Hugh McGuire

Hugh McGuire is the founder of PressBooks, an open source book publishing platform, of LibriVox, an all-volunteer publisher of free public domain audiobooks, and of iambik audiobooks, a commercial version of LibriVox. He's the co-editor (with Brian O'Leary) of Book: A Futurist's Manifesto -- Essays from the bleeding edge of publishing, published by O'Reilly.

Building an ebook business around analytics

What happens when a web publishing business enters the ebook space?

AskMen, “the leading online magazine for men,” has just launched an ebook publishing program, using the PressBooks Publisher Platform to manage the front-end catalog/website, and back-end ebook production. In the year-and-a-bit since PressBooks launched publicly, we’ve worked with many traditional book publishers, big and small. But what’s most interesting to us is non-traditional book publishers entering the ebook space, because they have the flexibility to approach book publishing in whole new ways.

Especially interesting to us are successful web publishers, mainly because web publishers have the most direct understanding of their readers, and reader behaviour. This skill, and approach, will be critical, we believe, as book publishing evolves. Web publishing is an analytics-driven business. In the ebook world, timely analytics are very hard to come by. And generally, analytics is not something most book publishers prioritize in their business. We believe this will change, as book publishing becomes increasingly digital.

In the interview below, I explore the issue of web vs. ebook analytics with Emma McKay, managing editor of AskMen’s online magazine, and the leader of their ebook publishing program.

Read more…

Startups and Publishers: It Ain’t Easy

Why startups and publishers have a hard time working together

Any startup company trying to work with book publishers will tell you tales of woe and frustration. Big publishers and small publishers (I’ve worked with both) pose different sets of problems for startups, but the end result is a disconnect.

If you sell a product publishers don’t want, who is to “blame”?

Start-ups tend to blame “slow-moving legacy publishers” … but blame lies as much on startups misunderstanding of publisher needs as on publishers being slow. This is a classic “customer development” problem for startups. The reason things don’t work is not that “publishers are too dumb to see how they should change, and choose me to help them,” but rather that the pains publishers are suffering, and solutions startups are offering, are probably not well matched, for a few kinds of reasons:

a) the pain startups are trying to solve is not acute enough for the publishers (yet?)
b) the cost (in time or dollars) to adopt startup solutions is too high (for now?)
c) startups are trying to solve the wrong pain (for today?)
-or-
d) startups are addressing their products at the wrong customers

Solutions to solve future problems

In my particular case, I’ve recognized that the PressBooks pitch ends up being something like:

“Eventually you’ll need to embrace solutions like PressBooks because solutions like PressBooks will radically transform this market flooding the publishing market with more books than you ever imagined” …

That is … we (and others like us) are trying to solve for publishers problems that we are helping create, and which aren’t quite here yet on a scale that is visible to the day-to-day operations of a publishing company. (Certainly these big/catastrophic problems are coming, and soon… but still, it’s a future problem, not a present problem).

Where to next?

So, as a startup, you have to choose what direction to go in:

a) try to solve the pain that traditional publishers have right now, which is felt acutely enough

-or-

b) (in our case) try to expand the market by helping millions of new publishers exist…thereby helping create the problems traditional publishers will have to face in the coming years

I like b) as a direction, but in the end it’s not so surprising that existing publishers aren’t falling all over themselves to embrace solutions for problems that aren’t quite here yet.

The risk of ceding the future to other players

Still, there is a case to be made that a publisher with a vision of the future you should be out-front of the changing market. As a fellow-traveller in startup frustration, Andrew Rhomberg at Jellybooks says:

Publishing has been – technically speaking – an amazingly stable industry for a very long time. In defense of publishers: it is going through a transition from analogue to digital AND online faster than any other media industry before it. But by not partnering, publishers are ceding influence over how this industry will be shaped.

And that’s the problem for both startups and publishers … most publishing startups are trying to solve problems that will come because of innovations in the future; most publishers are worried about solving the problems of a radically transforming industry right now.

Brian O’Leary once suggested creating a kind of Manhattan Project funded by publishers that would invest in new technologies, models and thinking. It’s an admirable idea, though evidence from some such initiatives in publishing hasn’t been promising.

In the end, readers will drive the change

Change is coming though, there is no doubt, and we will know it is here when big numbers of readers start to choose new solutions over existing solutions (see: ebooks). These solutions will come from a mix of startups, of old publishers and new publishers, and crucially, from the big four tech giants: Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook (and possibly others).

In the end, it’s readers who will choose the future, which will follow their eyes, minds and wallets. And for all of us — new players and old — our task now is to present readers with different kinds of futures, and see which ones stick.

The line between book and Internet will disappear

The line between book and Internet will disappear

The inevitability of truly connected books and why publishers need APIs.

The timeline and output may be unknown, but the distinction between the Internet and books is arbitrary, and it is destined to disappear. Hugh McGuire examines the transition and takes a few guesses as to what lies ahead.

Sifting Through All These Books

We have a massive and growing supply and demand imbalance in the book business. And, as the technologies for creating and distributing books becomes trivial, the supply of books is just going to keep growing exponentially…. How are people going to sift through all these books to find what they want?

An Open, Webby, Book-Publishing Platform

This short article outlines some ideas about an open source, online platform for making books, based on WordPress.