Disqus - Latest Comments for gregor_wolf

Re: Trying to explain publishing, or understand it, often remains a great challenge

gregor_wolf — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 09:20:08 -0000

You made a very valid point: I was a lower financial risk for Amazon than for anybody else.
Upselling to existing clients is easier (and cheaper) than setting up a business from scratch. But it's all history and nobody knows.
Best, Greg

Re: Trying to explain publishing, or understand it, often remains a great challenge

gregor_wolf — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 08:51:07 -0000

Mike, apologies for some misunderstandings, but I hope we can partly meet :

1. We are all on the same page - academic, professional, education and trade are *different*.

2. Surely, trade is not just and only "entertainment". But for the sake of making the difference between trade and academic clear, I find this black and white picture helpful. Academic is "information providing", and this offers many opportunities to academics, because there are so many ways to improve acccess to information by digital tools. Contrary, the major interest of trade book customers is to be entertained by reading. I don't state that this cannot be improved digitally at all, but it's easier to improve the user experience in the academic world.

3. I do not suggest that academic shall be more entertaining. If this came across, my post was simply incomprehensive. Academic shall concentrate on information providing using digital tools - and all academics have already understood this, and offer ebooks, databases, add value by features like search, browse, cross-link, semantic search, Such features are nearly pointless in trade, so trade needs a different approach to digital. To keep it black and white, trade must use digital tools in order to provide more entertainment and ease of use.
I accept that such a black-and-white view invites disagreement, e.g. a cookbook (is that really trade) would benefit from the same technical search & browse features as a professional information book, but the basic message remains true.

4. Let's see if we disagree in what drove ebook adoption...

We both said, one reason was a device where you could load directly without going throung a computer. In my words, "it eliminated the transport-from-shop-to-device issue". I my view, this was the killer feature.

You correctly add, that Amazon used their contacts with publishers to build a reasonable list of titles right from the start. It would not have worked without enough content right from the start.

I do not agree that it became a success, because Amazon was pushing it hard to their large core of dedicated readers, because another company with reasonable financial and technical power could have done this, too. Nobody disagrees that it was easier for Amazon given their customer base and market share, but I truly believe it could have also been Sony, Apple, or a Pearson-Hachette-RH joint venture.
Why do I believe this? Becasue Apple proved it years ago, when they were not in the music business, had no music shop, had little contact to the music industry, BUT believed that iPod plus iTunes would work. Neither iTunes alone nor iPad alone would have worked. Neither Amazons's reader nor Amazon's ebook-store alone would have worked alone. We come back to the point on which we fully agree, which is the seamless integration of shop and device.
Best, Greg

Re: Trying to explain publishing, or understand it, often remains a great challenge

gregor_wolf — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 06:33:05 -0000

Thomson’s distinction between trade and academic/professional is correct and helpful, but shouldn’t it go without saying? I would go one step further and say that it is a fundamentally different business:

It already starts with very different consumers: Trade is a BtoC-Business (although through resellers). Academic is a BtoB-Business, >90% of the customers are libraries, institutions, consortia (with or without resellers). Professional is a BtoB-business, primarily targeting the customers directly, who can be small and big, but rarely academic libraries.

I would even go so far, that categorizing both under “publishing” is more misleading today than describing the few commonalities correctly. Isn’t it rather the case that academic/professional is “information providing business” and trade is “entertainment providing business”?
With this distinction, we also understand why the digital transformation implies totally different things for academic, professional and trade.

Academic/professional means making content findable, accessible, more usable, curating content, guaranteeing quality. For these guys digital is more a chance than a threat and that’s why Elsevier, T&F or Springer are running well. Digital tools allow them to repurpose their content, re-slice and dice, reuse, create more products, invent additional monetization models, and finally, improve access to their content – this is exactly what people in need of information are finally willing to pay for. Monetizing access to information
is easier in a digital word. Therefore, all the heavily discussed digitally driven monetization models like ebook-packages, print/ebook-bundling, patron driven acquisition or open access are simply void and irrelevant in trade.

