The future of publishing may be digital, but costly Kindles and eBooks on iPhones aren’t enough to trigger a digital book revolution. It’ll take more than the promise of a portable library to convince readers they’re better off without paper.

The iPod heralded a seismic shift in content distribution. Music downloads now seem as obvious as they were inevitable, so it’s reasonable to expect written content to follow music, movies, and TV down the path towards digital distribution. But to get consumers onboard, eBooks will need to supply a superior reading experience and better value for money than they currently offer.

Increased availability satisfies a demand that doesn’t yet exist

Last week Google released Book Search for mobiles and made over 1.5 million public domain books available on iPhones and Android mobiles. As well as introducing a revamped Kindle 2.0, Amazon has announced that its more contemporary range of Kindle titles will be made available for download to devices other than the Kindle.

Both companies are addressing the issue of title availability, but that’s not the eBook bottleneck. Having more titles is an important step, but it’s not enough to trigger a fundamental shift in people’s reading habits.

It’s easy to blame the slow uptake of digital books on nostalgia for printed paper

There’s a some good reasons digital books haven’t taken off, and the least of them is the ‘I just like paper books’ problem. Don’t get me wrong, like many people, I don’t think that the look, feel, and smell of books will ever be fully replaced. But it’s possible to imagine a future where convenience, cost, and environmental concerns make digital books a mass market alternative to the paperback, in the same way that paperbacks have become a cheaper, more convenient alternative to hard covers.
The true causes of consumer reluctance are more compelling, and more easily addressed, than an enduring love of paper:

• Readability and the user experience
• Value and the total cost of ownership
• Flexibility: to sell, trade, and loan books

eReaders need the readability of a paperback printed on recycled paper, to last 12hrs, and be durable enough to throw in a backpack

Many books will soon be available on mobile phones, letting you read eBooks on hardware you already own, though at a cost to your battery-life and with poor readability. With better batteries, phones may yet become a reasonable platform for reading, but it’s hard to see such a small, eye-straining LCD screen leading to the mass desertion of paper.

Both the Kindle and Sony’s eReader use breakthrough technologies to offer improved readability and extended battery life, as such they seem the more likely catalyst for mass eBook adoption. They’re not cheap though, they cost over $350 and lack the readability, durability, and portability of a paperback. The hefty price tag doesn’t include a contrast ratio that approaches black text on white paper and the low resolution is a problem for the line drawings in text books.

Paper books combine content with the hardware needed to read it in one convenient package

Like CDs, books are a way to distribute content, but unlike music, electronic books introduce a new hardware cost for consuming written content. CDs don’t come with headphone jacks, so the removal of the physical media makes sense for content that’s always needed a separate ‘player’. Fully self-contained, books have never needed extra hardware to be read: no turntable, no CD player, no iPod. Electronic book readers need to be much better value and find ways to justify their upfront costs.

As a reader, what do I gain from electronic distribution?

People like the option of listening to a lot of different music, so an iPod that makes your entire music collection portable is a big win.

Digital books ask readers to sacrifice the advantages of paper for the same reward as iPods, but if you’re not at school or working in publishing how often do you want to carry around more than a couple of books? I’m a big reader, but I don’t often have more than two books on the go.

Until digital books can be traded as easily as their paper cousins, publishers must consider the implicit costs of digital delivery

DRM is a regular source of contention in the tech industry, and there’s plenty of debate over the use and effectiveness of rights management for books. Leaving aside the important arguments over fair use and piracy, it’s worth remembering that the exchange of books has been a powerful force in their marketing. I’ve borrowed, loaned, and traded a lot more books than I’ve bought new, but it’s the books I’ve borrowed that have fuelled my appetite for buying new fiction and trying new authors. It’s important to consider the implied costs of DRM if it means eBook readers won’t share books with friends and family.

Aside from that, by selling or exchanging their used books, readers have been able to subsidize the cost of further purchases. Digital editions, at a discount of only one or two dollars, don’t offer a payoff comparable to exchanging or selling used books.

Without the opportunity to experiment with digital music, it’s unlikely that its adoption would have been so fast or comprehensive

When music started shifting to digital, early adopters could rip CDs they already owned to MP3s. If publishers offered free digital copies along with every paper edition sold, wary consumers could experiment without paying twice. Eventually ‘digital only’ editions could be sold cheaper to encourage people to make the switch.

