9

Developments in digital publishing for consumer markets

Introduction

While the professional and scholarly sectors have well-developed digital products and business models, and the education markets have been following on rapidly, the consumer (or trade) markets have been slower to change. As the internet expanded and became more flexible as a rich mode for delivery of content, so specialist markets could all expand too; customers were increasingly used to using digital environments via computers for their activity and publishers had more direct relationships with their markets, which helped when developing and selling new products.

While the internet was accessible to the consumer markets, the activity of reading for the general reader did not really take place on or near a computer. Two main developments had to take place to ignite the market – the development of flexible ebook formats and the growth of affordable e-readers. As we have seen, there were early developments but it was not until around 2005 that the market started to develop, once the technology and hardware became more readily available.

For consumer publishers the technical ability to produce straightforward ebooks has not been a major problem, though some outlay has been required in terms of developing workflow and digitising past titles. The bigger problem has been how to price these products and put a price and value on the content. As we will see in this chapter and in Chapter 12, it is clear that customers have felt that, with savings in the cost of printing and distributing physical books, as well as in inventory management, the price of books should be cheaper.

This is tied up too with perceptions of price established by the big technology players that have moved heavily into other parts of the entertainment industry such as the music industry; there the expectation is that the price of individual items could be cheap, the outlay having been made by the consumer on the hardware. For those players, content has become part of the game of driving the purchase of the technology rather than an item in its own right. Of course there are differences: the act of reading a book, the duration of the activity and the motivation behind doing so are very different. In pricing terms a book is not like a short piece of music, so standard pricing would be more difficult to apply. The pattern of purchasing is different too: customers in general would not usually purchase as many books as they might pieces of music in a given period of time; the price of a paperback book was also reasonably cheap, whereas an album could often cost more.

Nevertheless the industry has to face a changing perception in how a book is to be valued in the eyes of the consumer, whose views are influenced by other types of digital material. The value of that content from the publisher’s point of view includes not just an idea of what the market can and will pay but also an understanding of the cost of acquiring the content and producing the product. However, it is more often only the tangible parts of this cost (the physical product) that are taken into account by the consumer market. The big change therefore for the consumer publisher is how to manage that changing perception of value and manage the transfer from being a print-based business to a digital-and-print business. At this point many publishers have started to re-evaluate their role in the publishing value chain and step back to explore again what they really are doing for their customers, getting back to first principles in order to understand how to direct and restructure their businesses.

This chapter looks at the specific changes in the consumer market with the development of ebooks and how this has already changed the activities of some of these publishers in areas like fiction publishing, while other areas, such as illustrated books, are waiting to see how these developments will pan out. It will also explore the different sorts of products available. Some of the wider issues of pricing, self-publishing, publishing structures and the activity of major technology-based competitors will be looked at in Part III of the book, which explores the critical challenges that publishers across all sectors need to face.

Development of ebook sales

We looked at the history of the technology in Part I of the book. But how did these ebooks get to consumers? The early ebooks were essentially available from the late 1990s, when early ebook vendors were emerging. These centred around various book programmes that took content from publishers and made it available in digital format. These vendors contacted publishers to ask them to work with them to produce ebooks. Often they were focused on particular areas, such as the academic arena, with the aim that aggregated collections could be sold to institutional libraries.

However, there were examples of companies that sought digital rights from the mainstream trade houses. There were four main problems:

• payment
• digitisation
• lack of devices
• retailing ebooks

First, the rights needed to be granted in some way and that might possibly involve payment: authors, after all, were entitled to royalties for their works and these were often covered in the contracts they had by the subsidiary rights for digital rights, so somehow these needed to be taken into account. This could pose a problem as the business models did not always accommodate this.

The second problem was the cost of transferring the texts into digital files, which, even with some of the workflow beginning to be in digital format, was still costly; broadly, the ebook vendors took on this cost, but it became, for most of them, a very expensive part of their operation and often their business models could not sustain it, so they either folded or had to ask for contributions from the publishers (who were, in any case, often beginning to see the possibilities of digitising for themselves and not handing it all over to third parties).

The third problem remained the issue of how the consumer could consume these titles without any really reasonably portable device to use. The final issue was quite how to sell titles to consumers: a variety of business models developed and different approaches to marketing these digital libraries, but they were difficult and the cost of producing the digital format in the first place was constantly a problem. So while some early ebook vendors do still exist, these early experiments in selling ebooks, particularly to the consumer market, broadly disappeared as the first generation of ebook vending.

Drivers of the growth of ebook market e-readers

E-readers, as we have seen, began to be widely available from around 2006, with Kindle really driving the sales from the end of 2007. One of the particular issues that Kindles cracked from the beginning was to ensure that the ability to purchase the book was seamless with the delivery to the device. Early ebook vendors could process payments and a book could be downloaded but this still might take time and would require somewhere in the procedure an internet connection to a computer that, in most cases, required a wire to connect. One of the beauties of e-readers was the ability to download books via wifi or 3G, allowing quick and easy access to books potentially from anywhere around the world.

What Amazon then did was connect the product with the device in a way that Sony, although it was first to the market, was not able to do. Amazon had the book listings and could simply ensure the Kindle connected effortlessly to their storefront so that, from browsing for a book through the ordering and paying for it, to the downloading of it onto the device (with an automatic back-up on Amazon itself) the customer could do it all in one place very quickly; with the additional benefits of Amazon’s well-developed customer service approach it made the whole process of buying ebooks simple and problem free.

Most critical of all was the fact that Amazon already had customers, customers who bought books and had an established, often ongoing, relationship with Amazon. To convert existing customers to ebooks was always going to be easier than finding and encouraging a market to make the connection between buying a device and finding a marketplace; Amazon had customers predisposed to them and people to whom they could regularly market, keeping the Kindle high in the consciousness of customers when buying other items. The Kindle therefore was one of the key reasons why the ebook market was able to start to develop in a much more convincing way than it had before.

Challenges for publishers

As customers took up the Kindle and started to buy ebooks, various challenges emerged, of which three were prevalent:

• how to price ebooks
• who built the ebook files
• which books were the most likely to be bought on a device

Prices

At first there was a considerable pressure from Amazon to price low; taking an approach similar to the music industry reasonably early on after the launch of the Kindle, Amazon did promote the idea of fixed prices for all books and wanted to set the bar at $9.99 for hardbacks in the US (normally sold upward of $20). Once you had bought the device and connected to Amazon to purchase everything very quickly, commoditising ebooks around cheapness and standard pricing appeared a good way to attract a growing market for the devices, even if it meant loss-leader price strategies. This was never actually achieved and perhaps Amazon was never going to be able to make it work, but it was a possibility that frightened publishers in the early days of Kindle in the US. It was clear ebook pricing was going to be treated much more fluidly by Amazon than print prices, and publishers felt less in control. It was one of the influences that led to the large publishers putting pressure on Amazon to accept an agency approach to publishing, another being the way Apple worked in relation to ebook sales, more of which we will explore in Chapter 12.

