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Table of Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Innovation 3

How Agile Methodologies Can Help Publishers 3

What is an agile methodology? 3

How do agile methodologies apply to publishing? 4

Taking a Page Out of ESPN’s Playbook 5

Pay for one, access all 5

Building talent franchises 6

Memorable quotes 6

Perceptive Media: Undoing the Limitations of Traditional Media 7

How does Perceptive Media work, and are there privacy concerns? 7

What driving factors are pointing to the success of this kind of storytelling platform? 8

In the early days, Perceptive Media is being applied to broadcast technology What potential applications for Perceptive Media do you envision in the publishing industry? 8

Kindle Fire vs iPad: “Good Enough” Will Not Disrupt 9

How disruptive is the Kindle Fire to the low-end tablet market? 9

Is Amazon a threat to Apple? 9

What role do you see Apple playing in the future of publishing — and what current trends do you identify as driving factors? 10

Don’t Build Social — Thoughts on Reinventing the Wheel 10

Services, APIs, and the Complex Web 11

v

Publishing focus and third-party opportunity 12

Startups and Publishers: It Ain’t Easy 13

If you sell a product publishers don’t want, who is to “blame”? 13

Solutions to solve future problems 13

Where to next? 14

The risk of ceding the future to other players 14

In the end, readers will drive the change 15

It’s Time for a Publishing Incubator 15

Roadblocks 15

People have been thinking about this for awhile 16

The publishing incubator 17

The Slow Pace of eBook Innovation 19

Putting a Value on Classic Content 20

Reading Experience and Mobile Design 22

Mobile design? 22

Five convergence points for mobile design & reading system design 22

Serial Fiction: Everything Old Is New Again 25

Why should you be interested in serial fiction? 25

Frequency, engagement, and experimentation 26

It still comes down to great writing 27

3 Revenue Models 29

Getting the Content Out There Isn’t Enough Anymore 29

In what contexts does content aggregation create the most value? 29

How about paywalls — is anyone doing this properly? What is the best way to make this model work? 30

24Symbols is based on a subscription model Since your launch, have you had to change the model to make it work? 30

Amazon, eBooks, and Advertising 31

New Life for Used eBooks 33

In-Book Purchases 35

Why a Used eBook Ecosystem Makes Sense 36

4 Rich Content 39

In the Case of Interactivity, We’re Still at the Phase of Irrational Enthusiasm 39

Where do you draw the line between meaningful and

gimmicky interactivity? 39

Are there times when interactivity is detrimental and should be avoided? 40

How have mobile platforms changed the publishing landscape? 41

What kinds of tools do authors need to create interactive content, and what new skills might they need to develop? 41

What are some guidelines authors should follow when considering interactive features for content? 42

How should one decide between building an ebook and building an app? Is there a tipping point? 42

Are eBooks Good Enough Already? 43

5 Data 45

Transforming Data into Narrative Content 45

What does Narrative Science do and how are you applying the technology to journalism? 45

How does data affect the structure of a story? 46

What kinds of stories lend themselves well to this type of system and why? 46

What kinds of stories just won’t work — what are the boundaries or limitations? 46

In what ways can publishers benefit from Narrative Science? 47

In what other industries are you finding applications for Narrative Science? 47

Book Marketing Is Broken Big Data Can Fix It 47

What are some key findings from the Bookseer beta? 48

What kinds of data are most important for publishers to track? 49

What does real-time data let publishers do? 49

How would you describe the relationship between sales and social media? 50

Will Retailers Start Playing Big Brother with Our Content? 50

6 DRM & Lock-in 53

It’s Time for a Unified eBook Format and the End of DRM 53

Platform lock-in 54

The myth of DRM 54

Table of Contents | vii

Lessons from the music industry 55

“Lightweight” DRM Isn’t the Answer 56

Kindle Remorse: Will Consumers Ever Regret eBook Platform Lock-in? 57

Neutralizing Amazon 58

Kindle Serials Is the Next Brick in Amazon’s Walled Garden 59

7 Open 61

Publishing’s “Open” Future 61

Content access via APIs 63

Evolution of DRM 64

Apps, platforms, formats, and HTML5 65

Let’s open this up together 66

Free and the Medium vs the Message 66

Free as in freedom (and beer) 67

Information and delivery 67

Creating Reader Community with Open APIs 68

Reading is more than a solitary activity 68

The new era of data-driven publishing 69

The consequences of walled gardens 70

Buy Once, Sync Anywhere 71

The problem — a fragmented content ecosystem 71

The proposed solution — an API to share a user’s purchase information 72

What would the access permission API look like? 73

Concept basis of a specification 74

A common data transfer medium 75

The future 76

8 Marketing 79

The Core of the Author Platform Is Unchanged — It’s the Tools that Are Rapidly Changing 79

What is an “author platform” and how is it different today from, say, 10 years ago? 79

What are some of the key ways authors can connect with readers? 80

In marketing your book Cooking for Geeks, what were some of the most successful tactics you used? 80

What advice would you offer to new authors just starting out? 81

The Sorry State of eBook Samples, and Four Ways to

Improve Them 82

How Libraries Can Help Publishers with Discovery and Distribution 84

How to De-Risk Book Publishing 85

Selling Ourselves Short on Search and Discovery 88

The 7 Key Features of an Online Community 89

Book Communities 89

The Fundamentals 90

Conclusion 92

9 Direct Sales Channel 93

Direct Sales Uncover Hidden Trends for Publishers 93

Direct Channels and New Tools Bring Freedom and Flexibility 95

Direct Channels 95

Evolving Tools 96

It’s the Brand, Stupid! 97

NY Times eBook Initiative Could Be So Much More 98

10 Legal 99

Fair Use: A Narrow, Subjective, Complicated Safe Haven for Free Speech 99

How is “fair use” defined and what is its legal purpose? 99

Does the breadth of the fair use guidelines cause confusion? 100

What are some best practices people should follow to stay within the guidelines? 100

