System contents personalisation
Abstract:
Throughout history sources of information have been a model of the representation of knowledge and have provided information efficiently and precisely. Computerisation represented an initial change that made it easy to store and retrieve information in that it offered greater efficiency and performance. The internet constituted the second transformation with its modification of access systems and the availability of sources. Web 2.0 has been the third major change and has introduced collaborative tools that allow personalisation in the use of applications and also increases their visibility. One of the most interesting Web 2.0 innovations are authoring tools that provide a range of services for users of the sources in the manner mentioned above. In this chapter we analyse the personalisation of system contents in various sources of information on books and some of the most significant scientific editorial platforms. Amazon.com’s role is examined owing to its influence on the development of the eBook industry.
Introduction
Web 2.0 has changed the configuration, structure, and practices associated with sources of information (Rebuin, 2011). It focuses mainly on collaboration and exchange and promotes self-expression, person-to-person interaction, and the opportunity for a genuine interactivity experience (Brooks, 2008). Web 2.0 represents an emerging set of applications that have a huge potential for improving communications, allowing collaboration, and encouraging innovation; they are interactive, rich in context, and easy to use. The explosion of contents generated by users reflects the immense potential of Web 2.0 for the improving of communications, which allows collaboration and the encouraging of innovation on an unprecedented scale (Chua, 2010).
It is not only the presentation, characteristics, and uses of the primary sources that have changed, such as magazines, books, doctoral theses, contributions to congresses, directories, encyclopaedias, dictionaries, guidebooks, etc., but also the tools used for their bibliographical monitoring, storage, and administration, which gives rise to models governed by exchange, aggregation, collaboration, and dissemination (Shang, 2011). In general terms it can be affirmed that sources of primary information have followed the path of opening-up and collaboration, introducing systems of consultation and collaborative dissemination that have allowed greater transparency and visibility, and generating figures that have introduced new forms of scientific communication, such as blogs, wikis, and certain applications of social networks (Arthur, 2010). Secondary sources have developed in a similar manner (Armstrong, 2011), following the logic of the internal structure of scientific literature, according to which any primary source of information articulates secondary control systems that operate in syntony with it, implementing collaborative services on its platforms and increasing their useability and the personalisation of their use, or generating new tools for drawing up and administering contents, such as repositories or social partners of the Mendeley or CiteUlike type (Alonso et al., 2010).
On the other hand, the distance travelled by either type is not uniform and the times cannot be assimilated. Each documentary type has its own special characteristics that identify it as a source, which depend on its history, on underlying editorial practice, on the community of users to which it is linked, on publishing and reading traditions, on the social context of the transfer of information, on the latter’s type, on its greater or lesser need for updating, and on researchers’ needs (Zeng et al., 2011), which determines to some extent the speed of the changes (Postigo, 2011). Books constitute an example of this: for over 500 years they have been associated with an unchanging system of publication with few changes in the manner of their presentation and their publication processes. Recently, however, the technological innovations involved in reading devices have begun to generate major changes along the lines of the Web 2.0 philosophy (Lichtenberg, 2011). The large publishing groups have embraced this philosophy by incorporating features and services that are more and more useable and collaborative, such as Springer (Jacsó, 2011).
One of the most novel and interesting elements in the use of sources of information are what we have called personalisation tools, i.e. all those resources allowing participation, the personalisation of features, or the involvement of the reader or researcher in the articulation, structure, and administration of the source content. The objective of this chapter is to analyse the authoring tools in the main aggregators and publishing house trusts devoted to both academic books and titles of general interest, so as to examine the underlying features in the development of publication resources. The innovations introduced transform them into sources of information with an added value inherent to the collaboration and participation policies characteristic of Web 2.0.
Ways in which contents can be personalised
For this analysis a series of resources have been selected by taking as a reference the three main aggregators of academic books (Ebrary, Safari, and Questia) and the three main general platforms (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google Books). In this analysis the following aspects have been taken into account:
Creation of personal accounts linked to the site.
Configuration of account preferences.
Organising the investigation in files.
The possibility of sharing files.
Creating information alerts by means of predefined terms or search records.
Creating labels for the works.
Underlining, highlighting, annotating, and revising the works.
User accounts have been opened on each of the platforms so as to check the operation of the latter and of each of the aspects analysed.