Until students, editors, and literary agents are reading textbooks and manuscripts on eReaders, there’s little chance that the general public will welcome them

Rather than focusing on paperbacks, publishers and book sellers should look to replace the backpack full of textbooks. Students, and people in publishing, are an obvious target for replacing a bag, or briefcase, full of heavy books with a lightweight, convenient device. At $350 it’s clear why this hasn’t already happened.

By targeting students, you can develop a market for digital fiction through an audience that’s already comfortable with electronic books and the associated hardware.

Free, durable hardware and cheaper digital content will make eBooks as inevitable as on-demand movie downloads

Where iPods offer a familiar user experience at a familiar price, with the convenience of having all your music on hand, eBooks on mobiles and $350+ readers offer poor readability at a premium price. Consumers being asked to consider taking their libraries digital aren’t being given enough reasons to take the plunge.

The future of print may be digital, but for a real industry shakeup we’ll need to see cheap, easy to read, durable hardware coupled with cheaper digital editions. If Amazon started giving away Kindles while including a free Kindle edition with every paper book sold, they could quickly become the iTunes of the written word.

Reto Meier is a mobile software engineer and author of Professional Android Application Development. He’s based in London and blogs about Android, technology, and programming.

Amazon announced plans to make its Kindle titles available for a variety of mobile phones. Earlier this year they announced that they would no longer support PDF or Microsoft Reader formats for their ebooks, effectively locking buyers into its Mobipocket or Kindle formats.

Since the Kindle format is only an offshoot of the Mobipocket format, I wonder if these mobile device efforts will revolve around an updated Mobipocket Reader. The Mobipocket Reader software is already available for a variety of mobile phones including Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. If Amazon plans to revamp this application to make it available for other handhelds including iPhone – and they can duplicate the easy buying experience Kindle owners already enjoy – this could really change the landscape for ebooks.

In an article entitled The once and future e-book: on reading in the digital age, published earlier this week, Ars Technica’s John Siracusa lamented that dedicated ebook readers are not the entire answer, and asked why Amazon didn’t realize that devices like the iPhone were where reading was headed.

I do still believe that dedicated readers are more appropriate for a mature e-book market, when consumers can more easily justify the cost of such a specialized device. But that doesn’t mean a dedicated reader can’t succeed. The Kindle is the best example, hitching itself to the star of Amazon’s existing retail store. Maybe Amazon will haul the ungainly Kindle right across the critical mass threshold and it will become “the iPod of e-books.” Then again, maybe Apple will finally figure out that the iPod (and, yes, the iPhone) is “the iPod of e-books.” Amazon’s efforts are handicapped by the hurdle of that separate hardware purchase, so the door is still open for a strong competitor targeting an existing reader-capable hardware platform, whether it be Apple or someone else.

John also suggested that Apple was best positioned to lead us to the ebook promised land.

Will Apple wake from its apparent slumber and pull the sword from the stone—the sword that’s currently taped to its hand and sheathed in a teflon-lined crevice? That’d certainly be the shortest path between the present and the inevitable e-book future.

I say if Amazon plays this right and creates applications that open their ebook store to a variety of devices – including iPhone- they may actually hold Uther’s sword. But controlling formats and owning the largest selection of current and best selling books won’t in itself make this a winning solution. Amazon needs to deliver the right experience, making both the buying and reading of ebooks easy and enjoyable.

What do you think – major shift, or just another ripple?

(Image credit DaveQ)

The publishing life described in the NYT article does not reflect my more than a decade of experience in the industry. So, when we are all lumped into the types of antics described in the article, it’s no wonder people show little sympathy for the current challenges in the print publishing world.

I’m here to tell you that most of us the publishing industry do not enjoy huge expense accounts and 3 martini lunches.

Our industry is not dying, but it is evolving – rapidly.  And those of us in the publishing business are up against many challenges, the least of which is expensive lunches and other indulgences taken by the minority.

(Photo credit ginsnob)

It was widely reported this week that Borders has agreed to accept books from HarperStudio as non-returnable.  For those who don’t know, books sold to almost every bookseller can generally be returned to the Publisher for full credit.  In fact, this has been the norm since the 1930s so this arrangement between Borders is unusual and interesting.  Some thoughts:

The reported discount is pretty deep – 58% to 63% so that in itself is interesting in that it will allow Borders to deeply discount them in the stores if that is what they choose to do.

A discount that deep would normally trigger a deep discount clause in many publishing contracts.  I’ll assume that HarperStudio either has no such clause or has taken this into account in some other way.

