Dubbed the 1000 Great New Zealand eBooks, the idea is to provide a focus for the industry’s own move to digitising books, to provide a platform for a joint marketing programme, and to generate public interest in e-reading.

One reason the latter is especially important is that a reader’s first experience with e-reading should be a good one. That means having really good ebooks to try rather than the usual bundle of free classics which aren’t necessarily the first choice for readers.

The initiative has come out of the Digital Publishing Forum, of which I’m director, and over the coming months we’ll be putting together not just this ebook list but some innovative ways to get the quality New Zealand ebooks in front of the public, both within New Zealand and internationally. Ideas we’re looking at are free samplers, inexpensive ebook rentals, subsciptions, and hopefully some bundling deals with e-reading device manufacturers. We’ll be talking to potential partners such as booksellers, libraries, media, device suppliers, distributors, and publishers over the coming months.

The first step for publishers is to submit the books that they will consider adding to the list, whether or not they are currently in ebook formats. The submission form can be downloaded from the Digital Publishing Forum site. Copyright Licensing Limited, the publishing industry’s rights agency and main funder of the Digital Publishing Forum, is coordinating the project on behalf of publishers. We’re working to a 31 August deadline for submissions.

Once we have a list of likely candidates, we’ll be able to work through the logistics of putting the list together and hosting it ready for distribution to the public in New Zealand and to international markets.

We hope that the 1000 Great New Zealand eBooks project will provide the industry with an excellent platform for generating interest in e-reading. It should bring some early revenue into the market and will get New Zealand publishers, booksellers and others into the digital realm as quickly and simply as possible.

I’ve been organising this conference in my role as Director of the Digital Publishing Forum. It’s our big event for this year and it’s been a busy few weeks as regular followers of this blog will have noticed from the drought in postings. We’re expecting 150 people over the course of the two days and we’ve got some pretty interesting stuff lined up. Take a look at the finalised programme at digitalpublishing.org.nz/future. And no, it’s not too late to register, we never turn paying customers away.

Some of you might already have heard one of our keynotes, Sherman Young, on the Kim Hill show last Saturday on Radio NZ. Here’s a link to the MP3 or to the feed for the Kim Hill show (Saturday 13 June 9:10am). I thought this was a great interview, credit to both the interviewer and interviewee.

We’ll be posting most of the prezzos on the site following the conference so you can check back later to find out more.

The “we” in the title was deliberate because, while the seminars gave individual publishers pointers to getting their own lists into the digital realm, it was also about coming up with a roadmap for some shared initiatives — things we can do as an industry to jumpstart digital publishing and ebooks in New Zealand.

On this point, here are some take-outs from my experience of the three days of listening and discussion. We weren’t just looking for big ideas. Given the relatively early stage the market is in — especially the consumer ebook market — small ideas that are simple to implement and help to build forward momentum were very welcome.

A shared digital warehouse. A digital warehouse fills many of the functions in the online world that a traditional warehouse and distribution operation performs in the bricks and mortar book industry. It stores, manages, distributes and accounts for the digital “stock”, mostly at a wholesale level. Having easy access to one can be a big boost to a publisher and an industry, just as lack of one can be a big hindrance. At last week’s seminars, we road-tested the idea that, early in the market here, we might be better to support a single digital warehouse to get economies of scale and, perhaps, a more united marketing voice. The idea seemed to get a good hearing from the local indie publishers. And among the major multinationals, who already have digital warehousuing through their parent companies, there was a willingness to also support a local shared initiative, provided it met certain requirements chief among which was security and DRM support. DRM support was a common bottom line among the majors but local indies were far less wedded to it.

Putting together a list of great New Zealand ebooks – the “pledge”. This idea came up in two contexts. First, how we can tackle the “chicken and egg” problem of which comes first, do we create our ebooks now or do we wait for consumers to demand ebooks. Secondly, when consumers do start reading on screen, how do we make their first experience great so they continue e-reading and recommend it to others, accelerating the growth of the e-reading market.  The proposal was to get together a “starter” list of, say, 800-1000 quality commercial New Zealand titles, to create them in a simple and inexpensive way through bulk-buying of ebook production services (particularly for indie publishers, the major publishers already have a lot of ebook inventory), and to market them as a package to early market makers such as e-reader device manufacturers, ebook retailers, libraries, and others. To get this programme under way, I’ve suggested, for wont of a better word, that we could organise a “pledge” initially in which publishers can let us know which titles they’d be prepared to offer, under what (non-exclusive) terms, etc. This will again be a simple, inexpensive starting point to pursue a potentially Big Idea. Expect to hear more about this in the next month or two.

Digital rights marketplace. For me, the penny dropped when Penguin CEO Margaret Thompson told us that, while local retailers are not banging down the door demanding ebooks to sell, there’s increasing demand from companies who want to license content for use in their own digital products. So let’s encourage this trend. As well as a way for publishers and authors to earn more from their content, it can be a great way to build some of the new partnerships we need, such as between publishers and technology providers. I’m very keen to move this along and am now investigating adding a digital rights marketplace to our next event, the forthcoming Future of the Book conference in Auckland 24-25 June (more on this conference soon).

eBooksellers. Speaking of booksellers, a frequent lament was the almost total lack of “pull” in the ebook space from booksellers wanting to get involved. This was reflected in low bookseller turn-out to the seminars with only a couple attending out of 150 people. We need to find ways to get them involved early, whether it be traditional booksellers, online booksellers, or new entrants. There are opportunities begging, albeit in a small, early stage market, but there’s no cheaper time than right now to get started.

Just get started — and keeping a sense of urgency when the prize might seem a bit far away. I proposed several things that publishers can do today that are simple and inexpensive or free. The idea here is to just do something right now that will advance your skills or knowledge, make you a user of technologies your readers are using, help you understand the way digital reading works, or actually create some ebooks. The suggestions ranged from buying a NZ$389 iPod Touch which gives you a cheap, accessible ebook reader; to dusting off your authors’ contracts and making sure suitable digital rights agreements are in place; joining a social network; or actually creating or publishing ebooks today using freely available tools such as Smashwords or Calibre.

Continuing the dialogue — sign up for our new Linked-In group. Delegates wanted to get in touch with each other and to stay in touch. So I’ve set up a Linked-In group and we’ll use it to keep the dialogue going and make sure like-minded people with an interest in the New Zealand digital publishing industry can connect easily. Feel free to join up. If you don’t belong to the Linked-In social network, you’ll be asked to join. It’s free and well worth joining. It’s a professional-oriented social network.

Digital publishing in education. Two of the presentations at the seminar related to educational publishing. The education market is way ahead of the consumer market, in large part because they already have acceptable reading devices in the form of the ordinary PC and the increasingly popular electronic whiteboard. And, while most consumer ebooks are still simple black and white text, educational publishing uses the full gamut of rich media. Many delegates commented on the case study from Neale Pitches from South Pacific Press. “Inspirational” was the typical adjective I was hearing with Neale showing how a small Kiwi start-up can sell digital content to the world. Also inspiring to me was hearing from Pearson’s Adrian Keane that, for this big educational publishing company, global annual sales of digital products had already topped one billion dollars. And the smart way he showed of how to view the opportunity made it clear that it can be bigger yet. I’m conscious that we need to be finding ways for our educational publishing sector to work together to get New Zealand on the global map in a market that is already significant. I’ll be doing more work on this and hope during the course of the year to have some solid initiatives to work with. A starting point will be our forthcoming Future of the Book conference in Auckland 24-25 June which will have a whole stream devoted to the educational publishing opportunity. Again, more about this soon.