Sometimes it is  a bit hard to be an early adopter. But I like testing new things and I have a good track record for spotting successes and failures very early based on my first tests.

I am using my bicycle every day, all year round in Stockholm and love it. So I was naturally intrigued when I read about the upcoming ”invisible bike helmet” Hövding a year ago. It is an airbag contained in a collar around your neck. It is activated by motion control sensors when you are falling off your bike and inflates all around your head, offering radically better head protection than traditional bike helmets, this of course appealed to me.

I also admired the way this Swedish startup handled their PR. They hired professional photographers and models to produce spectacular product photos and seeded them to media all over the world, gaining a lot of publicity. So I immediately pre-ordered a Hövding, for delivery in spring 2011.

Production was delayed, so the first batch was not delivered until November. I eagerly unboxed my Hövding and immediately began to feel that this was perhaps not an ideal product for me. The next day, after having tried it on during 3 bike rides in the city I decided to return it.

Why? Well, here is my personal impression of Hövding.

1. It is definitely not invisible, it looks like a bulky big medical neck support and it weighs 0,7 kg, which is a lot heavier than a bike helmet.
2. It is quite difficult to put on, as you have to pull a small zipper under your chin, and then turn it on by fastening a small button. Both are hard to locate and feel that they are in the right positions since you cannot see them. After two days of frustration it still took me minutes to get the helmet fastened and activated, compared to around 4 secs with my old helmet. There must be ways to do this much easier and faster!
3. It gave me a suffocating feeling, wrapped around my neck, and limiting my ability to turn my head sideways. In this cold winter weather, I did manage to put a thin scarf under it, but then it felt very tight and I was still cold around my throat. I also suspect that it will be way to warm to wear in the summer, when I definitely want my neck to be cooled by the air.
4. Since it is quite heavy and bulky, it is a drag to carry around when not in use. And it costs €400 so I am worried about theft and forgetting it in places I visit. My old bike helmet I simply put inside my bike lock, so I never have to carry it around. Since Hövding  has a serial number and can be synced to my computer, I suggest that Hövding looks at the Find my iPhone function or something similar that might deter theft and help me locate it.

So I am back to my old bike helmet. I still love the concept of having a head airbag, but think that Hövding will not sell volumes until they have improved the design to make it much more convenient to use. And lowered the price.

I still have not seen any real independent tests of Hövding, will be interesting to see if others react like me.

                 

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updated Sep 3, 2011

The big discussion around ebooks is usually:
Should ebooks be cheaper than printed books?
This is the wrong question!

The pricing of printed books and ebooks:
two fundamentally different ways to charge for content

Buying an e-book cannot be compared to buying a printed book:

You buy a paper book. Then you own it, it’s yours. You can give it away or sell it as you like.

But you don’t buy  an ebook, you license it. You don’t own the file that you paid for and downloaded. You cannot give it away and you can certainly not sell it. However, Kindle and Nook allows you to loan your ebooks to friends for 14 days.

This means that the price of a printed book cannot easily be compared to the price of an ebook.

The gut reaction of many is that this difference is negative for ebooks: “If I pay for an ebook I want to own it, to be able to control it…” But in my view the licensing model of ebooks is actually better for us book lovers in several ways.

Frédéric Filloux expresses this difference and its benefits elegantly in the blog Monday Notes: “Buying a right of use instead of an actual file will profoundly change the landscape and the role of the different players.” He also writes about other consequences of this, so read his post!

Also, when you think of it, we are in fact used to this licensing model for other types of media, more on this further down here.

First about the price itself:

Why on earth is the discussion of ebook pricing still based on production and distribution costs?

People seem to think that since the cost to distribute ebooks is very low, they should be very cheap. This is just as silly as the old argument “Why are movie DVDs so expensive when a recordable DVD only costs $0.50?”

There are more problems with this reasoning:
The biggest part of the production cost is the authoring and the editing, not the physical printing.

The price of any product has never been set based on production costs only. We pay for the status of the brand, the design, the usability, the convenience of the delivery and packaging, for being first with a new product, for additional features etc. Why should digital media be any different?

For example: the price difference between a hard cover book and the same book as paperback is only slightly based on reduced printing costs, it is about access time and status, even though the content is identical.

It could actually be argued that ebooks should cost more than printed books, since the ebook can have enhanced functionalities that offers increased reader value compared to a printed book, (see my post “Where’s the e in ebooks?“).

Move from ownership to accessibility

I have a feeling that we will let go of this urge to own and possess many types of books (but not coffee table books etc) just like we have already stopped buying CDs with music.

