eBook Subscriptions Part 3: The Future Should Be Significant

In the last two articles we looked at today’s subscription market and some of the players, but what of the future? Do we really believe that the consumer will continue to want to ‘buy’ eBooks that they effectively don’t own, that they can’t easily share with others and that they are prohibited from reselling. Adobe may have backed down from their heavy handed approach to their initial ACS5 upgrade plans, but DRM remains a millstone around consumer’s necks and wedded to yesterday’s 'download to a device' ownership model. Today the media world is moving towards on demand, streamed and cloud based services whilst ebooks often appear to be still stuck in an eink device type offer.

Some would suggest that the eBook market is already a mature and well established, others would suggest that it is merely at first base and has some major changes and challenges on the horizon that will redefine it, in terms of its content, context and commerce.

Some will look at the other media consumer markets; music, film, TV, games, newsprint, magazines, etc and see clear and growing trends towards on-demand subscription services. Some of these sectors are further ahead of others and all may be moving at different speeds, but they do appear to be moving in the same direction. So should eBooks remain stuck in some pseudo digital world?

Imagine making one monthly payment and getting your network connection, together with media options on films, music, TV, games, news, and eBooks. You may get some services free, or others cross subsidised by others, but you potentially get your Home Entertainment under a ‘one shop’ federalised deal. Today the likes of Spotify are being rolled into network and Home Entertainment deals, so why not extend it to encompass all media? Today we see the likes of Nokia and others now realising that providing digital content services is maybe as important as selling the device. Enter the likes of Apple, Google, Samsung with their growing media content offers.

Home Entertainment propositions have huge appeal to advertisers who could also have both separate and collective deals. It will potentially attract new investment which in turn can either lower consumer subscriptions, or feed greater rewards to the creator. Many sports today benefit from Home Entertainment tie-ins and this route could raise the appeal of ebooks, reading as well as increase the revenue in the market.

Imagine a world in which consumers are encouraged to read, not by serving up free copies of the same stuff they don’t buy today, but by offering them digestible chunks of content that by themselves fit into their often time poor, multi-demand lifestyles. We don’t expect young children to be immersed in long textural works, so why do we expect adults who don’t read today and have shortening attention spans and time windows, to suddenly create 16 hours to read an eBook. We have written much on this subject, but the relevance to the potential subscription market is significant, as readers will consume short works faster and potentially more regularly than large ones. Also pricing short works today to sell through against the heavily discounted longer ones, is very difficult. Has anybody stood back and asked whether its wise to converted the physical book and merely just pour it into an ebook container?

If we look at how films and TV shows are now financed, produced, branded and even merchandised, we increasingly see cooperative ventures. These set out to maximise the investment and rights sold, not minimise them in a hope that they prove to be winners that may be exploited later. Amazon’s influence in making the BBC change its decision to cease production of the ‘Ripper Street’ series was a significant step and it is not alone in the shift of power that is happening in the Home Entertainment world. Harry Potter may be seen as an exception today, but can others now take a more holistic approach to rights and services and beg the questions as to whether subscription based models a more natural way to harness and maintain these new communities?

It is easy to envisage subscription services being a major driver of change to what is created, how it is developed, marketed, promoted, sold, paid for and consumed. However it is often harder to see an industry which is often slow to change and diverse in its structure making those changes. So are we to remain wedded to the digital base 1 or can we now move towards second or even envisage third base, or will we wake up one morning and find someone has done it to us?  

Post A Short Story To A Friend

Forget 140 character stories on twitter we now have a 224 word story on a stamp!

To celebrate Dublin’s permanent designation in July 2010 as a UNESCO City of Literature Ireland has issued a 60 cent stamp with the words of a 224 word short work by Eoin Moore that captures ‘the essence of Dublin’.

Eoin Moore’s short work, as depicted is on An Post’s new 60c stamp.

The thick clouds cover up the moonlight, but the city’s lights provide worthwhile illumination – above them all, the beacon burns bright atop the monolithic podium, signalling to wayfaring voyages the ancient Viking settlement.  Now, where Norsemen once stood, I look back, along the quays, streets and alleys, to where the inhabitants live their lives: eating, speaking, and breathing their city into existence.  It gives me cause to wonder, as I stroll aimlessly along the cobbled paths, about those who have traversed them before me, by carriage or before there were even cobbles to walk upon.  I feel their lives and mine are somehow connected, that we all were at one point a part of this city, living pieces of its grand, striking framework.   Every High King and scholar, every playwright and poet, every politician and every rebel, every merchant, student, and busker who ever set foot in the city holds or held onto a chunk of this city’s soul; every one of them stepped to the city’s heartbeat.  I listen to the streets at night and I can feel the city’s lifeblood pumping through me; I can feel myself flowing through it.  All of us who travel those arteries step on the words, actions, and lives of those who travelled them before us. The city embodies the people, and the people embody the city.

The unusual new stamp and a First Day Cover may be viewed and purchased at main post offices, at Dublin’s GPO and online at www.irishstamps.ie

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?       

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.

