Observations from BEA And IDPF 2015

The Javits Center must have some sort of time warp technology. I recently attended the BEA event there and I kept asking myself the same question: Is this 2015 or 2005? The digital vibe was almost nowhere to be found in the expo hall. For example, publishers are still handing out stacks of print galleys and samples. Is that really more effective than digital copies? Wouldn't it be better to distribute e-versions and gather customer info along the way? All this talk of establishing direct relationships with readers and having access to the resulting data still seems to be the stuff of fiction.

There's also still a big gap between the core industry and the startup community. The Startup Alley, an expo aisle featuring 15 or so up-and-comers, is a nice concept but doesn't seem very effective for anyone. It also highlights a bigger problem in the publishing industry: there's no platform or service that continuously evaluates new startups and helps match them with publishers who could benefit from their capabilities. Startups are generally relegated to an area off the beaten path with virtually no buzz to draw attention to them. That's sad because, as Richard Nash pointed out during the IDPF conference, it's clear the real innovation is going to come from the startup community.

The most painfully accurate statement I heard all week was from Michael Bhaskar of Canelo Publishing during his opening session at the IDPF event: "Publishers treat ebooks as a secondary priority." This is partially understandable given the fact that print is still the largest revenue stream but I believe this mindset also prevents digital content from achieving its full potential.

Bhaskar made another terrific point when he noted that the music industry is leveraging consumer curation in ways the book publishing industry hasn't even dreamed of. I believe tomorrow's e-content leaders will fully understand and encourage consumer curation. Whether you call it remixes, custom editions, or something else, this is a concept that will help the industry achieve escape velocity from today's print-under-glass model.

The IDPF conference highlight for me was Jane McGonigal's session. I haven't played a video game since PacMan in the early '80's so I went into this one highly skeptical but she opened my eyes to the possibilities. It's not that every book has to become a game. That's not it at all. Rather, she challenged the audience to find ways of creating content that takes readers to a whole new level of enthusiasm. The images she showed of gamers completely engaged and immersed in the experience were inspiring.

Another valuable IDPF session was one where Jim Hanas of HarperCollins interviewed David Arabov of Elite Daily. Arabov described how Elite Daily organically builds audience and community and turns that into their finished product. Compare that to book publishing where a totally non-agile approach is used to build products behind closed doors with the hope that yesterday's marketing models will generate buzz (e.g., buying promotions, shelf space on physical shelves, etc.). Wouldn't it be cool if publishers engaged with readers during the idea conception and development process rather than waiting till the end after all the time and money have been invested? That sounds like Wattpad to me, which might explain why Allen Lau and his team always report such amazingly high traffic levels. Now they just need to figure out how that translates into revenue, of course...

I had the pleasure of serving as moderator on a couple of IDPF panel sessions. The Amazon panel included Molly Barton and she made an excellent point about the problems with today's closed ebook ecosystem. As Molly described it, readers often want to socialize their reading experience and today's model forces them to have those conversations away from the book. Why not integrate this functionality in the reading app? It can be completely unobtrusive, where the service only appears when the reader wants to access it rather than forcing readers off to other apps and platforms.

All-you-can-read subscriptions were, of course, a topic that came up many times throughout the week. Scribd's Andrew Weinstein shared some observations including how this model affects the long tail. As Weinstein put it, with unlimited reading platforms consumers are more willing to abandon a book and move on to the next one if they lose interest, figuring there's no additional cost to taste-test a lot of books every month. First of all, let's hope that's doesn't turn out to be the most important benefit subscription platform have to offer. Second, what does that say about the industry's inability to create a sampling model that actually works?

Finally, I wanted to mention an interesting quote from Sherisse Hawkins of Beneath the Ink. Sherisse has been a pioneer in pushing ebooks beyond the print-under-glass experience and she said that one of their readers recently sent a message saying, "thank you for helping me avoid getting lost in the 'wiki holes.'" That reminded me of the new Wright Brothers book by David McCullough that I recently finished. It was a fantastic read but I can't tell you how many times my curiosity led me away from the book to Google where I searched for locations, images, and related content. Unlike Sherrise's customer, I did get lost in a variety of "wiki holes," but it once again proved to me that this industry needs to figure out how to provide consumers with something more than dumb content on smart devices.