Yes, there is a future for the content industry in media and enterprise markets, and the Software and Information Industry Association Content Division has been charting it for several years now at its Information Industry Summit events in New York City. This year's IIS is drawing more than 300 executives from leading content and technology companies, a good crowd in the middle of a dismal economy. No surprise, given the star-studded line-up of speakers that was assembled by the Content Division this year. You might say that these people are documenting a future that people have been talking about for many years and that finally arrived - a future in which the Web dominates the dialog on profits and products on a daily basis, even as high-value premium products punch through to define new opportunities for value in enterprise and media publishing. Key to that trend is the rise of technology companies that are driving change in major publishing organizations, which enable publishers to define new relationships with their clients. Are all of these publishers ready for this ever-present "future?" Let's see what these experts have to say. I will be posting on our events blog throughout the day and linking the posts to this entry. You may also find my conference Twitter messages (and retweets) here.

Labels: authors, books, conference, content, enterprise, events, First Research, information industry summit 2010, media, Publishing, SIIA, Social Media, speakers, Technology

On-demand book publishing has been a quiet reality behind the scenes for several years, now, with outlets such as Amazon and a handful of major universities and bookstores generating some books on an on-demand basis rather than shelving inventory. On the retail side of the equation, however, on-demand publishing is almost a total cypher, in spite of technologies such as the Espresso Book Machine from from On-Demand Books. The EBM carries a still-hefty price tag and has kind of funky marketing (does anyone really name products with acronyms any more?), but nevertheless represents a great opportunity for many new business models to surface around print media. Yet most publishers have failed to commit any significant resources to delivering their titles to consumer-demanded printing.

Labels: books, business models, espesso, Google, on-demand books, Printing, settlement

With a webinar for MIT coming up at the end of September, I finally accepted that my aging laptop was overdue for an upgrade to keep up with the increasing need to be video-literate online. In the process of ordering up my new unit, I had an opportunity to order a nearly-free netbook along with my new Dell Latitude. Looked interesting for a moment, but I decided to pass and to wait it out a while longer for something with a little more power and battery life. That something is not just an idle dream: smartbooks are coming to town in a few months, and they promise to do for mobile computing what PCs did for desktop computing in the 1990s.

Labels: books, censorship, Chrome, Google, Microsoft, mobile, smartbooks, snapdragon, tegra, video

While there's been enormous buzz about Kindle eBook readers from Amazon and, now, the new eBook platform offering from Barnes & Noble and an updated eBook reader from Sony, the broader truth is that eBooks represent just a sliver of the book industry as a whole and an even smaller portion of online attention. With USD 118 million in U.S. eBook sales last year versus USD 24.3 billion in overall book sales, electronic books have barely scratched the economic surface of publishing, in spite of all of the Silicon Valley bluster about their potential. Yet this isn't stopping major retailers and publishers from experimenting with eBook technologies again and again - and continuing to pull their punches when it comes to realizing the possibilities for books in electronic forms.

Labels: amazon, Amazon Kindle, barnes and noble, books, eBooks, eInk, Google, plastic logic, Publishing

BookExpo America is one of the premier U.S. trade events, encompassing more than a few Wal-Marts of display space wherever it sets down. This year's event in New York was no exception, but more than ever there was a pall in the air of its exhibit halls as much of the paper-based world of books began to come grinding to a halt in recessionary times. The other key factor, of course, was the meteoric rise of premium ebooks on Amazon's Kindle device, a blessing for publishers needing quick revenues without inventory commitments but a curse with its draconian revenue cuts and control over unit pricing. Who would have thought, then, that the name of Google would come along to offer the book industry...some hope?

