By Edward Nawotka
E-readers at the Tokyo Book Fair 2011
If you go back 12 to 18 months, the publishing world was in love with the promise of enhanced e-books, transmedia storytelling platforms, and the ability of digital publishing to break and recreate the “container of the book.” Yet you can still count the number of breakthrough projects on one hand (or at a stretch, two). Are we now at a point where e-book innovation is at a standstill?
Today’s feature story looks at the Japanese e-book market, which is a country where you might expect e-book innovation to be in the lifeblood of the tech business, but where the market for e-books has been surprisingly slow to develop. There are a variety of reasons — debates over extending fixed prices to e-books (largely settled in favor, with e-books being priced at a 15-20% de-facto discount on print), debates over DRM (largely settled, in favor), and general confusion on the part of the customer as to where exactly to acquire e-books. Cell phone novels — keitai shousetsu — continue to be popular, but comics account for 75% of the digital market — largely as a result of innovation demanded by commuters.
This phenomenon was explained in a superb overview of the current state of the Japanese e-book market by Robin Birtle published last month in TeleRead. In a follow-up article — from which much of the aforementioned information was derived – Birtle wondered “where are the innovators” in Japan? He offered a few suggestions as to how the industry might innovate — starting with thinking of the business as different from print and challenging the very form of the book:
Books as we know them will never go away but not every book needs to be written with the expectation that it will be consumed linearly in a single or small number of sittings. During my wait at a checkout line I’ll not launch the reader app on my smartphone because books are not written to be consumed in one-minute chunks. Instead, I’ll play a game or read a newsfeed.Now, if my Sony Reader were to send one minute’s reading worth of backstory to my phone based on what I had last read, an author in my reading list would be able to vie for my slots of micro-downtime.
He adds to this the need for publishers to experiment with new pricing models (“making the first 10% of an e-book available as a free sample does not constitute a new pricing model,” he notes wryly), as well as the fact that different constituencies are likely to innovate in different ways.
That said, the very idea that the book business needs to think more radically about how to deliver digital content to consumers — and implement those ideas — is not new. It takes willingness to think creatively, take risks, and commit capital. The recession may have stifled some early efforts at innovation, but as the economy recovers and tens of millions more people each year acquire e-readers and tablets, if publishers hope to capitalize on this shift in attitude the need to jump-start the process of (re)innovation is all the more acute.
Let us know what you think in the comments.
5 Comments
As always, an interesting topic, thanks!
My take is that e-readers and tablets are not the same thing: you can have enhanced, technologically complex content on a tablet, but not on an e-reader. In Japan, it all depends on what will sell more: standard electronic-ink based readers on which only “traditional” novels/non fiction can be read, or the more pliable tablet suitable to enhanced e-books, videos/vook etc.
If I’m right and they are really two different products, then different content has to be produced. The publishing industry will need to have this difference clearly in mind…
PS: I was a little taken aback by Birtle’s comment that novels are not good for standing in line because they need great chunks of time to be consumed. For me, they are perfect and I don’t forget what I’ve read when I close my e-reader because I’ve come to the top of the line! Usually, I can’t wait for my next opportunity to open up my e-reader and continue reading…assuming, of course, it’s a good novel!
Great topic. I agree that the content side of e-Book publishing has languished, perhaps because of thin margins, perhaps because of uncertainty over what consumers actually want.I also agree with Claude that really the market now has to be broken into two verticals now: e-ink and tablet. Tablets are really probably the biggest future here.
I have Sony e-Reader (older gen), two generations of Kindle, and my iPad. My iPad has Kindle and Kobo. 99% of the time I use my iPad, to the point I’m thinking about donating my other readers to my local library. So, it seems to me that innovation should be along the lines of software innovations. The iPad lends itself to content-rich content, but so far most ebooks are still being written/published for the e-ink platform with all its limitations holding back the content (it has the advantage of readability in sunlight, but that’s a small factor for most)
Publishers aren’t exploiting the content-rich element of e-Books on the iPad and other tablets because they’re publishing cross-platform. Maybe that’s the first thing that should change. But even Kindle has the ability to play audio, so why, for example, do I find that a self-help book I buy for my Kindle app doesn’t have the audio from the audio CD that came with the paper book (and at the same price). I buy many self helps, and those I still buy paper because I can’t get the audio otherwise.
One innovation that is recent, although still Beta (I’m being self serving here because I write freelance for their ezine), is iDoLVine. It addresseds the biggest weakness of e-Books for publicity tours. How does an author sign an ebook for those readers who value a personalization from their favorite author? They host live events with authors with video online and the author digitally writes an authentic personalized autograph which is then embedded on a DRM book. From what I hear, even the video of the author event might potentially be embedded on the book. That seems like a pretty exciting innovation and I’m signed up to beta their events. I watched the Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon events. They were fun.
Innovation tends to come with business opportunities, and the mores split-platform it becomes, the less return on investment there might appear to be for people in this area. On the other hand, diverse platforms also means competition, so when market is big enough, the innovation will likely come.
Right now, many are just playing catch up. For example, the Kobo platform is good, but it feels like nothing new (similar to Kindle). So they missed an opportunity for innovation on the first time round anyway. There has to be money in it for a developer, I guess. I think we’ll see more innovation come.
It’s hard to say if its at a “standstill” or if it ever even started. Sure, there were a few extremely progressive (or bleeding edge) publishers/content creators that put out some interesting works, but until the tools are there for authors to create stunning new digital content, it will be a while before it is created. Like the early days of the web, innovation is stifled by minimal and choppy scripting support on browsers, people forced to code in notepad or emacs, and an unknown audience size.
In the next year or two that will change. There are companies working on such tools that will enable non-tech-savvy authors to create quality digital content. It is then that you will start to see more wide-scale innovation.
-Nick
I’m holding my wallet for the first good colour DX sized $200 or less Kindle. When they have that, I will buy it and start getting into different types of media. Currently, I’m not willing to pay for a B&W expensive version that the DX is. When they do make one, my buying habits will increase to include graphic novels, books which are photographic in nature (ie., the art book or travel book), the big tech books, and magazines. So, I suspect that there are a lot of people who might be waiting for the same thing. When that happens, I expect it to really revolutionize publishing. I also expect a stand-still until that happens.
In scholarly publishing, not much new has been done to exploit the full potential of digital publishing since the Gutenberg-e and ACLS Humanities E-Book projects launched more than a decade ago. Of course the major challenge here is generating enough revenue in a small market to cover the large extra costs of publishing these kinds of monographs, which go well beyond what people think of as “enhanced” ebooks today. Probably this will not be solved until some way is found to make “open access” a viable form of publishing scholarly books, perhaps with the creation of special endowments to support complex projects like these. Meanwhile, some publishers like Chicago are experimenting with apps for some titles, but generally the costs here require sales that go well beyond what normal academic books can generate, so their use is likely to remain limited to a few more trade-oriented titles.