If I am right, and trade is an entertainment business, then the transformation to digital means transformation to a technically different way of consuming the entertaining content. Easier
reading, more fun than with the dull device printed book, more fun with features beyond the scope of reading words in lines (now we could come to enriched books, social network features, and everything which could be better in digital books, but like Mike, I hate it when people use the rubric of
q&a to make their case, so full stop here). Digitally driven entertainment has very little in common with digitally driven access to information.
It remains invariant that people buy trade content because (they hope) it’s entertaining. There is only one reason why people buy ebooks: Because it is more exciting, looks better, is more fancy, adds features (add criteria however you like, it will always entertainment criteria), and, ultimately, because it’s cheaper (but that’s not the primary driver in entertainment, or nobody would buy an iPad or iPhone).

So, what will happen to trade ebook sales? Looking at why ebook sales grew in the past years tells us how it will develop. In my humble view, there is little secret in it. Ebooks jumped over what I would call the acceptance threshold - when the readers became competitive to a printed book for the first time. They were a worse reading device than a book before this threshold point in time, although existing. Two (technical) events marked the threshold:

1. Passive digital ink, making digital reading near-to-print, which is fundamentally different to reading on a computer device (clarity, reading, in the sun, battery consumption, …)

2. The ease of the transport from shop to device, perfectly demonstrated by the Kindle-Amazon-integration and the iDevice-iTunes-integration, making the way from purchase to use as convenient as with a printed book (which you can read after purchasing without any technical step at all). This point has always been underestimated, primarily by the techies, although nicely demonstrated by the iPod a decade ago; I truly believe that the success of the iPod had the same reasons: it was fashionable, it made the listening-experience entertaining, and it eliminated the transport-from-shop-to-device issue, which was the most important point. It was not successful because it invented MP3, or because it was a portable player, all this already existed long ago.
Because the commodity of ebook readers is now there, but still far away from a technical peak (we can await much better passive color displays, true digital paper, much faster passive displays, declining cost), and has just reached the tipping point where ebooks are just competitive to printed books, there is no reason why this trend should stop. I would rather predict that ebook reading devices will technically outperform the reading device print in all (I mean all) aspects within the next 10 years, and will then simply be better (in weight, size,
readability, adaptability, …). If then the majority of trade books is naturally sold digitally, two things will count: Who will make most out of the features ebooks can add compared to print, and who has the best stories to tell. The second point has never changed, whether print or digital.

Re: What’s so hard to understand about Random House’s strategy?

gregor_wolf — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 06:33:08 -0000

Hello Mike, thanks for the post as always.

May I dare to disagree to your skepticism about the success of the iPad?

The existing eBook readers are all based on the Idea that readers would want to read, and nothing else.

In my view, the Kindle has been successful for three simple reasons: 1) It closes the chain from “search – find – download – read”, in the same way as the Ipod/phone did it for music 2) The physical and optical reading experience is not worse than with a printed book 3) It had an enormous market reach and hype right from the start, because it is from Amazon.

Doubts about the iPad’s success as a reader are primarily based on the argument, that it’s optical reading experience is substandard compared to a (Kindle et al) ePaper reader; People would not look at it as an eBook, but as a multimedia device (by the way, if this is the case, why doesn’t it even have a camera?).

I believe that the iPad will be a very (!) successful eBook device, but only (!) for a very new kind of colored, and interactive eBooks, as demonstrated in e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watc.... We may have a conceptual debate whether such interactive content applications are still eBooks – but they will appear, and in many instances they will be the better product compared to the Kindle-alike-read-only-eBooks. I will not go so far that the iPad will take over the eBook market, but I would encourage every publisher to think about the enormous potential of interactive content application based on book content. ePub on an iPad will certainly be boring and substandard compared to other devices.

Re: DRM or not? a debate that won’t be over anytime soon

gregor_wolf — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:34:52 -0000

This is a well article, like always. Thx for this. Just one remark, and this is the bread and butter rule of DRM in my view:

DRM can work, and DRM finds immediate and implicit acceptance by the customers, if it does not jeopardize the ease of use. Even the littlest discomfort in accessing the content caused by DRM immediately annoys the customer.

