iBooks Open to All: Good or Bad?

Wed, 2 Jun 2010 06:35:08 -0600

With Apple's recent announcement that the iBooks store is open to anyone, it begs to ask the next obvious question - is this a good or bad thing for authors?

The initial obvious answer is that it's a great thing for authors. No more middle man taking a cut of the proceeds. No more agents or publishers blocking the door to the path to publication. And no more requirements to fit within the limited confines of what the publishing industry has decided is the hottest genres or even fitting within a definable genre. With direct access to the iBooks store, the doors have been thrown wide open, making the possibility of publication available to absolutely anyone.

But, really, is that what any of us want? And did Apple really make it easy enough for anyone to get their book in the store? Read through the application, and you'll find a few caveats to the process. Each book submitted will need a 13-digit ISBN, be in ePub format, validate against epubcheck 1.0.5, and contain no unmanifested files. Once you have that done, you'll need to get your own US Tax ID, a valid iTunes Store account with a credit card on file, and you'll need to own an Intel-based Mac running OSX 10.5 or later. Oh, and you have to apply and be accepted into their program.

So, in the end, it looks like Apple hasn't done away with agents or publishers at all. They've simply taken over their job. Now you'll have some entry-level techie scanning your manuscript for erotic or inflammatory content. The Apple employee won't catch your typos or mis-spellings, but they'll nail you to the wall for violating Apple's decency clause.

It is my own contention that this new policy is not good for the publishing industry and will not allow the masses access to the next budding Stephen King. Consumers will still gravitate to titles recommended by the established publishing industry. And authors who decide to go it alone will get mired in the details of the process and end up producing manuscripts that were not worthy of surviving the established vetting process. The sales for the majority of independent titles will be paltry ... and that poor sales track record will go on to plague authors who then want approach an established publisher in the future.

There will be a few breakout titles, but overall, I am not convinced this is a good thing for anyone but Apple.

Will Readers Pay for news e-print?

Thu, 6 May 2010 08:53:12 -0600

A couple of years ago, if you asked me if e-books were a viable option, well, let’s just say disdain and condescending would probably help describe my attitude. A lot has changed in two years, and with the introduction of the Kindle and Sony e-readers and the newly introduced iPad (and with rumors that Google will soon be introducing their own e-book store), the handwriting on the wall is clear. New Media Publishing isn’t the wave of the future, it is the imperative for survival.

I read an article today on Forbes.com that I want to share with you all - not so much because I think the writer has it all right in his premise, but because I think it is a perfect example of someone in the print industry seeing part of the answer while still desperately trying to hang on to a dying revenue model. When I started my iPhone app city guide company this past October, the first challenge was to develop a viable business model. I had to define who my real customers were, how much they might be willing to pay for my services, and whether the content produced would be of high enough quality to attract those customers to my platform.

From my own experiences over the past six months, it is my contention that the newspaper and magazine industries need to completely throw out the baby with the bathwater. What worked in the past won’t work now. Print is often the last place people now get their news, not the first. And with enough free news sources who will not play ball when it comes to charging consumers for content, it will be an uphill battle - not to mention a bad PR move - for print media to try to make their readers go back to a paying model for online or smart phone content. It’s like trying to charge $2 for lemonade when a booth right outside is offering it for free. It won’t work.

So how do I think the print industry can re-tool to not only survive the changes in the industry but maintain quality of reporting standards? Decide who their customers really are. Are the customers actually the readers? No, not really. A customer is someone who wants to buy what you have to sell. Consumers no longer want to buy their news when they can get it through radio, television and websites without paying. The real customers are businesses who either cannot afford to develop their own content for new media platforms and for those who have come to the realization that the massive costs involved to develop branded content is not worth the few times consumers interact with that content before throwing it away. When you consider that most iPhone apps have a shelf life of 8 uses, it seems like a tremendous waste of money to throw hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases to develop an app for a specific product when those hundreds of thousands of dollars could be used to spread a far wider net for paying for in-app content across multiple resource, utility and social apps which attract a wide user base.

Printing anything is expensive. If most newspapers and magazines tossed the print version and went solely for web and smart phone content, their expenditures could be better spent hiring software developers who could help create dynamic publishing platforms to solve the real challenge facing today’s smart phone publishers. Except for the option of creating RSS feeds which require an online connection to update, smart phone app content is often stagnant and slow to update. Once that challenge is solved, the publishing industry can lower costs of publication and speed dissemination to the masses in ways never before possible, making themselves a very attractive platform to businesses with products and services to promote.

A very wise business advisor gave me a vital piece of advice as I was first developing my business: decide who you real customers are and then do not charge anyone else. Instead, develop alliances and partnerships which allow you to provide the very best content for the end customer.

Newspapers and magazines still have a vital place in the information age. All they need to realize is that their customer has changed. Once they figure that out, the rest will sort itself out.

about lisa abeyta

iBooks Open to All: Good or Bad?

Will Readers Pay for news e-print?