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Great digital expectations

September 11, 2011 - 23:41 — kuldeep



We are in the midst of the similar revolution in the book industry as it's faced by the music and newspaper industry. It has some to have little late for publishing industry than other industries, nevertheless with the same daunting challenges. But, unlike music and newspaper publishers, book publishers don't think they will be met with the same fate as others. Amazon now sells more e-books than the paper-back books. The profit margins with e-books are much higher than they are able to take from hard copies. One of the biggest and interesting problems, as cited by the article and faced by the book industry was the distribution,

"Peter Osnos, the founder of PublicAffairs Books, says the biggest challenge small publishers face is managing their inventories. Print too many books, and lots of them will be returned by stores. Print too few and publishers will forgo sales while they order reprints (at higher prices). None of these problems exists when distributing books digitally."

Due to Digitization and especially Webification through services like Amazon and iBooks it has made it easier for publishers to distribute their books and also it has made it easier for the online retailers to organize all these books under one portal. One more interesting repercussion of the digitization found by the industry is people are buying more Romance novels, as it's difficult to tell from the distance what a person is reading from e-books.

But, the digitization has also brought many more difficulties for publishing industry. One of the biggest is piracy. It has become easier than ever for users to share and copy the books without paying for it, keeping publishers outside the loop in the transaction. Due to the lack of window shopping in Webification, it has also become harder for publisher's to promote their books. To overcome these challenges is a daunting task and book industries survival is dependent on these challenges.

My Take on Publishing revolution:

Publishing business is going through a lot of changes, but it seem to have taken a long time for it, compared to the music and newspaper industry. Mostly, due to they seem to be holding longer than others on their content. Not long time ago we had to go to the store to buy the CDs of the music you love. Now, we just have search it on YouTube, Grooveshark, or many other such places. Same can be said about the news, now we don't have to wait for next day to find-out about the breaking news. Digitization and Web-ification of these industries has transformed our whole experience. Especially, before the Webification, the phrase "Medium is the message" ringed very true. Can you tell why Music Artists always release their albums with around 8 tracks, or why release albums at all? why not release tracks as they are made? Similarly, why don't newspapers distribute fliers as and when the news is broken? Sounds insane to do that, isn't it? Largely, due to the constraints put on by their respective mediums they had to choose for particularly strategy. In case of the music industry, it was easier for them to distribute the bunch of tracks and for the newspaper publisher's it was easier for them to publish whole array of news once a day. But, after the web revolution their strategy or business has been shattered at the core. We are seeing more and more sell of single music tracks. Even music artist's have started to release more singles or smaller bunch of tracks at one go, as they are made. We have also started to see more decentralization of daily news by consuming news from different sources depending the authors, type of the news, or the preferences.

All these years medium of distribution of the respective industry has influenced content so much that we still see traces of it. Books are distributed in the same chunks, they are just basically called e-books now. But, I believe they'll be met with the same fate as the music and newspaper industry. We don't have to sit and consume books in same the chunks as we used to or in the same flow as it's set by the author. An author doesn't necessarily have to wait for whole book to finish to share his/her ideas. They can just start sharing with the world as and when they come. We have already started seeing results of it through blogs. Even as a reader we can also explore any particular subject of interest from different sources easily at any length, or in case of the technical knowledge, it can be read in much interactive flow with the online tutorials and references. Even, in case of novels we have started seeing shrinkage of the length of the content and much more immersive and narrative representations in different formats. I believe due to the Digitization and Webification we'll see more decentralization of the ideas contained in the books as they can now break out of the constraints put on by the books.