The obvious pricing model then becomes subscriptions. “Subscribe to books? What a silly idea!” you might react. But consider the giant book club industry? And an ever bigger subscription based media business that has been around for 50 years:

The Cable-TV model

We are used to paying for cable-TV packages, such as bundles of channels for sports, feature films, child programs, documentaries etc. And the ownership of these programs are similar to ebooks: you can record them for personal use, but you do not own them and you cannot resell them. We have never seen this as a problem, so why not implement the same model for ebooks?

The subscription model is already growing fast in digital music, with services like Spotify, Grooveshark and Rdio

iPad magazines are moving from selling individual magazine apps towards subscriptions, such as Popular Science,  Wired Magazine and The New Yorker.

And there are a growing number of ebook publishers that are now starting to go this way, for example 24symbols.

Ebbok subscriptions will soon become a very important part of the ebook business, once the publishers learn how to reach out and demonstrate the advantages. But there are several other interesting pricing models that will also be important in the digital transition of the book industry.

I will dive deeper into the subscription model and other ways to monetize ebooks in my upcoming post: “New business models for ebooks”, so stay tuned!

                 

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updated Sep 1, 2011
This is a long post, but with many goodies if you are into books:

1. Basic e-features that enhance the reading experience
2. How to expand the life span of books
3. How to help the readers to drive your sales
4. Powerful sorting and searching
5. How to encourage book reading with tracking and reminders
6. Five reasons why ebooks aren’t here yet – or are they?
   

Ebook lovers usually have these basic reasons for liking ebooks:

1. You can bring your ebooks along easily on commutes and travels
2. You save shelf space

They usually don’t mention the core of ebooks, that the they are digital and therefore have more functionalities than printed books. As I pointed out in my previous post, “Early ebooks and why they failed“, already at the beginning of ebooks 20 years ago the main selling point was the enhanced digital functionality. So why are ebooks today still not using much of all these digital features?

One main reason for this is fragmentation. There are numerous user interface designs and no common standard for how these e-features look or work. And conservative book publishers still don’t see the value of user communication, social media communities etc. So most ebooks are just converted print books with no e-functionalities.

What  e-features, you say?

Well, there are a number of smart e-features already in avying degrees in different ebook applications.
For example, see these exemplary video clip examples from the UK publisher Enhanced Editions (scroll down and watch the short videos of each feature).

These are basic functions that should be integrated in all kinds of ebooks:

1. Notes, being able to write my own notes into the ebook and decide if I want to share them with others, see other’s public notes
2. Highlighting text
3. Bookmarks
4. User-selectable fonts, font sizes, background colours (for example light text on dark background for reading in dark rooms)
5. Online sharing: being able to easily recommend the book to my friends by email, Facebook, Twitter etc
6. Rate the book online and read both professional and user reviews
7. Copy quotes from the text
8. Search for text in the book
9. Multiple-device support: being able to read it on my laptop, mobile, tablet, and auto-sync where I am in the book
10. Integrated audio book: Listen to a voice reading the book, for example when you are driving is a feature that is now becoming more common, supported for example in Apple’s iBooks and in applications like these:

A demo of the integrated audiobook function from Enhanced Editions of their ebook novel “The Death of Bunny Munro” as read by the author himself,  Nick Cave (highly recommended ebook!)

Then there is the whole spectrum of more advanced things that enhance certain types of ebook, blurring the distinctions between books, games, learning etc:

1. Video inserted into the ebook, either illustrating the content or a short talk by the author.
2. Animations that explain and visualize the content
3. Interactivity such as game functions, move around in photo panoramas, play sound effects or music, quizzes etc.

But the above is just the first step, there are many more e’s that should be utilized now that we have the online possibilities to improve the reading experience and business of ebooks!

E as in Extended life time

One of the biggest problems in the printed book business is not discussed much, but it is solved by ebooks. Or it could be solved, with a bit of forward thinking!

It’s about shelf life, the short longevity of printed books.

All publications, including books, can be divided in two types

1. Short life-span, needs to be updated often: non-fiction, user manuals, school books, most management books, travel guides etc
2. Long life-span: Novels, cook books, some types of reference books etc

E as in Enlighten your friends

Help the readers to drive your sales! Make it very easy to spread the word about an ebook they like. And make it equally easy to receive such a recommendation and act on it by buying the book directly, on the spot, even if you are on a bus.

More on this in my previous post Stories of spreading ebooks

E as in Evolution of storage order

Imagine that you have a number of book shelves in different rooms at home, but you could only put books from one specific publishing house in each book shelf. So to find a book you first have to know the name of the publisher, then in what room and book shelf the book is in. Not very reader-friendly, eh? Well that’s the way it is with ebooks now!

