Technology versus content

From Frederic Filloux: “Le Figaro’s new facilities are able to address several of its competitors’ printing needs. The most obvious is Le Monde whose printing plant is obsolete and costly to operate (too many people). The two papers now use the same page size (a ‘Berliner’ format), and are produced at a different time of the day. A perfect fit in theory. Mr. Morel [Francis Morel CEO of Le Figaro] denies vehemently having any intentions of harmingLe Monde. But there is no need to be a Wharton scholar to see the two torpedoes Le Figaro is firing at its competitor: one is the better looking and cheaper ads, the other a more commercially potent printing plant. At least, ‘Le Fig’ might print the business paper Les Echosand perhaps one of the three free papers.

“But the real potential for Le Figaro’s online revenue lies in the readership duplication rate between print and web. Today, only 20% of the print readers also visit the website, this is quite low when compared to the 30% to 45% its competitors experience. This points to the paper’s generation problem: 42% of Le Figaro’s readers are 60 years-old and above, compared to 27% for the rest of the French press; naturally, the web is expected to rejuvenate its audience. Today, LeFigaro.fr is the #1 newspaper site in France with more than 5 million unique visitors a month (OK, thanks to some questionable measurement tricks). Still, each time 10 web users are gained, this translates into 2 more print readers (along with 10-15 times more revenue per reader on paper side).” 1

Marie Benilde writing recently in Le Monde Diplomatique quotes the assessment of a banker at the French National Conference in Strasbourg in 2006: “Journalists are now in the same situation as steel workers in 1970’s : they are destined to disappear, but they don’t know it.” Benilde cites the loss of 2,300 jobs in the French press last year, and about the financial performance of the press last year she adds, “Every national daily in France, apart from the sports daily, L’Equipe, has lost money.” 2

The owners of the Indian news dailies are by and large not gamblers. Those who have made large investments in new technology are looking at a sure thing although it could take time. Nevertheless, to use their new and modern capabilities, they will need a huge growth in product and unfortunately they are thus far focussing mostly on their own product which will rarely if ever drive their presses 24/7. The new technology allows for better colour and more diverse offerings in the newspaper package and an integrated approach to new and cross media. The issue for the Indian news or media organisations is one of vision and content. Print is still growing as the most impactful part of the news package in this society but since the demographic is changing, for the news or media organisation of the future, the key issues are vision and imagination. Machinery and new plants can be bought – where will the content and engagement come from?

--Naresh Khanna


1. From A Case Study: Le Figaro’s Advertising Gamble
September 20, 2009 - 11:08 am Edited by Frédéric Filloux
2. The end of newspapers Le Monde Diplomatique Marie Benilde, English in Hard News, April 2010, New Delhi

Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one. – A J Leibling

As I recall from a media debate in New Delhi a few years ago, Vinod Mehta, the editor of Outlook said, “Newspaper owners often have three ambitions: fame, power and wealth. However it is almost impossible for them to achieve all three – they must choose, and in my estimation at most they may achieve two out of these three ambitions.”

There is righteousness and there is self-righteousness in every newspaper industry. While in much of the world the emperor is now naked, in the world’s largest democracy with the second-largest daily circulation in the world, we still seem to be clinging to our fig leaves. The question is how long can we owner-publisher-editors survive? If we are to grow, to communicate to a new generation, and to write and create new things, surely we need new people, the best people for the job – professionals who are passionate and engaged in the concerns of the day. Why should we expect the new generation of writers or editors to only be concerned about our own passions? And do we not need to grow fast enough to give an opportunity to those in the family who wish to grow the business? Why will they join the business if we do not grow fast enough to use their talent and their hard won qualifications? Is the Columbia School of Journalism merely a finishing school for the sons and daughters of the Indian newspaper owners or a place to train our best young journalists?

Adventures in Kindleland -- India

Even before I could buy a Kindle eBook reader one of my new young colleagues beat me to it. It was quite a blow to my ego, fancying that I am usually the first person to buy another new gadget which is overpriced and usually, of little utility. Anyway full marks to the new generation for adventure-ness in Kindleland. I had a chance to handle the Kindle and try and get over my envy (in spite of the fact that the kid had readable books -- in fact I think he had Salinger's Catcher in the Rye -- one of my favourites). (You always think that anyone can buy a gadget but you are the one who knows what to do what to do it or books to read).

Anyhow, the next thing I know he has sold his Kindle over eBay. It's already gone because although he wanted to buy books over the Internet from Amazon, they were expensive. He's a reader and in spite of having a Kindle he had visited real bookshops and bought real books for prices ranging from Rs. 200 to 400 (US$ 5 to 8) which is what bestselling paperbacks cost here while the Kindle versions were anywhere from US$ 12 to 25 (Rs 600 to 1200).

