The Behaviour of Change

‘But are they ready for it?’

This is the question that can most often be heard in debates over the migration of books to ebooks. Changing consumer behaviour, as it is known in the VC trade, is one of the most complicated market factors to consider, because it presumes that what the producer or distributor is doing, is presenting something to the consumer in a way that has not been done before, and whether it succeeds depends on a variety of intermingling forces, such as technology drive, consumer spend, and the wider health of the retail sector (i.e., if book retailers are foreclosing, as is happening with Borders UK, then the punters must find other means of acquiring their books. Their hand is forced, in effect). That network of factors is already sparking an ebook land-grab and market push in the US, where publishers, retailers and tech companies are falling over each other to take a slice of the action – with ebook sales up 176 percent.

Here in the UK, it is, thus far, less of a land grab, more a tentative foray into territory unknown. The Kindle has only recently become available, and despite good publicity, ebooks such as Enhanced Editions’ Death of Bunny Munro app, have yet to achieve the sort of mainstream penetration that would really make the book world stand up and notice.

Elsewhere in the media sector, however, there are promising signs.  The Guardian newspaper recently released its own iPhone app, charged for a one-off price of £2.39, which provides readers with a constantly-updated, customizable version of the newspaper on the go. Theoretically, with several free app alternatives, and the fact that the Guardian newspaper is available free online, this app ought not to have worked. Yet it undoubtedly has, and is not only the top-selling paid App, but also the highest-grossing app on the store. The Telegraph, with its much-vaunted Euston Project, is also making significant forays into the monetizing of digital content.

Newspaper companies are not sitting around conference tables asking if their readers are ready for change. They are looking at the declining circulation figures, the poor ad rates, and reasoning that they either do this, or they die. The question is less, are consumers ready for ebooks as a standard, and more, how can we sell ebooks to them in a way that reflects their changing habits – and our own changing industry?

Which Mistake to Make

Publishers are in the habit of claiming that they wish to avoid the mistakes of their peers in the music business when it comes to the digitization of their content. By mistakes, of course they mean piracy and the protection of copyright. However they would do well to learn the other key lesson: engagment with new technologies, dialogue rather than alarmism. Embracing new ways to reach consumers, as opposed to busying themselves with the erecting of multiple barriers.

This was evident again when Random House Inc. CEO Markus Dohle decided to make the case that ebook rights belong to them even for books published before ebooks were in existence, which is a bit like claiming a patent on the chicken before the egg has hatched. (And, indeed, the US Author’s Guild has labelled it, appropriately, a ‘retroactive land grab‘.)

There is no headline figure of the amount of money the music industry has spent combating illegal downloads; only the statistic that some 95% of music, in the UK, is not paid for. But then one sees reports that Virgin Media’s music service, billed as the ‘world’s first unlimited MP3 download offering’, is still locked in negotiations with big record labels, who have anxieties about signing up to such a service.  Neither consumers nor technology providers will sit back and let the music industry have it their own way, because in today’s marketplace, both parties have a much stronger say in how much content costs, and the way it is delivered.

The discontent continues to grow. Stephen R. Covey’s move to shift ebook rights for two of his books away from his physical publisher and to Amazon.com, via Rosetta Books, shows that authors will not hang around waiting for publishers to ring-fence every last portion of their industry. Technology, consumers and producers are impatient; publishing conglomerates, fuelled by decline in the trade market and a corporate aversion to creative approaches to the publishing model, are the exact opposite.

By the time the music industry started to embrace digital models, such as Spotify, Last.fm and subscription services such as Napster, the damage had already been done. And still, outside of iTunes, MP3s are easier to download via BitTorrent sites than they are through licensed online stores. That failure to embrace the seismic shift in music production and consumption has seen the music industry in the UK decline from a £2.8bn market to £1.3bn in less than a decade.

Book publishing could shrink even more dramatically, if it does not shed its siege mentality.

High Street on a One-Way Road to Nowhere

The news that Borders UK has gone into administration will provide a new source of anxiety for a publishing industry still enduring a tough year, with Hodder & Stoughton the latest to announce redundancies. Much hand-wringing, typical of the business, will doubtless follow, apportioning blame to the supermarkets and online retailers for engineering a fractious discount war, or to Borders themselves for having the temerity to import a successful US franchise to the UK (like, that never worked with Starbucks or McDonald’s or the Gap or…oh, wait).