What are the most common fair use abuses? 101

What kinds of content aren’t protected by copyright or subject to fair use? 101

How would someone know if something is in the public domain or not? 101

What’s your take on Creative Commons licensing? 102

eBook Lending vs Ownership 102

A Screenshot, a Link, and a Heap of Praise Are Met with a Takedown Notice 103

11 Formats 105

Portable Documents for the Open Web (Part 1) 105

Table of Contents | ix

What’s up with HTML5 and EPUB 3? (and, is EPUB even

important in an increasingly cloud-centric world?) 105

The Enduring Need for Portable Documents 106

Portable Documents for the Open Web (Part 2) 109

Portable Documents for the Open Web (Part 3) 112

Graceful eBook Degradation 118

IOS 6, Android, HTML5: Which Publishing Platform Prevails? 119

Responsive eBook Content 120

HTML5, EPUB 3, and eBooks vs Web Apps 125

Your mileage may vary, especially on the Nook 125

Distinguishing apps from ebooks 126

eBooks as Native Apps vs Web Apps 127

Distinguishing ebooks from apps 128

Closing the gap between HTML5 and EPUB 3 support 129

Books as Apps Deserve Serious Consideration 130

12 Pricing 133

Piracy, Pricing, and eBook Hoarding 133

Page Count, Pricing, and Value Propositions 134

The Future Is Bright for eBook Prices and Formats 135

Pricing 135

Formats 136

13 Production 137

The New New Typography 137

Browser as typesetting machine 137

The power of CSS and JavaScript 138

Ease and efficiencies 140

BookJS Turns Your Browser into a Print Typesetting Engine 140 Ebook Problem Areas that Need Standardisation 145

Overrides 145

Annotations 148

Modularised EPUB 148

Staying out of CSS 149

Graceful degradation for Fixed Layout 149

What else? 150

InDesign vs CSS 150

Math Typesetting 151

What’s the hold up? 152

WYSIWYG vs WYSI 154

A Kindle Developer’s 2013 Wishlist 156

1 Add support for embedded audio/video to Kindle Fire 156

2 Add KF8 support for MathML 157

3 Add a Monospace Default Font to Kindle Paperwhite 159

4 Add more granularity to @media query support 160

5 Add a “View Source” option to Kindle Previewer 161

Table of Contents | xi

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

2012 was quite a year for change in the publishing industry Through‐out the year we used the TOC community site to provide insightfulanalysis of the latest industry developments And since ours is a com‐munity site, the articles we publish aren’t just from the TOC team; wealso feature perspectives from many of the top innovators and pub‐lishing experts

It wasn’t easy, but we hand-picked the most noteworthy articles from

2012 for inclusion in this Best of TOC collection We think you’ll agreethat the more than 60 pieces featured here represent some of the mostthought-provoking dialog from the past year We’ve arranged the ar‐ticles by category, so whether you’re most interested in marketing,revenue models, production or innovation in general you’ll find some‐thing to get your creative juices flowing

And since we’re all about fostering community at TOC we hope thiscollection will encourage you to add your voice to the discussion Sinceeach of these articles is taken from our website you can add your com‐ments by searching for the headline on toc.oreilly.com

1

CHAPTER 2

Innovation

How Agile Methodologies Can Help Publishers

By Jenn Webb

CEO Kristen McLean (@ABCKristen) believes many of the same tech‐niques can also be applied to content development and publishingworkflows She explains why in the following interview

What is an agile methodology?

Kristen McLean: An agile methodology is a series of strategies for

managing projects and processes that emphasize quick creative cycles,flat self-organizing working groups, the breaking down of complextasks into smaller achievable goals, and the presumption that you don’talways know what the finished product will be when you begin theprocess

These types of methodologies work particularly well in any situationwhere you are trying to produce a creative product to meet a marketthat is evolving — like a new piece of software when the core conceptneeds proof from the user to evolve — or where there needs to be avery direct and engaged relationship between the producers and users

of a particular product or service

Agile methodologies emerged out of the software development com‐munity in the 1970s, but began to really codify in the 1990s with therise of several types of “lightweight” methods such as SCRUM, Ex‐

3

were all rolled up under the umbrella of agile in 2001, when a group

of developers came together to create the Manifesto for Agile Software

philosophy

Since then, agile has been applied outside of software development tomany different kinds of systems management Most promote devel‐opment, teamwork, collaboration, and process adaptability through‐out the life-cycle of the project At the end of the day, it’s about gettingsomething out there that we can test and learn from

How do agile methodologies apply to publishing?

Kristen McLean: In relation to publishing, we’re really talking about

two things: agile content development and agile workflow

Agile content development is the idea that we may be able to applythese methodologies to creating content in a very different way than

we are traditionally used to This could mean anything from serializedbook content to frequent releases of digital content, like book-relatedwebsites, apps, games and more The discussion of how agile might beapplied to traditional book content is just beginning, and I think there’s

an open-ended question about how it might intersect with the deeplypersonal — and not always quick — process of writing a book

I don’t believe some of our greatest works could have been written in

an agile framework (think Hemingway, Roth, or Franzen), but I alsobelieve agile might lend itself to certain kinds of book content, likeserial fiction (romance, YA, mystery) and some kinds of non-fiction.The real question has to do with what exactly a “book” is and under‐standing the leading edge between knowing your audience and crowd‐sourcing your material

Publishing houses have been inherently hierarchical because they’vebeen organized around a manufacturing process wherein a book’s cre‐ation has been treated as though it’s on an assembly line The publisherand editor have typically been the arbiters of content, and as a whole,publishers have not really cultivated a direct relationship with endusers Publishers make Users buy/read/share, etc

Publishers need to adapt to a radically different way of working Forexample, here’s a few ways agile strategies could help with the adap‐tation of a publishing workflow:

• Create flat, flexible teams of four to five super-talented individualswith a collective skill set — including editorial, marketing, publi‐city, production, digital/design, and business — all working to‐gether from the moment of acquisition (or maybe before) Theseteams would need to be completely fluent in XHTML and wouldwork under the supervision of a managing publisher whose jobwould be to create the proper environment and remove impedi‐ments so the team could do its job.

