'eBooks are Coming' - a response

As I returned from my annual break where nothing was digital or remotely ebook to find some interesting news and some usual ‘August noise’.

The Bookseller wrote a feature article about the coming of the ebook. Did it say anything? Well unfortunately very little and it used a games industry practitioner as its catalyst. Yes, it went through the usual doom and gloom, the question of what will be the tipping point and gave the usual suspects their 15 minutes of free advertising. But did it say anything or did it merely raise the fear bar in the market one notch more?

I found the one paragraph about Continuum interesting. It alluded to the issues of where a publisher starts and where the greatest return is, as opposed to what has to be tackled in the longer term. Yes we know publishers aren’t ready, we know that there isn’t a reader today, we know that there isn’t an effective channel today and we know that the majority of publishers are at square one. But if you where a publisher what would you do and where would you start?

What Ken Rhodes raised is the need for a strategy that enables manoeuvrability and the ability to respond to demand. So who runs the strategy? Marketing will have a huge input as emarketing is closely aligned with all things digital. Sales will have an input as revenue return is always a driver. Production will have a say as it’s their domain, processes and relationships that are being turned upside down.

Editorial will have a say in that it is about content development as well as content delivery and merely changing things at the back door isn’t the long term solution. Finally, rights must have a say as that’s what publishing is and where the greatest challenges are both with authors and consumers.

In the ‘Brave New World’ report we wrote a chapter on the music industry. There were many lessons to be learnt. We all assume that the music industry was digital – after all we all had, or could create digital copies of music. The reality was that they weren’t. The inherent processes and contextual information was far from being digital. What they had was huge libraries of content that couldn’t be searched, accessed or sold digitally. Forget the digital content the digital context was missing and the channel was still in the dark ages thinking in terms of albums and singles. Napster, Kazzaa and iTunes all blew the market apart faster than anyone had thought possible and the industry today is still trying to reposition and recover. Why is this relevant to book publishing? Well we still think of content in books - sheets within a jacket. We still market and promote the same way with the same context, even to sending out a significant volume of review / inspection copies in physical format – like - throwing confetti to the wind. We still have not addressed many of the thorny rights issues – rights reversals, customised content.

The book industry is not one but many industries once joined by a common format - the book. As digitisation evolves these will diverse and move at different speed and in different directions. We are currently trying to predict a market in a vacuum – there is no or little digital content or context. We are not looking at the processes but more at the finished product.

What we need to look at is the end to end value chain, from author to reader and understands what needs to be done, where the quick wins are and how to support the existing business and channel.

The Cat's out of the Bag

Following on from our blog earlier this week there is now lots of fresh noise around rights reversals.

This classic quote from the Bookseller Bulitten of yesterday ‘S&S Uk could follow parent’s rights grab’ ‘UK publishers, meanwhile, are calling for the whole concept of rights reversion to be heavily revised or even scrapped. "Why should it be that way? If you buy a house and you don't go to it, you don't stop owning the house," said one publishing c.e.o.. "It seems to be based on a weird notion of punishment, where you're punished for not trying hard enough." ‘

Its understandable that the publisher wished to remain unknown, with a arrogant quote like that I would too.

Authors create the wealth and content, others merely add value to its development, marketing and distribution to the consumer, who pays and are the only ones who put money in. Authors will use publishers to get exposure and maximise their revenues and opportunities but once a book is past its attention span they should be able to reclaim their rig, is wrong. It does not maximise the opportunities for the two people that actually count – the author and the consumer. The author gets lost in history and although they may be found via a search engine their creation is out of their control. The book may have been a huge success in its day but the publisher has no intent to promote it again to a new audience. The consumer also can’t enjoy it as they will never find it. The marketing theory that new is good and deserves money and attention and old isn’t is strange at a time when the classics are been rejacketed and produced by everyone standing.

The real threat is that the technology is providing the opportunity for authors to do more themselves. They can promote themselves and sell they content direct through pod models. Maybe the publishers are merely trying to get the cat back in their bag?

We already have the Ophan works Act in the US, or to the cynic, the licence to hoover or google old works or scan first ask later. We all know how hard it can be to establish copyright ownership after time once works go out of print. Given all this, why can't a sensible and fair solution be found and the rectric become positive and less adverseral.