I’ll admit that I wasn’t very surprsied when I read Declining Sales Cast Gloom at an Expo on the New York Times website yesterday. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, cut off from all civilization and news, then it’s hard to ignore the news about how this deep recession we are in is hurting a lot of industries – publishing included.

This weekend BookExpo America, the book industry’s annual convention, is taking place in New York City. Also not surprising is that attendance at the convention is down as well.

Normally I’m not a numbers guy. I don’t like math and I failed remedial math in college (embarrassing, I know). But sometimes you have to let the numbers speak for themselves.

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Sometimes I lose all faith in the world of book publishing. And after I read the article Steal This Book from the New York Times, I just wanted to bang my head against my desk until I stop caring what publishers do. The article details Amazon’s $9.99 price point for a majority of ebooks and the consequences it might have on the publishing industry.

For one, publishers (and a few authors) fear that if us readers get too comfortable with lower prices for ebooks, it might be the end of literature as we know it. Well, not really, but that’s how they make it sound. And the sheer stubbornness that some publishers and authors view ebooks with is frustrating. But what gets me the most is that some in the book industry have not really learned a single lesson from the music industry, or even our county’s dying print newspapers. Here’s an example:

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The Kindle DX has officially "been out" for a few hours now (though not shipping until summer), which has been just enough time for me to think about it a little since writing this previous post. I’ll start off by saying that, despite all my criticism, I do like the Kindle and I even like Amazon. My beef with both is when it comes to DRM.

As for the Kindle DX, I think it is definitely taking a step in the right direction. Amazon is spot on to develop and release a device that can be very well suited to help college students lighten their loads, maybe help a struggling newspaper industry, and even give those with vision problems the ability to enjoy reading.

Let’s break it down one item at a time!

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I was working on a different blog post when the news caught my eye in my Google Reader account. I first came across this post from Teleread – Amazon.com has bought Lexcycle, the makers of the popular Stanza ebook reading app for iPhone/iPod Touch.

Then I had to see for myself and found this short article in the New York Times. Yep, the news is true. And continuing to browse through my Google Reader posts, I then read Teleread’s first post about the news. I share Paul’s sentiment – wow!

But I also share Paul’s worry as well:

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The glitch that caused Amazon’s website to pull many ‘adult oriented’ books (mostly gay & lesbian titles) from its sales rankings, causing the books to be harder to find, caused quite a controversy last week. I detailed it in this post Amazon ‘glitch’ stirs rumors of alleged censorship (April 14).

While the question of whether or not Amazon engaged in deliberate censorship because of homophobic tendencies is still up in the air, the fierce and harsh response to the incident on blogs and Twitter brings up other questions. Were people too quick to judge? Was there a ‘mob mentality’ in the online community?

These questions, and more, were brought up in this NYT article:

Although the way messages speed across social networks makes today’s digital world ripe for mob-fueled conspiracy theories, the controversy over Amazon was striking both for its ferocity and for the velocity with which it spread.

And at least one blogger, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, backtracked on his criticism of Amazon:

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"I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true," Mr. Shirky wrote, noting that "the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me."
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Some people view ebooks as just a fad, something that’s popular today but gone tomorrow. I think they’re wrong. There are signs everywhere that ebooks are the future of the way we consume all kinds of literature.

Thus I composed this short list of the top 5 signs that signal ebooks are definitely getting more "mainstream" every day. I didn’t rank these in order of importance because I think they are all important in different ways.

1. Release of the Kindle 2: Despite my criticism, I don’t hate Amazon and I don’t even hate the Kindle, I just hate the DRM they have in place that let’s users have access to content they buy, but not actually own it. But I have to give Amazon credit, they have really pushed ebooks into the public eye.

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In a move that signals the continuing growth of the self-publishing arena, the first-ever self-publishing book expo has been announced:

Publishing veterans Diane Mancher and Karen Mender are launching Self-Publishing Book Expo, an event that will focus on self-published books and the companies that produce them. SPBE will offer attending authors a place to exhibit and sell their books to the general public–and agents and publishers–as well as offering representatives from self-publishing companies to showcase their services. The event is slated for November.

You can read the the entire article from Publishers Weekly. And you can visit the book expo website here.

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The news about Amazon’s ‘glitch’ that has resulted in thousands of titles being removed from its ranking system has really spread around the internet like wildfire.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, thousands of titles, dealing mostly with gay and lesbian themes, were removed from Amazon’s ranking system. This basically means none of those titles will show up on bestseller lists, "Amazon Recommends" lists, and pretty much everything else. In other words, you won’t find those titles unless you specifically search for them.

Amazon says it’s nothing more than a glitch that they are working to fix. Many on the intertubes, however, are pretty sure it’s a conspiracy by Amazon to censor what we read.

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I freely admit that I like Amazon.com. I have ordered a lot of stuff from them (mostly books) over the years with minimal fuss and it’s always such a joy to see that Amazon package sitting on my front porch waiting for me when I get home.

I’m not saying Amazon is perfect, no large corporation is. But I can easily say I have been a satisfied customer and confident enough in the company to place their ads on this blog.

Ironically, the problem I have with Amazon is the one area of book publishing,distribution and consumption I’m interested in most – that is, ebooks. While I don’t doubt that the Kindle has thrown ebooks into the mainstream in a big way, I think Amazon is making some very fatal mistakes that can easily spell doom for Amazon and for ebooks.

Kindle DRM means you "access" books, don’t really "own" them

My biggest fear has come true. In this disturbing post yesterday over at Teleread, a Kindle customer, Michael, relates how he was banned from Amazon and blocked from the ebooks he legally purchased on the site.

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I’m pretty convinced that J.K. Rowling does not read this blog, because if she did, she would have read this earlier post about her problem with ebook piracy. Yet Rowling has still refused to release her popular Harry Potter books into ebook format, creating a ripe environment for unscrupulous pirates to post digital copies of her novels online.

Today I came across this article from the Times Online, which says that her novels, along with other popular books, have shown up on the popular site Scribd.

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