With many other analogue media going digital, it was naturally assumed that books would follow suit sooner or later. It certainly looked that way shortly after Amazon’s Kindle was launched 10 years ago.
Sales were brisk and growing solidly year by year, at least initially. But as of late sales figures haven’t been so good. The US Publishing Association Yearbook 2016 noted a 17 per cent drop in sales of consumer e-books while physical book revenues increased by 8 per cent.
Books are really the last man standing — the only media platform where analogue is growing while digital is declining. That’s not the case with movies, TV shows, music, newspapers and magazines. For some reason, when it comes to books people seem to still like print.
That’s certainly the case in Malaysia where e-books never really ever took off. There’s neither much demand nor supply for e-books. In this chicken-and-egg situation, something needs to be done to break this vicious cycle or e-books will forever be a non-starter.
FORMAT WAR
When any technology is new, there’s always a format war. Back when video tapes were new, there was the famous VHS vs Betamax war. Later there was the Blu-Ray vs HD DVD war. Digital music also had multiple formats although in the end it was MP3 that won out. Computer systems had Microsoft vs Apple. Phone operating systems also have their iOS vs Android war.
Format wars are common. And so it was with e-books. Amazon was (and still is) the 800-pound gorilla in the e-books game so it was able to impose its own proprietary format called Kindle. The rest of the world opted to go with the ePub format (ePub2 for static content and ePub3 for interactive and multimedia content). These were the two primary formats though there are others.
For the past decade, if you were serious about e-books you’d have to make them available as Kindle books or ePub books if you wanted online retailers to carry your title. Amazon only accepted Kindle-formatted books while distributors like Ingram, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and even Apple’s iStore all took variations of the ePub format.
The major players’ persistence in sticking to these formats has actually hindered the progress of e-books. Kindle’s basic format and the corresponding ePub2 format are designed for novels or very text-heavy books. If a book has a lot of graphics or pictures, these formats don’t work well for it. That’s because the text is designed to be flowable.
When you have a lot of images, you want the layout to be fixed, not flowable. But to make a Kindle or ePub2 book fixed format isn’t an easy thing to do and the cost of having it done by specialist service providers is remarkably high.
So while romance novels and other text-heavy books have taken off as e-books, books with lots of images have not.
E-books also brought with it the promise of interactivity and multimedia. Amazon’s Kindle Fire 8 (KF8) and ePub3 are two formats that facilitate that. But these two formats require heavy doses of programming and isn’t something a typical graphic designer can handle. Is it any surprise that very few e-books are actually interactive? The dream of interactive, multimedia e-books remains largely just that: a dream.
We’ve all seen pilot projects and proofs-of-concept e-books with all kinds of gimmicks embedded in them but just because something can be done doesn’t mean it’s easy or cheap to do so. In the case of interactive multimedia e-books, it’s both difficult and cost-prohibitive.
GOOD OL' FASHIONED PDF
There are alternative formats out there. Some independent e-book publishers have dispensed with Kindle or ePub for static e-books and have instead adopted good-old-fashioned PDF as their preferred format. It doesn’t offer a lot of the features that Kindle and ePub do but PDF’s super easy to make. And that’s its winning point.
There are also many PDF-hosting services such as ISSUU (www.issuu.com) and Publitas (www.publitas.com) which allow you to present your PDF as an e-book where you can flip the pages. They even come equipped with sound that mimics the turning of a page.
PDF allows you to embed video content but it’s not really the best platform for that. There are many online e-book services that do offer truly interactive platforms though. Joomag (www.joomag.com) is one of them. If you create an e-book using this platform, you’ll be able to offer not only audio and video clips very easily, but also animation, photo slideshows and galleries that change pictures automatically.
It should be noted that Joomag’s interactive magazines have to be viewed online. If you want to read the e-book offline, you can download it as a PDF but then the interactive elements wouldn’t work. To experience these e-books fully, you need to view them online. That’s the main downside to this platform. You can’t really download a fully functional version of the e-book.
But do readers really require a downloaded copy of an e-book if it’s available in all its glory online all the time? If you look at movies, TV shows and music, today’s generation of young people seem to actually prefer streaming.
I come from an era where being able to download music was considered radical. Today’s generation finds downloading old-fashioned. They prefer to stream their songs. The same with movies: Why bother to download a show when you can watch it online?
Why not with books too? As long as the book is always available online, why do you need to download it? The answer is that you don’t. Readers generally don’t care about formats. They just want something that works. What’s important is that the content is accessible to them when they want it.
While it might not yet be time to tell authors and publishers to ditch the Kindle or ePub formats, it certainly makes sense for them to seriously look at making their books available in other kinds of formats.
The other thing that readers want is low prices or ideally, free. If consumers are reluctant to pay for e-books — maybe because there’s already so much free content online — it doesn’t make sense to go against their wishes.
TRYING SOMETHING NEW
Perhaps the business model of selling e-books needs to be changed to a free model that’s funded by advertising or sponsorship. In other words, publishers should stop trying to make money directly from consumers who are reluctant to pay but instead get organisations and corporations who wish to reach the target demographic of a particular title.
For example, a car brand might be interested in sponsoring an e-book about defensive driving. A housing developer that specialises in green homes would probably be interested in sponsorship of an e-book about how to make your home more energy-efficient. A diaper manufacturer might want to support an e-book on baby care.
This would take books closer to the terrestrial radio and TV model which is free broadcast paid for by advertisers. Even newspapers and magazines survive mainly on advertising, although they do charge a nominal price for their products.
Books traditionally are sold at full price and are neither subsidised nor sponsored. But why not? Consumers would love it and advertisers would have another digital platform to work with.
If a publisher wants to really try some out-of-the-box ideas, they can even consider making e-books a conduit for e-commerce activities or lead generation for sales of products or services. In other words, the e-books are free and money is made from commissions from e-commerce or lead generation sales.
Albert Einstein supposedly defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If e-books aren’t taking off despite a decade of trying the same old format and same old business model, it’d be insane for publishers not to try something new.
Oon Yeoh is a consultant with experiences in print, online and mobile media. Reach him at oonyeoh@gmail.com