Children’s books & digital

2009 November 29
1 Comment
by eoinpurcell

I have to say, when I read this news from EA Games last month I was not TOO blown away:

Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announces the development of FLIPS, an innovative new book range created for the Nintendo DS. FLIPS has been designed to give children of all ages a fun new way to read their favorite books. EA has worked with some of the UK`s leading publishers of children’s books and magazines, including Egmont and Penguin Publishing, to bring modern classic titles from critically acclaimed authors such as Cathy Cassidy, Eoin Colfer, Enid Blyton, and the various writers from the popular boys series, `Too Ghoul for School` to the DS. Each FLIPS title features multiple books and the first four titles will be released exclusively on Nintendo DS in the UK on 4th December 2009.

But then I saw one (the Artemis Fowl-Eoin Colfer collection) in action at the CBI Digital Developments Seminar on Saturday 28 November in Tallaght Library. I’m still not blown away but I am more impressed than I thought I would be. The device is the same as any DS but the program is actually fairly clever and offers a range of extras that kids might just find enjoyable, though to a certain extent it remains in essence a book on screen. I don’t think this will be converting non-readers into readers. Still, interesting move.

One of the discussions that I tumbled into on Saturday was whether digital products opens a new market for books and will deliver new readers. I’m not sure that it will in any real sense. It may make it easier for people who have always read to read digitally, or enable people who have wanted to read but couldn’t to read with great ease, but NEW readers, people who simply didn’t read out of choice deciding to read on screen, seems unlikely, especially not book length pieces.

Still, one interesting development I spotted [in Publishers Weekly] today is that ScrollMotion are launching a series of releases for their Iceberg ereader which will be heavily child focused with:

animations, audio content, interactivity. Picture books in the Iceberg Kids format are more than books—they’re activities. The app has a sleek and entertaining aesthetic and navigational system (though all e-books will be sold as separate apps for the moment, they all share the same design and navigation system), featuring five buttons—”Read,” “Bookmark,” “Index,” “Record,” Settings,” “Help”—that make musical sounds when tapped.

To accommodate full-page illustrations in the iPhone’s small format, the application automatically pans around the illustration while the child or parent advances through the text on that page. By pinching the screen, one can move around the entire illustration at will. The text can be made larger or smaller, and automatically moves to accommodate the art.

I remain unconvinced by the need for these type of applications when they could be as easily hosted on a decent website, that had a mobile access mode, but still, it is good to see development on the area one way or the other.
Eoin

from → Books, Children's Publishing, Children's Books, Digital Publishing, Future of Books, Print to Digital, Print to Web, Publishing Innovation, digital, e-books, e-publishing, publishing

Why not direct? WOT Ebooks From Tor

2009 November 19
1 Comment
by eoinpurcell

The covers are incredible

Notable news
Tor.com have announced the launch of the ebook of the second book of the epic (though perhaps a new word should be created to describe the scale) series, Robert Jordan’s, Wheel of Time, The Great Hunt:

We’re happy to announce that The Great Hunt, volume two in Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, is now available as an eBook from the Sony eBook Store and other online retailers. This edition sports a new cover and has been re-typeset especially for ebook production.

But riddle me this?
Why do they not just sell it direct? The multi-publisher bookstore provides just the platform, they have created an incredible audience and the property is a very, very good one. I cannot understand this decision. Sure the rest of Macmillan also avoids ebook sales listing instead other sellers on their site bit surely teh selling of a digital download is not THAT difficult? Is it?

Eoin
PS: The covers are quite frankly fantastic for the ebook series, savvy to redesign them!

from → Authors, Book Marketing, Books, Bookselling, Business, Digital Publishing, Future of Books, MacMillan, Publishing Innovation, Tor.com, digital, e-books, e-publishing

Book Depository Free Ebooks

2009 November 18
1 Comment
by eoinpurcell


The wonderful people over at The Book Depository have rolled out a free ebook program. Kieron Smith, Managing Director of The Book Depository, said [in their press release]:

We wanted to give our customers a really wonderful present this Christmas. We’re continually working to increase the number of books that we have available on our website – 2.4 million at present, which is an unparalled number. Ebooks are much talked about at the moment but difficult for people to try, this gives people a chance to experiment, read something new and try ebooks all at no risk and free of charge.
We’ve not launched ebooks for sale as yet, but will do soon, this promotion is a great way for us to start talking to our customers about what they want from the format.

Quite wonderfully in my opinion, the program uses PDF. After all most people who don’t know anything about ebooks, know about PDF and feel confident in downloading them. I think the ebook program is nicely executed. It is smooth, fits into the rest of the site where you would expect it and offers something very interesting to readers.

I’m hoping this also drives print sales for The Book Depository’s Dodo Press. I’ve downloaded these two (1,2) for free, what will you get?

