Digital Conferences 2007
From The Big Picture Wiki
Yes, more acronyms – IDPF is the International Digital Publishers Forum; MIP is “Making Information Pay”, the annual conference held by the Book Industry Study Group.
Those who attended both noted the similarities in the concerns addressed by the speakers. Essentially, the importance of data standards – especially when it comes to interoperability of files with different types of hardware – was a much-emphasized topic. But what really struck some of us was how so many attendees were muttering the words “tipping point”.
(The joke at MIP was that the speakers were getting a kickback from BISG every time they uttered the word “ONIX” – I frankly began wondering if Malcom Gladwell was getting a similar kickback.)
The ebook has not exactly caught on like wildfire, but the general consensus is, it’s more on its way than not. I think the attention to the Sony Reader and the Amazon Kindle (or whatever they’re calling it this week) is a little misplaced; I don’t see the pleasure-reader reaching for ebooks anytime soon.
(And sensibly, the old argument about whether ebooks will replace print books is dwindling – thank heavens.)
If we look to the academic market, however, we’ll see that they have been through this before…with journals. In the 1980s, journals were incredibly costly to produce, and almost prohibitively costly to subscribe to.
The journal world was going through a real crisis – one that was ultimately solved by digital distribution. Now, over 90% of academic journals are published electronically, and print subscriptions have plummeted.
College textbooks are going through a similar upheaval. They are exorbitantly expensive to produce, and likewise to purchase. More and more textbooks are being released digitally – and college students are increasingly in front of laptop screens anyway, doing research (in those digital journals), chatting online, downloading music; it makes financial sense to migrate textbooks to a digital model, and it makes sense to the users to read their textbooks that way.
And of course once those college students get out into “the real world”, and are working and playing all day on laptops, reading books that way will become commonplace to them. I don’t know that an actual ebook reader is going to make a lot of sense to them – and if laptops keep getting smaller and smaller, the reader/computer dichotomy will begin to blur anyway.
We can also look to the music market, to the iPod, for more context. Yes, a delightful portable gadget like an iPod is a wonderful thing – but the real revolution is not the hardware. The real revolution happened a lot earlier…with Napster. With Kazaa. With the idea of downloadable music. The creators of ebook readers are looking at the iPod as though it is the product of interest to the consumer, but they are missing the point. The product of interest to the consumer is the music – and the iPod fits how they want to listen to their music. It allows them to do what they were doing anyway, but less clumsily – making mix tapes/CDs (now in the form of playlists), listen to music in their car or on the subway (without juggling things to change the CD), while working out (no skipping) – the iPod only highlights the convenience of downloadable music. It certainly did not invent it.
All of which is to say, much like a baby in the womb, the ebook will appear when it’s ready – not before and not after. Trying to bring something into existence before the market is ready for it is just throwing money away, as the folks at what used to be RocketBook can tell you. Or is that Glassbook? Softbook? Ebookman? iPublish?
What’s more important than anything else at this stage is attention to standards. However ebooks are published, they are going to wind up on many different sorts of devices. They are going to have to operate on multiple platforms. They are going to have to have certain basic functionality – bookmarking, highlighting, excerpting, etc. They are going to have to be distributed, marketed – all the things we do with print books now. If companies want to make sure they are making wise investments, invest on the back-end – in adherence to XML standards that will permit necessary features and functionality, in distribution systems that track downloads (and hence royalties and rights). The road to ebook nirvana is littered with the corpses of companies who invested in the bells and whistles – the companies who will actually get there are the ones who are smart about putting their dollars into the un-sexy stuff.
See also Digital Standards
