Digitisation - It's Not About 'Books'

Today we stand at many believe is the digital evolution of literature, moving from paper to bytes. Many others believe that much will remain the same, after all we, ‘all love, grew up with and where educated by books’. We now ask if the evolution is about books or about the content itself.

In the mid nineties only the few would have envisaged the impact the Internet was going to have on all our lives. Then it was no more than a dirt track and many doubted it could raise its game, but it did and the only limiting factor on its path was not technology, but culture and our ability to adopt, adapt and utilise it on mass.

We have assumed digital is the same as physical and have created programmes and devices to migrate one form to the other. We now have to ask if that’s wise?

We were once invited, along with a mismatch of what appeared no more than teenagers, to a conference held by a global broadcaster. They asked us what they need to do differently and they listened intently to the answers they were given. The biggest change is that the global broadcaster now sees themselves as a rights, manager and owner not a broadcaster. Other media companies are now starting to change their views as change continues and divisions blur and are redefined.

Now we would ask the average book publisher what they see themselves as? We would guess that 'rights manager and owner' wouldn’t be on the tip of most tongues. Some would say that publishing isn’t about books it’s simply about content and rights and understanding the market and channel to it. If we were to look at the trade as a rights trade what would that mean moving forward?

Why do we presume that the physical content will merely morph into the digital. History has surely taught us that media survives but has to adapt to new forms. Fiction is not about books of 75,000 words or 250 pages, its more about telling a good story that captivates, engages and stimulates readers. Why does this have to be any specific length?

The challenge we may now face is to create short stories that are suited to new media. Some may opt to serialise something that was never written to be serialised and in doing so merely create a half way house which is neither one or the other. However, to support short stories may mean that we have to accept that old skills that were honed to the book may not always adapt.

A Kindleless Christmas?

The rumours about a new Kindle reader have been circulating and fuelled the ‘Septemberfeast’ vision of pre Frankfurt rivalry between Sony, Amazon and mobiles for the expected ebook explosion. The New York Times today carried a quote from Craig Berman, Amazon’s chief spokesman, “There’s a lot of rumour and speculation about the Kindle. One thing I can tell you for sure is that there will be no new version of the Kindle this year. A new version is possible sometime next year at the earliest.”

So it’s official and it can be struck off the Christmas wish lists. As an aside two different instances of Kindles locking have been recalled to us over this week. On referral to Amazon they immediately shipped out replacements. So do they have technical issues even with the current model? Maybe two incidents is so small and coincidental to be meaningless but it does raise a quality and resilience eyebrow.

Does the delay of the Kindle V2 mean that they will introduce the current version in the European market this year, or that everything is on hold until version 2?

The interesting questions to us are neither about the gadget, nor the rivals but what content will be available and why so little is available today. Amazon claim around 135K titles, Overdrive 150K titles and others vary widely in their claims. Some are US exclusive, others worldwide, but whatever number it is, is it enough to generate the consumer demand and why is there not more digital content? Many point to the music, film and other media industries and how digital has taken off. But in these industries the content was digital to start with and merely distributed and sold through physical formats. The book publishing industry are still clearly analogue and physical and unless this changes then what appeal will consumers have to invest in expensive gadgets that only can supply a small fraction of the books that are available in print?

The Smartphone and iTunes simply locked into vast musical catalogues of millions of tracks and enabled them to be downloaded, stored and played. It was a case of being at the right place at the right time. But do the ebookreaders have the same opportunity or is it a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time? It's not a case of focusing on the devices, but a case of focusing on the digital content, and its availability.