Labels: amazon, Amazon Kindle, bookexpo america, books, eBooks, Google, marketing, publishers

I've had the privilege to have moderated many great SIIA panels over the years, but the 24 June Brown Bag Lunch mid-day event at the McGraw Hill building in New York City (online video available) certainly ranks among the most important topics that I've had the opportunity to moderate with some excellent panelists who will stimulate your thinking on how best to monetize content on today's hot distribution platforms. Please register soon, the last Brown Bag Lunch event was a sellout both in-person and online. If you have suggestions for questions that the panel should address, please add them as comments to this post. A panel summary and a list of our truly distinguished panelists follows. See you there!

Labels: Amazon Kindle, books, brown bag, busines models, crovitz, events, Google, iPhone, journalism online, magazines, Monetization, newspapers, Oxford, profits, Publishing, settlement, SIIA, thomson reuters

The landscape of Europe is dotted with the ruins of hundreds of castles and city walls dating from the Medieval era of feudal rule, when local kings, dukes and other land-owners defended their claims to farms and forests through their ability to repel invaders from behind their castles' walls. Castle defenses worked reasonably well for several centuries, but eventually the use of castles as power bases became obsolete. Was it improved war technology that made castles charming antiquities? To some degree, perhaps, but the larger force that made castles irrelevant was the rise of a new way to store and protect wealth: banking. Once the rise of wealthy merchants made the marketplaces of towns and cities the real battlefields for proving out power, castles protecting farmlands became far less important for securing power than having an economic system that could enable efficient trade. Yet those old castles still stand, and, darn, they do look rather nifty even today.

Labels: Amazon Kindle DX, books, E-book, introduction, Jeff Bezos, magazines, Newspaper, Publishing

The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberger and other prominent lights are weighing in on the launch of an application on Apple's iPhone that enables reading e-books compatible with Amazon's Kindle mobile device, with many analysts cooing about this as a huge event. There's no doubt that Kindle e-books have everthing to gain from leapfrogging out of a pond of half a million Kindle devices into a lake of thirteen million-plus iPhone owners (just in time for "Content Nation," which is now available on Kindle). Better yet, since the Kindle application does not tie down Amazon to any exclusive marketing deal with Apple, the doorway is open for Amazon to march onto Nokias, Blackberries and phones equipped with Google's Andriod application. As people owning Kindle-compatible book titles move from one mobile device to another, the Kindle Store on the Web will make it possible for them to use their e-book on any equipped device, "closing" their book on one gizmo and being able to "open" it on another one at the same spot. Think of it as an iTunes for books that's not tied down to any particular player. Not much to complain about here at first glance: it's the creation of the first true mass market platform for electronic books from major publishers. Kudos to Amazon and to the publishers that are playing with them to advance Kindle sales.

But let's look past the first glance and get to what this really means for book publishing. The good news is that Kindle books can now reach the relatively affluent and educated audience that has enough money to buy iPhones - many of whom may have the money for both an iPhone and a Kindle reader but not necessarily the desire to lug around two book-reading gizmos all of the time. Now e-books get to take a major step towards the "nearly everywhere" profile that Web content has on both Internet and mobile-based devices. The bad news, though, is that the book industry, already beholden to Amazon almost as much as music companies are beholden to iTunes for electronic sales, appears to be repeating the mistakes that are likely to prevent their revenues from growing quickly enough to sustain their business models. Put simply, book publishers have turned over the keys to their electronic printing presses to Jeff Bezos and said, "Knock yourself out, you know what to do more than we do." E-books will progress only as quickly as it suits Amazon - and on only those platforms that suit them.

A benevolent monopoly of this kind for electronic book distribution might be beneficial for publishers if it had global reach, but those 13 million iPhones represent only about half of the greater New York City metropolitan market. A good chunk, to be sure, but a far step away from, say, the 1.6 billion people using the Web or the billions of mobile phone users around the world. And even within that universe of 13 million iPhone users, a fair amount of those people fall into the category of folks who Steve Jobs believed would never really read much of anything. In the meantime the audience for books continues to get grayer and grayer. To put it another way, I don't see all that many people in book stores toting around iPhones. The Kindle packaging for iPhone solves a key licensing and distribution problem for book publishers that's likely to improve their profits in the short term, but it does not come even close to building marketable exposure for books on a scale that is likely to draw attention away from other forms of electronic content.

