It should be ‘Joy in Books’, not ‘Joy of Books’

A number of people have been sharing a cool video which features animated books moving around a Toronto bookstore. It’s named ‘The Joy of Books’, and it’s a well-made, enjoyable creation which is fun to watch, as you can now see:

But possibly as a result of the title, a few people are using it as an example of why print is in some way superior to an electronic version.

And that’s rubbish, quite frankly.

There are two elements of books that elicit joy:

  • What’s in the book
  • What surrounds the book

None of that is inherent to print, eReaders, parchment, hieroglyphics or any other transportation medium.
Wall of Books

What’s in the book:

Amazing writing and art will bring someone joy. I’m happy reading William Gibson books in print or on my Kindle, and if he decided in the future that he would only inscribe his work into the trunks of trees, I’d be trying to find a way to fund a private forest in my back garden.

As long as the typeface is legible, and the art is clear, then the transportation of it matters not a jot. Possibly my last line of resistance was comics and graphic novels, but even in this case I’ve overcome my reservations about reading them electronically when I’ve been borrowing an iPad. And as always, great writing and art works.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things that could be improved – reading a PDF on a Kindle can be frustrating when the text and font aren’t suited, but PDFs have always been the work of the devil regardless of how you’re forced to encounter them.
Christopher Moore book signing

What surrounds the book:

Here’s where it gets more interesting. So the first aspect to transfer between formats is the social aspect. Reading to my son from a printed book or a Kindle doesn’t matter in terms of the benefit and enjoyment he gets from someone reading to him. Chatting about the book with other people isn’t diminished by a screen, and lending is a possibility now. In fact, electronically I can share Creative Commons books directly with friends around the globe, ensuring they can read the same ‘copy’ as me.

There are differences in the physical sensation. It’s not so much the turning on a page – the way buttons work to flick through a book on the Kindle is a pretty damn effective substitute. But particularly the smell of an aging book hasn’t been replicated electronically (Although it easily could). Not sure that’s a particularly great source of joy though – more an association that old paper quite often comes with great stories.

Then there are two tangible areas which reflect the hoarding of knowledge – the receiving of a book as a treasured gift, and resale value. The resale value of most books is negligible thanks to the massive inventory of mainstream paperbacks, so it really only applies to niche hardbacks.

And then we come to gifting – particularly if it’s a family heirloom or with handwritten notes. That’s the only area in which culturally it’s hard to put the same weighting on an electronic version, but that shift will undoubtedly happen to some extent, leaving either small inventories of the most popular gift choices in print editions, or print-on-demand for anything which isn’t in a classic gift choice.
kindle_etch04

Either way, the pleasure of the contents, the social aspect of sharing and discussing, and many of the other areas of enjoyment when it comes to literature are already present in electronic formats, and some of the others could be closely replicated. That’s why the joy is ‘in’ the book, not ‘of’ the book.

Recommending you check out a print magazine…

I may have spent years suggesting that the print industry will decline in the face of digital abundance, but I’ve also long-suggested that niche print publishing is the logical future of dead trees.

Which is why Hacker Monthly is so cool.

Essentially it’s a curated selection of the top links voted to the top of Hacker News – which itself has long been a favourite user-voted site of mine. Leaning towards coders and programmers, Hacker News submissions can be “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity.”, and the organic growth of the site means that it sticks pretty closely to that, rather than slipping into trivial shock links (as happened to Digg a lot over the years).

Originally started as a side project, Hacker Monthly has become a 3,000-paid subscriber production, available in print, or as a digital download. And the promotion of it largely comes from hardcore digital people making a rare move in buying something in a print format…

Lower East Side Print Shop by cherrypatter on Flickr (CC Licence)

Lower East Side Print Shop by cherrypatter on Flickr (CC Licence)

The reason it works is that it’s a mix of crowd suggestion and editorial curation which has a big digital audience to convert a certain percentage into a payment model.

Or just because it’s cool.

(h/t ReadWriteWeb.)

More on business strategy in a networked world

Following on from my previous post on networked business strategy – which was itself a response to a post from Dave Cushman) – I thought it’s a topic worth expanding upon in light of the constant debate over online publishing revenue.

Flicking through Seth Godin’s ‘Tribes’ reminded me of the work of Ronald Coase, the Nobel laureate in Economics.

Back in 1937 he wrote the highly influential ‘The Nature of the Firm‘ which looks at the fact that “production could be carried on without any organization that is, firms at all”, he sets out the transaction costs ( which means the cost of obtaining something through the market is generally more than the actual price, plus search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets and policing and enforcement costs) which mean that ‘firms will arise when they can produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs’.

