TOC Editor Note: Light Posts Through Holidays

Mac Slocum
December 24, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

The O'Reilly offices are closed through the remainder of the year, so TOC blog posts will be light until January 5, 2009.

We're thrilled with the interest and enthusiasm we've experienced throughout 2008, and we look forward to more coverage, projects and events in 2009. We hope everyone in the TOC community has a restful and enjoyable holiday season!

-- The TOC editors

iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes

Andrew Savikas
December 23, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes (where it has remained, behind only the Classics App), and it continues to gain ground. In just four days, it has become one of our top sellers of the year in electronic format. Notably, even at the promotional $4.99 price, it is the highest-priced app among the top 50 paid book apps. While $0.99 pricing clearly moves merchandise, it's unlikely that kind of pricing is sustainable for most Apps, including books (for more, see this excellent post from Andy Finnell on app pricing).

Yesterday brought news that several other major publishers are rolling out iPhone Apps of popular titles, including the Twilight series (which right now is priced at $10.99), via an app development company out of New York, ScrollMotion. I haven't tried their reader, but the annotation feature shown in the screenshots looks pretty neat. We've been very pleased with how our books render in Stanza, especially for computer code, cross references, and tables -- all of which are quite common across our catalog.

Not everyone is enthusiastic about the news of more iPhone book apps, most vocally TeleRead blogger (and TOC Conference panelist) David Rothman:

Some consumers may want hundreds of books on their iPhones. Should publishers put such a crimp on their purchases? And will apps be the easiest things to organize into libraries? I'm open minded about the O'Reilly iPhone guide as an app, given its connection with the machine. But please don' make an app of every book!

While I share David's concerns about format lock-in (a big reason we offer many of our books in a variety of DRM-free formats), I think his distaste of standalone book apps is misplaced. Yes, it's true that right now the iPhone can only hold 148 apps. But given the nature of the device, I don't think it's likely that most customers will begin using it to manage/consume large numbers of books they intend to keep for long periods of time. Books on the iPhone likely serve the same function for readers as games do -- temporary entertainment, likely to be replaced by the next cool thing that comes along. I've deleted dozens of apps myself, at least a few of them ones I paid for.

But regardless of where your personal opinion lies on that issue, if you're a publisher there are several things to keep in mind as you consider the App Store as a distribution channel:

• Apple has tremendous power in this relationship. They're taking 30 percent right off the top, and they alone decide if and when your app appears. For many of your potential customers in this new market, that's just fine. They don't care about you or your other products. They care about entertaining/amusing/informing themselves.
• The App Store is a vibrant and thriving marketplace, but it's still in its infancy. There is a lot to learn about how to price and promote books this way. For example, here's a list of sites that promote new apps. Some are pay-to-promote, which sounds kinda gross, but isn't much different from co-op. Here's more from the same site on pricing.
• While this depends a lot on the types of books you publish, it's likely a small but very active segment of your audience feels the same way David does, and will reward you for offering standards-based, DRM-free versions of your books that they know will outlast you, the device-of-the-month, or the DRM format you're using.
• Speaking of DRM, stop worrying about piracy. One of our best selling books in electronic form this year is Real World Haskell, which was written out in the open, and is still available in its entirety from the book's website. For free. This is not an isolated case, and this book has been a commercial success not in spite of its open availability but because of its open availability.

If you're interested in reviewing the iPhone Missing Manual App, and are willing to share your review on your blog and in the App Store, drop me a line at andrew AT toc.oreilly.com. I have a limited number of promo codes for free access to the App, and it's first-come, first-served.

Related Stories:

• O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs
• Experimental O'Reilly Ebook iPhone Integration with Stanza
• Open Question: Standalone iPhone Ebooks vs. E-Readers
• Q&A; with Developer Who Turns Ebooks into iPhone Applications
• Q&A; With Co-Creator of Classics iPhone E-Reader

O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs

Andrew Savikas
December 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (14) | Listen

While there will always be a demand for printed books, few of those books will have a life entirely disconnected from the wider digital Web. In that sense, all publishing is becoming digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the Web. That's a big shift, and it will take time for the existing players to make the transition (and we'll almost certainly lose some along the way). For now, here's a roundup of where things stand for us at O'Reilly on the ebook front:

• David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual is now available as an App in the iPhone App Store. It's available for a limited time at an introductory price of $4.99 (the regular price will be $9.99). The App was built by Lexcycle, creators of the popular Stanza App, so you get the same rich reading experience (including live linking and cross references) as when you read our other books on Stanza. More titles will follow in the coming weeks.
  
