“Content is Free… but curation is sacred”

The phrase (see below for its origins) first came to mind during the Google [un-] settlement with US publishers, and since then I’ve become more and more interested in the notion of “curation”, and publishing.

What struck me with the Google deal (other than surprise it actually got through) was that from one perspective, it could create an unprecedented opportunity for a new wave of entrepreneurial publishers, who could see the oceans of digitised, rights-cleared material, as their new playground.

Putting aside the awful implications of the deal for traditionally positioned publishers (and also, perhaps those currently publishing out of copyright material, via print on demand), I was struck by this question, of what happens when previously “locked up” content – stuff that is invisible, lost, or in far-off backlist – becomes free, and even more freely available? How will we judge, choose between, or come to find/value content – new or old?

One answer was inspired by the famous CP Scott line,

Comment is free, but facts are sacred

(used by The Guardian to name their blog channel, CommentIsFree – and I sincerely apologise for bastardising this quotation.)

What I felt at the time was that if content becomes effectively free then it will be curation that is worth something. And that good curators will be those with the ability to add significant value to something which has effectively become free, and available in multiple formats.

What do I mean? Just that as the amount of content we are exposed to increases, without any discernible gauge of quality, it is the trusted curators of that content to whom we will choose to give our attention, time or money, rather then trying to filter it all out personally.

In my case, the curator may be the bloke in the record shop who knows my music collection and recommends something new, the staff in my local wine merchant, or a particularly good blog I follow, my newspaper – anything. However, it is not Amazon’s recommendation algorithm; it is decidedly human, and, over time, a relationship of trust is built up. If it works, that trust leads to action, purchase, attention, refinement and more trust.

So, perhaps one opportunity thrown up by the settlement will be for the publishers who can compile (say) a poetry or short-story collection from 100% “Google-Available” material, and create a compelling “curatorial” package out of the material? Or the publisher who makes a city guide peppered with locative literary references and extracts through the ages?

Whilst the role of the editor has always been curating the available material, with selective taste, perhaps one by-product of “free content” will be to
bring the selection criteria into sharper focus. Publishing has always been very focused on the “new”, rather than looking to the strengths of the (”old”) backlist, which must at one point, have been considered strong enough to merit publishing in the first place. Perhaps the agreement even puts the “old” and the “new” into competition?

There is one further angle to this last idea, which can be illustrated through the (possibly worrying) trend of the recent boom in reading on hand-held devices such as the iPhone or the DS. “Worrying” for traditional publishers only, in that they are barely benefitting from this boom. Currently, most of the material being read in this new way has been content taken from the deep backlist – out of copyright material, and classics in particular. People are finding joy in those classics – the free ones – in their hundreds of thousands.

Whilst the settlement (I think) allows Google to provide Print on Demand editions of the entire books they have scanned, they are less likely (I think) to enter the market of producing highly curated, highly produced, “chunked” anthologies of this content, selected by whatever criteria. That is a human task.

Publishers prepared to adopt new models (and find ways beyond the printed book to make it work commercially) may find a new lease of life from this. And they may find that in so doing, they create a relationship with their readers that is worth a whole lot in these difficult times.

However, I am concerned that two of the most sensitive aspects of the digitisation discussion – DRM for ebooks and pricing of ebook editions – could conspire to create the perfect storm for piracy, and an early hurdle for the industry to cross successfully.

1. Price

Alarmingly, the current policy among publishers seems to be that an electronic edition of a book should be priced at just about the same price as the prevailing edition – despite publishers having conditioned users to the idea of books being heavily discounted. So if your hardback RRPs at £20, the eBook won’t be far off:

Several publishers told The Bookseller [7/8/2008] that the reason behind this was they wanted to avoid heavy discounting of e-books. “We don’t want to start from a weak position and then negotiate downwards,” said one.

Hachette, which plans to have 750 titles available from next month aims to increase this figure to 1,000 e-books by the end of the year, was the most bullish on price. Group commercial director Richard Kitson said that e-book r.r.p.s would be “no more than 10% off the physical price”. But added: “We want to see how pricing develops.”

So, if we take this as fact, your £20 book will be £18-£16 in eBook format, but maybe £10.99 (more or less) in hardback in some shops.

Consumers assume (even if it is wrong) that without a physical product and supply chain, the production costs of getting the book electronically should be lower – and that this cost should be passed onto the consumer in the form of a lower price. So an apparently “cheaper” edition that is priced significantly higher than the “expensive” physical edition may immediately suggest that something is wrong or suspect with eBooks pricing.

