On the backdrop of Sony’s e-reader launch in Germany on March 11th I was asked to review it for rbb-TV yesterday. For all non-German readers of this post: Amazon’s Kindle is not yet available in Germany and Amazon is really secretive about the reasons and when it finally plans to launch. Rumour has it that it’s due to two reasons:

• fixed price for books: to protect diversity and smaller retailers (official justification) books can only be sold at a fixed price - no discounts allowed; with the advent of ebooks the association of book retailers is calling for the totally outlandish same fixed price as for printed books - the discounted sale of ebooks as practiced by Amazon in the US is therefore not possible in Germany without getting lengthy legal issues straightened out first
• mobile operators demanding too much of Amazon’s share: Amazon struck a deal with Sprint in the US to provide Kindle users with a built-in Wi-Fi connection to enable them to download new ebooks from Amazon’s store, anytime, anywhere; rumour has it that mobile operators have been much less forthcoming in those partnership-negotiations in Germany; a deal would therefore result in a higher price point for the Kindle or lower margins for Amazon

Back to Sony’s Reader: I met up with the TV crew and a Sony representative in a shopping center to shoot my first impressions of the e-reading device in a big chain book shop. My first impression of the device: technology has come a long way since the Rocketbook e-readers of the 90’s (although Sony is actually launching with a version in Germany that is outdated in the US already) - its E-Ink display makes for very comfortable reading without any strain on the eye; its about the size of a paperback book and weighs about the same; using the device is very intuitive.

The Sony representative pitched one of the key advantages of such an e-reading device to me: with a click of a button I can enlarge the font size - from small to medium to large. So far so good. What followed started to puzzle me: they apparently developed a certain technology that allows the page number to stay the same no matter what font-size you select. So if you change from small to large, more pages are going to be used for the same amount of text that used to fit on one page in small font; however, their amazing technology development keeps the page number the same - say, if I’m on page 5 and it takes up three pages in large font, the page count stays on 5 on all three turns of the page. Really?! Freakin’ amazing! They developed that? Awesome! I didn’t dare to ask if this might be due to the fact that the XML-format actually determines at which word one page ends and the next one begins, no matter the font size selected. Therefore changing the page count with the font size selected would be the real development, not the other way around. OK, let’s write this one off to the lack of technical expertise of a marketing guy.

DRM and lacking shopping-process-integration

But now to the real flaws of the device, or rather the implementation of the whole service - or to a classic tale of how immune old media is to learning, displaying how wishful thinking trumps rationale up to the very point where their business is gone. Therefore, only part of the blame of these shortcomings lies with Sony. The problem really lies with a publishing industry that just like the record labels and newspapers before them got too comfortable with how things used to run. With such a profitable business model that used to work for such a long time it’s not really surprising that they cling to it for their dire life: if you are an executive with such a media company, are you going to give up the traditional way of doing things for something radical that might cannibalize your core business? Hardly. If you have to report on a quarterly basis, chronic pain of a gradual decline is easier to justify and to blame on general market conditions and usually better for your career than acting pro-actively, taking the personal risk of acute pain. But I’m digressing to the macro-level of strategy. Back to Sony’s Reader.

The first big flaw which can’t be blamed on Sony is DRM: it’s often said that publishers are pushing DRM because they saw the decline the music industry went through. What have they been smoking? Didn’t the music industry try to push DRM as well? Of course they did. Did it prevent them from getting marginalized and from dropping DRM alltogether after all this mess was created? Not at all. So as a consequence of this industry’s experience I as a publisher am going to do the very same thing in order to get a different outcome? Anybody who has been paying any attention over the course of the last ten years will know two things for a fact:

• DRM doesn’t work from a technical point of view:

Cory Doctorow: “There’s a reason that giant IT companies and entertainment companies spend a decade and a billion dollars developing these fiendishly clever DRM schemes that are then broken by teenagers in a morning for fun. It’s not because the people who work for these companies are stupid, it’s because they’re trying to keep something a secret after telling you what it is, and it’s very hard to keep something a secret when you actually tell millions of people this bit of information in the form of a little hidden bit on their Xbox, or what have you.”

• DRM doesn’t prevent files from being available for download illegally - a lot of copyrighted books are already available on platforms like Scribd.com; someone will always go through the trouble of scanning it or breaking its DRM, making it available illegally, in turn, for everybody; as a consequence it doesn’t make the life of pirates harder, it’s only effect is to annoy the crap out of your loyal, paying customers

The impact of this DRM system became obvious in the very first steps of using Sony’s Reader: first of all, I have to install an iTunes-like piece of software (eBook Library) on my computer. Since the ebooks stored on the Reader weren’t loaded up via my installation, they coudn’t be accessed from my installation. If I want to purchase an ebook from one of Sony’s partners, I have to register my Reader device with this partner individually, making the shopping experience extremely cumbersome.

