Presented to the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association
March 13, 2010, Dominican University (San Rafael, California, USA)
The following material is an outline of commentary by UP founder Danny O. Snow, a senior research fellow of the Society for New Communications Research and board member of the Independent Book Publishers Assocation, serving thousands of publishers across North America and around the world. The report debunks myths about e-publishing. This is not a verbatim transcript, but rather previously prepared "talking points" used to organize the presentation.
Photo: Snow (left) with New York Times columnist Scott James after his BAIPA session.
Scott's new novel, The Sower, was the subject of a lively panel about new methods
for publishing and promoting books, both in print and online. (Photo credit: Kate Farrell,
California Writer's Club.)
Myth #1: e-Books: will soon overtake tree-Books in the marketplaceThe e-BOOK BANDWAGON: FACT AND FICTION In early 2010, the long anticipated migration of periodicals from print to Web is undeniably underway. Major daily newspapers including the Christian Science Monitor are already replacing unprofitable (and environmentally unfriendly) print editions with leaner, greener, more timely online distribution. As much as newsprint is a beloved institution, most informed observers agree that the transition from 'paper-n-ink' to 'bits-n-bytes' for newspapers and magazines makes good sense in today’s world - and certainly in tomorrow’s. It’s a better match between form and content.
We can learn something special from the CSM transition to digital distribution. Why? Because unlike most other daily newspapers, the CSM did NOT formerly rely on advertising as its primary source of revenue; instead, it relied on subscriptions. Other papers, already ad-based, moved from print to Web with less change in their business models. One might conclude that this would leave the CSM at a disadvantage, but this has not proven true. Interestingly, its one remaining weekly print edition (a 48 page glossy) has actually seen subscriptions grow since the shift of daily issues to online distribution... and a breaking report states that its Web edition attracted an all-time record 12 million page views in February 2010. The success of the CSM's transition from print to Web illustrates why the newspaper and magazine fields are abuzz about e-publishing.
In the book world too, the word on the street these days is e-Books, e-Books, and more e-Books. The scuttlebutt among book publishers is that they must rapidly jump on the e-Book bandwagon, or risk getting left in the dust. Having observed how record labels were blindsided by music downloading over the last decade, most book publishers are taking the danger seriously.
One motive for publishers to embrace e-Books is that sales are growing exponentially. “Convert from print to digital distribution,” they hear, “and tap a booming new market while earning as much per copy as you did with tree-Books… maybe more!” But early adopters are now learning that this widely circulated notion may be overstated for the moment, as reported below.
Likewise, book publishers are told that the emerging e-Book industry standard EPUB format is a kind of silver bullet. “Convert your production files from PDF to EPUB,” they hear, “and your books will almost magically become marketable for reading on nearly every conceivable electronic device from the Kindle to the iPhone, and everything in between!” Like the misconception that e-Books are rapidly supplanting tree-Books in the marketplace, in 2010 the full promise of EPUB is still unrealized.
This report, without denying that the time has definitely come for book publishers to take e-Books seriously, will debunk some of the more prevalent myths about e-Books under current market conditions and technological realities.
Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol was released simultaneously as an e-Book and a tree-Book on September 14, 2009. Many industry observers predicted watershed sales of the e-Book edition, akin to the release of Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet exclusively as an e-Book in 2002. But while the print edition of Brown’s novel broke several sales records in early release, e-Book sales represented only about 5% of total sales… about the same as other titles available in both printed and electronic form. This is not to suggest that 100,000 e-Books sold in less than two weeks (with near-zero production and shipping costs) isn’t impressive… but on the other hand, Harry Potter isn’t exactly quaking in his hobnail boots yet.Myth #2: EPUB format is a cure-allScholarly studies suggest that there are inherent physical/cognitive differences between the way readers “interact” with paper, versus a computer screen. They conclude that e-Books will be slow to supplant tree-Books as a result.
“With the Web, people could access more information more easily than before, but though they used digital means to find and retrieve information, they still preferred to print it out on paper when they wanted to read it,” state Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper in The Myth of the Paperless Office (MIT Press, 2002).
Why do people embrace paper? “Paper has intrinsic properties that (1) make it easy and enjoyable to work with, (2) help us make sense of information, and (3) are conducive to certain kinds of reading and thinking. They are properties that [our] newer media, for all their wonders, have not yet learned to match,” add Sellen and Harper.
