Michael Jensen | 03/29/2010

As some of you know, I teach graduate courses at George Washington University’s Master’s in Publishing program, and have for years.
Watching the cohorts entering the program, and seeing how they’ve changed, has become a social experiment of its own, for me.

The class this year was team-taught. In the first class, a colleague of mine and I overviewed the “Big Ideas” that we’d be covering in this “Fundamentals of Electronic Publishing” course, among them:

It’s the content not the container
Disintermediation/Decentralization
The end of tyranny of time and space
Scarcity vs. abundance
Value-add through structure and metadata Changes of channels Programmable “smart” content Changes in user expectations Dominance of “standards”

In the second class, I was outlining the changes in the world of publishing of the last 25 years: of going from an information economy of scarcity to one of abundance; from one of defined “channels” to one of interconnected communities; from a rich, biodiverse world of independent bookstores to a virtual monoculture of Barnes & Noble and a threatened Borders; from a robust library economy to one where the entire Philadelphia library system might have closed because of the mayor’s “Plan C” budget in harsh economic times; from a “turn it on”
relationship to technology, to an “always on” relationship to technology.

One of my students raised his hand and asked an important question: is this an evolution or a revolution?

My answer at the time was fairly instant: this is a revolution, because it no longer plays by the rules of its predecessor paradigm.
And in revolutions, the old paradigms get washed away.

I told the story of my multiple visits to Prague, post-Revolution, from 1990-1994, helping publishers understand what (at the time) was “the digital revolution”: desktop computers.

What I saw in 1990 in Czechoslovakia was a well-subsidized publishing culture that produced a rich publishing and reading popular culture.
A variety of visible and invisible translation, print run, distribution, or office expense subsidies made the process of publishing very cheap. In 1990, just about every hardhat and shopkeeper and working human I saw on the tram, the metro, the bus stops, was reading a book. Books were cheap and plentiful.

That was operating on a small-language-nation, social-subsidy publishing paradigm. Subsidies for Czech publishing, because of its small market, was seen by the state to be required, to maintain high national literacy and intellectual vigor.

Naive, robust neo-capitalism changed that. By 1993 and 1994, publishing subsidies had disappeared in all sectors.

And by 1995, a book resided in the hands of only around 10% of the people I saw on the tram, the subway, the bus stop.

It’s a lesson I’ve taken to heart (and written about elsewhere): that revolutions—whether political, cultural, or technological—have unexpected consequences, and that it’s up to us to try to aim them in the best directions. That social goods which we’ve come to expect, aren’t necessarily givens. And that four to five years can radically disrupt particular markets.

After the class, I was chatting with my co-instructor, who comes from the hypercommercial publishing sector. He said to me: “What you say about small language markets requiring subsidies makes sense, but in the English marketplace? What would subsidies subsidize? Who really cares if a publisher goes out of business? The cream will always rise to the top one way or another, after all, right?”

He was talking about a publishing revolution within a cultural revolution—which once started, iterates into some sort of weird fractal system of evolutions happening within revolutions, which ends up…  looking a lot like the workings of an ecosystem. Evolutionary pressures within a changing environment, in the end.

So maybe it’s evolutionary after all, not “merely” a revolution. *Some* of the old rules still apply: know your audience, know your market, promote to the interested, ensure high quality, follow your mission.

To get philosophical: every day’s weather pattern is a revolution (not following the patterns of the previous day) of temperature, wind, sun, rain… which occurs within a season that may be a tiny revolution of its own, within a year that is likely unlike any other in recent biological memory….

But flora and fauna evolve and prosper within that ever-changing, but pattern-persistent, ecosystem, especially if they’re resilient and flexible.

Thus, our jobs as publishers is to be sure we build genetic resilience into our DNA, so that we can survive revolution after evolution after revolution, within the patterns of the changing cultural, political, economic, and technical ecosystem.

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Michael Jensen | 03/22/2010

The publishers who are able to sell directly to customers—which is a small proportion—are also able to sell “bundles”: get the digital ebook (E) and  the print (P). For many of those publishers, the bundles sell better than either E or P.

Part of it is the ease of add-on: “For an extra 10%, you can have the digital form, too.” Another part is the pleasurable immediacy of getting the digital instantly, while knowing that the “real” print version is coming.

So far, I know of no instance of someone cancelling a print order after placing an order for a bundle and receiving a digital file. The publishers who sell bundles—O’Reilly, my own National Academies Press, and others—soon discover that the bundle is often the preferred mode, sometimes outselling either option even combined.

Selling a “bundle” presupposes, of course, that a Canadian publisher could sell directly to a US customer from their own website—something that few currently do.  That market niche is worth exploring in other venues, however, by expressing your desire for bundle sales from any distributor who enables individual sales.

As I’ve said elsewhere, finding ways to “upsell”—even upselling something that just adds a wee premium to an existing premium product—is a big part of finding ways to stay solvent in the new information-abundant society.

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Will Tablets Rule?

Michael Jensen | 03/15/2010

The answer is, not in 2010—but possibly by 2011, and likely by 2012.

I’m a longstanding, hardcore laptop user whose first, twenty years ago, was a two-floppy no-hard-drive Toshiba. I probably won’t be one of the “tablet majority” ... except on plane flights, or except when I’m having a videochat with a colleague, or except when I’m reading a long ebook.

I expect to have a laptop (for my serious writing, serious email, serious programming, serious work), as well as a tablet (for most of my other digital engagement).

In the States, it’s not just the geeky early adopters who will go for the tablets. In fact, for geeks, they’re not optimal tools. But Apple, Microsoft, HP, Google, and other manufacturers hustling onto the tablet bandwagon, will be promoting tablets not as Microsoft Office machines (though they will function for that); not as database-entry devices (though, in a pinch, they’ll also function for that).

Instead, the promotion is going to be for entertainment, enjoyment, and interaction. The tablets will be promoted for chatting with your kids or grandkids from 2000 km away, and watching their videos. For tweeting about something you just saw on the tablet. For drawing, annotating, mapping, photo-ing, audio-booking, and (more to the point) for reading.

That promotion will encourage a relationship with the device—one that is very different from the clumsiness of a laptop, and that is more akin to the friendly, cuddly warmth people feel toward their iPhones.

If Canadian publishers’ books are absent from that environment, we’ll disappear from many markets, because other forms of distraction and enlightenment will replace what we do. When an existing niche is sparsely filled, after all, it gets filled by other things.

In the big media markets of the US, the tablets will rule the kingdom of onscreen reading—not as a tyranny, but as a preference, and in addition to other “work” devices.

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