Michael's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Publishing’

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.

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.

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.

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