Richard Eoin Nash

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The Emergent Landscape, or, The Continuous Permanent Reinvention of Publishing

[Crossposted from the official Frankfurt Book Fair blog.]

As readers of the Book Fair blog have by now ascertained, my beat certainly encompasses matters digital. And now we’re done with the Fair, the fog is beginning to lift and allowing certain features of the landscape to become more distinct.

All Will Change, Change Utterly (Again and Again)

First a warning, an admonition, really – a core organizing principle of our landscape is that it is now “emergent.” (In philosophy, systems theory and science, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.) Or, in relatively simple terms, each action by hardware companies, software companies, media companies, artists, writers, publishers, and retailers affects the landscape.

The falling of barriers to entry has increased the number of these actors operating on the landscape, and their degree of interdependence has grown. So not only will things continue to change, the rate of change itself is likely to increase.  We are not just in transition from one state or model to another state or model, we’re in transition to a state of permanent accelerated transition where the model is continuous rapid reinvention.

Publishing will never be stable again.

(Skeptics, remember: if Moore’s Law – which asserts that processing power will double every eighteen months – continues to hold up, and it has held up for 35 years, then 25 years from now the iPhone will fit inside a blood cell.)

Getting with the Reality-Based Program

So, with that caution in mind, let’s look at what the panels and conversations and announcements of the first half of the Fair suggest. My co-blogger Alex summarized a superb conversation Wednesday amongst a pretty much perfectly representative sample of companies facing the digital challenges: Victoria Barnsley (CEO, HarperCollins UK), Richard Charkin (Executive Director of Bloombury Publishing), Andrew Savikas (VP of Digital, O’Reilly Media), and Ronald Schild (MD of MVB Marketing). It was clear from the comments that for all the discussion in the industry of pricing in terms of “should,” ie. what should we charge for digital content, prices are going to be set by consumers, plain and simple.

To allay your skepticism, I should say that this was the trade publisher CEO, Victoria Barnsley, who was saying that. I chatted with Charkin after the event and he emphasized that regardless of where one stands on the law and philosophy of copyright, the business models have to reflect the reality that even if individual shouldn’t hack, copy, pirate, they can, and some will, so the models need to be predicated on that reality, not a fantasy in which some combination of automated takedown notices and digital rights management manages to eliminate illegal copying from the planet.

What this means is that we (publishers, authors, agents) are going to need to make decisions based on the world that is (people will make unauthorized copies, people will undercut your price), rather than the world we will wish for. Until recently, it was not clear that the publishing industry accepted this, but these statements by Richard Charkin, Victoria Barnsley and other industry decision-makers are powerful indicators that this approach has solidifed to the point of consensus.

There is no such thing as an eBook

This is not in fact to say there is no such thing as an eBook but to say that the digital transformation facing the industry is not one is which files downloaded to a reading device are replacing print books, but that digital information and entertainment will not be single files but will be apps, files, websites, streams… Over the course of the Fair various players offered phrases such as “a digital manifestation of what was a book” and “long-form narrative delivered digitally” and “story-telling” and “immersive text-only experiences” and it is clear that the reason for such a profusion of vague terms is not obtuseness but a recognition that we’re not replacing one static-priced unit (pBook) with another static-priced unit (eBook), but finding that our single massive unidirectional pBook supply chain is now just one component of a tremendously variegated set of producer-consumer relationships and each producer is therefore going to need to offer the consumer a range of pricing models: subscription, rental, per unit download, advertising, serialization, fewer or more guarantees of ownership (as opposed to personal license) rights. And other yet to be named or thought up!

The World is Your Oyster

There are a billion web-enabled cell phones. Lexcycle’s Stanza reading app has been downloaded 2.5 million times in 75 of the 80 countries in which the iPhone is now available. There will be 20 Android-based smartphones by the end of this year. This is not an American thing, or an Asian thing, this is worldwide. For example, the country-by-country breakdown shows that while the U.S. is the largest market for O’Reilly’s Snow Leopard OS Missing Manual app at 35%, Italy was second at 23%. China’s Shanda has 4 million people signed up to buy and read novels on their mobiles.

Not only, it turns out, are the readers of the world looking to buy our content if we can deliver it to them digitally, but the world’s leading hardware companies are looking to help us. Along with Sony, iRex, TXTR, and other dedicated reading device manufacturers exhibiting, presenting, and working the floor, two Apple executives were traversing the halls of the Fair to let publishers know all the opportunities that await them on that platform. (Let it be said: that platform, right now, is the iPhone. Not any other rumored device. Apple has not been in private discussions about a larger device and reports that they have are a hoax. But Apple does believe in the opportunity for the publishing industry’s content, contrary to the occasional snarky comment from Jobs.) Apple is working to improve the Books section of the App store to make it more browsable, and they are trying to help publishers find the right developers to work with.

The Takeaway

This year’s Fair has made clear that:

1. This is happening now, the future is already here.
2. Everyone can benefit, no-one is exempt.
3. The transformation is irrevocable, continuous, multivalent, and potentially asymmetric.

Much of the change will not be apparent in the tradition consumer print supply chain for a while, especially in countries with a protected marketplace and/or fixed consumer prices. Take advantage of that breathing space and do not take its longevity for granted—fixed prices are not fixed sales. Instead, use the cushion that that social compact has afforded you to continue the process of advancing the cause of literature in whatever format or experience your country’s reader might desire.

