Allen WeinerLet’s try and untangle the congested freeway of e-book news that had led to the enhanced content myth. No matter what business model evolves as the de fact online retail model (wholesale to retail or agency model), publishers are struck, for the most part, with existing market pricing for best-sellers. With $9.99 being the norm, not only from Amazon but from those hoping to compete with the online giant, e-book customers have shown little elasticity in their purchasing habits. A number of e-book retailers say that once pricing surpasses $11 per title, sales hit the wall and drop off significantly.
Out of this consumer intransigence comes the notion of “enhanced books.” Modeled on Apple iTunes’ “Extras” which packages goodies such as liner notes, interviews and even original material, enhanced books combined such value-adds as author interviews and video to jack up the retail price. The excitement over enhanced books grew with the introduction of the iPad in that the device offers more real estate, a glitzy color screen and a platform that could be flexible enough to mash book content with publisher goodies.
Sound like a promising way for publishers to squeeze a few dollars extra out of the book-buying world? Sadly, the notion deflates like a old spare tire when you consider:
- Publishers and developers have no clear idea on what constitutes enhanced content worthy of a few extra consumer shekels.
- Publishers most likely don’t have the rights to the content needed to create these enhanced packages.
- The myriad of platforms (iPhone OS, Android, Html 5, Windows 7) each have their own specifications making uniform enhanced content offerings a developer’s nightmare.
This nets out to a limited supply of enhanced content packages (however that’s defined) for soon-to-be-released devices such as the iPad. Publishers admit the value-added e-book game will require a lot of trial and error before anything reaches the balance of price and consumer interest.
While some argue that it will be easier to build enhanced content for non-fiction titles (travel, cooking, etc.) that combine dynamic info with static e-book content, I disagree. If the resulting mash of recipes and cooking video looks like little more than a decent cooking web site, I think such a content asset is a recipe for disaster. Again, trial and error will be the industry norm for quite a while.
Category: Publishing Tags: Adobe, Apple, e-books, e-readers, iPad, Kindle, Nook
4 responses so far ↓
1 Dan Sholler February 11, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Do you think the current pricing model is stable?
My personal take for years is that the “dollar per song” stuff had to crumble.. since you sell me a device that I can keep 60,000 songs on, I am not likely to spend $60,000 on music from ITunes (hence the amount of stuff downloaded from the swarm.. )
Books have held up OK so far, but I suspect that there is a bit of a disconnect when you get to the online pricing. The reason is people like me that polish of 2-3 novels a week are also the people that get most of their current reading material from the public library, and will not be willing to pay $1600 or so per year to get what they get now for free.. (cost of content exclusive of the reader).. if you add to that the fact that I only subscribe to 3 magazines or newspapers (down from a high of about 15 in the 1980s) and I read most of my free content on my phone.. the pricing model is looking pretty ugly..
I think that media providers need to remember that the technology is not just a way of preserving the current business model, but also resets people’s expectations as well. If I can carry around 2000 books, I am not going to spend 10 bucks each for them, because while 10 bucks did not sound like much, $200,000 on books sound outright ridiculous. Same like with music.. If they do not figure out how to do business with prices orders of magnitude lower than they are today, then they will just be replaced by whatever becomes the e-reader version of the swarm.
Hasn’t happened yet, but I do not think I am alone with these kinds of thoughts..
2 Phil Simon February 11, 2010 at 7:14 pm
I honestly am not sure about how this will play out.
I enjoy the extras in DVDs and still buy them. If I tire of them, then I can sell them. That’s one of the trade-offs of “digital books” that people will have to accept. For obvious reasons, publishers won’t be too keen on letting others legally and easily “share” their books. Authors won’t like that much either.
I have my doubts about people in my generation (X) will adopt eBooks en masse. I still like the tactile sensation of books, especially my own.
It’s probably too early to say for sure.
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[...] Noen kommentatorer påpeker at det er mange skjær i sjøen. Forlag sliter allerede i dag med å få rettighetene til å distribuere tekst digitalt, hva da med å sikre seg rettigheter til interessant lyd- og levende bildeinnhold? For “enhanced books” som lages som applikasjoner må det videre tas hensyn til ulike plattformkrav på tvers av iPhone OS, Android, osv. osv. [...]