Entries tagged with “business models” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Publishing Models for Internet Commerce
Andrew Savikas
October 14, 2009
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Last week I pointed to a 1994 interview Tim O'Reilly did that touched on the impact the Web would have on publishing. A nice contemporary companion is this 1995 paper titled "Publishing Models for Internet Commerce" that remains relevant (perhaps more so) today:
In an information glut, it is not content but context that is king. Someone chooses the New York Times over the New York Post not because of any kind of proprietary lock on content (though to be sure there is a role for scoops and special features) but rather because it has developed an editorial point of view that appeals to a particular class of reader. In a similar way, there is an enormous role for the establishment of "information brands" on the net--publications that have established relationships of trust with particular audiences.
Anderson: "It's All About Attention"
Andrew Savikas
July 29, 2009
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Over on Spiegel Online, Chris Anderson does a great job responding to nearly all of the standard old-media responses to new media. Unsurprisingly (I'm sure Wired would have done the same) they pulled one line from a lengthy response to create the provocative title "Maybe Media Will Be a Hobby Rather than a Job." The full passage is much more useful and nuanced:
In the past, the media was a full-time job. But maybe the media is going to be a part time job. Maybe media won't be a job at all, but will instead be a hobby. There is no law that says that industries have to remain at any given size. Once there were blacksmiths and there were steel workers, but things change. The question is not should journalists have jobs. The question is can people get the information they want, the way they want it? The marketplace will sort this out. If we continue to add value to the Internet we'll find a way to make money. But not everything we do has to make money.
The complete interview is worth a read.
Extraordinary Piece on the Future (and Past) of Digital Books
Andrew Savikas
February 2, 2009
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Over on Ars Technica, John Siracusa revisits the history of the ebook, and explains why he thinks there's very much a future in digital reading:
If you remain unconvinced, here's one final exercise, in the grand tradition of a particular family of Internet analogies. Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word "horse" for "book" and the word "car" for "e-book." Here are a few examples to whet your appetite for the (really) inevitable debate in the discussion section at the end of this article.
"Books will never go away." True! Horses have not gone away either.
"Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome." True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don't go everywhere, nor should they.
"Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can't match." True! Cars just can't match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn't. I'm sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a "horseless carriage"--and they never did! And then they died.
Siracusa goes on to eloquently elucidate why this market is extremely attractive for a publisher:
What are the publisher's costs for this deal? Well, there may be a one-time, fixed cost to prepare a digital incarnation of the book to hand over to the e-book seller. But the publisher probably already has such a thing, e.g., for use in the editing process prior to traditional print publishing. In fact, these days, most authors produce the original work in digital form to begin with.
Let's see, what else? Um, that's it. The publisher hands over a file. Then, every month, a check arrives from the e-book seller. There is no additional cost to the publisher per unit sold. There are no printing costs, no warehousing, no trucks or planes to deliver merchandise. There's no forecast of demand, with the accompanying dire consequences of unsold inventory or unrealized income if the predictions are wrong one direction or the other. There's no tracking of and accounting for unsold books, no retailers cutting the covers off of paperbacks and shipping them back to the publisher as proof of their destruction. (These days, an affidavit is accepted as proof of the books' destruction, which is only slightly less wasteful and absurd.)
In short, the terms are unbelievably favorable for publishers. It essentially moves them from print publishing margins to software publishing margins: pay once for the creation of the content, sell an infinite number of times with no additional per-unit cost.
The full post is lengthy, but well worth a full read.
(And of course ebooks and digital publishing will be a big part of the program at next week's TOC Conference in New York. If you haven't signed up yet, register today while there's still space left.)
iPhone App Outperforms Most Print (Computer) Books This Holiday Season
Andrew Savikas
January 7, 2009
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Conventional wisdom suggests that when choosing pilot projects, you pick ones with a high likelihood of success. It's hard to argue that iPhone: The Missing Manual was a reasonable choice for testing the iPhone App waters. But while we knew it would do well, we've been quite pleased with just how well:
- If the iPhone App by itself had been a book, it would be a top 10 seller in BookScan for Computer Books this holiday season, based on just 17 days of sales
- The print version appears to have been unaffected, retaining a solid position in the top 3 for Computer Books in BookScan
- A full 1/3 of those buying the app are outside the US, mostly in countries where the print book is not readily available
There are certainly some who don't care for the book-as-app approach, preferring the library model (where one app enables reading multiple titles). It's also clear there's substantial customer interest in both options, and we strongly believe that offering a variety of options and letting customers choose is the right approach. This is a time for experimentation, and we'll be doing quite a bit more of it (format, pricing, content) in the digital -- and especially mobile -- space in the coming months.
