People have spent a lot of time chatting and arguing about digital publishing recently. The Bookseller in fact recently invited us all to attend an overpriced conference on the subject. No doubt many there looked grave at the prospect of increased piracy. I am sure too that many spoke strongly about maintaining eBook prices – and maybe a few argued for lowering them. I would probably have slept through these bits.
I feel that piracy is an unescapable part of getting a massive audience through the internet, that DRM would hamper this process, and that eBooks are grossly overpriced across the board. Having said that I also appreciate as the publishing dust is yet to settle, information services must tread carefully, and keep the old eyes open. I warn now that the biggest threat to the whole caboodle is taking place in the corridors of Amazon head office (no I don’t mean the discount thing).
One subject I do not feel gets that much recognition in the great forum though is delivery of the publishing products. A great deal is said about digital publishing, whilst including the word “eReader” as if it is the embodiment of digital publishing. My favourite description of the Sony eReader is that it looks as if it was designed in the 1970′s. My other favourite observation likens the typical eReader to something from the 1980′s – something called the Atari games crash of 1983. If you have flicked through my dissertation (linked in a previous post) or kept your ear to the chatroom ground you’ll be familiar with this already.
Atari basically invented a lot of expensive consoles to use play their games on and so expand their empire. The consoles were very simple in terms of what they could do, and very expensive – as were the games to be played on them. Perhaps the strategic planners thought they could base the consoles sales on the growing popularity of the games. Well whoever thought what, the public didn’t think much of the consoles and didn’t buy them (or the games thereafter). People instead looked at the more versatile PCs, which were used for a number of other things, and proving pretty indispensable. They also played games. So the public used PCs as many had them anyway, or were planning to get them, and Atari crashed.
Before we go back to Amazon, we now take a look at iPhones. These are great because you can do so much with them. They cost 45 quid a month for lots of call, texts and internet access – and you can get lots of free apps to idle away your time with. If you use the free Stanza app you can read books; anyone of 80, 000, of which 60, 000 are free (as of August). The other 20, 000 are easy to pay for and download becuase it is just a couple of clicks and your phone settings see you get a book downloaded to your phone. This you can read anywhere – and it isn’t even streamed (it’s a single download) so you can read on a train in a tunnel. Stanza enhances the value of iPhone so Lexcycle (owner of Stanza) are paid each time someone downloads a book. The publisher and through them, agent and author then get paid by Lexcycle for each download (whether its a free or paid for book). This seems like a pretty good idea and as 12 million books were downloaded through Stanza last year (first year of trading) you might argue it works. Opinions abound but I saw this as the future of the publishing industry – a growing audience, a quick and oh so easy, easy vector for the customer to whim purchase again and again – surely those ridiculous clunky eReaders are on the way out at last. Margins certainly wouldn’t be huge on each transactions but the number of sales would be. iTunes have adopted a very similar approach (that involves dropping DRM for the same reasons) and look how well they are doing. It’s all web 2.0. And it’s all easy for the customer.
Amazon though has fought back; they have released their Kindle DX, which has internet access. Actually it still seems to be as convincing as all the other attempts, and it is still extortionate. So that isn’t the fight back I refer to. Amazon, bought Lexcycle and Stanza. Humph. What happens when Stanza are really threatening to dominate the digital book market? Exactly. Rather optimstically I thought all could still be well as Stanza could still plug away, even as a division of Amazon – an entity then far from being sufficiently organised to damage the business of digital publishers.
Amazon now seem to be running their own brainchild as well. The new Amazon app for iPhonesnow stalks the iPhone screen. Competition might well prove to be a good thing for the customer (and the new activity in this area is further proof the eReaders are a stupid concept). But when both the competitiors are held by Amazon it probably doesn’t equate to much competition. It is no secret eReader sales are a long way off proving they are anything other than a gimmick. The Stanza business model, a stellar example of web 2.0, was set to capitalise on all the strengths of the internet and weather the negative effects. Is Amazon going to sweep the idea aside in favour of those horrible Kindles? I hope not…
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