Results
Safari
Safari Books was founded in July 2001 as a joint venture between O’Really Media and the Pearson Technology Group, two publishers of books on information and technology. The catalogue of this successful alliance was acquired by numerous libraries (Fernández, 2007). The platform has incorporated numerous Web 2.0 applications that allow the user to intervene on the resources that it offers. The personalisation of the work environment is very significant as it allows the creating and adding of files and the revising, annotating, and labelling of their contents, sharing them by syndication, and the assessment and revision of the contents that can be shared with anyone accessing the platform. Notes, comments, highlights, and interventions are possible anywhere in the text. The system allows the creation of Mashup, featuring the original text and the corresponding comments. Searches can be saved and any of them can lead to reading suggestions on similar subjects. When they are saved in the so-called Smart Folders, the content is updated every time the file is opened. The Safari website allows downloading in various formats (pdf, epub, mobi) and for reading devices such as Kindle and iPad, according to user preference. It has a test area in beta (Safari Labs) that has been conceived as a place where the users participating collaborate more closely, proposing products and services to improve resource performance. Another form of user interaction with the author is that of the documents known as Rough Cuts, which are unpublished works provided on the website so that comments can be made about them and exchanged with the author. They concentrate on leading research subjects. Videos that have been produced by specialists on a subject and that can be shared can also be found on the site. In the same way as other documents the videos can be revised, annotated, and labelled. Documents can be shared through social networks (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) by means of the creation of a widget to generate a URL bit.ly and/or by sending an e-mail with the content you wish to share. So as to make the consultation of contents flexible, these will be available for consultation from iPad (with a specific app) and from Kindle, with the use of their reading applications and with the additional implementation of all their features.
Questia
Questia has over 72 000 complete books from over 300 publishers and two million articles from the most prestigious periodic publications, journals, and newspapers. Questia users can locate and read all pages of the works of the collection that have been published and revised, which have been carefully selected by professional librarians and range from literary classics to the most up-to-date and influential works in the fields of humanities and social sciences. Questia also offers a personal work space with a set of leading-edge research tools for note-taking, underlining part of the text, quoting materials correctly, and automatically creating bibliographies with a suitable format. The personalisation work tools allow the following operations:
Saving and organising all notes and text highlights in personal files.
Transferring books and articles to your personal library for quick reference.
Creating footnotes and bibliographies automatically with a format in any style.
Furthermore, Questia also provides another interesting reading personalisation tool that goes a step further than conventional requirements in the context of the Web 2.0. This is Lexile, which is a system that allows the user to read those texts that are suitable for his/her level of knowledge thanks to a measuring scale that assesses them. The Lexile scale of advanced search results has three levels: basic, intermediate, and advanced. These degrees of difficulty can be applied to personal preferences so as to access documents that only correspond to one of them.
A Lexile text measurement is based on three factors indicating the degree of difficulty, the frequency of the words, and the length of the sentence. Other factors concerning the relationship between the reader and the book are also used, which are: the content, the reader’s age and interests, the design and legibility of the work, etc.
Bibliographical tools are also part of the personal work environment and allow the inclusion of routines that facilitate research and the use of more efficient sources:
The inserting of quotes allows the making of notes with the correct format in the research.
The adding of a bibliography allows the marking of a book or an article so that it can be included in the work being carried out.
The drawing up of a bibliography based on books and articles that have been quoted or marked in the personal work area. This characteristic also offers the option of including books or articles that have been highlighted, annotated, or added to one’s personal bookcase even if they are not quoted in the work.
Ebrary
The basic idea of Ebrary (www.ebrary.com) is to allow anyone to glance through the complete text of a book free of charge, as you would in any bookshop or library; payment is only due when the decision is made to buy the book or part of it.
In the same way as Questia or Safari, Ebrary also includes a set of personal work tools that make the source more than a mere information and consultation tool. As well as allowing the organisation of the results of research in files and offering the possibility of sharing them, it can also export registers to Endnote/Citavi and Refworks. It permits the marking, highlighting, annotation, etc. of the texts and the drawing up of a bibliography in different formats with the existing works in the personal work area. One of the most interesting features is the possibility of using a set of search tools (Info Tools) that allow linking with many other resources while reading a text (dictionaries, encyclopaedias, websites, definitions, searches by author, biographies, news, videos, images, and the exporting of the register of the work being consulted).
Amazon
This company stands out in the non-academic field with over one million titles on its database as a paradigm of the personalisation developments of user information. On its conventional book sales platform Amazon already offered the possibility of giving one’s opinion on books, of assessing them, of having access to revisions by other readers, of labelling the work, of taking part in discussion boards either on existing threads or by creating new ones, of reading notes made by users from their Kindle (Highlights), of receiving recommendations of works from search records kept by Amazon, etc. It has now taken things a step further to allow greater personalisation in the use of the platform through the Kindle website, Amazon.com. With this tool the socialization of reading attains new heights. Through their personal account users can annotate the works they read, publish notes through the platform, and follow someone; i.e. they can get to know what anyone who interests the reader is noting and publishing as they take down their notes and also get to know the passages that have been underlined or highlighted most frequently. When a book is marked as having been read, the Daily Review resource gives access to its most outstanding ideas as from the annotations that have been made.
Amazon offers an extra service regarding the reading of a work and participation, which is that of self-publication. With CreateSpace, Amazon allows anyone registered with a personal account to publish a work. One of the most interesting options of this tool is the possibility of following the process of the creation of the works of other authors (Preview Gallery) and of giving an opinion on them to create a collaborative reading community that is permanently active. Finally, this way of bringing together services for exchanging information, reading, and recommendations uses Shelfari (http://www.shelfari.com/), which it acquired in 2008 to allow full linking between the social reading features and the eBooks of Amazon’s database. Later in this chapter we will study the Amazon phenomenon independently owing to its effect on the development of the eBook industry and business.
