E-book Publishing
is a little different from e-books but I believe we’re going to see similar shifts,’ continued Kenneally. ‘There is a misunderstanding that, if it’s
online and digital, you can do whatever you want with it. There is a continual tension between availability and recognising value and it’s an extremely complex scenario.’ This was one of the issues observed by
Kevin Guthrie, president of Ithaka, at the ALPSP conference in September: ‘Libraries don’t really understand the notion of recommended books for courses bought by individuals and how important they are to publishers’ revenue when they talk about e-books and DRM.’ He went on to observe that library consortia
want to share books in order to ‘buy’ fewer copies. ‘Unless there’s DRM of some sort it’s not really a loan between libraries. It’s natural for libraries to ask these questions but it can’t be as extreme as simply applying the print world model to online,’ he added.
Publisher workflows Another challenge with e-book production is publisher workflows. ‘One of the big challenges from a publishing services
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perspective is the way that publishers work. Most still have print as first in their minds and consider the e-book at the end of the process,’ explained Alex Schrjver of MPS. ‘They’ve been working digitally but geared to something in print so we often have to reconvert a PDF to an e-book and this is always a challenge.’ He advocates having publishing processes
geared towards creating e-content. ‘Then they would have a more e-first workflow where the result can easily be converted into a PDF for printing and an e-book, making the time to market quicker,’ he said. ‘Attitudes of publishers are starting to change about workflows but it’s very slow. They all see the benefits but adopting it probably requires quite a paradigm shift.’ ‘Publishers vary widely in their readiness to
offer e-books, both in their ability to generate the proper technical formats such as EPUB and in the maturity of their business models for offering e-books,’ agreed Gary Coker of MetaPress. ‘If a publisher’s e-book collection exists solely as book-level (as opposed to chapter-level), image-only PDFs but the publisher wants to offer chapter-level sales and reading on mobile devices and e-readers,
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then it’s a bigger technical challenge to create an e-book offering for the publisher.’ Fawzia Nazir of Publishing Technology
added that a print-centric approach can place constraints on digital products, such as not having the relevant data fields to be able to hold the metadata required specifically by e-books. ‘Publishing companies as a whole are trying to use print-based tools and systems to create digital titles and this is not working,’ she said. ‘Publishers now need to think of themselves as media companies and not as book or print companies. They need to invest in good workflow tools that help them make this transition.’
The future These are the types of issues that publishers and their partners need to continue addressing as new standards and user expectations continue to push the definition of the e-book. With interactivity and mobility likely to be two of the top expectations of e-books, along with cheaper prices, constantly-updated content and instant availability, all eyes will be on the market over the next few months to see what the first EPUB 3-based products will deliver.
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