Now of course I am envious of his quick decision-making and eBay trading skills. He was able to get rid of Kindle at a good price while I still have junk-filled cupboard including the Apple Newton that I bought second-hand from a tourist many years ago.

In another recent discussion/seminar in Singapore and reported in a Delhi daily, I think it was a guy from a paper company who said that eBooks will never take off in India until they are available for about US$ 3 each. Although I think that commentator was undervaluing the rising Indian buying power, he may have been right about the likely slow traction of eBooks and the high traction of print on paper in this country.

Even as average Indian disposable incomes rise and double in the next five years, the real issue is the price of content, digital rights and compensation to authors, and also the flexibility of the tablets to be format independent. Of course publishers fear this greatly since books will be traded as email attachments and USBs but this is one of great values of printed books -- you buy not only the artifact but the right to lend it and pass it on.

Yes the Kindle was sleek, legible, and excellent for carrying a library along but I'll try and wait for my disposable income to double before I buy an eBook. By that time I expect that the price of content will come down to half and it will become even more portable.

Will Kindle replace “real” books or newspapers?

By Bimal Mehta

Six months ago, Amazon introduced a new product called Kindle. Many predict that Kindle sets out to change the way we read books, newspaper, weblogs and more. The Kindle is a watershed event in electronic publishing. It is not the first eBook device, and may not ultimately be the one that will prevail. Yet, Amazon’s Kindle is touted as one of the most ambitious projects after the Gutenberg’s printing press. Recently launched in India, priced at Rs.13,100, Kindle wirelessly downloads books, magazine, newspaper and documents to a high resolution 6-inch e-Ink display which looks like real paper.

Reading on Kindle is remarkably comfortable. Unlike a laptop or an iPhone, the screen is not illuminated, so there’s no glare, no eyestrain — and no battery consumption. You use power only when you actually turn the page, causing millions of black particles to realign. The rest of the time, the ink pattern remains on the screen without power. You can set it on your bedside table without worrying about turning it off.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that the first goal the Kindle team set was to emulate the book’s most crucial feature: that it disappears into the story as you read. However, Kindle does work differently than a paper based book. Kindle allows the user to experiment with different type sizes. A paper book offers nothing like this (just the thing for older people). Kindle is also designed to facilitate access to multiple or several books at a time. In the home screen, the most recently read items are at the top of the list (you can sort by title or author). When you leave any book, Kindle remembers your place so you can jump back in where you left.

Reading a newspaper is interesting on Kindle. Kindle newspapers are hyperlinked, like web pages. When you open a paper, you see its logo and front page with headlines and short summaries, followed by a table of contents. Click an article to read it; click the Back button to return to the article list; or just keep paging forward to the next article. But Kindle’s limited grayscale display makes photographs almost a complete loss. Kindle’s technology certainly deserves a mention. The single most interesting component is its paper-like display. Rather than the LCD displays used in most previous book readers, this display uses E-Ink technology invented at MIT’s Media Laboratory. E-Ink film has hundreds of thousands of tiny capsules containing white and black pigment. A circuit layer, underneath, applies electric fields to swap these pigments from top to bottom – turning the surface light, absorbent or reflective. Another notable feature of E-Ink is that it can be laid onto plastic substrate, even a flexible one! This means that Kindle is very resistant to the greatest threat facing LCD displays in laptops – cracking and shattering.

Kindle is not just a book reader. Thanks to its wireless connection, it is very convenient reader for many types of content: books, newspaper, magazines and blogs, not to mention Wikipedia and the web in general. One can access the Amazon online store and download any book from over 200,000 English titles within 60 seconds.

Kindle is also making an impact on the environment. According to a new study, eBooks are better for the environment than traditional paper books. Focusing on Amazon’s Kindle eBook reader, the study was produced by Cleantech Group and stated that after 12 months of using it, the emissions it creates will have been offset. ”The new study finds that eReaders could have a major impact on improving the sustainability and environmental impact on the publishing industry, one of the world’s most polluting sectors,” Cleantech asserted in a statement published online, which added: “In 2008, the U.S. book and newspaper industries combined resulted in the harvesting of 125 million trees, not to mention wastewater that was produced or its massive carbon footprint.”

Technology continues to make changes in everyday life. We have seen musical recordings change form numerous times, until they became digital files; the once cumbersome reel-to-reel film is now downloadable; and many newspapers are now online.

Will books may be the latest victims of technology?

