Reading | Eoin Purcell's Blog

Go Read This | Sathianathan to head Tesco’s blinkboxbooks | The Bookseller

It will be fascinating to see if big retailers (as distinct from booksellers) can further ebook adoption. I suspect they can and probably will, publishers should be hoping so anyway:

Sathianathan said it was a good time to join Tesco and lead its digital book service. “Technology is changing how people read,” he said. “Offering a digital book service is an example of what Tesco does best – focusing on the customer and anticipating their needs as the market evolves.”

via Sathianathan to head Tesco’s blinkboxbooks | The Bookseller.

Go Read This | The E-Reader Revolution: Over Just as It Has Begun? – WSJ.com

Think of it like the horseless carriage! I think that line about the real innovation is where it’s at:

“The real innovation in e-readers has been giving consumers a convenient way to buy books, wirelessly, without even having to use their computers,” says Sarah Rotman Epps, a Forrester Research analyst. “Giving consumers a digital storefront right in their hands, that’s what really made e-readers a phenomenon.”

But tastes and technology have moved on. People haven’t stopped reading. They are just increasingly likely to read e-books on tablets rather than e-readers, according to a recent Pew Research Center report. The polling firm found that 23% of Americans said they had read e-books in 2012, compared with 16% in 2011

via The E-Reader Revolution: Over Just as It Has Begun? – WSJ.com.

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Go Read This | Google Nexus 7: ebooks’ sleeping giant finally has its own reader | The Verge

Nice piece from Tim Carmody over at The Verge. I think he’s asking the right questions and saying the right things. I’d note one small thing though, which is that ALL the tech giants have been using reading to sell tablets, its obviously feeding back to them that users may THINK they want tablets for reading books until they actually get them and use them for almost everything else:

In other words, books and magazines are important not for their own sake, but for Google’s long-term strategy. For years, Google Books has been a store with no physical storefront, even as Apple and Amazon convinced millions of us to walk around with networked shops in our bags and pockets. Add in the rejected settlement and ongoing lawsuits with the Authors’ Guild over out-of-print books, and Google’s attention wandered elsewhere. Meanwhile, book retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble carved huge chunks out of the Android tablet market. The booksellers’ customer base helped them branch out, forking the platform and substituting their app stores for Google’s.

via Google Nexus 7: ebooks’ sleeping giant finally has its own reader | The Verge.

1 comment

May 10, 2012

Go read This | Binaries Aren’t Going to Work « Wordisms

It’s a day of good posts on publishing and books and how they are going to work:

I often get annoyed at people ruing that the Internet has destroyed book culture, because this tends to clump blogs, online magazine and journals, and independent or DIY presses alongside content farms, auto-aggregated “reviews” and recommendations, and corporations intent on selling your data to other corporations. But that’s not to say that there isn’t a threat from the Internet, it’s just that the threat to book culture is not from digital, per se. It’s from corporate entities really, really interested in finding ways of exploiting book culture, sucking it dry and leaving its bloated corpse behind when it’s finished.

via Binaries Aren’t Going to Work « Wordisms.

March 27, 2012

Author, Niche & Power Shifts: What Pottermore MIGHT Point To

Mike Shatzkin has a fine post about the implications of the Pottermore move in terms of publishers and DRM:

Without DRM, as Berlucchi explained, anybody can sell ebooks that can be read on a Kindle. Once Pottermore decided they could live without DRM, they faced Amazon with a very difficult choice. The ebooks were going to go on Kindle devices whether Amazon wanted them there or not. Either they could ignore them or they could play along. I am sure the “play along” deal includes compensation to Amazon for the sales they refer (as it does B&N and, according to a quote from Redmayne, other distribution relations and affiliations will be enabled going forward.)

In other words, in a refreshing change from recent history, the content owner was able to present Amazon with a “take it or leave it” proposition. They decided to “take it”. They were wise. The game was changing either way.

I’ve long felt that the power balance between authors and publishers has shifted and will shift further as digital change drives home a point I made most clearly in my essay No New Normal: The Value Web (and reiterated here on Futurebook):

All of this will happen despite, or perhaps because of the fact that, the actual slice of value captured by each player changes in size and shape. Publishers will be forced to cede more revenue to authors, the idea that 25% Net is a defensible long-term ebook royalty rate is a farce best forgotten about quickly.

And even earlier (2006) when I wrote about Authors Driving Change:

E-books will push this change even more. There is no reason why authors’ royalties should be the same on e-books as they are for paper books and in many ways there is no reason why the authors cannot sell e-books themselves rather than through a publisher. Why should you sell a paper publisher your digital rights when there is no need?

I think Mike is right to say that Pottermore marks a decisive point of change. It is the point at which owning the brand becomes essential, the point at which the 25% slice for the author stops being enough and the changed power balance between author and publisher begins to bite really hard.

If publishers hope to use author brand and scale to attract readers direct then they need to persuade the authors to work with them. That’s gonna take money and a whole new approach to working with the author. I expect we’ll see more of that.

The other change I believe it will drive even further is that of Niche or community driven content publishing. If selling without DRM enables big publishers to flourish as retailers (or for that matter niche publishers with scale in a single niche), then there is even more incentive for them to pull readers together in communities of interest (or rather to build stores that appeal to those existing communities of interest) and sell content to them directly rather than spending all their marketing on pulling them to a mass appeal site that only offers them content that works for that reader by chance event or a well placed cookie!

So I see Niche coming back with a vengeance, and community at its side, perhaps even a third horseman in the shape of an industry newly engaged in open standards, weak DRM and a willingness to innovate. That’s rather exciting if you ask me.

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Eoin Purcell's Blog

Tag: Reading

March 4, 2013