best of toc 3e Analysis and Ideas about the future of publishing pdf pdf

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CHAPTER 1 Introduction

  2012 was quite a year for change in the publishing industry. Through‐ out the year we use to provide insightful analysis of the latest industry developments. And since ours is a com‐ munity site, the articles we publish aren’t just from the TOC team; we also feature perspectives from many of the top innovators and pub‐ lishing experts.

  It wasn’t easy, but we hand-picked the most noteworthy articles from 2012 for inclusion in this Best of TOC collection. We think you’ll agree that the more than 60 pieces featured here represent some of the most thought-provoking dialog from the past year. We’ve arranged the ar‐ ticles by category, so whether you’re most interested in marketing, revenue models, production or innovation in general you’ll find some‐ thing to get your creative juices flowing. And since we’re all about fostering community at TOC we hope this collection will encourage you to add your voice to the discussion. Since each of these articles is taken from our website you can add your com‐ ments by searching for the headline on

  niques can also be applied to content development and publishing workflows. She explains why in the following interview.

What is an agile methodology?

  

Kristen McLean: An agile methodology is a series of strategies for

  managing projects and processes that emphasize quick creative cycles, flat self-organizing working groups, the breaking down of complex tasks into smaller achievable goals, and the presumption that you don’t always know what the finished product will be when you begin the process. These types of methodologies work particularly well in any situation where you are trying to produce a creative product to meet a market that is evolving — like a new piece of software when the core concept needs proof from the user to evolve — or where there needs to be a very direct and engaged relationship between the producers and users of a particular product or service.

  Agile methodologies emerged out of the software development com‐ munity in the 1970s, but began to really codify in the 1990s with the rise of several types of “lightweight” methods such as

  

. These were all rolled up under the umbrella of agile in 2001, when a group of developers came together to create the

  

hich set the core principles for this type of working

philosophy.

  Since then, agile has been applied outside of software development to many different kinds of systems management. Most promote devel‐ opment, teamwork, collaboration, and process adaptability through‐ out the life-cycle of the project. At the end of the day, it’s about getting something out there that we can test and learn from.

How do agile methodologies apply to publishing? Kristen McLean:

  In relation to publishing, we’re really talking about two things: agile content development and agile workflow. Agile content development is the idea that we may be able to apply these methodologies to creating content in a very different way than we are traditionally used to. This could mean anything from serialized book content to frequent releases of digital content, like book-related websites, apps, games and more. The discussion of how agile might be applied to traditional book content is just beginning, and I think there’s an open-ended question about how it might intersect with the deeply personal — and not always quick — process of writing a book. I don’t believe some of our greatest works could have been written in an agile framework (think Hemingway, Roth, or Franzen), but I also believe agile might lend itself to certain kinds of book content, like serial fiction (romance, YA, mystery) and some kinds of non-fiction. The real question has to do with and under‐ standing the leading edge between knowing your audience and crowd‐ sourcing your material. Publishing houses have been inherently hierarchical because they’ve been organized around a manufacturing process wherein a book’s cre‐ ation has been treated as though it’s on an assembly line. The publisher and editor have typically been the arbiters of content, and as a whole, publishers have not really cultivated a direct relationship with end users. Publishers make. Users buy/read/share, etc. Publishers need to adapt to a radically different way of working. For example, here’s a few ways agile strategies could help with the adap‐ tation of a publishing workflow:

  4 | Chapter 2: Innovation

• Create flat, flexible teams of four to five super-talented individuals with a collective skill set — including editorial, marketing, publi‐ city, production, digital/design, and business — all working to‐ gether from the moment of acquisition (or maybe before). These teams would need to be completely fluent in XHTML and would work under the supervision of a managing publisher whose job would be to create the proper environment and remove impedi‐ ments so the team could do its job.
• An original creative voice and unique point of view will always be important in great writing, but those of us who produce books as trade objects (and package the content in them) have to stop as‐ suming we know what the market wants and start talking to the market as frequently as possible.
• Use forward-facing data and feedback to project future sales. Stop using past sales as the exclusive way to project future sales. The market is moving too fast for that, and we all know there is a di‐ minishing return for the same old, same old.

