“E-Myths”

Peter Kilborn | 10/07/2009

The Independent Publishers Guild (IPG) has over the last year or so initiated a series of Digital Quarterly meetings aimed at the sharing of information with its membership on digital matters. The IPG is in profile a grouping of fiercely entrepreneurial companies, large and small, which are loosely defined as outside corporate control. Its members, many of which are highly successful publishers in niche areas, have typically battled to find ways to sell their products outside the conventional trade channels; and its meetings are always rewarding in terms of the out-of-the-box thinking which is their gratifying characteristic.

At a recent event, David Attwooll, a veteran digital publisher from before such a term had been invented, presented an entertaining ten ‘e-myths’, debunking some of the current hype around e-books. His message was the sane appraisal that publishing is not defined by any particular delivery mechanism but existed to provide content or information to an interested audience by whatever means that audience required.

Here are the myths (and you can read them in greater detail on the Bookseller web site at http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/97286-my-favourite-digital-myths.html and http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/97827-my-favourite-digital-myths-ii.html):

- Content is king (context is everything).
- There will be an ‘iPOD moment’ for e-readers.
- Do nothing: no one’s making any money (they are: Reed Elsevier have revenues of £3bn from digital publishing; and in the US – if not here - Kindle sales   are growing to significant levels).
- We need to do everything ourselves (outsourcing of digital services is no different from outsourcing print or copy editing).
- You have to be a techie/under 25/a futurologist (you don’t).
- We’re all doomed!
- We’re all going to be unimaginably rich.
- E-books cannibalize print sales.
- People read online in the same way as printed books (studies show that even readers of academic journals have a much less sustained online reading experience).
- You have to be big.

You could argue that there are some internal contradictions within these myths, but the message is clear: digital publishing is best viewed in the context of publishing in general and not as something which needs to be re-invented.

The meeting also included an informative rundown from Tanya Price from the Random House Distribution Division on the issues publishers of e-books need to address. These included the necessity to acquire electronic rights not just in a text but also in related illustrations and images as well perhaps as in fonts; the crucial role played by metadata in enabling discovery of digital products; and the timely reminder that digital editions are – unlike printed books – subject to value added tax, currently at 15% but scheduled to revert to its previous level of 17.5% in January. This inevitably distorts the issues around pricing raised in my last post: an £18.99 Dan Brown in printed form is a £16.50 e-book (£16.15 in January). The government takes the difference!

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