Or as Seth says, ‘we start formal organisations when it’s cheaper than leading a tribe instead’.

This is where the kernel of your business is located.

Or for the flipside:

As my former boss at Bauer Media, Carl Lyons, wrote today ‘people will pay for digital content – if it’s easy enough‘. (Now I’ve left, I can say his blog is well worth reading, without sucking up!)

The flipside is this:

‘Consumers (Customers/users/whatever terminology you like) will accept using a firm for their needs when it avoids the transactional costs of circumventing it.’

By that I mean that I’ll happily pay for a Pro account on Flickr simply because it was a lot easier and more convenient than finding an alternative when I needed it, despite the fact I know I could find a reasonable alternative. I’ll happily buy books from Amazon (My recommendations are all here) or sell via either Amazon or Ebay because although I could find alternative routes to the market, they involve a cost of time, effort, organisation etc I’m not happy about paying at the moment.

So the key seems to be:

1. Figure out what people want to achieve when they are in the area of the market you serve

2. Figure out what you might offer which allows them to achieve what they want in a way which reduces their transactional costs (Time, effort, cost, etc)

3. Figure out how you might offer that service in a way which allows your service to benefit from an internal reduction/removal of transaction costs over/above/with the network.

Does this seem to make sense?

Applying this to a content model:

If we accept that there will always be free content available from somewhere, the transactional cost for a consumer is finding it, judging reliability, going into more background, possibly acting upon it, sharing it, discussing it etc (Any I’ve missed?)

As a content producer, the cost of content creation in many circumstances has already been hugely disrupted by online publishing, digital audio, video etc. The cost of a live broadcast for a major television company over recording it on a mobile and broadcasting via Qik? And the difference in terms of the technology gap will only reduce in line with Moore’s Law.

But the content curation (rather than aggregation) aspect raises big transactional costs via the network – what relative percentage of trust do you place in Wikipedia? Digg? Reddit? Is it cheaper to organise a network, build a system, or use a specialist journalist? And they have contacts to relevant industries which could come under Trade Secrets in transactional costs etc.

And this is also why I despair when online publishers only talk about display advertising revenue (or now subscriptions), as if they’re the only possibilities for revenue. (If a blogger puts Google Ads on his site and then claims he can’t monetise he gets a lot of feedback very quickly!).

The transactional cost for me of finding a product to buy is either in terms of locating reviews and hoping a relevant display advert is close by. Googling it and finding what I’m looking for. Or posting a message on Twitter. And the subscription model has the flaw of inviting/inciting the network to either reproduce content outside, or finding ways to beat the pay wall.

Not writing about not comparing print and online audiences…

I had an amazing response to my previous post, ‘Why it’s dangerous to compare print figures to website stats‘, including a good follow up post by Martin Belam, the invitation to repost and start contributing to the Online Journalism Blog, great comments from Dave, Neil and Andrew, and most impressively, Martin Lengeveld updated his original post with a link and details of my post.

Inspired by all of this, I’ve decided to take the undoubtedly risky approach of not only poking holes in the arguments of others, but to try and maybe answer some of them – but that proved more difficult than expected, (partly due to the epic victory of Chelsea in the Champions League game vs Liverpool last night)

Initially I started brainstorming measures that could be broadly equivalent with some work – could the effort of walking to a shop and paying for a print copy be judged equivalent to reading a website? Commenting? Subscribing via RSS?

But then I got hit by a far more fundamental question.

Why are we trying to compare print readers and online readers in the first place?

And it’s a serious question.

Because if you run a publishing business, you’re going to make judgements about print and online on revenue. And scale in both mediums is a byproduct of an advertising model based on number of eyeballs, usually within a target location/demographic, or from being able to attract flat rate advertisers by being able to claim the largest readership.

The actual scale itself doesn’t matter once we’re in the same ballpark and seeing trends in readership over a reasonable period?

Or am I missing something?

Or are we trying to find figures to justify editorial or marketing resource? Or refocus online media commentary?

Only when the reason for the measurement is clear is it going to be possible to try and devise a method for comparing ‘domestic print apples and global multimedia organges’ (quoting Mr Belam).

I’m actually heading off to a Twitter-based event called Aperitweat tonight, organised by good friend @tojulius, so I’m hoping great food and conversation will fuel something closer to a conclusion rather than more questions! (Apparently you can watch the event live on Ustream- I’ll be the scruffy one…)

And I’m also hoping to keep the brilliant contributions coming from Dave, Neil, Andrew, Paul Bradshaw and maybe Martin himself to produce something from my hopefully constructive criticism – and if not, perhaps just an agreement to never compare print and online audiences directly again?