A little bit ago I wrote a kind of iPhone app wishlist for independent publishers. Well, it looks like Indiebound made good on their promise. Their new iPhone app (in the U.S.) is the exact right step booksellers should be taking. For more on the genesis of the project, here’s a great overview at Follow The Reader.
How to Get Indies in on the iPhone Game
on 24 March, 2009
Hello everyone, Ryan again from New York. I hope this entry’s not too U.S.-centric! I know little about the UK scene, so who knows if this applies on both sides of the Atlantic.
After reading Adam Hodgkin’s take on the Google/Amazon/Apple ebook shakeout (and Mike Shatzkin’s response), I thought about what’s lost here: Browse. The Kindle, the Amazon iPhone app, the Sony reader all work fine if you know what you want to read next. They fail when you just want to see what’s out there and snoop around.
Of course, this isn’t a new argument. Amazon’s webpages encourage plenty of recommendations via homophily, and brick-and-mortars will always excel at getting you to walk in looking for one book and leaving with three. (Much to my wallet’s chagrin.) If we must find a parallel in the music world, think about the number of new music you hear about through iTunes’ homepage vs. music blogs.
Where do the indies come in, you ask? Here’s my fantasy: what if an outfit like Indiebound, which links U.S. booksellers together, were to develop an iPhone app? They’d sync your favorite bookstores from your Indiebound profile, and import the weekly/monthly staff picks. You’d somewhat address the browse issue, sure, with one extra advantage: at the end of each staff review you would hit the “Reserve” button and instantly have a copy put on hold at that bookstore. The savvier indies like St. Mark’s Bookshop could tie it into their ecommerce and provide the option to ship. (The ultra-savvy indies in certain locations might even be able to deliver the copy to your door, though of course this isn’t scalable for most cases.)
So the indies connect their online and offline audiences without creating new content, customers can extend the bookstore experience beyond the brick-and-mortar, and everyone finds out about new books.
What does everyone think? Too blue sky?
Pan Macmillan and GoSpoken
on 26 February, 2009
Pan Macmillan are going into GoSpoken, the mobile reading platform. As regular readers of this blog will know, we are big fans of mobile reading and believe it has a hugely significant role in the future of how we read. Our lives are becoming more and more device centric while our devices get better and better. Moving in early with mobile distribution makes sense and we look forward to expanding our mobile list.
All our ebooks and a significant proportion of our audiobook titles will be available. You can download the press release below and read coverage in the Bookseller.
lament
on 20 February, 2009
… the dizzying range of easily accessible material on the internet conspires with a lack of editorial guidance to make web reading a disjointed experience that works against the sustained concentration required for serious reading.
There is an interesting piece in the London Review of Books from Colin Robinson about the impact of global economic woes on publishing. As the byline has it, “Colin Robinson until recently worked for a large publisher in New York.” He outlines the pressures facing the principal cast of the publishing ecosystem (to mix my metaphors), including writer, editors, producers, retailers, and readers.
Two Presentations
on 23 January, 2009
Recently I gave too little presentations and thought that the time had come to stop keeping these things secret. The first was at the Digital Forum of the Publishers Association and the second was at the awesome Bookcamp 09.
The former presentation is fairly straightforward and deals with how publishers can and should be getting more involved with social networks. It was originally delivered at a conference in Russia so is primarily visual, hence I’m not really sure quite how well it works online. Oh well.
The latter is a more of an academic, off the wall, blue skies thinking presentation. It was enormous fun to write and allowed me to go back to my glory days talking about people like Jacques Derrida (no, don’t groan, he’s cool, honest). The presentation basically looks at how our culture is turning back into an oral culture, how even text is becoming like oral communication and asks what this means for the novel and the book.
Any questions feel free to get in touch!
Presentations below the fold.