  [This interview was edited and condensed.]

Taking a Page Out of ESPN’s Playbook

  By

  If you missed you owe it to yourself to go back and read it. ESPN is so much more than just a sports network and their brilliant strategy offers plenty of lessons for publishers. Here’s just one important indicator of their success: While the average network earns about 20 cents per subscriber each month ESPN is paid $5.13. That’s more than 25 times the average!

Pay for one, access all

  Of course ESPN isn’t just one channel. It’s a family of channels (e.g., ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Classic, etc.) If you’re a subscriber to any one of those channels you’re able to watch all of them online via

  

. That means no matter where I am I can catch

  anything on the ESPN network on my tablet, even those channels I don’t get via cable. Think about that for a moment. That would be like buying one ebook but getting access to the entire series it’s part of. That’s unheard of in

  Taking a Page Out of ESPN’s Playbook | 5 book publishing. It’s also pretty unusual in network broadcasting but ESPN is ahead of its time. When I stream those channels on Watch‐ ESPN they’re commercial-free; a static logo appears during commer‐ cial breaks. That’s because ESPN hasn’t sold the advertising rights to the streaming broadcasts … yet. They’re willing to stream everything now, even without advertising income, to build a nice solid base to lure those advertisers to the table. Smart.

Building talent franchises

  The article talks about

  

e brought the concept to ESPN to see what they thought. Rather

  than watching Simmons go off on his own and create something that might compete with them they launched Grantland with him using thm. When this scenario plays out in the publishing world it usually ends with the author taking the idea somewhere else, often to a self- publisher. It’s clear ESPN is willing to take more risks than the typical book publisher, even if it might lead to cannibalization. As the saying goes though, it’s better to eat your own young than to let someone else do it.

Memorable quotes

  This article is loaded with plenty of interesting observations but my favorite quotes are the following:

  

I have friends who work at Google, and they are beating their chests.

ESPN, they never feel like they are at the mountaintop. They’re always

thinking they can do something bigger.

  

He stresses ESPN’s multi-platform advantage: print, radio, broadcast

television, cable television, Internet, mobile applications. To date

there are no competitors who have assets in all those media.

I don’t think you’ll find a lot of hubris here. Or complacency. I don’t

think there’s any sense of trying to protect what we’ve got. We’re going

to try new things.

  Meanwhile, most book publishers today seem content with high growth rates (off small bases) for what’s nothing more than quick-and- dirty print-to-e conversions. There’s certainly not much happening in the multi-format, multi-channel world ESPN is pioneering.

  Think this advice only applies to the world of television? If so

  

  What’s your opinion? Do we need to think more like ESPN? And can you name any publishers who are breaking away from the pack and creating some really innovative, multi-channel products?

  

Perceptive Media: Undoing the Limitations of

Traditional Media By

indicates a clear desire for interactive engagement in

  storytelling on the part of audiences. Researchers at the BBC are pio‐ neering the concept of engagement and content personalization with their Perceptive Media experiment. The Next Web’s managing editor Martin Bryant took a look at Perceptive Media and its first incarnation

  

  earlier this summer

   :

Essentially, it’s media — either video or audio — that adapts itself

based on information it knows about individual viewers. So, if you

were watching a game show that you’d never seen before, it might

show you an explanation of the rules in detail, while regular views are

shown bonus, behind-the-scenes footage instead. … Other smart

ideas behind Perceptive Media include the idea that TV hardware

could automatically recognize who was watching and tailor the con‐

tent of TV to them automatically.

  I reached out to BBC R&D researcher to find out more about Perceptive Media and the potential for the concept. Our inter‐ view follows.

  

How does Perceptive Media work, and are there privacy

concerns? Ian Forrester

  : takes storytelling and narrative back to something more aligned to a storyteller and audience around a fire. However, it uses broadcast and Internet technologies in combination to achieve a seamless narrative experience.

  Our takes advantage of advanced web technologies [to adapt the content], but it’s only one of many ways we have identified. [Editor’s note: BBC writer Sarah Glenister wrote about her experience working on the Breaking Out audio play experiment .] The path we took means there are no privacy or data protection issues. Other paths may lean toward learning from what’s being customised (rather then personalised) using a more IP- based solution.

