March, 2009

Amazon made a huge leap to the front of the iPhone line.

Putting a Kindle reader on the iPhone for free through the App Store enables shopping at Amazon’s Kindle store and then a direct download into the iPhone (or into the Kindle, or both!) This means reasonably good book merchandising and one-click.

The reader is not as good as Stanza’s. You’re stuck with ragged right; you have five discrete type size choices (six on the Kindle itself) rather than a slide bar;  you have no choice of page-turning mechanism or type face or the color of things (all of which you do in Stanza.) 

But I think we’ve learned from the original Kindle launch how powerful is the combination of a) the community of heavy book readers Amazon has, b) the vast title selection, and c) a quick and seamless shopping experience. 

Now we can add to that the ability to read the same book on the Kindle and the iPhone, with bookmarks and your place in the book ported from one to the other.

It is still true, as I wrote last week, that Amazon’s hegemony will be much harder to maintain in a large ebook world than it has been in the world of selling printed books online. But they just took a big step toward solidifying their hold on the book-reading market. The creators of readers like Stanza and Scrollmotion may soon understand the frustration that Betamax and Apple must have felt in the 1980s when they were getting their clocks cleaned by inferior technology from VHS and Microsoft. The best technology doesn’t necessarily win. And, measured purely on the basis of the “reading experience”, Kindle isn’t as good as Stanza. (Scrollmotion can “do illustrated” very well; that gives them a potential market position for the books that benefit from an integrated text-and-graphics presentation.)

But if selection and shopping experience trump, and they have so far, Amazon is going to make it tough for these newcomers to survive. There are going to be lots of complaints about Amazon’s not using epub and therefore preventing interoperability across devices. But that gets to be a harder argument to make because they have used their format to enable interoperability between the iPhone and the Kindle.

And this is one Kindle-and-iPhone user that believes this will stimulate sales of Kindle devices, not hurt them. It is a lot easier to read for a long time on a Kindle than on an iPhone, where the advantage is portability. People building up a library of Kindle books through their iPhone become better candidates to buy the device on which the reading experience is better.

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Some of the recent conversation about ebook fair use sparked by the Kindle-and-audio incident made me recall that Joe Esposito and I had written about this problem in Publishers Weekly more than two years ago.

We had a different catalyst for our thinking; at the time, we were wondering what the rules should be for libraries (or anybody else) to make, possess, or use a digital copy of a work they had acquired in print. The subject of concern then was the Google Library program: the partnership between some major research institutions and Google that delivered content (some of it in copyright) to Google to scan in return for digital copies for the libraries to keep. 

At the time, Joe and I observed that Google and the libraries had no direction from the copyright owners about what digital rights came conveyed when they bought a physical copy because no publisher was making any clear statement of what they believed they sold in the transaction.

Since then, the ACAP project actually tried to develop a standard for communicating rights like this electronically, mostly on behalf of the newspaper industry, not book publishers. The standard for communication is, of course, a separate problem from determining what rights can legitimately or sensibly be asserted. And the newspaper problem is perhaps more complex. With newspapers, much of the value being purveyed is closely linked to timeliness. Forty years ago, The Rolling Stones sang “who wants yesterday’s papers? Nobody in the world”. They wouldn’t have said that about “yesterday’s books.”

What concerned publishers was the possibility that a Google scan could end up on a library server and be shared with a whole campus, network of campuses, a state, or even the entire public. Even imagination-challenged publishers could envision a day when one sold copy could satisfy a large network of demand now purchasing hundreds or even thousands of copies. What concerned Esposito and me was that publishers weren’t taking charge of their destiny. They were being made uncomfortable by what they saw as erosion of their rights, but they weren’t making any explicit statement about what they believed their rights to be.

I hope Yogi will consider it fair use to say that the Kindle-and-audio flap is deja vu all over again. The Authors Guild, with no audible objections (pun appropriate if not intended) from publishers, complain that the application of TTS technology to a legitimately sold electronic text constitutes a rights violation. If that particular limitation on the license granted with an ebook ever occurred to an author or publisher before, I’m not aware of it.