Digitisation by pulishers

Once e-readers were more prevalent, it was clear by then that there were customers who would buy ebooks. Whereas early ebooks had been developed by third parties, there was a natural pressure on publishers themselves to ensure their books were available in ebook formats, ready for online retailers. It was not a huge difficulty for them to do this but it marked a change from the earlier arrangements, where conversion of files was shared between the vendors and the publishers. New books began to be automatically made available in ebook format and by 2010 most publishers were automatically producing ebooks as well as print books for much of their new narrative output.

The bigger question remained about how much of the archive to make available digitally, involving more complex conversion processes, but even this has become less of a problem more recently as publishers are broadly going through the process of digitising most of their main in-print backlist and considering releasing their out-of-print backlist in ebook format.

Types of books to digitise

It is a particular type of book that works most effectively on e-readers. Books that are broadly narrative in style, what is increasingly defined as long-form narrative, are especially well suited to e-readers. They do not involve a lot of visual material; they are not interactive or media rich. Basic ebook formats are not hugely sophisticated so are best left dealing with reasonably straightforward text; they also cannot cope with complex page design and in general do not preserve the page style at all, with readers navigating often in terms of locations more than with page numbers.

Simple ebooks often do not have interactive indexes or table of contents. For the free books mentioned above Amazon bolts on a table of contents, charging a small amount for its own ‘premium’ edition. However, these limitations in, for example, navigation or text style, do not especially matter if one is reading a novel designed to be read in one direction from beginning to end. Effective book marking and syncing to where one has read, with a couple of additional benefits such as a dictionary, highlighting or adding notes (in a rudimentary way), mean that the e-reader usually does enough for the reader. The overall benefits of long battery life, portability and the ability to store many books on one light device are compelling enough. So the long-form narrative, whether fiction or non-fiction, has proved to be very successful in ebook format. As such titles are not complex, and do not require a lot of effort in terms of checking ebook files and formatting, there is room for the price to be lower and in general publishers have accepted that point.

Genre publishing

What has also become apparent is that genre titles have been particularly successful, that is, books that clearly sit within a particular genre such as romance, horror or crime. Readers who especially enjoy accessing books in a particular genre may like to read lots of them but may not necessarily want hard copies stacking up. There may even be a tendency to regard these sorts of titles as more disposable. Consumers of Mills and Boon-style romances, for instance, tend to be keen to move on to the next title rather than dwell for any length of time on the last one they read; the style of selling for these books often reflects that (with new titles constantly being released and semi-subscription options to buying them). Genre therefore has an element of easy commoditisation about it; readers generally try out things within that genre, and with low prices there is less risk for the reader if a particular crime novelist for instance does not live up to their expectations.

The area of genre has two other aspects going for it that have made it successful for ebooks. The first is that it is very easy to categorise books that sit firmly within one genre; if they are easy to categorise they are easy to find in an internet environment. If one looks for horror titles on Amazon it does not take long to find the area and explore the books on offer. Browsing becomes easier if you are looking for a particular type of book that is simple to define.

And because of that the second phenomenon can occur: that of the growth of self-publishing authors. It is difficult to be discovered on Amazon, so if one can place one’s books clearly in a particular well-defined part of the site there is more chance of being discovered. Titles that do not fit clear categories are much more difficult to publish in an internet environment without the sort of complex and costly promotion activity, developed with extensive experience of the workings of book marketing and PR, that publishers can put in place; this is much more of a challenge for new self-published people. Self-publishing, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 13, exists across all sorts of books, but niche titles do appear to be areas where it is easier to find some success, compared to, for example, self-publishing literary fiction.

The ebook business model

The growing market

With the market growing, the move into ebook selling has been an important development for publishers. None can afford to be left behind and while predictions of a swift switch into digital publishing away from print have not been realised, the growth of the ebook market has nevertheless been inexorable. Overall the digital market is growing, and in the consumer marketplace in the UK the annual rate of growth is often between 200 and 400 per cent, though this is slowing now the base figure of the market has grown. The trend for trade publishers who have strong lists in terms of narrative fiction and non-fiction has been to see the percentage of digital sales increase. This growth has been faster in the US – a large market and the early availability of e-readers have ensured this – but the growth in international markets is following. For some US publishers the percentage of digital sales for these sorts of books is coming close to 30 per cent, while a more standard percentage is around 15–20 per cent in the UK.

An important driver of market growth is critical mass, the availability of enough product in digital form to attract the market. This has been important to drive sales and also exploit the typical purchasing behaviour of a new e-reader owner; there is usually a large spike in sales at the point someone get a new e-reader as they load up their device with new products; this then evens out and slows quite considerably, so it is important to exploit this first rush of activity.

Publishers have digitised much of their key backlist in order for their titles to be available for purchase. While not every backlist book will necessarily be digitised, there has been an impetus to ensure titles are available in order to maximise ebook sales; some customers re-buy their favourite books in digital form, and some publishers have been able to reinvigorate the sales of their backlists by providing this new medium; in addition, new customers have discovered some older well-known titles that may have been difficult to track down in print form. In some cases this has led to a pricing dilemma, as it is often cheaper to purchase the paperback of an older title where stock is being sold off than the Kindle version.

With this growth there have been continuing problems around copyright for older titles, and for some time publishers had to focus on reviewing their contracts and, in some cases, renegotiating them (in a way that did not affect the specialist markets). Digitising backlist, however, is not the same as releasing new titles: the backlist titles have already, in theory, made their money or, at least it is hoped, broken even on their previous print sales; these books were published in the first instance without the expectation of a digital book – the ebook therefore represents a nice additional uplift on the title. The question that is more testing for publishers is how to manage the business model for the new titles.

Print supports digital

Given these growing numbers, the business model has yet to move on radically. Print sales still make up the majority of the market: publishers need to ensure they do continue to focus on these markets. The way publishers have often looked at the sales of digital versions of their books is as a sale on top of their existing print versions. The legacy of digital rights in the subsidiary rights part of the contract may be one reason for the continuation of this, while the other critical point is that digital books, sold as they are at cheaper prices (often considerably cheaper than the hardback), are not able to support the total cost of the book.

