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Digital
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Written by Michael Bhaskar
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Friday, 19 March 2010 09:08 |
Planning our digital future involves negotiating between what we know and what we don't, Michael Bhaskar writes
In my previous piece I argued that the digital debate was dominated by things we didn't know. Well, like politicians, tabloid columnists and Walt Whitman, I am happy to contradict myself. Why?
The real question is not the growth of digital, but the growth in commentary on the growth of digital. Digital sales are showing a healthily increasing upward trend; the commentary on digital is a stratospheric, exponential hockey-stick curve. The point is that excitement about digital is more prevalent than digital success to date.
Partly this is because of what we don't know. Fear of the unknown, boldy going where no publisher has gone before - you get the picture. This doesn't fully explain it, though. There are plenty of unknowns in any business, but not all of them get the kind of coverage we have seen with digital. The answer is that while the fundamental questions remain unknown there has, over the past 10 years, been a massive shift.
What we know:
- People actually will read from screens, and what's more they enjoy it. We have at last reached a point where the endless scoffing about reading from a screen ("You mean actually read from a screen? Never!") is redundant. People read from screens for work, to check the news and to update their Facebook profiles; and they also read books from e-ink displays, laptops and mobile devices. Of course this doesn't tell us how many people will eventually do so. It just means we don’t have the same yawn-inducing circular debate about "Will it hurt our eyes?" and "Why would anyone want to do that?" and "You can't read it in the bath." Most people who give it a try end up rating the experience highly. We know there is a place for it.
- A critical mass of big and start-up companies all have a massive investment in making digital publishing work. From the West Coast Big Three of Google, Apple and Amazon, to major Asian electronics giants like Sony and Samsung, from prominent high street retail chains like Waterstone's, Barnes & Noble and Indigo, to massive telecoms carriers like Vodafone and Orange, blue chip firms have started to pile into the space, resulting in enormous market-making potential and marketing clout, professional offerings and services, a huge pre-existing customer base, and robust, scalable hardware, software, production and retail capacity. Equally, there has been a wave of VC-backed start-ups, each of which seeks to out-innovate and out-manoeuvre the conglomerates. We don't know which platform will win, but we know the race is on.
- It’s a tired old cliché and perhaps for that reason we can't ignore it. Other content industries have been knocked sideways by the internet. The shell-shocked echoes of the record industry circa 2000-2005 can be clearly heard in the publishing noise of 2010. If anyone is in doubt of the ongoing problems look at the latest broadsheet circulation figures, a kind of horror show of content monetization. Arguments about the equivalence or not go back and forth, are overstated and overanalysed, but digital distribution has indisputably been a devastating influence on the balance sheets of many industries. We don’t know whether this will be the case for us; we do know that history suggests it might.
- Public literary discussion is dying. At least, if you read only print media. As newspaper book reviews get cut and boutique literary magazines struggle for survival on meagre Arts Council handouts, it has become apparent that the location of vibrant literary culture is the internet. Whether it's highbrow book blogs or Jonathan Ross on Twitter, there is a mass of argument and comment about reading and writing. Moreover, word of mouth, the oxygen of book sales, is channelled and amplified via online networks. Digital marketing has become integral to any campaign. In short, if you want to sell books, let alone talk or read about them, you cannot ignore digital.
The growth in commentary on the growth of digital is best understood as a response to these factors. Executives look at this list and see the gun barrel of business annihilation and the promise of new markets bearing down upon them.
Virtually everyone's views on digital publishing exist in a negotiation between the four things we know and the three we don't. Together they map the fundamentals of what is happening to our industry. There is indeed a lot of sub-MBA chat about how we shall navigate through these positions, an activity that typically takes the form of classic buzzword bingo excitingly spliced with a dose of heavy "management theory". Ultimately though, digital publishing is like everything else: we don't really know that much but we'll try to make what we do know really count.
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