Lessons from the first month - Part I - October 21, 2008

The Huffington Post has a pretty good article on what publishing can learn from the music industry. The lessons are:

1. An iPod for Books Will Change Everything
2. Think Beyond DRM
3. If You Help Us, We Will Buy
4. Don't Be Afraid of Free
5. Find Out What Your Customers Want

Unfortunately the article doesn't go far enough. Making your material available in whatever digital formats are out there was last year's lesson. Just making the material available is too passive. It still assumes that if you build it, they will come.

And they're not coming. They may have come when there was five or five hundred or five thousand choices. Now though, there are unlimited choices. The scarcity is no longer the material, there's more quality material out there than people have time to consume it. What is scarce today is time and attention.

Looking forward, the winners will be the players who go beyond good content. It used to be that content was king, that good content was what separated you from the crowd. Now good content is assumed. Everyone who matters has good content. The problem is that good content is spread out all over the place. It's on blogs, forums, youtube, news sites, it's everywhere.

And that creates tremendous opportunity. Most people don't want to search for content. They let others find it for them and present it to them. And so you get content aggregators. Not just online but offline too. What are movie theaters? Content aggregators for Hollywood. Bookstores? Content aggregators for the publishing world. Tower Records? Aggregation for music labels. Blockbuster / Netflix / Hulu? All of these are just places you show up because the content is there.

The problem with a lot of these places is that when you show up, there's nothing to guide you. How do you know what's good? Critics? Recommendations? Those are all external to the actual aggregator. Offline, the aggregators are dumb. They just offer selves of content and let you figure out what, if anything, you want to buy. Some of these places made a half step towards solving this by offering employee recommendations but it was an afterthought.

I'm not saying anything revolutionary here. This has been known for the past ten years. Sites like Kottke, Slashdot and more recently Digg, Reddit and Drudge have all figured this out. And they've taken the aggregation business to the next logical step. Instead of dumbly offering a selection of whatever is out there, each of those sites has a focus and a bias. They've begun the process of picking the best of one subject and offering only that to their readers.

I bring all this up because publishing is facing the same old problem that it's always faced. And eBooks are not the answer. Going digital is not the answer. That's like saying "well, there are these new fangled bookstores. If we print our stories on paper, the bookstores will sell them. Score!" Going to the medium where your readers are only gets you in the game, it doesn't win it for you. We're still living in an era of too much content, too little attention. From Tim Ferris:

there are more than 200,000 books published each year in the US, and less than 5% ever sell more than 5,000 copies. On a given bestseller list, more than 5 spots could be occupied by unbeatable bestsellers like Good to Great or The Tipping Point, which have been on the lists for years.

Going digital doesn't make those odds better, it makes them worse. Everything is "going digital" and since a blog can have the same reach as a magazine, newspaper or publisher the competition is even more cutthroat. People don't care about the medium. They don't care if they're reading a newspaper article, eBook or blog article. They care that they're getting the content they want, especially as we move to a world where it's all delivered on the same e-reader.

[In Part II I'll tackle where we should be headed. And what we really learned from the music industry.]

Posted by Ben Corman at 5:07 PM

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