Its About The Book

Will Distribution Survive eBooks?

Microhard, But Not Up To Standard.

Distribution is a category of business that has a model made for hard copy books; can it survive in the eBook market? Well answering the unanswerable question is best done before breakfast so this is my morning’s helping. As the inevitable happens and paper books are relegated to a tiny corner of the book market over the next fifty years distributors will still hold a piece of the market. Here are some reasons why I believe that is true.

Fragmentation of the publishing market is continuing; with small independent publishers gaining on the big houses in market share as eBooks grow more popular. What is this garp? Isn’t consolidation the wave of the future? Not once the worm turns one more time and the publishing world becomes as open as the Internet to new sources of writing. Tiny presses are learning to compete with the major’s in this new environment. That means fragmentation of book sources will continue for a long time. Fragmentation empowers aggregation and distribution. Thus distribution will survive as a necessary function in the Internet publishing market.

Why do we need distribution in a mixed book market where eBooks are a large part of the mix? It is all about easy access to the buyer. In the paper bound world access to bookstores and warehousing went hand in hand to empower distributors. In the bracing new environment of the Internet access to multiple bookstores will still empower distributors. The names may change and some new distributors may come into power while others fail to adapt but distribution will not end with eBooks.

Who needs more than one bookstore when we already have an Amazon in our bedroom? Well butterfly, your wings may cause a category five storm, but the perfect world on the Internet is one where dominant players are powerful but not totally in control. The Internet is chaos in action. Amazon, while it will possibly remain powerful for a long time, is still going to lose market share to a growing list of small competitors. Nothing that changes as fast as the Internet is going to be controlled or even dominated forever by a single business model.

Amazon is a smart company but as it grows in size and merchandising power it becomes bound up in its own contractual relationships. That will constrain the adaptive capacity of its business model. Smaller aggressive companies are already appearing and they can live quite nicely on the residual income that Amazon’s business model leaves scattered around. All they have to do is recognize where the giant’s foot will fall next and stay out of its next central target zone.

The long tail will certainly open up bookselling a lot but who will actually stock and sell ten million books, even in eBook form? Amazon will probably not do that nor will most stores on the Internet, but some distributors will. Books not in print will come into print as people stop buying second hand books and buy eBooks instead. All it would take is a hundred buyers discovering a book that once sold a hundred thousand paper copies to make that book profitable again as an eBook. Distributors will use the long tail to help them survive in the eBook Market.

Then of course there is the issue of marginal value applied to the eBook publishing market of the future. What will be the marginal value of eBooks individually when they finally hit their stride? It will not compare with the cost of paper books which add more cost for each level of the market than an electronic version. If paper books are ten dollars the same profit margins are available to every level of the market from author to publisher to distributor to bookstore at six dollars or less for the eBook version.

Distribution will still add enough value for its new business models to survive in the eBook driven publishing market of the future. The older models of distribution will of course fade and disappear but that is all to the benefit of the reading audience. Where except inside of the digital revolution can more people read more books for less cost? EBooks are here to stay! So is distribution in some form or style.

Poor tiny little Microsoft is one more time striking out on its own to set a standard. All of us in the pursuit of the holy grail of publishing, a real electronic publishing standard, should wish them well. After all aren’t they setting out to succeed where all of us have failed? It is a strange new world where people actually believe that really open standards should exist. Microsoft has never been hampered by that fantastic view of reality. If there is going to be a publishing standard they want to own it.

Back when computing was owned by IBM, before Micro’s slew the giant, or at least made it recalculate a bit, there was no such thing as an open standard. Of course only insane visionaries thought computing could be brought to the masses at that point in history. Standards were something handed down from on high to the small priesthood of technologists that were actually allowed to touch the computer. Now even the non-programming rabble actually wants a say in the creation of standards. It only goes to show that if you want to keep your standards up you should never allow the unwashed billions near a computer.

The continuation of civilization depends on the transmission of information from one generation to another. Knowledge of the details of maintaining our culture could be transmitted more easily when we were not face with maintaining all of this technology that keeps the potential disasters caused by all of our billions and their needs at bay. Of course then we lived in a world where only one billion humans were polluting the biosphere as fast as they could discover the means to do it.

We now live in a world where human beings are facing Global Warming, an acidifying ocean, holes in the ozone and Chemical, Biological and Nuclear weapons any of which could end human civilization on the planet. We operate a government committed to the utter folly of military budgets that exceed expenditures on health, education and welfare. How important is an open standard for publishing?

Well, that is not as easy a question to answer as it appears to be at first glance. In an industry where the device is used to display text, graphics, photos, video, and also deliver audio; does the standard used to manage any or all of those media types really matter? Perhaps not, at least not as long as the device can manage multiple standards and make the publication work. The day of the single purpose, single standard device appears to be on a fast track to nowhere today. Perhaps multiple competing standards and their evolutionary process will better serve the audience’s interest after all.

Certainly talking about Microhard’s fiat standard will not make it go away. I suspect that Adobe and other competing players in the world of publishing tools are busily working toward their own version of a toolkit that could replace the Microsofties panoply. If they are not then they had best get going. We are at least two generations of software away from a standard today. We may be four or five.

XML in all of its glorious complexity will probably prevail as the underlying basis for a toolkit that works, but that feat appears to be a ways off as yet. The consensus opinion is that there is currently no consensus that can give birth to a standard for all of publishing. Perhaps we ought to take it on as the divided market it appears to be from my chair. We have academic publishing, trade publishing, corporate publishing and government publishing to mention a few.

In any case, the die is cast, King Micro has spoken, and they do know how to tread softly and carry a big hard stick. Evil empire or no they will have an effect on the standards that are eventually adopted for publishing. The rest of us will just have to move on without their mostly dubious help.