Ten Digital Reflections

If we look back over the decade of the ‘noughties’ we see ten technology/service step changes which have all in their own way enabled publishing to be digital. They may have not been the first to market, but were first to get it right and change things.

iPhone: The iPhone redefined the mobile, the user interface, the operating system, the application, the look and feel and much more. It combined the best of the iPod and iTouch and brought them to a smartphone. It made reading on a phone acceptable and was adopted by young and old.

Amazon Kindle: It started out as just another eInk device and ended up a multi device platform, leaving many so called pretenders in its wake. The single focus Amazon applied and their determination to evolve and protect their customers investment in Amazon, was what ultimately swept the others behind them.

YouTube: Youtube did for film what iTunes did for music. It became the enabler, the changer, the vehicle that promoted us from video watchers, to video makers. It gave the masses a common platform to express themselves and view alternatives. It was and is a 'starmaker'.

epub: As a standard it unified the industry and effectively became a 'category killer'. It is far from perfect today. Many see it not one standard, but as a mere container, with many issues and variations. However it effectively killed off Mobibook, MS Reader and nullified Adobe ebook. It enabled everyone to believe we had a single standard.

Widgets: They may have been overly engineered by some and lacked a common specification, but they started to make everyone think outside the box. Context started to be used to promote and sell content. We started to use the jacket as a container for content, metadata, bibliographic record and even to be a two way communication vehicle. Unfortunately, widgets were often not understood, lacked industry standards and leadership and remain waiting to be fully discovered.

Facebook: Many will ask why Faccebook? Why not MySpace, Bebo, or even those many publishing only pretend social networks? Facebook wasn’t the best social network, but it was the one that was adopted and accepted by all. It may have started as a narrow college vertical, but it then became inclusive of all and it was this that ultimately separated it from the rest. Why do we need book social networks such as Copia or BookRabbit when we have Facebook that can include all book social connections?

ACS4: When Adobe killed off ACS3 and embraced epub under the intial Adept service many industry players said 'no way'. Adobe quickly adapted it to what is now ACS4 and it soon became the DRM service across multiple devices. Love or hate DRM, it is here today and Adobe continues to be the glue that secures epub and Aebooks (PDF) on many devices. It offers the reader the ability to buy from a wide range of resellers and read files on a wide range of readers. It offers the author and publisher the security.

The Blog: We now have social networks, twitter and a host of ways to express and share our views. Some would suggest that the blog post has had its day and that the 'real time' snippet and interaction of Tweets is more powerful. Others would suggests that 140 characters says little and merely reflects our growing sound bite culture. Whatever, blogs were the vehicle that redefined journalism and writing and enabled many to be able to express themselves to a wider audience.

The Google Book Settlement: We all have an opinion on this audacious attempt to highjack an industry for little more than chump change. It sits still on the shelve awaiting judgement, but it has single handily woken everyone up to the issues facing copyright in the digital age, the challenges of orphan works, the nonsense of territorial rights in global digital economy and the fact that as a rights business, publishing stands exposed without even a basic rights registry.

Lightening Source: LSI came of age during the decade. It quickly became the aggregator and distributor of print on demand titles. First exploited by academia and smaller niche publishers, it has now grown into a vehicle to maintain back lists, produce short print runs and enable ‘lost works’ to be brought back into print. Interestingly it also enabled Ingram to quickly grow its digital offer.

Some may ask why we did not include Android, OLPC or even the iPad. The answer is a difficult one in that they all have had a dramatic impact on the market, but we feel that they and others still to offer or consolidate a step change.

What are your top ten and have we missed the obvious?

eMarketing Thoughts: 2 What is a widget?

Is it a book sampler, a look inside the jacket, a look before you buy? We have seen many widgets of all shapes and sizes. Some were very impressive giving you the real book experience with turning pages in duplex views and full colour, others crude scanned pages that in some cases weren’t even scanned straight! Some merely followed instructions and on displaying the first 10 pages even showed us the blank ones! Amazon gave us a ‘surprise me’ option which was often a poor surprise as it displayed a totally meaningless page and was not even a smart move. Others could only be managed by the publisher so were limited in their application to resellers. Although the reseller could with dexterity change certain fields like the buy now button resolution, each publisher did it differently!

We would suggest that the widget is just a container - nothing more and nothing less. When one starts to look at it this way one avoids the trap of it being a one-dimensional vehicle to merely sample a few pages. It is a marketing box which can offer as little or as much as appropriate, it can become the new tip sheet or advance information sheet, a door to more information, a collector of comments, requests the reps suitcase and much more.

We must remember that eMarketing isn’t about selling digital content but about selling all content; digital, physical, audio, rights and combinations of.
We must also remember that the material never leaves the repository - it is merely viewed and when viewed the information is current and real time.

The widget offers competitive advantage today which is sustainable.