Till date, despite hundreds of millions of PCs in use around the world, only a few hundred thousands of their users have downloaded eBooks. The slow start is partly due to the perception that an eBook doesn’t fully replicate the book reading experience. Kindle does not give you the “holding, feeling, smelling” experience. Nor is it convenient to read to your children in bed.

According to Steve Kessel, Amazon’s vice president for Kindle, about 48 per cent of book sales in the US now happen via Kindle. He expects products like Kindle will replace physical books in future.

According to the Association of American Publishers, annual eBook sales had gained 150 per cent as of April 30th 2009. This contrasted with overall book sales, which dropped over four per cent. Overall, US$ 112 million (approximately INR 600 crore) worth of eBooks were purchased last year – a figure predicted to rise to $400 million in three years time.

Kindle is clearly aimed at the sort of book buyers who save their books to re-read, search, or use for reference — voracious readers with sprawling shelves and stacks of books. Those who read a book and then pass it on to a friend may not find the Kindle as attractive; it doesn’t offer many benefits to those who treat books as disposable items.

The brick-and-mortar experience will also impact Kindle sales. Several book buyers step into bookstores to buy a specific title that brought them to the store in the first place, but the consumer also may buy something that happened to grab his or her attention (for future reading). Most Kindle users will only download a book, when they actually want to read it. One exception is college students. Kindle provides a great advantage in having multiple textbooks available simultaneously without the burden of carrying them around, as students go back and forth to their classes.

Fiction and everyday reading will probably still have a market in physical books. One thing that keeps paper books going as a mass market is inertia. The current generation is used to the habit of reading paper books. Although in the decades to come as older generations die out and younger ones come online, and as generations in the middle try eBooks, and realize their advantages, the use of eBooks will accelerate.

In conclusion, will Kindle replace “real” books?

In Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. eBook readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace eBook readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences . . . somewhat akin to the old ”TV will replace radio” sentiment. The advent of TV obviously changed the radio industry as the advent of technology will change the publishing industry. However, I don’t think print will ever go away.

Bimal Mehta is the executive director of Vakil and Sons in Mumbai

Copy right and wrong

By Aakriti Agarwal

At the Delhi Book Fair a lively panel session on copyright was organised on 31 August jointly by Kitab, the joint venture of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage and the Frankfurt Book Fair. The panel included Urvashi Butalia, publisher Zubaan; copyright lawyer Chander Lall, two representatives from the Federation of Indian Publishers – Anant Bhushan, General Secretary, Indian Reprographic Organisation (IRRO) and Siddharth Arya, legal advisor to the IRRO. The discussion was moderated by Naresh Khanna, editor of Indian Printer and Publisher.

Butalia with over 35 years of experience in publishing, said that the industry is structured around the copyright issue. “India has been at the forefront of leading developing countries in recognizing the imbalances in the power of place of knowledge and therefore demanding this historical imbalance should be set right. So India led a move in the international copyright arena of compulsory licensing which meant that if a foreign publisher was not willing to make a cheap edition of their book available in India then given certain conditions, the Indian publisher had the right to publish and print the book in India compulsorily by taking licenses and had to pay royalties. But there has not been one book that was published in India using compulsory licensing although this was a very important move for India to make,” said Butalia.

Pirates are not bothered about knowledge, they do it for the money. Butalia adds, “the issue is whether small and big publishers could publish ethically,” and she discovered that it was possible. She said that buying the rights was an issue because it was expensive but foreign publishers can be convinced to make rights available at reasonable rates if they are convinced of the business issues in a particular market.

Reflecting on some numbers, Lall told the audience about the scale of copyright infringements. The Association of Indian Motion Pictures does about 700 cases a year and the Indian Music Industry (IMI) does 3,000 cases a year for the music industry. There are at least 10,000 copyright cases in the criminal justice system of India, he said. There is less litigation over print, Lall pointed out, because publisher’s budgets are lower. However a lawyer who is associated with a Publisher’s Association does 100 cases a year. The average time for resolution is very long, he says and “it does go into years unfortunately.”

There are four intellectual properties -trademark, copyrights, patents and designs. “The moment you create, you get copyright, not only in India but across the world,” Lall said. Any work of creativity is a subject matter of copyright. The six copyright areas are literary works, musical works, artistic works, dramatic works, sound recordings and films. Coming to the digital media, every matter on the Internet is a subject matter of copyright. If you cut and paste, copyright is violated. Even if someone takes a few seconds of a music piece, s/he becomes a copyright infringer. Scripts and films are subject to copyright too.

Copyright is a bundle of rights. Lall explained that to translate a book is one right and to sell it in a different country is another. Publishing it in paperback or hardback are two different copyrights. Music to be sold in VCDs and DVDs require two copyrights and if you have the right to run a movie in one theatre then it cannot be run anywhere else. Copyright is not given verbally, it has to be in written or else it is considered piracy or infringement of law.

