NabaTech

Mainstream Publishing—Accommodating the Long Tail

The term "long tail" is certainly catching on fast. There's the recent article in the Economist—Profiting from obscurity—and American Public Media's Marketplace Morning Report on radio—E-Commerce Buzzwords— both of which discuss the long tail as it applies to the economics of online commerce. Without repeating the details of the power-law distribution, in the words of the Economist article, the essence of the long tail is "...a shift from mass markets to niche markets, as electronic commerce aggregates and makes profitable what were previously unprofitable transactions." The Economist mentions the example of limited shelf space in brick-and-mortar bookstores versus the unlimited shelf space of an online store such as Amazon.com, which enables Amazon to carry and sell books in the long tail—the ones that are way down in popularity, yet appeal to some buyers.

The mainstream book publishers have had to ignore the long tail because they have a limited capacity to print books. Of all the books that are written, the print publisher is constrained to select carefully and publish only the "most likely to sell" titles. Just like the brick-and-mortar bookstores, major print publisher have no choice but to ignore the long tail of niche books. This makes perfect sense for print publishing and there is nothing wrong with the approach, but could there be a way for mainstream book publishers to exploit the long tail as well?

One option for major publishers might be to augment their current product line of print titles with a new "electronic content" product line. The electronic content would be the lower-demand titles and the publisher can offer them through Amazon or its own web site as ebooks or as "print-on-demand (POD)" books (perhaps, in the future, Amazon will take care of the POD as well so all a publisher has to do is offer the electronic files to Amazon). A publisher can prime its ebook catalog from its print book portfolio. For example, as a print title from the mainstream product line drops below a certain monthly sales volume, the publisher could move that title to the ebook catalog, but keep it on the market virtually indefinitely. I think this could be the start of a strategy that enables mainstream publishers exploit the effects of the long tail.

Tags: ebooks epublishing trends long tail longtail

Ebooks—Size, Pricing, and Format

I was pondering the question: "what type of books would I buy as ebook and what would I be willing to pay for them?" I think I would be willing to buy a 70- to 100-page ebook (more a booklet than a book) for a price range of $5 to $7.50 if I needed the information covered in that ebook. This is what I was thinking of when I talked about "chunky content" in previous posts.

As for subject matter of the ebooks, I would be interested in a wide range of technical "how-to" and tutorial topics, ranging from a quick introduction to C programming to setting up a secure home wireless network. Some of the topics may be time-sensitive. For example, if a new operating system upgrade is coming out, I might want to buy a 75-page guide to upgrading the OS as soon as the upgrade is available.

Ebooks can be sold in many different formats, but I would prefer a printable PDF file without any password protection. I'm just used to PDF and feel comfortable downloading and reading PDFs. I can always print parts of it, if I need to. You could say that my preference for PDF is a matter of user acceptance.

Why would I buy a PDF ebook for a subject—let's pick the example of "how to touch up digital photos in The GIMP"—even when that information may already be available in various free online resources. Well, for starters, I might not have time to do my own research. If I can browse a sample of a 75-page PDF ebook on "Photo Touchup with the GIMP" and I like what I see, I am willing to pay $5 to get the tutorial and spare myself the effort of searching and collating the information.

Where would I buy the PDF ebook? I won't feel comfortable buying PDF ebooks from just any Web site—it has to be some Web site like Amazon that I already know or an established ebook publisher with a catalog of related titles in that general topic (for example, lots of other photo retouching guides). In other words, it has to be an online shop with a huge catalog that accommodates the "long tail" or a niche publisher out in the "long tail." I might also consider buying directly from an author's Web site, if I have previous experience with that author's books.

Adam and Tonya Engst's Take Control series of Mac OS X books seem to fit the niche ebook publishing model nicely. They sell 60- to 100-page printable PDF ebooks for $5 and larger ebooks (up to 155 pages) for $10. They also offer free samples of each ebook. Peachpit press publishes print-book versions of some Take Control ebooks and these are available on Amazon (see, for example, Take Control of Your AirPort Network by Glenn Fleishman and Adam Engst).

