“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.

The good news is that I was told that Waterstones is completely out of stock, and so is Sony. [Perhaps, as with the PSP, the PlayStation and the iPhone, Sony is playing a deft game of supply and demand, keeping an exclusiveness around the product, rather than flooding the market with it. And they are clearly selling.]

The more bizarre news is that there is a Sony Reader on display on each of the five floors of the Piccadilly store – and I was told by staff that each device, on every floor (bar the second floor) has had all of the pre-installed titles – all 100 of them – manually deleted from the reader. By a member of the public.

Furthermore, Piccadilly is not the only store to have this happen to them… Who is the luddite doing this, and why?

Some photos after the jump.

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?

So far, I’ve packed:

• Personal Days by Ed Park, Jonathan Cape
• Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household, Penguin, very secondhand
• Americana, Don DeLillo (Vintage) – have given up on this one before, despite being a big DD and advertising fan.

I kind of think that’s just about right for the novels.

But, nagging me from the side of the bed are worky books, heavy with illustration, and good intention: The Pirate’s Dilemma (great, from what I’ve read so far), Webdesign for ROI (I know, the title scares me too, but is very full of sense) and Web Analytics, An Hour a Day.

Frankly, given the fact that I’m nowhere near an internet connection (and why can’t I buy a roaming dongle on pay as you go?), and everywhere near a beach and insanely good food and drink, I’m unlikely to open these books. So maybe I’ll leave them at home. They’re big, and you know, heavy. (Unwittingly, I’ve become one of those people, talking about seeing the benefits of electronic reading in terms of luggage. Forgive me.)

Still, the fact is, that this year, for the first time ever, the idea of taking a digital device with me, and sharing the load and ambition, is actually plausible. I have an iTouch enabled for ebooks. No extra weight. Perhaps I get these books digitally – or supplement them with those I can? Can I carry them with me to every beach, and avoid reading them electronically?

And for just one moment I had a glimpse into the future.

I googled “The Pirate’s Dilemma” and found that Matt Mason’s site allowed a free download
(actually, it’s an honesty box model, but seeing as I bought the book, I figured I could get away with a freebie on that); the other two are print-only.

And what a revelation. Instant.

I downloaded it to my laptop, googled for how to get it to sync with one of my iTouch applications – stanza and ereader – and went for it.

OK. I had to update Stanza. But I was away. And full of excitement.

Until I saw the way it looks in the application. No line breaks, no page breaks, no typographical sensitivity at all. In short – a fairly intimidating experience:

I thought perhaps this was a feature of the book itself, so tried again, this time with Sara Lloyd’s Digital Manifesto. Not so much:

(I can’t take a screengrab from my iTouch, but if you can imagine just one of these columns, that’s pretty much it.)

Of course, these are out-of-the-box PDFs rather than more native formats such as ePub. But they are still being displayed with standard structural formatting rather than that of the document (hence why Sara’s document title is “Microsoft Word” and the author “Michael Bashkar”). So I don’t want to be too unfair.

But even the ePub versions of the books I have are a little cold in their typographical attentions – focused more on getting content onto a page,rather than off it, and into the mind of the reader.

I’m very excited by this though, particularly the serendipity of the first book I looked for digitally being available, and the crystallisation of how persuasive that could be for all books. All I want to do is make it look a lot nicer.

Read them I will – or try to, I’m on holiday – but what this exercise says to me is that these are very early days, and wonderful as they are, there are some opportunities for some very great design leaps (in terms of experience and interface) to be made very quickly.

Mad Men is brilliant for all sorts of reasons, but one thing it does very well is show the cracks emerging in a society as it shifts from life as it always was (men working, women having babies, men drinking, women having problems, men having affairs, the women having to get rid of those babies etc) to life as it will be.

In this case, life as it will be is shown the by occasional hipsters that Don Draper (our conflicted, everyman hero) encounters – and who occasionally prick his bubble. The hipsters don’t get him – in fact they loath him and his suits, three-martini-lunches, and despotic capitalism, selling more stuff to people who don’t need it. Instead the hipsters are into reefer, jazz – and literature.

In season one we saw DD join one of his mistresses (the illustrator, and more interesting one, IMHO) and her stoned, goateed beatnik friends go to a beat poetry night. The drama here was that Don didn’t get it at all – and by implication, lost his mistress to the new world – and retreated back to the world he knows and feels safe in: the world of newspapers and truth, rather than literature, poetry and ideas. (Don is always pictured with newspaper, never a book.)

