iBookstore and the Format of eBooks

Increasingly I rely on my Twitter stream for arresting issues in publishing technology. First off, yesterday was a thoughtful blog post at Semantico on the choice facing publishers on whether to go into the iPad platform via individual apps, or via the iBook store. Richard Padley's conclusion:

For straightforward chapter based book content it seems clear there is no longer a compelling case for publishers to deliver e-books as apps. The extra cost of software development, combined with the slowness and lack of scalability in the approval process no longer make sense now that Apple have introduced the iBookstore. (iBooks or Apps? The Publishers Dilemma)

If this conclusion is warranted, it presumably follows that for books that are not 'straightforward chapter based' there remains a compelling case for going down the books as apps route. In point of fact, a very large proportion of books are not straightforward and chapter based. ePub is not a happy format for books with lots of illustrations and tables. So that should keep us busy at Exact Editions. But something else follows from his point: publishers and even worse, readers are going to have to make choices. We are going to expect our audience to read books in one way, as eBooks, on the iPad if they are simple books, but in another way, in another format, say digital editions as apps, if they are not so easy. The experience of reading books will become increasingly fragmented.

Sigh! Life would be a lot simpler if publishers were to consider whether all books might be readable straightforwardly as digital editions (so probably best delivered as individual apps) and then readers would not have to get used to reading books in one way (if they are the kind of book where it does not greatly matter how the page looks and is laid out) and in another way if the layout and design of the book matters. The really odd thing about this, is that the devices are getting better at displaying books as books that we recognise. Because the iPad has a much more generous screen, the need for texts to reflow, or to rescale on the fly, is much reduced. Most book pages on the iPad will be very readable as is.

Furthermore we do not yet know quite how the iBook's reading and display interface is going to work. There are lots of different ways of presenting ePub files. From another tweet, a link to an article in which Hadrien Gardeur notes

(I am disappointed by my).... first glimpse at the iBook's typesetting. "There's not even hyphenation on the page," he said. "If you're designing a reading system I think it's much better to offer optimized typesetting and really create something that's beautiful and easy to read rather than trying to replicate pages in a real book."

Although most readers don't think in terms of kerning and leading, Gardeur's concern was that when they start reading, they'll be able to tell that something's wrong, even if they're not sure why. (from Mediashift -- Dan Brodnitz)

I think its becoming increasingly clear that the ePub format is not going to work equally well across all the many devices that the eBook proponents want it to travel. Part of the reason for this is that the standard file format was designed to solve a problem of how to make 'reasonably straightforward chapter based' books flow and reflow across multiple screen-based systems. The original specification did not allow for the fact that scores of different and somewhat incompatible reading engines would be implemented so that the same text looks so different across different platforms. Here (from some email that Michael Jensen has allowed me to quote) is a heartfelt groan about this inconsistent rendering:

In my own experiments with .epub and other formats, I have yet to find a way of presenting, dependably, any visual model that works the same in Calibre as it does in Stanza/PC as it does in Adobe Editions as it does in Stanza/iPod....

We're still in the late-1990s world of "the same HTML webpages displaying differently in IE than in Netscape," as far as I can tell. Different proprietary software interpreting the same file leads to consumer confusion.

That leads to lowest-common-denominator design: sequential, linear presentations. Sure, leading and line length matter. But c'mon, if I can't have a callout? A wrapped-around image? A dropcap? What a mess, and it's more the rendering software than the format itself.

We are far from making the e-version anything but a pale imitation of the print -- because e-reading software is still in its infancy. For straight prose, it's fine. Anything more? bleh.

My .03 -- we are far away from anything that my ancient typesetter genes would recognize as smart presentation. Perhaps that will change, but I'm betting it'll be 18-24 months before quality and readability becomes dependable, across "e-book browsers."

One can get even more of this pain by reading Mike Cane's accounts of his heroic but frustrating struggles with the ePub format. I think that there is a chance that Steve Jobs is going to decide that ePub is not such a good idea after all (Adobe had a good deal to do with the ePub format and Adobe is Steve's current whipping boy. Can somebody gently point out to Mr Jobs that ePub is a kind of Flash for text -- a flexible but plug-in solution, which complexifies by over-simplifying, where we no longer need it?). Stick with pages! After all, an iPad really is a pad, which holds virtual pages, and Apple has a perfectly good page-oriented word processing program called..... Pages. Admittedly, page breaks in books are arbitrary but they are better than arbitrary implementations of standard files by an unmanageable and ever growing collection of rendering engines.

If all digital books have pages, life will be even simpler if they are all apps. We can then start doing clever stuff with the pages, like linking from pages in one app to pages in another. Will we call that a cross reference or a cross app? Or a page reference from within an app? The idea makes perfect sense. Apps should aspire to them.

GBS and the Judgement of Solomon

The Google Books Search Settlement came to court last week for a Fairness Hearing. There is now a full transcript, but like many who follow the case closely, but not too closely (it could easily become an obsession), I have mainly relied on Twitter comments and the excellent blog of Professor James Grimmelmann, The Laboratorium, as a way of keeping in touch with what is going on. Grimmelmann and his students have also produced a fascinating, colourful and impressionistic report of the presentations and the behaviour of the actors on the day. This is highly recommended if you have an interest in how the case is developing. The whole process leaves me in considerable admiration for the American legal system -- astonishment even; though one knows that it is very possible that a perverse decision may be formulated in the end. And then dragged out and mangled with a decade-long process of delay and appeal all the way to the supreme court.

Admiration, that the process involves a Fairness Hearing -- a hearing where all parties are invited to present arguments for and against the 'fairness' of the proposed settlement. Fairness really is at issue and fairness should speak. Admiration for the remarkable skill and ingenuity of the critics and the proponents of the settlement. Admiration, really, that the Judge is clearly looking for a solution. At several points in the process he asks for help -- he especially wanted suggestions from the critics as to how the Settlement could be fixed. Grimmelmann notes in his commentary that critics who could not come up with ideas as to how to fix the problems they were focussing on, lost ground.

The Judge (Denny Chin) was not asking for outside help, but like Solomon he clearly needs it. Perhaps his case would work in a Biblical framework? The dispute has unnerving parallels with the one brought to Solomon, but there are also many additional complications: Rule 23 and the arcane process of American class actions, identical factual predicates, Firefighters and all (no, I don't know what Firefighters is about, but a lot hangs from its precedent). The crucial point is that this is once again a dispute about a child who should have a long and healthy future and there is a danger that it may be smothered or torn apart in his chambers. The orphan books should thrive! But there are too many jealous 'foster parents' and the judge will need a masterly stroke if he is to separate the shameful pretenders from the true mother. Is there scope for the judge to put the settlors to a Solomonic test? Two moments in the argument struck me as particularly crucial in this regard:

First: BONI (for the Authors' Guild) on orphans in dialogue with the Judge:
THE COURT: I think I agree with Mr. Katz and the government that if you give an opt-in, you would eliminate a lot of the objections.
MR. BONI: We would eliminate a lot of objections but we wouldn't have a settlement, and here's why. Number one, and most importantly for us, we will not -- we as class representatives --THE COURT: Well, I would assume -- before I said I would surmise. But I would surmise that Google wants the orphan books and that's what this is about -- (Transcript p138)

Second: DURIE (for Google) in dialogue with the Judge:
THE COURT: If Google had been digitizing entire books and not just making portions available but making the entire portions available and indeed selling them, would that be
something that Google would have tried to defend?
MS. DURIE: Selling the work, no. Making the entire work available, that is a more complicated question, in the following respect. We were giving an entire copy of the book to the library.....(Transcript p150)

Boni says that there wouldn't be a settlement if it had to be opt-in (presumably because Google would not work on that basis. But are we sure about that? They are working on an opt-in basis from now on). Durie, speaking for Google, concedes and volunteers that Google have been quite willing to give away entire copies of books in copyright (books that it did in no sense own). Google is not ungenerous. I think these positions conceal an axis on which Judge Chin may be able to turn the case with a judgment worthy of Solomon. Notice his comment to Boni: 'make it opt-in and you would eliminate a lot of the objections'. There are bluffs to be called. The parties should be forced to live with a purely opt-in solution, which incidentally keeps copyright the right way up, will keep Ursula le Guin, and the French and German governments happy; or (and at this point Judge Chin needs to stroke the handle of his sword, even test the mettle of the blade with his forefinger) Google must be much more generous with the copyrights it has opted from the orphans. Generous to the public domain and non-exclusive to its competitors.

