On March 27, Apple will hold a purely educational event at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago, a sort of technological high school. In view of this appointment, which has aroused much curiosity both for the location and for the theme, we asked Mario Mancini what we can expect from Apple in the electronic book sector.
Mario Mancini, co-founder of goWare, a new publishing startup that publishes apps, ebooks and PODs for new media, is the author of two books on new publishing both published by goWare: Screencracy. Book or ebook? (2015) and Amazon vs. Apple. Brief history of new publishing ten years after the Kindle (2018). In the last one, he reconstructs the history of the last ten years of the new publishing industry, which saw Amazon knock Apple out.
Do you think in Chicago there there will be news and important announcements by Apple?
"Certainly. Otherwise they would have held the event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino with a more diluted agenda. If Apple's management, which is rather sedentary, has taken the trouble to do 3500 kilometres, it means that there is something boiling in the pot. Educational has always been within Apple's field of vision. He thinks Steve Jobs' NeXT was initially aimed at the university and school market. Now Apple wants to pick up the thread of a conversation that has been interrupted for a while and it wants to do it with a clear signal. It is the mountain that goes to Mohammed”.
What news will there be?
“According to Bloomberg there will be the presentation of a new low-cost iPad whose technical characteristics are not yet known, except that it will mount the Apple A9 processor, the same as the iPad Pro. It is said that it will cost around $250 precisely because aimed at the school market. Analysts are also talking about a new MacBook front, a new model under a thousand dollars that will take the place of MacBook Air. Apple is therefore focusing on price leverage to recover the educational hardware market from which important slices have recently been stolen by competitors, Google in the lead”.
But I understand that there will also be other interesting ones news?
“From the rumors, I don't know how reliable, the other news will concern the electronic book and in particular the textbook. It is said, and I think it is, that Apple is revamping its entire ebook offering. The news will concern the reading application, iBooks, which will simply be called "Apple Books"; the book store, which will probably take the name of "Apple Bookstore"; and finally the tool for creating new generation electronic books and school manuals, more related to interactive apps than to paper books. Always in line with the terminological renewal, this new tool will also lose the Jobsian “i” to probably become Apple Book Author”.
It is a package of products and solutions that embrace the entire electronic book supply chain, from production to distribution. True?
"Certain. It was already there, but a finger of dust had settled on it. Revisiting this set of tools can truly be the beginning of a new chapter for the eBook. A chapter in which the conditions for the innovation of content and the remedying of the medium could be verified, so far a mere and sad replica of the paper book. A remedy that Amazon, with its Kindles, is not able to carry on, unless it decides to overcome them. And perhaps the renewed competition with Apple could be an opportunity to do so. This is also why what will happen on March 27 is very important”.
Why did Apple feel the need to take this step 8 years after the launch of the iPad?
“For two reasons dictated by the need not to be definitively marginalized by the electronic book market”.
Marginalized in what sense?
“Let's start with the first reason, which I would define as “external”. Apple, as a pioneer and protagonist of the electronic book, today finds itself in a position of almost irrelevance. I am not going to talk about the reasons for this state of affairs, which I have explained in my book. Apple's market share is just over 10%, compared to Amazon's 70%. In Italy, according to recent AIE data, Apple has 12,5% of the ebook market, against 52% for Amazon. Embarrassing! The game is over and Amazon has won. Amen. But there is a wedge that Apple can drive into and from there leverage to undermine the existing structures. And maybe the time is right now.”
Which is this wedge?
“It is the need for new generation electronic books capable of attracting new readers who currently prefer to spend their time on other more Pavlovian media than books. These "potential new readers" will never approach reading an ebook as a mere replica of paper. If they didn't read books on paper, they won't read books on the screen of their smartphone or tablet either. It takes more to bring them closer to the narrative or informational form of the book. A need for novelty that is not at all abstruse, as many think and as Bezos also seems to think when he says that we cannot add anything to the book as it is. It's Gutenberg's, period. But now we are in the age of artificial intelligence and we need Gutenberg 2.0”.
What makes you think there is questo need, since so far il so calledo "enhanced book" o "app books" è stato beautifully ignoredo from the market?