Yet – in this week’s episode, Don is lunching alone at a bar (shirking his work responsibilities) and the guy next to him is reading a book. It turns out it’s a book of poems, rather than (as I thought) a play. The guy (borderline beatnik) tells Don, after looking at him, that he “doesn’t think he’ll like it”. Don buys the book, and the episode closes with him in voiceover reading from it, whilst posting a copy to (we assume) one of his (other) mistresses:

Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

Clearly, Don is in trouble.

A few things strike me. The first is that (as we saw with Lost), producers seem to enjoy referencing real books into their plots, letting the viewers go to town on doing the reading, albeit between the lines. (I anticipate a slew of articles this week (as there were for Lost) talking about the massive hike in sales for the book – Meditations in An Emergency – as a result of a recommendation by Don. Let’s hope the broadcasters don’t try to actually publish the short stories that the juniors of the office are competing with each other over getting into the Atlantic.)

The second is that, in this context, liking poetry is used as short hand for Don’s psychological turmoil. Don is not only reading poetry, but he’s sending it to someone whilst thinking of them. Don may read a novel here or there – something manly, crime, and hard-boiled, perhaps Chandler – but nothing that disrupts his world view. Clearly, if he’s reading poetry, this season is going to show Don’s issues coming to the surface.

But I think the book is also used as a symbol for our – as in modern – psychological turmoil: I was struck by how the book, in another context (a contemporary drama) would look anachronistic. Here however – for all the turmoil it signifies to Don – it became, and was possibly used as, another nostalgia trigger. Like much else in the series, the book provides us with a window into a simpler life – although we are also warned that life didn’t feel any simpler for Don, or indeed Mrs, Draper.

One thing is for sure; it’s pure nostalgic indulgence for anyone in publishing to watch a series where books are portrayed as cool, counter-cultural – and dangerous, rather than geek-fodder.

Update:

Since I wrote this, I’ve seen a few articles talking about exactly this – not least Freakonomics! Oops. Here are some links:
Freakonomics:

I clicked over to Amazon to check the book’s sales rank a few minutes after Draper read the book. A rather mediocre No. 15,565. This morning, at 8:30 a.m., the book was ranked No. 161. That probably represents only 50 or 100 copies sold, but it’s a pretty fantastic leap for a 50-year-old book of poems.

AMCTV: Evolution of an ad campaign (shows Don with Newspaper)

The Ampersand

AMC’s buzzed-about drama Mad Men launched its second season last night. Aside from the attention to detail, clever writing and sharp acting, one of the things that stands out about the series – and makes it sing – is its subtle nods to literature.

They also clear me up on Don’s reading material: Exodus by Leon Uris and:

The Best of Everything, a 1958 novel by Rona Jaffe about a group of young women working in a publishing company

New York Magazine: Don Draper’s Bookshelf

Clearly, Mad Men isn’t just nostalgic for the days when men tossed back Scotch — but for the days when they tossed back Scotch and read books too!

Recent Posts:

Stanza: ebooks for iPhone
Harlequin: Enriched
The iPod Moment for Books

Recent apt Studio work:
Granta Magazine: The Magazine of New Writing
James Frey: Bright Shiny Morning
Stephenie Meyer: “The next J.K. Rowling”

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

Crucially – see below – Stanza (which also has a good desktop version for Mac users) supports the ePub standard. (ePub has been “adopted” by a growing number of the publishers who are digitising content – although they are of course hedging their bets with “support” for any other number of standards and formats and DRM options).

In other words, getting digitised content onto the iPhone for Stanza shouldn’t technically be a problem, although availability is another issue.

What is interesting about this coming out today is the growing feeling of a tipping point happening with ebooks, although not coming from where one would have expected it. Rather than Apple themselves adding ebook software and distribution to the iPod/iPhone (or a new device), they have simply outsourced the job, and let the market produce one, or many such options. And by doing this very easy thing, they have got the jump on Amazon, Sony, Iliad, Borders, Waterstones – everyone.

Let’s get this straight – ebooks and the iPhone / iTouch are very good friends at the moment, and it may be that Apple is making the most popular iPhone an ereader by stealth.

Last week we read that almost 8% of iTunes “applications” for the new iPhone are reported to be ebooks, and the entertainment division of the iTunes store is stuffed with (out of copyright) books being sold.

The question for me is – when will the first (UK?) publisher break ranks and upload the first frontlist title in ePub to the Apple store, without DRM, and at a sensible price?

