Five Digital Changes To Respond To

Battle lines are being drawn in the digital book arena and these are changing both in terms of goals and measures of success. The changes taking place may appear relatively small and tactical today, but their impact could be significant over time. How long they will take to deliver change is questionable, but that they will, is inevitable.

Although there is much noise in the market and many are merely shouting about what they are doing and it’s often hard to determine noise from substance and authority. It is also has to be recognised that different sectors have different issues and drivers and nowhere are there any silver bullets.

We would suggest that are five shifts taking place with the Trade environment. These are all at different stages of evolution and moving at different speeds, but will spawn more change.

Interestingly, as the overall digital market will be shaped by all of them, it may not be wise to simply cherry pick the ones you think apply to you and ignore the others.

Subscription

We are now starting to see the emergence of serious players and offers. Interesting, they have all pitched the consumer reading demand at the high end and made ‘one price fits all’ offer. 

Subscription offers need to be geared to individual needs and yet encourage members to read more. Just having the biggest library to choose from and expecting readers to consume 3 books a month is not the answer and niche genre offers are essential as well as recognising variable reading demand patterns which will keep members hooked. Today the churn rate is unknown and we suspect it will be quite high in the initial period and therefore these services need to develop secondary community draws to compliment and add subscription value and not merely appear as one trick pony’s. We would expect them to follow other media subscription services and align themselves to larger and complimentary subscription lists and this is essential as long term as subscription offers continue to consolidate their customer facing propositions.  

Ownership

The old and somewhat irrelevant buy to own model that prevailed in the physical market is fast becoming exposed. Although we have yet to see the ebook used market happen, with only the Dutch service Tom Kabinet is challenging the courts, it is inevitable in a highly restricted market.

However as used books, DRM, watermarking and on demand streaming services all overlap, maybe the emergence of on demand means that we no longer have to test the first sale doctrine and the used ebook market never happens. But unless on demand occurs, the used sale market potential for ebook is bound to be tested and found wanting and it is inevitable that the courts will eventually fall on the side of the consumer.

One of the challenges is about proving ownership, which with DRM should be easy, but with the current DRM walled gardens is almost impossible. Again with watermarking it should be also possible, but without a registry and standards conformity, is again almost impossible. With no DRM, no watermarking and no registry some would suggest that this is like closing the stable doors after the horse has bolted.

Self Publishing

We are firm believers in the democratisation of writing which is currently exploding in the digital market and will continue to grow for the foreseeable future.

Self publishing is no longer about the slushpile of aspiring writers all wanting to be the next EL James, but about the ability of anyone to bypass the intermediaries and express themselves and publish their works. It facilitates small publishing ventures as well as new and established writers. They may select to use outsourced services to polish and refine their work, or simply publish themselves.  

It challenges the ability of the intermediary to control what is being bought and read and can level the marketing playing field. The bestseller will still be a bestseller, but increasingly the backlist and midlist authors will now have to do more themselves to promote their works and in doing so find themselves head to head with others who have self published and earn a greater percentage of the revenue they have generated.

Can traditional publishers use the self publishing services to feed their lists, or have they now lost that opportunity? Maybe it’s down to the value they will offer the writers and that may have to be more than just a ‘safe home’ and a brand.

Author Care

As author earnings continue to be squeezed by net receipts, reduced advances and more competition, the publisher profits from digital have been seen to grow. Maybe the widening gap is down to bad PR and communication, but the writers are increasingly aware and continue to be the ones who create the initial value.

One area that is very visible to authors under the KDP and other self publishing services is their sales reporting and revenue payments. As the authors will demand greater transparency on earnings, speedier payments and an increased revenue share, there becomes less hiding place for publishers.

Publishers do add significant value, but now have to increasingly demonstrate this and one potential knock on effect will be a revision of digital rights to term based and separation of these from print. 

Content, Context and Community

In the main, the market continues, to merely pour the physical content into a digital container. 

Some would suggest that this is short slighted and ignores that it is just a transient step and some would even argue is the equivalent to performing self-harm. We don’t say that all ebooks must go down the multi media experience route, far from it, but that we should be thinking about the user experience and making the digital rendition complimentary and not just substitutional.

Digital also offers significant opportunities to grow author, genre, reading and writing communities. These may be devolved to others better suited or motivated to organise and curate. Digital also expands the ways in which works can be discovered, validated and valued which applies to both digital and physical renditions. It is no longer about describing books to place them on dry one dimensional shelves, but about enabling them to be found in many ways within a virtual environment. Standard bodies think library and bookshop shelving, but today’s buyers don’t.