This report concludes that while e-Book sales topped $40 million (wholesale) in 2009 (source: IDPF.org) and will continue their steep upward trajectory in 2010 and following, they probably will not pose a serious challenge to tree-Books for several years. Some experts predict that retail e-Book sales in 2010 could grow as high as $100 million -- while tree-Book sales are likely to top $25 billion. In fact, some observers speculate that e-Books may evolve as an entirely separate market (not unlike audio books), since there is little evidence that e-Books erode sales of their printed counterparts.
The first question that confronts book publishers who want digital distribution is whether to attempt copy protection (also called DRM or “digital rights management”). Among hardcore techies, it’s widely agreed that there are NO bulletproof solutions to prevent consumers from making pirated copies. Instead, current DRM strategies are more of a deterrent. They make it annoying, but not impossible, to make unauthorized copies. For e-Books with affordable prices, the annoyance may very well outweigh the value of what is stolen. As a result, current DRM solutions may be up to the task at hand in many cases.Myth #3: e-Books Will Always be Hard to PublishApplying DRM to an e-Book greatly complicates the process of e-publishing, as this report will amplify shortly. Yet few book publishers, who increasingly view themselves as guardians of intellectual property, are comfortable with DRM-free e-Books today. Why would readers pay for something they can get for free? they ask, echoing the question posed about online music downloading a decade ago. iTunes solved the problem for musicians, by offering legal downloads for 99 cents. But in today’s world, there is not (yet) a perfect analog to iTunes for e-Books.
If a book publisher opts for DRM, life gets more complicated. In recent years, many book publishers heard that they needed only to convert print production files (such as PDF files) to EPUB format, in order to achieve a kind of “one-stop shopping” approach to e-publishing. EPUB files, they thought, would flawlessly re-convert to other formats for the Sony e-Reader, the Palm Pilot, Microsoft Reader, etc. Unfortunately, in 2010 this is simply not yet reality.
Even with a polished EPUB file, many additional adjustments are often necessary to insure good performance on various reading devices, even before DRM is applied. The most obvious example is that Amazon’s Kindle requires at least one additional conversion to MOBI format. To sell DRM-enabled e-Books for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a PDB format file may be required. Next, after the body of the book has been converted, copy protection is finally applied.
A promising new solution for the delivery of e-Books to smartphones (iPhone, Droid, Blackberry, etc.) has now become available from AppsPublisher.com, which will convert a Word, HTML or PDF file into a stand-alone application available to more than FIFTY MILLION users of the iPhone, iPod Touch, Droid, Blackberry, etc. They also handle the setup of the completed e-Book application at the Apple App Store and other outlets, with no up-front fees and minimal technical hassle for the publisher:Myth #4: The Market for e-Books is Peaking
http://www.unlimitedpublishing.com/baip Similar services from Amnet Systems, Aptara, CodeMantra, Fusion Mobile Solutions, Libre Digital, Publication Services, Inc. and others also promise to simplify the pathway to e-publishing for foresighted authors and publishers in the near future.
The announcements cited above are just a few recent examples of efforts to smooth the bumpy road that book publishers must travel today en route to digital distribution of their books. More are sure to follow, as the market for e-Books grows, adding incentives for further innovation and streamlining of both business and technical challenges.
In spite of the news that Dan Brown’s latest bestseller saw only 5% of its early sales as downloads, remember that the number of e-Book reading devices in use is virtually certain to grow rapidly.Re-capAt present, there are fewer than 5 million Kindle readers in use, but the customer base is expanding. The trendy new iPad is poised to challenge the Kindle in the market for devices that are larger than hand-helds. The mighty iPhone and iTouch alone jointly boast more than 50 million users in 2010, and more than 3 billion downloads from the Apple App Store to date. Rival smartphones such as the Blackberry, Droid and Palm Pre promise to add millions more consumers, hungry for content to download, in 2010 and following.
e-Books solve serious problems in traditional publishing: overprinting; the cost of shipping books back and forth between warehouses and stores during a time of climbing fuel prices and growing focus on air quality; and the bad bookstore practice of over-ordering, then returning unsold books are all eliminated by digital distribution. These benefits virtually insure continuing growth for e-Books.The world of publishing is changing in 2010, with real and lasting results after years of wishful thinking. Music, radio and TV, newspapers and magazines are already firmly shifting to online distribution. Books will follow soon, though no one yet knows exactly when, or in which of several possible directions… or whether e-Books will evolve as a separate market entirely.
The landscape for e-Book publishing is growing and changing by the day. It isn’t easy to navigate yet, due to a myriad of lingering uncertainties about hardware, software and market factors. But the future growth of e-Books is clear, and points toward leaner, greener and more efficient ways for publishers to reach readers in the years ahead.
Danny O. Snow
Society for New Communications Research
http://www.sncr.org
dosnow@sncr.org