There are numerous methods for organizing the books in your physical book shelf, as described in this funny article in the Guardian, or with this innovative book shelf tree branch. In these book shelves you have a good overview of your books.

Compare this with your collection of ebooks: You cannot search for book titles, authors or content,  and you cannot sort them with tags for different categories.

Your ebook collection is just a database, sitting inside a powerful computer. So technically they should be possible to sort in any way you want!

With a physical book shelf you have to choose between sorting the books alphabetically, by the title or the autor, or sort them per category. With a data base you should be able to sort your books in all these ways and more!

Here are my current ebook apps in my iPad:

Some of these apps, like Kindle and iBooks,  contain multiple books of many kinds that I have purchased from these ebook stores. Others are independent publishers of niche types of ebooks or services for ebook lovers. And some are for individual ebooks. Can you tell the difference?

Looking at this collection of icons, how do I find a certain book that I have on my iPad? I can certainly not search for an author’s name or a specific word of phrase that I know is inside one of my ebooks, like I can in every other type of document I have on my computer.

So I want a view where I can see and search for all my ebooks, independent of its type or publisher.

E as in Enhanced tracking and reminders

I usually read several books simultaneously, and sometimes forget what book I was reading. With printed books it is somewhat easier: I see it lying on my bedside table. With ebooks, it is very easy to lose track of what books I have started reading. In my screen shot above from my iPad there is no way I can see what books I have started or finished reading.

So how about a clock-type little visual indicator on top of all book icons, showing how much I have read? It would also be nice to have automatic reminders: “Henrik, this is Sunday afternoon and you have 11 unread ebooks and 4 that you have started reading”.

And a function (like Runkeeper) where I can automatically post the reading status of my books in my Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Wired Magazine had an interesting article in June 2011: 5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet.  In the article, the author argues:
“There are some aspects to print book culture that e-books can’t replicate (at least not easily) — yet.”

I agree with some of these reasons, but find others can be fixed now or are already here:

1) An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.

I also have this problem. But as I say here, it is possible to create smart reminder systems and social media functions that inspire me to finish my books. I have not seen these functions anywhere yet, here is room for innovation!

2) You can’t keep your books all in one place

Yes, indeed, see above!

3) Notes in the margins help you think.

How come the author has missed that this feature has been in ereaders since 1992? Perhaps because it is sometimes not so easy to understand how to use it, we need more intuitive interface designs.

4) E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.

5) E-books can’t be used for interior design.

This is not a problem really, just old-fashioned thinking. Like “kerosene lamps are so beautiful that they will never disappear”. We will continue to buy beautiful coffee-table books to decorate our homes. The ebooks we will use to decorate our social media profiles.

                 

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1. Ebooks from 1992: not so different from today!
2. Why did ebooks fail in the 90s?
3. 2011: breakthrough for ebooks!
4. Whats’s next?

Amazon started the recent ebook growth in late 2007 with the Kindle e-reader. And Apple put another big booster into ebooks in 2010 with the iPad. In February 2011 another milestone was passed, when ebooks became the biggest format of all kinds of books in the US.

But nothing is new under the sun, ebooks have been around for a long time, with different names and formats and readers. So why are ebooks taking off now?

I see many similarities between today’s disruptive book market and the multimedia business that I worked in during the 90s when my company Ahead Multimedia produced numerous interactive presentations and learning programs on CD-ROM. They had chapters, headlines, body text and illustrations, just like ebooks. we called it “interactive multimedia”. They looked like many of the ebooks you see now, but they also had more interactivity, animations and video than most ebooks have today.

Another similarity was the problems of competing and incompatible hardware and software platforms and varying screen sizes. My company thrived because we produced B2B communication for corporate clients so we could control the delivery platforms.

Here is the first ebook that I bought:

The novel Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton, an ebook on a 1,4 MB floppy disc, introduced in 1992!

This was the first title in the Expanded Books series produced by the famous Voyager Company, these ebooks were designed for the brand new Apple Powerbook computers. I attended the launch at the MacWorld expo in San Francisco in January 1992.

Note that they called it Expanded books, their pitch was that it offered extended functionality compared to printed books. “Electronic text is a dynamic medium that enables you to become a more active reader”

Notice the features such as being able to dog-ear a page or put a paper clip on it, and type in margin notes, search for any words in the book etc.

Notice also the absence of all communication tools, remember this was before internet and email so there was no social media or online communities to share your book experiences with!

