Last week I had the opportunity to speak at the BISG Doing Rights Right event in New York City, a conference focused on sharing best practices, tools, and perspectives on book rights and licensing. The audience included publishing executives, rights and legal teams, literary agents, and professionals responsible for protecting and monetizing editorial catalogs. The agenda covered a wide range of topics, all approached with the pragmatic mindset that defines BISG initiatives.

At Amlet.ai we are just getting started, and the invitation was a valuable and humbling opportunity to test our assumptions and engage openly with the industry.

My goal was to share our perspective on how book publishing infrastructure needs to evolve if the industry wants to continue supporting a healthy diversity of voices, languages, cultures, and worldviews.

Our thesis

I began the talk with a simple observation: today, the primary consumers of written content are often machines rather than human readers. Books are continuously indexed, analyzed, and reused by search engines, recommendation systems, and AI models used for training, retrieval, and inference.

These forms of usage are becoming structural, while most digital publishing infrastructure still assumes content is consumed exclusively by humans.

AI systems operate at machine-scale. They process vast amounts of content continuously, and this shift is happening much faster than contractual practices, collective licensing schemes, or enforcement mechanisms can realistically adapt. Copyright law and publishing contracts were built around human reading, while content today is not only read, but also processed, extracted, and learned from at an unprecedented scale.

This machine-driven consumption does not replace human readership, but exists alongside it and represents a distinct new layer of demand that, with the right infrastructure in place, can open up new monetization opportunities for book publishers.

Our approach

With Amlet.ai, we are building a platform that enables book publishers to make their content discoverable, clearly express their rights, and monetize it within a machine-driven economy.

We are not trying to replace existing commercial relationships or licensing strategies, but to provide shared infrastructure that enables additional remuneration from machine-driven consumption, because we believe this opportunity for publishers and authors could be larger than in any previous digital revolution.

Everything starts with identification, because AI systems cannot pay for content they cannot reliably recognize. Traditional identifiers such as the ISBN are no longer sufficient in a machine-driven environment, as AI systems need to index, search, and identify content at a granular level rather than at the level of finished book products. This is why a content-based identifier is needed, one that emerges directly from the content itself. This is where the International Standard Content Code, or ISCC, comes in.

Amlet is built on top of the ISCC open source technology stack. As an open standard, the ISCC provides content-based digital fingerprints that enable interoperability across systems and stakeholders. It works across media types, allowing books, audio, images, and video to be handled within a single framework, and as an ISO standard it offers a level of global recognition and trust that is essential for long term adoption.

On top of this foundation, Amlet provides a registry of usage rights attributes, also known as Text and Data Mining (TDM) attributes.

The Amlet Registry allows rightsholders to express their content usage rights for AI systems in a public, machine-readable way. At the same time, it enables AI systems to discover those rights through a central public interface via simple API connections, providing a compliance layer that allows AI training and AI inference to happen in line with declared rights.

Finally, Amlet includes a monetization layer designed to be highly scalable and to support platform-driven pricing for long-tail AI usage, for publishers who choose to allow AI companies to access and remunerate their content. This layer, including pricing for AI usage, remains fully under publishers control, reflecting the fact that different publishers will make different choices.

What we are building with Amlet reflects a vision in which AI systems can evolve and deliver better services and productivity while respecting the intellectual property of rightsholders and relying on high quality, trustworthy content. With the right infrastructure in place, this can unlock new monetization opportunities for publishers and authors and help human creativity continue to thrive.

I very much appreciated the opportunity to engage directly with thoughtful and sometimes challenging questions from the audience, and I am very grateful to the BISG team for the invitation to participate.

If you are interested, you can find the presentation at the following link: https://speakerdeck.com/giacd/amlet-from-content-identification-to-attribution-to-monetization-in-the-ai-era

You are welcome to reach me at giac@amlet.ai if you would like to continue the conversation.

Questo articolo è stato tradotto in Italiano dal sottoscritto, Giacomo D’Angelo, su gentile concessione di Publishers Weekly e dell’autore Thad McIlroy. L’articolo originale in inglese è stato pubblicato su Publishers Weekly il 2 Giugno 2023 ed è disponibile a questo link.

Le ultime versioni dei motori di Intelligenza Artificiale Generativa (AI o GPT — Generative Pre-trained Transformer) rappresentano un cambiamento epocale. Non sarà un cambiamento graduale e progressivo: l’AI generativa cambierà tutto molto velocemente. Ad una velocità impressionante.