Therefore, digital sales are more often than not added onto a profit and loss account as an additional sale, with the print version – first in hardback, then in paperback – accounting for most of the costs. In many cases digital sales have been treated rather like a special deal sale, one which adds a bonus of money but does not have to carry the higher costs of creating the books. This means that while costs are saved on the digital sale in terms of printing and distribution, the costs of preparing the text (such as copyediting and cover design, for instance), marketing it (often very costly) and payment/royalties to the author (where very large advances can have a crippling effect on the book’s profit and loss account) have to be covered by print sales. The high price of the hardback has traditionally supported some of these costs, with profits being made on the release of the paperback at a later stage.

The ebook, like the paperback, can bring in extra revenue that goes to the bottom line, but without a hardback launch in the first place the book may not be affordable. However, how far can this be sustainable when publishing an ebook at a lower price? If fewer people buy the print copies, particularly the hardbacks, the logic of the current business model would suggest that the hardback price might have to increase further to continue to support the rest of the formats.

The relationship between costs and prices therefore has been thrown into the air, with customers’ perceptions of where they think costs lie adding a further layer of complexity for publishers when trying to price cost effectively, but still attractively, for the market. This problem is at the root of the business models for consumer books and the models have yet to adjust convincingly, unlike the specialist markets, where customers have always held a clearer understanding of the value of the content in relation to the price when assessing the worth of the material.

Pricing and the ebook intermediary

Pricing is distorted further by the sorts of deals the intermediary does on the different formats, if, like Amazon, it can offer the different formats (as opposed to digital-only stores). So, however carefully crafted a pricing and format policy might be by a publisher, if Amazon decides to discount the paperback considerably while the ebook is set at the publisher’s price according to agency pricing (which we discuss in Chapter 12), the prices at which the book is available seem to go against logic. In the trade print books market customers have been used to a fairly consistent approach to pricing for many years and have reasonably fixed expectations. Customers do not like complex or illogical pricing and tend to blame the publisher.

Phasing

Different publishers take different approaches to this. Early on some publishers followed the strategy of phasing the release of the ebook so a hardback comes out first, with the ebook release following on later with the paperback. This can still be the case with titles that are publishing events, such as a large significant biography, or for books where the hardback is launched early as a beautiful object in terms of production quality.

However, for other titles, such as novels, it has proved too difficult to delay access to a key title to separate launch dates. Clearly there is a legacy of producing hardbacks of novels, with customers waiting patiently for the paperback to come out if they are not willing to pay the high price of the hardback. But this expectation is a little different in the digital arena: why wait to get at a book (a contradiction given that one of the aspects at the very root of digital reading is speed to market)? And while the hardback was available for keen print customers, albeit at a premium, if a reader is a complete convert to the digital environment they do not want to be penalised by having to wait for the ebook.

If it releases ebooks alongside hardbacks, though, how does the publisher then manage the release of the paperback? Some publishers have released the ebook at the same price as the hardback and at the same time, but then the price reduces if the book subsequently comes out in paperback. While there is a logic to this, nevertheless the price differential between a hardback and a paperback is clearly presented in the physical attributes of the books, while an ebook is the same at the higher price and at the lower price, a fact that could annoy customers.

A customer of an ebook, priced high at launch, is buying not only the book but the early opportunity to read the book: this is one of the reasons for buying the hardback. However, educating the customer about the reason for this sort of ‘premium’ around an ebook is more tricky as, again, the actual product itself does not change when the price does.

So the ebook format stretches the customer’s traditional perceptions of books and how they are published; the basic premise of the issue remains the same: customers always paid more to get the product early, but the change in print format from a hardback to a paperback distracted the customer from this central point; so publishers have to work out how to get customers to step back and see this issue of timeliness transparently.

Digital-only imprints

With business models still needing to be rethought, the focus has been on versions of the same content available in both print and digital formats. However, there are digital-only products that are being developed by publishers. These include short stories or journalistic pieces (long-form journalism) that can be quickly signed up and developed; publishers have been asking their backlist authors to write for these digital imprints or encouraged new authors to become involved.

The advantage here for publishers is that they have something they can sell at a low price (creating a floor, as it were, for their longer works); they do not have to cover the costs of expensive book production, and they can market these assets (saving money) and agree reasonable terms with authors, who have not had to commit too much of their time or effort to produce the work. This also drives customers to explore more digital titles and the low price allows customers to buy in easily. Most of the major publishers have developed some sort of ‘born digital’ list of this sort and are increasingly exploring options for other ways to publish digital-only products.

Genre publishing has also become an arena for publishers to launch digital-only lists. For some, this is a way of capitalising on the growth of genre markets with low-priced books. For others, it is a way to break newer authors who may in the longer term become print authors.

Issues for the print products

Despite all this, hardbacks do still sell and, while their sales are declining in some consumer areas, there are specific characteristics to hardbacks that are influential in their continued survival. Depending on the type of book, the hardback represents something substantial; a coffee table book has a particular physical presence; art books require large high-quality pictures; cookery books should be durable and, for some, easy to annotate. Hardbacks are more often chosen as a gift and hardback launches before Christmas can continue to do well.

New approaches are also taking print titles further. While the future of print titles is not something that can be explored in depth here, there is a growing trend toward the development of the book in terms of its beauty as an artefact. A biography can be launched as a beautiful and expensive hardback before it becomes available in paperback (e.g. Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens); lush cookbooks by celebrities, providing a sense of lifestyle, often do not turn into paperbacks let alone ebooks (for instance some of Jamie Oliver’s books). The deluxe print edition, with time spent on covers and production quality, is a growing genre. The collectable nature of physical books is appreciated. These are manifestations of a redefinition of print for some areas of publishing.

Problems with ebooks

There are also a few issues that need to be solved for ebooks:

• gifts can feel less meaningful if given as an ebook voucher compared to a selected physical object
• library loans become complicated
• sharing good reads with friends is a problem
• the second-hand market also has yet to be considered

Specific titles can be gifted via Amazon in certain markets. Amazon is also developing a lending service via subscription so you can borrow books; you can in theory lend a title to another Kindle for a certain amount of time, though it might feel cumbersome. There are also library lending services using open ebook formats. There are, therefore, technological ways around these problems, but the physicality of the print book is part of the reason why some of these issues can never be fully resolved.

Other digital products

Enhanced ebooks

Ebooks have always been essentially an electronic reproduction of the book. The nature of digital publishing in this environment is rather straightforward and does not really exploit the opportunities that digital publishing provides. Ebooks still follow a broadly narrative approach and are no different in that respect from the print version. However, the enhanced ebook can take this further, adding in a variety of multimedia elements from photography to video clips, adding value to the product. This enables some publishers to charge more than for the paperback or the plain ebook and, depending on the cost of the additional features, supports the cost of the cheaper editions. It allows some flexibility in product development, designing a strategy for keen readers or fans of a particular writer; it is similar in concept to the special features added to DVDs or collectors’ editions, which contain added value.