So, the first factor is to note is that ebooks will be expensive. Certainly at the outset, more so than physical ones.

2. DRM

I don’t know nearly enough about DRM, but I do know that (1) it’s complex and (2) most sane, sensible people with any technological experience loathe it, and for very good reasons.

If one looks “at the music industry” for insight, it has – perhaps not entirely of its own volition – come full circle to distributing content without DRM, acknowledging that DRM is damaging to everyone, but primarily to consumers.

Certainly a major barrier to those publishers who want to distribute in a DRM free, inter-operable format, is the lack of understanding from authors and agents about the complexities of the issues at hand. I’ll leave the percentages to someone who knows a lot more than me, but my feeling is that most publishers are currently distributing the vast majority of electronic books in locked / protected (single-device) formats.

Interestingly, and to my mind surprisingly, that may be changing. The emerging consensus from the smart end of publishing seems to be that – for unexpected reasons – DRM could be dead in the water before eBooks really take off. In other words, we’ll either see distribution of unprotected content in a variety of formats, or that the open “ePub” standard may become the format of choice.

This, on one hand is great – open standards are to be embraced, they allow interoperability, and reinforce the idea that consumers have bought rather than borrowed a piece of (expensive) content. [For more on DRM, ePub, and much more besides, I heartily recommend the excellent (if militant) Teleread blog.]

However, on the other hand, it is also quite risky for a couple of reasons.

The first concern is that ePub is a very clever format, but it’s basically a “wrapper” format for other types of file. On the whole these files are (X)HTML – the very building blocks of the web – along with some navigational, indexing and “media” files such as images. In other words, it is trivial to convert a DRM-free book from an ePub format into a website. (And, of course, back again.)

If one makes a comparison to the early days of Napster, you at least needed to have a special player to listen to mp3 files; whilst such players were available to download, they weren’t “native” to the operating system. You had to be mildly geeky to use them; the same can’t be said for HTML pages.

Secondly, finding pirated music and film content requires mildly geeky skills: file-sharing networks can be invitation only, require a complex combination of forces (find a tracker site, find a torrent, find enough people seeding content) to get what you want.

But if books were to be “ripped” into HTML pages, the most powerful (and popular) search/find method on the web – Google – would find, index and rank book content very quickly, and probably very highly for the relevant search terms (e.g. Harry Potter Book). And if enough people link to the content, its page ranking could be unassailable. I don’t just mean a search for “Pirated Harry Potter Book”, but a search for “Harry Potter book” could rank the actual content top (assuming non-intervention by Google). Copyright owners could find it very hard to compete against this, other than hurling DMCA Takedown orders at offending sites; and even if one such site is taken down, it is trivial to relaunch another.

So the second factor is that (as well as artificially high pricing) we have a piracy/distribution-friendly format potentially becoming the dominant distribution type, and that this same format is optimised for being found and consumed on the web itself.

So to me, high pricing, and an openly rippable format would appear to be the perfect breeding conditions for piracy. It’s great that publishers could be moving away from DRM, and this is an important battle to win. But surely the price battle is an equally important one in the front to drive adoption and resist loss of revenue through piracy?

One quote from The Bookseller article was that, “the market will eventually set its own price”. Indeed it will – but whether that price is controlled by pro-active or reactive pricing by publishers remains to be seen.

What I’m not assuming is that people want to pirate content – quite the opposite. But if a consumer feels that they are being given a choice of an excessively-priced, perhaps hard-to-find version, against a freely priced, easy-to-find version, there will be a point where they will go for the latter.

Afterword: Is Piracy Such A Bad Thing?

I have been reading The Pirate’s Dilemma, a very interesting book by Matt Mason that (amongst other things) describes piracy as “just another business model”.

Piracy, as we can learn from businesses such as Nike, KissFM and even Hollywood, may not actually be such a scary thing.

Looked at one way, piracy helped consumers get used to the idea of consuming music digitally, and the appeal of the iPod was an added incentive.

The problem was that the music industry was slow to see digital distribution as an opportunity rather than a threat; this allowed piracy to become the easiest method for consuming digital music. Even when iPod and electronic music was mainstream, the music industry still wasn’t acting as one – pirated content was easier to get than legal content – and this inertia opened the door for Apple to take 80% of the market.

The music industry, however, wasn’t dying when electronic music came along. In many ways, I remember it as being in its hay day. Publishing (and reading) on the other hand is struggling to engage readers, and reading / literacy trends are not looking healthy.

