In this month's podcast, we're looking back at our biggest book-publishing-meets-technology conference ever. From March 21-23, 2018, hundreds of professionals from across the industry, from ebook developers to librarians, converged in Toronto for Tech Forum and ebookcraft to share, learn, and debate the future of the industry.
We've put together a highlight reel from some of our favourite talks (though they were all amazing), with insights on topics like metadata for ebooks, how retailers are bridging the digital divide, some great moments from our women in publishing panel, and lots more.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
Talks highlighted:
1:00 - Dave Cramer (Hachette), "Jiminy and Dave's Excellent CSS Adventure"
2:30 - Rose Donohoo (OverDrive), "Oh the Places Ebooks Go! An ebook's journey from creation to circulation"
3:30 - Noah Genner (BookNet Canada), "How We Read Digitally: ebookcraft 2018 research study"
4:25 - Monique Mongeon (BookNet Canada), "How We Read Digitally: ebookcraft 2018 research study"
5:12 - Ellen Ullman (Life in Code), "Ellen Ullman in Conversation"
7:38 - Scaachi Koul (Buzzfeed), "Women in Publishing Panel"
10:52 - Bhavna Chauhan (Penguin Random House Canada), "Women in Publishing Panel"
12:50 - Joshua Tallent (Firebrand Technologies), "Backlist Keywords"
14:30 - Jennifer Haines (The Dragon), "Retailers Bridging the Digital Divide"
15:08 - Serah-Marie McMahon (TYPE Books), "Retailers Bridging the Digital Divide"
15:49 - Noah Genner (BookNet Canada), "State of the Publishing Nation 2018"
16:22: - Jon Fleming (Audible), Reka Rubin (Harlequin), Nastaran Bisheban (Kobo), "Audio-First Publishing Panel"
18:35 - Jessamyn C. West (Randolph Technical Career Center), "Libraries Bridging the Digital Divide"
Watch the talks on BookNet Canada's YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/BookNetCanadaVideos
Join the Tech Forum & ebookcraft mailing list: eepurl.com/Z8aIL
Tech Forum is presented by BookNet Canada. ebookcraft is presented by BookNet Canada and eBOUND Canada.
You can subscribe to the podcast and listen on the go with iTunes, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Google Play Music, and Stitcher.
Transcript
Zalina: Welcome to the "BookNet Canada" podcast. I'm your host, Zalina Alvi. And this month we're looking back at our biggest book publishing meets technology conference ever. For three days in March, hundreds of professionals from across the industry, from ebook developers to librarians, converge in Toronto for Tech Forum and IBA Craft, to share, learn, and debate the future of the industry. We've put together a highlight reel from some of our favourite talks, but they were all amazing, with insights and topics like metadata for ebooks, how retailers are bridging the digital divide, some great moments from our women and publishing panel, and lots more. We'll post a list of all the speakers and talks that we've included in the episode notes, along with details on how you can watch the full videos on those talks very soon. But for the next little while, just sit back, or hold on to the pole of whatever bus you happen to be on right now, and join us on a whirlwind tour of books, data, and technology.
Dave Cramer: I might as well start at the beginning. In the beginning, the director created the canvas, and the canvas was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of the director moved upon the face of the screen, and the director said, "Let there be content," and there was content. And the director saw the content, that it was good. And the director divided the content from the style, and the director called the content the document tree, and the darkness, he called style. And the evening and the morning, were the first day. And Bert said, "Let there be a box tree in the midst of the canvas, and let it unite the document tree and the style." And Bert made a document and rendered the fragmentainers of the box tree onto the canvas. And it was so. And the director called the document valid. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And Bert said, "Let the maker of standards be gathered together unto one place and let the standard appear," and it was so. And Bert called the standard cascading style sheets. And the gathering, together with the makers, called he, the CSS working group. And the director saw that it was good. The director, of course, is Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Bert is Bert Bos, the co-inventor of CSS.
Rose Donohoo: EPUB, by far, our favourite format. I'm just echoing all of the conversation that's been going on. And EPUB is our favourite because of the compatibility across reading systems. All files that come through to overdrive have to pass the most recent version of EPUB checks. So, 4.02. And if not, we do just put those files on hold, or report it back to the publisher and wait until we can get a revised file. One question that we do get is, if you already have a title that's live and an ebook file in place, and you send through the file again and it fails the EPUB check for whatever reason. Maybe there's been an update to the check since you last send it through, do we pull your title from the sale? The answer is no. It'll stay there until you have a file that will pass EPUB check. And at that point, we do process it and we'll override the old file and libraries. We'll get that new file.