• More than 130 titles, including many of our best sellers, are now available as ebook bundles, which can be read on a variety of ebook devices and systems, including Stanza on the iPhone, Bookworm, Amazon Kindle, and the Sony Reader. A full list is available at oreilly.com/ebooks, and includes the following:
  • JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5ed
  • Learning Python, 3ed
  • High Performance Web Sites
  • Rails Cookbook
  • Beautiful Code
  We're working to release the bulk of our backlist as ebook bundles during the next 90 days.
• All of our in-print Head First books will be available for purchase as PDFs within the next 24 hours (two of them already are via the Rough Cuts program). Those of you familiar with our Head First titles know their layout would not translate well to reflowable formats like EPUB. We regularly evaluate alternatives, but in the interim, we're happy to finally deliver something a lot of customers have requested--the option to purchase Head First books in digital form.
• In total, more than 700 of our books are currently available for sale as DRM-free PDFs or Ebook bundles (and even more are available through Safari Books Online). As more Ebook bundles become available, those are included as free updates for anyone who's already purchased just the PDF from oreilly.com.
• Our "Media Management" account pages for customers who have purchased ebooks from oreilly.com are now much more mobile-device friendly, and are accessible from oreilly.com/e. A screenshot from my iPhone below:
  

In the coming months we'll be working to make more of our new book content mobile-friendly, better integrate our book content with the Web, and continue exploring how to deliver our content in ways that take advantage of all that being digital has to offer.

If you're a publisher trying to figure out how to deal with digital, registration is open for our 2009 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. Lexcycle's Marc Prud'hommeaux and Neelan Choksi will both be speaking. New York area publishers should also check out StartWithXML, our one-day forum deep-diving into how and why to move to flexible formats for more nimble book content.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line through Get Satisfaction

Webcast Video and Slides: Social Media for Publishers

Mac Slocum
December 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Below you'll find the full recording from the recent TOC Webcast, "Social Media for Publishers" with Chris Brogan.

Chris has also made his presentation slides available:

Early Registration for TOC Conference Ends Tomorrow Today

Mac Slocum
December 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

The $200 early registration discount for the Tools of Change for Publishing conference, held Feb. 9-11 in New York, ends tomorrow today. Event information and registration details are available at the conference site.

The roster for the third annual TOC conference is nearly complete, and we're excited by the caliber of tutorials, sessions and speakers (and we aren't alone in that regard).

Confirmed sessions include:

• Keynotes from Tim O'Reilly, Jeff Jarvis, Sara Lloyd, Cory Doctorow, Jason Epstein, Nick Bilton, and Jason Fried
• Half-day tutorials covering ebooks, social media, community building, XML, print on demand, and copyright
• "Google Book Search and Copyright" with Jon Orwant
• "CEO Roundtable" with Eileen Gittins, Clint Greenleaf, Michael Hyatt and Bob Young
• "Building a Better Web-based Book" panel discussion
• "Managing the Human Side of Change" with Scott Berkun
• "What's Your Mobile Strategy?" panel discussion
• "The Rise of eBooks" panel discussion
• "The Long Tail Needs Community" with Gavin Bell
• "Greening the Book Industry" panel discussion
• "Success Stories and Failures in Digital Publishing" case study session

Additional speakers and sessions can be found at the Tools of Change for Publishing conference site. Be sure to register now to save $200.

The Realities of Big Web Traffic and Advertising

Mac Slocum
December 18, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Major news sites that rely on advertising as their primary revenue stream need to log hundreds of millions of page views per month to attract significant attention from advertisers, according to a new report from Lauren Rich Fine, research director of ContentNext.

