Lessons From The Mobile Plunge

Differentiation and budgeting are key to successfully entering the booming mobile app marketplace, said panelists last month at the Publishing Business Conference’s “Making the Most out of Your Mobile Opportunity.”

Annette Tonti, CEO of mobile publisher MoFuse, predicted that 2% of the U.S. population will own Kindles by 2013, with 7.5 million active Kindles and $813 million in annual Kindle e-book revenues. But iPhone apps are the subject of most of the excitement and innovation in the mobile app world, even though the number of book-related apps is currently dwarfed by those of e-books on single-use reading devices.

The number of Book apps available in the iTunes Store (27,235) eclipsed that of other kinds of apps for the first time last month, reported app research company Mobclix. But according to a recent report by Dutch research firm Distimo, books still make up less than 5% of the apps actually downloaded.

In this cutthroat environment, “the key is that you understand what your goal is,” said Ryan Charles, Senior Product and Marketing Manager at Zagat. He added that finding out what devices your readers are currently using is also important.

The marketing angle for the $9.99 Zagat-To-Go app, launched in 2008, is to enhance the “core, in-the-moment experience” of readers by helping them find local restaurants and reviews on the go. The app uses augmented reality technology to overlay information about local restaurants on the phone’s realtime camera view.

Chelsea Green’s $4.99 app for Howard Dean’s Prescription for Real Healthcare Reform takes a “more utilitarian” approach, said Kate Rados, Director of Digital Initiatives. The app includes a “citizen action kit” that connects to Facebook and Twitter and allows readers to look up their Congressmen. Publishers should begin by “looking at the backlist and thinking, if I were a reader, what would I want to carry around with me?’”

One backlist title that made an app-fueled comeback is Perseus’s 2006 YA title Cathy’s Book. The $0.99 app, which blends sample chapters with illustrations, animations, voice-acting, and game-like elements, is more “alternative reality game” than ebook, said Peter Costanzo, Director of Online Marketing, in a follow-up interview. “It’s a different experience entirely from reading a book.” The app turns from an e-book into a fake iPhone, allowing the reader to “call” different characters from the story, it “forces[the reader] not only to interact with the book, but interact with the product itself,” he said.

Ambitious app concepts must be rooted in solid financial planning. Rados recommends that publishers minimize financial risk by forming partnerships with mobile content providers; that way, publishers can share back-end expenses instead of fronting money for development. Rados used as a financial case-in-point the $4.99 “HappyHour” app she worked on when she was at Sterling. Sterling created the app in-house at a cost of over $10,000, but it sold only modestly and is no longer available. In retrospect, Rados said, hiring an outside agency and bringing in a corporate sponsor would have been wiser.

Saving money on the back end helps keep the app price down, a crucial factor when competition is fierce. Costanzo said that partnering with Extended Books helped to keep the price of Cathy’s Book at $0.99. Rados cited HappyHour’s $4.99 price tag as nearly prohibitive; many similar apps are free. A $9.99 price tag doesn’t necessarily meant doom, but Distimo found that the average prices of the most popular book and game apps are $2.49 and $2.82, respectively. Worldwide, app prices have dropped 15% since last year.

One area where Rados does recommend spending real money is marketing, “breaking through all that noise” in the app marketplace by establishing a set budget for promotion. Ultimately, the first step is the most important one when you feel that you have book content that’s distinctive, said Charles. “If it’s something you know no one else has, I think you should feel free to start experimenting—now, rather than later,” he said. Rados concurred. “At least try something. If you’re not experimenting, you’re not learning.”

Should Publishers Attend SXSW?

As the Interactive portion of SXSW winds down and the music crowd takes over just as the rain appears, it’s time to consider what SXSW accomplished this year for publishing types—and whether it’s worth attending going forward.

As Richard Nash, a newbie this year, marveled, “If there’s a tech show that is friendly to culture, this is it.”  As a newbie last year, I couldn’t believe that “creative” and “geeky” coexisted so easily in so many speakers, panels, and attendees. Half a dozen sessions were mindblowing enough that I can recall specifics a year later.

This year, not so much.

True, there were some terrific panels—including, I’m relieved to say, two well-attended publishing-related ones: New Publishing and Web Content, moderated by Jeffrey Zeldman, with Lisa Holton, Erin Kissane, Mandy Brown and Paul Ford; and A Brave New Future for Book Publishing, with moderator Kevin Smokler and panelists Kassia Kroszer, Debbie Stier, Matthew Cavnar, and Pablo Defendini.  There was also a stunning brave new world panel called Imagineering the Fully Digitized and Connected Future that presented a day in the life, 2015-style.

