Digital Book Clubs

A few months ago there was a burst of enthusiasm for Twitter book clubs. We participated in some of the excitement around the Wossy bookclub. Like a lot of good ideas, this one seems to have fizzled. There have been other Twitter bookclubs, but like the Jonathan Ross experiment, it seems that they quickly need to invoke the aid of a more substantial platform (wossy went to a news forum), Facebook or an email list. Perhaps Twitter with its 140 character limit doesn't really have the bandwidth for the conversation engendered in a proper book club. That may be part of the problem....

But a more serious, and remediable problem with these book clubs is that it is very hard to share the reading experience through the web if the club is using a print book or even a traditional eBook. eBooks dont generally facilitate straightforward citations and bookmarks. This is of course where a platform such as Exact Editions (or the pre-eminent Google Book Search) come in. Such digital editions can be easily shared and precise passages cited and even excerpted by their book club readers. It would seem to us that there is big scope for the revival of the book club idea through the web. This could either be the informal 'reading group' style of book club that has become so popular with readers in the UK and the USA in the last decade, or the special interest type of book club for a relatively mass market, which was the foundation of Bertelsman's fortunes in the 1950's and 60's.

Such book clubs would work well with a subscription service which gave their members access to a book for a period of time. Our interest in this idea was sparked by a suggestion that the Guardian is planning to create a readers club. That could well be the basis for a valuable subscription service: valuable both to the Guardian, its readers and the publishers and authors of books who might be very willing to grant the Guardian very favourable leasehold rights.

But in some ways the most obvious sponsor for a new wave of digital book clubs will be found amongst publishers. Publishers could now launch digital book clubs (for a small annual fee, say £9.99 per annum) which would give limited access (a month or two) to books, 3 or 4 a month, with rights that they control and with audiences which they can develop. The advantage of a private book club for a publisher are several:

• It can become a premier layer in the catalogue (a title which is selected for one of the slots each month) is gaining additional promotion
• Providing full access to some books, to club members for a month or two is in most cases not likely to preclude sales of the title to club members (but perhaps the lightest forms of fiction would not be suited to such temporary loans).
• Selling print copies of the books that are on digital loan for a month or two would be a key objective
• As would be the option of selling digital subscriptions to those titles. Sales direct and indirect would be encouraged by promotion through a digital book club.
• Publishers who have a direct sales operation in place will be particularly interested in these opportunities.
• Bookclubs will foster word-of-mouth success. Digital book clubs will merge into digital word of mouth (even as some of the book choices inevitably die through word-of-mouth).
  
• The publisher who develops his direct links to a reading audience is well placed to develop other attractively 'social' elements of the reading experience (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc)
• A key value of a book club is the proposition of membership. The publisher who can boast of having 5,000, or 10,000 or 40,000 members in his history book club is going to be in a very strong position to attract new authors. And new members.
• Choice, but 'limited choice' is also a key value, both for the members and for the publisher in negotiating rights (and negotiation will be needed, not all authors and agents will immediately recognise the advantage of having their new book out with 4,000 members on a 2 month loan)
  
• Publishers like propositions which develop their unique role as a builder of lists. It is the publisher with a strong and coherent list, or strong and coherent lists, who can most successfully launch and possibly 'twig' such book clubs. But above all publishers should like this proposition because it is non-exclusive. Developing your own bookclub is not going to stop you selling books via the Guardian book club, the Tesco bookclub, or the Walmart bookclub if and when they come to pass. It certainly is going to help you sell eBooks to Amazon or Sony if you can point to some of the opinions that have surfaced on your own readers' comments and reviews.
  

'Book clubs' are an attractive idea, and as the web becomes more social and more content oriented, their time will come again. The concept of a book club is so much more attractive than the concept of an ebook, or a digital edition, don't you think? But I suspect that the bookclub may be a key part of making ebooks that flourish.

Twitter and the Wossybookclub

In conformity with our policy of conducting R&D on the project of a Twitter Book Club in public (see earlier posts here, here and here) and in response to the first session of Jonathan Ross's wossybookclub, which took place yesterday, it seems appropriate to give some provisional reactions to it in the open:

1. The session clearly worked. It ran for an hour and wossy must have been busy, since everything went through him (as a retweet or a response by him). 130 postings in an hour. The style of discourse was thus more like a chat-show on radio -- with no possiblity for genuine group discussion. This does put a lot of focus on the keyman, and suggests that the specific format (a 'star' formation with everything going through wossy) may not be completely scaleable. Would wossy be able to cope with an Oprah-size audience? The @atwossybookclub currently has under 6,000 followers. What happens with 60K followers at a book group? Managing 130 interactions in an hour of tweeting strikes me as pretty good going, and I can't see Jonathan Ross wanting to do this for two hours.
2. As well as the public and official record of tweeting at @atwossybookclub, there was a parallel search stream at #wossybookclub; making this an official back-channel may be a way of broadening the audience without putting wossy in hospital with RSI
3. The author (Jon Ronson, on holiday in Sardinia, and tweeting from his iPhone) contributed to the discussion. A book group with the author present and listening! That clearly works, and perhaps the idea needs to be adapted, shall we say Twitter-twigged, so that Twitter becomes a medium for online 'author signing sessions'. Kind of virtual 'author tours'?
   
