Simply Producing More Books Isn't The Answer

What happens when the amount of books available to read exceeds the market’s ability to read them! We have always struggled with more books than buyers. The economics of market forces has always prevailed, choking back on production, shrinking shelf space and reducing the rewards to those who aspire to make fame and fortune from their writing.

It was simple when we only had the physical book. The market was controlled by the shelf space available, the cost of the inventory and the rate of purchases. We still produced more titles and units than could be purchased, but for those who back the right works the rewards were significant and for those with excess inventory there was always the ability to trade this through. Importantly the sales were steady and although unpredictable at title level, they were more predictable at market level. The supply chain was inefficient, but worked and publishers wallpapered stores with their sale or return approach to merchandising. Some aspects still remain, but those heydays are long gone. Many blame the demise of the Net Book Agreement in the UK and the resultant discount wars. The truth is far more complex and one element alone drove the result.

The arrival of the Internet resulted in the virtual shelf and inventory. No longer was shelf space an issue, as warehouse space, distance shopping and customer service prevailed. The back list vied on equal terms with front list and the mid list often found itself squeezed. Those mail order players who were in the market should have won this battle, but were wedded to yesterday, did not understand the new parameters and importantly did not understand virtual inventory and changing consumer demands. The retailers struggled to get the right people and often treated the internet as an adjunct and not an integral part of their business. Amazon won and became a category killer and although some shoots of new business have appeared, the ecommerce game is firmly controlled from Seattle.

The digital book should have been the opportunity to address the ground given away to Amazon, but the market lacked the commitment and ability to work together. It stumbled from one white knight to another, as if it was punch drunk and desperate to hold on to anything that offered anything. We had Sony who promised much but understood little, Google who came to ingest all and were courted, fought and allowed to offer not one but two poor settlements and finally by Apple, who only wanted business on their terms. Some such as Nook and Kobo were spawned from existing players, but these and others lacked the technology clout, investment and global presence to succeed.

However, the biggest change that digital introduced was to lower the barriers to publishing, not only allowing anybody to publish anything, but also giving them channels and virtual shells on which to display their works next to more traditional published works. Suddenly we were awash with books, physical and digital. Self publishing was no longer to be dismissed and looked down on. We were no longer just over producing new books, but effectively bringing back every book ever published, but the consumers were still only buying the same number of books. They may buy more to fill their physical shelves, but why should they buy more to fill a virtual shelf?

The purchase model then came under a new threat – subscription and on demand reading. It was working in music and film so why not in books?

We have to look at music more closely to understand the other changes that had taken place over the same period; the switch from album to single, the migration from physical form to full digital, the high bandwidth and availability of the internet, streaming technology, and the desire to listen on the move. Film is no different and has had many different pressures which make subscription viable.

We now even have the new EU regulations which have resulted in Apple introducing, a no quibble, 14 day return policy. Some will suggest a ‘read for free’ policy. The new EU and Japanese consumption tax changes may result in ebooks costing more, but the extra money goes not to the creators, but to the governments. Both these initiatives will hurt creators’ pockets and may drive more to publish themselves.

So the facts are that we have a glut of content and in the physical world even greater disparity between the successful and the others. In the digital world we have a dominant channel which has understood the overall business, its value chain and targeted elements overlooked by others and integrated them into their offer. The market is no longer controlled by a handful of publishers but by Seattle and yet we continue to stumble forward with more of the same. If we have too many books we can no longer rely on natural selection. The market isn’t suddenly going to grow and will continue to flatline.

There will be increasing pressure to try something new such as subscription.

However, what we are failing to address is the difference between physical and digital. We are failing to create digital content for consumers on the move. We are failing to look inside and see what’s in the locker already and instead we continue to publish the same and expect that a miracle will happen all by itself.

Time is the clue to the market opportunity.

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. 

HELLO! Books Are Digitally Different

So what will be the next technology must have and what will drive its adoption? Will media come second and merely follow new technology?

In the last decade we have seen the transition from fixed location desktop PCs, through luggable laptops, the life and death of the notepad, the ‘air’ laptops and the explosion of the tablet. We have seen single functional devices such as the eink ereaders come and almost go, the transition from games only consoles to games anywhere, the death of the music only iPod and Zune and those video movie players. Home entertainment devices and interoperability has been redefined. The app, the cloud and streamed media services have arrived. Today the smartphone, or computer in your pocket, has taken over all our lives.

It has been a decade of significant technological and culture change and is unlikely to stop or even slow down as the technology shrinks, gets more powerful and anytime, anywhere and at high speed continue to drive our thirst to be connected. Our interface with technology is becoming more intuitive and although we may still be some distance from Pranev Mistry’s sixth sense world, it’s coming.

So how are the media and creative industries responding? What can we expect to see soon and what is still stuck some way off?

If we just look at film, music and books we see that although technology has increasingly impacted the development of the stuff, the output is the same. Films are still 90 to 120 mins long and apart from some 3D and computer aided technology the majority remain as they were. Music still retains the same length of tracks and although the technology has dumbed down the quality of content, a song is still a song. Books remain books with the vast majority of ebooks being straight digital renditions of the physical book.