The non-returnable nature of the purchases likely means Borders will take less stock to begin with, meaning less copies of a book per store.  Unless, of course, they decide to adopt a strategy where they buy large quantities at discount and hope to “stack ‘em high and watch ‘em fly.”

At any rate it’s it very encouraging to see that a publisher and bookseller are willing to experiment and push the edges of an industry that is in transition and in need of change.

What do you think?

(Image credit Leo Reynolds)

In a recent post, Moonrat (ok, so I feel silly typing that) discusses what went wrong with the publishing industry in October, 2008 -  lamenting the returns issues we publisher face, and offers a suggestion on how book lovers can make a difference.

I don’t think anyone’s being really straightforward about what exactly happened, and a lot of it is not very complicated.* The crux of the problem is that book publishing is a returnable industry. That means that say Big Chain Store (BCS) agrees to stock a book that my company publishes. They buy 100 copies at, say, $1 a piece (to be easy). They give me $100; I send them the books. Two months later, they didn’t sell any, so they send them back. I have to give them $100.

Keep in mind a couple of things about this system that don’t work in the publisher’s favor:
1) Shipping costs. Books are heavy.
2) Production fees incurred by the publisher (because, unfortunately, we can’t return the books to the printer).
3) Inflation. Haha.

Like many other industries, book sellers are getting hit hard by our current economy – but the Holiday season is upon us, so things should improve, right?

However, BCS and all its chain compatriots are counting on Christmas sales to save them. They need to stock up! They need to plump their stores with new enticing merchandise so they can convince customers to save them from foreclosure!

Where to get the cash for all the holiday books they needed to stock in October and November? Three. Guesses.

In October, bookstores returned so many books that most publishing companies had more coming into them than going out of them. For some companies, the incoming number was more than several months’ outgoing.

So, what to do? Moonrat has some great advice.

For anyone who cares about the book publishing industry and wants to do their part, there’s one simple action step:

Buy a book this weekend.

Just buy one.

Perfect idea.

Read more of Moonrat’s publishing blog at http://editorialass.blogspot.com/

(Photo credit: _mpd_)

Mr. Kiley wraps his post by asking the question “could it be that with such change afoot amidst a national financial crisis, readership of the dead-trees product will swing up again?”  Perhaps, but I don’t think that is the reason there were no newspapers left at 8:30 am this morning in Ann Arbor, MI. Instead I’ll suggest that when people want to hold a piece of something, especially when that something is connected to an event like the historical moment we all witnessed last night, they want something tangible.  Something real.

Why not just archive a digital copy of the New York Times, or take a screen capture of your web browser open to you local paper’s website?  Because those are not the same are they?  Do people keep the paper because 50 years from now, they want to pull it out of a box in the attic and share it with their grandchildren or even great grandchildren?  Seems a more authentic experience than booting a PC, or an e book reader doesn’t it? Gone is the feeling of the paper in your hand.  The smell.  The texture. The sound it makes as it moves in your hands.  Electronic formats are a long way from being able to replicate that.

Paper is still future-proof in many respects. Today we still have physical access to books that date back centuries. Imagine the scenario above and in 50 years hoping that digital copy of the New York Times on your Kindle is still accessible.  Assuming of course, your Kindle still works.

At this point you might be thinking that my examples serve to further the point that paper is not dead – and you would be right.  In fact, I believe there is a very good chance that we will always want some permanently imprinted or inscribed format for our words wither it be paper or not.  And that is really my point – publishers need to start thinking not only about the convenience of formats like e books and start considering how we can make those formats as future-proof as paper.

E books and related media suffer from too many formats, too many devices, and too much DRM and very little is being done to make sure that readers will always be able to access that content in the future.

Centuries ago publishers defined a format for the book – ink on paper, bound together.  As we define the formats for the future book, we must not forget about the generations to follow and their access to the words within.

What do you think?

(Photo credit: Wilsonious)

In the meantime, I see the same book on the agenda for the next meeting from another editor here in the building.  Ironically the book aimed to teach business readers the importance of being “open” and “transparent” in the Web 2.0 Age.  Since the editor had prepared a very nicely done presentation for the book, it was obvious that they had been working on it with the author for quite some time.

Now don’t misread me – I think it is absolutely fine to shop your book proposal around.  This is a very competitive industry, and you absolutely should be sure you are partnering with the right publisher for you.   But if you know you are sending your proposal to multiple editors at the same publishing house, be sure you let them know that.  We aren’t all going to publish it after all and frankly if several of us know we are looking at the same thing we can collaborate to be sure we place it in right group for maximum sales potential.