This brings us back to those music publishing companies which had such high hopes for the DRM-enabled iPhone agreements that they signed only a few years ago. This "magic bullet" seemed great at the time - and it certainly has been great for Apple's profits. But it did little to slow the rapid erosion of profits from music sales at most of the major music publishers. Put simply, the insistence on having packaging that seemed to protect their existing business models only delayed the point at which music publishers had to face that their models were going to miss the lion's share of revenues that could be generated online from music. What they saw in the Web was the world's largest music store. What they should have seen was the world's largest theatre and radio station rolled into one.

Book publishers in general don't suffer from the electronic piracy problems that plagued the music industry, so no doubt it seemed like a logical step to move into rights-protected distribution that enabled book publishers to manage industry metrics in much the same way that they have managed metics on print book sales. But in focusing on protecting their existing business model, like the music industry the book industry is largely delaying the more troubling question of how they can make the most money possible from the global audience of billions who engage the Web and mobile devices daily.

Kindle book packaging is useful for traditional reading, but how, for example, can it facilitate even the most basic collaborative use of books? Basic uses of books such as discusions via book clubs, classroom discussion, fair-use excerpting, note-sharing and other value-add services are nowhere near the surface of the stack of potential Kindle developments. Beyond replicating basic uses of print books there is little if any thought given as to how multimedia can be integrated into Kindle books effectively. For example, the online version of the "Content Nation" book has about a dozen video clips embedded in the text. Even still photos of most of these clips did not make their way into the print edition because of traditional print publishing standards. Yet these same clips would be great to have in an electronic, Web-enabled version of the book.

While it's possible that an aggressive roll-out of Kindle readers on most major mobile devices could help to stave off some of the worst problems that are looming for book publishers, the truth is that they are years behind in developing the real opportunities for books in electronic format. Book publishers are facing the same revenue gaps that confront music, newspaper and magazine publishers that waited far too long to build robust online revenue models that could sustain them as their traditional revenue sources moved into legacy status. In the meantime the Google e-books initiative that builds on their book-scanning initiative promises to put millions of book titles on electronic devices that are no longer controlled by book publishers. In other words, Kindle may just turn out to be the "eight track tape" solution for books - a technology that seemed to be extremely popular at first with the public for listening to tape-recorded music but that turned out to be a dead end for early adapters when more flexible and higher-quality technologies came along.

Every time publishers resist the fundamental dynamics of the Web, they usually come to regret it. Traditional book publishers still have an opportunity to redefine their future independent of the Kindle, but it's more likely that the explosion of alternative online book publishing services will begin to overtake Kindle-based books over the next few years as sources of content that are more flexible, more shareable and more attuned to the needs of new generations of readers to whom the term "cracking the books" is largely a metaphor. Traditional books and book publishers will live on, and Kindle will help them to live on for many years to come. But in the meantime a new book industry is being defined that will be the true future of books - with or without Kindles.

Labels: amazon, Amazon Kindle, apple, books, business models, eBooks, iPhone, Jeff Bezos, Publishing, Steve Jobs

Well, along with launching a book, tweaking our Web site and keeping a business a going concern, why not redesign the blog? Hey, it's a living. ContentBlogger has had a couple of minor redesigns through the years, and more is slated for the future, but it seemed time to correct some key best practices no-nos and to add in the headlines that I've been broadcasting on Twitter.

Twitter was an especially key concern, as I had given up finally on doing headlines the hard way: looking at dozens of Web site bookmarks, compiling and categorizing the best of them in an HTML editor and then cutting and pasting them into a ContentBlogger post. Yuk. How did I do that for four years? Finally last year I started to pop out headlines with links and a touch of commentary in Twitter every now and then. It seemed to be promising and I got strong feedback from folks that they were really useful. The Twitter convention is to insert keywords preceded by a pound/hash mark ("#") into the 140-character messages to help people provide categorization, so I started adding some of the key categories in the content industry that Shore tracks and analyzes, with a few extra Shore-specific categories for promotional purposes. Best of all, Twitter's real-time orientation meant that I could pound out a few headlines, go back to other tasks, and then come back and do a few more. It made for a more newsworthy approach to content news.

