The Future of Publishing
This is a very clever video produced by DK in the United Kingdom, one of the biggest publishers in UK.
The book publishing industry is perceived to be a sunset industry. With the launch of Apple iPad, Kindle and many other E-book devices, people are telling printed book publishers like us that we have to accept the death penalty of traditional book publishing, pack our bags and look for a new job elsewhere. But is the future for us so full of gloom and doom?
I have been a book publisher for more than 17 years, but I have never seen myself as a ‘printed book publisher’. I see myself as a content creator. I see myself as a knowledge and information provider. Well, maybe because the books we produced over the years are more non-fiction based. The book is just a medium where knowledge is packaged, shared and accessed. The printed book is the default medium because, it is cheaper to print books than to do in any format and it is what people want (maybe until now).
If the future is one where people prefer to have content on mobile and e-devices, so be it. We just have to change and convert our content to these growing e-devices. But is it easy? Are we talking about content conversion with just a click of a button? Of course not. This is where the problem comes and those who can overcome the challenges will stay in the business and those who can’t shall be become the hugry ghosts of the printed world.
What are the challenges faced by publishers in the digital revolution?
1) You got to think in color, images and interactivity.
2) You got to think in bite size information
3) You got to think what is the best way to teach and deliver knoweldge to the end users given the fact that now you got a variety of media to use – texts, images, videos and sound.
These challenges are not easy to overcome and here is why:
1) Publishers often think in black and white – in the printed world, color means high costs, more work and expensive. It is not economical to print a full color book for just 1000 copies and expect to break even should the book fails. But you can afford to print in black and white and take a risk on the title and you may not lose your pants. Images are expensive too and run into thousands of dollars, if you buy from photo stock libraries unless the publisher or author provides its own images. So, images are NO NO. Videos and sounds? NO NO — few publishers know how to shoot a video and many don’t even know how to record his own voice into the computer. The closest thing may just be the web-cam. These are not just the tools that a typical publishing company plays with. These are toys that belong to the video production companies.
2) How to think in bite size when experience tells you that a book with few pages will get few customers.
3) Did I hear multi-media and animation? What is that?
You see the problems?
Are publishers prepared for the digital world? The answer is NO. The mindset, the skills and the hardware are missing. Why is that so? Because, those who sing to the digital tune and the developers are mainly not from the publishing world. They are techno geeks. They forgotten to rope in a publisher like me to board their bus. So, now publishers are stranded.
Publishers are not the only one who are left behind. The authors who are the kings and queens of content did not board the bus as well! The author’s mindset still resides in the printed world, few authors are ready for the digital world. How many authors really blog? How many authors know how to build a website and promote themselves and sell their book on the internet? How many authors have created a book trailer or shoot a video of themselves talking about their book? But, you may say, that’s the publisher’s job. You are wrong.
Authors today have to think multi-media to embrace the digital world. My view is that few authors are there yet. The author of the future cannot think and write for the printed world and leave the conversion of the content to suit the digital world to the publisher. This does not work. Let me give you an example. We have produced a number of e-books on CD-Roms using an e-book publishing software. We also received many enquiries by cookbook writers who are looking to self-publish their own recipe books. Now, the problem with recipe books is that it must be printed in color. And to print in color means it is expensive and it does not make economical sense if you do a small print run of anything less than 3000 copies. As an enlightened publisher, I happily proposed the idea of doing an e-cook book because now you can put in as many color images as you want in it and it does not really increase the costs of produciton, you can make less than 1000 copies for your ebook and still it is a viable project and best of all, the reader can print any page he or shes likes and bring to the kithchen and cook the dish! Now, you can even film yourself cooking a few recipes and it’s like having your own cooking show like “Yan Can Cook” series on CD-ROM. Wow! you can become a star chef now!
Now, this sounds really fantastic to me! But few cookbook authors are as excited as me! The authors tell you– but people like to hold the book and flip the pages!
My point is that the technology has arrived but the content has not really arrived. There is a gap. The content creators have not really caught up with people who created these devices. Direct conversion of printed content to the digital world, will not work in the long run. We need new content creators who can think digital to make this work.
The fear is not if these digital devices will wipe out the printed texts, but are publishers and authors able to be equipped and be ready to transform itself to become the Content Warriors of the digital world.
(Copyright Rank Books. No reproduction of this article is allowed without the permission of Rank Books.)
Welcome to Rank Seminar.