From Advertising Age:

"Based on our research, the conversation [with advertisers] gets interesting at 200 million page views plus a month, but much more so around 800 million," Ms. Fine writes ...

... The report also looks at whether the [New York] Times could ever succeed as a web-only product, and concludes that it could -- once NYT.com starts generating 1.3 billion page views a month.

(Note: Advertising Age cites ComScore Media Metrix figures that put the Times' traffic at 173 million page views in October, but the Times communications department says this figure is very low).

Traffic estimates in the hundreds of millions and billions are a shock to the system, but they're nothing new. Jeremy Liew analyzed the online media industry in early 2007 (a time when Web advertising was still enjoying double-digit growth) and concluded:

At large scale, without a great deal of targeting possible, a startup's "run of site" or "run of network" advertising might be able to get to the $1 RPM range (Revenue per thousand impressions, including CPM, CPC, and CPA models). To get to $50m in revenue you would need 50 billion pageviews in a year, or just over 4 billion per month.

This type of analysis -- which is certainly on target -- is why it's important for publishers to acknowledge the reality of Web advertising by addressing two deeper questions:

1. Can I reach sustainability faster by aggregating advertising across sites or building a smaller organization? -- Limited choice shoehorns audiences into large groups, but the Web disrupts channel lock-in by allowing individual consumers to find material on their own terms. Big organizations are in trouble because the transition from limited channels to distributed channels means audiences are smaller (ie: 1 million vs. 10 million, 100,000 vs. 1 million, etc). There's still significant value in reaching 1 million people, or even 100,000 people, but smaller audiences attract less advertising revenue. So the challenge is to either scale businesses down so audience size, advertising dollars and sustainability even out, or, aggregate advertising revenue from a large number of targeted sites. Both options are arduous, but both are also realistic. Finding and maintaining billions of page views per month is not (the New York Times being the exception here).

2. Can I diversify beyond advertising? -- Ad-only Web models are inherently flimsy because the thing advertisers want is the thing most Web sites can't attract: huge crowds. A lot of lip service has been paid to the Web's targeting argument -- and in Google's case, that's proven effective and lucrative -- but the analysis from Fine and Liew shows that advertisers still can't shake that "big crowd" mentality. So if that's the reality, advertising needs to become one revenue stream among others.

Folks like Mike Masnick, Clay Shirky, Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson have addressed these "other" revenue steams at length (all are recommended reading), but the abridged analysis of their work generally comes down to one word: scarcity. Digital content is not scarce. It's easy to find, distribute and copy (even if publishers lock it down). Because of this, audiences don't often equate "digital content" with "pay." Publishers can fight consumer expectation by creating artificial scarcity (DRM, pay walls for general content), but that same energy is better directed toward products that are naturally scarce: things that solve a problem (recommendations, education), offer an experience (readings, concerts, trips, conferences), grant access (consulting, POD for out of print titles), save time (curated information), and offer value on an individual basis (customization). All of these are outside publishers' comfort zones and none are guaranteed to catch on, but models that work in conjunction with the digital world offer a better shot at sustainability than those built on artificial limits and unrealistic audience sizes.

Related Stories:

• Clay Shirky: "The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers"
• Kevin Kelly: "Better Than Free"
• The 26th Story: "Tribes author Seth Godin discusses free content and the publishing industry"
• Redefining Professional Content and Accepting Digital's Limitations
• Finding Balance Between User Experience and Web Ads
• Levels of Quality and Revenue Streams
• Web Analytics Primer for Publishers

New Tech Mixes Book Experience with Sensors

Peter Brantley
December 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

A new form of hybrid book is coming on the market -- and the inventor consults with Apple. From the Guardian UK:

Lyndsay Williams -- who has already developed the PC sound card, SmartQuill, and SenseCam -- is now working on SenseBooks, and the first of a series will be published next year.

SenseBooks are a hybrid of paper and computer intelligence, and will have MP3 quality audio from an ARM processor and a gigabyte of storage. Williams says SenseBooks "will know when the user picks up the book and looks at a page":

A proximity sensor detects this and can light up pages or make music. What is also useful is the book has sensors to know what page it is on, can send a wireless message to a PC and open up a web page with more information on. Current applications include children's teaching books, music books, cookery books etc.