OK, great, but how to integrate this into ContentBlogger? Pumping them into a consolidated blog post was one option, and I may yet do that at some point, but that would take away their timeliness. I also found that the headlines were a bit of a distraction to people visiting the blog: they concealed the meaty entries that were the real "bait" for visitors. So embedding a feed of headlines seemed to be the best solution. But how? Hash marks and little personal comments had to go to make the service more readable and professional, filtering of some sort was a must - and I knew already from experience that it's hard to beat Yahoo! Pipes for reliable and quickly developed feed filtering and processing. It took just a few minutes in Yahoo! Pipes to hack together a filter that translated the hash/tags in Twitter to meaningful phrases and to filter out messages that wouldn't fit on ContentBlogger. Fortunately, having built our newsletter filter using Pipes made this a cinch. Then the question was which service to use to embed the feed. I've looked at all sorts of services that do this, and most of them are kind of half-baked. Yahoo! Pipes' badged feed widget wasn't too much better than most, but it integrated nicely with our existing formatting styles so it seemed a small price to pay for unsolicited advertising. Sorry for the badge, I try to avoid them like the plague so that you can have an impartial service, but sometimes compromises are necessary. If there's something better for embedding feeds simply, let me know.

Finally, some style nits that have been bugging me for a long time. At long last I took a deep breath and switched the main text column to the left and the secondary column to the right. It's really the way to go for readability, and I regret having ever set it up the other way. Sometimes old code is just not fun to look at, especially when you have much better things to do. I added iGoogle and Google Reader to the feed bookmark list and replaced the old "XML" feed icon to the newer and more standard orange feed logo. The AddThis bookmarking graphic I changed to the "share" label from "bookmark," as this fits better all of the options availble on AddThis. Finally, a little sidebar promo for the Content Nation book was in order, and easily done.

I hope that you enjoy having headlines back on ContentBlogger, you'll get them in a more timely fashion if you subscribe directly to Twitter or the Yahoo! Pipes feed, but if you're not that type of person you can at least know that you can view the most recent headlines easily on the scrollable sidebar. In the meantime my Twitter friends can get the hottest commentary as quickly as possible while ContentBlogger afficionados still get the best of it. Next is getting them sorted into a weekly summary for ShoreLines. Doable, but still thinking about the value of this. Let me know your thoughts on these changes, not revolutionary, to be sure, but I think that it makes for a better reading experience.

Labels: Best Practices, books, content nation, Feeds, integration, Twitter, weblogs

There now, that wasn't so hard, was it...?

Well, of course it took a long time, but at the end of the day most of the several years between Google's introduction of its book scanning program for out-of-copyright and out-of-print books and the recently announced settlement with the book industry for USD 125 million has been a matter of the book publishing industry deciding to name a reasonable price that would sync up with the realities of book publishing in an electronic marketplace. Since the book industry was barely interested in e-books and print-on-demand a few years ago, it's understandable that the magic number was not readily at hand back then. But now that eBooks are beginning to take off via Kindle and mobile phones via Amazon and other outlets and print-on-demand publishing is beginning to look more attractive as a business model the book industry has some real revenue and traffic data and a marketing plan that will benefit from Google and other partners pushing their out-of-print wares.