Myopia: A Tale of Two Companies for 2009
on 8 January, 2009
In 1960 the economist Theodore Levitt wrote an influential essay in the Harvard Business Review entitled “Marketing Myopia”. In it he discussed the parlous decline of the US railways in the twentieth century. Decimated by the widespread use of automotive transit, by the 1960s the railways were a shadow of their former selves- broken and bankrupt.
Levitt argued that there was no fundamental problem with the railways contrasting the States with Europe, where to this day railways are thriving. Rather there was a problem with the attitudes of the railway companies. They had always seen themselves to be in the railways business and focussed their efforts as such. According to Levitt this was their mistake- had they realised from the beginning that what they were in was the transportation business they would have been much better prepared to respond to and piggyback on innovations like the car, the lorry, the highway and the airplane. In short, had they not had a bad case of “marketing myopia” they might have been in a much better state.
In contrast take Nintendo. In a recent article for the London Review of Books John Lancaster looks at the cultural status of computer games. He highlights the history of Nintendo as an interesting casestudy. Founded in 1880’s Kyoto, Nintendo originally produced hanafuda (Japanese card games). Throughout their history though they refused to define themselves as makers of card games- they saw themselves as facilitators of play, and so had a constantly evolving product set while maintaining a consistent purpose. It meant they were always ideally positioned to exploit new advances and could comfortably react to change. Moreover it has led to them being in the vanguard of innovation; just when their competitors Sony and Microsoft were beefing up their consoles for the hardcore gamer, spending mega bucks turning games machines into omnipotent media playing nodes, Nintendo re wrote the rule book.
The DS and the Wii, with their intuitive gestural interfaces and ludic game design, perfectly fit what legendary Nintendo games designer Shigeru Miyamoto sees as the defining goal of Nintendo: to create products grandparents and grandchildren can play together. Both consoles were colossal risks for Nintendo; both paid off handsomely.
There appears to be a fairly obvious moral for publishers in this story. There are certainly those like Booksquare who argue that digital is a new market, a new market in which publishers will have to redefine their approach in order to succeed. In 2009 I don’t think anyone is seriously pretending that this digital stuff will go away and no one really has to worry.
For me the real issue is that we obviously cannot be the railways. We cannot be myopic in ignoring the challenges, opportunities and changes of the internet and digital distribution. Here is the but- But neither is it realistic for publishers to be Nintendos. As much as we can say that we are curators of stories and information, people involved in the entertainment/education business pure and simple, we simply don’t have the scale, the expertise and the financial muscle to become full on web platforms, film studios, arts infrastructure bodies or whatever else moving beyond print matter might entail. Publishers cannot jeopardise their core operations by completely losing focus.
The question, then, for 2009 is how publishers can effectively steer the line between being a railway and being a Wii. Between myopic decline and radical re-engineering. It means doing this in a dire economic climate, with limited resources, managing what we do best with what we’ve not done before.
We’re working on it.
go anywhere, be everywhere?
on 15 October, 2008
BBC Have Your Say is moving out into the wilds of the web and joining the conversation where it happens – link [via Peter Brantley]
This is surely a significant move that publishers should watch with interest. The BBC is testing the waters of not hosting the discussion.
One of the answers to MBQ (My Big Question: why visit a publisher’s website?) contains ‘discussions and user generated content’ in it somewhere. If the best stuff about your book of the moment can be easily found, and neatly aggregated, on the publisher’s site then surely surely surely that’s a good reason to visit the site. Right?
Perhaps, though, if the publisher joins the conversation you’re already having on Phreadz or Qik or Twitter, then that is a good reason to visit their site – to find out more about the book at source… to see what else the publisher’s saying about other books… and so on.
There are real advantages, too, for the publisher in creating and stimulating discussion (i.e. ‘undertaking customer engagement’) on other people’s servers where the storage and serving of the content is someone else’s problem (sorry, can’t help being pragmatic, as ever). The stock disadvantage to this, of course, is that you’re not as directly in control of your own content anymore, or people’s interaction with it. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
The point: joining the conversation, whereever and however it’s happening, is an open impulse; it is a release of control and a shifting of roles. And I think another answer to MBQ, if not the answer for a while at least, is that people will come to your site if you make it into a purple cow [tips hat to Seth Godin] – shift the roles, change the content, flip the structure over, and generally do things in a new, unexpected way that connects with readers.
