The pre-requisites of innovation
Content innovation in the digital scenario can only be produced by the convergence of two forces: creatives and technology. There is no simultaneity in this convergence, there is often a mismatch, but when these two factors align, innovation is fruitful and spreads quickly.
Let's look at ebook technology. The technological infrastructure which is the prerequisite, like the railways were in the second industrial revolution, exists and is of an excellent standard. In the world there are 2 billion mobile devices suitable for reading and there is a distribution model that works very well with many options for the consumer. What is lacking is software that hasn't yet developed those elements that are essential for creatives to implement content innovation beyond some notable pioneering and spontaneous efforts.
Paradoxically it is Apple, which finds itself in the unusual role of pursuer, that has the most advanced software which however remains a prisoner of the territorialism of the Cupertino company.
Apple's royalty
iBooks, Apple's application for reading ebooks, has everything you need to create next-generation content that goes beyond the mere digital reproduction of book form. "Surpass print experience" is the slogan of iBooks. Since June 21, 2010 iBooks fully supports HTML5, the language of the web, allows you to include audio, video and widgets, gives you the ability to view and rotate 3D objects, supports the JavaScript language to introduce interactive functions and mini-applications, automatically updates the library in the case of new editions of the book purchased, offers the possibility of sharing significant passages on Facebook, Twitter, iMessage or email, allows you to manage mathematical formulas with MatML, supports non-Latin alphabets, allows listening to an audiobook, synchronizes the reading aloud (Read aloud) with the text lighting up the recited words in sequence (function for children's books). iBooks can play fixed-layout ebooks where the integration of illustration, text, and multimedia elements is critical to understanding the content, such as children's books or picture books or cookbooks.
At the beginning of 2012 Apple presented an application, called iBooks Authors, with a graphical interface similar to Word, to create interactive ebooks also oriented towards education. It's easy to use and allows authors, graphic designers and enthusiasts to create an ebook without the need for a developer. The only drawback is that a proprietary format that cannot be exported to other platforms.
Apple's is a royal suite. But there is a problem that Apple will have to face sooner or later.
Ebooks created with and for iBooks only work on iOS systems and Macs. Apple has 10% of 25% of the entire book market. It is truly a fraction bordering on irrelevance. Now, Apple has the means and the potential to grow, as the AppleMusic experience demonstrates (20 million subscribers in three years), but it should really change the proprietary and iPhone-centric approach. Until now, services have been ancillary to hardware, they are tools that drive the sale of hardware and help encapsulate the consumer in its ecosystem. If Apple's services complement and eventually overtake hardware in the business model, new scenarios will open up. And perhaps that is what is happening. But the fact is that ebooks are marginalized and there is very little attention from Apple management to this segment.
What are the consequences? The consequences are that a creative, a publisher or a start-up does not find the conditions to invest resources, time and actions in a product, for which there is not yet a paradigm, which is placed in such a fraction of the market. 85% percent of the market is excluded. Therefore, wait-and-seeism wins. What happens in the other 85% almost entirely controlled by Amazon.
The wanted minimalism of Amazon
It happens that Amazon, on the book form, has a very different approach from Apple and surprisingly cautious for a company that innovates furiously without too much concern for market balances. Amazon takes a conservative approach, not an innovative one. Instead of "surpass the print experience" it is "improve the print experience". In its technological proposal, Amazon has remained faithful to its original approach exposed by Bezos in 2007: what can be added to a book? Nothing! The book form is a historically defined and vital form; it is also a very advanced technology. Difficult to think of an effective content innovation compared to something that is already effective. It follows that the content elaborated for the new media can only be essentially mimetic and respectfully modified. That's why the Kindle ebook is a book in another format.
The Kindle file format, AZW, is proprietary. It is basically a subset of the Mobipocket (.mobi) purchased from Amazon. Despite being HTML5, AZW minimally supports the fully developed features in iBooks. There is no application with some sort of GUI to edit it, and improve the code obtained from the conversion tools, provided by Amazon, from the main word processor formats and PDF. With the Kindle Fire, the original format has been updated to include the fixed page format ebook.
Amazon, if it wanted to, would take just over an afternoon to migrate to ePub3, which is already included in the file format of its ebooks, and thus open up a new scenario that could truly become a laboratory for content innovation. This time the creatives, publishers and authors would meet the market conditions to truly go beyond laboratory experimentation and meet the general public. But Amazon does not decide to take this step.