  The BBC has a rich history in this field, with the likes of

  

hich I was the head of for many years. Big data is the trend

  right now, but in R&D, I’m more interested in implicit data that comes from us and everything we do.

  

What driving factors are pointing to the success of this

kind of storytelling platform? Ian Forrester

  : As an R&D department, its very hard to say for the broadcasting industry, and we have even less experience in the pub‐ lishing industry. However, our research on people’s media habits tells us a lot about people in the tates. We use that research and what we have seen elsewhere to gauge market ac‐ ceptance.

  At the BBC, we don’t look at advertising, but every other company we’ve seen interested in this type technology/experience/media is thinking adverts and product placement.

  In the early days, Perceptive Media is being applied to

broadcast technology. What potential applications for

Perceptive Media do you envision in the publishing industry?

Ian Forrester : We have only scratched the surface and do not know

  what else it can be adapted toward. In BBC R&D, we watch trends by looking at early innovators. It’s clear as day that ebook reading is taking off finally, and as it moves into the digital domain, why does the con‐ cept of a book have to be static? is tragic and feels like a massive step back. But Perceptive Media is undoing the limitations of broadcast. It certainly feels like we can overcome the limitations of publishing, too. [This interview was lightly edited and condensed.]

  8 | Chapter 2: Innovation

Kindle Fire vs iPad: “Good Enough” Will Not Disrupt

  By

  With its recent release of the new Kindle Fire HD tablets, some have argueut how serious is the threat? Are the two companies even playing the same game? I reached out to analysounder and author of

   , to get his take. Our short interview follows.

  

How disruptive is the Kindle Fire to the low-end tablet

market? Horace Dediu:

  The problem I see with the Kindle is that the fuel to make it an increasingly better product that can become a general pur‐ pose computer that is hired to do most of what we hire computers to do is not there. I mean, that profitability to invest in new input meth‐ ods, new ways of interacting and new platforms can’t be obtained from a retailer’s margin.

  Also, there is a cycle time problem in that the company does not want to orphan its devices since they should “pay themselves off ” as console systems do today. That means the company is not motivated to move its users to newer and “better” solutions that constantly improve. The assumption (implicit) in Kindle is that the product is “good enough” as it is and should be used for many years to come. That’s not a way to ensure improvements necessary to disrupt the computing world. Lastly, the Amazon brand will have a difficult time reaching six billion consumers. Retail is a notoriously difficult business to expand inter‐ nationally. Digital retail is not much easier than brick-and-mortar. You can see how slow expansion of different media has been for iTunes.

Is Amazon a threat to Apple? Horace Dediu:

  Amazon is asymmetric in many ways to Apple. Asym‐ metry can always be a threat because the success of one player is not necessarily to the pain of another. Thus, the “threat” is unfelt, and therefore it’s less likely that there is a response in kind. However, it’s important to couple the asymmetry with a trajectory of improvement

  Kindle Fire vs iPad: “Good Enough” Will Not Disrupt | 9 where the threat goes from unfelt to clear and present. That’s where I’m having a hard time putting Amazon on a path that crosses Apple’s fundamental success. I’d say it’s something to watch carefully but not yet something that requires a change in strategy.

  I would add one more footnote: Apple TV is a business that matches Kindle perfectly in strategy. Apple TV is a “cheap” piece of hardware that is designed to encourage content consumption. It is something Apple is doing with very modest success but is not abandoning. Apple is exploring this business model.

  What role do you see Apple playing in the future of

publishing — and what current trends do you identify

as driving factors? Horace Dediu:

  I think Apple will put in a greater effort at the K-12 and higher ed levels. I think the education market resonates strongly with them, and they will develop more product strategy there. The main reason is that there are more decision makers and less concen‐ tration of channel power. [This interview was lightly edited and condensed.]

Don’t Build Social — Thoughts on Reinventing the Wheel

  By

  For the publishing community, social reading has been the hot topic of the year. Since 2008, in fact, social features have spread like wildfire. No publishing conference is complete without a panel discussion on what’s possible. No bundle of Ignite presentations passes muster without a nod to the possibilities created by social features. I under‐ stand why: in-content discussion is exciting, especially as we approach the possibility of real-time interaction. Granted, I’m biased. Running a social yself, I think all this interest is great. The web should take advantage of new paradigms! So‐ cial discussion layers are the future! However, there is one important point that all the myriad new projects are ignoring: unless it’s a core feature, most companies shouldn’t build social.

