Apple became the biggest online retailer when the music industry failed to set up an online digital store. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images
(Second of a series)
Last week, we looked at the ebook's Giant Disruption. A new ecosystem in which Amazon eats publishers' and agents' lunch by luring authors into self-publishing.
Today, we examine the new regime's impact on bookmaking and distribution processes.
The outcome will surprise few readers: Over time, the new book publishing business will look more and more like the software industry.
1/ Managing abundance. Traditional publishing's most salient feature is the maintenance of high barriers to entry. The journey from manuscript to bookstore is an excruciating one. Publishers are deluged with book proposals; a quick glance at a few pages and the bulk of submissions is rejected. Still, far too many books get published. Several Parisian booksellers told me they sometimes have to return unopened boxes of books to distributors, simply because they don't have enough space for them. Therefore, the 80/20 rule applies: most of the revenue comes from a small assortment of books. Digital publishing removes those barriers – brutally so – the floodgates are now indiscriminately open to every aspiring writer. This will have two effects: more difficult choices for the reader (see Barry Schwartz TED's talk on The Paradox of Choice) and, on average, lower-quality products.
Overtime, two factors will help solve the problem of the choice: search engines and manual curation. As semantic search rises, books content gets treated like data, searchable not only by words clusters, but by variations of meaning, pitch and, at some point, style. Put another way, a search engine will soon be able to differentiate and to attribute texts written by two novelists working in the same segment of literature.
Such breakthroughs will impact recommendation engines systems that already act a serious sales booster. Again, tech companies, such as Amazon (more than Apple, which does not seem to "get" search) will ride the wave thanks to their past and future investments into search and data analytics.
Semantic recommendation engines won't kill the need for human curation. Like the app business where abundance creates a need for more human-powered guidance and suggestions (see Jean-Louis's idea of a Guide Michelin for Apps), book sections of magazines and newspapers will have to adapt and find ways to efficiently suggest e-readings to their audience.
Read the full piece at The Guardian.
Last week, we looked at the ebook's Giant Disruption. A new ecosystem in which Amazon eats publishers' and agents' lunch by luring authors into self-publishing.
Today, we examine the new regime's impact on bookmaking and distribution processes.
The outcome will surprise few readers: Over time, the new book publishing business will look more and more like the software industry.
1/ Managing abundance. Traditional publishing's most salient feature is the maintenance of high barriers to entry. The journey from manuscript to bookstore is an excruciating one. Publishers are deluged with book proposals; a quick glance at a few pages and the bulk of submissions is rejected. Still, far too many books get published. Several Parisian booksellers told me they sometimes have to return unopened boxes of books to distributors, simply because they don't have enough space for them. Therefore, the 80/20 rule applies: most of the revenue comes from a small assortment of books. Digital publishing removes those barriers – brutally so – the floodgates are now indiscriminately open to every aspiring writer. This will have two effects: more difficult choices for the reader (see Barry Schwartz TED's talk on The Paradox of Choice) and, on average, lower-quality products.
Overtime, two factors will help solve the problem of the choice: search engines and manual curation. As semantic search rises, books content gets treated like data, searchable not only by words clusters, but by variations of meaning, pitch and, at some point, style. Put another way, a search engine will soon be able to differentiate and to attribute texts written by two novelists working in the same segment of literature.
Such breakthroughs will impact recommendation engines systems that already act a serious sales booster. Again, tech companies, such as Amazon (more than Apple, which does not seem to "get" search) will ride the wave thanks to their past and future investments into search and data analytics.
Semantic recommendation engines won't kill the need for human curation. Like the app business where abundance creates a need for more human-powered guidance and suggestions (see Jean-Louis's idea of a Guide Michelin for Apps), book sections of magazines and newspapers will have to adapt and find ways to efficiently suggest e-readings to their audience.
Read the full piece at The Guardian.
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