Joe Wikert's DisruptorFest

Why today’s ebooks are like the golden age of radio

The date was April 8, 1927 and the front page of The New York Times featured this headline: FAR-OFF SPEAKERS SEEN AS WELL AS HEARD HERE IN A TEST OF TELEVISION. Click here to read a PDF version.

As I read that 1927 article I recently I couldn’t help but wonder how confused the public was with this newfangled television thing. After all, radio had been popular for several years and few probably even imagined the need for a more powerful and engaging communication and entertainment vehicle. In fact, the article notes the following:

The Bell Laboratories have been directed to concentrate on developing television with all possible speed, although the American Telephone and Telegraph Company has no idea today whether it will ever be commercially valuable.

So a new technology was invented, the public was curious but everyone questioned its viability.

Sound familiar?

We’re in the print-under-glass stage of ebooks today. The ebooks we read are nothing more than digital replicas of the original print product. They almost never take advantage of the powerful digital capabilities of the devices they’re read on. I often refer to this as “reading dumb content on smart devices.” 

Today’s ebooks are more or less at the same stage radio was at back in the 1920’s. Like radio in the 20’s, ebooks are still a somewhat recent success, particularly since the first popular e-reading device, the Kindle, is less than 10 years old. Today’s ebooks are easy to get comfortable with. They operate like we expect them to. But other than the content itself, the presentation of today’s ebook rarely surprises or delights; it’s basically a digital page-flipper of the print edition.

The market has experimented with enriched or enhanced content and the results have been weak at best. As a result, most publishing experts feel the future promises nothing more than the print-to-e editions we see today.

I couldn’t disagree more.

In April of 1927 television was viewed as a gimmick, a solution in search of a problem, similar to how anything beyond today’s static ebook is perceived. It didn’t happen overnight but television obviously got beyond the gimmick stage and became an enormous industry. I believe the same thing will happen with the next generation of ebooks, or whatever we end up calling them. Anyone who believes today’s ebooks are as good as it gets probably would have scoffed at television in 1927.

By the way, although that NYT article is almost 90 years old it’s important to note that radio hasn’t gone away. Listeners don’t spend anywhere near the amount of time with radio that they used to and families certainly don’t gather around radios for evening entertainment. But radio found its niche and didn’t disappear.

The same will be true not only for print books but for today’s static ebooks as well. Sometimes you just want to curl up with a simple story, no fancy digital device or web connectivity required. But there are plenty of other types of content and reading experiences that will dramatically benefit from moving beyond today’s print-under-glass model. That’s where the real disruptive opportunities await an industry that’s never been known for embracing change.

Chromecast needs a killer app

Judging by the ongoing out-of-stock situations it's safe to say demand for Google's Chromecast device remains strong. One of my local Best Buy stores finally had them in stock so I grabbed one. My one-word review: Meh. I don't regret buying Chromecast but I can't find a killer app for it.

If you're not familiar with Chromecast all you need to know is that it allows you to wirelessly stream content from your computer or mobile device to your TV. It's an indirect method, as the content on your tablet/laptop gets sent to your router and then over to the Chromecast device in your TV. On the surface, that's nice. After all, projecting video from your computer to your living room screen without a bunch of cables is handy. On the other hand, the apps that support Chromecast are limited. Anything in the Chrome browser works but few mobile apps are supported. That means I can stream games from my NHL Gamecenter subscription but I have to do so within the browser, not through the Gamecenter app on my iPad.

I'd love to see Chromecast work with PowerPoint. Most conference rooms have HD TVs but sometimes the right connection dongle isn't handy. It would be great if I could just plug Chromecast into the TV and project the deck wirelessly but that's not an option yet.

YouTube, Hulu and NetFlix all work fine as well, but what's the point? My Samsung LED TV has apps built in to let me watch streaming movies anyway. All I have to do is plug a USB WiFi stick into the TV and I have full web access. Granted, managing it with my TV's remote is a hassle, so Chromecast has that advantage since you control it with your tablet or laptop.

The only use-case I can think of that really lends itself to Chromecast is video-based training. Even though you can obviously do this on one screen or a computer with a second monitor, I see the benefit of having the instructor on a much larger TV, especially if there's a whiteboard or other region to focus on besides the talking head. Learning to code, for example, would really lend itself to the instructor, their source code and whiteboard on your TV and the programming environment on your computer.

