Posts tagged Workflow
The e-books war: Antonio Tombolini’s point of view
Feb 16th
Antonio Tombolini is the owner of Simplicissimus Book Farm, and he is with any probability the most authoritative advocate of the digital shift in trade publishing in Italy, as his firm started distributing e-book readers years ago, when e-books seemed – and actually were – a distant vision. He published last week on his blog a post on the Amazon/MacMillan/Apple issue, and I asked his permission to translate it for Inchiostro Elettrico.
So… I apologise for the rough translation, and thank him for his kindness:
Apple, Amazon, MacMillan and the e-books war. But… isn’t someone missing?
by Antonio Tombolini
Poor Publisher, MacMillan, that plays as David, succeeds in imposing Amazon, that plays as Goliath, his victory after two years of ruthless oppression by the latter, in the name of the Good Guys, that is those who do not want to kill books, and just want – oh, yes they do - the greater good of the authors and of beaux arts. And the strength to David-MacMillan comes from Apple, the Good Samaritan.
But what exactly was the oppression that Goliath-Amazon forced on David-MacMillan? Thanks to his uncontrolled power, Goliath-Amazon imposed to the ebooks of Poor Publisher sold in the Kindle Store the prices Amazon decided, depriving Poor Publisher of any control on the prices of his own products, and putting at risk – indirectly – author’s revenues. It’s the wholesale model, where the retailer (Amazon) asks the producer (MacMillan) the net price for the goods he wants to buy, and then it’s the retailer that decides the price to which he will sell the product to the consumer.
After two years of such a ruthless oppression, enter Good Samaritan-Apple, and he suggests publishers, with his iBooks, a different model, the so-called agency model: the retailer (Apple’s iBooks) doesn’t buy any goods, but acts as a sales agent on part of the producer (MacMillan), and is repaid with a commission. It’s now the producer/publisher that decides the final price to the consumer, and the agent/iBooks only asks for a commission.
So what’s the victory of David-MacMillan? Well – thanks to Good Samaritan-Apple that tells no way, with me and my iBooks it’s you that decide the price of your ebooks! – he is able to rebel against Goliath-Amazon and manages to win in the end: from now on Poor Publisher will sell his ebooks at the price he prefers. And that is true also in the Kindle Store of Goliath, that has to concede defeat.
Ok. But what’s the reality of things?
Who really is MacMillan? Certainly not a Poor Publisher: on the contrary, it’s one of the big six.
Thanks to MacMillan’s victory, their ebooks will be sold in the Kindle Store at 14.99$ instead than 9.99$: a weird kind of healthy competition, the one desired by MacMillan’s CEO, a competition that wants prices to go 50% up for the consumer!
In this whole story it’s bizarre that the world of the Good Guys (MacMillan and Apple) totally forgets that there is a player in the market that they may want to consider: the consumer, the one that spends the money that make firms survive. It’s bizarre that MacMillan, that any publisher actually, does not understand that the one that is making the rules, in the end, is the one that measures the added value, and that in the end it will be the consumer to impose his price to ebooks: and everybody knows – unless one wants to trick himself – that the 9.99$ threshold is already too high for who’s buying ebooks, and is accepted only now, given the rudimentary phase of the market. But soon, let’s say in three years’ time, an ebook will not cost more than 5$ (or 5€): and if there’s a way to earn an income (and there is, there definitely is!) it’s a matter that authors, publishers and booksellers will have to solve on their own.
What would a similar choice to MacMillan’s one from all of the big publishers bring? What will happen if they are to raise ebooks prices to 12/15$?
An accelerated extinction. Authors will realise that in this way they will earn less, for the simple reason that less (legal) ebooks will be sold. And they will shift to the opportunities of self-publishing (first among them the one of, surprise, Amazon), selling at a lower cost their ebooks but getting 70% of the incomes. As some Paulo Coelho did, for example.
So, what should publishers do?
Lots of things: anticipate the requests and expectations of the market, that is pricing ebooks less than 5$/€, offering them now, without being forced by the market, starting now the reorganisation of their production costs.
Realising that in the ebooks’ world (as the majors of the music world are showing) the reduction in production costs is more than proportional to the reduction in the incomes, that anyway will come.
