The Good and (and some Bad) of TOC Frankfurt Coverage

Andrew Savikas
October 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

The session from TOC Frankfurt that seems to have generated the most interest in the trade press here at Frankfurt is the one from Brian O'Leary discussing the research he's been doing on the connection between p2p filesharing activity and book sales. I'm glad to see that, and I hope it persuades some other publishers to join in the research.

Today's Bookseller includes a piece titled Improved TOC to Return in 2010 by Catherine Neilan that takes issue with the program from Tuesday's event. Without a hint of irony, Pan Macmillan's Sara Lloyd, after noting that she'd been a keynote speaker here in Frankfurt and in New York, said that trade publishers weren't represented.

There is no shortage of events and platforms for mass-market trade publishers to talk about and amongst themselves. (Though I'll note that there were speakers from Random House, HarperCollins, PanMacmillan, Wiley, Cengage, and Hachette in 2009's New York program.) There are many at those houses doing interesting and innovative things, and while it's great to hear from them, TOC is also about expanding that conversation to include voices from outside the traditional publishing circles.

And while Catherine reports that "No one from O'Reilly could be reached for comment," I can say with certainty that no one tried to reach anyone from O'Reilly at either the email address or phone number listed on every page of the TOC Frankfurt website.

I'm disappointed that some of those from organizations that already have a loud and powerful voice in the industry like Pan Macmillan, Random House, and the Bookseller would choose to criticize TOC for not giving them even more say.

Publishing Models for Internet Commerce

Andrew Savikas
October 14, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Last week I pointed to a 1994 interview Tim O'Reilly did that touched on the impact the Web would have on publishing. A nice contemporary companion is this 1995 paper titled "Publishing Models for Internet Commerce" that remains relevant (perhaps more so) today:

In an information glut, it is not content but context that is king. Someone chooses the New York Times over the New York Post not because of any kind of proprietary lock on content (though to be sure there is a role for scoops and special features) but rather because it has developed an editorial point of view that appeals to a particular class of reader. In a similar way, there is an enormous role for the establishment of "information brands" on the net--publications that have established relationships of trust with particular audiences.

Kindle Device and Clipping Limits Now Lifted for O'Reilly Books in Kindle Store

Andrew Savikas
October 9, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Earlier this year, one of our authors reported hitting some sort of undocumented limit when using the "Clipping" feature on Kindle. And then other readers discovered they were unable to load Kindle books onto either additional Kindles or their iPhone running the Kindle app because there's a limit to the number of simultaneous devices a Kindle book can live on.

While I can't speak about the terms other publishers have with Amazon (though it's a safe bet at least some of those kind of restrictions weren't Amazon's idea), because we want O'Reilly Kindle books to be available without any DRM, we asked Amazon if those limits applied to our books, and if so whether they could be lifted.

Though it took some work on their end (and they deserve credit for being receptive to our request), I'm happy to say that there is now no simultaneous device limit or clipping limit for O'Reilly Kindle books, and those changes have been retroactively applied for anyone who's already purchased one of our Kindle books. Here's the Product Details section from The Twitter Book on the Kindle Store:

As a reminder, most O'Reilly books aren't yet available on the Kindle in large part because the Kindle 1 doesn't yet support tables. But you can buy a Kindle-compatible Mobipocket version directly from oreilly.com as part of our "ebook bundles," which also include EPUB and PDF formats, which provide a nice alternative if you have a Kindle 1 and run into a table from one of our books that's difficult to read.

Just to be clear, our desire to make these books free of DRM does not mean that we are allowing our readers to redistribute copies to their friends, but to allow them to read the book on all of their own devices, and to otherwise make use of them without artificial encumbrances. If you're interested in multi-user licenses, talk to us.

Thanks again to Amazon for working with us on this.

Customer Loyalty for Mobile Devices

Andrew Savikas
October 8, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Some of the most interesting data on trends in mobile development has been coming from Flurry, an app analytics company (developers insert little snippets of Flurry code in their apps to gather usage data).

