Why doesn’t businesses learn from other businesses? The music industry could have looked at newspapers, the movie industry should look at what is happening to music (DRM, hello!?), of course magazine owners and book publishers have lots to learn from the previous once as well. The printed word is not “safe” from digitalization.
Everything that can be digitalized will be digitalized and it’s pretty obvious who’s up next. Book publishers – it’s time to act. You have an amazing digital future ahead of you. Monetize it before some smart guy in a garage does it.
Stanford is using a scanning technique developed by Google to digitalize their library – and that’s a huge one (”digitizing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of books from the shelves of Stanford libraries and making them available to readers worldwide and without charge.”) Scanning old books together with the fact that all publications from recent decades have passed a computer before being printed seem to make the opening of a digital library happen sooner rather than later.
Interested things is also happing on the gadget side of coin. The Kindle is a far greater success than anybody expected and e-paper/e-ink is being developed at an increasing pace. Mygazines.com has shown how cool a magazine can be presented online and, more importantly, be improved with features printed paper can’t deliver (searchability etc).
The good news is – the technological development is still in it’s early stages and as a book publisher you have time to come out as a precursor. This is probably the largest paradigm change since 1454 when Gutenberg printed his first Bible and lots of new ideas can/will be tested either you as a copyright owner want it or not.
I’m sure that books will exist forever, but think about the digital advantages and see it as a development, not a successor, of your business plan. Look at the benefits. For example you can bring 10, 100, 1000 of books on your vacation. Maybe you only read some chapters digitally and then finish the ones you find interested in a printed version. Many will probably buy their favorite titles to just have them in shelfs because it’s an important amplifier of their identity. Furthermore I would love to buy insight in a process instead of just the final product. The possibilities are infinite and you can make additional money on them.
I’m not very familiar with the book business but here’s a little thought I had over a cup of coffee the other day. To me there is a quite obvious starting point and testing ground in the field of poetry where parallels can be drawn from pop songs released on a major label. First, there seems to be a great gap between poets and most literature customers. On the other hand the format of short texts with lots of possible interpretations seems like a 3 minute Clash song. What I’m saying is that poetry would fit the 22nd century man perfect and poems would be perfect for interactive internet supported ideas. Images, sources of inspiration, music etc can be added to lower thresholds between authors and readers.
Poetry would be a great training ground for publishers on the internet. Again, like for the music business, filter and context thru meta data and deep knowledge is where you can/should make money in the future. If you are a good publisher this is good news – knowledge about yourself, your writers and everybody else that have written a good book is your core business – that’s where you differ from the smart tech guy in a garage.
Book publishers – take advantage of the digital era and learn from the other art distributers ahead of you. Psst, don’t forget to give up a little bit of your control to gain the possibilities of the future.
8 Comments
1 Bob12 wrote:
The fact is, that even if people do buy digital books, which will be very hard to bring about if one can get them for free, it will no longer be a very interesting business because the margins will be tiny. Look at music. One can hardly make alot by selling tracks for 99 cents or even less. There’s no margin. So on the whole, the digital economy is less profitable for entertainment companies than the old one.
2 Martin J. Thörnkvist wrote:
@Bob12: Yes, but what if the number of sold items are much larger?
3 oxymoronx wrote:
Margins? Uhmm basic mathematics and logic will tell you that the margins are ridiculously better for digital format vs. physical. it’s all about the business model. You can’t run the same business model against digital media that you do with traditional media. it just won’t work. Look at iTunes .. they are the 2nd largest music distributor in the US and they are a digital format only. In fact, their whole focus has shifted to the digital format and their devices.
It’s a new world and you’d better learn or devise new rules or you’ll be left behind.
4 Akheloios wrote:
I’ve got the Sony PRS 505 and am very happy with it. I’ve bought a couple of DRM’d books so far, Will Self’s latest and the rather spiffy new Neal Stephenson.
I’ve also downloaded a ton of OCR’d books via torrent, mainly sci-fi, but also a ton of classics that are out of copyright and are therefore wonderfully legal.
One problem stands out with both bought ebooks and OCR’d editions. Formatting is very hard to do well. The text can be too small to read (The 505 has a zoom function, more on that later) or formatted with unnecessary borders that waste an awful lot of screen (only talking 6″ max here)
Any special formatting, such as equations is handled badly too, especially when zoomed. Equations can muss up whole pages if you ever try to zoom in on paragraphs including them.