However, there is a significant difference between books and the other two media. Film does not exist in a native technology free form, Unless you count the theatre and live music performances, both Film and music are very different cultural experiences and consumer purchases and not something you can put on the shelf and replay at will. Music has evolved through a series of disruptive technology changes, from vinyl, cassettes, 8track, CDrom, to today’s streamed MP3 on demand. Vinyl may be enjoying a small and limited renaissance and success in clubs, but for the average consumer it’s only like discovering a pile of old 78s and then looking for the device to play them on. The gramophone players, Walkman, ghetto blasters have gone and today we have the personalised earpiece connected to the smartphone and the cloud.

Books are different. Books remain and ebooks are a competing new rendition like the paperback was to the hardback. This difference challenges the ebooks ability to be a disruptive rendition and to kill off its previous forms. Book technology and the reader goes back hundreds of years and isn’t broken, nor is it made obsolete by the new form or its evolving technology. Therefore eBooks over pBooks is not a straight binary decision choice.

When we first grappled with the ebook in the 90s we often tried to enhance and exploit the content with the technology. Many fingers got burnt and so when it returned under the eink revolution, many kept it simple and also found that the eink technology didn’t exactly encourage content enhancement. However as tablets, mobile and smartphone technology become ubiquitous some may now return to enhance the content. Others may choose a different route and abridge it, or even play to the strengths of the technology and embrace the obvious – the short form.

Whatever the route taken the stupid thing would be to continue to merely pour the same content into a digital container. This logic is flawed as it not only creates competition where competition is not needed and can be counter-productive, but it fails to understand the technology, the cultural changes that are happening and the opportunities that are available for the two that matter - the author and the reader.

Drones, Cheap Tablets, The Cloud, Robots and Publishing!

This month we have read of the $38 tablet, Amazon’s statements on the potential use of Drone technology to delivery local parcels and the growth of stuff that is now and predicted to be connected to the Internet. Some would suggest that these are interesting but don’t apply to their world, others would suggest that they are part of the relentless march of technology which is now promising so much, whilst threatening so much at the same time.

Drones

Drones have started to revolutionise warfare in the same way that communications did before them. The move from open warfare, to insurgent terrorism, may now start to be redressed once again. Armies who once were exposed by the hidden insurgent and suicide bomber, now have their own crewless spy and attack tool. Like space exploration before it, drone technology will provide us all with new opportunities to do things smarter.

I remember seeing the film ‘Enemy of the State’ when it was released I the late 90s and marvelling at the spy and satellite technology it predicted. Over a year ago a friend in Bath showed us his $100 drone he acquired when he was working in Silicon Valley. It came complete with GPS, camera, video and internet connection to his smartphone. The control, speed, pictures and range where frightening to observe and the privacy issues it raised, frightening to consider. Now that same technology has the potential to go to not only observe, but collate what it sees.

The embedded YOU TUBE video is only a simulation, but makes you think. For more in-depth insights on Drones click here

When Amazon throws down a statement saying that in the future drones could deliver goods, it may be foolish to mock. We always considered individuals having their own personal flying machines to transport them, maybe it’s not people, but goods that get flown around in the near future?

Matternet, A Silicon Valley start-up, Matternet reports that is building a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles or drones) system that will transport crucial goods in areas where roads aren’t always accessible. They offer a fast, energy efficient opportunity to deliver medicines and emergency relief and remove heavy infrastructural costs. It is claimed that some billion people around the world live in such areas or would greatly benefit.

What we view today as a gimmick, a toy, something for the geek in us, may after all soon be offering us something lifesaving that was developed in a life taking world.

The $38 tablet

It’s not the potential price that matters, but the opportunities that such low price, ubiquitous technology can deliver.

The UbiSlate 7Ci will be priced for the US market at just $37.99. It will not have the sophistication of the more expensive tablets, nor the brand ticket price of others, but it could start to significantly change our storage, processing and network processes in ways the others only talk about. It will have sufficient internally to, send emails, browse the internet, check Facebook, and play simple games. Others will follow which may be a tad more sophisticated, have a higher spec, but all will now compete on a low ticket, commodity price point.

These tablets can enable one tablet per child, one tablet per worker, one tablet for all. This not only offers so much to developing countries, but also to the developed ones too. It could change culture from a local file ownership and manipulation to explode cloud computing to all. The potential benefits to education, community services and the workplace are obvious and huge and it is not hard to see the knock on impact on all mobile technology.

The growth of connected stuff

I am grateful to my good friend a futurist, Ray Hammond, for pointing out that research group, Gartner claim that the Internet of Things (IoT), which excludes PCs, tablets and smartphones and is the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment, will grow to 26 billion units installed in 2020 . This will represent nearly a 30-fold increase from 0.9 billion in 2009.

Gartner also claim that this will generate revenues exceeding $300 billion in 2020 and $1.9 trillion in global economic value-add through sales into diverse end markets.