Related Stories:

• Manolis Kelaidis: "bLink: Completing the Connection Between the Analog and Digital Worlds"
• Voice in Google Mobile App: A Tipping Point for the Web?
• Open Question: Do You Read Books on a Cell Phone?
• Tagging the Real World through Barcode Apps
• Mashable: 100+ iPhone Games That Use the Accelerometer

Report: 300,000 Sony Readers Sold

Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

The e-reader guessing game may be in its final stages. According to theBookseller, Sony confirms it has sold 300,000 Readers globally since 2006:

So far three million books have been downloaded from its online library, which is home to 57,000 titles. The electronics giant said it planned to grow its online library to 100,000 titles by the end of the year.

The Reader is available through a variety of channels, including U.K. retailers. The Kindle is currently sold only through Amazon to U.S.-based buyers.

Sony is prepping a wireless-enabled Reader to compete against the Kindle, but theBookseller says there's no firm release date. The third-generation Reader -- a faster model with more storage but no connectivity -- was announced in October.

(Via Walt Shiel's Twitter stream.)

Related Stories:

• The Pitfalls of Publishing's E-Reader Guessing Game
• What Would Your Ideal E-Reader Look Like?
• The Oprah Effect and the Kindle
• Analyst: Amazon Downplays Rumored Kindle Sales
• Open Question: Have You Seen a Kindle in Public?

Slides from "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow" Webcast

Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Laura Dawson has made her slides available from the recent TOC Webcast, "Essential Tools of an XML Workflow." A complete recording of the event will be posted here soon.

[TOC Webcast] Social Media for Publishers

Mac Slocum
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Tools of Change for Publishing will host "Social Media for Publishers," a free webcast with presenter Chris Brogan, on Tuesday, Dec. 16 at 1 p.m. eastern (10 a.m. pacific).

Webcast Overview

So much of what we hear about blogging, podcasting, social networks, and the rest of the social media toolkit seems to be arbitrary, overly time-consuming, pie-in-the-sky. We might hear the occasional good strategy, but rarely do we understand how to put it into action. And how much will any of this cost you in resources and money? Meet with Chris Brogan for a not-too-techy and not-too-light dive into the world of social media from the mindset of a publisher.

Register for free.

Related:

• Why Blogging and Social Media Shouldn't be Ignored
• How Should Authors Promote Themselves Online?
• Web Publicity Grows Up, Learns the Value of Conversation
• Gaping Void: "The Porous Membrane: Why Corporate Blogging Works"

Interstitial Publishing: A New Market from Wasted Time

Joseph J. Esposito
December 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

To grow, publishers must either battle other publishers over market share or identify and serve new markets. Digital media are useful to publishers only insofar as they serve one of these aims. (A separate matter is using digital media to drive down costs and boost profits, but that is not growth in the defined sense.) Using digital media to redistribute market share may be costly and not lead to the expected gains, as a publisher's rivals are likely to use the very same tactics: anyone can publish for the iPhone and Stanza, anyone can get books onto the Kindle. But with market share battles there is no relief; it is an arms race, and a publisher can no more forego publishing in digital form than it can stop seeking new and creative authors. For a publisher pursuing growth, alas, it's new markets or nothing.

Digital media do not necessarily lead to new markets, and in some situations, digital media may actually serve to shrink markets. For consumer or trade publishing in the developed world, finding a new market can be challenging. Our lives are full, our calendars are snug, and our attention is spread over a seemingly infinite number of media choices, ranging from old-fashioned books to social networks, music, movies, museums, and countless other things. To find a new market here requires opening up a crack in a broad, seamless facade.

Which brings us to interstitial publishing, publishing between the cracks. (No, uh, wisecracks, please.) For a day filled with IMs and music and slathered over with email, one opportunity for publishers is to promote interstitial reading, reading that is done in the brief moments between other engagements, whether those claims on our attention are other media or simply the wiggle room in a schedule: the time spent waiting for a plane, a doctor, or for a meeting to begin. That's a huge number of minutes in any day; a good portion of our lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive.

