Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog

Cheap Copies of the Original

That's what most content on my Kindle feels like today...cheap copies of the original.  Quite a few books look like the print to e- conversion was done so haphazardly that nobody ever bothered to look at the finished product.  As publishers we fret about the prospects of $9.99 price ceilings for ebooks and yet we treat that rapidly growing sector as a quick-and-dirty way to make an extra buck or two.  Where's the R&D, the investment in future platforms and products?  Btw, Walt Shiel recently wrote a great blog post related to this called Kindle Errors and Typos.

Walt is right that many of the problems we see today are the result of corners being cut and the e-opportunity viewed as nothing more than a way to squeeze a few more dollars out of the investment we already made in the print product.  That's OK to a certain extent, but for some publishers that's their entire e-strategy.

Here's the fundamental problem I have with this: As long as customers view these products as cheap copies of the originals they'll never even achieve the same value as the originals.  So if that's your strategy, get used to the $9.99 ceiling because it's not going up.

Cleaning up the conversion process is important but it's not going to change the $9.99 ceiling either.  What's really needed here is a fresh look at the way content is designed, acquired, developed and produced in the e-world.  And as a visitor wisely commented recently elsewhere on my blog, this issue will become even more important as ebooks become a larger percentage of the overall book market.  All that overhead and fixed costs found throughout large publishing houses simply can't be supported if the industry switches to a $9.99 model.

Ebooks won't become 50% of the market overnight, but the percentage is growing and isn't likely to stop.  There are a couple of options here.  Publishers can get leaner and meaner as they adjust to the new model or they'll choose to invest in the future and start building more compelling eproducts and eplatforms.  The ultimate winners will attack both of those fronts.

Getting More Magazines on the Kindle

The Kindle is now more than 18 months old and there are still only 24 magazines available for it.  Why so few?  I've heard several reasons why and the most likely ones are (a) the magazine publishers don't like the financial terms offered by Amazon and (b) they also don't want to give up control of their content (and direct customer access) to Amazon.  I've got an idea that solves both these problems and would make Kindle owners everywhere much, much happier.

The company I work for, O'Reilly Media, Inc., sells Kindle editions on Amazon's website.  We don't rely on Amazon as our only means of access to Kindle owners though.  We also sell e-book bundles on our site and those bundles feature all the popular formats including .mobi for the Kindle.  Magazine publishers (and newspapers too, for that matter) should take the same approach and sell Kindle content right from their own websites.

Granted, we're talking about a single block of content with a book vs. an ongoing subscription with a magazine or newspaper...and that's where things get interesting...

Amazon has a document conversion service for all Kindle owners.  I can e-mail a PDF to my Kindle address (joewikert@kindle.com) and Amazon will convert that PDF and wirelessly send it to my Kindle.  The service used to be free but now it costs 15 cents per meg for the upload.  Each of the magazine issues currently on my Kindle (The New Yorker and Technology Review) are less than one meg, btw.

Here's how the model would work: Each magazine website would simply add another option to their new subscriber page.  This option would be for Kindle delivery.  Choose it, give the magazine publisher your @kindle.com address, set your Kindle e-mail account to accept incoming messages from that magazine's server and you're done.  The result is a direct relationship (again) between magazine publisher and customer; it's just that this particular customer happens to receive issues via their Kindle.

That's how the front-end works, but how about the back-end?  The magazine publisher could prep the issue in PDF format, send it to the customer's @kindle.com address and let Amazon do the conversion and upload work for them.  Sure, Amazon gets 15 cents/meg, but each magazine publisher would simply have to figure out how much that translates to per issue and price the subscription accordingly.  Btw, if you want to avoid the Amazon charges, have the subscription sent to your @free.kindle.com address and simply move the content from in-box to Kindle via USB cable.  Another option is to take that last option a step further, automate it a bit, and go back to wireless delivery, like KindleFeeder now offers.

As a magazine publisher you'd keep 100% of the subscription price.  You'd also do away with printing and postage fees, so please keep that in mind when setting the subscription price!  Finally, you could determine how much advertising you want to keep in the digital edition.  Maybe you'd want to offer two plans: A higher-priced subscription with no ads and a lower-priced one with all the regular ads.  As an added bonus, those ads could now have live links to the advertiser sites; good luck pulling that off in the print edition.