This is not an isolated case of retail misadventure. The Borders model worked in the US; the difference between it working there, and here, should not have come down to a difference in store rental prices, especially with a smaller land mass across which to transport product. Instead, consider this: fifteen years ago, there were any number of places you could go on the high street to buy music, from HMV or Virgin Megastores to the lingering Our Price outlets and the many independents found up and down the country. Today, there is only HMV. That is pretty much it, give or take. As music migrated online, so the ability of previously solid franchises to survive died too. And I cannot help but think that, as ebooks begin to come into their own, there is no space left on the high street. Supermarkets, of course, will continue to flourish because they offer supreme discounts (at huge cost to the publisher and the author). But there is no point mourning the decline of Borders, any more than there is wallowing in the role of Waterstone’s or the retreat of independents. Books are what they are. They become digital, you don’t need a physical high street. Just a digital one.

We are about to see just how durable physical books are. Is there place on the high street for the good old fashioned book?

I suspect not.

When Is a Discount Not a Discount?

Interesting post from personanondata about the gun-shy nature of price pointing in book publishing. Certainly as an acquiring editor, there is little debate or time spent discussing price points with sales directors; much more focused on the theoretical number of books sold to put on the P&L (you would have thought publishers would have recognized a more symbiotic relationship between the two factors by now…)

It is also an industry that behaves in the opposite direction to other media content producers. Take two of the mostly hotly-anticipated items released this year, one book and one video game. Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol and Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 are undoubtedly the biggest single-title releases in their respective industries of the year.

According to Nielsen Bookscan, over 550,000 copies of The Lost Symbol were sold in its first week of sale, taking £4.6 million in the UK alone. Now let’s compare that with Modern Warfare 2‘s UK takings: 1.23 million in its first day, grossing over £47 million in the UK.

That discrepancy is huge, and although game retail prices are higher than hardcover UK fiction books, it is only by a factor of 2 or 2.5 (£18-£20 for books versus £40-£45 for video games) – not at all representative of the massive gross revenue for the two products.

So where is the difference? The answer, of course, lies in discounting. First, Infinity Ward’s distributors, Activision, raised the bar by promoting Modern Warfare 2 at a price point of £54.99. Expensive? Yes, absolutely. But logical? Doubly so. If you have the hottest-anticipated product of the year, it makes sense to price it accordingly. Activision knew that every gamer (in other words, every man) simply had to purchase the game. Likewise, Transworld, Dan Brown’s publishers in the UK, could have been bolder and taken the step to up the hardcover price to £25. Would there have been a slight decline in sales at the higher price point? Given the anticipation of the release, it’s unlikely. But 500,000 books at £25 is better than 550,000 at £20.

So pre-launch pricing strategies differ dramatically. Then you have on- or post-launch pricing strategies, and again their are polar opposite approaches. Activision were shrewd enough to negotiate a discount with the supermarkets, but ringfenced it around a catch; the game was £25 ONLY if you purchased another Top-Ten listed title with it (so, add another £35 to the checkout till). Otherwise, you would have to suck it up and pay the Tesco.com listed price of £39.70. The UK’s other leading retailer, GAME, carries it at £44.99. The discount, excluding the supermarket offer, rarely hits deeper than 30%, with only Amazon nudging below that.

The Lost Symbol, on the day of its release, sparked a furious discount war that resulted in Amazon announcing the very same day it was selling the book at £4.99 against a list price of £18.99, a staggering 73% discount. (In contrast, Amazon retails Modern Warfare 2 at a discount of 42%). Such was the  industry-wide horror at the continued trend of deep discounting, of which The Lost Symbol seemed to be the nadir, that even John Grisham felt compelled to step into the debate and voice his bewilderment at the price wars regarding his own book, Ford County Stories, between Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target in the US.

There is an obvious need for discounting. It helps shift product and attracts consumer interest. But there is a watermark, and publishing has been creeping ever further towards plus-50% discounts for the past few years. This year the watermark has effectively been reached, and then crossed altogether. And yet, without a strong, non-supermarket sales platform, books will continue to be squeezed. GAME, along with a strong independent video game scene and the rise on online-purchases through Steam and other official download portals, offer a strong counterbalance to the supermarkets. Trade publishers do not have such an alternative outlet for their product. As the saying goes, if your book isn’t in the supermarkets, it ain’t gonna sell.

