Michael's Blog

Archive for the ‘Publishing’ Category

One day after the launch of the IPad, Macmillan – one of the major book publishers in the US – announced to Amazon that they would not agree with the Amazon pricing of their content anymore. The following weekend a showdown happened that eventually concluded with Amazon giving in and changing their pricing model. This was the first public locking of horns about ebook pricing and may be symptomatic of future discussions between publishers and digital distributors.

Amazon wanted to sell books for their Kindle ebook reader at 9.95, Macmillan said they want to determine the pricing of books themselves, not undercut their hardcover editions by that much and sell at least some of them at a higher price (14.95), just like they have always done with distributors/booksellers of paper titles. Macmillan stated that they would not allow Amazon to sell their books. This was communicated by their CEO John Sargent via a paid ad in an online newsletter on Saturday.

Amazon promptly withdrew all Macmillan titles – e- and paper books – from their online store (which had the effect that Macmillan titles shot to the top of the other online retailers, like Barns & Noble).

Eventually, Amazon gave in, allowed Macmillan to set their own pricing and re-instated all titles.

In the meantime, other publishers, like the french Hachette Group, have joined Macmillan. Harper Collins have also expressed their dissatisfaction with Amazon’s pricing.

Amazon’s Kindle Team posts a letter to their customers citing a mission for inexpensive ebooks.

So this was to a big part prompted by the introduction of the IPad by Apple, who will open an ibook store in competition to Amazon, so far the dominant ebook distributor.

The Apple IBook store will work according to the “agency model”, in which publishers determine pricing of their titles, proceeds are split 70/30 between publisher and Apple. Amazon, on the other hand, operates on a low cost model, buying books at a big wholesaler’s discount (70%) from the publishers and selling them at bargain pricing.

So the result is that ebook prices are going up. In the short term. In the long term there will be competition, and many more of these battles will be fought. No publisher will price themselves out of a competitive market, and if titles are available on a variety of platforms, from a variety of distributors, this can only be a good thing in the long run.

2010 will be an exciting year in book publishing and distribution. Old business and pricing models will have to be questioned and revised, and even traditional media producers must re-think, ideally before technological advances, market changes and consumer behaviour force them to.

Sunday morning on Bondi Beach, 27 degrees, time for a swim.

There is a promotion by IKEA for 30 years of their most popular book case, Billy. There are hundreds of books in a very long book case and if you bring an old book, you can exchange it for a new one. You can also buy books, proceeds are donated to the Australian literacy and numeracy foundation.

On the beach, print rules. Magazines and paperbacks go where LCDs are impossible to read and too cumbersome to take. It will take a while until printed media is replaced by IPads here.

This week the Apple IPad was unveiled after much anticipation and speculation. There was a lot of media hype, the most entertaining of which were probably  Jason Calacanis’ tweets before the event about features he pretended to have seen on a prototype, which were taken as truth by some journalists who re-posted them immediately, further raising expectations (and showing the dilemma of confusing tweets with a respectable news source in the process).

The official video is here and the device looks definitely cool.

It does, however, not have anything unexpected, there are no unknowns, nothing magical in the device, it is a 9.7 inch screen that you can use to play games and read news, books and magazines. It is lacking a few features that were expected. It is clearly made to consume contents, not to create.

To me – and I am working in a printing company – the IPad looks like a gaming tool and like print replacement. It has the ability to make online content accessible and trendy.  Apple has used brilliant design to make technology accesible many times before, and I am sure the IPad will accelerate the uptake of online distribution and consumption of content.

“The iPad and other tablets will continue the erosion of preference for printed goods” writes Dr Joe Webb.

I don’t know if it will kick some new life into newspapers or magazines, but it will make their online content available to more traditional readers, who so far have not spent extended time with online reading.

As for books, it really depends on whether Apple can secure the content. If you decide to read for an extended period of time, say a book, you will welcome the fact that you will be able to get the exact content you want within minutes. Whether you will be able to focus on an LCD screen, whether the updates from facebook and messaging applications will not distract you, and whether you will actually have the device ready and powered up where you want to read is another question.