This point was brought to mind by a mailgroup post by O'Reilly's Andrew Savikas, who commented that he was stuck for an hour in an airport. What a great opportunity to pull out his iPhone and check out mail, alerts, and Web sites. But he could have been reading, if publishers had provided formal material (formal here means "the kind of stuff you are willing to pay for") to slip between the interstices of Andrew's day.

An hour is a big crack in the day; to become a true interstitial publisher, you would have to aim smaller. How about the 10-minute crack? Five minutes? Think of your own day: How often are you simply waiting, doing nothing? Daydreams don't count -- because ultimately the aim of every media business is to colonize your mind's every moment. (Dust off that old copy of the science fiction classic "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth for a satiric vision of imperial marketing.) If you had something to read that you could sip in draughts of five minutes at a time or perhaps 10, you would participate in the growth of the new market for interstitial publishing. And this is genuine growth, as at this moment the total sales in the interstices is zero or close to it. The goal is to go from zero to 60 in five minutes.

For interstitial publishing to work, you need a handy device (PDA, iPhone, or something like that), which you carry with you all the time so that you can take advantage of the cracks in the day. For this kind of thing, a Kindle or any dedicated ebook reader won't work, as it is more of an effort to pull such a device out of your bag as you wait in line in the supermarket. So if it's growth you want (as distinct from market share), forget the Kindle. A smart phone is a different matter, however: How many times do you see someone yank a Blackberry from a belt clip and glance at incoming email? Instead of email, that could be the twenty-third chapter of the new micronovel by William Adama. The proper device is critical, and the software that runs on it must have sophisticated bookmarking capabilities.

You also need (and this ultimately may be the harder part) content crafted with the interstices in mind. Reformatting "Moby-Dick" for interstitial publishing simply won't do, as the structure of the text, even the syntax of the sentences, militates against draughts of only 5 minutes. This is not a matter of immersive vs. non-immersive reading: it's entirely possible to get immersed in 5 minutes. But it is an issue of what you get immersed in. Sorry, Tolstoy and Grisham, even William Gibson, but we need a new breed of writer, who is born digital, who is born in the interstices.

Often interstitial publishing is confused with having a short attention span, as though a moment is somehow less valuable than an hour. The key to this new form of publishing, however, is that it views the short period of each entry not as a watered-down version of the "real thing," a long text, but as something built perfectly for the space and time it occupies. This is what McLuhan meant by "understanding media": it's not about the content in itself but the content as it accommodates itself to the shape of the surface, which in turn is created and supported by the underlying technology.

Interstitial publishing can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology ("brief bursts about the new administration"; "101 short poems about transistors and current") will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.

Narratives for interstitial media may very will be linear within each five-minute episode, but it is improbable that item A will lead serially to item B, to item C, and so forth. It would simply be hard to gather the narrative in our minds if it were written in this way. More likely each episode will have a beginning and an end--and then cut to another episode, which may be built around a different time or place or another character. All the pieces get assembled in our minds, five minutes at a time.

For "five-minute fiction" to catch on, we will need creative people who probe the nature of the interstitial medium. It's easy to forget (or never to have known) that the linear narrative as we think of it today was in fact invented once upon a time when writers were faced with books that were inexpensively manufactured and distributed to wide audiences for the first time. Publishers will need to seek out writers who comprehend the new medium, who can engage a reader for fie minutes, who can make the many pieces of the work congeal in the reader's mind. These writers will study readers, PDAs or smart phones in hand, standing before the spinning dryer in the laundromat, stopped at a red light, preparing to board a plane, waiting for the meeting to begin. In all of this publishers will see growth.

The aim of digital media should not be (or should not only be) to substitute a screen for a printed page but to reinvent the text on the screen and, in so doing, to bring new readers into the marketplace.

Related Stories:

• New York Times: "Introducing the Twiller"
• Open Question: Do You Read Books on a Cell Phone?
• Q&A; with Susan Danziger, CEO of DailyLit
• Q&A; with Hadrien Gardeur, Co-Founder of Feedbooks
• Daddy, Where's Your Phone?
• Bezos Hopes for Longer Attention Spans
• Wired: "Snack Attack!"