How Much is Too Much?

Publishers currently get away with multiple editions, at multiple price points - a strategy that does not easily fit with ebooks

Like several other industries (primarily other entertainment like film and music), book publishing’s commercial model has relied on the ability to sell the same product to consumers in a variety of different formats, each with its own unique price point.

So, Author A produces a manuscript. The publisher then takes said manuscript and staggers its release, based on format. First you get the hardcover edition, at a price tag circa £20. If the book is big enough to merit one, Author A may also see a trade paperback, in the dimensions of a hardcover, with a soft paperback cover, at £11-£13. Then follows the paperback true, at £6-£8. In time, the book may also work its way into BOGOFs, at a reduced package value of £3-£4.

That means, for successful books, author and publisher can hope to earn monies from four different sources (more if the book had subrights value, apart from foreign rights, such as first and second serialisation, large-print, book club, although admittedly in the past few years, income from these subright strata has significantly declined).

I think you can see what’s coming.

When you or I purchase a digital file, well…there is really only the electronic book. Noble pioneers such as Enhanced Editions (The Death of Bunny Munro, which I have discussed in a previous post) have tried to re-attach value to book content, but it is a process fraught with difficulty, notably because books are passive and static, and there is not the history of multi-media integration and crossover that exists with, say, music (Guitar Hero and its spin-offs, music videos, TV commercials) or videogames (movie franchises, interactivity).

The choice of format in the digital publishing world, has been taken away from content publishers themselves. In the print universe, the publisher declares what format the book will be and dictates a price point (well, a theoretical list price anyway, that at least has some bearing on the discount margin offered by the retailer).

In the digital marketplace, the format is the device. And the reading device is not controlled by the publisher. It’s outside their domain.

The current trend is for commercial publishers to list ebooks at or close to full retail price, whether that is the hardcover edition or the paperback, even on iPhone – where mobile versions of video games like NBA Live and FIFA are less than 25% of the full console price! It is a nonsensical, arbitrary pricing strategy, tied to the old-world print logic rather than the logic of the prevailing, that is digital, medium.

Publishers claim to be very keen to avoid the mistakes of the music industry at the turn of the century, when they suffered hugely at the eponymous ‘iPod’ moment. What I have found this means is, publishers are eager to avoid issues of piracy. On too many occasions, it extends no further. Perhaps they would consider another lesson from the music biz. MP3s, and therefore digital music, only really took off once the hardware and software (iPod and iTunes) had been aligned with an attractive price point for individual songs – less than a pound.

Can E-Authors Go It Alone?

Self-publishing used to be a dirty word.

Now it’s a buzz word.

There has been a lot of talk recently about the potentially redundant role of publishers in the ‘post-medium’ world.

United Agents’ Adam Martin, head of their interactive department, recently told the Bookseller that “There’s no good reason why a key author with fresh content should ask their publisher to make their app for them,” stressing that publishers would only out-source app development anyway. And then Cory Doctorow, who is more insightful than most when it comes to ebook content, claiming that the real pirates are in the digital departments of publishing houses. The implication being, publishers’ sense of ownership of digital content is preventing the ebook from reaching its true potential, owing to digital licensing systems. In other words, publishers should stop guarding the vault, unfold their arms and step aside. Then you have Harper Studio’s Bob Miller worrying about a contracting industry where there is more work for less people. Like David Cameron’s pledge for smaller government, reduced roles for publishers seem to be the current trend.

The role of publisher will unquestionably need redefining as the migration to digital-mobile reading platforms continues at pace. Tightly wound around that question is the re-focused roles within publishing houses. Already the title of ‘editor’ has become something of a joke, as editors rarely do any actual editing these days. In publishing conglomerates they are, with a few noble exceptions, merely extensions of the sales department, whose primary role is to generate sales copy, liaise with marketing departments and negotiate lower royalty rates and advances. These have always been part and parcel of an editorial position, but their importance has shifted in recent years, for reasons far too complex to expand upon here, but suffice to say, the watermarket was the mid-90s corporatisation of the major publishing houses, which brought with it economies of scale and critical profit margins for each and every title published. Sales teams used to haggling discount margins with buyers down the phone will have to readjust, as will marketing departments populated by punters who organize wine-and-cheese events than sophisticated augmented-reality programmes.