  That’s right. Unless social discussion features are the thing you’re sell‐ ing, don’t build it from scratch. What’s core? Your unique value prop‐ osition. Are you a bookstore or a social network? A school or a social network? A writing community or a social network? A content creator or a social network? The distinction is often lost on a highly-motivated team trying to be all things to all users. For all these examples, the social network is just an aspect of the business. It is an important piece of the experience, but most of the time it’s not worth the incredible investment in time and manpower to build it from scratch.

Services, APIs, and the Complex Web

  We’ve seen this happen again and again on the web. If you’ve ever heard of , you’re familiar with the evolution of customer service on the web. Ten years ago companies built their own threaded bulletin board systems (and managed the resultant torrent of spam), so that they could “manage the user relationship.” There were some benefits — you could customize the environment completely, for example. But it took the greater portion of a week to build, and a lot of work to maintain. Today that kind of support can be up and running in an hour with third party solutions. Just ask forward thinking com‐ panies like ho have embraced these services. The same can be said of newsletters. For years newsletters were hand- coded (or text-only) and sent from corporate email accounts. Unsub‐ scribing was difficult. Getting email accounts blacklisted (because they looked like spam) was common. Today everyone uses

  

, or a similar service. Even if you hire an

  agency to design and manage a system, they’re likely white-labelling and reselling a service like this to you. Companies no longer build a newsletter service. Now you just use an API to integrate your news‐ letter signup form with a third-party database. Design your newsletter using one of their templates, and let them do all the heavy lifting for email management, bounces, unsubscribes, and usage stats.

  There are other examples. Who stores video and builds their own player? Instead we upload it tus‐ tomize the settings, and let the service tell you who watched it, handle storing the heavy files, push player upgrades frequently, etc. Even web

  Don’t Build Social — Thoughts on Reinventing the Wheel | 11 hosting itself has become a service that people sign up for - in many cases setting a project up on AWS ( , essentially cloud computing) is faster and easier than acquiring a real hardware server and configuring from scratch.

  The rise of these third-party solutions are a testament to maturity and complexity of our digital world. Specialization makes systems more stable and dependable. Sure, any time you partner with a service there are risks. But I’ve seen so many publishing projects with social features miss their launch deadline or trash their social features before launch because they found they couldn’t get it built, that it’s hard to watch them spin their wheels over a perceived need for control. That’s a mess of work for something that isn’t the center of your business.

Publishing focus and third-party opportunity

  This move to third-party social solutions should start happening with all the education, journalism, authoring platforms, writing commun‐ ities and publishing projects currently in development. Although it sounds simple to just add discussion into content, the devil is in the details. Obviously the front end — the process of adding a comment — takes some work, and the estimation for that is fairly straightfor‐ ward. But what about the paradigm that people use to connect? Are they following people in a Twitter paradigm, or is it a group-based, reciprocal model, like Facebook? Who can delete comments? What can you manage with your administrator dashboard? Are servers ready to scale with peak activity? What kind of stats can you get on how your audience is interacting with your content? Most of these issues don’t relate to the core business.

  In the end, it comes down to the project definition. Is it a bookstore or a social network? I’m guessing nine times out of ten it’s a bookstore first, with additional social features. Focus on controlling the content and making the sale, be unique via curation and selection, and add the rest of the social features in using APIs and third party solutions. Then tweak the experience based on what those third-party services can tell you. That way you have the freedom to experiment and tweak the social options you offer your users, but still focus on your core offering. Everybody wins.

Startups and Publishers: It Ain’t Easy

  By

  Any startup company trying to work with book publishers will tell you tales of woe and frustration. Big publishers and small publishers (I’ve worked with both) pose different sets of problems for startups, but the end result is a disconnect.

If you sell a product publishers don’t want, who is to “blame”?

