Photo Credit: Renato Mitra
With print sales falling faster than tween girls are falling for Justin Bieber, book publishers are getting a bit panicky. In not so modest desperation, they’re looking for a savior…
Enter the iPad.
Advertisers are lining up for periodicals, and according to the Wall Street Journal, breaking out their checkbooks for iPad deals. This has caused some minor elation, even among more traditional book distributors.
This, I think, is foolish.
Fact: the iPad won’t save publishers
This is a given. Publishers and news organizations need to get over themselves. Henry Blodget tells us why:
The iPad-will-save-our-asses craze is based on a single, flawed premise: Consumers want to read magazines and newspapers electronically the same way they have read them for centuries in print — in a tightly bound content package produced by a single publisher. But 15 years of Internet history suggests that they don’t.
I’m going to say that the same logic that extends to periodicals will be true of books: we assume that people want iBooks—which are presently just an emulation of a paper book with resizable text—when really, the value of a book is almost always wrapped more in its content than its container (almost always).
But what about sexy video integration? Won’t customers pay more for that? Again Blodget:
Some rich aesthetes might do that. (Some.) But the mass market won’t. The mass market will just save their money and read the publications in the iPad’s browser, where the publications are free and it’s easy to jump around to as many as they like.
The question then is, why can’t we do this with ebooks too? Put them in the browser I mean.
The iPad is a distraction
The way I see it, publishers really have only one responsible option at the advent of the iPad age: rethink how their content is formatted, defined and delivered.
Sure the iPad gives us living canvas we’ve only gotten glimpses of in the iPhone. But I don’t expect this type of media to ever completely replace the ubiquity of traditional text-based content that we pass so freely on the web (and on bookshelves) today.
After all, TV didn’t kill radio
The problem is that publishers are often stuck thinking in terms of “definite content” on the iPad. Craig Mod writes,
…Definite Content is not only aware of the page, but embraces it. It edits, shifts and resizes itself to fit the page. In a sense, Definite Content approaches the page as a canvas — something with dimensions and limitations — and leverages these attributes to both elevate the object and the content to a more complete whole.
And really the point is that for the first time, we’re able not only to have a sharp, 1-to-1 representation of a physical page, but we’re also able to think of the iPad as an, in Mod’s words, “infinite content pane.” Entire chapters can be in one vertical scroll, pictures can flow seamlessly in a horizontal line, etc.
We’re stuck on the content form for one device!
What we really need is something more flexible…
A case for formless content
IMHO, the path publishing should take is to go back to first principles—to understand what the Internet is good at doing and how people use it:
The Internet is good at copying and quickly transferring bits from place to place.
People are good at sharing content they like.
People don’t have a consistent experience in using the web: they use a variety of devices (computers, phones, tablets) with a variety of operating systems (Windows, Mac OS, Android) on a variety of browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).
With so many ways to access content, it stands to reason that, as Brett McLaughlin writes,
The first group/publisher/company/person who moves away from the ebook and to content–content that can be delivered to a variety of media, digital and non-digital, with display and style applied separate from and after content creation–wins.
For publishers, it’s not about art: it’s about ubiquity
I’m looking forward to the aesthetic experience of the iPad.
But the masses don’t give a crap.
The masses demand something that can be easily accessed and experienced through a variety of devices. And more importantly for publishers, the masses demand content that’s easily shared.
So as we face the arrival of the iPad, with all of its multi-touch, high-resolution glory, I’m going to suggest that publishers also turn their focus to their greatest ally: text, and more specifcally, XML.
XML allows us to do precisely what McLaughlin suggests—separate our content from its form, reapplying format to meet various device specifications and delivery options for browsers (HTML5), first-gen ebook readers (ePub), etc., etc.
Our goal at this point should not be flashy presentation, but widespread distribution.
This path that McLaughlin sets out isn’t hard from a tech standpoint. We just have to cut through distractions like the iPad and do it.
What do you think?
-Andrew
Image credit: renatomitra on Ficker; see original for copyright info
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Tags: Internet, iPad, publishing
