The publishing industry is a traditional one: authors and publishers are reluctant to adapt to changing reading habits and incorporate digital initiatives in their strategy. Books are still mostly sold as physical products, while in the music, game and video industry most information goods are already distributed in a digital format: think of iTunes, on demand movie streaming services and online games. In the United States in 2015, only 17% of book sales were e-books (Fortune, 2016). Industry experts reported that industry sales were down 2.6% in 2015 (PublishersWeekly, 2016). Is the market for reading and writing skipping e-books and moving to two-sided platforms?
Two-sided digital-only open platforms have become mainstream and generally known in many markets. Soundcloud and Spotify for music, Youtube for videos, games in the App Store and Instagram for pictures. People can’t name a go-to platform for books, stories or articles. However, there are a few upcoming platforms with millions of users, having the potential to disrupt the industry.
One of those examples is Wattpad, a free and open platform for reading and writing, originating from Canada. By now, this platform has over 40 million users (Wattpad, 2016). The reason it’s quite unknown, is because the large majority of its users are teenage girls. They indicate that 10% of their users are writers, and 90% are readers-only. Another upcoming platform is Medium, founded by twitter co-founder Ev Williams. It is used as a platform for ‘sharing ideas’ in the form of articles, used by 30 million people per month. It received $57 million in funding in September 2016 (CNN, 2016). Both are available as apps for the smartphone, with 90% of Wattpad’s activity on smartphones, showing the potential of the publishing industry to become mobile.
Another platform that wants to bring reading and writing to the smartphone is Sweek. It caters to the changing reading behaviour: short and serialized content, the need for community-based reading and direct contact between the writer and reader. Also, people are increasingly on-the-go and need entertainment on the device they always have with them: their smartphone. Their goal is to make reading and writing fiction on mobile devices not only interesting for fanfiction and the younger marketing, but also for genres like thrillers, literature and fantasy (Sweek, 2016).
Does this mean that these platforms will replace traditional forms of publishing? For sure not: there will always be room for curated content. However, the way we discover stories and the way we consume them will change along with our reading preferences. The new rockstars of writing will arise through mobile publishing – reaching millions of readers. Published authors can use these free platforms to build and engage with their online fanbase, and promote traditionally published books when the time is right. This way, the publishing industry gets the innovative boost it desperately needs.
References:
Milliot, J. (2016). Publishing industry sales down 2.6% in 2015. [online] PublishersWeekly. Available at: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/70125-publishing-industry-sales-down-2-6-in-2015.html [Accessed 03 Oct. 2015].
Pressman, A. (2016) Here’s Why E-Book Sales From Major Publishers Are Plummeting. [online] Available at: http://fortune.com/2016/07/11/ebook-amazon-publishers/ [Accessed 03 Oct. 2015].
Segall, L. (2016). Why 30 million people visit this site each month. [online]. Available at: http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/19/technology/medium-ev-williams/ [Accessed 03 Oct. 2015].
Sweek (2016). Sweek press kit. [online]. Available at: https://sweek.com/#/media [Accessed 03 Oct. 2015].
Wattpad (2016). Press. [online]. Available at: https://www.wattpad.com/press/ [Accessed 03 Oct. 2015].