  Start-ups tend to blame “slow-moving legacy publishers” … but blame lies as much on startups misunderstanding of publisher needs as on publishers being slow. This is a classic “customer development” prob‐ lem for startups. The reason things don’t work is not that “publishers are too dumb to see how they should change, and choose me to help them,” but rather that the pains publishers are suffering, and solutions startups are offering, are probably not well matched, for a few kinds of reasons: a) the pain startups are trying to solve is not acute enough for the publishers (yet?) b) the cost (in time or dollars) to adopt startup solutions is too high (for now?)

  c) startups are trying to solve the wrong pain (for today?)

• or-

  d) startups are addressing their products at the wrong customers

Solutions to solve future problems

  In my particular case, I’ve recognized that th pitch ends up being something like:

  

Eventually you’ll need to embrace solutions like PressBooks because

solutions like PressBooks will radically transform this market flood‐

ing the publishing market with more books than you ever imagined

…

  Startups and Publishers: It Ain’t Easy | 13 That is … we (and others like us) are trying to solve for publishers problems that we are helping create, and which aren’t quite here yet on a scale that is visible to the day-to-day operations of a publishing com‐ pany. (Certainly these big/catastrophic problems are coming, and soon … but still, it’s a future problem, not a present problem).

Where to next?

  So, as a startup, you have to choose what direction to go in:

  a) try to solve the pain that traditional publishers have right now, which is felt acutely enough

• or-

  b) (in our case) try to expand the market by helping millions of new publishers exist … thereby helping create the problems traditional publishers will have to face in the coming years I like b) as a direction, but in the end it’s not so surprising that existing publishers aren’t falling all over themselves to embrace solutions for problems that aren’t quite here yet.

The risk of ceding the future to other players

  Still, there is a case to be made that a publisher with a vision of the future you should be out-front of the changing market. As a fellow- traveller in startup frustration, Andrew Rhomber says:

  

Publishing has been — technically speaking — an amazingly stable

industry for a very long time. In defense of publishers: it is going

through a transition from analogue to digital AND online faster than

any other media industry before it. But by not partnering, publishers

are ceding influence over how this industry will be shaped.

  And that’s the problem for both startups and publishers … most pub‐ lishing startups are trying to solve problems that will come because of innovations in the future; most publishers are worried about solving the problems of a radically transforming industry right now.

  

once suggested creating a kind of Manhattan Project

  funded by publishers that would invest in new technologies, models and thinking. It’s an admirable idea, though evidence from some such initiatives in publishing hasn’t been promising.

In the end, readers will drive the change

  Change is coming though, there is no doubt, and we will know it is here when big numbers of readers start to choose new solutions over existing solutions (see: ebooks). These solutions will come from a mix of startups, of old publishers and new publishers, and crucially, from the big four tech giants: Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook (and pos‐ sibly others).

  In the end, it’s readers who will choose the future, which will follow their eyes, minds and wallets. And for all of us — new players and old — our task now is to present readers with different kinds of futures, and see which ones stick.

It’s Time for a Publishing Incubator

  By

  Last June, over beer (generally a good place to start), I had a great conversation with entrepreneur about how startups are funded in publishing. There was a lot to discuss, a little to celebrate, a bit to complain about, and one fact that we arrived at beyond every‐ thing else. It’s a challenge to raise money for publishing ventures. Sure, raising funding is always difficult, but publishing presents a par‐ ticular challenge. Publishing is “old media,” and it’s new to the tech‐ nology game (especially in terms of startups focused on the consumer web). There isn’t a real precedent of cooperation between technology and publishing. And that makes it a challenge to find money to build new things.

Roadblocks

  Some of the issues come straight out of the investor community:

• Most investors are unfamiliar with publishing. Books seem tradi‐ tional. I can’t tell you how many investors put their personal feel‐ ings into the equation and say things like, “Well, my spouse is in a book club, but I don’t read much so I’m probably not a good fit.” Ouch. Although personal experience figures in somewhat, their total unfamiliarity with the market stops them cold before we’ve even started.