Definitions

The term enhanced ebook is loosely used and can be seen as somewhat interchangeable with apps. Indeed many argue that the term enhanced ebook will not be used for much longer; the concept of the book will have moved a long way beyond a digital book with add-ons, which is what many see the enhanced ebook as today. However, the principle of ‘a book with features’ is still an important one and for the moment I will use this term to distinguish a certain type of media-rich book that occupies a middle ground between the ebook on one side and the app on the other. Indeed the distinction is necessary to differentiate between books which have additional materials linked to them (special features, audiovisual material etc.) but are still produced using ebook software rather than produced and delivered as an app.

In the longer term it may well be that all ebooks are more enhanced than a simple black and white digital version of the text. The development of the iBookstore and iPad Author means that it has become easier to produce multimedia books as standard. The enhanced ebook is a title that would sit within the iBookstore on Apple, as opposed to within the Appstore, where book apps would sit. This distinction is important – an enhanced ebook can include visual learning material, embedded video footage and audio files, yet does not necessarily need to be as complex or as potentially expensive to develop as an app.

Enhanced ebooks and tablets

For some areas of publishing this is where the tablet becomes important. The ability to view beautiful visual material on extremely high-resolution screens in a portable way is important for titles where the illustrations and artwork are key. These titles will not necessarily be labelled ‘enhanced’ ebooks but they are beyond the basic digital version of a fiction title. The illustrated book market has not yet moved in any major way into the digital environment, but this is coming. While the physical element will still play a part in the market, it is clear the growth of the tablet and related publishing software is providing an important opportunity.

However, these enhanced ebook titles at this stage do not necessarily do much that is genuinely interactive. We have seen that textbooks can have a layer of simple interaction where iBooks Author is used (rolling photo galleries, note making), but they are not as sophisticated or highly produced as app book products are. So enhanced ebooks do not take the format of the book that much further at this stage and there are not many of them to reflect any definite trends in pricing.

The business model essentially follows the print copy. Sometimes savings can be made, reproducing a lot more visual material than might be affordable for the print version with the cost of paper and print (subject of course to relevant rights clearance). If charges increase for downloading times, media-rich texts may also suffer if their files become large.

Enhanced ebook futures?

This middle ground may be where the direction of the digital publishing starts to change most actively. Some of the key questions that might indicate the future are:

• How flexible can these sorts of books become when compared with an app?
• Are the development costs more manageable in an enhanced ebook format than an app?
• What sort of product does the market want? An interactive app, or a book with extra material?
• How far is a title more discoverable if it is sold via a digital bookstore environment, dedicated to books, compared to an app marketplace?
• Do publishers have more control over the sale of an enhanced ebook compared to an app product?

This last question raises the issue of the policies of the marketplaces in which these products are sold. Enhanced ebooks can potentially be sold directly by a publisher; apps for iPads (or for Android) need to be sold through the proprietary app store. Will there be differences around sales commission, for instance, or in-app purchases? How will those marketplaces control and promote their different offerings? Google Play will have a different approach to Apple, and those will be important influences on publishers’ decisions about what sort of product they produce. Apple has recently been reported to have rejected some titles from their app store in order to move them into the iBookstore; this might not be a major problem, may even be a very good idea, but it suggests that the publisher is at the mercy of a particular company’s policy at a particular time. For publishers this represents a change in their business operations; these intermediaries will be influencing the sort of product they create and knowing their rules will be very important. These are all important considerations and ones that mean publishers need to bear in mind a wider range of distribution decisions for their content.

Book apps

The challenges of producing apps

The area of apps for books has, it seems, created much more of a stir for publishers as they consider whether to enter this marketplace and, if so, how they can manage it. Smart phones and tablets have developed an app culture offering highly interactive, visual material; it seems like there should be potential for developing exciting app books. However, the apps can cost varying amounts to develop, while the prices charged for general apps are low. Sales occur through one main intermediary who sets the policies for those sales. More third party developers are required in creating and administering the apps. Should publishers be getting into this marketplace, which differs so much from their traditional arena?

Other questions emerge. While Android-based devices continue to grow, research generally agrees that users of Apple devices spend more money than those with Android ones, so the focus of development has generally been getting apps into the Apple app store. However, that could mean missing out on an important part of the market. But if it is also to be sold for Android-based devices the product has to be built again; this does not necessarily have to mean building from scratch, but it can still be an additional cost.

Question of scale

There are various approaches to app publishing and the business models vary here; there is a big difference between a small-scale app and a large one, while prices can vary considerably. Some apps can be created reasonably cheaply if they are not too complex and broadly follow a developed template; this can then be tweaked for another product. Others are expensive and involve creating a considerable amount of new content to supplement any book content already available. There are consumer reference materials, for instance (such as photographic travel guides), that it makes sense to have in an app format allowing easy navigation in a variety of ways around a range of visual reference materials; other apps take an extremely sophisticated approach to the material (Faber and Faber solar system) and recast it and extend it by quite some margin beyond the original print version. Scale therefore is much wider ranging when producing an app than an ebook: a publisher could be producing anything from a quick quiz based on their books through to a complex and comprehensive multi-layered work, and with all sorts of pricing patterns to adopt.

Development strategies

The costs of developing an app can vary enormously and for some of the complex, higher-priced ones a partnership approach is the only way to afford it. In managing the development of apps various approaches have been taken:

• Joint venture: where an app is extremely expensive to produce (some can be well up to £100,000 where new material needs to be commissioned and detailed research undertaken as well as complex software development) it is unlikely a trade publisher would easily spend the money, and examples of the most sophisticated apps tend to have been developed as a joint venture or co-publishing deal where each party contributes a certain amount to the project (in time, services, content, money, etc.); for every sale made they will gain a share of the revenue. Disadvantages here are that control and ownership both over the product and over the ability to interact with Apple’s app store can be lost for the publisher. Advantages however are the ability to produce high-quality content by involving partners who are expert at their different activities – whether producing audio files, specifically commissioned visuals, video content with actors, sophisticated GPS software, etc. The best people to deal with Apple may well be the developers rather than the publishers anyway.
• Buy the services of a supplier: paying the producer outright is the option that publishers would usually follow for less costly apps. They simply spec out their idea and pay a developer to produce it; here developers may be able to make use of their own software. The publisher then has complete control over the product.
• Hybrid arrangements: there are also hybrid models where developers offer a model which shares the profit. As an example, developers can cover the costs themselves, deal with Apple and own copyright of the app. They have fixed arrangements where they offer to the publishers a percentage of the revenue (the revenue left after the author has been paid their royalty). The publisher pays for the marketing of the product and manages the licence of the content from the copyright holder. There may be similar arrangements where developers have created a particular type of app template for which they have spent some time perfecting a certain unique type of navigation, or a way of integrating certain types of content, and this is used by a variety of publishers for their content. In these cases the developer still works as a partner rather than a supplier working to a publisher’s spec. ‘Made in Me’ is an example of an app producer that has a story book app that can be personalised; this has formed the basis of different collaborations with stories held by different publishers.
• Licensing: a publisher can simply license its material into other apps in a rights deal. As we see later, these are not necessarily that straightforward but they do avoid any involvement in developing digital apps.

