The E-Publishing
Dealscape 2000
FROM PUBLISHING
TRENDS (JANUARY 2001)
This
was supposed to have been the year of the e-book, though
judging from the hype and early sales, it might be safer
to call it the year of the book, period. After scanning
the evolving e-publishing landscape, PT’s
panel of industry experts has selected the most interesting
electronic publishing events of 2000, offered herewith
(and in no particular order) for your delectation.
Adobe
purchase of Glassbook
This deal put Adobe’s PDF format in byte-to-byte combat
with Microsoft’s Reader software, creating what
was viewed at the time as a crisis for industry-wide
e-book standards. Adobe contends that — with 180 million
copies of its free reading software floating around
out there — it has as much chance to become the reigning
reader format as does the competing version championed
by most of the Open eBook Forum (see below).
On the other hand, observers said it was rather too
early to decide which of the formats fell where in book
publishing’s version of the VHS/Beta debate.
AAP
e-book project with Andersen Consulting
Rushing to save the industry from peril, the two partners
launched their e-book standards project, which drew
together techies (and unexpectedly large numbers of
dollars) from seven sponsoring publishers, including
HarperCollins, Holtzbrinck, and Random
House. The team urged publishers to tend to their
metadata (including appropriate extension of the ONIX
standard) and advocated adopting the DOI identification
system — though the question of how and whether to use
multiple ISBNs for different formats of a single book
remains a matter of dispute. Also hot on the trail of
e-publishing standards was the Open eBook Forum, which
has been working with a number of other standards bodies,
including (we heard recently) the Electronic Book
Exchange (EBX) group. Can publishers now stop losing
sleep over the spectre of competing e-publishing standards?
Probably not.
Deal
between IDG and Fatbrain
When it signed a content deal with the online information
site, IDG exhibited a bracing eagerness to slice and
dice its content for a variety of new-media formats.
Others joining Fatbrain included John Wiley and
Ziff-Davis Journals, as content providers tried
to figure out how to brand and finance their online
publishing strategies with an eye on the as-yet-untapped
mass market. As for Fatbrain spinoff MightyWords,
the company somewhat abruptly announced plans to dump
most of its self-publishing program, and begin syndicating
texts to other sites rather than focus on selling titles
to consumers from its own site — giving a clear signal
that there’s more carnage to come in the online content
biz.
Gemstar
purchase of NuvoMedia and SoftBook
This deal put a good chunk of the existing e-book business
into the hands of Gemstar CEO Henry Yuen, who
envisions two-way paging devices that might one day
be used to order books and other content from reading
devices — presumably paving the way for downloads directly
into our skulls. For now, he’s just trying to make stocking
stuffers out of the RCA e-book readers, which
use technology licensed from Gemstar, and figuring out
how to leverage his TV Guide holdings to dominate
the universe.
2nd-round
financing for Questia
Venture capitalists were stunned when the Houston-based
online research service scored $90 million in its second
round of financing — at a time when most VCs had crawled
under their laptops. The New York–based Oppenheimer
Funds led the effort, bringing Questia’s total venture
capital up to $130 million. Then in November, Questia
(a client of PT parent MPI) signed its hundredth
publisher, Stanford University Press. With a
January launch slated, the service hopes to provide
students with access to its hyperlinked online collection
of 50,000 scholarly books and journals (rising to 250,000
by year end), plus a suite of writing tools designed
to make composing papers a joyful matter of cut-and-paste
— with royalties beamed back to publishers, of course.
Launch
of media sites Inside.com and PublishersLunch.com
Each site attempted to strike the right balance between
high-tech and high-touch; now publishing news is clickable,
e-mailable, downloadable, and delivered right to your
desktop — 24/7, as they say.
Closure
of Subrights.com
CEO Joel Fishman told the press that “there was
no serious light at the end of our tunnel,” citing horrendous
customer acquisition costs and slim revenue potential
— despite having registered some 500 clients to buy
and sell rights on the site. Competitor Kip Parent
at Rightscenter.com opined that selling rights
in “eBay fashion” wasn’t where the industry wanted
to go. In a related matter, we also note the apparent
failure of the much-ballyhooed-when-announced Frankfurt-Whitaker
partnership for online rights sales to do anything but
produce ballyhoo.
Microsoft
investment in Xerox ContentGuard
Spun out of Xerox, ContentGuard will develop digital
rights management technologies for books, music, and
video distributed via the Internet. Microsoft’s minority
stake (in the “tens of millions of dollars”) assures
it plenty of DRM assistance for its e-book platform,
in addition to collaboration on a complete e-book distribution
system (though ContentGuard will also work with producers
of competing software, namely Adobe). The move was hailed
as a rare instance in which Xerox actually attempted
to capitalize on a discovery made at its vaunted PARC
research facility. As one Xerox official stammered:
“Our intent is to IPO this company as soon as feasible.”
Disappointing
performance of print-on-demand vendors
Meanwhile, POD’s not doing anything for Xerox’s investors,
Sprout’s disappeared from the radar, and Lightning
hasn’t ironed out the kinks in its system. We note that
the sluggish POD business is wallowing in concert with
the relatively slow conversion of titles into digital
files. The best estimates count 40,000 books in digital
files, but considering that there’s a million titles
out there, we’ve got a long way to go.
©2001
Publishing Trends