• An original creative voice and unique point of view will always beimportant in great writing, but those of us who produce books astrade objects (and package the content in them) have to stop as‐suming we know what the market wants and start talking to themarket as frequently as possible

• Use forward-facing data and feedback to project future sales Stopusing past sales as the exclusive way to project future sales Themarket is moving too fast for that, and we all know there is a di‐minishing return for the same old, same old

[This interview was edited and condensed.]

Taking a Page Out of ESPN’s Playbook

By Joe Wikert

If you missed this recent BusinessWeek article about ESPN you owe it

to yourself to go back and read it ESPN is so much more than just asports network and their brilliant strategy offers plenty of lessons forpublishers Here’s just one important indicator of their success: Whilethe average network earns about 20 cents per subscriber each monthESPN is paid $5.13 That’s more than 25 times the average!

Pay for one, access all

Of course ESPN isn’t just one channel It’s a family of channels (e.g.,

ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Classic, etc.) If you’re a subscriber to any one of those channels you’re able to watch all of them online via the

anything on the ESPN network on my tablet, even those channels Idon’t get via cable

Think about that for a moment That would be like buying one ebookbut getting access to the entire series it’s part of That’s unheard of in

Taking a Page Out of ESPN’s Playbook | 5

book publishing It’s also pretty unusual in network broadcasting butESPN is ahead of its time When I stream those channels on Watch‐ESPN they’re commercial-free; a static logo appears during commer‐cial breaks That’s because ESPN hasn’t sold the advertising rights tothe streaming broadcasts … yet They’re willing to stream everythingnow, even without advertising income, to build a nice solid base to lurethose advertisers to the table Smart.

Building talent franchises

The article talks about Bill Simmons and how the network has turnedhim into a superstar So when Simmons had the idea to create Grant‐land he brought the concept to ESPN to see what they thought Ratherthan watching Simmons go off on his own and create something thatmight compete with them they launched Grantland with him usingtheir ESPN Internet Ventures arm

When this scenario plays out in the publishing world it usually endswith the author taking the idea somewhere else, often to a self-publisher It’s clear ESPN is willing to take more risks than the typicalbook publisher, even if it might lead to cannibalization As the sayinggoes though, it’s better to eat your own young than to let someone else

He stresses ESPN’s multi-platform advantage: print, radio, broadcast television, cable television, Internet, mobile applications To date there are no competitors who have assets in all those media.

I don’t think you’ll find a lot of hubris here Or complacency I don’t think there’s any sense of trying to protect what we’ve got We’re going

to try new things.

Meanwhile, most book publishers today seem content with highgrowth rates (off small bases) for what’s nothing more than quick-and-dirty print-to-e conversions There’s certainly not much happening in

Think this advice only applies to the world of television? If so, look athow Rosenfeld Media is reinventing and repositioning itself for the

What’s your opinion? Do we need to think more like ESPN? And canyou name any publishers who are breaking away from the pack andcreating some really innovative, multi-channel products?

Perceptive Media: Undoing the Limitations of Traditional Media

By Jenn Webb

storytelling on the part of audiences Researchers at the BBC are pio‐neering the concept of engagement and content personalization withtheir Perceptive Media experiment The Next Web’s managing editorMartin Bryant took a look at Perceptive Media and its first incarnation

Breaking Out earlier this summer He describes the experiment’s con‐

Essentially, it’s media — either video or audio — that adapts itself based on information it knows about individual viewers So, if you were watching a game show that you’d never seen before, it might show you an explanation of the rules in detail, while regular views are shown bonus, behind-the-scenes footage instead … Other smart ideas behind Perceptive Media include the idea that TV hardware could automatically recognize who was watching and tailor the con‐ tent of TV to them automatically.

I reached out to BBC R&D researcher Ian Forrester to find out moreabout Perceptive Media and the potential for the concept Our inter‐view follows

How does Perceptive Media work, and are there privacy concerns?

to something more aligned to a storyteller and audience around a fire.However, it uses broadcast and Internet technologies in combination

to achieve a seamless narrative experience

of advanced web technologies [to adapt the content], but it’s only one

Perceptive Media: Undoing the Limitations of Traditional Media | 7

of many ways we have identified [Editor’s note: BBC writer Sarah Glenister wrote about her experience working on the Breaking Out audio play experiment here ] The path we took means there are no privacy

or data protection issues Other paths may lean toward learning fromwhat’s being customised (rather then personalised) using a more IP-based solution

The BBC has a rich history in this field, with the likes of BBC Back‐

right now, but in R&D, I’m more interested in implicit data that comesfrom us and everything we do

What driving factors are pointing to the success of this kind of storytelling platform?

Ian Forrester: As an R&D department, its very hard to say for the

broadcasting industry, and we have even less experience in the pub‐lishing industry However, our research on people’s media habits tells

us a lot about people in the lean back and learn forward states We usethat research and what we have seen elsewhere to gauge market ac‐ceptance

At the BBC, we don’t look at advertising, but every other companywe’ve seen interested in this type technology/experience/media isthinking adverts and product placement

In the early days, Perceptive Media is being applied to broadcast technology What potential applications for Perceptive Media do you envision in the publishing industry?

Ian Forrester: We have only scratched the surface and do not know

what else it can be adapted toward In BBC R&D, we watch trends bylooking at early innovators It’s clear as day that ebook reading is takingoff finally, and as it moves into the digital domain, why does the con‐cept of a book have to be static? Skeuomorphism is tragic and feels like

a massive step back But Perceptive Media is undoing the limitations

of broadcast It certainly feels like we can overcome the limitations ofpublishing, too

[This interview was lightly edited and condensed.]

Kindle Fire vs iPad: “Good Enough” Will Not Disrupt

By Jenn Webb

With its recent release of the new Kindle Fire HD tablets, some haveargued that Amazon has declared war on Apple and its iPad But howserious is the threat? Are the two companies even playing the samegame? I reached out to analyst Horace Dediu, founder and author of

How disruptive is the Kindle Fire to the low-end tablet market?