Business models

The basic app business model has, perhaps more than other digital books, released itself from any ties with the profit and loss of the print versions. An app stands alone and, while the myfryapp mentioned above did link to the book, many apps take a title and move quite some way from the print product, ensuring that the profit and loss account has to make sense without being an adjunct to a print book. Once a product is self-supporting the cost of development of the content has to be included, not just the cost of the format, so this has put pressure on app profit and loss accounts. It is one of the reasons that the emphasis of some publishers is on apps that exploit backlist materials, some of which may be owned outright by the publishers so the cost of the content is covered; and other titles will at least have paid for themselves in one format so there is no need to build in the cost of a large advance (as an example).

In terms of generating revenue, app models have developed in a variety of ways:

• Paid for app: this is clearly a straightforward single transaction similar to buying a book. In general most book apps currently take this approach (if they are not free), mimicking the book environment; however, other forms of payment are likely to become more popular.
• The free app: this is broadly for marketing and profile raising. Here the cost of development needs to be covered; the marketing aspect of the app may be worth it, to create a buzz and draw attention to the publisher’s other activities (maybe its backlist), but it is difficult to measure in terms of sales success for other titles.
• The freemium model: the basic app is free but customers buy into additional material or services. This can cover the in-app purchase, where customers can agree to buy more material, and is increasingly popular. There are benefits: the app may be more attractive, overcoming some discoverability issues, while free; once engaged, purchasers may buy more access, which also helps the publisher get a better understanding of its customers. Publishers are usually confident of the quality of their content, so if they can get customers in to see it the purchase can follow.
• In-app subscription: this is also a common form of payment in the app marketplace and one that publishers may be able to use more effectively in the future as they experiment more with pricing. One of the trends is for consumers to pay a subscription for access and then expect content to be free once there, incurring no further costs; while there are questions about the devaluing of content (as we shall see in Chapter 12) this does mean the concept of a subscription is growing in currency if one can then follow up with enough content.

App pricing: the challenge of low prices

Pricing is, as ever, the central challenge. The average price for apps in general has its own dynamic and price points; book apps can be muddied by this more homogenous expectation around the price for apps. There are apps produced by specialist publishers that are able to sell at higher prices, but these do not require high exposure to a consumer market and can be marketed easily via the specialist publisher’s existing direct marketing channels. The challenge is therefore in the consumer market.

The general consumer is used to buying apps at low prices; yet their expectation of the content is high, their experience with interactive content-rich apps in other sectors leading those expectations. In general the arena of the app is based on very high numbers at very low prices (micropayments almost), which is not a natural environment for publishers. Free apps proliferate in the market, though often as a way to engage customers to buy into something more. However, even the next step up is still cheap and there are several price points before one starts to reach the prices that match standard paperbacks.

So publishers have to consider whether they want to move down to meet the prices at the low end or try to establish a price band typical for book apps. A book can have a lot more content than a single-use app for a very specific task so the market may support higher costs, but an app over £10 is an oddity and the offer has to be extremely compelling. Faber and Faber have famously produced apps at around £15 which have proved successful. These generate some revenues for Apple at that high price and for that reason do stand out at times in some bestseller lists. However, these apps are very sophisticated and extremely expensive to produce; the actual development of the app and its architecture is costly, as is the creation of materials that needs to go into the app (for example commissioning film crews to film actors reading Shakespeare).

App price expectations

Publishers have a challenge to create an expectation of a book price within an app environment and they have to strike a balance between pricing at a price that customers will buy and covering the costs of development. If you look at apps at a higher price, such as the Faber and Faber titles made in association with Touchstone, the quality and sophistication is clear immediately; but they also take the book into new arenas; for example, in the case of their Shakespeare sonnets app, specially commissioned video clips of well-known actors reading the poems mean consumers may value this in a different way, perhaps more like buying a TV programme or short film. The problem is the publisher has to choose carefully to ensure its core market will buy at that price, while educating newer markets that some types of book apps are so sophisticated and so very different from standard apps that they have to be priced differently, even if the actual price is very similar to a normal book price.

In general, then, the app price is lower than the book price but for that lower price a lower-spec app is produced. It can still be interactive and highly visual but it may not be very sophisticated. The cost of producing it must be taken into account. The problem that this raises is that customers expect apps to do a lot once they pay for them. They can see the limitations in free or very low-priced apps, and do not necessarily expect much from them, but given the technological capabilities of apps (capabilities that customers expect simply because they have got used to technology) they expect apps of any sort to do a lot – so once a publisher is charging over £10 the expectation of technological wizardry for that app is immense. Here again the publisher is moving into a world where expectations and valuation of content are very different from the one they are used to. A customer for a hardback cookery book at £15 knows what to expect and the content is the main feature; but expectations of a £15 app would be very much higher.

Not enough apps have been produced yet to create a sense of how app pricing for books may settle, though one advantage of the apps market is that prices can be changed regularly and there is a lot more flexibility to test the market, promote special sales opportunities (e.g. free days for apps) and change pricing if necessary; so as a publisher observes a market it can manipulate the price much more easily and find the price point where enough people will buy while still supporting costs. Of course playing around with pricing too much is tiresome for customers and no one wants to find they have bought a book that was reduced in price immediately afterwards, but the opportunities for experimenting are much easier to manage than through a traditional book trade.

One area where book apps are increasing rapidly is the children’s picture book market; one can see that well-known well-loved book characters make sense in an app environment where children can interact with their favourites. To some extent the content of the apps does not have to be extremely extensive and the pricing for children’s picture books is not too far removed from low-priced apps, so the gap between a book and an app price is less distinct. These title have several attractions for publishers: they can be marketed internationally; high-quality visual material can be reproduced cost effectively and in any quantity; translations can be arranged easily (key for children’s books).