I'm also surprised there aren't any great Chromecast hacks yet. If you search for hacks or novel applications you'll be disappointed. Chromecast seems like the type of device that hackers would love to enhance, and you'd think Google would fully support their efforts.

I'll still use my Chromecast, probably a few times a week. I also plan to take it on the road since at some point I'd like to think PowerPoint access will be supported. And since most hotels have complementary WiFi I should be able to watch NHL games at night via my Gamecast subscription on the TV rather than on my smaller computer/tablet screen.

So for $35 Chromecast is a fairly small investment but its limited functionality holds it back from being worth so much more.

Newspapers as disruptors

That seems like a contradiction, doesn't it? After all, newspapers are the ones that have been disrupted the past several years. True, but Matt Sokoloff recently wrote a very interesting article suggesting that newspapers are about to disrupt local TV. Yeah, I laughed too when I first considered it. But do yourself a favor and read Sokoloff's piece. It's one of the insightful pieces on the newspaper that I've read.

He paints a picture of local TV being fat and happy while the newspapers are desperate for survival. And, true to The Innovator's Dilemma, which Sokoloff references in the article, the TV industry is likely to be caught completely off-guard by an unexpected competitor.

The disrupted becomes the disruptor. How cool is that?

Bundled vs. a la carte content

Once upon a time when you liked a song and wanted to own it you had to buy the entire album it appeared on. It didn't matter if the other 11 tracks were terrible. You were forced to buy them all.

That all changed in the digital era, of course, and now we can buy tracks individually. Consider that a victory for the a la carte model.

Spotify and a number of other all-you-can-listen-to music streaming services then arrived on the scene, further disrupting the music industry. There was a time when I insisted on owning my music, not renting it. I guess I've evolved though since I can't tell you the last time I bought a track but I know I've listened to Spotify several times in the past week. Advantage, bundled content...or is that just a new, even more liberating way to enjoy a la carte music?

Let's shift the focus to books. Many publishers, myself included, made the mistake of thinking books are like music and we should make them available by the chapter. Oops. That hasn't worked yet and I'm not sure it ever will. It's more accurate for me to say that I don't think it will ever work on a wide variety of genres; some, like cookbooks, lend themselves to it, but the typical book doesn't. Looks like bundled content wins here.

A more appropriate example in the book world would be one of the many all-you-can-read ebook subscription services. They've been moderately successful so far and I think there's a great deal of genre-specific upside here (e.g., broad ebooks subscriptions for sports, history, etc.) Again, bundled content looks like a winner.

How about shorter-form written content, like newspapers and magazines? Up to now we've been forced to subscribe to the whole paper or issue. Publishers haven't been willing to let us pick and choose the topics, writers, etc., that we want. I think that will change in the not-too-distant future. I'd love to be able to select my favorite columnists, sports, locations, etc., and create my own custom product. In this space, bundling is the only option today but a la carte looks very promising.

I mention all this because of an article I read recently about how cable TV's pricing model is supposedly unfair. The article's author notes we're forced to pay for a lot of channels we never watch. True, but what happens when that content is unbundled? If ESPN costs every cable customer $5/month does it really remain $5/month if only half the households in an a la carte world sign up for it? Highly unlikely. So in many respects, non-sports fans are helping subsidize my ESPN habit while I'm helping subsidize their Travel and Lifetime channel habits.

You don't have to look any further than Comcast's "triple play" model to see how bundles are often a better financial option than a la carte services.

My point here is that bundling and a la carte shouldn't be considered mutually exclusive. We've seen some areas where both work well while other segments tend to favor one over the other. So why not offer both and let the customer decide? But as a consumer, don't fall into the trap the author of that cable TV pricing article did and assume that adding one magically leads to lower prices.

Taking a page out of ESPN's playbook

If you missed this recent BusinessWeek article about ESPN you owe it to yourself to go back and read it. ESPN is so much more than just a sports network and their brilliant strategy offers plenty of lessons for publishers. Here's just one important indicator of their success: While the average network earns about 20 cents per subscriber each month ESPN is paid $5.13. That's more than 25 times the average!

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