Joe Wikert's DisruptorFest

How readers will become curators and resellers

It’s easy to think that today’s ebook is as good as it gets. Publishers are mostly satisfied with the current print-under-glass model and, unfortunately, flattening (or declining) ebook sales trends aren’t likely to drive investment in digital innovation.

What if readers could help drive some of that innovation in the future? Here’s why that’s a viable scenario…

When it comes to annotating ebooks today, consumers are typically stuck with some very basic options: highlights and comments. Those annotations are almost always limited to private view only. In fact, there was a startup a few years ago called Findings.com which tried to enable readers to share their highlights in Kindle books; they were quickly shut down by a rather large, powerful company in the northwest.

I think Findings was onto something and one day readers will not only be able to share and socialize highlights, but they’ll be able to add more content and value to the original ebook.

Consider the use-case of a student who’s mastered the art of note-taking and textbook highlighting. Back in my college days I loved it when I managed to buy a used textbook marked up by one of these students. It helped me hone in on the most important points in some pretty dull and dreary textbooks.

Now imagine that same use-case in a digital world where there are no barriers. Think of the textbook as one long web page the reader can manipulate and add to.  The original textbook content forms the foundation but the reader can add to it as they see fit.

So while Jane is studying chemistry she comes across a slick periodic table website that allows her to dive deeper into any given element. Today she merely bookmarks the site in her browser; tomorrow she drags the url into the textbook, perhaps configuring it as a pop-up element inside the ebook, thereby enriching the reading experience.

Maybe she also finds a few terrific videos online that explain some of the more complicated concepts in this chemistry course. Why not drag those into the book too?

At the end of the semester, Jane has managed to curate an entirely new product. The textbook is the foundation, but web elements and widgets curated by Jane help round it out. This has been useful for Jane, but what if she’s also able to sell her annotated edition to other students next semester? Maybe Jane’s edition sells for $5 more than the standard edition and Jane gets a cut of that price difference.

Are you getting hung up on all the IP and content rights issues this raises? It’s fair to point that out, but what if all these web elements are nothing more than pointers in Jane’s annotated edition? In other words, Jane isn’t actually embedding the videos and web pages in her ebook, she’s just inserting pointers to them. It’s the same as when the book suggests the reader “go to www.wherever.com”. In my model, the words are replaced with a link and the link might just open the widget as a pop-up or perhaps a new tab in the browser. In short, I’m convinced the legal issues can be completely avoided.

I’m also convinced this model will one day become a reality. Readers will become curators and resellers. Not every reader will be part of this movement, but enough of them will see the opportunity to leverage their passions and experience to make it a viable model. Publishers will also have an opportunity to promote the reader curators who create the most interesting, value-added annotated editions.

Here’s how search will evolve and become more powerful

You’re probably pretty happy with Google search today, right? It’s incredibly fast, extremely reliable and almost always delivers the desired results. What more could you ask for?

I think the problem with today’s search solutions is that we’ve limited them to what’s online. If the content has a web address and it’s been crawled by the major engines it’s properly analyzed and presented in search results.

But what about everything else? Once again, Evernote is a terrific example of what could be.

I’m a huge Evernote fan and I’ve configured it so that all my notes are exposed and retrievable in a Google search. Alongside the standard web, news, maps, images, etc., search results categories, Google also shows a frame with Evernote’s Web Clipper results. Simply put, a single Google search produces results from the web as well as my Evernote archive. Simple, yet powerful.

Why does it have to stop with the web and Evernote? Why can’t one search be configured to retrieve results from all my content streams?

Let’s start with the documents on my computer and in the cloud. They’re mostly Office applications, so a search needs to understand the structure of Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. I’m not talking about simply searching file names; this search functionality needs to know whether the phrase is buried in the document itself.

Don’t forget about Outlook and all the other email applications. Search needs to sift through everything in my inbox, folders and attachments.

How about all the digital books, newspapers and magazines I read or scan every week? My search tool needs to capture, index and report back on all that activity as well. I sometimes rate articles and books I read, so the search algorithm needs to understand those rankings and include them in its algorithm, pushing higher-rated results towards the top.

Let’s also not forget about websites I’ve visited. This search tool should understand which sites I frequently visit and which pages I’ve spent more time on, reflecting the fact that I’m reading rather than scanning. This too is critical information for the search algorithm.

Next, it needs to understand my social graph and factor that into the search results. I’m much more active on Twitter than Facebook, for example, so what are the most recent relevant tweets that belong in my search results?

I realize this starts to clutter the results page. That’s why it all has to be configurable by the user. Clicking on/off checkboxes in a list should allow me to show or hide the various sources in search results. 

I’m able to search each of these sources individually today, of course, but there’s no uber-search tool allowing me to consolidate and search across all sources with one query.

Finally, and here’s where it gets even more interesting, I want the ability to curate and share my search results. Today you can do this by sharing the url from the results page; for example, here’s a Google search for my employer, Olive Software. That’s a start, but now I want to insert links to other sources, including all the ones noted above (e.g., documents, emails, ebooks, etc.).

Yes, there are countless sharing, opt-in, privacy and copyright issues to navigate before this vision becomes a reality. But imagine how powerful the results will be when these capabilities become standard features in every search engine.

Using technology to boost bookstores

Technology and innovation probably aren’t the words that come to mind when you think about your local grocery store. Bar code scanners in the 1970’s were probably the last recent advancement in the grocery store industry. As you’ll see in this article, however, at least one grocery chain is leveraging a new form of technology to improve the shopping experience and I believe it offers guidance for a terrific lesson for bookstores.

The smart shelf technology described in that article describes how Kroger plans to provide more information for shoppers with LED displays that display accurate prices and other product information. It’s not exactly rocket science but it’s a much-needed first step towards an improved and more efficient in-person shopping environment.

Imagine your local bookstore with this functionality. OK, accurate prices on the shelf edges on shelves aren’t exciting but take it a few steps further. What if the store knows who you are and what you tend to read? Once again, we find ourselves in an area that freaks out the privacy advocates, but keep in mind this would be a 100% opt-in model for consumers.

As you go through the store the shelves communicate with an app on your phone to surprise and delight, taking the shopping experience to a whole new level. You’re greeted with information about new releases that interest you and special deals offered exclusively to you and available only during your current visit. You prefer ebooks over print books? No problem. The app already knows that and offers similar information and focuses on ebook deals which are only available while you’re in the store.

This sounds a lot like what e-retailers are able to do with email blasts and “buy x, get y” campaigns, right? The missing piece online is serendipity.

When was the last time you went to an online bookstore to simply browse? If you’re like most consumers, impulse buys are far more likely to happen in a brick-and-mortar store than on a website. Yes, there are exceptions, but serendipity is more of an in-store experience than an online one.

It’s time for technology to boost serendipity in the brick-and-mortar environment. That mobile app needs to tell me about the book I just walked past and why it’s perfect for me. And the message needs to have a button for quick, one-tap sample downloads to my mobile device. Make it a more enticing sample than what I can find anywhere else though (e.g., longer, richer, etc.) And don’t forget to dangle the special discount in front of me to make buying an irresistible step.

In short, give me a reason to go the brick-and-mortar store. I’ve only visited two bookstores in all of 2015. I used to go every week but there are fewer reasons to go now. Ironically, just as technology contributed to the struggles brick-and-mortar stores currently face, technology could also be part of the solution to make them more relevant again. If bookstores offered this sort of in-store experience I’m quite certain I’d go out of my way to discover the new products and deals that await me.