They've plotted frequency of usage against app "retention" (what percentage of buyers returned to the app within 90 days of downloading it), and put each category of app into a corresponding quadrant:

They note that books fall squarely into the "use a lot for a short period of time" category, which is not unexpected:

In Quadrant II, we find categories like Books and Games, among the two largest app categories in both the App Store and Android Market. These application categories are characterized, on average, by intense usage over a finite period of time. Because games and books offer content that typically is consumed only once, the user usually moves on after reading a book or finishing a game.

They also draw some interesting conclusions on which categories are suitable for subscription vs. a la carte models.

Note this data comes from the set of apps using the Flurry software (they say more than 2,000), so is by no means a scientific sampling. Interesting reading nonetheless.

A Classic from the Archive: Tim O'Reilly interviewed in 1994

Andrew Savikas
October 7, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Unfortunately I don't remember who pointed me to this (it was a few months ago via Twitter I think), but I came across it while cleaning off my Mac desktop. It's open government maven Carl Malamud interviewing Tim O'Reilly (mp3 link) from a weekly series (something that 10 years later would properly be called a "podcast"), and a lot of what's covered is eerily prescient (especially around the role of the Web in publishing).

Well worth a listen.

(Some other notable names in the interview series include Tim Berners-Lee and Brewster Kahle.)

Anecdotal Evidence from the Digital Shift

Andrew Savikas
October 6, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Back in 2004, when I spent most of my time doing format conversions and production automation, I had the privilege of turning much of what I learned doing things like batch running Word macros from the DOS command line with Ruby into a book, Word Hacks. Like our other Hacks books, it's a lesson in the value of curation and convenience -- much of the contents came from existing information, culled from blog posts, help forums, and other sources (all with permission and attribution, of course).

While it sold quite modestly, it was reviewed well, I earned out my advance, and as recently as September I ran into someone who told me the book has helped them do their job more effectively (their job being substantially similar to the one I was doing at the time I wrote the book).

This weekend my quarterly royalty statement came, and even I was struck by the relative proportion of sales coming from digital sources (this is from Q2 2009). Please note this is totally anecdotal data from a single book that probably hasn't been on the shelves in most retailers for years, so do take with the appropriate grain of salt:

Less than 20% of sales were for the print book. This is something we've seen for other "long tail" titles that show very little demand when viewed through the lens of retail print sales (i.e., Bookscan). Making titles available in digital form means the opportunity to capture sales long after a title has left most bookstore shelves.

There's still (a few) spots open for TOC Frankfurt next week on Oct. 13. Use discount code TOC09BL.

"We had all the advantages and let it slip away"

Andrew Savikas
October 5, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Among the most honest assessments of the failure of newspapers to adapt to the Web comes from John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. The whole thing is unflinching, powerful, and nearly every word worth reading if you're part of a media company hoping to survive the current digital environment, much less the shift to the mobile web. It was hard to pull out highlights, but here's a few:

As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, "We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn't give up the idea that we were newspaper companies."

Also an admission of the (in hindsight) classic mistake of judging new ventures using the expectations of the old:

The service was shut down after about 9 months, but not before scooping the paper on the start of the First Gulf War, reporting 12 hours before the paper landed on most doorsteps that the war had begun. The project was halted, I was told, because "we just couldn't show that it was having any measurable impact on retention of print subscribers and it wasn't producing revenue."

Right from the start, new offerings were measured by what they did for the core product, not on their own merits. A big mistake.

And some great words about understanding that you're working with a new medium, not just a new format in which to present the old:

You have to have a strategy and you have to be committed to pursuing it. We perceived the Web site as a newspaper online, as a complement to the paper, not as its own thing. That's not a strategy.

Go. Read it now. Thanks to Jay Rosen for the link (via Twitter).