Horace Dediu: The problem I see with the Kindle is that the fuel to

make it an increasingly better product that can become a general pur‐pose computer that is hired to do most of what we hire computers to

do is not there I mean, that profitability to invest in new input meth‐ods, new ways of interacting and new platforms can’t be obtained from

a retailer’s margin

Also, there is a cycle time problem in that the company does not want

to orphan its devices since they should “pay themselves off” as consolesystems do today That means the company is not motivated to moveits users to newer and “better” solutions that constantly improve Theassumption (implicit) in Kindle is that the product is “good enough”

as it is and should be used for many years to come That’s not a way toensure improvements necessary to disrupt the computing world.Lastly, the Amazon brand will have a difficult time reaching six billionconsumers Retail is a notoriously difficult business to expand inter‐nationally Digital retail is not much easier than brick-and-mortar Youcan see how slow expansion of different media has been for iTunes

Is Amazon a threat to Apple?

Horace Dediu: Amazon is asymmetric in many ways to Apple Asym‐

metry can always be a threat because the success of one player is notnecessarily to the pain of another Thus, the “threat” is unfelt, andtherefore it’s less likely that there is a response in kind However, it’simportant to couple the asymmetry with a trajectory of improvement

Kindle Fire vs iPad: “Good Enough” Will Not Disrupt | 9

where the threat goes from unfelt to clear and present That’s whereI’m having a hard time putting Amazon on a path that crosses Apple’sfundamental success I’d say it’s something to watch carefully but notyet something that requires a change in strategy.

I would add one more footnote: Apple TV is a business that matchesKindle perfectly in strategy Apple TV is a “cheap” piece of hardwarethat is designed to encourage content consumption It is somethingApple is doing with very modest success but is not abandoning Apple

is exploring this business model

What role do you see Apple playing in the future of publishing — and what current trends do you identify

as driving factors?

Horace Dediu: I think Apple will put in a greater effort at the K-12

and higher ed levels I think the education market resonates stronglywith them, and they will develop more product strategy there Themain reason is that there are more decision makers and less concen‐tration of channel power

[This interview was lightly edited and condensed.]

Don’t Build Social — Thoughts on

Reinventing the Wheel

By Travis Alber

For the publishing community, social reading has been the hot topic

of the year Since 2008, in fact, social features have spread like wildfire

No publishing conference is complete without a panel discussion onwhat’s possible No bundle of Ignite presentations passes musterwithout a nod to the possibilities created by social features I under‐stand why: in-content discussion is exciting, especially as we approachthe possibility of real-time interaction

Granted, I’m biased Running a social service myself, I think all this

interest is great The web should take advantage of new paradigms! So‐ cial discussion layers are the future! However, there is one important

point that all the myriad new projects are ignoring: unless it’s a corefeature, most companies shouldn’t build social

That’s right Unless social discussion features are the thing you’re sell‐ing, don’t build it from scratch What’s core? Your unique value prop‐osition Are you a bookstore or a social network? A school or a socialnetwork? A writing community or a social network? A content creator

or a social network? The distinction is often lost on a highly-motivatedteam trying to be all things to all users For all these examples, thesocial network is just an aspect of the business It is an important piece

of the experience, but most of the time it’s not worth the incredibleinvestment in time and manpower to build it from scratch

Services, APIs, and the Complex Web

We’ve seen this happen again and again on the web If you’ve ever heard

customer service on the web Ten years ago companies built their ownthreaded bulletin board systems (and managed the resultant torrent

of spam), so that they could “manage the user relationship.” There weresome benefits — you could customize the environment completely, forexample But it took the greater portion of a week to build, and a lot

of work to maintain Today that kind of support can be up and running

in an hour with third party solutions Just ask forward thinking com‐panies like Small Demons and NetGalley, who have embraced theseservices

The same can be said of newsletters For years newsletters were coded (or text-only) and sent from corporate email accounts Unsub‐scribing was difficult Getting email accounts blacklisted (because theylooked like spam) was common Today everyone uses MailChimp,

agency to design and manage a system, they’re likely white-labellingand reselling a service like this to you Companies no longer build anewsletter service Now you just use an API to integrate your news‐letter signup form with a third-party database Design your newsletterusing one of their templates, and let them do all the heavy lifting foremail management, bounces, unsubscribes, and usage stats

There are other examples Who stores video and builds their ownplayer? Instead we upload it to Vimeo, Brightcove or YouTube, cus‐tomize the settings, and let the service tell you who watched it, handlestoring the heavy files, push player upgrades frequently, etc Even web

Don’t Build Social — Thoughts on Reinventing the Wheel | 11

hosting itself has become a service that people sign up for - in manycases setting a project up on AWS (Amazon Web Services, essentiallycloud computing) is faster and easier than acquiring a real hardwareserver and configuring from scratch.

The rise of these third-party solutions are a testament to maturity andcomplexity of our digital world Specialization makes systems morestable and dependable Sure, any time you partner with a service thereare risks But I’ve seen so many publishing projects with social featuresmiss their launch deadline or trash their social features before launchbecause they found they couldn’t get it built, that it’s hard to watchthem spin their wheels over a perceived need for control That’s a mess

of work for something that isn’t the center of your business

Publishing focus and third-party opportunity

This move to third-party social solutions should start happening withall the education, journalism, authoring platforms, writing commun‐ities and publishing projects currently in development Although itsounds simple to just add discussion into content, the devil is in thedetails Obviously the front end — the process of adding a comment

— takes some work, and the estimation for that is fairly straightfor‐ward But what about the paradigm that people use to connect? Arethey following people in a Twitter paradigm, or is it a group-based,reciprocal model, like Facebook? Who can delete comments? Whatcan you manage with your administrator dashboard? Are servers ready

to scale with peak activity? What kind of stats can you get on how youraudience is interacting with your content? Most of these issues don’trelate to the core business

In the end, it comes down to the project definition Is it a bookstore or

a social network? I’m guessing nine times out of ten it’s a bookstorefirst, with additional social features Focus on controlling the contentand making the sale, be unique via curation and selection, and add therest of the social features in using APIs and third party solutions Thentweak the experience based on what those third-party services can tellyou That way you have the freedom to experiment and tweak thesocial options you offer your users, but still focus on your core offering.Everybody wins

Startups and Publishers: It Ain’t Easy

By Hugh McGuire

Any startup company trying to work with book publishers will tell youtales of woe and frustration Big publishers and small publishers (I’veworked with both) pose different sets of problems for startups, but theend result is a disconnect

If you sell a product publishers don’t want, who is to

“blame”?