But just because the jobs that publishers do must change, and at least some of their current activities will soon be irrelevant, does that mean authors can go it alone, launch their own apps and by-pass the publisher? Especially if, given that editors by and large no longer edit, the old argument that publishers offered some kind of quality-control input into books, no longer applies? Some bright spark might argue that publishers contribute marketing budgets, which give a book a much better chance of success. The counter to that is that, even for the biggest publishing houses, the marketing spend is isolated to just a few headline titles, with the majority of books allocated little or even no spend at all. Not enough to fund a bus or Tube campaign, certainly nowhere near enough to get the kind of exposure that helps motivate sales. So, marketing and editorial add nothing. Sales clout? Well, many publishers, even the biggest ones, mean nothing to the man on the street, and are definitely not brands in the same way that other production houses, such as Universal or News International are. The only guarantee is that, with more overheads, more product and focus on only a few key titles, a lot of good content is not so much pushed under the carpet as neglected like an unwanted dog.

Three strikes and out, then? Perhaps, not quite. There is still something that publishers bring to the table: the ability for authors to piggyback on the shoulders of more familiar brands.

I have no empirical evidence to back this up, but my experience is that, in digital marketplaces, brand discrimination is on a par with, or even greater than, the high street. We are, by now, all familiar with the extremely long tail of the iTunes App store. Only a few leading products get headline status, with more than a few carrying some brand value that is instantly familiar to the user (Time Magazine app, NBA Live, FIFA, Nasa, movie apps, and so on). If you are with a major publisher and they put your App on iTunes, because of their own ubiquitous status, you are more likely to succeed, even with zero marketing spend or editorial feedback, than if you launched your own Joe Bloggs app. The App store is not the be-all of the ebook marketplace, but it is a good barometer of the type of environment authors and publishers are going to have to compete in over the coming years. With more than 75,000 apps available, and an increasing number of those book apps, it is inevitable that user selection is streamlined, with only the top few per cent gaining any significant traction. And herein lies the dilemma of ‘endless information’ marketplaces. With so much to choose from, people are naturally bewildered. And often they will settle on the most prominent selection, with a little nudge from the retailer. If you are self-published, my friend, as an App, there is a very, very small chance you could achieve any mainstream exposure. Just because you are on iTunes, doesn’t mean anyone is listening. Or reading.

Does Enhanced Really Add Value?

Quite a lot of attention in the mainstream media over Enhanced Editions, the new project headed by Peter Collingridge that has begun selling specially-enhanced versions of books on iPhone. First up is Nick Cave’s The Death of Bunny Munro, which comes complete with author videos and music, as well as a synched audiobook.

Is the Bunny Munro app at an attractive price point?

Now, as a pointer, I should start out by saying that I have not downloaded this app from the iTunes store. My reason for this is that, at just shy of £15, it seems very expensive for a non-physical, product for use on one specific device. I’m sure I am not the only one who feels this way, given that, as of 21.09.09, the title sits at number 10 on the Paid Books list. Apps, generally, sell for around the £0.59-£2.99 mark. Many others, of course, such as the Zippo lighter, are free. Some specialist apps may indeed charge more, such as the recent TomTom app which is the better part of £60. But that price point make sense, because spending £60 to convert your iPhone into a TomTom is much cheaper than spending £200-plus on an actual TomTom gadget. Likewise, £4.99 gets you The Secret of Monkey Island, or Madden 10, both super-cool videogames that are a much more attractive proposition than a book, however much audio-visual confetti is thrown over it.

To be fair, Collingridge does point out that the standalone audiobook version of Bunny Munro is actually double the price of the iPhone app. And one does applaud the company’s ambitions to add value to books at a time when the 70% discounting on the hardcover edition of The Lost Symbol is slashing value off of books, an argument that takes on particularly sharp focus when one considers that the iPhone version of Dan Brown’s latest bestseller is an astonishing £14.49, and includes such ground-breaking features as ‘Automatic bookmarking’ and ‘Table of contents’.