Robotics

We were all shocked by the BBC documentary on the working performance target driven picking within Amazon warehouses in the UK. For those with a logistics background it was less ‘pick by light’ and more ‘pick in the dark’.

   

But thanks again to Ray Hammond, we learn that Amazon has quietly deployed 1,400 robots in its US warehouse distribution system. The technology comes from a Kiva Systems Inc., a company it bought last year. They claim that the technology could reduce fulfilment costs by some 20% to 40%,  which not only raises the bar for others, but also demonstrates that it may not just be down to offering the range and service, but also operating to exploit the economics of scale.

Google has just aquired Boston Dynamics a military robotics company.

So what does all this mean to publishing?

First, we must recognise that the age of the cloud is here and its impact on all things digital is only going to grow. With cheap tablets that are basically cloud based you have to have cloud based services that are streaming and on demand and maybe subscription based, and less of the old download and licenced model.

Second, closed communities with cloud access for all, such as education, will need online solutions and platforms. The device doesn’t matter anymore, it’s what is at the end of the connection that does.

Third, the content has to be re-thought and merely pouring physical content into digital containers is not a wise way forward.

Four, the economics of scale and scope will radically change if Amazon successfully deploys robotics for physical goods and few will be able to match those new economics. They also may not be happy to subsidise the rest of the market.

Tomorrow’s winners might just be those with the right investment in technology, robots and of course the delivery drones. 

Why We Need To Challenge Today's eBooks

Offered below are just three arguments that force us to question what we publish today and what we should publish tomorrow. Individually, the arguments may not pass the ‘so what?’ test, but taken together they should ring alarm bells in every publishing building.

Firstly, we often assume we will see and understand change and importantly be prepared for it. The reality is very different and change today is not linear, nor is it predictable and in many cases it is disruptive. The industrial giants of yesterday have been overtaken by technology and networking companies who connect stuff. Things that were once impossible to imagine can now be achieved from anywhere, at any time, in a click. Technology is enabling us to reevaluate how we develop, manage and market content and its associated context. As change happens society adopts and adapts and expectations and values we took for granted also change. Technology is now enabling everyone to be a creator of content and to connect to an audience and this democratisation of creativity is further impacting content formats such as books, film, TV, music, games, photography, art.

Secondly, we are a society, which in the main, has an ownership culture. We buy bricks and mortar and called it home, we  then set about filling it with possessions, some transient and throw away and others more assets and collectibles. Our possessions often reflect and describe who we are, or who we aspire to be. Unlike yesterday many rooms may not be filled with shelves of books, music, films, magazines etc. On demand instant access to very large ’libraries’ starts to question the basics need for ownership and opens the market to models such as rental and subscription, which were not attractive in the old analogue world. Netflix, Lovefilm, Prime, Spotify, Pandora are all creating the on demand market in film and music and now the likes of Oyster, Scribd, Amazon and others are following their lead in the ebook market.  

 

Thirdly, the way we read, what we read and when we read and how we spend our leisure time today is increasingly different from 100 years ago, fifty years ago and even 20 years ago, yet the content itself has altered very little. The vast majority of ebooks today take the content developed for the physical container and merely pour it into a digital one. Is that logical? Are we presuming that’s what consumers want? Imagine we could take the text and create a perfect audiobook at a click, would we really expect that to be good enough or just a lazy quick fix. Today audiobooks are adapted from books and professionally read to fit the medium and consumers’ expectations. It’s true that they no longer are restricted by the digital media but just how long would it take to listen to ‘War and Peace’ with a synthesised voice? Screenplays of books adapt the content to fit the format, consumers’ expectations and budget. We do not have many 5 hour films and most fit within 180 to 240 minutes and may only cover a fraction of the book content. We don’t have many 15 minute music tracks and again these are no longer restricted by the media. 

So why are ebooks so wedded to the 75,000 word or 256 page economic physical book model?

How we should respond to these arguments today and what will we have to consider tomorrow?

We have been fixated on the end form, the finished book and not the creative process itself which for many has changed very little. We have remained locked to the physical book economics and presumed that the chicken will always lay the ebook egg. We have continued to be obsessed with units sold and largely ignored other models which may cause contract friction. We have continued to pour the same content into a similar digital container without thinking. We continue to view the book as the start and not the book as a potential subsidiary. We have many very well subscribed short story competitions which go nowhere. We have failed to grasp or translate the Japanese Keitai opportunity.

There is no silver bullet. No one solution way forward. Expecting that worked yesterday will continue to work tomorrow, is not good enough.

Rethinking Marketing and Discoverability for Today

‘Digital publishing is publishing’ and the news this week from Bowker that online sales have reached 44% of total sales should not come as a shock to anyone. The question is what are we doing to exploit this, the rise in digital titles and sales and other cultural changes? We hear lots of talk about who is the retailer, publishers going direct and of course digital, but how are we planning up to service this? Finding and valuing anything on an every increasing virtual shelf is becoming harder, when in fact it should be easier?

