Michael's Blog

Archive for the ‘Publishing’ Category

It’s a lazy Sunday morning, Kerry is reading a book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She likes it, tells me briefly about it and gets back to it. She is a focussed reader and I realize that she’ll be offline for a while, considering this is the first in a series of three.

I decide to read it as well, and check IBooks and the IPad Kindle app. IBooks does not have a lot of content in Australia. Amazon’s store wants me to register my Kindle before allowing me to download any ebooks. I don’t have a Kindle, I can’t find out quickly how to register my iPhone or iPad, so I move on to Kobo. Credit card registration and 30 seconds later the book is on my IPad, ready to read. I love instant gratification.

Cost is less than half of the paper edition, $10 vs $25. This is the same for most bestsellers and will certainly have an effect on the printed volumes.

The Kobo reader app is simple: adjust font size, screen brightness and there you are, ready to flip through pages. If you like, you can change the page transitions, page curl for the traditionalist, fade for the presentation fan. Pages turn instantly, no delay as on some of the e-ink readers.

The Kindle app has a couple of additional features: There are annotations and explanations in footnotes. You can also see which passages of a book others found remarkable, as they are highlighted and when you tap them, the app tells you how many other readers highlighted the word, sentence or paragraph. There is no further explanation or discussion, but it is a basis for forums and other interactivity.

The IPad is a little heavier than a paperback and that makes it difficult to read while trying to hold it with one hand, for example standing in a train. But lying on a lounge, the IPad rests on my chest and holding it is no problem. I have chosen fairly big type and I prefer to keep it in portrait, so that I don’t have to flip pages all the time. Being able to read without glasses is one of the main advantages of e-readers for vain people like myself.
Backlit pages mean you don’t need any additional light, it makes you location independent and is obviously very handy at night. The iPad does emit a lot of light, but it is surely less disturbing than an extra light in the bedroom.
Bookmarks let you find the spot you left off immediately and I never have a problem finding where I left off. The Kobo reader does not have a progress bar and does not show you where you are in the book. I notice during those short reading breaks when you look at he book instead of reading the type and contemplate what you have taken in and what could happen next. Kobo reader gives you a page count within the chapter, so you know you are on page 11 of 26 in chapter 15, but that may not be relevant to overall progress. The Kindle reader gives you a percentage at the bottom of the page, 12% read of the book.
Surveys claim that readers are faster when reading off paper, but I can’t confirm that. Once you have gotten used to the differences, the medium doesn’t really matter that much.
In fact, I finished first, compared to my control group, and now I can put the book away - though I haven’t quite worked out how to do that. One thing I definitely can’t do, is give the paper book to someone else, “you have to read this…”.

The IPad is a cool reading tool, it requires changing a few habits, but the advantages compared to printed books show very quickly. The biggest of them will be the price of the book, printed matter cannot compete with books at half their price. Other benefits are instant availability or books and the adjustability of the display. However, it is not for every situation: in bright sunlight it is useless; reading does use battery power which needs to be managed and a $1000 gadget is not to be left on the beach when going for a swim.

Anyway, time to download the next book in the series.

Twitter for business?

If you think you can ignore Twitter, have a look:

Some stats from April 2010:

• Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users
• It gets 300,000 new users a day
• It receives 180 Million Unique visitors a month through web and 3rd party apps
• >50 million tweets per day are published via web, sms, mobile apps
• 90% of content is generated by 10% of users

Some of the things businesses use Twitter for:

• get and publish news
  (many news items are now published through twitter first, broadcast media have long started naming and quoting it as a source of information, prominent examples were the landing on the Hudson, Mumbai, the Teheran demonstrations)
• market analysis
  Twitter is for short messages, often linking to further, more elaborate posts and articles; it is searchable and a search will often give you a snapshot of thoughts and feelings about a topic, more immediate than a conventional search engine)
• research
  (many tweets are pointers to further information online; link journalism)
• creating and observing networks and interest groups
  (by following people and building lists you can create interest groups and collect information about topics and areas of interest)
• broadcasting of promotions
  (within a social media marketing plan)
• direct communication (listen and respond)
  (most bigger marketing departments listen to the stream of tweets and often do reply or connect in some other way with customers or prospects)
• general customer relationship maintenance

Twitter is public, but allows for conversations to be continued in private.

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 response (QR) barcodes can store up to 4000 characters, much more than a conventional barcode. They may contain 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 information such as:

• 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.