(Live blogging is hard work where your fingers have to work faster than your brain; please forgive typos, incomplete phrases and commentary, bad capitalization etc. The idea is to document the presentation to some level of detail on the fly.)
One of the things that we try hard to do at O’Reilly is to identify what’s already happening not just at the horizon.
Quote from William Gibson: “The Future is here — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
(bits about canary in the coalmine as warning signal)
Much of what I talk about today is based on our experience as a publishing company. It’s easy to chalk up our experience at O’Reilly …
Computer book market for past 4 years is dropping. Dropped 20% after the dotcom crash earlier in the decade and never recovered – data of printed books sold at retail.
As of late last year, we’re selling more digital books than print books on our website. Our print market share hasn’t dropped. Many of these sales are overseas customers who don’t have direct access to the print copies. And this is not just us. (Showing graph of entire computer book market .)
Despite stagnant market in print books, substantial growth in ebooks. Why has every speaker been up here today has been talking about ebooks?
We give customers 3 different DRM-free formats. (st: did I get that right?) One is e-pub, pdf, and mobi-pocket. Customers with Kindle can download/upload(?) mobi-pocket format.
Not selling through Kindle, until recently it didn’t support tables or computer code. PDF is most popular. ePub is catching up quickly.
Doctorow’s Law: “If someone takes something that belongs to you, and puts a lock on it that you don’t have a key for, that lock isn’t in your best interests.”
Publisher should have a choice to use DRM or not. We learned the value of open standards. Users can add their ePub books to an online library: bookworm.oreilly.com
It’s not enough just not to tell people, it’s important to experiment.
Here’s bookworm on iPhone. it looks al lot like a webpage, and that’s an important thing to remember: ebooks are a hyperlink away from the web.
People may be reading fewer print books, but they are reading+writing more text than before.
The web in particular + digital distribution in general ….
(st: missed a couple of points here, I’m tired!)
What does the long tail mean for the publisher? Our books online never go out of stock. Books shown as zero demand are still being consumed in digital format because they are on the infinite digital library.
Finding ways to make all your content available Safari books: 23% long tail, 77% short head.
web = free?! If our books are connected to the web, does everyone expect them to be free?
Do people really pay?
- Internet access fees: $25.8 billion
- Music: $2.3 billion
- Games: $1.8 billions
- (etc)
Quote – Scott Adams ” Free is more complicated than you think”. (example of attributing value to free)
Radiohead + NIN examples. NIN example: While free is always available, the $300 version is sold out by the next day. The content is free, but people would pay $300 for it.
People don’t always just pay for the content itself. They pay for packaging and convenience. There are people who subscribe to news+blogs on the Kindle and pay for it.
One of our books available for free: realworldhaskell.org/read This is an obscure book, but is in our bestsellers since it came out, even if it’s available for free at the author’s website.
This book was written online. Notice that after each paragraph, it opens up a comments dialogue. Every single paragraph in the entire book. 7500 comments during book development.
2000 more since publication. Only 10% were anonymous. 21 people left at least 75 comments.
People want to be part of the book production process. When readers are given early access, the books sales double.
If we start to think about the books as connected to the web, let’s think about how the next trillion books will be seen.
[Rise of cellphones]
Global middle class is booming in places that don’t have existing print + retail channel. It’s quite likely that these places will skip building a print+retail infrastructure.
Since iPhone missing manual app released, we have sold more copies of the app than printed book. Ranked 6th computer book year-to-date.
In additional to not harming our print sales, we brought in more print sales through digital.
What happens when people are ready to read books Nokia phone? Blackberries? But you can’t just dump a book on the phone at the same price. This is a different market with different expectation on pricing. We launched the app at promotional price at $4.99. We raised it to $9.99, sales fell by 75%. We went back to $4.99.
A lot of opportunity for experimentation on pricing. If you overprice or underprice an ebook by 20%, it’s not going to break a business. Remember those who don’t have access to retail+print books.
Real numbers are hard to nail, but these apps are being sold [a lot] every day. They are not substitution sales, these are real sales, plus people who buy both. Safari is growing 30% year on year.
What happens when something is released in both print+digital at once? I’m quite certain for most of the books we publish this year, most people will read them in digital than in print.
All publishing is now digital publishing. All writing is writing on the web. These aren’t print books you happen to sell digital, these are digital books you might happen to also sell in print
How many of you include hyperlinks in your books? We are geared to launch 20 more titles. Showing: YouTube video launching from an ebook.
A book behaving like the web it’s part of.
Readers build commentary around what they are reading. TV & Radio: “the first TV shows were basically radio programs on the television – until someone realized that TV was a whole new medium. Ebooks should not just be print books delivered electronically.”
Quote: Alan Kay: The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
In 30 years no one under 55 will remember life without the internet. There’s enormous challenges and extraordinary opportunity.
Q: Do you see any compelling reason for publisher to use DRM?
A: I can’t tell you how to run your business, but I just want to have a choice.
Q: Re Twilight series: it’s difficult to find space in the App store. the more popular your title, the most visibility you have. Working with Apple to see how this could get higher visibility.
A: Changing the price might help the sales.
Q: Price is a huge factor in the app stores. $25 dollars and up is not that attractive.
A: Have you seen an impact on your print sales?
Q: Hard to tell if our print sales have been affected.