Itunes has shown how to do this. Itunes has demonstrated what it means to make content access hassle-free. The entire music industry has not achieved this before. Ironically, Itunes has always been cited as the example of a DRM free and still well working business model.

However, ITunes is NOT DRM free. Indeed, ITunes makes extensive use of DRM, but if they apply DRM, then it is easy, it is embedded, it is invisible, and it is NOT ANNOYING (at least, let’s say, better than the rest).

Publishers may repeat the mistakes of the music industry and the video industry: Add inflexible DRM, and you will only attract people who hack the DRM. Folks, one of my favorite CDs, Norah Jones, has a copy protection. I cannot copy it to my own MP3 player, and cannot listen to it, when I travel. One of my favorite DVDs, the last Pink Floyd concert, has a copy protection. I cannot copy the soundtrack to a CD and cannot hear it in my car (of course, my car does not play DVDs). What is this, please? (and imagine for a second, how I will solve this).

My opinion is: Make use of reasonable, hassle-free mechanisms to protect your content, and the customers will accept it. If you can’t keep it hassle-free, don’t do it. Customers are a sensible species.
Best, Gregor

Re: An ebook experiment stirs up conversation

gregor_wolf — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 05:35:48 -0000

In all the discussions about the "right price" for a eBook, I miss a rationale: The publishing industry discusses this, as if they could set "the right price". This is simply wrong. The price of a product, whatever it is, is NOT manufacturing costs + sales costs + profit margin. It is, what the customer is WILLING TO PAY.

The current price for an eBook is the high one-off cost for the device, plus the per-content price of the eBook. I replied in another post (http://www.idealog.com/blog... that I do not believe that the model "high reader price plus per-eBook price" will eventually survive, since it simply creates a market barrier. I am personally reluctant to buy a reader for 300 $, even if the eBooks are for 9 $. I need to read 100 eBooks, before I reach an ROI compared to a softcover. The reader will be oldfashioned before I ever reach this.

I appreciate, there are many reasonable people out there, who have a different view on what their ROI is - as explained by kwn2196 in reply to your blog. But I think that the majority sees it like me, which means that there is business on street and waits to be picked up.

a) There is enough margin for low(er) OVERALL eBook prices (as explained by you on several occasions).
b) Per-eBook revenue can be used to subsidize the reader prices.
c) This will lead to dramatically more eBook sales, and this will finally result in enough profit margin, although prices will be lower.

The question is, who dares starting.

Re: A context in which to evaluate ebook strategies

gregor_wolf — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 04:57:39 -0000

Congratulations. In my view this is an analysis of a situation, which I have not seen in this intensity and clarity so far.

While I perfectly agree to the general analyis, I see a difference in one specific aspect: The transition phase will not be reached by a steady growth.

I do expect a situation, which we had in the early days of the mobile phone industry: We faced a jump to what you call the transition phase, when the providers started subsidizing (funding) the devices. This dramatically removed the entry barrier for the consumers, suddenly everybody purchased a mobile, and in turn, this dramatically reduced the manufacturing costs for the devices.

I expect the same to happen in the eBook world (or may I say, it HAS to happen). Without a significantly lower price for the readers, the transition phase will not be reached. The current price of the readers is dictated by the ridiculously high manufacturing cost of the display (approx. 200$ per reader today). This price can go down by 50 to 95%, if readers become a mass product. With such a low price, the market will suddenly explode and we will jump into the transition phase and very soon after into the new marketplace phase. I do expect mobile phone alike business models like "Reader for 1 $ plus a subscription on 10 eBooks in 2 years". I think, the shift to eBooks will happen in the same way as it happened with the mobile phones.

Re: Digital challenges from the photographer’s perspective

gregor_wolf — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 04:26:49 -0000

Mike, maybe we sometimes talked about it: In my "other life", I scuba dive and I shoot underwater videos. I have never tried to make this a business, but I am surely well connected with professional photographers and video makers, and many of your thoughts sound very familiar to me. In my view, there are many commonalities between the publishing industry and the situation of photographers. No surprise, it’s all about content and digitization.