Too many what we have said, is not relevant to their business today. They may wish to sit on the fence and wait for it to happen and expect that they can respond quickly. To others they see these changes happening, new opportunities and the ability to position themselves for tomorrow and not run the risk of being too late to the party. 

Books Without Price Points

Most retail products have price points. These are either know price points which the consumers expects; can of beans, pint of milk, loaf of bread, or are more industry accepted price points which the consumer doesn’t always know. When at B&Q we had some 50,000 plus SKUs (stocked units), we discovered only a couple of hundred had consumer know price points and it was only these you often had to focus on in a price war.

Book publishing has always enjoyed price point freedom, where the RRP (Recommended Retail Price) is often anybody’s guess and some would suggest as fictitious as some of the content. It is also one of the few consumer products to still carry the RRP on the product itself. When being discounted this is a great indicator of value to the consumer. Although it has often been a bone of contention to retailers who feel it can limit their options.

Buying a physical book is often a process of selecting a title and then flipping it over to discover the price expected. Many titles sit spine out and negate the use of POS shelf stickers so demanding that each individual title is either stickered or pre-printed and discounted. It can often be like a lottery with prices often all over the place and all sitting alongside each other. The obvious exceptions are when the book is in a discounted section, dump bin, end of gondola, or is discount stickered. Although some publishers and formats did come close to establishing price points, they often find themselves sitting next to others that undermined the action.

Remember when music had little price points and the impact that iTunes and others had and now we find pricing is being established by market forces and discounting and also is very low compared to only a few years ago.

Today we live in the price comparison world where anyone can find the cheapest offer at a click of a button and even via their smartphone. This has had a significant impact on many sectors where pricing was a challenge. Insurance, big ticket items, travel and many other sectors are now down to a beauty contest where the winner is often the cheapest, or the cheapest known source.

So how much would you pay for an A, or B format paperback, hardback biography, softback reference work, academic monograph, etc? Does the RRP price reflect the cost of production plus margin, what the publisher thinks people will pay or some vague recognition of a market price and price sensitivity?

As discount wars exploded, some would suggest that many publishers merely raised their RRP to compensate for the heavy discounts given and those with a price point policy often found their hands tied by a policy that the consumer didn’t recognise. We had rendition format pricing with those big paperbacks at airports aimed at adding an extra return for larger paper. We have the hardback versus paperback price which is now confused further by the digital edition. All contain the same content merely held within a different container, or container priced.

Can effective RRP price points be established , or is it now one way discount traffic and down to the retailers to establish their own price points? Remember when Amazon introduced the $9.99 ebook concept and the ensuing responses and agency debacle?

Amazon’s latest Matchbox offer may be a success, or it may fail, but the one thing it will do is drive down the price of ebooks even further and faster. The bundling concept doesn’t drive up the price of the physical merely devalues the secondary sale and although some will state this is good and new revenues, there is a cautionary saying – beware of what you wish for.

Amazon’s marketplace is the new book price comparison destination for many and their mix of physical and digital offer is one few can even start to compete with. They may not be the discovery channel but they will be the price comparison one.

The other interesting aspect of the price pointing of books is how publishers will position themselves against their channels as they explore direct to consumer sales.

Finally, the digital ebook market has already thrown up some interesting insights on price points. Which of the following price points will attract the most activity, the next highest activity, next highest level from; free, 0.99, 1.99, 2.99, 2.99 plus? The challenge is to then understand the logic behind the attractiveness of the offers and their potential logic.

The industry has taken too long to establish and work with price points and it’s the market that will start to establish them and maybe not just for digital product.      

How will shrinking shelf space impact publishing?

This week Barnes and Noble boldly stated that they envisaged a store reduction of around a third over the next decade. Some however might raise the question of whether they will be in the market at the end of that period. We also expect Waterstones in the UK to cut their cloth and shrink in the near future.

What would you predict for the sales of your next best seller that you will publish in say 12 to 18 months? What will be the initial print run and costs to get it to first base? How reactive can you be to ramp up or shut down? Will merely cutting back the list resolve the issue? If the likes of Barnes and Noble close a third of shelf space, can you be confident that the internet will take up that slack on your title, or will the internet find its own best sellers through the myriad of new ‘discovery’ facilities that spring up each month?