Barnes & Noble
With one million titles on the market, some of which are of an exclusive nature, this company has also decided to include platform personalisation tools that go beyond the mere consultation of traditional sources. The platform allows the creation of a personal bookshelf, revising the work, assessing it, labelling it, sharing comments with other users, and using social networks to give your opinion on the work. In the same way as Amazon, Barnes & Noble have included a self-publishing scheme: Pub It. It has been developed so that independent publishers and authors can distribute their works in digital form through B&N’s eBookstore. The titles are directly added to the eBookstore, which is one of the largest digital content catalogues in the world. Each eBook is available for sale between 24 and 72 hours after the file has been uploaded to the eBookstore. The standard format is ePub. If the files are in Microsoft Word, TXT, HTML, or RTF, the platform will convert them to ePub at no extra cost.
Google Books
Google Books allows the creation of a personalised library in which one can organise, create reviews of, assess, and find a selection of books. These collections are published on-line, which means they can be accessed from anywhere with access to the Google account. The ‘public’ bookshelves are available to those who know the collection’s URL (Uniform Resource Locator). By means of the affiliation program Google allows authors to upload their books and make them visible and project them through tools such as Adword that the system makes available. Through the Readum application, a plug-in available for Mozilla, any intervention on a book from Google Books can be shared in the Facebook or Twitter user accounts.
OverDrive
The most popular eBook lending service model in public libraries has been developed by the United States digital service company OverDrive.1OverDrive allows the installation of a platform that adapts to the library’s website as far as design, logos, and colours are concerned. From it we can access the loan or the reserving of a copy if it is not available, as the platform allows only a limited number of uses. The user can decide whether to borrow the book for 14 or 21 days; at the end of this period the Digital Rights Management (DRM) prevents the book from being reread as it disappears from our reading device. The platform offers us a varying gallery of various types of documents, such as games, audio books, and other multimedia products, as well as a large catalogue of eBooks. It can be parameterised to display the books most frequently lent, the latest novelties, books recently returned, essays, science fiction, etc. We can locate the titles by means of a search engine that includes an advanced search option. Each register gives detailed information about the book: a description of the content, information on the author, formats available, or whether it has DRM; it also includes a module of recommended books or readings. OverDrive has recently included a gallery of free titles called Additional eBooks Always Available, which contains works free of rights that any user can access.
The information on a book that we ask to borrow is very extensive: its availability, system of digital rights, information on formats, on the author, a description of the contents, extracts and the voting system, and recommendations through social networks such as Twitter or Facebook. Another of its advantages is the possibility of downloading a sample of the opening pages of the book before requesting the loan. In this way we can decide whether the title selected really interests us.
If we decide to proceed with the loan, we must select the book or books we are interested in and identify ourselves with our reader number and the password we have chosen. The loan period varies from 7 to 14 days depending on the library. To download the book in our reading device, we need to have installed the Adobe Digital Editions system.
A curious feature of the system is that the book cannot be returned before the stipulated time, and that while we are using it other users may reserve it but not borrow it. It also offers the possibility of buying the book in an on-line shop; if it is available on Kindle it can be purchased with all the personal elements that the user has added during the lending period. This has given rise to criticism from consumer associations as it is considered to be an invasion of the client’s privacy.
OverDrive now has an application for mobile devices known as the OverDrive Media Console that allows the consultation and the lending of eBooks from a mobile phone, and a geo-application known as Search OverDrive in which we can search for a book and find out in which libraries near the user it is available.
Freading
Library Ideas LLC offers Freading,2 which is an alternative eBook lending service for libraries that is already being used experimentally in over fifty libraries in the United States. The difference between this service and that of competitors such as OverDrive or Axis 360 is that it is based on simultaneous and unlimited lending in a pay per use system that gives libraries access to tens of thousands of eBooks at no initial cost. This gives wider access and effective pay per use by means of a lending rate for each download.
Freading gives other additional advantages:
An initial collection of 20 000 titles that costs nothing in advance.
Simultaneous and unlimited lending service.
Multiple access to all titles.
No annual fee for the use and maintenance of the platform.
Regular inclusion of new titles.
This system allows libraries to lend as many copies of each title as they wish at no increased cost. As it is based on the pay per use model, each library pays between 50 cents and 2 dollars; renewals cost less. The books have DRM and the loan period is two weeks.
Freading is also a viable system if publishers decide to develop a business model in libraries, as they themselves negotiate the inclusion of their titles in the catalogue instead of on a platform. This allows on the one hand the creation of a flow of constant income and on the other maximises the value of its products, as every time a book is borrowed from the library they receive payment by virtue of the pay per use system.
The procedure is a simple one; in the first place and before initiating the session, the user must have installed Adobe Digital Editions and authorised his/her equipment with his/her Adobe ID. Adobe Digital Editions is the tool used to download eBooks in ePub with the DRM. When the loan period expires the book will automatically be returned. Secondly, the user must access his/her Freading account of the library and identify him/herself as a user. Thirdly, he/she searches for the book he/she wishes to download, clicks on ‘download’, and then on ‘open’. Finally he/she must go to Adobe Digital Editions to read the book or download it to the authorised device.
