Amazon and B&N Continue to Redefine Their Roles

It is clear that the publishing marketplace is going through radical changes with new entrants, the rise of author power and existing players all scrambling for a place in this new world order.

Today ‘Pubit’ was announced by US Barnes & Noble. ‘Pubit’ provides independent publishers and self-publishing authors with the opportunity to distribute their digital titles through Barnes & Noble.com and the Barnes & Noble eBookstore. They claim to have yet another ‘simple and competitive’ royalty model and compensation process. The content will be in epub format and rendered with Adobe’s DRM protection and onto many computing, mobile and eBook reading devices.

So Barnes & Noble are going after the small publishers and self publishing market and follow the lead forged by the likes of Amazon. There is clear an opportunity to attract those many authors who feel disenfranchised by the traditional publishing and reward model. Resellers such as Amazon and B&N can offer higher rewards and access to an established channel.

Amazon also announced today a further step into the publishing territory with its new imprint AmazonCrossing. The imprint will offer English language translations of foreign language books. It’s a potentially smart move which offers clients both print and digital formats. The first title will be Tierno Monénembo's award-winning novel, "The King of Kahel," which was originally published in France in 2008 and was the winner of the French literary prize, the prix Renaudot. It will be released for the first time in English in November and begs the question why it was missed by others.

A global player, such as Amazon, is in a great position to pick out foreign winners, acquire the rights, translate the work and in doing so cut out the traditional publisher. They can promote it and offer it straight to market through multiple channels and to a very wide and diverse audience. Picking foreign winners is always difficult, but getting the readers to recommend them and then having the sales data to validate them is an interesting and logical twist.

For many authors, to be selected and promoted by Amazon to the English language global audience may be similar to winning a literary prize.

Whilst the publishing market cosies up to Apple and booksellers align to Google some resellers continue to redefine their role and relationships and refuse to be pigeon holed.

The ABA's Digital Move Makes BookSense

When we wrote the Brave New World report some 3 years ago we clearly saw the glass as half full for the bookseller. It was clear that what was required was a way of supplying and servicing the channel. However, many publishers wanted digital to be direct, aggregators wanted to control the files and build up their own market, chains wanted to go alone and manufacturers saw an opportunity to lock in their devices.

The news that the American Booksellers Association, have adopted Adobe's Content Server 4 (ACS4) digital rights management server architecture to serve files to customers of their member bookstores, not only makes true Booksense, it is what we envisaged 3 years ago, It is the logic that underpins the Gardner Books Digital Warehouse and is being adopted by other wholesalers and distributors in many countries.

The news that Sony is in involved is in fact more noise. ACS4 is agnostic not exclusive and is fully supported by an increasing number of ebook devices, also support secure Adobe ebooks (PDF) and the only exception to this common ground is the Kindle.
So we are now seeing a significant shift with the major opposition to Amazon not being Sony, iRex, Cooler, Plastic Logic, BeBook but the file server that joins them together - Adobe’s ACS4.How will resellers react to the opportunity that now clearly enables them to participate? Will consumer buy local or from the chain, or from the aggregators? Will publishers commercially enable the current channel to fully participate, or back the ‘stack them high and sell them cheap’ merchants?

Today it is hard to envisage an alternative to ACS4 and once it’s SDK option is taken up by mobile players, we will start to see a level of interoperability sought by many. This is a bold step by the ABA and as long as we steer clear of the false repository wars, we may now see a significant digital step change that is makes it possible for all to partisipate.