One word, Michael: food.

I think my idea of a cultural centre and your understanding may be different. By a cultural centre I mean more of an art/sculpture/book/clothing/entertainment store which also will serve as a gathering place next to the Temple to be built in Philly.

Given that many of the saints in PA/NJ/DE/MD will be traveling into center city and may want to treat the visit as more than just a normal suburban Temple visit, i was envisioning a centralized place to meet.

I also think it would be a good idea for occasional events such as you describe but not to excess.

By focusing the art and sculpture and books on more of a Christian theme instead of just an LDS theme, it may also be an attractive store to those of other religious faiths since it has the advantage of an urban location with lots of foot traffic and proximity to the expanded Philly convention center.

What do you think? I respect you experience in this area.

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Regarding Michael’s original notion: I agree. I’m too lazy to look up the comments right now, but both Kent and I have talked a bit here at AMV about how bookstores could be more cultural centers and do a better job of making their customers friends of the store rather than just someone who comes in and buys a book when they need a gift. And that’s an effort that needs to extend to their electronic communications and presences in addition to in-store events and amenities.

I think the Kodak analogy was excellent. Even Random House could be in danger of bankruptcy if they ignore the future until it has already arrived. Because in this virtual world, one company really can be a distribution network all on its own. Think about how out-of-nowhere iTunes was.

However, I have to observe that you seem to claim that these chanels exist, but then hint that they are only known to those that have a reader–and blaming the traditional publishers for not knowing where and how to get books into the necessary formats and where to sell their ebooks.

This is, of course, my point exactly. Until most publishers interested in selling ebooks can get their books into the most widely used formats and easily distribute them to most ebook retailers, these channels are under-developed, and an impediment to the wide acceptance of ebooks, just like the lack of national distribution systems before the 1900s was an impediment to the development of the book industry before that time.

I disagree with most of your claims, principally because you seem to dismiss major factors as unimportant. One company (Smashwords) that formats ebooks for multiple retailers in multiple formas doesn’t make a developed sales channel. Assuming that everyone who has purchased an ebook reader knows what format to buy for their device and where to find that format, doesn’t really help newbies who have just got a reader for Christmas or those who are exploring the market ahead of purchasing a device or software to read ebooks. Likewise, dismissing “newbie e-publishers and the big traditional NY houses who don’t know anything about e-publishing” for not knowing about formats kind of misses my point in a big way: their books are needed in the market also. If they need time to figure out the formats, the market can’t take off until the majority of the titles are from publishers who have figured it out! Likewise dismissing the most popular ebook format just because you don’t like it and how it works is also a good example of an important part of my point — the fractious disputes over what format is good and what isn’t, or what device is good and what isn’t, or over whether drm should be used or not, too often ignore the fact that customers will eventually decide what is acceptable, and the market needs time to sort that out. And that time will keep ebook sales from reaching a significant portion of the total book market for several years still, at least. It could even be several decades before ebooks quite arrive.

I don’t mean to say that anyone should ignore ebooks. I do think, however, that a lot of work needs to happen to build a workable infrastructure that draws the major providers of content into the market in a way that satisfies most consumers.

Palm uses the Mobipocket (MOBI) format.

iPhone/iTouch reads EPUB and/or PDB (eReader), depending on which reading application you have.

BlackBerry et al reads PDB (eReader).

Free advice: If a publisher is looking to digitize, remember that people who are digital book hounds can change an HTML file into whatever format they want/need. However, it would behoove the publisher to offer (at the very least) those four formats. If the MS Courier takes off, add LIT to that. MS didn’t abandon its reader for four years, only to update last month, for no reason.

I recently did some research on ebook stores, where ebooks are sold and where to purchase them.

I’m just curious: Which ones are you talking about, specifically?

Third-party digital book distribution is a BIG problem. I’ll be the first one to agree with you on that. There are many reasons I don’t distribute with any of them, and not all of them because I’m not eligible. At this stage of the game, I’m not sure I would want to anyway.

That said, Smashwords is making the inroads here because not only are they all-inclusive, easy to use, inexpensive (WRT its cut), and open/friendly to publishers, they are also all-inclusive, easy to use, and open/friendly to purchasers and readers. They’ve struck deals with B&N to provide their content through B&N’s site with B&N’s reader (crappy thing), and now through Sony’s store. You’re on Smashwords? Voila! You are also in B&N’s and Sony’s stores.

A, um, purist, might not like that Smashwords does not curate, and it might seem that Smashwords is one big slush pile (because it is), but that’s for the readers to decide. The fact that B&N and Sony are using it to feed their digital catalogs is huge.

don’t make it easy to tell if a book will work with your device or not,

Right now, the people who have digital book reading devices know what devices read what formats. It’s the newbie e-publishers and the big traditional NY houses who don’t know anything about e-publishing who don’t know what format goes with what device, and who are confusing the issue for their customers. They also don’t care.

On the other hand, they really don’t need to know because, again, the people who read digital books just want content.

With the push toward a universal format (EPUB, which is the heir apparent of the title “mp3 of digital books), and manufacturers’ building in the ability for their devices to read the EPUB format, this problem will decrease over time.

Sony recently dropped their BBeB proprietary format (as far as I know, it’s the only format never to have been broken) in favor of EPUB (albeit all wrapped up in Adobe DRM), which is a step in the right direction. Those of us in digital books are crossing our fingers that Amazon does the same with Kindle, because Kindle has one predator:

iPhone/iTouch. People (including me) do not want a single-purpose device. There are 3M iPhones out there and applications aplenty with which to read digital books, and myriads of ways to go about getting them. One of those big ways is Smashwords.