And within this shopping experience the second major flaw comes into play, which at least partially can be blamed on Sony: since Sony doesn’t have its own online store in Germany and wants to be partner-agnostic in order not to alianate any retailer, they didn’t partner with one retailer exclusively to really integrate them into their shopping process with the goal of a seamless shopping experience for their customers. I assume the strategic thinking behind that goes as follows: cooperate with all of them (except the main online retailer, of course - Amazon) to gain as much weight with retailers as possible. This backfires badly from a customer experience point of view and is not thought-out at all: instead of being presented with an actual shop when clicking on “eBook Store” in the iTunes-like eBook Library interface, all I get are a few banners of the retail parnters.

In order to be able to buy an ebook, I now have to click on one of these banners. This opens a separate browser window, displaying the ebook-shop of this particular partner. I now have to go through the whole shopping process on their website: searching for the book, adding it to the shopping cart, registering with this shop complete with address and payment information - no process of transferring this information via the eBook Library software I just installed on my computer in place whatsoever.

Once I’ve completed all this manual hassle, I’m finally able to download the ebook I just purchased onto my Reader, right? Far from it. Here is where DRM comes back to bite your loyal, paying customers: First I have to register my Sony Reader with this purchase - of course, no integration of this process between my eBook Library software installation and the retail partner, either. OK, after this additional step I am now finally able to load the ebook I just paid for onto my reader, right? Nope - you first have to save it on your computer, remember the folder and filename you saved it to in order to be able to import into eBook Library program later. After all these steps you are now finally able to load the new and shiny ebook to your Sony Reader.

Let’s do a quick reality check of this strategy (if you can call it that): the Kindle demographics skew towards more senior users than the iPhone (for example) - not necessarily the most tech-savvy audience. Are they likely to figure all these steps out? Think again.

Why this product launch is a failure

DRM and the lack of integration of a retailer into Sony’s eBook Library will be a clear failure, preventing this device from going mainstream. Shocking, that such a major product launch is carried out with such a bad customer experience due to the lack of process integration, even if you have to go with DRM due to conditions out of your control (i.e. publisher’s demands). Even the most basic user tests must have made your alarm-bells ring.

The device itself is a one-to-one translation of the book into an electronic device - which is well and good but fails to capitalize on the potential of added value such a device can have: no full-text search, no annotations possible, no Wi-Fi connection allowing for exchange of notes with other readers which could be a particularly interesting proposition for textbooks.

The technology works fine; the learnings and ideas are all in plain sight - yet the device and the industry needs a couple of more iterations to make the purchase of the Sony Reader worthwhile. It’s no news that misconceptions aren’t dying out because insights prove them wrong; it usually takes the people/industries holding these misconceptions to die out for changes to occur. Let’s hope the publishing industry has learned those lessons - for their own sake. Unfortunately, for now it doesn’t look that way.

You probably realized that it got awfully quiet on our blog. Quite in contrast to the assumption that we’ve nothing to write about we’re really busy behind the scenes. Unfortunately that doesn’t leave us a lot of time posting here. You can, however, stay up to date on what’s new at quillp and in the publishing industry in general by following us on Twitter, checking out our posts of interesting articles on Delicious, joining the quillp group on Facebook, using our Best Books Facebook App, checking out our book magazine (in German) - or simply joining quillp, of course. Until we return to posting here on a more regular basis again, we’re looking forward to seeing you there.

Seedcamp has announced its finalists and we’re thrilled to be among the 22 teams out of the 380 startups who applied  who are invited to the Seedcamp Week September 15th-19th in London. Judging by the program and the high-profile-panel it promises to be a very exciting one for sure! We’re looking forward to meeting all the other teams in person.

Here’s a quick intro to Seedcamp and last year’s Seedcamp week:

Seedcamp Week 2007 from Seedcamp on Vimeo.

Now off to find a place to crash - any offers?

Here’s a quick wrap-up of some seriously busy weeks which left our blog neglected for far too long:

quillp has been featured on deutsche-startups.de and received some very positive and encouraging reviews on- and off-site. We’re glad you’re enjoying quillp already while development is still continuing at full-throttle. Let us know what you like an what is missing and we’ll make sure to include it into one of our next release versions.

We’re currently working on groups to enhance disussions around books, stories, and authors as well as expanding our author sites to create comprehensive author-destination sites complete with background information from Wikipedia, video content from YouTube and much, much more.

A few days later quillp was featured by the gorgeous Jeannine on Ehrensenf. Thanks to Piet over at Fehlerleser for pointing it out to us - we were kind of worried in a positive way where all those new quillp users were coming from
If the number of posts containing books in response to featuring quillp on Ehrensenf are any indication, it proves once more how important books are to people and how much we want to associate and identify ourselves with our favorite books - or prominently reject the ones we despise.

