 |
|
|
Promises, Promises: eBooks Still Await
Serious Commitments from Major Publishers |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
27 January 2007 |
|
|
|
|
The buzz this week is about Google's plans to offer eBook
downloads for PCs and mobile devices. Great news, but will
this allow the book industry to wrestle out of the
stranglehold of a mass of conflicting delivery technologies
and DRM strategies? That's not likely any time soon -
especially given the tentative relationship between Google
and wary book publishers. Yet the future of book publishing
is hanging on the willingness of publishers to move
aggressively into an environment that will allow eBooks to
move into the contexts in which users value them most. Are
book publishers ready to move past promises of eBook
development to aggressive new strategies? |
|
News outlets have been burbling
with news of Google plans for downloadable eBooks that could be
viewed on PCs and mobile devices.
According to The Times of London features may include
rentable content, content purchasable by the chapter - a fairly
familiar list of features for premium eBooks these days as they
become available from Amazon, O'Reilly Sony and a growing list
of outlets. And there's the rub: why should the Google
brand name change that same list of features into anything more
revolutionary than all of these other "eBooks are coming"
efforts? If eBooks were a marriage engagement, we'd be worrying
if publishers were ever going to get to the altar, much less
consummate it in full.
This is not to say that there haven't been some major
strides in eBook sales. Firm numbers on total 2006 sales are
still in the offing but
indicative accounts seem to point to another year of robust
growth for eBook titles. Major publishers are beginning to work
vigorously major content technology vendors and online outlets
to get significant offerings online for sales and downloading.
Book publishers are gradually getting infrastructure into place
that is moving electronic book offerings beyond digitization
into digital-first book offerings. In many ways eBooks are
beginning to come into their own as offerings from major
publishers after many years of promise.
But o, those years. While the book industry fiddled with
eBook file formats, copyright issues and protecting the
retailers and licensors that remain the backbone of their
profits, competition for books has flourished in all manner of
forms. Weblogs, Wikis and social media portals have usurped
books in many ways as page-turning content from both new and
popular authors. Independent eBook producers flourished and
gained market share via inexpensive titles. And while trade
book publishers presumed pre-eminent control over print
production and distribution the self-publishing online portal
Lulu.com has
soared as a popular alternative for bringing content into
print format for highly focused audiences. No wonder major
online book outlets like
Amazon are
sinking in spite of innovative and aggressive plans to sell
digitized book content.
In short, the book industry has stumbled as it has moved
ever so reluctantly into the 21st century - and ignored the
real opportunities to be had in both eBooks and print. The
problems found in the book publishing industry are not so
dissimilar from other transitions into the digital era being
experienced by audio, video and newspaper vendors - and the
answers to these problems frighteningly similar. The digital
era has provided the opportunity for publishers of all stripes
the opportunity to make their content useful in a myriad of
contexts that may have nothing to do with their traditional
production and distribution channels and which can be immensely
profitable - if they learn how to make the monetization of
context more important than the monetization of distribution.
How can book publishers help to get book content soaring as
"digital
natives" begin to define how they want book content to
matter to them? Here are a few thoughts to mull over:
- Time for open standard formats. After years of
wrestling with proprietary file formats, the music industry
is only now beginning to recognize that its future lies with
accepting popular open formats such as MP3 to underpin their
distribution success. Book publishers can do even better -
using open
standards already in place and easy to implement that can
allow books to live on any platform. Publishers license
through technology providers out of habit - not because it
makes any sense in an era in which users are the most
powerful content distribution agents on earth. Google is
likely to come up with a good proprietary solution for
multi-platform book distribution - but it will be only
Google's in all likelihood.
- Time to do what books do best. The slicing and
dicing of book content for academic and engineering audiences
is a good step towards making book content useful, but an
important aspect of books' strengths seem to have been
missed. Yes, books are important as standalone experiences,
but they are also social media. They're handed on from
generation to generation. Given to loved ones with special
messages. Marked up. Discussed. And yes, eventually trundled
down to the local charity book sale. Long thought of as
objects as fixed as the printing presses that create them,
the book's real advantage through time has been to hold both
the thoughts and sentiments of an original author and those
of the people through whose hands a book has passed. This
fundamental aspect of books must become the fulcrum for their
value in the era of eBooks to ensure robust new revenue
streams.
- Time to rethink DRM. Heavy DRM controls have been
the supposed savior of premium publishing in an electronic
era - except that there's not much substantial proof that
they've eliminated large-scale piracy or encouraged online
sales. Intellectual property needs to be respected and
protected, but today's environment seems to favor publishers
who help users to make doing the right thing with IP easier
than ignoring its importance. Book publishers are going to
have to look carefully at systems provided by Adobe,
Microsoft and other providers and decide whether the comfort
gained from locking down content heavily is going to be worth
the trouble when others are more adept at getting book
content into the hands of online users without it.
The Google eBook system will probably be a good thing for
helping people to think about electronic book consumption in
more contexts than before. Being able to get at book content
easily through the world's dominant search engine has been
probably the best thing to happen to the book industry in the
last twenty years. But this benefit will go largely unexploited
unless publishers move more aggressively to enable book content
to migrate away from Web sites into the contexts in which
people value it most - without being tied down to proprietary
technology constraints. Look carefully at the
Amazon traffic stats - online book sales are going nowhere
fast. It's time to stop promising a future of eBooks and to
start delivering it.
-
John Blossom
To top of
page
 |