Further challenges of the app market

There are some particular issues that publishers face with regard to the app market. These include:

• Updating: ebooks exist as a finished product once in the market and as they are reasonably straightforward they are not often affected by technological changes to devices. However, apps operate differently and with every new update in technology glitches can appear that need correcting to ensure the title still works. Providing updates and maybe additional material is something publishers need to consider; for other apps this tends to be considered as a free part of the service and so needs to be budgeted for in the original product. Updates can be a good way to present the product again to the customer and some publishers have noted increased sales to new customers when they have produced an update to their original product. However, this then raises other questions: do new editions need to be issued? If so, how often? These are questions that publishers have to resolve.
• Competing in the app environment: another aspect of apps is that, unlike the ebook, which still sits within a publishing environment, in this arena products may be competing with those produced by other sorts of entertainment industries. The quiz app, for instance, is not in the domain of book publishers alone and publishers have to consider whether they can really work within these newer marketplaces, with different competitors. In many cases, therefore, apps of this sort are often marketing tools, looking to drive sales of a brand name, whether in app or book environments, and care has to be taken over choices of products when deciding what to do.
• Finding partners: app developers will be working with all sorts of customers and may not always be focused just on book publishing (unlike the traditional suppliers that are more embedded into the book industry). They may well be working within games development and interactive media for a much wider environment. They can argue that book apps do need to go beyond the concept of the book in any case, but they are nevertheless working within a much wider entertainment industry. This can mean the low costs and tight profit margins that publishers often work to are not an attractive arena for them (compared to games manufacture, for instance). There are developers that work primarily with publishers and are able to offer smaller-scale opportunities for app development. App developers are proliferating and some are looking for content, so they will find links with publishers beneficial as they exploit the platform they are developing.
• New market entrants: some app developers will be doing their own publishing, finding their own authors and not going to a publisher at all. These latter groups are therefore developing business models that do not require them to fit a legacy of print products into their activity and they can do something new in an agile way, leaving behind the publishers, who have to redesign their large publishing structures. This is a very different supplier marketplace for publishers.
• Discoverability: the issue of discoverability is particularly important when selling apps. Publishers have to work hard at the continual promotion of the titles to maintain their presence in the app store. The category of book apps within the app store certainly helps a new title, mainly because there are not many book apps, so most book apps will feature in the bestseller lists for a while (as long as they can compete with Disney apps). However, within that, keeping your title to the fore requires constant effort, and as more books move into the area, further issues around discoverability emerge. Publishers have to monitor spikes in sales, perhaps after a good review comes out, and continuously market; watching rankings and trying to get the app noticed by Apple so it will feature on Apple’s recommended and editor’s picks lists are important. Overall, publishers are only beginning to understand the behaviour of customers in the app environment and this needs to be watched closely in order for them to work out how to manage app selling effectively.

Is an app worth it?

There are many considerations publishers need to be aware of when deciding whether to create an app. Even where one can be created cheaply, the publisher needs to be sure whether the app makes sense or not. There is an attraction to doing something exciting in the app marketplace, but as apps are such a challenge they really do have to be worth doing and make some sort of strategic sense.

The strategic objective needs to be clear. What is a publisher trying to achieve with an app? So, for instance, the app may need to make revenue, generating this by sales or access, in which case the costs needs to be balanced with the potential revenue. It may be that the app is more focused around marketing a product, in which case it is important to ensure there is a level of engagement with customers that may enable a publisher to assess its success. In some cases it may be purely strategic, to develop brand awareness for the company as a whole, or experiment with a format and price, in which case the break-even parameters may be a little different if profit can be put to one side.

Once the vision is clear, the type of development arrangement needs to be decided and clear objectives put in place for the arrangement, with detailed specifications and checks to ensure the project is managed effectively and does not try to do too much, go over budget or take too long.

Experience of working on multi-layered projects of this sort, developing new methods of communicating with different sorts of suppliers and building knowledge is important and takes time to develop, which explains why publishers are moving only slowing into this marketplace.

Apps are time consuming to set up but once fully in development can be produced quite quickly and can be made instantly available to the market once they are ready; the lead times and processes around marketing the product therefore are very different from traditional sales planning.

This expertise is not necessarily very different from the way specialist publishers have had to develop new project management techniques, but they have done so with the safe knowledge of a market ready for them; for consumer publishers the level of risk is much more difficult to quantify.

The impact of digital publishing on the wider consumer environment

Marketing and social media

This range of new product types emerging in the market poses challenges for marketing at just the point when the traditional approaches to marketing are changing. The activities within marketing departments are evolving rapidly in response to the sorts of structural changes that are taking place with the growth of digital products. Some argue that the marketing function will continue to grow in importance for a publishing house: where production spend is less, the marketing spend will need to grow to ensure discoverability for authors. It is a lot of hard work for a writer to undertake this aspect of publishing on their own, and marketing may be a compelling reason for them to choose a publisher above self-publishing.

In addition, as the number of sales personnel potentially declines with the decline of bookshops, marketing departments are becoming involved in negotiating deals and planning promotions with customers like Amazon. They have to develop greater expertise to deal with these sorts of key relationships. Reaching consumers in the traditional way of publishing generally meant creating some buzz and PR around a book in the form of reviews, events and awards, so driving consumer interest. Marketing needed to promote books to the key intermediaries, wholesalers and bookshops, in order to encourage these sellers to stock the books, making sure they had enough material with which to promote them while advertising books to get customers into bookshops in the first place.

Since the online marketplace can stock everything (the long tail), marketing has to expand its approach to focus not just on getting the book stocked on the shelves but also on discoverability of the book within the internet store. This challenge obviously exists for both print and ebooks. However, as more books move into a digital environment this can become more of a challenge and it is this that is changing the methods for marketing both print and ebooks. All sorts of techniques to develop discoverability are being explored, from posting animations or author conversations on YouTube to launching Twitter competitions and online games, for a new style of word-of-mouth marketing.

Marketing departments are rapidly developing expertise on the way to manage search engine optimisation, create good metadata in their material in order to facilitate keyword searches and ensure titles are highlighted as far as possible within online retail environments. They are also concentrating more closely on building direct relationships with certain groups of readers using social media. However, this requires skills in developing conversations and communities that have not traditionally formed a key part of the trade marketing activity.

Social media and content

Social media obviously play an important role in expanding marketing opportunities. A side effect of this is that, while social media are not the focus for monetising content for publishers, a considerable amount of content development of one sort or another is taking place on social media sites. Publishers have recognised the importance of using social media for marketing. Here are just some of the newer activities they will be engaging in:

• developing microsites for their key writers
• writing blogs for particular subject areas
• interacting with fan sites
• setting up competitions and events
• creating a buzz around Facebook sites and Twitter feeds

All of these require content, much of which needs to be created for these specific purposes. Some of this new content may come from authors (YouTube excerpts of key authors talking about their latest books or sample material loaded up early); some of this content may be being produced in house (such as reports on book events for blogs or other websites); and other content may be especially commissioned for the website, such as games to support a children’s book series. Trying to create opportunities for customers to spread the word to their friends about good books themselves is critical, harnessing the power of word of mouth so they do the marketing for you – this becomes part of your ‘earned’ marketing.

