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.
