Teens and ebooks

Recently I’ve been part of a couple of discussions about reading habits, and some interesting themes have begun to emerge. One, of course, is that ebooks are still a small fraction of books read by consumers (3.5%, according to Bowker’s PubTrack Consumer reports). And the fact that the primary audience for the Kindle and other readers seems to skew towards older generations (most likely because font size can be adjusted) leads many to conclude that teenagers and college-age kids are not adopting ebooks very quickly.

Which really runs counter to common sense, given how much time young people spend online. (I have a 16-year-old and an 11-year-old, both of whom have their MacBooks open whenever they’re in the house.) 

Does this mean they have a weird retro fondness for paper books? Does it mean they’re not reading at all? What DOES it mean?

We know that they are not reading print newspapers. They’re getting the bulk of their news online – whether from newspaper sites, aggregation sites like Google News, or other online sources. We know they are not reading print magazines – again, they’re getting that content online, largely from bloggers, who are supplanting magazines at a rapid rate. We know that when they do research for school papers, they are doing it online unless teachers or school librarians steer them to the stacks to find material that’s not on the web.

Additionally, more students are using digital textbooks – PDFs or VitalSource or CourseSmart books (or in some cases, open-source textbooks) that integrate with their course management systems and include interactive features such as quizzes, labs, downloadable audio and video. The print textbook is gradually (very gradually but inexorably) being replaced by its digital counterpart.

So let’s look at reading for pleasure. Truthfully, kids spend much of their leisure time online – IMing friends, Facebooking, downloading music and movies, playing games. The time they spend reading for fun has been shrinking for quite some time.

But there are certain authors whose books transcend online temptations – J. K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, Jodi Picoult, to name a few.

Rowling’s an interesting case – she will not permit ebook versions of the Harry Potter series. So ebooks simply aren’t an option with her titles. As for the others, they are also bestselling authors, but their print books are heavily discounted in chain stores – a Stephanie Meyer hardcover can sell for as little as $12.95 when all’s said and done. So price – a huge issue with more mature readers, who pursue the ebook option in large part because of the $9.99 price point – isn’t really much of a concern for younger readers.

Then there’s the device itself. Teenagers and college students are not, unless they are required to, going to spend upwards of $250 on a dedicated reading device. Their parents are not going to buy them one (in this economy, anyway). They’ll play with reading on their iPhones and iPod Touches – and I suspect that’s where the younger ebook market will grow. 

But it’s not there yet. Anecdotally, I can report that my teen continues to read her print books and swap them with friends (along with clothes, shoes, and everything else). Occasionally she’ll use her iPod Touch to access my Kindle account and "borrow" a book. But this is still a novelty for her.

BISG’s Annual Meeting

BISG has announced the date of their annual meeting: September 9th, 2009. As in previous years, it will be at the Yale Club, and admission for members is free.

You can consult the spiffy new BISG website for more details!

ONIX 3.0 Webinars

BISG is sponsoring two ONIX for Books 3.0 webinars. ONIX 3.0 is particularly concerned with digital products – downloadable audio, ebooks, video, etc. It is also NOT backwards-compatible with previous versions of ONIX. So it’s important to understand 3.0 as your company moves forward.

Each webinar is 60 minutes. Registration info is below:

ONIX for Books 3.0: An Introduction
Presented by:
Mark Bide, Executive Director, EDItEUR
David Martin, ONIX Support Team, EDItEUR
Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Time: 11:00 a.m. EDT

 
ONIX for Books 3.0: Best Practices for Implementation
Presented by: Richard Stark, Director of Product Data, Barnes & Noble, Inc.
Date: Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Time: 11:00 a.m. EDT
 
To obtain general information on ONIX for Books 3.0 and previous ONIX releases, visit here.

Shortcovers is doing ePub Conversions

Michael Tamblyn at Shortcovers announced today that in addition to distributing ebooks using the .ePUB standard, they would be providing .ePUB conversion services!

…[W]e were also hearing from a lot of publishers who want to sell eBooks but don’t have the resources to create .epub files themselves. Independent presses, regional publishers, literary presses — publishers who are producing fantastic books but don’t have the wherewithal or the time to produce the accompanying digital files themselves. We also heard from medium and larger publishers who are grappling with the task of converting backlist that they think would be a good fit for the eBook space, but are shocked by the fees charged by conversion houses to convert their source files to digital.

This is great news for indies who are looking for a level playing field.

Books Rights Registry: There Should Be Standards

One issue that frightens the hell out of me is digital rights. I’m not just talking about DRM. Basically, I mean what happens when – a few years from now – digital formats proliferate and there are more than just a couple of booksellers in the ebook market. What happens when – a few years from that point – those many digital booksellers are also selling PORTIONS of books? Then you have format AND content proliferation across multiple vendors from multiple publishers, with the inevitable intermediation of distributors.

It makes ONIX look like a game of "play house".

At the heart of all this winging and wending and downloading are rights. Rights for the author. Rights for the publisher. Rights for the vendor. Rights attached to format. Rights attached to territory. Rights attached to portions of the whole. And someone – presumably the Books Rights Registry (should the Google settlement actually get settled) will be in charge of keeping track of all that information.

Standards, obviously, are the key here. And there are no standards when it comes to rights. "Worldwide rights, except for Tanzania" is an exaggeration, but not by much. Rights have been negotiated book by book, format by format, over decades.

Some of us in BISG are starting to get concerned about this and are researching what’s currently out there to help us come up with standards that will be useful in this new chaotic world. The obvious question is, of course, "What about ACAP?" And we’re thinking…not so much.

