Entries tagged with “strategy” from Tools of Change for Publishing

In-depth insight from Tim O'Reilly on lessons learned from Safari Books Online

Andrew Savikas
November 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | Listen

"As I outlined above, Safari adopted a "cloud library" model rather than downloadable ebooks as its fundamental design metaphor. I thought it might be worthwhile to understand how we arrived at that decision, as well as some of the other lessons we've learned over what is now 22 years of ebook publishing experience. (O'Reilly published its first ebook, Unix in a Nutshell for Hypercard, back in 1987!) With that, a few reflections on lessons learned"

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/10/safari-books-online-60-a-cloud.html

Posted via email from Andrew's posterous

"We had all the advantages and let it slip away"

Andrew Savikas
October 5, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

Among the most honest assessments of the failure of newspapers to adapt to the Web comes from John Temple, former editor, president and publisher of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News. The whole thing is unflinching, powerful, and nearly every word worth reading if you're part of a media company hoping to survive the current digital environment, much less the shift to the mobile web. It was hard to pull out highlights, but here's a few:

As one former Scripps executive told me in talking about what has happened to the newspaper industry, words that I think apply to the Rocky, "We had all the advantages and let it slip away. We couldn't give up the idea that we were newspaper companies."

Also an admission of the (in hindsight) classic mistake of judging new ventures using the expectations of the old:

The service was shut down after about 9 months, but not before scooping the paper on the start of the First Gulf War, reporting 12 hours before the paper landed on most doorsteps that the war had begun. The project was halted, I was told, because "we just couldn't show that it was having any measurable impact on retention of print subscribers and it wasn't producing revenue."

Right from the start, new offerings were measured by what they did for the core product, not on their own merits. A big mistake.

And some great words about understanding that you're working with a new medium, not just a new format in which to present the old:

You have to have a strategy and you have to be committed to pursuing it. We perceived the Web site as a newspaper online, as a complement to the paper, not as its own thing. That's not a strategy.

Go. Read it now. Thanks to Jay Rosen for the link (via Twitter).

Do the Math on Your Mobile Apps

Andrew Savikas
October 1, 2009 | Permalink | Listen

One of my favorite sources of interesting reading material these days is Hacker News (follow them at @newsycombinator), and this week they pointed me to a piece from Derek Sivers that applies to many of the emerging digital and mobile markets for media:

He kept saying, "If only one percent of the people reading this magazine buy my CD... that'll be 10,000 copies! And that's only one percent!"

...

Over the next few weeks he received four orders. Total CDs sold: 4

....

I think of this every time I hear business plans that say, "With over 30 million iPhones sold, our app is sure to..."

On the one hand, putting a one-click bookstore in 30 million pockets means someone is bound to buy your app. On the other hand, if it costs you $25K to develop the app (a typical and realistic investment for a greenfield app), you're probably not going to have enough income to build any more apps for awhile.

Does Digital Cannibalize Print? Not Yet.

Andrew Savikas
August 7, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (10) | Listen

One of the big risk factors publishers think about when it comes to digital books is that they will cannibalize print sales. Factor in the lower prices we're seeing for ebooks, and it's a quite reasonable concern.

Looking at data on sales from our website, at first glance that would appear to be exactly what's happening:

Over the past 18 months, we've gone from print outselling digital by more than 2:1 to just the opposite.

But that's not the full story. If there really was cannibalization happening, you'd expect to see our print sales underperforming the overall computer book market, but that's not what's happening. Here's a comparison of how our sales (as measured by Bookscan) stack up against the broader computer book market. The data here is normalized (the first period in the graph is set to 100, and subsequent results are calculate relative to that period):

Roger Magoulas, who heads up our Research Team (which is doing some way cool stuff with App Store data) put it this way in a recent backchannel email covering this as part of a larger analysis:

By looking at the data and these charts we infer that while O'Reilly physical book sales are down compared to last year, this seems more the result of the drop in demand for computer books since the financial meltdown than the impact of ebook sales. Since O'Reilly is a relatively prolific publisher of econtent we would expect that ebooks would affect O'Reilly's physical book sales more than other publishers and we don't see that evidence in these results. Even if ebooks are taking a bite out of O'Reilly physical book sales, we see no negative effect on O'Reilly's slightly increasing share in the physical book market nor on how O'Reilly's sales correlate with the overall market for physical computer books.