And this means that in the ebooks’ world the publisher (and the author) may earn more than what is earned now: but in order to do so he must focus on his job as a publisher in this new world starting from now, he must focus on the added value that he may give compared to self-publishing.
To sum up, I mostly agree with this:
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I asked Antonio the permission to publish his post because he underlines in a convincing way that, as I mentioned before, the reader is your master and that publishers have to focus on the added value they can give to ebooks.
It is true that people pay more – and will probably continue to pay more – than 9.99$/€ (and sometimes even more than 14.99$/€) every day, but that will hardly be the rule. In the end the market will push prices down, as already happened in other industries.
Not only: it seems that publishers keep reasoning only about production costs. This can be understood, also because mammoth firms that have to change their workflow must spend a whole lot of money right now. Nevertheless, they seem not to think enough on the value perceived by the reader. They seem to think that the reader will simply adapt to the prices.
An underlying reason is certainly the fact that they do not want for low ebooks prices to harm the paper books prices and they want to keep them competitive. It is also true, as for example Mike Shatzkin tells, quoting Michael Cader on Publisher’s Lunch (subscription only, sorry), that publishers are in fact lowering their margins with the agency model, and are ready to lower their prices in a not-too-distant future (I’ll try to tackle all these aspects in future posts).
But now the question actually is, at least for some of them, why not doing it now, why not boldly go where no publisher has gone before and try to build for themselves a different image?
Most of the business lies in the quality of the titles, but the quality itself is not only the story or style or depth of research of the book: it’s also the reader experience, and it’s also the brand. Why not build for themselves an “innovator” brand in the e-books business? There seems to be a crack open to reach a new audience that could be missed if publishers will stick too much to the standard business model, that is not efficient in the new market. Moreover, lowering the prices to the consumer and building a new image may have the nice side-effect of pushing not only ebooks sales but also the sales of traditional books, as it happened in the past and is happening right now (think Coelho, think Doctorow, or think Wu Ming in Italy).
A wild thought: waiting too much in lowering the prices will also open a wide space for smaller publishers but especially for independent editors / publishing communities (Cursor, anyone?) that could take advantage of the agency model and its sibling proposed by Amazon for lower priced e-books.
As Antonio says:
in the ebooks’ world the publisher (and the author) may earn more than what is earned now: but in order to do so he must focus on his job as a publisher in this new world starting from now, he must focus on the added value that he may give compared to self-publishing.
If he won’t do so, somebody else will step in.
From good-enough to fit-like-a-glove e-books
Feb 10th
A great post by Pablo Defendini sparked some thoughts on the production in publishing and the changes it will (well, should) implement.
First things first: the reader is your master.
There is no way in which the reader will buy for let’s say 15$ a poorly formatted e-book that he has troubles reading.
And a poorly formatted e-book is, for example, the same file you are printing, with the TOC, the title page, the blank pages, and so on. That’s great for a paper book. That’s awful for an electronic device.
Look at Liza’s slides. Memorize them. Sleep with them.
It’s easy to learn. It’s not easy doing it right.
But it’s essential, because the reader may buy something now, for the excitement of this-new-thing-that-is-digital-book, but will not be fooled for long. If what you’re selling them is badly designed and clumsy they will not pay you 15 bucks. They will not pay you even 5 bucks, actually. And that does not mean they will go and buy the trade hardcover or paperback.
Sidenote. Learn it as a mantra: a reader that wants to buy the e-book *will* have the e-book, or nothing. He will not go and buy a paperback instead. Yes, it may happen sometimes, but rarely. It's far more probable that he will download it from P2P, or give up.
Not only: apart from the layout, e-books are not static by nature. They may grow fatter, or thinner, they may change in time. Heck, they may also communicate with the external world, provided some kind of connection! So why would it be enough to put the book on a Kindle to make it magically an e-book? Sure, there will be room for this kind of static e-books, but big is the room for titles especially suited to the various devices.
For now anything good-enough or not-too-bad may be ok, but in the long run (long? let’s say medium) e-books will have to fit like a glove to the pros and cons of every device. And in order to win in the long run, it’s better to have an early start. And the early start requires some changes in production.
So what are books now? Well, almost what they have always been, a mix of text and paratext. The fact is that the paratext cannot be the same for a digital edition and for a printed one – and cannot be the same for all the digital editions.
