The Bookseller.com

22nd March 2010

Tom Williams is an associate agent at PFD and is currently working on a range of app projects with several of the company's clients.

Apportunity knocks

08.02.10

Towards the end of last year the Association of Authors Agents held a seminar about the possible future business models for publishing. Amidst all the fretting, there was plenty of focus on the opportunities that digital technology made available. Toby Mundy made the point that with the recent shedding of talent within the industry there was a strong possibility that some of those made recently redundant will set up their own digital publishing houses, specializing in producing ebook only content.

These new publishers will alter publishing's digital landscape considerably with their lower over-heads and agility. A blossoming of such digital publishers will also help incubate and grow a new market. More digital publishers will inevitably lead to low priced products and they may bring the £3.99 ebook, a prospect that fills many agents and publishers with horror as it dramatically reduces author revenues.

However, it needn't be this way. Whilst there is some pessimism in the industry about digital opportunities, I would argue that the future is in fact bright and that there is plenty of money to be made by authors, agents and publishers alike. But, to do so, publishers need to consider a new approach to digital media - they need to ditch their obsession with books.

Though ereaders are fancy bits of kit, they are not game changing devices. When I use my iPod I listen to between five and fifty tracks in a session, often from various artists depending on my mood. The pleasure of the device is that I have copious variety at my fingertips and even though the quality of the reproduction is less than it would be if I listened to a CD it is this variety, ease and accessibility that I enjoy. And this has always been a pleasure of music - it is not that long ago that you would sit on the tube and see someone thumb through the collection of CDs they carried with them before choosing the best to listen to on their discman. The iPod made this easier and better.

But when I read a book, I am not looking for variety. Most of us read one book at a time and it is only when we are on holiday that we need to carry more than that. So for many readers, the large memory capabilities of ereaders are redundant as they only ever really replace one book at a time. And, of course, no book every runs out of battery. The only advantage that ereaders could have (and thus far only the kindle supports this function) is that you can buy books on the move using the device. If anything, ereaders are actually a false start in the digital revolution because, unlike the iPod, they don't fundamentally change the way we consume books.

The devices that have started the revolution however are mobile devices like the iPhone and the many phones that use Google's Android operating system. These devices are in the pockets of millions and these people are hungry for content. One way this content is delivered is as an app. Publishers have not ignored these developments. If you log on the App Store on iTunes you can buy ebook - or perhaps app book - versions of The Lost Symbol, Brute Force, Eclipse and many others. Peter James now has an app which uses in-app purchase technology to let readers buy app books after having read sample chapters and Penguin have recently released something similar with The Left Hand of God app.

These are tentative forays into a new market. But the approaches that publishers have taken so far with these app books is simply to reproduce the book to be viewed on a mobile device.  Some publishers, like Random House, have added extras such as video interviews with the author to try and give their app books some extra appeal, much in the same way as DVDs and Blu Ray discs have extra features such as commentary and cast and crew interviews. But, the difference between the DVD and the app book is that the DVD was a better piece of technology than the VHS tape that proceeded it.

People bought DVDs because watching them was a more pleasant experience than watching a video tape: the interviews they contain were not a primary motivation for purchase. When it comes to app books this is precisely the problem because they are not better pieces of technology: given the choice many would rather read a book than read a novel on an iPhone.  As digital versions of a physical book, apps are not an evolutionary step.

Whilst publishers focus on reproducing books digitally, they are missing a huge market and recently Jamie Oliver has showed quite how out of touch publishers are with the technology available. His iPhone app 20 Minute Meals is not reproduction of a book - it is an entirely new piece of content that repurposes recipes and adds video and a shopping list function to make a product that is really useful and practical. Oliver's team looked at what an iPhone - or  other mobile device - could do and harnessed its strengths and tailored their content to it, locking it into the Jamie Oliver brand and producing a cookery app that people can use and that is lucrative. It is not a book, it is an app and Jamie Oliver has earned a lot of money through it's sale. Of all the apps released in 2009 it is certainly the one with that has captured the attention of the publishing and technology industries.

Publishers are treasure houses of content and rights but the current lack of imagination in the industry means that they are not innovating and using the material they have creatively. The focus is too much on books and not on content because books are what they know. But, in the current market consumers want content and if publishers looked at what was available to them and thought how the devices available might use that content in a device specific way then they could create successful apps and sell them at a reasonable price that allowed them and their authors to make money. At PFD we have been talking to our clients and looking at the rights we can exploit and we are in a the middle of several deals. Recently we took a simple maths puzzle and migrated it to the iPhone, when this is made available on the app store it will pay out a much a better royalty than a book. 

If publishers want to take advantage though they have to act fast. It won't be too long before more innovative media industries start to buy up rights that allow them to bring together video, audio and text in a way to make great apps. Plus the technology is already changing. Apple's Tablet and Google Chrome Operating System, which most experts expect to be available this year, will allow larger portable web-connected devices and, eventually, the apps on them will be stored on the web, so that it won't matter whether users access the app through a phone or a computer or other device, as long as they are connected to the internet. This will make for richer apps, that are more flexible and personal.

The revolution has come and the question is, in this rapidly changing market, will publishers be ready to capitalize on these new opportunities? Already there is confusion, with one publisher recently telling me that Apple was a purchaser of apps, rather like amazon, instead of a host and conduit as it is. Publishers have to understand this new industry better and if they don't get their heads around the current technology and how to harness its power, then perhaps they never will.