The new media revolution can instead be applied to everything that surrounds this content and brings it to its users. It is in this area that Amazon has concentrated its disruptive action and it is in this area that it innovates furiously.
Amazon barrier to market development?
In Amazon's minimalist approach towards the content of the ebook there is not only the noble intention of bringing the book form, still vital and devoid of real alternatives, into the hostile territory of new media where entertainment, l escapism and the more Pavlovian forms of cultural consumption, such as moving images or videogames, assert themselves. Amazon, being totally immersed in this universe, has repeatedly warned publishers, authors and players in the book industry against the risk of being overwhelmed by the economic and cultural competition of digital media that quickly appeal to the consumer's five senses. The leisure time of the latter does not grow with the pace of the content offer; we will have to wait for the advent of robots to have enough to satisfy all the supply.
In Amazon's pro-book approach there is also a, shall we say, hegemonic component which is the ambition to control, through technology and services, the transition of the book industry from mass media to new media. Let's not forget that Amazon's laboratory and its core business were books and still today they are an important, albeit secondary, component of its business. Why unhinge the book if it is such an important source of business? Why put it in competition with something that can replace it, opening the door to competitors and disrupters who can, in the medium to long term, replace Amazon's hegemony with their own? According to the well-known theory of "disruptive innovation", formulated by Clayton M. Christensen and which has become a sort of gospel of technological companies, today's destroyers are tomorrow's destroyers.
Creating software that stimulates content innovation and pushes creatives to produce new paradigms is certainly not in the field of vision of Amazon management. Amazon thinks as an incumbent, not as a disrupter.
This approach has worked great so far, but will it still be as fulfilling in the even near future? The question is serious. With the xerox-ebook starting to show some difficulty even in the world of new publishing, not to mention the major one, it is necessary to start offering consumers new generation content aligned with the technology that can support them. A first step could be to align the Kindle software to that of Apple, ie fully implement ePub3 on the Kindle. But this decision, which would cost Amazon very little effort because the Kindle is already ready for all of this, is still not seen.
Paradoxically, Amazon has become the main barrier to the development of a new market that flanks and takes on the legacy of the book market.
The consequences of this state of affairs
The failure to align software with the potential of technology in Amazon's proposal has had consequences that are anything but technological, as Heidegger would say. It has happened that creatives have not been put in the conditions, even minimal ones, to develop new ideas, to go beyond the book form so as to transform the ebook opportunity into a laboratory of innovation. Something was tried with applications, but when apps didn't prove to be the correct vehicle for meeting the reading public, there was no alternative. Innovation has remained frozen and it has been beautifully concluded that the public is too tied to the book form to give satisfaction to those looking for new ways.
The second consideration concerns the public. Without innovation, we continue to insist on the same audience. For now the statistics are benign, in the sense that reading is not undergoing the erosion held and still shows a certain vitality, but the audience is not growing.
Farhad Manjoo, the tech columnist of the New York Times, in an article entitled How the Internet Is Saving Culture, Not Killing It wrote: “In every cultural media, cinema or music or books or visual arts, digital technology gives space to new voices, creating new experimental formats allowing enthusiasts and creatives to participate in an extraordinary remix of the contents; From blogs to podcasts to YouTube, the last twenty years have been marked by a staggering array of formats that have broken down the barriers to crazy new creations.” Hard to say better.
To use a happy expression of the former “Economist” journalist and English peer, Matt Ridley, any change can only happen when “ideas have sex”. Unfortunately the ideas in the world of Amazon are going blank. But let's take comfort in the story.
Today, unfortunately, history is a discipline forgotten or enslaved to some purpose so that it can serve to illuminate the understanding of our time and to inspire the actions of decision makers. There is one example that should be looked at carefully to understand how technology has produced a content innovation that has led to a new expressive language, stimulated the best minds to experiment, and finally mobilized an audience that has lain in indolence towards existing cultural forms.
This example is the birth of cinematographic language at the beginning of the last century which we should look at to understand the unimaginable potential of a new medium which, driven by technology, detaches itself from known forms and from those that originated it to find its own autonomous and effective expressive space. We will deal with this issue in the next post.