“Yes, they were ignored because they weren't the right product aimed at the right audience. They were experiments, especially by publishers, just to say "oh, we're here too". But there was no real news”.
So what has changed?
“That something has changed, makes me think Arnaud Nourry, the boss of Hachette. Hachette is one of the largest and most conservative publishing houses in the world, one of the institutions of French exceptionalism. It is strong in the trade market and an institution in the school book. Nourry recently stated that the paper page replication ebook is a stupid thing and that it brings no contribution to the cultural book industry, which is struggling to find a significant space in the digital landscape. He also said that something different needs to be done to expand the book market in the age of artificial intelligence and hyper-connected devices. That's why Hachette is buying video game startups and looking for new professionals in the field of software and interactive product design. Publishing companies will become software companies, not much different from video game or film production companies. If you look at the current situation, the fact is that Amazon with its Kindle is not able to understand this need and leaves a wedge. Apple's cavalry can enter this wedge."
Going back to Apple's two reasons. Which the second reason to relaunch the e-book?
“It's a more internal reason, it's about Apple's strategy. Tim Cook and Luca Maestri are telling the rooftops not to worry about declining iPhone sales because Apple is becoming a media company, a content company. In his latest call with investors, Cook said that if Apple were to give the content business to an independent company, it would immediately enter the list of America's 500 most capitalized companies. There is talk of 7-8 billion dollars in revenue from content. It is clear that books, both from the trade and scholastic channels, cannot be ignored, given that after television they are the most important sector of the media sector and also given that Apple already has an important, albeit frustrating, experience with the book electronic. And books now contribute too little to Apple's content business."
Do you think Apple can truly become a Disney-like content company?
“It's still to be seen. In the field of content, he has done some exceptional things, such as creating the market for applications from nothing and good things like Apple Music, even if he let streaming be blown away by Spotify, and finally he has done some bad things like Apple News and above all electronic books. But here there is a starting flaw that dates back to Steve Jobs, who didn't want to know about books”.
How can he recover, then?
“Apple has the best devices in the hands of 5 billion people accustomed to paying for content and aware consumers of cultural products. It also has the best fully HTML27-aligned software that can accommodate applets; a dedicated bookstore, albeit currently run as a pharmacy; has an efficient electronic payment system, Apple Pay, which allows painless and immediate transactions. It lacks nothing to bring the electronic book to a new level of conception, use and consumption. In the meantime, let's see what emerges from the March XNUMX event in Chicago”.
Do you think Apple will be able to move the school book, moving it from paper toi bit?
“Hard to predict. What is certain is that scholastic education, which has the most favorable demographics for the transition to digital, does not exist in the digital world. The market share of ebooks in school is just 5% in the United States. The biggest fault lies with the publishers, but users also don't like studying on screens, despite spending several hours a day there. I think this is due to the poverty of the offer, which is a mere replica of the paper book, with some additions of interactive elements whose performances make you smile when compared to those that kids find on the net. In reality, there is still a lack of a tool to produce real new generation interactive schoolbooks, in which there is the best of new technologies. With Apple Book Author, the tool for developing interactive books, Apple can stir things up. But until publishers like Pearson, McGraw-Hill or Cengage move, little will happen. For now, publishers are mountains of salt”.
Un'Last question. What are the biggest obstacles you see is preferably used for Apple's resurgence in the field of electronic books and the interactive school one?
“Apple's mentality is the biggest obstacle. It is very elitist, looking to partners who are located at the top end of the market and who very often, as incumbents, have little interest in innovating and much in maintaining the status quo. The bear hug for Apple's electronic book was precisely the alliance with the big publishers. Content innovation is a distributed fact that can arise spontaneously from authors, startups, organizations, a universe towards which attention is needed. I'm not sure that Apple is able to incubate and appropriate these phenomena from below, so to speak. Amazon is much better at this, as demonstrated with the incredible phenomenon of self-publishing that Apple has almost completely ignored. The point is that Apple, unlike Amazon, really has what it takes to bring content innovation to the field of electronic books. If he really wants to become an average company, he can't throw this possibility away again. To Apple technologists who complained about the feasibility of his projects, Steve Jobs used to say: "It can be done... and now let's get to work!". This maxim still applies today.
