Rudiger Wischenbart Ebook 2018: Phase 02 For podcast release Monday, December 17, 2018 KENNEALLY: The storyline in trade book publishing for much of this decade has followed the shifting answers to a single question is print dead? Welcome to Copyright Clearance Center s podcast series. I m Christopher Kenneally for Beyond the Book. When Steve Jobs introduced the ipad in 2010, the pundits and the journalists were ready to declare the death of print. They saw the digital reading device from Apple and its Amazon-bred competitor, the Kindle, as twin stakes to the heart of paper and ink. Over the years since, we watched the rise of ebooks, the attendant pressure on print, and even the surprising plot twist that many readers, including young ones, continue to prefer physical books over their virtual counterparts. Industry analyst Rudiger Wischenbart says this is hardly the whole story and in fact is only act one or phase one. About to dawn as the decade closes is the second act in the ebook play, what he calls digital reading. Ebooks will inhabit a transformed publishing ecosystem where audiobooks, subscription services, and self-publishing drive readers deeper and deeper into the digital environment. In this new world, a book is a fluid digital object and not a physical format. Rudiger Wischenbart joins me now from his office in Vienna. Welcome back to Beyond the Book, Rudiger. WISCHENBART: Hello, Chris. Good to be here. KENNEALLY: It is good to have you back. You have recently published several reports on this topic, Ebook 2018: Phase 02, as well the accompanying European Ebook Barometer, a look at digital consumer publishing in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain. Your analysis is always driven by the numbers, by the facts, and it presents a fascinating story. I think the best place for us to start, Rudiger, is to talk about why you feel, as we come to the close of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, ebooks have passed from an initial phase and are entering a new phase. WISCHENBART: Because you mentioned the death-of-the-book debate, I couldn t resist and was looking up a very famous German essayist and one of the heroes of the 1968 revolt. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, exactly 50 years ago, proclaimed the
death of literature. And five decades later, we are still seeing quite a lot of storytelling around. So I m always a little bit making fun of those predictions about the death of whatever. More realistically, we see that change and transformation is happening in phases and in steps. Innovation is not linear. Innovation is having its strong moments, then it is slowing down, then it re-catches, reframes. There s a lot of reframing, reconceptualizing when something new is happening, and ebooks are not an exception to this. I clearly remember a panel debate that I could moderate, perhaps eight years ago or seven years ago, with Michael Serbinis, the founder of Kobo Books and one of the strong-going international ebook pioneers. Michael said to me at that point, don t forget that such a transformation takes two, if not three, decades to occur in all the different steps. That s what we really need to bear in mind if you want to have a realistic and accurate reading of the digital transformation. I guess with all the flattening out of growth curves, with all the debate in non-english territories like Germany, France, Spain about why ebooks did not grow in the same strength like in Great Britain or in the US in these European territories with strong readers, we better take some time and ask a number of questions. For me over the past year, in my observation of the market and its transformation, the key question turned out to be more and more, wait a moment. What are ebooks? Are ebooks very significant, or are ebooks just a format, a technical standard that brings a one-to-one copy of a printed book onto a screen? That s pretty much what ebooks have achieved within that first decade since the ipod, ipad, and the Kindle. And I guess we really better look more critically to the format of the ebook by saying, wait a moment, that is a first standard, a first appearance of electronic books, but not more. It was important as a step, but it s no final anything. KENNEALLY: Right. What I believe you re driving at, Rudiger Wischenbart, is that these ebooks were just simply these digital containers of printed books, and that was simply one way for readers to approach reading on a digital device. Of course, the other evolution we have seen in the marketplace is the adoption the wildly enthusiastic adoption into all aspects of our lives of the smartphone. This was something unanticipated when Steve Jobs held up the ipad those many years ago. That has had influence on this, too, and you must reckon with the smartphone when you look at where we are with e-reading and ebooks.