Search and discovery in a digital era is very different to that we experienced in the physical only world and yet many appear to be trying to serve up the same basic information and to be crossing their fingers that one shoe will fit all – it won’t. Look at music and how services such as Shazam, Spotify, YouTube, digital online radio and social networks are redefining how we find, sample and enjoy music. 

The Onix XML standard was a milestone for common description of metadata and its construct and promotion was long overdue, but although it was built on some great work done in the music industry by the likes of Muze, it was built primarily on the back of the EDI market and XML standards which were aimed at a physical product market and servicing established B2B supply chain channels. As with many industry standards some would suggest that it often played to the lowest common denominator and rather than expanding the vision and usage of contextual material it confined it to the established B2B service model. It continues to service the online retailers but does it do enough or just enough? Does it really work in a world of self-service where the consumer wants to define their own discovery approach? Does it work when the content is digital and itself can become the metadata to describe itself?

We would suggest three observations towards a different way to view Context and in doing so service Content better.

   

Book in hand

Years ago the major wholesalers created their ‘book in hand’ processes which captured and validated the information about the book as the first copies were handled in the warehouse. The key to this was the fact that the book itself was the best authoritative source of the information. They still needed basic information on which to pre order the title prior to publication, but as many know, the title, jacket and other detail was often subject to change.

We have seen various ‘search inside’, or online samples of the book which are in the main driven by the distributor/wholesalers and online retailers. With the exception of certain sectors it was driven at the discretion of the publisher by the retailer and digital distributors.

Search Inside could be the new book in hand environment, which now can not only service the intermediary, but can also now service the consumer. All that is required is a digital file – the digital rendition itself, the rest is down to technology. So we all can have a book in hand and this can change how we create, develop, control, market, promote and offers a new and different context opportunity.

Contextual rights may be a term we have just created and some would say they already exist today as rights, but it makes sense to recognise them. The could create a leveller playing field and rules in which both intermediaries and consumers are able to fully exploit the digital content for digital content purposes within a standard framework.

When the likes of Amazon started to scan jackets some would have suggested it wasn’t strictly allowed but years later who would suggest that today? Using the full content to provide authority and context is plain logical. A better framework could enhance the discoverability of works and help remove those embarrassing search inside and often meaningless ‘surprise me’ and blank pages.

Far too often we have retained the physical book process and merely tipped the end product into a digital container. This approach was sensible yesterday but could be viewed as very naïve tomorrow.

Word of Mouth

Goodreads and others have demonstrated that many wish to read what others recommend.

The word of mouth recommendation has prevailed throughout history. However with the emergence of social networking it has exploded and we now can see where our ‘friends’ are, what they are reading right now and their views on it and recommendations. It’s like being given the keys to not only their lifestyle, movement but also their library. The challenge isn’t the people we actually know but those who are merely ‘friends by some association’.

Many have long treated the ‘independent review’ with some scepticism. After all, when the reviewer is actually also offering the book for sale, it makes one question how independent they are. Newspapers today sell the books they review and the question must be as to which the driver is and whether the reviews are the reviews independent or mere adverts. We once did a business survey on Home Depot and loved those wiring boards that looked like they were created by the local electrician, but discovered that they were in fact giant POS boards produced centrally. We also loved those little hand written book recommendation cards in some chains, but the sceptic questioned whether these were paid for space, or genuine. We would have loved to see if the same books got the same reviews, or were reviewed in other stores of the same chain. We are also all aware of the numerous claims over false reviews made by interested parties on online service.

Reviews and recommendations are often only as good as the last one and you still need to validate that it is what you actually want.

Looking at the same house through different windows

Today it can be difficult to determine who needs what information and we still build system silos to service only one aspect of the business. Search and discovery has gone beyond the basic bibliographic and metadata information that serviced the B2B market. The market now needs more information in order to sell both physical and digital into the channels and to the consumer.

The virtual bookshelf has given us the challenge of finding needles in digital haystacks.

Digital content can be viewed many ways by many different people. The reader may wish to see the first chapter of a novel. The academic the index and table of contents of a monograph. The teacher or student a selection of pages. Even the bookstore, school or library may wish to see what they are buying. It is just marketing material that can be easily drawn from the same digital content. It’s like looking at a house through different windows and seeing different aspects of the same house.

This leads us onto the catalogue which is just a collection of works which have been compiled together for presentation or commercial offer. There is no difference to the concept of sampling and marketing merely an extension. The reward for thinking this way is that you can see what everyone looks at, or ignores, or even if it have been viewed at all! It can itself drive sales, adoptions and marketing and promotional programmes.

This starts to again beg the question as to whether the same material can serve both B2B and B2C?

It also starts to suggest that the content itself can become the richest source of context to help the marketing and promotion of works and the search and discovery of them not just post publication but across the total lifecycle.

Chicken and Egg: Technology and Content?

