Month: June 2011

Amazon

Is Amazon the Wal-Mart of Books?

Here’s another excerpt from the interesting article I read recently in the Nov/Dec 2010 issue of Boston Review titled “Books After Amazon: Publishing’s Race to the Bottom” by Onnesha Roychoudhuri — which is available to read in its entirety by clicking here. 

Many in the publishing community mock Amazon as the “Wal-Mart of books,” but it’s important to remember that Wal-Mart is also the Wal-Mart of books. Last year, Target, Amazon, and Wal-Mart fought a price war over a handful of new hardcover bestsellers. Books with $25 and $35 retail prices were being offered for nine dollars or less.

In response to the price war, the ABA wrote a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ), requesting that it investigate possible “illegal predatory pricing.” David Gernert, a literary agent who represents the novelist John Grisham and was quoted in the ABA letter, told The New York Times: “If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over. If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s Ford County, for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25?” People who tend to read Grisham and King aren’t necessarily reaching for a brilliant first novel, but Gernert’s point still has some force: devaluing the books produced by an industry already squeezed to the brink is not likely to benefit the reader in the end.

Amazon

Does Amazon sell books like cans of soup?

I read a fascinating article in the Nov/Dec issue of Boston Review recently. The article is titled “Books After Amazon: Publishing’s Race to the Bottom” by Onnesha Roychoudhuri.  It was a well-written and astute view of the world’s largest book retailer.  I strongly encourage you to read the article in its entirety by clicking here, but just to whet your appetite for what’s in store for you if you do, here’s a small excerpt:

Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and of Small Press Distribution, suggests that the difference between Amazon and brick-and-mortar bookstores is most evident in how they market books: “I think even people at Amazon would say that it’s essentially a widget seller that happens to have begun by focusing on books. Many people, like me, will say you can’t sell a book the same way you sell a can of soup.”

At the heart of the soup-can analogy are the algorithms that Amazon uses to “recommend” books to customers. Most customers aren’t aware that the personalized book recommendations they receive are a result of paid promotions, not just purchase-derived data. This is frustrating for publishers who want their books to be judged on their merits. “I think their twisted algorithms that point you toward bestsellers instead of books that you might actually like [are] a shame,” Gavin Grant, cofounder of Small Beer Press, laments.

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Apple customer service

So finally we got the Apple Developer Certification done. You’d think it would be easy street from here, but no. You see, I had already created an “Outskirts Press” relationship with Apple for the purposes of distributing ebooks through the iBookstore for the iPad and iPhone (more on those developments soon).  But, therefore, my iTunes Connect account wasn’t “capable” of managing applications, nor was it set-up to do so. It could only manage e-books.  There didn’t appear to be a way I could “combine” the two objectives into one account.

So I called the Apple Customer Service number and spoke with a nice person named Holly. She ultimately ended the call with “I need to consult with one of my colleagues about this. May I call you back in 15 minutes?”  Sure… and I hung up.

The next day I received a call from Nicholas at Apple Customer Service (or I guess they call it Apple Provisioning Portal Service, or something equally odd), and he first apologized for not calling back the day before. That was a nice touch.   He then began speaking softly and quickly, presumably on the topic I needed assistance with. But I interjected with a polite, “I can’t quite hear you or understand you, can you speak louder and slower?” 

He apologized and said, “I have an out-of-date boom mic.”

I playfully replied, “An out-of-date mic? At Apple?!”

Our cordial conversation continued with a long monologue on his part about the current issue we were facing with my account. About 3 minutes into it, I’m afraid I interjected again and said, “Nicholas, those words all sound like English, but I’m afraid I didn’t understand most of it.”

Long story, short — we set up two accounts. One under Outskirts Press, Inc. for our ebooks. And one under plain ol’ “Outskirts Press” for our applications (which, ironically, if you’ll remember the start of this whole fiasco, was the name of our App account I wanted anyway).

So why all the fuss just to get Apple Developer Certification? Next time I’ll show a sneak peek of our free Outskirts Press app which (hopefully) will be available soon, pending some successful testing. You have to complete all these steps I’ve just outlined in order to test your own applications, even if you only want to perform ad-hoc testing on a local iPhone or iPad device.  I may or may not get into the nitty-gritty of doing THAT in the near future; it’s a  pain in the rear-end, too, and I’ve been blogging about Apple for quite a while. It may be time to move onto other OP CEO stuff…

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Approving your certificate through Apple’s Provisioning Portal

Once you have created and uploaded your CSR (which I covered in previous posts), your Provisioning Portal page will show a “Pending Issuance” status.  Wait five minutes or so and when you hit “refresh” on your browser your screen should update with an expiration date of a year from the day, a status of “Issued” and two actions you can take:

  • Download
  • Revoke

This file is a “cer” file type.  Choose download to save the distribution “cer” file to your computer.  Ta-da, you have a distribution certificate. 

Here’s perhaps the most important part of this entire series, especially if you are running into problem completing ANY of these steps:

If you’ve run into any problems during the course of completing these steps, one of the potentially easiest solutions is to use the Safari browser instead of Internet Explorer (not that Jobs would purposefully prevent his site from working on Gates’ browser or anything… naaa).

