With the Digital Conference of the London Book Fair falling yesterday, I wanted to put together a blog about the digital direction of the sector to act as Chameleon Net’s follow up. As a digital agency working with some great publishers in the UK – including digital advocates like Random House and Pan Macmillan – we are in a great position to provide commentary.

So when I started to assemble the various thoughts I’d had for the blog, I concentrated more on what really matters for publishers if they are to establish meaningful digital strategies, and less on the technology that is helping to support digital.

"Dear reader"

Naturally, I found myself at the doorstep of ‘the reader’. Without the reader none of this means anything; authors would write books no-one reads, publishers would waste a lot of energy and yes – even today – paper, technology companies would sell gadgets no-one wants.

Ask someone outside the industry what they think about e-books. They’ll often say “what’s wrong with books?”. Of course the answer is “nothing”. It’s just that there are possibilities opening up that weren’t there before, and once experienced they’ll become part of the reader’s expectations and desires for their book experience.

So what does the reader want from books now, and what will that experience look like in the near future?

To make sense of these questions it’s essential to recognize the nature of the revolution happening with books. Quite often there is a comparison made between reading books and the way listening to music has evolved. That is helpful in some ways, particularly around technology and rights, but in another very important way the comparison misses the point. Music’s revolution was different to the one we’re seeing for books.

What revolutionized how we think about, and consume, music was the fact that media and playback became portable in the 1980s. That was the point of no return for music and the music industry.

Almost every time I pick up my MP3 player I can’t help but remember the walkman-accompanied journeys I’d take in the 80s and 90s, the audio backdrop for which you would have to plan carefully in advance to be sure to take enough of the right C90 cassettes, often having to sacrifice a fair few candidates due to the space they’d take up. Even so, it was amazing to be able to take a soundtrack with you!

It has taken 30 odd years to get to a world with iPods, shuffle, Spotify for mobile and so on. In the intervening years, an entire generation has grown up with portable music… and in more recent times access to pretty much anything they could want, when they want it.

Viva the revolution

That latter point - access and immediacy - is something that is more recent and is an important point in planning for digital in publishing. Books have always been portable, so introducing new ways to carry them around – which is effectively what most e-books experiences provide at the moment - is not revolution no matter how smart the technology housing them.  

Even digitizing books is not revolution. That has also been possible for many years, and while e-ink technology is exciting in improving the visual experience of reading on a screen, it’s still not the tipping point. Digital media is.

What will be revolution, and will make for an exciting ride, is a new model that combines access, choice and interaction. Digital media and an interconnected world make this a reality.

Back for a minute to the reader’s experience and intention in picking up a book in the first place.

Now, publishing is an industry that thinks very carefully about readers. The vast majority of people I have met in the book trade love books and care about the experience of the reader that buys or borrows them.  So the potential for digital to be organically adopted into the way publishers work is enormous – so long as it’s good for the reader.

And what’s more the reader/publisher relationship is about to get much more important, more obvious, and more bilateral. That relationship has historically been one obscured by authors and titles, genres and subject matter. Readers understandably place more emphasis on the book itself that on its publisher.

Access all areas

Readers now and in the future will want to access related information, immediately, through internet connected devices and web-enabled publications. They’ll want to be able to choose what they read more easily, and have more choice. They’ll want to be able to engage with the material, the author, the experts (including publishers) and other people who are interested in the same material or topics.

The best opportunities for publishers will arise when you act as curator, by helping the reader select, understand context, and point them to related material or experiences, perhaps not even produced by you. You’ll also be combining media… text, audio, pictures, reader discussions, fiction and non-fiction will all be part of the experience. You’ll be breaking outside the book format, but not with disrespect.

The digital revolution for publishing has come at a perfect time for the industry, and publishers should react with relish. The timing is perfect because most of us can remember a time before the web and mobile telephony, but we can all see the benefits they bring. This means we’re afforded a unique way of thinking about the relationship between digital and books - we can both respect the past, yet embrace the future, and in doing so help to shape the reading experience in the best way possible.

Decisions publishers make now will form the future of digital book experiences. You will be facilitator of the experience, educator about the possibilities, and deliverer of the next wave of developments.

What better way to protect, and enhance, books for future generations of readers?