Category: Author & Publisher Strategies

Concluding my summary of my recent presentation to a publishing industry group, begun here and continued here, we turn to the question of what to do to revitalize the publishing opportunity.

I wrote a lot about the idea of exploding the limitations of the book in the last installment. Getting beyond the covers. Turning from a distribution model to a reader-centric model. It’s simple to argue that change is needed and to say what needs changing. Here, I offer a few specific ideas about lines of research and development that I would like to see begun by publishers, who, if they wish to remain viable—let alone profitable—must undertake immediately. The change in book publishing will happen at a faster pace than the collapse of newspaper and music publishing did, making a collective effort at research and publication of the results for all to discuss and use, critical during the next 18 months. Think open sourcing the strategy, so that a thousand innovations can bloom.

Making books into e-books is not the challenge facing publishers and authors today. In fact, thinking in terms of merely translating text to a different display interface completely misses the problem of creating a new reading experience. Books have served well as, and will continue to be, containers for moving textual and visual information between places and across generations. They work. They won’t stop working. But when moving to a digital environment, books need to be conceived with an eye firmly set on the interactions that the text/content will inspire. Those interactions happen between the author and work, the reader and the work, the author and reader, among readers and between the work and various services, none of which exist today in e-books, that connect works to one another and readers in the community of one book with those in other book-worlds.

Just as with the Web, where value has emerged out of the connection of documents by publishers and readers—the Web is egalitarian in its connectivity, but still has some hierarchical features in its publishing technologies—books must be conceived of not just as a single work, but a collection of work (chapters, notes, illustrations, even video, if you’re thinking of a “vook“) that must be able to interact internally and with other works with which it can communicate over an IP network. This is not simply the use of social media within the book, though that’s a definite benefit, but making the book accessible for use as a medium of communication. Most communities emerge long after the initial idea that catalyzes them is first published.

These communications “hooks” revolve around traditional bibliographic practices, such as indexing and pagination for making references to a particular location in a book useful, as well as new functionality, such as building meta-books that combine the original text with readers’ notes and annotations, providing verification of texts’ authenticity and completeness, curation (in the sense that, if I buy a book today and invest of myself in it the resulting “version” of the book will be available to others as a public or private publication so that, for instance, I can leave a library to my kids and they can pass it along to their children) and preservation.

Think about how many versions of previously published books, going all the way back to Greek times, when books were sold on scrolls in stalls at Athens, have been lost. We treasure new discoveries of an author’s work. In a time of information abundance, however, we still dismiss all the other contributions that make a book a vital cultural artifact. Instead, we need to recognize that capturing the discussions around a book, providing access (with privacy intact) to the trails that readers have followed on their own or in discussions with others to new interpretations and uses for a text, and the myriad commentaries and marginalia that have made a book important to its readers is the new source of infinite value that can be provided as the experience we call “reading.” Tomorrow’s great literary discovery may not be an original work by a famous author, but a commentary or satire

Continuing my tale of the publishing industry presentation I made last month, begun here, let’s turn to the changes in the book and book supply chain that are necessary to resurrect publishing as a pivotal source of creative value in a time when gatekeepers are despised and largely redundant.

The electronic publishing supply chain is dominated by distributors, particularly those that wield a popular format as leverage to gain a larger share of revenue from publishers, who are still trying to determine how to change their product to address opportunities when books are not trapped in paper. Just as the music industry in the late 90s was led by the nose by encoding companies that charged a million or more dollars to “rip” a new version of a record label’s catalog to address a new format, today’s e-book industry is being hauled along by distributors who trade “free” encoding and distribution of e-books to publishers in exchange for rights to do so. The only major difference between the e-book industry today and music industry of 1999 is that more rights are being exchanged for encoding, where music remained a cash business that sapped the labels of massive amounts of money to keep up with new formats and channels for music. There are, however, plenty of e-book services companies trying to reproduce the music encoding phenomenon with publishers who, thinking that they can pay for a format will then be able to distribute the resulting files directly.

Unfortunately for publishers, the channel is controlled by application and hardware developers who have the actual customer relationships. Amazon, which has been toying with the question of whether to compete directly with publishers for more than a year, finally did so last week by signing Seven Habits author Stephen Covey to an e-book deal that completely circumvents the publisher of the books, Simon & Schuster. When I made my presentation in November, this suggestion was greeted with horror and a reflexive dismissiveness that has been beaten into sensibility by the hard reality that publishers have never mastered the customer relationship.

Publishers have excelled at the paper distribution process, actually managing to earn profits despite the vast return rates that paper books produce by the nature of mismatched supply and demand. With electronic publishing and the Web, publishers can certainly reduce returns—indeed, that is what most publishers I talk to are banking on in order to survive the transition to mixed paper and digital publishing—but no one establishes a branded relationship with a publisher, simply because books are aimed at readers’ attention, which is completely fungible, shifting from one publishers’ products to another’s from day to day and read to read.

Competing for attention and building brand reputation for reliable, enjoyable or authoritative writing (though books will be much more than writing in the near future, as Fast Company‘s Adam Penenberg pointed out on Wednesday), requires that publishers reject