Archive for February, 2010
February 26, 2010 No comments

FebFast – last orders!

If you received an email from any of the Red Hill team this month, you may have noticed a note at the bottom that says we’re taking part in FebFast. We’re going booze-free this month as a way of raising funds to combat alcohol abuse and harm among young people.

FebFast money goes to great causes such as the Ted Noffs Foundation and the Australian Drug Foundation. It’s a subject that’s close to our hearts – not just because we enjoy a chardonnay or two, but because we’ve seen the damage alcohol abuse can do. Especially for me – my years in the music industry showed me how talent and creativity can go down the drain when alcohol and other drugs take the wheel.

Many thanks to those who have so generously supported our efforts this month. If you would like to back us with some cash, whether it’s the price of a beer or the cost of a carton, just go to www.tr.im/febfast. We’d love to rustle up at least $60 more: if every FebFast participant could do that, we would collectively hit the million dollar mark – woo hoo! (Our fundraising page remains ‘live’ for another 30 days.)

Have a great weekend – and if you’re raising a glass, think of us …

Robert & the Red Hill Publishing team.
February 23, 2010 No comments

Die ugly ebook, die

I am developing an intense dislike for ugly ebooks. There are exceptions, such as the absolutely amazing The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave, but they are truly exceptions. I wonder how our customers feel when they buy an ebook that looks like a dog has barfed up a hard copy? It would be enough to turn even the greatest of book lovers into an ebook pirate. After all, if something looks as though it’s been left in the gutter for the first taker, where’s the crime in lifting it?
February 23, 2010 No comments

Will the iBookstore allow ‘home sharing’?

One of the very cool features in version 9 of iTunes is ‘home sharing’. The function lets users on the same network share their content. For example, if I buy an iPhone app, up to five people on the office network can grab the app off my machine, load it into their iTunes and sync it with their iPhone. Makes good sense.

Wonder whether book publishers will allow the same functionality with their books? Given that publishers seem to be wedded to DRM, it would be a huge leap and I hope it’s one they take.
February 22, 2010 No comments

What makes a book a book?

What makes a book a book? Certainly not the container through which it is transmitted. Books are conversations. Whatever form books take in the future, and they will invariably evolve and mutate many times over, the days of static, one-way communication are numbered.
February 22, 2010 No comments

Price rises to stunt ebook market growth

In a recent post to All Things Digital (Book Publishers Beware! At iTunes, Expensive Music Equals Slower Sales) Peter Kafka noted that the move by the major record labels to ‘variable pricing’ in the iTunes Store resulted in a slowing of music sales on the platform. This has been noted before by Glenn Peoples over at Billboard, and given the relative maturity of the iTMS/paid singles market the result is hardly surprising.

Kafka writes:

Industry wide, year-over-year “digital track equivalent album unit growth” was at five percent in the December quarter, down sequentially from 10 percent in the September quarter and 11 percent in the June quarter.

The big takeaway for the book publishing business was Kafka’s comment on price elasticity and market maturity:

So here’s the question for the book industry, which has been working very hard to boost the price for its digital goods: Which lesson do you learn from this?

My gut is that the industry will see this parable the way (Warner Music Group chair and CEO) Bronfman apparently does: If you can move prices up early in the digital adoption cycle, you’re much better off.

The ultimate question of course, and Kafka notes this, is whether higher prices will stunt ebook market growth? I think a problem of much greater concern is the perception amongst some ebook buyers that the major publishing houses are price gouging. This all comes back to the price war between Amazon and the Big 6.

Given that the book publishing industry has done little, if anything, to inform consumers of the costs associated with the production of its content it’s hardly surprising that some will hold this world view.
February 22, 2010 No comments

FairPlay, Adobe DRM, who cares?

Apple will be using its FairPlay rights management technologies for books in the iBookstore, leaving the industry ‘standard’ pushed by Adobe out in the cold. Hardly surprising!

FairPlay works well, but given that the music industry let go of DRM in order to grow after many years of procrastinating, I can only wonder why book publishers have not learnt anything about the futility of DRM implementation in its current form. And that includes FairPlay.
February 19, 2010 No comments

Creativity cubed in Brisbane

Brisbane will soon play host to a very exciting new conference held by the team at Creative Enterprise Australia and the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).

The event, creative3, is exciting (to me) because it’s the first creative industry conference I am aware of that has investment outcomes as one of its core objectives. So much so that there’s a $100k prize on the line for the best business pitch during the conference.

The ‘cubed’ bit refers to creativity, investment and enterprise.
February 19, 2010 No comments

Digital devolution – publishing in the 21st C

Some of the most interesting responses to the digital revolution: publishing in the 21st century conference in Sydney this week were from the non-publisher perspective.

Tim Coronel on the new B+P blog Fancy Goods urged the publishing biz to think like a reader, while indie bookseller Jon Page argued that the local industry was even further behind the ebook curve than he feared.

Page wrote: ‘There still remain significant impediments to any Australian retailer wanting to get into the ebook market. This issue was barely raised and in fact the retail side of the digital future was hardly discussed at all.’

Sadly, Coronel noted, ‘There was a real need for a contrary voice on the program, someone with radically different opinions on digital rights management (DRM); the future of copyright; and the rapidly changing relationships between creators, publishers, retailers and readers.’

I have blogged about the issues Tim raised many times before – on this site, on music industry blogs and in my first publishing venture Entertainment & Media.

Here’s a synopsis of my world view vis Tim’s comments:

  • Digital Rights Management. As currently implemented, pure insanity. Rights management as a means of restricting trade is entirely contrary to how content is used and how people interact on the internet.
    [Red Hill Publishing's parent company Acute Communication P/L is developing a technology that uses rights management to facilitate trade rather than crush it. Stay tuned.]
  • Copyright. Creative Commons is the future, and it’s here now. Certainly there needs to be a gentle transition to CC and in fairness some publishers are already very open to mixed copyright models. I wonder whether it is authors who are more reluctant to release their works under a CC license than publishers?
  • Creators, publishers, retailers and readers. What’s changed is that an individual can be all four, at once. That ought be plenty scary for those publishers who laughed out loud at the notion during the conference. A good publisher can deliver scalable advantages that an individual will find very hard to match, but hubris is a dangerous thing.

What really amazes me though is that the book publishing biz is having a debate that the music biz had nearly a decade ago. Thus far I am yet to hear an argument from a publisher or book retailer that I didn’t hear at least five years ago while working in the music industry. I accept that there is no equivalent corporate memory, so why not employ or consult with ex-music biz pros?