Frankfurt Book Fair 2014: How to Outcompete Amazon? Think 'Reader'
By Amanda Van Beuren
In August 2014, author Chris Kubica led a two-day meeting of e-book industry movers and shakers, in which they brainstormed on this notion: “If we had no budget or other constraints, what would the perfect e-bookstore look like?” He wrote about that meeting previously, and now has written an update article on it again in Publishers Weekly.
From those two days, Kubica outlined 8 inspiring ideas that are very grassroots-oriented and people-empowering. Very human; much less corporate. Time to “take back the night” from the e-book marketing behemoths…
I read all the time online – web pages, articles, email, work documents – but I do not like reading on e-readers and I do not like to purchase e-books because it’s not a purchase, it’s a rental. I chafe at being so constrained in how I might use the information just because it’s electronic and not printed in a book. (I’m not flouting copyright here, just speaking to the e-book reduction-of-use issues.) I think most e-book formats for books are pretty boring. I am very concerned over the privacy issues surrounding use of e-readers and the platforms behind them. I believe that when I buy something, I should own it. (I don’t lease cars either for just for this reason.) I want to be able to loan, give, resell in the same ways we’ve been able to with print books. And I don’t want to be charged extra for that previously free privilege, either.
Kubica’s 8 tenets are that the perfect e-bookstores would:
1. Think Like a Non-Profit:
“…would strip out all unnecessary clicks, walls, and distractions, and put the reading experience front-and-center” because “…so far, the online reading experience is focused more on commerce than the reading experience.”
2. Foster Communities:
“…where the connections between readers, writers, and publishers are open, transparent, and direct… Where readers have absolute control of the information they share … publishers and authors can maintain their own communities and email lists … can engage with others as little or as much as they’d like to with no one throttling or filtering them.”
3. Embrace the Human:
“Companies … have boiled movie and book recommendations down to a science. … books and readers are connected to one another in ways algorithms will never understand fully. … Taking the humanity out of book discovery is silly.”
4. Offer Every Option:
“… would offer all options in one place” -- free books …that you can buy outright, that you can really own, lend, or resell; all-you-can-read plans; library checkouts. It would always present the reader with the choice: ‘How would I like to enjoy this book?’”
5. Demand Openness:
Would allow readers to “be able to buy a book in any place they choose, and have it always available, anyplace, on any device” -- “… DRM [limits] what your legitimate customers can do with the books they’ve paid for, and lock[s] customers into vendor platforms.”
6. Free Data:
Powerful epublishing sellers (ahem) consider their data proprietary and private. The perfect e-bookstore would “find a way to protect reader privacy, but would also let everyone see who is reading what (anonymized, of course), and offer real, objective, precise sales numbers and ranks.”
7. Reinvent Reading:
Rather than e-books just mimicking printed books, Kubica asks “Where are the never-ending cookbooks? …Massively Multi-Author Online Novels (MMAONs)? … digital car manuals with built-in recall alerts and tips from mechanics and the collective wisdom and maker-hacks of thousands of owners? … a library book that can be checked out by dozens of patrons at the same time?”
8. An Elegant API:
With all this in place, then “build the interfaces necessary to share the reading experience…” – to allow us to e-read humanly.
Indeed!
By Amanda Van Beuren
In August 2014, author Chris Kubica led a two-day meeting of e-book industry movers and shakers, in which they brainstormed on this notion: “If we had no budget or other constraints, what would the perfect e-bookstore look like?” He wrote about that meeting previously, and now has written an update article on it again in Publishers Weekly.
From those two days, Kubica outlined 8 inspiring ideas that are very grassroots-oriented and people-empowering. Very human; much less corporate. Time to “take back the night” from the e-book marketing behemoths…
I read all the time online – web pages, articles, email, work documents – but I do not like reading on e-readers and I do not like to purchase e-books because it’s not a purchase, it’s a rental. I chafe at being so constrained in how I might use the information just because it’s electronic and not printed in a book. (I’m not flouting copyright here, just speaking to the e-book reduction-of-use issues.) I think most e-book formats for books are pretty boring. I am very concerned over the privacy issues surrounding use of e-readers and the platforms behind them. I believe that when I buy something, I should own it. (I don’t lease cars either for just for this reason.) I want to be able to loan, give, resell in the same ways we’ve been able to with print books. And I don’t want to be charged extra for that previously free privilege, either.
Kubica’s 8 tenets are that the perfect e-bookstores would:
1. Think Like a Non-Profit:
“…would strip out all unnecessary clicks, walls, and distractions, and put the reading experience front-and-center” because “…so far, the online reading experience is focused more on commerce than the reading experience.”
2. Foster Communities:
“…where the connections between readers, writers, and publishers are open, transparent, and direct… Where readers have absolute control of the information they share … publishers and authors can maintain their own communities and email lists … can engage with others as little or as much as they’d like to with no one throttling or filtering them.”
3. Embrace the Human:
“Companies … have boiled movie and book recommendations down to a science. … books and readers are connected to one another in ways algorithms will never understand fully. … Taking the humanity out of book discovery is silly.”
4. Offer Every Option:
“… would offer all options in one place” -- free books …that you can buy outright, that you can really own, lend, or resell; all-you-can-read plans; library checkouts. It would always present the reader with the choice: ‘How would I like to enjoy this book?’”
5. Demand Openness:
Would allow readers to “be able to buy a book in any place they choose, and have it always available, anyplace, on any device” -- “… DRM [limits] what your legitimate customers can do with the books they’ve paid for, and lock[s] customers into vendor platforms.”
6. Free Data:
Powerful epublishing sellers (ahem) consider their data proprietary and private. The perfect e-bookstore would “find a way to protect reader privacy, but would also let everyone see who is reading what (anonymized, of course), and offer real, objective, precise sales numbers and ranks.”
7. Reinvent Reading:
Rather than e-books just mimicking printed books, Kubica asks “Where are the never-ending cookbooks? …Massively Multi-Author Online Novels (MMAONs)? … digital car manuals with built-in recall alerts and tips from mechanics and the collective wisdom and maker-hacks of thousands of owners? … a library book that can be checked out by dozens of patrons at the same time?”
8. An Elegant API:
With all this in place, then “build the interfaces necessary to share the reading experience…” – to allow us to e-read humanly.
Indeed!