Richard Nash has a great round-up of the conversations and opinions about digital that took place all over this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair.
…we’re not replacing one static-priced unit (pBook) with another static-priced unit (eBook), but finding that our single massive unidirectional pBook supply chain is now just one component of a tremendously variegated set of producer-consumer relationships and each producer is therefore going to need to offer the consumer a range of pricing models: subscription, rental, per unit download, advertising, serialization, fewer or more guarantees of ownership (as opposed to personal license) rights. And other yet to be named or thought up!
Nash gives us some pretty clear advice to take away:
- This is happening now, the future is already here.
- Everyone can benefit, no-one is exempt.
- The transformation is irrevocable, continuous, multivalent, and potentially asymmetric.
All of which underlines something that’s been reverberating around in my skull lately. We keep talking about digital publishing like it’s a bolted-on addition to our traditional business practice. If publishers, authors, booksellers and other actors in this industry are going to embrace, even transcend, the tenets above, we have to stop differentiating digital from other parts of our business.
Digital media now flows through our organisations the same way information does, the way money does. It is spread through our daily practices in ways many are not even aware of, from the literary agent who tweets to the editor who reads manuscripts on an e-reader, from the bookseller using Facebook to promote literary events to the author moderating a social network of fans and readers.
It’s not about digital publishing anymore. It’s just publishing. Maybe not even that. It’s media. It’s one professional and commercial facet of human communication. Perhaps thinking within this framework will help us find the new business models we’re looking for.
Kate Eltham is a writer and creative industries professional based in Brisbane, Australia. She is Chief Executive Officer of 
kate.eltham {at} gmail.com
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Agreed, although I rail about “digital publishing” less than most because it effectively replaced “electronic publishing” as a phrase
Yeah, good point Brian.
“New media” is a fairly pervasive phrase here in Australia, but like you I rail about it less because it replaced “multimedia”.
kate said:
> It’s not about digital publishing anymore.
> It’s just publishing.
um, i’m not exactly sure how to interpret that.
but i’m quite sure that, under some interpretations,
it’s not just wrong, but it’s wrong to a deadly degree.
if you mean that “all publishing will be digital” then,
to a large degree, you’re probably correct, although
paper — as print-on-demand — will still do quite fine.
if you mean that digital publishing and print publishing
boil down to the same thing, however, you are wrong…
print will always have significant variable costs attached,
but the variable cost of digital products approaches zero.
this difference is _huge_.
and it is precisely because they leverage this difference
that the mammal digital publishers of the future will be able
to out-maneuver, out-fox, and out-compete the dinosaurs.
anyone who thinks “it’s all publishing” will be left in the dust.
-bowerbird
Hi bowerbird, thanks for commenting. I don’t disagree on either point. But I think there is still a perception in some companies (obviously not all, from Richard’s reports from Frankfurt) that digital is “other” and not core to what they do in the marketplace or even core to what they do in daily interactions with colleagues and customers.
Kate – I agree with both of you. Bowerbird points out something I actually alluded to in my blog about your post – and that’s that writers probably should be given a larger percentage for digital just because the costs are so low… at a minimum they should get the same percentage as print. There have already been a few attempts to make digital mean always in print no matter what the publisher is doing and to reduce or eliminate pay… writers and their agents have to stay alert on the digital / electronic rights – vigilant.
Glad you posted this.
A