Brave New World

Is There a New eBook Club Model?

2012-02-14T15:50:00.006Z

As ebooks diverge in many different directions we find that we are often still left with the same 'buy to own' business model. We have long argued for ebook rentals not just for libraries, but in general and believe that the market is ripe for a 'Netflix'or 'Spotify' for ebooks.

Ballantine books today have launched a new digital platform 'booquo' and claim a wide range of Castilian ebooks for their Spainish community. The service will be available via a Digital cloud based Library Club on monthly subscription. The cost is reported to be 9.90 euros per month and entitles "a monthly reading of digital books available" and the basic book club. Those who are already members of the book Club, will only pay a fee of 7.90 euros.

However our interest soon waned as we read the usual book club demands that you purchased a book every catalogue and thought what a wasted opportunity. When will the dying breed of book clubs that use the old ‘BCA’ tired and dated model learn?

Imagine, a ebook club which had hundreds of thousands of ebooks, which you could read free on a monthly subscription. If you wanted to buy the book you pay the rate card and it’s yours, if you just want to read it you could do so online. You could be restricted to a small number ‘free reads’ per month and if you wanted more you pay a higher subscription. The service could carry advertising and royalties would be based on loans and advert revenues. It could even be multi media and carry audio, films, music and games.

Some will say that we are dreaming, but I bet we aren’t the only ones.

Digital Library Fallout Continues

2012-02-10T11:15:00.006Z

The above poster comes from Sarah Houghton, who is the Acting Director for the San Rafael Public Library, Calofornia and writes a blog Librarian in Black. In frustration to the current non supply of some major publisher's ebook titles, Houghton had posted the notice on her library wall.

Yesterday, Penguin added fuel to the debate when it announced that they have effectively shutting down their ebook relationship with the major digital public library service provider, Overdrive. We find ourselves now asking many questions about the state of digital public library support from publishers and the thorny issue of the ebook rent and loan business models.

Why are some refusing to allow public libraries to loan out their ebooks which are freely available to buy in the market? Why has Penguin withdrawn its ebooks from the Overdrive digital library service? Why has a prominent group of major publishers refused to supply ebooks to public libraries? Why did HarperCollins previously invent a rule that said ebooks wear out after the same number of loans as their physical counterparts and must be bought again? Why are some insisting that library lending has to be done physically in the library and not over the networks?

If we look at the public library we see the friction many predicted between publishers and the libraries over digital content. You can wrap it up many ways, but at the heart lies commerce and the challenges of download to buy versus loan for free. If libraries seize the opportunity to loan ebooks and appeal to a wider and larger audience they could undermine today’s revenue streams. If they don’t seize the digital opportunity and remain wedded in the physical world they could spiral into obsolescence.

Some would suggest that libraries charge for ebook rentals and also sell downloads, but does this work against their public principles. Some would ask why publishers aren’t renting books out direct themselves and why we are still wedded to the ‘ownership’ model in a virtual world? If there were to be a significant shift in market demand, do publishers have rental models that would hold water?

Some like Bloomsbury Online are quietly forging library relationships and moving forward, whilst others appear to be standing firm behind the barricades and not moving.

The Overdrive service is not new and it is the dominant provider to public libraries today, not just in the US, but increasingly in many countries. The libraries like the retailers have left it to third parties to invest and provide the common platform and repository. Was this wise, – probably not? Was it inevitable given the funding, – probably? However, we are were we are and it isn’t going to change for some time.

The tragedy is that these battles are being fought in public at a time when we all try to help reposition the public library in the face of disruptive change, spending cuts and even closures. It would appear to be more about reacting to change, not from a collective, but a singular perspective.

Some of our other recent posts on this subject:
Can eBooks meet the Changing Social Demand? Nov 28th 2011
Whose going to capture the various library worlds? June 20th 2011
Amazon Takes Another Step to Join the Publishing Pieces May 5th 2011
Amazon Overdrive Potentially Lock Up Libraries April 20th 2011
Freeing eLibraries to Compete? March 15th 2011
Digital Library Madness: 26 and You Are Out February 27th 2011
'Public Libraries: Back to the Future'. Brave New World December 2010

'Digital Drop Ship' Logistics and Commerce

2012-02-09T11:31:00.002Z

When we look at the book supply chain in its most simplistic form we find; authors, who create the work; Publishers, who acquire the rights, develop, hone, produce and take the work to market; Retailers, who promote and sell it and finally, the consumers who buy and read it. The Physical book supply chain was always made complex by the sheer numbers of unique titles, from thousands of publishers, which were sold through thousands of retailers. Consolidated publisher distribution and third party wholesalers helped aggregate the bulk, but it remained a ‘many to many’ and crowded supply chain. Some saw this as a weakness, but in reality, it was a strength, which despite its inefficiencies, it gave us great diversity.

In the late 90’s online bookselling saw both publishers and even retailers handing over their internet sales and customers to new internet entrants. It was amazing to see even large retailers initially prepared to duck out of the internet and align their internet fulfilment with the likes of Amazon. Some woke up and started to create their own internet offers as they realised that it was just another channel and it was their customers and margin that they were handing over. Others were happy to sell someone else’s range, through a customised generic ‘white label’ websites and just collect the commission on sales and many publishers developed their own web sites but still often handed over the fulfilment and sales to others such as Amazon.

Around 2006 the ebook re-emerged. It was now driven by a new breed of eink devices and a digital network capable of supporting media. Many decided it was too expensive, too difficult, or too risky to compete and again handed over the trade to a handful of digital aggregators/retailers. Many just sat on the fence and waited to see if it would happen. As a result we now find the ebook world is effectively serviced through a handful of digital aggregators which include the ever agile and market dominant Amazon. As a rule aggregators do not link to other aggregators to retrieve files, but instead demand all files reside in their own repository.

Some would suggest that the ebook supply chain just got very simple and cut out the majority of bookstores. Ventures such as Indiebound offer bookstores the white label solution, but the reality is, that with the exception of the likes of Barnes and Noble in the US, the retailers did little to embrace and invest in ebooks.

Many publishers were happy to create ebooks and were happy to mix direct marketing with indirect fulfilment.

We now even have an ‘honesty box’ sales environment were publishers no longer count the units out the back door. They hand over a single file and then rely on sales reports from others on how many units actually shipped and at what price.

A few however adopted a different approach. This separated the different activities associated with the sale on similar principles to the ‘drop ship logistics’ that is used by many in the physical and internet world. Here the retailer can sell anything from anybody. The customer finds the ebook at the online store pays for it and their cash transaction is processed locally. When cleared the transaction is automatically transferred via web services to the digital repository holding the title with instructions to ‘pick, pack and dispatch’ it electronically to the consumer. Once downloaded the retailer is notified of the completion and the whole process is completed all in real-time.

Some would suggest that is what happens today and to a degree they would be right. However, the fulfilment is often by one aggregator. In 2007 we created ‘digital drop ship’. This could use a combination of digital repositories many hosted by the publishers. The web service coding and messages were standard and the location of the file could be determined either locally at the retailer or remotely at a clearing centre. The same infrastructure could also support library and other rental services.

We could go on but the point is that the publisher were still able to send files as they do today to the half dozen major retailers and then service the rest themselves. They effectively be counted the downloads out of their own backdoor and controlled their assets. Importantly they now enabled anyone sell their ebooks, with no commercial risk, retaining tight control over their inventory and never letting a single unit out the door until it was sold.

Some may say we are dreaming, but it exists today.

Today we find the power in the ebook supply chain is shifting firmly into the centre - to the aggregators. As we have seen these then can be or become retailers, restrict the market to their white label offers and importantly control the channel. They could also become publishers themselves, initially in self publishing and later by their own imprint or perhaps acquisition of other’s lists. We have also seen the movement away from devices and towards the ‘closed platform’ often with its own DRM and file format nuances. The likes of Amazon, Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble platforms all close down the opportunities for others and have become the new ebook ‘king makers’.

We are not saying that ebook consolidation is bad, but we are saying that it creates new challenges, risks and opportunities and perhaps its time to consider some of these before we sleepwalk into a position we may feel uncomfortable wakening up in.

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

2012-02-08T11:47:00.003Z

A friend shared this with us and although it is 14 minutes long it is a simple story about the joys of books and reading. Enjoy

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

Are Sony's Days in eBooks Numbered?

2012-02-02T20:23:00.003Z

Sony once aimed its sights at being a big player in digital publishing. It created its own ebook format, was one of the major drivers behind Adobe updating the neglected ACS3 with the ACS4 DRM service, were the early backers of the ePub format and of course introduced several eink ereaders. It even entered into one of those ‘exclusive trade deals’ with UK retailer Waterstones. However it failed to deliver the list, didn't not develop a plausible platform and lost the eink world to Kindle. Some five years on and how times have changed. Sony were around at the begining of the digital reading chapter, but this may be one ebook that will remain unfinished and is in danger of slipping from the front list and going out of digital print.

Sony’s problems would be small if they were just about their ill fated venture into ebooks. However, today Sony have just announced a 159 billion yen ($2bn) net loss for the last quarter of 2011 and have slashed their full-year forecast to a loss of 220 billion yen ($2.8bn). Hard times, require hard action and Sony have reacted and announced that in April ex-PlayStation exec, Kazuo Hirai will take over from Howard Stringer as Sony president and CEO.

The reasons for the challenges facing Sony are as many as the different markets they deal in. They include the implications of the losses it made on selling its S-LCD display shares to Samsung. Also there is the cost of the migration of Sony Ericsson back to Sony with the associated creative accounting on deferred tax assets and a fickle electronics market,where Samsung have eaten into Sony’s once strong market share and it has dropped some 15.7% in the last quarter. Then we have the floods in Thailand a strong Yen and a sales drop of some 24.4% in its consumer products and services sector. Even Sony Music and Sony Pictures didn’t lift the gloom with Picture only registering a modest profit and Music seeing a sale year on year decrease of some 11.7%.

Its hard to see Sony making a comeback into digital publishing and its offer would require some serious investment and change of fortunes at a time when the business obviously reqires to focus on its core operations.So as Waterstones look set to announce another partner is Sony's ebook venture at the end of the road?

Kobo Unplugged

2012-02-01T15:42:00.002Z

The one thing that you can say about Kobo is that they remain focused and determined to forge an international offer and pit themselves in the face of some formidable competitors. Their international strategy was eloquently conveyed by their evangelist and Vice president of content, sales and merchandising , Michael Tamblyn, speaking at the Digital Book World conference in New York. Michael said that when you start from Canada you have no option but to go International.

Michael’s presentation is good and well worth a listen and brings home some of the realities of managing a tight roll-out to many countries and the need to segment operations and stick to a template approach. They aim to establish themselves in 12 more countries this year, which may not sound that ‘gun ho’, but is a country a month and will get harder as they break out of the English speaking and ‘western’ markets.

However, international growth, which is heavily reliant on ‘partners’, can have its challenges. Last weekend we visited a large WHS store and saw first hand how a partner can let you down badly. Getting some retailers to treat it better than just an instore franchise is itself a challenge, but this was in what was a ‘hotch potch’ of a ‘pick and mix’ store that frankly made the old Woolworths look good and was hardly aligned to the messages Kobo needs to get across. Yesterday, Asda announced that they would be selling the Kobo touch reader for £87 which is just under the Amazon Kindle price of £89, which enjoys the Amazon brand and is backed by significant mainstream advertising campaign. Simply relying on spot buys, bin end POS and a comparable price isn’t exactly pushing the boat out. We have already seen how the old Waterstones was unable to retail ebook readers in store. Its one thing to have retail partners, its often another thing altogether to control their representation of your offer.

Michael presents some very interesting figures for Kobo sales of self published titles in various countries. Self publishing represents some 7% of US unit sales, this rises to 8% in Asia, 9% in South America, 10% in Australia, New Zealand and Europe and 14% in Africa. He explains some of the reasons behind the local variances but the percentages are somewhat higher that we expected and demonstrate that the opportunity that is potentially starting to blossom under the ebook umbrella.

Michael also shares some interesting insights on local and global pricing which demonstrate how many publishers still see physical and digital pricing locked together.

Kobo are now within the Japanese giant Ratuken, which will give them better backing and they know that they will need it as they race to get themselves established in many countries and across all the continents. This is about raising brand awareness and credibility just as much as it is about service. Whilst Barnes and Noble still today remain largely unknown outside of publishing and the US market, Kobo now has a better street profile in a growing number of countries. It will be interesting to see how the Kobo brand stands up to the potential Waterstones’ adpotion of B&N’s Nook and how they both compete with Amazon in the UK later this year.

To hear Michael's 15 minute presentation

Related posts
Kobo Steps up to go Global (Nov 2011)
Can Kobo Win at the Races? (oct 2011)
Kobo Has to Follow (June 2011)

Lost in Transition

2012-01-31T14:17:00.003Z

The ISBN, ISSN, BIC and BISC codes and jacket images have all helped the trade, but do they still matter as much in the digital and direct marketing era?

It’s as if we have all been on a constant never ending journey to improve the contextual information and identification of works. Everyone in publishing today understands the relevance and power of good structured bibliographic information. This helps us search, find, validate and select the right work, but is this still enough in today’s consumer driven market?

Today we use the likes of Google to search, Wikipedia to search deeper, Amazon and ABE to search for books and the likes of email, Facebook and Twitter to communicate. The reality is that they are what many of us use and so are pivotal to any marketing strategy. Does the consumer know or even care about the ISBN and would they know the BIC and BISC category codes?

Today we have to start to think about the user, how they want to find things, how they socialise and how they can validate the relevance of what they find.

The emergence of the jacket image, which really started with the likes of Amazon in the 90s, has now become a de facto standard. Whether we like it or not, users can and will often immediately, ‘judge a book by its cover’. It’s hard to imagine selling physical let alone digital trade books over the internet today without the jacket, but is that enough?

We all dabbled with ‘search inside’, but even Amazon often got this wrong and their ‘surprise me’ page could often turn out to be a ‘reject me’ one. First chapters were not fully exploited as a free teaser and the page selection experience was and remains somewhat inconsistent and haphazard across the market. It is interesting that academic publishers often understood the key pages to sell their books, but others left it to the arbitrary, ‘pick 10% from anywhere’, which could include front matter and even blank pages!

A product description, (blurb) and readers comments and their ratings often now accompany an individual title, but again more as filler than a driver and are often restricted to one site. Some would also suggest that some consumer comments, read like they had been written by a marketing person, an author and not a consumer.

We have seen the author video which often was too long and also tended to play to the converted. We have seen the emergence of other video reviews from retailers and fans but these often languish on YouTube looking for a home. Youtube is as valid a promotion platform as any, but how many use it and what information is tagged?

Google gave us the ultimate search across the content itself but this often was only as good as the term used and the pages rendered. How many jacket images and illustrations are correctly tagged, promoted and linked through the likes of Google images?

So as we move into the ‘enhanced ebook’ world and the content itself can explode into different media, how do we package that contextual wrap such that it is contestant across the market, engages consumers and sells books, be they physical or digital? Esther Dyson once said that the key to the Internet was being able to find that digital needle in the digital haystack. We would suggest that we haven’t found it yet. We may also have to rethink what we do and consider a revolution not a gentle evolution.

Some would suggest we adopt the DOI identifier but they would be as foolish as when it was first muted in the late 90s. Some would suggest that every form of a rendition is given a unique ISBN and that would appear to miss the mark. Some would suggest it more important that we are able to group renditions and present choice than divide them and offer a disjointed picture.

Finally, we are moving from a front list bestseller mass market to one that sells all books, in all forms and has a distinctively long tail. How do we revisit those long forgotten titles and ensure that they too have visibility?

It is important that we recognise that context needs to be uniform and available to all across the market. So what would you see as the contextual information of tomorrow?

iPhone Enlargements!!

2012-01-26T09:29:00.006Z

Every now and then we see something we didn't expect but that when we think about it is obvious.

Today we found a host of iPhone accessories which demonsrate why the likes of Kodak have left the room.

60X Magnification Mini Digital Microscope with LED Head Light and UV Light for iPhone 4 just $14.49

Long Focal Lens Tripod Set for iPhone 4S/4 Just $29.99

Telescope 6X Zoom Camera + Case Holder for iPhone 4 / 4S Just $11.67

Perhaps the immortal Mae West would now have said,'Is that a iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?'

Click to see more from miniinthebox.com

So who is an ePublisher?

2012-01-25T10:55:00.002Z

Although they varied with the market sectors they served, being able to defining a book publisher used to be fairly easy. The same could be said of film, broadcasting, music, games publishers. However digital has the capability to change these well defined and understood divisions and not only explode the physical media container and constraints, but also the content itself and the roles of those who produce it.

Last week’s over hyped Apple event did one crucial thing – it brought home the reality that an ebook is just a mere digital container that can accommodate many different forms of digital content. Yes, we all knew this, but now everyone, everywhere can clearly see it. This not only has the potential to change what we see as an ebook but also creates a new awareness and potential market demand for something different.

The ‘digital container’ changes roles. Will the author be able to mix and mix digital content into a digital package or will they need help in identifying, validating and clearing rights to extra material. Will the role of the publisher as a collator, packager and administrator become more important in some sectors? Will others outside of the traditional book market step in to be publishers?

We now read that NBC News plans to launch NBC Publishing, aimed at publishing 30 interactive new e-book titles in the first year. The ebooks will be based on current events, documentaries, trends, biographies, and profiles and they are looking to leverage their existing content assets from shows such as NBC Nightly News, Today, Dateline, Peacock Productions, their archives, NBC Sports, and Universal Pictures.

The venture will enable NBC to use video, audio, and current programming in creative new ways and may prove pivotal as TVs become smarter and connected. They have brought in two publishing executives to help on the venture and plan to use a network of freelance professionals as needed. NBC claims over one million hours of archival video content going back to the ’20s can repurpose NBC news coverage and also plan to work with independent authors who use NBC’s resources.

It is possible to now see a greater polarisation of publishers with at one end the specialist and smaller publisher and self publisher and at the other large or divisions of large media entities. We already have the players such as News Corp, Bertlesmann, Pearson but are now likely to see others enter not necessarily with text content as their main asset. It will be interesting to see if the BBC soon rues the day it lost its publishing control.

Whatever, happens mixed digital media is here. The challenge is not burning your fingers in lavish digital utopias that don’t earn out and grappling with the issues of rights, acquisitions, licences, permissions and sales.

What the eDickens?

2012-01-23T09:03:00.004Z

Last week we wrote about the logic of the appeal of the short story in this new digital world and yesterday we attended The Museum of London’s special 200th celebration of Charles Dickens.

What may you ask have has Dickens to do with today’s digital publishing world?
The answer is simple and is significant if we are to learn from the past and keep our literary heritage alive.

Dickens was a master of the instalment.
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 and in 1837 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.

We find ourselves again asking why we are not publishing digitally by instalment today? The Keita novels in Japan thrive through instalment and Stephen King and others have also ventured down this digital route, but why hasn’t a publisher grabbed this clear digital opportunity by the throat? Is it down to the way many write today? Has the publishing and editorial process got in the way of the instalment? Is it just too revolutionary?

Why are even short stories still seen as collections and packaged as such. Even worthy initiatives such as Quick Reads appear to be locked into what some may question as yesterday’s thinking and merely duplicating the physical offer digitally.
What is also interesting is that Dickens lived through the literacy revolution where the masses were able to read and penny fiction was a way of feeding their new habit in a digestible form.