The zooming is a nice feature, especially for anyone with bad eyesight, but it does magnify (fnar fnar) any existing problems in the formatting and causes a few of it’s own.
Bad line breaks, tabbing, equations and pictures are all handled badly and very slowly (tiny underpowered processor in the thing can’t do anything fast), making page turning a labour of love for some books.
This shouldn’t really have been a problem, the ebook library system that sits on your PC should have been used to preformat any books delivered to it. I have the feeling that they left this bit of functionality out on purpose because most DRM’d books can’t be modified as part of their contract. So implementing a PC side formatting system for non DRM’d books might have seemed provocation to bootleg on Sony’s part.
This problem really needs to be fixed, it’s not difficult, there’s already rip-off-soft out there to preformat your bootleg ebooks with the proper line breaks, single lined spacing et al. I’ve been doing it myself longhand, Ctrl-C to Openoffice (which seems to do a bang up job first time, every time), saved, then into my library (sometimes as .PDF if I’m feeling posh).
DRM’d books are a waste of time for their owners, only a very small number of machine licenses per edition, no printing rights, limited amounts of text available for quotation. People will very quickly go to the intarwebs and download the OCR’d copies of the paper versions.
The only drawback to the OCR’d versions is the fact they’re OCR’d, as bad copying errors are rife in the books I’ve downloaded. Still, that’s only waiting for a few people to take a little time to proofread the copy to fix.
Book publishers are going to miss out very soon if they continue to use DRM. It’s just not worth the bother to buy legit with the DRM intact.
5 Justin Reese wrote:
with digital devises we can skip the simple novel on a screen (so web 1.0) and jump right into the web 2.0 paradigm? Interactive Fiction! The story develops before your eyes, and you have a say where the story goes… crowd-sourced, mass collaboration, interactive stories exactly what Storymash.com is already doing!
6 Pierre Lapointe wrote:
Martin, we believe that you are absolutely correct in challenging traditional book publishers. We believe that the book publishing revolution will not be driven by new devices but that it will be caused by new publishing business models.
Thanks to a friend who was frustrated when she tried to get a children book published we studied the children book publishing industry.
We saw a great opportunity in the fact that paper publishing is already a high risk and low margin activity, especially for children books. This means that there are thousands of authors dreaming of being published but unable to find a publisher willing to take the risk.
We believe that there are thousands of great books waiting to be discovered. Only web publishing can let the public decide which books truly deserve us using up trees to print them on paper.
We also believe that children books should be free and available anywhere anytime. There is only one way to accomplish this: e-books.
We also believe that DRM are an obsolete and unnecessary irritant in a Web 2.0 world. We feel that they protect more the middleman than the creators of the works. Business models that do not need middlemen do not need DRM.
Non DRM content means that you have to trust your audience. Something very difficult to do for old thinking businesses.
We also believe that the communities of the web 2.0 like businesses with a greater purpose than just profit and we added an important cause to our business model, literacy.
So we created a business model that shares the revenue equally between the book creators (1/3); a charity (1/3), Room to Read involved in equipping the developing world with literacy resources,see http://www.roomtoread.org; and that we had to build an extremely automated and efficient business that manages itself as we need to prosper with only the last 1/3 of our revenue.
This quite outside the box but we have built this business. You can see our beta at http://www.sharing-books.com. Children books’ authors can upload their creations in a few minutes. Their books are then submitted to volunteer librarians who approve or reject the books as appropriate for children. In less than 24 hours a new e-book (pdf) can be made available for free to children or their parents visiting our site.
We did not build this in a garage as you suggest, but we bootstrap like crazy and we only have a virtual office where our international team “works”.
With a burn rate that is ridiculously low, we can take our time and build new features that will enhance the reading experience using web 2.0 tactics.
Money will come in time from six different revenue streams that we are building and testing on our development site. Implementing these revenue streams will a lot easier for us than they would be for a paper publisher.
Margins? Margins are measured very differently in business models requiring a relatively small investment and with very low fixed and variable costs.
Finally we have to mention the environment. How many unsold books out of the newly printed books are wasted? 10%, 20%? Who is measuring the waste?
Indeed you are right Martin, it is time for change. Ours is a small and early example of new publishing business models that will challenge paper publishers.
This is an industry begging for disruption.
7 Lucille Hays wrote:
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8 Pekka wrote:
nu blev de fuckat
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