In many ways this enables the book industry to monetize fringe content far more effectively via Google partners such as Amazon, in essence validating the value of Chris Anderson's "long tail" theory for content that was sometimes discounted by book industry executives resistant to Google's scanning efforts. The settlement is really just a bulk licensing fee to make it easier to administer long-tail revenues, not too different than the industry royalties paid by radio stations. This sets up people to buy books in print and in e-reading devices like Amazon's Kindle based on Google Books "broadcasts" just as premium downloads and CDs are fed by online and broadcast radio revenues. With finding an audience for one's content the greatest challenges for all publishers Google Books has become a powerful browsing engine that maximizes the value of any title, new or old, for an audience that is just right for it.

With the new agreement Google becomes a premium destination as well: you will be able to browse full pages of scanned books covered by the agreement instead of snippets and opt to pay for the full online rights to the book via Google Books - or purchase them for your private online "bookshelf." On the surface this may look like a bad thing for Amazon and it's proprietary Kindle strategy, and certainly Amazon would love for their gizmo to get as much momentum as possible. But as successful as Kindle has been with many core book enthusiasts it hasn't escaped Amazon's attention in all likelihood that the mobile market is exploding and that they are going to lose market share for books in general if they cannot get their inventory onto as many mobile devices as possible.

Enter Google's new Android operating system, which will be able to power any number of mobile and handheld devices - including perhaps, Kindles. As Amazon's portal specialty is shopping support and fulfillment, in the long run Amazon is better off partnering with Google and other platform providers to make their inventory relevant in as many venues as possible. Amazon may also turn up a winner with the Google out-of-print deal for print-on-demand support. Already a growing number of titles at Amazon are produced on a print-on-demand basis anyway, so Google and help to power that capability as well.

So all in all this deal is likely to turn into a content industry love-fest over the next few years, a peace treaty that finally enables book publishers to leverage the vast power of Google's book scanning initiative, thus avoiding expensive or less powerful alternatives and enabling book marketers to accelerate their increasingly aggressive exploitation of online channels for their marketing efforts. I can't say that I didn't say several years ago that this would happen eventually, but for now let's all just be glad that there are better times ahead for book publishers who are learning how to exploit electronic content markets far more effectively.

Labels: agreement, amazon, books, ecommerce, Google, kindle, scanning

Amongst other things that I was checking out during my book-writing sabbatical was Amazon's Kindle portable reading device, courtesy of the Westport Public Library's lending desk. I checked out the unit for a few days, which actually turned into about two weeks due to a bad cold that caught me unexpectedly, but it was long enough to appreciate the ins and outs of this increasingly popular device.

A Kindle starts up easily enough by sliding a slim switch on the back of the unit, though its being next to a switch that activates the unit's wireless networking capabilities makes this something a bit awkward to do by habit. You have to flip the Kindle unit over to make sure that you're hitting the right switch most time. There are a lot of little ergonomic issues like this in the Kindle, ideas that look good in the design phase that perhaps could have been better thought out in real life. The keyboard of a Kindle falls into that category also, being barely usable for hunting and pecking but with a slippery and ambiguous feel that makes it unthinkable to use it for more than a few must-do tasks.

Overall, though, many of the key features are remarkably easy to use. The unit boots up quickly and its basic page turning functions are remarkably intuitive, with large broad keys on each side of the unit for turning forward and backwards. A Kindle will boot up to where you were last looking at content, so it's not always necessary to bookmark where you were last reading - same when you return to a specific book. There is a small scroll wheel at the bottom of a thin channel that parallels the main screen: scroll the wheel and a kind-of cursor will move up and down next to the screen and allow you to select from pop-up menus or to click on links. I thought that this would be a really inconvenient interface but you get used to it fairly easily. I can see how its steadiness will be useful in bumpy environments like subway trains. So for basic functions and navigation control you can give it a "weird but usable" rating for the most part.