With a crafty swipe of his rapier, Judge Chin should be able to pierce the settling parties apart on this issue. And put the whole thing back together in a more pleasing fashion. I am not sure whether or not copyright will still be the right way up. But we may hope!

Uniquely Attractive Invitations

So the question arises: how are publishers to make their offerings uniquely attractive in the multi-media maelstrom of the iPhone/iPad space? Keep in mind that we are operating under two constraints: first, the shop is a media hypermarket -- iTunes is an ecommerce environment in which all types of media product and service can be purchased (Apple are going to have to do something about that name, 'iTunes' is off-key for most other media). The competition will be naked and ruthless, although slightly less naked this week than last. Second, the iPad (and its iPhone, iPod Touch, companions) will be fully capable of showing all media in gorgeous and slick reproduction and playback. The capacity of the system as a media player is going to be very impressive and will be getting better fast (Moore's law applies). How does a publisher make his wares gorgeously attractive in this fiercely competitive environment?

If you are a media-owner or a publisher-proprietor, you are not allowed to dodge this question! Nor are you allowed to postpone it by forming consortia or by hiring consultants to tell you how to build a new cultural format. Newspaper owners who think that their best future is to build a new kind of Text-TV-PressWire news channel are on a voyage to nowhere (TV channels can and will make their own elegant transition to the iPad, whilst print journalists are still finding out how to clip on their microphones). Magazine owners who think that their future lies in building brand-oriented, vertical, communities, with multi-media components, had better ask themselves why these new sort-of-maybe-products did not work as web-sites, because they will otherwise be making the same expensive mistake with the iPad that they have been making these last five years with their web services.

By and large book, publishers have avoided the temptation to think that the right response to a multi-media maelstrom is to build muti-media products and services. The Vook team may have located a viable niche, but no publisher thinks its a big niche, or that a lot of books are going to become vooks. Book publishers know that there is a digital future for books. Magazine and newspapers show much less confidence about the enduring validity of their format. But they should give it a try. Because putting your magazine, or your newspaper directly on to the iPad has a lot to recommend it. And now for the first time it can be done in a way in which the traditional print format actually looks and works very well. The iPad is going to be very friendly to publications in the traditional print formats.

Getting the book, magazine or newspaper on to the iPad and into the iTunes competitive environment pretty much as it is, is the first, but very necessary step. The second requirement is that the iTunes audience should be able to find your product in the iTunes e-commerce environment and it would be better that they should be able to find it directly, by which I mean that it is very much second best that iPhone users who want to read Business Week or the Independent, currently have to buy their subscription via Amazon's Kindle. Finding magazines and newspapers in the iTunes maelstrom is not going to be too much of an issue once the publication is there. Magazines and newspapers have tremendous brand recognition, tied up in the name, perhaps supplemented by the location (there is more than one Independent). These first two steps are really surprisingly easy.

The third requirement is that potential customers should be able to sample or try your product before they buy it or subscribe to the service provided. Sampling is really the answer and the Apple system also makes this surprisingly easy. Films (with their trailers) and music tracks (with their lead-in samples) are already showing how sampling, try-before-you-buy, works in the iPhone economy.

At Exact Editions we have now realised that the Free App Sample to Paid App subscription is an enormously powerful part of the Apple e-commerce system (and it did take us a few months to recognise how this should work and how to tie the 'free' element in with 'in-app purchasing'). We are now re-positioning all the Exact Editions apps so that they will use this freemium approach. The first of these new-style apps will be released in the next week or so. The user will be able to freely acquire a branded app in the iTunes service. The app will give the user some free pages from the magazine issue in full, the publisher deciding how much, and the rest of the content will be available as a searchable resource -- but only viewable in thumbnail pages. This way of arranging matters for a periodical is especially compelling because it means that the magazines key contents pages, and cover pages can be delivered through the free app as a kind of alert service. The freemium approach is also very compelling with books, and I suspect that this is one way in which book publishers can be highly aggressive in competition with other forms of media. Film makers and music owners will be wary of giving away sizable samples. But book publishers can be very generous in offering chunky samples without undermining the value of ownership.

Books of real quality (and books of marginal, minimal or even questionable quality) will be able to make themselves available as free apps in the Apple system, with generous content chunks being for each book a uniquely attractive invitation to its potential readers. Amazon has already shown with its Kindle, how powerful it can be to promote by digital sampling (hub pages). The interesting thing about the app store is that the publisher, who has to take responsibility for how much to offer by way of a sample, will be in direct control of these decisions and will be seeing the very immediate impact of decisions through the sales reported, day by day. Again the Apple way of doing things is giving publishers/developers more control than they are used to having with Amazon. Publishers will be getting immediate and very measurable feedback from their promotional decisions about sampling. It is also a strong plus that the 'free samples' that can be sync-ed with a book/magazine app will be on the consumers iPhone or iPad, even when they have not yet bought. This puts the publishers sample directly in the consumer's pocket (when did anybody think of downloading a movie trailer to their iPhone?). I suspect publishers will soon learn that it pays to be very generous with samples for publications available through the iPad.

Apple and Amazon in the battle for books

Three weeks ago there was a very public bout of fisticuffs between Amazon and Macmillan over the pricing and sale of eBooks. The fight was a by-product of Apple's announcement of the iPad and Macmillan's desire to extend the trading relationship and pricing parameters that will now be deployed for the iPad to its existing business with Amazon. After the dust settled it looked as though Macmillan and the authors, who largely backed Macmillan, had won; that Apple had won without needing to raise a finger and that Amazon has lost. From now on pricing will follow the so called 'agency model' which is really just the supplier management system that Apple uses in its iTunes store. The term 'agency' is a huge misnomer, because Apple is much more than an agent for the publisher. Apple 'owns' the customer and Apple retains all the information and almost all the demographics relating to users (this is something that the magazine and newspaper publishers are very upset about). Under the Apple one-size-fits-all e-commerce system, the publisher sets the price and sells the product (eBook or digital license) to a customer and Apple takes a 30% cut from facilitating and exclusively managing the transaction. Amazon is now being invited/instructed by publishers to follow a similar route, and in fact Amazon had earlier seen this coming and announced that it was willing to work with authors/publishers on a 30:70 split provided some other conditions applied.

Although this dispute appeared to be a dispute about pricing: it was really a dispute about control. Macmillan as a publisher, having been reminded of its role in the supply chain by its dealings with Apple, was asserting its power to set the terms of sale and to regulate the flow of goods. The best commentary on the upshot of this change in the balance of book power comes in a pair of blog postings by Michael Clarke at the Scholarly Kitchen. Why Publishers have Won and Why Publishers have Lost.

The real reason the iPad marks the end of pricing controls for ebooks has nothing to do with Apple’s iBooks pricing policy. In fact, the iPad renders Apple’s own ebook pricing policy as irrelevant as Amazon’s. The real reason the iPad renders any ebook pricing policy irrelevant is because the iPad is not a dedicated ebook reader. Why Publishers have Won

Because the iPad is not a dedicated ebook reader, there are, unfortunately, many things that users can do with the device other than read books. .......Publishers may have won the pricing war, but the real struggle is going to be for users’ attention. Why Publishers have Lost

We can add that the book publishers also lost in a way which they appear not to have noticed or minded, Apple's definition of 'agency' presented the publishers with apparent control of list price but snaffled the customer while they were pondering the various regions and the 85 tiers in the Apple pricing matrix. Reverting to Clarke's observation that the iPad is a multiply undedicated book reader: we should point out that it is a media pad with an impressive technical specification and at the same time a peculiarly empty and neutral format, such that it can be used for accessing and displaying many kinds of media. Certainly the iPad is not primarily to dedicated to books (as is the Kindle), and it is also not restricted to reading books in any particular format or digital manifestation. Books could be on the system as ePub files, but they could be there as title-specific Apps, or they could be there as web resources simply accessed through the browser, plain old HTML, or they could be there as viewable via title-agnostic apps (as Amazon already has a Kindle app on the iPhone platform, and Exact Editions has a generic app, Exactly). Clarke, we must assume, has been studying Derrida and Lacan in preparing for the iPad (I am positively certain that Steve Jobs reads Derrida); for, as the post-structuralist theoreticians might put it: the flexibility of the iPad is radically overdetermined since the consumer can not only read books on it in different ways and from distinct routes and formats, it is also much more than a book reader: music, film, TV, photos, email and the web will all crowd for attention on the device. The iPad is a great but 'undedicated' digital picture frame, a fabulous but undedicated hold-in-your hand TV consol, a truly amazing, undedicated, but remarkable music centre, wonderful for games etc.... It is this very flexibility and media-omnivorousness of the iPad that led to the initial "Is that it?" reaction to the Apple presentation ("Just a large iPhone with a chunky bezel"). The device appears to be strangely empty because it seems to invite or depend upon such a confusing variety of media inputs.

