Helping Customers Find

1
Helping CustomersFind BuyE-Books

• Sydney Davies
• BA Head of Trade Industry
• 25 March 2009

2
Brave New World

• Digitisation of Content The opportunities for
  booksellers and the BA
• Conclusions

3
The STM and the Academic sectors have already
gone digital and are grappling with the changing
business relationships

• No change there

4
Digital content is accentuating the differences
between sectors, which are diverging and
migrating at different speeds

• One example is libraries continuing to favour
  ebooks
• OCLC NetLibrary, OverDrive etc
• Audio books standing still VAT?

5
Consumer confidence in e-books is growing but is
held back by lack of content, reader/DRM format
wars, and uncertain price points and is unlikely
to change in the next two years

• Still true?

6

• First Read an E-Book Week
• UK searches for ebooks doubled between January
  2008 2009
• Amazon Waterstones not enough ebooks
  available
• PDF dominant epub gaining?
• XML not yet established?
• ISTC just getting off the runway
• No DRM iTunes audiobooks next
• Pricing experiments still big issue
• Amazons 9.99

7
Today convergence is sought by all and there is
strong resistance to stand alone solutions unless
they can quickly capture the marketTechnology
is also now highly fashion/brand led
8

• Endles new devices
• BeBook, Cybook, jetBook, Pixelar, Readius etc
  over 20
• Is the future mobile?
• No Apple but lots of iPhone apps
• Stanza
• 1.3m consumers, 60 countries, 100k titles, 3m
  downloads
• PG Mobile
• 3 Books on the Go

9
Social publishing and attitudes to free access
to information are at odds with todays
commercial models

• Advertising hit by downturn
• Libraries why pay, rent for free!
• Primary schools blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia,
  Twitter

10
There are significant opportunities for
booksellers, but the approach must be proactive
as well as reactive

• Barnes Noble/Fictionwise
• ABA/Ingram
• Waterstones/Sony Reader

11
POD, podcasts, blogs and interactive services
offer booksellers opportunities to differentiate
and support niche/local publishing

• Lightning Source 2m books 2008
• Self publishing
• Blackwells Espresso machine
• RNIBs Focus

12
The development of specialisation, communities
and customer relationships are the key
ingredients to success for the majority of
bookstores

• Publishers digital directors focus on social
  networking
• Book reviews on the web
• Booksellers?

13
Amazon has morphed into a formidable killer
store and now covers nearly all aspects of the
value chain within its offer

• 500k Kindles Kindle 2
• 250k titles
• iPhone, Mobipocket
• Audible, BookSurge

14
There is a clear change of value when the
consumer moves onto the Internet where
aggregation, search discovery and qualification
become the key values soughtThis offers
opportunities to new entrants such as Google, MSN
and Yahoo
15

• MSN? Yahoo?
• Google Settlement The Book Rights Registry
• iPhone Android 1.5m public domain
• Sony tie in
• Apple?

16
Digital content and the Internet offer new
relationships with customers, authors,
publishers, local business and moreBut those
relationships have to be consistent in both the
phyiscal as well as the networked environment
17

• Ingram OverDrive hosting, managing,
  distributing ebooks/audiobooks
• Baker Taylor - ebrary
• Gardners Bertrams

18
The bibliographic gap between the haves and the
have-nots will widen as content is increasingly
used to support sales and is valued by the
consumer