From tablets to phablets
Some analysts have attributed the decline of Apple's ebook business not so much to its inability to interpret and anticipate market trends, as it usually is capable, but to a major change in the mobile device sector and audience preferences. . Just as tablets have put a halt to the growth of notebooks, so large format smartphones, phablets, have put a cap on the growth of dedicated tablets and ereaders. Now no analyst speaks of the latter any more in the terms in which he spoke a few years ago.
In the third quarter of 2016, tablet sales fell by 20,1%. It happens that the smartphone is replacing the tablet even in what the tablet was most useful for, i.e. reading, writing and streaming. Fewer and fewer people carry around two devices, while everyone carries around a smartphone with which they have learned to do everything. My friend Giulio Sapelli writes articles and entire chapters of books on his old Blackberry with an execution skill that leaves you amazed. He can also write on the summit of Gran Paradiso with the fine air that oxygenates his brain. The adaptive capacity of people is amazing if the need arises.
Large format smartphones are now 25% of the entire smartphone market. IDC predicts that in 2020, one in three smartphones will have a screen between 5,1 and 7 inches. At that date, the volume of phablets delivered will reach the remarkable number of 610 million.
Reading a book is certainly possible on a phablet, although it still tends to be considered a rather extravagant choice. Reading on a phablet screen is certainly possible, but undoubtedly less easy and satisfying than reading on a well-set and typographically impeccable paper page. Reading a book on a smartphone can only make sense in particular circumstances or for special contents that need a certain interactivity as, for example, they incorporate multimedia, video or audio expansions. Studying is even less conceivable and in fact all school-age children still declare that they prefer books without too much hesitation.
Reading and studying require concentration and immersion. Silence in libraries is something sacred and the cell phone is the denial of silence and concentration.
From ebook to audiobook
With the advent of the hybrid reader that chooses the reading format indifferently and with the leveling of the prices of ebooks, the smartphone tends to be essentially a stopgap solution and less convincing than tablets for reading books. The latter are preferred. The smartphone, however, immediately returns to the game if instead of reading we talk about listening. And that's exactly what happened when the offer of texts read and recited, whether they were audiobooks or podcasts, became an option as simple as obtaining and listening to a piece of music from a device.
The smartphone, in fact, is an exceptional tool for listening to a book and it is precisely this activity that is starting to appeal immensely to readers whose reading time has begun to contract strongly with the enormous increase in the average offer. Listening, unlike reading, is something that can be combined with other activities, it is something summative and not exclusive. Reading a book through headphones while walking down the street or running in the park or on the treadmill or ironing a shirt has become something more than an ephemeral fad. It has become a habit for millions of people.
Audible, which supplies Amazon and Apple audiobooks, offers an easy, smooth, and efficient application for downloading and listening to a book, newspaper, magazine, or any other text-based content. Multiple contents can be listened to without the application losing the last listening point of each one, listening can be synchronized on devices from different manufacturers and even Amazon offers a solution which allows, in continuity with listening, to resume the reading on your Kindle.
Then there are the podcasts, many of which are free and are served by subscription from specialized applications. The latest book by Canadian sociologist Malcolm Gladwell, one of the 100 most influential thinkers on the planet, was actually a free podcast downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and funded by advertising. The head of the digital area of "The Economist" said that a subscriber listens to the articles of the magazine, which has been offering an unabridged audio edition of each issue for years, while swimming in the pool on his waterproof smartphone.
For more than a year, Alexandra Alter, the NYTimes book critic, has been repeating the usual refrain: audiobooks will soon have the place of ebooks in consumer tastes. And in 2016, the audiobook market grew by 35%. This demonstrates that if the suitable content is served to the medium, the consumer does not evade consumption. And this is precisely the crucial point that prevents ebooks from taking off. There is a lack of product innovation that serves the right content for the right medium.
From paper book to xeroxebook
Traditional publishing ebooks downloadable from the Kindle store or iBookstore are mere digital copies of the book. They are xeroxebooks, photocopies on file. They do not add or subtract anything from the book from which they are born as a pure conversion from one format to another. Still in 2017 you can download a non-fiction ebook and notice that there is no link to support the sources and documents, there is no internal cross-reference, there is no interactive index of the places and names mentioned, the figures are tiny and interrupt abruptly and casually in the text causing page jumps that lead the reader astray. Many ebooks are poorly spaced and look like a mass of asphalt, when they could be aired, broken and paragraph spaced, since pages are not a cost. There is not even the slightest investment in what constitutes the specific characteristics of the medium, not even the minimum wage. A large and reputable publisher like Gallimard has put ebooks on the market in which the hyphens that are left over from a bad conversion from pdf to ePub float on the page. One could continue with the list of purely typographical defects. And we are talking about ebooks from major publishers, from established and followed authors. In this context and with this hyper-minimal ebook, the consumer's choice can therefore only be driven by a consideration of convenience. Traditional publishing sees ebooks as an additional distribution channel that is very difficult to control and therefore abhors. It is the same sentiment that prompted the great art critic Roberto Longhi to write "let them go!!" referring to the two figurines of Florentine bourgeois painted by Masolino da Panicale in a scene from Masaccio's large fresco in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine Church in Florence.
Amazon, unlike Apple, continues to sell well in ebook format because this format is by far the most prevalent in new publishing and in 90% of cases there is no paper alternative, even if print-on-demand is growing in considerably in terms of volume and turnover. But in the new publishing industry, unlike the larger one, the price gap between digital and paper remains marked because Amazon, which controls this market, wants it to be like this and rightly so. For the new publishing industry, the ebook is not a new distribution channel, but it is the distribution channel.