We often assume that those driving the market and the leading marketplace are the same and would expect to find the US number one in intellectual property, its ownership, creation and consumption. With the exception of the far eastern players, such as Samsung, Sony, LG, etc. the technology drivers and leaders all have strong US origins and bases, but the content , or IP drivers are outside of that marketplace.  

In an interesting blog post ‘Foreign Ownership of Firms in IP-Intensive Industries’ by Jonathan Bland , he highlights how the actual ownership is often outside of the US centric marketplace. His argument that this questions whether US copyright favours these owners ahead of US citizens is interesting but far more interesting is the fact that everyone sees the US as the digital market leader but the content that underpins that marketplace is effectively produced and owned from outside the marketplace where digital is not so prevalent. Bland cites some interesting examples below which he claims demonstrate the ownership of publishing is from outside the US and he lists others such as music, film, games, patents and pharmaceuticals which are similar.

·         Four of the “Big Six” publishers, the largest English language trade publishers, are foreign-owned. More than 80 percent of the global revenue of the Big Six is generated by these foreign-owned companies.  These foreign-owned companies published more than two thirds of the trade books in the U.S.

·         Four of the five largest STM (science, technical and medical)/Professional publishers are foreign-owned.  More than 90 percent of the revenue of the five largest STM/Professional publishers was generated by foreign-owned firms.

·         Only seven of the world’s 50 largest publishers of all categories are U.S.-owned.

·         The book publishing industry in Europe has approximately twice as many employees as in the United States.

·         Of the top ten best-selling fiction authors in any language whose work is still in copyright, five are foreign.  A British author wrote three of the top five best-selling books in the U.S. in 2012.

So is the push by the content and IP or by technology effectively pulling through the content. Is this why there tends to be a huge gulf between what the technologists expect from digital content and what is on the ground today and why the content appears somewhat conservative to the technology advances?

TEDEd Continues to Deliver Lessons Without Walls

TED Ed is not a replacement for the teacher or the lesson but a complimentary guide a way of introducing the best teachers into the classroom in an engaging way that stimulates the student, validates their attention and allows the teacher to build on the sound bite and messages conveyed.

TED Ed doesn't try to own the classroom, build a walled garden around it and be the only source of information.

There is a ‘think’ features and quick quiz features  which enable students to answer questions and a , ‘dig deeper’ one which expands on the lesson and material and the teacher can take any of these and even the title and edit and enhance them to their needs. They can also flip the lesson to create their own rendition and URL which they can share with their own students.

When we first wrote about TED Ed it was being launched now some 10 months later it has a growing body of work with some videos across subjects; the arts, business and economics, health, mathematics, philosophy and religion, literature and language, psychology, science and technology, social studies, thinking and learning.

It takes the best and most engaging teachers and shares these with everyone for free.

Some great examples:

How simple ideas lead to scientific discovers

23 and ½ hours

How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?

One is one…or is it?

Content to Fit the Digital Container?

We have been brought up to believe that irrespective of the container it is rendered within, content is content. A story is a story and doesn't change and a book is a book and apart from illustrations the content itself remains the same.

It’s often hard to accept that up until 1878, some 135 100 years ago, music was restricted to the live performance, be it in the home, on the streets, in bars and clubs or in concert halls. The original recorded format was restricted in both length and quality. What the likes of Sousa feared, that we would see the recording as the master and the live performance as secondary has largely prevailed over the last century. 

Songs have in the main been restricted and confined by the container either in the recording or in their playing. We now have the three minute song born not out of the composer or artist’s ability, but by the restrictions of the likes of vinyl technology. Recording studios have created perfect timing, rhythm, pitch etc. However, technology has also often taken a ‘it’s good enough’ route, where we end up with formats such as MP3 which give us ubiquitous reach, but at the cost of quality.

As music went digital the technology eventually enabled the content to be freer of its recording constraints, but it was still often restricted by devices and distribution capacity. Ringtones, samplers , MTV and You tube have all helped maintain the three minute song package, whereas the live rendition remains still free to embrace solos and extensions.

Textural content has been restricted by both economics and two pieces of card and a spine. We have as a result created our own 3 minute story, or 75,000 word 256 page book. The content remained in type, with illustrations often restricted to fantasy and children’s content.

So what about textural content, stories and what we loosely refer to as fiction?

The Victorians understood that the masses who had just learnt top read didn’t want the equivalent to our 256 page and often padded out story., They wanted penny fiction and fiction that could be read, as Poe aptly put it, ‘in one sitting’. In 1837 Dickens was selling some 50,000 copies of his Pickwick periodicals at a shilling a time. The pamphleteers ruled and that medium, with its adverts and affordable price ticket, ruled. 

Short form writing continued and the pamphlets became magazines and newsprint. The short form diminished with the paperback and it was economics that forced many writers to drop it in favour of the 256 page economic model. We even stuffed short stories into collections so that they could fit the container. The container ruled or reading habit.

