The Kindle

Peter Kilborn | 10/08/2009

The excitement this week has been that Amazon is at last ready to bring the Kindle to Europe. By the time you read this we shall know if it’s true.* The UK is a natural market for Amazon, where it already takes a commanding share of the online retail market for books, but the wireless technology Kindle has used in the US for e-book downloads – certainly the reason for its remarkable success - has not up to now been available in the UK, let alone across continental Europe. How this will be resolved will come as a surprise to everyone.

Certainly this seems a natural time to be launching: at the time of the Frankfurt Book Fair and with Christmas approaching. The rumour has been fuelled by reports of recent meetings with the major publishers and a ratcheting up of the pressure from Amazon UK’s Kindle evangelist Genevieve Kunst to persuade publishers to make their titles available.

What if it’s true? As previously indicated here, the UK has been in a kind of limbo as far as e-books are concerned, waiting for Kindle. Waterstone’s, Borders and more recently W H Smith have e-readers available to buy – and reasonable but not spectacular numbers have been sold - but the volume of downloads had been distinctly lacklustre. It is certainly possible that the much more user-friendly Kindle will grow the market very quickly, especially if it makes the process of buying and downloading content a simpler and more intuitive process.

There is concern here, though, about pricing policies: probably one of the most tricky issues facing the emerging e-book market. Clearly this will be dictated by Amazon in the end (and it’s unlikely that publishers will hold out against it) but there must be anxiety that cheap e-books (that is, e-books priced well below that of a hardcover equivalent) will further undermine the value of the book market – although it is arguable that the levels of discounting in the marketplace have already done exactly that. And, as I mentioned in my last post, the fact that e-books are subject to value-added tax where printed books are not means that in commercial terms you can’t make like-for-like comparisons in any case.

So, things may be about to change here; and it could be an interesting few months ahead. To what extent in the final analysis the impact of an e-book reading device will dictate the way people consume content is not yet clear. There are those who believe that e-readers are a distraction from the main issue; but a dominant player such as Amazon, with an established customer base and an innovative new way of delivering its content, is bound to send ripples through this market and perhaps mark a decisive digital moment.

If the rumours are true… 

*Postscript

The announcement was duly made – expectations had been raised too high for it not to have been - but it was very far from being a full-blown launch. It begs too many questions to be answered right now, especially whether it will indeed be enough to change the landscape of UK digital publishing.
At first glance, the answer is no. First, the Kindle will be sold only via the Amazon.com site and shipped from the US at a dollar price of $279. Potential UK consumers have been quick to note that there are substantial carriage costs to add to that, plus import duties, plus – apparently – a $1.50 surcharge on each downloaded file. The wireless technology, based on AT&T’s network, will work for many but not for all: some will have to download to a USB device before loading onto Kindle.

It seems probable that Amazon has done things this way to manage the expectations of the UK publishers who have agreed to make their content available. We know from experience that this is not the way Amazon normally launches potentially huge new developments and no doubt the Kindle will come properly to the UK in due course; but that moment does not seem to be now.
I will report further when the dust has settled and the Frankfurt Book Fair has had its say.

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“E-Myths”

Peter Kilborn | 10/07/2009

The Independent Publishers Guild (IPG) has over the last year or so initiated a series of Digital Quarterly meetings aimed at the sharing of information with its membership on digital matters. The IPG is in profile a grouping of fiercely entrepreneurial companies, large and small, which are loosely defined as outside corporate control. Its members, many of which are highly successful publishers in niche areas, have typically battled to find ways to sell their products outside the conventional trade channels; and its meetings are always rewarding in terms of the out-of-the-box thinking which is their gratifying characteristic.

At a recent event, David Attwooll, a veteran digital publisher from before such a term had been invented, presented an entertaining ten ‘e-myths’, debunking some of the current hype around e-books. His message was the sane appraisal that publishing is not defined by any particular delivery mechanism but existed to provide content or information to an interested audience by whatever means that audience required.

