On Futurebook.net, the digital blog launched by UK magazine Bookseller, Nick Harkaway just published two insightful pieces on digital publishing. Maybe I think they’re insightful because they speak to my own prejudices, but I do think he makes clear, logical arguments that address some of the more self-defeating behavior of publishers in these unsettled times.

What makes Harkaway’s ideas even more valuable, in my opinion, is that they’re not limited in scope to just the big publishers. Anyone who publishes, including self-starting indies and small niche presses, can and should take note.

Here’s what he suggests, although the paraphrased explanations that follow should be blamed on me:

1. Make your content available. Don’t window the digital release in a misguided attempt to boost hardcover sales; you’re wasting opportunities to sell to new consumers who wouldn’t or can’t buy the hardback.
2. Price wisely and think in tiers. Don’t charge a premium price for a substandard (i.e., typo-ridden or image-lacking) digital version. At the same time, add value incrementally to digital versions so that you can segment them into different price points. First, this will help you give the consumer the option to spend as much as he’s willing to spend (always a good thing for profits). Second, this will give you a way to “window” digital content in a useful way, by letting you release differently priced versions of digital content to correlate with the traditional release schedule.
3. Don’t cheat customers. Harkaway doesn’t quite use such strong language–he says customers don’t want to pay twice for the same content. But ultimately it comes down to feeling cheated as a consumer: if you paid for something, you don’t want to have to buy it again, and then again, each time you want to consume it on a different platform. Here’s an idea: if you really do want to charge a consumer on a per-platform basis, then you must drop the price to a “rental” level as an acknowledgement of how limited the access is that you’re selling.
4. Skip DRM. It adds cost to your production budget. It creates potential situations where your customer will feel cheated. It’s arguably ineffective. The people telling you that you need it are frequently the ones who are selling it. Most of the arguments for it are based on emotion, not business intelligence. If it’s too late for you–because there are higher-ups or board members who insist on it and are too slow/scared/suspicious to try something new, then at least start pushing for an exit strategy.

“DRM is not all that” [Futurebook]
“The Rules Of Harkaway Club: everything I think I know about ebooks, but probably don’t” [Futurebook]
www.nickharkaway.com

Joe Konrath’s scenario of the future, where an ebook can fluidly move across devices while being consumed in a variety of ways throughout the day, inspired me to write my own user experience scenario.

Below is a look at what kind of person might buy a personalized anthology, how a retailer might offer the service, and what it might cost. When it comes to personalized anthologies, the technology and the content already exist; it just requires some large-scale cooperation among retailers, publishers, and authors, which may take some years to work out.

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So why is there so much doom and gloom, instead of excitement, from so many in the industry? The problem is one of economics, yes, but I think the real problem is a lack of imagination. Too many professionals–publishers, agents, authors, technologists, journalists, economic types (but maybe not real economists)–see ebooks and epublishing as building off of the current publishing model. Instead, they should be thinking of epublishing as disruptive. To put it another way (and to borrow/misuse terms from biology), epublishing is not the next stage in a gradual evolutionary path for the industry; instead, it’s an example of punctuated evolution–that is, the industry has been in stasis for a long time, changing little, and now is beginning to undergo a dramatic mutation to a form that’s more suitable to the new market environment. Publishing in the future will look so different as to seem like a new species, I predict.

Framing the topic like this raises a question: what will make it so dramatically different, then? How is epublishing really that different from physical publishing? If it’s truly disruptive, it had better possess some unique characteristics that have never before been seen in publishing.

That’s where I come in! As a hypothetical Future Published Author, I take a keen interest in trying to come up with new schemes to publish and sell books, so I think I can help provide some of that imaginative power for the FUD crowd that sees the future and only sees death.
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