At least now we don’t have to speculate on what the IPad will be and we can start thinking about whether it will bring any change, what it will change and where it will accelerate change.

Monthly Computer Pals Meeting

Last week I was invited to talk at the monthly Computer Pals meeting and I met a group of great people that are all interested in learning about digital technology. Computer Pals is a club of seniors on Sydney’s North Shore, they have over 400 members and a waiting list of more than 100.

Computer Pals conduct courses on topics such as using PCs, the use of popular software packages, connecting and communicating via the internet. They organise talks on technical topics once a month.

I was invited to talk about recent developments in print, recent investments into big presses as well as new technologies such as digital printing and ink jet presses. I included a short printer’s winge about dropping volumes in print, technology driven changes and threats from online technologies.

All wired up and talking at the Computer Pals

The audience was great, there were many questions and nobody fell asleep (not just here an important indicator on the quality and suitability of the talk). Almost everyone in the audience had some sort of connections to printing or even the printing industry, either through having worked in it themselves or through relatives.

An interesting topic was the development of digital book printing and the fact that it has become very affordable to self publish and get your own book printed at book shop quality, even at low quantities. Obviously many in the audience saw an opportunity and incentive to write and then produce their own book.

The Computer Pals definitely “got it”, they understand the need to keep learning new technologies and their applications. It was a real honour to talk at the club.

QR Codes are a popular type of two-dimensional barcode, which are also known as hardlinks or physical world hyperlinks. The quick readable (QR) barcodes can store a variety of text information, be read very fast and even upside down and can be scanned from a screen, a newspaper or magazine, flyer or even a billboard.

QR Codes store text, which can be:

• A website address
• A telephone number
• An SMS Message
• Contact Details (VCARD)
• A Google Map
• A Facebook or MySpace Profile

QR codes can be generated easily and read by scanners or camera equipped mobile phones. Many Nokias have the software built in, if you have an IPhone, you can download free QR barcode readers at the ITunes store.To generate qr codes you can use dedicated software or a number of free online tools, there is a list here.

QR codes can be placed in magazine ads or on outdoor billboards, pointing to further information about products. These hyperlinks on paper help integrating paper into the information and marketing media mix, they can be found on books, McDonalds packaging, pointing to information about your burger and there is even an example where codes on a cemetery point to information about people. Another very cool application is Starbuck’s loyalty IPhone app.

The code below is pointing to this post, if you have the software on your phone you can try it out:

Update: QR codes gaining popularity:

NYT: From Print to Phone to Web. And a Sale?

Some thoughts about high speed inkjet presses and their impact on print:

Inkjet presses are going to make a big difference in many digital and offset pressrooms to the point of being disruptive technology. They will bring a jump in in productivity and a substantial reduction in price for digital colour printing.

Presses available today are producing “good enough” quality, but not yet offset like quality.
However: There are samples from two manufacturers, Kodak an HP, that show that offset quality can be achieved. Key is the stock the press can print on, especially when thinking about offset replacement.

Inkjet technology will improve in output quality quickly as most RnD money seems to be devoted to this technology, and has been for a few years.

Inkjets have so far been mostly used in transactional printing, but now are moving into higher quality variable data and short run print including educational and trade publishing. This is a change for vendors, who need to satify a different set of requirements from printers compared to mailing houses and statement printers.

As more and more are sold and a wider range of models is introduced, Inkjet presses will substantially come down in pricing over the next few years.

Cost of consumables and service are not stable yet, different vendors have different costing models, factors are cap ex, service charge, cost of ink and in some cases print heads.

Printers (and suppliers) will need to re-think their pricing models with inkjets. Ink usage is a determining factor in cost per page/document, this may have been possible to be calculated in advance in transactional use, but will be much more difficult with jobbing and offset replacement work.

More info: There is a collection of links from the last few months covering articles about inkjet presses and manufacturers here.

