In this article, Wired’s (@wired) Angela Watercutter (@WaterSlicer) writes how “with tablets selling at mind-boggling rates, book publishers are scrambling to figure out how to bring their ancient medium into the digital realm.”
Though the rewards promise to be great, the adaptation book publishers must make is far more complicated than that faced by the music and movie industries, which essentially needed to digitize their current products. Bookmakers must become multimedia companies — creating audio, video, and interactive components for their immersive, built-for-tablets offerings.
They also face a dizzying array of decisions brought on by evolving standards and platforms: Should a certain book come to life as a dedicated app, an approach that, until iBooks 2 was released, offered more flexibility in terms of features like video and audio on the iPad? Or should it be turned into an “enhanced ebook,” which will work on Apple’s tablet as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and other devices, but must be re-created several times over to meet each device’s specs?
Therein lies the rub: are enhanced ebooks a profitable return-on-investment for publishers? This is explored by Digital Book World (@DigiBookWorld) in Andrew Rhomberg’s (@arhomberg) “Some Tough Questions for Enhanced Ebooks.”
Also see our previous blogpost, “Extensive New Study: The Rise of E-reading” and Mike Shatzkin’s (@MikeShatzkin) analysis, “A feast of data to interpret in new Pew survey of book readers about ebooks.”
And then there’s the article, “A Billion-Dollar Turning Point for Mobile Apps” by New York Times (@nytimestech) tech reporter Jenna Wortham (@jennydeluxe) that, even though it focuses on the Web strategy of entrepreneurs and start-up companies, may have implications for publishers preparing ebooks and ebook apps for tablets.
The path for Internet start-ups used to be quite clear: establish a presence on the Web first, then come up with a version of your service for mobile devices.
Now, at a time when the mobile start-up Instagram can command $1 billion in a sale to Facebook, some start-ups are asking: who needs the Web?
“People are living in the moment and they want to share in the moment,” says professor S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University. “Mobile gives you that immediacy and convenience.”
Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you plan your strategy for ebook (as well as pbook) publishing.
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