Speaking for Kindle owners everywhere, I hope magazine publishers will follow O'Reilly's lead and start offering a direct-to-Kindle-customer subscription plan.  What do you have to lose?!

P.S. -- Why am I so comfortable publishing my Kindle e-mail address here?  Because every spammer in the world can send messages to it and they won't get through.  I give Amazon a list of acceptable incoming e-mail addresses and none of them are from spammers.

Google Wave and Publishing

Have you heard about Google Wave?  It's been described as "how email would work if it were invented today."  So instead of simply tacking on new features to existing email clients, Google Wave offers a clean slate approach.  In fact, it looks like Google Wave will offer a new, intuitive way of communicating while still using some of the email/IM/etc. features you've grown to know and love; IOW, it will offer the best of both worlds.

Think about this now in publishing terms.  The Sony Reader is just a convenient way to access books in electronic form.  The Kindle took it up a notch by enabling wireless delivery of more content forms, not just books but also magazines and newspapers, for example.  At the end of the day though, both of these products still mostly re-render print content in e-form.  They don't do much to fully leverage the e-platform, mostly because they're working with content that was built for print, not e-use.

What the publishing industry needs is a product like Google Wave more fully leverages e-content capabilities while still supporting all of the useful features of print.  If you haven't watched the Google Wave demo from last week's Google I/O you need to (see below); and even if you can't spare the almost 90 minutes the full demo/keynote required, just watch the first 10-12 minutes and you'll have a good feel for this amazing service.  And when you watch it, think about how an approach like the one used for Google Wave would create an enormous splash in the publishing industry (books, magazines, newspapers, etc.)

Interview with DailyMe's Eduardo Hauser

I've been keeping a close eye on the news and newspaper industry, mostly because I think there are a lot of lessons for to be learned from it in the book publishing world.  Although I still subscribe to my local paper, I find I get most of my news online from a variety of sources, including several that didn't even exist as recently as 3 years ago.

With that in mind, when I heard about DailyMe I wanted to learn more.  If you're not familiar with DailyMe, it's a customizable online news service and their tagline is "just the news topics you want to read."  I recently had the opportunity to interview DailyMe's CEO, Eduardo Hauser, and here's what he had to say about his operation:

JW: One of the knocks on news personalization services is that they don't allow for serendipity. You're only likely to read about what you've asked for. Are there ways to address this so that your subscribers are expanding their horizons?

EH: Serendipity is a very important part of the news experience and, as such, we promote it.  We believe personalization is the starting point, not the end point. Personalization must promote exploration of content (including serendipity) and exploitation of content, thus allowing user to dive deep into subjects that matter to him.

The way we have currently implemented serendipity is by making DailyMe's Top News the landing page.  As a result, the user's first taste of DailyMe is completely serendipitous.  The 'personalized' version of DailyMe sits next to Top News. In the next version of DailyMe personalized content will co-exist with editorial content on the same pages.  So the experience will be a combination of serendipity and personalization throughout the site.

JW: Localization seems critical in this space. DailyMe has all the right national and international feeds, but what if I want to keep track of what's happening in my home town, for example?

EH: Local news has been one of the most significant challenges, and still presents some of the best opportunities, for news organizations.  DailyMe's technology is well suited for promoting local content, but we have not yet built a local content product yet.  It is an area of great interest and is definitely in our future.

JW: There's a great deal of concern that online news services will completely kill the newspaper industry. It seems like every week brings news of another paper shutting down. If the papers and other news services aren't able to adapt to the new economy, where will our news come from?

EH: I think the news will continue to come from journalists - whether they work at newspapers or elsewhere.  The question is how will these journalists be compensated for their work?  Some will be able to keep their jobs as employees of existing traditional publishers.  Some others will likely find employment opportunities in new media; and probably a large number will develop direct audiences through Blogs, syndication, contributions, etc. The good news is that there will be many more people reporting and many more people writing.  The bad news is that we will still face a few years where the business models are in flux.