Recent news about print and publishing included the (not so) news that print volumes are declining, Newspapers are vanishing, magazines are getting thinner or disappear, advertising revenues are suffering in a recession and are shifting online (and could you blame them? Measurable returns, pay for results, easier, cheaper and quicker production).

The future of paper books is not looking any more promising as E-Readers gain momentum and are fast becoming mainstream gadgets and then tools, even Opra’s Life has been changed by an ebook reader?

Books are not read anymore anyway, says Steve Jobs in a NYT interview,

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

Espresso book machines are installed in bookshops to print books on demand and printers argue that they won’t replace whole digital print departments. Yet.

E-paper and e-ink are driving a whole range of applications, the Esquire cover was only a first stab, showing that the technology is mainstream ready.

Digital Natives are the ones to watch, because they grow up (not) using print without a long education through which print was so dominant, will they treat print as a niche product, a luxury item, books and magazines as not useful but pretty?

It’s obvious: Print is suffering, if not dead already. Other – formerly known as new – media have proven themselves and print is just not a preferred medium of communication any more. The US elections showed the niche use of print, the elections were won online, but everybody wanted a copy of the newspaper front page with the historic election result, several papers reprinted that edition.

Further volumes of offset print will change to print on demand, for manuals, books and even magazines. Returns and obsolescense are expensive, environmentally unsound and not sustainable in the longer run.

Print is not for fast, efficient information distribution, it cannot compete with online on efficiencies and soon the people at the receiving end will be satisfied with online  as opposed to print, if not happier, because it makes it so much easier for them to re-purpose.

Print is good for archival of special information. Coffee tables need books. However, if you think how many photos will often be viewed but never printed.

If you’re in print, now should be the time to re-think. Print will obviously not vanish that quickly - think CD manufacturers - but it willl change. It is important to question your perception of print’s relevance, always remembering that younger people may not inherit that attachment to printed newspapers and books that you may have.

So learning from the famous Canadian philosopher Wayne Gretzky, we’re thinking not where it is, but rather where the book will be.

Trying to buy physical paper books in Sydney I was reminded again why local book shops do not compete well with Amazon.

“The Goal” is a business book about constraints and ongoing improvements in manufacturing, it sold more than 3 million copies and last week I needed to get a few copies for our production people

I went to Borders in Bondi Junction and could not find it in the business section. I queried the database and an employee. She said she’d never heard of it, they did not have it in stock and if I really wanted it, my best bet was Amazon

I went to Dymocks in Broadway. They did not have it in stock, found the name in the database, did not let me know whether they had it in another Dymocks store and could not tell me when they could get it in.

I went to Better Read than Dead in Newtown, they were helpful but did not have any copies in stock. However, they could order it in, I could have them in four weeks.

The Co-Op bookstore in Broadway did not have it, but they could tell me that it was in stock in their Uni bookstore, so I went to Sydney Uni and bought four copies at $38 each.

I looked up the price on Amazon and even including shipping they would have cost me half the amount.

I then contacted the publisher in the UK to explain the issue and to offer local production on demand, but they were not interested.

Twitter is the last big thing in social networking, catch it before it jumps the shark.

You may have heard of it: users answer to the question “What are you doing now?” with sms size messages that can be sent via the web or the phone to many others, that are interested.

You can be interested by following someone, which means that you receive all their tweets.

It is a very fast way of distributing information and it has been all the rage for a few months now. Millions of people are using it, Barrack Obama used it to communicate with his electorate and his twitter followers knew first, who was nominated as vice president. After that, twitter gained popularity outside of tech circles, it quickly became used for marketing purposes, now the accounts with the most followers are celebrities, reporting their daily lives.

When you have such masses of users and messages, there is obviously a very high signal to noise ratio – as with all free messaging/social networking sites – and a lot of junk (“just went to bed”), but there is also a lot of interesting information. You can find this by following interesting people or by searching through all tweets (http://search.twitter.com) for interesting terms.

