Feels like Christmas

Michael Jensen | 11/25/2009

So the Kindle comes to Canada. Finally.

What that means to Canadian publishers is that the toe of their stocking may be squarish this Christmas. And by January they’ll have hands-on experience. And by February they’ll be wanting to get their books into Kindle format right away.

Amazon Kindle is a tiny market compared to print, but the Kindle is still (for now) the biggest digital marketplace around.

Getting into it is pretty simple, especially for publishers of fiction and other text-heavy books. For anything with tables, graphs, images, or complex typography, wait for a year or two. But for long-form and short-form text, it’s worth the investment of a little time and effort.

Surprisingly little.

Amazon provides a Quick Start guide for publishers—and also provides free code-translation and light editing tools to make it relatively easy for publishers to upload and publish a Kindle-ready publication, particularly if you have anyone on staff who understands HTML.

In a few years, Kindle may be the Laserdisk of ebooks—but that’s a few years off. Now’s a good time to get your feet wet with a book or two whose rights are clear, and perhaps whose first-blush sales have peaked.

You then can begin to experiment with the expanding export markets (100 non-US countries) as well as the new Canadian market for Kindle publications—and experiment with methods of promoting the Kindle versions, from your own site, your authors’ sites, and in other venues.

You’ll get hands-on experience, not only with Kindle and its marketplace, but the experience of having a Kindle ebook or two that you can show off to authors and friends.

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Let’s Imagine

Michael Jensen | 10/13/2009

Let’s imagine the publishing environment, five years from now.

As I wrote in the last post, in just the last five years, we’ve seen the rise of Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, Google Books, ebooks 2.0, YouTube, Flash, massively multiplayer games, iPhones and apps, the institutionalization of open source and XML standards, and plenty, plenty more.

Let’s imagine five years ahead, and let’s think about how to position Canadian publishing optimally for that future. I invite supposition, theorizing, and even pull-from-the-air hypothesizing, in the comments.

It’s a fool’s game, predicting the future. And at the risk of becoming Moliere’s “knowledgeable fool” (“A knowledgeable fool is a greater fool than an ignorant fool”)—I’ve been trying to forecast the next five years for the last, oh, twenty years.

I’ve done all right, being mostly correct on the things that matter.
I’ve also been wrong (about how quickly micropayment systems would be accepted, for example), but on the main I’m not embarrassed by my past prognostications.

If the last five years brought us such incredible, surprising bounty, then what must the next five years bring? At base, we will have the compound-interest effect making a hockey-stick rise in terms of digital connectedness, making five years from now disruptively different.

Here’s a few of the things that seem clear:

* We’ll have 1000 to 10,000 times more documents available for free on the World Wide Web than we have today. Consequently, certified quality and substantiveness (as defined culturally and algorithmically) will be ever more cherished.

* Ubiquitous information: you will connect with the Web in a way that allows you constant access to “your world”—your library, your house, your friends, your virtual portable personalized digital reality. It can be presented on your phone, on your laptop, on hotel widescreen TVs, in library kiosks, in Starbucks and in Chapters.

* The distinction between “work” and “life” will have continued to dissolve; that said, avatars that pleasantly say “I’m off the grid until about 4:00” to anyone trying to contact you, will have become a signal of sanity.

* Micropayments will have finally become institutionalized (which I first erroneously predicted as a near-future inevitability in 1996 [Google “michael jensen” micropayments]). But by now (2014), tossing a digital dime or a virtual quarter into someone’s virtual hat, to access (or reward) something of value, will be trivial and accepted—in fact, the information economy will be turning to depend on these transactions.

* Increasing intersection between gameworlds and other virtual worlds (think frequent flyer miles as viable currency to buy a battle-axe in a medieval massively multiplayer online game) mean that APIs, digital transactions, automated access systems, and currency-neutral pricing models will be normalized.

* A functionally borderless digital environment predominates—in which tribes, communities, groups, causes, and the like wax and wane transnationally, based on brief, or enduring, interests. Think a potentially transitory, virtual association, the SESO, the “Society for the Exploration of Something or Other.” These communities accrue link/search collections of resources—for free and potentially for pay—that become “vertical aggregations of the community of knowledge” about the thing they’re interested in.

