Entries tagged with “iphone” from Tools of Change for Publishing
Despite recent gains for books, Games still dominate in the App Store (via @dliman)
Andrew Savikas
November 3, 2009
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"While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week†, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps."
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/11/games-top-the-charts-iphone-android-markets.html
O'Reilly Ebooks Now in Aldiko Online Catalog for Android
Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009
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The iPhone gets a lot of the attention when it comes to smartphones, but signs point to Android playing a huge role in the growing smartphone market, with 20+ new devices by the end of this year worldwide (like the Motorola Droid). O'Reilly readers with an Android device can now browse and buy via the online catalog in the Aldiko ereader app.
Buying through Aldiko gets you the same DRM-free ebook bundle offered on oreilly.com (and there's even a 15% discount applied at checkout).
The catalog is implemented using a prototype of the OPDS spec, part of the BookServer architecture.
Customer Loyalty for Mobile Devices
Andrew Savikas
October 8, 2009
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Some of the most interesting data on trends in mobile development has been coming from Flurry, an app analytics company (developers insert little snippets of Flurry code in their apps to gather usage data).
They've plotted frequency of usage against app "retention" (what percentage of buyers returned to the app within 90 days of downloading it), and put each category of app into a corresponding quadrant:
They note that books fall squarely into the "use a lot for a short period of time" category, which is not unexpected:
In Quadrant II, we find categories like Books and Games, among the two largest app categories in both the App Store and Android Market. These application categories are characterized, on average, by intense usage over a finite period of time. Because games and books offer content that typically is consumed only once, the user usually moves on after reading a book or finishing a game.
They also draw some interesting conclusions on which categories are suitable for subscription vs. a la carte models.
Note this data comes from the set of apps using the Flurry software (they say more than 2,000), so is by no means a scientific sampling. Interesting reading nonetheless.
O'Reilly iPhone App Tips and Tricks
Adam Witwer
September 4, 2009
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To address some of the most common questions we get, I recently added a page on oreilly.com. I cover three main topics:
- "Hidden" features -- handy things you can do that aren't always obvious in the UI
- Long code lines -- my attempt to help users deal with the question we get most often on the support queues
- Extracting the EPUB files -- yes, there is an EPUB file in that app, and you can get to it quite easily
The App Store and the Long Tail Part 2: The Real "DRM" At Stake
Andrew Savikas
August 10, 2009
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Note there's a lot of images in this post, so if you're reading it via RSS, you may want to click through to the original post if you can't see the images.
A few weeks ago I wrote about how the small number of sales from many different countries were adding up to more than the large number of sales from the US in the App Store for our books. That trend has continued (and accelerated), and right now about 60% of our App sales are coming from outside the US:
When I've talked with other publishers about our success with iPhone Apps, they typically discounted what I said because I was talking about iPhone: The Missing Manual, a title particularly suited to the device. And to a degree, that's a fair argument, and I don't expect very many other books-as-apps to sell as well as that one. But the results for the next batch of 17 titles is instructive. For the two-week period of July 20 to August 2 (the first two calendar weeks the apps were on sale), five of the 17 titles sold more units as iPhone apps than via print (as measured in Bookscan). Here's a comparison across all 17 titles:
That got me wondering why there's not stronger interest from other publishers, especially trade publishers, in iPhone apps (besides concerns about pricing and the approval process). Then as I was looking at rankings for some of the top paid book apps, I spotted a possible answer.
In the App Store, each country has its own top 100 lists (overall and for each category, and for free as well as paid). Something that's #1 here in the US may not even register on the top 100 in another country. Here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for the "Classics" App, the #1 paid book app right now:
Classics is one of the most popular paid book apps in nearly every country with iPhone service (the list actually goes further down than shown above).
Now here's the current (as of this writing) worldwide rankings for "Twilight" which has been holding steady in the top 25 paid apps here in the US:
Yup, that's it. Just the US. Presumably this is a rights issue -- Hachette either doesn't have the rights to sell this book as an App anywhere else, or they're choosing not to. But taken in light of our own sales of nearly 2/3 outside the US and the data from Classics, that means a publisher who can't (or won't) sell their app outside the States is missing a lot of the market. Here's the current rankings for the "A Twilight Trivia" app, which is ranked above Twilight in the US (and is not affiliated with Hachette or Stephenie Brown):
So there's clear interest in the Twilight content on the iPhone outside the US -- enough interest to keep this app well into the top 100 paid book apps in dozens of countries.
