(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.)
I’d like to talk to you about what we’re doing at Shortcovers. I’ve been at Indigo for 3 years. One of the exciting things about Indigo, we’re actually in pretty strong shape, our business is growing. We invest in kiosks, and our Indigo community, and also now Shortcovers.
When i first joined, this is the kind of discussion we had: one view of the future: impact of reading digitally. 10-20 percent of decline can mean serious impact to the business. We are really focused about when it’s going to happen, when would we see decline, when would ebooks (consumption) be greater than 1%.
Here is a photo of a woman reading a book on an iPhone in a park — archetype of the reader of the future. what’s important to them about where they can read, accessing content immediately. We focus on what’s the consumer doing instead of focusing when ebooks will be more popular.
People are reading differently – nothing related to ebooks. There’s user behaviour that’s already there and changed. People have been reading ebooks for a long time; there is a graveyard of devices. You want to use a device you already own.
People want to be social, they want to engage with the content whether with the author, content or other readers. Not too different from the behaviour of people in a bookstore on Saturday morning. We found people want that as well – they want social experience, they want book samples — things they can already do in a book store.
We are passionate about physical books, we view reading digitally as a convenience. Provide convenience to read anywhere — at a cafe, in a park — is something where we think is important.
We look at the changes in the music industry. Track sales accelerated. User behaviour changed: an important thing we pay attention to.
Inflation adjusted newspaper revenues: are at 1982 levels. definitely change going on here. New tech, devices, screen technology.
Our goal is to be able to deliver a compelling experience. Enter shortcovers – a new digital destination for people to discover their next great read on any mobile device. Use the web, or existing iphone, blackberry, android, etc. any device, any time and any place.
Sample: purchase & read content in seconds. Share your favorite reads with friends, family or create your own Shortcover through social network channels: Twitter, Facebok, etc. Instant acess to content; You should get content by chapter, or serially, buy physical book. Newpapers: by subscription, buy article.
Launch highlights: in 2 weeks, 124 countries visited. strong demand for all mobile applications. Our publisher offering: a solution that maximizes reach.
Our new publisher program should give you all the information you need to learn about Shortcovers, and if you’re interested, provide us with content, sales or distribution. Our intent is to support whatever content types you have, and get them to the consumer. We think that there’s a real exciting/growing market opportunity, but it’s still really early.
We saw what’s happened in music in the last 7 years. This is on the back of 25 years of Sony Walkmen. There’s behaviour and digital media there, that didn’t have to radically change to get to where we are today. The content has already been on digital media. it’s gone from one format to another.
Early days; there are new devices coming out. It’s going to be hard to compete if you think it’s only *your* device. There are real issues to work out: quality of data, support for metadata standards, supporting epub/formats, pricing.
Customers don’t see the sense to pay the price of a hardcover for an ebook. Exciting times – we see a lot of work ahead of us. We’re listening to you and your feedback.
Lastly – we love to talk to you about Shortcovers and get your content up and available for the world.
(st: couldn’t get the questions, wasn’t able to hear properly from where I was sitting.)
