Please enjoy my despair at the beginning as all the wireless-enabled readers interfere with the microphone.

It might be useful to follow along with the slides in the latter half of my talk, when the camera doesn’t show them.

Keith and I beat pretty hard on Sony and Fictionwise (and Stanza, by extension), but only because we want commercial ebooks to succeed. We want publishers to make money and readers to make use of a convenient service.

Here’s a quick summary of our conclusions:

1. Your ebook purchasing process should be as much like the Kindle as possible.
2. Buy your own ebooks through every device and channel you offer. Identify points of friction and fix them.
3. Consider the mobile purchasing experience.
4. Have empathy for your customers.

I think we can all agree that this is a don’t.

(There’s a free sample though!)

Sometimes the issues are minor: occasional spacing errors, missing or overzealous capitalization.  Other times they can be more prevalent.  A friend recently purchased Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates from the Kindle store and many of the quotation marks were mangled (it’s likely the wrong encoding was used).

Amazon responded to the customer complaint very quickly, saying that they would notify the publisher and my friend could re-download the corrected book when it was posted. They also gave him a credit for an additional purchase. That’s a good outcome, obviously, but you never have to return a printed book because the punctuation is wrong.

Clearly the quality control needs to be on the publisher end, as each individual bookseller can’t be responsible for checking all of the digital books they offer.  The recent survey conducted at the Frankfurt Book Fair found that 60% of the respondents did not have an ereader, and while I don’t think everyone involved in book publishing actually needs to own one, I’d hope that any group distributing ebooks would be able to review them in the same way that their customers are receiving them.  If you sell Kindle books, someone on your team should have a Kindle and should check at least a representative sample of your offerings, especially if your group is new to digital distribution.

The best thing readers can do to improve ebook quality is to complain.  For now I believe the focus should be on simple fidelity: does this ebook at least contain the same text as the printed version?  Eventually, though, expectations about digital books should rise to the point of considering design. This is especially true when the ePub format is capable of supporting embedded fonts and the same level of aesthetic sophistication that’s present on the web.  Books can be works of art, and ebooks can be beautiful too.

Of course, going from text to scanned images is exactly backwards from the way things ought to be.

In all likelihood, this was a one-shot deal: I bought a book, I liked it, I’ll tell a few people, and at best there might be one additional sale.

Now imagine it’s 2am and I’ve read this book on my second-generation networked digital reader, maybe the Kindle 2.0.  As soon as I’ve finished the book, the device prompts me to rate it (4 stars!).  It also knows about my social connections.  It asks me if I’d recommend it to my friend, who has enjoyed similar books, and I say yes.

The next morning my friend wakes up and picks up his e-reader.  There’s a recommendation from me — and a 20% discount to purchase this book immediately. This $5 digital book is now just four bucks, and it’s instantly on his device.

Once he accepts, I get 20% off my next purchase too, and a “karma point” in my profile for a successful recommendation.

Social

People overwhelmingly buy books based on personal recommendations.  Reading is normally a solitary activity; the only way to share the experience of a book is to urge friends to read it too.  It’s curious that Amazon.com has hardly any social component, whereas Netflix (which loses money every time I rent a movie) has a very useful but underpromoted “Friends” area. I rent movies directly off my friends’ queues all the time, but I still buy books from Amazon after speaking with someone or reading anonymous reviews.

The combination of social networking and instant media transmission on devices like the Kindle can revolutionize this experience, by motivating readers at the moment they’ve read the book, and pushing high-value content directly at other consumers.

(Social patterns do not need to be two-way. Twitter has established the convention that people can “follow” others without the expectation of being “friended” back.  So while I might “friend” people I know, I may also want to “follow” the reading habits of favorite authors, or books promoted on The Daily Show, or books disproportionately read by people in my geographic community.)

Anti-DRM

I call this an “anti-DRM” pattern is because DRM is unnecessary here.  Libraries are full of free books and yet books are still purchased.  A lot of that is convenience.  The more convenient a service is, the more value it has.  Even if it were possible for me to grab that digital book off the device and email it to my friend for free, would I bother?  Most likely I’d forget before I ever got around to it.  My own discount is a nice bonus, but the primary motivator would be the desire to share the experience combined with negligible personal effort.

Lazy

And let’s suppose that people did send around free digital books.  If I didn’t have an e-ink reader, what would I do with them?  After I got a few freebies from friends I’d probably go buy a Kindle, and then that seductive “share this book” button would take hold.  The existence of some free books is an incentive to move up to a specialized device.  They create the necessary ecosystem and will ultimately motivate, not destroy, publishing sales.

High-volume readers are not the same demographic as high-volume music consumers.  They are older, they are well-educated, they have better things to do with their time than email free books.  (Not to mention that most readers probably know a writer; few teenagers know a rock star.)  Nearly everyone who gets a Kindle says that they make more purchases, and the current Kindle store is technologically and psychologically primitive.  To compete in a networked world, digital books need to come alive, and enlist readers to promote them.