Perhaps the most important "digital rights management" at stake right now is that of the rights to sell digital content globally.
If you're planning to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair, producing and selling digital and mobile content from a global perspective will be a big part of the program at TOC Frankfurt on Oct. 13.
Would an Apple Tablet be an Ereader? Yes and No.
Andrew Savikas
July 28, 2009
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Last Friday the latest round of rumors of an Apple Tablet swelled considerably after a piece from Apple Insider asserted the device is now on the 2010 product roadmap:
However, the past six months have reportedly seen the critical pieces fall into place. Jobs, who's been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction. He's since cemented the device in the company's 2010 roadmap, where it's being positioned for a first quarter launch, according to people well-respected by AppleInsider for their striking accuracy in Apple's internal affairs.
That means that the device, which is expected to retail for somewhere between the cost of a high-end iPhone and Apple's most affordable Mac notebook, is bound to turn up any time between January and March, should there be no last minute setbacks. Analyst's following the Cupertino-based company may consider factoring first full-quarter sales of the device into their models for calendar Q2.
The news sparked considerable interest among publishers, who apparently see this development as a "Kindle killer" that will upset Amazon's apparent dominance of the ebook ecosystem. It's understandable from the perspective of a publisher, but if this device actually exists, it's doubtful anyone at Apple sees it as an "ereader" any more than it sees the iPhone as "a GPS device." (The speculation stems from a piece in the Financial Times quoting an anonymous "publishing executive" and saying Apple has been talking to publishers.) Apple also talked to major newspapers before the iPhone launched, but they didn't build the iPhone as a mobile newspaper.
Some have been speculating about whether Apple would ink deals with aggregators like OverDrive or Ingram Digital to secure ebook content for a tablet. But that assumes that Apple sees a need to directly deal with ebooks the way they deal with music, and I don't believe that's likely. While it's possible they'd beef up the native PDF capabilities in a larger device, I think it's much more likely they'll establish the market (the App Store) and the platform (some variant on the iPhone SDK), and let developers and content creators take care of the rest, the way they have already on the iPhone with games.
Seeking Alpha has a nice analysis of Tablet Fever, and correctly places any discussion of news or books in the context of the App Store, where it firmly belongs:
Steve Jobs has mentioned that he has never seen anything like success of the App Store in his career. If he is saying that, then I'm saying that this 9.7 inch iTouch that has been designed to optimally utilize the apps will become the flagship Apple product... The order of operations for the iPhone are phone first, iPod second, Apps third, and Internet browser fourth. This new iTouch is principally designed to take advantage of the App Store gaming, books, news, entertainment, social networking, etc...
Long Tail Evidence from The App Store
Andrew Savikas
July 20, 2009
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Last week we released 16 of our books as iPhone Apps (and on Saturday added The Twitter Book), and there's some interesting Long Tail data coming in. We've seen Long Tail behavior in the data from Safari Books Online and from Google Book Search, though in this case it's about geography: even though regions like Colombia, Belgium, and Greece are individually generating a small number of sales, together they add up to more than the total number sold in the US:
Amazon Acquires Lexcycle
Mac Slocum
April 27, 2009
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Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, has just announced it's been acquired by Amazon:
We are not planning any changes in the Stanza application or user experience as a result of the acquisition. Customers will still be able to browse, buy, and read ebooks from our many content partners. We look forward to offering future products and services that we hope will resonate with our passionate readers.
The New York Times says terms of the deal have not been released. It's not yet known how Stanza will fit amidst Amazon's Kindle and recently-released Kindle iPhone app.
Karen Templer from the Readerville Weblog poses a number of key questions:
Will the Stanza/Fictionwise store be replaced with a Stanza/Amazon store? (Presumably.) And/or will Stanza be merged with the Kindle app? Will it continue to read ePub and other formats or will it conform strictly to Kindle? (Conversely, will Kindle begin reading ePub?) And, most of all, where does this leave IndieBound and their ebook plans?