In this environment all this additional content is free to the consumer. That could be seen to be diluting the offering (for instance, is this the sort of material which might go into an ebook?) but is an essential part of marketing for social media.

Social media for selling

One of the purposes of this sort of activity is to create a more direct relationship with the market. As the bookshops continue to decline and online stores dominate, publishers are looking for ways to get in touch with their markets directly to understand them better. Traditionally publishers have only needed a number of well-established, well-run relationships with key members of the trade rather than hundreds of individual relationships with individual customers. They need to learn the skills to get in direct contact with their customers from both a selling point of view and a product development point of view.

Starting conversations with their customer base has been a big driver. From the point of view of selling it is important that publishers begin to cultivate a customer base that they can approach directly. A publisher is not expecting to move much of its market into buying direct, but there are compelling reasons to try and tap some of the market at least. Amazon may claim a large part of its market and, unlike booksellers, who are dependent on publishers, Amazon is less so; it can put pressure on discounts. Getting sales knowledge from Amazon is a lot more difficult than via bookshops and in effect the publisher is further removed from the customer than previously. This is particularly noticeable in the change to ebooks. When they were delivering physical books daily to bookshops publishers could watch sales and stock patterns change at any time they wanted; they could also see more precisely where the sales were going. Now they are not able to watch sales patterns as closely and even when they get a report on downloads from Amazon the data may well not be as rich.

A further issue is around reviews and recommendations. Customers are less likely to read reviews in newspapers, which are suffering a decline of certain parts of the market where free news has replaced the need to buy a paper. For other parts of the market, reviews in newspapers remain key but they now need to compete with the continuous reviewing of customers on the internet, who may just be briefly recommending a title they enjoyed or setting up well-developed blogs and discussion forums. The marketing and PR department has to consider how to engage with these new voices.

Social media for new product development

Publishers are also beginning to use social media as a way to access more content, not just for further marketing purposes but potentially to source authors. This may be a way for publishers to manage the slush pile, using readers of interactive sites where new stories can be posted to help sort new book ideas; the ones that seem the most attractive to readers of the site move forward onto a list to be considered by publishers (authonomy is an example set up by HarperCollins). Here are, potentially, the roots to developing new sources of content for publishers. We will look at content development in Chapter 13. Where it may not be directly sourcing new authors, any discussion forum or recommendation site can provide a publisher with important research into the way at least some consumers behave in a digital environment. Publishers will only reach a certain group of users who participate actively in social media, but this can still provide some useful knowledge.

Change for bookshops

The use of social media for marketing has been important as bookshops decline. Exposure via bookshops has, up to now, been critical for a book title and marketing activity can promote large titles to audiences that may not necessarily have browsed in bookshops. There is research by Bowker PubTrack (carried out in 2007 and cited by Thompson) about the choices of book people make and how they quite often buy a book they had not planned to buy (some may have expected to buy something, for others the purchase might have been made entirely on impulse). A buyer might be inspired to buy something from browsing without knowing beforehand what specific title they would buy; the number of books customers bought that they did not necessarily intend to buy is an interesting statistic that shows how far browsing can affect sales. The bestsellers will be high in a customer’s consciousness wherever they purchase, but for smaller titles, and particularly for gifts and highly illustrated books, where the customer is less usually looking for a specific title, the ability to sit beside a bestseller is important for attracting attention.

As intermediaries, the online shops are also less in the control of the publisher; publishers were able to organise promotions and shop fronts with bookshops to draw attention to particular titles and particular times; while deals are agreed with online bookshops, it is difficult to get the same impact. Amazon has also tried to keep conversations going and raise awareness of titles for customers specifically within the Kindle environment so that readers of ebooks are encouraged to interact explicitly with the online bookshop; this is done by recommending titles at the end of the book and creating an environment where there is rudimentary sharing of information with other readers of the book (allowing readers to read lines highlighted by other readers, for instance).

Bookshops are trying to develop their own internet presence; the large chains have sophisticated websites and some, like Barnes and Noble, have built successful online stores, but for others, such as Waterstones in the UK, it has been more of a challenge to create an online presence because Amazon had such a strong offering and online customers already. Independent shops that need to compete selling online books have options such as Hive from Gardners, a key bookshop distributor: here they can use the Gardners internet purchasing system and brand their own bookshop around it. Smaller bookshops are having to develop a greater community presence to maintain their business; they cannot afford to compete on discounts so need to develop other compelling reasons for customers to use them, whether it is by providing excellent individual service, reading group support or events (as examples).

With print being core to the bookshop business ebooks are a threat. However, it must be remembered that with the majority of sales still based in print, the bookshop is still an extremely important marketplace for a publisher even if it is competing with print distribution of supermarkets and online bookstores.

Bookshops do play an important part in showcasing titles and, in many ways, even where there is an ebook available the print title may be helping drive sales as a marketing tool, as the physical and visual impact is important; Amazon itself is aware of the power of the bookshop, providing a barcode scanner which means while they are in a shop browsing a customer can scan it into their Amazon app and purchase the title online. Meanwhile, where customers are not using bookshops but simply going online for ebooks, it becomes important for publishers to have some sort of direct relationship to build up the interest around new launches and keep customers aware of when a new title by their favourite author is due.

Publishers and the direct consumer sale

Some major publishers are developing the e-commerce aspects of their websites in order to develop the capacity to sell direct to their customers. Books can be sold in print form as well as downloaded, but the issues around compatibility mean they cannot sell a Kindle version and their systems are still not quite as smooth and as comprehensive as using an online bookshop. However, developing more expertise around e-selling may encourage at least a specific part of their market to buy direct, and with that sort of contact it is easier to profile customers and see who is buying their books. For the general market, customers will not necessarily know which publisher has the book they want, they may want titles across several publishers and they will stick with their tried and testing online marketplace. Publishers are also developing an online presence, setting up their own book communities. Anobii was set up by several major publishers to encourage reading and debating around titles, allowing users of the site to interact with each other alongside marketing activity. This particular site has been bought by Sainsburys in the UK. The site still exists in an international environment, while in the UK the community element of Anobii has been built into the Sainsbury ebook retail site, thus combining a well-established retail brand and a social network site to attract book lovers.

