Disrupt Publishing Opportunity in Chaos

Who wants to break the Internet?

Notice all the publishers in the list? Godin says these guys are putting money into supporting SOPA. 

Hachette Book Group

HarperCollins Publishers L.L.C.

Hyperion

Macmillan

McGraw-Hill Education

News Corporation

Pearson Education

Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

The Perseus Books Group

Random House

Reed Elsevier

Scholastic, Inc.

Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Time Warner Inc

W W Norton

Wolters Kluwer

You should click here to tell Congress this anti-internet legislation is bogus…after all,  Tumblr will be one of the first to get shut down if this thing goes through. Then how will get you get your disrupt publishing info?

There is a natural limit to the growth of digital? I still know people who have cords attached to their phones, but they don't buy much

The level of digital disruption might hit 20% of sales at Hachette in 2011 - a huge number (up from 1% in 2008). This is an interesting interview. I’m pretty sure 50% is way too conservative, but it makes the future seem much easier for publishers.

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Hachette Digital’s Maja Thomas on Digital Revenue, Bookish and the Leaked Manifesto  

Q: In 2011, Hachette is expected to derive 20% of its revenues from digital. How will the company accomplish this? What will this number be in 2012? In 2015?

Maja Thomas: It’s an interesting question.

I started in audio and spent a lot of time in audio. At first, I was at the beginning of a business that didn’t really exist. It was a minimal part of what we did. When I took it over and started to really work on it, it had that rapid, hockey-stick growth; but it took ten years to get to 10% of the revenue of hardcover books.

With digital books, it’s been a lot faster: It was 8% last year, 4% in 2009 and 1% in 2008. It’s now surpassed 10% in less than half the time.

Audio was the first publishing business to go digital. It was the first business where the file could be delivered by iTunes. At first, our revenue was 90% or more physical and much less on the digital side, but, as time went by, this has started to shift. While other publishers have dropped the physical format, we have not. We are at 50% physical.

There is a natural limit to the growth of digital. I think it might be 50%. The book as an object is a perfect object. It has a lot of utility. People love it. There is something about a book. We’re going to see again a doubling of our growth over the next few years, to 40% or more. But once we reach a plateau, we’re going to have two businesses: a digital business and a physical business.

The Kicker Tactile Touchscreen Reader: A Touchscreen Interface for the Blind

Now that technology is increasingly accessed through touch, isn’t it odd that it all feels like glass? Technology is at our fingertips. How can we use the sense of touch to control it?

Good point. Cool stuff, particularly the discussion of skimming, visual reading, and braille grids. More here. 

It's not that simple.

Arguments between digitizing vs. keeping it on paper are oversimplified. It’s not about which one is better, it’s about what these formats make possible. From Sarah Werner’s Fetishizing Books and Textualizing the Digital:

…And there you go. The digitization folks talk about access and the book folks talk about being in the presence of the object. Neither side tends to present a more nuanced sense of how they might each have something to offer the other

…This is such ridiculous tripe, it’s hard to know where to start. The basis of his argument seems to be that access diminishes value: if you can come across this stuff too easily, you won’t really have earned understanding it. 

…But access is not all that digitization can do for us. Why should we limit ourselves to thinking about digital facsimiles as being akin to photographs? Why should we think about these artifacts in terms only of the texts they transmit? Let’s instead think about digitization as a new tool that can do things for us that we wouldn’t be able to see without it. Let’s use digitization not only to access text but to explore the physical artifact. What would be the book equivalent of the extreme zooms, as you have in Google’s Art Project’s depiction of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” 

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I would go beyond Sarah Werner’s physical inspection, and consider the amazing things we can layer on top of the text. But this is a start.