Start-ups tend to blame “slow-moving legacy publishers” … but blamelies as much on startups misunderstanding of publisher needs as onpublishers being slow This is a classic “customer development” prob‐lem for startups The reason things don’t work is not that “publishersare too dumb to see how they should change, and choose me to helpthem,” but rather that the pains publishers are suffering, and solutionsstartups are offering, are probably not well matched, for a few kinds ofreasons:

a) the pain startups are trying to solve is not acute enough for thepublishers (yet?)

b) the cost (in time or dollars) to adopt startup solutions is too high(for now?)

c) startups are trying to solve the wrong pain (for today?)

-or-d) startups are addressing their products at the wrong customers

Solutions to solve future problems

In my particular case, I’ve recognized that the PressBooks pitch ends

up being something like:

Eventually you’ll need to embrace solutions like PressBooks because solutions like PressBooks will radically transform this market flood‐ ing the publishing market with more books than you ever imagined

…

Startups and Publishers: It Ain’t Easy | 13

That is … we (and others like us) are trying to solve for publishersproblems that we are helping create, and which aren’t quite here yet on

a scale that is visible to the day-to-day operations of a publishing com‐pany (Certainly these big/catastrophic problems are coming, and soon

… but still, it’s a future problem, not a present problem)

Where to next?

So, as a startup, you have to choose what direction to go in:

a) try to solve the pain that traditional publishers have right now,

which is felt acutely enough

-or-b) (in our case) try to expand the market by helping millions of newpublishers exist … thereby helping create the problems traditionalpublishers will have to face in the coming years

I like b) as a direction, but in the end it’s not so surprising that existingpublishers aren’t falling all over themselves to embrace solutions forproblems that aren’t quite here yet

The risk of ceding the future to other players

Still, there is a case to be made that a publisher with a vision of thefuture you should be out-front of the changing market As a fellow-traveller in startup frustration, Andrew Rhomberg at Jellybooks says:

Publishing has been — technically speaking — an amazingly stable industry for a very long time In defense of publishers: it is going through a transition from analogue to digital AND online faster than any other media industry before it But by not partnering, publishers are ceding influence over how this industry will be shaped.

And that’s the problem for both startups and publishers … most pub‐lishing startups are trying to solve problems that will come because ofinnovations in the future; most publishers are worried about solvingthe problems of a radically transforming industry right now

funded by publishers that would invest in new technologies, modelsand thinking It’s an admirable idea, though evidence from some suchinitiatives in publishing hasn’t been promising

In the end, readers will drive the change

Change is coming though, there is no doubt, and we will know it ishere when big numbers of readers start to choose new solutions overexisting solutions (see: ebooks) These solutions will come from a mix

of startups, of old publishers and new publishers, and crucially, fromthe big four tech giants: Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook (and pos‐sibly others)

In the end, it’s readers who will choose the future, which will followtheir eyes, minds and wallets And for all of us — new players and old

— our task now is to present readers with different kinds of futures,and see which ones stick

It’s Time for a Publishing Incubator

By Travis Alber

Last June, over beer (generally a good place to start), I had a greatconversation with entrepreneur Hugh McGuire about how startupsare funded in publishing There was a lot to discuss, a little to celebrate,

a bit to complain about, and one fact that we arrived at beyond every‐thing else It’s a challenge to raise money for publishing ventures.Sure, raising funding is always difficult, but publishing presents a par‐ticular challenge Publishing is “old media,” and it’s new to the tech‐nology game (especially in terms of startups focused on the consumerweb) There isn’t a real precedent of cooperation between technologyand publishing And that makes it a challenge to find money to buildnew things

Roadblocks

Some of the issues come straight out of the investor community:

• Most investors are unfamiliar with publishing Books seem tradi‐

tional I can’t tell you how many investors put their personal feel‐ings into the equation and say things like, “Well, my spouse is in

a book club, but I don’t read much so I’m probably not a good fit.”Ouch Although personal experience figures in somewhat, theirtotal unfamiliarity with the market stops them cold before we’veeven started

It’s Time for a Publishing Incubator | 15

• Concerns about returns on investment It’s true, we haven’t seenthe huge acquisitions like Instagram Or Yammer Yet Publishing

is worth billions - it has what everyone wants: content So maybethe book industry doesn’t seem like a high growth market Onething is certain, though, as the industry goes digital, those pub‐lishing billions are going to be spent on something Clear exits willmaterialize

• There’s always the What-If-Google-Does-It argument To be fair,every startup gets the Google, Amazon, Apple question, whichgoes something like “What will you do if (all together now), Am‐azon, Apple, or Google does it?” A few weeks ago I heard HenrikWerdelin of Prehype give a presentation at a TOC event aboutinnovation and he chuckled about this specific question He poin‐ted out that at this point Google can pretty much build anythinganyone can invent That shouldn’t be your yardstick The betterquestion is, are the founders smart enough to offer good strategy,

a unique experience, or a new market? If so, Google is much morelikely to buy the company once the idea proves out, rather thanbuild every single idea in the world In short, that question is not

a question

True, there are some people who get investment while working onpublishing startups The list above can be overcome if you’ve workedwith those investors before Or if you’re an Ivy-League ex-Googler thathas had a successful exit, you have qualifications that will work in yourfavor But that is a frightfully small portion of the people with boots

on the ground, developing cool ideas What about the technically savvypeople who don’t meet those criteria (most of the people I know in‐novating in publishing today)? If they’re starting up in Amercia, thosepeople go out and crash head-first into the arguments listed above,then spend a few years toiling in bootstrapped obscurity

People have been thinking about this for awhile

Last October Brian O’Leary gave a stirring talk, The Opportunity in

(transcribed here) He put forth a bold vision of collaboration amongpublishers, each contributing to support innovation and enjoy in itstechnical fruits He talked about goals — that survival for publishing

is not a “goal” in itself, for example — and that innovation is one ofthe important pillars of publishing health He used an example fromthe gas industry to illustrate how it pooled resources to innovate Hesaid:

I called the prospect of people not engaging with our content the publishing manifestation of a super-threat I’d argue (pretty strongly) that it represents a super-threat not just to publishing, but to the way

we function as a country, an economy and as a part of a world or‐ der We have a responsibility to address this threat, not just so that we can make money, but because we’re the ones with the ability to solve it.

