The Future of Print Publishing and Current Device War (Kindle vs. Sony Reader)

When you watch the print publishing industry scrambling around in search of a clue, it can be funny… especially if you’re familiar with pre-Internet media. Publishers may grasp the gravity as Amazon and Sony fight the e-Reader equivalent of Browser Wars, VHS/BetaMax or Blue-ray/HD DVD. While the music industry and the film/television industry were caught flat-footed, they were much quicker to adapt to the digital world. Why? Because they’re more accustomed to shifting resources to new forms of media.

Consider music since 1900. As an industry, every few years (once per decade, if possible), a new format would be introduced with the hopes of the consumer re-purchasing old product in the newest medium. Records went from phonograph to stereo. 78 RPM records were phased out in the 1950s as 33 1/3 rpm and 45 rpm fought it out for desired format. The 8-Track format emerged in the late 1960’s. The “standard” (or compact) cassette showed up towards the end of the 1970s. The end of the 1980s brought the CD. The 1990s brought digital files like the .MP3, and though the music industry fought against them tooth and nail (because they couldn’t control the digital files to their liking) and tried to supplant them with the ill-fated Mini-Disk. They eventually jumped on the digital file bandwagon after essentially being worn down by it.

The film industry had their first big shock when television brought moving pictures to the home. It really wasn’t until the 1970s that the VCR brought non-broadcast film into the consumers’ homes and the format war between VHS and BetaMax, as well as the laser disc. In the 1990s, the DVD emerged and you had to re-purchase your films in that format, just as Sony would now like you to purchase a copy of something like Doctor No for a third time as their Blue-ray format appears to have beaten out HD DVD for the newest format. And as this goes on, the film/TV industry has slowly adopted inserting ads in Internet-broadcast editions of their product and selling downloads. While they haven’t quite embraced the digital format to the extent of the music industry, they haven’t dealt with as much change, and change tended to come in increments closer to 15-20 years, than a decade.

For print publishers, hardcover books, newspapers and magazine date back prior to 1900. After World War II, the paperback novel started to supplant the pulp magazines as the preferred format for cheap fiction. Since that time, what’s changed with print publishing? For books, the trade paperback edition (the higher quality editions somewhere between the size of a mass market paperback and a hard cover) have become popular as an alternative format in some genres. Other than that, not much before the Internet hit. Print publishers just aren’t used to change relative to other forms of media. Guttenberg’s had remarkable staying power.

What should the print publishers be looking for as technology encroaches? By now everyone knows all about banner ads. The next big online issue is subscription. The rule of thumb is blindingly obvious, but relatively few people stop to think about it: there’s very little barrier to paid subscription for content that is work-related, which is to say something your employer will pay for and can be deducted from taxes as a business expense. What does well online? The Wall Street Journal. Medical journals. The sort of investment newsletters that used to be printed newsletters. The entertainment dollar has started to flow online, but with so much ad-supported content, unless the brand is particularly strong, the urge to pay isn’t always there. The same goes for general audience news. Publishers are aware of this. Some struggle, some prosper, some avoid it.

What print publishers haven’t been paying quite as much attention to is what was previously driving the changes in music and film: the device. There are two ways money is made from the media device: re-selling content, selling the device, itself, and licensing how the content is encoded. Sony is not only making money every time someone buys a Blue-ray, if you talk to someone in the film industry who deals in DVDs, they’ll likely complain to you about how high the fee for recording in Blue-ray is.

There are three basic types of devices seeking to supplant the printed product: the computer, the cell phone and the “e-book reader” (a.k.a. the Kindle or Sony Reader).

You’re probably familiar with how you read content on a computer. It might be a web browser. It might be a .PDF file. You might have e-book software in a different format or maybe just a lot of text in a Word document. Odds are either you’re looking at something ad-supported or you paid for a download. The thing about computers is, they aren’t very portable. You probably aren’t going to want to read from your laptop while in bed (though I did once witness someone take a laptop into a bathroom stall).

The cell phone is a little different. It’s very portable (in fact, a newspaper columnist once told me reading off a cell phone was much better suited to the bathroom stall than a laptop). Some people download e-books to their cell phone. Some people play music. Some people surf the web. The downsides to the cell phone for the consumer are the small screen size and the occasional software/plug-in limitations. For the publisher, if the content isn’t a paid download, advertising intended for a web page can be problematic on cell phones.

Then we have the e-book reader, the device that will eventually throw a huge monkey wrench in the economies of print (but will be a good thing if you like trees). The e-book reader is a sort of small tablet computer, slightly smaller than a notebook in most cases, that seeks to specifically replace the book, magazine and newspaper (though it usually is only promoted as replacing the book). Right now, the e-book reader is still the equivalent of a cheap paperback.

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