Giant book publisher, Random House, announced on Monday (11/24/08) that it had digitized an additional 8,000 titles, bringing its electronic library to nearly 15,000 properties. Although digital books only account for approximately 1% of the publishing market, growth of the segment has taken off due to the agressive sales of the Kindle reader from Amazon.
So, from a consumer’s point of view, what are the advantages of ebooks versus the non-virtual product made of paper, ink and binding glue? According to Random House, the advantages include:
Portability: You can download several eBooks to your handheld for vacations and business trips.
Convenience: You can download hundreds of eBooks to your computer and create a library specific to your own interests.
Special features: eBooks have searching capabilities that print books do not. You can electronically underline, highlight, and search for specific words and terms.
Cost: eBooks are priced less than their print equivalent.
Instant gratification: eBooks are delivered instantaneously. You can search for an eBook, purchase it, and download it all in a matter minutes or even seconds.
But what about for marketers?
First off, the ebook format reduces the “friction” associated with self-publishing. There are plenty of bloggers and other experts who have generated enough content that a little editing is all that’s needed to have a manuscript ready to be turned into an ebook.
On the other hand, though, marketers may find the ebook format offering additional possibilities for clients: mainstream ebooks may start to contain more “product placements” (i.e. mentions of a product along with a bit of detail of how the product is used) or streaming or updatable content to keep them current (via RSS or other syndication technology).
That same kind of updatable content may form the basis for ecatalogs whose content and prices may change based on stock availability. Social media mechanisms like user feedback and consumer reviews may be built into travel or consumer product ebooks down the road.
The point is this: consumer adoption of these marketable extensions of the ebook depends on one, major thing – the circulation of popular titles in the ebook format. Random House appears to have made a significant step in that direction.
What do you think?
Just received word today that VeohTV is going away. Of course, this may be old news to some, but not for me. Maybe my antenna is up on services like Veoh, Hulu and others (including, of course, YouTube). The online, digital video content stream seems to be more vital than ever before, and Veoh now looks like they’re jumping into it with both feet in a way that will allow viewers to take their online content with them.
Even when they’re not online.
Veoh took the opportunity today (via e-mail) to explain about their switch from VeohTV to a downloadable application that connects to Veoh.com. By concentrating on the user experience, the team at Veoh came to the conclusion that re-booting their service as a stand alone application was a better choice:
The Veoh Web Player enables you to watch videos of any length right in your browser without launching a separate application. You can download videos for later viewing, even when you’re not connected to the Internet. The Web Player also consumes fewer system resources than VeohTV.
This is all interesting news when you consider that by separating the player from the site, Veoh can now distribute its player on other portable media. Last week, the company announced it was releasing a version of its player to be included on SanDisk flash drives.
For advertisers and marketers what this means is that ad insertions into streaming content are now portable, as well. How this plays into possible promotions or creative executions remains to be seen. But we can no longer assume that if someone sees an ad on a streaming broadcast that they’re sitting in front of a computer screen on a desk in a living room, bedroom, kitchen, office, etc.