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Hardware Upgrade Complete

Over the past week Outskirts Press has been involved in a major hardware upgrade for both our file servers and our website servers. I wish I could say that process went off without a hitch, but as anyone who has been involved in a hardware and data migration of this magnitude would tell you, the likelihood of it going off without any complications are pretty slim.

Since the new servers were in a different physical location, we had to physically move the data, which required a time intensive process of actually copying it from the “old” server to a temporary migration drive, confirming the successful copying of the data, uploading it to the “new” server and then reconfirming the successful uploading of the data again.  It was a 4-step process that literally took days, considering the amount of data that we were moving.  And here’s where we ran into a hiccup.  The data did not successfully upload to the new server the first time we attempted the data migration. 

The security and maintenance of our author’s data was the most important component to us, which is why we engaged in several different double-checks throughout the process.  And when one of those checks failed, we opted to be “safe rather than sorry” to ensure all our author data was maintained properly, and exactly right. As a result, we lost 4 days in this migration and needed to begin anew with a different temporary drive.

Our authors have been extremely patient with us through this week-long hardware upgrade.  Our website, by contrast, was only down for a very brief period of time early Sunday morning.  As a result, it was probably difficult to tell that such a massive technical undertaking was taking place at all. 

The good news is that all servers and back-up redundant drives are now running optimally, and much, much faster than their predecessors. 

Overall, this hardware upgrade will result in a better experience for our authors in the long run. Their experience on our website will be even better and their production timeframes should be even faster.    It’s never “fun” having to confront a hardware upgrade, but among all the problems any business faces on a daily basis, the one that is caused by being successful is among the “better” problems to have.  I thank all our authors and all our production personnel for that.

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How to create a certificate signing request on a PC for Windows

Okay, we’re going on two months of posting about our process of becoming a certified Apple developer so we can provide author “apps” for our published authors at Outskirts Press.

Last time I posted about how to create a certificate signing request on a Mac. And actually, if you have access to a Mac, that’s the easiest way to do it. But, if like 90% of us, you own a PC instead, here’s what you do (it’s a royal pain, but hey, complain to Apple).

1. Go to http://www.openssl.org/related/binaries.html
2. Install Open SSL
3. It’s possible you will also need to install Redistributable files for Visual C++ 2008 if your computer doesn’t already have it installed.
4. Open a command session in Windows by going to the Start menu and typing CMD in the Search box and then choosing the CMD program.
5. Type the following into the command line: openssl genrsa -out mykey.key 2048
6. Save the private key file that is generated.
7. Type the following command into the command line, replacing the BOLD variables with your specific information:

openssl req -new -key mykey.key -out CertificateSigningRequest.certSigningRequest  -subj “/emailAddress=yourEmailAddress@domain.com, CN=Certificate_Name, C=Country(US for United States)”

8. You should receive your CSR file via email attachment. Save it to your computer. Then upload it to your Provisioning Platform at http://developer.apple.com/ios/manage/certificates/team/createDistribute.action

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Uploading your CSR File to the Apple Provisioning Portal

Okay, I apologize to Apple, but since this blog series is helping them, I’m sure they won’t mind if I just cut and paste this page of their website about how to create a CSR file to upload to the provisioning portal. It’s easier than trying to summarize it, especially since I don’t really understand what I’m summarizing.  Oh, and of course, like everybody and everything at Apple, these instructions assume you have a Mac.  As if this thing called the “PC” had never been invented (and didn’t dominate the market).  I’ll cover how to do it on your PC tomorrow…

How to create a Distribution certificate:

  1. Generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) with a public key
    • In your Applications folder, open the Utilities folder and launch Keychain Access.
    • Choose Keychain Access > Certificate Assistant > Request a Certificate from a Certificate Authority.
    • In the Certificate Information window, enter or select the following information:
      • In the User Email Address field, enter your email address
      • In the Common Name field, enter your name
      • In the Request is group, select the Saved to disk option
      • Click Continue
    • The Certificate Assistant saves a Certificate Signing Request (CSR) file to your Desktop.
    • The public/private key pair will be generated when you create the Certificate Signing Request (CSR) if you use the Key Chain Assistant to create the CSR.
  2. Submit the CSR through the Provisioning Portal to the Admin for approval.
    • Click the Distribution tab
    • Upload the certificate by choosing the file
    • Click Submit
  3. You will be notified by email when your CSR has been approved or rejected.

Once you submit your CSR you receive a Status of “Pending Issuance” on your “Current Distribution Certificate” screen in your Provisioning Portal.  Looks like it’s time to wait on Apple again…

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Part 3 of Getting your Apple Developer Certification

Once you have logged in to http://developer.apple.com/iphone and clicked on the iOS Provisioning Portal link you will be on the “Welcome to the iOS Provisioning Portal” screen, which features a menu of choices along the left-hand side, and these choices are:

  • Certificates
  • Devices
  • Apple IDs
  • Provisioning
  • Distribution

Click on Certificates and then on Distribution on the tab menu because first we need to set up a Distribution Certificate.   In all likelihood you probably don’t have a CSR certification file, and that’s okay because the instructions at the following link tell you how to create one: http://developer.apple.com/ios/manage/certificates/team/createDistribute.action

Then you will submit the CSR through the Provisioning portal… and more on that next time.