We read about shrinking bookshelf space on the High Street, library closure and the constant re-examination of both channels. The traditional physical market space is reducing, as are the sales from it. The internet has taken up much of the slack, but the vast majority of that has gone into one channel – Amazon. The ebook market has also converted and increasing number of pbook sales to ebook ones and again the vast majority of these have gone into one channel – Amazon.

The reality is that we have declining physical book sales in the traditional physical channels and the increasing dominance one player in the replacement channels and new ebook market. There are, as in any sweeping prognosis, many exceptions to the rule, with some industrious and innovative booksellers bucking the trends, but we have to balance these against the increasing market share of others such as supermarkets that carry a limited range.

However, the shelf space is shrinking.

It is hard to see these lost shelves being replaced by others and therefore the volume of print itself may have to shrink further. Some believe that a direct marketing  approach will replace the High Street and to a degree it is true, but unfortunately the biggest direct marketer today is Amazon. The one that knows more about your book buying habits, tastes, dislikes and your disposable income is only one click away. Many direct marketers merely only handle the marketing and throw the fulfilment over to – yes, Amazon.

So what is the potential impact of shrinking and highly consolidated trade market? Do we honestly think it is a case of substitution sales and that the underlying commercials and value chain will remain unscathed?

We have already seen the obvious, revaluation of books. Today we expect heavy discounting and have seen it move from a selective model to everyday low pricing and the control move to the consumer end. It will not move back up the value chain in the foreseeable future.

We have seen the emergence of the aggregator controlled marketplace which feeds off the need of many to associate with the main player in town. Amazon have been very clever in how they have developed this potential, created a lock in and have even enabled the players to fight amongst themselves to be cheapest in town and sometimes even cheaper than Amazon.

The average volume of sales needed to top the charts has dropped. The market has widened and deepened and despite the consolidation, or because of it, the internet aggregator now offers a greater range than those physical shelves could ever stock. This results in sales are now being shared against a wider range of titles – sales are spread wider and deeper.

The traditional marketplace is still dominated by the ‘sale or return’ model, which works well in a front list dominated market with a constant queue of ‘guaranteed’ best sellers every thirteen weeks. Being able to pay; to be at front of store, in the seasonal catalogue, at a gondola-end, were all the things we took for granted and fed the High Street and chain model. You spend your marketing dollar, get the visibility and be rewarded with sales. But does that same discovery model work in shrinking shelf environment?

What will the unpredictability of some titles mean to print runs, marketing budgets, inventory placement, sales and returns? Can we predict, or forecast the winners and does this change the ‘bets’ we may well place across the value chain. Like music, we may well see fewer but bigger hits but also see an overall a drop in the ‘also rans’ who simple don’t get that same exposure the old model afforded. Can you spread bet in a highly volatile market?

We have seen the erosion of the market differential between traditional and bargain markets, between full price and value pricing. The lack of price points, which appeared logical before, could now be viewed as having acted against the market and enabled the free fall off prices we have today. When consumers don’t know the price it’s relatively easy to maintain them, once consumers expect a 99p book, that becomes the norm and itself vulnerable. It’s like death by a thousand cuts or price cuts. This has now even dangerously knocked on the door of the one market that it should have not impacted – digital.

The challenge is that the physical channel does not have the deep pockets to survive and operate at such low margins and so it shrinks further.

How do you manage the inventory disposal of that failure when you have taken out the bargain value statement?

What happens when consolidation goes sub optimal and the cost of shipping inventory back and forward starts to creates it own friction? What happens when the likes of Amazon demand their own inventory print buy in, logistics costing and refuse to cross subsidise others? What happens when you see more erratic sales with some titles selling very well in limited and smaller locations? 

The Book Dating Agency

There are many lost and lonely manuscripts looking for a friend. Like finding a partner some are fortunate to have a good active social circle to help them, but increasingly many are now turning to the internet and the dating agencies. Imagine what Jane Austen would write about today’s ‘good man’ looking for a ‘good wife’ over the internet? So, if we are increasingly turning to dating agencies to find our partners why not a section ‘Books seeking a good reader’?

Serial Thriller seeks Readers:London, swinging 60s, the scene of music, murder and the macabre. The Rippers' groupies got more than they bargained for backstage. Will the bandever get out of the groove?

Last week we wrote about the gatekeepers within the industry that control the flow of works being published and how some appear to remain firmly fixed in the old world of print, ‘ The Suppression of Writing‘.