I’m not going to lie and say that I’d rather people get our books from Smashwords, because I’d rather they get them from my site. (Why? Because my formatting is excellent and Smashwords’s is not.) They can do that, no problem, but visibility there is the issue. Still, I’d far rather they get our books from Smashwords than from Amazon, because Amazon is bordering on racketeering, IMO, and Amazon’s digital upload do-hickey is abysmal on both publisher and reader ends.

Ebooks, because they need an electronic delivery mechanism that hasn’t existed before, don’t have the sales channels they need. And these channels don’t develop overnight.

The delivery mechanisms and sales channels ARE there. The people who read digital books know this and know where to find them. The people who don’t yet, well… It’s kind of like Mozilla Firefox. And the church. You get converts one at a time. The easiest to convert are the people who already have the devices and just haven’t discovered all its bells and whistles yet. So many analogies, so little time.

Yes, digital books have a long way to go before they hit the mainstream, most notably in price (because traditional publishers who venture into digital books have no idea what they’re doing and/or [more likely, IMO] they want to discourage digital book sales by pricing them out of desirability), universality of format, and ease of purchase/download. I’ve made the process as simple as possible, but I’m a one-chick micropress and still building.

The rumored Apple tablet that has yet to prove it exists, and the Microsoft Courier which has proven it exists (and with Microsoft’s EXCELLENT reader updated last month for the first time in four years, I hope, in preparation for the Courier’s launch), will be a huge leap forward for digital books.

Note: Deseret Book has somewhat gotten on board, but I’m not sure the free download approach with only the crappiest format for reading digital books ever (PDF, which does not a digital book make) will prove anything good to them. This is more Doctorow’s approach of giving something away for free in the hopes of boosting print sales, but that misses the point of digital books altogether.

No, it won’t happen overnight, but the movement is gaining momentum and I believe it’ll explode sooner than anybody actually thinks. It does no publisher any good to pretend it isn’t happening and not prepare for it. I’m prepared and preparing, looking to the future, and I have ideas.

Not only do I intend to be there when it takes off, I intend to be one of the pioneers in the next generation of digital books, which will happen while this generation’s taking off.

Just as a side note: I post my wonderful comment (at least in my mind) of making bookstores into cultural centres and no one responds except TH.

I post a little link about the Apple tablet and all the comments come out of the woodwork.

What do you all think of my idea of making the bookstores more like cultural stores?

Michael, I did mean to respond to your comment, but I ran out of time because of some additional obligations I’ve been given recently.

In general, I do think that stores can and should be cultural centers, especially in comparison to current LDS stores. I’ve had the same idea myself. BUT, I would caution you to be flexible and careful about how you do this. Holding instore events is one thing, giving up a lot of store space to a stage or seating is another. Only in the largest stores have I seen anything approaching the latter.

The biggest problem with the idea is promoting events. The LDS market has a built-in difficulty in communicating to its potential audience (you can’t use the Church’s lists or events or anything else to promote your business, and lists of addresses of members in your area are generally not available.) This limits you to those who are already your customers.

Besides the practical difficulties of the idea, I do think you are largely right, and in line with the way I would like to see LDS stores develop.

I recently did some research on ebook stores, where ebooks are sold and where to purchase them. In general, the sites that sell ebooks are not that well known, don’t make it easy to tell if a book will work with your device or not, and make it very hard for publishers to know how to get their books into the stores. With many of these stores, I get the idea that you have to approach each of them individually to get your title listed. While I have found a couple of major distributors of ebooks, not everyone carries the books these distributors have. There isn’t any standard resale discount, or even any standards about formats or whether or not drm is employed — although the major distributors assume drm and the smaller, independent stores usually do not. Prices seem much higher than you might think. There is no standard way to find books that are available, and many retailers don’t require the ISBN or any standard for identifying works — making it theoretically difficult to know if the book sold on site X is the same as the book sold on site Y. In addition, it looks like each of the smaller retailers is preparing its own descriptions and sales information for each title, instead of getting that information from the publisher or a distributor — so perhaps the publisher doesn’t have a way of getting the information to the retailer. Significantly, I was surprised to find that some device manufacturers offer no help whatsoever in finding ebooks that can be read on their machines. Other sites offer exclusively public domain materials — google books and project gutenberg materials. So, the market as a whole feels chaotic and unstable. These are all issues already worked out for print books. Its these problems that may, I think, take decades to work out.

[Interestingly, many of these same issues plague the LDS market for print books too -- they are part of how the LDS market is undeveloped in comparison to the U.S. national market.]

Yes, some publishers are and will make a lot of money in the mean time. BUT, all of the above has a cost — and that cost is generally lower sales and less penetration of ebooks in the market.

Part of the assumption that everyone makes is that ebooks will take off any day now and overnight become a significant part of the lives of most Americans, just like the DVD has and like the VCR did before that. But the DVD and VCR had sales channels built already for them. Ebooks, because they need an electronic delivery mechanism that hasn’t existed before, don’t have the sales channels they need. And these channels don’t develop overnight.

The major brilliant innovation of the Kindle is its distribution system. Amazon got that part of its ebook reader right. But its a proprietary system that gives Amazon all the control, and probably too much of the margin. Give me distribution like that in all ebook readers and all ebooks, regardless of format, publisher, distributor or existence of drm, and I’ll be a believer that ebooks will overcome print books any day.