Seybold: E-Books Build Momentum
Seybold attendees got an earful about e-books this week in San Francisco, with a bevy of announcements and plenty of stimulating dialog about the technology and how it will affect the future of publishing. Show goers would have been hard pressed to miss the announcement from Microsoft of its new Reader product, or the alliances struck between Microsoft and Amazon.com, and the Adobe announcements about acquiring Glassbook, a developer of consumer and commercial software for the e-book market; partnering with Barnes & Noble.com to sell PDF e-books online; and plans to work with iUniverse.com to develop a service that streamlines the process of producing and distributing e-books.
But they may not have heard the presentations that began on Monday, which was e-book “Special Interest Day,” covering the issues surrounding e-book standards, implementation, and digital rights management (no discussion about e-books goes very far without also becoming a discussion about DRM). In an open-mike session at the end of the day, panelists described the synergistic relationship between e-books and print-on-demand books, which publishing markets will be first affected by e-books, and how traditional publishers must adapt their businesses to the technological changes that they face.
“It’s the content, stupid,” joked James Sachs, CEO of SoftBook Press. Until now, Sachs says, e-books have faced the conundrum of the chicken vs. the egg: The volume of content won’t grow without good readers, and readers won’t be developed unless there’s content. Sachs also predicted that e-books will legitimize paid content on the Web, as there’s no precedent for giving books away online as there is with news, magazine, and other published content.
Judy Kirkpatrick, executive vice president and general manager of MightyWords.com, said “need-to-know” forms of publishing will be the first to embrace e-books. These forms, she said, would include reference books, corporate documents, and investment research. The favorite image that e-book pundits like to invoke on this topic is that of the college student who currently spends hundreds of dollars on textbooks that they then lug around in a backpack, and ultimately sell back to the bookstore. With e-books, the heft and (perhaps) prohibitive cost of textbooks become nonissues, and the content will be both current and modular because it doesn’t have to go through the slow, linear print manufacturing process. Also, acceptance of e-books is a generational issue: Young people are generally less reluctant than older consumers to read onscreen, and they welcome the benefits of e-books with less hesitation.
The challenge for publishers, Sachs, Kirkpatrick, and others said, is to maintain their value and brand in the brave new world of e-book publishing. In the last few months, especially, there’s been speculation of how traditional publishers will survive as it becomes so easy to self-publish. But pundits point out that book publishers add significant value to the process — editing, publicizing, branding, manufacturing, and distributing works — and those services will only become increasingly important as a way for consumers to determine the quality of unfamiliar content.
At another conference, Mark Resmer, CTO of iUniverse.com, described how consumers will soon be able to build custom books online. For example, a vegetarian student traveling to France might cull a chapter on vegetarian restaurants in Paris from one travel book, a chapter on French wine from Wine for Dummies, and a chapter on how to travel cheaply by train from yet another book. Then they can choose a format, perhaps downloading the content as a Microsoft Reader book, ordering the content as a paperback printed on demand and shipped out to their home, or using any number of other delivery methods. “E-books give greater empowerment to authors, publishers, and content consumers,” he said. “We are going through a continuous revolution of the publishing process, in terms of technologies, tools, and participating players. The possibilities for distributing modular content to the market are explosive.”
And in a session in which pundits spoke of the future of publishing, Paul Saffo , director of the Institute for the Future, described a world where the use of paper is much more selective. “New technology creates new forms of media,” he said. “We’re in transition now. We’ll never be paperless, but some forms of content on new media don’t make sense for print.”
This article was last modified on June 30, 2023
This article was first published on September 1, 2000
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