Tags: ebooks epublishing trends long tail longtail

Content Tagging for Online Content Shops

Right now we tag content in a simplistic manner. For example, if I want Technorati to use “self publishing” as the tag for my post, I can do so by embedding the following link in my post: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/self+publishing" rel="tag">self publishing</a>. Then I can ping Technorati and Technorati associates my post with the embedded tag. Anyone can then use a Technorati URL such as http://www.technorati.com/tag/self%20publishing to view all posts tagged “self publishing”. On a side note, Technorati also displays images from Flickr and links from del.cio.us that have the same tag. Tagging is all the rage now and I think I am getting the hang of it. There is even a blog on tagging—You’re It!—that makes interesting reading.

I bring up the subject of tagging because in a recent post (Selling Content Chunks—Need Online Content Shops) I talked about selling content chunks through online content shops. For this to happen, we need a way to add some more tags in addition to the tags that classify the content. Perhaps an initial step in that direction would be to use HTML’s rel tag with a syntax similar to current tagging, but provide other information such as price (rel=”price”), abstract (rel=”abstract”), and so on. I don’t have the answer, but I hope some enterprising online content shop figures out an approach and tells us how to tag content for their shop. I’d then happily participate as a creator/provider of chunky content.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books content intermediary trends tagsonomy

Selling Content Chunks—Need Online Content Shops

Recently Joe Wikert wrote about blogging as a new book platform and pointed out the issue of monetizing the model. Perhaps a subscription-based model for a blog book would work, but I am wondering if the near-term path is more along the lines of content chunks that are aggregated and sold online. The other day I wrote about the potential of Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and others emerging as the new content intermediaries who could aggregate chunky content from authors and publishers and provide a marketplace where end users can shop for the content. I don’t know if the term “content intermediary” is appropriate, but what I have in mind is a virtual online store for content. Perhaps I should call them “online content shops.” We need these shops so we can sell our content (I don’t mean blogs, but books, or, more accurately, booklets).

Content that is currently packaged and sold as books would be broken into booklets—chunks (say 50 to 100 pages in size) that are tagged with information such as the subject, an abstract, size, ownership information, and price. The booklets are then listed with the online content store. Potential buyers would visit the online content store and either browse categories or search for specific content. They can then either buy separate booklets of information or create a bundle of booklets (think of it as a custom book). They can then choose the format in which they want the content—the choices could be any electronic format (lower cost) or a printed copy (at a somewhat higher cost). The online content store then collects payments and pays out to the content owners apportioned shares

The basic change from today’s book publishing would be the change from a book to a bunch of booklets—chunked online content—with appropriate tags to enable all the transactions. I think this approach could work for technical and computer books that can be easily broken into chunky content.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books content intermediary trends tagsonomy

Google, Amazon, Yahoo, ... as the New Content Intermediaries

Commenting on one of his recent posts on whether self-publishing changes all the rules, Tim O'Reilly's noted that the middlemen never go away; technology just changes the middlemen. His observation certainly rings true and it’s really not a problem because we need the middlemen. As someone capable of producing content that the market might want, I have been wondering how I could get paid for at least some of my content in the new world of tagged content. It seems easy for authors to become online content creator/provider, but we need intermediaries to get content to the paying customers, deliver the content in a format that the customer wants, collect the payment, and apportion the payments among various content creators/providers. Here’s a simplified diagram illustrating the new content intermediary:

The content still stays under each author’s control, but I am envisioning an automated process where the intermediary’s systems can gather relevant pieces of content from different providers based on what a customer needs. The intermediary enables customers to search the content, browse catalogs, view rankings based on third-party reviews or sales rankings, and mix and match to create a custom set of chunks of content. Perhaps the customer can even decide in what format she wants the content—print or any one of several eBook formats—and all these are generated on the fly from the tagged content. (Print version could be done by the intermediary’s print-on-demand system.) The intermediary takes care of accepting payment from the customer and keeping track of sales for all content providers, and making payments to the providers. Nothing that revolutionary in the concept except that we probably need some tags for providing pricing information for content. Do we also need any standard taxonomy for the tags or could the intermediary discover these through online indexing of the content? These are some of the details that a prospective content intermediary needs to work out.