Crunched: the Next Generation
on 13 October, 2008
Everyone seems to be writing about how the economic crisis will affect their small part of the world, so I think I should do to, especially now that Robert Peston has transcended to a higher state of being and will be unlikely to comment on ereaders. Usually this would be a little too obvious but the reason I felt compelled to write is that at the exact same time half the world’s banks spontaneously combusted the next generation ereaders emerged like new born defenseless hatchlings into the cruelty, pain and danger of the grown up world. Awww.
iRex announced the new iLiad. It’s big, (10.2″ big), shiny, comes with a touch screen and costs what, even in times of boom and plenty, would be considered alot: $849 with wifi (not 3G). So in the UK probably £849. Without wireless. Still, designed with the business user in mind it looks good and might work.
Then Sony announced their new reader, the PRS 700. And, praise be, it comes with a touch screen, looks shiny and new, keeps the cool leather case; alas, shame be upon it, there is no wireless connectivity. Price point = $399, you do the maths for the UK version.
If all this excitement wasn’t enough leaked pictures started appearing of a new, shiny, sexier(ish) Kindle, making a perfect storm of new ereaders that between them mark round 2.0 in the long hard road to flawlessly desirable ereaderdom, even if we don’t know whether the Kindle pictures are real or not. For fun we can assume they are.
The irony is of course that every economic chart currently resembles a cliff or at least the bad side of a relativelty steep mountain. There has been much talk of how publishing might be “recession proof“; of how sales are up due to Super Thursday and the impending Frankfurt Bookfair will be as big, glitzy and money spendingly awesome as ever. To my mind such talk sounds a bit like the commercial equivalent of waving a big red flag at a big angry bull, but no matter. Book publishing has always survived previous recessions roughly in tact so it’s fair to assume the same will happen this time round. We can assume that demand for books will not be as elastic as for Ferraris and second homes in Hampshire.
All of which might suggest that there is great potential for ebooks at this juncture, as there is a flexibility inherent in the format that allows for greater responsiveness to market conditions and experimentation in commercial models. All of which is fine, but won’t really matter if nobody buys any ereaders, the principle consumption vehicle for ebooks. Articles on consumer spending are a plethora of dark clouds and the ereaders, as a reasonably large discretionary spend on a unique piece of functionality, are caught up in the high street maelstrom. All three of the ereaders announced may fall into a category of goods savaged as the credit crunch carries on crunching with the result that ebook forecasts have to be revised for 09. Demand is, one would think, fairly elastic for an iRex iLiad.
It comes at a sensitive time for digital publishing as the industry finds a toehold in reader’s imaginations and retailer websites. This is an area of publishing that has never experienced a recession and divining what impact it might have is like guessing which bank will fail next- a matter of luck as much as judgement. Charlie Stross has written that no one knows what a web 2.0 recession looks like. Not a 20th century one seems a safe answer, if such an answer can be said to exist. Credit to the manufacturers they have all, by the looks of it, upped the stakes in terms of the quality and functionality of the next gen readers. We have to respond in kind by making sure that our products are available and of high quality- books that are worth investing in, worth skipping a restaurant and staying in for and easy enough for anyone to do so. Ebooks have to be as good as their print cousins- and better.
The long winded message of this article can be summarised fairly easily: to ensure that the just announced next gen of ereaders doesn’t fail, manufacturers will have to seriously consider cutting price points in reaction to the (real and anticipated) collapse of consumer demand as a result of the crunch. While ebooks will be robust enough without it, they could really start kicking ass if we get a bit creative.
Apologies to anyone immeasurably bored of hearing the words “credit crunch” and “economic crisis”. You are not alone.
