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Digital Publishing: Unlearned Lessons from the Humble CD
I’ve written in the past about my belief that digital publishing has the potential to re-energize the written word and potentially bring new life to dying newspapers and magazines. Even though technologies like the e-reader are still very much in their infancy, they point the way to a place I think everyone would like to go…a place where periodicals and literature are not only abundant and affordable but can follow you anywhere on a single device . It could happen and in the not too distant future too, provided the publishing industry sets aside its own divisiveness and works together to assure its common future.
I remember a day many years ago when I walked into a little stereo shop in Virginia Beach, anxious to hear a new digital music format called the compact disc. The player was enormous by modern standards and frighteningly expensive. It was a rich person’s toy, a technological curiosity. It would never replace vinyl records and cassettes which were not only more abundant but far cheaper. Then the salesman slipped in a disc of the 1812 Overture and hit “Play”. A few seconds later, everyone in the store knew something noteworthy had just happened. The Compact Disc became one of the greatest consumer media formats of all time and it revolutionized not only the way we would listen to music but the entire industry itself.
Looking back on it now, so many things could have gone wrong. The Compact Disc could have easily died in its infancy and very few people would have cared. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first promising format to fade into techno-oblivion. One of the reasons why it didn’t die was because the industry chose to back a single unified standard, one which offered clear benefit to consumers. The rest, as they say, was history.
Unfortunately, the digital publishing movement seems to have largely ignored the lessons of the compact disc. Instead of a single industry-wide standard, there are a variety of formats and behind each of those formats is a company desperate to see their standard prevail. There is AZW, PDF, TomeRaider, OPF, ARG, TEI, PDB and many others. For lack of a unified standard, books from various outlets are often incompatible with the very devices created to view them. The more the individual vendors slug it out, the weaker the fledgling industry gets. It needs a common format and it needs it quickly.
I read with great interest this week that Sony, a longtime purveyor of all things proprietary, was adopting the open ePub standard for its e-book store. ePub, a format developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum is exactly what the industry needs right now and while the move may be motivated more by fear of the Amazon Kindle than some sense of collective destiny, it places them on the right side of the equation…which must be a nice change of pace.
When the compact disc first debuted, the clarity of the music with its notable lack of pops and hisses was easily understood by the public as a clear advancement in technology, much as color TV had been when it debuted years before. You didn’t have to sell people on the benefits of CD’s. Those advantages were self-evident. They were physically smaller and easier to store. They were more durable and best of all, they sounded better to the average person.
One of the main problems with digital publishing is that while it has advantages, there has yet to emerge that killer feature that makes it a superior option. Turning a virtual page is not nearly as effortless or enjoyable as turning a real one. Hard plastic and glass are poor tactile substitutes for bound leather and paper. Books are also less fragile and best of all, don’t need to be charged. These are clearly setbacks.
So what can alter this equation and make digital publishing attractive? Three things….color, parity and price.
Black and white is fine for text but everything else from dust covers to college textbooks requires color. Deliver color and all of a sudden e-readers begin to replicate more of the experience of their printed counterparts, making them more valuable. The publishing industry cannot afford to leave the development of flexible, inexpensive color displays to the whims of the marketplace. It must invest in their development now and support their introduction with lots of available content.
The second issue is parity. A digital version of a magazine or newspaper cannot be a cut down, excerpted version of the original. Who would invest the money in an e-reader and a subscription to a magazine only to get less than someone who didn’t? It simply doesn’t add up.
The final hurdle is price. If consumers allow publishers to escape the ever-rising costs of printing presses, ink, and paper as well as transportation and warehousing costs, there has to be a payoff. Currently, most e-books and magazines are about half the price of the regular paper edition. That sounds great until you realize that you’re paying for a string of zeros and ones that are essentially meaningless without your device, an account, a charged battery, etc.