Noah Genner: Ebook sales have bounced back quite a bit this last year. So, we saw a bounce down. And you've probably heard a lot of that in the media. And you can see it there on the graph. But we've seen it bounce back. And every quarter last year was higher than the previous quarter and the year before. And when we look at the product mix that they're buying, it's a lot of self-published stuff. But the numbers are not down, as we hear in a lot of media. They're actually up. Just slightly up, but still up. And you've heard Maria talk a little bit about TPL, the Toronto Public Library. And we talk to Toronto Public Library a lot, and we know that their checkouts, is up, not just at Toronto Public Library, but most public libraries across Canada, or a lot of them, anyway. So who bought what? It stays pretty consistent. 84% of Canadians bought a print book, or book buyers bought a print book, around 22% bought an ebook, and around 4% bought a audiobook.
Monique Mongeon: So, looking at the data for the accessibility feature usage, this graph represents readers who did not report having a print disability in our study. And I was really surprised that 12% of those readers are using screen reader technology to access ebook content. While that is still the lowest usage of all the features we decided to study, with font size and night display coming out far ahead, around 40%, and others around 30. It's really important to remember, as I think has been discussed often over the course of the last few days, that people can be permanently, temporarily, or situationally print disabled based on different circumstances, and that the people who want to use these features, far outnumber just those people who are reporting print disabilities.
Ellen Ullman: When someone stands up and says "Facebook," you have to change the way you are. Don't wait around for that to happen. First of all, it takes them weeks to get up and say, "Oh, we'll try harder to be better." There is a kind of way in which the coding technology, the tools to create computer code and systems works, that has a sort of self-fulfilling aura about it. The whole system is imbued with a set of values already, that to write code, you need to sit there and be obsessive, you know, for days on end. That to be a good software engineer, as one who shall go unnamed, infamous, former Google software engineer said, "Well, these women can't be any good at it because they won't stand sleep under their desks at night."
Laura Brady: I love him.
Ellen Ullman: Yeah. So, you have to understand, this is the culture that goes on inside there. And bringing in people who do not come directly out of the computer science schools into this environment, is also a cause for attention. I know, particularly women, because they are the ones who've contacted me after the book came out, they say they go into meetings, and they ask questions. "Well, you know, what's the social effect of this? Who is our intended user? Who is it that we're ignoring? Who are we underserving? Who are we over-serving? Now, wouldn't it be good to us, for us to explore?" You know, there are new markets out there of underserved people, they can't just all be poor, desperate people, you know? There must be some advantage for us in this, as a company. Look, these are money-making, you know, we're not asking them to function without making money. And they aren't ridiculed. Their response is, you know, "That's not our job. Our job is to increase our user base. It has to be increased." As if it was some kind of exponential curve that could never break. Venture capitalists are on them. The market is on them. So, everything is invested in a certain... Invested, so to speak, in a certain direction to push technology where it is now.
Scaachi Koul: But the thing about women in publishing that I found both in the building and out, is that...what happens is that you bring those women in, you give them a chair, and then you say good luck, and you leave them to figure it out. So there's no movement in terms of figuring out how to promote those women. There's no movement in figuring out how to listen to them. There's no thought as to what kinds of books maybe they're tasked with editing or marketing or doing publicity for. You end up getting put in this really narrow box. The next issue is obviously, that you don't hire any women of colour. Look how white this room is. Don't look at me, look at each other. Look how white this room is. That's embarrassing. Like, this should feel embarrassing. I'm embarrassed. We should all be embarrassed by how white this room is. And the thing is, if you think about it, how many prominent editors of colour are there? There's one on the panel. So we got one. Good for you. But how many do you have who are black women who are prominent editors in the country? Can you think of any? And if you can think of one, that's also bad. How many are indigenous?
