Kate Eltham is the Chief Executive Officer of Queensland Writers Centre and founder of if:book Australia. In 2009 she was named by The Australian newspaper as one of 10 Emerging Leaders of Culture.
Kate contributed to the discussion on Access and Accessibility.
Kate Eltham from if:book Australia on Vimeo.
if:book’s own Kate Eltham presented at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference. Her topic for the lightening-fast Ignite session was ‘Four Things a Catastrophic Flood Taught Me About Social Media…(and One Thing It Taught me About Publishing)’.
if:book’s Kate Eltham is currently blogging for if:book from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York City.
Paper-based literature is becoming digital, migrating from the page onto screens and the web. James will be talking about book guilt, the Open Bookmarks project, foam-phase literature and how publishers can reclaim reading.
Find out more about this session.
We try to sell books (and talk to our readers) by showing them pictures of books. As opposed to advertisements of eReaders and Kindles is to show people reading. It’s about the reading process, where as book publishers are about the product.
Apple are the masters of this message (don’t have ebooks right, but they know how to sell experiences).
People obsessed with the physicality of the book, the smell. Why? Because there are qualities that have value for us that are temporal qualities, they are about how our experience of the book exists in time.
Physical books show the marks of their experience, and of our own experience with them. There are things we do with books, and the way we interact with them, that we don’t yet know how to transfer to other objects yet. How do you write your name in the front page of an ebook, to show your ownership?
How can we put temporal qualities back into books in the digital context?
Life/use of the book:
| —- advertisement —- | ———- reading (info delivery) ———- | ——————————- souvenir ——————————>>>>>>>
The reading process itself is where the magic happens, that’s the fun bit. Then after that the books become souvenirs. They become souvenirs of themselves. We put them on the shelf and keep them as a way of marking the experience we had while reading them, and the value that held for us. (temporal)
bkkeepr – way of sharing the reading experience
Sharing is a form of distributed memory. It fulfils some of the functions we lose when we lose the paper book.
Questions to ask: what services will strengthen the sharing of the reading process? can a reader export their data?
if:book’s Kate Eltham is currently blogging for if:book from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York City.
This session will examine open, web-first book-publishing systems, built on top of the open source blogging software platform, WordPress. We’ll look at work done with Simon Fraser University’s Ickmull project and Book of MPub, George Mason University’s Anthologize plugin, and other developments.
This work suggests a future where we create “books” in the cloud first. With structured mark-up, expressions of a book in various forms (print, epub, pdf, mobipocket, html, etc) on various devices (iPad, Kindle, or paper & print) becomes almost arbitrary, and trivial in practice. Further, if the book lives first in the cloud, then the range of things that can be done with it multiplies significantly—giving publishers flexibility to experiment much more easily within the digital landscape.
If a system built on these ideals is implemented well, it could be transformative, both for professional publishing workflows, and for the emergence of a new grassroots of independent publishing.
Find out more about this session.
Books are ecosystems that include the content but also conversation, sales, reviews, comments, flamewars etc. And if that’s the case we need to change the way we think about publishing systems and workflow.
Meet the #dpplatypus (The platypus is the animal that most resembles publishers’ workflow)
The future is books in browsers. HTML5 can slice through the gordian knot of format/platform proliferation.
InDesign File -> Save As -> HTML5 [Ha! Right!]
Nope. So need…
A web-native CMS (WordPress!)
Some examples of existing tools or services that might be plugged into an open, webby book publishing system:
3 reasons why we take the web seriously for book publishing
Pragmatist argument: Web is simply a superior platform for developing e-publications. Good reasons too. For example, the ePub spec is aligned with HTML5 and CSS. It makes sense to go to those formats from web-native content. Plus, you’re using it already!
Liberty argument: open, transparent standards are increasingly valuable in an age of would-be monopolists (future-proof)
Futurist’s argument: the web is THE publishing platform of our time. In 2050, the platform we’ll be using won’t be a replacement of the web, but the evolution of it.
