In a recent interview, author and digital book producer Peter Meyers talked about what we can expect as publishing comes into its own in the digital era. He said customized book apps will largely go by the wayside, and HTML5 as a format will be a bit of a hard-sell to consumers. And using his own experience as a basis, Meyers said publishers aren’t in danger of becoming irrelevant.
Highlights from the interview (below) include:
- Different kinds of books gravitate toward different kinds of formats — Meyers said the majority of books in the future won’t be customized apps. The ones that will be apps will be the ones that require interactivity. [Discussed at the 0:19 mark.]
- HTML5 is still a wild card — Meyers said HTML5’s core question is transactional: Are people willing to pay for web-based content? Consumers have been reluctant thus far, but as HTML5 gets fully supported, we’ll see more experimentation. [Discussed at 1:40.]
- Amazon’s Fire tablet will be a problem for B&N — Even though both tablets are similar in a lot ways, Meyers pointed toward Amazon’s ecosystem and said B&N just doesn’t match up to Amazon’s content and service offerings. [Discussed at 4:54.]
- Will publishers become irrelevant? — Meyers said no. Using his own experience as an example, he highlighted the fact that his publisher (O’Reilly) provides a platform to publicize his work and technological support to produce works in particular formats. What he doesn’t get — and said few authors do — is hand-holding, individual attention, detailed line editing, cheerleading and so forth. Meyers said authors need to go in with the expectation that they’ll have to do as much for their publishers and their books as the publishers do for them. [Discussed at 5:26.]
You can view the entire interview in the following video.
Meyers’ new book, “Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience,” will be released in the next couple weeks — you can nab a free preview copy now — and he’ll host a workshop at TOC 2012.
TOC NY 2012 — O’Reilly’s TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they’ve learned and join together to navigate publishing’s ongoing transformation.
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