Who could be these new content intermediaries? Well, you know the potential players already—Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc. and perhaps some of the current book publishers would become the new intermediaries (publishers could also be content aggregators that feed the content intermediary that sells to the public). The new twist is that we’d have a new way of selling smaller chunks of content instead of today’s model of one bookful at a time.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books content intermediary trends

Trends in Popular Computer Book Topics

In the late eighties and early nineties, X Window System (X) was a hot topic and there were quite a few books about it. These books did quite well.  (On a side note, Tim O’Reilly started by publishing a set of books on the X Window System and O’Reilly still carries those early X titles in print; even my own X Window System Programming still shows up in Amazon catalog, so these titles did have some traction!) Even though X is still the windowing system underlying many GUIs on many different systems, there is no market for X books because programmers now work at higher levels of abstraction. They typically create GUI applications using a GUI builder that can spit out whatever code is needed, so most programmers don’t need to learn X or even the various GUI programming toolkits. I bring out the X Window System as an example of trends in computer book topics—as programmers move to higher levels of abstraction, some of the underlying technologies lose viability as book topics (even when they retain a niche book market). At the same time, the X example shows that when a technology is young and programmers still work at lower levels of abstraction, books covering the low-level details are probably going to do well. This observation helps point to what book topics might do well in the near future—those that focus on the highest level of abstraction of a specific technology that is being embraced by software developers. One caveat is to make sure that you are looking at the emerging trends and not what’s well entrenched.

In spite of my comments about everyone gradually moving to higher levels of abstraction, there is, however, no denying that there are basic computer topics—programming languages, operating systems, networking protocols, software architecture, and so on—that are always being sought by new waves of programmers and autodidacts who strive to learn these subjects. These basic topics will always have a demand; perhaps small, but surely steady. Computer book publishers who know how to exploit the timelessness of these basic computer books—by printing a book on each topic and keeping them available forever at a low volume or on demand—are going to do well.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books trends

Self-Published Computer Books—Problem is to Convince Buyers They’re Worth Buying

We have been talking about self-publishing computer books in recent posts (see my post on Self-publishing Computer Books and Joe Wikert on Self-Publishing). In a recent post in his ePublishing blog, Brad talks about the lack of literary quality of eBooks when compared to books published by mainstream publishers and he thinks reviewers will become essential as filters for quality. Brad talked in general about eBooks; my thoughts are about self-published computer books. I have not studied enough eBooks to comment on their quality, but Brad’s conclusion seems plausible considering that the editorial process at mainstream publishers tend to improve the quality of books, but self-published books may lack the editing steps.

When it comes to self-published computer books—whether eBook or print format, the hurdle is to convince the buyer that the self-published title is of good quality and worth buying. As it is, a prospective computer book buyer already faces lots of choices when buying computer books published by mainstream publishers.  Each major publisher has at least one book, and sometimes several, covering each technical subject that has enough interest (see Joe Wikert’s post on When Is a Topic “Big” Enough to Warrant a Book?). Throw in self-published titles into the mix and the choices can get really confusing. For computer books from mainstream publishers, a buyer can at least rely on a publisher’s reputation when selecting a suitable book. Besides, the mainstream publishers’ books are more likely to be at local bookstores where potential buyers can actually thumb through the books and pick one they like.

In the end, the success of a self-published computer book seems to depend on the author’s name recognition and reputation, the word-of-mouth buzz from an established online presence, and the book’s focus on a niche subject area that the mainstream publishers have ignored. I don’t have the recipe for success with self-publishing, but I think it makes sense for aspiring self-publishers to build an online presence and focus on niche topics that are underserved by mainstream publishers. For topics that merit the attention of mainstream publishers, authors can as well approach a mainstream publisher and avail themselves of the editing services and distribution channels. The only problem is that the market may be already saturated with computer books covering those mainstream topics :-)

Note: Read Tim O'Reilly on: What do you think about self-published books?