The Adobe Digital Editions software limits access to each eBook to two weeks as an initial period. However, the user can extend the loan period for a further two weeks. Most renewals are free. Each book available on the platform can be voted and recommended by personal e-mail or on social networks.
The system is used by means of a series of tokens that the library purchases. The tokens are virtual coins used for download exchanges, of which a consignment is shared out weekly by the library. When a book is chosen, the number of tokens appearing on the book’s label will be deducted from the account. The user’s capacity for downloading eBooks from the portal of the library’s website depends on the number of tokens that the library has bought in advance. The user also has a weekly token limit; if this limit is exceeded the books cannot be downloaded even if they are available at the library.
There are three different token prices for a book; downloads cost 4, 2, or 1 token/s depending on the value established by the publisher. In most cases novelties cost 4 tokens, after a time they are reduced to 2, and finally after a longer period they fall to 1. The value in tokens thus generally depends on how novel the book is. In some cases, however, the publisher may choose another criterion such as popularity. Unused tokens accumulate every week until the end of the month. At this point unused tokens are erased from the user’s account, with the exception of the number of tokens transferred by the library to the user’s account on a weekly basis.
The Amazon.com phenomenon
The Internet has no frontiers as it is a global market. When we refer to global competition in the digital era there are four multinationals that corner the market: Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. Amazon, the biggest eBusiness company in the world, is transforming the United States economy with a formula based on cost saving on infrastructures that is characteristic of on-line business models. This allows a large turnover that is further favoured by its pioneering nature in the sector and means that very competitive prices can be offered while an acceptable level of profit is maintained. Moreover, the magnitude of its business allows it in its turn to negotiate very attractive agreements with wholesalers and manufacturers, and even to reach agreements with retailers and authors so as to place their products on the largest global sale showcase, the Amazon.com platform, in an environment of users who are becoming more and more accustomed to reading in digital format. After some years of ups and downs, Amazon’s business picked up thanks to Kindle: in 2011 it invoiced 50% more than the previous year with a figure of 34 200 million dollars. In less than 15 years the company has gone from having 158 employees in its Seattle factory to having over 30 000 all over the world. Its market value is 100 000 million dollars (73 000 million euros). This has been possible thanks to the fact that on-line sales systems have a very efficient cost structure, as there are a number of expenses that other business types must maintain and that on-line businesses can avoid. In July 2010 it announced that was already selling more digital books than printed books including both hardbacks and paperbacks.
The process is, however, harming small and medium-sized enterprises such as bookshops, as these do not have the necessary scale economies to be able to compete with the large platforms. This is the case of long-established bookshop groups in the United States such as Borders, one of the main North American chains, which has not been capable of withstanding the pressure of the digital market. It did not follow the example of its competitor Barnes & Noble, which decided to embrace the digital business by selling eBooks and a device of its own, the Nook; the latter has allowed it to continue trading although not without difficulties. It is, however, also true that multinational platforms have accelerated the destruction process initiated by hypermarkets, which according to book sales data in most developed countries had the highest sales before the advent of the eBook. A study carried out by the Mckinsey agency (Mckinsey, 2011) reveals that for each job destroyed by the arrival of the Internet 2.6 new ones have been created. Contrary to what could be expected, therefore, the Internet phenomenon has had a positive effect on employment, as in this environment industries related to logistics appear that need additional personnel. This is obliging the traditional bookshop to change its business model and reinvent itself in a creative destruction process that implies an increase in service levels and also provides users with more personalized services (Varsavsky, 2011).
As we have heard so many times as part of the legend of American entrepreneurs, the company originated in Seattle in 1994 when Jeff Bezos, one of that race of young entrepreneurs from the Silicon Valley area that includes Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, started his business from his garage and a month later was distributing printed books in 50 American states and 45 countries all over the world. Subsequently the on-line bookshop, which has used data from the ISBN catalogue and has enriched them with covers and contents, diversified its business model to include selling music CDs and DVDs; it is currently a true superstore for all kinds of products, although its raison d’être is that of a digital bookshop. In 1997 it was listed on the Nasdaq index (the New York electronic stock exchange). After several crises owing to its aggressive investment policy and a relative profit margin, in 2007 it picked up again thanks to a new product, the Kindle device for reading eBooks that serves as a terminal and reading tool for the contents sold by Amazon. The process can be summarised by saying that initially it maintained a business infrastructure of physical products but subsequently diversified its market to include other articles, finally concentrating on digital products.
Amazon’s catalogue currently includes 2.5 million books, 450 000 CDs, 130 000 DVDs, and 15 000 video games, as well as other products such as household appliances, clothes, and toys. It has over 140 million users from all over the world.
All is grist to Amazon’s mill as it monopolises all links of the publishing chain; it is at the same time a publisher, a distributing agent, a sales platform, and a bookseller. Its book selling methods concentrate on two aspects:
Marketplace is the system that allows small booksellers and writers to sell their products on Amazon and benefit from the high visibility of the platform in exchange for part of the profit. When it negotiates with local publishing houses, it stipulates that eBooks must be sold at least 30% cheaper than printed copies and recommends that the price should be between 9 and 11 euros, although the final decisions as to the price and the books circulated lie with the publisher.