Other industries facing an uncertain future have banded together to form and fund superstructures The Gas Research Institute, for ex‐ ample, was authorized in 1976, at a time when the natural gas industry was highly fragmented among producers, wholesalers and distribu‐ tors The latter often held a local monopoly.

By 1981, GRI was spending $68.5 million on research and a total of

$80.5 million on oversight and R&D This represented about 0.2% of the wellhead price of gas that year, valued at the time at a bit more than $38 billion.

GRI undertook research and development in four areas…Funding, drawn from a surcharge on sales as well as some government grants, accelerated to something north of $100 million in the mid-1980s.

If you look across all of publishing in the United States, it’s about a

$40 billion business Imagine what we could do if we could create and sustain an organization with $80 million a year in funding It’s also likely that an industry-wide commitment to addressing engagement would garner the external funding that most parties have been un‐ derstandably reluctant to spend on narrower causes.

A good point A great plan If CourseSmart and Bookish show us thatpublishers can partner, then why not partner in innovation? Briangives a number of concrete suggestions for areas to focus on I’ve beenmulling this over ever since he gave this presentation Despite hisguidelines and recommendations, it hasn’t happened yet But there’s away this idea fits neatly into startupland

The publishing incubator

A similar solution already exists in the tech world: the incubator Ifyou’re not familiar with it, technology incubators accept applicationsfrom startups in small batches If accepted, the startup gets between

It’s Time for a Publishing Incubator | 17

$20,000 - $100,000 (in exchange for around 5% equity), along withthree months of office space, mentors, a chance to demo for investors,and a lot of help Investors get early access to cutting-edge technology.Corporations are encouraged to come in and meet the startups at anypoint along the way.

Many incubators are industry-specific For example, there are four

new technology multiple times a year Imagine the amount of health‐care innovation going on right now Education does this too Incubator

the country — with a group of startups that has raised $10M graduation And Turner Broadcasting just launched an incubator inNYC called Media Camp Since the products integrate with broadcastmedia, there is a major focus on mentorship from executives in thefield, and a lot of discussion about how to work with big media con‐glomerates Sounds a lot like what we need in publishing Even pub‐lishing expert Craig Mod recently wrote about how he is strugglingwith how to distribute his TechFellow money to startups

post-Granted, there is some remarkable internal R&D: NYTimes Labs and

mendable efforts But those teams are usually small, and since they’reinternal they don’t have the massive variation we see in incubators.One company isn’t going to move the needle for an entire industry inthat way

We need an incubator for publishing technology We need a group ofinvestors and publishers that want to benefit from a pool of innovation,and encourage it grow With this, publishers would contribute to andsponsor events, perhaps even influence the direction of future part‐ners Investors would raise the fund, and choose the most viable start‐ups Innovation and disruption might actually find a common ground,

as new technologies could drive reading adoption which drive sales(an argument technology writer Paul Carr has made before) We need

to bridge publishing and technology, and this gets us there

This should exist now I’ve been working on publishing startups forfive years and I have yet to see it Moreover, with so many publishers

on the East Coast, New York City is the place to do it New York has ahealthy startup industry, access to publishers and publishing confer‐ences, mentors and experts My question is, who’s going to do some‐

The Slow Pace of eBook Innovation

By Joe Wikert

I love this comment from Dave Bricker regarding an earlier post, EPUB

Ebook vendors enjoy a closed loop ecosystem They have millions of reader/customers who are satisfied with EPUB 2 display capabilities and devices Amazon readers, for example, are largely content with the offerings in the proprietary Kindle store; they’re not lining up with torches and pitchforks to push for improvements While publishers wait for eReader device manufacturers to add new features and EPUB

3 support, eBooksellers are just as happy to wait.

The best way to promote EPUB 3 right now is to bypass it in favor of delivering ultra-innovative books through the web and app-based distribution When we can give eReader device makers a compelling reason to bring eReaders into parity with apps and webkit browsers, they’ll put their mouths where our money is Until eBookstores know they’re losing sales to alternative/open channels, they’re going to sit pretty, stall, and make money doing what they’re doing.

Who’s pushing for innovation in the ebook space? Publishers? No,they’re fairly content with quick-and-dirty p-to-e conversions andthey’re risk averse when it comes to making big investments in richercontent formats Retailers? Nope If retailers were motivated we’d seemuch broader adoption of EPUB 3 in the various readers and apps outthere

This reminds me of the Android challenge It’s widely known that newversions of the Android OS don’t get adopted as rapidly as new versions

makers (e.g., Samsung) have no incentive to update all the existingdevices They’d prefer to force you into a new phone rather than giveyou a quick OS update with all the new features

This is one area that Apple really understands and gets right Whenthey come out with a new version of iOS they have it pushed out to asmany customers as possible (assuming their devices can support it).Apple knows there’s so much sex appeal for each new device they don’thave to starve existing device owners from the new OS features.Will an ebook vendor ever follow Apple’s iOS model and lead the in‐dustry to a more accelerated pace of innovation? Or is Dave Brickerright that web delivery is the best way forward?