Today we have the opportunity to re think the content. Some will venture into refining it in terms of going beyond text and Kate Pullinger is a good example of writer adapting to this new form of content. Some will see an opportunity to reintroduce the short form text work either as whole works or like Dickens in episodic form. The content now needs to be defined for the new digital containers. We are now going through a new reading revolution which involves smartphone and mobile technology and 256 pages may render into these new containers but is it a case of content overload as we all adapt to mobile technology. Content  also needs to be very mindful that it doesn’t need to displace the physical book and simply pour in yesterday’s content into today’s containers. In some cases digital can be seen as creating a new market and a complimentary one for content.

Related blogs:

What the eDickens?       

It's All About Content and Rights

Publishers rightly tend to stick to what they good at when it comes to genre and content. The public may not always recognise the Publishing brand and only recognise the author, but focusing on the genre and building authoritative collections is critical to publishing today. Some mistook this focus as being what book sellers should also do, but forgot that book consumers were eclectic in their buying habits and wanted both value and ‘one stop’ shops.

Earlier this year, Wiley sold its Fromer’s travel guide to Google and had declared its intent to dispose of its remaining trade and reference division. Today they concluded that sale to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH). The sale includes Wiley’s cookbooks, dictionaries and study guides. This continues the new approach within HMH to trade and consolidates material under their Betty Crocker, Better Homes and Gardens and How to Cook Everything brands. We are all aware of the cookbook celebrity brands and success of the likes of Jamie Oliver in the UK and Betty Croker in the US. Cookbooks appear to be holding their own in print and despite the significant growth in cookery applications and websites, account for some 2% of book sales in the US market. HMH now also add Webster’s New World Dictionary to it’s CliffsNotes and educational publishing, test preparation and assessment services.

Growing vertical publishing operations is not new and is publishing. As further publisher consolidation takes place, what we once saw a one industry joined together by a single format - the book is starting to diverge and consolidate into stronger vertical operations. The digital marketplace now allows these focused content repositories to be exploited in ways that were somewhat restricted by the book and the economics of the physical market. Consolidation of ‘book’ content will continue for those wanting a one stop shop and book buying value, but new markets will now evolve for the digital content and context which will be outside of the book market as we know it today. Packaging and licencing rights into new offers will become increasingly important as the content itself starts to become more fluid. We must always remember that Steve Jobs in creating iTunes sold tracks not albums, George Martin said the album was the menu and the concert the meal and that individual recipe could be proportionately more valuable than the collection.

Should publishers become the genre point of focus? Can author brands co-operate to form compelling points of consumer focus, or will they always be reliant of third parties to aggregate them? Who are the genre consolidators that the consumer recognises and how can they cash in on their ‘first point of contact’ opportunity?

Yesterday, books were not stocked by retailers whose primary goal was to sell other stuff,  but as retail itself migrates increasingly online, then adding associated digital content that enhances the proposition and authority of the sale, becomes a potentially no risk, small cost added consumer value and lock-in. Being able to licence that digital content in chunks, collections and many renditions may be the key to many publishers moving forward.

It’s all about content and rights.   

'Powell's Dilemma' Equals Digital Obesity

When Guttenberg created the first press in the western world did it change just the accessibility of printed text, or the text itself? The illuminated manuscripts and the scribes who painstakingly created these works of art were no longer the mainstream, but a high end sideshow. When the Statute of Anne reformed publishing, or when Robert Dodsley and others redefined publishing, or when the Victorian age of literacy and mass reading were born, these changes went far deeper and wider that just the consumer and the transaction?

 It is safe to suggest that these and other seismic shifts were just as much about changing the content itself as changing how it was produced, marketed, sold and read.

To date much of the current digital revolution in books has been merely about pouring physical content into digital containers. We can talk about enhanced ebooks, learning object and all sorts of extensions to the text but fundamentally the text itself has stood still. It’s as if we have all assumed that the 256 page, 75,000 word economic model of the print world is perfect for the digital world. Has anybody seriously questioned it or even thought that maybe its not?

At the end of a interview in last week’s New York Times book review, Colin Powell was asked, ‘What do you plan to read next?’ and his answer was: 

Sigh. That’s a problem. I keep sending new books to my e-reader, and I don’t know which one I’ll read next. Electronic books have become such an impulse and instinct purchase that I buy them constantly and can’t remember what’s on my e-shelf. When I do look, I often see titles I don’t recognize or don’t remember wanting or buying. I’ll get to some of them.

To many this probably was funny throwaway, but it raises an interesting point we all to often take for granted and ignore. We have addressed the simple – producing digital content. We have even recognised the platform need to cover all the device bases. We have dabbled with social interaction and a consumer driven demand. But have we actually forgotten the basics and assumed that consumers just want more of the same, albeit digital or with digital extras?

It is as if we are living through the digital shift but are expecting the fundamentals to stay the same?

Many, including ourselves, have talked about the shift to subscription and rental on demand models but as an industry we still think in terms of sales, of retail and library worlds and its as if we missed Netflix and, Pandora, Spotify.

What we now will refer to as ‘Powell’s Dilemma’ is about digital obesity. In our haste to make buying simple and the books affordable have we have forgotten the reader’s ability to consume them? Its as if we can only see LPs and can’t see singles and miss the iTunes moment, can only see full length movies and can’t see YouTube.

