Theresa Horner, Barnes & Noble; Corey Podolsky, Entourage Systems; Peter Balis, John Wiley & Sons
Horner: need consumer-driven product development. Need to think about the aesthetics of the book on the screen. Haven’t focused enough on selling the content, especially with older content. Have to figure out how to do a good shopping experience on digital. It’s a fool’s game to predict a winner among publishers or platforms at this place.
Podolsky: presented the Edge, which we know. Device automatically integrates epub or pdf with on-line resources and publisher doesn’t have to do anything. Take notes, highlight and annotate and send to friends. Sweet spot is education and a lot of professional verticals are interested as well. Have on-line storefront.
Balis: reached a point at Wiley that basic ebook program functions seamlessly and works as well as the print book program. They want to look at the next place for their content to go. Not a fiction publisher. They recognized that underlying most of their publishing is learning and they then analyzed how people learn and need to apply that digitally and have to find partners who can help them do this. Have started to produced enhanced ebooks where it is appropriate for the learning experience. Using epub in all their enhanced their products. Working with Blio and Copia.
I asked B&N’s Horner when their DRM system would be made compatible with other DRM systems that use Adobe Digital Editions. She dodged the question and the moderator cut things off pretty quickly.
Do any of these people predict anything about the silly geographic restrictions on ebooks?
Any word from B&N, since they have begun steering us towards them and away from EReader/Fictionwise, when in heck they will have an update for iPhone and allow us access to ALL our books from ALL their sites? They are too slow for my taste, not the way it used to be when Fictionsise was the big player!
Piet, it will probably take years for the geographic walls to fall. Agents prefer to sell rights per-country and tell their authors this is the way to go; multinational publishers are built around country specific profit centers — none of this will go away very easily, unless consumers either yell. A lot in the media, or simply go to the torrents when they can’t buy the ebook in their country. Another example of trying to take what worked for print and apply it to digital.
You are asking the wrong person – it is not in B&N’s control anymore. Adobe has partially taken care of this, with the 9.1 Release of RMSDK (Dec 15 2009) which supports opening of the ePub files that B&N is selling.
So if your device uses RMSDK and hasn’t updgraded to it, you should ask the question of when of your device manufacturer and not B&N.
However that being said, Adobe has yet to support this in Digital Editions. Again this is under Adobe’s control and not B&N’s. The next major release of ADE will have this support, but we haven’t announced timing yet. Getting the desktop software updated is important for transferring content to devices which don’t have a keyboard (virtual or real) for entering in a username/password to open ePubs purchased from B&N.