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eBooks Follow-up: Other Likely Early Adopters
January 27, 2010 | Neal | No commentAfter posting yesterday on eBooks I woke up this morning to a post on TechCrunch that my ego is sad to report is much better than what I wrote. Some of the points are the same but as the author is actually paid to write full time he does a much more complete job of pointing out the places where devices like the Kindle and the soon-to-be-released Apple Tablet might make some inroads. I have to say, I completely agree with his premise that authors and the media companies that sponsor them will be slow to leverage the opportunities afforded by the new technology. Not too long ago we had a conversation with an author of business books about the very topic that Mr. Kincaid discusses in the quote below:
But it’s going to be tough. My concern is not that Apple will fail to deliver; I have little doubt that their product launch tomorrow will be stellar. My doubts lie with the content providers themselves. Yesterday, the LA Times ran a story that touched on this:
Although Apple has proved its deftness at creating trendy devices and a digital store in which publishers could sell their wares, Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner said there will be plenty of trial and error before newspaper, magazine and book publishers figure out the “fine art” of creating digital editions that take advantage of the device’s graphics and video”… “Where’s the opportunity? It’s creating book experiences. It’s taking a cookbook and adding video and author updates. That’s an opportunity, because you can charge extra for that.”
The question, then, is how long it will take publishers to figure this out for themselves. Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I think that this will be a long and frustrating process. Look at how long it has taken the large media companies to fully embrace rich, multimedia content on the web.
The one point that wasn’t made in the article was that the iPod/iTunes Store soared to popularity BECAUSE they required very little of music publishers other than to sign a contract for more revenue. The iPod delivers music in unchanged formats. The first version of the Kindle does much the same thing for books – same content in a more convenient device. The iPod doesn’t really offer much in the way of technology that would push music in a different direction (it was already multimedia before iPods existed) but some combination of eReaders, laptops, and smartphones have a chance to change the way that content that was traditionally delivered in print is delivered. I would argue that the 24 hour information networks – CNN, ESPN, etc. – have already started down this path by taking print journalists and transforming them into multimedia journalists via a combination of feature-length articles online, magazine articles, blogs, tweets, embedded video clips, and more formal appearances on the television network. The author of the article I quoted appears to be looking to the traditional book publishers to “make the leap” but it is my guess that the TV networks are more likely to work “backwards” from their TV properties to written and multimedia forms before the publishing industry pushes “forward” into multimedia. For those who missed the ABC-driven mystery novel Heat Wave that spun off the TV show Castle and went as high as #6 on the NYT Best Seller List.
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