Dickens embraced the new
The transport and communications revolution of Dickens’ time was, on reflection, as great as that we have today with technology and communications changes. He travelled extensively, especially by the new railways, used the new telegraph and postal services. Between 1858 and 1870 he gave some 472 readings of his works in the UK and US. He even had special bound reading copies in larger font and was a consummate speaker. He was a writer, social observer, pamphleteer, speaker, columnist, playwright and publisher.

Dickens enhanced his works
In Victorian times the novel was often enhanced by illustrations. The ‘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. Does the new ebook now enable us to once again enhance and illustrate the book? There is now a new opportunity to bring back the imagery and even differentiate the different renditions.

Dickens wrote in the language of the people
Dickens was a master of not just description but narrative. He was a master of dialect and could write and express narrative to reflect a person’s origins, class and the times. He even travelled one day to Yarmouth and used the dialect he heard to paint the character he wanted. It is fascinating to hear how Dickens used the dropping of the ‘h’ , or how he could change ‘ing’ to be ‘in’ or even ‘ink’ to reflect the character. He would have been a nightmare to edit today!

But this understanding of the narrative and even the enthusiastic way Dickens would have read to his captive audiences may also be new enhanced book opportunities.

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.

That Was The Week That Was: Apple, Kodak and a Blackout

2012-01-21T18:35:00.004Z

So what was the biggest news story this week? The filing for Bankruptcy of that previously leading technology giant Kodak, the Presidential launch and hype of Apple’s grab for textbooks and to create an exclusive iWorld or the darkness created by the likes of Wikipedia and others and resultant climb-down of US legislators to their ill conceived SOPA and PIPA bills?

Kodak clearly teaches us that no one is immune to disruptive change and the emergence of digital technology and integrated video and photography in every smartphone simple by passed them. It is a very real lesson and one we should rank alongside many others who failed to adapt. In any value chain we all have to add value to survive.

The Apple launch will have significant repercussions far wider than the intended textbook market. Apple has not thrown a people into the pond but a whacking great bolder, that forces us to question much of what we do between author and reader. The one thing that is certain is that it will change not only what we do but how we do it and what we trade moving forward. Apple is not the winner merely the one to throw the first stone.

So what about the lights that went out over the Internet and the ensuing recreation of what, would have been bad law. This was a relatively quiet but significant revolution. Backed largely by big media and content producers such as the movie studios, record labels it is seen by them as their way to control and fight piracy and by many others as going too far the bills would have gone too far and with the capacity to created a nightmare.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was going to be bad law and along with its Senate cousin, the Protect IP Act,(PIPA) have galvanised protests across a very wide spectrum of companies and have been controversial from the beginning. Site such as Wikipedia and Reddit switched themselves of in protest. The object was to demonstrate what could easily happen under these ill conceived laws.

Under SOPA, a rights holder can take steps to shut that site off from search engines, ad networks, even Internet service providers and basically starve the offending site out of existence.

But critics see as being to easy to close down a supposedly offending site by just writing a strongly worded letter and would give legitimate sites a huge new set of legal obligations. Like a 21st century McCarthy witch hunt on the Internet.

On Wednesday U.S. lawmakers' websites were inundated with messages and Google delivered a 4-million-name petition against SOPA and even before the switch off, President Obama declared that he didn’t support SOPA. The silent majority stood up.

Is it the end, or will those experienced political wranglers and lobbyist divert their money to try and make some minor changes and push this bad law through?

This certainly was the week that was!

Apple iBooks Hangover

2012-01-20T04:52:00.004Z

Today we all wake up with an Apple hangover from yesterday’s iBooks Education announcement. We all will now face a bombardment of commentary on whether it is good, bad or ugly. Opinion will be divided. Technical detail on file constructs will loose all but the die hard techie. The commercial rights and wrongs of the restrictions Apple have built in to contracts, their pricing vision and much more will be heatedly debated. Finally, we will face the reality that we are now entering a significant escalation in the Gorilla wars between the big four technology media reading platforms that stretches far past learning and is fundamentally coming down to which player is smartest in capturing our attention and creating the groundswell to lock out the others. The war win not be won by the smartest technology, the most open technology but by the smartest marketing and PR programme.

Last night we participated in a debate on Litopia After Dark. It was good and at a high level. It was also strange in that we all appeared to be struggling to form an opinion either for or against and found ourselves asking for more clarification. This is not a case of glass half full, versus half empty, it is about getting common understanding on a wide range of social, commercial and technological issues as they relate to the offer presented and forming an opinion based on what we know and not on what we don’t know. We recommend you to listen to the Litopia Broadcast.

Today we can look at the high level issues and then drills down to further clarify points.

Social
It is a given that learning can benefit enormously by universal access to technology to assist students of all ages to engage and develop. This is not just a US or even developed world issue and is truly global. However, at a time when spending everywhere is tight, we must ensure that choice prevails, in such a manner that it drives down cost and is inclusive and not divisive. Our thoughts are not about Apple versus Amazon but about Apple versus initiatives such as OLPC.

It is important that choice is available such that we avoid adding more fuel to the educational divide of those how can afford and those who have to learn without. Yes textbooks are expensive today, but replacing them with expensive technology that has an equally short shelf life, may not be the answer.

Finally, we must also consider who is the creator, who is the packager, who buys, who adapts and who users the content and context that supports learning. The value chain in one learning community or geography, doesn’t always prevail in another.

Authoring
We have long recognised that we now live in a world where we no longer listen, read and watch, but were we increasingly write, produce and repurpose, or ‘mix’ our own media. The iBooksAuthor toolkit looks to fit this bill perfectly and acts as one would expect. It enables multi media to be packaged to explodes and enriches today’s flat content.

It is reportedly aimed at publishers but is it really aimed at them, or to undermine them?

Irrespective of the technical issues of the tool, we see a potential groundswell of self publishing authors taking to the tool to create their works and enrich them. Is this restricted to education – no. Is it restricted to educationalists even within the learning environment – no. Some would suggest that it has the power to help further democratise writing.

Why would large publishers then be standing next to Apple and supporting the launch? Some would suggest that these same publishers are backing not one but many horses and spreading their bets widely. Will they shift from their other investments in the likes of Coursesmart or fledglings such as Inkling?

The challenge that publishing and learning now has is identifying who the author in the ibookauthor world is. Is it the traditional author, the publisher, the education board, the institutional library, the teacher, the parents ot groups, or the student? Some will say all of the above.

Publishers today add more value than just producing a textbook and paying the author. They ensure quality, conformance, provide supplemental learning aides and content for the different stakeholders. The more complex the work, the more collaborative the workflow and the wider the participation of creating and producing it. Does ibookauthor support collaborative works, or is it simply focused on the single creator?

Will textbooks have to be created as is today and then enriched after the event, or enriched at concept and flowed into varies renditions?

If we move to a ‘cut and paste’ world of self authoring, not just of text but media, who will act as the gatekeeper, who will ensure rights are not infringed, who will ensure ‘fair use’ doesn’t become open piracy? It is one thing to democratise creativity it is another to try and control abuse. Yesterday we talked about the lack of a rights registry tomorrow we may now have to accept plagiarism as a given.

Commercial
The commercials disclosed at the event and on Apple would appear to be divisive. They have plucked a price point of $14.99 out of the sky and whether we all agree or disagree, that like mud will stick. Does this include or exclude any tax and Apple’s 30% commission? How is the pie divided up and what is the expected cut for all parties? Some will suggest that it is aimed at increasing volume sales, but others will suggest that the market is finite and in some subjects areas, very finite. Some suggest that it will lead to more smaller works. So instead of one textbook, you could now have four richer ones. Will buying more twxtbooks still add up to the same cost to the student as the one textbook today and so defeat the argument of affordability.

There are many potential issues for ‘authors’ and publishers to consider in the terms published. Obviously these may not be applied to those Apple want on board, but we expect that there will be much written on this subject and it impact on whether the platform is open or closed commercially.

Technology
Some would talk about technology first, but It is interesting and fitting that we find ourselves bringing it up last.

Already the debates are raging across the internet as to the level of openness Apple has adopted with their new tool. Yes it is compliant with ePUB3, but with extensions and those would appear to be more in the CSS style sheet end and could prove a challenge to unlock for many. It make it a close format, merely hiding behind an open standard.

It would also appear that ibookauthor is free, open, but only available in Appleworld and on Apple devices. Good for Apple sales and domination, not so good for many others outside this community with sunk investment.

What we don’t understand today is how these new textbooks will work with the LMS environment and whether they will sit outside, inside or create new ones of their own called iBookstore?

For just one take on some technical aspects read this early paper by Baldur Bjarnason. There will be many more over the next few days.

Some have questioned the size of the files and the devices ability to accommodate them but these issues can be overcome. We await the next Apple launch.

There are many who recognise that all technology doors can be open and issues overcome. To many self publishers and small publishers, app developers etc these lock-ins may not matter as much as getting their creation published and in the one store.

We were asked last night what we thought the impact would be 5 years out.

We think:

it will change self publishing of rich material, be it reference, learning, information etc.
the take up in education will be slower that Apple would like as the beast is cumbersome and change is not overnight.
Google, Amazon, Adobe, Facebook all have to respond and these will heavily impact the coming platform wars and not just in learning
Governments and those holding the purse strings will decide some battles and with the budgets for content and technology starting to blurr in the US, this may be the start of a huge platform war

Today the dust is far from settled and some would suggest that anyone who is today either 100% for or against the initiative is not going to change their opinion whatever comes to light. The presentation and hype certainly drives a stake in the ground and made messages which are hard to disagree with, but it is not those but the Apple execution that we must focus on and decide if it works as delivered, needs to be adapted or doesn’t fly.

The Renaissance of The Short Story?

2012-01-18T12:51:00.002Z

We now live in a sound bite word where the channel hopper often rules and where our time is often torn between many competing distractions. It is only fitting therefore that we are now starting to question and revisit the length of the story and recognise that it is just as rewarding to engage a reader on short and digestible read as a long one.

We have long argued that the digital era should herald a renaissance of the short story. As digital explodes the physical book spine, it starts to re write the economics and the need for 256 pages. No longer is it about tens of thousands of words but more about compact stories, or developing stories by the chapter.

My mother-in-law and many of her contemporaries broke into writing via short stories, which were much in demand across many magazines at the time. My Father-in-law like many started as a journalist and developed the skill of reworking, cutting back and sticking to the storyline.

Digital has started to now accommodate the short story and some such as Salt and Penguin has embraced the opportunity. The BBC has a National Short Story Award and the Quick Reads literary charity is now 5 years old and has distributed over 3.5 million ‘Quick Reads’ written by bestselling writers and celebrities aimed at engaging more people in reading.

This weekend the Telegraph dived in with a competition not based just on digital but recognising the potential to reintroduce this concise literary form that has inspired so many in the past. The British library have also launched a online service to enable everyone to enjoy the likes of Somerset Maughan, Kingsley Amis, Edna o’Brien and William Trevor reading their own works.

All these initiatives start to create a new form. Some will view them as singles that are then wrapped into a collection, others as stand alone stories that can be promoted bought and read as such and others as instalments to a greater living story. Poetry also starts to also have new opportunities to engage a wiser audience. Even those textbooks may be rented or sold by the chapter. Irrespective, the short is coming back and will give author a new opportunity to make that connection with the reader.

Apple Education Plus iPad?

2012-01-13T14:53:00.005Z

Before his death Steve Jobs had already targeted textbooks as the next opportunity His idea was to hire the best textbook writers to new create digital versions that were complimentary and exploited the iPad. Importantly he wanted to make them free so they would obviate the US state adoption and certification process, which he thought was “corrupt.” In chapter 38 of his biography he says “ if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”

Apple have now announced a special event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Jan. 19. It is widely reported that Apple will announce partnerships with textbook publishers aimed at positioning Apple at the heart of the multi billion dollar market. Apple will launch their new digital textbook business. We don’t know the plan, but expect that in a market dominated by a few large publishers such as Pearson Education, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, John Wiley & Sons and Macmillan that some will be looking for that Apple magic to rub off on just on their sales but their share values.

A report, "Simba Information's 2011 National Textbook Adoption Scorecard and 2012 Outlook," claims that almost all adoption states now are either promoting or permitting the inclusion of digital textbooks and other digital resources and importantly this includes hardware. It states that "Texas jettisoned the term textbook and replaced it with instructional materials, expanding the adoption process…Recent changes have also allowed districts to acquire hardware using the adoption funds." With respect to Florida it reports that the state’s Board of Education has overhauled its instructional materials adoption process and placed a greater emphasis on the approval and spending for digital materials, By the 2015-2016 school year…districts are required to spend at least 50% of their funding on digital materials."

If Apple were to secure a significant foothold in the market and deliver a seed change in how textbooks get adopted and bought they could well see significant revenues both in devices and in collecting 30% commission on each textbook sale.

So apart from the industry stalwarts such as Follett who are some of the leading digital textbook players today and can they adapt top any disruptive change?

CourseSmart.
The company was founded by a consortium of higher education textbook publishers to both offer digital inspection copies and full titles. It currently has iOS app for reading textbooks and with the backing of the major publishers is a force in the market. It is questionable whether this is used as the content repository and vehicle and so bolster its position further, or is sacrificed by its publishers and will now find itself competing with Apple.

Kno.
Kno has moved from being a device company to a platform and software one and is reported to have some 150,000 textbooks from 45 publishers. Kno textbooks are already viewable on Apple devices and the company was the top-downloaded educational app in Apple’s App Store at the end of last year .

Inkling.
Inkling has an iPad textbook app), which combines reading school texts with social and interactive ways to study with others with links to external and authoritative sources. McGraw-Hill and Pearson have both invested in Inkling.

Vitalsource.
Is part of Ingram Content Group also has its own app, with 60,000 digital textbook titles available for download to any iOS device. Vitalsource now has two million students using its platform worldwide and providing feedback to tell a publisher, “Nobody is reading Chapter 8,” as well as enabling enhanced multimedia applications.

Then there is the wonderfully branded site http://www.appletextbooks.com/ . A few challenges here we think.

The iBookstore hasn’t lived up to the expectations that many had and the Apple agency model is subject to a number of fair trading reviews. Will textbooks fair differently and make the difference and how will impact others already trading digital content?
We then have the Appleworld rule against running apps on iOS devices that direct the user away from Apple's ecosystem to buy competing products without using Apple e-commerce engines to handle the transaction. Apple has imposed a 30% tool both and made it harder to buy from the likes of Amazon, Barnes and Noble and others. However as demonstrated by Amazon’s latest ipad optimized website its relatively easy to provide a clean and touch-friendly for iPad-based browsing experience for readers without a 30% toll booth. With increasingly powerful Web-based solutions using technologies like HTML5, Apple won't be able to keep its ecosystem as closed as it might like.

Amazon’s touch-optimized Kindle Store for iPad allows readers to purchase or read Kindle e-book selections via Safari. The HTML5-based reading app is available via amazon.com/cloudreader and provides access to e-books through the browser, offline and online, with no downloading or installation required. Cloud Reader automatically syncs with other Kindle apps.

The AAP (American Association of Publishers) estimates that the college textbooks industry was worth $4.58 billion last year. Student Monitor, a private New Jersey student market research company claims that autumn etextbook acquisitions where up over 100% on spring and accounted for some 5% of sales. Simba Information, estimates that etextbooks will rise by 44.3% and generate $267.3 million US sales this year and they also estimate that, sales generated from state textbook adoption programs in Texas totaled $660 million in 2011.

However, we have to be also mindful of Job’s intent was not just to shake up the ‘corrupt’ textbook supply chain but to make them affordable if not free! Whatever the outcome Apple appears determined to shake the tree and collect the fruit.

First Sale Doctrine: Digital Threat or Opportunity?

2012-01-10T13:36:00.005Z

One of the drawbacks with ebooks is that there is no second hand market for them. Unlike physical books you can’t sell a book once you have read it. You can’t even put it on your bookshelf. It is doomed to sit often forgotten on some virtual bookshelf.

The lack of ‘first sale doctrine’ on ebooks is a big opportunity lost today as we find ourselves tied up in DRM knots and fear of the digital unknown. Too much of what we do is negative and restrictive and denies freedoms, rights and norms taken as a given within the physical world. Denying established social practice just helps fuel further consumer piracy.

Music is probably the last sector media should look at for digital guidance.
Last week EMI filed two lawsuits against different online music services, Grooveshark and ReDigi for breach of contract and copyright infringement.

The first case against Grooveshark is understandable in that it is claimed that the digital music service has paid no royalties since entering a licensing agreement to stream music nearly three years ago. That it has taken three years to issue a lawsuit is somewhat amazing and EMI’s filing comes after three other major record companies; Universal Music Group, Sony Corp and Warner Music Group, all filing accusing Grooveshark of pirating thousands of songs.

Founded in 2006, Grooveshark claims 35 million users and has major adverting support contracts. It allows users to upload songs to their servers, which it then lets other users stream for free. A virtual ‘swopshop’. The music industry is starting to accept services like Spotify and Rhapsody that stream music by subscription, but Grooveshark is again different and operates heavily under the protection of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Founded only last year ReDigi is different again and operates under the “first sale doctrine” legal concept, that allows users who buy a copyrighted item like a book or CD the right to sell it or give it away. ReDigi operates a ‘used music store’ where users upload unwanted songs and buy others at a discount. ReDigi claim that they can verify individual MP3 files were legally purchased and not ripped or downloaded from a file-sharing network. Interestingly the sellers must also install a ReDigi program on their computer that removes any copies of a song from the seller’s computer.

The case pivots on the claim ReDigi is infringing copyright in making copies of digital files as part of the process of uploading songs from a seller’s computer and transferring them to a buyer’s. EMI claim that, unlike selling a used CD, a used MP3 is theoretically the same as a new one and hence the infringement. ReDigi counters saying it is merely acting as a responsible marketplace. Again EMI is not alone and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) has also sent ReDigi a cease-and-desist letter.

So we return to the question of opportunity versus restriction, or a glass half empty versus a glass half full. Digital files have been made different not by technology, but by unimaginative thinking, restrictive DRM and bad law that is no longer relevant to the times. We must all realise that just as like having different tax rules for the same product, having different consumer rights will just drive more honest consumers to cut corners and disrespect copyright. The publishers may protect today’s revenues, but in doing so may end up losing tomorrow’s and their customers.

Publisher be they music, games, ebooks all have to realise that the right to resell is a given and finding a way to allow that is a must. We already have digital rental and loans and restricting or denying resell is just plain lunacy. The resell markets could in fact blooster the price of the original sale and start to create value added ownership. It could even offer the independent bookstore a digital lifeline. The ebooks and publishing market is a very fragmented and getting consensus of vision let alone action is often a challenge in itself.

Media on Demand Takes Another Step Forward

2012-01-10T12:12:00.004Z

The way we all consume and pay for media is changing radically and moving from, pay to own, to subscribe for on demand. This is no longer about music, film, games, TV,information and books , but about all digital media and how we find it, access it and pay for it.

The film on demand wars just got a lot more interesting in the UK with the news that Movie and TV streaming service Netflix has launched in the UK and Ireland. It is claimed that Netflix has been the single biggest driver of internet traffic in the US and has over 20 million online subscribers in 47 countries.