So, for now, if what we infer is correct, you can put away your exorcism crosses, ebooks seem more a legitimate expanded market opportunity than a projectile vomiting Linda Blair wannabe.

"Being wrong is a feature, not a bug"

Andrew Savikas
July 2, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

A thoughtful piece from Michael Nielsen on the disruption of the scientific publishing industry includes a lot that's very relevant to other publishers and media companies. For example:

In conversations with editors I repeatedly encounter the same pattern: "But idea X won't work / shouldn't be allowed / is bad because of Y." Well, okay. So what? If you're right, you'll be intellectually vindicated, and can take a bow. If you're wrong, your company may not exist in ten years. Whether you're right or not is not the point. When new technologies are being developed, the organizations that win are those that aggressively take risks, put visionary technologists in key decision-making positions, attain a deep organizational mastery of the relevant technologies, and, in most cases, make a lot of mistakes. Being wrong is a feature, not a bug, if it helps you evolve a model that works: you start out with an idea that's just plain wrong, but that contains the seed of a better idea.

Around here we like to say "fail forward fast," and it's an acknowledgement that we will learn much more by trying and doing (and probably failing) than by planning. The real challenge with that is to make those experiments as cheap (financially and otherwise) as possible.

Essential Points in the Free Debate

Mac Slocum
June 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2) | Listen

Expanding on "free"-centric discussions from Steven Poole and David Pogue, TechDirt's Mike Masnick argues that free experiments are only valuable if they're backed up by business models:

The basic problem is this: they hear about the importance of "free" and so they give something away for free. But they don't have a business model around the free content. They don't understand the economic forces at work. They just give stuff away and pray ... and then whine when nothing happens. As we've pointed out before, no one says that "free" by itself pays the bills. You need to have a more complete strategy than that -- and it involves a lot more than "give it away and pray."

Poole, Pogue and Masnick all support their cases (whether you agree or disagree likely depends on your overall take on free), but what I find interesting about some of these recent pieces is the tonal shift: there's an edge to them, and I'm not entirely sure where it comes from. It could be the alternative nature of free (giving stuff away is anathema to some), or maybe it springs from the odd mixture of frustration and opportunity that's swirling around the broader transition to digital. It could also emanate from ancillary topics like piracy and fading industries.

The problem with edgy discussions is that the edge generally overwhelms the core topic. And when you're dealing with an already ambiguous concept -- such as free -- distraction is even more disconcerting.

That said, there are a number of salient points within these recent posts, and each deserves to be called out:

• Free needs to be judged contextually. As Tim O'Reilly wrote in the past, free is more complicated than it initially seems, so it must to be examined amidst the goals of a particular company.
• A single experiment -- whether successful or not -- does not signify a trend. A variety of experiments need to be conducted to get a true handle on free's utility.
• Free requires an outcome. As Masnick notes, and as we've discussed here, an experiment without a strategy won't yield anything useful. Free needs to be part of a broader plan, and that plan should be thought out before giveaways begin.
• Free is one of many potential adaptations. As digital industries mature and revenue streams become more fruitful, additional models will likely form. These models deserve the same level of inquiry. Companies might find that an aggregate approach yields the best results.
• Finally ... free isn't fully formed. All viewpoints and trial runs deserve at least a passing glance.

Related Stories:

• Author Notes Risks and Opportunities in Free Ebooks
• How Do Publishers and Authors Get Paid in a "Free" World?
• Piracy is Progressive Taxation ...
• Responsibly Assuaging Author Concerns about File Sharing and "Piracy"