Interstitial Publishing: A New Market from Wasted Time
Joseph J. Esposito
December 12, 2008
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To grow, publishers must either battle other publishers over market share or identify and serve new markets. Digital media are useful to publishers only insofar as they serve one of these aims. (A separate matter is using digital media to drive down costs and boost profits, but that is not growth in the defined sense.) Using digital media to redistribute market share may be costly and not lead to the expected gains, as a publisher's rivals are likely to use the very same tactics: anyone can publish for the iPhone and Stanza, anyone can get books onto the Kindle. But with market share battles there is no relief; it is an arms race, and a publisher can no more forego publishing in digital form than it can stop seeking new and creative authors. For a publisher pursuing growth, alas, it's new markets or nothing.
Digital media do not necessarily lead to new markets, and in some situations, digital media may actually serve to shrink markets. For consumer or trade publishing in the developed world, finding a new market can be challenging. Our lives are full, our calendars are snug, and our attention is spread over a seemingly infinite number of media choices, ranging from old-fashioned books to social networks, music, movies, museums, and countless other things. To find a new market here requires opening up a crack in a broad, seamless facade.
Which brings us to interstitial publishing, publishing between the cracks. (No, uh, wisecracks, please.) For a day filled with IMs and music and slathered over with email, one opportunity for publishers is to promote interstitial reading, reading that is done in the brief moments between other engagements, whether those claims on our attention are other media or simply the wiggle room in a schedule: the time spent waiting for a plane, a doctor, or for a meeting to begin. That's a huge number of minutes in any day; a good portion of our lives is wasted while we are waiting for the main course to arrive.
This point was brought to mind by a mailgroup post by O'Reilly's Andrew Savikas, who commented that he was stuck for an hour in an airport. What a great opportunity to pull out his iPhone and check out mail, alerts, and Web sites. But he could have been reading, if publishers had provided formal material (formal here means "the kind of stuff you are willing to pay for") to slip between the interstices of Andrew's day.
An hour is a big crack in the day; to become a true interstitial publisher, you would have to aim smaller. How about the 10-minute crack? Five minutes? Think of your own day: How often are you simply waiting, doing nothing? Daydreams don't count -- because ultimately the aim of every media business is to colonize your mind's every moment. (Dust off that old copy of the science fiction classic "The Space Merchants" by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth for a satiric vision of imperial marketing.) If you had something to read that you could sip in draughts of five minutes at a time or perhaps 10, you would participate in the growth of the new market for interstitial publishing. And this is genuine growth, as at this moment the total sales in the interstices is zero or close to it. The goal is to go from zero to 60 in five minutes.
For interstitial publishing to work, you need a handy device (PDA, iPhone, or something like that), which you carry with you all the time so that you can take advantage of the cracks in the day. For this kind of thing, a Kindle or any dedicated ebook reader won't work, as it is more of an effort to pull such a device out of your bag as you wait in line in the supermarket. So if it's growth you want (as distinct from market share), forget the Kindle. A smart phone is a different matter, however: How many times do you see someone yank a Blackberry from a belt clip and glance at incoming email? Instead of email, that could be the twenty-third chapter of the new micronovel by William Adama. The proper device is critical, and the software that runs on it must have sophisticated bookmarking capabilities.
You also need (and this ultimately may be the harder part) content crafted with the interstices in mind. Reformatting "Moby-Dick" for interstitial publishing simply won't do, as the structure of the text, even the syntax of the sentences, militates against draughts of only 5 minutes. This is not a matter of immersive vs. non-immersive reading: it's entirely possible to get immersed in 5 minutes. But it is an issue of what you get immersed in. Sorry, Tolstoy and Grisham, even William Gibson, but we need a new breed of writer, who is born digital, who is born in the interstices.