WISCHENBART: It s so funny to see that even Steve Jobs, the big innovator, when he innovated the ipad didn t anticipate what he would do next with the ipod and with the iphone. Because it was the iphone which kicked off all that smartphone revolution where we are in. One of the consequences for books is suddenly we realize that not even the (inaudible) is a holy grail. Suddenly, people take in the stories by listening to the stories, and they don t just listen to them from the iphone or the smartphone. Now they have Alexa speakers and other smart speakers in their living room read to them and reading books for them. At the same time, we have all that tremendous debate around storytelling in new formats with new TV-like companies like Netflix or Amazon Studios. So we see that we have to reframe constantly in that transformation where no point of reference is really a secure point of reference. We go from reading to listening to watching. Being tremendously conservative in my understanding of that transformations are radical and stick to certain rules at the same time, I don t expect that reading is going away. Not at all. But I see that there are different things that can coincide, and that s what I want to make the key point of reference of my observations. KENNEALLY: Right. So it is this continuous flow of media that you are watching and seeing audiences adopt certain forms of those media for various purposes. You mentioned audiobooks. Another aspect of this is something that also is kind of infiltration from elsewhere in the online world, and that is subscription services. WISCHENBART: Exactly. We have started for 200 years with a book trade that was really perfecting one way of presenting content, in printed books with a spine and two cover pages, with one channel of distribution, bookshops, and one business model. I take as a publisher the book from an author. I turn that into a physical object, give it to a retailer who s specializing in retailing, in distributing, just this. And that s how it comes to the consumer who picks it up, pays for one copy at a time, and reads it. And now, suddenly, with the digital transformation, we realize all three things are changing. It s not just one kind of object. It s different objects or different ways, even, by listening and watching. It s not one channel but many channels around. Also, the chatting about books occurs on social media between friends, in traditional media, anywhere. And we have also a multiplication of business models. Subscriptions suddenly bring books on par with what music has become. We listen to a continuous flow of music from subscription services. We saw quite a few initiatives applying that to books that have failed. But still, suddenly we see
for some books, that works, and it finds an audience which is convinced that it s more convenient just to pay a flat fee every month and that s it. I don t think that one will kill the other, but I strongly believe, as in the other media environment, that what we really see is segmentation and specialization, where different modes and formats and different ways of distribution and different business models can coexist and will find very specialized target audiences who prefer one or the other. KENNEALLY: We are speaking right now with Rudiger Wischenbart from Vienna about his new report, Ebook 2018: Phase 02. You mentioned the multiplication of formats, the multiplication of platforms. There s also been a multiplication of providers, content creators. What has also transformed the industry is the rise in some spaces, the dominance of self-published authors. Talk about the independent author and the role that he or she has played in driving the kind of change you re seeing. WISCHENBART: My favorite anecdotal story is that some key elements have been invented twice in very different places. Self-publishing is not just an author doing their own book, but it s an author interacting with a platform so aggregating stuff with other authors and with readers. That has been the way to bring that to happen with Kindle Direct Publishing at Amazon, but also it has found different ways to organize. It s like the Canadian platform Wattpad, which is around for more than 10 years and only recently reconfigured, reinvented itself in becoming Wattpad Studio. They see themselves as a conduit where self-published authors can become either authors of books, but also authors of movies or of TV series or of games. It s that process and interaction that makes the whole thing work and makes sense of it. Coincidentally, one of the founders of Wattpad, Allen Lau, has a Chinese personal background, but he wasn t aware that in the same period of time in mainland China, a very, very similar model had been introduced and is becoming popular with millions of users. Only a few years ago, Allen Lau told me he met his counterpart from the other initiative in mainland China, which has headquarters now in China with this huge internet company, Tencent. And now we see new patterns of connecting writing and reading and watching between two entirely different places such as Shanghai and Toronto. So I think we see how much new spirit also we have around.
KENNEALLY: I want to ask you the most difficult question of all for someone in your position as an analyst, and that is to give us an idea of where you see us headed, what the future holds for ebooks. You re describing the current state, and it s a current state that would have been possibly unforeseeable 10 years ago. But I m going to ask you that tough question where are we headed? What do you think is next, maybe phase three? WISCHENBART: I guess I need to mention the word standards here, because what were standards in closed shops, what was so much restraining, restricting ebooks in the first decade, was that the ebook standard, EPUB, allowed so few things to happen around books. The enhanced EPUB 3 standard still was not really embraced by the industry, who said, OK, it s good enough when we have a printed book turned into something that you can read on a screen. Don t do more, because otherwise, it s spoiling something of the experience, or it s costing too much money or whatever. That was even reinforced by the Kindle, all the Apple stuff, all the other initiatives, building closed shops where you were kind of caught between even if theoretically you could import other books or export your books to other platforms, it was done in a way that was not really good in terms of user experience. So it was really limiting everyone and binding everyone to one little basket, one little turf, one little closed shop. I guess these closed shops, reinforced by the bad standards with a very low and limited performance and vice versa, that was restraining ebooks in the phase two. I would never imagine that that can stay like this for the years ahead. I would really expect to have here a kind of explosion where you don t have one way, but you have many competing and coexisting ways driven by different actors, by different audiences, by different usages, and behind of that in the back office by different, more open standards and more open ways of distribution. Closed shops will remain the way of choice for some practices, but they will lose their monopoly. It sounds at first as a very abstract answer, but in practical terms, it says expect that bookish content can behave as it behaved over the past two centuries in print. You can find a book anywhere and pick it up and give it to someone, and that other person can pick up and do a different reading out of the same books and integrating that communication between a reader and the book and the authors into their working flows, etc. So it can be so much more fun and so much more easygoing and natural to have bookish content around in your daily life. KENNEALLY: You described that, Rudiger Wischenbart, as an explosion of bookish content. We ll look forward to chatting with you again when the fireworks are
really visible to us all. We appreciate the chance, though, to get an assessment for where we are at phase two in the evolution of ebooks. We ve been speaking today with Rudiger Wischenbart. He s the author of Ebook 2018: Phase 02 as well as The European Ebook Barometer, a report on digital consumer publishing in Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain. Rudiger Wischenbart, thank you so much for joining us today on Beyond the Book. WISCHENBART: Thank you. KENNEALLY: Beyond the Book is produced by Copyright Clearance Center. Our coproducer and recording engineer in Jeremy Brieske of Burst Marketing. Subscribe to the program wherever you go for podcasts and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. The complete Beyond the Book podcast archive is available at beyondthebook.com. I m Christopher Kenneally. Thanks for listening and join us again soon on CCC s Beyond the Book. END OF FILE