Also note that they used real- life metaphors like adding a paper clip or dog ear a page, something that we still have not broken free from, compare with the wooden book shelves in Apple’s latest iBooks application:

I think it is time to move to user interfaces that build on today’s digital possibilities and get rid of these old real-life metaphors! I am glad to see that others are also realizing this, such as Swedish startup Readmill in this post:
When we founded Readmill there were a few things we were fed up with. One was imitations of wooden bookshelves, the other that everyone was building closed ecosystems where no innovation could thrive. We decided to go the other way.

So why did those early ebooks fail?

1. They only worked on Macs and there were few Macs back then
2. They were difficult to install, the users had to manually install fonts and manage the application memory etc. (This to some degree remains a problem, just try to buy an ebook in the epub file format online and install it on your computer today…)
3. Cumbersome distribution on floppies (then CD-ROMs came, but they were just as cumbersome)

But of course the main factors were:

1. People where not used to consuming media on a computer, and there were no mobiles or tablet computers.
2. People were not ready to pay for digital media (that problem still persists to some degree, 20 years later…)
3. There has been a djungle of platforms and formats for ebooks and ereaders introduced in the 90s and 00s, see these enormous charts.

2011 – the breakthrough year for ebooks

Right now it seems that in the US, the Kindle and Nook dedicated ebook readers are leading the pack, while the iPad is totally ruling among the more general-purpose tablet computers. Note that the Kindle ebooks can be read on Kindle ereaders as well as on PCs, Macs, iPads, iPhones, Android mobiles etc, according to Amazon’s vision “buy once, read anywhere”.

So the ebook took a long time coming, but it finally looks like the time is ripe now and the ebook market is booming, especially in the US and other English-speaking markets. The ebook market is growing everywhere, but in much varying degrees in different countries, here is a report from spring 2011 on the global market in 2010.

What’s next?

                 

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I love attending conferences and seminars for the inspiration it gives me to listen to interesting talks and meet other curious people of all kinds. But I am usually also frustrated that the formats and the way conferences are organized is not evolving more, I see so many ways that conferences could bring much more value to attendees, organizers and sponsors.

So I have been accumulating a lot of analysis and ideas on how to organise conferences and gathered a part of it in my post “Conferences Do’s and Don’ts“.

I have now updated and revised this post based on my latest experiences.
It is soon getting too long for a blog post, maybe I should write a book?

So please enjoy my new edition of  ”Conferences Do’s and Don’ts“, all comments are welcome!

                 

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1. A revolution in finding books you want to read!
2. Easy recommendations turns ebooks into social objects

I started reading some ebooks in the 90s, but it was not until I bought my first iPad a year ago that I started buying ebooks instead of paper books whenever they are available.

I really enjoy the comfort of having my ebooks available and synchronized  for reading on my iPad, mobile and computer.

But I also discovered that I have started to buy many more ebooks now, and in new ways, as illustrated in this story:

Recently I took a trip to my vacation home in the Stockholm archipelago with this ferry:

During the 25 minute ferry ride I read some blogs on my iPad. My eye caught a story about a new ebook publisher called Atavist, publishing original non-fiction journalism laced with video, audio and layers of information.

That of course appealed to my multimedia production experience, so my finger touched the link to Atavist and this appeared in seconds on my iPad:

I played the video and immediately realized that this is my kind of ebooks; short, non-fiction journalism with multimedia features, love it!

Then I browsed the titles and found the story Lifted,  about the big helicopter robbery in Stockholm 2010, a drama familiar to all Swedes. Seconds later I had spent $2.99 buying it in the App Store.

A new faster way to discover and buy books!

So, most important, only minutes after first discovering Atavist in the blog post, I had bought and started reading the ebook Lifted, while still riding the ferry!

This is a fundamental change in how we discover and buy books. Before, when we read or heard about an interesting book, we hade to make a note of it and then either go buy it at the book store or order it online at Amazon etc. Now this threshold is lowered with two improtant factors, in this order:

1. We can buy a recommended ebook in seconds and download it wirelessly by just tapping links on our e-readers like the iPad.
2. It is very easy to pay for ebooks (mostly, at least with the Apple App Store and Kindle book store) and the prices are now often very affordable.

This changes our consumer behaviours, opening great possibilities for new publishers like Atavist.

Easy recommendations turns ebooks into social objects

A week later I am having lunch at our coworking office space The Hub. I tell a guy sitting next to me about Atavist and how I bought the ebook Lifted on the ferry. Turns out he also enjoys this kind of books, so he flips open his iPad and visits Atavist.net on his web browser.

Seconds later, he also has bought the Lifted ebook for $2.99, thanking me for the tip! All this while we are eating our pastas.

Ebooks are transforming both our reading and buying habits!

                 

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