Lots to enjoy here,
Eoin

from → Book Depository, Books, Bookselling, Business, Classics, Content, Digital Publishing, Distribution, Free, Future of Books, Future of Publishing, Publishing Innovation, Selling, digital, e-books, ebooks, publishing

Amazon Encore: Again, Again, Again

2009 November 13
4 Comments
tags:
by eoinpurcell

You have to wonder just how many books Amazon Encore has to publish before we consider it a fully fledged book publisher? I wrote a long post about the implications of Amazon Encore here some time ago. In it I said:

Sure this can be extended and it is clearly being set up to do so. Amazon is in a great place to carry out their program to almost any conceivable scale. That in itself should indicate that they intend to extend. If you don’t believe it look at what Barnes & Noble have done in Classics and Rediscovered titles and you will get the idea.

But add to it the previously mentioned POD set up, they wouldn’t even need to expend extra capital on print runs, they’d be able to deliver books on demand so even if a huge proportion of the titles failed, their costs would be lower than the major publishers and the bookstore publishers too. That competitive advantage would be added to the fact that they wouldn’t have to pay a retailers discount unless they were selling to the retailers themselves. In effect, aside from what the author and their agents can grab from the chain, Amazon with Encore has successfully placed itself in control of the entire value chain of which I wrote some more about last week but didn’t quite count this in.

And now, quelle surprise, Amazon has expanded the encore program by 300%! I’ll admit from 1 to 3 is not a huge leap, but if every season (twice a year say) they leap 300% by the end of 2012 they would be publishing over 2000 titles. Of course that is an exaggeration I doubt that Amazon will expand the division at that speed but even at a lesser pace they could easily be publishing 100, 200, 300 titles a season.

Are we ready for that? I don’t think we are.
Eoin

from → Agents, Amazon, Authors, Book Deals, Books, Business, Companies & Organisations, Future of Books, Future of Publishing, Print, Print On Demand, publishing

Children’s Books Ireland: Digital Developments Seminar

2009 November 9
4 Comments
by eoinpurcell
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With thanks to Flickr user adafruit used under CC Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic Licence

I’m (through Green Lamp Media) working with the wonderful people at Children’s Books Ireland to make a Digital Developments Seminar happen in Tallaght Library on 28 November 2009. I’m really rather looking forward to it:

Digital Developments will focus on where digital changes have taken publishing so far and what further changes can be expected in the future. The seminar will also offer practical tools and strategies to authors, booksellers, and publishers alike, on how to take the next step into the world of digital and social media.

The half-day event will feature a keynote address from me and a panel discussion featuring Ivan O’Brien, Susan Carleton and Vanessa Robertson. It is going to be wonderful.

For more information visit the event page over at CBI.

I’m hoping that it will be practical, useful and focused on the real application of technology for authors, publishers and booksellers.
Eoin

from → Authors, Books, CBI, Children's Publishing, Children's Books, Conferences, Irish Publishing, O'Brien Press, digital, publishing

Six Implications of Digital Vertical Niches

2009 November 2
15 Comments
by eoinpurcell

Promises made, must be kept!
I promised I would post notes to go with my Pecha Kucha speech from TOC FrankFurt at the start of the week but it has been quite the week, so here, a little later than promised, they are!

For those who attended TOC Frankfurt the notes give some more detail on what I said (or would have liked to say) at the event and fill in what I couldn’t fit in.

Pecha Kucha
I want first, to say a few things about the format:

    1) It is great fun
    2) It is very hard
    3) I tried to do too much
    4) I learned an awful lot
    5) I’d do it again

So to my actual thoughts
I think that digital change is fundamentally altering the world of publishing. Like a glacier it reshapes the geography that it passes over. But in many ways that’s not very useful to a publisher, what is useful is to think about how you might react to this change and what specifically you need to be thinking about.

One of the ways to react is to develop vertical niches in product categories where you are, as Dominique Raccah put it at TOC, “Essential to the conversation!”. A vertical niche is a community organized around a particular type or genre of content, for instance, Irish History, Military History, Science Fiction or Cookery. I’ll leave it up to you to find the niches and communities that suit your market, you might even decide that you can do better than the existing ones (if there are existing ones), or indeed you may need to create some because they do not exist yet.

But what do you need to be thinking about in order to achieve a digital vertical niche or a community? I highlighted 6 things, there are more implications and perhaps these 6 are not even the most important but they are the 6 I wanted people to think about.

    1) Sales Channels
    2) Brand
    3) Content
    4) People
    5) Education
    6) Time

Sales Channels
Creating a community changes drastically the ways and opportunities for selling. For one thing it changes publishers, traditional Business to Business companies into direct to consumer companies. So your sales channels will change. That is okay though because the types of products you’ll be selling will change too. Publishers need to think about how community will change their niches/market segments/genres. If you are a publisher of computer books for instance, it seems to me that some kind of partnership with O’Reilly’s Safari is inescapable in the medium to long term (40 or so publishers agree). I strongly suspect that Tor.com have created a beast of a similar nature. Competing against it may well be folly, so how do you engage and use it as a sales channel? If your segment does not yet have its Safari or Tor.com, how can YOU create it?

Brand
I used to think that we could as easily dump the plethora of imprints that major publishers control and develop a more streamlined brand much as Thomas Nelson did recently. But recently it has occurred to me that many of these imprints can be rejuvenated as niche brands, focused exclusively on single vertical of content, filled with meaning and relevant to consumers. Of course this would require a new way of thinking as well as new honesty with readers too and a willingness to allow imprint to develop an identity of their own.