But I still believe the pricing is way off kilter. Sony and Amazon (publicly with the former, privately through aggressive discounting from the latter) have long been pushing for lower ebook prices. Sony, in particular, has long experience of the need for reasonably-priced software from its PlayStation experience, where it sought to keep videogames sub-£40, in comparison to Nintendo 64 games that came in at £55+ for the likes of Starwings and Zelda. You need software, or content, to motivate device sales, not vice versa. (And, for reference, the console market is littered with high-quality spec machines that tanked because the games were so limited – the Neo Geo, the Jaguar, the Dreamcast…)

Some editors and booksellers will inevitably argue otherwise, but I cannot help but think that the intrinsic value of the book is in the process of being scaled down. There are several causes behind this. First, as bookstores disappear and book product therefore sits in supermarkets and other non-specific retail outlets, they need to compete with non-book product (again, going back to iTunes apps, books look ridiculously expensive when you consider that a leading game is a third of the price). Second, the proliferation of words that are freely available in a variety of forms on the Internet has meant the exclusivity of books is no longer as potent. An example of this would be the decline of topical books; the many Michael Jackson memoirs and souvenir titles that flooded the market a few weeks after his death in the summer, mainly failed to live up to the big expectations and loudly trumpeted print runs. This is because there is more printed and online round-the-clock media for consumers to absorb, and so by the time such books are on the shelves, people have already read the full story elsewhere, and several times over. The emergence of blogs, free news sites and papers and shared content via YouTube and real-time search has eroded the preciousness of literary products. Wider cultural shifts, a drag on leisure time and spend, have also had their effects, though they are too multifaceted to properly examine in this posting.

Book values haven't been eroded. They have just been realigned.

The net result is a decline in book value, and I am afraid that this decline is irreversible. Book value will stop declining when it hits a point at which consumers will happily part with cash to purchase it. I think this will be somewhere around the sub-£5 mark. The Lost Symbol‘s discounting to £4.99 is the first step in this direction. It will not go unnoticed to those who browse the Books category on the App Store that many titles are free; and many more, £0.59. But these aren’t new titles, and they don’t have extra features, I hear you cry. Yes, but the critical question is this: is the value-difference between a free Complete Edgar Allen Poe and a Nick Cave title with some fanciful add-ons (though ones that, to my eyes, seem a little too close to the bundled DVD extras, like Director’s Commentary, that people rarely use), in the region of £14? I cannot help but think that is a bit of a gulf, and that publishers, if they really wish to create the biggest splash on smartphones (and by that I mean a level of sales that makes the rest of the industry sit up and take note), the price needs to be substantially lower.

Selling Used Ebooks?

Is there space for a pre-owned digital file market?

