The Bookseller.com

4th July 2008

Gayle Feldman is The Bookseller's US correspondent.

Return of the digital glory days?

18.02.08

Tim O'Reilly chose New York over sunny San Jose for his second Tools of Change digital gathering. The large turnout was by one estimate at least twice as large as the California conference, and reminiscent of e-book glory days past.
It was no coincidence that both Random House and HarperCollins chose the eve of the event to unveil their latest digital strategies, while not new both Ingram and LibreDigital fanned out in force to talk up their respective digital support services.

O'Reilly's own keynote was obviously de rigueur. The TOC conference demonstrated that while everybody wants to figure out how to use digital technology to make money, a pricey three-day conference convened by a publisher who was already an internet innovator back in 1993 most certainly does.
He took on the concept of "free", and argued, echoing Dilbert creator Scott Adams, that "free is more complicated than you might think". O'Reilly sees "free as a strategic tool, but we're nervous about it". Wikipedia, after all, "is the emblem of everything that might be poised to destroy publishing".
It's okay to be a Google wannabe in our dreams, O'Reilly seemed to suggest, but in the real world publishers should stop thinking about advertising as the model for monetizing the digital world. In addition to events, O'Reilly is using corporate-backed websites and subscription models to make money. Their joint-venture "Safari" subscription platform (with Pearson) represents 20% of the company's business, is growing at 30% a year, and they are thinking of opening the platform to other publishers.
"Free" can "help build those assets", O'Reilly concluded, but you have to "pick the model to fit the math": how big is the audience, how unique is the product, how much exposure do I need.

On the two strategies unveiled by Random House and HarperCollins, O'Reilly told The Bookseller that while "remixability" was a "good idea" – his firm has been selling chapters online since the middle of last year - what users really want "is the ability to download the whole book".  He pointed to Logos Bible Software as mounting the kind of initiative that might actually "energize" the publishing community. Logos "harnesses" the internet to find out what consumers are willing to pay for a new product before they publish it.
Random deputy marketing director Avideh Bashirrad said, "we published the book [Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die] in January '07 and have 220,000 copies in hardcover. We didn't want to cannibalize sales but it's obvious that people want content to be fed in different ways. Our authors are happy."
But Harper's svp for global marketing strategy Carolyn Pittis told The Bookseller that "while everybody's paying attention to digital, there isn't enough talk" about the divergent desires of "authors and what they want".

In session after session, the social aspect of the internet, with buzzwords "social marketing", "social currency", "connecting shared passions", came up time and again. Forget that old mantra content is king. Author Douglas Rushkoff produced a new one: "contact is king". He said: "The content is the excuse for people to interact." He offers people online games to interact around his book.
Fellow author Seth Godin, who is more experienced than most in giving books away free online, said that we should think of printed books as "souvenirs". As for blogs, "I do way better when others blog about what I write rather than when I blog about what I write." But "you can write stuff designed so that others will want to write about it".

Two of the most interesting sessions came from Brits Timo Hannay and Gavin Bell of Nature, who brought some games of their own. "If I were a fiction publisher I'd be developing alternate reality games to encourage people to buy books. To get the attention of the young guy with the mobile phone you need to understand the medium as creative in its own right," said Hannay.
Authors, too, need to get with the medium. He sees "conservatism" among many fiction writers. The "priority should be to nurture new talent that embraces the medium. If only James Joyce and Douglas Adams were still alive!"
Bell pointed to what not to do. Why does Casino Royale come up confusingly in four places on Penguin's website, rather than have one page devoted to it? On the DK site, why is reader-submitted content buried rather than publicized as an asset? If you aggregate content from others, "you become a hub, not a spoke". You "miss out" if everything is only about your own books. 
Bell advised that profile pages are "one of the most important aspects of modern social software". Publishers should add "a single set of unified profile pages to sites". Building "a social catalogue" rather than a book catalogue was the first stage in building community online, he said. Publishers also needed to integrate with the rest of the web. An important example: URLs "should be short, memorable, persistent, stable and predictable". Amazon understands this; it's high time that publishers should, too.

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