Content
If your thinking about how sales channels, products and brand are going to change then the way you look at, commissioning and using content will alter completely. In my speech I gave this quote from Mike Statzkin and I think it brings into focus the kind of thinking publishers need to do about their content offering:

The bottom line is that we can expect to see reshuffling as publishers trade off areas they can’t afford to market to for others where they’re going to expend the marketing effort and want to have the most possible content to dominate the niche and from which to extract a payoff for their efforts.

You need to double down in the niches where you can add value and create a community. Otherwise you will spread yourself too thin. That may mean allowing imprints to develop as stand alone companies, trading lists, shuttering imprints or simply commissioning tonnes of new content in a niche you already dominate.

People
If your are going to develop a community around your content then you need to consider people. Not just editors, authors and readers, but community members and the crucial voluntary leaders of those communities. How do you intend to grow an authentic community without recruiting readers and community leaders? Does an audience exist online to do that yet? How can you grow this organically? In a digital community, your content will be worthless without people and engagement. Without people your brand will not grow and your newly thought out sales channels will yield no revenue.

Education
So assume you have the right content mix, your brand has succeeded in attracting attention and you have successfully engaged volunteer community leaders how will you keep other readers interested? The key readers are new arrivals to the community. Do you have the content to hand to lure them in, is there a receptive atmosphere that encourages participation and education of people new to your topic area or genre? Or does your community intimidate newcomers and leave them cold? You need to think about how you will draw those newcomers in and educate them. This will be hard.

Time
All of this is going to take time. And a lot of that time is going to look very unproductive. You need to be ready for that. If you work in a publisher with a decent editorial staff, you’ll be used to that in any case. Of course, once you have a functioning community and so long as you don’t undermine your community and lose it, the community will be easier to maintain than to build. It will be as they say defendable and will create something of a barrier to entry* in your genre.

And that, was pretty much what I wanted to say. I know it didn’t quite come out that way, but you live and you learn Pecha Kucha!
Eoin

* Though my thinking on this is that if you have a truly open community, new publishers will be part of it either as partners or as members. Either way they will add value and ensure that your members see more reason to stay in your community or vertical.

from → Authors, Business, Commissioning, Content, Digital Publishing, Future of Books, Future of Media, Future of Publishing, Future of Reading, Future of Writing, Niches, Planning, Publishing Innovation, Readers, digital, publishing, user generated content

Links of Interest (At Least to Me) 03/10/2009

2009 November 2
1 Comment
by eoinpurcell

In retrospect, this revised talk by Michael Tamblyn from Shortcovers at TOC Frankfurt was one of the most positive and enjoyable! Thankfully following some pressure on Twitter and such like, he put it up on Blip.tv! You should watch it!

This is a very clever post on building a channel (read niche if you will):
Here

Mike Cane on Apple’s long term strategy for ebooks! You’ll like it:
Here

from → Content, Copyright, Digital Publishing, Digital Records, Distribution, Future of Books, Future of Media, Future of Publishing, Future of Reading, Future of Writing, Irish Publishing, Publishing Innovation, Read, digital, e-books, e-publishing, ebooks, publishing

YOU are a publisher

2009 October 28
1 Comment
by eoinpurcell

That’s right YOU.

It bears repeating because at times I fear people have missed the reality that If you have a Blogger or a WordPress.com blog, if you Tweet, Tumbl or Flikr YOU are a publisher.

That carries enormous implications as Guy Gonzales points out in a Tweeted response to me:
GuyleCharlesTweet

What you do about it is up to you, and it doesn’t guarantee success but it IS a fact.
That is why the tagline of this blog is:

It’s that simple — and that hard. And that inescapable.

It’s a line from a rather excellent article in Fast Company by Tom Peters. The article is called The Brand Called You and it’s about branding. It is deeply relevant to this discussion. You should read it.

Eoin
Publisher
Eoin Purcell’s Blog

from → Blogging, Content, Digital Publishing, Distribution, Future of Books, Future of Media, Future of Publishing, Future of Reading, Future of Writing, Media, Publishing Innovation, digital, e-publishing, publishing

Links of Interest (At Least to Me) 27/10/2009

2009 October 27
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by eoinpurcell

Interesting post about engagement strategy and an upcoming webinar from Digital Book World.
Here

Smashbooks looks at how authors need for publishers is being diminished.
Here

Mike Shatzkin has a great post that sums up the problem facing Print Publishers.
Here

from → Agents, Authors, Books, Content, Future of Books, Future of Media, Future of Publishing, Future of Reading, Future of Writing, Print to Digital, Publishing Innovation, digital, publishing

My Pecha Kucha Slides

2009 October 21
1 Comment
by eoinpurcell

I’m putting these up cold, but there will be a post that goes into detail early next week.

Comments most welcome!
Eoin

from → Books, Community, Conferences, Content, Digital Publishing, Future of Books, Future of Media, Future of Publishing, Future of Reading, Future of Writing, Print to Digital, Publishing Innovation, Tools of Change, digital, e-books, e-publishing, publishing

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