Do digital books have sell-on or trade-in value?
The question is an interesting one, not least because in some sectors of the entertainment market, pre-owned goods create sizable revenue streams for retailers. Consider that in the video game business, Eidos recently claimed that more than a quarter of video game revenue comes from the pre-owned area of the market (trading in old games for new ones, or buying pre-owned games for less than a brand new copy).
Consider also that charity outlets such as Oxfam sell a considerable number of book titles, with Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code its most donated title. Although there is very little data on the state of the UK used book market, in the US a study in 2006 found that used books constituted 8.1% of the total US book market, with 25% of adults and 40% of students acknowledging that they purchased pre-owned texts.
Pre-owned has, for some time, been a delicate issue. Whereas retailers such as Amazon argue that the availability of pre-owned products draws consumers back for repeat business, the publishers and content authors do not see it in such favourable terms, plainly because they do not receive a portion of revenue from the sale. (Although with margins on used books often as low as 2%, it does raise the question of what revenue, exactly, the publishers wish to take a slice of.)
When book publishers started to tentatively dip their toes into the digital waters, some saw it as an opportunity to manipulate an idealistic bookselling template – by pricing ebooks at the full list price (i.e. £18.99 and no discount) and by sandboxing the books with DRM, they hoped to foster a sort of bookselling utopia where title margins are not slashed via aggressive discounting – and where books cannot be sold on as pre-owned products, thus eating into revenue from potential new customers.
The first of those pillars has already fallen, with Amazon discounting most new ebooks down to $9.99 on Kindle, and manufacturers such as Sony acknowledging that ebook prices must fall in order to gain space in a congested digital consumer economy. It is surely not long until the second topples over too.
Already there is some discussion about the possibility of users selling on their music files via online ‘used marketplaces’. The catch is that the file would, during the listing process, suffer a drop in quality, or have a limited number of playbacks, or both. But by collaborating with publishers, distributors and content creators, such trading zones would allow everyone to take a share of the sale, in much the same way as, say, Apple takes a cut from apps sold on its iTunes App Store. Buying used files for as little as 17p would also sway further groups of people away from file-sharing, as the hassle of locating a file on IsoHunt and then downloading it barely outweighs the 17p cost of the file, even if it is for a lower-grade edition than the original MP3.
Ebooks, of course, are not subject to the same types of variable quality. But they could have an ‘expiry period’ when you acquire them second-hand. Suppose you are able to get a 50% discount on a new thriller, but the title automatically deletes itself from your handset and/or PC after 14 days. Some people would be fine with that proposition, whilst others would want a more permanent edition. As ever, the market would be free to choose. The prospect of having your ebooks deleted might sound unpalatable to some, and raise uneasy comparisons with Amazon’s ghostly deletions of George Orwell texts on its Kindle owners’ devices, but if the consumer is aware that this is the trade-off for paying a much smaller download fee, I don’t think it necessarily creates a security or trust issue.
We are still at the beginning of a switch to a near-total digital economy. There are, quite rightly, elements of our physical economies that will not, or cannot, quite port over to the digital realm. But the strength of online and mobile delivery systems is that there are more ways of packaging, and selling, content than in any physical retail space, if creativity is aligned with value of opportunity and consumer need. My instinct is that, if the physical retail market is a barometer of the desire for pre-owned goods, creating a second-layer pre-owned digital marketplace could lead to substantial alternative revenue streams for both digital publishers and across the wider online media economy.

Is Book Interactivity A Good Thing?

There are many assumed positives about ebooks and ebook readers, be they platform software or independent devices. (I say ‘assumed’ because the ebook is still at a nascent stage where many positives – and indeed negatives – are unproven, and will be until mainstream take-up occurs.) Some of them, instinctively, appear perfectly logical, such as the beneficial effects on the publishing world’s carbon footprint (the book industry being one of the main perpetrators in this regard, despite those fancy little Forest Foundation logos you see at the front of books). Others will work for some, but not others (annotated editions, where classic texts such as Moby Dick or Romeo & Juliet have key comments from scholars located in the margins, would work for high-school students as they perfectly assimilate two currently rather disparate elements – the main text, and then the teacher’s handbook notes).

However there is one assumed positive that I believe will turn out instead to be a negative. Interactivity is accepted, and indeed, encouraged in many of our daily technological engagements, but in ‘received media’ (i.e. music, movies, books) it has remained steadfastly on the fringes. Will.i.am made much of the fact that the new Black Eyed Peas’ album The E.N.D. was not an album in the traditional sense, but rather a free-form set of tracks that would be allowed to grow and evolve over time, in part through listeners creating their own versions of some of the songs. This is a neat idea, but it remains to be see how widely it appeals to the Peas’ undoubtedly large global fanbase.

In books, some observers are commenting that they foresee a future where ebooks in the most traditional sense of the word (i.e. purely a text file in digital format) will be replaced by multimedia stories. I am not convinced, for two primary reasons: quality control, and user passivity.

First was the phenomenon of the ‘interactive movie’ in the early 1990s. This was perpetrated by advances in video game console technology at the time, specifically with the first next-gen consoles, and some developers tried their hand at creating movies where you, as the player, would control the outcome of actions at certain key points, by pressing a button or solving a puzzle. The most infamous of these was ‘Night Trap’ for the Sega Genesis CD, a game that contained real girls being pursued by laughable masked bad guys in a big house, and inevitably led to a Daily Mail campaign to try and ban it, and a Congressional hearing in the US.

All of which overlooked the fact the game was terrible, and efforts to create ‘interactive movies’ were rapidly abandoned, with developers instead focusing on more holistic game-universe environments, leading to the creation of the near-real-world landscapes in games like Grand Theft Auto IV and Halo.