O'Reilly Ebooks Now In Stanza Online Catalog
Andrew Savikas
March 9, 2009
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Just in time for Read an Ebook Week O'Reilly's 400+ ebooks are now available for direct purchase and download on your iPhone or iPod Touch from within Stanza's Online Catalog. Buying ebooks this way gives you the same flexible, DRM-free ebook bundles as buying through oreilly.com (because you are buying from oreilly.com via Stanza). That means 3 ebook formats and free lifetime updates (and did we mention no DRM?).
To celebrate the Stanza news (and Read an Ebook Week) you'll automatically get 40% off any ebooks purchased on Stanza through March 15 for a limited time.
If you have Stanza on your iPhone or iPod (it's free -- click here to get it), here's how to get to the O'Reilly Ebook Store. From your Stanza Library, click the Online Catalog link:
From there, select "O'Reilly Ebooks" to browse by Bestsellers, New Releases, or All titles:
Select the title you want to see a description:
Press "Add to Cart" to buy the ebook, which will take you through to the O'Reilly shopping cart to complete the transaction (you'll need to create an O'Reilly account if you don't already have one). We're working to make the purchase experience a bit more mobile friendly, but wanted to roll this out right away. There is an awkward step when you'll see what appears to be some gibberish in a confirmation dialog -- go ahead and click download:
We're working with the Stanza folks to try and make that a little cleaner.
If your download is interrupted -- or if you ever want to re-download an ebook you've already purchased -- you can always return to your purchased ebooks by visiting the "My Bookshelf" link from the O'Reilly Catalog in Stanza (or by pointing your iPhone to oreilly.com/e or visiting members.oreilly.com from any web browser):
We'll be adding new titles, free samples, and more ways to browse, search, and sort in the coming weeks.
Kindle Comes to the iPhone
Mac Slocum
March 4, 2009
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Users of the iPhone and iPod Touch can now tap into Amazon's Kindle store with the free Kindle for iPhone application. From The New York Times:
The move comes a week after Amazon started shipping the updated version of its Kindle reading device. It signals that the company may be more interested in becoming the pre-eminent retailer of e-books than in being the top manufacturer of reading devices.
Amazon is positioning the iPhone app as a gap filler: nibble on book content while waiting at the airport, in line, at a restaurant, etc., but settle in for deep reading with the original Kindle (or, presumably, the printed edition). Toward that end, the Times says Amazon is using a bookmark feature that keeps a reader's spot as they switch devices.
Reaction to the Kindle iPhone App
I'll be adding to this list over the next few days as more coverage appears (I highly recommend following the real-time Kindle trend on Twitter). Please share additional links and your own Kindle/iPhone analysis through the comments area.
Hands on: Kindle for iPhone a great Kindle companion
(Chris Foresman, Ars Technica)
Clicking on the "Get Books" button on the Home screen instructs users to got to Amazon's Kindle Store via a computer for "the best shopping experience." And they aren't kidding; while there is a link that will open the Kindle Store in MobileSafari, browsing and buying books this way is just plain frustrating. The Kindle's own integrated buying is far simpler in comparison. Apple presumably has this restriction in place so that developers don't abuse the App Store system, giving away free apps on Apple's dime and then selling content elsewhere. Perhaps Amazon can build an iPhone-browsable version of the Kindle Store and display it via an embedded browser, or better yet, perhaps Amazon and Apple can come to some sort of agreement to allow in-app purchasing.
First Impressions of Kindle on iPhone
(Walt Mossberg, AllThingsD)
... it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon's servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does. It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone.
Kindle for iPhone Review
(Perrin Stewart, 148Apps)
Read more…... it's worth having the app on your device for the access to Amazon's virtual library alone. In many cases, the pricing on Kindle versions of books are much cheaper than other ebook stores (compare the Kindle version of "The Graveyard Book" for $9.99 to the Fictionwise version which is $17.99 and the stand-alone iTunes store app which is $17.99, for instance), and they often have books that other stores do not.
