Business Management - Industry Trends

Though the rewards promise to be great, the adaptation book publishers must make is far more complicated than that faced by the music and movie industries, which essentially needed to digitize their current products. Bookmakers must become multimedia companies—creating audio, video and interactive components for their immersive, built-for-tablets offerings.

They also face a dizzying array of decisions brought on by evolving standards and platforms: Should a certain book come to life as a dedicated app...Or should it be turned into an “enhanced eBook,” which will work on Apple’s tablet as well as Amazon’s Kindle Fire, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and other

My friends kept talking about Pinterest and I thought, “Good God, please, not another time suck!” And then, Kevin P. Keane turned me onto Pinterest as a way for us folks to share cool stuff about print.

MIT’s robotics scientists aren’t just playing in the sand. They have a vision for the future where you will be able walk into a store like Kinkos and design and print your own custom made robot. Yes, you read that right, print out your own custom robot, using something like a standard paper inkjet or laser printer.

Technology is rocking the pillars of the print medium. It’s generating new communication channels, new methods of engagement and new ways to deliver value. I’ll have an opportunity to take stock of this dynamic this week, when I head back to Western Michigan University to speak at WMU’s annual Litho Day.

The Justice Department could reach a settlement in the next few weeks with Apple Inc. and some of the major publishers suspected of colluding to push up electronic book prices, according to two people close to the negotiations. The deal could also force a shift, at least temporarily, in pricing control from publishers to retailers, one of the people said.

Such a move to a “wholesale model” would not only benefit consumers but also Amazon, which had been the leading bargain eBook retailer with its Kindle reader.

The Justice Department is seeking to unravel agreements Apple secured from five publishers.

In a break with industry practices, the (“Harry Potter”) books aren’t locked down by encryption, which means consumers can move them between devices and read them anywhere they like. If Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s new Web store, proves a success, it could provide a model for other authors and publishers and undermine the clout of Amazon.com, which dominates eBook sales.

“We believe that people should have the right, once they’ve bought the book, to read it on any device that they chose to,” says (CEO Charles) Redmayne.

There’s another reason Pottermore is going DRM-free. It wants to “own” the relationship with the customers.

So you have a LinkedIN account, a Facebook Page and a Twitter account. Now, do you know what your social standing is? Do you have Kred? Do you have Klout? Klout measures, as the language distorting name implies, your social “clout.”

The complaints were first brought to light by Tumblr blogger Jamie Billett. He pointed out that in The New Yorker’s iPad app, the text on some pages is rendered as HTML, and the text on other pages is rendered as an image file. The latter pages now appear “badly aliased”— i.e. conspicuously pixelated—throughout the app because the images haven’t been formatted to accommodate the new iPad’s 2,048x1,536-pixel resolution, he complains.

Titles from other magazine publishers—we looked at Time magazine and Sports Illustrated from Time Inc., and at Esquire and O: The Oprah Magazine from Hearst—all suffered from the same problems.

The necessary action to counter and capitalize on the 10 consumer trends detailed in my last blog is to offer targeted and enhanced personalized communications—personalized communications with microsites and landing pages that are designed to be friendly, game-based, differentiated by language and cultural needs, and support traceability.

In the early ’90s an estimated 81 billion cards were printed in a single year. And then, the bubble burst. The card business struck out. Today, it’s down as much as 75 percent. The "youth" are missing.