Meeting Minutes

As recorded by our secretary, here are the minutes from our most recent meeting on
February 11, 2012. You can read these minues below or download them as a PDF.

Agenda: 1. Self-introductions and Announcements
2. Featured speaker: Sandra Williams

Present (27): Elva Anson, Everett Anson, Azevedo, Bowen, Edsberg, Edwards, Greene, Kevin Hoirup, Laurie Hoirup, Holmdahl, Allison Johnson, Pamela Johnson, Kando, Lenson, Mason, Mendezona, Ortega, Pryor, Ryan, Schlaepfer, Schoenborn, Silver, Teie, Thornton, Umbach, Westlund, Williams.

Barry Schoenborn opened the meeting. After the personal introductions, featured speaker Sandra Williams began her presentation on: E-books: The State of the Art. She passed out a very informative “e-book primer.”

Sandra runs a business writing, editing and designing books, e-books and websites. She began by discussing differences between printed books and e-books. There are three sorts of machines to download/read e-books: pads, computers and smart phones. It is possible to customize the text you download (e.g. justify margins, etc.) by using certain applications.

There is such a thing as Digital Rights Management (DRM). For astronomical sums such as $20,000, you can try to protect yourself against piracy. But this is hardly worth it.

The US E-book market: 63 million “devices” so far, and it recently doubled within one month. But half the people who own such things (Kindle, Nook), don’t buy books. E-books now make up maybe 25% of all books. The typical prices of E-books are 99 cents, or $3.99, or $7.99, or $10.00

Formats: Kindle for Amazon, and EPUB for everyone else. Also, Amazon now has KF8, which is nicer, with colors and all. Apple also has its recent format - iBook Author. This is more for textbooks. Another software is “Fixed Layout.” You must know HTML for this.

Amazon/Kindle is about 65-70% of the total market, Barnes and Noble/Nook is 20% and Apple is 10%. The quality of E-books depends on which e-reader you use, also which browser and website you use to download.

At this time, there was a discussion about pricing: Sandra said that it is reasonable to charge maybe 30% less for an E-book than for its paper version. The cost of producing an E-book is much less than a paper book. The single greatest difference is that E-books require no printing. On the other hand, E-books require cover, design, editing, formatting, ISBN and other costs just the same as paper books.

Metadata: this is the information about your book - the title, genre, the author, the category, a brief description, etc. This is the very important information through which people FIND you and your book. You submit these data on a form when you publish your book with Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Smashwords, or when you list with Bowker.

There followed a discussion of indexing. Ken Umbach told us that if you upload your entire book with Bowker when you list with them, they do your index and your metadata for you (?)

Next, there was a discussion of how to sell books from your own website. There is a way to accept credit card payments through your iPhone. Also, how to sell e-books while you are at a book fair or at a signing event. Linking your website to Amazon.

There is a distinction between mass market paperbacks and the higher-quality trade paperbacks.

The question was raised as to whether students increasingly buy e-books instead of paper textbooks.

In sum, a very informative presentation about a rapidly evolving field.

The meeting closed with some announcements.

Barry mentioned the March San Francisco Conference of the Independent Book Publishers Association.

Pamela Johnson reminded everyone of the April 29 NCPA Book Awards Banquet: 6:00 PM at the Lionsgate, McClellan Air Park, Sacramento. Cost of dinner $15,00, subsidized by the NCPA. We will all be notified and asked to select a dinner.

Ken Umbach informed us that Laurie Hoirup will have a signing event for her new autobiographical book I Can Dance, on March 24 at the Market Place in Rancho Cordova.