Brand Central Station

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?

Jon Fine, the media blogger for BusinessWeek, provides a concise review of what’s wrong with Time Magazine’s latest rationale for moving to a Friday street date for the publication. Time’s justification for the shift in publishing schedule is, in theory, advertiser-driven:

“The new Friday on-sale date gives advertisers a tremendous opportunity to convey their messages to TIME’s 27 million readers before the weekend, when consumers do the large majority of purchasing.”

But as Fine points out, similar scheming for Time’s sister publication, Life, hasn’t borne any fruit.

Print media is writhing under pressure to drive down costs, increase ad pages and stay relevant with a media that can’t change once its made and isn’t timely under any circumstance. Mike Driehorst points out the very same problems in this post on the Newspaper Industry’s problems.

Your thoughts are welcome here – what should Time do?