Online rival and Amazon owned Lovefilm, recently surpassed two million subscribers and both it and Netflix now line up against Sky Movies,Sky Atlantic, Virgin Media, YouTube and retailers such as Tesco’s Blinkbix for the online market.

Netflix has only launched its online service in the UK and in doing so has pledged to break BSkyB's stranglehold on the movie market. The service will allow users to stream film and TV content on devices including tablets, smartphones, games consoles and internet TVs and all priced at just £5.99 a month. Not to be undone Amazon's LoveFilm, has announced a new "streaming-only" tariff at £4.99 a month. Netflix hopes that its personalisation technology and an integration with Facebook, which allows people to share what they are watching with friends on the social network, will also provide it with competitive edge.

Netflix has also announced a number of new TV and film deals with partners that include Channel 4, Disney, ITV, Sony, 20th Century Fox and All3Media. These deals are mainly for the second rights window as opposed to BSkyB’s which has prime rights deals with the six major Hollywood studios which enable it to air films in the first pay window. When Netflix launched in Canada the company had no "pay one" deals.

Netflix has also announce deals with the likes of the BBC, Miramax, Lionsgate, MGM which will give it access to titles such as Pulp Fiction, Kick-Ass, Top Gear and Doctor Who. Lovefilm has agreements with partners including ITV, BBC, Warner Bros, Entertainment One, Sony and Studio Canal for titles that include the Twilight Saga, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Social Network.

So the UK now has three determined online streaming service providers who are not only going to aggressively compete on price but also on content. We see the growth and demand for Spotifty's music on demand, Wii's expansion to media console and recognise that as media continues to converge, platforms become important and usage migrates to on-demand we ask why many many still see books as different?

Is eInk Sinking?

2012-01-09T15:17:00.002Z

Apart from basic Amazon Kindles what other eink devices are selling today. It could be said that even the Kindle could soon be on Fire. The fact is that the ‘loookie likie’ devices that once littered the market are today being usurped by AMOLED smartphones and tablets. The best measure for this decline came today as E Ink Holdings Inc. shares slumped some 6.9% (the lowest close since July 1, 2009) on the news of the company’s December sales which had slid 84% from a year earlier!

Fourth quarter sales were only down 4% from the third quarter and overall annual sales were up 53% However, E Ink alarmingly reported that its December consolidated sales were down 55% from November and also down 57% from a year earlier...

Investors may see this as a temporary sales issue, but some will see eink has had its day as we know it today and is unlikely to bounce back and that far from a seasonal dip it could be a sudden decline. We have seen yet another supplier BeBook bite the dust and its hard to see any real action other than basic Kindles..

CES 2012 and Device Rumours

2012-01-09T11:58:00.004Z

This time of year is not about January sales, but CES in Vagas and the new electronic gadgets and devices on show or rumours afoot. This year may not be so exciting as previously, there are some very interesting developments.

Ultrabooks

There will be more tablets this year, but the question remains as to whether they are seriously going to compete with the iPad at the high end and the Kindle at the low end, or end up as RIM, holding the baby? Are the manufacturers going to avoid the tablet and concentrate on the ultrabooks? The ultra thin 'weightless' models that are now starting to flood into the market to compete with the Macbook Air. Its just as if everyone wants to be Kate Moss! Personally we have been eying the Asus ultra model for a couple of months. With laptops now weighing in at just over 1Kg why do we need a tablet? These models are not new, but the $100 per device incentive from Intel to manufactures to build them is. As a result there are expected to be about 50 ultrabook designs on show, costing around $1,000 and as we all need to upgrade some time, why not with a device that is as light as a feather..

OLPC Tablet

We have always love the One Laptop Per Child project and it is now set to unveil its long-awaited tablet for $100. The tablet will feature an 8-inch 1024x768 screen, a Marvell Armada PXA618 chip and 512MB of RAM, running either Linux Sugar or Android OS. It will be able to be powered by hand-cranking and even has a solar panel optional extra! We love the housing and design and it shows that a $100 tablet is now a reality.

We recommend viewing Engadget’s video review of the device.

Google tablet?

Rumours are rife again on Google introducing a low end tablet early this year. This would probably follow their tie ups with Motorola and partnership with Samsung on Nexus. However do they have the media to make it attractive or will it remain an also ran like many other tablets?

Wii U Media Console?

There are the rumours that the Wii U will support a touch screen in the next generation console. The feature will have Ereader features which would allow users to download not only books, but newspapers, magazines, comics but much more. The touch screen will be used in a typical fashion to scroll of flip pages and would make the Wii U a more services orientated console and widen its appeal to be more of a entertainment and media than just a gaming device. There are even reports that Nintendo is secretly building its own Apple-like app store for the upcoming Wii U console.

Reading on Kindle via solar power?

Finally, Gizamo reports on a new leather Kindle case with an integrated reserve battery that can store solar energy to power a built-in pop-up LED reading lamp for up to 50 hours.

Do Barnes and Noble Have A Digital Strategy?

2012-01-06T10:46:00.002Z

Last year the US market lost Borders and book chains globally started to look increasingly as vulnerable. Today’s news on the deliberations, speculation and announcements at Barnes and Noble are the latest shockwaves to reverberate across the publishing world. Whatever they do, or don’t do, it is apparent that everything is up for grabs, with reports of the sale of Sterling Publishing and the splitting of the Nook ebusiness from the bricks and mortar business. As its shares tumbled on the news to what looks, from the outside to be a PR and communications ‘challenge ‘ it leaves many asking just what the strategy and the desired outcome is.

Barnes and Noble have stated that the two sides to their retail business have very different levels of maturity and investment. What is alarming is that they make the public announcements and then say that there is no certainty that the review will result in a separation but that they do not rule out a potential sale of the ereader business. The obvious lack of strategy will not assure investors and without the Nook ebusiness what is left? The bricks and motor business is solid, but with no US chain competition, B&N would appear to be not taking up the slack Borders left behind.

The Nook sale could generate substantial cash for shareholders but does it include BarnesandNoble.com or is it just the ebook business? Barnes and Noble’s ebook business is where it is today on its brand. We think its time that Barnes and Noble realise that the brand is Barnes and Noble not the Nook. Without that affiliation would consumers still buy Nook? Would it have sold even a fraction of its sales without the Barnes and Noble brand? It is different to Kobo and Indigo, where KOBO’s brand was built separately from the start and also internationally many consumers have not even heard of Indigo. Is Nook actually strong enoughto survive alone and even if Waterstones were to adopt it would it be just another case of dejavu?

Even more surprising is the news that Barnes and Noble intent to get out of publishing and sell off Sterling Publishing. The shareholders may be rubbing their hands at the thought of cash but is Sterling in fact the digital family silver? In a world where content is the key, why sell off a viable content business that feeds the digital engine. Barnes and Noble have long bought into print runs, had their own imprints and Sterling’s wide range of content is perfect for digital exploitation. At a time when digital content is about to explode and Amazon is increasing its publishing activities, it wise to dispose of this asset for a few pieces of silver? There is also the question of whether the potential sale of Nook and Sterling will include Pubit , or exclude the self publishing ebook imprint?

We can see that B&N is not going to win the battle against Amazon’s Kindle platform. Their pockets are not deep enough, neither are the strategically positioned even within the US, let alone outside it, to do so. Can they be happy being the number two in the US or even lower and nowhere outside the US? Will Apple or Google inflict more damage to their market share? As Apple prepares to launch its own self publishing offer and go textebook and Google prepares a tablet, where would Nook stand? Like Amazon, B&N understand publishing and bookselling, but unlike Amazon they are carrying too much baggage, have less understanding shareholders and have greater financial exposure.

Addicted to Piracy?

2012-01-04T18:54:00.003Z

According to industry bodies, governments and the press, digital piracy is reaching epidemic proportions and swift and focused action is needed to save the media industry. We are now regularly informed of the growth of piracy, the estimated number of illegal transgressions, amount of revenue stolen and even the numbers of jobs lost to piracy. Piracy is not restricted to any one medium and impacts the; software, games, film, music and now book industries.

Content piracy is not new and many of us have committed piracy, or know someone who has done it, either wittingly or unwittingly. We must face the reality that it will never be totally eradicated and there are degrees of piracy.

We now have legislation being rushed through different bodies that is aimed at shutting down sites and fining or black listing users. We have all read of the court prosecutions against individuals bought by bodies such as the RIAA. However if we step back, we could easily conclude that the threat of the stick, appears to be having little, if no effect and that piracy would appear to be on the rise in all sectors.

The questions we pose are not aimed at solving piracy, but at trying to understand what drives it and in doing so, look at alternative ways to contain, or reduce it. In many ways, it is a social problem similar to others such as; drugs, gambling, drinking and prostitution. It is important that we do not set our sights too high and by doing so, alienate those we wish to influence and that we are realistic in what we wish to achieve.

What are some of the root causes which are feeding the current digital piracy habit?

Free

Napster didn’t create the ‘digital free’ perception, but helped raise its profile to the masses. As Napster and others changed to pay models, they failed to migrate their bases and the ‘free’ music demand they created remained. Is the problem really ‘free’, or is it the ability to share and network with friends? We obviously will face the challenge of first defining a ‘friend’.

We believe that people are willing to pay and also recognise the need to support creative talent. However we also recognise that the hard core of people who will always demand ‘free’ are not going away and maybe are impossible to coral.

Fair Use

The right to fair use has always been prevalent and is very relevant in academia and libraries. Digital potentially lifts the fair use lid and can create confusion in the eyes of the user. Creative commons licensing is a positive way forward and is starting to address this. It adopts a mature approach to copyright licensing and one which accepts the fair use doctrine. However, works that are not licensed under creative commons can fuel confusion and lead to a piracy approach to all works.
Interestingly, our copyright laws were built in an era where we listened, watched and read media, but today they must encompass and era where many now also create media.

Music and film industries have had to grapple with the demand for sampling and our permission rights now need to reflect this. The challenge remains a rights industry without a rights registry and frustration can often lead to rights shortcuts and piracy.

Price

Price is always the sore point. Academic, text, professional, reference and trade books all have pricing challenges. It is easy to put a recommended retail price on a title, it is a lot harder to convey its value and sell it in a world that is now discount crazy, very price sensitive and where a price comparison is only a click away. We would suggest that the heavy discounting of physical books has had a significant devaluation impact on the perceived value of ebooks. It is also crazy to try to enforce a retail price maintenance ‘agency’ regime on ebooks, whilst allowing a price discounting free for all on physical books. Think of the consumer perception of such open hypocrisy.

Tax

We all have an aversion to paying taxes, especially taxes we don’t agree with. Governments openly reduce the tax on pbooks to promote reading whilst taxing ebooks to raise revenue. Are Governments and tax authorities actually fuelling piracy with taxes that are clearly inconsistent between the physical and digital rendition of the same work? Taxes have to be raised and someone has to pay, but no one likes to be ripped off. Who can justify a 20% tax difference? This taxing hypocrisy is not unique to the UK and is prevalent across many countries. Governments have to realise that the economy is now global, digital transparency is real and clear double standards will drive many to piracy. The media associations should be educating the government to think about its negative actions on tax.

Ownership

We all know that a digital file can be spliced and diced far easier that its physical cousin. One click and the font and its size can change. Another click and we have text to speech. We can annotate alongside the text, create bookmarks and of course copy and paste and much more. Today we still put ebooks into a DRM straightjacket ‘for the good of copyright’. We do not allow ‘the first sale doctrine’, often make it impossible to share books with friends and even limit the number of devices we can transfer the file to. The industry has failed to grasp even half way measures, such as social DRM (watermarking) and has maintained a hard line DRM approach. It reminds one of the early music days before the operators realised that MP3 wasn’t as much a threat as DRM which overly restricted user’s rights. It is questionable whether there would be any viable download market today if the likes of Apple had not abandoned their rigid DRM and embraced MP3.

Users want to ‘own’ their files and even sell them. If this is not recognised, then it either puts pressure on the price paid, or generates piracy. We must look at the ‘on demand’ and cloud based licence models, such as used by Spotify and Netflix.

However, is the industry ready or even willing to entertain such a radical shift when it can’t appear to even sort out its digital lending relationship with libraries?

The issues that drive piracy are not simple and are more about social economics.
Cracking down on the dealers of piracy is understandable, but it is not addressing the demand and the actions needed to change social behaviour. When we throw are arms up and complain about the level of apparent piracy and its estimated loss of revenue, we should perhaps ask ourselves, what we would accept as acceptable and work towards monitoring and maintaining this. A zero tolerance approach to piracy may well result in more not less.

2012 Digital Perspectives: The Publisher

2011-12-31T09:53:00.004Z

This week we have written a series of short articles titled, ‘2012 Digital Perspectives?’ These have looked at what we believe are the short term issues, challenges, potential game changers and outcomes across the digital publishing value chain. Today we look at the many complex opportunities facing the Publisher.

As we have seen this last week with the HaperCollins versus Open Road legal charge, different parties can view even a contract from a perspective, which is not always shared. We often find ourselves through different windows into the same house and seeing completely different rooms.

Rights
Publishing is a rights business without a Rights registry, where much of the information about rights remains locked away behind closed doors. Digital publishing now demands greater clarity and transparency on rights and the current ambiguity and lack of information remains digital publishing’s biggest threat and opportunity.

The book world is global and as the ebook market explodes, publishers have to rethink territory rights. Orphans remain the prize sought by many and an issue still unresolved. Permission rights will increasingly become an opportunity as content gets fragmented, enhanced and as snippets become more accessible in a digital world.

Licensing models that exist in other media don’t exist in the book market today. Rental and loans can’t be ignored any longer and if not addressed proactively they may be addressed by others.

Digital Rights Management will continue to be demanded by publishers who will be wary of piracy. The shift to online and cloud based on-demand platforms will also start to negate the need for DRM and downloads as we know them today and it is inevitable that DRM as we know it will have a limited life.

Copyright contracts should move to fixed term contracts and commercial terms where a licence may automatically revert if not renewed. This could itself offer a different reward structure and one which is based more on performance by all parties. However publishers must seize the initiative and not wait for others to dictate it.

Content
Many still print first then convert to digital and Editorial remains for many the last bastion of the analogue world. Although many in professional and STM have already learnt the lesson and gained the benefits of XML workflow and development it is still to be adopted more widely across all sectors..

Context
Ester Dyson once said that being able to find a needle in a digital haystack was key and we thought that Google’s big opportunity was to start to change search and discovery. However this did not happen in 2011 and perhaps their problem is that they still see books as mere information to index and fail to grasp the context.

Content will increasingly be used to provide context and support search and discovery. These opportunities demand changes in how content is developed, managed and distributed.

Progress has been made with services such as Net Galley and Yudu, but these were still locked into solving bits of and not the total problem. The industry is failing to grasp the difference between content based services and transactional ones. It’s standards bodies and focus is still focuses on servicing business to business information and fails to grasp the more important and greater business to consumer opportunity.

Social networking is starting to make a difference, and the challenge is to harness the social facilities in a positive way to advise, stimulate and lead consumers to discover titles, whilst avoiding blatant product placement and ;happy money'. Success is not guaranteed by the size of the spend, but by the skill of the approach and the only one that really matters and decides the winners is the consumer.

We still have to see trade publishers grasp direct marketing skills and mail list management. It is after all easy to collect names, but a lot harder to know how to exploit them when you are not the natural consumer facing agent. Trade publishers now find themselves dealing with traditional mass marketing, marketing to channels, brand building of both authors and their own brand and direct marketing. Is it therefore understandable that they all often fail as they try to cover all bases.

Digital Sales, Tax, Pricing and Royalties
Today’s digital ‘honesty box’ sales model is not sustainable without sales and royalty transparency. Asking publishers to reconcile sales that they can’t often audit, could be seen by some as an untenable position. No longer can publishers count the stock out, sold and returned. In a digital world, the unit only needs to be stored once and only moves when it is sold and there should be no returns. In theory this should make sales and royalty reporting and reconciliation very simple. We expected the industry to address this before it became indoctrinated within the market, but have seen little co-ordinated effort, standards or even approach.

Taxation is a digital mess with different rules and rates everywhere and a lack of harmonisation even across the EU. Should prices be inclusive or exclusive? Should tax be at point of distribution or consumption? Why is the same product taxed differently because it is digital? Publishers may not make the rules but can lobby and influence them.

We know now that the agency pricing model will face many legal tests this next year and will probably fail some if not all. Pricing is a threat and an opportunity. Managing prices across thousands of titles, from thousands of publishers, through many many channels and outlets, can only be managed at the consumer interface. In a digital world where all books look the same, the lack of consumer price points only adds to confusion. This was partially addressed in music when iTunes invented the track price but remains a challenge in publishing where value still has to be effectively communicated.

The Publishing Organisation
Publishers now need to seriously consider the impact of digital on the organisation. There is no right or wrong answer.Do they have a single organisational focus that sees physical and digital as mere renditions of the same work and if so, which part is the dog and which is the tail?

The digital business will have to be far more holistic in its approach and consideration of all aspects of publishing and yet must remain agile enough to respond to rapid changes.

The large publishers will continue to control the vast majority of sales and in sectors such as education, professional and academic and it is hard to see a change to this 80/20 rule set. However, in trade publishing we see a different dynamic and potentially, a more level digital playing field. In digital, publishers are only as good as their ability to exploit their content and rights and those that believe they have a divine right to market share will soon learn the digital reality.

2012 Digital Perspectives: The Bookseller and Librarian

2011-12-29T14:28:00.006Z

We have written a series of short articles titled, ‘2012 Digital Perspectives?’ which we shall publish this week. These will look at what we believe are the short term issues, challenges, potential game changers and outcomes across the digital publishing value chain.

We have looked previously at digital publishing from the author and consumer perspectives and today we look at the customer facing Booksellers and Librarians. It’s the same house but we shall see yet again different perspectives.

The decline of the physical High Street model has continued in 2011 with the chains suffering the greatest demise. The economies of scale and scope once enjoyed by the brick and motor chains has continued to migrate online and physical shelf space has been replaced by more accessible virtual shelf space.

As ‘Rome continued to burn’, the Media continued to talk up the change in consumer shopping.

Bookshops will survive and will continue to sell books, but there will be fewer of them and they will have to start to rethink what the sell, how they sell and to whom they sell. They will have to break out of the ‘low risk’, sale or return model and start to sell all books not just front list and new. There will be less safety and more risk as they increasingly have to learn to buy firm and sell through.

However, the greatest immediate threat to the High street comes not from online but from the retail shed; the supermarket, hypermarket and retailers, for whom books are just one of many product lines where they can discount and demonstrate value. Any bookchain that believes that it can compete with the likes of Walmart on price and top titles is at best naïve and at worst doomed. The Asda £1 book sale will no doubt be repeated again this year and the range of titles on offer will have broad appeal. With books cheaper than greeting cards, its about time someone stepped in and said, 'Enough!'

The retail discount wars we lived through in a different retail sector, taught us that the only winner in a discount war, is the one with the deepest pockets and the greatest resolve. Bookchains thought this was them, but now have to realise it isn’t any more. The value pricing trick is to move from deep discounting to ‘everyday low pricing’ which is not simple.

Help for UK independents could come from the government and their determination to preserve the High Street. Two steps that would make a significant difference would be the removal, or levelling, of the charity shop status and a reduction, or freezing, of small shop business rates. Irrespective, 2012 will be yet another year where many independents disappear, but it will also be one where many find their retail flair and survive.

