…In effect, Macmillan is trying to do exactly the same thing that many other media companies are desperate to do — from newspapers to music labels to movie companies — which is to replicate the pricing model of an analog, real-world business in digital form.

In other words, (windowing) tries to artificially reproduce the kind of scarcity (and thus pricing power) it used to have in one medium in a medium that doesn’t even know what scarcity is.

Sooner or later, that attempt will fail (among other things, iTunes appears to show that flexible pricing actually leads to lower sales).

For now, Macmillan and other publishers have managed to convince Amazon and Apple to accept the new agency model, but those sandbags aren’t going to last for long.

My take: “Macmillan, like most publishers, is attempting to protect their existing printed business long enough to readjust their production, sales and distribution model to digital media, rather than print media. Until then, their pricing model for eBooks and print media will be closely related and will walk in tandem towards a new model; at least in theory.”

“What we are seeing is a change in the business model of content distribution. There are simply more efficient and effective ways to subsidize the cost of transporting information.”

“Content is a service and a book is the conduit and container.”

Looking to turn its e-publishing expertise into a new business, O’Reilly Media is launching O’Reilly Digital Distribution, a new division offering publishers a complete e-book publishing service. Starting with text conversion, O’Reilly Digital Distribution can output files in any format for any device or e-reader and market and distribute the e-titles though an extensive and growing network of e-book retail channels.

In an interview conducted at O’Reilly’s annual Tools of Change conference in Manhattan, Laura Baldwin, chief operating officer of O’Reilly Media, said the new service will offer free conversion as part of a comprehensive program that will secure and store a publisher’s digital files and market and distribute them into 24 digital e-book retail channels (with 40 more under development) and in every format. ODD can turnout e-books for any format–from Kindle to iPhone to Stanza and Android readers like Aldiko. Publishers pay a fee of 25% of sales–no fees, she emphasized, until the e-books are in the sales channels. “We’ve automated the process of digital title conversion and production and for us this is all about sales and marketing,” Baldwin said. “It’s about getting e-books into the retail channels and there are more channels coming online all the time.”

Baldwin said the service grew out taking over the distribution of Microsoft titles last year. “We won the bid because of our sophisticated digital infrastructure. It took us seven weeks to go live with 200 Microsoft titles and make them available as e-books and apps.” A longtime champion of the e-book category, O’Reilly has seen its own e-book sales rise steadily and the publisher has been aggressive in offering e-books in all formats as well as bundling e-books with print. Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly’s v-p of digital initiatives, has said that O’Reilly’s Safari Books Online, a subscription service that gives it client access to library of digital titles, is its second largest sales channel.

The new division will be directed by O’Reilly Digital Distribution general manager Pascal Honscher and Baldwin said the company would be hiring new workers as well as promoting from within.

Baldwin said they were marketing the service to all kinds of publishers, not just technical houses. “We’re looking beyond technology books to poetry and fiction,” and she said the services and pricing can be customized to what a publisher needs. “If a publisher only needs conversion or only wants marketing and distribution support, we’ll work with them to come up with a different price.”

Baldwin compared the new service to the annual TOC conference: “The TOC is designed to help publishers and this service has evolved out of that. We know technology is driving the publishing business now, but people shouldn’t have to deal with technology issues. We want to take the technological confusion and ambiguity away and help publisher get their books to readers.”

You can find O’Reilly Digital Distribution here:
http://oreilly.com/digital-distribution.html

Elizabeth Weiss: “Look, this is nothing less than a revolution. This is going from an analogue world to a digital world. To think that we will reinvent ourselves once and that will be that would be an illusion, this is going to happen many, many times and the only thing that’s constant is rapid change.”

Stephen Page: “We will have 1,100 e-books available by June. Why? Because now the window has opened, we cannot pause; we cannot be slow because we can see that if we don’t make our books available, someone else will.”

via abc.net.au

Elizabeth Weiss is Academic and Digital Publishing Director at Allen & Unwin. Allen & Unwin is considered one of the leaders in digital publishing in Australia.

Stephen Page heads the literary publishing house Faber and Faber which is embracing the digital future of electronically published books. Stephen is credited with dragging Faber and Faber into the modern age. The firm has an impressive history publishing literary giants like T.S. Eliot, and novels that we’ve all read like Lord of the Flies.

PubFactory is a digital publishing platform that emerges from iFactory’s many years of solving their clients’ pressing Web publishing demands, alongside iFactory’s habit of throwing in a few extra-demanding capabilities of their own.  They’ve taken what they’ve figured out and rationalized the process into a platform, and the platform is impressive.

PubFactory is content online publishing platform “built from the ground up to support books, reference works, and journals in a variety of XML formats, with full support for PDF, images, and other rich media.”  Sounds, good, but not unique, right?  Here’s what I really like hearing about: “…management tools for librarians and administrators, and a full suite of back-end controls for publishers to control their content and manage relationships with their customers.”

The range of options that are oriented to a publisher’s customers is impressive, and includes such things as flexible ecommerce, access models, social media, analytical metrics, to name the big ones, and the flexibility in publishing control is also smart, with strong search and browsing, DOI and various library-specific support, customization, and, basically, push-button PDF and ePUB creation.

The biggest surprise about PubFactory, however, is its sheer scalability. Using PubFactory, and slated for release in late spring 2010, Oxford Dictionaries Online (part of Oxford University Press) will present modern English dictionaries, thesauruses, and usage guides. Not exactly a chapbook.

pubfactory@ifactory.com
33 Farnsworth Street
Boston MA, 02210
617.426.8600