  It’s Time for a Publishing Incubator | 15

• Concerns about returns on investment. It’s true, we haven’t seen the huge acquisitions like Instagram. Or Yammer. Yet. Publishing is worth billions - it has what everyone wants: content. So maybe the book industry doesn’t seem like a high growth market. One thing is certain, though, as the industry goes digital, those pub‐ lishing billions are going to be spent on something. Clear exits will materialize.
• There’s always th give a presentation at a TOC event about innovation and he chuckled about this specific question. He poin‐ ted out that at this point Google can pretty much build anything anyone can invent. That shouldn’t be your yardstick. The better question is, are the founders smart enough to offer good strategy, a unique experience, or a new market? If so, Google is much more likely to buy the company once the idea proves out, rather than build every single idea in the world. In short, that question is not a question.

  True, there are some people who get investment while working on publishing startups. The list above can be overcome if you’ve worked with those investors before. Or if you’re an Ivy-League ex-Googler that has had a successful exit, you have qualifications that will work in your favor. But that is a frightfully small portion of the people with boots on the ground, developing cool ideas. What about the technically savvy people who don’t meet those criteria (most of the people I know in‐ novating in publishing today)? Imercia, those people go out and crash head-first into the arguments listed above, then spend a few years toiling in bootstrapped obscurity.

People have been thinking about this for awhile

  Last October Brian O’Leary gave a stirring tal

  

, at the Internet Archive’s Books in Browsers conference

  (transcribe ). He put forth a bold vision of collaboration among publishers, each contributing to support innovation and enjoy in its technical fruits. He talked about goals — that survival for publishing

  16 | Chapter 2: Innovation is not a “goal” in itself, for example — and that innovation is one of the important pillars of publishing health. He used an example from the gas industry to illustrate how it pooled resources to innovate. He said:

  

I called the prospect of people not engaging with our content the

publishing manifestation of a super-threat. I’d argue (pretty strongly)

that it represents a super-threat not just to publishing, but to the way

we function as a country, an economy and as a part of a world or‐

der. We have a responsibility to address this threat, not just so that we

can make money, but because we’re the ones with the ability to solve

it.

Other industries facing an uncertain future have banded together to

form and fund superstructures. The Gas Research Institute, for ex‐

ample, was authorized in 1976, at a time when the natural gas industry

was highly fragmented among producers, wholesalers and distribu‐

tors. The latter often held a local monopoly.

By 1981, GRI was spending $68.5 million on research and a total of

$80.5 million on oversight and R&D. This represented about 0.2% of

the wellhead price of gas that year, valued at the time at a bit more

than $38 billion.

  

GRI undertook research and development in four areas…Funding,

drawn from a surcharge on sales as well as some government grants,

accelerated to something north of $100 million in the mid-1980s.

If you look across all of publishing in the United States, it’s about a

$40 billion business. Imagine what we could do if we could create and

sustain an organization with $80 million a year in funding. It’s also

likely that an industry-wide commitment to addressing engagement

would garner the external funding that most parties have been un‐

derstandably reluctant to spend on narrower causes.

  A good point. A great plan. If show us that publishers can partner, then why not partner in innovation? Brian gives a number of concrete suggestions for areas to focus on. I’ve been mulling this over ever since he gave this presentation. Despite his guidelines and recommendations, it hasn’t happened yet. But there’s a way this idea fits neatly into startupland.

The publishing incubator

  A similar solution already exists in the tech world: the incubator. If you’re not familiar with it, technology incubators accept applications from startups in small batches. If accepted, the startup gets between

  $20,000 - $100,000 (in exchange for around 5% equity), along with three months of office space, mentors, a chance to demo for investors, and a lot of help. Investors get early access to cutting-edge technology. Corporations are encouraged to come in and meet the startups at any point along the way.

  Many incubators are industry-specific. For example, there ar

  

alone, churning out fresh startups and

  new technology multiple times a year. Imagine the amount of health‐ care innovation going on right now. Education does this too. Incubator

  

s one of many education-focused incubators from across

  the country — with a group of startups that has raised $10M post- graduation. And Turner Broadcasting just launched an incubator in NYC called ince the products integrate with broadcast media, there is a major focus on mentorship from executives in the field, and a lot of discussion about how to work with big media con‐ glomerates. Sounds a lot like what we need in publishing. Even pub‐ lishing exper about how he is struggling with how to distribute his TechFellow money to startups.

