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E-books will continue to be a challenge in 2014, even though they are already a multi-million pound industry, Hachette UK’s head of digital George Walkley has said.
Speaking at the Digital Publishing Chrismas Fair in Hoxton yesterday (11th December), which brought together start-ups from across the trade, Walkley outlined challenges he thought the publishing industry would face next year, including the need to stop viewing digital solely as e-books, and competing for people’s time against games and apps.
“It sounds funny to say that the first challenge is e-books when they’re already a multi-million pound industry," he said. “We’ve been doing it since 2008, it ought to be easy but there are still challenges. There are significant issues around platforms, when for many of us it comes from just one large multinational retailer.”
But Walkley, who said publishers were no longer competing against just each other for people’s time when they used devices, but also “with everyone who can put content on these machines”, did say: “I am resolutely optimistic. I think what this event and similar ones do is demonstrate the breadth and inventiveness of this industry. There is a huge opportunity for everyone to claim the space.”
Rob Boynes from Dennis Publishing spoke on the key publishing innovations needed to ensure publishers could compete with non-publishers. These included “share or die”; the need for “value to be greater than pain” and for the consumer to be able to get content on demand; designing for the user not the device; doing more user research; and putting less emphasis on making people use search to discover content.
Other speakers included Jon Ingold of Inkle on digital choice-based storytelling; Yvonne Biggins of Movellas on creating communities for creative teenagers; and Charles Catton of Amber Books on business models and backlists.