{"id":274406,"date":"2009-10-19T12:31:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-19T12:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2009\/10\/19\/putting-the-reader-first-at-toc-frankfurt\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T17:15:21","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T17:15:21","slug":"putting-the-reader-first-at-toc-frankfurt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2009\/10\/19\/putting-the-reader-first-at-toc-frankfurt\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting the Reader First at TOC Frankfurt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>This post originally appeared on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.book-fair.com\/en\/blog\/\">Frankfurt Book Fair blog.<\/a> I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The first ever Tools of Change Frankfurt conference took place all day today, bringing together representatives from a number of different parts of the book industry to discuss opportunities for the future of the publishing industry.<\/p>\n<p>Seeing as that my flight arrived at 7am this morning, I didn&#8217;t exactly make it to the opening sessions . . . and wasn&#8217;t entirely cogent during the panel that I participated on.<\/p>\n<p>That said, the presentations I attended were pretty inspiring, especially the one from Michael Tamblyn&#8217;s &#8220;Your Reading Life, Always With You,&#8221; which employed a very &#8220;reader-centric&#8221; approach to contemplating the future of e-books.<\/p>\n<p>Tamblyn&#8212;the VP of content, sales, and merchandising at Shortcovers.com, an e-book retailer launched by Canada&#8217;s Indigo Books &amp; Music, Inc.&#8212;gave a very engaging and humorous presentation littered with real-life situations and the impact these situations should have on the future of e-books.<\/p>\n<p>His basic goal was to demonstrate the readers would be willing to pay $14+ for an e-book&#8212;if there are enough useful features included. This might seem like a small point, but publishers have been collectively freaking out about the now-almost-standard $9.99 price point that Amazon.com has helped institute and that readers have cottoned on to. Remember the #9.99boycott of a few months back? This is supply meets demand meets value expectations stuff, and at the moment, what you get when you buy an e-book is only worth $9.99 to the vast majority of e-book users.<\/p>\n<p>But Tamblyn things that can change. He pointed out a myriad of features that would entice readers to fork over a few extra bucks for an improve level of e-functionality.<\/p>\n<p>For example, \u201clongevity of the book\u201d was an obvious starting point. A traditional book can be passed down from mother to son, generation after generation, until the book falls apart or goes missing. Tamblyn\u2019s argument was the readers would pay an addition $.25 for an e-book with this feature.<\/p>\n<p>Other potential e-book features Tamblyn thought readers would be willing to cough up a few cents for, included:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cshared library,\u201d the digital equivalent of what happens when two people move in together and start sharing books;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cmultiple platforms,\u201d which would allow a customer to purchase the e-book, print book, and audio-book versions of a title for one low price;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cloaning ability,\u201d so that you can share your favorite books with someone and cultivate word-of-mouth; and<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<ul>\n<li>\u201cthe social aspect of reading,\u201d through which it would be possible to share information about what you\u2019re reading or have read via all the various book-related social networks such as Good Reads and LibraryThing.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Tamblyn briefly touched on the technical side&#8212;claiming that all of the features discussed could be implemented almost immediately&#8212;but what he&#8217;s most concerned with is giving readers what they actually want. And getting other publishers to buy into this vision.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, as a print book publisher and reader, I was actually swayed quite a bit by his presentation. With each example I could imagine how this would occur in my life and how I&#8217;d be much more tempted to invest in an e-reader if x + y + z were possible. It was also striking how well his ideas fit in with those found in Ted Striphas&#8217;s The Late Age of Print.<\/p>\n<p>This need for publishers to be \u201creader-centric\u201d when expanding their digital initiatives was a theme that ran throughout the Tools of Change panels, including the panel Richard Nash of Cursor moderated on the \u201cDeconglomerated Publisher &amp; the End of the Supply Chain,\u201d (which is also the one I participated on) and Kassia Kroszer\u2019s presentation on \u201cStarting from Scratch\u201d in building a digital publishing company.<\/p>\n<p>Never having been to a <span class=\"caps\">TOC<\/span> conference, I wasn&#8217;t exactly sure what to expect, but the turnout was fantastic and the level of discussion extremely sophisticated. Great first year, and hopefully this will become a staple of the Frankfurt Book Fair for years to come.<\/p>\n<div class=\"ad_banner\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/catalog.openletterbooks.org\/authors\/4-kjaerstad#discoverer\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/images\/320.jpg\"  \/><\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post originally appeared on the Frankfurt Book Fair blog. I highly recommend visiting the official blog for interesting posts from Richard Nash, Alex Hippisley-Cox, and Arun Wolf The first ever Tools of Change Frankfurt conference took place all day today, bringing together representatives from a number of different parts of the book industry to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[376],"class_list":["post-274406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-frankfurt-book-fair"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274406"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":350736,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274406\/revisions\/350736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}