Google Opens Mobile Access to Public-Domain Books
Andrew Savikas
February 5, 2009
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Via a Google press release, word that visiting books.google.com/m provides mobile access to 1.5 million public-domain books from within Google Book Search:
Today, we're making it possible for anyone with an Android or an iPhone to find and read more than 1.5 million public domain books in the US (more than half a million outside the US) in the Google Book Search index for free on their mobile phone, from anywhere with Internet access. It's possible for a commuter on a passenger train to read classics like Pride and Prejudice right along with lesser known works like Novels and Letters of Jane Austen, or for a student in India to read Shakespeare's "Hamlet" on her iPhone, all via a simple website accessible from your mobile phone.
So far, the mobile edition only offers browser-based access (Web-style scrolling, no offline access, no remember-my-place), but an interesting addition to the emerging and important mobile reading space. Screenshot below (or click here if you can't see the screenshot).
Google will be at next week's TOC Conference talking about the past, present and future of GBS.
Popping the Hood on the iPhone Missing Manual App
Andrew Savikas
February 4, 2009
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Over on Teleread, Chris Meadows has a nice review of our iPhone Missing Manual app, which echoes several other reviewers (and my own personal experience with the app):
How helpful is the book? I have already found a lot of remarkably useful information just in the space of a few chapters. It would be no exaggeration to say I learned things over the course of a couple of hours of reading that I never learned in months of iPod Touch ownership.
But the neatest part of the review is the tutorial Chris provides for popping the app open and getting at the EPUB content inside:
Once you've unzipped it, it can be read in ePub-reading software such as Adobe Digital Editions (looks flawless) or FBReader (formatting a bit messed up), or even synced into the iPhone version of Stanza by sharing from Stanza Desktop. (Though as the book is almost 9 megabytes in size thanks to all the illustrations, the Stanza app may choke and require a reboot the first time you load it, but after that it opens fine. I suspect the wrapper version of Stanza is optimized for the book's large size.)
Chris is right that the electronic version available from oreilly.com is $24.99, compared with the $9.99 app (on sale right now for $4.99 in conjunction with the TOC Conference), though our "ebook bundle" includes EPUB, PDF, and Mobipocket formats, along with free updates. That said, we're tracking sales and price data across formats and platforms, because it's clearly a critical issue. The App Store has provided an easy way to measure price elasticity of demand, and that's just with one app!
"Kindle Killer" Might be Hyperbole, but a Lot to Like About Shortcovers
Andrew Savikas
January 20, 2009
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The email invitation I received to check out shortcovers -- a new hybrid Web/mobile reading site from Canada's Indigo Books & Music -- touted it as a "Kindle Killer." While there's a lot to like about shortcovers, there's some shortcomings to that moniker. First, it's not a device, it's a Web site with a companion iPhone app (presumably wending its way through Apple's approval queue) and eventually other mobile apps as well. Second, while I was very impressed with their execution, I didn't see much that Amazon couldn't match with a similar mobile App.
That said, I really liked what I saw of shortcovers (though to be fair, it's hard to truly judge something you've seen only via Webex -- my comments are based on a brief demo, and apply primarily to books). In particular:
- iTunes-style previews and a la carte purchasing. Buying single chapters won't make much sense for some kinds of content, but we know from experience at Safari that a lot of readers like that kind of chunking.
- Online/offline options. Adding "buy the print version" to the iPhone equation might be shortcovers' biggest contribution to the mobile reading market. Sure you can buy books from Amazon's iPhone app, but you can't also buy/read an electronic version at the same time. A lot of our ebooks are sold bundled with the print version, and it's a great option to offer customers. (Print orders are fulfilled by Indigo in Canada, and by an as-yet-unnamed partner in the U.S.)
- Cloud-style syncing. Buy from your phone, and the book appears in your online "Library" accessible from a browser. Offline downloads won't be available initially, though apparently are on the way.
- Recommendation and annotation. This was key to Amazon's rise to dominance in online book retailing -- its database of reviews and recommendations, a system that got smarter the more people used it.
- Support for the EPUB standard, and the option for publishers to make their content available without DRM. As long as there's a choice, the market should take care of the rest.
Overall, shortcovers probably isn't the revolution they're implying, but it is a big next step for mobile reading and ecommerce.
For additional viewpoints, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg recently reviewed shortcovers, and Chris Meadows on TeleRead has this counterpoint.