But on balance—and this sentiment was shared by others—a certain pizazz was missing.  Was it that the crowds were bigger, so that some sessions got closed out early?  Was it that, as one person put it, the panels started resembling cliques, made up of like-minded friends who didn’t have a whole lot of creative tension to share? Or was it that, when the audience (this correspondent included) is so busy writing and monitoring tweets on the current panel, as well as those going on concurrently, it was hard to absorb the points being made—and even harder to not to feel that other, better sessions were being missed?  Is sxsw setting itself up to foster a sense of deprivation—why am I here listening to this, when I could have, should have, been there, listening to that? Read More »

Lessons from O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing 2010

“If you don’t eat your own children, someone else will”: That’s how Michael Mace, Principal of the Silicon Valley–based Rubicon Consulting, began his presentation, “Check Out My Scars: Seven Lessons from the Failure of E-Books in 2000, and What They Mean to the Future of Electronic Publishing,” at the 2010 O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference, which took place February 22–24 in New York City.

Mace, former VP Product Planning at Palm and VP Marketing for Softbook Press, warned against falling in love with the way you’re doing business today—inevitably, it will change. Sure, important barriers to e-book adoption—availability, pricing, usage patterns, and marketing—mean they’re not going to take off as fast as some people think. Printed books may be the last thing to go. And since the economic structure of traditional publishing is unstable, it’s tough to figure out when the real change will take place—but when it does happen, it will go very quickly. So how to predict what’s coming? We can look at the year 2000.

In 2000, hopes were high for the many e-readers on the market (including Softbook, Rocket eBook, Go Reader, Hiebook, Franklin eBookMan, and others, “more than there are now”). That year, the Industry Standard optimistically forecast e-book device sales between 3 and 7 million for 2001. (Point of reference: Kindle has sold an estimated 2 million units.) And Dick Brass, then Head of E-books at Microsoft, predicted that by 2020 90% of publishing would be electronic. “He’s got ten years to go, but I don’t think we’re likely to hit 90% in the next ten years,” Mace said. So what went wrong at the turn of the century? Read More »

March 2010 Roundup

PEOPLE

Major changes at Random House under Madeline McIntosh, President Sales, Operations, and Digital. Joining her team are Nina von Moltke, VP, Digital Publishing Development; Amanda Close, VP, Digital Sales and Business Development; and Pete McCarthy, VP, Online and Digital Marketing. Andrea Sheehan, formerly VP & Director, Digital Strategy and Business Development at RHPG, will now report to von Moltke as VP, Digital Publishing and Product Development. Amanda d’Acierno, VP, Publisher, Random House Audio, Books on Tape and Living Language; Tim Jarrell, VP, Publisher, Fodor’s Travel Publishing; Fabrizio Larocca, VP, Creative Director; and Susan Livingston, now Director, Digital Business Management and Planning will also report to von Moltke. In addition, Sheila O’Shea becomes Director of Publicity, Digital Initiatives. Read More »

What Can The iPad Do For Paginated Media?

Though hardly the “Jesus tablet” it was purported to be, the new Apple iPad offers game-changing, possibly industry-saving opportunities in paginated media, according to Tuesday’s mediaIDEAS webinar “Blowing Away the Hype: What Is Your Future, iPad or E-readers?”

David Renard, mediaIDEAS analyst, pointed out the critical design flaws in the product, including poor readability, limited size, and short battery life, but nevertheless called the iPad launch a “call to action” that requires corporate strategizing and investment from the highest levels of management to address the potential of iPad-compatible brand extensions, which are what he called “the key to the future of publishing.”

For book publishers, the problems of luring customers to long-term reading experiences on an iPad screen might be offset by making books into full-color multimedia experiences, revolutionizing the content. Renard also predicted the rebirth of micropayments, the once-hyped payment method of the 90s that flopped in broader Internet applications but has been the financial engine behind iTunes. With micropayments, magazine companies may finally make more from circulation than from ads, Renard said. And with minimal setup costs for iPad media, he foresaw immediate ROIs.

Though the magazine publishing industry has aggressively pursued iPad adaptations of their content, the book publishing industry has not embraced the new e-reader entrant as enthusiastically. It remains to be seen if Renard’s “call to action” will indeed reinvigorate a troubled publishing environment.

On-Demand Publishing Is In Demand

On-demand publishing has overtaken traditional publishing in yearly title output, signaling a surge in products like customized print-on-demand books, according to a recent Publishing Business webinar, “Customized Books: What Is The Opportunity?”