  Granted, there is some remarkable internand

  

are doing good things. Those are com‐

  mendable efforts. But those teams are usually small, and since they’re internal they don’t have the massive variation we see in incubators. One company isn’t going to move the needle for an entire industry in that way.

  We need an incubator for publishing technology. We need a group of investors and publishers that want to benefit from a pool of innovation, and encourage it grow. With this, publishers would contribute to and sponsor events, perhaps even influence the direction of future part‐ ners. Investors would raise the fund, and choose the most viable start‐ ups. Innovation and disruption might actually find a common ground, as new technologies could drive reading adoption which drive sales (an argument technology writer ). We need to bridge publishing and technology, and this gets us there.

  This should exist now. I’ve been working on publishing startups for five years and I have yet to see it. Moreover, with so many publishers on the East Coast, New York City is the place to do it. New York has a healthy startup industry, access to publishers and publishing confer‐ ences, mentors and experts. My question is, who’s going to do some‐ thing about it? Who’s wit ?

The Slow Pace of eBook Innovation

  By

  I lov

  

Ebook vendors enjoy a closed loop ecosystem. They have millions of

reader/customers who are satisfied with EPUB 2 display capabilities

and devices. Amazon readers, for example, are largely content with

the offerings in the proprietary Kindle store; they’re not lining up with

torches and pitchforks to push for improvements. While publishers

wait for eReader device manufacturers to add new features and EPUB

3 support, eBooksellers are just as happy to wait.

The best way to promote EPUB 3 right now is to bypass it in favor of

delivering ultra-innovative books through the web and app-based

distribution. When we can give eReader device makers a compelling

reason to bring eReaders into parity with apps and webkit browsers,

they’ll put their mouths where our money is. Until eBookstores know

they’re losing sales to alternative/open channels, they’re going to sit

pretty, stall, and make money doing what they’re doing.

  Who’s pushing for innovation in the ebook space? Publishers? No, they’re fairly content with quick-and-dirty p-to-e conversions and they’re risk averse when it comes to making big investments in richer content formats. Retailers? Nope. If retailers were motivated we’d see much broader adoption of EPUB 3 in the various readers and apps out there.

  This reminds me of the Android challenge. It’s widely known that

  

. That’s because the carriers (e.g., AT&T) and handset

  makers (e.g., Samsung) have no incentive to update all the existing devices. They’d prefer to force you into a new phone rather than give you a quick OS update with all the new features. This is one area that Apple really understands and gets right. When they come out with a new version of iOS they have it pushed out to as many customers as possible (assuming their devices can support it). Apple knows there’s so much sex appeal for each new device they don’t have to starve existing device owners from the new OS features.

  Will an ebook vendor ever follow Apple’s iOS model and lead the in‐ dustry to a more accelerated pace of innovation? Or is Dave Bricker right that web delivery is the best way forward?

  The Slow Pace of eBook Innovation | 19

Putting a Value on Classic Content

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  Think of a newspaper or magazine as a mountain of data to which a thin new layer of topsoil gets added each day or each week. Everybody sees the new soil. But what’s underneath gets covered up and forgotten. Even the people who own the mountain don’t know much about the lower layers.

  That wouldn’t matter if old content was bad content. But it’s not. Jour‐ nalism, at least good journalism, dates much less than we are prone to think. You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going to listen to that record because it was released last year”, or, “I’m not going to watch that film because it came out last month”. Why are we so much less interested in journalism that’s a month or a year old? The answer is this: We’ve been on the receiving end of decades of salesmanship from the newspaper industry, telling us that today’s newspaper is essential, but yesterday’s newspaper is worthless. Look who’s talking. It’s been 50 years since newspapers had the main job of telling people what’s new that day. For decades they’ve been filling their pages with more and more timeless writing. The process is all but complete. Go back into the features pages of your favourite newspaper from a year ago, and you’ll find scarcely a piece that couldn’t appear just as easily today, with a few very minor changes.

  All this boils down to a simple proposition: old content is undervalued in the market, relative to new content. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of articles in writers’ and publishers’ archives which are as good to read today as they were on the day they were published. Yet they are effectively valued by their owners at zero, written off, never to be seen again.