Palm's webOS Represents Major Shift for Syncing and Data
Peter Brantley
January 12, 2009
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In an article covering the Palm Pre mobile device, Ars Technica makes a very important point about how devices utilize network connectivity, and what the assumptions are underlying their models of data storage and access:
Users just make changes to their data (contacts, calendar, mail, etc.), and Palm's webOS handles committing those changes to whatever canonical data source it is accessing in the cloud. And herein lies the most important difference between the webOS and Apple's iPhone OS: the iPhone was originally designed under the assumption that the canonical source of a user's data (contacts, calendar, music, tasks, etc.) is a Mac. Palm's webOS, in contrast, presumes that cloud-based services are the canonical source for your data (with the possible exception of media, which we don't know about yet) ...
Palm's webOS does not presume any sort of tether at all. The company has totally ditched the idea that you will use this phone in conjunction with a specific "main PC" that contains the canonical, authoritative repository of your data. Instead, webOS draws seamlessly on a variety of data services--not data repositories, but cloud-based services that actively feed the device both data and critical context.
This is a deep, fundamental break with both the iPhone and previous, repository-based smartphone usage models, and it's important enough that other smartphones are bound to follow.
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.
iPhone Updates: Missing Manual Already #2; More Book Apps Hit iTunes
Andrew Savikas
December 23, 2008
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We released David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual as an iPhone App on Friday, and by Saturday it was already the #2 for-pay App in the Books category on iTunes (where it has remained, behind only the Classics App), and it continues to gain ground. In just four days, it has become one of our top sellers of the year in electronic format. Notably, even at the promotional $4.99 price, it is the highest-priced app among the top 50 paid book apps. While $0.99 pricing clearly moves merchandise, it's unlikely that kind of pricing is sustainable for most Apps, including books (for more, see this excellent post from Andy Finnell on app pricing).
Yesterday brought news that several other major publishers are rolling out iPhone Apps of popular titles, including the Twilight series (which right now is priced at $10.99), via an app development company out of New York, ScrollMotion. I haven't tried their reader, but the annotation feature shown in the screenshots looks pretty neat. We've been very pleased with how our books render in Stanza, especially for computer code, cross references, and tables -- all of which are quite common across our catalog.
Not everyone is enthusiastic about the news of more iPhone book apps, most vocally TeleRead blogger (and TOC Conference panelist) David Rothman:
Some consumers may want hundreds of books on their iPhones. Should publishers put such a crimp on their purchases? And will apps be the easiest things to organize into libraries? I'm open minded about the O'Reilly iPhone guide as an app, given its connection with the machine. But please don' make an app of every book!
While I share David's concerns about format lock-in (a big reason we offer many of our books in a variety of DRM-free formats), I think his distaste of standalone book apps is misplaced. Yes, it's true that right now the iPhone can only hold 148 apps. But given the nature of the device, I don't think it's likely that most customers will begin using it to manage/consume large numbers of books they intend to keep for long periods of time. Books on the iPhone likely serve the same function for readers as games do -- temporary entertainment, likely to be replaced by the next cool thing that comes along. I've deleted dozens of apps myself, at least a few of them ones I paid for.
But regardless of where your personal opinion lies on that issue, if you're a publisher there are several things to keep in mind as you consider the App Store as a distribution channel:
- Apple has tremendous power in this relationship. They're taking 30 percent right off the top, and they alone decide if and when your app appears. For many of your potential customers in this new market, that's just fine. They don't care about you or your other products. They care about entertaining/amusing/informing themselves.
- The App Store is a vibrant and thriving marketplace, but it's still in its infancy. There is a lot to learn about how to price and promote books this way. For example, here's a list of sites that promote new apps. Some are pay-to-promote, which sounds kinda gross, but isn't much different from co-op. Here's more from the same site on pricing.
- While this depends a lot on the types of books you publish, it's likely a small but very active segment of your audience feels the same way David does, and will reward you for offering standards-based, DRM-free versions of your books that they know will outlast you, the device-of-the-month, or the DRM format you're using.
- Speaking of DRM, stop worrying about piracy. One of our best selling books in electronic form this year is Real World Haskell, which was written out in the open, and is still available in its entirety from the book's website. For free. This is not an isolated case, and this book has been a commercial success not in spite of its open availability but because of its open availability.