This may seem like a confusing situation and a perplexing opportunity for media creators and media owners. It is. But I will draw one urgent conclusion from the confusion. Scoffing aside, the iPad is a huge and wonderful opportunity. The flexibility and omnivorousness of the device will remain a feature, but the apparent emptiness will not. Book publishers, magazine and newspaper publishers had better figure out quickly how to make books, magazine and newspapers more attractive than film or TV shows. Or, at least more attractive in themselves. Did you notice that Apple are encouraging TV broadcasters to offer their shows for 99c each (a 50% price cut)? So winning in this competition is partly a matter of pricing, where comparisons will be drawn with other media. But it is also a matter of availability and even more of attractiveness. How do publishers make their digital offerings on the iPhone/iPad peculiarly and uniquely attractive? That is the key to success in a multi-media, marketplace, maelstrom.

Making the newspapers look more like broadcast news is surely not the answer; and making the magazine look more like a collection of YouTube videos, or Flickr slide shows is not going to be a winning strategy either....

What Happens when we get the 15" iPad?

The rumour mill was pretty accurate about the size of the iPad. Most of the speculation was about a 9" or 10" tablet and so we get a 9.7" screen device. I suspect that most users, when they lay their hands on it, will consider it objectively a little small (smaller than most books), but it will feel (subjectively) bigger than you imagined --just as the tiny iPod/iPhone, feels a lot larger than it seems once you get going. The touch screen with its easy zoom creates a sensation of spaciousness. The virtual page can be several times as big as the screen. The iPad has to be that not-quite-paperback size to begin with, since at the moment it is too tricky and too expensive to build a 15" touch screen iPad. Predictably, there will be bigger tablet devices on offer, in the months and years to come. From Apple, and from others: 3.5", 5", 9.7", 15" and 23". Expect even more variety. No law says that mobile systems and their media players have to have rectangular shapes, or even be flat! Look out for hexagonal shaped systems from Android makers, and perhaps spherical projected 3D gamespaces from Light Blue Optics.

Does it matter that media players will come in different shapes and sizes in the years to come? Not at all for most media. For music, the iPod Nano has already shown us that the coolest and most convenient music players can be very small. Music players only need to be big enough to give the user a convenient control panel, and if the control panel can be virtualised the music system could yet be even smaller than the Nano. Video, TV, photographs and film require more space for display and it will be these forms of media which are really pushing the boundaries for the 23" and 48" display iPads that we may be buying in the 2013 holiday season.

Printed media? That is another issue. Do magazines, newspapers and books, when they become digital, absolutely need the rectangular shape that we have come to expect from print volumes and editions? Do they need any particular shape at all, or will they become like web pages and blogs, infinitely extendable scrolls of information? Does the print-like page with its fixed and inevitably arbitrary page breaks still have a function? Will we still have editions and issues? Front covers and front pages? Tables of contents? Will books and magazines be parked or opened on the iPad interface in much the same way as printed books are placed on a desk or a shelf? Or will they morph into time-shaped, multimedia, evolving-structure aggregations in the manner of the web site, the RSS feed, the Fast Flip, or the blog? Exact Editions holds that the time-tested design and shape of books and magazines is far too valuable to readers and to our expectations for their to be any question of abandoning the format. Do not lose the design values when you abandon the paper version!

Most of the magazine and newspaper apps that have so far been developed for the iPhone are RSS-style apps. They take the news stream from the magazine/newspaper web site and repackage it in a blockier, formatted, tagged and streamed way for the phone's app. It is the web site, rather than the newspaper issue that is being repackaged. Some of these apps are very good (we like the New York Times app, the Guardian app and especially Le Monde's app), but they have been tightly designed for the tiny screen on the iPhone. These little apps, with their micro story-stream, will not do justice to their parent publications if they are merely 'blown up' for the larger screen sizes that are coming. There is a difficult decision coming: do you design two (maybe three or four, for Android and Blackberry) variant RSS apps for different mobile platforms, whilst still maintaining the original web service, and not forgetting the 'mobile' web pages, also? Soon newspapers and magazines which have committed themselves to this route will be supporting and repackaging their digital product into half a dozen variant forms. Worse, every time there is a significant new hardware form-factor, they will be pulled towards offering a tightly engineered solution for the new thing (15" iPad, Hearst Skiff, Blackberry Lozenge, Nokia Bottle, or Android Scarf etc).

The complexity of this enormously evolved format-offering has considerable impact on the overheads and production infrastructure of the publisher. But it also has a bad effect on the expectations and loyalty of the user/reader. The loyal reader is required to learn different navigational and editorial conventions for the different formats, and app interfaces supported by the digital newspaper/magazine.

Right at this moment, commercial directors of many of our major newspapers and magazines are considering whether they should develop and support two types of 'app' for their audience: a 'micro' iPhone app and a 'maxi' iPad app. They are also wondering whether the apps should be free, or part of a 'pay wall strategy'. The chief operating office of the New York Times or the Guardian, who contemplates this convoy of evolving digital formats, might ask him/herself the question: "If there is a digital newspaper format that can be used on all platforms, should we not stick to that?" Once this question has been framed, the attractions of the digital edition which just is the newspaper becomes apparent. The digital edition can be fed out to any number of platforms and should look the same on all platforms, though inevitably a bit slower or smaller on some of them. The advantage of the iPad, and even more of the 15" iPad, is that we will then be able to lay out the sections of the newspaper (or the issues of the magazine) as separate entities on the more generous screen canvas provided. The presentation to the reader is straightforward as front-covers, thumbnails over an app engine that work the same way with different packages of material. The sections or issues, yeah the pages, are all laid out and held together the same way as they worked in print. Of course, there still will be some value in an RSS feed, it is the way that you communicate to readers between editions, but it is not and should not become the skeleton on which all the content of the paper or the magazine is to be hung.

Once one starts thinking of digital editions of books, magazines and newspapers as just being virtualised editions of the print variety, life becomes a whole lot simpler for the reader and the distribution director (these digital editions also have a bit of magic web dust scattered over them and built into them). This approach also naturally leads to a subtler way of tackling the thorny issue of 'pay walls'. But we will tackle that subject on another day....

Where is the iPad Projector?

I am not sure how Apple were projecting the image off the iPad that Steve Jobs was using in his initial presentation last week. But since they are making such a big thing of the productivity suite iWork on the iPad, there is going to have to be a way to project Keynote presentations from the device.

When is this coming? What will it look like? I am pretty sure that there is not yet a reliable way of doing real time presentations from an iPhone (though you can do videos off an iPhone). It would be a good idea.....

Mind you, in a couple of months we should be able to do an intimate presentation straight off the iPad (one would be enough for a small group) and then pass the device around, clicking through to the magazine app under discussion, whilst the small group admires the trial magazine that we have also prepared for our demonstrations. We may or may not be able to pay you a visit, but if you publish a successful print magazine and would like to see a trial of the app we could make for you, do email us for a free test. With our test account you will be able to simulate the performance of your branded app, using our generic app Exactly. Drop us a line here. And then send us a complete PDF of a single issue, PDF of single pages rather than double page spreads, please.

What Will Google Do Next?

Is the DoJ filing, the nail in the coffin of the Google Books Settlement? James Grimmelmann, who has been following these things as closely as anybody, thinks that it is increasingly unlikely that the Settlement will be approved (which is how I interpret this tweet: "I'm updating my priors on the chances of the settlement's passage downward substantially." -- James, poor guy, has been reading too many briefs these last few months).

So, if the Settlement is not approved, what happens next? In fact, even if the Settlement is approved since it will be ensnared in appeals and delays for years yet to come we might well wish to know: what happens next? The most visible part of the grand Google library project, university-based subscriptions to most of 20th Century literature and published knowledge, modest royalty streams flowing to orphaned works, public access terminals in libraries etc, is stalled. The Books Right Registry may not come to pass. There are three good things that could and should nevertheless happen when Google finally washes its hands of the Settlement and shrugs off its law suits:

1. There should be a way of delivering the original index-ing service that was the primary goal when the whole exercise began. Negotiating for that to emerge, may be a way of letting the Author's Guild and the APA off the nasty hook that they have constructed for themselves and Google. It would also, of course, be a way for Google to satisfy many of the obligations it has by now built up to its library partners.
   