Here are the myths (and you can read them in greater detail on the Bookseller web site at http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/97286-my-favourite-digital-myths.html and http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/97827-my-favourite-digital-myths-ii.html):

- Content is king (context is everything).
- There will be an ‘iPOD moment’ for e-readers.
- Do nothing: no one’s making any money (they are: Reed Elsevier have revenues of £3bn from digital publishing; and in the US – if not here - Kindle sales   are growing to significant levels).
- We need to do everything ourselves (outsourcing of digital services is no different from outsourcing print or copy editing).
- You have to be a techie/under 25/a futurologist (you don’t).
- We’re all doomed!
- We’re all going to be unimaginably rich.
- E-books cannibalize print sales.
- People read online in the same way as printed books (studies show that even readers of academic journals have a much less sustained online reading experience).
- You have to be big.

You could argue that there are some internal contradictions within these myths, but the message is clear: digital publishing is best viewed in the context of publishing in general and not as something which needs to be re-invented.

The meeting also included an informative rundown from Tanya Price from the Random House Distribution Division on the issues publishers of e-books need to address. These included the necessity to acquire electronic rights not just in a text but also in related illustrations and images as well perhaps as in fonts; the crucial role played by metadata in enabling discovery of digital products; and the timely reminder that digital editions are – unlike printed books – subject to value added tax, currently at 15% but scheduled to revert to its previous level of 17.5% in January. This inevitably distorts the issues around pricing raised in my last post: an £18.99 Dan Brown in printed form is a £16.50 e-book (£16.15 in January). The government takes the difference!

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Digital Publishing in the UK

Peter Kilborn | 09/28/2009

This first post on digital publishing in the UK must inevitably be in the form of an overview of the current situation here. That’s not an easy thing to do, given that it is necessary to separate the hype from the reality.

So first, the hype. The UK book industry has undoubtedly joined the international obsession with e-books. All the major publishers have invested in digital asset management systems of more or less sophisticated kinds and done their deals with digitization and conversion houses. Some are experimenting with new workflows to assist in bringing digital products to market, while digitization of backlist titles continues apace. There is evidence everywhere of initiatives to exploit ‘the long tail’ as e-books or in print on demand programs.

The reality, however, is more sobering. There is little real evidence yet that a sustainable market for e-books exists. Published sales growth rates are impressive but start from such a low base as to be meaningless. Sales of e-readers are increasing but there is nothing to indicate that we have reached the much-touted ‘iPod moment’. Like you, we don’t have the Kindle - there is still, it seems, no suitable wireless network available to supply the download technology – and this puts us in a fundamentally different place as far as e-book exploitation is concerned from the US situation. Amazon is a powerful force in the UK marketplace, the dominant online bookseller by a substantial factor with around 15% of the total books market; and with an innovative product such as Kindle known to be in the wings, it is unsurprising that the attempts made by the land-based retail chains - Waterstone’s, WH Smith and Borders – to seize a commanding place in the market have lacked lustre, though Waterstone’s have made strenuous efforts to promote the Sony e-Reader.

The e-book revolution, then, is still waiting to happen, and it would be a rash prophet who would predict how things will develop and when: there’s no shortage of digitized content (but not nearly enough titles to make e-books a plausible substitution for the printed article), a supply chain still in the making, a lamentable lack of good metadata to enable discovery, no clear policies on pricing, no automatic granting of e-book rights by agents and authors - not even to mention the impact there may be on the trade in general from the outcome of the Google settlement.

This is well exemplified in a blog by Philip Jones on the Bookseller website on the day of the publication of the new Dan Brown. ‘I’d have thought,’ he writes, ‘ that the launch of the biggest book of year as an e-book on the same day as the printed edition might prove a useful test-case for the immediate future of digital reading here.’

On the previous day (14 September), he discovered that of the main e-book sites only WH Smith even provided a buying option, but refused to allow a download until the 16th, the day after publication. Borders seemed not to know anything about it. Even Waterstone’s did not make it available until well after publication day had begun; and when they did sent out mixed messages about price: ‘Having been coy about the e-book price for the past two weeks, Waterstone’s today lists it as expected at £9.49 [the recommended price is £18.99], the same price as the hardcover. Oddly though, it gives a list price of £11.86, so the offering is only a 20% discount.’

All these subjects will be featuring in future posts, I have no doubt.

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