The eInk display was somewhat disappointing in that the background was rather grayish rather than whitish, which made many illustrations almost impossible to make out clearly and made it a little more difficult to use in dim light. But in spite of this the display was remarkably readable for text - especially when the font size was bumped up a bit. Whew - for those of us who rely on reading glasses or progressive lenses, this is a blessing. There are plenty of great books that I'd love to pore through that have bitsy little print that wears my eyes out very quickly. With a Kindle you don't get print fatigue or the fatigue of looking at a backit screen. With bumped-up font sizes there's not that much information on any given page but the ease of turning to a new page of content makes up for that mild inconvenience easily. I found that I really enjoyed reading materials on the Kindle once I got settled in for a good sit-down.

The early Kindle models now available do provide Web access, but except for a handful of Web sites well adapted to the unit it's largely an exercise in fumbling through awkwardly formatted content - and also a feature that led to the unit freezing twice. A push of a bent paper clip into the unit's reset hole got it back to good order, but this is not a unit meant to replace mobile units with more robust Web browsing capabilities. Still, for a quick sneak peek at the headlines, it beats going back to the PC sometimes. The wireless service was quite good at my home, so chances are it will perform reasonably well with its network connectivity turned on wherever broadband services perform well. However, leaving the wireless connection does drain the batteries far more quickly than normal local -only reading would. In reading-only mode the Kindle batteries last for many days of typical use.

It's certainly a unit that I would consider as a convenience for future book purchases, especially given Amazon's pricing that enables one to purchase both a printed book and a Kindle-compatible copy for one purchase price, or get a Kindle-only copy for an even steeper discount. But what of gift books - or, for that matter, the huge library of printed books already at my disposal? The huge gap in Kindle's market strategy is a lack of "hooks" to keep people attached to their existing libraries and to be able to move on to new books once their usefulness has run their course. There's no real concept of a "used" market for Kindle books, much less the ability to add significant value to them in a way that could be onpassed to others.

More importantly there is little ability to use a Kindle book to activate online content. For example, if I am reading a passage and would like to research a specific person or historical event mentioned in the book, there are no "hooks" to online content that would make that easy - nor any way to store that research with my Kindle book copy for future reference. It's still a fairly unimaginative approach to book marketing. This may reflect the generally conservative approach to book packaging and marketing that still grips many publishing houses, but this conservatism now competes with a demographic curve that is racing against the clock.

Like the music industry print publishers have locked in their future to proprietary technologies to protect existing business models, but in the process of doing so they may have sold away their futures. With an explosion of different kinds of portable devices reaching the marketplace today and the promise of an even more complex array of devices fitting people's lifestyles in the future, why on earth would an entire industry select a proprietary platform to develop their future revenues? In a few years I believe that we will look at experiments such as the iPod and the Kindle much as people today look back on proprietary electronic content services such as Compuserve or the original AOL and ask themselves, what were we thinking?

The future of book publishing will rest on more open publishing platforms that enable book content to move to the contexts and popular devices in which it's valued most far more effectively and that will enable others to add value around a given book independent of its initial publisher. Book publishers already are more aware that their best strengths lie in talent management, providing services that leverage as many aspects of an author's value as rapidly and as effectively as possible through the lifecycle of a given work of authorship. But expect that more nimble companies who see the ability to manage talented authors more effectively through a variety of publishing media to challenge traditional publishing houses over the next few years, especially those who are best able to leveral social media outlets to build and maintain loyal communities of readers and commenters. The Kindle is a nifty little device, but it's just a hint of where the future of book publishing could take us in the not too distant future.

Labels: amazon, books, eInk, fm publishing, kindle, review, Trends, usablity

Major book pubishers have not been known in years past for their innovation in adapting to online audiences, but after years of investing modestly in the future of online content many print publishers are stepping up their efforts to capture a new generation of audiences who grew up with online content as a given. Elsevier is one major scientific publisher that seems to have picked up their pace of online innovation significantly as of late, Their announcement last week of 10 major reference works being made available online this year was trumped today by the announcement of a new Wiki-based platform that will enable practicing physicians to update evidence-based medical information online. In both instances Elsevier is betting that some titles will do best as online-only reference materials.