2. Google may finally get round to delivering Google Editions, about which there has been some talk, and more than a little rumour. But if it really is going to appear in the first half of 2010 it was time that it had a bit more visibility.
   
3. Google should give greater prominence to Google Scholar which has been for too long a neglected but steadily useful aspect of the Google service
   

Whatever Judge Chin decides, Google has 10 million+ books scanned, databased, interpreted and searchable in its servers. It has had a good deal of encouragement and collaboration from the publishing industry and I can't see the publishers really wanting to pursue their original copyright infringement suit to the bitter end. Those books are going to be put to some use at some point. I bet there is intense internal debate at the Googleplex about what to do next. The critical mass of 10 million books will be part of the answer.

Too Many App Stores?

As is generally known the Apple App store handles payments for developers and some distribution functions in exchange for a 30% cut on the revenues obtained from the sale of those apps. 70% is passed along to the publishers and developers who make the apps. The Android App store is run along similar lines (30% to Google for handling the transaction, collecting the monies and maintaining the store front: 70% to the developer). Amazon last week announced its own App store, along with an invitation to developers to produce Apps for the Kindle platform. Co-incidentally it announced a new and improved deal for authors and publishers, whereby under certain not too onerous conditions the author/publisher will get 70% from the Amazon sale. It is fishy the way that these deals seem to cluster around a 30% cut. Is there something about the investment and infrastructure needed to set up and run an App store that dictates a 30:70 deal? Who is going to be first to blink, and move to 20:80?

Along with its brilliant iPad, Apple just announced an iBook application within the iTunes store. Edward Nawotka, an industry pundit wonders whether this presages Apple offering a direct route to publication for authors. Amazon has been cutting direct deals with authors (sidelining the publishers). Google is in the class-action settlement of the century in its effort to become the digital publisher or republisher of millions of out of print but in copyright books. It would seem that in there effort to establish dominant positions in the distribution of digital books these three great companies are moving back up the publishing chain in an effort to secure greater security of supply.

As well as trying to buy into a dominant supply position (it would be fascinating to see the details of the exclusive deal that Amazon struck with Rosetta for McEwan's backlist. What guarantees or minimums are in that package?), these great companies are also trying to muscle into the other guy's distribution channel. Both Google and Amazon have built apps for the iPhone which allow users of the Apple device to access resources hosted/published for Kindle or by Google Books. Somehow it is barely conceivable that Apple will produce apps for the Kindle or the Android app stores.

What does this tell us? It tells us that building an app for the other guy's store is a sign that you have either lost the market, know that you are going to lose the battle in the long run, or are not really concerned to establish a dominant software or hardware platform for books in the first place. Apple can afford to ignore (in fact can afford to welcome) the Kindle and Google Apps, because these book reading systems will only take off on the iPhone/iPad platform if the users are able to purchase media content directly to the device through iTunes and the app store. Any such transactions are a direct win for Apple at the expense of rival platforms. If Google or Amazon were to support Apple's in-app purchasing they have lost the market and 'lost' the customer relation. My hunch is that Amazon really doesn't care too much about the market for 'soft reading systems' and does not care at all in the long run about the hardware market. They care about selling digital books and built Kindle as the first stage of the rocket that would take them to being everyone's digital library. They would be very happy if the Kindle became a mere brand, a virtual personal library system; if need be on Apple's hardware and O/S. They really do not want to lose the digital books market, especially not to Google. There is therefore scope for an alliance of sorts between Amazon and Apple, if Apple wanted it. Apple has the whip hand in these matters with its clearly superior hardware and software package, but it could offer Amazon a pretty exciting prospect as the digital books back-end to the iTunes content management system.

Why the iPad is Great News for Digital Editions

We have been taking a preliminary look at the Apple announcement of the iPad. It looks like a fabulous machine and we can not wait to get our hands on one. It seems to be just right. Just right for digital editions. Here are five really good points:

1. It should be affordable by the mass market. $500 is an excellent entry price
2. It is large enough (nearly A4) to give a rich visual and touch experience, but still small enough and light enough to be handheld and used walk-about.
3. Compatibility with the iPhone for users and for Apps is a great start. There will be cool new things that are specific for the iPad implementation of Apps, but the fact that every iPhone App will run on this new thing is a boon.
4. The iPad is apparently blindingly fast, and efficient (battery life is good, much better than the iPhone)
5. Simplicity. The iPad interface and software is very appealing, and will encourage media use. The 'touch', 'geo-awareness' and 'orientation' will be wonderful for web activity.

Clearly some things are 'still to come'. Multi-tasking is surely going to be in the next O/S upgrade. We may see some more e-commerce developments: for example, it is surprising that there is not (yet) a magazine solution to match the iBooks app. The iBooks app is clearly just an eBooks store (an important distinction as it wont be able to deliver the full design-rich experience that users get from digital editions), and perhaps not yet a great eBook reading experience (see John Gruber's cavils (see at) Typography and iBooks "I was hoping for better from Apple"). We also wonder about its embrace of publisher regional restrictions: having the app restricted to the US rather than managing the territories for each book on a title-by-title basis, as is done with other content in the iTunes system, sounds inflexible. Maybe the implementation will change when they have negotiated with more educational publishers and publishers in more regions. We think that Flash is not going to be missed. We are slightly surprised that there is no camera, not even two! We are intrigued as to how iPad use is going to impact on social networks: Twitter, Facebook etc (the effect of the iPhone has been huge so far). There will be more, there is a lot to find out, but right now we want to get our hands on a few of these iPads as soon as possible.

One of the nicest features of the iPad from the Exact Editions standpoint is that it will facilitate and encourage use of books and magazines in another portable device (the iPad will create this new category) and readers will become used to reading their stuff on the iPad, on the iPhone and on any other web device that enables them to access the content feed. Underlying all of this richness is the internet and the web services that it supports. Publishers need to understand the opportunity that this presents. The same stuff can be accessed, searched and read any-way the user wants. A lot of them will want to do it on Apple's new device, and a lot of them will be buying.

Apps and Some Lessons we Have Learned

The big news today is the launch of the Apple Tablet yesterday. Gizmodo has a helpful summary of features.

We have also just released a new version of our generic iPhone App Exactly, which has an important improvement. It allows the user to sync the latest issue of her subscription to the phone. This makes the reading experience much more consistent and speedier, and of course it is then feasible to read the latest issue of the magazine on the plane or the subway, or anywhere else where you dont get an internet connection.



















Publishers sometimes find it hard to believe that iPhone users enjoy reading books and magazines on their iPhones. The fact of the matter is that a lot of iPhone usage is primarily reading: email, web pages, blogs, books and magazines. It is also clear to us that the Apps from Exact Editions are being read, and subscriptions to them are being renewed. Reading in an App which is designed to take full advantage of the iPhone software and interface is a lot more fun than reading web pages or text through the Safari browser. We recently looked at the usage of one of our magazines from this point of view. About 2% of the December usage for this magazine was through iPhones. Of that iPhone usage, customers were 20 times more likely to be reading a given page through the generic App Exactly as through the Safari browser on the phone. Now that our Apps are sync-ing its going to be a lot harder to do this kind of analysis.

The second big lesson that we have learned this year, is that making the App free is clearly a winning strategy. Publishers need to figure out ways of offering a good smattering of their book or their magazine issue as a free offering through the App. Thereafter in-App purchasing looks after the business end of the proposition. Very few magazine publishers are yet offering their magazines through the iPhone interface. The iPad announcement is a wake-up call that they better!

The Book as Information Appliance

The best blog posting on the Apple Tablet that I have read this week is at Gizmodo, by Jesus Diaz, The Apple Tablet Interface Must be Like This.

Anybody blogging now about the Tablet has an excellent chance of being proven wrong in 5 days time. But the most interesting aspects of Diaz's piece are historical, where he speculates about the interface by thinking about what has already gone before, in which he notes that the iPhone has already changed our expectations about how an interface should work. The touch screen is crucial but the flexibility of the 'app-based' interface is also crucial. He is betting, and I am sure that he is right, that the Tablet is going to be an extension and development of the iPhone interface and of its operating system (this is not going to be Mac/OS). Diaz sees the iPhone as having already established a crucial break with the 15 year reign of the desktop metaphor for usability. The genius of the iPhone is that it has shown how a small device can be a succession of information appliances in which the special features of each application are captured in the specialised interfaces which belong to each application (or 'appliance').