JW: Social networking seems like it should play a major role in the DailyMe model. Sharing and commenting on news stories will only help build buzz Is this an area you're focusing on?

EH: Yes.  We are very interested in social media.  We have introduced a widget called Meme-iT that enables user to share their emotions around stories and in the next few weeks we intend to introduce an exciting product called the DailyWe aimed at promoting a distributed editorial function among our users.  More details to come…

JW: What does the future hold for the news industry? What will things look like in 5-10 years?

EH: I feel very optimistic because technology, connectivity and devices are eliminating some significant funnels in the news dissemination process.  This will obviously create some disarray at first, and then things will settle down.  I think tools like DailyMe, Twitter and others put tremendous power in the hands of people to generate and share information.  Whether that power finds a home - and an audience - will require focus and skills that are unique to journalists. The ones that hone those skills will make careers out of it and the others will simply go on as amateurs in the new news ecosystem.

In the next years I expect news to surface in many more devices than now. I expect personalization and other discovery techniques will have matured and stabilized.  I trust and hope there will be models that have matured to a point where they create a clear flow of funds between consumers and creators of content.

A Model for the Magazine Industry

Once upon a time I subscribed to more than a dozen different magazines.  Keeping up was overwhelming at times, particularly since many of those magazines were a half-inch thick or more.  (Anyone remember the good old days when Wired used to have some serious heft?!)  Now I can count my magazine subscriptions on one hand.  I still crave the content and the writers, but I prefer to read this information sooner than the print model allows.

I use RSS feeds and other techniques to obtain some of this material.  And even when I'm 30K feet in the sky on a flight I have my Kindle 1.0 with the terrific KindleFeeder service to provide my daily dose.  Despite that though, I feel there's a huge hole in the magazine model and I have a suggestion that could go a long way to addressing it.

I'm talking about a service that starts by providing access to all the magazine content on the planet.  It would be delivered wirelessly to my various devices (Kindle, iPhone, MacBook Pro, etc.) and I'd (gladly!) pay a monthly fee for it.  What I'm describing is fairly close to the Safari Books Online model, only applied to magazines, not books.  So rather than getting physical copies of BusinessWeek, FastCompany, etc., in my mailbox from time to time (and several days after the material was written), I'd get it immediately and have access to it anytime, anywhere.  (Btw, there's nothing more frustrating than seeing a full-page ad in a magazine about the great additional content that's available this month on their website...especially when you're on a 4-hour flight and and wifi isn't an option!)

I would gladly give up my print subscriptions for this service.  Yeah, I know that's one of the reasons the magazine industry is so afraid to build such a beast.  They need to learn a thing or two from the music and newspaper industries though.  Magazine publishers: Yes, your revenue base is likely to be smaller in the future.  Deal with it.  Btw, that's going to happen anyway, so why not acknowledge it now and start doing something about it?

So how much would I pay for an all-you-can-eat magazine subscription model like this?  At least $50/month, maybe more.  That's a lot, I know, but I'd expect some additional functionality built into the system to justify that price:

• I want the full contents of my favorite magazines.  I don't want every magazine delivered to me in this format...I'll never get through it all!  But I absolutely want to pick and choose which magazines automatically show up and include 100% of the regular content.
• I also want to be able to pick and choose certain columnists and other features/articles from some of the magazines that aren't in that first list.  Again, these should be delivered automatically, without all the other content I don't care about from that particular magazine.
• Most importantly, I want this system to learn about me and my interests.  If I happen to read a lot about baseball, send me the hottest new baseball article from a magazine that's not part of those first two lists.  Help me discover things I wouldn't other wise find!
• Include a terrific social networking platform.  Make it super easy for me to send articles, excerpts, etc., to any of my friends, regardless of whether they have a subscription.  After all, exposure to those who don't have a subscription might provide the nudge they need to sign up.  And give me a finder's fee if they do!

You might be wondering how magazines earn their fair share when each customer is paying a flat fee for access to everything.  Simple.  It's all based on page views.  My device keeps track of what articles I read and sends that information back to the service so that my monthly payment can be split into pieces and divvied up to each magazine I've touched.  Maybe one month I only read ESPN The Magazine.  OK, my entire monthly payment goes to them.  Again, this is very similar to models we have in the book industry.