Issues for digital browsing

Online sites are paying attention to ways of improving the browsing experience. Amazon has considered this aspect, organising its bookshop to try and build a browsing experience in various ways, including:

• the ‘search inside’ mechanism to get an idea of a title
• rankings from sales
• recommendations suggested by the Amazon algorithms
• recommendations based on connecting the title to other titles that were also bought by other customers at the same time
• reviews from other Amazon users, which themselves are ranked for usefulness

These are all innovative ways to try and develop the ‘bookshop’ experience but they do not quite substitute for the randomness of a purchase in a bookshop; nor does the sampling quite replicate the ability to flick through a whole book and get a sense of the length and structure of it.

Futurising the book

While we have seen how ebooks are developing as a new format, they have yet to develop as a new product. The enhanced ebook is moving in this direction but there are still many aspects of the digital book that are essentially those of a traditional book. The tablet is increasing the opportunities to develop illustrated titles, though these also tend to be recognisably a book. The app is taking the book into a new environment and experimenting much more effectively with the way of interacting with a book, perhaps through a game or with a recorded performance; ways of linking the book or story to something more personal or something the reader can manipulate to some extent have also been developed. But many would argue the starting point is still the traditional book.

However, the technology to make the book something much more again is developing, and companies are beginning to spend time futurising how books connect to each other or how a narrative develops much more interactively again, maybe through GPS links to a reader’s actual location. Publishers at heart are creative and, with that, innovative. They have been innovative with content for a long time, even if innovations over format have been more limited up to now.

Publishers can see the opportunities to use an app environment to rethink the way the book works. These are examples of the different sorts of directions in which the book format can evolve within a digital environment:

• Narrative form: there are examples of products that have been moving to non-linear narrative forms – something that the children’s apps have certainly been doing and some experiments in adult apps are now exploring. There are titles with multiple endings and ways for readers to interact and direct narratives (such as Profile and Inkle Studio’s Frankenstein, where the reader is placed in conversation with Frankenstein).
• Shared experiences: another direction is to increase the connectivity of books, sharing reading experiences as you go and drawing elements of social media into the offering. Sharing writing too can build on this.
• Curation: in this arena editors can come up with much more creative ideas around content; they can curate new sorts of products or act as producers by bringing different content sets together and thinking of new ways to present them. New connections can evolve and readers can get a more holistic embedded experience.
• Navigation and presentation: for publishers there is suddenly a new space to explore ways to present things and overcome certain physical problems. For instance, an app can provide a new way to navigate a graphic novel, or stream in new content, or involve the reader much more closely. App developers are often looking for content to show off their exciting new presentation and content management tools.
• New authoring approaches: multiple concurrent narratives can be produced by different authors collaborating in interactive ways, taking over different elements or viewpoints of the story, adding to the content within real time, possibly responding to readers’ interactions.

The cost of developing more sophisticated books, whether through highly visual elements or sophisticated software, is considerable. There are many stories, often covered in news features, of the complexity of delivering such projects, while the market itself is not big enough to justify them. These efforts, however, do try to take a different approach, rethinking the product and using technology to solve problems and create ideas, rather than simply transferring a book into a digital environment.

Many industry commentators can be quoted as saying that publishers need to see themselves as entertainers and from that point of view create new entertainment technologies rather than look at what book content they have and try to convert it into a digital product. If publishers can see what it is they really do – provide entertainment or share knowledge or create learning opportunities – they will be in a stronger position to move forward and not be trapped by the legacy of their print pasts.

So publishers need to extend their view of themselves. The term curating has been mentioned; it is currently popular, indicating the range of content a publisher might be employing, selecting and organising in order to create a new product. In this, digital convergence can be seen more clearly. A publisher may be dealing with anything from knowledge management and games development to e-learning and collaboration; it could be including anything from user-generated material to especially commissioned video footage in its products. The products of the future will not draw distinctions between these sorts of different applications of media.

Once this is recognised it throws up much wider opportunities to collaborate. Larger-scale partnerships can develop across a range of industries; a London app is being produced by involving audio tours, a museum, a publisher (Macmillan) and news archives. This is an example of digital products, that are born digital, driving an area of convergence for publishers – a programme on television can link to a book, which can bring together a community involved in a challenge. This can be a way for publishers to broaden their definition of themselves and ensure they are involved right at the centre of the new digital world, providing the content part of the package since it is content they are really good at.

Conclusion

The consumer marketplace, having lagged behind the specialist markets, as we have seen, has in the last few years been set alight by digital publishing opportunities. Models for straightforward ebooks have been developed and, while challenges remain (about pricing for example), the simple shift of format has proved reasonably straightforward. However, moves to adopt a more innovative approach to content with enhanced books and apps are not yet very widespread; publishers are being innovative and experimental but not on any large scale: they remain understandably cautious, given the cost of investment required, as they develop new types of products in the consumer marketplace. This is not just because of the nervousness of the publishers. Consumers themselves are just starting to explore new ways around stories, narrative and content in digital environments; but what will become critical for publishers is the need to understand the way the changing consumer will value this new approach to content in the future.

Further reading and resources

Books

Darnon, Robert. The Case for Books. Public Affairs, 2009.

Phillips, Angus. ‘Do Books Have a Future?’ Coda in The Wiley Companion to the History of the Book. Wiley Blackwell, 2007.

Thompson, John. Merchants of Culture. Polity Press, 2010.

Websites

authonomy.com – the HarperCollins site encouraging authors

www.anobii.com – a community book site, originally set up by a group of publishers and now being transferred to the ownership of Sainsbury; the Sainsbury’s site can be found at www.sainsburysebook.co.uk

www.bookconsumer.com – for background to Bowker Pubtrack and its consumer book research

www.bookmarketing.co.uk – for research into the book publishing industry

www.bowker.co.uk – for background to Bowker and the various services it provides, including Pubtrack and consumer book research

www.goodreads.com – an Amazon-owned site for sharing reading experiences

www.shelfari.com – an Amazon-owned site for sharing reading experiences

www.tescoebooks.com/tescoweb/home.aspx – Tesco’s UK ebook site

www.theliteraryplatform.com – a news site that covers developments in digital publishing, focusing on consumer publishing and showcasing new digital app and enhanced ebook products

Questions to consider

1. What sort of digital publishing strategy makes sense for the print backlist?
2. How do you attempt to overcome the issues of discoverability?
3. How successful are publishers at building brands?
4. If you were devising a digital strategy as a small independent publisher where would you start? What information would you like to have?
5. Is there a future for the ‘enhanced ebook’?
6. What sort of apps do you think it makes sense for a publisher to engage in?
7. Take a selection of publisher websites and microsites. Which do you feel are the most effective at engaging the reader?
8. Do you think a publisher can really expect to create much of a direct relationship with its customers?
9. What is the future for bookshops and how can publishers work with them effectively?