booklab

It is just amazing how a really big organization like Amazon in less then 2 weeks makes an about face in their strategy for their arguably most ambitious strategic project, the Kindle.

After doing everything and a bit to roll out a radically proprietary machine, closing it like a can of Campell’s tomato soup to avoid piracy, and sharing of content, or allow any other players to put their fingers into the matter, they make a contrary statement, without blushing, saying that funny word: Oh, we discovered that there are a number of folks out there who perhaps won’t buy a Kindle, but who have a phone and who want to read e-Books as well. Sorry guys, we forgot about you initially, but right, why wouldn’t you continue to spend your reading money on Amazon.com. So welcome, and here is our reading software, help yourself.

The 2 simple things about (printed) books are that we got used to read wherever and however we want; and we like to pass that book to our friends and colleagues. Both of which e-Books so far tried hard to boycott - and therefore failed.

Bringing the books to your phone is quite another story.

But then, at what price?

Amazon already set their benchmark at $ 9.99 - while many publishers, notably in Europe, started to struggle for e-Books to be priced just as printed books.

A friend pointed me to the Apple iTunes store which I had not explored so far for books. In some aspects it is still weird, as the iTunes store indexes books like “Music style: Book” - hinting that books only start to pop up on their radar screen, but they do come up.

They offer many freebies or cheapies, and the most popular, at least in Germany - you would never have guessed - are Karl Marx, followed by Goethe (oops) and Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” (the Bible, in English though, is only #6).

The really interesting thing however is pricing, plus the fact that some publishers started already to experiment with *cool* community driven backlist titles that are still under copyright. Karl Marx (who is free already, is priced at € 0,79, like Goethe). More relevant are probably recent titles by living and therefore copyrighted authors. I found a brand new eBook version, released on Feb 9, 2009, of Gerhard Polt: Hundskrüppel (Polt is a “cult” author and popular comedian in Germany) at € 3.99. The same title is offered at the Amazon online bookstore as an audio CD at € 16.90, as a hardcover book at € 12.90, and as a paperback at €7.00.

Perhaps even more important is still another element illustrated by the iTunes store: Whoever is used to this iTunes environment takes it for a given that music videos, podcasts, audiobooks and now books are integrated into one realm, one pattern of *culture ware* (or stuff that I want to hear/read/watch), and the boundaries between say music and the word or the pictures have already blurred.

The book arrives here as a late, yet highly honorable guest at this party, and will certainly get integrated fast, but as just another format between all the many others. So the singularity, the uniqueness of the book will be gone - well, not really, I assume, because there are good reasons for the book to be considered as something special, as I have argued recently. But it is going to be interesting how things evolves.

Jason Epstein, only a couple of weeks ago at the O’Reilly Tools of Change” conference, had this wonderful metaphor for what is going on right now, before our eyes:

“Like blind men in a room with an elephant, we cannot begin to imagine the eventual consequences as digitization and the Internet ignite a worldwide Cultural Revolution orders of magnitude greater than Gutenberg’s inadvertent implementation of western civilization.”

I guess it is a big elephant indeed.

The German book trade magazine buchreport published its yearly ranking of the top 50 German language book retailers (chain stores as well as local chains) emphasizing once again the dynamics of market consolidation.

The 2 leading chain stores, Thalia (a division of perfume retailer Douglas, with book revenues of 801 m Euros) and DBH (the combined Hugendubel and Weltbild groupformed only in 2006, with revenues of 711 m Euros) are way ahead of the rest of the pack. Their closest competitor Mayersche has only 145 m Eros in revenues.

 Well, this is not entirely true, as online retailer Amazon released its sales figures for Germany of 1,48 bn $ or roughly 1 bn Euros in revenues in 2007 (it was 1,1 bn in 2006 - or up 31 % with currency exchange effects taking into account). (Figures reported on 3 March 2008 by Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - available online on subscription only)

Acknowledging that Amazon sells a lot more than just books and other media, with estimates guessing that all media combined represent ca. 60 % of Amazon’s German sales, this puts Amazon at least at #3 in Germany, and probably as the retail book and media company with the most dynamic prospects of groth.

Here you can find Paulo Coelho’s new megaseller “The Witch of Portobello” - for free. Oh, and yes, it is entirely legal. Courtesy of Harper Collins, Coelho’s US publisher.

Why they give away Coelho’s new book digitally? In order to sell it on paper, of course. And Harper decided, as of today, to start putting books up online for free more or less systematically. With Coelho, this will be one book per month, in a read only, no printing, no saving locally version, yet of course with a direct ‘buy this book’ link attached.

Harper Collins is, after all, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire of News Corp, and he has a reputation of both not doing anything without thinking of the money he can make, and of having a pretty good nose for when is the moment to jump on a band wagon of innovation. Remind you that he had acquired MySpace, and thereby heavily boosted all of web 2.0

In an interview with the New York Times,  Harper’s top lady Jane Friedman called this kick off of serious experimenting (I guess this is what it is, after all): “It’s like taking the shrink wrap off a book“.

This is an interesting concept, I think: Using digital to **open books**.  (I will discuss all the many implications of this in a special post here soon).

But as for today, take note of a number of co-inciding recent announcements, related or not: Simon & Schuster created the office of a Chief Digital Officer “for the full scope of the company’s activities in the digital realm.” Random House meanwhile will start to sell “chapters” of books online, starting with “six chapters and epilogue of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die for $2.99 each”, according to the Wall Street Journal, and quoted by The Bookseller.

While I’m not sure if the price tag of $2.99 for a chapter is a sticky idea - I remember an earlier announcement by RH (or was it Amazon) of a bit more than a year ago of a penny a page - and sorry, I did not check now what was the correct quote.

But the strong news is this: Publishers - and for sure, rather sooner than later, online booksellers even more so - start to take the web seriously (and, oh, right, Amazon just acquired Audible, to sell bookish content truely online, and not from their brick ‘ mortar warehouses).

Add to all of this the sheer number of books that are somehow available digitally online - in all of those restricted forms, as ’snippets’ with Google, in digitalisation projects - with many users craving to access them at once.

My point is: This is how the eBook market will take off for real, not through heavily rights managed closed boxes in the style of Amazon’s Kindle. Cost is not the main hurdle. It is that (a) why should I want to digitally buy a clumsy and bastard variant of a book reading device, and more importantly, (b) why would I allow anyone selling me that digital book to intrude into my ways of using that book, so that I can’t give it to my buddy, or do with my copy whatever else I want.

So, when publishers stop sitting on their digital books and start to experiment, put up stuff for free, cooperate with their writers, and their writers’s communities, when booksellers get serious about downloads of audio (and therefore need to consider if they will use RDM, or learn from the music industry and prefer high usability), and start to consider of all of this in integrated strategies (with some Chief Digital Someone), they may liberate forces that are really relevant.

More on this soon.