There are various options to make the contents of an author or publisher available on the Amazon Kindle platform. The options depend on the nature of the publications, file formats, resources, technical knowledge, and the general eBook sales model. In order to do so it has all the necessary documentation and all the publishing tools in Amazon, which will help self-publication on the platform.3 It therefore maintains Kindle Publishing Programs4 on the Internet with the necessary tools for self-publication or for a publisher to market its catalogue on Kindle Store.
In the case of an author or small publisher the Kindle Direct Publishing option is available.
In the case of a publisher that wishes to convert a large number of titles, the Kindle Plug-in for Adobe InDesign or KindleGen software is available.
Once the titles are available on Kindle Amazon, the publisher will be paid for each title sold.
The Amazon.com business (as occurs with other multinationals) is based on a global scale economy that is segmented and vertically integrated to cover all links of the publishing chain and all spheres of the business, from leisure books to text books.
Segmentation and diversification
Segmentation allows sustainability and minimal risk, as if part of the business is not operating in a satisfactory manner it can be sustained by another. This is especially so as Amazon is a business essentially based on an aggressive price and investment policy.
In the case of Amazon.com this phenomenon occurs in two ways:
1. On the one hand the diversification of products, based on a business that started out as a bookshop selling physical books on-line that branched out to sell other products such as music, videos, and subsequently many others ranging from household appliances to clothes, toys, etc.
2. And on the other the diversification of the market; one of the features of the eBook market is its diversification. More than any other business Amazon is a recurring example of this concept, which was drawn up by the economist Chris Anderson in a book published in 2004 with the title Long Tail. Until that time the market was based on the sale of a few high-sale products. Amazon created a new economy based on the sale of many products in the low sales niche. In other words, a large part of Amazon’s success is due to its buying and selling books that can only be found on its platform: books that are out of print, bookshop collections, the purchase of books expurgated in libraries that at a given moment a user somewhere in the world is looking for and which will only be found on Amazon. In this way works that other publishers were not interested in are put into circulation.
The Long Tail concept is based on the fact that all publishing catalogues include a small group of books with a high demand compared with another group with a very low demand. For the latter group the option of printing on demand can be chosen so that these books are always available, even if there is not enough demand to guarantee the profitability of printing a run. In this way it is not necessary to focus the business on few products; it is possible to minimise and diversify the risk by putting our faith in other authors with a smaller market niche. We thus have two market types (Anderson, 2004):
1. The mass market, concentrating on the high performance of a few.
2. The market niche, based on the sum or accumulation of the low sales of many products to equal or exceed the profits of the above type.
This concept is even more evident in the digital format as the risks are minimised. Such a large initial investment is no longer necessary owing to the immateriality of the book; neither is it necessary to print a minimum run of copies that may not be sold subsequently, owing to which product diversification can be even greater. Amazon is thus using highly profitable formulae such as self-publishing (Kindle Direct Publishing5) with a minimum investment, at very low prices (around $1), and a 70/30 share-out of the profits (i.e. 70% of the sales go to the author and 30% to Amazon). The result is that some authors that use this formula such as John Locke, Tina Folson, and Amanda Hocking share the bestseller lists with highly successful authors such as Steig Larson, Lori Foster, and Dan Brown.
This diversification of business is also affecting libraries. In the United States Amazon has reached an agreement with OverDrive, the main lending platform for digital contents in libraries, so that those users who have borrowed an eBook from a public library and wish to continue reading it or to buy it on Amazon can do so without losing all the personal elements they have added to the book such as annotations, highlighting, and marking. This agreement has been opposed by consumer associations because it affects user privacy. The process consists of the library lending a book to a user who has a Kindle reading device; the user is sent to the Amazon website to complete the transacion and subsequently receives an e-mail from the company with the title of the book and with an offer to buy it or renew it at the library (in this order). This does not occur with other reading devices from other brand names. In this manner Amazon holds a register of the books that the user borrows from a public library.
Globalisation
Half of the company’s income comes from outside the United States, mainly from European countries. Amazon already had a warehouse in Europe which it keeps secret to achieve better distribution. However, its expansion policy has led to differences of opinion in various countries such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, China, and Spain. Client acceptance from the different countries has been uneven and mediatised by local policies. In the United Kingdom the integration has been a success, as to a certain extent the British market is an extension of the North American market and has been favoured by the dynamics of the latter. In France and Germany Amazon has not been so well received, as most of the opportunities of success derive from national book policies in the various countries. In France, publishing houses have accused it of unfair competition as they consider that it was selling books at below cost price. In the case of Spain, two political measures combine to hamper its extensive acceptance as they do not allow a competitive price policy; VAT is 18% for eBooks but 4% for printed books, and a fixed book price policy of an excessively protectionist nature only allows a margin of manoeuvre of 5% (ESPAÑA, 2007). In contrast to the situation of printed editions, that of digital publishing means that the market is not restricted for logistic reasons to one language or one area. For this reason, Spanish- speaking countries are one of the priority markets for Amazon, as they represent a tempting potential market of almost 500 million people. Barnes & Noble already has a catalogue of over 40 000 eBooks in this language in its ‘Nook books en español’ division,6 although it has not yet been redimensioned and only sells to the United States market. In only two months Amazon.es already had a catalogue of 24 000 eBooks, four times more than Libranda, the main Spanish platform.
