So Misguided

Dan Wagstaff, publicist extraordinaire over at the Raincoast blog, and I have been having an ongoing conversation about books and technology.  In this series, Better Books, we’re looking at the book publishing industry’s challenges, successes and promises from a technology perspective.

Here’s what you missed:
Introduction
Part 1

New this week:

Question 2
There have been comparisons between the music industry and the book industry –- diminishing placement, payment for placement, digitalization of content—in your opinion is this an accurate assessment?

I say sure. But I also say compare apples to apples. The music industry has seen much more dramatic change in the last 100 years than book publishing. Cory Doctorow talks about the music wars and how each stage of technical advancement had some type of cannibalizing effect on the old format. (I’m paraphrasing and likely missing a lot of steps here. Old Doctorow article with some of these thoughts.)

He rightly points out that the music industry was mainly sheet-music publishers.
Hiring a live pianist gave way to the piano roll.

From Doctorow: The player piano was a digital recording and playback system. Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which they sold by the thousands—the hundreds of thousands—the millions. They did this without a penny’s compensation to the publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!

Composers and music publishers were in an uproar, and this repeats every 10 or 15 years (the uproar part, but also the technology shifts).

- Records, 8-track, tape, cd, mp3
- Live music, sheet music, piano roll, radio, iTunes

The motion picture industry is a better comparison to the music industry: vaudeville theatre to theatre house to home movie to BitTorrent.

With books—we have books. I know there are ebooks, there are digital downloads. But for whatever reason we are still cutting down trees, making paper and buying bound formats instead of digital books.

So can we compare the music industry to the book publishing industry. Sure, but there are complications and historical parallels and divergences. We should be careful about only comparing the apple bits to the apple bits. (Subtle plug for Mac and bits and bytes.)

I think Dan agrees with me. I should have let him go first.

The similarities between the music industry and the book industry tend to be overstated. Sure, there are some superficial similarities - they are both creative industries right?  But I’m sure part of the reason this has become a popular notion is that HMV owns Waterstones bookstores in the UK. Admittedly HMV often behave as if there is no difference between music and books, but it’s not exactly working out for them and in general I kind of think it is a slightly sloppy comparison.

Dan’s British. He says things like sloppy and rubbish.

There are far smarter people who’ve compared music and books. I’m going to go read them and we’ll be back next week with more about download formats for books. I’ll make slightly sloppy references to other smart people and Dan will say smart things. You’ll love it. Please come back.

Happy BC Book and Magazine Week.

Interesting post.
I probably can add some extra information to the conversion......as a person who has been actively involved in trying to develop commercial models for ebooks and ebook publishing on the Net for the past six years.

I forsee the use of advertising as a means to properly compensate copyright holders of printed material. We have been developing such models and our tentative feedback has been very positive.

Check out our site at http://www.bookyards.com

Hey Monique! I think we do broadly agree on this one! My sense is that whilst the music industry and book publishing have things in common, the differences are as important as the similarities. The reason I describe some of the comparisons as ‘sloppy’ is that there is a tendency to assume publishing will follow exactly the same route as the music industry which I don’t think is the case… More on that next week I think! 

Hey Victor! Thanks for your comment. I hope you’ll stick around for the rest of the discussion. I don’t think you’ll agree with me, but I’d love to hear why you think I’m wrong! ; )

Thanks Victor and Dan.

I have checked out bookyards.com and it is definitely interesting.

Advertising is currently a good model, but what happens when people start ignoring advertising? Advertisers want to insinuate themselves into the readers’ space even more. A side banner is no longer good enough, there’s a pop-up, a whistle, a sponsored page, a note at the end of the post.

There’s a fine line between what people are willing to accept (what’s easy to ignore) and what they rally against.

Membership models are also interesting, as are online/print models, where you offer some type of extra physical product at an additional cost.

There are a couple of interesting options, both for the short term and long term, and I appreciate that authors and companies, like bookyards.com, are experimenting successfully in this space. I appreciate the early adopters and leaders who are forging a path and figuring out what the industry is going to look like, could look like, should look like.

Thanks for the comments.

Just a couple of quick questions for Victor - What do you think are the biggest problems facing e-books? Why have e-books not had the same impact as MP3s/music downloads? (Or have they?)

Answers to the above....and thanks to everyone for their interest in Bookyards.

We have found that our advertising has had no effect on people interested in downloading our ebooks. They are willing to spend the necessary 15 seconds to see the ad in order to get their free ebook. I cannot take credit for realizing this.....I first heard about this from CNN News, and on how they are developing advertising/revenue ideas for their news web site.....I just took their business model and applied it to our library.

