Social Media and New Markets

Lest you and I thought that Macmillan is going to be material only in demanding royalties from iPad and Kindle, the followers of education reform in Obama country have something more important than 123 million European subscribers to look forward to (That’s February’s Facebook score – 23% of Europe’s Pop) . Macmillan is also producing its own ebook software for laptops and iPhone which is already releasing special ebooks for school and college text from Atkins’ insights in Chemistry to standard Psychology texts in editions called Dynamic Books. these books can be rewritten by faculty for their class on the subject and would still be available at about 66% discount to their published price.

There is also a print on demand option for a higher price. For innovators like Amazon and Apple, this definitely makes things more complex than Adobe Air script or the style and looks game as offerings show greater customisation and increase consumer demands outside price and availability criteria.

Here’s the great investigative work from the NY times team working out kinks in Obama’s reform plans

While many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years — allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher.

“Basically they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the content right there and make whatever changes they want,” said Brian Napack, president of Macmillan. “And we don’t even look at it.”

In August, Macmillan plans to start selling 100 titles through DynamicBooks, including “Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight,” by Peter Atkins and Loretta Jones; “Discovering the Universe,” by Neil F. Comins and William J. Kaufmann; and “Psychology,” by Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert and Daniel M. Wegner. Mr. Napack said Macmillan was considering talking to other publishers to invite them to sell their books through DynamicBooks.

Students will be able to buy the e-books at dynamicbooks.com, in college bookstores and through CourseSmart, a joint venture among five textbook publishers that sells electronic textbooks. The DynamicBooks editions — which can be reached online or downloaded — can be read on laptops and the iPhone from Apple. Clancy Marshall, general manager of DynamicBooks, said the company planned to negotiate agreements with Apple so the electronic books could be read on the iPad.

The modifiable e-book editions will be much cheaper than traditional print textbooks. “Psychology,” for example, which has a list price of $134.29 (available on Barnes & Noble’s Web site for $122.73), will sell for $48.76 in the DynamicBooks version. Macmillan is also offering print-on-demand versions of the customized books, which will be priced closer to traditional textbooks.

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In a move reminding of the precipitate ways of the Music Industry, Macmillan seems to have argued with Amazon over increasing the price of ebooks in the fledgling market. Amazon, rightly moved Macmillan off its shelves, thus causing tremendous losses to MacMillan.

We can tell you as customers that even $9.99 is not going the whole way for market development of the e-books market. Apple’s iPod had revolutionalised the music industry by making songs available for $0.99 ea. However, Apple had avoided the public spat and convinced publishers to go along with it. The pecuniary advantages of negative reinforcement may well be limited.

Apple’s ibookstore is planning to price titles at a steep $12.99 and $14.99. However, amazon’s action may also be compromised if it resricts the ban to only e-books from MacMillan Titles and should go the whole way.

On the flip side, even if MacMillan sells half its inventory thru Amazon, it will lose out on those markets in the next year or so and sales will surely dip by aleast 8-10% from the defranchising. Amazon’s model may not dissuade from bestsellers or any titles already preselected in the customer’s mind but when it comes to browsing and selecting purchases and gifts based on Interests, an immediate negative impact is likely on those not available at the site.

C-NET published this shocking piece of news yesterday

Amazon.com has pulled books from Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the United States, in a dispute over the pricing on e-books on the site.
The publisher’s books can be purchased only from third parties on Amazon.com.
A person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute, which has been brewing for a year, said Amazon was expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books. The person did not want to be quoted by name because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of e-books to around $15 from $9.99.
Macmillan is one of the publishers signed on to offer books to Apple, as part of its new iBookstore on the iPad tablet unveiled earlier this week.

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I know what you all are thinking. Why suddenly a Kindle in Facebook vs Twitter wars? What about the Friendfeed and the dozen social networks to be branded me too! Where do they come in? Well, to me Kindle comes first because Amazon is a phenomenon on my personal list of Enterprise greats and the other start ups have still got something to prove in terms of viability. Not that the risk is any lesser for a Myspace or a Kindle but My space going down would be a turning point people would remember like AOL, eBay and the others who have had a not so easy time since they set up on the web and who have never graduated to the real Web 2.0 or near real time social collaboration. Amazon and Kindle however have that potential ( may be they will also drop out later like Starbucks) and they can handle innovation and complex consumer minds with a relative ease that would be critical.

Long back, during the days of Patricia Seybold’s customers.com and Guy Hagel’s ‘Net Worth’ we saw an expostulation of the success determining parameters of the new invisible continent by Kenichi Ohmae ( let’s face it, the guy was an other world icon but still made it as a strategist on the new web). What the Invisible Continent described in great detail was an Infomediary – An organization or ‘Trust agent’ that would broker all business transactions on the web because they would be entrusted with the Customers foibles and deep seated choices that would make the best buying decision and robust sales. Amazon and Kindle are the perfect intermediaries for such digital transactions like iPhone and iPod have been for music albeit non collaboratively till now.

I think the new web needs Kindle and amazon to ramp up the offering in tune with customers, learning the nuances along with the customer as they go along this adventure. For amazon to continue with its 50% market share of the World’s Book Sales has been relatively easy when compared with the others and a vital part of that has been the enriched customer experience which is really beautifully collaborative and store front’ish at the same time. It also highlights the other essential for social collaboration which Facebook and Twitter seem to make light of, ad that is the reading habit. For any transaction on the new web, one has to be a voracious reader to navigate the choices, discuss with friends, colleagues and competitors online and make instant decisions that are almost always right.

Kindle could easily include Video, Audio and twitter / friendfeed messaging on the device along with maps and the books to replace other devices you need to carry arund today for a complete mobile experience. I think that’s the way it’s going to go too.

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Sitting inside a conference room at Twitter, BlackBerry in hand, Kevin Thau is all business.In his first interview since taking charge of the San Francisco technology companys mobile business development a month ago, Thau is confident that cellphones will play a crucial role in helping the messaging service make money.

The four-year-old company, which has raised more than $35 million from Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital and others, offers its service free of charge, and hasn’t yet figured out how to generate revenues.

Thau, 36, says thats about to change. He says the number of text messages passing through Twitters platform has grown 1,000% in the last year. Add to that the fact that users are texting more substantive observations and opinions in real time, and the company has a valuable information database it can sell to businesses.

Thau says Twitter is developing a range of analytics and metrics products and services built around the information contained in “tweets,” the e-mail and text messages that pass through its platform. “We can measure the tweets,” he says. “Were trying to figure out what are the appropriate metrics around engagement and how to convey those.”

Thau, however, didnt say when Twitter plans to sell these services or how much it will charge for them.

Its an interesting business model, but can Twitter survive selling analytics and other services? “When it comes to enterprises, absolutely,” says Jeremiah Owyang, a social computing analyst with Forrester Research ($FORR ) . “I just got off a call with a client thats asking about how to engage on Twitter. There’s definitely interest.”

via ‘Forbes’

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