Vertical integration
The Amazon system is made up of three elements that are perfectly integrated with the aim of controlling the eBook market:
Device + Platform of contents + Services
Amazon takes on all roles of the book chain. When it is able and allowed to do so, it is an all-in-one operation that monopolises all the functions ranging from that of publisher, agent and distributor to platform and bookseller (Figure 6.1).
It sells the reading device and the contents. The price of the device has fallen almost a quarter of its original value since its inception; each new version includes new features and costs less. The company hardly ever provides specific data on its market figures; occasionally it makes a public declaration on its distribution channels. A year ago it announced that the Kindle device was the biggest selling product in the history of the chain, but there are no precise data on the millions of devices sold. According to some media reports, Amazon is losing money with the device that it sells for 99 dollars (73 Euros) as its price is lower than the production cost, but in compensation it is gaining clients. This explains its business strategy: its raison d’être is not the device as it is not a technological company like Apple or Sony, and it is well aware that it is unlikely to beat the devices of the latter as to design, operability, usability, and features. For Amazon however, Kindle is not only a reading device but is the purchase terminal of its bookshop Kindle Store; this makes it just as revolutionary a product as iTunes was for music by selling songs instead of compact disks, or NetFlix for motion pictures with its business of hiring its whole film catalogue (some 100 000 films) for a subscription of nine dollars per month with which it has attracted 25 million clients in the USA and Canada.
We have a similar situation with the Kindle Fire Tablet, which is being sold at an unbeatable price of 199 dollars. According to the consultancy IHS,7 Amazon sold four million Kindle Fire Tablets in two months, obtaining 14% of the market share in record time. Amazon is aware that it cannot compete technologically with Apple’s iPad and that its sales argument has to be based on very competitive prices. This is also because Fire has to be for the new divisions of the sale of applications, hiring of films, and music storage that have appeared this year what Kindle has been for books, just another terminal for the sale of its products. In this field Apple’s advantage lies in the fact that it has sold 24 million Tablets in 19 months, with which it dominates the applications market with over 1 500 million of them downloaded from iTunes and Apple Store. In this endless race of the giants, Apple is negotiating with the Swedish company Voddler so as to be able to begin to offer a film product by means of streaming.
Not only does Amazon adopt a closed policy that is hard on its opponents, it also makes a habit of absorbing its competitors. An example of this is its purchasing of companies such as Diapers.com or Soap.com. As far as its accounts and company data are concerned it is anything but transparent: they are never made public, which means that some say Amazon’s data constitute its best kept secret.
Amazon uses catalogue sales and its strength is that it sells very well; it is highly adept at attracting clients. It is promoting more and more strongly the market of digital products over that of physical products. Indeed, it was one of the first companies to transfer its business model to the cloud, which according to all experts is where the most important forms of business will be carried out in the future. In March 2011 it launched Cloud Drive, a space that allows clients to store and access their music, videos, and books from any mobile device. For eBooks it uses the Kindle Cloud Reader, a web space for storing the books acquired with all the personalisation elements such as underlining, highlighting, page marking, and notes.
Once the client has registered he/she can have access with his/her account to any of the platforms without the need to re-register. Once registration has been carried out a link is established with a payment card, which means that the user will never again have to enter his/her card number. A single click confirms an order in a speedy system compared with other solutions using Adobe Digital Editions that require at least 14 clicks to buy an eBook. It is this, together with a competitive price policy and the best before and after-sales service on the market, that makes Amazon the eBusiness platform par excellence. Messages with the smile logo identifying Amazon reach private addresses within the time stipulated. It has an unbeatable after-sales service; some years ago the Madrid Business Institute carried out a market survey that consisted of buying and returning 15 books from various internationally known online stores. Amazon complied with its commitments perfectly and also provided the best after-sales service as it raised no objections before returning the money (Alonso Conde and Suarez, 1999). This continues to be the case in all market research carried out by North American consultancies. It is precisely in this way that Amazon achieves client loyalty, as distrust is the main reason given by users who prefer not to make purchases over the Internet (Martin, 2011). Amazon has earned the trust of its users owing to its sales service with a well structured catalogue that is very user-friendly and has multiple interaction and feedback possibilities, such as preliminary access to the contents as it allows the downloading of a file of the first pages of the book to help the user to decide whether to buy it. The company itself has recognised that one of the strengths of the service is the inclusion of negative client comments that encourage it to improve and continue to learn, in addition to the superb after-sales service mentioned above.
In short, right from the beginning its policy has been to gratify its clients, enriching their experience by means of collective intelligence that provides them with the purchase data and opinions of other users.
