No, it's the Kindle that's stupid
Arnaud Nourry has been the head of Hachette Livre since 2003. Hachette is one of the largest publishing houses in the world: it controls 170 brands and publishes 17 titles a year. Among its authors: John Grisham, James Patterson, Robert Ludlum and Stephen King. Nourry recently gave an interview to the Indian site Scroll.in about Hachette's prospects in India. On this occasion, he was able to address the issue of digital publishing, stating that the ebook is a stupid product in which there is no creativity and no development for publishing. Nourry's claims have been reported by the Guardian and the Post as the de profundis of this technology.
We asked Mario Mancini, co-founder of goWare, a new publishing start-up that publishes apps, ebooks and PODs for new media, to comment on Nourry's claims. Mario Mancini is also the author of two books on new publishing both published by goWare: Specchiocracy. Book or ebook? (2014) and Amazon vs. Apple. Brief history of new publishing ten years after the Kindle (2018).
Because the ebook is stupid
Is it true that the ebook is as amazed as Hachette CEO Ariel Nourry claims? Of course the ebook is stupid. "Stupid is what stupid does," said Forrest Gump's mother. If you keep doing stupid things, it means that, although potentially intelligent, you are stupid. This is the meaning of stupid for ebooks. It's stupid because it is deliberately weakened; because deliberately kept in a state of stupid minority. Creatives, publishers and platforms use this new media and the technology that drives it to 10% of its effective potential. I would like to be even more clear. Ultimately, and I'm sorry to say because that's where it all started ten years ago, it's the Kindle that's stupid. Kindle technology, in the age of artificial intelligence, is primitive.
Primitive in what sense?
The Kindle is concerned only with preserving the classic form of the book. It incites writing for the classic form of the book. It is something unusable for anyone who poses the central problem of innovating the narrative content. A crucial development today given the ubiquity of new intelligent devices for information, learning, entertainment, communication and even reading. It's not true that we read less, humanity has never read as much as it reads now. And since the ebook is stupid, because, as Nourry says, "it's the same as the paper book, there is no creativity, improvement, real digital experience" and it costs only a few euros less than the aristocratic book, it happens that readers they buy the books and the writers write books and not ebooks. And those who have never read books, and who could be reached with next-generation ebooks, still don't read books. A virtuous circle.
Is this why readers, after an infatuation with ebooks, have returned to the fold?
Yes. The ebook-book game cannot even be played under current conditions. While the book remains for centuries and appreciates over time, the ebook is as transient as any modern technology.
You don't even have full ownership of the ebook because you don't buy it, you license it like software. The ebook is deprived of any exchange value and the use value is lower than the original. The only lever is the price, but with the leveling of the latter, every competitive advantage disappears. The ebook has only innovated the distribution chain, and it's already a lot, but in terms of content and format, nothing has been seen.
Let's talk about price levelling.
Look, it's Nourry himself who explains it better than anyone else when he says:
“When I became CEO of Hachette in 2003 I studied what happened to music, cinema and newspapers. I became convinced of the need for book publishers to control prices. If in Western markets we allow the ebook to drop in price by 2 or 3 euros, the entire market infrastructure collapses. Bookstores die, large-scale distribution dies, authors' revenues fall. We have to defend the logic of our market against the interests of technology groups and their business model."
Clear, right? Nourry, however, need not worry about technology and Amazon, in particular, which has no intention of turning this market upside down since its book sales grow by 35% on an annual basis, while those of its competitors collapse or stagnate. . We are now at a stabilization of the Amazon-rest of the world conflict.
The consequences of this state of affairs
Why is the Kindle the problem?
Unfortunately, or fortunately, 80% of the digital book market passes through the Kindle. The hegemonic position of Kindle technology, however, stifles innovation, or rather does not attract innovation. In what sense? For example, developing a hyperlink on a Kindle e-reader can become an Indiana Jones experience. If a poor link becomes a problem, what are we left with? Writers, who are supposed to team up with game developers and creators to produce narrative content of a new kind, don't go looking for anyone because you can't work a year for something that doesn't have a market or is aimed at a large market on 5 %.
Is it a modifiable situation?
Unfortunately, there is no way to change this situation. This should be done by Amazon itself, which innovates furiously in all fields, but in this sector it acts as an incumbent: the business as it is suits it. There is little to expect from publishers because they see the ebook as a destructive factor in their turnover. The authors are watching. Someone has done something important. Rowling, for example, founded Pottermore where she distributes Harry Potter stories in innovative digital formats. But Pottermore is the only business of the blonde English writer that is making a loss. Even James Patterson has mobilized to create something suitable for this new channel. But none of these initiatives had a sequel or triggered a "network effect". It's not easy to do that.
Could Apple do something?
Apple is hopeless. Apple has everything it takes to accommodate the content innovation of writers and storytellers: it has the best hardware and software, it has a dedicated store and there are XNUMX billion iOS devices in the pockets of consumers ready to spend . But
he got it all wrong on ebooks and is now in a position of embarrassing irrelevance. I'll tell you a case I know well. goWare, where I work, is a new publishing startup that has been publishing apps, ebooks and PODs for new media since 2009. Well, when the iPad arrived in 2010, 60% of its business went through Apple's iBookstore. Today on Apple it makes only 3%. Let's hope it does. But the match with Amazon is lost, as I also explain in my book.
Disheartening. But doesn't Apple today define itself as an average company?