Over the course of a month I'm probably accessing 20, 30 or more different magazines this way.  That means my monthly payment gets sliced up pretty thin, so why would a magazine publisher have any interest in these small payments?  Two words: advertising revenue.

You currently pay an annual subscription price for most of those magazines you get in the mail.  That subscription rate typically covers printing and shipping...and that's about it.  Magazines get the bulk of their revenue from advertisers, of course.  There's no reason advertising can't be part of this model too.  Yeah, I know Amazon's magazine subscription model on the Kindle doesn't include ads.  That's one option but I'm not sure it's the best.  We're all used to seeing ads in magazines, so there's no reason they can't be present in an e-model with the same content.

In fact, I'd argue that the advertising component is where this could really change the industry.  No more static images.  No more wondering whether your target audience actually saw the piece.  And don't forget about that third bullet above.  This needs to be an intelligent system that knows a lot about me.  As a result, every customer becomes part of a much more highly targeted audience.  That generally means a higher CPM rate...or perhaps a completely new model.  (Yes, those same old privacy advocates would choke on this idea...that's OK, they can keep killing trees with their print subscriptions!)

If the Kindle is any example it's clear magazine industry leaders have their heads in the sand.  More than a year after the Kindle was announced there are only 24 magazines available for it.  I'm sure the common magazine publisher complaints are, "we don't like Amazon's terms" or "we don't want Amazon to become the next Apple and control our channels."  Any magazine executive with that point of view should be fired.  Now is the time to be experimenting, not hiding in your foxhole.  The Kindle represents yet another storefront and a chance to learn more about your customer.  As the old saying (sort of) goes, those who don't pay attention to history (e.g., music and newspapers) are doomed to repeat it.

Enhancing Print Content

Does anyone remember the ill-fated CueCat barcode scanners that supposedly were going to change how we interact with print content?  You'd see a code in a magazine, scan it with the CueCat connected to your computer and your browser would automatically go to related content.  The idea didn't work, mostly (I believe) because we rarely read magazines, newspapers, books, etc., when we're right next to our computer.  It wasn't a portable solution.

The iPhone, on the other hand, is a portable solution and the built-in camera offers the ability to read barcodes...at least in theory.  I played around a bit this morning with an iPhone barcode reader app called NeoReader and got mixed results at best.  Even if the technology is currently far from perfect, the concept is interesting and the capabilities will improve over time.

Wouldn't it be cool to embed small barcodes throughout magazines, newspapers and books so that when a reader snaps a picture of them with their iPhone it loads a video showing more information about that topic?  You're making a recipe from a cookbook and you're not quite sure which ingredients get mixed together first.  Grab your iPhone, take a picture of the barcode next to the recipe and watch a short video of how the dish is made.

Better yet, how many times have you pulled your hair out trying to assemble a child's toy, a piece of furniture or any one of a zillion other products with lousy documentation?  What if all these vendors were to create short videos of each step and make them accessible via barcode scans right in the doc?  If you're not a visual learner you can continue using the awful written instructions; the rest of us will gladly reach for our iPhones to see how it's done!

You've undoubtedly noticed that I'm biased towards one particular platform, mostly because in less than two weeks I too have become one of those annoying iPhone snobs.  In reality though, what I'm describing could work for any phone with a camera and video playback capabilities.

The difference between this and the CueCat is that I almost always have my iPhone handy and I can easily make sure it's next to whatever project I'm currently working on.  It's an interesting model because it doesn't cost any more from a printing perspective.  And while there's a cost associated with creating and hosting the videos, this opens the door for new sponsorships and/or advertising revenue streams, not to mention a much richer reader/user experience.  (I'm not sure how it's paying off for them but the Pandora iPhone app interface is a nice model for sponsorship income, at least from a user point of view.)

Newspapers and the A.P.

I'm certainly not a newspaper industry expert, so maybe what I'm about to suggest is ridiculously naive.  I'll go out on a limb and do it anyway so that the real experts can correct me if I'm wrong...