The indigenous question is important because we have built our work on the backs of indigenous writers. We love to say that. We love to say this is an important book. We love to say that this is the thing you're supposed to read about. We love to say this is our history. And we don't have any roots. We don't have any proof to say that, "Oh, we've supported those people." And then the other issue is when you bring women of colour in, especially women of colour, but people of colour, generally, what do you task them with? Do you listen to them when they talk? And do you bring them in because you feel like you need to check a box, or do you bring them in because you feel like, "You know, I've read this passage in this book, and it feels really problematic, so I need somebody to read it and tell me I'm not a racist"? If that's what you're doing, that's not enough.
And so it gets really easy, I think, in publishing more so than in other industries because publishing is very liberal. There's a lot of liberal white women in it. There's a lot of liberal men. But it gets easy to say, "I'm doing a good job. I talked to one black person today." It gets really easy to do that. But the thing is, is it's almost a pernicious threat because it's so liberal and because it's so comfortable and because it's really easy to say, "We're doing a good job," because we're publishing big ideas. And this is an 80% female industry. And Random House was very female. It was extremely female-dominated. It gets very easy to say, "I'm doing a good job." And that makes me crazy because then the other thing you can say is, "Well, we don't hire people of colour because they don't come through in the schools." But if you run the company, if any of you run any sort of department, or if you run any programme, you can put in place an internship programme that only brings in indigenous or black or brown writers. And you have money put aside, and that money is put towards making sure that they can live in a city like Toronto, which is unmanageable, otherwise, and you can do that sort of mentorship, and then you solve your own problem. And then people come to you and they say, "Oh, that publisher actually is going to give me financial care. They're gonna take care of me as an employee. And then when I'm bigger, and I'm better, I'm gonna come back, and I'm gonna work for them." This is how you have people stay faithful to companies, or to individuals, either way.
Bhavna Chauhan: The nature of training in this industry, you don't really learn how to edit. Most of us, I'm sure in this room, have taken editorial courses, and it's really ambiguous and abstract, and it's never how it actually plays out in real life when you're working on a manuscript. So, I think, you know, the mentorship part of it is so important because, you know, I could sit in classes, and I could, you know, watch from a distance what the editors around me are doing, but like Scaachi said, in a lot of ways, you know, you are left to your own, you know. And that, I think, has been incredibly challenging on a lot of levels, being... You know, I tried to do the count today, and I think we have a big editorial team at PRHC. I think there are only two of us that are of colour, that are editing. Myself and Anita Chong, who works at McClelland & Stewart. And, you know, that is incredibly isolating. But it's also isolating because then I also don't really... I had to learn myself how to help tell other women stories. So, I can have the mandate and the vision and the dream to, you know, publish more diverse voices, indigenous women of colour, all of that, but if I don't know how to do it, that's a problem. And, you know, I do certainly feel the imposter syndrome every day. Am I a good editor? Am I doing this correctly? Am I doing this voice justice? Am I giving this person the space they deserve? Because I don't know everything. But then you also feel that added pressure of supporting those new voices coming in. And how do you teach those young editors how to edit this way? So it really feels sometimes like this cycle that, you know, feeds this inequity, but also feeds this imposter syndrome. So, it's a challenge, I think.
Joshua Tallent: So doing a good job on keywords, though, is going to set you apart. It's gonna set your books apart from the competition and from the rest of the crowd. So I do recommend that you do that. Now, how many keywords should you have? We talked about the longtail keywords, about the queries that you want to match for. So, there's a pretty common bit of information going around. You've heard people talk about it before, that Amazon only takes about 500 to 600 characters from your keywords list. Now, there's not a technical limit on the number of keywords that you can send. But if Amazon only takes the first 500 or 600, then there's no reason to send more, right? But it's not completely accurate. Amazon assesses the in excess of 1,000 characters based on all of the studies that we've done. The misconception that a lot of people have is that each individual keyword is processed by Amazon and then applied to the book. But that's not actually the case. Each keyword is assessed, but it may or may not be applied. So if you look at a list of 600 characters, then you see that keyword in position 501 isn't actually being applied, you might think that everything after 501 is not being applied either. But in all of our research, looking at thousands of books across Amazon and looking at keywords that were past the 1,000-character mark in that keyword list, there were often very unique keywords that were matching for books because they were in that list. So, don't take into consideration the idea of just the first 500 or 600 characters. My recommendation is, as much as possible, do 1,000 plus characters in your keywords list.