Some would suggest that Powell’s dilemma is good as long as they continue to buy books and who cares if their virtual shelves become weighed down with the unread. Obesity is not healthy, feeding obesity is unwise and ignore the signs may well speed up to migration to on demand and some challenging commercials.

Perhaps it’s time we step back and think through what digital offers us to do things smarter and lead to a healthier and engaging diet for all readers and avoid 'Powell's Dilemma'. 

BIC 2012: Rethinking The Future

This is a presentation i gave to the BIC New Trends Seminar 2012 on 20th June in London.

The one thing that is certain about tomorrow is that it will be different to today and anyone who says that they have a clear and defined long term digital strategy is someone to be avoided and treated with healthy scepticism. We can all spend too long looking backwards to spot trends, But the future is not a linear journey. Trends merely tell us where we have been, not our destination. However, history teaches us that much is cyclic and what comes around goes around albeit differently. Change as we have all witnessed, can and will be, very disruptive and there will be many digital ‘black swans’ moving forward.

Richard Charkin recently said that publishers need to now think and act as start-ups, which is a hairy prospect for many and will not suit all.

I believe that the future is often born out of understanding the past, recognising what is different and identifying the enablers that make change happen and for us to do things smarter.

Today, I want to share 3 stories that help present just one perspective of the future. These are merely three stories which weave together to present just one argument. Just one piece in tomorrow’s digital jigsaw.

The first story is about finding needles in haystacks

A couple of years ago I found myself in Ludlow market looking at a pile of old books. I bought three, two by the same author and one featuring an artist I admired. The first two were cloth bound and published in the late 1930s by Country Life and the author went on to be; an author, artist, environmentalist, TV personality and wildlife campaigner. I wanted to share with others; the art, the wildlife, the environmental perspectives, and their insight into life in a bygone age and of course the man himself. 

I started to think about reprinting them. I established the direct market potential, the audience and was confident it was viable as a quality two volume collector’s slipcase edition and so I started to research the rights to the works. However, tracking the rights to 80 year old works quickly became a challenge. Eventually with the help of friend, who is somewhat of an expert in orphan and public rights, we tracked down the estate’s owner and there the issue sits today. The exercise proved that even with a well know author and clear publication history, tracking down rights, be they orphans or just old works, can be a testing exercise.

Imagine tracking down a less notorious author’s work from even 50, 40, or even 30 years ago? 

I was one of the first to stand up against the audious Google Book Settlement. My opposition was and remains primarily over the proposed ‘land grab’ or adoption of orphan works. Does my quest to adopt an orphan damper my opposition, or push me towards the ‘nationalisation’ of orphans or mass digitisation some propose today? The answer remains no.

Thinking about a rights business reminds me that some ten years ago I was invited by the BBC to attend a special conference on their future. It was to be attended by all senior figures from the Director General down.

On the day I found myself joined by a group of what appeared to be students and teenagers complete with street clothing and undaunted by their surroundings. I felt somewhat out of place and wondering what on earth was happening. We were ushered into a room and ask to sit on tables with senior BBC executives. After a couple of speeches the most illuminating dialogue started around each table. It was all about technology, software, games, gadgets, viral events and the latest things, some of which I had never heard of. It was about how the BBC should engage and what they should do next. The BBC learnt a lot from that exercise. Interestingly the BBC was starting to recognise that they weren’t so much in the broadcasting business as in the content and rights business.

That fundamental realisation has helped them shape their BBC Worldwide commercial arm and changed much of what and how they work today.  

Publishing, be it; music, film, games, books, is about content and rights. It is a rights business from acquisition, development to trading. Yet it is somewhat ironic that we remain wedded to rights terms which would appear to be inappropriate to the digital world, stuck in the print world. We find ourselves now moving in that digital environment without a rights registry.

It’s like going into combat today with First World War technology – it’s plain just dumb.

The one thing Google would have at least given us was a registry and without one some would suggest that we are flying blind in the eye of a digital storm.

The second story is about that extraordinary man Charles Dickens

A couple of months ago I visited the Dickens exhibition at the London Museum. What is interesting is that Dickens lived through the great literacy revolution where the masses were able to read and his penny fiction was a way of feeding their new habit in a digestible form. Dickens was many things not just a writer of great novels. Dickens was a performer, a journalist, a letter writer, a pamphleteer, a theatre producer and a self publicist extraordinaire.

He not only wrote many works by the chapter, he also delivered them as ongoing works. He used the ‘penny press’ to presale the stories by instalment. In 1837 he was selling some 50,000 copies of his Pickwick periodicals at a shilling a time. These contained one chapter sandwiched between pages of adverts. Many of these adverts had little to do with books or even the subject matter of the story. In fact the adverts demonstrate the diversity of the audience. The journals appeared either weekly or monthly and given the number of chapters and volume of sales, plus the advertising revenues, should have earned him a good return. It is claimed that when Great Expectations was published in weekly instalment in 1861 it had weekly sales of some 100,000 units a week. Interestingly they didn’t diminish his book appeal but fuelled interest in the finally work.