The Slow Pace of eBook Innovation | 19

Putting a Value on Classic Content

By Robert Cottrell

Think of a newspaper or magazine as a mountain of data to which athin new layer of topsoil gets added each day or each week Everybodysees the new soil But what’s underneath gets covered up and forgotten.Even the people who own the mountain don’t know much about thelower layers

That wouldn’t matter if old content was bad content But it’s not Jour‐nalism, at least good journalism, dates much less than we are prone tothink

You never hear anybody say, “I’m not going to listen to that recordbecause it was released last year”, or, “I’m not going to watch that filmbecause it came out last month” Why are we so much less interested

in journalism that’s a month or a year old?

The answer is this: We’ve been on the receiving end of decades ofsalesmanship from the newspaper industry, telling us that today’snewspaper is essential, but yesterday’s newspaper is worthless.Look who’s talking It’s been 50 years since newspapers had the mainjob of telling people what’s new that day For decades they’ve beenfilling their pages with more and more timeless writing The process

is all but complete Go back into the features pages of your favouritenewspaper from a year ago, and you’ll find scarcely a piece that couldn’tappear just as easily today, with a few very minor changes

All this boils down to a simple proposition: old content is undervalued

in the market, relative to new content There are tens if not hundreds

of thousands of articles in writers’ and publishers’ archives which are

as good to read today as they were on the day they were published Yetthey are effectively valued by their owners at zero, written off, never

I have my own ideas for exploiting this market failure What puzzles

so Why do almost none of them (the New Yorker is an honourableexception) make any serious attempt to organise, prioritise and mon‐etise their archives? They, after all, are the owners of the mountains,and whatever treasures may lie buried within.

The answer is that they are too fixated on adding the daily or weeklylayer of new topsoil Some of them, I know from experience, see anyserious effort to monetise their archive content as a form of competi‐tion with their new content At most, they may have some “relatedcontent” algorithms, but those algorithms are only going to be as good

as the database tagging, which is to say, not good at all

So here’s my advice: Newspapers and magazines, make your next hire

an archive editor Mine that mountain of fantastic free content It’s yourhistory and your brand Don’t just sit on it

Putting a Value on Classic Content | 21

Reading Experience and Mobile Design

By Travis Alber

It’s all about user experience Once you get past whether a book isavailable on a particular reading platform, the experience is the dis‐tinguishing factor How do you jump back to the table of contents?How do you navigate to the next chapter? How do you leave notes?How does it feel? Is it slick? Clunky? Satisfying? Difficult? Worth themoney?

A few weeks ago, at Charleston’s mini-TOC, someone asked me how

I approach new digital publishing projects How to test or design them.Where to start The easy answer: start by looking at mobile design Theway we design reading experiences and the way we’ve been designingmobile applications are similar The two are converging

Mobile design?

Mobile design patterns and best practices overlap with the way wedesign (or should design) reading experiences It’s a simple conceptthat may seem unremarkable — that generic concepts in mobile designand user experience apply when putting together a reading system —but it’s actually at the heart of building something in publishing today

If this sounds technical, it isn’t If you’ve used a smartphone to reademail, a tablet to read magazines, or an e-reader to consume content,you’re experienced enough to have seen a number of mobile designpatterns, even if you didn’t notice them Consistent functionality, sim‐ple interfaces, polished graphics, and speedy responses: together thesethings are all part of mobile experience design As the opportunity forreading long-form text explodes across different platforms, the readingsystems (the way we navigate through the content), will draw from thelessons mobile UX designers have learned over the last decade, fromthings that had little to do with reading

Five convergence points for mobile design & reading system design

1 Simplicity is really, really important

tures People close apps before bothering with a FAQ People are im‐patient Knowing this, mobile UX designers are specific about whatgoals they design for, and they stick to those Most mobile apps do just

a few things, and they strive to do them well That keeps apps verystraightforward and simple

Obviously simplicity has always been a sign of an optimal reading ex‐perience Open and read, right? In fact, it’s best if most of the chromearound a book disappears, so readers can focus on the content It’snatural that the most successful reading systems need to follow thisprinciple of mobile design

2 Everything takes place in the context of our lives

The first thing UX designers learn when working on a mobile project:people use phones while doing other things They use them one-handed They often use them when they are not at home Design forsub-optimal conditions, because you never know if you have some‐one’s complete attention

Reading also takes place within the contextual fabric of how we liveour lives People read books on the subway At the doctor’s office Incoffee shops Loud noises, phone calls, check-ins, and conversationsall disrupt the experience, even with paper books As long as we have

an easy way to mark our place, a simple way to carry it with us, and agraceful way for features to fail until we can get back to optimal con‐ditions (for example, in the way a reading service might need to re‐connect to upload notes), reading systems will act like people expectthem to: consistently

3 No one will wait to read

One the biggest complaints when the original Kindle came out was the

page refresh It was a simple blink to swap out the content from one

page to the next People didn’t want to wait for the next page to load

— they expected it to appear instantly

The same is true of mobile There are a number of design patternscreated to notify the user that content is loading Different loading barsand contextual messages are designed to manage people’s expectations

in a world of high-speed internet, where most clicks bring content tothem instantly This is called latency, and it will drive users away Inboth reading systems and mobile apps, latency needs to be under con‐trol

Reading Experience and Mobile Design | 23

4 Patterns matter

tions For example, if you’re filling out a form in a mobile app, thereare some best practices the designer has (hopefully) followed, like sav‐ing your data as you enter it (people typing with their thumbs don’thave a lot of patience if they have to do it twice), or preserving thatdata if an error message loads (for the same reason) Granted, theseare good guidelines on the web too, but they are really of paramountimportance in mobile These best practices are used inside recom‐mended patterns, so layouts must have optimal places for error mes‐sages, or easy ways to update content You see those patterns repeated

in the way lists and forms work across all your mobile apps (I

use patterns and best practices loosely here, the exact definition of each

is eternally debated among UX professionals.)

