E-books, Tree-books, and On-demand Books

I was fortunate enough to attend this year's Publishing Business Conference and although much was discussed in the two-and-a-half days' worth of sessions I attended, there were a few themes that kept reappearing:

1. Traditional books--or "tree books"--and print is not disappearing anytime soon, but publishers should keep inventory and costs down, as well as acquire and market more wisely.
2. E-books may be on the rise, but given that they are currently such a small percentage of book sales, publishers should use them to complement, not replace, tree books: e-book sales are not currently cannibalizing tree book sales.
3. Since print is going nowhere anytime soon, more and more publishers are turning to print-on-demand and short-run digital as an alternative to the traditional offset model. And while the unit cost for these may still be higher than that of offset, the total cost is lower.
4. Inkjet technology will be the tipping point for POD by making color POD economically viable.

And although there were some bleak discussions of the current economic clime, there were hopeful predictions as well. Here's to the latter...

Know Your Requirements Before Shopping for the Right CMS

(Publishing Executive, 3/20/09, by Joe Keenan)

As many publishers have found out the hard way -- i.e., wasting their time and money -- identifying the right content management system (CMS) for your business is no easy task. As a prelude to a session he'll lead at next week's Publishing Business Conference & Expo in New York, CMS Forum: Identifying and Implementing the Right CMS for Your Magazines, Han Huang, principal and founder of Counterpoint Analytics, offered up some tips to help save publishers from the frustrations of a CMS implementation gone bad.

INBOX: What factors should companies weigh when determining whether to build or buy their CMS?
HAN HUANG: The first thing to do is look at their business objective. What functionality do they want on their site? Do they want blogs/forums? Do they want polls? What kind of reporting do they want? Do they want lead reporting? Look at what their Web site is trying to do -- what their business model is.

When they work out what that is and what functionality they want -- they literally want to list it out -- then it's a question of looking at CMS companies. Look at whether the build vs. buy question is favorable one way or the other.

For example, if all they have is basic article content, one could argue that they could build that themselves. But the moment you start wanting to have blogs/forums, it's pretty rare now that one could build it themselves. But there's a proviso on this: You have open-source CMSs. So it's not always a question of build vs. buy. You can actually get an open-source CMS. There's still a cost to it, and that's in development costs to integrate it. But essentially the short of it is: Know what your requirements are, know what your budget is and then shop around for the right CMS.

INBOX: What are the outside expenses that publishers need to budget for when implementing a new CMS?
HUANG: I'd argue that most CMSs are quite intuitive from an editor's point of view. There's not a huge cost there. The most significant cost generally with publishing is the development cost itself and the managing of it. It's one thing to get the CMS, but then you've got to integrate it. One thing to bear in mind is if someone's buying a new CMS, normally they're going to be doing a site redesign at the same time. It's pretty rare for someone to say, 'I just want a new CMS,' and then not use it on the front end. They normally get a CMS because they want to change something on the front end. There's a redesign process; it's not just about getting a CMS.

INBOX: In your experience, what are some common mistakes publishers make when implementing a new CMS?
HUANG: The first one is not laying out your requirements in detail. If you do that, you've got a road map for completion. The second one is the resources -- how you manage the execution of the project. Are you resourced properly? Most publishers implementing a CMS will outsource. It's very common to outsource the building of it and the integration because there's only one upfront cost for integration and redesign, which isn't the same as doing maintenance. Managing the outsource relationship; there's definitely a skill [required] there. If you get the wrong people to implement it or there's poor communication between the core people who are buying into it and the developers through the project managers, then that can cause problems.

And then you have some technical issues going live. A typical one that causes real problems is you have editors who are using the old CMS until the day it goes live, so managing the live date is quite tricky. It can get technical, but it's difficult to do the transition to live because sometimes editors have to double enter the content into both systems. And if there are any technical problems, then that can extend out. It's very common that as you approach the live date, it gets more and more complicated to execute it well. So the live date gets pushed back.

INBOX: What are the latest trends with CMSs that'll help provide publishers tangible ROI?
HUANG: First, from a user perspective I'd say Web 2.0 functionality -- blogs, forums, reviews. For users, especially younger users, social networking and interactivity is becoming much more important. They're moving away from the idea of just reading an article. Now for most publishing companies, orthodox print publication companies, it may be too early for social networking, but a lot of their users are using social networking. That's one thing that CMSs can provide -- relatively out-of-the-box solutions for those things. You don't need to build them yourselves. You have to tweak them, but you don't have to build them.