Jennifer Haines: It's about creating identity, too. Like, when we bring in creators for signings, we are very specific about which creators we bring in. So, for example, we had a signing for the graphic novel, "Bingo Love" recently, and so that was really important for us to showcase... We try to showcase continually how much we support diverse material and how we wanna prop that up. Like, I'm not really that interested in having a signing for the next superhero book because those things kinda sell themselves. They have their own market, their own demographic. I wanna reach the other people who feel like there isn't material for them. I wanna let them know that there is stuff that they can find. There's amazing things for them to read and enjoy. And I wanna show them how welcome they can be in my store.
Serah-Marie McMahon: Well, I think we're all happy that the book is selling. I'm certainly not suggesting tackling customers with phones, you know, as obnoxious as they are sometimes. Just trying to flash off, like, please. But no, I think, for the most part, we're just happy that people are getting the books in their hands. It's a matter of having the publishers acknowledge that that role that we play, and having them acknowledge it may be a little bit with their pocketbooks. And just not even necessarily to, like, hand us cash. Just make it easier for us to claim something that is theoretically supposed to be available to us, because I promise you, Heather is not leaving any co-op dollars on the table.
Noah Genner: Another interesting thing we saw last year is that backlist, very significantly, as a portion of sales. It moved to 60% of all sales, which was generated by backless last year, which was a 4% increase over the previous year. Now, there are some factors that contributed to that. It's partly because of two strong female authors, Rupi and Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood always has a good year, but had a great year last year because of TV and movies. But Rupi, some of Rupi's poetry books are a little older, too, so that really pulled the backless titles up quite a bit.
Audience member: I was just wondering, you mentioned earlier with the personal digital assistants and the voice technology behind them, as they get integrated into iPhones and android phones, and their reading technology over ebooks, how do you see that affecting the market of audiobooks?
Jon Fleming: Well, the success of audiobooks in, our mind, is gonna be dependent on the performance itself. It's not just about reading a script. We focus on working with the best actors out there. As matter of fact, we were the number one employer of actors in the tri-state area in New York. We are focused on working with folks who really understand the power of the spoken word and performance. So, we will take great pains to focus on making sure we have the right narrator. So it's...
Hazel Millar: Really important.
Jon Fleming: ...the recitation of the script. You know, reading the phone book, is not gonna sell.
Reka Rubin: When I started doing audio back in the '90s, we would do, like, a lot more famous people. And one of the things that I've really discovered, kinda, coming back to it, is that there are people who specialize. Like, this is what they do, and they are rockstars at it. And people will not just look for authors in terms of what they wanna listen to, but they will look at narrators. And you can certainly do that on Audible, where you can... People discover narrators that they will just follow to the earth, just the way that you wouldn't offer. So, that's something that we are focused onto, where we really do try to pick the right people. I, myself, am curious what's going to happen? I've certainly had these conversations with colleagues, who said that, you know, the speakers are gonna get to the point where they're going to get really good. I will say, I feel like they've said that about actors, too.
Nastaran Bisheban: And as a technologist, I can actually add to it that, it is inevitable. It is comic. I'm actually waiting to read and listen to the first book that it is AI-generated. I can't wait to hear that one as well. Does it replace human, the soothing voice of the human being? Probably not, but it will have its own kind of category and genre. Why not?
Jessamyn C. West: I have a sort of a running Google search for digital divide. And one of the things that I find is we get a lot of stories about, you know, indigenous kids who sit outside the library to be able to do their homework because they don't have internet where they live. And I like those stories because I think they highlight the problem, but I don't like those stories because I think they also offer a really easy solution, which is, like, "Oh, give the kid internet at home, and that kid's gonna be exactly the same as a kid who's had internet at home since the kid was born." And it's trickier than that. And I don't mean to be like, "So don't try," but I do mean like don't just offer sort of facile digital divide scenarios that also happen to be the ones that you can't help, basically. So it's, you know, structural limitations on connectivity, but also inclusion and access that we have to deal with.
Zalina Alvi: Thank you to all the speakers who presented at Tech Forum and IBA Craft 2018. If you'd like to see their presentations in full, subscribe to our YouTube channel or join the mailing list. The links are in the episode notes, so you can find out when those videos are up. Thanks as well to everyone who attended, worked at, or supported the conference in any way. We couldn't do it without you, or without the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