If / when a publisher is brave enough to do this, not only will they gain a huge amount of good PR, they may also break open the floodgates for using iPhone / iTunes as an electronic book platform. (As we know, publishers are quite good at copying one another when a competitor makes a new announcement). Of course, they’d stuff up all of their secret deals to wrap their content in proprietary DRM’d formats with their existing customers, but we may actually see a viable market emerge.

If such a thing happened, it would make a mockery of the need for an expensive, crippled, dedicated device such as the Sony reader, which as luck would have it, the Indy broke news of this morning: Waterstones to sell Sony Reader in September.

It would also further marginalise the overwhelmingly underwhelming release of the Iliad through Borders. Note that neither Sony / Waterstones or Borders / Iliad has an effective, trusted, and “adopted” retail infrastructure for selling eBooks. It would also put Amazon’s Kindle launch in the UK under more pressure.

Apple, on the other hand, doesn’t need to manufacture such a device or channel: it exists. iTunes is the perfect channel for getting ebooks onto iPhones, and is on millions of computers worldwide. There is no adoption curve.

So, if Stanza can support ePub; and publishers are supporting ePub, and iTunes can support the sale of products on behalf of third parties – why isn’t every UK publisher rushing to get its books into ePub on iTunes?

For all the talk of digital innovation, new strategies, experimentation, skunkworks and failing cheaply, the picture in the UK publishing industry still feels like one that is failing to get anywhere new very quickly. It’s not hard to feel that the innovations that are getting “traction” are those being driven by retailers – Amazon and Kindle’s effect in the US spring to mind – rather than by publishers.

On the other side of the pond, however, things are very different. I’ve just read the press release from Harlequin about their “enriched edition ebooks”:

“Harlequin becomes the first publisher to offer entire eBooks that are enriched with interactive buttons that hyperlink to Web sites with more information about the content.

[the launch title has] been enriched with interactive buttons that hyperlink to Web sites containing photos, historical commentaries, illustrations, sound effects, maps, articles and more, bringing the world of the novel to life without the reader having to leave the computer or the current screen page. The interactive buttons have been designed to be unobtrusive, so if one prefers not to access the bonus material, the reading experience remains uninterrupted.

This is, clearly, a great idea and one that has been talked about for ages, in somewhat mythical terms (”Imagine when we can dynamically update a book, or pull in information from the web” Well, this is it).

But when it comes down to it, it’s not that hard and – crucially – someone has gone out and done it. And it’s not an edgy, small, publisher, it is the “global leader in series romance” (yup, the same people behind Mills & Boon). Unlike most of their UK sisters, American publishers seem to have realised that innovation and experimentation are not worthless if the first try doesn’t wholly succeed, and have seen dgital as an investment rather than a cost. Harlequin have been at the forefront of this when it comes to eBooks.

Well done Harlequin – I look forward to checking it out. (OK, so the site doesn’t appeal to me, and despite having at least one link on the title verso, the “read inside” software can’t find any instances of “www.” as a search, but that’s beside the point here).

Two points. First of all it’s good to see an example of a big publisher doing something they should be doing, rather than leaving it up to the hackers (as Russell Davies said of James’s Bkkeeper):

[bkkeeper] is another perfect example of the sort of little service that some large corporation should have done, if only they had the nouse. I bet there are all sorts of publishers and book-sellers attending conferences about ‘branded utility’ and sitting in brainstormings about what they could do to extend their relationship with their readers.

Secondly, I’ve been talking to a few friends in the business about the struggles of trying to drive positive change, innovation and collaboration in publishing – and have been surprised at how long it’s taken me to realise that publishing is a very conservative and innovation-averse industry. And as one well-placed friend said (and I paraphrase),

“You shouldn’t be surprised. This is an industry that for the past 8 years has been told, repeatedly and in public, that they should heed the cautionary tales of the music industry. Yet for all the head-nodding CEOs and digital conference talk, what are we most likely to see when digital comes to town? Whose money would not be on DRM’ed eBooks, sold at eye-watering discounts to the major retailers, with multiple competing formats and devices and publishers still out of the loop? And how would this not be a carbon copy of the (broken) music business, catalysing a piracy trend that the industry denies exists?

I hope he’s wrong, but I feel he’s not. It is hard, as an industry, to feel that there is a shared long-term (or even medium term) vision for how publishing will survive, isn’t it?