Amazon is also able to draw up a list of its clients’ wishes, so that other clients close to them can decide what book or other item they want. By means of algorithms and purchase data statistics, the system can issue suggestions in keeping with its clients’ tastes, which may lead to compulsive purchasing. However, if a purchase has been made in error owing to the one-click system (‘Books in 60 seconds’ is its slogan), the money paid will be returned within a reasonable timeframe.
The range of services offered by Amazon is very complete:
Amazon Cloud Reader services in the cloud.
2.0 technologies to promote its books on social networks.
The Kindle reading device allows its clients to underline and make notes as they read, which makes it possible for these personal elements to be viewed either publicly or privately. In this way authors, opinion leaders, teachers, and Kindle users in general can choose to share their notes with other readers. If someone has highlighted a passage in a book and has chosen to make this public, any other reader of the network can find out who has done this and also view all the notes made by the same reader in the book.
Amazon Kindle Read, Review, Remember8 is Amazon’s social network that is devoted to promoting reading and to helping readers learn more from the books they read by taking advantage of the social intelligence of its own clients. It has the ‘follower’ and ‘followed’ mechanisms of any other social network to share reading activities, public notes, and highlighted paragraphs, with the option of activating or deactivating them at will. Following another user of the system allows viewing of the public notes that the other reader or readers make in the book as they read.
The user profile mentions all the books that the client has in the Amazon account, although other users will only be able to see those in which the reader has made his/her reading public.
Every month Kindle clients highlight and annotate millions of passages in the books they read. The Amazon Kindle Read, Review, Remember network compiles these annotations and identifies the passages that have been highlighted most often. The result is Most Highlighted, which helps readers to concentrate on the passages that are significant for the largest number of people. The system only shows those passages that have been highlighted by at least three different people. In this section we can view the most popular passages depending on different classifications: the most highlighted passages of all time, the books with the most highlighted passages, those most highlighted recently, and the books with the most public notes.
The Daily Review is a tool that helps to revise and record on a daily basis the most significant ideas in books, and displays the passages highlighted most frequently in some of the books that have been acquired. The Daily Review only indicates the books marked as having already been read. The books included are those of the Amazon purchase records, books that have been voted and commented on, and also books on the list of wishes of the Amazon website.
The state of the reading of any of the books can also be modified. The assessment and state of reading for a book that has been made public can be viewed by other readers through the user profile.
Another possibility is that known as ‘People with similar tastes’. These are people that the reader may wish to follow on the network as they read similar books. The percentage is a calculation of reading similarity based on the books that have been made public.
Moreover, all these annotations and highlighted passages are synchronised in all the devices registered at Amazon through the Kindle Cloud Reader service, which makes possible what is known as ‘Reading in the cloud’. In other words, personal readings are available anywhere at any time together with personal elements, regardless of whether we access from a Kindle reader, an iPad with the Kindle reading application, an iPhone, or a personal computer. This is possible thanks to technology known as Whispersync, which is a system that synchronises personal marking and pages with devices registered in the same account. These notes, and any we may make from any of the devices, are maintained as unique and are updated automatically in the remainder of the devices.
The competitive advantage of a publishing house in a similar space is distribution. In a digital context any connection by means of recommendation systems on social networks is considered to be an extra advantage for the promoting and selling of its products (bookmarks). The general public attaches more and more importance to other users’ opinions as expressed in recommendations on social networks rather than those of literary critics or those expressed on traditional distribution channels such as the press, television, or radio (Cordón-García et al., 2010).
Another strategic field for Amazon is the development of purchase applications for mobile devices. Recently Apple attempted to establish limits to the applications developed by other companies for their mobile devices, its intention being that it should be impossible to purchase in a context other than iTunes or Apple Store; it withdrew from its store the application that allowed downloading and reading books on the iPad. However, as clients continued to access the Amazon purchase system alternatively through the browser Safari, it decided to reactivate the application that had been withdrawn. This was not the only reason for the tension. Recently the big two have again confronted each other in the law courts over the name that Amazon has given its application shop (AppStore), which Apple considers to be confusing as it resembles that of its own shop Apple Store.
One of Amazon’s new developments is the possibility of placing orders for articles no longer in stock directly from any mobile device by means of bar codes, or directly taking photographs of the product; this concept has great market potential. Some of the lawsuits entered into by Amazon with a large number of traders have arisen precisely owing to the development of an application that allows the comparison of the prices of any business with their own, and purchasing from a mobile phone at the digital shop at a 5% discount, which has been considered an attack on the basic principles of business (Alandete, 2011).
There is however no doubt that the system is essentially based on an aspect that is fundamental for the organisation, i.e. the obtaining of data from the users themselves so as to strengthen their reading affinities and as a result draw up a recommendation service for the client.
Amazon’s profits (190 million dollars) are not excessive in relation to its investments as these are 50 times higher than its income; this does not indicate the weakness of the company but quite the opposite. The policy followed by Amazon is to invest aggressively with the aim of controlling the market in the medium and long term.