When it came out, people instantly got this concept. Clicking icons transformed their new gadget into a dozen different gadgets. Then, when the app store appeared, their device was able to morph into an unlimited number of devices, each serving one task.

In this new computing world there were no files or folders, either. Everything was database-driven. The information was there, in the device, or out there, floating in the cloud. You could access it all through all these virtual gadgets, at all times, because the iPhone is always connected. Gizmodo

Well, I am frankly delighted that this world of windows, files and folders is on the way out. Documents too are under notice of termination! I am very excited about the way in which information appliances will give us many more models and metaphors for the way that our software should work. Gestures will replace commands and trial by touch will replace error.....

But before we chuck all the paper-based metaphors out of the window (along with the files, the folders, the waste baskets and the .docs), I think that an age of software interfaces emulating information appliances is going to be very helpful and very preservative for some parts of our print and our paper heritage. Pages will stay with us. Tablets like pages and canvases. Libraries too -- we need a collective noun for a large collection of apps, and 'library' may be the group noun of choice. Above all, books, magazines and newspapers are great 'metaphors' for information appliances. They are information appliances par excellence, and they have in their 'soft' or emulation versions great potential for use on a tablet or an iTouch interface. Books, magazines and newspapers should behave and will teach us how to use the tablet interface in much the same way that they behave and teach us how to learn in real like. But they will not be the same. They will be software applications, appliances, apps, and so they will have much more potential for compute application. The main advantages of tablet-books or tablet-magazines or tablet-manuals, behaving somewhat like their physical counterparts is that we all know how the physical objects work and the virtual information appliance will work in a similar way to help our expectations and to help our discovery of how they are different.

I have no idea what the Apple digital publishing environment is going to look like when it is unveiled next Wednesday, but I bet that it is going to look much more familiar to book lovers, more retro, than most of us realise. If Apple have got their information appliances right digital books and magazines are going to feel more like real books than most digital publishing experts would have predicted.

What Happened to Twitter

There has been some reports of Twitter's growth slowing in recent months. ReadWrite web reports some HubSpot research which shows Twitter's growth slowing to merely 3.5% month on month growth in October; down from 12% in March 09. But it all depends what you are measuring. It seems unlikely that the Twitter investors are getting anxious. HubSpot is measuring new users and followers and the really interesting change is that Twitter usage is growing very fast still, but most of this growth is not on Twitter.com but in the Twitter ecosystem, which includes the mobile space, and other social services such as Facebook. Fred Wilson has a good posting about the difference between Twitter.com and the Twitter ecosystem. Think of it as the proverbial iceberg, with only Twitter.com emerging above sea level. The hidden, 'submerged', Twitter seems to be growing like crazy: and as web services continue to broadcast to billions of mobile phones it is going to carry on growing. As Wilson says:

My point is this. You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure. And the latter is 3-5x bigger than the former and that delta is likely to grow even larger. Twitter.com vs the Twitter Ecosystem.

Exact Editions is fundamentally a database driven web service, providing access to books and magazines, most of the action happens on our web servers. But in our own much smaller way, we have also noticed that our growth now is spurting in ways that are hard to measure as more of the Exact Editions ecosystem is working in a devolved fashion away from our servers. We have had a rush of users of the new Music Week App in the last 10 days: the downloads of this free app will have an impact on our bandwidth costs this month. But it is hard to know what happens with those downloads once they have been sync-ed to the iPhone (there are various indirect measures from which one can infer activity and we will increasingly rely on them). It seems probable already that a large part of the activity on our publications is happening in 'client' nodes, holding sync-ed issues, where our server logs and analytics gives no reliable data on usage. If free apps take off this could explode. As Fred Wilson says, the delta is going to grow.

This burgeoning penumbra of eco-systems associated with multiple and various web services will surely lead to a more of an 'organic' view of the web, with each web service and each individual distributable app collecting its own 'clients' within a cellular membrane. I resolve to stop thinking of the web as a net. It is getting to be more like frogspawn than a spider's web. We live in interesting times.

What do Literary Agents Do?

The other day I was talking (mostly listening) to someone who works in trade publishing. That is the kind of publishing in which books are 'sold' for advances of £25K, or maybe £250K, or very occasionally more than a million smackeroos. This friend/acquaintance was explaining that the house she works for controls very few of the electronic/digital rights in the books they publish and she was frustrated that agents seem highly reluctant to grant any rights, or even to experiment with digital propositions.

This got me to thinking. What is the point of an agent who does not do deals? We do not hear much about agents doing digital deals. Are they just sitting on their authors' rights and not exploiting them at all? Or are there soon going to be a rash of direct deals by agents with the likes of Amazon, Sony, Apple, Plastic Logic, Google etc? Perhaps there will be some deals: a couple of months ago Amazon flew a dozen top literary agents to Seattle for frank discussions. A few days ago Amazon announced that they had done an exclusive deal with Paul Coelho, exclusive for all his e-books in Portuguese. I wonder how much Amazon had to guarantee or pay as an advance for the exclusive rights? But all the e-books rights for Portuguese Paul Coelho, (why only Portuguese?), does not sound like such a big deal (oh yes, I know he is Brazilian, so it is a fairly big deal).

I suspect that exclusivity is the key issue here. Agents are used to handling and dealing in exclusive rights, and they are working with the hypothesis that digital rights are going to be like the exclusive rights that they have learned to carve out of the traditional book-publishing contract. Identify and separate the rights and sell each of them for as much as possible to one counter-party. But are digital rights like this? Does exclusivity really cut it in the innovative market for digital books? It has always seemed to me that copyright owners would be better off, and publishers would also be in a stronger position, if digital deals were almost always non-exclusive. Why do an exclusive eBooks deal with one supplier if there are 15 different players in the market, each with their own 'installed base'? Why do a five year exclusive with Amazon if the market for digital is going to end up with Apple, or Google or someone else?

If you look at the couple of dozen eBook reading platforms that were announced, re-announced, released or previewed at last week's CES (Consumer Electronics Show), it would appear to be quite possible that the market for digital rights is going to become extremely diverse and based on many different types of non-exclusive exploitation. Are agents capable of handling this kind of fast moving market? Is your typical literary agent capable of identifying and negotiating deals with dozens or scores of technology partners? How many literary agents were at CES in Las Vegas last week? Not too many, and few literary agents are comfortable in evaluating technology propositions.

Perhaps agents should get used to the idea of granting all digital rights to the book publishers they deal with on a non-exclusive basis, retaining the right to do non-exclusive deals themselves in certain circumstances. That way publishers and agents will all be working for the trade authors they represent. Just at the moment, it appears that a degree of paralysis and ignorance is ensuring that as few deals as possible are taking place. We are seeing the emergence of a new class of 'neglected exploitation' rights, somewhat analogous to the 'orphan copyrights' which lie at the core of the Google Books Search Settlement.

Broadening and Deepening the Exact Editions App Platform

The midwinter break seems to be getting longer. But we have been busy improving the Exact Editions App functionality in the last few weeks.

There have been some important changes in the way we view Apps. The first big change is that the Exact Editions App platform now supports full issue sync-ing to the iPhone. The sync-ing is only possible in a WiFi zone and it happens in the background, automatically whilst you are using WiFi. The sync will only work for the 'most recent issue' for a periodical (if it happened for everything iPhones would soon be full of back issues). This development was strongly requested by early users of the Exact Editions Apps and it has been warmly welcomed. The change has three important consequences:

1. Subscribers can read the current issue of a magazine anywhere on their iPhone (no need to be connected to the web, so great for tubes and airplanes).
2. Reading of a sync-ed issue is significantly faster and smoother. You have to be in a very good web environment (eg 4G) to get such a fast response from an un-synced App.
3. An incidental benefit is that a subscriber whose sub has ended, will still have access to the last issue of the subscription, even after the term of the subscription. This has obvious benefits for the subscriber, but it also makes 'trial' or 'free' Apps more attractive, when the trial has ended the sync-ed issue is still there.

The Music Week App which we released yesterday, was the first to be launched with single issue syncing from the 'off'. Apple have also been making some subtle shifts in the way they manage/control the App Store. And a couple of these changes have also had some bearing on the way we think of Apps for magazines. A very important improvement has been that Apple are now more comfortable with developers offering in-App purchasing from a free App. This has huge potential for magazine publishers (who have always used the free issue as an incentive for print subscribers). Another subtle shift is that developers are now advised against offering subscription services for a period of only a week (30 days is OK). Since all of the magazines that we have launched have used the 'low priced' one week sub as a way of seeding the market and encouraging early adoption, this presented a slight problem for Music Week (which is a high value professional publication). So, with a last minute change of guidance via the approval process, and a fast moving decision from the publisher (who liked the idea of offering a free taster for their premium service) we were able to quickly introduce the concept of a free preview. Within a day of launching the Music Week App we were also able to offer a free App which provides users with almost all the functionality of the full publication -- but on a delayed basis. The issues available for free are four or more weeks out of date.