Richard Eoin Nash, Oct 22, 2009

• bloomsbury
| 
• oreilly
| 
• harpercollins
| 
• stanza
| 
• apple
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• frankfurt book fair

Comments

Discuss this article.

Richard,

Again, thanks for the context and reporting.  It’s mind-blowing how much has changed in only a couple of months, but it has—and the pace seems to be accelerating: Nook, Internet Archive, Kindle prices changes, price war, etc.

The future is now, indeed.

    – Mark Barrett (10/22 04:39 PM)

It has been changing for the last 12 months or so and as Mark mentioned, it seems to be in acceleration. The one thing that has always been a factor is the technology was just not there. Readers were bulky, the selection limited, and most people didn’t want to deal with it. Now with B and N jumping into the pond with the Nook, which has been under development for years, I think we might see a bigger surge. Amazon just posted larger than expected profits, and I am sure Kindle sales had something to do with that. I have seen a huge surge in my sales there.
NY publishers are still not getting. Some are still trying to charge more for a digital copy than the print. I do think that how 2010 will go for digital will be seen after Christmas. Big electronic buys are great presents and we might just see a suge in the industry late Dec/early Jan.

    – Melissa (10/23 05:21 PM)

I have a couple of questions.  Can I upload my memoir to Kindle as an indie author and still have it be interesting to a literary agent?  Can I upload it to Kindle and then Nook and several others at the same time?  Why not, right?

Thank you!

Susan McKinney

    – Susan McKinney de Ortega (10/24 11:55 AM)

Could scholars and neuroscientists (and bloggers!) benefit from a new
word for “reading on screens” and what might that word be, in your
opinion?

A guest blog by Danny Bloom in Taiwan
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com

I’m on a crusade of sorts to try to find a new word for “reading”
on computer screens and Kindle and other e-reader device screens—other than
“reading”, that is!—and I wonder if you’d join me in my quixotic quest.

I’m pushing forward with my little crusade, step by
step, despite the many naysayers, who keep telling me: “No, Danny,
you’re wrong. There’s no need for a new for reading on screens.
Reading is reading.”

Sometimes I feel this word search campaign is like pushing a heavy
stone up a steep hill, only to have it roll back
a few feet every time we advance a few inches. But along the way, I
have met some experts in the education and technology fields who have
told me this is a good question to ask, and to keep pushing on,
gently, quietly. So I soldier on.

Although few people in the education and technology fields agree with me
on this novel idea, but I remain determined. In fact, a
few experts and forecasters around the world have told me privately
that this crusade is worth it, if only to start a global discussion
on the future of reading and the future of E-readers.

Reading on screens is a whole new ballgame, I feel, and I
believe Western culture needs a new word for this new human activity. It
is more than just “reading”. On a screen, you scroll, you
link, you see photos and videos, you use a mouse or buttons on a
Kindle, and then of course, you read. This is
reading-plus-one.

So I feel we might need a new word for this, although I
have no idea what that word will be in the end, because as many people
have told me in the past year during the course of my crusade, new
words happen organically and
naturally, when the time is right, and when the need becomes more than
apparent. So this is all just to jumpstart a good discussion, pro and con.

I read, of course, on both paper surfaces and screens every day, and
I love both.
I am not a Luddite. I love technology as much as you do. One is not a
priori better or worse than the other, just
different, and we need to study these differences more with brain scan
tests and other scholarly research. A new word might help us “see” the
differeneces better. That’s my hunch.

Some people online have suggested such words as “screening” and
“screading”. Who knows which words we will adopt
for this or when? I have no idea. I just like thinking about it now,
and when the time is right, the new words or terms will come. One
blogger told me we might even need two words for this, one for reading
on computer screens, which are backlit, and another for reading on
e-readers like the Kindle, which uses E-Ink for the
screens.

I am open to all suggestions for the new words, and I am very
patient about this crusade, while at the same time steadfast and
committed to this
seeminly impossible word search. Patience is my middle name: Danny
“Patience” Bloom (1949 - 2032).

do you, dear reader, have any suggestions on this? All ideas are
welcome, and all comments are welcome, too, both pro and con. Let the
discussion begin!

——————-

Danny Bloom is an American blogger who has worked out of Asia since
1991, where he maintains a blog at http://zippy1300.blogspot.com

    – dan e. bloom (10/30 10:03 AM)

hey, that’s all nice, and it’s a fine trend of e-reading, but really, must it be that way.  i’m not a luddite, either, but i don’t want to curl up with my cellphone or e-reader, no matter how nice or small or thin they make the plastic, metal thing.  and what happens if the power goes out, if batteries become too much—not enviro.  a book requires no energy but my fingers, and they aren’t going anyway.  like i said, i love technology, but does the book have to be replaced?  what’s the shelf life of a book only available electronically?  one might say: forever.  one might say, equally: never.  every a-hole in the world can then publish something, like blogs, and what—the market alone will determine what’s read, what’s not?  i still like the editor, the publisher to do a bit of sifting. 

i remain,
mostly ,
the same,
mark

    – mark yakich (10/31 01:37 PM)

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