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books trends

Self-publishing Computer Books

I suspect most computer book authors have thought about self publishing at one time or another. Maybe it's because we know a bit about computers and software and we think we can do the typesetting ourselves and it's just a little more to get copies printed and distributed- - and make a bundle of profit, right? Well, maybe not. But that doesn't mean that you can't be curious about it or that some authors have not succeeded doing it on their own. You can get tons of books on self publishing, but the granddaddy of them all is Dan Poynter's book: The Self-Publishing Manual: How to Write, Print, and Sell Your Own Book. Believe it or not, it's now in its 14th Edition and I had bought my copy before the Web and Amazon existed. As the book's title suggests, Dan Poynter's book does cover all aspects of publishing a book on your own, but I never gave his advice a try. There are just too many pieces in the self-publishing puzzle and I was not sure I would have the time to do everything and still write the book. Besides, I have been lucky enough to have had a sustained long-term working relationship with a publisher.

If you are tempted to consider self-publishing, you might want to learn from the experiences of someone who has tried it recently. A good example is Srikanth Shenoy's self-published Struts Survival Guide: Basics to Best Practices—he summarized his overall experience in his blog recently. If you want to check out his book, he now offers a link to the PDF file that you can download for free (in case you are curious, he sold all print copies and broke even). You can also read David St. Lawrence's blog for another interesting first-hand experience of self-publishing as well as lots of practical advice. Even though I personally have not tried self-publishing yet, I admire those who have  given it a try!

Note: For another good account of self-publishing experience with lots of tips and tricks, visit Brian Bischof's Web site.

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books trends

Is ePublishing the Future of Computer Books?

Recently Joe Wikert wrote about tinkering with the publishing model and I wondered if we could publish a printed book with an online companion. That generated quite a bit of discussion. It seems that some pioneers have already forged ahead and started providing books online. As for an online companion, providing the online information (with routine updates) for free can be a hook for the printed book and it sounds like the author should take the initiative. I think the printed book with companion online content is only an intermediate step towards something else that’d be the future computer book. The problem is that I don’t know the specifics of that future, but could ePublishing play a role?

There are already some examples of ePublishing—for example, there is Adam Engst’s Take Control eBooks covering Mac OS X,  Mac applications, and hardware. It’s definitely a niche market. He prices the 70- to 100-page PDF books between $5 to $10 The PDF eBooks are designed to be read online and they are not copy-protected. A 2004 Wired article says the model is working well for Engst and he pays his authors 50 percent royalty. Engst does have the 50,000 subscribers of his TidBits magazine as a built-in audience for his eBooks.

Would a similar ePublishing model work for other niche computer books? Could established print publishers adopt a model similar to Adam Engst’s? It’s hard to tell.

By the way, I noticed several ePublishing books on Amazon, but guess what, they are all print books—why aren’t these books practicing what they preach? Or is it because people aren’t buying eBooks yet?

Future of Computer Books: Print plus Online Companion?

I am sure printed books will be around for a long time to come, but should we expect a gradual evolution to other formats or combination of formats? I am thinking about a print format for unchanging or slowly changing information and an online format for more transient information. The paper version would cover things like how a technology works, the description of standard protocols, programming language tutorials, and so on. The online, periodically-updated information would be the latest features of a program, installation steps, screen shots, and so on (perhaps evolving to video content in the future).

How does a publisher accommodate a print book with an online companion? For starters, the publisher applies its existing editorial processes for all content the same way as with any printed book. The publisher markets the printed book through its normal channels. The print copy includes information on how to register online for the book's online companion. For the online content, the publisher sets up the Web presence for the book and the author has to participate by updating information periodically. Ideally, the book's site would have an RSS feed that readers can subscribe to and the author could even run a blog just for that book That way readers can keep abreast of the changes in the book by subscribing to the feed. The online content can be somewhat protected if we include a unique password in each copy of the book and require the user to register using that password. And then every so often, the Web site can prompt for a word from a specific page of the book before the reader can access the online information (this would require the reader to have a print copy nearby).

I don't know if this would work, but I'd sure like to test the waters if my publisher is willing to give it a try!

Tags: self publishing epublishing ebooks books trends