Vonnegut Goes eBook

Last week Random House announced that its imprint, Delacorte Press, would release 14 previously unpublished short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut who was best known for his satire, humour, anti-war sentiment and science fiction writing, died in 2007.

However its not the posthumous collection that is the news but that they will be made available as ebooks. The first story, “Hello Red,” would be available as an e-book in August followed the next month by a second, “The Petrified Ants.” The remainder will be available on Oct. 20, the day Delacorte publishes “Look at the Birdie,” a new hardcover collection of Vonnegut’s short fiction. Delacorte also has plans to release new additions of fifteen of Vonnegut’s best known books.

The e-books will be sold for $1.99, but is unclear as to whether this signals the return of the short story for the ebook, which makes a lot of sense, or whether in this case they are being used as promotional tasters for the physical book. It is also not clear whether by buying the ebooks the price paid is deducted from the book when its published.

Apparently Mr. Vonnegut is claimed to have told an interviewer in 1995 that he would “welcome” being called a Luddite.

Why can’t the short story stand in its own right as an ebook. We have long argued that the form lends itself to digital reading. Whether, its short stories, selling by chapters or selling individual works such as poems, digital should stand in its own right. Yet it appears some now see ebooks not as works in their own right, but as promotional teasers and that publishers still cling to the physical economic model.

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.

Size Does Matter!

This week we read that Hewlett Packard are to release two new laptops that are lighter, thinner and have extended battery life. The EliteBook 2530p, weighs just over 3 pounds and the EliteBook 2730p is an ultra-thin computer that converts to a touch-screen pen-based tablet computer with a twist of its screen and weighs 3.7 pounds. They recognise that travellers demand true portability not lug-ability. We have already written about the iPhone applications and the ebook reader developed by Fictionwise and today read that Lonely Planet is to make its content available via Nokia mobiles.

Not only is the world shrinking through technology but the technology is also shrinking and converging. So what about the content itself? Today we joined a email discussion group supported by Peter Brantley the force behind the Pubfrontier.com.

The points we made were:
If we all agree that the short story or serialised novel or reference work is the ideal form for mobile and e content and I would venture that only a few and the brave would venture to read war and peace digitally, we have several fundamental challenges to face.

1. The economics of publishing today is skewed toward a print economic model best described as a ‘strightjacket’ binding 250 pages and x thousand words. This is economic to develop, print, market and shift. Why on earth do we simply see this shifting like a hardback to a paperback and to digital. Even the video guys saw merit in additional material! The audio guys realised that unabridged didn’t always make sense! So why not like the Keitai novels, Dickens, S King think again and also think of the consumer experience not merely replicating formats?

2. Payment models are not an issue. There are many examples of models that work on wallets, subscription, micropayments. The issues that may be more relevant are tax and price points. Consumers don’t want to know about tax so inclusive pricing helps. Price points are very interesting given iTunes and the track revolution in music – 99c a short read?

3. Marketing is not an issue as it is more about selling collections, series, brands than individual stories. Again think music and tracks, think Dickens and King and serials.

The main and difficult challenge is to generate content that is worthy and a demand for it that generates sales. Do authors write the book and then serialise it into chunks or write it in chunks? Is writing a short story the same skill set as the long novel and do we have the short story brands. Can you imagine if Harry Potter had been written and released in digital chunks first then as a book second? We would not be here today discussing the obvious! Some may ask why do publishers insist on digital experiments with first timers and unknown authors and not the block busters?

Short Stories Are Needed

We read much this week about short stories, its apparent demise within the UK and how the US in contrast is now growing the genre and has writers producing works exclusively in it.

The length of a story has been something we have often been amused by. It’s like comedy, there is simple one liner and there are the long monologues. Both can work equally on the audience and some comedians are better suited to one form than the other. Economics have often dictated the length of a book which is often expressed not in pages but number of words. Someone once remarked, the first novel is tightly controlled and shaped by the editor and delivers the requested volume. The second novel is a bit more relaxed re its control but again delivers around the required volume. The third and subsequent works are often very loose and the volume can vary widely often growing in size. They suggested looking at the Harry Potter series. We couldn’t possibly comment.

In a world of shortening attention span and available quality time, the short story has huge potential. Not only can it provide that quality quick read, but it also can be a lever to introduce the readers into longer reads. The progression is not a given, nor are they two mutually exclusive and therefore short stories must stand on their own two feet. We fondly remember the short stories that lay within many households between the covers of Reader Digest, Women’s Own, People’s Friend and many others. These have not gone away, but many have been replaced by Hello, OK and the sound bite celebrity photo shoot. This has both reduced the creative pool and also the audience.

Japan has demonstrated through its Keitai novels and the rise of Mieko Kawkami’s writings, that today’s technology is suited to the short story, or serialisation of the longer one. As technology shrinks it is appropriate that content shrinks to fit. Technology is very well suited to the short read but is very questionable when it comes to 250 pages. That is unless you have regular eye check ups and a good optician.

So the short story has a real opportunity to both assist the adoption of digital works and importantly to entertain. Its now up to many to recognise that size may not matter so much and simply shoehorning an existing work into the new technology may not be the answer.