We do not see a viable independent digital model today. Rather than build a viable digital co-operative distribution repository and service, the associations have chosen a 'quick fix' and one that merely gives away store brand and community to white label aggregators for a small commission. Other than in a superficial manner, this is not going to engage independents with the digital market and its consumers and is not sustainable for the future.

Barnes and Noble may have created a successful digital business, but their physical one is creaking. They achieved what they have online and digitally by tacking control and owning their own repository, distribution and platform and turning their back on their previous white label arrangements.

Another group that failed to grab their own destiny were the public libraries who in the main rolled over and gave the business to the likes of Overdrive. The libraries still retained their members but the service was effectively becoming outsourced.

Who needs library buildings in a digital world?

We have finally seen the conflict that we envisaged between ‘free to loan’ versus ‘pay to own’ digital models. It was obvious that public library digital lending was going to upturn the commercial tables and relationships that had been neatly separated by the constraints of the physical world.

Google may have been tied up in their audacious land grab of the GBS and library service, but others have stepped in.

Amazon’s partnership arrangements with Overdrive blew the doors off the library hinges and all of a sudden the digital issues became visible. Amazon and B&N’s digital lending programmes came out of the shadows and now threaten to even blow away the library and certainly force it to be redefined.

The reality is that digital book lending and rental is the future and a great opportunity for all. The challenge is to acknowledge this and respond quickly and positively to make it economically viable and rewarding for all. Spotify’s and Netflix’s relentless progress should have taught us all that digital on demand is both viable and potentially game changing. Also anyone who believes that a digital music and film files are inherently different from a digital book files, needs to now think again.

The digital Libraryworld has the potential to be a big winner and vehicle to promote both community and reading, but will publishers allow that, or will they attempt to force the digital genie back into the lamp and only accept change tied to their old commercial terms.

We must look close at the history of the public library and recognise that it is still relatively young and that both library and retail change is inevitable.

2012 Digital Perspectives: The Consumer

2011-12-28T16:52:00.003Z

We have written a series of short articles titled, ‘2012 Digital Perspectives’ which we shall publish this week. These will look at what we believe are the short term issues, challenges, potential game changers and outcomes across the digital publishing value chain.

Yesterday we looked at digital publishing from the author perspective and today we look at the Consumer. It’s the same house but we shall see a different perspective.

Today’s media noise about ebooks and digital is now driving a greater consumer awareness about the opportunities and importantly what they want from digital content. What issues matter may vary by the different consumer demographics and they will change with time.

Who do the public recognise as the drivers of their ebook needs – Amazon, HarperCollins, Randon House, Penguin, Apple, Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones, Google?

We now live in a global world where consumers are connected 24x7 and can compare prices at a click of a mouse. They no longer are influenced by newspapers, magazines, TV, radio but now have a virtual world of information available in a click on the move. Importantly, the largest power block is not the youth, but the silver surfers, who now have the greater disposable income and time, are increasingly technically savvy and are the heavier book readers.

What Amazon has taught us is that no single device is going to satisfy demand and that ebooks have to be available across all platforms. They learnt this trick early on in the physical book world with ABE, marketplace and other ventures and now have transferred the logic to digital.They also recognise that the first page consumers turn to in a book in not the copyright page to see it it’s a new book.

Amazon understand consumer demand and behaviour better than most and it is this that aligns them with consumers. We should remember that it was consumers made Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and it was consumers that walked away from MySpace, Napser, Sony.

What are the key issues consumers look for in digital books? Do we understand these, or do we presume to understand them? Price is probably a major if not the major driver, but does this apply to all content and demographics? Availability is probably a major driver, but is it of the latest, or the right content and how do they find it in the digital haystack, let alone validate it is the right one for them?

Digital rights management has to work for not just publishers and authors, but also consumers. Napster demonstrated the folly of tight control and MP3 music is the norm and DRM free. Even Apple have had to yield to consumer demand for DRM free music. We must always consider the consumer usability needs, as well as our own and if we make it too hard to enjoy, share, borrow and read then, they will find an alternative.

The industry must find a way forward on the library ‘free to lend’ versus ‘buy to own’ issue. Consumers will increasingly question the commercials and ownership benefits and the more some refuse to do business with libraries on digital, or demand unreasonable terms, the greater the divide becomes with the group that matters – the consumer. Libraries charging for loans should not be off the agenda and we must also recognise that loans, rentals and on demand commercials should not be restricted to libraries and their members. As consumers become more aware that they have ‘lost’ the right of the first sale doctrine on ebooks then an ‘on demand’ 'Spotify' model could be the obvious answer.

The folly of agency pricing was not in a return to retail price maintenance by a back door to just stifle Amazon and support Apple, but the fact that it was not in, or would not be perceived to be in the consumer interest.

The salient lesson that the music producers failed to grasp was that the ‘customer is always right’ and it is all about perception and making that a ‘win win’ not a ‘win loose’ situation.

The Ghost of Christmas Past

2011-12-28T16:18:00.004Z

Perhaps someone at HarperCollins had just read 'A Christmas Carol' and wanted to be Scrouge and to be visited in the night by the ghosts of Authors Past, Present and Future.

As reported in Publishers Weekly, HarperCollins decided to dump a Christmas infringement present on Open Road in the form of a lawsuit on 23rd December. The suit is over Open Road’s publication of the e-book edition of Jean Craighead George’s bestselling and award-winning children’s book Julie of the Wolves which has sold some 3.8 million copies. The charge is that in 1971, George entered into a contract that gives HarperCollins exclusive publishing rights of the work “in book form,” and that this extends to ebooks by the inclusive clause “computer, computer-stored, mechanical or other electronic means now known or hereafter invented.”

HarperCollins also refer to “stated limitation of paragraph 20” of its contract, which refers to them having to seek George's consent to license rights in the work by stating that that does not permit the right for the work to be taken elsewhere. It is reported that Harpercollins is seeking an injunction against Open Road distributing any more copies and the destruction of copies.

Sometimes one has to take a firm stand to protect one’s rights and ensure that your investment is also protected. Other times one has to recognise that time has moved on and the intent you entered into in an old contract has long changed. The exercise can become more about flexing muscles and posturing to influencing others than about the individual case.

It is interesting to note that Jane Friedman, who set up Open Road, previously worked as CEO of HarperCollins.

The challenge could be that in 1971, some 40 years ago, the spirit of the contract that was entered into does not reflect the reality today’s today’s networked world. It was even before the PC, let alone the internet. However proving unworkable or unreasonable clauses, costs money and is not guaranteed an outcome.

The action could well win the battle for HarperCollins to retain their rights. There may be a out of court licence settlement, which effectively also may gag all parties, as like the earlier Random House versus Rosetta and also may act to stifle others looking to break free of the physical handcuffs. The declaration of war is however a far greater challenge for HarperCollins as it declares its stance not only on this one title by all those thinking about digitally moving on. It also sets an alarming precedent at a time when digital rights are being negotiated and warns all to avoid open 'catch all' clauses that may come back to haunt them in the future.

As we have seen News Corp is not adverse to bad publicity and this move is certainly not going to enamour them to many.

2012 Digital Perspectives: The Author

2011-12-28T11:24:00.003Z

It is easy to predict that 2012 will see us celebrating the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, see the US presidential elections and enjoy the London Olympics, but it is not so easy to predict the winners and the losers of each and every Olympic event. When it comes to complex issues such as; the stability of the Euro, Syria, Russia, North Korean we often recognise that they are influenced by many forces that are even more difficult to predict.

In digital publishing we can obviously see trends and understand the direction in which issues are heading, but identifying individual milestones, their relevance and timelines is often impossible. The other issue is that we all may look at the same issue, but see it from a different perspective. That doesn’t mean that we are right or wrong, we just see it differently. It’s like looking into the same house through what are often different windows – it’s the same house but we all see different rooms and perspectives.

We have written a series of short articles titled, ‘2012 Digital Perspectives?’ which we shall publish this week. These will look at what we believe are the short term issues, challenges, potential game changers and outcomes across the digital publishing value chain. Today we look at the creators – The Author.

2011 often demonstrated that Authors were starting to ‘do digital for themselves’.

Many authors continue to be tied to relatively new digitally inclusive contracts, but many of those who had retained their digital rights or reverted their back list rights, started to realise that it is easy to do it themselves and potentially earn more as a result. Some choose Amazon, Pubit or Smashwords whilst others took a more conventional route with the likes of Open Road. Some separated their back and front list and realised that they do not need the ‘digital serfdom’ of perpetual licences with fixed royalties and where the vast majority of earnings go elsewhere. The challenge authors and their agents now face, is how to avoid those digital handcuffs. It like taking on a business lease, you want break clauses, rent reviews and a fixed term deal and not life plus 70 years in a marketplace that is still in its infancy and unpredictable.

We envisage that more published authors will ensure old physical rights are reverted and that their digital rights are treated separately to the physical ones. Many may still choose to be tied to their print publisher and many will treat their digital rights separately, but all will be doing so with increasing digital market awareness.

We believe that at least one trade publisher will wake up and see the benefit of offering a significantly better digital royalty deal on back list and potential digital orphans in line with the likes of Open Road. We envisage that this will be tied to a fresh approach to proactively promote back lists and not just place them on virtual shelves. As publishers become more aware of the need to be seen as a trusted business partner, we seen ‘Author care’ becoming the ‘flavour of the month’ and offering greater transparency of information to authors and maybe even speedier digital royalty payments.

Promotion and marketing authors within a growing social direct marketing network will remain a significant challenge. This isn’t just about engaging with current fans but finding new ones and growing the base. It is also about publishing collaborations to create genre groupings which cross publishing houses and channels.

The key driver for change is digital awareness and we see increased media coverage on digital author options being a major catalyst.

We are not only in a digital age but also and importantly we are now entering a golden age for writing. Accommodating this creative explosion of new as well as old material is the real challenge. Managing authors expectations and ensuring that they are fairly rewarded and recognised is now the goal for all.

Santa Delivers VAT Present?

2011-12-22T23:07:00.002Z

The rules on VAT on ebooks is about to become very interesting. In 2015 EU consumers will pay the VAT rate based on the country they live in, but until then and under the current EU rules, European consumers pay VAT based on the country the vendor is based. The spanner in the works comes not from the UK, France , Germany but from the European home of Amazon, Luxembourg.

Some will question what difference this makes to retailers and whether Amazon pricing just got very competitive and attractive. The difference between the UK and Luxemberg will be a massive 17% and 2015 is a lond way off in ebook years!

However there are opportunities in this for publishers as well as consumers.

Today many price their book as VAT inclusive, but if they were to price them VAT exclusive then the VAT difference of 17% could be up for grabs with some creative juggling. One major European publisher recently changed its pricing terms with Amazon to take advantage of this opportunity.

Interesting times and an early Christmas present for some and maybe the act that will force the some countries to think twice about their high tax rates on ebooks and the great gulf between reading the same material on two different platforms.

Techradar source document

Wanna Make the World Read

2011-12-21T07:03:00.005Z

Jessie J’s ‘Price Tag’ has been a huge hit, but how many of us have enjoyed the catchy tune and been oblivious to the lyrics? The message of the song will resonate with many musicians, but equally, there will be many musicians who disagree and want the ‘cha-ching, cha-ching’ and who are focused on the ‘Price Tag’.

Today we read of another author, the Pulitzer Price winning Michael Chabon and his decision to split the digital rights to all his works. First there are those works were there were no digital clauses in the contract and he is free to trade and then there are those later works, which are tied to contracts with digital clauses and that remain licensed to the original publishers.

Chabon has made what many would see as a 'no brainer' of a decision to licence many of the untied works he where he owns the digital rights to, to Jane Friedman’s Open Road. Here he can enjoy a 50% royalty, whereas with the works where he is effectively tied to the print publisher and gets the standard 25% net sales deal.

Some would suggest that the publisher has not only made a significant investment to develop, edit, promote, sell, as well as all the physical inventory cost, but that the 25% royalty offered authors is fair. Others would say that the investment into the original physical publication is a sunk cost, irrespective of the exploitation of the digital rights and therefore, a far higher author royalty rate is not unreasonable.

In the Washington Post article Chabon referred to the Open Road terms as ‘extremely fair and generous.’ He said of the original publisher terms “I agreed to the traditional e-book royalty, which I think is criminally low, because I didn’t really have any legs to stand on. I didn’t want to get left behind in the e-book revolution.”

But is it all about the ‘cha-ching, cha-ching’, or is that just another symptom of a far larger divide that is now starting to open up publishing and question its value chain?

We have long advocated that digital rights should be separately licensed, or that the terms should be cleanly separated re reversal and that the license should be term based not perpetual. However, some would suggest that many authors appear to be slipping blindly into digital serfdom, for periods of life plus 70 years. Is this wise in what is a rapidly changing world and where digital books are only just in their infancy?

One agent claimed recently to us that the author 25% perpetual royalty deal was good because the publisher could 'cross sell the back list titles with the physical copies'. We stepped back somewhat amazed.One only has to look at the Amazon page to understand who actually does the cross selling and especially on back list. We raised a list of other contractual considerations that we thought should be taken up with the publisher which had been not considered in the offer. It is often easy for many to think about their own ‘cha-ching, cha-ching’ and ‘price tag’.

Authors are the bedrock of the publishing business and are often very different in their personal motivation to create and be published. However, many seek a fair reward and digital now offers a level playing field between; old and new works, famous and unknown authors and one where social technology can make the difference between being read and being left on the virtual shelf.

The one thing that is certain is that the commercial models for both royalty and reward and also revenue generation are changing. Agency pricing should and could well be thrown out, or at least seriously questioned and not just by the authorities, but by the consumers. ‘Honesty box’ trading has still to be tackled and as the percentage of digital market share rises, this will soon become a further issue to authors who want to question their sales. Finally, if as would seem inevitable, the cost of digital drops, we must also remember that even a 100% of nothing is nothing.

It is down to the added and perceived value between the two people that matter, the author, who puts their words in and the consumer, who puts their cash in and for some it is about the words of Jessie J ‘We just want to make the world dance, Forget about the Price Tag’.

To read The Washington Post article

To Read the lyrics to 'Price Tag'

Peace on Earth and Goodwill to Technology Competitors?

2011-12-20T14:38:00.002Z

Christmas is the time to think about others less fortunate than oneself.

Well one has to think that the spirit of Christmas doesn’t extend to the corporate world of telecoms as the battles between the giants continue unabated and patent disputes are more common that fights in the school yard and everyone tries to outsmart each other.

Today British Telecom filed a lawsuit in the state of Delaware claiming that six of its core patents have been infringed by the Google Maps, Google Music, location-based advertising and Android Market products on Android. The patents relate to location-based technology that underpins navigation and guidance information and personalised access to services and content. The suit could have serious financial implications on Google with even penalties being due on every Android set sold! HTC and Samsung have already yielded to patent claims by Microsoft against Android and are paying a per-handset fee for every one they make. If held up in the US the BT suit could then move to Europe.

With the number of lawsuits being fought by Google one wonders if they have any friends to sit around their Christmas table let alone send greetings to!

Meanwhile Apple have just scored won a narrow victory over HTC as a court ruled that the HTC copied Apple’s touch screen software for clicking on phone numbers in documents from the iPhone. But the world of patents is not simple and the U.S. international trade commission ruled in favour of HTC on another three claims by Apple that its software had been copied. These are mere skirmishes in the raging patent wars. It should be noted that originally Apple accused HTC of infringing 10 patents so they won more than they lost but with the US being their single biggest market any loss could prove damaging.

So is it all about smartphones?

Well in the 6 months we shall see Amazon Fire grow into a furnace and Apple yet again contradict itself and produce a smaller screen iPad. But the interesting one could be the introduction of a Google Nexus tablet. This would be interesting not just because it’s Google, but also given their Chairman Eric Schmidt’s employment history. We wonder if he took any ‘secrets with him’.

Google has already ‘contributed’ in the development of the Motorola Xoom, but like other Android tablets, it has not delivered the sales but Schmidt in the Christmas spirit is reported saying that ,’competition between Android smartphones and the iPhone will be “brutal”.’

Microsoft to 'Silently' Kill Off IE6

2011-12-17T08:15:00.003Z

The number of browser we have to support may be small but the versions within these can be a pain as new versions of some browsers appear to be arriving on a constant conveyer belt. Most users are cautious about upgrading until the release is bedded down and stable, but buyers of new PCs don’t have much choice.

Microsoft claim that their research shows that many cyber criminals target old or outdated software when they tried to trick people into installing fake updates. Therefore, in order to help beat scammers catching people out with fake updates, Microsoft will start next year to ‘silently’ update Internet Explorer (IE) users automatically without their users knowledge to the latest version of the browser. Microsoft said that those who did not want their browser updated could opt out or uninstall the software.

The programme will initially affect IE users with automatic updates turned on and running Windows XP, Vista and 7, and will first be rolled out in Australia and Brazil. Those using Windows XP will be upgraded to IE8, while those on Vista and 7 will be upgraded up to IE9.

Globally, Internet Explorer is still the most popular browser, with more than 52% of the market followed by Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome. Interestingly though some 8.3% of IE users are still wedded to the 10 year old IE6 which, to the relief of many developers, is expected to die with this new initiative.

Don't Forget The Digital Back End

2011-12-17T05:53:00.005Z

We have long recognised the issue of the lack of effective and consistent digital sales reporting. Its as if the standards bodies and consultants that work for the industry are too focused on building and selling the car but forgot about the after sales servicing. As an industry we spend a great deal of effort deal with the issues at the front end of the sale process, but like the infamous publishing physical returns issue, we often fail to follow through and deal with the back end. It is a golden rule of any supply chain that the chain is only as strong as its weakest link and that any all cost or inefficiency within the chain, is a cost and inefficiency to all and not just those impacted.

We have previously advocated that the standards bodies make strides to at least standardise digital sales reporting. However, in doing so we believe that they should also look not just to fix today’s problem, but build a mechanism that will enable us all to do things smarter and cost efficient tomorrow.

Reconciling digital sales is not straight forward and this was well put across by Helen Kogan, MD of Kogan Page in her reported comments in the Bookseller from the UK PA conference’s "Changing Face of Export Sales" panel. Kogan was reported stating that, ‘One of my biggest bugbears is about the nightmare of digital reporting, it should be a simplistic supply chain but instead we are dealing with multiple reports, multiple spreadsheets. Reporting is a real issue and distributors have a part to play in this. They could support us.’

Some would suggest that the market is consolidating around a few aggregators and therefore it’s a manageable issue. Others would suggest that the lack of reporting standards today and the inconsistency of reporting schedules effects not just sales reporting but also royalty transparency of reporting and payments. Whether we have a few super digital distributors in the future, or as more likely, hundreds of smaller ones as well, the problem remains transparency, timing and standards. Dealing with it today will be easier that trying to deal with it tomorrow.

In today’s ‘switched on’ world where there is literally only one digital file, which is then digitally ‘pick packed and dispatched’ in real time for each order, it would surely make sense to have real time sales reporting to its rights owner and maybe even its author. If addressed from a strategic and architectural perspective we may also address some of the ‘honesty box’ and audit issues which are not going to go away.

Well done Helen for stating the case.

Bifurcation

2011-12-11T14:45:00.005Z

Last week we had two viewpoints expressed in Digital Book World which raised much debate and further amplified the gulf of dialogue and thinking within the industry today over the issue of self publishing especially in the digital world.

