Ingram has announced its purchase of the iofy audiobook publishing platform:
Ingram Digital, an Ingram Content company focused on solutions for digital content management, hosting, distribution and promotion, today announced it has acquired the iofy digital audiobook platform from Audiofy Corporation.
This move further enhances Ingram Digital’s audio services across all sectors and adds additional experience to its expanding team of industry experts.
This comes after Ingram have spent the past year or more working with the platform’s originators in what they describe as “various digital initiatives”. Sounds to me like they took the system for a test-drive for a year!
According to Sol Young on his blog (he heads up the iofy development team), things are looking rosy for iofy. Sol is looking forward to the deal’s potential for the platform:
I’m confident our acquisition will bring incredible value and additional ingenuity. We’ll now be building something amazing, which iofy wouldn’t have had the resources for on its own.
Publishers have for some time been crying about the cost and logistics of developing audiobooks in the various formats required for both physical and digital distribution. With Ingram securing a solid offering in solving those problems, perhaps we will see even more audiobooks flooding the market.
Personally, I think the more options we have for consuming what an author has created, the better.
They say it’s just around the corner - the “iPod moment”. Books are about to go digital at last, according to many publishing pundits, and the publishers are pre-emptily crying poverty.
On the heels of the recent WGA writer’s strike, book publishers are already showing authors their empty pocket linings stating that the swing to digital publishing and distribution is a long term, low-profit investment for them.
It will be years before we are even close to making money from this and I think we should see a little bit of latitude from authors.
Large publishing houses are stating that although there are lower physical production costs for an electronic distribution, titles still require editorial, sales, marketing, promotion and publicity. Add to this list the new costs of converting files into multiple formats [eh?], digital warehousing, anti-piracy protection, and content and metadata tracking. Random House have suggested this additional investment will mean they will not turn a profit until beyond 2013.
The argument about royalties centres around a proposed 15% royalty on net receipts from digital sales. It is higher than the standard 10% for hardback sales, but significantly lower than the current 25% rate for ebook sales in the US.
Ebook makeup is still extremely low, however with less than 1% of the entire US book market. At such a rate, it is not surprising that the costs per unit sold seem pretty high right now.
The question for me is whether the publishers are not forward thinking enough to appreciate that aggregate costs will drop significantly as the market grows, or whether they are merely looking to engineer inflated profits when that time comes.
It is a difficult space to predict, but I feel that publishers need to break away from seeing the digital market as simply a non-paper version of the printed market. As the music industry has been forced to learn over the past year or two, the it is the millions of digital consumers who will ultimately dictate how the digital space is exploited.
We currently see top name artists pushing their content out for free (Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead), and new artists doing the same to build reputation and audience. I suspect we will see the same for the publishing world. Who might be the first big-name author to distribute a brand new book in electronic form, completely free of charge?
Waterstones in the UK are starting “The Writer’s Year” - a campaign “celebrating the relationship between the reader and writer”. From publishing guides to writers wanting to get published, to lists of recommended books from established writers, Waterstones is pushing its prominence hard while it builds both high street and online presence.
It’s a way to sell more books, of course, particularly at a time where sales growth over the recent holiday period was not as high as they would have hoped. There has been overall industry growth, but with so many new options vying for a reader’s attention, booksellers have a lot more to compete with these days.
Waterstones’ are extending their online presence through competing on price and delivery directly with Amazon, and moving into the new space of e-books - which seems to be the latest trendy buzzword in the publishing industry. Online seems to be the growth area with the company quoting 1% of last year’s overall 4% growth coming from online sales, and those sales performing 107% up compared with 2006.
What is worrying for writers - and appears on the surface that Waterstones are not only aware but are trying to address it - is this quote from Waterstones M, Gerry Johnson:
The big books get even bigger and it’s harder to keep the mid-range running
For new and up-coming authors to survive with acceptable sales, booksellers will have to make a concerted effort to avoid the lure of the big bucks and find a way to keep their customers fully aware of the range of reading matter out there. An exaggerated class society within books - where only those lucky enough to be selected for Oprah or Richard & Judy reading lists can survive - will be wholly damaging to the business of writing and publishing as a whole. Waterstones appears to be conscious of the problem so it may be worth keeping a close eye on them during 2008, and hope others wake up to the bigger picture.