Tim Cook and Luca Maestri have no reason to say that Apple has become a media and content company. In reality, Apple is too elitist a company to welcome an innovation that comes from below like the one needed to innovate this sector. It seems that now they are putting their hand back to iBooks and the iBookstore to revive the business. The intentions seem so good that it was decided to remove the Jobsian prefix "i" from the name of the app and the store. They want to give a strong signal to the market. We'll just have to wait and see. Apple can really surprise us. Let's hope it does. But the match with Amazon is lost, as I also explain in my book.
Can publishers do anything?
They can do as much as their authors can. But they are mountains of salt. Nourry explains it very well when he says:
“We can invent something new using our content and digital beyond ebooks, but I've come to the conclusion that we don't have the skills and talents needed for that. In our businesses, editors are used to taking a manuscript and putting it on a page of paper. They know little about the potential of 3D and digital. That's why we've bought three video game companies in the last couple of years, to acquire talent from different industries and see how we can enrich content beyond copy-copy ebooks. I know that we have to offer different experiences to our customers”.
Well done Nourry. An interesting program. In unsuspecting times Matteo Hoepli, who manages the online shop of the historic Milanese bookshop, told me that publishing houses must become software houses. A very accurate forecast But publishers need time and until the big publishers move, even the big authors, those who have the X-Factor, are at the window.
Beyond the ebook
How can we go beyond ebooks in their current format?
Certainly not with app-books. Closed experience. App-books are a completely different audience and channel than editorial ones. There are certainly audience overlaps, but from apps the consumer, even if they are strong readers, expects a strong interactivity, something Pavlovian that a traditional narrative content, albeit revisited, cannot provide. So I fully understand what Nourry is saying when she says:
We publishers have tried to improve or enrich ebooks, but it hasn't worked. We tried apps and sites: successes were one or two and failures by the hundreds.
Readers don't go to the AppStore, Google Play or the web, they go to Amazon to stock up on paid publishing products.
Yet the enhanced ebook seemed like a good idea?
It seemed because it was just in the right channel and was inheriting the concepts from the apps. But this too is a closed experience, because enhanced ebooks couldn't be purchased on the Kindle Store, because they didn't work on Kindle e-readers. Furthermore, this product was not born as a project aimed at creating a true interactive digital experience. It was born as a book + something fancy. When I think of that experience, the sculptures of Dawn and Night in the new Sacristy of the Medici chapels in Florence come to mind. Since Michelangelo had difficulty depicting the female body, he built a male body to which he then hung the female attributes. But those are still huge masterpieces. So it was with enhanced ebooks. You took a paper content to which you added video content, Java applets, interactive tests, maps, links and all a cobbled together stuff that seemed like a great thing and instead was shit. It couldn't work. The public isn't stupid like those ebooks were.
Amazon
It seems to me that Amazon has the turning key. What should be expected from Bezos & co.?
Yes, it is definitely Amazon that has the passe-partout. One could start with a very simple step, a decision to be made with a snap of the fingers. It wouldn't have any consequences on Kindle users, but it would change the reference scenario a lot. It would be enough for Amazon to decide to support the epub3 format, retiring the mobipocket format. The ePub format is already incorporated into the file that consumers download from the Kindle Store. ePub3 is HTML 5, the technology of the web. One bomb, everything can be done. It would be enough for the Kindle software to load an ePub file instead of loading a mobi file. We often talk about this step which, however, does not happen because Amazon is glutted with books and sits well in its role to such an extent that Hachette's boss, who considered Amazon a threat to planetary culture, today sings the paean:
Amazon has played a fantastic role in the publishing industry,” Nourry says. Aside from our little dispute, it's an efficient reseller with the ability to deliver books quickly to anywhere in the world. It's a great opportunity for publishers.
It makes you smile. In reality, Amazon management knows very well what to do but does not want to.
Would ePub3 be enough to unleash innovation?
No, that's not enough. It would take a second step which is much more difficult. Amazon should gradually phase out its e-ink devices to fully embrace the smartphone and tablet technology that is already implemented on the Kindle Fire and the Kindle app for backlit devices. In China, a nation that is already in the future, everyone reads on large format smartphones and few are looking for dedicated e-readers, because they are simply not needed. Western readers are much more sophisticated, the book tradition is much more entrenched, and anti-tech snobbery is much more fashionable, so e-readers carry more weight in readers' choices. However, one cannot fail to recognize that in this cultural area e-readers have had a very useful function of ferrying the consumer to the digital side. They had… now, 10 years after the introduction of the Kindle, we can be more daring. And it's right to do it.
What would you suggest to Amazon?
I would tell them to implement EPUB3 now and launch an e-ink scrapping program with encouraging incentives to switch to the Kindle Fire, large format tablet or smartphone. Amazon could enter into agreements with third-party manufacturers. It would be the horse's move that would open scenarios that are unthinkable now. But none of that will happen.
The example of early cinema
To conclude, is there an example in the history of modern media that can serve as a viaticum for the ebook?
Of course it exists, it is the cinema of the origins. Cinema was born from photography as a technology and from vaudeville as a content, just as the ebook was born from the web as a technology and from narrative as a content. Thanks to the action of pioneers such as Georges Méliès and Edwin Porter and the initiative of entrepreneurs such as Gaumont and Zukor, the cinematograph from a mimetic and derivative medium became a medium that was capable of developing a new and original expressive language and knew how to create from nothing a new reference audience, an audience that the cultural industry of the time did not reach. It was such an important development and a revolution in taste and behavior that cinema became the seventh art, the art most loved by the masses. The book industry must be able to follow the same path as the film industry of its origins. And it will. It just needs time. But as Keynes said “in the long run we are all dead”.