So despite what I’ve said above, perhaps this wouldn’t be a bad thing at all. Unpopular as this may be, is it not possible to see the benefits of a short-term boom in new readers, guided to books by freely available (pirated) content? Readers who could be then persuaded to cross over to buying legitimate copies of books when they’ve got back into reading? Is there not an argument that piracy could, in fact, both grow the market and train people to use, and enjoy, books in a new format?

However yesterday I listened to two of their most recent postings, both of a digital bent.

The first was hosted by Mike Shatzkin and is called “Teaching some old publishing dogs new tricks” and features some “learnings” from third-party tech vendors, on what their take on publishing is. (Download MP3)

If you’re pushed for time, skip straight to Caroline Vanderlip (CEO of SharedBook) at 24:30. She’s great, very smart, and gives some great information about the process of selling and making personalised books, both to consumers and to publishers. And also about adjusting to the, um, slow rate of publishers getting their head around your brilliant idea.

One statistic sticks out (and in my throat, given apt’s attempts in the past to convince publishers to engage with customisation – on which more later):

• The Pokey Little Puppy personalised childrens’ edition (personalised means the inclusion of a single, personalised, printed-on-demand dedication page), published by Random House US, sells for $25.
• The trade edition (exactly the same, less the dedication) sells for $8.99
• The customised edition outsells the trade edition 4:1
• So that’s four times the volume, (almost) three times the price. And direct to consumer.

I could see a future for that kind of model. Anyone?

The second is a bit of a love-fest, and is chaired remarkably stiffly by Jeff “Print Is Dead” Gomez (he just sounds like he’s reading everything out). But it features Derek Powazek (who knows a lot about community sites), the VP of Shelfari, and man of the moment, Scott Sigler.

If you’re really pushed for time, it’s kind of all about using free to build value, and audience, and how to look after your community once you have them there. Nothing that should surprise anyone who reads blogs about the future of publishing.

There are also some postulations on what publishing needs to do to haul itself out of “Publishing 1.0″ and into “Publishing 2.0″ right at the end. (Download MP3)

More recent posts:

Coversourcing: All about our crowdsourced book jacket for Jeff Howe’s new book
The iPod moment for Books: How UK readers can’t actually buy eBooks
Stanza for iPhone: How UK publishers can’t actually sell eBooks

We have an increasingly broad range of options these days for electronic reading devices – be it the basic (phone, computer), dedicated (Kindle, Sony Reader), or phantom (iPhone / iBook etc).

But as publishers continue to founder around digitisation, formats, DRM and the like, we have a disconnect between the demand and supply of electronic files to go on these devices. Without a single, unified offering for content in the right formats (and at the right price) then where can readers go to get their writing?

They’ll go anywhere. If we look back to the birth of the MP3 platform, then it was very hard to get music in that format without resorting to “free” (or rather, pirate) sites. Napster was pretty much unchallenged from the late nineties until the launch of iTunes in 2003, which itself took a while to get the market share it has.

As a result, music fans – who really did want to get access to their music collections in the new format – flocked to illegal services, arguably because the industry couldn’t supply them with something that the community (who were ripping and sharing their own collections) could. (And the music business is still feeling the price of it: I heard a statistic on the radio the other day suggesting that for every song bought, five are downloaded illegally.)

And so it struck me that seeing as the most common file for distributing “books” in is either Word or PDF (but particularly PDF as it’s also used for grouping scanned images of pages as found on pirate sites) there is a valid parallel to that of MP3, which was a brilliant compression format. Compression isn’t so much of an issue in books, given that text is usually very lightweight, and that we have lots more bandwidth than we did 10 years ago. But the PDF is the format of choice for fans to share pirated books among themselves – and as such, could be tarnished as the perfect vehicle for transmitting pirated ebooks?

It’s a bit of a weak question really, I suppose. Of course it’s the perfect vehicle. That is what it was built for, it just hasn’t been adopted in quite the way Adobe possibly hoped, other than in the printing business.

But I wonder what comes next from the industry? Perhaps there really is a covert, unified, rallying movement under way from the conglomerates that will come out with a single channel (perhaps, say, a competitor to Amazon / audible) and in a month’s time, we’ll be astonished by the vision, prescience and execution by a troubled business of a way to draw hope from its future?

Or perhaps (should such an insatiable demand actually exist, and I can’t say we’ve been shocked by recent images of angry readers waving Kindles on the streets outside corporate publishing house head offices, demanding ebooks) we’ll see something else. Imagine if hackers got into the archives of one of the printers and “liberated” all those poor PDFs to go back into the wild, among readers, where they’d be happiest?