First we had the original article ‘Leaked: Hachette Document Explains Why Publishers Are Relevant’ , which again raises the question as to the role of the publisher in tomorrow’s changing value chain. The premise of the proposition was based on, ‘Self-publishing is a misnomer’ and it went on to lay out the value added services that publishers can offer authors. When we look at these in pure digital terms there are a number of questions:

‘Curator’ we are not sure that this is the right term but irrespective is the curator for the author or the consumer?

‘Venture capitalist’ some would suggest that this actually describes the publisher role. As many who have dealt with VCs know, the VC onus is often purely on the money and return, more than the venture and interestingly most VCs have an exit strategy from the outset.

‘Sales and Distribution Specialist ‘ we agree this is very important in the physical world where grabbing shelf space and promotion has to be ‘in the face’ . However, does it carry the same weight in a digital world? The digital world does not just compete with the other new titles and some back list, but has to compete with everybook ever published. There is an opportunity, but it is more about marketing and brand awareness than sales and distribution. It could be questioned what digital sales expertise one needs when the sales are to a small number of aggregators who actually drive the sales and who by their virtual shelves carry everything anyway.

’Brand Builder and Copyright Watchdog’ this is real value and one that becomes of even greater importance the more digital we become. Brand building is critical in today’s viral world, but as often proved, this can be unpredictable in today’s Facebook and YouTube world. Copyright protection is however difficult and the publisher should have the mechanism to monitor, raise take down notices and litigate where needed. However, we must remember that a watchdog is not just about copyright and we live in a digital ‘honesty box’ trade, where it is rumoured that ‘no audit’ clauses exist today, so assuming a huge amount of trust.

We then read the response from self publishing author JA Konrath, ‘Advice to Publishers’ .

In his response Konrath lists six points:

‘Offer much better royalties to authors.’ This should be a given but there is often much debate about the digital norm and the fact that royalties are based on net sales which can be very loose. If agents do not tie contracts to term times, authors may find they are digitally tied to perpetual contracts, with little incentive and where both agents and publishers live off a sizable proportion of earnings for life plus 70 years. In this digital real time age, why digital royalties aren’t paid out monthly or even at the end of each day and totally transparently? The recent Simon and Schuster move on transparency is a step in the right direction but to some is only a one step.

‘Release titles faster. It can take 18 months after a book is turned in to be published. I can do it myself in a week.’ This is a legacy issue and often tied to physical lead times that are required by many large bricks and motor chains. In a digital world this doesn’t apply but the implications on the development process within publishers are significant and with reducing advances the pressure to reduce lead times and be smarter is clear for all to see.

‘Use up-to-date accounting methods that are trackable by the author, and pay royalties monthly.’ We have covered this above and must remember, when someone decides to do this and promote it heavily, it may become a game changer for all.

‘ Lower e-book prices.’ We see Konrath’s point and how some have moved volume by low price pointing. It is a case that when there is only one mouth to feed then a larger amount of a lower price is acceptable, but when there is a corporate to feed, there is often a cost point that must be first cleared to have any chance of break even.

‘ Stop futilely fighting piracy.’ This is not so much about self publishing as about publishing risk. We will soon reach a point when DRM (Digital Rights Management) becomes less of a risk and more of an inhibitor. It happened in music with MP3 and it will happen with books, it is just a case of timing.

‘Start marketing effectively. Ads and catalogue copy aren’t enough. Neither is your imprint’s Twitter feed.’ We understand Konrath’s point, but we all face the same problem and there are no digital marketing silver bullets. If there were, we would all be adopting them and … Publishers do offer scope and skills, but many have not developed these and rely heavily on external resources to show them the way. This is a core skill set for tomorrow’s publisher and one where they can offer in house value add.

Last week a good friend was offered a digital deal on some six titles that are still in print, but where the digital right is not encompassed within the contract. The agent had taken some months to negotiate an offer 25% net and suggested it was a good deal. Our advice was to define a fix term time, understand the reversal clauses on digital, agree the loan and rental deals up front, and the control and pricing policy on agency. The agent gulped and understandably is yet to respond.

The Digital Jungle Book

2011-12-11T12:51:00.003Z

The news last week was again littered with the impact on how the publishing industry deals with new entrants and in particular the Gorillas that are now in the back yard. Two stories in particular raised our eyebrows.

Google Book Settlement

Or as we called it from the very beginning ‘The Great Book Bank Robbery’.

It now looks like the saga is entering yet another interesting phase as Google moves to get the case dismissed by the court. According to which side of the barricades you stand behind, the legal technicalities and case is clear. However, once again we enter into somewhat uncharted waters and a level of unpredictability on the outcome and keenly await the court ruling. What is apparent, is that the world has moved on since the original submission and has twisted and turned ever since, to a point today where one could argue the original submission is in danger of being lost in translation.

Does this mean that all parties will now loose the appetite to resolve the dispute? Some now believe that Google has manoeuvred themselves into a position where the shackles can come off and free them to resume their quest to scan and monitories all in Googleworld, on Goolgleworld terms. Orphan works remain the key, but will everyone now ignore these to open the door to allow everyone to adopt them and be dammed? Will the legislature finally arrive and redfine copyright for the 21st century and protect orphans, or will the opportunity again corrupt our thinking once more? Will anyone protect the orphans or will they just become casualties from increasing ‘friendly fire’ and land grabs? Who will step up to citify the obvious need for a rights registry and will this be global or restricted by somewhat meaningless geographic boundaries?

Some would suggest that the current rights information void is akin the those patents that some big corporate entities buy up and sit on out of their own vested interest.

Agency Pricing

The second predictable development was the growing concerns over the agency model, or what some see as a return to retail price maintenance for just ebooks by the back door. The agency pricing debates rage on, with often ‘holier than thou’ arguments according to the side you sit on. Our view has always been that the only entity that can effectively price for the consumer is that which deals directly with them and they should be allowed to make their own commercial judgement call on price, profit and offer. However, many publishers will disagree and some will believe that they in fact ‘own the consumer interface’ and are the only middleman between the author and the reader. Others see agency as the Amazon ‘brake’ and vehicle to start to get control of pricing. Many now recognise that ebooks will have a significant place in tomorrow’s revenue streams and understandably want to protect the status quo through price control. Some would suggest this happens today with the pbooks and the somewhat fictional RRP which is there in some cases to accommodate deep discounting.

We would suggest that publishing is now entering a phase where cost reduction across the whole value chain is needed and today’s ‘passengers, prisoners and wounded’ may not be affordable moving forward.

The referral by the UK OFT (Office of Fair Trading) to the EU on the agency issue, the news that the DOJ is finally looking into the issue and the establishment of a federal Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation accusing Apple, Barnes & Noble and a group of major publishers of conspiring to fix e-book prices should be welcomed by all as a wake up call. No one can call the result but the investigations themselves should signal that agency is at worst against the consumer interest and at best skirting very close to being against their interest.

The rumours of some of the contractual clauses that may or may not be included in the agency agreements are alarming if true and still disturbing if not.

So what do we learn from these two separate but related threads?

The industry should not act out of fear of Amazon to form new business models and alliances but should do these on their own merit. Inviting another Gorilla into the back yard may look attractive but what ever happens the only certainty is that there will be a Gorilla in the back yard and whoever the Gorilla is they are still a Gorilla. Agency was a kneejerk reaction and a unilateral declaration by a few, for the few and without thinking of the many. The Google Book settlement unsurprisingly has the same fingerprints on the gun.

The Legacy of Mark Hodder-Williams

2011-12-09T10:56:00.002Z

Yesterday I learnt of the sad death of Mark Hodder-Williams, who was the original MD and driver of the publishing service First Edition in the 90’s. First Edition was a rival to Teleordering, the proprietary Whittaker service. First Edition was built on EAN standards and the GEIS EDI network and focused on addressing the inefficiency in communication within the publishing supply chain.

At the time I had left B&Q and just completed a massive EPOS roll out programme at UK supermarket Somerfield. My EDI track record was forged at the leading edge B&Q to be the first major retailer with 100% supplier participation. I was also the Chairman of the Tradenet User group, which then was the largest EDI User community in Europe and part of GEIS’s EDI Empire and also was on the council and management committee of the then ANA (Article Numbering Association), the body responsible for all cross industry EDI standards (Edifact, EAN, Tradacoms etc.). So it was natural that First Edition approached me to help get their service established.

For a variety of reasons I declined to join First Edition and was quickly snapped up by Denis Bennett (Vista) who along with Francis Bennett (Book Data) then jointly owned First Edition. My association with First Edition continued when I became a non executive director on behalf of Vista.

I have just reread the business plan that Mark and I worked on and it amazing to read the opportunities that were identified. The business plan itself helped me later invent and architect BookEasy which turned into PubEasy and the BA association’s Batch service. It was interesting that the business plan also gave me the insight to input into much of the acclaimed Publishing in the 21st Century series and engage with those industry thinkers Mark Bide and Mike Shatzkin. In particular it gave great input to the Supply Chain paper, my BA conference Dublin speech in the late 90s and discussions with highly influential Findlay Cauldwell who the drove the Dillons supply chain agenda which led to the KPMG review.

Mark had a great desire to change the way publishers and booksellers did business and together with Denis and Francis made a formidable trio of evangelists for doing things smarter. The battles with Teleordering were not to be underestimated but Mark saw the logic of adopting cross industry standards and extending the communication past the basic ordering. That this vision and conviction drove me to Pubeasy and Batch can’t be underestimated and the industry owes much more to Mark than it probably will ever realise.

Spotify Redefines Music - Again

2011-12-01T09:48:00.002Z

"We want music to be like water -- available everywhere, available seamlessly," Spotify CEO and founder Daniel Ek.

There has been much interest of late at reviewing the difference between the digital journey’s of books and music. We wrote about this some 5 years ago in the Brave New World report and although the media have evolved the roots of the divide were clear laid many years ago and the divide very clear. However, there is much to learn from other media and today those smart guys at Spotify delivered another lesson in digital evolution in a press event in New York.

Spotify announced the birth of a redefined social media platform based around full member participation, added value supplementary content and what can be best described as a music platform which would make iTunes look sterile and clunky and Amazon a music shop -full stop. Along with Spotify’s on demand model the platform could not only change music but the commercial model of digital music for all. Sounds grand and overstated and the only thing potentially standing in their way is the music business itself, which would be an irony given the opportunity potentially on offer and the dire position of the current model. The other potential issue is whether developers will build apps for the platform

Spotify are releasing a new API (application programming interface) that will let developers create apps coded in HTML5, and powered from within the Spotify app. Spotify will add a section called the "App Finder" on the left side of its landing page. Spotify is also building its own new features which include ‘favorite friends’.
It’s like the democratisation of music and the creation of new ways to share music, reviews, information, lyrics, concerts tickets etc. It would enhance the subscription service adding a significant number of optional features that will be invisible to users who just want the vanilla version. Publications such as The Rolling Stone are on board and its co-founder Jann Wenner states that the service is “really just the perfect companion to read about the stuff you want to hear as you hear it.” Rolling Stone plans to ctreate playlists for release on Spotify. Last.fm are to provide an app that lets members share their songs with each other, see what other members are listening to and display album covers. Hovering over an album cover in both the Rolling Stone and Last.fm apps will trigger them to play one of the album's tracks. Another app, from Songkick, shows users what concerts are playing in town. It uses their playlists as the base to recommend concerts they might be interested in and displays the locations of those concerts. The location display includes a Google Map.

The list of partners at the launch was an impressive gathering of players; Last.fm, TuneWiki, The Guardian, Dagbladet, We Are Hunted, Soundrop, Top10, Billboard, Fuse, Gaffa, Pitchfork, ShareMyPlaylists, Tunigo, Songkick,and MoodAgent. Now imagine you are a musician and what you could do on a platform that today has 2.5 million subscribers and growing and is both established in Europe and the US.

The jury is still out as to what this will mean to the relationship with Facebook nwhich has helped Spotify’s growth but if they remain coupled then it is easy to envisage mutual benefit.

Despite the recent removal of some indie labels Spotify’s 15 million legally-licensed songs must offer a significant opportunity for app developers to create a music platform which would be difficult to emulate and could actually move music fully into a on demand world and change how we pay, listen and relate to all things musical.

Tax Can Be Taxing

2011-11-30T21:13:00.002Z

Tax and laws created before there was an Internet often can create conflict often between bricks and motor stores and online eretailers however changing the law can often be as hard as collecting the tax.

In the US, sales tax has been a thorny issue between online and physical stores. On one side stands Amazon, eBay and the new breed of online only etailors, who do not have a physical presence in a state and do not have to collect sales tax and on the other, there are those who have physical stores and operations and have to collect taxes. Brick-and-mortar retailers, are claiming that because of their sales tax burden they suffer a competitive disadvantage compared to their online counterparts
States are prohibited from taxing a person with whom it lacks a relationship between the taxing authority and the taxpayer. Some 19 years ago, the Supreme Court held that, at least for purposes of collecting sales tax, ‘ a state lacks substantial nexus over a taxpayer that has no physical presence in the state.’ It was the courts view, uncertainty about what jurisdiction has power to tax, as well as compliance with numerous and difficult tax policies, would place an undue burden on interstate commerce.

The current hearing was set up to explore whether Congress should reform the sales tax legislation and to understand how this could be done so that it does not increase administrative and compliance burdens on America’s small businesses.

Currently 45 US states and the District of Columbia have a sales tax and also a “use” tax, equal to the sales tax rate, which residents must pay for the usage, consumption or storage of goods purchased in a non-resident state and brought into the state. A consumer in Florida who buys goods online from a retailer that does not have any physical presence in the state is responsible to pay use tax and pays no sales tax on his transaction. This is achieved by taxpayers declaring their purchases in other states. Obviously this is a significant tax loophole and as a result online purchases invariably escape taxation altogether.

Three separate bills have been tabled to address the situation and Amazon testified before the hearing to put forward their case.

Paul Misener, vice president, Amazon global public policy, today made a testimony in which they fully backed the need for change. Misner stated that, ‘Far from an e-commerce "loophole,” the constitutional limitation on states’ authority to collect sales tax is at the core of our Nation's founding principles. For this reason, Amazon has steadfastly opposed state attempts to require out-of-state sellers to collect absent congressional authorization…’

He continued, ‘ Fairness among sellers should be created and maintained. Sellers should compete on a level playing field. Congress should not exempt too many sellers from collection, for these sellers will obtain a lasting un-level playing field versus Main Street and other retailers. Congress should rectify the current imbalance and avoid a future imbalance…’

Amazon recognised the need for a small sellers threshold, ‘Such a threshold, which would exempt some sellers from a collection requirement, must be kept very low to attain the objectives of protecting states’ rights, addressing the states’ needs, and creating fairness among sellers…The consequences of the threshold level to states’ rights, the states’ needs, and fairness are very significant, because a surprisingly large fraction of e-commerce is conducted by smaller volume sellers. For example, nearly 30% of uncollected sales tax revenue today is attributable to sellers with annual online sales below $150,000, and only one percent of online sellers sell more than this amount. In other words, a $150,000 exception would deny the states nearly 30% of the newly-available (yet already owed) revenue, but would exempt from collection 99% of online sellers. Any higher threshold would deny the states even more revenue and keep the playing field even more un-level.’

But they ten took a swipe at eBay saying that , ‘while Amazon is prepared to make its technology available as a service to help sellers by collecting sales tax for them, eBay seeks to avoid any role in collection, claiming that small volume sellers will be burdened and, implicitly, that eBay’s technology is not capable of helping its largest sellers to collect. And these claims are made despite the fact that eBay manages to collect the transaction fees it charges its sellers, and despite the fact that eBay already calculates state sales tax for eBay sellers, all the way down to the local jurisdiction level. Amazon and many other service providers will help smaller online sellers collect; surely eBay can as well.’

So change looks imminent which would take the pressure off Amazon having to fight many state battles and give them consistency across states.

Amazon Press Release
Link to watch 2 hours 30 mins of the hearing

Australia Lifts Samsung Ban

2011-11-30T15:23:00.002Z

An Australia court has overturned an earlier ban on the sale of Samsung’s Galaxy tab in the country. Apple had previously won an injunction against Samsung in Austrailia and Germany preventing sales of the Galaxy 10.1 tab, accusing of it copying its touch-screen technology and infringing its patents. Samsung has sought a ban on sales of Apple's iPhone 4S in Australia, Japan, France and Italy.

Today’s news means Samsung will no longer be restricted in Australia. However, they will not be able to start selling the tablet immediately as Justice Lindsay Foster granted a stay on the order until Friday, 2 December, which allows Apple time to appeal in the High Court.

The case is part of a long legal battle which we have previously reported and one which is focused on the two market leaders slugging it out bout in the courts and the shops for a bigger slice of the smartphones and tablet market.

recent article: Apple and Samsung Lock Horns

Can eBooks Meet Changing Social Demand?

2011-11-28T11:14:00.006Z

Three stories catch our eye that all point to a significant trend in the demand to loaning and renting ebooks. Some can be seen to be responding to these changes, whilst others dither, stall and demand it to be on their terms only. Are ebooks just for Christmas and today, or are they really going to be around for life? Do we have to replace those treasured printed titles with a digital library?

Social Reading
A fascinating blog from Danny Sullivan titled http://daggle.com/amazon-apple-hate-families-2867 raises many interesting questions about lending within the family unit. It explains the challenges families face in having to use adult only accounts and in reading on multiple devices. It relates the digital restrictions to those of the physical world and asks for tolerance. Perhaps it makes the case for single versus and multiple use licences, but some would suggest a book is a book is a book.

We live in a rapidly changing world where this year’s latest technology is next year’s junk and where purchasing loyalty is often defined by convenience. Locking in family units to one channel may not be desirable, but may be practical. However, overly restricting what they do between themselves could be an open invitation to unenforceable infringement.

If we step back and look forward, how will the current model and its restrictions pan out say in 5 years, when the devices have moved on several times, the under 13’s have become ‘adults’ and what we see today as future proof standards and DRM, may be not be so solid?

Library Lending
Libraries feed the needs of communities. They were originally restricted by the local budget and facilities but now we have interlibrary lending and collections are more open and sharable but does this support the one digital library concept and result in just one global library. Google, Overdrive, Amazon, and the others.

This week we have all read the often confusing story about Penguin ‘it’s my ball and iam not playing’ spat over ebooks. First it was a call on security and then it was new titles and now some would suggest like a spoilt child they have left it hanging in the air saying maybe they will and maybe they will not allow libraries to play digital lending. This year we have also had the HarperCollins demand that ebooks are not for life and wear out after the same number of library lendings as physical books and therefore like the physical book, they have to be obviously repurchased. We also have two other majors in Simon and Schuster and Macmillan apparently sitting on their hands unable to accept or reject digital library lending.

We have written much about the potential conflict between retail and libraries within the digital world. The history of the public library appears to have past many by and been ignored yet it clearly indicates that what we have today is almost certainly a transient model and will change with digital and trying to protect it for the sake of the status quo will surely fail. We may not have covered everything but our historic review article of last November is worth a second read.

The library lending battles are as predicted now starting to hot up. Some may suggest it is a shame that all parties could not see the writing on the wall and work together to reach a compromise.

Some would suggest that the digital opportunities should create a renaissance opportunity for libraries and reading but appears that it must obviously be on commercial terms acceptable to the big publishers.

