The UK Digital Publishing Scene

Peter Kilborn | 06/30/2008 | Digitization

There’s nothing particularly new about digital publishing – academic journal publishing has moved decisively from print to digital with comparatively little pain – but in the UK, as elsewhere at the moment, there is a big and persistent buzz about e-books and other forms of digital delivery.

Ironically much of the excitement is about using digital content to promote the sale of physical books: the various search inside programmes, jacket/cover images, widgets and other marketing collateral. In order to have such things available, however, it is necessary to have book content in digital form in the first place; and UK publishers have been on the whole ready to provide material to Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Search Books (while it lasted) and to Amazon.co.uk. All see benefit in having a degree of browsability available to online users to support physical sales. Some of the largest companies, however, – Random House, HarperCollins, Penguin, etc – have sought to keep control of their assets away from their powerful trading partners by setting up their own repositories of digital content.
This hugely expensive enterprise is also providing a way of storing digital content in a form which will allow a proliferation of repurposed products, either physical or digital. And that, of course, is the prize if and when e-books become a serious proposition.

The frustrating thing about the UK market in this regard is that we are still waiting for things to happen: Google are not trying to sell content; we don’t have the Kindle or a Sony E-Reader; practically no digital content is yet being traded. That doesn’t mean that there is not a huge amount of activity under way to prepare for what may happen in the future.

The big fear last year was that publishers, aided and abetted by Google, would seek to exclude booksellers from the sale of digital content by direct selling to the consumer. The UK Booksellers Association, ever defensive of booksellers’ place in the supply chain, has been very active, commissioning a series of reports and documents (available at http://www.booksellers.org.uk). However, the debate has moved on now and few believe that disintermediation is a serious threat: after all the company best placed to make digital sales is a bookseller (Amazon); and both Waterstone’s and Borders are in the process of setting up web sites which are certainly planned to feature e-books. Gardners, one of the two major general wholesalers, has set up a digital warehouse into which publishers can deposit their content; and their competitor Bertrams clearly has a similar project in its plans.

There is, however, general agreement that a plausible e-reader is an essential component of the market for e-books gaining critical mass. Kindle is not yet available in the UK and because of its wireless connectivity may not be unless a deal is struck with one of the UK mobile phone networks. This has not yet happened but presumably talks are under way. The Sony e-Reader is not yet available here either but there is speculation that it will be launched in the autumn, possibly in collaboration with Waterstone’s. It had previously been mentioned in connection with Borders (now only connected with the US company through a small minority stake), but Borders have recently announced that they will sell the iRex iLiad reader at £399, bundled with 50 classic out-of-copyright titles. Although this is the only dedicated e-reader on the market, obtaining additional digital content to read on it is by no means easy (not available from Borders, or from Waterstone’s or Amazon, but only from a handful of e-books sites not guaranteeing compatibility).

Compatibility is the matter of most concern. The decision taken by Amazon.com to sell only proprietary Kindle content has been widely interpreted in the UK as an attempt to dominate the market through a standards war (VHS v. Betamax). Almost everyone here (outside Amazon) would argue that the more interoperability of products and formats there is the better it will be for the growth of a mature e-book market.

To summarise, there is much talk and not much action here. The Publishers Association is organising two ‘digital summits’ primarily to address issues of copyright in digital content. Soon afterwards the Liaison Group of the Publishers and Booksellers Associations will be holding a meeting dedicated to digital issues. Book Industry Communication, the UK’s supply chain organisation, has set up a Digital Supply Chain Group which held a one-day workshop recently to discuss a range of contentious issues.

Chief among these at the moment is the question of identification of digital content. It has been generally taken for granted that e-books, like physical books, should be identified using ISBNs. The ISO ISBN standard says that each digital format traded should carry its own individual ISBN, exactly as various versions or formats of a physical product do. This position has been endorsed in a joint publication of Book Industry Communication and the Book Industry Study Group published in January. Not all publishers are persuaded, however, encouraged by the coincidental appearance of the generic .epub file format: apparently fearful of the number of ISBNs they might have to assign if they sell chapters or fragments of their titles, the cost of numbers (though most big publishers already own vast stocks of unused ISBNs rashly assigned when the system came into being), and the possibly burdensome impact on their systems, they have sought to assign a single ISBN to all digital manifestations and find other mechanisms to distinguish them in their own systems. Most of them have seem not to have thought through the consequences: that e-books sold through library intermediaries such as NetRead or MyiLibrary will need individual ISBNs by format if sales are to be correctly reported (this would raise the unwelcome possibility of intermediaries assigning ISBNs to publishers’ titles); and that assigning an ISBN to a source file such as .epub implies that the publisher has no interest in the form in which the product is sold after it has been sold to an intermediary for repurposing.

To conclude: while the marketplace remains so ill-defined there is very little advice which can be given to Canadian publishers with digital content to sell in the UK. Most for whom it is appropriate will already have established links with Ingram’s (formerly Coutts’) MyiLibrary and other intermediaries in the library market. Dawson Books are the latest UK entrant with their Dawsonera offering. In the consumer market, the situation might change very quickly if there were to be a disruptive intervention in the market by one of the global goliaths (Google, Amazon) or even a hardware provider, perhaps even an organisation with no connections to the book trade so far. But so far, the industry is just trying to be as prepared as it can be for something which doesn’t yet exist.

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