Having seen a major response to its making chapters of its Major Reference Works availableonline Elsevier is indicating that two reference titles - the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience and the second edition of Encyclopedia of Ocean Science - are to become
online-only references. Elsevier indicates that other reference titles will be available in print for some period of time, but clearly the trend is to move towards online access that's likely to move people into recurring revenues rather than chancing the publication of expensive reference materials. Knovel showed the way years ago to Sci-Tech publishers with its Knovel Library of online reference content, but now the major scientific publishers are beginning to see that electronic additions are going to become the core of their revenues moving forward it's not just a game for aggressive startups.

Today's announcement of WiserWiki underscores not only the awareness that Sci-Tech publishers have for the value of online reference but also how best to make use of social media technologies to make it valuable to specific audiences. WiserWiki is seeded with The Textbook of Primary Care Medicine, a reference book covering problems, conditions and diseases encountered in the practices of primary care physicians. No longer in print, what better way to keep this grass-roots information about the real world of medicine than to let the physicians encountering these phenomena to update it themselves? This is a great online product strategy, combining authoritative content from peer professionals as a core that can help to build an online community rapidly. Just as Wikipedia did not spring from thin air - it took more than 100,000 articles from an earlier project to get it going - Wikis built for specialized online communities will work best when there's a core of content to help people feel that they don't have to wait for their contributions to be part of something that has collective merit.

Print titles are going to be with us for quite some time to come, but as printing, shipping and stocking expenses fall prey to rising energy and raw materials prices the need for better margins with less risk is pushing book publishers of reference materials inexorably towards "digital native" audiences who have become used to search engines as primary tools for accessing reference content. Obviously other types of titles benefit from this move but for reference works the move is essential if publishers are to keep these products growing and profitable. In the end scientific publishers have much to gain from tranforming their business from one of delivering tomes to delivering content in higly valuable contexts that can drive scientific research and applications forward more rapidly.

Labels: books, elsevier, reference, Social Media, STM, Wikis

Reuters notes the steep discounts being promised by book retailers when the new Harry Potter book from Scholastic hits the shelves of stores in July - no surprise, given that Amazon is already offering pre-ordering of the book at a 49 percent discount. With the younger book fans of the Potter series already very Web literate only the most avid fans are going to bother to line up on the release day to snatch up a copy at a bookstore rather than pre-order online. And if that's the case, isn't that what they call a matter of...supply and demand? The book industry is one of the last bastions of supply-oriented publishing that stands a shot at making its margins off of the "tall tail" of high-volume publishing, but implicit in their need to compete with online outlets is the greater need to build margins from "long tail" content - and yes, from Godiva chocolates and espresso - once customers are in the door. But if the most successful book franchise in modern history has become nothing more than a loss leader for long tail books eating up rent, climate control and staffing then the "big box" book stores may be headed to the remainder shelves in their efforts to compete with online content sellers and distributors.

For the time being the movie industry seems to have staunched some of its woes by leveraging available screens to make the most of the unique context - precisely orchestrated opening weekends - that they can offer for their wares. The movie distributors and theatre operators have the advantage of not having to compete with online outlets for same-day distribution with lower overhead and the added advantage that going to the movies is a social activity by and large. But even here the demand to distribute movie content online will push movie theatre operators to many of the same decisions that bookstore operators are facing today.

How to do better? To some degree the book industry addresses this with kiosks in other big-box stores that highlight popular content selections. But both booksellers and movie producers need to get better at making these kiosks centers for consuming long tail content as well as the hits. I can punch in an order at my local supermarket deli counter's touchpad screen to pick up cold cuts after a few minutes of shopping: why can't I do the same and pick up a print-on-demand book or a freshly burnt video? Or better yet, do it online at Amazon or some other outlet and direct the order to my local store for pickup? Zero inventory and shelf space for the retailer, easy profits and the ability to focus customized offers on the person picking up the merchandise. It's coming, don't worry.

Labels: books, Hary Potter, retail, Scholastic, Trends