Joe Wikert's DisruptorFest

How “Send to Kindle” can help neutralize Amazon

Publishers who sell ebooks direct to consumers typically do so in EPUB format. That’s because most publishers are still wedded to the false sense of security DRM provides and EPUB offers a popular DRM solution. Contrast that with Amazon’s format, MOBI, where Amazon is the only company who can apply and manage MOBI’s DRM’d files and settings.

A former colleague of mine and I used to get a kick out of reading the many painful steps readers are forced to go through when buying DRM’d EPUB files direct from publisher websites. It’s not uncommon for the process to require more than a dozen steps to proceed from buying to reading. Most of the process has to be endured once again if the consumer decides to start reading the same book on another device.

Click here or here to see the many hoops one must jump through to install DRM’d EPUB ebooks on one device as well as read them across multiple devices. It’s no wonder when you search for help on the topic the most popular links aren’t how to manage the process but rather how to remove the DRM and eliminate the associated headaches.

More and more publishers are starting to realize that DRM is pointless but they’re still missing out on one of the biggest opportunities of all: Putting their DRM-free ebooks into a reader’s Kindle library.

It’s no secret that Amazon dominates the ebook marketplace. Most readers have built a substantial Kindle library and the last thing they want to do is create a new library outside the Kindle ecosystem. They simply want all their books in one place.

Amazon’s Send to Kindle functionality has been around for quite awhile and I believe it’s one of the most underutilized services available to publishers. The Send to Kindle email option lets publishers push non-DRM’d ebooks directly onto a consumer’s Kindle bookshelf. I’m sure it was originally designed for documents other than ebooks but I think it’s time for book publishers to take advantage of it for their ebooks as well.

In addition to simply selling EPUB or PDF ebooks, why not provide readers with the MOBI version and push them directly onto their Kindle devices and apps? All you have to do is ask the reader for their unique Kindle email address and then have them enable inbound emails from your domain. Once that’s in place you’re able to place the ebook on their shelf just like Amazon does.

Once you’ve established that direct relationship with the consumer and their Kindle account, why not ask them if they want to opt in to receiving future related ebook samples from you? They’ll no longer have to search for similar books from your list as you’ll be able to automatically push samples to the reader’s Kindle bookshelf as they’re published. Take it a step further and make your samples available via this service 30 days before they’re available anywhere else. Get even more creative and offer a random free ebook prize to some number of lucky winners every month. There are plenty of ways to make Send to Kindle work for you and your customers.

It’s all part of creating a compelling reason for readers to come to you, the publisher, rather than always relying on retailer partners. Used wisely, the Send to Kindle service can help neutralize Amazon’s dominance while also helping publishers establish a better direct relationship with their customers.

Is the Ebook Revolution Over?: Driving Ebook Growth as Sales Plateau

You knew it wouldn’t last forever. You expected the double-digit growth rates would taper off but you never anticipated your ebook sales would flatten out so quickly.

Is the ebook revolution over?  Is this as good as it gets for ebooks? Or is there something you can do today to generate ebook revenue growth like you’ve seen in the past?

To help answer these questions I'm pleased to announce a free Olive Software webinar I'm hosting which will show how publishers can grow their top line and, at the same time, wrestle back control of their business.  

Here are just a few of the topics we plan to cover:

• Why the market is flattening out
• What will drive future growth
• It’s not print or digital; it’s print and digital
• How indirect can help drive direct sales
• The tools and techniques you need to succeed
• How Olive can be your growth partner

Please join us at 1:00PM ET on April 28 for this 30-minute session – click here to register now, as virtual seating is limited. 

Making apps a core part of your digital publishing strategy

On May 15, 2013, Apple celebrated 5 years of the App Store and released some astounding statistics.  Over 50 billion apps have been downloaded and that number jumped to 60 billion just 5 months after that announcement. That’s an average of 800 apps downloaded per second! With Apple paying out $15 billion to developers and December alone recording $3 billion in sales, do publishers need more reasons to look at the app store seriously? Let’s not forget, we haven’t spoken about the Google Play store yet, for which numbers are difficult to come by.

But aren’t customers tuned to buying books from iBooks and apps from app stores?
The answer is no. 10 to 30 times as many books are sold on the app store as compared to iBooks. The iBookstore pales in comparison to the Appstore in terms of traffic. So why would you place your wares in a store that has no footfalls? App Stores have changed the way we buy and install software and this begs the question: Aren’t ebooks software in a sense?

