25/07/06

eBooks: further update

It’s hard to know what to make of the eBook future at the moment.

On the one hand, we have the promise of an imminent entry by Apple with an iPod that is also an ebook device. As Engadget says, it’s “no e-ink device”, but apparently,

the possibility is very real, since according to a source at a major publishing house, they were just ordered to archive all their manuscripts — every single one — and send them over to Apple’s Cupertino HQ.

At the same time, as Medialoper points out, iTunes is already delivering PDF files.

Maybe after missing out on a full-blown dalliance with movie purchases through iTunes, as is rumoured, Apple is instead gunning for the eBook market which would certainly be one (sorry, another one) they could clean up in. Of course, now that they’ve renamed the iBooks MacBooks, they could easily use the iBook for something else…

Among those hoping that Apple don’t enter the market will be Irex, whose reader has just come out, at €649 plus a 3-5 week delivery time.

Meanwhile Joel Rickett of the Bookseller suggests that such a device will come about in five years and be the death of backlist sales,

“In less than five years’ time, an application will almost certainly be invented that makes leisure reading a more comfortable experience in digital format,” Rickett said. “So if you agree in principle that Google can scan anything it likes from a library, and feed it into its search engine, then it effectively becomes the backlist publisher and starts to destroy the basis of your business.”

No comment on that.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported on the hookup between Bloomsbury and Value Chain, hoping to pre-empt the inevitable format wars it says are part of any adoption of new technology. And the Telegraph had a piece suggesting that the biggest growth market in eBooks was the romance. It also dipped a toe into the format ‘wars’.

So what to think? it must be naive to think that Apple isn’t looking at this as a market. They’re in digital distribution of content, and iTunes is the perfect channel for doing that - much more so than Sony’s Connect Store - given that the barrier here - other than the device and the availability of content - is the channel for delivery. Apple already has a massive advantage in the iTunes store which has between 200 million and 10 million users worldwide, depending on who you listen to. The user experience will be identical to purchasing any other content from iTunes which jumps over the hurdle of consumer adoption immediately.

Moving back to the other barriers, and the device - well, Apple can easily loss-lead with an iPod enabled for widescreen (which also plays music and video) and measure the adoption of book content for the devices by comparing iTunes volume of music and video sales against that of text. The outcome of that would give them insight into producing a dedicated device, possibly using e-Ink, which might be well into R&D now for a quick launch to avoid other spoilers.

So, to the content. All of the major publishers out there are investing in some kind of digitisation programme, or so we’re led to believe, which would mean that for Apple it’s just a case of loading the content onto the database and agreeing terms -oh and DRM. No doubt as with music and the video formats, some kind of proprietary format will be used but which also allows the device to play unlocked content.

Once the big publishers are involved, then surely the smaller players will be desperate to move in as quick as it can, particularly for those backlist sales Rickett mentions. Obviously such a move by Apple would be the first step in a move that would lead to the publishing industry having to be turned around as was the music industry.

Apple would then be competing against Google and Amazon and Microsoft in the book space, but would conveniently have leapfrogged the current stumbling block for the search engines of actually doing the digitisation, and clearing rights. Apple’s doing this would also, presumably, put a massive spanner in Google’s works, although it might force them to open up and, say, offer back to publishers the files they digitise. Or something.

One wider problem I see for publishers (off-topic, sorry) is that the digitisation programmes I’ve read about seem to amount to scanning, delivering jpegs rather than .txt files

This is great for Google-type or Amazon ’search inside’ experiences, displaying entire pages as if looking at a scan of a book, but not so good for micro-content. It doesn’t yet unlock the content from a book to allow the user to be able to create and compile their own anthologies for example. I hope I’m wrong though, but everyone hates reading PDFs out of websites, right?

So this is all very exciting and it’s easy to get carried away with that idea. On the other hand, the reticence of Sony, the pricing of the competing devices, and the general (to be frank) apathy of the UK pubilshing community would suggest that any such turnaround of the business is a long, long way from being practical. Even if Apple did bring out such a device, who’s to say the content owners would play ball? Who’s to say they could, no-one (other than Penguin and to a degree, Bloomsbury) having any available digitised content?

This would also get interesting. We’d have a possible scenario where (following the Endgadget story, where a whole ‘major publisher’s’ archive is sent over to Apple HQ - which I’m not sure I belive is possible as easily as that makes out) US publishers are more up to speed than the UK. Which would mean UK early adopters would get their hands on US-licensed content, which would take a bite out of the UK market, and put a rocket up the non-digitised publishers. M

aybe then, they’d do the decent thing, and get together to come up with some kind of coalition that took on Apple at its own game? They are, ultimately, the ones who should hold the power as they hold the copyright. Although, of course, the holding of that copyright is in itself something that is still under debate.

No, what we need is a catalyst. And that will come in the shape of a leap of faith - and Apple is extremely well-placed to make the leap.

Thoughts?

Posted by Peter Collingridge in Future of the book, Publishing.