Interestingly, the conflict has come at a time when public libraries are under their greatest threat of closure and are subject to spending cuts. Many, for all over the industry, are manning the barricades to fight the closure, but it would appear that some would only do so for physical books and their overall revenues remaining the same. Is this commercial reality or digital hypocrisy?

Canadian Success?
We now read an uplifting story about Montreal's largest library which claims to be busier than ever. According to a recent report by Lumos Research for the Canadian Urban Libraries Council, library usage across the country is up 45% over the past decade, from 16.6 to 24.1 transactions on average per capita and the growth is down to digital. The Grande Bibliotheque’s membership has grown 17% and the $142-million library, now claims some 286,000 active members and 3 million visits annually.

These increases are not just about ebooks but access to electronic databases, Internet visits to library websites and catalogues, digital audiobooks, as well as music and movies. The Montreal library now has 200,000 ebook titles available which all can be downloaded from home with the click of a mouse. It claims to be the busiest library in the French-speaking world and other Canadian cities, have apparently committed to building similarly large, central libraries.

If libraries can be allowed to adapt to new technology they will continue to play an important role in communities. It may be appropriate to redefine the size and reach of the community in this virtual world. If libraries are seen merely in terms of stacks of print books, then the future looks to be far more menacing.

Does the Kyobo Reader Pass the 'So What' Test?

2011-11-26T08:47:00.004Z

If we had a colour ‘eink’ ereader device some 18 months ago we world may have been different today. If we had a colour ‘eink’ ereader device even 12 months ago it would have had a significant impact on the market. But today we have to ask whether it even passes the ‘so what’ test?

Kyobo Book Centre in South Korean has launched a Kyobo eReader, with a full-color display using Qualcomm mirasol technology which is even fast enough for video.The Kyobo eReader uses a 5.7-inch XGA mirasol display from Qualcomm with resolution of 1,024 by 768 pixels and runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. The device also features a 1 GHz Qualcomm SnapDragon processor, multitouch touchscreen, Wi-Fi connectivity also has English-language text-to-speech capabilities.

The display combines the long battery possibilities of E Ink displays with a full colour output. The Mirasol display controls the distance between a membrane and a reflective glass surface, and this either blocks light or amplifies particular frequencies. The result is that the membrane can appear transparent, black, or a particular colour. Qualcomm’s mirasol display layers three of these together to create a full colour red, green, and blue display. The displays then only consume power then they’re moving the membranes around, and only have to move a few hundred nanometers to change colour, The display gets brighter in direct light, and uses a front-light LED system to simulate sunlight in the dark.

The Kyobo eReader is available in South Korea for a relatively high ticket of around US$300.
So does it pass the ‘so what’ test?

It would appear to be halfway between a smartphone and a tablet. It reads ebooks but is that its main draw and in our opinion it fails on some basic counts. It is not a smartphone. Size wise it falls uncomfortably between the new smartphones and today's tablets. The screen technology may now offer colour but anyone who has a Amoled screen will know this game has already been decided and the winner is here today. Finally the price is sitting on the high side of unattractive.

Interestingly we wonder whether those UK booksellers that have a somewhat daunting ebook challenge may go for it just to be different? As the market moves progressively away from devices to platforms these devices will still create interest but will not become mainstream just expensive gadgets with a limited life expectancy and novelty usage.

Spotify Delivers Pay Subscribers

2011-11-24T16:14:00.002Z

Some 4 years ago we awaited the launch of Spiral Frog’s music streaming service but . Unfortunately when it finally it came to market it was littered with many industry issues and was still too early for the market. Spotify and Pandora have followed and those who have followed our writing will know we have long supported these services and the logical user model adopted by Spotify.

Many questioned whether users would just use the basic service and avoid the payment subscription service and whether the music industry would allow it into the US. Today Spotify has announced that it has now over 2.5 million paying subscribers and since its summer US launch it has grown from 1.6 million subscribers in June to day’s 2.5 million with revenue increasing over the last year from £11.3 million to £63 million with subscription alone delivering £45 million.

Spotify is still not into clear waters with losses growing from £16m to £26.5m. Even with the increased royalty and licence payments that cause the losses it is now possible to see growth and with it the potential to change the music model.

It is important that the media sectors recognise that models will have to change and that it is better to support legitimate players such as Spotify than cripple them and hand over the business to others who will not pay a penny. This shift to rent, subscription real-time and cloud based services on demand are perfect for today’s mobile world. The question is whether we will all see this or remain wedded to models that they have little future.

Buffy the Facebook Mobile Slayer?

2011-11-24T12:26:00.002Z

Will Facebook’s ‘Buffy’ be the vampire mobile slayer or a step too far?

Facebook are widely reported to be working with HTC to create its own Android smartphone, which is due out in 12 to 18 months. According to The Wall Street Journal the Facebook phone project has been codenamed, ‘Buffy’.

However why does it need to have its own hardware? Facebook is already tightly integrated into many Android smartphones and it is very questionable exactly what Facebook would gain over the wide adoption it already has. If Facebook believe that ‘Buffy’ could tightly integrate other Facebook services such as their email it could turn many off if all their all email and messaging from the phone have to be done through Facebook?

Facebook isn't a hardware company and perhaps they should stick to what they are good at. Even the likes of Google have struggled with the hardware and ended up buying Motorola and launching a Nexus with Samsung and Microsoft has many hardware nightmares most notably with their Zune player.

Ironically HTC, the world's fourth-biggest smartphone brand shares have fallen by 7%, which is the maximum allowed in one day. The fall has been driven by a cut its growth forecast. HTC had earlier forecast growth of 20% to 30% but despite a booming market now expected revenues for the final three months of 2011 to be little changed from a year earlier. This demonstrates the growth of Android adoption by many players.

Equally interesting is the news that Google and Samsung have confirmed that there are volume issues with their flagship mobile phone the Galaxy Nexus and Apple and that the battery problem that has dogged the new iOS 5 Apple operating system remains unfixed.

However, the one thing that is clear is that smartphones remain at the core of mobile technology, Android is now leading the wave and the more platforms tightly integrate applications and services the more the smartphone will become the device of choice. This has a significant bearing on how media providers, channels and cloud based services must adapt.

Cybercrime, SOPA and Copyright

2011-11-23T10:40:00.005Z

Cybercrime takes many different forms and always happens to someone else. We can take precautions against it but when it happens its impact can be significant.

Some recent news items demonstrate the size and impact of cybercrime activity.

The UK’s Metropolitan Police’s Central e-Crime Unit (PCeU) have closed down over 2,000 fraudulent e-commerce websites ahead of this year’s Christmas shopping season. These were websites that were marketing products from well-known brands such as Nike, GHD, Tiffany and Ugg. Consumers received shoddy bogus items, nothing or could have their identities stolen or bank details used. It is estimated the banking fraud alone was in the region of £2.9 million.
The US FBI have charged six Estonia individuals with conducting a sophisticated click-fraud scheme that infected about four million computers in 100 countries with malware and stole over $14 million Six people were arrested in on 8 November. The seventh member of the gang, a Russian, remains at large.
US and Romania authorities have arrested over 100 people in connection with Internet fraud schemes that are claimed to have netted over $100 million.
Four British men have been charged with conspiracy hacking to carry out an unauthorised act in relation to a computer as part of the infamous LulzSec and Anonymous group activities.
Hackers are even alleged to have destroyed a pump used to pipe water to thousands of homes in a US city in Illinois.

These are some of the cybercrimess that have made the news in the last few days and we have to accept that there are many that don’t and that go undetected, or are merely kept quiet. Cybercrime is not going away nor is any consumer, organisation or even state totally safe. Cybercrime also is global but is often policed locally. It's not only about financial gain, but affects all property, intellectual property, utilities, commerce, and even personal identities. What makes cybercrime so difficult is that the motives behind it vary widely. We may hear about the large financial fraud and theft cases and those relating to large scale privacy issues, as above, but everyday what we all regard as criminal activity is taking place and intellectual property theft and infringement is happening at an alarming and increasing rate.

As states attempt to clamp down on cybercrime they do so often with a lack of inter state consistency and some would suggest that they go too far in encroaching on the rights to privacy. The laws have to deal with many complex issues and it makes us wonder whether police forces will be judged in the future, not by the number of ‘bobbies on the beat’ (police on the street but on the number of ‘bobbies on the net’.

It is often difficult to separate copyright infringement from financial cyber fraud and many hold different opinions about these. Protection and management of owned rights is critical in today's intellectual property sectors. It is often one thing to own rights and a completely different thing to be able to police and manage them.

SOPA

The US legislators are currently grappling with how far to clamp down on copyright infringement. The House of Representatives has tabled a Stop Online Piracy Act, (SOPA) copyright bill which is designed to make it much harder for rogue offshore sites to sell counterfeit U.S. goods, including fake prescription drugs and copyrighted movies and music. Such sites are believed to be causing tens of billions of dollars in losses annually to U.S. companies.

The bill however is attracting as much negative as positive attention. Objectors are raising issues regarding the bill potential to require Internet providers to monitor customers' traffic and block the addresses of Web sites suspected of copyright infringement. A network provider can be ordered to "prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States" to specific Web sites defined by their unique DNS number. ‘Deep packet inspection’ to block data from specific Web pages, or URLs and potentially intercepting a customers' browsing for analysis is at the core of many objections. As well as free speech and rights advocates groups, some of the largest web companies, including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, have spoken out against the bill.

What is also interesting, is how SOPA and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which grant immunity to website owners for content posted by users will interact could be in conflict. The DMCA offers website owners a Safe Harbour for content posted on their site by users. So a sites such as Wattpad or YouTube cannot be held responsible if a user posts copyright infringing material on its site. DMCA allows content owners to ask the YouTubes of the world to take down infringing material but the site can claim safe habour and is immune to being sued unless it refuses.

The Recording Industry Association of America, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, strongly supports the SOPA legislation. However, the question remains as to in whose interest should the bill be crafted.

European Union Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes is widely reported saying that the millions of dollars being spent copyright infringement it is not addressing the issue. She also believes that consumers can see copyright as a restrictive tool and that artists are still not being adequately rewarded.

Kroes said, "We need to go back to basics and put the artist at the centre, not only of copyright law, but of our whole policy on culture and growth. In times of change, we need creativity, out-of-the-box thinking: creative art to overcome this difficult period and creative business models to monetise the art."

We support the sentiment given by Kroes but also accept that legislative action is required to deter, and police the internet. When we see the legal patent battles that are going on today between the technology giants we have to ask what realistic chance has the small owner of intellectual property got in the depths of the internet and in dealing with international infringement and crime?

Digital Content Is Different

2011-11-17T15:05:00.004Z

Yesterday we sat down with someone who is starting a new digital venture. As we discussed the potential, the market, the options and much more, it became apparent to us that there are a lot of things that applied to the physical book market, that simply do not apply, or should be questioned in the digital market. Walking blindly into the digital world assuming that all remains the same is in danger of establishing a set of urban myths that we have written about in the past but that continue to dog all our thinking and real digital opportunities.

We would like to take the opportunity to offer a dozen points as to why we believe digital content is different.

1. Size - 256 pages and x thousand words were mere economic parameters that prevailed and mattered in the physical world. They become meaningless and irrelevant in the digital world. The author is free to write as little, or as much as they feel appropriate and that convey his story and that the consumer can digest. One would argue that small starts to become beautiful and large may be present a page turn too many. Short stories present a great digital opportunity, but may only happen if they are thought through economically and cost is taken out. After all many successful authors started their writing with short stories and articles. We still have still to adopt and adapt the Keitai model in the West, but if Dickens could write and sell by instalments why are we waiting for the finished tome?

2. Price – Some would suggest that prices must relate to the physical book and that any major price reduction on digital could cannibalise physical sales and the market. Some also suggest that digital is a huge investment and that the costs of the physical product are still incurred in the pre production and marketing activities. The problem is all too often this thinking is based on ebooks being just ‘another rendition’ and that each must stand economically on its own two feet. Why aren’t ebooks ‘given away ‘as aperitifs, lost leaders and to stimulate and drive physical sales? Why doesn’t digital content adopt simple price points like other media? Finally, digital content must be different as demonstrated by the differentiation given to it by the vast majority of governments.

3. Age - The consumer may want the ‘latest book’ but this is often driven by media and promotion. How many consumers do you see opening a book at the copyright page to check when it was published before they buy it? Amazon’s advanced search has a publication date field which is missing on The Book Depository, Waterstones and Blackwell’s who has a ‘published between two dates’ option. We may be thick, but we couldn’t even find an advanced search at Barnes and Noble or Kobo. The eWorld now has to compete with, not just the remaining books on the shelf, or in the store, but all books ever published.

4. Rights - When you buy an ebook, it may be literally just for Christmas! eBooks do not have a second life, no first sale doctrine and being able to lend them to friends. Therefore, to say they are merely just another rendition is like saying there is no difference between a taxi and a car, both get you from A to Z, both are driven by an engine but both are very different .

5. Media - Today we see books, music, film, games, being offered separately on some sites and collectively, as a one stop media shop on others. Dedicated media offers will work as long as they offer the consumer value, but when the vast majority of digital media is now supplied through white labelled channels this makes the one stop shop attractive. As some start to ‘enhance ebooks’ the synergy between media sectors could further erode and the one stop shop appear even more compelling. As we have seen it isn’t difficult for supermarkets, associations or in fact anyone to sell white label stock off their brand with no inventory cost.

6. Taste – It used to be said that you could judge a person but the books on their bookshelf. However, when their collection is no longer visible, no judgement is possible. Some would advocate that this merely flips into a social network opportunity, where readers share their book experience, favourite reads and what they have bought. However, we would suggest that this is a different and ignoring the hype has still to be proven between strangers.

7. Device – The ebook evolution was born out of a combination of digital content and reading devices both being widely available. Today we have now passed that stage and replaced the device with a device agnostic platform. Importantly mobile devices have not stood still and we now have smart phones with sufficient power, Amoled screens, apps and broadband connectivity to challenge ereaders, games machines, laptops, and even the emerging tablet itself. Multi media devices have arrived to your hand and technology is going only one way – smaller, cheaper and smarter. We would suggest that the ereader device is fast becoming irrelevant.

8. Leadership – The largest players always dictated the game and the book market has been no different. Amazon has established itself as the largest driver and influencer in the market today and will be for some years and the largest retailers are no longer defined by square footage or constrained physically. Will tomorrows leading retailer be that with the best mailing list and management? As the retail internet offers become somewhat indistinguishable does this open the door for smaller specialists and innovators to survive and thrive? We also assumed the largest publishers will drive the market but is this a given? Will again the innovative and agile score over those who will find it hard to tack and change course in what will be choppy seas?

9. Re reading the novel - People often say that they re read their favourite books and its true, but they often do this after a long period of time. Guess what, the ebook format, device, technology may have changed by the time you get round to re reading it! It may be like going back to cassette, vinyl and eight track.

10. Metadata – We used to cringe when the dreaded ‘m’word was raised and often found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to use a word which itself was an instant turn off. Great strides have been made to rationalise the communication between trading partners and improve the physical supply chain and standards and metadata where pivotal to this. However, when you have all the content digitalised and the associated material and information is fully indexed the game starts to change. Some 80% of what you need to know about the book is retrievable from the digital content itself and some other information exists in real time. This must change how we communicate and what we communicate as we move from a transactional and physical supply chain to one that is driven by media content and social interaction. The library world has finally accepted that the old MARC record is past its sell by date and maybe it will be followed by others we regard as essential today. We now have to radically rethink information, access and retrieval and equally who is best to lead us through this revolution.

11. Rental and the public Library - We strongly believe that ebook sales are going to move from downloads as we know them today to online and cloud based rentals. Netflix, Last FM, Pandora and our favourite Spotify are among those leading the way. Many may see this as a huge threat but is this real or more based on the challenge it poses to the existing business model . We have written much on this radical change and on the redefinition of the library tomorrow. Some may resist the move to online and rental, but it will happen and it may well not be a top down driven but a bottom up revolution.

12. External agents –5 years ago, when we wrote the Brave New World report, we recognised that the digital world was going to be heavily shaped, not from inside but from the outside. Today we have all seen the impact that the likes of Amazon, Apple, Google and others continue to have on the market and the evolution of digital publishing. These new entrants have bothered to invest in the physical channel and when some suggest that they should acquire Borders, B&N etc the answer is obvious and negative.

There are many thoughts we all have as to how the market will evolve. It is important that we start to see digital content as different and free it from the physical book spine that will continue to choke it.

Samsung and Apple Lock Horns

2011-11-15T15:55:00.002Z

We handed in our old and trusty HTC Hero Android last week which now some two years on is showing its age. We looked hard at what was on offer from operating systems, hardware and networks and choose not to wait for Ice cream sandwich and choose the Samsung Galaxy S 2 running gingerbread. It isn’t until you actually get your hands on the latest Samsung technology that you appreciate the real threat they pose to Apple today.

In just a handful of days, iPhone users who have seen my smartphone have been taken aback and old iPhone users are clearly jealous. The thing that won it over the other Android for us was the quality and size of the AMOLED screen and its lightness and thin profile. The thing that won it over the iPhone was the growing position and offer of Android. We didn’t consider the others as serious contenders. Samsung also offers the tight integration of many apps and superb communications. It even came preloaded with the majority of apps and social services we use including BBC iPlayer which is as good as watching TV and of course for us free Sykpe, GTM app and much more.

Samsung is now locked in patent wars in some 10 countries with Apple and its isn’t the one way traffic some would have you believe. Samsung is trying to even ban sales of Apple's latest iPhone on alleged patent infringements in Australia, Japan, France and Italy. Apple has preliminary injunctions against some Samsung products in Australia, Germany and the Netherlands, and is trying block US sales of some Samsung models. Samsung has also appealed against an Australian court's decision to block the sale of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet and a full court hearing is scheduled for later this month.

The battle is not just about phone patents but also tablet ones too as these two giants tussle for what is a huge global market. To top it all and little know to many, is the fact that even Apple buys chips and displays from the South Korean giant!

We now have the smartphone market growing by some 42% year-on-year in the third quarter and shipping some 115.2m units. Smartphones continue to not only outsell PCs, but the gap is growing. In just three years since its launch Android now powers 52.5% of handsets shipped, which is staggering, given this was just 25.3% only a year ago. Samsung claims to have shipped more smartphones in the third quarter of 2011 than any other company. The Android genie is definitely not going away and Samsung still has others such as Motorola, LG, HTC all pushing the Android envelope.

Is Apple concerned – well yes, according to the recent Steve Jobs biography. Apple’s market share has dropped from 16.6% in the third quarter of 2010 to 15% in 2011 and even though its sales rose from 13.4m to 17.3m, this fell short of Samsung’s 24m.
It’s no wonder Apple wanted to put the Australian case hearing put back till next August, but the judge has set a date on March and feels August is simply too far away.

So we come back to our decision and what we have in our hands today. When I demoed it to someone yesterday they summed it up perfectly by saying I had a true mobile that offered everything and can make calls as well! Why bother with a tablet you can’t slip into your pocket and are tablets really the answer or just a fad?

The Times Are a Changin'

2011-11-11T09:22:00.003Z

Today we have two different stories which by themselves are newsworthy. Together these demonstrate that the booktrade is not in full control of its own destiny and that changes can happen from outside that will change what is developed, sold and how it is sold.