Second "Open Feedback" Title Now Online

Andrew Savikas
October 2, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Over on the O'Reilly Labs blog, Keith Fahlgren talks about the latest title to go live in our Open Feedback Publishing System, which gives authors and readers a way to discuss a book while it's being written. The latest book, Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, also features a very nice upgrade to the system's CSS (its look-and-feel).

Keith also offers up a nice post-mortem on the first book to go through the system, Programming Scala, where "over the months, nearly 100 people left a total of 543 comments. Ten contributors stood out in particular, giving more than a third of the total comments."

Do the Math on Your Mobile Apps

Andrew Savikas
October 1, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

One of my favorite sources of interesting reading material these days is Hacker News (follow them at @newsycombinator), and this week they pointed me to a piece from Derek Sivers that applies to many of the emerging digital and mobile markets for media:

He kept saying, "If only one percent of the people reading this magazine buy my CD... that'll be 10,000 copies! And that's only one percent!"

...

Over the next few weeks he received four orders. Total CDs sold: 4

....

I think of this every time I hear business plans that say, "With over 30 million iPhones sold, our app is sure to..."

On the one hand, putting a one-click bookstore in 30 million pockets means someone is bound to buy your app. On the other hand, if it costs you $25K to develop the app (a typical and realistic investment for a greenfield app), you're probably not going to have enough income to build any more apps for awhile.

Economist on "Mobile Marvels" in Emerging Markets

Andrew Savikas
September 29, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Though here when we talk about mobile it's usually in the context of mobile reading and media, that's just a small piece of what's happening as we move to the age of the mobile web, especially in emerging markets.

This week's Economist has a special report on Mobile and Telcoms in Emerging Markets that's worth a read. For example, in about two years mobile is forecast to eclipse fixed broadband as the way most people use the Internet:

Worth particular note are the Beyond Voice and Internet for the Masses stories (from which the graph above is taken):

HOW long will it be before everyone on Earth has a mobile phone? "It looks highly likely that global mobile cellular teledensity will surpass 100% within the next decade, and probably earlier," says Hamadoun Touré, secretary-general of the International Telecommunication Union, a body set up in 1865 to regulate international telecoms. Mobile teledensity (the number of phones per 100 people) went above 100% in western Europe in 2007, and many developing countries have since followed suit. South Africa passed the 100% mark in January, and Ghana reached 98% in the same month. Kenya and Tanzania are expected to get to 100% by 2013.

Microsoft/O'Reilly Alliance Means DRM-free Ebooks Coming from MS Press

Andrew Savikas
September 24, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | Listen

Full details are in Tim's post on the Radar blog (and in the Press Release and in the statement from Microsoft ), but thought one part of this deal worth calling out specifically here:

I'm particularly excited that as part of this agreement, Microsoft has committed to make its ebooks DRM-free and device-independent. One of our goals at O'Reilly has been to make sure that ebook customers can read them on any device, and have the ability to keep using them even if they change their preferred device. Having Microsoft Press join us in this commitment is a big step forward towards an open ebook market.

We begin transitioning distribution (including digital) in December, which means there will be lots to show and tell at February's TOC Conference.

Mobile as New Medium

Andrew Savikas
September 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (21) | Listen

While prepping for my talk tomorrow on mobile publishing at the Digital Publishing Group in New York, I was also popping in and out of a related ongoing email conversation about textbooks and iPhones, and couldn't help but weigh in on the question of how to handle some the issues like cross referencing and annotations on the iPhone compared with in a textbook. Several people suggested the comments were worth sharing with a larger audience:

These are relatively minor technical problems that generally already have solutions. The bigger issue I see is that thinking of the problem as "how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone" is framing it wrong. The challenge is "how do we use a medium that already shares 3 of our 5 senses -- eyes, ears, and a mouth -- along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly-always-on Web connection to accomplish the 'job' of educating a student." That's a much more interesting problem to me than "how do we port 2-page book layouts to a small screen."