How does this relate to reading systems? On one level, the same applies

to users adding notes or reading socially — respect the data becausemost people won’t enter it twice But it also has a lot to do with designpatterns for reading The way a table of contents is treated, the waypeople move through books, the expectation that there will be a way

to bookmark a section — these are all patterns

Last month, at Books in Browsers, Craig Mod gave a presentation on

of instructions on how to use your reading app, it’s probably too com‐plex To avoid this, UX designers need to pay attention to user ex‐pectations and habits Everything from page-turn options, to title vis‐ibility to a linkable table of contents, these rules are being created now,and they need to be followed consistently

5 APIs will be the source of interactivity and real-time action

Mobile systems often pull in different informational feeds: maps, Twit‐ter posts, ratings The flow of information into mobile apps means thatthe applications are richer; these capabilities live on top of an app’s coresystem

Expect to see the same thing in reading systems Although many read‐ing systems are a bit too immature to allow full EPUB 3 capabilities,they will evolve to allow JavaScript and the ability to bring in real-time

data iBooks does this with limited ability now Enhancements thatmake reading better without being a direct part of the book are going

to very popular And readers will expect it in the way they expect itfrom mobile apps

All of these similarities between mobile design and reading systemsexist now; faster, better reading applications will be created if we aremindful of what has already been defined by the mobile experience

Serial Fiction: Everything Old Is New Again

By Alice Armitage

2012 may be remembered as the year that digital publishing broughtserial fiction back to the reading public Readers in the 19th and early20th centuries often read fictional stories in installments in newspa‐pers and magazines: books were simply too expensive for many people.But as affordable paperbacks flooded the market in the mid-1900s,serials lost popularity Now, however, the ease of delivering install‐ments to digital devices, combined with the limited time people have

to devote to reading, is leading to a resurgence of interest in serialfiction

Serial fiction has been available on the web since the 1990s But sud‐denly in the last six months, there has been an explosion of interest infiction delivered in installments: Amazon announced its Kindle Serials

ies, (e.g., Byliner, Wattpad, and Plympton), several iOS serial bookapps (Silent History and Seven Poets) were launched, and at least oneaward-winning novelist, Margaret Atwood, began writing her ownserial stories

Why should you be interested in serial fiction?

Whether you are looking at this development as a publisher, reader, orauthor, there are plenty of reasons

For a publisher, serial fiction provides ongoing engagement with yourreaders Each new installment is delivered to them automatically ontheir device of choice, bringing your product back into the forefront

of their minds The episodic nature of serial fiction may also increase

Serial Fiction: Everything Old Is New Again | 25

the buzz around the author and the story, as there is often a lively onlinediscussion among readers about what may happen in future install‐ments This enhances discoverability by creating more opportunitiesfor new readers to hear about the product.

Perhaps most interesting for publishers is the flexibility in paymentoptions for serial fiction For example, Kindle Serials charges one lowprice for the purchase of the series up front, with each subsequentinstallment delivered for free If the series is well-subscribed, when it

is complete, it is offered for sale as a book, either as a paperback or as

a Kindle edition The price for this often exceeds the price for the series

if purchased when it began Other publishers charge a per installmentprice, usually also offering a discounted price for all installments ifpaid upfront as the series begins Some have experimented with of‐fering the first installment for free, with subsequent installments at aset price, charged as each is delivered And a few publishers have begunselling subscriptions to their site, with all series then available for free,

no matter whether delivered in installments or as a completed whole.Obviously serial fiction lends itself to many different business models.For a reader, serial fiction provides the opportunity to personally tailorthe reading experience Some serials offer quite short installments,1,000 words or so per piece (Silent History is an example of this) Oth‐ers are closer to 10,000 words per installment (like Margaret Atwood’s

ment, running between 50,000 and 100,000 words (like Margaret At‐

Frequency, engagement, and experimentation

The shorter the installment, the more often it is likely to be delivered.For example, Silent History delivers a new installment each weekdayfor four weeks and then takes a break for a week to let everyone catch

up before issuing new installments Where a reader plans to read eachinstallment may be a factor in what they purchase For example, some‐one looking for something to entertain them during their 30 minutecommute will most likely want longer installments than someonelooking for a diversion while they wait in line for 10 minutes at thebank But for someone about to begin a three-hour plane flight, a fewinstallments of novella length may be the most appealing Readers mayalso like serial fiction for the option it provides for interaction with the

have changed the ending or the level of involvement of secondarycharacters based on reader feedback.) And lastly, the need for cliff‐hangers at the end of each installment, as well as other techniques forbringing readers back to the story after a waiting period, means thatserial fiction is often more intricately plotted and engaging than a standalone book might be.

For an author, serial fiction offers the chance to experiment with newways of storytelling Pieces are shorter and more quickly delivered toreaders This allows authors the possibility of receiving reader feed‐back before the story is finished — a kind of agile development modelfor writing And for serial fiction offered as apps on Apple devices,there is the opportunity to use the increased functionality of the mobiledevice as a part of the storytelling For example, Silent History tells themain story through short “Testimonials”, written by the authors Butthere is the option of reading and/or creating what are called “FieldReports.” These stories (based on the fictional premise of the app) arewritten by the community of readers and can be accessed only within

10 meters of the GPS location about which the field report is written.Another app, Seven Poets, offers not just the story installments, butalso “newspaper articles” on the main events in the story, as well aschallenges to the reader based on the events of each installment, theresults of which are stored and can be shared as “Your Story” with areader’s own community

It still comes down to great writing

Overall, after reading many different kinds and examples of the serialfiction that has recently burst onto the scene, I have to say I like theflexibility of matching my current reading needs (the length of time Ihave, my attention span at the moment, the situation I’m reading in

— is it a quiet doctor’s office or the DMV?) with all the different sorts

of serials available at an affordable price And I am amused by the newways of telling stories utilizing the bells and whistles of my mobiledevices But I have discovered that the measuring stick for serials isthe same as the one I use for all books: How good is the writing? Overtime, neither the novelty of periodic delivery of installments nor thenew storytelling techniques available through my device kept me in‐terested in the story unless the plot was intriguing, the characters werefully developed, and the writing was engaging Bottom line: I like theflexibility of serial fiction, but only good writing will keep me comingback for more

Serial Fiction: Everything Old Is New Again | 27