Often interstitial publishing is confused with having a short attention span, as though a moment is somehow less valuable than an hour. The key to this new form of publishing, however, is that it views the short period of each entry not as a watered-down version of the "real thing," a long text, but as something built perfectly for the space and time it occupies. This is what McLuhan meant by "understanding media": it's not about the content in itself but the content as it accommodates itself to the shape of the surface, which in turn is created and supported by the underlying technology.
Interstitial publishing can be fiction or nonfiction, but it is unlikely to be a single isolated five-minute item, as it would be hard to market or to find such an item. More likely short items will be strung together in an anthology; the thesis of the anthology ("brief bursts about the new administration"; "101 short poems about transistors and current") will suffuse each item with a sense of being part of a whole.
Narratives for interstitial media may very will be linear within each five-minute episode, but it is improbable that item A will lead serially to item B, to item C, and so forth. It would simply be hard to gather the narrative in our minds if it were written in this way. More likely each episode will have a beginning and an end--and then cut to another episode, which may be built around a different time or place or another character. All the pieces get assembled in our minds, five minutes at a time.
For "five-minute fiction" to catch on, we will need creative people who probe the nature of the interstitial medium. It's easy to forget (or never to have known) that the linear narrative as we think of it today was in fact invented once upon a time when writers were faced with books that were inexpensively manufactured and distributed to wide audiences for the first time. Publishers will need to seek out writers who comprehend the new medium, who can engage a reader for fie minutes, who can make the many pieces of the work congeal in the reader's mind. These writers will study readers, PDAs or smart phones in hand, standing before the spinning dryer in the laundromat, stopped at a red light, preparing to board a plane, waiting for the meeting to begin. In all of this publishers will see growth.
The aim of digital media should not be (or should not only be) to substitute a screen for a printed page but to reinvent the text on the screen and, in so doing, to bring new readers into the marketplace.
Profile of Hay House: "An Attitude is Not a Business Plan"
Andrew Savikas
May 19, 2008
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A recent New York Times article on self-help publisher Hay House is a glimpse into the fascinating life of founder Louise Hay. Whether you believe she really cured her own cancer is up to you, but beyond the human interest part of the profile are some great insights about publishing, including the importance of keeping practical business concerns in mind:
But an attitude is not a business plan. Hay House was not, in the beginning, very well run. The employees were mainly “people I knew,” Hay says, “a friend, or somebody who turned up, or somebody who wanted to work for Louise Hay. ... Meanwhile, large trade publishers, like HarperSanFrancisco and Tarcher/Putnam, were seeing the potential in New Age and investing heavily. Hay House would have failed quickly, or been bought out, but for the vision of Reid Tracy, who joined the company as an accountant in 1988 and became president in 1998. He invested his own money, too, and now owns 35 percent of the company; he is the sole shareholder besides Louise Hay herself, and everybody at Hay House, including its founder, considers Tracy the true leader.
That itself isn't terribly novel. But Reid Tracy's recognition that for authors (and savvy publishers) books are often just a means of enhancing their reputation in order to sell speaking engagements and ancillary products presaged the current buzz around using free content as a promotional tool:
[Tracy] realized more than 10 years ago that much of the money in New Age was to be made in items other than books: in card decks, audio tapes and page-a-day calendars. Major authors like Wayne Dyer and Marianne Williamson, who first came to Hay House just for ancillary products, later abandoned big trade houses to also do their books with Hay House.
And while the content Hay House published arguably couldn't be farther from what we publish, O'Reilly editor Andy Oram (who shared the original article link) pointed out some notable parallels to our eponymous brand:
- They realized that their authors had many channels for making sales besides conventional books, and they use all these channels to bolster one other.
- They recognize that their authors' work complements each other, and bring their authors together in group seminars.
- They play up the celebrity of their founder, who tends to choose trusted people based on intuition.
- They have a brand that goes far beyond the significance of any single offering, and fans accept what they think up next while staying true to the brand.
- They tend to follow their star authors wherever they take their ideas, and trust them.
- They're very self-consciously branching out into specialized products that also hold interest for children.
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