Ramen noodles in two days!

It’s very interesting that Amazon — the unquestioned leader in the e-commerce and digital publishing space — isn’t trying to force college textbooks onto Kindles. Instead, they are taking a shot at the college bookstore market, but they have the sense to know what that means — which is textbooks (in paper), hoodies, and Ramen noodles.

It’s all well and good to have a digital strategy, to imagine what the future might be, etc., but if you’re trying to run a business you need to sell the products people want, at a good price, with good service. Amazon excels at that.

“But it’s different now!” gets tiresome

I had a nice conversation with a publishing industry colleague who is trying to work with some of the digital cool kids to sell his magazines.

It’s almost as if the Woodstock mindset has been merged with e-commerce. “Don’t trust anybody over 30” has become “dismiss any business practice that wasn’t invented on an iPhone.”

In the early days of digital newsstands I thought the evil empires (chiefly Apple and Amazon, but there are others) were just ignorant about magazine publishing. As time went on that seemed less and less likely. Certainly they had somebody on staff who was supposed to learn about the industries they’re trying to pillage. Certainly they’ve had conversations with industry experts who had told them — probably multiple times — how publishing actually works.

I realized that a charitable way to understand the conflict is to see Apple’s and Amazon’s strategies as an attempt to make the buying experience as nice as possible for the consumer — because, as I said above, they’re good at that. (At least Amazon is.)

The purchaser on Amazon doesn’t want to send his information to Hachette, or Time Inc., or whoever (most people have no idea who publishes their magazine anyway), they want to buy the thing (on Amazon or Apple) and be done with it. The relationship is with Apple or with Amazon, not with the publisher.

Well … that works with a book or a box of Chinese tea, but there are lots of reasons it doesn’t work with a subscription publication. A subscription is an on-going relationship, and it has to accommodate things like changing an address, suspending service while on vacation, or linking up print and digital subscriptions. These things require the publisher to have the customer’s information.

It’s almost impossible to believe that it could have taken the people at Amazon and Apple more than a couple weeks to learn that. Publishing is not rocket science. Simple people can learn it pretty easily. It seems horribly unlikely that these digital whiz kids were incapable of understanding how subscription publishing worked.

We know they’re not stupid, but we also know that they are arrogant. They know better, you see, because they’re reinventing the world. So when a publisher says “but that’s not the way it works,” what the cool kids think is, “yes, we understand that you old fogies are stuck in the past and can’t change, but we’re not bound by your old traditions. We’re re-creating business models. It’s different now.”

In some cases that’s true. Some things are different and need to change. But somebody has to have the intelligence (seasoned with a little humility) to distinguish them. And it seems that humility is very slow coming.

Here we are, many years into this “digital revolution” that “changes everything,” and the cool kids still don’t understand some very fundamental things about subscription publishing. I’m no longer surprised by it, but I am frustrated, as are my industry colleagues who have to work on these issues.

Progress is taking place, but it’s very slow. It may be that we’re going to have to wait until a higher percentage of the cool kids are over 30.

The idea of a “shift from print to digital” is a source of confusion

I saw that phrase in a headline — “the shift from print to digital” — and it conjured up all the wrong-headed ideas the publishing industry has been suffering under for the last several years.

It’s not that there is no shift going on, properly understood. There clearly are more people doing things on digital devices. The problem is that the phrase “shift from print to digital” feeds a mindset that everything currently in print has to “shift to digital,” which is a mistake.

It’s a mistake for two main reasons. First, some people like print and will continue to use print, but second, the idea that a product is “shifting” from print to digital assumes a commonality between the two products that might not be appropriate.

In some cases it’s relatively easy to make a digital product from a print product, and the two products are quite similar. A digital book is a little bit different than a printed book, but they’re substantially the same.

A phone book, on the other hand is a very different thing in print and digital versions. Also, the concept of an “edition” is necessary in print and unnecessary in digital, so “digital magazine” is a little weird.

Rather than thinking in terms of a “shift from print to digital,” we should be thinking of how to make good products for discrete audiences — in whatever format, and with whatever product assumptions, are appropriate for that audience.