The next is reporting systems. Publishers are realizing -- some publishers, anyhow -- how to leverage their user information online, especially if they have subscriber databases. How do they monetize it? How can they not just provide clicks but qualified leads? CMS has helped with that because you don't have to build your own login and tracking system. It's already there. So it's easier to integrate with all the other functionality. You really don't want to have to build that yourself. Those two areas are the two opportunities on the revenue-generating side.

And then the other thing on the back-end, the trend is definitely toward open-source. In the mid- to low-range CMSs, open-sourced CMSs are incredibly competitive because you're not just factoring in the buying of the CMS, you're looking at the build and the maintenance.

Customer's Choice

So publishers and distributors are finally coming to the realization that it's all about customer's having the option to choose, whether it's what platform they want to read content on...or apparently even what price to pay for that content.

• Baker & Taylor Unveils First Phase of Integrated Digital Media Distribution Platform

• Publisher Lets Customers Pay What They Want for Latest Title

And according to Mike Shatzkin's article Will You Recognize the Industry in 10 Years? this will extend to e-books not only having links, but moving photos...kind of like in the Harry Potter world.

So if e-books will have links to videos and the web, will TVs have links to the web and to pdfs of text? Why can't TVs be large e-book devices too that get synched up to the smaller portable device you take with you? But how does that work with a family and their separate devices?

And when do we stop being publishers and just become part of the larger entertainment business? And does it matter as long as we're still dealing with the words we love?

The ever-evolving world of "publishing"

Here are just two of the exciting developments that occurred this week in the ever-evolving world of publishing:

• Amazon Joins the iPhone App Market
• Nelson Makes Books Available in All Formats for One Price

Although personally I don't understand why Nelson is choosing to give content away free with their one-price model, unless it's to drive people to buy the print product, it's still exciting in that it shows how publishers are having to rethink the traditional pricing and manufacturing model we're all familiar with.

Although it's nearly impossible to predict the next evolution, do you have any theories? Please share.

E-bookstore Browsing?

With the Kindle 2 out and e-readers becoming more and more popular, I have been thinking more and more about the bookstore experience, and what I enjoy most about it: browsing. Most of the times when I enter a bookstore, it’s not with a particular book in mind, but with the desire to see what’s come out and if anything’s worth buying and adding to my ever-growing to-read-pile…and half of the times, I actually will buy something. How do I find these books? I first go the “new fiction” table and shelves, then walk around the fiction and sci-fi aisles and see if anything grabs my attention.

How can we translate this “bookstore browsing” to “e-bookstore browsing”? Amazon is already ahead of the curve with the features it offers on amazon.com, but have they made this available on their Kindle? What if when you wanted to buy another e-book, you could click on a feature which showed you the “covers” of the latest releases, and then can further filter by genre. If you like something, you could click on the cover and have the option of reading the “back cover copy,” the first chapter, or a random sampling.

Or does the Kindle or Sony E-Reader already do this? Since I don’t own one (I’ll explain in a bit why), I may be behind and this has already been done. So let me ask those of you who do own one: how does the e-reader browsing experience compare to the brick-and-mortar browsing experience? Which do you prefer, and why?

And the reason I don’t own an e-reader is very simple, and not related to any of the above: I’m an Orthodox Jew and would not be able to use the Kindle on the Sabbath or on any of the holidays, which is when I do most of my reading.

Hearst Gets Into the E-Reader Game

(Mac Slocum, February 27, 2009)

Hearst Corp. is developing its own wireless e-reader that may debut this year. From Fortune:

According to industry insiders, Hearst, which publishes magazines ranging from Cosmopolitan to Esquire and newspapers including the financially imperiled San Francisco Chronicle, has developed a wireless e-reader with a large-format screen suited to the reading and advertising requirements of newspapers and magazines. The device and underlying technology, which other publishers will be allowed to adapt, is likely to debut this year.

The larger screen size will put the Hearst reader in the same class as devices from Plastic Logic and iRex.

Fortune says Hearst isn't discussing product specs, but the company has a longtime association with E Ink. Last September, Esquire published the first E Ink magazine cover.