Category: Publishing & media (Page 34 of 53)

At yesterday’s Argyle Executive Forum Leadership in Media conference in NYC, I had an interesting exchange with John Suhler, founding partner and president of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, and one of the deans of media industry private equity. Suhler had just given a talk in which I was glad to hear him excoriate publishers for the lack of attention they pay to technology and digital media as part of their strategies.

After his talk, I compared figures from our just-released market study on Digital Editions with his own off-the-cuff statistics about digital revenue for publishers, and the results were rather revealing. Our study shows a large gap between the readership penetration of digital editions in consumer vs. B-to-B (vertical) publications – whereas digital B2B subscriptions have grown to 15% of overall subscriptions, the corresponding figure for consumer pubs is down to 1.4%.

Compare these subscription figures with Suhler’s figures for digital revenue: 12-13% in B-to-B vs. 2-3% for consumer publications. This suggests that although digital editions are becoming a much more important ingredient in B-to-B publishers’ product mix, they are not quite carrying their share of digital revenue; whereas in consumer media, they are carrying more than their share, perhaps as much as double their share.

Of course, the missing ingredient in this admittedly superficial comparison is costs. For B-to-B publishers, digital editions can provide revenues at lower costs than fancy websites with lots of interactive features. In another presentation at yesterday’s conference, Andrew Heyward of interactive consultancy Marketspace/Monitor Group showed several examples of elaborate interactive websites that consumer media brands like Sports Illustrated launched in order to engage their audiences. I said to him that although these websites looked very cool, they struck me as very expensive to build, non-scalable (compared to advertising platforms like those of Google or Yahoo), and ephemeral in their appeal. He didn’t disagree.

For consumer publishers, the message in the above statistics could be mixed. In our study, noted publishing technology visionary Peter Meirs of Time Inc. is bearish on digital editions for consumer media. The statistics suggest either that consumer publishers are now taking that pessimism too far and under-investing in digital editions or that they don’t see a great long-term future for them. Comparisons in statistics like the above in future years will determine which of these messages is the correct one.

Amazon’s front page today is announcing that the Kindle is back in stock. They also provide a link to Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to Amazon shareholders, which is dedicated to his thoughts about the Kindle. Nothing earth shattering, though I do think he tries to get to the heart of the question about why someone would buy a Kindle when they already own both a Blackberry and a desktop or notebook computer. After the obligatory reference to Gutenberg, Bezos writes:
Lately, networked tools such as desktop computers, laptops, cell phones and PDAs have changed us too. They’ve shifted us more toward information snacking, and I would argue toward shorter attention spans. I value my BlackBerry–I’m convinced it makes me more productive–but I don’t want to read a three-hundred-page document on it. Nor do I want to read something hundreds of pages long on my desktop computer or my laptop. As I’ve already mentioned in this letter, people do more of what’s convenient and friction-free. If our tools make information snacking easier, we’ll shift more toward information snacking and away from long-form reading. Kindle is purpose-built for long-form reading. We hope Kindle and its successors may gradually and incrementally move us over years into a world with longer spans of attention, providing a counterbalance to the recent proliferation of info-snacking tools.
This is an interesting way to position Kindle or any eBook reader–the competition isn’t the other devices per se but the habits these other devices have accommodated. This is true, I suppose, but I still think that devices will emerge that support both kinds of information consumption–the short form and the long form. What’s missing in Kindle, interestingly, are some features that would make “information snacking” also possible–and useful. As David Guenette pointed out, the Kindle could have readily added MP3 support (“It has the ICs and jacks for playing MP3 files, but no playlist management, nor–absurdly enough, considering that Amazon is set up to sell things like music–any iTunes-like music downloading.”) Plus the idea of paying to read a blog that is otherwise free on the Web is just silly.
So we are still left with, as David calls it, the “additional device conundrum.” I have been using an eBook reader lately, and enjoying it, but there are limitations with that one and what I can read on it. I want to be able to read, at minimum, books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, general web sites, and a wide range of personal content including but not limited to Word, HTML, PDF, and XML formats. I want it to be brain-dead easy to download and access new content. As David points out, I also want multimedia. And I want a level of interactivity to include links, forms, and feedback. I want it to be cheap, powerful, and sturdy, and I want the reading experience to be superior to my notebook computer in terms of size, weight, portability, and readability. In other words, I want something like the Kindle in form factor that behaves much like a really good notebook computer.
Is that too much to ask?

The ever-helpful Jon Noring has formed a new discussion group on Yahoo, EPub Community, with a goal of furthering discussion and collaboration around the IDPF specifications which underlie EPub (OPS/OPF/OCF).

As part of the review I was doing of the eBookWise-1150, I played some with their publishing tools. The device maker, eBook Technologies, Inc. (ETI), has some tools for publishers, and I tried both a batch processing tool and an interactive one. I say “played” with them because I only tried a few things, and there were many features, especially to the interactive tool. The tools looked very solid. I have also played around some with the Kindle Digital Text Platform. I do this to learn the tools, but also to keep myself honest. We advise clients on these devices and also the workflow surrounding eBook creation. Our clients don’t expect us to know every bell and whistle, but they do expect us to understand what is possible and not possible.

The more eBooks become attractive options for publishers, the more issues of publishing to multiple formats and platforms become important for publishers. Our experience so far has been that the most typical requirement for publishers is the need to produce eBooks in many different formats and not just one (this despite sensible solutions like IDPF’s EPUB format). And they need to do this efficiently. This is a practical reality of the marketplace today as no one eBook format has won the format war, no one channel is dominating sales, and indeed no one channel is typically worth doing on its own. The revenues simply are not there yet. (Indeed, even if you decide that you will only do, say, PDF-based eBooks, the similarities from one channel to the next end with the PDF extension, necessitating technologies like codeMantra’s Universal PDF).

Adobe is one of the vendors supporting EPUB, and their Digital Editions developer site has some good resources. They just added an EPUB Best Practices Guide (in, not surprisingly, EPUB format, so you can download Digital Editions if you want to get right to reading it).

So I have been reviewing an eBook device, the eBookWise-1150, for an upcoming issue of eContent Magazine, and I have to say that I am sold with the reading experience. More detail to come in the actual review of course, but I tried reading in a few settings–indoor evening light, on the subway aboveground and below, outdoors a bit–and I could read comfortably in each setting. I also like the size. This picture is my crude attempt to show the screen size of the eBookWise device against the other devices I often read on–my notebook, a desktop computer in the Gilbane office, and my tiny Motorola cell phone.