Another important matter for Amazon clients is the price of books. It is not surprising that the same book is priced differently in the various divisions of the same platform (Amazon.com, Amazon.es, Amazon. fr…), as their circumstances differ. Spain is a case in point; in this country 18% VAT is applied to the purchase of eBooks as we have mentioned. Moreover, there is a law that establishes a flat price for books that is preventing, up to a point, the existence of a competitive market. It was recently in the news that the European Commission had started to investigate Apple and five internationally relevant publishing houses for having reached an agreement against the competition; the United States government is also carrying out a parallel investigation. The complaint dates from 2009, when Amazon attempted to establish a maximum price of 9.99 dollars for the eBooks it marketed. Other publishing houses, including Random House, Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Pearson, and Penguin were not prepared to accept this policy. Amazon’s reaction was in keeping with its aggressive behaviour towards the competition: it removed their works from the Kindle Store catalogue. Apple, which was already preparing to launch its iPad, offered it the freedom to establish the selling price on its platform; that week the Amazon shares fell on the stock exchange which meant that Amazon had to backpedal and accept that the publishing houses should establish the prices of their books.
To conclude, in many countries the greatest stumbling block to economic growth by means of the Internet is mistrust. Amazon has been clever enough to manipulate this concept to its own benefit by means of an excellent customer attention system so as to gain the trust of users as another resource of the organisation. Its great achievement is that of client loyalty, in which art it is both a master and a pioneer. It makes profit because people trust its business and purchase more (Martin, 2011). It uses a good feedback system with the user, always answering him/her in a highly personalised manner.
It can be said that Apple changed the concept of the music industry with iTunes by selling songs at acceptable prices instead of CDs, which practically put a stop to piracy in the United States. NetFlix is doing the same with films; its catalogue provides everything by means of the streaming method for a monthly payment of 9 dollars; in this way it has gained the confidence of 25 000 million subscribers. Amazon has taken the same path with the eBook in setting very competitive prices and establishing a good sales and customer attention service based on the administration of the collective intelligence of users.
On the other hand, another of the great strengths of the company lies in its eagerness to exhaust the market. Amazon takes on anything and rejects nothing; it assumes all publishing processes and diversifies to include all products. However, as is the case with its great competitors (Apple, Google, and Microsoft), this is never enough. The negative part of this process is its aggressive and monopolising policy. Faced with its competitors Amazon concentrates on contents (eBooks); Google focuses on the digitalization of millions of copies from all over the world which it hopes to turn into the largest bookshop in the world with on-line access and reading if it resolves the legal matters it has pending; Apple monopolises multitask devices and applications; and Kobo looks towards the concept of social reading so as to differentiate it from its competitors. Other companies such as Yudu, Bubok, and Lulu go for self-publishing and subsequently market their products on large platforms such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble.
Conclusion
Sources of access to books, whether academic or of general interest, have gradually incorporated a series of applications favouring the socialisation of user interventions to allow marking, highlighting, annotating, exporting registers, or incorporating them to social networks. They have assimilated work methods characteristic of scientific journals (Jacsó, 2011) and in some cases have exceeded their applications, in the sense that at times the applications of the latter (Barnes & Noble, Amazon) have created complete publishing creation environments. These dynamics are the result of continuous work, as is shown by studies on Web 2.0 applications in the field of publishing (Jacsó, 2011) and of publishing groups and that of research into applications (Safari Labs, Lexile, etc.). The collaboration, co-participation, intervention on social networks, and other options of social reading give sources of information a value, a visibility, and a projection capacity that are completely new and which favour the initial objective of any scientific work: its communication. The sources of information transform each other and are renewed by undergoing changes that are demanded by technology and reading and writing practices, although these are inconsistent in the field of books. There are still numerous platforms and sites that are rigid and conservative and which only contemplate offering search results with traditional features. These cases will, however, become less and less frequent as is shown by the changing mentality of the developments of the reading applications themselves such as Readmill, Kobo Reading Life, iBooks, etc., which incorporate collaborative features that are fully integrated in various networks for consulting and downloading works.
In the case of books, the large eBook platforms for works of an academic nature such as those mentioned in this chapter, in other words Safari, Questia, and Ebrary, have incorporated a set of tools to give them added value. This allows higher user intervention, thanks to personalised features that allow more visible resources and a more fluid exchange of information between users, and their multimedia integration also encourages greater interoperability. In the case of eBook platforms selling works of general interest, the inclusion of services and features that tend towards the socialisation of the reading experience are pointing in the same direction, especially if we take into account the integration of consultation, reading, and opnion services and those of the exchanging of information by users with similar profiles, as is the case of Shelfari in Amazon.
In any case, the road embarked upon is inevitable for all sources, and only those that adapt to the new working philosophy will prevail.
1.OverDrive, http://www.overdrive.com/
2.Freading, http://www.libraryideas.com/freading.html
3.Amazon Kindle Publishing Guidelines: How to make books available for the Kindle platform. Amazon, 2011, http://s3.amazonaws.com/kindlegen/AmazonKindlePublishingGuidelines.pdf
4.Kindle Publishing Programs, http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000234621
5.Kindle Direct Publishing, https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing
6.Nook books in Spanish, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/u/nook-books-ebooks-en-espanol/379003133/
8.Amazon Kindle Read, Review, Remember, https://kindle.amazon.com/