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The Little Package that Could: eBooks
and Their Friends Prepare for the Limelight |
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22 August 2005 |
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Alas, the poor eBook has suffered quite an identify crisis
these past few years - in spite of the fact that their
sales growth continues to surge impressively. By some
reckonings electronic books will be outselling their
paper-bound counterparts as soon as 2010. But the key to
the future of electronic books lies not so much in getting
existing book formats into electronic packaging as in
creating new concepts for packaging content for portable
use that extend the concept of the book in new directions.
The good news is that the resulting packages offer premium
content providers significant revenue opportunities - if
they can learn how to create products that appeal to users
used to both text and interactive capabilities. |
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The eBook
has been dismissed and disparaged time and again as an idea
whose time never came. Tagged as awkward, inefficient and meant
largely for inexpensive novels and specialzed reference
content, the eBook package is ignored in large part by most
business information providers and embraced with some
impatience by publishing houses seeking the blooming of this
long-awaited rose. Indeed, some services that have become known
for eBooks are moving away from the moniker to broaden their
appeal. Even the Open eBook Forum, the key industry association
pushing the underpinnings of eBooks, has renamed itself the
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) to broaden
its appeal as the platforms and formats used to distribute
digital content objects proliferate via common software and
devices. From this perspective you'd think that eBooks were
getting ready to be consigned to the scrap heap of content
technology history.
The problem, though, is that the facts
just don't seem to jive with the anti-hype. According to the
IDPF's own statistics eBooks sales continue to rise sharply and
according to a
recent news article electronic book sales are expected to
outstrip paper-based book sales by as soon as 2010. While the
average eBook sells at a fifth the cost of its paper cousins,
their cost of production is extremely low and their packaging
flexibility is attracting premium content producers.
McGraw-Hill Higher Education is opting for Zinio-formatted
delivery of college texts,
as noted by Shore Senior Analyst Jean Bedord in our weblog,
saving students money and publishers risky investments in print
runs. At the same time eBooks are becoming the darling of
mobile users, even making their way
onto digital watches. The new
Amazon Shorts selections of short non-fiction and fiction
works, many of them for just 49 cents, are designed to hook
readers who never related to paper versions of books and who
are likely to upgrade to more premium print and electronic book
offerings.
In short the stage is being set for a
rich environment of downloadable premium content objects, many
of which owe their existence to books that have gone before but
which are just the beginning of a relationship with content
purchasers that extends well beyond the traditional book
format. Many will be right-protected packages but
increasingly there will be a mix of both rights-protected
content and content that's designed to travel easily from one
user to another to promote the value of its sources and
channels to other readers. As the use of these packages
widens, content producers will become more aware of the value
of reader-friendly content objects in many more venues and
markets. Here are a few ideas for considering when thinking of
how to apply the eBook concept to your own content marketing
efforts:
- An eBook can contain lots more than
just a book. And vice versa. The efforts by Amazon and
McGraw-Hill Higher Education underscore that the package and
the content used for delivering books and other content
diogitally should not be confused with one another. The Zinio
reader, heretofore used for consumer magazines, works great
for textbooks, and eBook reading software can work very well
with texts other than novels and reference materials, as
shown by Amazon. With an increasing awareness of the value of
managing content redistribution effectively publishers and
distributors should look carefully at how they can use
existing platforms used for eBooks and similar formats to
facilitate convenient repackaging of their content when it's
valuable to have it in a print-friendly format.
- What's a book? Anything a user
wants it to be. Book marketers see long-term advantages
to being able to develop authors and titles more quickly and
cost-effectively using electronic titles, but oftentimes
these efforts are based on existing product concepts and
development cycles. Publishers need to think more creatively
about how they can produce book-like digital content packages
that appeal to highly focused audiences, even individual
purchasers, including both collections of content developed
consciously for a book format and content that may have other
roots, such as from weblogs and online databases. Some of
these pieces may be relatively static and other pieces may be
quite dynamic, depending on the users' needs, but the end
product can be something that's designed for both permanence
and portability in a way that aligns powerfully with the
concept of books.
- Think of a book as a database to
go. While we tend to think of electronic books as
objects that closely correlate with their printed
counterparts, this is just the beginning point of packaging
bookish content for more portability in the digital age.
Already products such as
Knovel's
library of SciTech reference publications use an online
interface to turn books into highly interactive research
tools. We can expect to see electronic books being able to
present themselves either as print-friendly volumes or
powerful databases designed for integration into applications
and other digital content collections, with or without a
supporting online service. The electronic book is likely to
evolve into a multi-faceted digital content object which
allows authors to ship off content to users with some hope of
meaningful payment coming their way but with a great deal of
downstream flexibility in how its content gets shaped into a
package that has meaning to its users.
The prose of books may be as deathless as
ever but the packages used to convey books to audiences in the
digital era are only at the beginning of a new life for
packaging content on the go conveniently and profitably. In the
process of exploring these new packages publishers have an
opportunity to define new product concepts for packaging
content that bridge both traditional concepts and new
electronic concepts in very powerful ways. Both books and
eBooks are far from dead: they're just waiting for publishers
to give birth to products that exploit the full potential of
portable digital content formats. Some of these formats may not
wind up looking much like the volumes that are the roots of
books, but to future users they will be personal objects as
indispensable as any beloved volumes on your bookshelf today.
That is, if you still have bookshelves...
-
John Blossom
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