The defensive position is to seek to continue to artificially impose national boundaries on the pretense of protecting local cultural industries, whether for Ireland or for Canada. But consumers can always work around these artificial boundaries, and as “The Game of Thrones” has demonstrated, artificial boundaries mainly serve to encourage pirating (http://www.techradar.com/news/web/internet/game-of-thrones-tops-torrent-charts-in-2012-1080138).

What I find encouraging in startups like ePubDirect is seeing that the same porous border that allows the foreign invaders inside the walls allow innovate startup to counter-attack.

While “US publishers will probably be the second biggest publishers of ebooks bought by Irish readers (if not the first having overtaken the UK)”, US and UK readers can become the largest audience for Irish (and Canadian) writers if, and only if, the publishers in each country give up on the now obsolete practice of leasing rights to US and UK publishers, who will never do as good a job digitally as the home author and the home publisher.

1) So build it.

2) I contest your assertion that the tenor of my writing is as you say. Indeed in this post, I wasn’t even setting out to look at the how or the why, simply the reality of the market. I DO think Irish businesses can create global enterprises, I suspect doing it in the book space would be difficult, not impossible, for example StoryToys is an Irish company doing global level stuff. But again, not a legacy business. The list is long of impressive folks doing impressive stuff, but that wasn’t the point of this post.

3) When it comes to the cost, it isn’t per say the actual platform (though that has costs, even when using the very good open source software that exists), but in marketing, community building, advertising, recruiting the right staff and all the other things that a good solid and scalable business needs. Yes many of these can be bootstrapped and for the right ideas, many don’t matter, but most ideas aren’t the one idea and need good solid structures to make them go from idea to actuality. Otherwise everyone would do it.

So yeah, I do think the Irish industry has to date done a bad job of dealing with the innovative landscape, I also think that most Irish business are ill-equipped to NOW change and that new companies without legacies would be better at it. But no I do not think that it is impossible to start a business that has global reach from here.

Eoin

No offence intended Eoin, but I regret to say that this is the blinkered view that persists here and causes us to fall further and further behind in the Internet world. Lack of vision, lack of ambition, lack of imagination. Always seeing the problems and not the opportunity. Always looking back at the old economy and not at the new online economy.

I’m not sure I agree that the cost of a platform is tiny. Sure, you CAN do things innovatively and for a limited cost but fairly soon, as you scale the cost becomes considerably larger than you would like.

This is especially true when your market is a global one and your marketing costs become global. It’s hard to see how a business, rooted in the Irish economy and supported by domestic revenue could grow a global business. it would need (as those who have successfully done it have needed) venture capital.

As for entrepreneurial spirit, I find there’s quite a bit of it in Ireland, just not focussed on digital maybe!
Eoin

In the world of paper, big capital mattered, production runs mattered, mass production mattered. This placed us at an immediate and inevitable disadvantage. Printing books here made no sense, going to an Irish agent made some sense but being in the periphery of a large market was always a risk. Publishing with an Irish publishers carried the obvious risks of provinciality and missing out on potential.

One small compensation was that the Irish economy still earned some income from publishing through selling paper books here in large numbers. That is about to change drastically because paper is on the way out the door. How long it takes is the only issue. Jobs in the paper book retailing sector are doomed whichever way you look at it. It is up to Ireland whether we can replace those with digital jobs.

Having worked on web projects and been involved in a web design business for several years not so long ago I take direct issue with the assertion that “The costs of developing ebook platforms, ebook retailing sites and ebook distribution systems are high”. What does ‘high’ mean exactly ? The cost is a tiny fraction of building any kind of real world platform and it is well within the budget of Irish business and Irish entrepreneurial capacity. Of that I have absolutely no doubt.

What is lacking in Ireland right now is the following. The economy tanked four years ago and there’s little money for risk projects. Spending has tanked. Ambition is running very low. Imagination and ambition are wounded and the media is exploiting our predicament by talking down the economy for commercial reasons. Publishers here have on the whole maintained the bunker attitude, hoping to god that digital goes away or a miracle happens to save them before they have to take any actual action to embrace the heathen computer world.

All of these things combined has created an unfortunate swamp in the whole publishing business, and most businesses here.

Having taken a big interest in the ePublishing industry over the last 3 years I see huge opportunities in the country for innovative exploitation of this transition to digital. I can see at least three significant opportunities and have been searching for entrepreneurial interest for a while now without luck as yet.

Every downside of the transition to digital brings an even more massive upside in terms of opportunity. We in Ireland now have a window on the whole world as a potential market. For what is, incontrovertibly, a relatively small capital investment we can reach out and offer our unique writing talent to the world.

Unfortunately timing has not been our friend.