On-demand publishing has enjoyed jaw-dropping year-to-year growth in market share. The number of on-demand titles published in the US in 2008 increased more than 200% from 2007 to 285,394, overtaking the publication of traditional titles (which dropped 3% to 275,232) for the first time, reports industry resource Bowker. According to Interquest, a digital publishing market resource, the books-on-demand market has increased from 20 billion pages in 2006 to 38 billion in 2009.

Barbara Pellow of market research firm InfoTrends predicted in the webinar, broadcast this month, that print-on-demand would continue to rise as on-demand book production costs continue to fall. Richard Adey, managing director at children’s UK book publisher Penwizard (www.penwizard.co.uk), explained the logistics behind his company’s personalized, print-on-demand children’s titles. The customer designs certain elements of the book, such as book characters, through an interface on the Penwizard website. Penwizard produces books using a web-to-print digital press that transmits data on customer-designed book elements, stored in a SQL server, to a remote printer. An individual customer’s order fulfillment takes up to three days due to the need to accumulate multiple orders for batch printing. Adey noted that, in customized book publishing, publishers form direct relationships with their customers, allowing publishers access to their demographic data but exposing them to the problems of customer service.

Rick Bellamy, CEO of on-demand manufacturing company RPI, described how a similar digital printing method was used by Against All Odds Productions (www.theobamatimecapsule.com) to produce their personalized Obama Time Capsule books. In those books, personalization was available through customer-uploaded photos and text and appears in several different places, including the front and back covers.

Penwizard’s Noddy books sold a respectable 10,000 in the UK within two and a half months. But RPI’s Bellamy admitted that his Obama Time Capsule books did not sell as well as expected and did not turn a profit. Though the exponential increase in the output of on-demand books is clearly encouraging, it’s not clear if consumer demand has risen to match.

TOC Pass: The Winner

Peter Garlid of LibriSource Inc. is the winner of the full conference pass to the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference.

Congratulations, Peter! Please e-mail me back ASAP.

I’ve e-mailed Peter to let him know he’s the winner and will call later today. If I haven’t heard back by 6 PM on Monday, 2/8/2010, or if he is somehow unable to attend the conference, we will randomly select another winner.

We had 92 responses to the survey. We selected one using Random.Org, a random number generator.

The Data Is Coming!

After Ipsos/NPD, which provided consumer data to the Book Industry Study Group’s Trends, exited the market, publishers struggled to get timely—or detailed—data on their consumers, and because their customers were retailers, they had little idea of who their readers were. The data that existed was too generic and surveyors often used questionable methodologies to get it.

But that is rapidly changing. Three relatively recent entrants into the market are the Codex Group, which surveys Borders customers to discover about genre, author, and jacket preferences (see our coverage here, here, and here); Bowker’s PubTrack, which partners with MarketTools, Inc. to conduct surveys; and the latest entrant, Verso Digital, which relies on its access to numerous “deep vertical” sites and is now rolling out a new service, tentatively called Verso Flight Plan.

Flight Plan makes Verso Digital’s survey technology available to publishers on a subscription or à la carte basis. It lets publishers carry out their own title-specific consumer research and pre-publication testing of book jackets, titles, and copy. They can analyze author awareness and audience size, run online focus groups, and delve into various vertical Reader Channels (such as Thought Leaders, Women’s Romance, and Science Fiction and Fantasy). The service will launch by the end of March; for more information, contact Business Development Director Jack McKeown at jack [at] versoadvertising.com.

Recently, Publishing Trends interviewed Bowker Director of Client Development James Howitt about PubTrack Consumer. Howitt, who previously worked at BookScan, said he realized four years ago that Bowker, which at the time was attempting to compete with Nielsen BookScan, should “move away from POS in the trade market and [instead] directly survey the consumer.”

In the past, “it was easier to get a consumer to buy your product,” says Howitt. “All you had to do was get it into Barnes & Noble or Borders. But now, with e-readers, publishers becoming vendors, and search sites becoming publishers, consumers can go anywhere to purchase a book. Traditional tracking of core channels no longer reflects the whole size of the market.” Though Bowker is known primarily for its core product, Books in Print, the company is increasingly becoming known for following the demand chain of the book process—beginning with ISBN registration and ending with PubTrack Consumer, for publishers.