(Image credit: Mekong Virus)

In the past, an improved store experience was an excellent proxy for improving the customer experience. But not so much anymore. Being a good retailer these days has more to do with relevance than it does with ambiance. Being relevant to customers means removing barriers, not adding new ones.

I’m not going to spend time going through loads of statistics confirming that nearly every man, woman, and child at every age in every country and continent is online, buying stuff, finding jobs, partners, and hopefully our books.   What I would like to put in front of you briefly is the idea of our customer’s EVOLVING EXPERIENCE EXPECTATION.

Some would argue that, and I include myself in this camp, that the Experience is the product.  When someone buys a book or a new perfume or cologne, they will judge that product on the experience that it create. Did the book empower me, did the perfume or cologne get me a date?  Did it make me feel better about myself?

The experience of music and the evolution of the music business is always held up as the harbinger for the book business.  And I think this analogy has reached a fevered pitch with the release of Amazon’s Kindle seven months ago.

Some of you probably saw this picture of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, in the Economist a few weeks ago with the heading “YOU’RE ALL DOOMED”.  Many have recognized that Amazon seems to be following a similar “digitize, divide and conquer” strategy masterminded by the maestro himself, Steve Jobs.

I don’t think many of us would question that Jobs and the iPod have revolutionized the music business,   BUT is it right then to assume that Bezos and his new toy will have the similar impact on the book business?  Last week , analysts in the US predicted that by 2012 global ebook sales at amazon will reach $2.5 billion. An astounding number considering amazon’s overall revenue in 2007 was $10.7 billion. How did they get there, with the music comparison of course.

If we look at some key points in history for both the music and book business in the context of the customer’s EVOLVING EXPERIENCE EXPECTATION, which I mentioned before. I think it starts to become clear that this comparison doesn’t really hold water.

A long time ago, when you wanted to experience music, you had limited options. You had to be in the presence of those creating the music, so your mobility was limited.  Unless you were royalty, or whoever was paying the orchestra, your choice of music was limited.  So, improving the mobility of music and the choices that were made available were huge factors in music’s widespread adoption.

Along came the phonograph and suddenly music could be mass produced and distributed, widening its market.
Now, personally, I think the real breakthrough moment in music, that paved the way for Apple, was the dawn of the boom box.

Clearly, this is when music became an accessory for fashion (have you ever seen a better matched bandana and boombox?) The point is, when music went mobile, it fit more readily into people’s experiences.

Then the race was on to make it more portable, stylish, all changing experience expectation. Now, when we think of a comparable breakthrough moment for the reading experience, many wonder if it happened 7 months ago with the release of the Kindle,  but I would argue it really happened just under 700 years ago with our friend, Mr. Movable Type, Gutenberg, himself.

Think about it. Since then, the experience of reading has changed very little. They come in all shapes and sizes. Mobility isn’t much of a problem. And as those traditionalists always say, I like books because you can curl up with them in bed, or read them in the bath.

So, I guess the point I’m trying to make is, unlike the music business the relationship customers have with the printed book is still quite strong and have been meeting the experience expectation for hundreds of years. And I don’t say this because I’m overly sentimental traditionalist.  But I do think it’s an important time to remind ourselves that the printed book still provides an excellent user experience.  And this is a real strength that only enhances our position in a digital age.

So, having read Christine thoughts, what do you think?  Are books still the ultimate experience when it comes to reading, or can what we think of as a book be so much more?  How will the book customer’s experience expectation evolve in the coming years?  Are we indeed doomed?

How, did this happen?  In this particular case it is clearly the recommendation of Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood.  His single post about the book sent it flying off Amazon.com’s virtual shelves, and started a conversation that included over 100 comments on Jeff’s blog and created a viral effect as several other blogs picked up on the story.

The lesson here for authors is not only do you need positive reviews of your books, but certain reviews can be  more effective than others.  You need a targeted approach to get your book not just in front of many people, but also the right people.

Think about who might have the biggest impact on your book.  The answer is not Oprah Winfrey – let’s keep it realistic.  Who is a trusted adviser, or connector within the community of your readership?  We use tools like the Author Questionnaire to help us answer these questions.  If your publisher is not using a similar tool, create your own and work with the marketing an PR departments on a targeted approach to get your work in front of the right people.

UPDATE: Looks like Charles Petzold is discussing this on his blog as well.