Saturday, July 21, 2007 3:00 AM PDT

It’s still not here yet.

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Amazon has promised — promised! — me that they will delivery my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this Saturday, July 21, 2007. But when? And can they come through?

Will it be early enough on Saturday that I’ll be able to finish it before the actual spoilers from people who have read the actual, physical book come spooling out of the ether? Or will it be right up against the 7:00pm deadline that Amazon has promised?

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Here is what happens when you give a blogger free wine. After confessing that I had wheedled and whined until I was the proud recipient of the last display copy of a new publication at a recent trade show (believe me, the wheedling wasn’t pretty; it was effective), I ventured another confession. “I really want to knit the kimono.”

“Me, too,” said the employee of the publisher. She’d expressed no horror at my underhanded tactics, assuring me that had she been there, she would have given me the magazine, too. She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “But did you see the size of the needles? They’re tiny! It would take forever.”

“Yeah.” What else could I say? Knitting a kimono would be a challenge, but, well, it would also be a challenge that would take the better part of a year. My current project is already moving into forever territory. I shrugged. “I’m knitting laptop covers for Christmas.”*

And off the conversation went. It turns out that nothing excites a vendor at a trade show like the prospect of knitting laptop covers and using cool, shiny, big buttons to close the snugly cover. The husband wandered over to another table, his attention focused on the Holy Grail of magazines. “It’s the pinball issue!”
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It’s no secret that people who write these types of online journal thingies pay attention to our traffic. And occasionally an old post that we figured was long dead and buried rises out of the morass and gets a lot of traffic. In the last month, a post I wrote back on February 3 called “Harry Potter and The Gynormous Spoiler” has become our third most-visited page.

Because the piece itself is pretty much a trifle — it’s essentially me whinging about how I’m sure to be spoiled on Harry’s fate prior to actually finishing the book, poor me! — I’m surprised that it got any traffic at all. But I think that it just reflects the public’s appetite for and anticipation of the ending of these books, an appetite that has suddenly ramped up, and is just about to explode.

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Every once in a while you hear publishers mutter something about not wanting to make the same mistakes the music industry made. While it’s an admirable goal, the problem is that it’s not clear that we all have the same view of what those mistakes actually were. As the music industry approaches the post-DRM era, it’s pretty clear that Digital Rights Management is one big mistake that book publishers would do themselves a favor by avoiding.

The very nature of DRM runs contrary to the freedoms that all book readers know and love. The freedom to read a book anywhere, the freedom to read a book without special requirements or equipment, the freedom to loan a book to a friend, or borrow a book from a friend or library. By inserting a layer of DRM between readers and books the experience of reading is fundamentally transformed in all of the wrong ways. Not only that, DRM protected books lose all of their essential viral qualities. Unrestricted books sell themselves — DRM protected books never get the chance to.

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It’s no secret that the publishing industry is facing the same challenges that all of the other content industries are facing. On the one hand, new technology offers publishers the chance to fundamentally re-invent their business models, on the other hand new media is syphoning off the attention of a growing number of would-be book readers. For the most part, book publishers have responded to these new challenges in the same way their peers in other content industries have responded — s-l-o-w-l-y.

As a group, book publishers clearly need help coming to terms with their own future. Fortunately for them, O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change for Publishing (TOC) conference has come along not a moment too soon. The event, hosted earlier this week in San Jose, was designed to be a gentle introduction to all manner of technology issues facing the publishing industry. For three days TOC was a place where publishers could face their biggest fear — acronyms — and learn more about POD, XML, RSS, and DRM.

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Considering this site has a decidedly technophile bent, it may strike some (well, not Kassia) as odd that I am so preternaturally focused on the oh-so-very-old-school world of books. Perhaps it’s because I have spent my entire adult life working in libraries (full disclosure: I am not a librarian, thank goodness).

So this week I attended my first rare book club meeting, where sad to say, the median age of the other attendees was “dead.” I think a few permanently left our golden orb somewhere between the departure of the salad and the arrival of the soup at the French restaurant near downtown Los Angeles where the thirty-five odd (and I mean “odd”) people gathered.

Not to get all ageist on my gentle readers, but this is a preface to saying that being thirtysomething, I look around and see my fellow Gen-Xers just don’t seem to be all that interested in collecting fascinating, if musty, tomes anymore. It used to be great sport back in the day to have succesfully collected, for instance, every volume of the sacred Zamorano 80 books on Californiana (no, that’s not a misspelling). You were lifted to the ranks of bibliophilic Valhalla, feted by your brethren-in-arms every bit as much as Audie Murphy in a New York ticket tape parade.

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It’s no secret that the newspaper business is in serious trouble. Circulations are plummeting and advertising revenue is in a free-fall. It’s widely agreed that the Internet is to blame, so you might think that newspapers would embrace new technology and work to establish strategic partnerships with companies that could help them deliver news in the manner that their readers prefer it. Instead many in the newspaper business seem to be waging an ongoing battle against all things new media. They’re responding in a way that media dinosaurs have traditionally responded to any new threat — with lawsuits and name calling.

A few weeks back I noted that would-be Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell doesn’t seem to understand the value of search engines. He’s not the only one. A number of European news services have been fighting Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft over links to European news websites. Apparently these publications prefer to limit their readership to the small number of individuals who might actually type the paper’s URL into their web browser. Since advertising revenue on the Internet is directly related to the number of visitors a website receives, suing Google probably isn’t the best business decision.

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Billionaire takeover artist Sam Zell has a problem. It has nothing to do with the financial structure of his proposed takeover of the Tribune Co., or the fact that he openly admits to knowing next to nothing about the newspaper business. No, Zell’s problem is that he seems to be fundamentally opposed to the one thing that could save newspapers like the LA Times.

Speaking to a group of Stanford Law School students last week, Zell asked rhetorically:

“If all the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content for nothing, what would Google do, and how profitable would Google be?”

While Zell claims he doesn’t know much about the newspaper business, he’s off to a good start in thinking like an old-school newspaper man.

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Buffy the Vampire Slayer has had many incarnations. Originally, it was a not-so-good movie starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. Despite the lack of success, creator Joss Whedon was given a chance to do it again, and because the network he was on was still in the “we’ll try anything” mode, turned it into an brilliant, iconic TV Series starring Sarah Michelle Gellar.

That show was funny, sad, witty and at times, even operatic. It was also one of the most influential series of the past decade. After spinning off Angel — perhaps the weirdest TV show ever — it also spun right into the realm of the comic book.

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