PubTrack Consumer, released in 2007, provides publishers with data regarding consumers’ book purchases, demographic, and behavioral profiles. Some clients include Random House (the charter subscriber), DC Comics, Zondervan, BISG, K-Mart, and Direct Brands. The cost of access to the service varies by client, Howitt says. Some companies, with complete toolset access to the data, can analyze information any way they want. Other companies have to rely on Bowker to come in to present it.

To obtain its data, Bowker works with MarketTools, Inc. (MTI), an online market research firm, using its ZoomPanel tool. MTI has a pool of 10 million active names of people age 13 and up (they receive rewards points for participation). Bowker tracks 3,000 unique individuals each month.

“In the past, companies like this were either doing phone-based or diary-based surveys,” says Howitt. “But if you try to get hold of a 13-year-old, they don’t have a household phone, they have mobile. If you’re doing diary-based surveys, you’re relying on someone with good handwriting, someone who’s able to distinguish Harry Potter #1 from Harry Potter #7.” As for internet access, Howitt says that since nearly nine people out of ten in the U.S. have it, “that bias…doesn’t affect what we’re doing.” (MarketTools weights the sample to eliminate any remaining bias.)

Panel participants answer 65 questions about their book-buying behavior. A participant is first asked to report on all the books she has acquired in the past month, including books bought as gifts. She types in each book’s ISBN (a diagram shows her where to find it; the ISBN ties back to the Books in Print database), which pulls up the book’s format, author, etc. Next, she answers questions about each purchase, such as:

How much did you pay for this book, excluding tax?
How was the book displayed when you first saw it?
What other items did you buy at the same time as this book?

“For the first time, the industry can see a book’s real average selling price,” says Howitt. “One of the things POS is great at telling you is that a book sold 20,000 units last week, but it’s not designed to tell you if that 20,000 is made up of 18 to 29-year-old females.” Kelly Gallagher, VP Publisher Services, notes that Bowker can also go back to previous participants and ask them more in-depth questions. The company also launched a Cover Analysis service last year.

Publishers have always had trouble attracting advertiser interest, and Bowker’s research opens up the opportunity to determine correlations between book buyers and brands. Now publishers just have to sign up for the service and learn how to use it.

Book View, February 2010

People Roundup

Lots of movement at Barnes & Noble: Liz Scheier has joined Barnes & Noble.com as Editorial Director, working with publishers to create “unique, exclusive content digital opportunities throughout our digital distribution platforms, including in store programs” and reporting to Theresa Horner, VP Digital Products. She was most recently Director of Publishing Relations at ScrollMotion and previously an editor at Random House and Penguin. Mike Ferrari has left the company. He had held several positions there, most recently Director, Digital Content at B&N.com.

Margot Schupf has joined Sterling Innovation as VP, Publisher. She was SVP, Editorial Director, Digital Publishing for the Morrow/Avon/Eos group.

With the demise of Air America, website Editor-in-Chief Beau Friedlander may now be reached at simnyc [at] rcn.com.

Ron Marshall, Borders CEO for barely a year, has resigned to join A&P. Michael Edwards, who joined Borders last fall as EVP and Chief Merchandising Officer, has been named interim CEO. He will report to Mick McGuire, Chairman of the Borders board. Also at Borders, Dan Angus has become VP, Customer Loyalty, and will be in charge of loyalty marketing programs and initiatives. Angus was formerly VP, Customer Relationship Marketing, for Guitar Center.

Scott Lubeck, most recently VP of Technology for Wolters Kluwer Health, Professional and Education, has been appointed Executive Director of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). Lubeck has also held executive positions with Harvard Business School Publishing and Newsstand, Inc., as well as with Perseus and National Academy Press.

Nicholas Brealey announced that John Groton has been named Sales Director for the North American operations based in Boston. He joins Editorial Director Erika Heilman and Finance Director Jill Friedlander. He was most recently at Globe Pequot, following many years at Random House.

Whitney Peeling is leaving PublicAffairs to “volunteer for a few months in India and Bangladesh.” Jaime Leifer returns as Publicity Director. Leifer was at Perseus from 2001–07 and was most recently Public Relations Manager at The New Yorker.

Sydny Miner has been named VP, Executive Editor of the Crown Publishing Group after 26 years with Simon & Schuster. Read More »

Win a Pass to Tools of Change!

Publishing Trends is an O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing media partner, and we’re excited to announce that we are giving away one FREE pass to the conference sessions (a $1245 value)! The conference takes place February 22–24, 2010 at the New York Marriott Marquis.

To enter the contest, please complete this (quick!) survey about PT by Friday, February 5 at 12:00 PM. We will post and contact the winner (one randomly selected respondent) on Friday afternoon.

Take the survey