The Inevitability of Newspapers' Downturn

Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

In a post at Boing Boing, Clay Shirky takes issue with the newspaper industry's slow adaptation to digital and its propensity for playing the victim:

I'd only arrived on the net in '93, a complete newbie, and most of my opinions about newspapers came from talking with Gordy Thompson of the NY Times and Brad Templeton of Clarinet. Instead, what struck me, re-reading my younger self, was this: a dozen years ago, a kid who'd only just had his brains blown via TCP/IP nevertheless understood that the newspaper business was screwed, not because this was a sophisticated conclusion, but because it was obvious.

Google, eBay, craigslist, none of those things existed when I wrote that piece; I was extrapolating from Lycos and it was still apparent what was going to happen. It didn't take much vision to figure out that unlimited perfect copyability, with global reach and at zero marginal cost, was slowly transforming the printing press into a latter-day steam engine. [Emphasis included in original post.]

(Via the Reading 2.0 list)

Related Stories:

• Politico Expands Content Sharing Service
• New York Times: "Tribune Files for Bankruptcy"
• U.S. News Shifts Focus to Digital
• Could a Young Newspaper Company Still Succeed?
• Sulzberger: "Be of the Internet, Not on the Internet"

Magazines Now in Google Book Search

Mac Slocum
December 11, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

Google is adding back issues of magazines to its Book Search index. From the Official Google Blog:

Try queries like [obama keynote convention], [hollywood brat pack] or [world's most challenging crossword] and you'll find magazine articles alongside books results. Magazine articles are tagged with the keyword "Magazine" on the search snippet.

Over time, as we scan more articles, you'll see more and more magazines appear in Google Book Search results. Eventually, we'll also begin blending magazine results into our main Google.com search results, so you may begin finding magazines you didn't even know you were looking for. For now you can restrict your search to magazines we've scanned by trying an advanced search.

The Associated Press says Google will share advertising revenue generated by Google ads with magazine publishers. Embedded advertising from the original print editions remains intact as part of the overall archive. It'll be interesting to see how Google and magazine publishers coordinate on ads if/when publishers seed current editions into the service.

In recent months, Google also released a similar newspaper archive through Google News and a large collection of photos from LIFE magazine.

Related Stories:

• Google Book Search: It's All About the Index
• Reaction to Google Book Search Settlement
• PC Magazine Goes Web Only
• Newsweek Repackaging Candidate Coverage for Kindle Bios
• Google Scanning Newspaper Archives

History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts

Peter Brantley
December 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3) | Listen

A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative.

The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly that they let Apple run away with control over digital distribution and the future of their industry.

It looks like the book publishing industry is about to do the same thing.

Publishing industry: The book isn't the paper. It's the content! Why don't you understand your own product?

Related Stories:

• Publishers Weekly: "Penguin Launches Penguin 2.0, iPhone App; Stanza Deal with Random House"
• New York Observer: "Penguin Will Let You Customize Collections ..."
• To Chunk or Not To Chunk?
• Point-Counterpoint: On Digital Book DRM
• Point-Counterpoint: Digital Book DRM, the Least Worst Solution

Book Publishing's Scale Issue

Mac Slocum
December 9, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

In a post looking at the future interplay of content, gatekeepers and consumers, David Nygren touches on a key issue for large book publishers: scale.

Mega Publishing Conglomerates Go Bye-Bye: Or at least they will look very different than they do today. Their scale is not sustainable. The partial implosion we saw in the publishing industry last week was just the beginning. The profit margins that will come from publishing will not be great enough to satisfy shareholders who expect revenue growth of 7%+ annually. No can do.

But there will still be major publishing houses that handle the superstars, the sure (as you can get) bets. That is what they do best, after all. But for the vast majority of readers, the big houses will not longer be the gatekeepers. Good. [Formatting included in original post.]

Via Jose Alonso Furtado's Twitter stream

Related Stories:

• Lamenting the Digital Decline is a Dangerous Path
• I Am Trying To Believe (that Rock Stars aren't Dead)
• Pricing Digital Book Content: Where's the Sweet Spot?
• Redefining Professional Content and Accepting Digital's Limitations