Last week was Digital Book World, an annual conference about everything ebooks, etailers, apps, and more. The event gets plenty of media coverage and analysis, and many excellent articles about it exist on the DBW website and via Pub Lunch (subscription required). I attended the fair on Tuesday and Wednesday, as well as Monday’s special Children’s Publishing Goes Digital program that was presented in partnership with Publishers Launch.
In the year since the 2011 DBW, a lot has changed but a lot also hasn’t, oddly enough. I remember sitting at DBW 2011, pinned in my seat by despair, thinking that the digital/ebook/apps ship had already left the harbor and I was too far behind to ever catch up. Everyone sounded like they knew exactly what they were talking about and doing in this paradigm shift (probably the most oft-spoken phrase last year).
This year, I got the same sense of people sounding like they knew exactly what they were talking about and doing, but now it felt like there hadn’t been that many truly seismic events in the interim 12 months to really throw me into a panic. 2011′s DBW ended on the note of, “It’s early days yet and some areas of epublishing are still the Wild West,” and this year’s closing remarks had very much the same flavor. The big sea change of digital books is no doubt going to happen, but I don’t think it has swept through with quite the speed or the force that we were all expecting just yet.
Here are some things that people seem to have learned between the two DBWs:
- Building an app is really expensive and time consuming, with a very shaky potential ROI: Lots of people gambled on apps and lost in this time period, from independent creators to developers to big publishers.
- Ebooks are gaining market share but not as quickly in children’s and YA as people were predicting (though those numbers are higher in adult, with about a quarter of the market now made up of ebooks versus about 13% for YA and MG, according to the Bowker survey).
- Once your app or ebook is out in the marketplace, it’s not reaching customers because of the App Store setup and a lack of discoverability (arguably the word of the show this year).
And it’s this last point that’s going to be the biggest challenge moving forward, indeed. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: On the Internet, if you build it, they will NOT come. There are billions of websites out there. Billions of things fighting for your customer’s eyeballs and brain space. You can’t just throw something online and hope readers and users flock to it. The App Store is a dreary setup right now and isn’t helping. Basically, if your app doesn’t explode on the scene in its first week and place on some lists, your battleship is sunk. There’s very little chance of getting in front of a critical mass of customers after that, unless you get media coverage.
So these apps, unless they are branded across platforms and linked to other multimedia properties or otherwise spotlighted, are tanking. And the barrier to entry for creating them (see point 1, above) is still too high in a lot of cases. So while houses have figured out that ebooks and apps are where it’s at, and while they’re taking stabs at creating them, and while some of those apps are very good, it all will come down to the eternal question of marketing the dang things in order to recoup the high initial investment.
Isn’t that always the rub, though? Publishers have been struggling with how to sell books forever. Do they need the additional task of figuring out how to sell apps? In most cases now, the book is still what drives customers to the app, not the other way around. So the app is yet another product they have to shepherd onto phones and tablets. The goal is to have app and book and TV show and movie work in synergy (and Disney seems to be having great success with this, per the presentation), but I don’t know if that’s happened yet.
Here is where I see the biggest brainpower and creativity going in the next year: the rise of the app platform and strides in ebook/app marketing. First of all, I think we’re getting to that place where we can’t expect publishers or developers to build each app from the ground up. Remember when you had to do that for websites? A simple, custom website used to cost thousands of dollars. Then Geocities came along and gave users a platform upon which to build their sites. Smart app developers like Oceanhouse Media are already all over this. They have a platform and then feed content into it to create apps.
The developers who are going to fail are those who code everything from the ground up each time, because that’s a great way to run out of money or steam or creativity or all three. The developer that’s going to win big is the one that creates a really solid platform that can be licensed to other developers or publishers to facilitate their apps, cutting production time and product management and streamlining the testing/updates process. Sure, these apps may start to look cookie-cutter and creators will always want to add their own value, but at least they’ll have a huge leg up. This will even open apps up to individual creators (for better and for worse).
Until this happens, though, I believe that ebooks and apps will be a little stuck in their current holding pattern. And when this does happen, creators better be ready to market their wares. (And the App Store better get its act together and improve how it showcases its content.) So everybody buckle in for what will be a long ride into the future. As we’ve heard for two consecutive years now, it’s early days yet and we’re lookin’ at the wild, wild West!
I really do not agree with your add as you have no clue on apps or creativity in general. Apps and similar book platforms are the future