Appy New Year? No thanks...

App-athetic, that’s what many consumers may be, about the plethora of publishers’ apps in 2012. This despite the reported sales in the UK over Christmas of over 600,000 more tablets (the majority being iPads). There were, after all, twice as many dedicated e-book readers sold in the same period (1.33 million, of which 92% were Kindles reinforcing their market dominance); and of course by contrast to these reading-machines people use tablets for lots of other things, if they read on them at all.

But more fundamentally, how many publisher-specific apps on iPads or other tablets or iPhones will readers actually pay for and use (as opposed to just downloading ebooks through an e-retail site), beyond those bundled with the devices? Half a dozen, a dozen for a ‘heavy’ reader? An amateur survey by this crusty old digital immigrant suggests that I’m not the only person with a limited app-etite (OK, enough puns) for an album of little postage stamp icons running to several screens.

Like Ghosts of Christmas Past, gnarled old campaigners like me remember the start of the CDROM wars around twenty years ago when products were loaded with multimedia and flashy features because the technology was there: unfortunately the market, or more specifically an effective distribution channel, mostly wasn’t there. The distribution platforms for apps are there now, but are these shop windows and the potential markets large enough for them?

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve nothing against apps in themselves: there are some great ones, and some of my best friends produce them. They can even be useful in giving publishers a taste of digital markets and processes. However I fear that not only will most lose money, but more importantly that they will distract publishers from the main issue. Shiny-eyed neophyte digital publishers and keen delegates on digital training sessions proudly wave their app proposals as passports to (or prophylactics against) the future. But an app does not a digital strategy make.

I see plenty of evidence that well-intentioned publishers have not thought or worked hard enough at the bigger issues that affect their future survival, like families who blow their budgets (if not fuses) on massive flashy Christmas lights in front gardens when in fact the whole house needs rewiring. A digital strategy doesn’t have to entail importing extra-terrestrial super-intelligence, just deploying commercial publishing skills and common sense more broadly than many are used to doing.

Many will have gone some way down this road already, but here, for those still trembling on the brink, are a few suggested New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Know thyself. Do an audit of all the intellectual property in which you control (or might control) digital rights, including illustrations and photographs (many of which will have restricted print-only rights from agencies). Put this on a spreadsheet.
2. Get fit. Digitise what you can of all this, converting printers’ files to web-ready pdf and Epub. There’s a specific nerdy point here: with the advent of Epub 3 publishers will be able to add more interactive and whizzy features (if they really must) to their titles more flexibly, so that they can be output and distributed as more interactive e-books as well as apps, blurring the boundaries between the two. There’s a much bigger market for e-books than for apps, as indicated above, and most of them just need to be decently produced plain text e-books.
3. Be prepared for the future. Build digital publishing opportunities into the commissioning/contractual stages of new projects and digital formats into the production/typesetting work flow, so that titles are future-proofed.
4. Help people find you. Metadata are your new super-power, not just an anorak bibliographic chore. Your ‘content’ needs all the help it can get so that customers can find it, and the metadata signposts and architecture you put in place will be some of the most valuable IP you create.
5. Know where you’re going. Just as apps are not the only potential e-products, so consumer e-commerce sites are not your only potential market channels. Despite library cutbacks there is a huge international institutional market with many dedicated e-vendors. Niche publishers will have many niche market opportunities, and will find it easier than more general publishers to build their own e-book sales or data licensing operations direct to their own ‘communities’. Then there are many smart phone platforms and brands, whiteboards in schools, academic database aggregators, etc. Digital markets are at least as various as print markets; more so, in fact.
6. Be a team player. Print publishing may be a relay race, passing the baton down the departmental line; digital products are best planned from the outset and managed through by cross-functional teams (editorial, production, technical, marketing, etc). And this should be part of the day job for all publishers, not hived off into a techie ghetto.
7. Have fun. The reasons you got into publishing in the first place, and the creative and commercial skills you have developed, are those that you need to deploy in these new(ish) frontiers. But you do need to deploy them.

A happy and prosperous new year!

David Attwooll runs a publishing consultancy and digital licensing agency representing a wide range of publishers. Please see www.attwoollassociates.com

This article first appeared in Bookbrunch on 25 January 2012.