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| The Digital Revolution |
18 Feb 2010 |
| This week the Australian Publishers Association and the Australia Council for the Arts presented Digital Revolution: Publishing in the 21st Century symposium. Spinifex Director, Susan Hawthorne, was involved as a member of the organising committee and as a speaker.
I attended the Melbourne session, which was a full day of speakers and Q&A sessions on Monday, followed by two talks on Tuesday: by Martin Taylor from NZ’s Digital Publishing Forum about the state of the New Zealand publishing industry vis-à-vis digital publishing, and Chris Palma from Google.
The international keynote speakers for the first day were Richard Charkin, Bloomsbury; Stephen Page, Faber & Faber; and Michael Tamblyn, Kobo. They were great to listen to because in a lot of ways they showed where the intersection of print and digital publishing in Australia might go in the future. Britain has had ereader devices easily available to the general public for a few years, due to partnership with Waterstones, the large ‘bricks and mortar’ bookshop chain.
Michael Tamblyn had a different perspective again. Kobo is a Canadian company that has been operating in various territories including the US. It was interesting to hear Kobo’s experience of the overseas ebook market as an antidote to endless pontificating as to whether this or that may be true of the Australian market in the future. Several speakers reiterated the need to bring out ebooks at the same time as paper books, and Kobo’s data reflected this. In their experience, 48% of the lifetime sales of a book happen in the first 90 days. Makes you wonder whether the practice of ‘windowing’ books (currently being trialled by Macmillan in the States) is either useful or sensible. If this is true, this means that it’s in the publisher’s best interest to try and release the physical and digital versions of a book at the same time.
The keynote speakers were joined by a host of locals, who gave a picture of the Australian industry as it is now. They spoke on various facets of future publishing from iPhone applications to DRM to accessible publishing. It was great to hear from a cross-section of the industry, too: educational publishers from primary through to tertiary and trade. It’s easy just to focus on the corner of the industry that you’re a part of and not be aware of the wider experience. Ebooks are also something that need to be approached very differently when publishing text-based trade books (like novels or non-illustrated non-fiction) than when publishing highly illustrated or formatted books like textbooks or recipe books, so different parts of the industry will have different things to struggle with.
The other thing that’s good to remember is that digital reading isn’t just about ebooks. Ebooks are what we’re focusing on, of course, but there’s also web-based digital reading, whether it’s a site like JSTOR that hosts scans of hundreds of academic journals; or Oxford University Press’s Ask Oxford website that allows you to search a few of its dictionaries and web-only content like “Ask the Experts”; or Mathletics, which is a digital answer to a maths textbook.
What I took away from the symposium was a new excitement of places that Spinifex might go next. Martin Taylor’s description of New Zealand’s journey and the advantages and disadvantages of being a small country were often directly applicable to the situation of being a small company, particularly the point that we often have time but not money to play with. Going digital is both exciting and scary (I’m a lover of the printed word and don’t want ‘real’ books to disappear!), and I’ll be fascinated to see where the industry goes from here.
Appropriately for a digital conversation, the symposium was covered via Twitter live. There’s since also been an ABC News article, and several Bookseller+Publisher blog posts ('Ebooks: Why readers will pay more (but not much more)' and 'Digital dilemmas: think like a reader') and articles (their report on the symposium here and on the Google chat here). |
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