Anthony Doesburg: The writing's on the screen for publishers

Martin Taylor, director of the Digital Publishing Forum. Photo / Anthony Doesburg

If you can't imagine reading the latest publishing sensation on screen rather than paper, you're ignoring a trend that's beginning to take hold in other parts of the world.

The Japanese, for example, spend about US$100 million ($176 million) a year downloading books to their cellphones, and United States ebook sales are worth a similar amount.

Amazon, the maker of the Kindle ebook reader, by one estimate will have notched up more than $1 billion in reader and ebook sales by next year. And this month it made its Kindle software available free to millions of Apple iPhone users in the world - although not those in New Zealand.

None of this has gone unnoticed by Martin Taylor, director of the Digital Publishing Forum, who wants to drag New Zealand publishers - and the book-reading public - into the ebook era.

He's having a first go next week with seminars for publishers in the three main centres, where he'll be urging them to get hands-on with ebooks.

"Anyone who's moving into an industry that's going to be affected by digitisation needs to be using the technology," says Taylor.

He has good credentials for his advocacy role. He spent more than a decade tracking computing trends as former head of IDG New Zealand, a publisher of information technology titles now owned by Fairfax Business Media.

As well as the forum, he runs book publisher Activity Press and distributor Addenda Publishing.

Taylor wants New Zealand to have a homegrown digital publishing industry and thinks it's not too early to be establishing the necessary distribution infrastructure.

"An example would be having a sophisticated digital warehouse so that our books could be managed and distributed once we'd made them and once we'd identified where the readers are."

He thinks a single such warehouse makes sense, since the risk of a fragmented approach to electronic book distribution is that no one publisher would be able to make a business case for it.

The joint approach could succeed. Taylor says although publishing has a poor technology track record, book publishers do collaborate well. "It's a collegial industry."

Surprisingly, given the age-old tension between authors and publishers - tortured souls toiling in garrets enriching rapacious businessmen behind big desks - writers have joined book publishers in backing the forum. That could be acknowledgment of the unhappy state of the New Zealand book publishing industry, which turns over about $200 million a year.

Colmar Brunton takes the pulse of the book trade annually for the Book Publishers Association and last year's survey showed domestic and export revenue, and the number of new and revised titles, all down by double-digit percentages. The present economic conditions aren't helping, with book shops, anecdotally, ordering less stock.

On top of that is what Taylor, who is on the publishers' association council, says is the inherent inefficiency of the book supply chain.

All of that, and the march of technology, would seem to make book publishing ripe for digitisation. But there are numerous issues yet to be sorted out.

There's the question of ebook formats. Amazon, with its Kindle, the second version of which was released last month, has devised its own format, .azw.

But there are a host of others, including .epub, formulated by the International Digital Publishing Forum. Sony's rival Reader device, which leads the Kindle in the sales stakes, handles the .epub format.

Both received a huge boost last week when Google made half a million .epub-formatted books from its digitisation project available free to Sony.

Nevertheless, publishers are left wondering which way to jump.

At more than US$300, the readers aren't cheap. But they are clever. They use E Ink screen technology developed a decade ago at MIT, which ensures batteries last for thousands of page turns, giving perhaps a couple of weeks of use between recharges. Colour versions are coming next year or the year after, Taylor says.

Pricing of ebooks is another curly issue. Taylor says US publishers are tending to price them at the same level as paper books, a sure way of holding back the market. Not so Amazon, however, which has hundreds of thousands of discounted ebook titles.

Taylor thinks the beauty of the technology is its pricing flexibility.

"I don't think there's anything incompatible in a top-selling author charging a premium or a first-time author selling at what may amount to little more than the royalties they may get on a book."

At this point Taylor just wants the industry to start turning some ebook pages.

"I say to New Zealand publishers, start early, start small and build - and keep - some control in our local industry."

Clash of the titles

* Amazon has been winning attention with its Kindle 2 ebook reader, which offers a choice of some 245,000 books, plus newspapers and magazines.

* Last week Sony hit back, announcing a deal with Google that will allow users of Sony's Reader (above) to choose from 500,000 out-of-print works, bringing Sony's total offering to 600,000 titles.