The Digital Rights Management & Digital Distribution for Publishing conference in New York on February 23–24 was something of a set piece ripped straight out of an early Ionesco script, with non sequitur following hard on the heels of non sequitur. Digital rights vendors continued to perform feats of creative visualization (“This is going to be a huge year for digital rights management!”), NuvoMedia’s Martin Eberhard testily defended his decision to keep the Rocket eBook system totally proprietary (“I don’t want to be responsible for causing an MP3-like disaster for the book industry.”), B&N’s Ken Brooks insisted that he should pocket up to 40% of an e-book sale (“Our business is developing and maintaining the customer relationship—we own that transaction.”), the Authors Guild’s Paul Aiken continued to insist that royalties for electronic editions should be higher than for printed books (“There is no comparison between delivering information digitally over the Internet and delivering information in trucks over highways.”), and the BISG’s Sandy Paul continued to adumbrate the ghastly 13-digit ISBN (“You have been warned.”).
Playing their pre-scripted role to the hilt, the 100 or so publisher types in the audience continued to react impassively to the likes of HP Laboratories’ ebullient John Erickson (lately of Yankee Rights Management), who wowed the crowd by splicing Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence with a touching nod to ET: “When you deploy your own content, it must eternally link back to you. The content must phone home.” It was the latest attempt to convince publishers of the joys of viral marketing, in which customers send little snippets of content — say, part of a chapter — to their entire address book of friends and loved-ones. When those recipients pound on the “Buy Me” button, they are instantly whisked to the publisher’s handsome sales site and, one hopes, surrender their credit card numbers and plenty of other customer-profile data that can be easily dropped into a marketing database. Or something like that.
The drama continued when B&N’s Ken Brooks announced that “the e-book industry is still all dressed up with no place to go,” and complained that lack of content was keeping everyone from getting to that big digital debutante’s ball. Brooks made a show of offering publishers use of his Manila-based e-book conversion shop, where for a “very low” fee, B&N will scan “p-books” (as Brooks insisted on referring to printed books) and output them in a variety of electronic formats, a process he described as “making the sausage back into the pig.” The electronic files are then returned to the publishers for, one hopes, future use.
Edward Ruehle, program director for Harvard Business School Publishing, continued in a mock-serious vein and pointedly compared book publishers to the once-dominant but now permanently beleaguered Sears, whose profits were systematically undercut by savvy discount retailers while the department-store giant kept haughtily insisting that no such thing could possibly come to pass. He warned publishers to guard against the imminent incursion of “vortals,” those vertical portals that offer a critical mass of information on a narrow topic such as health care or llama grooming. The point is that “disruptive technologies” such as vortals or other types of content aggregators need not offer a better product, but simply one that is as good as the old-fashioned book — and publishers might wake up one day to find their customer base vaporized.
In that vein, we note that Books24x7.com, a subscription-based “aggregated information supplier for professionals,” has already licensed 1,000 books and is eyeing a potential market of 6 million IT professionals in the US who would pay a $200 annual subscription fee. The site has actually doled out $1 million in royalties to date, with publishers paid on a percentage of revenue generated. It’s just further evidence that, as Ruehle noted, if publishers don’t keep an eye on those IPO-bound upstarts, they’ll be “picking the cherries out of our cake.”