Interactive movies didn’t work because the ‘movie’ featured appalling acting and a wafer-thin plot, and people are used to consuming movies passively, rather than reactively. Buying popcorn and talking through commercials is part of the cinema experience. Deciding when Brad Pitt kills Hitler is not.

If ebooks try to imitate other multimedia they will fall flat on their face, because unless the publisher is able to call on a multi-million dollar budget, their attempts at the audio-visual and control elements will fare poorly when compared to specialist interactive content on, for example, XBox 360 or iPhone. And they will be dealing with an audience that expects a passive experience. People do not buy iPhones or Wiis expecting to sit there and do nothing – they want to be actively engaged with the system. But you do not expect the same level of interactivity on story-media, because what you are paying for is the story – that is the craft. Where is the value in a top-notch Bourne thriller if you have to influence the story? The feeling you’re left with, ultimately, is one of being ripped off. You didn’t get the story, nor did you get a Grade A quality production.

There is another warning note about ebook ‘interactive content’. One of the main assumed positives of DVDs when they were first launched was the extra content they provided – director’s voiceovers, out-takes, sketches, makings-of, and so forth. But how many of us buy a DVD and never, ever, listen to or watch the extra content?

Square Pegs

Round-hole distribution and delivery systems require round-hole content. But do enough publishers realize this yet?

Review of the Kindle DX in the Guardian today (http://bit.ly/ArNyp) throws up two interesting points regarding content and its distribution or sale.

First, although the DX is a larger model than the Kindle 2 (and weighing in at 535g, it had better), it does still have a restrictive screen size in comparison to, say, a Berliner newspaper format. This point is noted dryly by the reviewer, as a negative point. But it got me thinking: when you have a new technology delivery system, as the Kindle or the iPhone, there will inevitably be a conflict between replicating fully the old technology system (i.e. the newspaper format, or the book, or whatever printed word system was in place before) on the new device. There is a clear tension between reproducing an old experience on a new system, and generating a new experience for a new system.

My instinct is that the new experience will always beat the old. There are two simple reasons for this. One, despite the infinite potential of technology to better our lives, it is almost impossible to reproduce an experience like-for-like from a non-digital system to a digital system. They are different worlds, with different rules and codes and consequences. (A tangential example of this would be in the way that, say, the best sports video games do not exactly replicate real-world equivalent in sports, but create their own sets of rules and behavioural patterns.) Furthermore it would be an awful waste of technological resources. Technology is not for replicating, it is for generating and creating anew. Experience has shown that early adopters of new technologies are interested in what new systems can do, not what they can’t. No one bought an iPhone and said, ‘You can’t send picture messages on this,’ because everyone was too busy downloading Shazam and Tap Tap Revenge.

Publishers and authors are, generally speaking, not enamoured by Amazon, or Google, or the Kindle. They prefer the cosy, quite pathetic Sony Reader or Borders Elxon (perhaps because they are partnered or produced by old-fashioned book retailers and therefore less threatening). They complained vociferously about the text-to-speech function on the Kindle 2, to the point where the Authors Guild intervened and Amazon decided to make the feature optional (http://bit.ly/5m2qJ). In fact, as the DX review puts it, the speech function is, well, functional rather than human, and the notion that audiobooks would suffer as a result of this is down to paranoia and fears about publishers losing their grip on the market. Already at the mercy of the supermarkets, their power is wilting. It used to be that publishers could ‘make’ a book through sheer willpower and enthusiasm, but these days the sales forces of the major publishing houses are quieter, less optimistic, more cautious zones.

This is because they are still trying to make a model worked that dates back to 1988, i.e. before the Internet, before Amazon, before social networking, before smartphones and mobiles, before the iPhone, before everything that has happened since changed the rules forever. The one thing they did right was identify a new market in supermarket casual shoppers, but this was down to a handful of highly talented and savvy editors, not publishing supremos or MDs.

The rules of the game have changed, and it is no longer a question of complaining that the DX can’t ‘handle’ a full-size newspaper that is inconvenient to carry and read anyway, or that reading Martina Cole on a mobile doesn’t quite work. You can’t squeeze square pegs into round holes. You have to say, well, there’s only going to be one winner in this battle and that’s the round-hole technology devices. Either we change ourselves and start making round pegs, or we die. The publishers that recognise this are the ones that will flourish.