After reading this article in yesterday's New York Times I couldn't help but scratch my head and ask "why?".  The Columbus Dispatch spends $800K per year on A.P. stories to round out their newspaper's content.  $800K.  Even though this syndicated content is a very important ingredient to any newspaper's formula, that's a large number, particularly in these troubling times (and in this struggling industry).  So while I understand why newspapers have paid these syndication fees in the past, I don't understand why they plan to do so in the future.

Why don't all the newspapers of the world unite and simply share their content with each other?  (OK, there's the radical and possibly naive suggestion.)  There would have to be rules in place so that one paper isn't simply constantly sponging from all the others, but reasonable policies could easily be developed.

It seems like the A.P. was a solution to yesterday's problem.  Before the advent of the Internet and all the ways to move e-content from point A to point B it was a very useful model.  But haven't we gotten to the stage where all the newspapers could form their own new federation and accomplish the same objectives?  The article talks about some local initiatives where several papers in Ohio formed a co-op to address this; why not take it up several notches and build a worldwide co-op?

Newspapers are apparently contractually obligated to give the A.P. two years' notice of cancellation.  Fine.  Use the next 24 months to hammer out a global co-op plan and move on!

Scoble Is Right: Start Iterating -- Fast!

I've often referred to the newspaper industry as the book publishing's canary in a coal mine.  Robert Scoble's latest Fast Company column focuses on the newspaper industry and what he believes it should do to survive.

His key message is to learn from the tech industry and to "start iterating -- fast."  I'm a big believer in making a lot of small bets rather than going "all in" on one.  This approach allows you to see what works, reinvest in the winners and let the others die if necessary.  As Salon's Scott Rosenberg is quoted in the article, "the most important thing to do right now is launch as many possible experiments in as many possible directions."  I'd add to that by suggesting you also keep a close eye on the experiments your competitors are launching; there's much to be learned from their efforts as well.

How the Kindle is Changing My Reading Habits

Now that I've had my Kindle for a few months I recently noticed a pretty dramatic impact it's had on me.  In my pre-Kindle days I'd spend my reading sessions going through a few magazines as well as a chapter or two of whatever book I happened to be immersed in that week.  The key point is that the majority of my time was spent reading books.

Nowadays I spend just as much time reading as before, but it's all centered around my New York Times subscription, my Kindlefeeder RSS feeds and either Time magazine or my most recent addition, MIT's Technology Review magazine.  I purchased and started reading three other books on my Kindle but I haven't touched any of them in at least two weeks.

So for some strange reason, I'm finding the Kindle experience to be more useful when it's focused on shorter length, more time-sensitive content.  Jeff Bezos has spoken before about our current culture's tendency towards "information snacking", or spending more time with shoter length works.  Amazon's e-reader is supposed to help us embrace longer works (like books) again, but if my experience is any indication, the Kindle (and its wireless functionality) is turning out to be yet another device that enables even more info snacking.

Does Online Reading Count?

I love my NY Times Kindle subscription but Amazon really needs to add a feature that lets you quickly forward links to articles via e-mail.  I frequently e-mail links to myself so that I won't forget to blog about them.  I meant to write a post about this article earlier in the week and it completely slipped through the cracks on me...

The article is called "Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?" and it adds to the discussion of how to properly define "reading" in a mostly online age.  My favorite excerpt is:

Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.

I'm finding this to be particularly true with my Kindle.  Ever since I got it I know I've been spending more time reading, but it's not just books.  My NY Times subscription is outstanding and it often leads me to check out other websites via the Kindle's browser.  During those side trips I often end up reading more content on these other sites (e.g., articles, blog posts, etc.).  Before I know it, I've lost an hour or two and still have much of the day's paper to go.

For some reason I feel like I've accomplished and learned much, much more after an evening of this than in one where I've spent a couple of hours reading portions of one or two books.  It's part of that whole "info snacking" problem Jeff Bezos says we all have; the Kindle is supposed to help us focus more on serious reading and not info snacking, but I'm finding it contributes to both.

P.S. -- This is a very interesting issue for us book publishers to think about, especially when plotting our e-content strategies.  I believe the key is to embrace this behavior and build it into your e-content models rather than trying to fight it.