The Guardian Hay Festival at Hay-on-Wye is one of the world’s foremost literary events. This year, we’re very pleased to say that Intersection: Publishing will be part of it!
Thanks to our friends at Academi, we’ll be a part of the Culture Cymru stand at 11:30am on Saturday, June 5th. As with our London event, it’s completely free – all you need to do is turn up – but we’d appreciate it if you added a couple of lines to our attendees page. (There’s also a Facebook event if you’d prefer.)
We’re also delighted to announce a new sponsor to Intersection: Publishing: Perera, a strategy and production agency which provides content and commerce.
Thank you!
Intersection:Publishing has come to a close, and we would like to thank everyone that participated – in person, on Twitter, and elsewhere. A great day was had by all; there was stimulating, frank and at times challenging conversation throughout.
Below is a list of links to coverage of the event.
- My co-organiser Ben Werdmuller has posted up a set of event photographs to Flickr, and written up his account of the day.
- Event attendee Ann Danylkiw captured two of the afternoon’s moments on video, and has uploaded them to Vimeo: Publishers want self-made authors; and How much room is there in the publishing market?.
- You can still follow the conversation through #interpub10 on Twitter.
As for what we’re going to do next… watch this space!
Intersection: Publishing is TODAY!
This afternoon, professionals from the fields off publishing, technology and IP law will gather together to discuss the future of publishing. We’re excited about meeting the attendees, having some interesting conversations and helping to forge productive ongoing collaborations. This is an important time for the industry, and our culture.
We’d love for you to join us. It’s free:
Intersection: Publishing 2010
1-6pm, Grand Union Kentish Town
If you can’t make it, keep watching Twitter for the hashtag #interpub10. This is also the tag to use (without the # mark) for blog posts and photos after the event.
Beneath the shadow of the iPad
The launch of Apple’s new iPad has inevitably created emotionally powerful reactions. For many reviewers, it is almost a religious artefact; it’s not a coincidence that the Guardian has compared the handling of new Apple products to the Turin Shroud.
My personal reaction to Apple products is usually cooler. But, this is different. The iPad is a game-changer on a number of levels. Exactly why this is a game-changer has been documented, at length, elsewhere. My focus is on the iPad as a market-maker. It’s somewhat naive to think that the iPad exists in a traditional market. Before the device was launched, the belief was that it will occupy the same market as the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader: e-readers.
Of course, the iPad does this very well, with its support for EPUB. But, the co-existence of EPUB and bespoke apps has made the device much more than an e-reader; it’s a tactile, multi-purpose, permanently-connected consumer access product. Therefore, the positioning as a market maker is interesting. As with other Apple products, it is a solid, premium device with an interface and user experience that is the product of millions of research Dollars.
As with the iPod, the positioning will create a shadow, and open up a potentially massive market for e-readers, at lower prices. The market will sustain both the iPad and a (hypothetical) Argos neutrally-branded e-reader at £400 and £20, in the same way that the market sustains both £10 MP3 players and the iPod Touch.
The shadow will bring prices of e-readers down from around £200 to something that everyone can afford. This will not happen overnight, but it will happen. A by-product of premium positioning can be the encouragement of commoditisation, meaning that we should see a wide range of e-readers of different shapes, sizes, resolution, quality, and features. Some of them will have some kind of DRM. Hopefully, many (all?) will have an open format such as EPUB. Some will have bespoke applications. Some will be part of other devices.
The market is opening. Digital content and publishing are on the cusp of large-scale adoption. Publishers need to both embrace the greatness that’s already out there – whether in the Kindle, iPod or elsewhere – but remain flexible enough in their strategy and approach to ensure that they can meet the challenges (rights, business models, user experience, consumer demand) of what’s to come.
PIRATE: […] Permit me to point out a fundamental error in your thinking: a text is not a physical object, so it cannot be stolen. Ownership of such an agglomeration of symbols (since ‘unity’ here is inapplicable) is an impossibility. The best you can do is _claim_ ownership – but anyone else can do that too. There is no legislation that can successfully govern the ether, thank heavens.I make my living, partly, as a librarian, but I don’t claim ownership of my catalogue. It is there – it exists, but it is not my property. If anything, it is everyone’s property – as are your texts. If you turn this over to the bottom-feeders, you will not hear from me again on this subject.