With that in mind, how do we reimagine book publishing with the web as our framework? Some SFU projects:
1. Ickmull: printing the web in InDesign [HTML to IFML via XSLT) http://code.google.com/p/ickmull
2. The Book of MPub (2010) An end-to-end book development project, entirely in WP, open peer reviewed, with simultaneous print, epub, web incarnations
3. Editorial workflow support in WordPress: ongoing graduate student R&D, going for low-hanging fruit
PressBooks: An open source, webby, book publishing tool built on WordPress
Export formats: Web (HTML), ePub, POD ready PDF, InDesign ready XML
if:book’s Kate Eltham is currently blogging for if:book from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in New York City.
Since the last O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference, the publishing world has experienced remarkable growth, challenging those producing content, platforms and devices to understand and keep up with changing consumer trends.
Unfortunately, in the absence of good data, many publishers, developers, device manufacturers, retailers, and other industry players have been making business decisions based upon assumptions about consumer expectations. But, the era of guessing what ereading customers want may be nearing its end.
Find out more about this session.
Michael Tamblyn, Kobo
Kobo looks for reader segments to understand what ereading customers want. Factors like:
1. “eInk Reading Machine”: a most valued customer segment (Lifetime Value), first time spent $35, every time they come back spend $20-25 at least 7 times a month, reading continuously, reading on a Kobo eInk device, long-time user, early adopter, fiction reader, 100% paid.
Looking at how people come to be customers, general conclusion is that ebook consumption is accelerating over time. A customer who started in June 2010 buys 44% more in their first month as a custoemr than a customer who started in December 2009. A customer joining in Nov 2010 buys 70% more in their first month than a Dec 2009 customer. First months are getting bigger. Why? Better apps, better devices, better marketing, moret itles, better customers
2. Small-screen Reader (smartphone)
Largest segment in terms o fnumbers. Buy less frequently and are lower value customers than peopl eusing larger screens. First time spent about $15 and visit around 1 per month, spening $7 each time. iPohone is Kobo’s least productive sales channel. [Web, Kobo eReader, Kobo-powered apps, Android,iPad, iPhone] iPhone customers are price sensitive. This user is less likley to stick around, churn is high in this category of customers. Especially strong consumers of genre fiction, particularly romance. Will hunt for free titles and consumer both paid and free.
3. iPad Socialite
Not as good as eReading machine. Spendabout $22 first visit, stick around a while, buy semi-frequently. [Break out: iPad Reading Life with social features, just launched for iPhone too]
How does social change reading? A lot. You can connect your reading life to facebook. People who do this spend about 33% more time in app. Alo gathering data about reading behaviours based on time of day. Turns out, late night readers (in bed) read less. Readers who read during the day (commute, lunch) spend more time reading overall. Book industry is not, as it turns out, powered by the bedside table. More interrogation of the data reveals that even though evening readers reading for a shorter time, there are more people reading at this time. ie. there are more evening readers than daytime readers. 8pm-12pm is ebook shopping primetime, this is when most people are buying new ebooks.
Kobo looking at cosumption patterns after the book has been purchased.
4. The Freegan
Don’t spend money on books, they want free. Web is their primary source, followed by smartphones and iPad. Likely to have multiple devices, looking for free content to load on each. Interestingly, there’s a lot of free access happening in international markets.
Not everyone who reads free books are “freegans”. Some are “paygans”.
Customers with free books get a free book or two (pride & prejudice) and this is their ebook training wheels. True freegan have more than 9 free books in their bookshelf, they are actively shopping for free content. Freegans are shockingly resistant to marketing (big surprise).
Kobo is using this data so they can make the reading experience better. Easier, more enjoyable. And how to do it while keeping in mind that there are different categories of users with different reading behaviours. Fighting for tiny slices of people’s day, the more we can enhance the experience, the better it will be.
if:book Australia promotes new forms of digital literature and explores ways to boost connections between writers and audiences. if:book Australia is led by author, editor and digital experimenter, Simon Groth. 