Update:
I also noticed today the launch of MagHound, aka “NetFlix for Magazine Subscriptions” which allows you to pay a fixed price for a subscription, whilst swapping magazine from issue to issue. It’s not up yet either, but an interesting approach to the problems of the magazine business – from Time magazine’s publisher.

Such a sexy, “converged” device would surely corral latent consumer desire to read books on a screen rather than a page – even if just through the force of Apple’s “halo effect” – surely?

eBook iPhone or not, my concern is (still) that most publishers haven’t yet got a range of ebooks to market in preparation for any such device. Devices are available (read Alex’s blog on reading nothing but ebooks for a year), but consumers have to work very, very hard to get copyrighted material onto them.

I don’t know if this is because publishers haven’t sufficiently sorted out their digitisation strategy and process yet – whether it’s a question of formats, DRM, or even the basics such as rights and royalty clearances. Or it’s the absence of a decent channel, or what. (Certainly most of the big houses have been making noises about expensive digitisation processes for at least a year if not two.)

If this is the case – that in the light of consumer demand, there is actually very little supply – then surely an “iPod for books” moment could actually be a disaster for the publishing industry, forcing keen and hungry consumers to find their electronic content from other (possibly illegal) sources – as with happened with the ipod moment for, um, music?

This of course is a sweeping generalisation, so I decided to actually look into it (a bit), and chose to compare last week’s Times bestsellers in the UK against which titles were (easily) available as ebooks. (Bearing in mind that neither Waterstones, Amazon, or Borders have a meaningful eBook inventory in the UK, and in the absence (cough) of a centralised eBook retailer, I turned to the respective publishers sites for this. Here are the results.

Top 10 Hardback Fiction

1 : The Front by Patricia Cornwell

Little, Brown site: No. (Search for “The Front in EBooks“. A search for “ebook” gets some results, but fails to pick up the “ebooks genre“. However they do have other Cornwell titles as ebooks, looking into it, so some points there.)

2 : This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
Penguin site: No. (Search for “This Charming Man ebook“) Whilst I was there, a Penguin search for “ebook” returns five books in different formats. And the ebook “Microsite” is broken in my browser/s).

3 : The Reapers by John Connolly
Hodder site: No site search at all.

4 : Flesh House by Stuart MacBride
HarperCollins site: No (Can’t link to HC search results, but a search for “ebook” only gives one result anyway)

5 : Revelation by CJ Sansom
Pan Macmillan Site: Yes!!! Sorry, No. (Search for “Revelation ebook” and indeed, just “ebook“) (I don’t think those links work to give you the results either).

6 : Hold Tight by Harlan Coben
Orion site: No. (Search for “Hold Tight eBook” throws an error and then gives this result)

7 Scream for Me by Karen Rose
Headline site: No (Site is a holding page)

8 : Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult
Hodder, again, so that’s a no.

9 : Nothing to Lose by Lee Child
Bantam Site: No. (Search for “ebook” also returned no results)

10 : The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir
Random House site: No (Search for “Lady Elizabeth eBook”; “ebook” just gives results like casebook, guidebook, notebook etc)

So, 0/10 on the Times bestsellers being available as ebooks in the UK. Because it’s been a newsy week, I also thought I’d try the fastest selling hardback novel in history – “Devil May Care ebook” on the Penguin site – nothing; and (Winner of the Orange Prize) Rose Tremain The Road Home ebook at Chatto: Nothing.

However, a search for all of the above on the (US) MobiPocket site shows that consumers can actually get 60% of these titles as ebooks by buying from a US etailer. Clearly the UK publishers are missing out on those sales. eBooks currently make a mockery of territoriality. If the US can create, market, and sustain an eBook store, why can’t the UK market?

What to take away from this: well, nothing that surprising. Maybe Apple will, despite Steve Jobs’ denials – themselves usually a great bit of doublespeak – , launch a brilliant ebook reader in the next iPhone, andsoup up iTunes, having successfully cleared rights, royalties, formats and DRM with the publishing industry without any leaks getting out. (And if he does do this, the industry is damned because they fail to get the spoils; if he doesn’t they’re damned because the spoils aren’t worth having).

Maybe Apple won’t develop it, but we’ll see some great third-party iPhone apps. (This will still keep the activity a marginal – both in terms of popularity and legality – exercise.)

Or maybe, both Apple and the publishing industry (like Microsoft) will hand the work to Google, who in their forthcoming, open-source Android mobile phone platform could not only include ebook software, but also integrate Google Books into the devices. In other words, Google could become the go-to store for ebooks rather than Apple, Amazon, Sony or anyone else.