We are pleased that we are now starting to see others who are seeing new ways to match the mountain of manuscripts through new innovative ways in order to review, auction and promote them and ultimately help them find a partner.

Inkubate is one of these new online services that enables authors to upload full manuscripts, excerpts, out-of-print works for review and possible acquisition by agents or publishers. The model is free to authors while publishers and agents have pay a subscription fee for access material. Everything is fully tracked and audited searchable and filtered. Users can categorise material, receive alerts on new submissions, authors, genres. One could say it’s a super dating agency. This site is not about reviews but is firmly based at creating a trading marketplace which could lead to future wedlock.

Although the site is still in beta, it already has 350 authors on board, offering some 400 works for a date and some publishers and agents are reportedly eying up the candy. The full launch is still about a year away and the model is to be further enhanced by incentives to raise the profile of works and tier the access of publishers and agents.

PUBSLUSH Press is also encouraging authors to submit their book ideas and even creating competitions offering those chosen to win an iPad 2 and a chance to be published. To win writers simply submit the best ten pages and a summary of their manuscript at www.pubslush.com, through October 15th.

PUBSLUSH Press use a social network approach that aims to connect authors directly with readers. They have an unfortunate name for their registered users , calling them ‘Slushers’ . These so called Slushers, review and share their favourite works and when a certain level of clear interest is indentified against an individual submission, PUBSLUSH then takes over and provide a comprehensive publishing process; editing, design, marketing, distribution, etc. PUBSLUSH can also acts as an agent, allowing editors at major publishers to easily browse the top submissions and extend deals to authors.

The term ‘slushpile’ is a derogatory and a rather supercilious and ‘holier than thou’ way the industry describes the mountain of unsolicited manuscripts they often dismiss as not worthy or are incapable of digesting. However the internet and technology changes all and itself encourages all to express themselves and to create. As we have said before we are moving from listeners and readers to creators and we are no longer restricted to the physical work. The democratisation of writing is a given and not all will be well written, or even read, but connecting writing to reading should be the first goal and these new dating agencies and others, maybe will help free us from yesterday’s gatekeepers.

Apple To Take Back AppleWorld ?

Yesterday Apple, as it often does, threw what some though was a ticking bomb into the ebook world. The company has told applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store.

The problem with Apple is that it controls its app world with an iron fist and as already documented is capable of changing the rules as it sees fit and with no recall and then changing them back just as quickly as it did last years on its stance on developer tools.

But before we look at some of the responses we are always reminded of that now infamous Steve Jobs quote he made in 2008, on commenting on the Kindle where he said, "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... The whole concept is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore.”

We are all realising that the power is in the access and interoperability, not in closed worlds. Kindle is making its device successful despite the iPad, because consumers recognise that Amazon is a platform and that its device is independent and the Kindle device is a bonus but not a nessessity. Couple this with a ‘cloud’ approach and we start to see a significant game change where the likes of Amazon, Google and Kobo benefit and the likes of Sony and Apple don’t. The money is in the eyeballs and content not in the tin.

Ars Technica in their report quotes Apple spokesperson Trudy Muller,'We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.'

They continue to point out that ‘If an app lets users access content that they purchased via Amazon's website, for example, then that same app must also let users buy the same book via Apple's own in-app purchase system. If the app developer doesn't want to use Apple's in-app purchases to sell content, then the app can't access content purchased elsewhere either.’

‘This is notable because it will require Amazon and Barnes & Noble (as well as Sony, whose iOS app is not yet available) to change how their offerings work. Apple wants its 30 percent share of content sales whenever possible.’

How would the move effect Amazon.com? They offer free mobile apps specifically to give customers the ability to read their e-book purchases on all devices allowing an iPad owner to still to buy and read Kindle books bought from Amazon on their iPad. How would effect any exclusive Kindle Editions or where a publisher doesn’t have a contract with Apple for a title?

In his blog Terry Jones (no not friendly Python) wrote how Apple's actions reminded him of Microsoft with the browser and the OS. He posses the thought, ‘Imagine Apple claiming that such a separation is technically impossible and that the App Store is fundamental to the iPhone experience.'

