The challenge for publishers is that they still think along old lines: words.

Today’s audience loves words. But they also like to experience them in different ways.

And today’s audience has embraced new technology faster than publishers seem to.

It’s a question of listening to the audience, of course.

It’s also a question of acting on what you hear.

Books can be interactive. And not just children’s books. Interactive books of all types can be doorways into a greater reading experience from Dr. Seuss to Lewis Carroll – and, one hopes, contemporary authors. Of course, “War and Peace” might not need additional content. But then again – wouldn’t it be great to have interactive maps of the Napoleonic campaigns? Wouldn’t it be great to imagine the characters and to see the landscapes – one can do both.

Sure, the Kindle, the iBook application, and a few other readers work well on the iPad. But they don’t take advantage of the potential. They don’t think outside the page.

There are a lot of ways to approach this. With an iPad app, readers have a chance to give instant feedback to creators, if they view the comments section. Most app makers do, but do most publishers?

Sure. Right.

But that would mean rethinking. The artist David Hockney has used the iPad to create a whole new series of paintings. He’s in his 70s, and this great contemporary artists gets it. He understands the vast potential of new technology. But then – he’s creative. He’s not a publisher.

Publishers are still wondering how to monetize electronic books. One way would be to take advantage of electronics. Electronics allow an interactive experience, and the iPad is perhaps the most sensual of electronic products: imagine sliding your fingers along the text and visualizing something, or even emailing a comment immediately, as you can with online newspapers.

It’s the rare magazine that allows this. And do you know of a book that does it?

No? Maybe not yet. But surely – if you are listening to your audience, you know what they want. They want you to be present.

A good way is to be present via current technology – and to anticipate what your audience wants. You can do that by listening to them – when someone listens to his audience, and really responds, it’s as if he can read their minds. It doesn’t mean you have to be a slave to new technology – it’s just that you have to be aware of it, and harness it. It’s called being present.

You don’t need an iPad to figure that out.

Let’s start with the first step and see how far we get today.

Step 1. Define the Problem.

I need to come up with questions about problems I see in book publishing.

Are traditional publishing models becoming mostly unviable?

Is book publishing going the way of the Internet, much like music and video?

How much money is made from electronic books?

How much money is made from traditional book publishing?

Is publishing a book, online or offline, a viable source of income for authors?

Who makes the most money directly from book sales? Is it the publishers, authors, distributors, or retailers?  How much money does each of them make for offline & online book sales?

How else do authors make money from book publishing?

What steps are involved in the traditional publishing of a book?

What steps are involved in the online book publishing process?

What’s the disparity between online book sales and physical book sales?

I think I have enough questions to help me figure out what types of data I will need to look for.  I want to make it clear that my main focus is on the viability of traditional publishing and the viability of online publishing.

I will define viability as the ability to generate profit.  To determine viability, we’ll need to analyze book sales statistics across the board.

Naturally, the next step is observation and data gathering.  The next hurdle to leap over will be in obtaining the data for analysis.  I will also need to learn more about statistics to properly analyze my data.  If my analyses are flawed, then I’ll botch the scientific method.

Can anyone point me to where I can get the data I need?  Does anyone have any data they can share with me?  Does anyone else want to get in on this project?

We know that Apple has sold several million iPads in just a few months, and that as a result of that popularity (part of it stemming from its stylishness, and the way it allows readers to peruse e-books in color), Amazon has reduced the price of its Kindle to $139, and Barnes & Noble is stepping up efforts to increase sales of its Nook. Amazon has sold about two million Kindles, and Barnes & Noble about 600,000 Nooks.

Old-fashioned analog books still sell more copies overall than e-copies of books, but that’s likely to change as more and more people move on to digital media devices. The paper-and-cardboard book won’t disappear, though: it will become yet another option for our niche-centered world, and consumers will have the choice of downloading a title, ordering it online or even going into a brick-and-mortar store to buy it.

I was out of the country for a few months and what struck me when I first rode the subway again in my hometown of New York was how many people were reading something on either their iPad or their Kindle. Now, New Yorkers read on the subway – it’s one of those refreshing thing about this hyperactive town that people use their travel time to soak up literature or business or whatever. But it wasn’t until I got back home from Europe that I saw so many people reading on those sleek electronic tablets. People read on the metro in Paris, too, but mostly old-style books or magazines. Rarely e-readers. The e-reader, in whatever form, has taken hold here.

And American publishers, usually so slow to respond to market trends (other than signing up another author to write a vampire series), are releasing “amplified” versions of novels, featuring scenes from movie adaptations, for example, and “enhanced” e-books, featuring videos and photographs and up-to-date interviews. These new versions are designed right now for the iPad – the Kindle remains a rather clunky device, and it doesn’t handle video at all.

But this embedding of video text within books is only the first step in what is surely going to be a continuing refinement of e-books. It will change the nature of reading, making it that much more actually interactive. Remember when you had to put your book down and link to a website to find out more about your author, on his or her stodgy old web page?

I think this is a great trend, and shows not only the primacy of the printed word – in whatever form – but also how books ( in whatever form) remain a starting point to begin a conversation, to engage the public beyond the book itself. To grow business.