I recently read about a company that offers digital versions of text books for students. For a price roughly half of a standard text book you essentially get a 12 month rental of the book either on-line or downloaded for access on a single device. It sounds great until you realize that a $150 text book is still $75 in digital form and you don’t even own it. You’re renting it. Then you must have either a live-internet connection or a digital device to view it and even then, you’re probably viewing a book printed in portrait mode in the horizontal landscape mode of a standard computer display, unless you have an e-book reader in which case you can choose orientation at the expense of color. Is that kind of trade-off worth the reduced price? If you have to ask the question, that answer is unfortunately no.
Another example is the New York Times newspaper. A year of daily home delivery to my personal address is a jaw-dropping $384. The digital version which can download to my Kindle wirelessly each morning is a much more bearable $167 per year. Big savings, right? Well..consider that viewing the times on the basic paperback sized Kindle is going to be a lesson in frustration. For comfort, you need the larger Kindle DX…which is $489. You’d need to subscribe for just under 3 years to recoup the cost of the device and what is infinitely worse, you’re not getting the entire newspaper but a light stripped-down version that may or may not contain the daily information you’re paying top dollar to access. Is it compelling enough to sell some Kindles? Definitely. Is it enough to save the publishing industry? Not likely.
According to Money Magazine, top-earning authors get about 15% profit on the books they write. The other 85% is dedicated to everything else…meaning that royalties actually comprise a very small percentage of the total asking price. If a $10 electronic book means the author gets $1.50 then pricing a book at $6 or $7 really isn’t that impossible, especially considering you don’t need ink, paper, printing presses, warehouses or transportation. The Kindle store already sells most of its titles for $9.95, but I think there is room for lower prices on back catalog titles…ones that have already made their money. George Orwell’s 1984, for example, costs $9.95 like a bestseller…despite the fact that the book was first published over 50 years ago. What if that title were $2-3 instead? Would that spur Kindle sales and encourage people to grow their own personal libraries? I think it would. Buy an e-reader device and start building your own personal library for less than the cost of a grande latte at Starbucks? Now that sounds intriguing.
Right now, there are simply too many variables in the digital publishing equation. IF you invest in a device and IF your e-store has the book you want and IF it’s the right price and IF your reader is compatible with the format then you can enjoy black and white text with no color on a device that is more fragile than a common paperback and which may or may not contain the same basic information as its cheaper print counterpart. Hardly a compelling sales pitch.
To save their skins and transition to a pixel-based economy, publishers must do the following things as quickly as possible:
1) set a common standard format for e-books and periodicals. Draft a set of guidelines concerning screen size, resolution and performance and offer your content only to those manufacturers who produce compatible devices
2) make direct investments in companies that can deliver tough, efficient color displays for the next generation of e-book readers
3) drop the price of back-catalog e-titles down to the floor. break even on them. turn classic literature into a giant loss-leader for the entire industry in order toget people comfortable with the technology and excited about the savings.
4) pay special attention to the educational market. Today’s e-textbook reading student will soon become tomorrow’s e-book reading graduate. Price e-textbooks aggressively and I’d suggest some kind of trade-in credit program where e-textbooks turned in or deleted after the course is over can generate a credit which can be used to offset the cost of next semester’s e-books.
5) offer full-parity between print and electronic versions…even if that means extra work or cost on the front end. A time magazine on a Kindle must be the same magazine as the print version or there simply is no point.
6) worry less about who’ll get rich first and focus more on who’ll die next if you don’t make the necessary changes.
So listen up publishers….learn the lesson of the compact disc. Offer consumers a single unified product which works across a wide range of devices in a wide variety of outlets. Price aggressively and don’t stop until the numbers make sense for the average consumer. Treat digital publishing not as a sideline to your current business but as the replacement for a dying business model and invest accordingly. If you can marry the convenience and immediacy of the web with the timelessness and depth of the written word you’ll have given your whole industry a heart transplant and you’ll reap the benefits for decades to come. It won’t happen without risk and there are no guarantees, but the alternative is far less appealing.
As Tim Robbins says in “The Shawshank Redemption”, “Get busy living….or get busy dying.”
ultimately, the choice is yours.
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