The Victorian engineering, transport and communications revolution of Dickens’ time was, on reflection, as great as that we have today with our technology and communications revolution. The new railways, telegraph and postal services enabled him to travel extensively and communicate to a wide audience and between 1858 and 1870 he gave some 472 readings of his works in the UK and US.

In Victorian times the novel was often also enhanced by illustrations. Dicken’s ‘Sketches by Boz’ was illustrated by George Cruikshank and as with many Dickens tales the reader was able to picture both in words and in imagery the story as it unfolded. Today, we have often lost the imagery of yesterday, but does the new ebook now enable us to once again enhance and illustrate the book?

It is not hard to see the relevance of Dickens to today and why it is somewhat ironic that 2012 is the 200th celebration of his birth.

Some have adopted the short story and instalment model and Keita digital novels continue to be a huge success in Japan. In the West Stephen King and others have also ventured down the digital short story and instalment route. But why hasn’t a publisher grabbed this digital opportunity by the throat? Are we stuck in the economic 75,000 words, 256 page format of the print rendition?

When we have done digital short stories, we have even bound them into digital collections. It’s as if we missed the iTunes moment when singles were reborn. We continue to ignore the shortening attention span and channel hopping culture in which we live.

Has the publishing and editorial process got in the way of the instalment and short story? 

Short stories and instalments may also unlock further the democratisation of writing. Some would suggest that they may have greater potential for consumer engagement than the enhancing today’s somewhat stretched physical content model with digital media for media’s sake.

If we want more people to read then give them something exciting that they can quickly appreciate and value.

The third story is about the creation and development itself - the publishing front office.

In the late 90s as part of the research programme ‘publishing in the 21^st Century’ , Mark Bide, Mike Shatzkin , John  Wicker and myself went to HarperCollins in Manhattan. We were doing research into the digitisation of the publishing front office and the objective was to look at an Editorial system that they were using.  The system looked impressive and acted as we would expect but I felt there was something not right about it. A few questions later and what appeared to be a good system was turning into a dog.

To cut a long story short it was built like a transactional system and not as a content one. It lacked that intuitive feel needed by creative people. What workflow that did exist was ridged. Editors were being asked to enter other people’s information for little perceived benefit to them. The final blow was that a number of Editors had refused to use the system.

I remember saying, ‘if the customer service clerk refused to use the system you sack them, if the editor refuses to use the system you sack the system.’

Have we moved on in the last decade?

Well the answer is yes and no. Systems have been adopted but the divide between content and context and transactional information still exists. People still see production systems as often financial and transactional and somewhat divorced from the content. Marketing, promotional and bibliographic information is still often in parallel silos and not drawn directly from the content itself. There is still a gulf between content and transactional information.

This is not true in some sectors, such as education, where the complexity of the works and digital has demanded better tools. However when you look at others such as the development of some academic monographs, you can see huge opportunities for radical improvement which are not being taken today.

I would ask you to consider that the argument that these three stories give us is that tomorrow will be heavily influenced and shaped just as much by the changes that will happen upstream in we acquire, develop, repurpose, store, curate, and market content and rights as it will be downstream in how the promote, sell, distribute and trade them.  It is about understanding and getting back to the basics, what has worked in the past, what could work tomorrow, adapting and understanding the total environment.

Digital is not just about pouring physical books into digital containers. If we think that is what it is about we have missed the plot.

There are many pieces to the digital jigsaw and there is no one piece that fits all.

To date we have been digitally obsessed with devices, DRM and formats. Thankfully these are now relatively irrelevant and yesterday’s issues

·         Devices are evolving into platforms, content is becoming agnostic, and finally moving to being cloud based on demand

·         DRM is at last past its sell by date. But before we all run out and drop DRM it it is worth thinking about rights and permission, collective commons registration, and the ‘first sale doctrine’ . Some would suggest that not to do so may be as short sighted as when we got rid of the NBA without thinking about returns

We do have some exciting challenges downstream, such as:

·         working out what the difference between ebooks and apps and associated usage rights

·         moving from outright sales models to new models, which most probably will be subscription and rental based

·         redefining and creating tomorrow’s libraries

·         exploiting the rapidly evolving social networking environment and helping readers find a digital needle in a digital haystack, or as it is now called ‘discoverability’

·         working out how we audit the sales ‘honesty box’ environment we have created

Returning to basics.

There are only two people that count in the value chain – the author, creator who puts in the IP and the consumer who puts in the cash. Everyone in between adds cost, but more than ever has to add value. Digital publishing isn’t just about the downstream activity and the consumer it is about the life cycle of content, context and rights from Author to reader.

I believe that the argument I have presented today can present one piece to tomorrow’s jigsaw and new opportunities which themselves could be significant and impact the downstream market, provide long overdue development productivity and rights governance and, may even offer a opportunity that doesn’t just cannibalise existing print but can compliment it.