What’s the most important benefit of using apps for publishing?
It’s a common notion among publishers that apps makes sense only if you want to plug in some “interactivity” into your book. But there’s so much more to publishing books as apps than just this. Apps give you direct access to the consumer so it opens the doors to promotions, up-selling and cross-selling. It creates a channel to sell direct and increase margins. With the ever increasing focus on direct-to-consumer methods, apps can help publishers build a relationship with their readers despite the control exerted by dominant ebook retailers. With 90% of book sales driven through word-of-mouth marketing, engaging with your influencers is becoming increasingly important.

Aren’t apps expensive to build and maintain?
Yes, apps are expensive to build and maintain. This is where the Papertrell platform comes in. With an easy to use, feature rich, do-it-yourself app publishing CMS that simultaneously builds for all device platforms natively, Papertrell dramatically reduces the cost of app development and maintenance. It’s a platform that’s built for scale: an interactive app can be repurposed from an ePub file in under 48 hours. The platform also supports tools to import and repurpose from InDesign, PDFs and even blogs.

What about distribution? Isn’t it a complex ecosystem across multiple device platforms?
Manually managing titles across app stores is a complex process. The Papertrell platform takes care of end-to-end app distribution, publishers can now automatically submit or update to 7 different app stores with a single click. This also makes managing price promotions and meta-data management simple across multiple app stores. Publishers have a choice of distibuting as a paid app or as a “collection” of titles within a Shelf app with in-app purchase or subscrition as a payment option. The Shelf is fully cusomtizable with a host of features like banners, collections, a fully-featured EPUB and PDF reader, a cloud synced library, offline access, social reading with Facebook and Twitter integration.

What about updating content?
One of the most important features in Papertrell is the ability to quickly respond to customer issues related to content. App stores are notoriously slow in reviewing apps and this can sometimes kill the chance of an app being successful. A Papertrell app can be updated instantly without the need for time consuming app store reviews and will still work in an offline mode.

Can any type of book be converted to an interactive app using Papertrell?
It’s important to define what we mean by interactivity. Most content apps use audio, video and animations to add interactivity, but Papertrell uses a completely different approach. The idea is use existing book assets and repurpose it into a usable, interactive app without relying too much on “bells and whistles”. There are many instances here and here where this principle has been effectively applied. These are examples of books that contain no multimedia but the products have been repurposed into commercially successful apps by simply “gamefying” the content around usage, for example, unlocking chapters based on the quiz result. This is how “interactivity” is defined in Papertrell.

How scalable is app production in Papertrell? Can the process be automated?
Papertrell automatically ingests content from EPUB and other digital formats into a structured content dictionary using pattern recognition methods. Once the content is mapped, and a template is created, an app can produced from a subsequent EPUB in the same series in a matter of seconds. Here’s an example of a series that was produced using automation. This makes it incredibly easy to quickly make changes to the design and look and feel. The structured content dictionary also helps in reusability as new titles can be easily produced by remixing content across a series.

What sort of publishers are best suited for Papertrell?
Papertrell provides a robust platform for publishers who want to build a direct-to-consumer sales channel. Today this pretty much covers every type of publisher: trade, educational, comics, graphic novels, STM, Illustrated, non-fiction and even B2B publishing. With a range of options available to reach out, acquire, sustain and nurture readers, Papertrell provides depth and breadth in terms of features and flexibility to suit any requirement. Whether it’s creating highly engaging and interactive interpretations of books, social reading, ebook promotion and bundling or direct selling and subscription, Papertrell can play an integral part in your digital publishing strategy.

This article was written by Arun Benty. Arun is responsible for Papertrell's business development and product strategy. He is also the Co-founder and Director of Business Development at Trellisys.net, Papertrell's parent company. He has guided several globally recognized app projects for publishers including HarperCollins and Hachette including The SAS Survival Guide - a Webby Award winning app.

Global Ebook Market Report

TOC is dead but I'm glad to see some elements of it live on. A couple of years ago the TOC team launched the Global Ebook Market Report with Ruediger Wischenbart. Ruediger updated the report once or twice a year and we typically released a major update each October for the Frankfurt Book Fair.

The book fair opens this week and I was delighted to see that Ruediger and his team did yet another thorough update to the report for 2013. You'll find all the various formats of it here.

If you're looking for the latest data on ebook momentum by geographic region you'll find all the details in this update. If you want to read what's happening globally regarding popular formats, piracy and pretty much everything else related to ebooks you'll also find it in this report. The best news though is that the Global Ebook Market Report has always been and continues to be free. No cost, no registration, nada.