But even from this astonishing phenomenon no real product innovation has come. Indeed, a very traditional content has arrived. In this universe, genre fiction and escapism dominate, where the pink genre stands out, accounting for 77% of sales. According to Mark Cocker, the boss of Smashwords (a self-published aggregator), the "pink authors" are the best organized, the most professional, the most experimental and the most sophisticated and have been able to build an incredible relationship with the reader. But the ebook is still conceived and written like a paper book.
A new channel for poetry, short stories, short novels and journalistic essays
In truth, something new has been seen and it is encouraging. This is mainly due to more visionary authors and start-ups that have begun to take the new medium seriously and invest in its specificities. A genre like poetry has had a sort of renaissance with the ebook both because it had been expelled from major publishing and because poetry is a short, accomplished and frugal text that reads really well on a medium format screen. The same can be said for journalistic, investigative or lifestyle stories and essays (on the New Yorker model, to be clear) which take advantage of two peculiarities of the format: the irrelevance of the foliation and the almost instantaneousness between conception and publication of the content. First Amazon and then Apple created specific areas of their stores to offer this type of content which requires a time investment of just over an hour. Amazon called them "Single ebooks", echoing the music, and Apple called them "Shorts" with a nod to the cinema. Erotica also works well in ebook format. James got her start as a self-published digitally distributed author. Then someone noticed it and it became the phenomenon that we know.
There have been great authors who have done excellent things. JK Rowling has created Pottermore where she offers the Harry Potter stories reconceived and reassembled with a multimedia, almost cinematic cut in ebooks. But Rowling, who usually creates a supersonic wake, hasn't had many other imitators. Pottermore's data is not known but it is known that, until recently, it was the only loss-making business of the blonde English writer. James Patterson, who creates "battery bestsellers" has set out "to sell books to people who prefer television, video games, movies and social media to reading." He has created a series called bookshots that offers shorter stories, more compelling in the plot and with a lot of adrenaline. “It will be like reading a movie,” he said. But he didn't hear much about it. In reality Patterson, as a marketing man that he is, has understood the ontological problem of the book industry in the transition to digital: it is not the competition between book and ebook or between Amazon and publishers, but the urgency to bring new subjects to read and to stem the erosion of the terrain of reading by the action of the more Pavlovian media which successfully contend with it for the reader's time. This problem seems to be the least of the worries of the big publishers, who are also affected by the common evil of today's business, shortism.
The ephemeral season of appbooks
However, the most important experimentation on narrative texts took place with applications. It is these small pieces of software that have become a laboratory of innovation and have remained so. And today the enthusiasm has almost completely died down. Today the interactive narration that was sought with the appbook is in the videogame. Perhaps a spin-off that is the interactive book could be born from the video game script. But this option is still shrouded in fog.
The Waste Land, the poem by TS Eliot, reworked as an iPad app by Faber and Touch Press in 2011, has become an editorial case. In six weeks, it easily exceeded one million dollars in revenues. It is still a rather linear application: the text of the poem is accompanied by its coordinated recitation with very rich textual notes and 35 expert videos.
Arcadia, written for iPad and iPhone by the English art historian and writer Iain Pears, is already a more elaborate narrative app because it intertwines stories and characters, encouraging the reader to interact with them in choosing the reading path. Either way, reading represents the activity you ultimately land on. 80 days, developed by Inkle on the trail of Jules Verne's novel Around the world in 80 days, is already starting to filter with the concept of gamification. In this app, the separation between book and video game begins to disappear. 80 Days garnered 4 BAFTA nominations. Another example of a hybrid between book and video game is Device 6, a surreal thriller that mixes literature, geography, puzzles and interactive games.
Here are outlined the three strands of appbooks: the expanded book (The Waste land); interactive narration (Arcadia) and finally the book/videogame (Device 6).
Even the big publishers, immediately after the release of the iPad, invested in appbooks. Penguin Random House has published about fifty apps, many of which are aimed at the kids segment. However, there have also been proposals for adults such as Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child (a selection of 32 recipes with related videos), Stephen Hawking's Snapshots of the Universe (an illustration of the principles of the universe through interactive experiments), Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (with plenty of visual and audio ancillary materials and the ability to share excerpts from Rand's works), Anne Frank's Diary with excerpts read by Helena Bonham Carter and interactive timelines, Antony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange (a mashup between book and films) and finally On the Road by Jack Kerouac, a sort of digital anastatic of the first edition of 1957 released in the legendary Penguin Orange Collection.
Despite the very promising beginnings of appbooks, it has happened that the AppStore has not proved to be the right environment to disseminate new generation books. Appbooks have been overwhelmed by the truly dominant narrative form of this newest market, video games. If a writer intends to spread his work with an app he should design a video game or something in which gamification plays an important role. Selling books as apps is a bit like selling non-game books at a game store. Furthermore, producing an application is a very expensive undertaking that involves many skills. In fact, it is a production effort that is more comparable to a film than a book with the software component as a key element of its appeal. It is truly something new and attempted and can easily exceed the 100 euro investment just for the technological component. The market will hardly return the investment.
We can therefore conclude by saying that, despite the significant experience of appbooks, however lukewarmly received by the market, we are still far from product innovation. We will deal with this issue in the next post.