Searching Twitter can give a fascinating snapshot of opinions about a current topic. Since Twitter has gained so much in popularity and therefore numbers it has become another tool for social marketing. Marketing departments not only spreading content via Twitter, they also scan messages and interact. (Within 24 hours after I twittered about a Virgin flight, the marketing dept of V Australia became one of my followers.)

A great site showing what people post is Twistori (http://www.twistori.com), which filters messages by key words (love, feel, think, hate) and displays a continuous stream of messages posted from all over the world.An interesting conversation starter with twitter research is here.

If you have an IPhone you can limit the tweets you can see to people within a 5 km radius, which means that you get local messages, possibly from someone in the same building as you, or sitting in the same seminar tweeting about the speaker.
Great IPhone applications are Tweetie; Twinkle; Twittelato; Twitteriffic and Summizer.

For publishing/printing there are many sources of good info bits in twitter, you just need to search. Just don’t start with themediaisdying, they are reporting mostly on media and print companies that fold or lay off staff, not a feel good account to follow.

The second wave of ebook readers like the Iliad or the Kindle shows that there is life in the idea of reading from a screen (TechCrunch has some numbers).

However, while these devices are much improved, friendlier on the eye, net-connected (Kindle) for immediate downloads they are still far from perfect (not only in that I don’t have one). Some can not play sounds, some cannot display videos, some need to be connected to computers to update their contents and some are just hard to use. Is it really the best approach to mimmick the interface of printed books? I think that might mean imposing a limitation that does not really have that many benefits.
A logical choice for an ebook reader would have to be the iPhone. Always connected, millions sold, great screen, multi-media capable, etc.

EReader is an ebook reader application, available for free at the app store. EReader lets you adjust font sizes, animation when flipping pages and screen brightness. The reader software is available for Iphone and IPod Touch, WindowsMobile devices, Palms, Symbian driven phones as well as PCs or Macs. EReader publishes content at their website, tagged as the world’s largest ebook site. EReader is powered by Fictionwise, choice is not enormous, but there are non fiction best sellers like “Tipping Point”.

Another option to read on the IPhone is Instapaper. This application lets you tag web pages while browsing on the computer, these tagged pages are then downloaded to the phone and can be read later.  This is a bit like bookmarking, but better, because you do not have to connect to the internet to read later. It allows you to display formatted as a web page or as text only, which is often much easier to read.

Stanza is another free application that makes it easy to read on the IPhone. It’s IPhone application is very flexible when it comes to adjusting text size, brightness, etc. The PC or Mac based application allows the conversion of almost any file into an IPhone readable format. It also converts into other formats like pdf, or for the Amazon Kindle, for other phones (mobi) or ebook readers.

Stanza is probably the most popular e-reader application on the IPhone, which prompted Amazon to buy it in spring 2009.

Another reading application is Classics. Classics starts with your bookshelf, where your books are stored. You can add books, subtract books or even re-arrange them on the shelf.
This adminttedly beautiful interface is continued to the pages, which are off-white and the page annimation, the closest to a paper book page I have seen. Even the mark, which it places automatically at the page you stop reading, looks like a real old fashioned bookmark.

However, while this is app is sticking very close to the presentation of a paper book, this also means that it does not (yet) take advantage of welcome e-reader features, such as adjustable font size. The view of the text is not customisable, the text does not even rotate as the phone is turned.

Classics definitely has a great interface, but for the actual reading of books it will only please those, who want to be as close as possible to the paper book experience. Classic costs 3.99 Australian dollars and comes with 12 public domain titles.

Stanza on the other hand is a versatile application that makes it easy to convert any text into an e-book. It takes advantages of the e-reader capabilities and allows for customisation of the reading experience.

Stanza is an interface to books, magazines and news and if Lexcycle are able to convince publishers to let them distribute current titles, it may be the application that helps the IPhone compete with devices like the Kindle as a reading device.

Applications like these make it easier to read on the IPhone, but the real breakthrough for reading on the IPhone could come when applications and content take advantage of its multi media capabilities, ie. when I can read, listen and watch the story on the phone (The Kindle already provides links to Wikipedia, however without the option of colour pictures or videos).