David Marlin of Metacomet has a great investigation as to why ACAP isn’t going to help a great deal. An excerpt:

ACAP has been designed to identify how third party “crawlers” can use content on a website.  Therefore, it has an entirely different set of use-cases than is required by a BRR standard.  For the BRR, we need to identify content which may or may not be published on a public website.  Because it will often not be so published, a standard for crawling web sites is not appropriate. 

That leaves open the question of whether we can use the same methodology for identifying usage rights.  Again, ACAP is not designed for this purpose.  It has a much coarser descriptor of rights than is required.  For example, it defines that translation is allowed, but it does not indicate in which markets or which translations.  It also does not appear to address non-textual usage (i.e. a dramatic reading of content to be broadcast online).

So now we’re going to look at whether ONIX for Licensing Terms can form a good basis for rights standardization. Stay tuned!

Smashwords at IBPA

Mark Coker will be giving a class on developing an ebook strategy at IBPA’s Publishing University Online, on July 29th. According to the description, Coker will be covering:

1. Why ebooks are hot
2. Latest market sales data
3. Will ebooks cannibalize or complement print books?
4. How ebooks fit within overall publishing strategy
5. What books work best as ebooks
6. How Ebook formatting is different
7. Why multi-format is important
8. Evolving distribution models: The new ebook supply chain
9. How Amazon is vertically integrating its ebook business: friend or foe to the independent publisher?
10. To DRM or not DRM?
11. Ebook pricing models

For IBPA members (and any other small/midsized publisher), this kind of information is crucial!

Where the Readers Are

This is the Download column from this week’s The Big Picture.

I’ve been working with Bowker’s PubTrack Consumer team in developing some industry reports on a variety of book-related issues. And just for the hell of it, I was playing around with some statistics for 2008.

Here’s a breakout of people who read, and the number of hours per week they spend reading books:

So you can see that not a lot of people read more than 20 hours a week. Just 11% of those surveyed.

Now here’s a breakout of time spent online:

 
You can see that 30% of those surveyed spend more than 20 hours per week online.

Now we can’t correlate which readers are spending more time online, but overall it’s clear that people are, in general, spending more time online than they are reading.

What does this mean for publishers?

Well, aside from the obligatory shirt-rending and bemoaning poor reading habits, it means that publishers should invest more time and resources (that means money) in marketing their titles online. Because online is where people are.

Yes, if you want to get people’s attention about something, it does help to go where they are already congregated.

We know that the world of print media is collapsing. Newspapers are failing all over the place. Book review sections are shutting down. All the outlets where publishers used to advertise are suffering.

Except online. In fact, 34% of all books purchased in 2008 were bought online.

And, even more crucially, 12% of book consumers became aware of the books they wanted to buy either through an Internet ad or an online book review – as many consumers as became aware of books through word of mouth (which we all know is the most powerful form of marketing there is).
So what does online marketing really mean for books? It means throwing as much of your books’ information as you can into the online world so people can find them.

It means having clean metadata – so search engines can find the books.

It means having BISAC codes and Library of Congress codes, so the books are categorized properly. If someone is looking for Thai recipes, and you’re a cookbook publisher, you want your books to show up in that search.

It means having a cover image, an annotation, a review or endorsement, and even an excerpt posted online, for each book, so consumers can understand what your books are about.

It means making sure that your books are listed in every available online outlet that sells books – not just and Barnes & Noble, but Ebay, Alibris, Hastings, IndieBound (which supplies book information to independent bookstore websites). It means having your book information listed on price comparison websites like Nextag. It means having your book information listed on library websites. (The most efficient one-shot way to accomplish all of this is to make sure your Books-in-Print data is up to date, because BIP licenses its data to most of these websites.)

It means making sure your books are listed with social networking sites like Goodreads (2.2 million members), Shelfari (owned by Amazon), and LibraryThing (40 million titles). People really DO congregate to these sites to get ideas on what to read next.

It means finding out who the top bloggers are in your areas of expertise, and sending them review copies. Do you know how many food bloggers there are? How many political bloggers (who would also be interested in history titles, or biographies)? As print review publications collapse, bloggers are stepping into the vacuum.

It means knowing which book review websites are worth having a presence on – Bookslut, Beatrice, Follow the Reader, Smart Bitches Trashy Books, among many others.

It means enrolling your books in book-scanning programs. Yes, that means Google Book Search. It also means the Internet Archive. You need to make your books find-able. That means making them searchable. On the web. Where people are already frantically searching for things.
It means making sure your authors have websites. Even a simple Facebook page is better than nothing at all – and Facebook has 200 million active users. One hundred million unique users log on at least once a day.

Notice that I have not mentioned ebooks. Digital marketing is not (necessarily) about ebooks. Ebooks are a format, like paperback or hardcover – and while people may prefer one format over another, they’re not going to have the option of any format if they don’t know that your books exist. Digital marketing is about getting information about your books in as many places as humanly possible – so that the ever-growing number of people who are online can find out about them.
 

Amazon to put ads in Kindle books?

Amazon apparently filed for a patent on contextual advertising in ebooks, according to Slashdot. Meaning that while you’re reading Eat, Pray, Love on your Kindle, you may be directed to local restaurants via ads in the margins.

This is, of course, similar to what Google is doing on its website already, and will be doing via Google Book Search. On Google, it’s not terribly intrusive – but we are not yet accustomed to ads in books.

That said, there hasn’t been an enormous hue and cry…yet.