Upon having been invited to participate at the Mini Seedcamp in Berlin in June we made it to the next round of pitching to Seedcamp’s panel in 10 minute interviews in London. I always love being back in London after the 8 months I spent here in 2003/04 - feels like I never left, especially on such a nice and sunny late-summer day. The best time for a nice long walk from Victoria Station up to Tottenham Court Road where the interviews took place. From the 40 teams selected to this interview stage out of several hundred applications from all over Europe 20 teams will be invited to the Seedcamp Week from September 15th-19th in London. Keep your fingers crossed that we’ll be one of them! After such a challenging day it was great to hook-up with Chris and Tom from YOOSE in one of the (far too few) street-cafes in London close to Oxford street for some drinks, enjoying people-watching in the sun! Aaah, the simple things…

Yesterday quillp was featured in the German weekly Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. On page 68 quillp is described as “ambitious platform connecting readers, authors, and publishers [...] A well thought-out algorithm matches people with a similar taste in books. Authors can publish their manuscripts on quillp; publishers can discover authors and contact them. The features are sophisticated and comprehensive, representing a clean and fun mashup implementation in its own realm, somewhere between amazon.de, ‘Xing’, and ‘Book on Demand’.”

The full story is available online here - if you’re a subscriber of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, that is.

A little over a month after our closed beta launch we’ve incorporated a lot of your great feedback and quite a lot of things we wanted to put in place prior to opening quillp up to the public. Thanks a lot for all your great ideas and please keep them coming!

Aside from a number of usability improvements here are some of the changes and additions:

• quillp shelf browsing: in addition to the list view of your library you now have the option to switch to a fun, interactive way of browsing through your and your friends’ libraries



• Author background information: aside from the entire list of books written by your favorite author you can now access all the Wikipedia author profile information with one simple click directly from within quillp
• Twitter integration: you can now feed your Twitter updates automatically into your quillp profile page - the usability is still due to be improved significantly in one of our next releases
• Deleted redundant information on detail book and profile pages: previously a lot of space was wasted on the top of each detail page by displaying the key overview information in each tab; this information has now been integrated into an overview tab, saving prominent page real estate within all other tabs

On some other features in more detail in another post - let us know what you think about those changes that should all be released tomorrow.

Not just since Google rolled out their Book Search program the debate about giving access to book content for free online has heated up. Opponents are convinced this will cannibalize book sales while proponents see it as a marketing factor: having the entire books indexed and at least in parts available online would make the previously invisible visible, making them part of the online conversation in the first place, just like most of the news sites had to acknowledge by shifting from paid walled-garden subscriptions to free and open access. Chris Anderson, godfather of the Long Tail, even coined Freeconomics as his latest paradigm shifting topic.

Since some groundbreaking shifts in thinking about content and business models are involved it is hardly surprising that the debate has been a very ideological one from the get-go. My take on it was the following: as long as there is no mass-adoption of substitutes to the traditional paper-based book (such as e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle) and only parts of the content are available, people will still opt to buying the book instead of reading it on screen or going through the hassle of printing it out themselves. For textbooks, however, I expected to see quite the contrary: given the price, the budget of students, and the fact that often only several pages are relevant from an entire textbook which can be searched for and referenced for papers in a very targeted fashion, I expected to see substantial cannibalization.

But let’s leave the world of speculation and ideology and look at some numbers. Cory Doctorow has always been convinced his books were not selling in spite of being released for free under Creative Commons but rather because of it:

“[...] it’s no foregone conclusion that free electronic copies of a book will substitute for sales of physical copies of that book. My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was released as a free, open download on the same day that it appeared in stores. Three years later, it’s in its sixth printing and more than 650,000 copies of it have been distributed from my website (an untold and unknowable number of copies have been distributed by others, as well). That’s because my biggest threat as an author isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. The majority of ideal readers who fail to buy my book will do so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free electronic copy.” Why Publishing Should Send Fruit-Baskets to Google

Paulo Coelho made quite a splash at the DLD conference in Munich this year when he acknowledged that he turned to pirating his own books, setting up a blog (Pirate Coelho) with links to free copies on filesharing networks. His take on it: online “piracy” has helped him not only to be more widely read, but also to sell more books:

Publishers sueing Google back in 2005 over Google’s Book Search have seen very positive results with a significant increase in sales from this program by 2006, as well as from Amazon’s Search Inside program. It seems that some of these results have encouraged some publishers to try marketing new releases by giving away the electronic version for free - with a significantly positive impact on offline sales.