4. The web service at our end also worked: The Men Who Stare at Goats was open to the whole web for precisely an hour. This time the switch was flipped manually, but it could easily be automated. 30/60/90 minute sessions pre-set to be open for particularly topical books or TV shows? Usage increased, it was busy, but it certainly wasn't overwhelming (the servers were not seen to emit clouds of white smoke and steam). Next time the publisher may wish to consider opening the book up for discussion a few hours before the discussion begins, that would encourage Tweeting participants to reference the digital edition, which in turn will encourage more people to buy the digital edition.
5. There was one reference to a specific page in the book, and wossy RT'ed this. Since we put it up using bit.ly, we know that it was activated nearly 300 times. A citation that went into the #wossybookclub was only hit 23 times. So the audience was looking at the links as well as reading wossy's tweets. For a first time live book club session on Twitter that looks to be a pretty strong validation of the concept.

Wossy has said that he does not want to develop the vehicle for personal gain. We can understand that position, but it might be worth reconsidering. If Wossy wont, I hope that Stephen Fry will. Doing 50 books a year would be A LOT of work and for the publishing industry it could be a highly significant new sales channel. The concept of 'celebrity-led' book reading and online book discussion has a lot going for it, but it will work even better if there is a stronger commercial infrastructure (perhaps funded by sales of the digital editions that would be used in the Tweeting). We look forward to seeing the proposition evolve and to working with publishers who are keen to develop the digital audience -- Picador and PanMacmillan have been excellent partners and promoters of this exploration, as has Jon Ronson the author.

I enjoyed the book (read the digital edition, of course) and you can still buy a subscription to the digital edition here (limited to purchasers in the UK and Eire); and in all parts of the world you can read the clever opening chapter here. Having read the book and raved about it to one of my children, I am now committed to buying a copy in print (son is out of webshot) and will certainly catch the film when it comes out later in the year with George Clooney and Ewan McGregor.

Twittering Publishers

Twitter may be a lot more important for publishers than most of them (us) realize. Few publishers would have a clue as to what Twitter means to their business model. Since Twitter still has not worked out its own business model, a matter of some general amazement to the illustrious VC's and industry watchers who follow it, this may not be all together surprising.

But here are three reasons why publishers of books and magazines should be VERY interested in Twitter:

1. A great deal of Twittering is really about linking your friends/followers to stuff that you have seen or read. Twitter is an ideal medium for sharing information about good books or magazines, especially as they get on to the web as genuine web resources. All those tinyurls and bit.ly's are citations. This is the direct response network that the web has promised publishers and authors.
   
2. (With apologies for a fragment of technospeak here), the Twitter 'social graph' with its asymmetrical follow/follower relationships is functionally analogous to the 'lectoral graph' of our reading patterns. You may have read a lot of the books and magazines that I have read, but there will certainly be a lot of non-overlap, and we will be as patchilly intermittent in our following as many of us are in our reading. Being able to connect to people who have read the same stuff as us, may be as important to us as being able to search the books that we have read or will read.
   
3. The key role of 'bestsellers' in the world of publishing and the importance of 'celebrities', or 'real experts', in the world of twitter. Trade publishers know how important celebrities are to publishing, so we had better figure out how this celebrity-hood in Twitterdom can multiply or interact with success in bookselling or digital magazines.
   

I have no more idea than anyone else what the ultimate or even the proximate business model of Twitter is going to be. My own hunch is that 'real time' search is not the key issue, much more important is the pattern of relationships and the elaborate web of communication that the service is weaving between its millions of users. This is why we have been following the Twitter Bookclub rumblings with avid interest, and helping the wossy project to get going with a digital edition of the first selection The Men who Stare at Goats. Something interesting will happen in this space in the next few months, if not with the wossybookclub, then with something similar. By this time next year Twitter will have found a business model and I will not be surprised if some strands of that model are quite closely intertwined with what publishers have done and need to do.

If writers and readers enjoy talking, twittering and sharing their experience of reading, then more books will be read, more books will be sold and the publishers who facilitate this will have played the part of concierge, that is their digital metier.

PS You can follow my Twitter stream here. And you can follow Daryl's here.

Goats and Crop Marks

There has been rapid movement on the Twitter book club front, since our posting of a few days ago. Twitter moves very fast and wossy has announced his first few titles. As luck would have it the first pick, The Men Who Stare at Goats, was in short supply in the bookshops and at Amazon -- a film is coming out later in the year, new printings must be in hand. There were ebook and audio book editions available but not many print copies in the warehouse.

At any rate Picador (PanMacmillan) who publish the book in the UK realised the advantages of having a digital edition of the book available to the wossy book club. They also saw that the streaming solution that Exact Editions provides is an excellent way of amplifying the immediate impact of the Tweeting that is going on as we speak, the streaming solution can be opened up for a publicity phase, much more feasibly than a download ebook solution. So they asked us to put up a sample, and to offer subscritpions to the digital edition when the full sampling spree comes to an end. The sample is here.

There is the added bonus that bloggers can use the ExactEditions clipper tool (works much better with FireFox) to post small tweet relevant quotations (limited to at most 10% of page). Which is why the crop marks matter, its on the basis of crop marks, or preferably with trim boxes set, that Exact Editions know the boundaries of a page in the PDF files that publishers send us. Unless the publisher requests greater openness the clipping is restricted to 10% of the page which is close to a traditional understanding of reasonable copying for purposes of quotation, appreciation etc (ie 'fair dealing').

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

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When it came to putting up the book in a test account, I noticed that there was quite a bit of discussion in the office about whether the PDF file had crop marks or not. Somehow this struck me as very funny as I had this image of the goat nibbling its own crop marks. So I was delighted to find that there really are goat crop marks in the page layout of the title, at least at the bottom of the page: there are ornamental goats at the corners. On the recto page the goat has keeled over and on the verso page the goat is the right way up. Here is an ex-goat, or what Monty Python would call a no-longer-goat:

The Men Who Stare At Goats

The Men Who Stare At Goats

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