Enter XML.
XML is a standard markup language aimed toward simplicity and interoperability. An XML file is a text file that does not contain any information on the layout of the text, but plenty of content-rich information.
An XML file may tell who is the author, may clearly identify that some word is a <place> instead of a <person>, may provide information that will help the device reading the file interact with other devices, and transmit or receive information (“hey, you are in Milan and two blocks from where you are right now, in an hour, the author will hold a conference!”).
Stripping away layout instructions and providing a standard language, XML helps a lot in tailoring the content for each device. Moreover, it permits to create a single file that *is* the book, put it in a central repository in the publishing house Content Management System (CMS), and send the content directly to all the possible devices already formatted to adapt to the potentialities of each single device – be it a book, a Kindle, the web, everything.
This is not immediate, of course. On the contrary, it requires a great amount of time and money.
Money, because there’s a system to build to take care of all the aspects of production inside the house. The best choice is with any probability to build the system in-house, so to tailor it to your specific needs and spare money in mainteinance and in buying a mammoth CMS that you then discover is almost useless for you. The relatively brief history of CMSs is full of failed experiments, of firms that bought huge systems that didn’t fit at all their needs. On the contrary, there are plenty of examples of successful smaller CMSs built from scratches.
The time expense is humongous as well, as requires to change perspective and habits to most players, and to learn new skills – but these changes are already covered well in Pablo’s post.
I do not really believe that you can get authors to provide clean, well formed XML files (but read the comments on Pablo’s post for nice insights), but on the other hand it has to be used in the workflow of the publishing house. There is no reason not to use it, unless you want to lose ground to all the other smaller or bigger publishers that will start, or already are, using it.
This is the way to go. This would have been the way to go years ago, actually.
A final thought, I will maybe build on that in a future post: the fact that there’s a design to be made for the new formats and devices open up spaces for great experiments. There’s a lot of work to do: there may be a whole new typography to be invented here.
Mobile disruption
Jan 27th
Andrew Savikas has an interesting post on the importance that mobile multi-purposes device will eventually gain – or has already gained – compared to the dedicated devices like the Kindle, the Sony Reader and so on.
It’s a sustaining against a disruptive approach, Savikas argues. Mobile devices are more affordable and portable. And I would add they are already more widespread, besides having less (let’s call them) psychological barriers: people are buying them for doing lots of things, with reading being just one of them, and certainly not the main one. It’s still early to see who will emerge the winner – if there will be (only) one – but the argument for the mobile multi-purposes devices it’s strong. They will be with any probability the real driver for the explosion of the e-book market, despite the smaller screens and retroillumiation.
The related question is: what will become of the (e)book? Different formats bring to different texts: it would also be possible to argue that an e-book readable on an iPhone will have to be designed entirely differently from one readable on a dedicated device – which once again brings to some heavy-thinking on the workflow side.
And then there’s the tablet, of course. And anything else will appear in the near future.
Getting the basics right
Jan 25th
A very nice post (not surprisingly) by Kassia Krozser on Publishing Perspectives: How about a little back to the basics? points out what every publisher should know but is able to get amazingly wrong.
The article is well worth a read, I’d just like to stress a few points.
First of all, the shift from the quality itself of the object/content, to the quality of the reading experience:
I have no interest in improving the print experience. I’m looking to improve the reading experience, which to me going forward means getting digital books right.
This kind of requires a shift in perspective: in a book you don’t really need to work on the reading experience, it’s been more or less the same for the last centuries. But now it’s open sea, and it will be interesting to look at all the experiments that will be made in the near future. Should I name my favourite insight on this subject, it would be this:
Consider the Medium: It’s digital, not print. Endless “pages” of breathless quotes about previous books are annoying and pointless. I’ve already bought the book; I want to start reading. Dump page number — they make no sense and highlight the lack of thought going into the digital edition. There are more logical ways to create these references.
Finally, and this will be a (the?) crucial point in the next few years:
It won’t come as a surprise to see that most of the basics noted below relate to production and workflow.
A well laid-out workflow is paramount. But this does not simply means to get the contect out in as many devices as possible with as less work as possible: it means rethinking the content itself (back on this, soon).
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