Do do yourself a favor, download this report right now and start reading. You won't regret it and you'll quickly become an expert on the global ebook marketplace.

Structured documents for science: JATS XML as canonical content format

It’s only my 7th day on the job here at PLOS as a product manager for content management. So it’s early days, but I’m starting to think about the role of JATS XML in the journal publishing process.

I come from the book-publishing world, so my immediate challenge is to get up to speed on journal publishing. And that includes learning the NISO standard JATS (Journal Archiving and Interchange Tag Suite). You may know JATS by its older name, NLM. As journal publishing folks know, JATS is used for delivering metadata, and sometimes full text, to the various journal archives.

But here’s where journal and book publishing share the same dilemma: just because XML is a critically important exchange format, is it the best authoring format these days? Should it be the canonical storage format for full text content? And how far upstream should XML be incorporated into the workflow?

Let’s look at books for a minute. The book-publishing world has standardized on an electronic delivery format of EPUB (and its cousin, MOBI). This standardization has helped publishers drill down to a shorter list of viable options for canonical source format. Even if most publishers haven’t yet jumped to adopt end-to-end HTML workflows, it’s clear to me that HTML makes a lot of sense for book publishing. Forward-thinking book publishers like O’Reilly are starting to replace their XML workflow with an HTML5/CSS3 workflow. HTML/CSS can provide a great authoring and editing experience, and then it also gets you to print and electronic delivery with a minimum of processing, handling, or conversion. (O’Reilly’s Nellie McKesson gave a presentation about this at TOC 2013.) And which technology will get the most traction and advance the most in the next few years, XML or HTML? I know which one I’m betting on.

In terms of canonical file format, journal publishing may have one less worry than book publishing, because many journals are moving away from print to focus exclusively on electronic delivery whereas most books still have a print component. Electronic journal reading—or at least article discovery—happens in a browser; therefore, HTML is the de facto principal delivery format. And as much as I’d like to think HTML is the only format that matters, I know that many readers still like to download and read articles in PDF format. But as I mentioned, spinning off attractive, readable PDF from HTML is pretty easy to automate these days. So I ask:

If XML is being used as an interchange format only, what do we gain from moving the XML piece of the workflow any further upstream from final delivery?

Well, why does anyone adopt an XML workflow? The key benefits are: platform/software independence (which HTML also provides), managing and remixing content to the node level (which is not terribly useful for journal articles), and transforming the content to a number of different output formats such as PDF, HTML, and XML (HTML5/CSS3 can be used for this transformation as well, with a bit of toolchain development work).

But XML workflows come with a hefty price tag. The obvious one is conversion, which is not just expensive, but costly in terms of the time it takes. Another downside is the learning curve for the people actually interacting with the XML—how many people should that be? In the real world, will you ever get authors, editors, and reviewers to agree to interact with their content as XML? So more likely than not, you’re either going to need to hide the fact that the underlying format is XML through a WYSIWYG-ish editor that you either buy or build (both are expensive), or you’re doing your XML conversion towards the end of the process. On a similar note, how easy is it to hire experienced XSL-FO toolchain developers? But developers who work in the world of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are plentiful.

So building an entire content management system and workflow for journal publishing around XML—specifically JATS XML, which is just one delivery format, that isn’t needed until basically the end of the process—doesn’t seem like a slam-dunk to me. I should clarify that using JATS XML for defining metadata does seem like the obvious way to go. But I’m not so sure it’s a good fit to serve as the canonical storage format for the full text. One idea is to separate article metadata from the article body text, to leverage the ease-of-editing of HTML for the text itself.

What about moving HTML upstream, and focusing efforts on delivering better, more readable HTML in the browser? What about shifting focus away from old print models and toward leveraging modern browser functionality, maybe by adding inline video or interactive models, or by making math, figures, and tables easier to read and work with?

Just to throw a curve ball into the discussion, I attended Markdown for Science last weekend, where Martin Fenner and Stian Håklev led the conversation about whether it makes sense to use markdown plus Git for academic authoring and collaboration. I want to hear from as many sides of the content format conversation as possible.

So, what do YOU think?

This article was written by contributor Molly Sharp, appeared earlier on the PLOS site and has been presented here with permission of the author. Molly has worked in various content management-related roles since the late 90′s, when she led the implementation of an XML editing and production system for Sybex, a tech book publisher. Most recently, Molly was the Director of Content Management at Safari Books Online, an electronic reference library of 30,000 tech & business titles, where she created and managed a Content Team to ensure the quality of incoming content; designed and maintained content-related processes and workflows; and managed a publishing partner community of more than 100 organizations.