In the digerati community, there is frustration with the GBS settlement because it short-circuited a legal test and definition of “fair use.” Of course, Google and the publishers and the authors are each operating in their own interests, not society’s (by their definition of society’s or the digerati’s, neither of which might be ours), and the settlement apparently satisfies their interests. But at least before the settlement, Google made its position of what constituted “fair use” clear, with policies about when they would use snippets versus when they’d show larger blocks of text. Publishers were never so transparent. If they want to be credible as they fight for their rights in the future, now is the time to think these questions through and stake out ground that makes sense to defend.

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I want to try to lay out a strategic approach to enhanced ebooks which I believe is more extensive than any general house has shown an inclination to pursue so far. I thought the clearest way to express this would be as a letter to an author which is, after all, how a strategic approach would have to begin. (For the purposes of this exercise, I’m sidestepping the obvious requirement to address authors through agents. The best approach would be to introduce the idea through a consultative process with agents and authors to bandwagon some advance support, but we’ll ignore that as well for the moment.)

I also want to stress that I’m thinking this through in here from the perspective of the general trade publisher: one not yet focused on niches and one whose brand is not a consumer brand. I don’t expect houses like Wiley, O’Reilly, or Harlequin to see as much of a gap between what is said here and their present practices as those houses that dominate the bestseller lists and have the most high profile authors.

Because I believe in short posts, and this publisher-to-author letter would not be short, I am going to break it into pieces, sort of a Dickensian approach to telling the story but without the frequent introduction of new characters. This first piece explains the overall strategy for a house-wide approach to “enhanced ebooks” by a notional company I’ve called National Trade Publishing. And it tries to make the case to the author to participate in the spirit necessary for the times: the spirit of experimentation.

Dear NTP Author,

As you know, the fastest-growing market for publishers and authors today is in ebooks: electronic files carrying the content that we have always sold in printed form. Although it is growing the fastest, and has been for years, the ebook market still only accounts for about one percent of our sales (and probably, of yours.) But because we believe that these sales could well reach 10% in the next few years and grow even faster after that, and because we believe that ebooks will be adopted first by many of the most important parts of our audience (and yours): reviewers, writers, and other thought leaders, we at National Trade Publishing are initiating new efforts to deliver a more robust ebook program. This presents opportunities for all our authors that I hope you’ll take advantage of.

There are three important things we want all our authors to understand about ebooks:

1. They present the opportunity to deliver additional content and features to consumers with no additional run-on production cost. Traditional printed books cost something additional for every extra page we put into them; ebooks don’t. (This doesn’t mean ebooks add no costs: the enhanced ebooks we want to do will require a little additional effort from authors and some real developmental effort from us. This letter is just the start of us expending real resources to try to make something new happen.)

2. We don’t know anything yet about how ebook pricing will ultimately work or, put another way, how well either authors or publishers will do as ebook unit sales rise. Publishers, ourselves included, have endeavored to keep ebook prices close to print book prices and, for the most part in the consumer book area, to sell individual titles the way we have in print. But we see pressure on the pricing and we also see the likelihood that various bundle and subscription models might become very important in the book world. So we’re going to need flexibility in how we price these enhanced ebooks. We’ll need modifying contract language to enable that.

3. We speak of ebooks as if they are one thing, but they’re not. Most ebooks today are still read on desktop and laptop computers; only a minority of sales are for handheld devices like iPhones or Kindles. We expect this to change; Kindle is having a big impact on changing it. What this means is that what an ebook can do: whether it can “show” video, make use of outbound links, deliver clear images (even in black and white, let alone in color) is variable. We can’t give the same capabilities to somebody on a Kindle as we can on a PC. And what we can give somebody on an iPhone (and ultimately a Blackberry or an Android) may depend on whether the ebook platform is a Stanza reader or a Scrollmotion reader.

So, with all that in mind, National Trade Publishing is building a dynamic database of resources — digital assets — to make the best possible ebooks in all possible formats, as we learn what that means and what it will take to do it. We are offering you the opportunity to collaborate with us to invent the future and, of course, to share appropriately in the rewards. We are also offering you the opportunity to collaborate with other NTP authors in marketing through your books and theirs, but only if you choose to.

(To be continued…but not tomorrow)

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