To us we see Apple as having a habit of firing shots and thinking later and tend to do this most in the App Store and with developers. Apple is never going to be the ebookstore leader but they can’t afford just to be demoted to tin provider

So the big line up:
Google growing multi platform with Android and opportunity to bury stuff in firmware (information content hungry and advertising driven)
Amazon the ‘online WalMart’ who have a books vertical, brand and loyalty that is proven by current Kindle sales (despite the iPad) but must counter their Amazon only world by offering all platforms
Apple has great tin, innovation and music business, but no book understanding.
Abobe still trying to control the content and design of content with CS6 and ACS4
Sony – lost souls who stumble along
And the pretenders who are very reliant on the big boys to allow them to play or simply follow

India Has its Own eBook Reader

EC Media has launched "Wink", which they claim as "India's first e-book reader".

We have to recognise Indian is not only the powerhouse of digital publishing today and itself is starting to embrace its output. We may think of India as third world but in many ways it is now casting that aside and generating wealth which EC Media is trying to capture through the Wink which can be picked up from a local Croma, a major Indian electronics retail chain. They claim over 200,000 titles as well as newspapers, magazines and journals. The Wink is specially designed for the Indians as it can support content in more than 15 Indian languages and They claim that they will soon support all Indian languages on the Wink. Books will generally sell for 50 to 75% of the cost of a paperback.

The Wink XTS model will have a 6” eInk screen, 2GB memory and has an SD expansion card slot, a miniUSB port lie, has a QWERTY keyboard and supports MP3. The XTS model on display supports Wi-Fi and will cost some $230, while the X3G model supports Wi-Fi and 3G and will cost some $320.

The point is that both China, where most ebooks are made and India where the west does its digitisation, have the ability to do it themselves. Maybe we should look at the history other electronics and manufacturing industries, such as cars and where the power now lies. Books may not be different.

Jisui: Digital Book DIY

Who has not copied music and films for personal use? We can all remember taping radio music, cutting cassettes off vinyl, copying CDs and downloading files from the likes of Kazaa. We all tape TV or now simply watch it on demand. We have all updated our media libraries as we migrate to new technology. So what is different about taking a book and scanning it to create your own digital file?

"Jisui," ("cooking one's own meals"), is a new digital book community in Japan which is creating its own digital copies of books. The process is no different to what many publishers do with their back list titles and involves scanning pages of a book through a scanner. The technology has been around for years, so what has changed and why would you break a book to just create a digital copy?

In June, Internet research company Macromill Inc. surveyed 300 iPad owners in Japan and found that 20% had digitized their own books and a further 30% were interested in doing so. The reasons given by the respondents were that, digital versions of the books were not available and that it was easier to read the digital versions of books than paper books whose pages had faded. The numbers surveyed may appear small but we still have to ask what has changed and why do these people feel the urge to perform digital DIY?

First they now have an ereader they like in the iPad and we must remember that the survey was focused on iPad owners. Secondly if there is a dearth of digital content people will always create it themselves. Thirdly the scanning technology has improved and has become cheaper. Forth creating an image file such as PDF from a scan is simple.

The combination of these factors has resulted in an increase in sales of related products. PFU, which is part of the Fujitsu Group, said its June sales of duplex scanners were double that of May. It is claimed that Amazon also saw orders of scanners and paper cutters double from April to June. The interest has even resulted in major electronics retailer Yodobashi Camera setting up an in-store demonstration area to show customers how to digitise books. Another company Jissen, even offers a service to cut books into loose pages for 110 yen per copy and claim to now cut between 1,000 and 1,500 books a day.

Digitization of books by the purchaser for "personal use" is permitted under Japanese copyright law as long as the individual does the reproduction themselves.

Some would suggest that copyright law is out of step with current times. Others that the practise is OK but only if it is ‘for personal use’ The professional pirate has had the capability to do this for years and can even convert captured text into any format and re typeset it for print. Until now digitisation was presumed too expensive for individuals and they didn’t have devices that made digitisation worth the effort. It is not the professional pirate that is the new threat but the individual.

"Jisui" may be confined in the main to Japan today, but it easy to see communities created to follow its example and the obvious outcome will be the sharing of files.

Fighting file sharing on a service is one thing but is often struggling under the reactive take down notices and first finding the content. Fighting copying and sharing content at the local community and friend level is completely different. As the publishing world locks up its digital files behind DRM encryption it be could merely encouraging the individual to bypass that source and go the original book and scan it. After all that is what happening with music until sense prevailed and MP3 was widely accepted.