Firstly, we have long believed that ebook sales are going to move from downloads as we know them today to online cloud based rentals. They are many who see this as a huge threat, whilst there others like ourselves, who see it as a huge opportunity. However, can such a change be controlled by the existing big players, or will we see a shift in market power driven by consumer demand, in the same way that Nasper, iTunes, Pandora and Spotify have changed music and YouTibe and Netflix video?

Verdict Research claims that consumers are spending 21% less on films, video games and music than they were in 2008, down from £7.7 billion to £6.1 billion. It would appear that they prefer free services such as YouTube, Spotify , BBC’s iPlayer and the mass of free app downloads for mobiles, over traditional home entertainment. The current economic downturn is also obviously fuelling the trend. So is the move towards an increased demand for ‘free’ in other media sectors a blip, or a real trend and will books be different?

Secondly, the current economic turmoil in Europe is significant and is now in danger of engulfing major countries such as Italy, Spain and according to the ex UK PM Gordon Brown, even France. Austerity has a funny way of driving both consumer habits on spending and government measures on taxation. What we assume is safe can become unsafe overnight and only a fool would believe that books are and will always be viewed as different.

The French government has announced that VAT rate on books will rise from the current 5.5% to 7% from 1st January. This is still a reduced rate compared to the standard rate of VAT in France of 19.6% but is a clear sign that in times of austerity the gloves come off when governments have to reduce public debt.

We all are acutely aware of the disparity on VAT between EU states and also of the tax disparity between physical and digital renditions. We should not assume that this will remain as is in difficult times and that any harmonisation has to be to the lowest common denominator.

So we see consumer consumption changing in other media sectors and taxation changes being taken to reign in state debt. We can’t assume tomorrow will be the same as today and that we have full control over our destiny.

KOBO Steps Up To Go Global

2011-11-09T06:42:00.003Z

In a move clearly aimed at the international market KOBO has been acquired by Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten for a reported $315 million in cash. The ebook world todate has been very US driven, but this could change as all the major players now vie for the other markets where they all wish to be number one. This change is both inevitable and significant and will squeeze those who do not have the reach or the commitment.

Founded in 2009, Kobo has grown from its roots in Indigo into a formidable eReaders platform and broken out of its Canadian roots to move internationally with partnership arrangements first with the ill fated Borders in the US and more recently with Fnac in France and WHSmiths in the UK. It is widely regarded as the strong outsider in the market behind Amazon, Google and Apple and in the uS Barnes and Noble. Kobo claim 5.6 million reader worldwide.

Kobo claim that the company will maintain its headquarters, management team and employees and will continue to be run from Toronto and see the acquisition as an enabler which will allow with them to grow faster and complete internationally.

Rajuten has been buying up ecommerce companies and spending heavily. In 2010 they bought French e-commerce company PriceMinister and German online shopping mall, Tradoria. In 2011 they bought e-commerce companies Ikeda (Brazil), Buy.com and Play.com. Rajuten is now one of the top global e-commerce companies by revenue and is clearly building an end to end platform which not only services the consumer but also manages important media content, giving it both higher margins and tighter control over media.

This move should open up significant global opportunities for Kobo in markets that they would have struggled to penetrate alone. It does however raise questions on how Barnes and Noble will break out of the US and what options are left for chains such as Waterstones in the UK.

Rethinking the Digital Future

2011-11-07T08:55:00.004Z

Technology is not only changing how we do business and is introducing a significant challenge in reducing the time to do business. As technology speeds up processes it also highlights those age old time blockages and inefficiencies that didn’t matter, or could not be addressed yesterday. Technology now enables us need to look afresh at the end to end business and consider how we can do things quicker and smarter.

Today when we look at publishing, we often see a market littered with ‘gatekeeper’ checkpoints. These barriers were not only aimed at introducing quality control, reducing the flow of traffic and they also often to slowed down the process itself.

Manuscript submissions, acquisitions, development and production can take months if not years. There may appear to be perfectly good reasons why it should be as slow as it is, but it is now clearly restrained by people rather than technology. The way works are also marketed, promoted and sold, could be said by some to belong to a bygone age that was more obsessed with feeding the shelf, events and calendars and those 13 week windows, than satisfying today’s real time world of instant gratification.

However, like many markets, we are obsessed with the consumer end. After all, the consumer is the only one that puts money is and despite what some marketers think, is the only one who decides the true winners. When we look at the end to end process we often view it as not one marketplace but a series of linked marketplaces each with their own gatekeepers, fiefdoms and find that they are often overly protected from each other. Despite the huge advances and improvements to Supply Chain communications, some what suggest that we still do business by ‘slipping notes to each other under the door’.

What if we could tear up today’s processes and redefine the role of the gatekeepers?

What if we could view the business as one end to end marketplace?

What if Michael Porter’s linear Value Chain model was a virtuous circle with no start and end?

What if we viewed the business as one integrated marketplace with content and associated rights at its core and the players and activities being just that and periphery to that core. More importantly, what if we recognised that all players could effectively participate at any time?

Imagine consumers being able to access and comment on manuscripts alongside agents, publishers and retailers, some will say its already happening. Imagine living bibliographic records being managed as ’wiki’ records where they are developed not so much in a vacuum but as crowdsourced documents that never stop being updated, appended to and refined. Imagine the elusive rights registry being open to all.

An inclusive ‘book’ marketplace perspective could change not only how we do business, the speed in which we do business but the relationships within the business? It could remove some of the adversarial and holier than thou attitudes that continue to dog the industry. It could create a new level of interest and participation that is more organic and spontaneous than today’s often ‘manufactured’ approach.

This holistic marketplace may appear unfamiliar, dangerous, exciting and to some a bridge too far, but it is the direction that technology, social networking and networks are clearly taking us today. We don’t fully understand the implications on today’s roles, processes and business and the route is somewhat dynamic and unpredictable but it is happening and the genie is not going back in the bottle.

The key is to see one holistic marketplace.

When we look at the likes of Amazon, Kobo and others we see businesses uncluttered with yesterday’s thinking and ready to redefine how we do business tomorrow not just at the consumer end but within the new virtuous circle of value.

Can You Define Tomorrow's Digital Library?

2011-11-03T17:44:00.006Z

Today we have two separate but interlinked news articles on libraries. Declining spend, visits, issues, stock, staff numbers would all send out alarm bells to most businesses let alone libraries today and the news that the biggest industry player has now launched its own ebook lending library would certainly heighten the alarm bells.

It’s just under a year since we wrote an article ‘Public Libraries: Back to the Future’. The article was about the history of the public library and changes that it now faces in the 21st century. This article was different to the many others we have written, in that it focused on the changes that libraries have gone through both in their funding and their membership and its concluding comments questioned why tomorrow should be the same as today and remain unanswered :

Many would go on blindly demanding on the universal right to 'free' and that the funding by public funds must be a given. However, some would now suggest that this needs to be seriously questioned if we are to avoid the questionable digital position adopted by the UK PA over electronic access, the handing over of public assets to Google and the potential challenges of digital subscription/circulation libraries outside of the public control. Could Amazon or Google Editions become the new digital subscription / circulation library?

First, despite the high profile activity to save UK public libraries, we have a report from the UK Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA) that states a 2.3% drop in spending across the service of from £1.19bn to £1.16bn. Book acquisition drops included; adult non-fiction, down 13.7% to 2.36m, Adult fiction down 7.4% to 4.58m, children's fiction down 7% to 2.92m and children's non-fiction down 5% to 659,000. The total book stock held by libraries also dropped from 99.2m to 98.3m and the number of libraries also dropped from 4,612 to 4,579. The decline also hit the number of overall visits to libraries which dropped 2.3% to 314.5m and book issued, down 2.9% to 300.2m and even the number of web visits to libraries, which had risen sharply over the previous four years, dropped from 120.4m to 114.8m.

The CIPFA report also stated that the total number of volunteers in UK libraries had risen by 22.3% to 21,462 people whilst the number of library staff had dropped by 4.3% to 23,681 over the same period.

As we face the digital challenge with declining spend, visits, issues, stock, staff numbers we have to ask whether public libraries as we know them today are sustainable.

Secondly, we have the launch of Amazon’s Kindle Owners' Lending Library, which allows ebooks to be borrowed by US Prime members and read on all Kindle E Ink and Fire devices. Prime began as a membership offer for package-shipping benefits and costs $79 per annum and has now added video-streaming with some 13,000 movies and TV shows to members as well as ebook lending. Prime members will only be able to borrow one book out at a time for up to a month and any Notes, highlights and bookmarks made will be saved even when they return the book. When they want to borrow a new book the old book is effectively removed.

In September Amazon entered in agreement with Overdrive to make Kindle titles available to libraries and already libraries claim that the impact of this has been significant in the US.

Amazon claims that Kindle Owners' Lending Library will offer "thousands of books to borrow", but today these will exclude titles from the major trade houses, who have refused to join. Amazon appears to have reached a fixed fee agreement with other publishers and is claimed in some cases to be purchasing a title each time it is borrowed by a reader. Some would suggest that to grow the service in the short term Amazon doesn’t need the major Trade Houses and if like everything else they have pioneered they get it right the major Trade House will need them or an alternative in the long term.

Libraries serve communities and promote reading, learning and have been at the heart of society over the years. However as public libraries come under increasing fiscal squeeze their current business model may also come under increasing pressure.

CIPFA Press Release and report
Amazon Owners' Lending Library
'Amazon Overdrive potentially lock up libraries', Brave New World April 2011
'Freeing eLibraries to Compete', Brave New World March 2011
'Public Libraries: Back to the Future'. Brave New World December 2010

Just When You Thought Standards Were Simple

2011-11-02T11:36:00.004Z

The amazing metadata map above is simply called Seeing Standards: A Visualisation of the Metadata Universe and is truly mind-blowing and a tribute to the creator Jenn Riley. It demonstrates not only the vast range of standards, the communities they serve, their purpose,function and domain.

Metadata is the data that describes data. We often refer to it as bibliographic data and it is the information that enables us the search, find, retrieve the appropriate information and allows us to talk to each other through a common language.

The book world is widely adopting ONIX which originated from the music industry in the 90s, whilst the library world with its more complex requirements has retained its MARC records.

However, it would appear that time is being called on the MARC record.

The Library of Congress is now being asked to take action by two expert groups with the aim of funding the work to create a new bibliographic framework that will serve a wide range of associated library communities well into the future.

In the late 1960s, early 1970s, the Library community created the MARC21 standard. At the time was a giant step forward and enabled libraries to share machine readable bibliographic data and also to reduce the cost and effort of cataloguing. The MARC standard has been a huge success and is responsible for the global creation of millions of bibliographic records. The structure was approved as a National Information Standards Organization (NISO) (Z39.2) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (2709) standard, which helped establish it as the standard used by libraries. It also was used to describe other material, such as serials, sound recordings, still and moving images, maps, archival material, computer software, digital resources etc. Today there are over a billion MARC 21 compatible records.

Now some 40 years later the a working group from the community have found that MARC is ‘no longer fit for the purpose, work with the library and other interested communities to specify and implement a carrier for bibliographic information that is capable of representing the full range of data of interest to libraries, and of facilitating the exchange of such data both within the library community and with related communities.’

This call for change is echoed from tests of the Resource Description and Access (RDA) conducted by the National Agricultural Library, the National Library of Medicine, and the Library of Congress.

So when we read the statement from the Library of Congress we find ourselves drowning is a sea of acronyms and names. We are familiar with some we have no clue about others. So we are lucky to have been pointed to work that Jenn Riley has done which could be described as a ‘dummies guide’ to standards and their relationships, which we highly recommend and share links to below.

Read the Library of Congress Statement, October 31, 2011

Seeing Standards: A Visualisation of the Metadata Universe by Jenn Riley

Glossary of Metadata Standards by Jenn Riley

Glossary of Metadata Standards (poster form) by Jenn Riley

Collective Endeavour On Cybercrime?

2011-11-01T12:58:00.002Z

What would bring representatives from over 60 nations to London to a special two day conference this week? The representatives include EU digital supremo, Neelie Kroes, Baroness Neville-Jones, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague, Cisco vice-president Brad Boston, Senior Executive at Facebook Joanna Shields and until issues forced her to cancel even US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had been due to attend.

In a world where literally everything is now online, cybercrime, which is now estimated to cost worldwide some £600bn a year, is increasingly becoming a big issue.
This year has seen some very high profile attacks; Nintendo, Sony Pictures, Sony Europe, 10,000 Iranian government e-mails stolen by Anonymous, Defence group L-3, Google Gmail, Honda Canada, Lockheed Martin, Sony Music Japan, Nasa etc.

It is not just large multi-national companies who get hacked, or their intellectual property stolen, but also individuals who can have had their personal information stolen and pasted all over the internet.

Today, we read that security company Symantec claim that from July until September some 29 companies in the chemicals industry, which included Fortune 100 companies, were the target of cyber-attacks and a further 19 companies, including defence specialists, had also been affected. The incidents are being linked to earlier attacks on carmakers and human rights organisations.

Iain Lobban, the head of GCHQ, claims that a "significant" attempted attack was made on the Foreign Office and other government departments over the summer.

Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, claims that as many as 5% of PCs are infected with malware and there was a one in 20 risk that any given computer was sending spam without the owner's knowledge.

Its hardly surprising that hacking is on the increase with Attack Tool Kits (ATKs), which programs designed to exploit website security, being widely available on the internet.

Rik Ferguson, senior security researcher at Trend Micro says of today’s hackers that they can be, "both black or white hat (or sometimes grey) depending on their motivation." In hackerworld, white hats are the good guys, black hats the criminals.
A popular practice is to simply deface websites with a message similar to the graffiti that adorns our cityscapes today. Zone-H, a website which monitors such activity, claim over 1.5 million defacements were logged in 2010.

Not only is the Internet a force for good and changing how and what we do, it is also reshaping and redefining crime against states, companies, property and individuals.
UK Foreign Secretary, Mr Hague, stated that, "The response does not lie in the hands of any one government or country but it is too important to be left to chance. This needs to be a collective endeavour, involving all those who have a stake in cyberspace.’ The UK government has also put aside some £650m of additional funding to help tackle computer-based threats over the next four years.

We hope that the ‘London Agenda’ can make progress and help define a new safer Internet road.

More info:
Symantic release on ATKs
Hacker attacks up 43% on Retailers SC Magazine Oct 2011
Thousands of WordPress sites sucked into BlackHole SC Magazine Nov 2011
'Nitro' Hackers Reportedly Attack Dozens of Companies in Chemical, Defense Industries
Fox News Oct 2011

Google To Take You Inside The Shop

2011-11-01T09:27:00.004Z

We all thought that Google Street was taking mapping to a new level when you could actually ‘walk’ down the street and see the sights as if you were actually there, but Google has now taken the experience to a new level and has started a pilot project which will take you behind the shop door!

The new project is completely on a voluntary and Google’s Street View has already gone behind the doors of some 17 museums.

Initially the project is being limited to locations including London, Paris and some cities in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the US. It is based on inviting the most searched types of businesses to be captured from the inside on camera. This group includes restaurants, hotels, shops, gyms and repair workshops, but interestingly today it excludes big-brand chains and community services such as Hospitals and solicitors.

In addition to the 360-degree fish eye and wide-angle lens shots the businesses that participate are also invited to upload their own pictures. All images will become Google’s property that may be used in other Google applications.

So if you own a bookshop would you participate or watch your competitors get that extra lift? Will Google make it a no brainer for those bookshops that sign up for Google? Will they exclude bookchains and enable the little independent to be exposed?

The interesting challenge is whether business see this as an intrusion, a marketing tool, or merely something they must now do in order to compete?

Sony Buys All Sony Ericsson

2011-10-27T14:44:00.002Z

Sony who was once ‘the’ electronics brand has had it share of market slippage and some years ago felt it had to enter the mobile market in partnership with Ericsson. Scandinavia once the centre of mobiles, has in recent years, lost out to the awakening Far East manufacturers and changing consumer demand driven by the likes of Apple. The likes of Nokia and Sony Ericsson have struggled to keep up.

Founded in 2001, Sony Ericsson only have some 2% of the global smartphone market with sales of 6.3 billion euros and now are clearly lagging behind others in the smartphone race. Sony Ericsson Xperia smartphones themselves accounted for 80% of its sales and these run on Google's Android operating system.

Today Sony has thrown down the gauntlet and decided to buy full control Sony Ericsson for 1.1bn euros ($1.5bn; £964m), making it a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony. Sony will also get the five sets of patents that cover the phones and a licensing agreement on any other intellectual property.

The question is will it make a difference?

They believe that the tighter integration with its TVs, tablets, PCs and the Sony PlayStation through its Consumer division will make the difference and also allow it to seamlessly connect smartphones, laptops, tablets and televisions online.

The proposed technology integration and alignment with Sony’s entertainment content should be a good test. Sony’s integration strategy will still have to compete with Apple’s and its App Store, other Androids and the Google Marketplace , Google Motorola, the Nokia Windows 7 threat, Amazon’s Kindle media platform and much more.

For Book Depository Read Amazon

2011-10-27T12:27:00.002Z

The UK OFT (Office of Fair Trading) has today cleared Amazon’s proposed acquisition UK Internet retailer The Book Depository. Many objections were submitted by the UK trade who were mindful of the growth of Amazon and the leverage that The Book Depository potentially gives it.

The ruling was not unexpected and was based on UK trading today and found that The Book Depository's share of UK sales was relatively small, accounting for between two to four per cent of online retailing of hard-copy books. They state that 'we are satisfied that this small increment to Amazon's position does not raise competition issues. The evidence showed limited competitive constraint from The Book Depository which, in fact, has shown most growth and expansion in overseas markets rather than the UK.’

Whilst the decision is sound today the merger does knock out a viable alternative to Amazon who has clearly demonstrate its ability to be both innovative and grow rapidly. The question now is who is the viable alternative and what levels of growth have they been able to achieve? Comparing a raising star to today’s market to many who are not exactly setting the world alight is valid but hardly fair trading.

Amazon clearly made a wise move in buying The Book Depository and got it under the OFT radar on today’s measures. If we were to extrapolate the growth and sales to see position that The Book Depository may have achieved in the coming years without Amazon and the power that the consolidation could deliver then the decision may have been tighter.

Just like they did some 13 years ago, some today are pointing to Amazon’s dip in profits and raising questions about further growth and returns. After all, accountants will often only see one goose and are unable to account in the books for the goose that lays the golden egg.

The full ruling can be read on the OFT site.

Amazon: Fiction Prizes, Japan and KF8

2011-10-22T16:39:00.007Z

Another day and that great river Amazon keeps on flowing. Today three disjointed pieces of news demonstrate why Amazon continues to chart its own course and is a significant publishing force.

First the fairly insignificant news that France Telecom Orange is co-developing its own ebook store as an alternative to Kindle. Orange intend to partner with rival French cellco SFR and the French Library Union and aim to develop a digital library. They believe that they can achieve their Kindle competing goals by a hosting a wider range of French titles than Amazon and will offer users the ability to pay via the mobile bill. Orange investment is claimed to be around €5m and although the French market may be seen by some as parochial, it is already getting crowded with Kobo teaming up with Fnac. We doubt Orange will make it to prize ceremony, but believe they will help raise the ebook profile in France. Forget the Orange 2011 winner,Téa Obreht and her debut novel, 'The Tiger's Wife', some would give the Fiction Prize to Orange itself.