I suspect that this impact can only be sustained in an era of transition from the traditional paper-based book to an electronic equivalent with mass market adoption. The music industry saw its sales of CDs plunge as it doesn’t really make a difference to the way I consume music whether I purchase a physical CD or download my tracks from somewhere. With books this haptic difference is still intact - for now.

Cory Doctorow’s take: “Smart authors, then, should make some hay while the sun shines — that is, use free ebooks to sell print books. That will make authors rich today. To ensure that authors stay rich tomorrow, though, we need prepare to change over to the new models that emerge when books are most often freely copyable digital objects. The best way to do that is to perform millions of experiments with digital texts to see which approaches are likely to bear fruit.”

Given these results the verdict is quite clear: giving away free electronic versions of your book does lift sales of the paper-based book rather then cannibalizing it, as it becomes part of the conversation and people don’t see it as a substitute for the “real thing”. Where do you think the book is heading in the future? How will authors and publishers engage their readers differently? Will they go down the same route the music industry went and have to start making a living from other things than the sale of just the “product” book?

Additional Links:

[German] “Kopieren ist gut für Autoren” - Interview Cory Doctorow
[German] Netz-Avantgardist Doctorow: Professor Unrast

There are always so many books I want to read but every time I finally find some time I’ve forgotton all about them again. To help you select the next must-read we’ve compiled a list of must-read-lists. Put them on your quillp-wishlist and get even better suggestions of must-read books directly from your friends by browsing their libraries on quillp.

Here we go with the lists - in no particular order:

• All-time 100 novels: TIME magazine critics Lev Grossman’s and Richard Lacayo’s picks of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present

• 100 best novels from the editorial board of Modern Library with links to their New York Times reviews

• 110 best books - the perfect library according to the Telegraph, accompanied by loooong discussion thread of readers on the missing books

• Top 200 - BBC’s Big Read as nominated by 750k UK readers

• Top 100 books of all time by the Guardian - determined from the vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries

• New York Public Library’s books of the century

• 1001 books you must read before you die - the full list taken from the book

• [German] Marcel Reich-Ranickis Kanon der deutschen Literatur - gegliedert nach Gedichten, Dramen, Erzählungen und Romanen

• [German] 100 Bücher des Jahrhunderts

Guess a couple of lifes are needed to read all of them before I die. What are your favorite-definitely-not-to-miss-books?

Update [August 18, 2008]: Another must-read list for all fans of comics - thanks to Alexander over at deutsche-startups.de for this one:

• 30 Essential Graphic Novels

Our closed beta is humming along nicely and the first quillpers seem to have a lot of fun stacking up their virtual libraries and browsing their closest library match’s libraries for new book ideas. In just one day (actually in just an hour of one day) Katja and Marcel have taken us by storm, dwarfing our libraries which we put together in the last weeks and months of our quillp development. Respect I don’t think Henry’s resorting to stacking up high-school text books to take the lead with the largest library again will put him in safe territory for even one day against those who love reading just as much as Henry loves programming quillp.

After all those months of hard work it’s great to see that quillp seems to be catching on with the book lovers and that it’s easy to use as well, adding that many books in such a short timespan. But with every new platform there are a few bugs that still need to be sorted out so thanks for all your invaluable feedback. The hands-down lead on this front goes to Tim, sending us feedback every other minute, so quillp will be even better when we go into our open beta a few weeks from now.

And what does all of this have to do with how to read a book? Well, as the following historical document from our Norwegian friends shows even the book wasn’t as simple to use back in the days when it was new technology. So keep your feedback coming so quillp will be fun and a snap to use from the get-go - a little far-fetched bridge from the headline, I’ll admit… Have fun with this clip anyway!

Over the last couple of months everybody here has put in crazy hours to turn quillp from an idea into reality. In the next couple of days we will be starting to send out invitations for our closed beta - on a small scale for now to test the performance and to get rid of some bugs.

To catch a first glimpse of quillp already today we’ve put a little intro video together, highlighting some of the things our coding wizzard Henry the qbyting shrink has built in, styled by Melanie who spent many weekends in the office. Finally a weekend off, Mel, enjoy - well deserved! While I’m writing these lines Peter has nothing better to do at close to 11pm on a Friday night than sitting in the office with me, putting the final touches on our first intro video. Guess I’ll have to lock the doors to keep him away from his desk tomorrow… And of course all the best to Rolf, who spent all his energy on pushing quillp forward as well - get well soon!! - and thanks to Jan for his technical expertise and the beers (sorry: Desperados) we had in Valencia, Berlin, Grabs along the way and to Marketa; your contribution played an important part in making quillp possible. And before I feel like I’m giving an Academy Award speech and boring all of you…

Here it comes - our first intro; we’d love to hear what you think.  Get your quillp beta invite and see you soon on quillp!