We may think this is small and insignificant and that we should to focus on locking up the digital files whilst we also continue to fight low prices and make it expensive in the mind of the consumer. We perhaps need to be careful what we wish for and instead consider making ebooks really cheap, available and DRM free. Soft DRM, digital watermarking, makes far more sense than the current clunky hard DRM. But we appear to be hell bent on encouraging consumers to consider a DIY future.

A group of students only need a scanner and one textbook.

source http://mainichi.jp/universalon/clipping/news/20100820dde001040002000c.html

Sky News Reports On eBooks In UK

A Sky News piece piece with ourselves in camera

Another Day and Now a Samsung eReader

Samsung will launch a touchscreen e-book reader called Papyrus in Korea in June and potentially later in the U.K. and U.S.

The A5-sized e-ink device (5.8 x 8.3 inches), has an aluminum stylus and is rumoured to have only 512MB of memory with no memory-card slot, no Wi-Fi and no cellular WAN access. So little room for the library of e-books, PDFs or documents, and MP3 files and more importantly these rumors either don’t stack up or we are looking at a lame duck .The other rumour is the price, at under $300 it can compete but without the features again its relatively useless tin.




It is being touted as not just to be an e-reader, but a “notetaker, world clock, diary, memo taker, calculator, and contacts” but alas the rumours say a lot less than more.




So the electronic companies from the Far East look to be wakening up and could drive down the price but its down to content and channels so it will be interesting to see who bits and what the final release looks like.

Flipping the Pages Onto a Screen

As digital content starts to evolve, we still have a couple of issues to address – price and value add. We have long argued that for consumers to switch onto ebooks there must be value, merely replicating the physical copy and presenting it digitally offers little. The experience may be different and offer some value, but the content is the same. This is a shame as the format offers so much extra that is currently largely being ignored.

We can add all sorts of marketing materials and extras, such as author interviews, original submissions, character biographies, historical notes etc. Penguin have stated to experiment with such in their renditions of the classics to digital. However, whereas the classics are relatively easy to collate public domain materials on, current works may prove a bit more taxing. First of all, who owns the intellectual property and is it tied to the specific rendition or the work? How do you clear author’s moral rights and if done does that gives them any rights of association going forward? Who gets paid what re royalties, or is the additional materials fee based? Can the additional materials be used in its own right and if associated with several works, can it be the leader and not the follower?
Some may say that we are talking about things that are already fully covered, but are they and do authors fully understand this aspect of the total work? Its interesting, following the highly published JK Rowling case, to perhaps stand back and think about this contextual work in a digital world.

The question of price will roll on forever, that's until, as in music, someone creates that price point and case that flips the market. Pricing ebooks equivalent to physical copies, is as ludicrous as applying VAT to digital copies of the same work. Its interesting that the reported consumer reaction to price in the press appears to indicate that the consumer is unaware the price is a VAT inclusive price.

Is anybody asking the consumer what they want? Do we have a collective view of the needs of the market, the potential barriers, or are we all assuming we know best.

Kate Pullinger - Multi Media Author

From author Kate Pullinger's impressive and different author web site please visit her digital section and enjoy something different! www.katepullinger.com

So how do we Identify a Chunk?

The trick to any machine to machine communication is identification of the product and clarity as to what to do. The ISBN was a great identifier and has served the industry well and no fits even more comfortably within the EAN structure. The adoption of the ONIX/XML message again was a significant step forward and has positioned the industry well in it e communication.

We read today of the edict that the industry should provide a separate ISBN for each digital rendition of a title. This makes logic sense as is what has to happen. After all who would dream of giving the paperback, hardback, large-print copies of the same title the same ISBN? The long overdue ISTC number, which is to identify and effectively group all impressions of the same title, also makes good sense. It’s just a pity it has taken so long to come through the process to the market.

The challenge however lies with the fragments or what is commonly referred to as chunks. The DOI is a great mechanism for referential linking and provides persistent resolution but is it the right means of identifying chunks? We think it may be a sledgehammer to crack a nut and its structure is not one that would be easy for the trade to adopt for this purpose. It works well in an online world of search and discovery but the trade environment it will be significantly different from the academic or educational ones. The question is about what we need to identify chunks for and what we want to do with them once identified. Even if we want to sell chunks do we have the pricing structure or the permission rights processes to do it and track the money through to royalty. Today the easiest solution to fragments is to issue them ISBNs and to link them to the title via a combination or an ISTC.

This issue will grow as content starts to fragment and break from the jacket which once held it so neatly and is a challenge to us all.