PaidContent today had a premature piece on the Music Week App where the journalist got this story almost backwards. The last minute change alluded to was not a matter of 'rethinking' on prices, but of fast moving development to offer a 'free trial' something which had not previously been possible with the Exact Editions technology and the Apple e-commerce rules. This was a case of 'instant development' not of 'indecision'. A lightning advance not a hasty retreat. We expect all our magazine Apps to adopt the same taste-before-you-buy approach in future. The response to the Music Week App has so far been very strong. More than encouraging: confirmation. Free Apps to paid for subscriptions is the way that magazines will work. That is the story that PaidContent needs to take a look at.

Magazines as Apps

The Exact Edition app platform now features full sync-ing of a complete magazine issue. We explained this here.

Shall we summarize the key features of the Exact Editions magazine app platform in rough order of importance!

1. The Complete Magazine. Each individual magazine app has access to the current issue and the available archive. The complete issue, all of it. Including advertisements. The most recent issue will sync to the reader's phone (iPod Touch) so enabling off-line reading and faster reading. What is more the individual issues and the archive are searchable when connected to the internet.
   
2. Additional Interactivity. The magazines have significant additional interactivity on the iPhone platform, compared to their print ancestors. All weblinks, emails, and phone numbers should be clickable. The click to call phone numbers are especially useful for magazine readers, and they are a feature of enormous potential leverage for advertisers. To give one concrete example of this interactivity: this week's issue of the Spectator, as an App has 108 web links, 64 phone links, 52 page links, 27 email links, 21 postcode links, 4 isbn links.
   
3. New Subscribers. The magazines can be sold through the App Store as single week subscriptions. And most importantly renewals can be sold through the Apple e-commerce system. iPhone and iPod Touch users can buy magazine issues and renew subscriptions in just the same way that they buy music. 7 day subscriptions to magazines, can be priced at the low end for paid Apps and are consumer-friendly. Publishers of music magazines should see the importance of this! Never mind music magazines; selling a 7 day sub is a great recruitment tool for any consumer oriented magazines!
4. Revenues (maybe this should come first!), consumer magazines will sell large numbers of subscriptions through the iTunes App store. The outlay to get an app up and running is modest and the potential market is very large: 50 million users and growing fast. Specialist magazines with a strong identity and a user base should be looking to grow digital revenues now. This is a way of making next year's budget.
   

We can be sure that other digital magazine solutions for the iPhone will emerge. Some will be very good. We liked the GQ app that appeared from Conde Nast the other day, but it is not using the in-App purchasing system that Apple provide. It provides hot links to web pages but it does not offer automatic 'call off the page'. Texterity have done good work with digital magazines and they have been promising to deliver a branded App solution any day now for some months; and I am sure that it will be neat when it appears. But the Exact Editions App for Athletics Weekly appeared in August, so we think it outrageously misleading for Texterity to be claiming that with their not-yet-released-App they are the "only publishing provider that is producing native apps for publishers, rather than relying on web apps." Texterity should correct their website, and when they have done that and released their first branded App we will welcome them as the second, third or fourth provider delivering native apps of full magazines for the iPhone!

Synchronised Apps

Three of the Exact Editions magazine Apps have met with Apples approval and are in the iTunes store in version 2.0. Opera magazine, The Spectator and Athletics Weekly.

The big new thing with these Apps, version 2.0, is that they sync the latest issue of the magazine to your iPhone when you are in a WiFi zone. "Sync-ing" is the preferred term, but one can think of it as a matter of cache-ing or downloading the current issue. For reasons to do with licensing and presumably with Apple's deals with the carriers, content sync-ing is only possible via WiFi. For a reasonable sized issue (64 pp), in a good WiFi zone, the process of sync-ing may take 5/8 minutes. The issues are quite chunky files. The subscriber syncs the most recent issue of a magazine to the phone, and the new one automatically turfs last week's issue 'out of bed' when it climbs on board. Thus freeing up some precious space on the iPhone.

The principal advantages of the new system are (1) it is now easy to read the magazine when you are out of reach of the internet. So its ideal for commuters or travellers; (2) reading, browsing the current issue is quite a lot faster. And the slowness of the App to load up was the main complaint we heard from early users of the App. So these are two important enhancements.

A side-advantage of the new feature is that the one-week subs become an even better deal for the customer who is merely tasting the magazine. After the subscription week has passed, the user will be unable to search or sample the magazines archive or back issues. But she will have the last sync-ed issue on her iPhone, as a reminder of the purchase. This makes the 'sampling' aspect of the one week, trial subscription a much more potent tool for the publisher who wants to promote to mobile users.

We haven't yet submitted a version 2.0 for Exactly our generic App, but that is coming along nicely and should be in the Apple deliberative process shortly.

Burke's Peerage

We have opened a new on-line store for some of the major family history books published by Burke's Peerage and Gentry.

These are substantial books and some of them had to be processed from scans of the original typesetting. There are some wonderfully evocative titles: Burke’s Great War Peerage Noble British and Irish Families on the Eve of the First World War. Nearly 3,000 pages and the OCR has tackled type from the time of the Kaiser. These books have intriguingly recondite elements (two of my favourites: 'Foreign Titles Held by British Subjects', or 'Maids of Honour in Order of Precedence') and they are rich resources for genealogists.

Eight of the titles can be subscribed to as a package, Burke's Peerage Shelf, for the bargain fee of £80 per annum (otherwise they are £20 per annum each).

Institutional licenses are also offered, for individual titles and for the shelf.

A certain amount of searching is available to non-subscribers for free. Taking advantage of this, I note that 'Hodgkin' only appears in these books 25 times; this confirms my theory that the Hodgkins of history were peasants or 'trade' rather than 'gentry'. I am sure that we would figure more prominently if there were to be a Burke's Oxfordshire Peasantry.

Why the iPod Touch may be bigger than the iPhone

An interesting piece by Om Malik, All Hail the iPod Touch, draws attention to the latest Flurry report (Flurry have set up a large panel which tracks Apps usage across the most important mobile platforms -- watch out Nielsen). Their November study shows very strong growth in the iPod Touch segment:

The chart below shows Flurry user sessions tracked across iPhone, iPod Touch and Android for the last six months. Over this period of time, the iPod Touch has gained four points, despite its already large installed base. While iPhone continues to grow in user sessions, its share of sessions has dropped, while iPod Touch and Android have increased as a percentage.

Even more powerful for Apple are the consumption patterns Flurry is detecting among the iPod Touch demographic, demonstrating this segment's power as a word-of-mouth promotional army. Anecdotally, we know the "iPod Touch Generation" is made up of heavy MySpace, Facebook and SMS users, who voraciously share their lives with, and influence their ever-expanding social graph. Importantly, this also includes promoting products they like.... (Flurry, Smartphone Industry Pulse, November 2009)

Flurry also say "While it is clear that the iPhone has significant short-term revenue value for Apple, Flurry believes that the iPod Touch holds more long-term strategic value for Steve Jobs and team. As all industry eyes look to the iPhone, the iPod Touch is quietly building a loyal base among the next generation of iPhone users, positioning Apple to corner the smartphone market not only today, but also tomorrow." So the iPod Touch is on the Flurry view the absolutely key part of the Apple strategy. I certainly find their data on usage (and the disproportionate usage by the younger age-group) very arresting. If Flurry are right there are some decisive consequences:

• Apple know, and has been finding out, month by month, just how important the iPod Touch is. Apple has all the data on usage. Their competitors are only beginning to wake up to the threat posed by the iPod.
• Apple knows that iPod users also buy tunes and Apps. How many and how much $$
  
• Most of Apple's competitors are focussing on the market for mobile phones (carriers, smartphone manufacturing, tariffs, and contracts). They are worrying about their installed base and their existing deals. Apple knows that the mobile space is really about mobile connectivity and the web, where phones are only a part of the terrain, and WiFi is growing like wildfire. Apple knows that its installed base is only coming into view....
  
