About This Series
Things Publishers Fear is an occasional series about the realities of publishing in the modern era. For the record, survival is not guaranteed, nor is it always deserved.
No 3 ~ Apple
On the day the iPad’s availablility in the US was announced (April 3 in case you missed it) I thought it suitable to discuss Apple. What’s to fear I hear you say? Hasn’t Apple provided the fodder to defeat Amazon’s nefarious $9.99 pricing demands and with the creation of the iPad opened a whole world of possibilities for publishers? To which the simple answer is yes but the complicated answer is yes, but.
Yes
You are right, most publisher probably don’t fear Apple. In fact they have welcomed their arrival on the publishing scene, seeing them as useful counterweights to Amazon. But they are wrong. Apple presents a real problem for publishers one worthy of fear.Yes, but!
Apple has created leverage for publishers that much is true, but is that leverage actually worth anything? Apple seems to have thrown the balance in favour of book publishers in a struggle that is really peripheral to book publishers survival, but in doing so made that struggle look more important than it was. Price, especially the price on specific forms of content (in this case the Kindle edition ebook) is not the sole factor in book publishing’s future, there is much more going on. In fact, the leverage Apple provided has blinded publishers to the larger realities of change and has been, I would argue, detrimental to the industry as a whole.
As for the iPad it is a fine looking device, but the iBooks app which Apple itself describes as:
the best way to browse, buy and read books on a mobile product. The iBookstore will feature books from the New York Times Best Seller list from both major and independent publishers, including Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan Publishers, Penguin Group and Simon & Schuster.
will not even be native to the product but:
will be available as a free download from the App Store in the US on April 3, with additional countries added later this year.
Competition
So, video will be native to the iPad, so will Photos, Safari, Mail, Notes and a few other applications but not iBooks. Will YouTube I wonder? Think that through folks. iBooks not native, why? Why not build it in if the product is so amazing, so intrinsic to the concept? Because Steve Jobs reckons people don’t read anymore.
I guess what he means is that the people who do read will download that app anyway and that most people simply do not consume vast numbers of books in a given year and in some senses they never did, at least not in the way that they watched television or listened to music. So why go to the bother of including it for a few die-hards who will do the work for themselves?
What he means is that books are not central to the iPad as a device, but they make for good marketing copy. In fact books, as far as Apple is concerned, are probably already fringe media and so are not vital to the success of the iPad or else iBooks would have come pre-loaded sitting there ready to download books.
The iPad is about the things that people do a lot of, watch tv and video, listen to music and surf the web. People don’t read books very much on average and so books fail the mass market test. Publishers have been so eager for an ally in the battle with Amazon they’ve ignored the fact that their ally might not really care about their industry much at all.
Binding us more
And then there is the issue that by keeping publishers obsessed with the iBookstore and app creation Apple keeps publishers locked into a closed development system of Apple OS. Which suits Apple and blinds the publishers to the real opportunity they have, and have had for some time now, and which few of them have been embracing, web based content accessible over any device with the use of a browser.
If publishers had pursued web access for the last five years it wouldn’t matter if iBooks was native, Safari would be their Trojan horse allowing readers to buy access online, bypassing Apples 30% tax. Of course the more visionary have done something like this. The O’Reilly/Pearson created Safari Books Online now has some 40 publishers and I would expect to see that kind of platform thrive in a mobile multi-media device environment. At the very least it is in a position to take advantage of web broswers as well as iPad Apps something most publishers will not.
To sum up
Apple is making mobile computing cool, easy and non-geeky. Apple is making it easy to put video, games, music, photographs and just about any form of entertainment in the hands of everyone, everywhere in a cheap and attractive package. In fact, if Google represents the reality of competition with every book ever published then Apple represents the reality of competition for every second of attention with EVERY form of entertainment imaginable. As a publisher and knowing that reading has consistently lost in a straight attention fight with video, music and mass forms of entertainment, that would create quite a bit of fear. As Laocoön might have out it: “Do not trust the Horse, Trojans. Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.”
I believe that Apple hasn’t included iBooks as a native application for two reasons.
1) They don’t have international rights to sell books. It’s USA only right now.
2) There are all kinds of e-book reading apps already in their App Store. If they included iBooks as a native application it would open them up to the same anti-trust problems that Microsoft had when they added IE as “part of the OS”.
Hear, hear!! I was beginning to think that I was the only person who doesn’t see Apple as publishing’s savior. Rather, I expect that ultimately Apple will become publishing’s tormentor and will coerce publishers into doing things that are in Apple’s interest and against the interest of publishers, authors, and consumers.
@Bob W — I don’t think there would be any antitrust issue, any more than there is one with Amazon’s Kindle. Apple’s including iBooks as a native application is no different unless Apple should suddenly control 90% of the ebook market, which is highly unlikely.
Two remarks:
1. There might be more anti-trust implications if Apple included iBooks on iPads but did not ship apps from other online bookstores. That’s the legal problem Microsoft faced with browsers. This at least creates the illusion of a level playing field, although how level it will be depends on how easy it is for Amazon and others to get their ereader apps approved.
2. This remark deserves comment. “Apple is making it easy to put video, games, music, photographs and just about any form of entertainment in the hands of everyone, everywhere in a cheap and attractive package.”
You were right not to list ebooks. Currently, there’s no easy, inexpensive way to create well-crafted ePub books, unlike the hundreds of applications that can output in the standard formats for music and photography. Open source projects to do this are still in the pre-1.0 stage. InDesign CS4 is pricey and limited in its ePub abilities and I’ve yet to seen any hints from Adobe that CS5 will be much better.
We need applications that make creating well-laid out ePub books as easy as creating attractive printed pages in iWorks’ Pages. With the arrival of the iPad, OS X should write documents to ePub as easily as it now does PDF. If that means modernizing the antiquated text tools in OS X (little improved from 10.1) to include named styles and similar features, all the better. I’m getting tired of OS X text applications looking like WordStar circa 1982, ruler bar and all. I want to be able to apple styles to documents, not wade through applying half-a-dozen formats.
I wouldn’t say that. Programs like Sigil and Calibre make it easy and inexpensive to create an e-pub book from a Word or HTML file, complete and well-crafted. And I wouldn’t assume OS X will just automatically write docs to ePub that will be “well-crafted,” or even as well-crafted as Sigil or Calibre products.