Well, she’s gone the way of many readers: into electronic books.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Friedman has raised $3 million for OpenRoad Integrated Media, which is putting together a company for e-book publishing and marketing.

The news broke during August, a traditionally quiet time in publishing (and news cycles), and, because of that SEC filing that a reporter uncovered, Friedman didn’t have a chance to publicize her launch in a big way. Observers in publishing were less surprised at the venture – electronic publishing is, after all, a growth area – than at the $3 million in funding, which isn’t much to start a company with these days.

That $3 million may not be a lot of money to someone used to running a company that printed thousands of book and employed a similar number of people in graphic design, publicity, sales, printing, and other areas, but it does show that a new publishing venture can spring up without much fanfare, with professionals who have solid, stellar backgrounds, and with the potential to become a player in a business landscape that is shifting faster than sands in a desert storm.

When you don’t have to pay for paper, for book design, for office space, for a host of other brick-and-mortar expenses, you can be lean. You can have an impact.

Consider the rapid growth of e-books—–Electronic publishing is expected to represent more than 2% of the $40.3 billion U.S. publishing business by next year, according to a report by the Book Industry Study Group. Now $80 million might not seem much, but with growth of more than 5% a year, it’s one of the more rapidly expanding sectors in a relatively stagnant business. And a $3 million company within that segment looks pretty significant.

One publisher I know believes that in about a decade, e-books will account for about 80% of the market.

He questions, though, what authors might think about this.

Authors tend to be old-fashioned, even the progressive ones who’ve embraced new ways of marketing themselves and their books. And authors like to have a hard copy of their work. I myself would prefer that my next novel be published in hardcover as well as electronic versions, so that I have a physical record of my efforts, plus one I can display and show off, even though I realize that the physical book is only a very small part of what I should be thinking of as I market myself as an author.

Perhaps the time is near when authors will release special hardcover editions, much as rock groups such as U2 put out limited-run vinyl LPs alongside the electronic and CD versions of their new albums. Not everyone who buys such an artifact (for that’s what these releases are) will play it. And maybe not everyone who buys a special-edition hardcover will read it in this digital age.

But it sure looks nice on a shelf.
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Robert J. Hughes, a longtime reporter for The Wall Street Journal, writes on the arts, based in New York.

The other day I noticed a man sitting next to me on the subway reading a book. Nothing unusual there. Just about everyone on the New York subway reads something. But this guy was reading a book on his iPhone, and was as engrossed in it as if it had been a trade paperback.

A day or two later, I was speaking with a friend at my book group (I belong to a group made up of writers, agents, and publishing-industry executives, where we read young-adult books). She told me that she’d just read Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. All 800-plus pages of it. On her iPhone.

She said that she downloaded quite a few books to her iPhone through the Amazon Kindle app, so that she’d have something to turn to if she happened to finish the physical book she was reading while she was out.

For myself, I carry a book around with me everywhere. As you might expect, as a writer I’m also a big reader. But I also walk around town listening to an audio book on my iPod. Right now, I’m listening to George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Last week, I listened to a Lee Child thriller. But when one audio book ends, and before I begin listening to another, I start reading the book I have with me. You know, the physical kind.

I also have a Kindle app for my iPhone (I’ve downloaded all of George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Jane Austen, and Anthony Trollope), and two other book-reading apps on it. One, called Classics, is a library of, yes, young-adult books. I have it because I couldn’t find a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book at my local bookstore when my group was reading it, and it would actually take a week to arrive from Amazon. I was able to upload the book immediately to my phone, where I read it. It’s an interesting app, by the way: it simulates the book experience by allowing you to “turn” a page backward or forward through sliding your finger along one side.

The point of all this? Right now, publishing is where the recording industry was a decade ago—figuring out how to deal with the varieties of options a reader has in the digital age.

Readers are ahead of publishers for the most part. Not too long ago, I heard even forward-thinking publishing industry friends declare that they couldn’t envision anyone reading an actual book on an iPhone (an e-reader, maybe, or a Kindle). Well, welcome to an age where a mother of two reads an 1875 novel on a 2009 smartphone while listening to music through her wireless headset.

Now, publishers are grappling with the whole pricing issue as a host of electronic options are becoming available to readers. Amazon’s Kindle prices most books at $9.99, and publishers complain that they lose money at that rate. There’s no logic to the prices for books on other electronic devices. Additionally, publishers are trying to get aboard whatever online platform might help make them money. For instance, Simon & Schuster just signed an agreement to make its books available through Scribd, the e-commerce site for all kinds of written documents. I hope it works out.

The problem is, publishers (and many authors) still think they’re going to make money off their books. Now, I’m all for copyright protection and fair usage and airtight royalty payments. But just as musicians realized that they don’t make money off recordings, that their recordings serve as brand extensions, that they make their money through live performances and licensing, so, too, will authors need to re-think their approach to the whole publishing business.

It isn’t so much about selling actual books as it is about branding yourself and extending that brand. It’s a lot of work, and it has taken musicians a while to get there. Authors and writers—and yes, publishers—need to figure it out for themselves before they’re digitized out of business.

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