Mobile is big on the agenda at TOC Frankfurt, TOC New York, and I'm sure will come up during the upcoming TOC online event.

O'Reilly iPhone App Tips and Tricks

Adam Witwer
September 4, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

• "Hidden" features -- handy things you can do that aren't always obvious in the UI
• Long code lines -- my attempt to help users deal with the question we get most often on the support queues
• Extracting the EPUB files -- yes, there is an EPUB file in that app, and you can get to it quite easily

The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake

Andrew Savikas
August 10, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (5) | Listen

Note there's a lot of images in this post, so if you're reading it via RSS, you may want to click through to the original post if you can't see the images.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. That trend has continued (and accelerated), and right now about 60% of our App sales are coming from outside the US:

When I've talked with other publishers about our success with iPhone Apps, they typically discounted what I said because I was talking about iPhone: The Missing Manual, a title particularly suited to the device. And to a degree, that's a fair argument, and I don't expect very many other books-as-apps to sell as well as that one. But the results for the next batch of 17 titles is instructive. For the two-week period of July 20 to August 2 (the first two calendar weeks the apps were on sale), five of the 17 titles sold more units as iPhone apps than via print (as measured in Bookscan). Here's a comparison across all 17 titles:

That got me wondering why there's not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.

In the App Store, each country has its own top 100 lists (overall and for each category, and for free as well as paid). Something that's #1 here in the US may not even register on the top 100 in another country. Here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for the "Classics" App, the #1 paid book app right now:

Classics is one of the most popular paid book apps in nearly every country with iPhone service (the list actually goes further down than shown above).

Now here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for "Twilight" which has been holding steady in the top 25 paid apps here in the US:

Yup, that's it. Just the US. Presumably this is a rights issue -- Hachette either doesn't have the rights to sell this book as an App anywhere else, or they're choosing not to. But taken in light of our own sales of nearly 2/3 outside the US and the data from Classics, that means a publisher who can't (or won't) sell their app outside the States is missing a lot of the market. Here's the current rankings for the "A Twilight Trivia" app, which is ranked above Twilight in the US (and is not affiliated with Hachette or Stephenie Brown):

So there's clear interest in the Twilight content on the iPhone outside the US -- enough interest to keep this app well into the top 100 paid book apps in dozens of countries.

Perhaps the most important "digital rights management" at stake right now is that of the rights to sell digital content globally.

If you're planning to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, producing and selling digital and mobile content from a global perspective will be a big part of the program at TOC Frankfurt on Oct. 13.

Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.

Andrew Savikas
August 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (10) | Listen

One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for ebooks, and it's a quite reasonable concern.

Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what's happening:

Over the past 18 months, we've gone from print outselling digital by more than 2:1 to just the opposite.

But that's not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you'd expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that's not what's happening. Here's a comparison of how our sales (as measured by Bookscan) stack up against the broader computer book market. The data here is normalized (the first period in the graph is set to 100, and subsequent results are calculate relative to that period):

Roger Magoulas, who heads up our Research Team (which is doing some way cool stuff with App Store data) put it this way in a recent backchannel email covering this as part of a larger analysis:

By looking at the data and these charts we infer that while O'Reilly physical book sales are down compared to last year, this seems more the result of the drop in demand for computer books since the financial meltdown than the impact of ebook sales. Since O'Reilly is a relatively prolific publisher of econtent we would expect that ebooks would affect O'Reilly's physical book sales more than other publishers and we don't see that evidence in these results. Even if ebooks are taking a bite out of O'Reilly physical book sales, we see no negative effect on O'Reilly's slightly increasing share in the physical book market nor on how O'Reilly's sales correlate with the overall market for physical computer books.

So, for now, if what we infer is correct, you can put away your exorcism crosses, ebooks seem more a legitimate expanded market opportunity than a projectile vomiting Linda Blair wannabe.