The main difference between music and ebooks is the time component. A song lasts a few minutes, a book will take longer to consume. But even with this difference, ebook popularity has been steadily growing.

For example.....over the past six years I have witnessed the growth of people downloading ebooks from a few hundred a month on our site, to approximately 250,000 a month.....all of this traffic coming from no promotion or marketing.

Project Gutenberg, located at http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page, gets approximately 2,000,000 ebook downloads a month. Online Books gets about 4,00,000 ebook downloads a month.

The World Ebook Fair (located at http://www.worldebookfair.com/ ) had 30,000,000 ebooks downloaded over a one month period of time last year.

The growth of online libraries has also been exponential. When I first started there were only a few sites.....now there are almost 1,000. I have categorized approximately 550 ( located at http://www.bookyards.com/links.html?category_id=1780 ) and I have an additional 400 to add....this will probably be done in June.

The main problem with ebooks ......and when I talk
about ebooks I mean GOOD and Interesting Ebooks, is on the issue of copyright laws. People are primarily interested in reading on up to date books and information. Most libraries....mine included.....use non-copyright or expired copyright material. My hope is that through the use of revenue generating business and advertising models that it would then be financially worthwhile for a Stephen King or equivalent to start selling and promoting his e-works on the Web.

I predict that once well known writers and publishers start to use the web and an advertising based model to pay royalties......there is no reason to believe why ebook downloads will increase even more. I witnessed a taste of this only last week when copies of J.K. Rowlings Harry Potter series were illegally put on Rapidshare.....the servers....no surprise.....were overwhelmed within a few hours.

Just to going to show these things are changing as we speak, Headline are going to make Simon Spurrier’s debut novel CONTRACT available for free online in a couple of weeks. GalleyCat posted about it this morning.

What’s kind of interesting to me is that Simon Spurrier is not only a debut novelist, but he writes comics. Would they have done the same for a veteran ‘literary’ author???

Finally, I get to jump into this discussion ... again rather late I think advertising models consistently change as new technology and new opportunities arise with new programming languages.  Banner ads were popular, but with the introduction of Macromedia/Adobe Flash technology, we now have video advertisements on numerous editorial content across the Internet.  With better browsers, Flash, improved javascript and AJAX coding, we now have ads that run across the actual browser screen.  Quite intrusive despite being fun.  The advertising as a couple of you pointed out, isn’t really the issue ... it is often how intrusive the advertisement actually is which determines reader satisfaction.  This really is determined by the audience that is being targeted.  I think Bookyards is pretty neat although I wonder if the model would work if publishers were offering titles that were still in print.

With regards to ebooks, I for one have always been enthusiastic with advancements because of the idea that I can store however many books on one sheet of paper or reader device.  There is a lot to be said about aesthetics of course and cover designs, but the functionality is beginning to reach a fair level of potential.  How people buy or read ebooks is a different issue but in a similar manner that I approach why people don’t buy online, I believe people need to be encouraged to purchase ebooks.  We need to provide the right conditions for customers to make that step.  There are numerous factors involved but for every individual, there’s a make or break factor with the decision to buy an ebook.  Perhaps those slow-loading, large PDFs are definitely not the way to go, but Adobe and Microsoft are pushing their way into new universal files involving their Silverlight or Apollo Flash based technologies.  Maybe either of these relatively universal, new and lightweight programming languages will bring a potential alternative.

Right now Canadian publishers and booksellers aren’t really making that effort.  The general argument is that we don’t have the resources to dive into this market let alone face the overshadowing issue of copyright.  There are a few exceptions but from my perspective, what is needed is for someone to take a big step.  Monique and Dan discussed the music industry briefly and I think it’s important to compare other industries and look at what they are doing to push forward their business.  Despite my rather low regard for Microsoft, the record music industry and its continual obsession with digital rights management (DRM), I can understand why and relate that with the copyright issues hindering the book industry.

That being said, I truly admire the work of Amie Street, a website that eliminates DRM and puts in place a new method of pricing music based on demand.  I also admire the work of Pandora and Last.FM, two Internet radios that really focus on the interests of the people as opposed to focusing on what they think people should or would be interested in.  These websites in my opinion represent a new way for people to find what they truly like and the option of purchasing is always available, without DRM.

Now the question should be, how can we apply what we understand from other industries to books?  As Victor pointed out, the main difference between music and ebooks is the time it takes to consume the product.  The funny thing about this is that I buy online to save myself time.  But for others, they use this amount of time to find the right book that they would be interested in.  Would connecting people to good books that they would be interested in a faster way be a plausible solution?

I think that’s enough out of me for now…