The duration of copyright cover on any creative content is the life of the author plus 60 years which implies that till after 60 years of the author’s demise, the work cannot be copied. Lall pointed out that if the author dies in January then s/he gets one extra year because the year the author dies in, is exempted.

The difficult realm of copyright is to gauge how much of the content is an inspiration and what percentage is copied from another source without due credit. If you have created and given rights verbally and not in writing to anyone then it is legally with the creator of the content. Explaining that copyright is a very untested and uncharted area, Lall described a case against a movie rental library where movies were contributed and exchanged among members of the club. It was a non-commercial activity and sounded like “reasonable use” but the High Court ruled it as case of copyright infringement.

Siddarth Arya added that, “It is usually cheaper to get the permission than try to circumvent it.” Arya talked about the Indian Reprographic Rights Organisation (IRRO) which helps authors and publishers with copyrights, photocopying, and scanning issues. The publisher thus goes to one place, applies for the rights and gets it at reasonable price. There is a Reprographic Rights Organisation (RRO) in many countries and IRRO has bilateral agreements with them to help Indian authors and publishers.

Although the discussion mainly centred on illegal use and plagiarism and not strictly on piracy in publishing, the connections were there. It became clear that although this is not a difficult subject there is much to learn and a great amount of detail and compliance to sort out for both publishers and authors.

Delhi police cracks down on book piracy

Pirate warehouse and printing press sealed

The Publishers Association and Association of Publishers of India have met with success in their anti-piracy effort against local a publishers and printer in Delhi. The raids that took place in Delhi over two days – 21 and 22 August 2009 were conducted following an investigation in which the PA unearthed a major book pirating operation covering consumer trade, academic and STM (science, technology, and mathematics) books. Many of these had been illegally reproduced and printed in preparation for the start of the academic year and were intended for sale both on the streets of Delhi and around the country.

The police raid was carried out on a number of targets including the printing press. Over 3,500 illegal copies of trade books were seized, including Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, Harry Potter titles and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, all of which are established favourites in the Indian consumer market. Police also stopped the illegal production of three major academic titles, seizing 80,000 incomplete copies of these books as well as negatives and printing plates. Amongst the unfinished books were two software programming titles by Indian authors published by Tata Mcgraw Hill, and a GMAT guide published by John Wiley and Sons. The printing unit was closed down pending further investigation. An FIR under Section 63 and 65 of the Copyright Act, 1957 was registered at the New Ashok Nagar Police Station.

The PA and API state that illegal copying of textbooks and other titles has a lasting and irreparable impact on the investment their members make in reprinting their textbooks for the Indian market. In order to make them available at a reasonable price, these are purportedly published with the aim of enabling Indian students to access academic and educational material at a tenth of the US sale price.

Emma House, International Director of the UK Publishers Association said, “We are delighted the police responded to our complaint and swiftly took appropriate action. Illegal copying destroys the legitimate businesses of publishers who invest in measures to provide Indian students with cost effective access to UK and US published materials. We are extremely grateful to the Delhi police, and in particular Deputy Commissioner Anand Mohan, under whose command the raid was conducted with professionalism and skill.”

Sanjiv Goswami, President of The Association of Publishers of India said, “We congratulate the Delhi Police for their swift and effective action. Effective enforcement against illegal copying will further encourage international publishers to expand their low priced reprint program to benefit the students in India.”

The Publishers Association is a trade organisation serving book, journal and electronic publishers in the UK. The Association of Publishers of India is the representative body of foreign publishers to deal with all matters pertaining to the promotion and advancement of their presence in India and to protect the common interests of members and professionals engaged in publishing in the SAARC Countries. Naresh Khanna

Why a Content & Media newsletter in print?

We have published, printed and distributed copies of two 8-page newsletters called Content & Media at the Delhi Book Fair. These mainly cover the DBF and some of the events held at the show. Why have we brought out these newsletters with the same name as our blog?

As the book publishing industry grows, it will become more complex and interesting for the professionals who drive it. We also think that the professionals will want a networking platform. This could be a virtual platform driven by the Internet and by the blogs which are already proliferating -- but there is the possibility that at certain junctures such as book fairs it would be nice to have a regular print platform as well.

Thus this newsletter is named after our new blog – Content and Media Asia Pacific – contentmediaap.blogspot.com. Let us know if you think there is a need for this print newsletter to connect authors, literary agents, publishers, translators, distributors and book shops. Our own thought is that as book industry grows it should also become more fun. Let me know what you think at editor@ippgroup.in.