Video Book? Is That Like A Horseless Carriage?

from the change-your-perspective dept

It's no secret that when new technologies and innovations come along, we tend to look at them through the prism of what we already have. We look at them as a minor improvement on what was done before -- this technology lets us do something faster or better -- rather than at ways that it enables us to do something totally new. Because of that, you often get amusing attempts at reinventing the old with the new that don't seem to take any advantage of what the new innovation really allows. It's simply a weak attempt to take the old and move it into the new. This comes to mind as PaidContent last week discussed the Harper Collins attempt to offer a $10 "video book," which was really just author Jeff Jarvis talking about his book for 23 minutes against a white backdrop. For $10. As Tim O'Reilly noted, the concept of the "video book" sounds like "moving pictures" or the "horseless carriage."

That's not to knock Harper Collins for at least trying something new -- but to note that when you're jumping into a new medium it's important not to identify it by the constraints of the old medium. A video presentation that complements a book by engaging people in a conversation could be quite interesting -- but not at $10 a pop. That's not engaging people in a conversation at all. In fact, it's the same traditional publisher mindset of "let's release something and get people to pay $10 - $30 for this unit of content." It doesn't take into account what the internet and video actually allows you to do that's different. This seems especially ironic, since Jarvis' book is called What Would Google Do, and it's all about making business decisions a la Google. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think Google would be offering video books for $10 a pop.

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Yet Again, Giving Away Free eBook Increased Sales Of Author's Books

from the and-again-and-again-and-again dept

Someone pointed this out on Friday, but I thought we've seen so many stories of it that it didn't necessarily merit mentioning. However, all weekend long more people submitted it, so perhaps it is worth pointing out. Neil Gaiman, who was part of Harper Collins experiment with giving away free ebooks, discovered (like so many others) that giving away the free ebooks helped increase sales. And, of course, it wasn't just for the one book that was offered for free, but across all of Gaiman's works. The other bit of information is that, as we expected, HarperCollins found that many people were not at all happy with all of the restrictions it put on the ebooks (including that you had to read it on their website rather than download it):

Response to our Browse Inside Online Reader was mixed -- with 44% saying they enjoyed the experience at 56% saying they did not. The chief complaints were that you had to have an internet connection to read the book, you had to scroll to see the whole page and that the load time was sometimes slow. 69% of respondents said that they would like to be able to download. Some people complained that since they couldn’t bookmark where they left off, they got lost between reading sessions.

Of course, plenty of people pointed this out when Harper Collins first announced the plan. But, better late than never. Gaiman notes: "the 56% of people who didn't enjoy the online reading experience may be a lot happier with how we do it next time out."

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