Friday, December 22, 2000

eBooks Will Flop!

Challenging book publishers' expectations, a new Report from Forrester Research forecasts slow growth for both eBooks and eBook reader devices. However, strong projected sales of custom-printed trade books and digitized textbooks will force publishers to dramatically restructure their processes and technologies.

Digital delivery of custom-printed books, textbooks, and eBooks will account for revenues of $7.8 billion -- 17.5% of publishing industry revenues -- in five years. Of this amount, only $251 million will come from eBooks for eBook devices.

"Publishers are expecting trade eBook sales that won't materialize -- the drawbacks of reading onscreen will discourage all but the most motivated readers," said Daniel P. O'Brien, senior analyst at Forrester. "But publishers can't go back to business as usual -- the Web's distribution advantages demand that they shift to far more flexible digital production."

Taken together, custom printing, digital textbooks, and eBooks will pressure publishers to offer greater consumer choice, variable presentation and delivery, and new ways to purchase -- none of which authors can do themselves. The result is a new publishing model that Forrester calls multichannel publishing. Successful publishers will manage all of their content from a single, comprehensive storehouse -- a repository containing modular book content and structure.

Forrester predicts that multichannel publishers will develop current business practices to match the Internet's speed and convenience. Negotiations between publishers' editors and authors' agents must begin to incorporate online research, communities of interest, Net promotional plans, and product variants. Multichannel publishing requires acquisitions driven by identification of demand, maximum flexibility in product packaging, and improved time-to-market.

To realize the benefits of digital books, multichannel publishers will need new technologies that support multichannel delivery. Successful companies will adopt XML to separate content from layout and enable delivery on any platform or device. Publishers will also convert content into both PDF and OpeneBook (OeB) files, which are easier than XML to repurpose and share with partners.

Book marketing has long been a matter of co-op bookseller ads, author appearances, and word of mouth -- all geared toward driving store traffic. In the case of digital books, however, every promotional message is also an opportunity to buy on the spot, and the product itself doesn't exist until it's delivered to the buyer. Flexible pricing and value-added components further reinforce successful multichannel publishing.

For the Report "Books Unbound," Forrester interviewed 51 trade, educational, and professional publishers and surveyed 71 authors via email. Each publish an average of 430 new books per year and typically have an active backlist of 1,486 titles.

Worldwide, Online Shoppers Flock To Local E-Retailers
Media Metrix, a leader in Internet and Digital Media measurement worldwide and its European affiliate, Jupiter MMXI today released November 2000 retail Website measurement results for Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Japan, the UK and the US amongusers at home. While top online shopping sites across the globe are dominated by local brands, the exception is Amazon which ranked number one in Australia, Canada, the UK and the US according to unique visitors, and ranked among the top five retail sites in Brazil, Denmark, France, and Japan.

Worldwide Highlights
- In the United States, 68.1 percent of all Internet users at home (home and work combined: 74.3 percent), in November 2000, visited online retail sites, while nearly 50 percent of online users at home in the UK, Canada and Japan shopped online.

- In Japan, where there are more men than women online, among users at home, women have a higher composition among retail sites relative to the overall online population (see charts below). The same is true for Canada, where there is a greater proportion of men online overall, but women comprise the majority of visitors to retail sites.

Here are the top online shopping locations per country:

Australia - Amazon.com
Brazil - Submarino.com.br
Canada - Amazon.com
Denmark - Haburi.com
France - FNAC.com
Japan - Rakuten.co.jp
UK - Amazon.co.uk
US - Amazon.com

News Tidbits (appears every day on front page)
- Hackers succeeded this week in hacking into Egghead.com servers giving the hackers access to Egghead's customer database, including credit card numbers. While Egghead.com didn't post news of the hack on its Website, it did release a statement confirming the issue and stating that credit card companies are being contacted about the problem. So how many potential credit card numbers could have been accessed? 3.7 million.

- Webmaster Techniques Magazine will unveil a new section on Christmas Day titled "Fun Stuff". The area will feature games of challenges that Webmasters can participate in. The first game to be released in the new section is "Who Wants to be a Webmaster?" The game is a take off of the famous "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" show except all the questions are focused on Webmaster issues and no actual money is awarded.