The Kindle is becoming increasingly common as a reading tool. The iPhone is getting high marks as well. We’re seeing a migration from a print-bound world to an (excuse the plug) unbound one, in terms of how we access the published world. Like the record labels in the past decade, the book publishing industry is resisting the inevitable and overlooking the opportunities for reaching markets in new ways.
Have you ever pre-ordered a new book on Amazon? They’ll charge your card and ship it to you as soon as it’s ready. If you didn’t have that option, you might forget to make the purchase or change your mind. With e-readers, you’d think that access to a new book would be instantaneous. Technically, yes. But publishers are so set in their traditional business model that they’re actually trying to push back the release dates for e-books to give the paper versions a chance to hit the market. Read this article to learn the details.
Slate.com argues that publishing is going to get Napstered as a result. We think they’re just missing a huge chance to fulfill an actual need. Instead of selling more books to people who want them, they’re telling customers to buy them in ways that fit their century-old business model. Way to go guys.
Book Expo America is one of the three major annual events in the world of publishing, along with the London Book Fair and the Frankfurt Book Fair. This year BEA is taking place in New York City. And the buzz is all about e-books.
So far e-books represent 1 to 3 percent of total book sales. But they make up the fastest growing part of the industry, and publishers, authors and booksellers have no idea just how big they will become and how they might affect profits and reading habits in the future.
People will always want paper, but buy-click-download is going to revolutionize the way readers read and authors connect with the market.
Is it good for authors to have their books be accessible digitally for free? Farhad Manjoo weighs in on Slate.com. As the work done by Google to digitize all books continues, more and more authors will be confronted by this question. In our experience, authors come down firmly on one side of the fence or the other. Everyone wants to get paid for their work, but some see the easy access as a way of promoting themselves and being part of the public conversation, while others see it as a way in which their intellectual property can be stolen.
The same range of views exist when it comes to presentations and talks for consultants, coaches and experts. But perhaps the argument will soon be moot. In an age in which connections and business will be driven significantly by digital networking, can an author or expert afford not to participate in the free-for-all marketplace of ideas?
Over at the Times a pair of bellwether articles. First, the news that Microsoft is shelving Encarta, its CD-Rom encyclopedia. After eclipsing the bound encyclopedia that was once a major purchase of striving families, the CD-Rom has itself succumbed to the search engine and dynamic sites like Wikepedia.
Second, the news that Facebook is going open-source with the tools it makes available to members. The weakness of any networking site is that it binds members to its location – people and ideas outside of that realm don’t exist in a networking sense. Facebook is reading the tea leaves correctly. People want flexibility in their devices and their virtual communities.
We wonder whether organizational learning strategies are keeping up with the spirit of the times.
It may not seem as noteworthy as two railroad giants merging in the late 1800s, but we did see an interesting move in digital publishing yesterday:
Maybe Steve Jobs doesn’t think there’s a market for e-books on the iPhone, but Amazon seems to. On Monday, it acquired Lexcycle, the company that developed the popular Stanza iPhone and iPod-Touch e-book reader application, for an undisclosed sum.
Alas, the competition between the two services seemed promising, but Amazon probably recognizes better than most that when it comes to digital content, consumers want a good e-reader, but they also want flexibility to move between devices. Stanza and Kindle can actually sync your bookmark even when you use your iPhone and your Kindle to read the same book.
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