We would suggest that the widget is the base entry point into the world of eMarketing. By itself it is not the answer, but part of the answer in this exciting new engagement with the market.

eMarketing Books

The world of digital marketing of books is currently a world of experimentation and lots of dots but not many joined up. We have seen; widgets in all shapes and sizes, colours; compendium web sites offering that extra content and context; the digital galley and review copy; digital inspection copies in education and academia; the digital catalogue and the emergence of the US BookDROP standards. The question is whether the dots are to be joined, or are merely scattered like corn in the wind?

Last week we read that the Bookseller has launched a new book video site, Bookbox. It is to provide a repository for publishers to present their author and book videos to a trade-wide audience and for the trade to pull these down for reuse. The business model isn’t clear but we would question why the Bookseller and why video? Why not VNU/Neilson and tied to the bibliographic and marketing feeds? In these days when the Bookseller’s content is getting somewhat lighter it is questionable whether spending on Bookbox is wise.com.

Yesterday the trade spent more marketing money promoting to the trade than it spent promoting to the reader. Full page spreads in the trade magazines may look nice, may have raised retail awareness but today that is changing and creating consumer demand is seen by some as more important that creating retail demand.

So we look towards those who have lead the bibliographic way – the wholesalers. Marketing materials are exploding but who gets it into the channel and to consumer and are the two requirements exclusive? Videos, widgets, podcasts, first chapters, web links are all now part of the extended marketing family but finding them, rendering them consistently and valuing their contribution appears a little challenge. Viral marketing is growing and becoming easier for all and it is different to direct marketing but is the technology to achieve both the same or different?

So the big questions are what is emarketing and how do we as an industry exploit the wealth of materials available in an audited and consistent manner to promote both digital and physical books. The one thing we are fairy confident about is that there isn’t a standard’s or solution silver bullet. Today and tomorrow we will have to deal with multiple format options, look and feel and navigation options. This may be acceptable at the basic level, but it will be a shame to loose the opportunity, where there is a real waste saving and also where process benefits clearly exist.

What’s in Your Widget?

We have seen the emergence of the mighty widget - the ‘live’ jacket that with a single click, opens up the book for the buyer to briefly evaluate and qualify for purchase. Whether its called Search Inside, Browse Inside, View Inside, Look Inside, they all work fundamentally the same and offer that enriched customer experience. They bring much of that bookstore ‘touch, smell and feel’ to the online world.

Today’s widgets offer limited pages views, text search, linking, table of contents, customisable ‘buy now’ resolution and the ability to copy and distribute the widget. So is that the end of the story or the beginning of a new one?

Today we can see the availability of more supplemental information that could be used by retailers, librarians, consumers etc. So can the widget be extended from being content into a container that holds content, context and even rights? Imagine clicking on a jacket and having the option to hear the author via a podcast or see them via a video, read authoritative review, link to other titles. The interesting thing again is that widgets may be dispersed to the four corners of the Internet but they are rendered dynamically from a single source. That model enables the publisher to update information as it changes and maintain its currency over its life cycle.

Imagine a world where all we pass between us is a widget, a jacket image, a persistent resolvable URL. It makes you think about the waste, the duplication and the lack of consistency that happens today.

Letter From America III

I was honoured to be invited to speak in Minneapolis at the National Association of College Stores (NACS) Innovate 2008 conference. The focus was about how the members could gain competitive advantage through technology. Campus stores are being squeezed by many and also face lots of new digital challenges.

The issues that face all campus stores are many and complex but are no different to those facing all bookstores. There are many questions:

Who are their customers?
How do they engage with their community?
Are student customers for life or just for a short time and why can’t they retain the customers past student life?
What do their customers want?
What is the size of their market and their percentage of this?

Once they have established where they are they have to decide where the want to be and how they get there. It is not about digitisation nor is it about technology – it’s about retail. The campus store is not dead it is merely changing and adapting to new opportunities. Will it survive – I believe so but it will be different and will be built on its existing relationships with its community and its publishers.

The following are the digital recommendations I left them with to consider:

1. Adopt Digital Drop Ship as the model to engage all bookstores into an effective channel for all publishers. Some would argue that the aggregators do this today but look at the exclusive models and demand more. You need an inclusive, integrated and independent model that is inclusive not exclusive and builds on the relationships you have today not one that merely put someone else between you and your supply.

2. Widgets. Ask yourself how you can maximise this within your environment to sell more books. You could even use them in-store to qualify stock you don’t carry. If I am right and they become ubiquitous, how are you going to manage them? I believe the association has a clear role to play to make sure the right widgets are created and distributed to its members in a way that they can be fully exploited and increase revenues today. Don’t wait for someone to sell you the package do it yourselves. Solutions here need to offer both development and be built to be ‘out of the box’

3. E Inspection copies. I believe you are integral to the process today and going forward. If you aren’t plugged into the process, where will the sales go? Only by working collectively and with others will the real benefits on offer here be realised. After all the reviewers are your customers, the students are your customers and the books are what you should be selling, so why wouldn’t you work with others to secure it?

