amy Shelton, and have found myself thinking more and more about the future of the printed word.

For years, pundits, know-it-alls and nay-sayers have been preaching a gospel that digital ebooks will never catch on because nothing can match the pleasurable look, feel and experience of print on paper. I think the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Will Kindle do for ebooks what the iPod did for digital music? Not the current version.

Although it offers a better-than-expected reading experience, it certainly isn't a must have reading device, at least not yet. The screen, while acceptable, still doesn't match ink on paper. The screen is a bit dark. The crisp black letters lack contrast against the too-dark gray background. To call the user interface clunky would be an understatement. It's difficult to hold the thing without flipping pages by accident.

On the plus side, it's easy to adjust the Kindle's font size for more comfortable reading, and the wireless download feature is superb. I bought my first book from the Kindle store while sitting in the sand on Waikiki beach. Imagine having thousands of books to sample or purchase, at your fingertips, anytime and anyplace. That's powerful and you can have that today with the Kindle.

I see a clear path for Kindle or its competition to achieve greatness with a couple more iterations. If you've got an extra $399 sitting around and you love to read books, buy a Kindle, you won't be disappointed. Otherwise, hold off for another year or two because we're that close to the killer, must-have ebook device. And in the meantime, you can still have a good ebook reading experience on your smart phone or laptop.

Publishing Smashwords books on the Amazon Kindle

I bought one of the first Kindles available, though I'm embarrassed to admit it's been sitting in a pile of unread magazines for the last few months. I'm on vacation this week in Hawaii, so I brought it along for some real-world beach testing (I'll do a review later). This morning, I tested it with Smashwords, just to see for myself how easy it is to move a Smashwords book to the Kindle. Initial results were quite favorable, though I did discover a small bug that perplexes me. Here's a step by step of how to move Smashwords ebooks to a Kindle:

1. Go to beta.smashwords.com (this will only work currently if you're part of the private beta test, btw).

2. Go to the book page of your book. Click on the .mobi file. Choose "save to disk" and download the file to your desktop.

3. Connect your Kindle to your computer via the USB port cable that comes with the Kindle.

4. From your deskop, click on "My Computer" and you'll see the Kindle appear as a hard drive. In my case, it appears as the D: drive. Click on the Kindle drive and then click on "Documents" to open up that folder on the Kindle. Drag your book's file, which ends in .mobi, into the Kindle documents folder.



5. This is what the Kindle screen looks like as it's connected to the USB cable.



6. Next, unplug the cable from the Kindle. Voila, your book is on the Kindle, accessible from the Kindle home button along with your other Kindle books!



Observations:

The book renders beautifully in the Kindle. I can alter the font size and get good pagination. The only problem I discovered is that the book's title, Boob Tube, doesn't appear as the title within the Kindle menu. Instead, I got gobblygook. And the gobblygook appears as the header on every page of the book on the Kindle. It's a minor annoyance but something I'm sure Gordy our CTO can fix if I'm unable to debug it myself.

Bottom line, it's quite easy to save your Smashwords books to the Kindle. If I had had my Kindle attached to my computer as I was saving the book to my desktop, I could have just as easily saved it straight to the Kindle to save a couple steps.

Smashwords to expand private beta

Beta testing is proceeding well. Early participants in the first round of the Smashwords private beta will soon be allowed to issue a limited number of exclusive invites to their friends. Their friends, once registered, can also invite others. Beta testers will receive an email notification once the second wave opens up.

Hello World

Welcome to the Smashwords blog, where we'll provide updates about the site and when the mood strikes us, unsolicited opinion about ebooks, electronic publishing, self publishing and politics. Well, maybe not politics.