• Apple knows that it at some stage it will be able to push for ubiquity, with a device manufactured at a scale not seen before. China has largely ignored the iPhone, but it will not do so when Apple can sell a device for $49 which it can manufacture for $25/20/15.
• Apple knows that when it achieves ubiquity the iTunes e-commerce ecosystem will generate the preponderance of Apple's revenues and profits.
  
• Apple knows that the Tablet (if it comes) will not introduce a radical discontinuity with the software/media platform which has to be a universal offering. Apps and tunes will run the length and breadth of the Apple media continent.
• We have seen speculation that the mooted Tablet is either an extension of the iPhone product line or a kink in the MacBook line-up. My hunch is that it will be a development of the iPod Touch concept. No phone contract. No Snow Leopard. But a very nice computer.
  

Apple's iPod Touch is their 'ace in the hole'.

Magazine Publishers are Getting Organized (Desperate)

This last week two separate (?) ventures were announced to help solve the problems of the magazine industry. First, a still nameless new company to build a kind of Hulu for magazines, the company is being 'organized' by Jeff Squires, a Time Inc, veteran and apparently has backing from Time, NewsCorp, Conde Nast, Meredith and maybe Hearst. The flurry of objectives and business models whirling around this venture are summarized by PaidContent.

This venture is about dual revenue streams and selling content from the start—add the sale of content from the magazines or newspapers their corresponding sites and content created for digital editions to ad revenue and expanding options for advertising. Executives from most, if not all, of these publishers at various times have stressed the need for agnostic solutions that can be used across devices, platforms. Given the fragmentation in the device market, the dominance by walled-garden players like Amazon and the split we’re heading toward in gray-scale and color e-readers, anything less and I’d suggest stopping this before any more money goes in. (Staci Kramer in Paid Content).

The second proposition designed to save the magazine industry is Skiff, a new venture which Hearst have been brewing for a couple of years. They have a nice diagram summarizing its business model and projected revenue streams:


These projects are gaining a hearing in the industry, because they appear to solve the problems of the industry at one bound. They have a deep appeal because they appear to offer a digital future in which the magazine industry continues to be supported by a rich advertising stream, whilst also capturing an audience to digital subscriptions. In effect this dream appeals to the ancien regime because "Everything changes and nothing changes." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

The Skiff project is almost impossibly ambitious in simultaneously 'ingesting, optimizing, delivering and rendering a wide array of content' to Dedicated Readers, smartphones, tablets and PCs. This is a tall order.

One wishes that they had picked a somewhat less comprehensive target to begin with. How about: designing a platform whereby digital editions can be supplied at very low cost to all existing print subscribers? An industry wide initiative to do this, would do much to encourage a culture of digital magazine reading and digital subscriptions. But one fears that in trying to solve all the problems of the magazine industry (and the fall in advertising budgets is the most painful of these problems, and the one which the magazine industry is least able to tackle on its own), there is every chance that the enterprise will fail.

And the real problem with that, is that too many people in the magazine industry will think that the efforts of these 'Big Boys' (and they dont come bigger than Time, Hearst and Conde Nast) will save the industry. The truth is that these big 'experiments' are not going to provide a solution, that is much more likely to come from rapid innovation and experiment at the grass roots. Let a thousand flowers bloom! That way there is a better chance that solutions will be found. I have a nasty feeling that with these big propositions on the drawing board, (subject to many months of prototyping and focus-group reactions) Time Inc, Conde Nast and Hearst are going to be even slower to innovate through the publishing activity of the magazines themselves: their publishers, editors and their existing readers have to be in the picture and enjoying the digital proposition if it is to have any chance of success. Conde Nast's recent effort to launch an iPhone App for GQ is a much more promising approach, in that way they can get feedback and a chance to offer a second iteration of the iPhone App proposition within a month or two. Have the Skiff investors taken on board how quickly the App market will be evolving whilst they spend many months, testing, manufacturing and launching their new proprietary eReader?

The Congleton Chronicle

Yesterday The Congleton Chronicle became the first local newspaper in the Exact Editions store. An annual subscription to the digital edition of this weekly paper is available for £25. There is a free trial issue available here.

The almost immediate launch of the newspaper in the Exact Editions platform was also a record. The publisher/owner of the Chronicle decided to do his digital edition yesterday and uploaded the necessary issues forthwith, discussed the deal, decided the price and the schedule, signed the contract (put it in the post -- we trust him), liaised with our team, who promptly processed the files at our end: by 4.00pm everything was shipshape. Files databased, blurb drafted and logo in situ. The net result was that the 'paper' was up and in the store less than 6 hours after the decision to proceed had been taken. One wishes that some of the big publishers we talk to could move at similar speed. They need to get moving.

The digital edition gives the Congleton Chronicle a number of things that much larger publications also need:

• A digital edition which can be bought by any loyal subscriber. So no need to put a paywall around the web site, which will continue to carry fast moving stories. But there is a lot that is not freely available from the web site; if you want the full monty, then the Congleton loyalist will buy a digital sub
• The digital edition is good for Congleton loyalists because it reaches them on the very morning that the paper is first published in Cheshire. And the statistics from the Chronicle's web site tells us that there are plenty of curious visitors in far off places who can now subscribe instantly without fuss, and with no more bother than a PayPal transaction.
• The readers also have the benefit of all the advertisements that appear in the paper. The ads are there in full glory. With clickable telephone numbers, url's and email addresses. There are hundreds of such navigable and actionable links in each issue of the Chronicle. The ads in a local paper are among the most useful resources of the paper for readers. So leaving them out is a non-sense (the Exact Editions content management solution transforms local numbers into the international format, so the American reader with Skype or mobile phone, can call the estate agent with a click from the page).
• The additional interactivity in the paper, in particular in the ads, is also excellent news for the advertisers. The ads will get additional and direct response from readers who click on links. The publisher will have the statistics to prove it.
  
• The digital edition is completely accessible on the iPhone and from other mobile phones with standard, fully capable web browsers. There is no need for the Chronicle to invest in the considerable expense and overhead of producing and maintaining an alternative 'mobile' version of their content platform. All of the newspaper content is accessible week, by week from the digital edition, which can be easily read on iPhones and other mobile devices.
• The Exact Editions platform also takes care of the support, distribution and e-commerce aspects of the digital edition and this is a proven and reliable system. So it really is possible for a publisher to be up and running with a digital solution a few days after the decision is taken (allow 5 working days, because the Chronicle may be exceptionally nimble).

The Congleton Chronicle's publisher also figured out a way in which he could recoup the really modest costs of this service from the get-go. Smart move.

Google Book Settlement -- ReDux

I go away for two days in the mountains and come back to find the Google Books Settlement II, a 173 page renegotiated version of the original deal (red-lined). Catch up with Grimmelmann.

I am not sure that I will read the new contract; getting through the first version was quite a strain! Here is one view of why it matters and why it doesnt.

The Google Book Settlement matters because something pretty much like what is envisaged in the Settlement is going to happen. And that is a good thing. Google has 10 million books scanned and databased in their servers. They are revved up and no doubt waiting to go. A large part of the most valuable human knowledge of the twentieth century will be accessible and will be being digitally read in American universities from some time in 2010 (that is a very good thing; a very bad thing is that they will NOT be available in the rest of the world, and the legal technicians have not much clue about how that broader accessibility can happen). Even if the judge were to reject the Settlement, even if the DOJ were to file and insist upon some swingeing limitations to the scope of the agreement, most books will be Googled from now on. 10 million books have already been databased in the way pioneered by the Google Books system, many of them at the express request of their publishers. Some aspects of the Google project have been very controversial, which is why we have a court case and why the legal hostilities may meander on for years yet. The outcome is predictably messy but the change has occurred.

The publishing paradigm has shifted and most books will now be accessible and searchable in various ways via Google (and perhaps, let us hope, via alternative search engines). Five years ago it was by no means obvious that all books would be digitised en masse, in their entirety (even many of the bindings), full text searchable, that they would be page-rendered, that they would be straightforwardly citeable in something like the ways print scholars have cited books for centuries (volume, chapter, page), that they would be readable in much the same way as ordinary web pages, that illustrations and indexes should be in place (though for many of the 20th Century books this will not be the case -- as a direct result of the Settlement orphan illustrations are more orphan than the texts). None of this was settled in 2004.