4. Print on demand offers much but is a significant change. It may work in one store but not in another today. However if you became the first movers and viewed it as a local resource could it secure a bigger market. If you wait someone will do it first. That may be a competitor, a print shop, a library, even a coffee shop. What being a follower mean to your business and community relationships.

5. 508 is my last suggestion. This is not an individual store option today as much as a co-operative one which could provide high visibility, take away a painful exercise for publishers, provide a real service and relationship link to the thousands of disability officers and the solution is not difficult not expensive.

You can read the full presentation at http://www.value-chain.biz/Brave%20New%20World%20ii.htm

Barnes & Noble.com to Sell Magazine Subscriptions

BN.com have announced they will be selling magazine subscriptions to over 1,000 magazine titles in both digital and print formats. Prices will offer up 90% discount off newsstand cover prices and digital subscriptions will be almost instantly available on desktops and laptops. A further 12,000 back issues of hundreds of magazine titles will be available digitally for purchase.

This is a natural extension of BN.com’s partnership with Zinio who have long offered online subscriptions and browsing to the magazine market and power B&N’s “See Inside” widget feature, which provides previews of book content. The “See Inside” feature will now be extended to preview certain magazines. The offer also includes a partnership with M2 Media Group, and provides the first fully integrated offer of magazines and books.

Previews of content are becoming increasingly important and we have already seen a number of variants in the market. It is clear that they need to be able to render all types of content and not be fixed to a book format and text. Features that promote illustrated and picture books are just as important as text and being able to embed other media and metadata within the feature is a logical extension of where many are today.

The questions are to do with who produces the material, who controls it and as to whether there will be many variants of the same book within different sites?

Re-Jacketing Content

We read today that HarperCollins is yet again at the digital front and pushing back the boundaries. It is now extending some of its ‘browse inside’ digital samples to whole books. The premise is that as they make more available then they will entice more to buy. The offer is not extended to downloads, printing and orders will be fulfilled by Amazon.

The offer could not be resisted and makes a stark difference from the often miserly few pages offered by many or the ‘surprise me’ offered by Amazon.

Unfortunately the offer doesn’t do digital ebooks a great service as it merely rendered the physical 268 pages of Paulo Coelho’ s ‘The witch of Portabello’ on the screen as images within a flash player. What’s wrong with that you may ask? Well it includes blank pages, you would think someone would have thought that one out. It is an image within a flash player so is restricted by the player in the size of the screen and functionality; basically you can make it fit the screen or make it smaller and see the table of contents. The real issue it highlights is the use of roman fonts to read digital text. Roman fonts look great on paper and add a certain style but on a screen are very difficult to read and when in italics are very difficult to read.


"Warriors: Into the Wild" from the children's series by Erin Hunter was easier to read as the font colour was darker but only the first 60 pages were available. Robert Irvine’s cookbook ‘Mission Cook’ was a huge disappointment. We expected photographs of his dishes but found none. It also showed that placing coloured text in coloured sidebars, may well work in the printer copy, but look bad on screen.

Flash drives and widgets are samplers to show off physical and digital books.

Nobody is going to read a whole book in a flash drive. There is therefore little point in highlighting the digital restrictions of flash by showing the whole book. More importantly the exercise is good if it starts to teach us that what worked in print may not work digitally. Font is an obvious issues but it stretches to layout and design. We have long taken content and merely re-jacketed it, hardback to paperback etc. Perhaps now we have to start to think differently about the digital representation.

There is little point to showing the whole book if by doing so it could potentially turns off the consumer to digital books.

Wigets Multiply Overnight

Predicting some things is easy. Only one day after HarperCollins announced their ‘Browse inside’ facility, Random House announced their ‘Insight’ one. Both service have adopted the same approach which enables others to add sample material from a title to their own website by use of that new word we will heart much of – the widget.

What becomes less predictable is who will be next? Also again how the bibliographic agencies will react and how those omnivore search engines will step on the digitisation accelerator re the smaller publishers.

What is clear is that we are now entering a new phase of bibliographic development far greater than that we saw ten years ago when suddenly jacket images became a must. This one is about using the content itself to promote the book in physical, digital, audio etc. Digital publishing is publishing and using digital content at the centre to provide a single authoritative source of context and rights metatdata is logical and one we have long spoken about. Building complex systems alongside this may be a duplication of effort and not the logical approach. Today the greatest driver for publisher’s to digitise their content, is not the ebook, but the support of their marketing, sales, publicity and promotion activities. I would be as bold as to suggest that those who follow this route will see a double digit return and this today is likely to be at the expense of others who have not responded to this exciting challenge.