Can the e-Galley idea make a comeback?

Joe Wikert’s post the other day about Simon & Schuster's internal use of e-reading devices got me thinking about the possible resurgence of the idea of electronic galleys.

Two years ago, I personally phone surveyed about 30 book buyers from stores all over the United States. To a person, they all told stories about their love-hate relationship with galleys. They loved them because it gave them advanced understanding about the books that they were buying, so that they could decide whether or not to recommend them to their customers. They hated them because a. they couldn’t sell them, and b. because they were hard to store and eventually recycle. They seem like such a waste of paper.

One of the huge take-aways from that informal survey for me was that independent bookstores that survived the age of the internet, and survived big-box retailers, and chain superstores, did so by embracing the new realities, and directing their attention to things they could do that the competition couldn’t. It was interesting that many actually made their businesses far more successful than they had ever been before the large threats came along, simply by better engaging their communities.

Now booksellers (of all types) are facing another huge challenge, the possibility that e-book reading devices will gain real traction in the marketplace, and that sales of e-books may cut into sales of print books. As I have mentioned in another post, I believe strongly that the 'indies' need to have a role in the e-book world. The way it looks from my perch, it’s time again for booksellers to make a survival decision: be stalwarts against the new invader, or embrace the new reality and use it to their advantage.

My money is on those that will embrace the new technologies, and figure out how to leverage them into revenue. I’m not sure what those business models will look like yet, but I suspect my friends at Ingram Digital have some notions about that topic. But, one thing I do know from my years in ‘change management’, there are two necessary ingredients to developing a new business model: 1. completely understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of the new product or service, and 2. Use the product or service yourself before offering it out to others.

And so, one way for booksellers to embrace and understand the new technologies are to to use them themselves. Using them for reading electronic galleys would be a great start to this process. There would be many advantages, not the least of which is the ‘green’ angle. Think of all the paper that could be saved, and the recycling that wouldn’t have to be done. It seems like a such a logical win-win situation for the publisher and the retailer.

I also think this is an opportunity for the American Booksellers Association to take a real leadership stand. Perhaps they could start to work with Sony, iRex, and other purveyors of e-reading devices, and get a few samples to pass around to their constituents to ‘test’. It would be a great first step in having a centralized approach to having bookstores (who want to survive) start selling the e-reader devices in their stores.

Food for thought.

Battle of the Titans

In the world of Digital Content Distribution, battle lines are being drawn and companies are starting to shoot salvos across the bows of each other. At the AAP General Annual Meeting, representatives from Adobe, and Microsoft had their moments at the podium, and just a few blocks away, Google was making all kinds of noise as well.

At the AAP meeting, Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, was asked about what kept him up at night. His response was “Microsoft, Microsoft, Microsoft, and, ah… Microsoft”. He went on to explain that Microsoft was this $50 Billion behemoth who might see that Adobe was starting to eat their lunch when it came to some of the products they were offering. Adobe, is a $3 Billion company whose products can be found on virtually every personal computer in the world. I thought that he was going to say that he was worried Microsoft would just outright purchase Adobe, but he didn’t.

What Bruce did go on to say was that Google serves as an enormous “heat shield” that distracts Microsoft from worrying about Adobe, and that allows him some measure of rest at night.

Later in the day, Bruce’s comments were validated by Tom Rubin of Microsoft, (click this link for the full text of his speech) who was there to talk about the Live Book Search program. Tom repeatedly said that he wasn’t there to attack Google, but anyone in the audience could literally feel the antagonism coming from Mr. Rubin as the name ‘Google’ crossed his lips. His main argument was that Google pays no attention to the rights of copyright holders, while Microsoft does. He also slammed their business model by essentially saying that Google will take publishers content and essentially put ads around it to monetize that content. Microsoft says that their approach is more altruistic, working with publishers to jointly make money by facilitating the sales of both traditional books as well as e-books.

Meanwhile at the Book Business show (formerly known as BookTech), Jim Gerber of Google was trashing Microsoft. I wasn’t there for that one, but as I understand it the gist is that Google feels that they are bringing more visitors to a publishers books through their program than Microsoft, and it isn’t costing the publisher a penny. This was covered in PW and Publishers Lunch.

In a world where publishers are going to have to deal with all of these companies, and also Amazon, and Yahoo! when it comes to distributing their content, none of this cross-town bickering bodes well. In order to deal with them all, some semblance of data transmission standards will need to be in place, but from the looks of things, it doesn’t appear that we’ll be able to get most of these folks around the same table.