Digital Dizziness: How do Book Publishers Begin the Process of Going Digital?
Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 8:41PM 
It's practically an epidemic. Everyone in the digital world is telling everyone in the book publishing world that they NEED TO GO DIGITAL AND THEY NEED TO DO IT NOW!
And while nobody's shy about offering up their opinions as to what that means -- aggregate content; produce e-books in all the available formats; distribute ebooks on every possible platform; do your marketing via social media; get your authors on facebook and twitter; and get your whole staff on every social media platform too--no one is all that forthcoming with telling publishers exactly how they're supposed to do all this.
Recently, I had a discussion along these lines with a very good friend who is also a very good publisher. Seems that I, and a million other enthusiastic supporters of social media and digtial publishing, were trying to convince her to take the plunge - go for the gold -- just do it!
Yes, there I was gushing on and on about the benefits of going digital, and she had the gall to look me straight in the eye and give me more than a few "practical" reasons why she's not so sure she can implement the changes she knows she should be at least "trying" to put in place.
I mean, really. The nerve!
All kidding aside, my conversation with her was very, er "grounding." Those of us who work on the more "conceptual" side of all-things-book-world, sometimes forget about the realities of implementation. When publishers don't adopt new technologies, we are quick to call those publishers "stubborn," or "set in their ways," or, to paraphrase my good friend Mike Cane, "dying dinosaurs of print."
But, guess what? Most publishers are not sticking their heads in the sand, or being backward, or even staring into the headlights of new technology like so many bookish Bambis. Indeed, most of our dear publishing friends are struggling with both the "dizziness of too much possibility," and overworked and underpaid staffs that are not exactly enthusiastic about taking on a whole lot of unproven new initiatives in addition to their already huge workloads.
Add to that the general anxiety in the book publishing industry right now, and it's understandble that book publishers would rather just hunker down and hope they can weather the storm than invest time, effort and money they don't have in the unknown quantity of "digital."
But, you and I know they should invest in digital. You and I know they will experience huge payoffs (or at least ensure their own survival) if they take a step into the digital age.
So, for those of you who have already gone down the path of digitizing your publishing practices (whatever it may mean for you), what steps would *you* recommend publishers take to ease into the digital age? -- what questions should they be asking themselves to determine where they should start?
Is there any one thing that all publishers should be doing, or is each and every publisher's situation going to be different enough that they need to do it all from scratch?
Please offer up your consul -- here in the comments, or directly to the publishers you know.
It's a brand new day in book publishing, folks, and we need to work together to make the industry thrive and keep great publishing alive.
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Reader Comments (6)
This is an excellent post. Someone with a brain hopefully will comment and explain all this eBook platform XML biznasty to us.
I don't understand the problem here. They already have books in e form. Does a magic genie come in while they sleep and turn paper into naked electrons for them or what?
Oh yes. I call this the problem of the 'and' -- you need to do everything you are doing now and this and that. The one thing I would say to do is get authors to do digital marketing for themselves don't do it for them -- otherwise things won't scale. Of course that doesn't mean publishers should have their heads in the sand. They should be shifting to a digital workflow and they should have a vp-of reader relations that oversees direct-to-consumer social media but that is different than doing digital promotion on an authors behalf. It is a hard balance to strike but as I read recently -- "I know of no industry that conducted an orderly downsizing when the opportunity it addressed disappeared" http://bit.ly/17LWN
I'm not so sure that publishers will experience huge payoffs by going digital. All they really have is their exclusive content. Maintaining that exclusivity in a digital world is almost impossible. Look at newspapers (they largely have gone digital). Why should I buy the New York Times when I can read the whole thing online?
It's a scary world for publishers and one that may contain a huge payoff, but also one that could lead to their own demise.
Good post, thank you. My company consults and helps with digitisation and distribution, and I speak to a lot of publishers. I used to be a publisher for a couple big companies too. Fact is, the decision makers in publishing companies don't have all day to read about digitisation and think through the details in depth. Moreover, they're swamped with consultants (like myself) knocking on their doors telling them to go, go, go, and they suspect, often rightly, that many of these consultants are out to make a fast buck or don't know much about the creative process of book-making. Who do these publishers trust? And where do they find the time to do proper research? I've been researching digital publishing and ebooks for years, and I still feel overwhelmed. I have a great deal of admiration for publishers who do manage to 'just do it', even in a small way.
Our company is currently dealing with the issue of examining all of our contracts to check that we actually have electronic rights. We have thousands of books in print and the manpower required to check every contract is insane. The plan is meeting a lot of resistance because everyone is working so hard to limit slippage on our bound books--they're the ones making our salaries. But we're distributing ebooks as fast as we can in the meantime. Sadly, only a fraction of a percent of the number of hits our books get actually convert to sales--is this how we want to spend our time?
Jess
http://bookpublishing.today.com