Tuesday 10 May 2011

Traditional publishing vs. Digital publishing

It’s been a year now and the battle rages on. Digital publishing was unable to deliver the killing blow even though it did manage to make the headlines more than ever. So what’s the deal really?


I stumbled (with StumbleUpon) upon a blog posting by Kristine Rusch about her book “The Business Rusch: Trust Me”. In her book she explores the traditional publishing industry and compares it to the electronic publishing. The post goes over various very enlightening examples of how the traditional publishing industry operates and what the major faults are in it.


For example, when a book is actually printed, the printer is allowed to deliver the ordered amount plus or minus 10%. So if you order 50,000 books from printer A, printer A by his contract could give you 45,000 books or 55,000 books. This isn’t because printers are inherently lazy or shady. It’s because shutting off the older presses at a precise number was impossible. You had to guess and let the machine either short the run or add to the run.
Doing short print runs (of, say 100 copies) was next to impossible. 
This, by the way, is one of the technological changes that has enabled cheap and easy print-on-demand books. Now a printer can print as few as 100 or as many as 10,000 and do so accurately. 
But remember my post on how Big Publishing actually works? Many Big Publishers have printing contracts that predate the change in technology, so they still get the print run plus or minus 10% from their printer, and accurate information is still impossible. 
Remember that this print run problem is compounded by the returns system. And human error. Exact numbers up until a few years ago were impossible to get.


It is no wonder Seth Godin decided not to publish traditional books. In his interview with Jeff Rivera from Mediabistro he stated “I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread”


I can’t but help agreeing with him. The revolution in the publishing industry that began with the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg almost 600 years ago enabled the sharing of knowledge at a pace never seen before. The pace now is something like the speed of light compared to then


What is also different in digital publishing is the way we want to pay for it. Survey conducted by Harrison Group revealed that publishers are blissfully unaware of what consumers want.
According to the survey, 74% of publishing industry professionals think that a standard subscription model is just dandy, while 87% of consumers prefer other models, including unlimited access at one price, one-off purchases and micropayments.
What we as consumers also want is to be able to share things with out friends. If I’m paying for something, I want to be able to share it across my own devices as well as with my friends. And I don’t want to have to pay for the same thing several times. Having to pay for a newspaper, to get past the paywall to the site and for apps for my phone and tablet isn’t very efficient for the publisher or me. Treating these publications as separate silos is unfair to consumers and will be hopefully gotten rid of once the industry standards began to shape properly.

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