So there has been a revolutionary shift in the publishing paradigm. But now for the other shoe: I am not confident that the Google 'victory' in the case of the Settlement, will be seen that way in the future. Thomas Kuhn who coined the usage of 'paradigm shift' to explain the way in which with a scientific revolution a period of upheaval with its paradigm shift, then led to a period of 'normal science' when investigations proceeded under the shelter of the new paradigm. I am not sure that Google will now find itself in a period of normal science or calmer waters. Google has made a tremendous step forward, with its vision of the comprehensive digital database of published books, but the suspicion is growing that this is not a terminus. The Googled library/bookshop of all published literature is not a finished product and it is highly probable that it will fairly soon be overtaken by other models and by other paradigm shifting changes in the technology. I have the very strong intuition (it is merely that and I can not prove it) that digital books will soon be used in ways that surprise us greatly and have very little in common with the current operation of the Google Books service. We have barely started on the path of understanding how digital books can be used; and as an early entrant to the field, Google has every chance of finding itself out-innovated. Some Twitter-type of disruptive service will doubtless come along soon to show us how computation really should work with digital editions.

Google will surely be making the incumbent's mistake if they suppose that the Settlement really settles, solves or finalizes the direction that digital book technology should now take. To quote the Scottish sage "I hae me doots".

Chasing the Format

The New York Times has been stealth developing a new format for its daily news. TechCrunch has a summary. The horizontal, grid-like layout is reminiscent of the Google Fast Flip, but I buy the suggestion in the TechCrunch comments that this format is being readied for the putative Apple iTablet computer, aka slate device.

That could well be; and it would make sense for Apple to launch the Tablet with something like the NYT as a core offering in its media-player. However, if the NYT is prepping a special format for the tablet, that is almost certainly a poor long-term move for the New York Times (not much different from its earlier play with Microsoft and the ill-fated Microsoft Reader). When the initial Apple enthusiasm is spent and the tablet has been ingested, the New York Times is left with another variant format to support; or as in the case of 'Microsoft Reader' Times readers, another batch of audience to disappoint. The Tablet needs to work with the New York Times as it is and the Times needs to work with every web capable device that there is. Every gadget capable of running a standard browser.

Newspaper publishers feel inexorably drawn towards customising their offering for each new ultra-fashionable device that comes along, and this is an issue at the core of their current dilemma (or their owners acutely sharpening current financial dilemma). The last time I counted: the Guardian (my favourite newspaper) was trying to optimize its content offering across half a dozen different platforms (from print to audio via web, mobile, video, RSS, PDF and blogosphere); and I am sure there are more coming. Even the web site is now being tweaked for optimum delivery in different web environments. There may soon be Apple iPhone, Kindle, Blackberry, Google Android, and Nokia-tweaked editions of different newspapers in web and digital formats (Pre anyone?) for all the different flavours of device out there. And if you think there will be only one dominant Android form factor you may have another think coming.

Newspaper publishers may think that the costs of these proliferating platforms are not falling to them (the adaptations are being paid for by technology partners, or by advertisers, or by new revenue streams from putative subscribers). Wrong. The cost is falling on the publisher who needs to maintain a very complex editorial and content management infrastructure and the cost is also falling on the brand which is inevitably being fragmented as the familiar format and style of the newspaper is poorly distributed and lost in these variant editions. Big damage to brand through content fragmentation and sub-optimal design. One of the principal advantages of a digital edition as the primary offering for a newspaper to its web subscribers is that it is offering the very same newspaper as to print buyers. That correspondence has to re-inforce the brand and develops a climate of continuity, predictability and reliability between print and web editions.

Why are newspaper publishers chasing these sub-optimal, format-based, solutions so frantically? I suggest that there are two reasons. The first is that the horizontal, hierarchical, RSS-friendly formats such as Google Fast Flip are well suited to the sequential, evolving, 24 hour real time operation of the news room. Better adapted than the page-based format of the traditional broadsheet or tabloid newspapers. My bet is that these horizontal formats, with the accent on left/right movement, will be adopted by news organisations that are not primarily newspapers (Fast Flip is working with article feeds from the BBC and Salon) and that a few newspapers will migrate in this direction.

But most newspapers really need to work with their historic format, a package in which news, editorial, features and photographs are integrated and distributed and which does not absolutely require paper since digital pages also work. Digital newspapers, when they have learnt the strength of the digital package that they can easily become, will adhere to their page-format style, their section-based daily organisation; the inescapable penalty of the daily edition cycle, which imposes deadlines and a rectangular organisation on the news, opinions, stories and illustrations that they contain. The new Apple Tablet/Slate will be good for this whether it is held in portrait or horizontal mode, and the New York Times will be making a mistake it it postrates itself in horizontal mode to make the most of the 11" aluminum casing of the early models.

Bring on the tablet which should be an ideal format for digital editions in all shapes and sizes. If it is any good (and it will be) it will be a wonderful showcase for the New York Times just as it is. Oh yes, for a certainty each edition will need to be 'carefully put to bed' as they used to say on Fleet Street. No more than that. Newspapers will thrive on the web when they know what it is to be a digital newspaper. Remarkably similar in many ways to a print newspaper, but better.

On Reasons for not going Digital

We sometimes think that we have heard them all. The reasons for not having a digital edition of a magazine....

But we are still finding some surprising responses in the market. And I do not mean:

• We will want to do a digital edition when we have sorted out our web site (I mean web sites are never, ever, in that sense 'sorted out').
• We will want to look at this when our publisher is back from her maternity leave
• .... when I have finished next year's budget (a budget which should really have a digital revenues component in it, but will not)
  
• ........ in three months when our mobile strategy team has reported on our options (as though it were not relevant to the mobile strategy team to take a look at a digital platform that runs smoothly on mobile devices)
  

Those are some of the none too convincing explanations for inaction that one hears when talking to publishers. But there are some more powerful reasons that occur to our publishing partners. Sometimes my sales patter gets stopped in its tracks.

• A few years ago, I was trying to persuade the gardening magazine Hortus that they should have a digital edition and that we could easily show them what it would be like if they supplied us with a PDF file. "A what file?" came the response, and it soon dawned on me that Hortus is one of the few magazines that is still entirely printed by hot metal and it would not be a trivially easy matter to spin out a PDF file from their production process. This is the only time that in talking to literally hundreds of magazine publishers that I have encountered a production system which completely eschews the digital. Mind you Hortus is a wonderful quarterly magazine even if somewhat exclusive and I STILL think that a digital edition of it would do rather well. In fact I would really die for an iPhone App for it, but that is another matter, and I am prepared to accept that Hortus does not need to be digital.
• A couple of months ago, the publisher at another up-market, high-style, magazine which shall be nameless (but not for gardeners) told me that his magazine had such wonderful production values in print that they really did not want to tarnish the brand with a digital offering. I am not sure that he used the word 'sully', but he got pretty close. Like the Hortus guy, this chap had me non-plussed on the other end of the phone. Spluttering. How could one persuade him, if he was not willing to undertake a free trial, that this beautiful magazine would for absolutely sure look even more stunning in a digital format? For if you have looked at high-fashion and high-design magazines on really good monitors (even on humble MacBooks) it is hard to deny that they look even better digitally than in print. Added to which, to put the matter at its bluntest: frankly there is a market out there and if you do not sell subscriptions to the 20 year olds and 30 year olds who want to read everything on their laptop and their mobile phone, the market for such magazines will surely shrink.
• I was also spluttering yesterday when the circulation director at one of our biggest magazine publishers told me that he would not want to, would not be allowed to sell digital subscriptions to the magazine through the iPhone App store, because such subscriptions would not count towards the ABC circulation and subscription measures which are the bedrock of the advertising business on which the magazines depend. Since I know that the American parents of this publisher are desperate to build up subscription revenues and since I know that the advertising revenues of almost all the magazines in this stable have been collapsing, I found this reasoning less than stellar. This was a conversation about selling subscriptions to the iTunes audience, not about giving away RSS-style App feeds to the magazine content (which in fact the American parent does do for some of these big name magazines).
  

Mind you, I expect he is right and the last time I looked ABC does not allow Apple certified distribution figures to count in any way towards advertising-related circulation bases. But that really shows us what terrible shape the advertising business is in, and how sublimely irrelevant the ABC methodologies (and the same for BPA statistics) are to the businesses that they purport to serve. I would not put special blame on ABC or BPA for this, but we should be chucking bricks at the movers and shakers in the advertising business. Google and soon Apple will be eating their lunch precisely because the mainstream advertising agencies and publisher networks have not seen how fabulous digital distribution can be for advertisers provided that the technology for measurement and for targeted distribution can be transformed with digital tools. ABC should be 'penalising' magazines for not having measurable digital offerings, not discounting those that do....