These were some of the themes from Monday's digital publishing symposium The Digital Revolution: Publishing in the 21st Century, hosted by the Australian Publishers Association (APA) and the Australia Council at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne.
With the imminent launch of Apple's iPad and the iBooks ebook store planned to accompany it (in the US at least), 2010 is shaping up for many commentators as the year of the ebook. And while many in the Australian publishing industry have been dipping their toes in ebook waters over recent years, the feedback on Monday's one-day symposium, being repeated today in Sydney, suggested an industry-wide acceptance that the need to enter the realm of digital publishing is not just real, but urgent.
‘"Will people read digitally?" is not even a question anymore,' said keynote speaker Stephen Page of Faber & Faber UK. ‘You have to make digital products--you need to make them over the next year,' he said. ‘And if you don't make them you won't get to play in that space.'
The Faber story: from fear to excitement
Page's presentation, together with that of Bloomsbury UK executive director Richard Charkin, were part of the kick-off session looking at digital publishing outside Australia. Like many speakers through the day, Page was keen to emphasise that digital meant more than just ebooks, and emphasised that the Faber team had been reorganised so that the digital department cut through all aspects of the company, rather than being seen as a separate department dealing only with ebooks.
Faber's digital efforts include a print-on-demand (PoD) program, Faber Finds, with titles selected from the publisher's backlist, initially by Faber authors and later by Faber readers using the company website. The chosen titles are then made available for one-off printing, complete with a simple yet stylish cover, unique to each title and designed using an algorhythm (to avoid high cover design costs). The program is ‘self-informing' said Page. ‘People who buy one Faber Find tend to buy half a dozen.' Also central to the publisher's digital strategy is the company's presence on Facebook, Twitter and its blog ‘the Thought Fox'. Publishers shouldn't make the mistake of believing such social media will make readers think they are ‘cool', Page believed. Instead, ‘we tell people in a calm [colloquial] way what we're doing'.
One of the key advantages of participating in social networks such as Twitter and Facebook is the opportunity it affords publishers to listen in on readers' conversations, to keep an ‘ear to the ground', said Page (in a comment echoed by Charkin and by Random House Australia's sales and marketing director Brett Osmond in his presentation on digital marketing later in the day).
As for ebooks themselves, Page admits that Faber has ‘decided that the moment has arrived' and is rapidly converting titles to ebook files-aiming to have 1100 ebooks by July this year. In the process of readying for the ebook revolution-preparation prompted by the 2008 UK release of the Sony ereader and the release of the international Kindle a year later-Page said the Faber team's attitude had moved from fear to excitement. ‘The good news is we can all really calm down,' he said. ‘The [ebook] rush is real but once [you have books] ready in ebook format you can act quickly.'
And as for those publishers worrying about which exact titles they should be converting, Page pointed to Faber's top-selling ebooks, which mirror the company's top selling ‘p-books', to demonstrate there was no great mystery to ebook title selection. ‘It's just your best books, selling like your best books,' he said.
Pricing: why readers will pay more (but not that much more) for ebooks
Page raised a number of issues relating to ebooks that occurred frequently over the course of the day, as indeed they do whenever the conversation turns to ebooks. Following the recent stoush between Amazon and Macmillan in the United States, the question of ebook pricing was a recurring one. Page said that Faber was ‘conservative' in its pricing, setting a ₤12 to ₤14 price-point for most e-titles. ‘The key to pricing at this stage is to [establish] the value of copyright,' he said, emphasising that the industry ‘needs to persuade consumers' that the price of a book reflects the value of its copyright and not the cost of producing it.
While Text Publishing's Mandy Brett queried during question time whether ‘that ship had sailed', a subsequent presentation by Michael Tamblyn, vice-president of content, sales and marketing at Kobo Inc-the Canadia-based ebook provider which has recently partnered with REDgroup to provide ebooks on Borders, A&R and Whitcoulls websites by May-suggested that the US$9.99 price-point for ebooks established by Amazon in the US had not necessarily ruined publisher's chances of resetting the acceptable price point for ebooks.
In a well-received presentation Tamblyn outlined results from Kobo's reader surveys which indicated ebook readers valued many aspects of ebook reading--the fact books can be instantly downloaded, the convenience of reading them, the fact that (at least with Kobo's model) they can be read on any device and the fact you can move them between devices--above the lower price of ebooks. Tamblyn said the survey indicated readers would pay more than Amazon's common US$9.99 for an ebook, but no more than US$14.15.
Kobo's survey also showed that ebook customers already have firm ideas on why they think an ebook should cost less than a print one: it hasn't incurred printing and transport costs, can't be shared around or sold and may be locked to one device
Local digital publishing: still waiting on ‘robust channels to market'
On the local front, Pan Macmillan's Victoria Nash, Allen & Unwin's Elizabeth Weiss and Spinifex Press publisher Susan Hawthorne--the well-informed usual suspects when it comes to public discussion of Australian digital publishing--outlined their experiences. Weiss pointed out that it was ‘no coincidence that Allen & Unwin and Pan Macmillan have educational lists', explaining that the move to digital resources in the educational market had ‘driven the move into ebooks' for both publishers.
Weiss said Australian publishers have been ‘organising digital rights and converting [books to ebook formats]' and that it was ‘time for the next step'. This was taking place now and included discussions with vendors. She reiterated the common publishing view that publishers are waiting for ‘robust commercial channels'.
For those only starting to address their digital strategy, questions to consider included how much of the work of conversion to handle in-house, which titles to convert, what ereading formats to go with, what to release when and pricing (though obviously not necessarily what the customer would end up paying).
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