Magazines of the future?
This is a demo of a new kind of magazine that would live solely on digital devices like the iPad. It’s certainly stunning – but how conducive is it to actually reading?
VIV Mag Interactive Feature Spread – iPad Demo from Alexx Henry on Vimeo.
Amazon, Kindle, and the iPad threat
The New York Times reports that Amazon are threatening to stop selling publishers’ titles online if they don’t agree to a list of demands:
E-book editions of most newly released adult general fiction and nonfiction will cost $12.99 to $14.99 [in Apple’s iBooks store].
Amazon has agreed in principle that the major publishers would be able to set prices in its Kindle store as well. But it is also demanding that they lock into three-year contracts and guarantee that no other competitor will get lower prices or better terms.
Kindle, of course, was Amazon’s early entry into the ebook reader market, and it makes sense that they would be worried about Apple’s imminently-released iPad. In a twist on the usual state of affairs, however, Apple is coming across as the more open competitor in the market:
- Whereas Kindle depends on its own proprietary format, Apple’s iPad uses the open ePub standard (meaning you can use books from any compatible store)
- Amazon are competing by attempting to lock publishers in to the Kindle as a platform
Amazon have a lot of leverage: their online bookstore can easily make or break a title. It’s global, ubiquitous, and part of the web in a way that no other vendor has managed. The Amazon store is a platform rather than just a website: businesses may leverage their infrastructure in a number of ways, for example delegating payments and/or shipping, and the sales platform may be deeply integrated into third parties’ websites and applications.
However, at the same time, their Kindle strategy seems to be anything but open. Prior to the iPad announcement, they were taking 70% of newspaper subscription revenue on the platform, for example. They’re now following Apple’s lead and giving 70% to content owners – albeit only if they agree to specific criteria.
The iPad is essentially a portable content reader for the 21st century (it handles websites, applications, movies and books equally elegantly), and the enormous success of the iTunes App Store to draw on. Kindle has Amazon’s existing bookstore to leverage, which has never had as wide-reaching a competitor. On their own, both companies tend towards onerous terms and lack of choice. In competition, the result should be a much better deal for publishers – as long as they ignore the current pressure to lock themselves in.
Welcome to our brand new blog, and thanks for reading.
Intersection: Publishing is two things rolled into one. The first, most pressing thing is a BarCamp-style event that will take place in London on April 17th – the Saturday directly before London Book Fair.
The second thing is this blog and its associated conversations, which will carry on well after the event.
What’s a BarCamp, and why do we need one?
Publishing is at a crossroads. Some hard decisions need to be made, and we think it’s important to both inject new life into the existing conversations, and start some new ones. Simply put, we want to put innovative publishers, geeks, authors and people who know about intellectual property law into a room, and allow them to bring their expertise to the discussion table in a hierarchy-free environment.
A BarCamp is a different, more informal kind of conference. When you show up in the morning, what you’ll find is an empty schedule and a room full of people who care passionately about the same things you do. Everyone shows up with an idea of what they’d like to talk about, and we collaboratively design the day together. Are you interested in how traditional publishing can adapt to devices like the iPad? Great; propose a discussion on that. If you’re more interested in the global licensing issues involved with digital publishing, say, or in the mechanics of the ePub data format, those are important too: add those topics to the schedule. You set the agenda.
Attending Intersection: Publishing 2010
Want to join us? It’s completely free. All you need to do is add your name to the list and show up on the day. There are also some sponsorship vacancies remaining; if you’d like to add your support to Intersection: Publishing, here’s some further information.
You can read more about BarCamps on the official BarCamp site, including what to expect at one and the BarCamp rules. (Hint: speak up and blog, tweet and post about what you learn.)
Photo from BarCamp SoCal 2009, released by Morgantis under a Creative Commons license.