Nelan
COO LexCycle, maker of Stanza
2008 was the inflection point for eBooks. $44 million wholesale eBook sales in last 4 quarters. This is new territory and the numbers are not easy to come by, but it is a small part of the business for sure now.
Oprah, Bezos, Sony are all talking about eBooks recently, so it's hit mainstream (LexCycle downloads went through the roof after Oprah spoke). netbooks are a phenomenon too and have actually cut into windows sales. e-ink has changed readers and in general mobile displays are improving greatly.
The iPhone is a great reader because:
-international reach
-color display
-multi-function display
-built in wireless
-no external light required (backlit device)
-app store (vendors are judged on merits of their applications)
Enter IDPF's EPUB
-user's don't care about standards
-the Jave EE world proves importance of standards
-proprietary formats (and DRM) creates lock in for vendors
-standard format eases the burden of conversion (converting your ebook to multiple formats before sending it out the door)
Stanza
-1.3 million users
-5 million books downloaded
-100,000+ books available
-12 languages
-one of the top applications in the app store
-0.1% of Stanza downloads are free. The first month was only with free books.
Primary usage of Stanza:
-in bed 31% (this shows the importance of a backlight)
-on bus/train 29%
-waiting areas 13%
-home 12%
-work 5%
-bar / cafe / lunch / dinner 5%
-airplane 5%
-2 writes mentioned "in the bathroom"
Stanza has a Fictionwise store, smashwords, feedbooks, project guttenberg, munzi
Adding a custom catalog is a published standard (can take advantage of GeoLocation)
For the Fictionwise store buying patterns are representative of print sales and has 3x sales growth since Dec 3. The average price point is $10.25
Publisher Promotions
-Pan Macmillan Excerpts - first notice of Stanza
-Random House has a free titles promotion / free excerpts
-Harlequin (more bold in the eBook space) has given 4 free minis in Dec and 15 free titles per imprint
The O'Reilly iPhone missing manual was sold as a separate app and was well fitted because of the color the iPhone offers.
Most important take away: It's all about the readers!
Lessons Learned - Readers
-Quality matters - virtuous or vicious cycle
-Every reader is unique - give readers lots of options to customize their reading experience (which font, size, color, etc)
-Every device is unique - things that work for an iPhone might not work for a netbook.
-Listen to the user - twitter blogs facebook - users are happy to tell you what you are doing wrong
-Give your readers a voice
-Moving users from established behaviors takes time
-Friction is bad (remove friction and sales go up)
-Immersive reading
Lessons for Publishers
-Calls to action need to be clear and contextual
-keep it simple
-Hold technology partners to higher standards
-Keep experimenting - be bold
-Have an eBook marketing budget
-Support EPUB
-Support DRM-free
Stanza will be available on other deices someday
Nick Bilton
"I'm not sure what you guys are actually selling right now"
March 22 1876 said the new device called the telephone was going to destroy culture because no one will go out. When the phonograph came out they said it would eclipse the telephone.
Teaches a course called 1 2 10
Gets students to think about mobile device, computer, broadcast
Everything is a story: comics, news, fiction, even user interface is telling a story. And now everyone is a storyteller. We are being bombarded with information. Gary Small did a study at UCLA which shows are brains are more lit up (more area) when on the net than reading.
On twitter we are dealing with all this with swarm intelligence. Us on the net us much like ants.
We used to all get the same content, but now we get smart content.
Sensors as editors (your deices are full of them that aren't taken advantage of) - smart content
Paper is just a device, don't worry about the death of paper. it doesn't offer immediacy. Children are growing up in a world where they are omnivorous and opportunistic. They want immediacy and paper doesn't offer that.
IM and SMS represents a hybrid form of communication, no more dangerous than acronyms
When the printing press came out words moved to the page and stayed their until the web. TV and radio were other forms of communication [which might say publishers missed an opportunity twice and let other industries take over story telling instead of jumping into it as a media company]
The music industry has dealt with new devices and moved form records to tape to CD, but publishing hasn't done that.
"It's all just storytelling"
"I called up major publishers and asked to speak to the R&D group and they said 'the what group?'."
Smart cookies - cookies that exist on iphone, laptop, desktop
Some content is constantly changing and some sets static and we need to be conscious of that.
Versioning is a difficult concept to take from paper to online. Maybe a wikipedia model works for books.
The people in the music industry were so focused on the old profit levels that the rug was swept out from under them. People will pay for content, there is a profit model that will work.
There shouldn't be a book, a video, etc of the same story, they should all be used together in an immersive media and tell one story once.
When journalism started two philosophers debated whether the newspaper should be about the editors telling the proletariat what to think because they're too stupid or should the people tell the story. The former won (with the exception of letter to the editor). Now things have flipped on their head.
Tim O'Reilly
Reasons to be Excited!
Billions of people are coming out of poverty. Alex Tabarrok says it's as if we had a supercomputer with billions of our processors were offline and are going online.
The routing maps of the net are increasingly looking like neurons.
Already the web has published more pages of content than all of the books in print (the ones Google looked at for their project).
Lightweight development has to be part of the publishing process. There can't be a spec and rfd and weeks before it happens. You need to be able to pick up the phone and get it in an hour. You need to partner with people where it makes since. They had the idea of the Missing Manual and called Stanza.
The cell phone is ubiquitous and increasingly is the answer to questions (for instance you want to know which team one a basketball game, you can just look it up instead of debating with friends) [what's that mean that we won't have those knowledge debates? Will there be some shifting in the social status of people?]
compete.com shows how goodreads, shelfari, and librarything are on upward swings. There is a reading public on the net that are sharing information about books. [are these sites going to be the new publishers/editors that choose what we read?]
Stephen Fry is the second most followed on Twitter and is doing a great job self marketing.
Publishers need to get serious about being useful to their authors. The authors shouldn't have to self-market [or maybe they can, but the publisher provides the tools]. Look at 37 Signals and how they didn't need a publisher.
Everybody is not equal on blogs, some have more power. The job of a publisher is to make the authors more equal.
People talk about the long tail, but the people at the head of it have a lot of influence. Tim O'Reilly twittered about a site and the traffic had a huge bump.
Personalize the feed. People follow Tim O'Reilly, they don't follow O'Reilly Books.
Don't just make announcements
Reflect and amplify your community
Talk about what matters to you
People are paying for access to information. The internet is basic cable. Safari online books is a premium channel. There's also pay per view and people buy PDFs.
DRM gets in the way of people reading
Share what you learn so we can all get better faster together.
Sales from O'Reilly eBooks show that PDF sales are growing faster than mobi and epub. PDF has also consistently been largest. (Some books are only sold as PDF because they are too complex to go into the other formats.)
Participation drives revenue - when users are given early access to books under development, revenue in Safari more than doubles.
Web teaches us writing is no longer a solitary experience [wrong: it's still solitary, but now there are many co-authors]
The sales of the iPhone missing manual seemed to be additive. They doubled the price and sales went down 4 times, so they removed that.
Google's concept of algorithmic pricing is probably right.
bookworm is a great digital reading experience
Free books will enable the market for pay books
It's not just about making money
"Go forward, get out of here, make stuff happen"
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