If you're interested in reviewing the iPhone Missing Manual App, and are willing to share your review on your blog and in the App Store, drop me a line at andrew AT toc.oreilly.com. I have a limited number of promo codes for free access to the App, and it's first-come, first-served.
O'Reilly Ebooks: 130 Top Titles Now Available, Plus an iPhone App and Head First PDFs
Andrew Savikas
December 19, 2008
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While there will always be a demand for printed books, few of those books will have a life entirely disconnected from the wider digital Web. In that sense, all publishing is becoming digital publishing, and all writing is writing for the Web. That's a big shift, and it will take time for the existing players to make the transition (and we'll almost certainly lose some along the way). For now, here's a roundup of where things stand for us at O'Reilly on the ebook front:
- David Pogue's iPhone: The Missing Manual is now available as an App in the iPhone App Store. It's available for a limited time at an introductory price of $4.99 (the regular price will be $9.99). The App was built by Lexcycle, creators of the popular Stanza App, so you get the same rich reading experience (including live linking and cross references) as when you read our other books on Stanza. More titles will follow in the coming weeks.
- More than 130 titles, including many of our best sellers, are now available as ebook bundles, which can be read on a variety of ebook devices and systems, including Stanza on the iPhone, Bookworm, Amazon Kindle, and the Sony Reader. A full list is available at oreilly.com/ebooks, and includes the following: We're working to release the bulk of our backlist as ebook bundles during the next 90 days.
- All of our in-print Head First books will be available for purchase as PDFs within the next 24 hours (two of them already are via the Rough Cuts program). Those of you familiar with our Head First titles know their layout would not translate well to reflowable formats like EPUB. We regularly evaluate alternatives, but in the interim, we're happy to finally deliver something a lot of customers have requested--the option to purchase Head First books in digital form.
- In total, more than 700 of our books are currently available for sale as DRM-free PDFs or Ebook bundles (and even more are available through Safari Books Online). As more Ebook bundles become available, those are included as free updates for anyone who's already purchased just the PDF from oreilly.com.
- Our "Media Management" account pages for customers who have purchased ebooks from oreilly.com are now much more mobile-device friendly, and are accessible from oreilly.com/e. A screenshot from my iPhone below:
In the coming months we'll be working to make more of our new book content mobile-friendly, better integrate our book content with the Web, and continue exploring how to deliver our content in ways that take advantage of all that being digital has to offer.
If you're a publisher trying to figure out how to deal with digital, registration is open for our 2009 Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. Lexcycle's Marc Prud'hommeaux and Neelan Choksi will both be speaking. New York area publishers should also check out StartWithXML, our one-day forum deep-diving into how and why to move to flexible formats for more nimble book content.
Questions? Comments? Drop us a line through Get Satisfaction
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.
History Repeating with Book Publishing's Mobile Efforts
Peter Brantley
December 10, 2008
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A Computerworld blog post from Mike Elgan looks at recent mobile announcements from book publishers. From the perspective of technology, watching book publishers slowly grapple with the tentative migration of books to mobile platforms is painful. Interestingly, the comments attached to the piece are almost all more conservative.
The music industry was holding on to physical CD sales so tightly that they let Apple run away with control over digital distribution and the future of their industry.
It looks like the book publishing industry is about to do the same thing.
Publishing industry: The book isn't the paper. It's the content! Why don't you understand your own product?
Amazon iPhone App Uses Crowdsourcing for Product IDs
Mac Slocum
December 3, 2008
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Amazon's new iPhone application has an experimental feature, dubbed Amazon Remembers, that blends product discovery and crowdsourcing. From the New York Times Bits blog:
The tool lets users take a photograph of any product they see in the real world. The photos are then uploaded to Amazon and turned over to the far-flung freelance workers in Amazon's Mechanical Turk program, who will try to match them with products for sale on Amazon.com. The results will not be instantaneous (between 5 minutes and 24 hours, the company says), but the idea is to entice consumers to buy products from Amazon instead of its offline rivals.
Human-generated Mechanical Turk results can be a wildcard -- and the lack of instant gratification is a disadvantage -- but this method could theoretically expand mobile product apps beyond text messages and barcode readers.
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