Booksquare

From what we can tell, attending the Book Industry Study Group’s recent “Making Information Pay 2007” conference was like reading BS every day. Except there was probably less snark. And less wine. Reading the wrap-ups is like reading our posts. Is that going to stop us from highlighting a few key points? Of course not. Repetition is good for the soul.

This is not a case of if you build it, they will come.

As you will recall from previous conversations, while the publishing industry was snoozing, a large portion of the world moved online. Not the entire world, but enough of the world that it would make sense for the publishing industry to follow suit. This has not been the easy, comfortable transition you would expect. In order to achieve the goal, industry professionals are being forced to abandon the “that’s how we’ve always done it” mentality.

Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Co., said, “The day will come when you should have done it last week.” Hopefully, the crowd shouted back, “Yeah!”

We’ve been reading various and sundry accounts of the presentations that generated the most brain waves, and it seems the O’Reilly ideas were the hot ticket (have we mentioned the upcoming Tools of Change conference? You, all of you, really need to be there. Take our word for it.). For years now, really, years, we’ve been all excited about O’Reilly’s Safari program. This is clearly the wave of the future for a specific type of non-fiction work; the traditional publishing cycle is simply too slow and expensive for time-sensitive work. The trick is to make the information available in multiple formats: traditional book, electronic, and bite-sized. Sometimes all you really need is a chapter.

And, of course, when you think beyond the book, you can also think beyond the one-way communication. You can have images, audio, interactivity, 3-D, virtual reality, whatever it takes to augment the message. We have noted many times in the past that the readers are online and clamoring for content. The only thing keeping them from embracing online publishing endeavors is the fact that online publishing endeavors aren’t doing a thing for readers. Stop complaining about declining sales and start engaging the people who want your product.

Publishing representatives such as Chris Hart of Random House took the idea of Digital Asset Distributors (DADs…how, uh, old school patriarchal, no?) introduced by Mike Shatzkin (quoted above) and explained that his company is moving forward, starting to get the concept of community and content. As Publisher’s Lunch said, “Hart underscored the company’s broad efforts are “not a move against Google and Amazon” and it’s “not about DRM, and not about e-books.” It’s about “having books in the internet conversation and it’s about books versus every other media possible.””

But in so many ways it is a move against the Internet giants. As the music industry is still painfully learning (it hurts to watch, it really does), if consumers don’t get the content in the way they want, they will work around the restrictions. iTunes has effectively proven that people will pay if access is easy and the price is reasonable. It amuses us that publishing professionals “e-books are nowhere near achieving their potential” without noting that publishers have been deliberately obtuse about the idea of ebooks. It’s not that the demand doesn’t exist, it’s that the demand doesn’t exist in way publisher’s decided it should.

Price. Ease-of-use. The right format for the right information. Publishers are just now coming around to this world-view. Now if only they could get on board with what matters to consumers: finding what they want. Random House’s “search inside” feature is great if you know what you’re searching for inside a specific book. Typing various search phrases into the little search box at the top of the page returns what can only be termed as useless results. It is unclear how the search results relate to the search term.

Searching inside a book works only when the customer already knows what information is inside the book. Searching for a book requires so much more. Let us give a short example. We typed “to be or not to be” in the search box. The results were, well, confusing. After a little effort (why would RH’s author page default to “events” as the first search item on the page rather than just authors?), we determined that William Shakespeare is published by the house. We also, through careful research, discovered that Hamlet is a RH title.

This is why effective, well-considered, well-built search matters. It matters a lot. This is an obvious example with obvious results. The fact that the obvious didn’t happen shows that publishers have a long way to go when it comes to fulfilling their vision. It also tells us that dissing the search giants is not in the publishing industry’s best interest.

We do not tout Google because of our undying love for the brand — though it is currently a personal favorite (how can you not love Gmail?)– but because it is the best at what it does. Information aggregation in a meaningful way. Let’s just say that the first Google results for “to be or not to be” point to Shakespeare. When we are searching for something, we want relevant results, simple as that. Most businesses are very, very bad at implementing search. Though, in the course of human invention, the search engine is a relatively new invention, it is a fairly well-defined concept. Yet it is so often done poorly.

It is not wholly the fault of the technology. Even the best search engine can only work with what it is given. Bad content creation leads to bad search. This, more than anything, is why we have decided skepticism when it comes to announcements such as the one where “…the AAP and the BISG will soon work together to develop a common standard for searching for online book content that is not entirely dependent on using Google.”

First off, what does this mean? Are we to believe that the publishing industry has somehow managed to do something Microsoft, Yahoo!, and a host of other search professionals have failed at? Are we supposed to believe that the publishing industry will create better search technology? Seriously. Is there swamp land involved with this deal?

Second — and we know, we know, you’ve heard this before — where are the searchers? This is not a rhetorical question. When customers (again, as always, the ones who buy stuff) are looking for information online, where do they start? It’s not the Random House website. In fact, in our long years of using the Internet for fun and business, including observing average citizens going about their online business in an average way, we have yet to see someone turn to the publishing industry as the first line of research. Watch real people search for real stuff online. Not canned, test searches designed by someone who lives in an IT bubble. Real people. Your mother.

This is not a case of if you build it, they will come. If you’re not indexable by major search engines, you won’t be found. Simple as that.

Google is not the problem. The problem is not working with Google, Microsoft, and all the other search companies. The problem is with what publishing professionals like to call “control over content”. This is generally corporate way of saying that the publishers will decide when and how to release information. It is also a way to say that publishers will decide how to withhold information. Maybe it’s because we’re feeling cynical, but are publishing houses the best choices to decide what level of information will be appropriate for consumers to seek and find the books (in whatever format they comes) they want?

Digitize, monetize, and sell lots of books. But stop thinking that it’s 1996 and you have time to figure it all out. Terence McKenna once noted “…that time is speeding up, that history is moving faster and faster.” Just like time and history, so are the publishing industry’s customers.