“Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.”
― Douglas Adams
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Device wars leave ePub3 to rot on the vine
The unfortunate reality is that ePub3 is less and less likely to become an adopted format as long as retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Kobo continue to to develop in opposite directions. The tragedy of digital books is it is not the books but the devices that are driving retailers right now.
Online retailers should be paying careful attention to the methodical work of Google and Microsoft though. The rules of the digital distribution pipeline are far from defined. In fact they are still in the early evolutionary stages. One day they may wake up to find in browser readers and instant Bing and Google book search buttons funneling readers to HTML5 cloud based content hosted by the publishers or authors, effectively cutting them out completely. Google’s restructure of PLAY and Microsofts in-book ad patents get largely ignored because of the focus on the traditional old school retailers but both need only change how they place book content on their search listings and apply lessons learned from watching what Amazon does well and learning from what Apple did so poorly to begin to siphon sales away. ~ eP
Microsoft Gets Patent on Relative Advertising in eBooks
I don’t particularly see advertising in books as a bad thing. Ad supported books could mean the difference between a $9.00 and $1.00 retail. Ads for other books similar to the one you are reading or movies based on the book would make sense. Certainly nonfiction books hold lots of opportunities. Home Depot and do-it-yourself books for example. I can see links to Etsy sites like classifieds at the end of craft books and drug companies creating incredible interactive ad pages in Dr. Oz’s next bestseller.
Of course the immediate reaction that crops up with many is this is a bad thing but I think the consumer will set the tone and acceptable level of this integration of advertising into reading (this isn’t new, newspapers and magazines have done this for decades) by not buying books where advertising is too intrusive. I imagine we will eventually get an easy skip this ad button or be able to page through quickly like many web popups. No reader will tolerate a countdown clock till they can read the next page. We will just stop buying from a publisher or retailer whose advertising disrupts the flow of reading too much.
I prefer to believe this represents some very positive potentials here though. Digital publishing needs to find a new revenue model more tailored to the new way we need to distribute content on the convergent web because the page and the screen work differently. Pages are bound and packaged and easily sold as a unit. Screens instead are projected and broadcasted on. It is streaming content not a physical product we are reading on our phones, Kindles, iPads and laptops. Broadcasted media is usually free or accessed on a rental or subscription basis. This model requires new and more flexible revenue flow in order to support it.
The good news for the reader in the long run is that while printed or manufactured content is primarily supported by consumer dollars, with broadcast content more of the cost burden is shifted to the publisher and retailer/broadcaster this often comes in the form of sponsors and advertising. New tools that help create alternate revenue streams make more possible things like book channels with unlimited access to as much as you can read for modest monthly sum. Books fully funded and supported by page view ad revenue could mean libraries instead of retail stores become how we get all our digital books. Imagine reading whatever you want as easy as watching TV.
Relative adversiting in ebooks can become a valuable tool for facilitating the evolution of book distribution and a core foundation of publisher revenue streams and if so Microsoft could hold the patent on a tool as important as Google’s ad clicks. ~ eP
Microsoft prepares their tablet for the big announcement…
Suck On Steve Ballmer's 82 Inch Tablet
Back at Mobile World Congress 2012 there was an 82 inch Windows 8 device, a behemoth of a contraption, that nobody thought it was actually for consumer use. Well, there’s at least one consumer with such a toy: Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s CEO.