Stolen content: When I talk to photographers, many begin to experience what it really means, if content can be copied digitally. Photographers, welcome to the experiences of the music industry! In the good old days, an analog photo could hardly be copied, you needed a negative in the beginning, every copy made it worse, and there was little interest, since the more or less only reason to reuse a photo was print. Since print was (and still is) the domain of professionals, not many reasons to leave the photographers unpaid. In a digital Soho world, this changes. Today, kids build websites. Kids produce u-tube videos. Kids need content for their projects. They don’t pay. And since the photo is now digital, they just paste it into their website. If it would only be non-profit projects, it would not be a big problem, since no real money gets lost. But since badly paid semiprofessional webdesigners do the same, it is becoming a problem for the photographers. Now, the good news is that watermarking on a photo is easy, visible (which is a big advantage compared to music!), and it is not easy to bypass it.

Agencies go Internet: This is the good side. Today, a good photographer can be visible. You need a really amazing picture of a Marlin? Go to www.seapics.com. Find a photo of a Marlin hunted by Sea Lions. I would say that only a handful of people ever saw this in the water, but the picture is there. How did a magazine find this 20 years ago? This drives business for photographers and it opens endless opportunities for talented people, even if you are yet unknown.

Massive availability of content: The bad side of the digital availability and the digital catalogs is that extraordinary people like Michael Yamashita begin to disappear in the mass. It is getting more difficult to stay visible. There is so much bad and so much good photo content out there. A good name is still a good name, but no longer the only way to get an extraordinary photo. When I look at dive magazines (which is a very vertical niche market!), I still see that most photos are still from the same few known photographers. But I see also scaring trends: Photo competitions for semiprofessional amateurs, in which you are forced to give your rights away if you want to participate. One dive magazine recently asked amateurs to send articles and photos from their vacations. They offer 100 €, if they print it. These are examples of price destroying trends. And more, at the end this may destroy professional journalism at all.

New business models and direct sales: This is the chance for photographers, and it is my true believe that photographers have not even considered new business ideas. It is time for photographers to become innovative. Your business model is not restricted. Why is selling to magazines the only business model? Why is being asked for a photo the only sales channel? Join digital agencies. Be part of seapics or gettyimages. Be part of communities. If you are Michael Yamashita, you may consider your own side, but even Michael may sell better on the aggregator’s sites. Have you considered creative commons? Be Flickr. Be freephotobank .There is a good chance that a decent webdesigner buys your photo! Buy vs. Steel has a lot to do with convenience. Try to make your content available. Make downloads easy. Make payment easy. Make pricing reasonable: Accept lower prices, but sell more. Why only selling photos? Recently, a dive magazine printed a double page photo from my friend Andi Voeltz, a recognized underwater photographer. Andi wrote an article on digital post editing, which was printed with the photo. They combined it with a free high resolution download for non-commercial use, and they offered a high resolution POD poster print for a reasonable price. This is a good example of creative business in a new and digital photo world.

Re: The need for critical mass is why verticalization is a process

gregor_wolf — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:20:11 -0000

Not exactly with reference to this article... but since you blog for a couple of weeks on monetizing models based on content, I wanted to draw your attention to two interesting recent development:

1. Springer is going to extend their “MyCopy” service after a very successful trial period; MyCopy books, a reasonably priced and highly standardized softcopy POD (all books for 24,95$) can (only) be ordered by registered users of libraries who had already bought the related eBook. In my eyes, this is a quite new and interesting business model, and indeed a role model for other publishers, since a) it has a clear, even restricted, and focused client based, b) the idea is to sell an additional print to initial digital buyers! In my eyes, MyCopy proofs that very vertical target groups for products do work, and that the eBook does not necessarily cannibalizes Print!

2. Very contrary to that, the “netzeitung” http://www.netzeitung.de/me... wrote today that a Netherland governmental study group suggested a yearly tax of 2€ to be paid by every Internet user, which should be used to support Dutch newspaper. This was meant to be a model fighting the “gratis culture” of the web… Sounds a little helpless, I’m afraid, no further comments...