What should a publisher do in such a borderless, ubiquitous, always-on, micropayment world do?

* Design flexible systems that don’t depend on a particular format of sale.

* Design niche-based marketing systems that attend to communities of practice and interest.

* Presume that contractual agreements can be arranged which preclude any interruption between interested audience and intellectual content (the only question is who gets what share of what money).

* Engage in every rational vertical market who asks—presuming at least 50% share in digital nickels.

* Resign ourselves to a low price for an ebook (currently “$9.99” is the sweet spot) compared to a p-book—but make up for it in volume and lower distribution costs.

Let me be clear: we will have to do this AND continue to do what we’ve always done, during this transitional half-decade.

US and Canadian publishers will, in 2014, still be making at least a third of our income from print sales, and probably more than half. But an increasing (and obviously inevitably increasing) proportion of our sales will be digital, through a complicated compilation of micropayment aggregations via multiple vendors, single-chapters-for-a-dime sites, online specialist libraries, Google Libraries subscriptions, direct e-book sales, aggregation e-book sales, and open-access-leading-to-sales systems.

“Export” of Canadian ebooks will be technically trivial five years hence—*if* you’re ready as a publisher. “Ready” presumes that you have 20% to 40% of your entire list (or at least the last 10 years of your list) available in ebook format, and that you are flexible and adventuresome with your e-titles.

Think I’m crazy, or even just mistaken?

Write about it in the comments.

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A Baker’s Dozen

Michael Jensen | 10/07/2009 | Digitization

Over the next five to six months I’ll be posting some musings on the nature and status of the digital and print marketplace, down here in the States—as well as some musings on the changing nature of the publishing marketplace overall, as we move into a chaotic second decade of the 21st century.

It was just five years ago that Google Book Search (then Google Print) terrified publishers. Four years ago, blogs moved into the mainstream, cell phones became cheap devices, and YouTube arrived on the scene.

In just the last three years, we’ve seen the rise of Twitter, the massive expansion of Facebook, and the establishment of open standards for epubs.

In just the last *two years,* we’ve watched the arrival of the Kindle, the Sony e-book reader, and other reading devices, with excitement and with trepidation.

Trepidation because we’ve also watched the downward spiral of newspapers, the transformation of the music industry’s business models, the decline of the independent bookstore, and a radical disruption in what we believed to be fundamentals of our economy.

What’s a publisher to do?

I don’t have “The Answer,” because we’re moving into a richly complex world of publishing biodiversity, of microniches, vertical markets, specialty collections, micromarketing to micromarkets, and much more.

What works for a publisher like mine won’t necessarily work for a publisher like yours; the marketing for this book won’t necessarily work for that book.

That was always true, when you get right down to it—but after 20+ years in publishing, I can honestly say that the signs of a “new marketplace” have never been so clear.

So what I’ll be doing in the following months is posting a series of meditations on how societal, economic, and environmental pressures are changing the publishing marketplace. I’ll explore how the changing habits of US consumers may indicate new opportunities, and investigate some specific examples. I’ll postulate some possible near-future scenarios. I’ll frame some discussions regarding the US marketplace for Canadian products.

I’ll be looking for engagement and comment from the thoughtful among you (that means *you*).

Since nobody has “The Answer,” I’m hopeful that with the AECB’s new website and blog, this community can grow into a conversation around these topics—because the more we can help each other understand the problems and the possibilities, the better we’ll all do, in the new information economy.

As a New Canadian (I became a permanent resident two years ago), I’ve got a dog in this fight—that is, I want to be sure that Canadian publishers prosper in the digital information economy, because I’ll be part of it.

We’ve got a rocky and complex road ahead of us in the next five to ten years—as new habits, new technologies, new environmental threats, new borderlessness, and new presumptions about the world unfold. I hope that the work we do now, in discussions amongst ourselves, can help devise sensible strategies to prepare for it.

I’ll not call for online discussion yet—that will begin with the next post—but please prepare yourself: I hope in the months ahead to have robust discussions about our visions of the future of Canadian publishing, the future of publishing in general, and the future that we will call “the present” in the years ahead.

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