This is why the Financial Times will be fine
From Reuters:
“We don’t want to lose our direct relationship with our subscribers. It’s at the core of our business model,” Rob Grimshaw told Reuters in an interview on Monday. He said he was hopeful of a positive outcome to negotiations with Apple, but added: “If it turns out that one or another channel doesn’t mix with the way we want to do business, there’s a large number of other channels available to us.”
No chest thumping. No talk of iPad “salvation.” Just a level-headed perspective of the current opportunities and how they may or may not benefit the Finaicial Times. This is how all publishers — news, books, film, etc. — should approach digital channels. Does it work for us or does it not?
The revenue power of free
Mark Pilgrim, author of “HTML5: Up & Running,” on the success of his new book:
“HTML5: Up & Running” sold over 14,000 copies in the first six weeks, of which about 25% were digital downloads and 75% were books on paper. Folks sure do love them some paper. The book continues to be available online for free, as it was during the entire writing process, under the liberal Creative Commons Attribution license. This open publishing model generated buzz well in advance of the print publication, and it resulted in over 1,500 pre-orders which shipped the day the book went on sale.
Why The Book Business May Soon Be The Most Digital Of All Media Industries
Compelling argument for why book publishers need to become digital first:
… not only do publishers need to take digital seriously—they must make it the new default for publishing, preparing for a day in which physical book publishing is an adjunct activity that supports the digital publishing business. And this dramatic reversal will have happened faster in book publishing than in any other media business. Not just because publishers have had years to watch other media industries face the digital transition, but also because book publishing is a single-revenue business.
Music used to generate revenue from the radio, from CD sales, and from concert tickets. Changing that business required upsetting several apple carts at once. TV is similarly complex, revenue is derived from advertising, cable carriage or retransmission fees, and direct sales of DVDs. You can’t go digital without first rethinking the entire business (and not every player in the ecosystem takes that lying down). But not publishing. Books are published and sold at retail. In the end, once the only channel from which revenue is derived starts to get remodeled, it’s not long before the whole structure gets torn down and rebuilt to accommodate the new dominant distribution model.
