Hearst Launching Kindle Competitor and Platform "By Publishers, For Publishers" 155
The Hearst Corporation has announced their intention to launch an e-reader competitor to Amazon's Kindle and a supporting store and platform that is much more "publisher friendly." More details are available form their official press release this morning. "Launching in 2010, Skiff provides a complete e-reading solution that includes the Skiff Service platform, Skiff Store and Skiff-enabled devices. Skiff will sell and distribute newspapers, magazines, books, blogs and other content. Skiff gives periodical publishers tools to maintain their distinct visual identities, build and extend relationships with subscribers, and deliver dynamic content and advertising to a range of dedicated e-readers and multipurpose devices."
Re:Hmm, where is the customer in this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Iunno, the Kindle makes a lot of sacrifices to publishers. Including incredibly stupid sacrifices like allowing them to disable text-to-speech for whatever books they want (I don't have a Kindle but I know some people that work for Amazon, one of whom does marketing for Kindle).
Amazon's model seems to be centered around itself foremost, and clearly it must balance customer and publisher demands. If this other company wants to cater more to publisher demands I guess they can try it that way. But don't tell the public that!
Re:Publisher friendly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Translates to: Screw the authors & screw the customers.
Many don't know that copyright in England was originally put in place to protect the authors from the publishers, not the readers with their pirate ink plates.
Re:Crash (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you think they intend to torture consumers until they buy the device? Or something like that?
And force authors to use that publisher? Why not just self-publish using PDFs? Many authors could do that, you know. And if you get so outraged at publishers and the way they treat their authors, then maybe don't read the authors that consent to dealing with those publishers (probably for monetary gain, I suppose?).
I don't know how Hearst is going to MAKE everyone pay for a costly e-reader.
Re:Publisher friendly? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is great in theory, but not how it works in practice.
In practice, publishers are terrified, because they make all their money in hardbacks. But nobody except for a few freaks (the "I'll never touch a paper book again!" crowd) is actually willing to pay hardback prices for an e-book. eBooks are a much better natural competitor to mass market paperbacks.
Well, okay, that's great, but why not just sell the ebook for cheaper? Amazon would love to. The problem is that the cost to print and bind an individual book (the unit cost) is pennies. Most of the price of a book is in the fixed (i.e. not-per-unit), upfront cost of editing, putting the files together, and (the big one) marketing. (And that's not just subway ads. It's mainly marketing to bookstores, and to the TINY HANDFUL of buyers who actually get to decide what books Borders and Barnes & Noble carry, and thus what Americans read.)
Publishers cannot cope with this. Their business will collapse if they release ebooks at the same time as hardcovers, because the ebook would horrifically undercut their hardcover margins. But they cannot afford to set a market expectation that an ebook costs a reasonable (i.e. under-$15) amount. They cannot afford to do anything that discourages people from buying hardcovers; why cannibalize your own business? And they will not get fully behind the ebook platform so long as that fundamental logic stays the same.
That's for book publishers, anyway, which is what the parent was about. From TFS, it sounds like this is as much about the newspaper and magazine business, who seem to think that people will magically want to pay for their content if you put it on e-paper instead of the e-, er, internet. GLWT, lemme know how it works out, I'll just be over here browsing the real web from my smartphone...
Re:Publisher friendly? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or more to the point, each layer of middle men need to add value. Between author and reader the author wants someone to deal with all the bother of collecting money, the reader wants someone to deal with filtering out all the obviously bad works, and either or both the author and reader wants someone to fix up the language usage and the other nice stuff the publisher's editor normally does. There are some other tasks in there that are useful as well.
There is no need for that to be spread across two middle-men (publisher + bookseller), but there is no special need for it to be one middle man vs. one per operation as long as having 12 companies touch the book doesn't make it cost more then only having 1 or 2 touch it.
With the current state of things the publisher filters out the worst of the bad writing (that is to say 99.998% of what they get), fixes up the english usage, remind the author when the sex of one of their characters changes midway through the book, when things get talked about in Ch4 but don't happen until Ch7, and all that kind of nice stuff. Then Amazon makes sure the book got nicely "kindle formatted" puts a price on it, handles some of the money, arranges network service for Kindle devices (iPod touch and iPhone users get to manage that on their own), handles long term storage of customer purchases.
All of those are valuable. If we stuff all that into one company that charges me less, I'm happy. If we stuff that all into one company that charges me the same amount, I'm still happy. If we break that out into 1 companies that charge me the same or less, well I'm still happy. If we charge more, I get cranky. If we do less stuff for the same money, I get cranky. If we charge less for less I probably still get cranky.
So I'm less happy by the proposal of a bizaar. Sure I probably pay less, but did the author hire a proofreader? How do I find the tiny number of authors that don't suck? It would work out well for authors who are already successful under the existing system. I know some of their past works weren't crap, so their new works have enough chance to be not crap that I can "afford" to spend the time to read a review or just buy the book. I know they have published stuff in the past, so they will know the value of a good editor and hire one. I might even pay less. It will totally suck for knowing what new authors I could buy from and not run into extremely poor writing, or a good story but no proofreading....
Solvable problems, but mostly by adding middlemen back in (for example, tags for "professional editing", tags for "slushpile review" and the like). They may not be middlemen in this model, but they still operate on the text, and then a tag gets affixed to it, and I filter out stuff lacking the tags. How they get payed might be the only difference (plus the "in theory" difference that people could choose to buy stuff that didn't pass a slushpile review, or wasn't edited by anyone....but I doubt enough people would do this to make dismantling the current system a good idea!). If we move the way something gets a slushpile review we could also break the value of that system. Currently a publisher does that, and if a publisher culls too many books they can lose good sellers. If they cull too loosely then they run the risk of people deciding "oh they publish crap, I won't risk reading that". If the "publisher middleman" goes away and an author has to pay for a slushpile review then they have incentive to pick registered slushpile reviewers that rubber stamp the most content. There may be ways to fix that, but struggling to get "as good as the existing system" while offering no real advantages doesn't sound exciting.
Magazines and Newspapers (Score:3, Interesting)
Note that Skiff is aimed (initially) primarily at magazines and newspapers, not books. That has a different use model - not "buy and keep", but mostly "buy, skim & read, discard". Sure, Kindle does magazines and newspapers too - but clearly not as well as might be done with a larger, color display.
Websites already fill this need, mostly for free - but web publishers can't cover costs of in-depth news and make a profit.
To get the market share they need AND avoid hardware freeloaders, Skiff will have to offer a hardware + 3 year multi-magazine subscription bundle for at least $10/month, probably $15. They can beat out paper magazines by giving people who'd normally subscribe to only one or two magazines, access to dozens for the same price, creating a higher perceived value.