Whilst Kobo are setting their sights on France and the UK and Orange are planning to ‘tango’ the Kindle in France, Amazon is rumoured to be entering the Japanese e-book market and to set up an online e-book store this year. The rumour is supported by claims that Amazon is in contractual negotiations with publishers such as Shogakukan, Shueisha, Kodansha, Shinchosha and PHP Institute Inc is expected to provide about 1,000 digitized titles to Amazon.

Japanese publishers have been reluctant to provide content to Amazon over concerns that the retailer will sell e-books at a discount. Although the Japanese e-book market in 2010 was estimated at only 65 billion yen ($846.9 million) the print book and magazine market is worth about 2 trillion yen. One could say the Amazon presents a clear replay of the US Black Ships that opened up Japanese trade. It is easy to see this as a clear strategic step for Amazon whilst others scrap and try to play catch up in easier markets.

Finally Amazon has unveiled its next-generation file-format for Kindle books. Kindle Format 8 (KF8) will replace Mobi 7, and it brings support for HTML5 and CSS3. Obviously this is not epub 3.1 and some would say is somewhat behind that standard, but it may be a significant and more timely route for many and better tuned to the market.

KF8 will obviously enable publishers to create better-looking books with richer formatting, which could include fixed and floated elements, embedded fonts and drop-caps, text on background images, numbered and bulleted lists, and much more. Children’s books could now “set on Fire” with imagery, fixed layouts and pop-ups; comics and graphic novels could benefit from ‘Kindle Panel Views’; reference books could be made more attractive by superior diagrams and cookbooks and travel guides cold start to come to life.

Some will say that isn’t enough, but it enables the Kindle Fire to display the enhanced ebooks in play today and if encourages more publishers to develop the content, then it may be a far smarter move than developing standards and expecting everyone to merely adopt them. Amazon’s KF8 formatting capabilities are outlined in full on its website.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet will be the first to support the KF8 with them predicting support on its latest generation of e-ink Kindles “in the coming months”, along with its free Kindle apps for other platforms.

Finally, Amazon are planning enhancements to its Kindle Publisher Tools through KindleGen 2 which will create Kindle content from sources such as HTML, XHTML, and EPUB. This will be complimented by Kindle Previewer 2 which will provide publisher previews on how titles will look on Kindle devices and apps.

The Amazon keeps flowing and appears to be still one step ahead in their planning and execution.

Facebook: For Delete Read Archive?

2011-10-21T14:59:00.003Z

What do you say on social networks and who you connect to may be one thing, but does the information collected against you go much deeper? Importantly, if you delete it, is it in fact deleted, or stored against you forever? Many of us are careful how far we embrace the social network world, but does that apply to everyone?

Today Europe vs Facebook points the finger at the social network site and once again asks many questions about the extent of personal data stored and its usage and archive. As Facebook’s European users are administered by its Irish Facebook subsidiary, the case is being driven through the Irish Data Protection commissioner, and falls under the Irish Data Protection Acts 1988 and 2003

The case is being brought by an Austrian law student, Max Schrems. Who requested personal data being held about him and discovered that the site had some 1,200 pages of personal data that he received on a CD. The amount of data was not the issue, but more disturbing was that much of what he received he claims had been deleted. This included rejected friend requests, actions he had taken to "defriended" someone, a log of all Facebook chats, photos he had detagged of himself and the names of everyone he had ever "poked",

The data also included some email addresses and other information he claims not to have never uploaded to the site, but which he assumes were gathered from another user's profile. Some would suggest enables Facebook to build ‘shadow profiles’ for people who may not even use the site.

Remember that even though you press delete, defriend, remove your data, it may never get cleared and could be stored for ever to be used in a manner you never intended.

Facebook says any user can download their "personal archive" and probably many may now start to do so.

Nokia Slip Further Behind

2011-10-21T12:18:00.004Z

There was a time not so long ago when Nokia could do no wrong and they dominated the mobile Market. However, today their market share continues to decline, they have just announced a loss in the third quarter of 151m euros (£132m) from a 322m-euro profit in the same period last year with a 38% drop of smartphone sales than the previous year. Net sales have fallen 13% to 9bn euros and shares have dropped 41% so far this year.

A report by the research firm Gartner claims that in the second quarter Nokia accounted for just over 22% of the smartphone market.

Having turned its back on the Symbian operating system in favour of its own Meebo system it refused to follow the Android route and now has pinned it flag firmly on Windows Phone 7. This may prove a stroke of fortune but is more likely down to the fact that its CEO Mr Elop came from Microsoft.

So the question is whether Microsoft Phone 7 plus Nokia can complete in what is becoming a very narrow market? The Microsoft system has failed to get the real sales when it was offered by HTC and Samsung and without a wide base of manufacturers is unlikely to win on the back of Nokia’s loyal customer base alone. A very close coupling of the two old giants may still prove attractive but it may find itself as a single market offer against Apple , Android and RIM with little to really sustainable differentiation.

Nokia's first device running Windows is expected to be launched in London next week.

A New Era of Author Care?

2011-10-20T13:56:00.003Z

We live in a connected world where information can be instantly available at a click. However, information on book movement and sales has todate often been a dark secret and a source of frustration to a major stakeholder – the author.

Today three major publishers have announced in the US that they would allow their authors to access book sales data directly online. Simon & Schuster have created an author portal, where authors and illustrators can check sales of their books, by format and merchant and including digital. Random House and the Hachette Book Group have also declared plans for their own portals for authors sales information. This in itself a significant break through and starts to make sales data transparent, embraces authors and is to be applauded.

Some have suggested that the motive behind the initiative is to combat Amazon, which gives authors access to data on their titles from Nielsen BookScan and also allows them to check their sales ranking compared to other books on Amazon. If this is the case it should be accepted as a price to be paid for not acting earlier and making business with author transparent in the first place.

The big question is whether this new wave of Author Care is to be consistently applied across all publishers, or remain as a tool by the big publishers to differentiate them from the smaller ones who will find it difficult to compete. As the creators are the ones who input the most it would be great if industry bodies such as the APA or AG could help facilitate a similar service for smaller publishers and their authors.

There will always be issues re timing and accuracy of the feeds but as the likes of Bookscan have proved, there should be no reason in today’s world why information lines are so broken and inconsistent.

Authors should only need to see actual sales to consumers, not the units shushing around in the market. Trying to explain sale or return movements to authors may prove a very interesting exercise and its not one that they need to understand today. However they will need to see special sales as units sold firm to intermediaries.

Digital sales are different and should be instantly available, as in theory, they only leave the digital warehouse when sold. However the more these are with aggregators the more difficult this often becomes. This brings us to the next logical issue of royalties and whether this new era of transparency will lead to a long overdue open reporting on royalties and speeding up of payments? As more contracts adopt reward based on net sales the actual cost of sales and not price paid by the consumer becomes important. With respect to digital sales and the agency model there is little reason why monies earned should not straight forward and even transfered in the swipe of a card. We realise that may be too much to ask but it should not be too much to strive for.

As many author advances and rewards shrink we must strive to look at ways to keep them better informed and pay them quicker.

Can Kobo Win at the Races?

2011-10-19T17:47:00.005Z

Racing it’s not just about the horse, or the rider, the form book , the course and the conditions. The winners and losers are often decided by all these factors and more. Outsiders do win and favourites lose and that’s what makes the ‘sport of kings’ interesting.

So can Kobo steel up on the inside track and get placed or do they remain an also ran?

Kobo has announced, "the People's eReader" called VOX. It intends the VOX to compete head to head with the Barnes and Noble Nook and the Kindle Fire and in doing so attempt to capture the middle ground between a full blown and expensive tablet such as the iPad2 and the cheap eink lookie likies such as the Kindle, Sony reader etc. Vox will retail for $199.99 runs on Android 2.3 and weighs in at a low end 14.2 ounces. They also have the touch which is priced around $139 in the US, or £110 if you are unfortunate to have to buy it in the Uk. They also have the basic WiFi model at $99 in the US and the poor exchange rate of £89 in the UK.

So they have a stable of horses but what about the riders. Kobo is as well know outside of North America, as it part time parent and book retailer Indigo. However, it has struck deals with WHSmiths for them to sell into the UK market and with Fnac to sell into the French Market. Looking at their web site they already have an impressive list of retailers Indigo in Canada, Walmart, Best Buy and others in the US, Angus Robinson and Borders in Australia (perhaps we should scratch that last entry). The franchise strategy is sound, but if it were a winner, one would have expected better market share results in the US, where they even ran the Borders ebook setup.

Perhaps the strategy will work in more fragmented markets such as Europe. However remember Waterstones made a huge leap to the front with Sony, but despite all the hype, some would say that they failed to get past the starting gate and now look to be changing stables.

Perhaps the market is more mature now and willing to back the outsider? The challenge for Kobo is not the size of their repository, nor the cuteness of their reader, but the effectiveness of their rider. Will WHSmith break the mould and actually make a great sale job of promoting it and getting it in the consumer space, or will they expect it to earn its keep and shift itself. It’s one thing to put it on a shelf, it’s often another to sell it.

Price and colours aren’t Kobo’s unique selling points. If Kobo are to succeed with this franchise model, where others such as Sony have failed, then they have to get their franchisees set up to promote, shout, spend serious money and sell, sell, sell. Amazon has been promoting the brand Kindle everywhere, Apple have a brand that sells itself, but is Kobo up to the job and what is its USP (unique selling point)?

Back in the early internet bookshop days I was asked who would win; Barnes and Noble, Amazon or Bol.com. My answer was quick and based on one simple piece of logic. Pick any 100 people on; Oxford Street, London, 5th Avenue, New York, Main Street, Frankfurt and ask them the same question, ‘Have you heard of Amazon, Barnes and Noble or Bol.com and do you know what they sell?’ I could predict the answers then and unfortunately today is not much different.

So as we return to today’s race we have the favourite Amazon Kindle, followed by Barnes and Noble in the US, Apple and then a pack of outsiders lead by Kobo. There is a dark horse in the shape of Google but for all its hype it is still hanging around in the stables.

Fancy an Ice Cream Sandwich?

2011-10-19T13:03:00.004Z

As Google unveils its latest edible operating system upgrade, Ice Cream Sandwich, we consider what this means to the consumer on the street?

What is clear is that the mobile battle has Apple squaring up the Andriod and it landscape will be very familiar to those who remember the early PC days when Mac squared up to Microsoft. Then the battle was really decided by the weight of manufacturers who sided with Microsoft and today one can see a similar pattern emerging.

Android handsets account for close to 50% smartphones shipped to retailers in August, compared to 19% for Apple devices and are being supplied by manufacturers such as HTC, LG, Motorola, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. The new Amazon Fire will also work on a Android platform.

Ice Cream Sandwich or Android 4.0 was launched in partnership with Samsung and their Galaxy Nexus handset and a new Droid smartphone from their acquisition Motorola, the Droid RAZR. Meanwhile Samsung separately battle it out in the courts over copyright infringement accusations and counter-claims.

The changes we find very interesting in Android 4.0 include:
The ability for the system to recognise the owner’s and unlock the system. This obviously is far superior security than a code and unless taken by your twin makes theft a bit difficult. Mind you I you can’t have a serious haircut or apply loads of make-up girls!

The ability 4.0 users to use Android Beam feature to swap web content or links to apps by ‘kissing’ or simply touching their phones together.

Open voice input recognition which is continuously listening out for instructions. This could cause some interesting embarrassing moments and we think needs to carry a serious health warning

A cool new panoramic camera mode enables you to stitch together multiple snapshots to create a larger scene and includes a slider to help you align your multiple shots.

Google have also changed how you browse your contacts with a new People app, which combines high-resolution photos and updates from Google+ and other social services. This tighter integration between the device and O/S could make for some very interesting developments.

There are other more predicable features in Android 4.0:
• Devices have no physical buttons but equivalent on-screen icons.
• Apps and shortcuts can be grouped by dragging icons onto each other.
• Redesigned of the multi-tasking screen.
• Support of nested email subfolders

So what will the next upgrade be called? We have had Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo and Gingerbread so why not Jammy Dogger?

My Blackberry is not Working

2011-10-15T22:04:00.000Z

Tales From Typographic Oceans

2011-10-10T12:58:00.004Z

Remember those great vinyl album covers of yesterday? We have a lot to thank the recently departed Alex Steinweiss for in inventing the cover art form and to others such as Roger Dean for giving us artwork to equal and that was reflective of Yes’s music. Steinweiss not only created the art form, but in doing so had a demonstrable impact on sales. Ask any Beatle’s fan which is simpler, to name the tracks on any albums or describe the cover. Vinyl shrunk to CD and the jacket artwork started to become less important and metadata took over. As the album model migrated to tracks, the jacket became somewhat irrelevant and the track could now be sampled in a click without even the taster of the jacket.

Think about your favourite novel and what will come to your mind is not so much the words, the characters, but the jacket. Yes, a picture tells a thousand words and book covers have always sold books and enticed readers to buy. The image is that single snapshot that is designed to reflect the content. For the older generation this clearly also works for vinyl albums.

When we still have the physical cover artwork and typography we have the imagery, but will that be the case forever? How do we market and promote ebooks in a way that embeds the image and its association into the reader’s mind?

When you read an ebook the jacket is often lost. You may see it on the selection shelf, but on a click you open the book at page one and the text. They often don’t make it easy to see the cover. After all it’s the text you bought and want. If you return to your elibrary, it is often just a list of titles you see and in one click you are taken to the text. The magic of the graphically designed cover is often lost and it’s not as if you are reminded every time you pick up the book. As for the greyscale readers the image can change all together.

All this is understandable and is part of the digital change process but what is the impact?

Another interesting cover point relates often to print on demand titles. Today the print on demand rendition often borrows the physical jacket, but where it is a reissue this may not possible and there may also be rights issues. We may find a cover with straight text, not typographically designed and sitting on a coloured background. This standardisation of the jacket may work for academic monographs and education texts, but surely not for fiction.

So as move into a digital library world how do we get that imagery association? Is it important, or is it like the album cover a fond memory of how it used to be? Do we need artists and designers and if so how should their skills be channelled?

It is interesting that if I remember the last two ebooks I read I can’t remember the jacket, nor do I have an image of the book. I do remember the story, the characters but it’s not as clean as the last two physical books I read or even the books I read last year.

Perhaps I am getting old and too fond of yesterday?

The Book Dating Agency

2011-10-09T10:49:00.005Z

There are many lost and lonely manuscripts looking for a friend. Like finding a partner some are fortunate to have a good active social circle to help them, but increasingly many are now turning to the internet and the dating agencies. Imagine what Jane Austen would write about today’s ‘good man’ looking for a ‘good wife’ over the internet? So, if we are increasingly turning to dating agencies to find our partners why not a section ‘Books seeking a good reader’?

Serial Thriller seeks Readers:London, swinging 60s, the scene of music, murder and the macabre. The Rippers' groupies got more than they bargained for backstage. Will the bandever get out of the groove?

Last week we wrote about the gatekeepers within the industry that control the flow of works being published and how some appear to remain firmly fixed in the old world of print, ‘ The Suppression of Writing‘.

We are pleased that we are now starting to see others who are seeing new ways to match the mountain of manuscripts through new innovative ways in order to review, auction and promote them and ultimately help them find a partner.

Inkubate is one of these new online services that enables authors to upload full manuscripts, excerpts, out-of-print works for review and possible acquisition by agents or publishers. The model is free to authors while publishers and agents have pay a subscription fee for access material. Everything is fully tracked and audited searchable and filtered. Users can categorise material, receive alerts on new submissions, authors, genres. One could say it’s a super dating agency. This site is not about reviews but is firmly based at creating a trading marketplace which could lead to future wedlock.

Although the site is still in beta, it already has 350 authors on board, offering some 400 works for a date and some publishers and agents are reportedly eying up the candy. The full launch is still about a year away and the model is to be further enhanced by incentives to raise the profile of works and tier the access of publishers and agents.

PUBSLUSH Press is also encouraging authors to submit their book ideas and even creating competitions offering those chosen to win an iPad 2 and a chance to be published. To win writers simply submit the best ten pages and a summary of their manuscript at www.pubslush.com, through October 15th.

PUBSLUSH Press use a social network approach that aims to connect authors directly with readers. They have an unfortunate name for their registered users , calling them ‘Slushers’ . These so called Slushers, review and share their favourite works and when a certain level of clear interest is indentified against an individual submission, PUBSLUSH then takes over and provide a comprehensive publishing process; editing, design, marketing, distribution, etc. PUBSLUSH can also acts as an agent, allowing editors at major publishers to easily browse the top submissions and extend deals to authors.

The term ‘slushpile’ is a derogatory and a rather supercilious and ‘holier than thou’ way the industry describes the mountain of unsolicited manuscripts they often dismiss as not worthy or are incapable of digesting. However the internet and technology changes all and itself encourages all to express themselves and to create. As we have said before we are moving from listeners and readers to creators and we are no longer restricted to the physical work. The democratisation of writing is a given and not all will be well written, or even read, but connecting writing to reading should be the first goal and these new dating agencies and others, maybe will help free us from yesterday’s gatekeepers.

Springer To Be Never 'Out of Print'

2011-10-07T11:05:00.002Z

Imagine one publisher offering some 100,000 ebook titles and those went back to the 1840s and including authors such as Albert Einstein, Sir John Eccles, Lise Meitner, Werner Siemens, and Rudolf Diesel. Imagine the exercise required to clear all the rights and agree royalties on this volume of titles.

Springer have announced a programme to digitization their complete backlist by the end of 2012 and create Springer Book Archives (SBA). The SBA initiative will include nearly all books that have been published since the 1840s and the archives themselves will contain around 65,000 titles.

Some 70% of the books are in English, with the rest mainly being in German with some Dutch and the ratio between scientific STM titles and professional literature is similar. The archive titles from 17 different imprints, including and medical books account for the largest share with over 20% of the archive.

Derk Haank, CEO of Springer Science+Business Media, made gave the great quote, ‘At Springer, a book will never die, but “out of print” will.’

If Springer can take this bold step will others follow and take control of their assets and be less reliant on others scanning them?

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

2011-10-06T10:16:00.005Z

Of everything one has read today about Steve Jobs this told us much about the man Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

An Indian Tablet for $35!

2011-10-05T21:53:00.005Z

What impact would a $35 colour tablet have on the consumer, education and business? Yes we did say $35 or £23!

That sort of price would turn OLPC on its head and make cloud computing a given? It certainly raises some interesting questions about the cost of other tablets.

The Aakash (Sky) is a tablet designed and manufactured in India under a government subsidy aimed at the Indian education market and is to be also distributed to India’s small towns and villages. A potentially true OLPC strategy! They even have plans to sell the tablet internationally under the name UbiSlate and at a price of $60.Indian Human Resource Development Minister, Kapil Sibal, launched the tablet, handing out 500 units to students and announcing that they now plan to buy 100,000 of the tablets and that they hope to distribute 10 million units to students over the next few years!

The Aakash has been developed by UK DataWind and Indian Institute of Technology (Rajasthan) and is to be produced at DataWind's new production centre in Hyderabad.

Even before it has been evaluated many experts are doubting its speed, performance and touch screen capability. Some say that they have heard it all before, when in 2009, the same ministry announced the ‘Sakshat’, which failed to deliver. However, it is clear that governments realise the potential and even if the Aakash doesn’t deliver it is only a matter of time before this vision does happen.