A mio avviso, ogni ambito di quella che chiamiamo Editoria Libraria può essere automatizzato con il supporto dell’AI generativa. E se ciò fosse vero, allora il mercato del libro non sarà più lo stesso. È arrivato il momento di svegliarsi e pensare al futuro.

A due condizioni.

La prima è scontata: non sto parlando solo di ChatGPT o di altri motori LLM simili (LLM sta per Large Language Models). Per quanto l’AI generativa resti l’elemento chiave e imprescindibile di questa innovazione, sarà necessario integrare ad essa tutta una serie di tecnologie e di processi al fine di aumentarne le sue intrinseche capacità.

La seconda è un po’ più articolata. Quando si fanno affermazioni assolutistiche su una certa tecnologia, si ricevono critiche altrettanto assolute. Se ad esempio si sostiene che un giorno tutte le auto saranno autonome, allora qualcuno farà notare che le auto da corsa di Formula Uno non lo diventeranno mai.

Capisco questo punto di vista, però in questo caso non sto parlando di Editoria di Formula Uno. Sto parlando dell’Editoria comune, cioè dei libri valutati, acquistati e letti dalle persone comuni. Non sto sostenendo che gli editori di Formula Uno non siano più bravi dell’AI. Sto invece dicendo che all’interno della filiera editoriale diventerà molto complicato capire esattamente dove il lavoro umano possa apportare un valore aggiunto sufficiente a giustificarne i relativi costi.

Quale sarà il futuro dei nostri amati romanzi o dei raffinati approfondimenti di saggistica? Scompariranno? Certo che no. Non è questo il mio punto.

E cosa ne sarà dei designer di talento e delle loro magnifiche copertine di libri? Saranno forse destinati a sparire? Certo che no. Tutti noi continueremo a scoprire nuovi libri in libreria e, affascinati dall’armonia delle loro copertine, diremo che non potrebbero essere state certo realizzate da una AI qualunque. E a volte avremo anche ragione.

Precedenti

Io penso a quello che abbiamo vissuto con l’avvento delle tecnologie digitali per l’impaginazione e per la produzione di prodotti editoriali (tecnologie di desktop publishing). Quasi tutti quelli che oggi lavorano in Editoria hanno iniziato dopo il 1985, quando sono stati introdotti i primi Macintosh, stampanti laser e software di impaginazione. Forse non sanno che i risultati dei primi esperimenti di desktop publishing non erano un granché. I caratteri erano rifiniti male e le interlinee poco precise.

Nel 1988, quando il Macintosh fu collegato a una Linotype, il miglioramento della qualità fu eccezionale. Ma i tradizionalisti continuavano a sostenere che il colore dei caratteri era ancora scadente e che i lettori avrebbero percepito questa mancanza di qualità. Dopotutto, gli specialisti — i designer e i loro clienti editori — avevano costruito le loro carriere prestando attenzione alle sfumature dei caratteri tipografici, al kerning, all’interlinea e alla progettazione della pagina stampata.

I tradizionalisti avevano ragione: questi erano tutti aspetti importanti e le differenze si notavano, eccome. Tuttavia, le nuove tecnologie digitali potevano ormai produrre libri ad un livello di qualità abbastanza buono, e ciò rappresentava una novità assoluta nella concezione dell’output editoriale: quel livello di qualità abbastanza buono era sufficiente ad accontentare la stragrande maggioranza dei lettori, che continuava ad essere felice con i propri libri senza storcere troppo il naso.

Le Redazioni Editoriali

La correzione bozze è il kerning del 2023. La tecnologia non è ancora perfetta e non penso che GPT possa ancora gestire la correzione bozze allo standard richiesto dagli editori librari. Ma accadrà molto presto. Anche se i libri corretti da un professionista in carne ed ossa potrebbero ancora sembrare “migliori” agli occhi di un raffinato redattore, quel “tocco umano” non aiuterà a vendere più libri. I libri corretti dalla AI saranno presto ad un livello di qualità abbastanza buono.

E la revisione editoriale? Oggi non sembra certamente una buona idea affidare le decisioni editoriali a una GPT qualunque, ma sarebbe davvero sciocco non chiederle almeno qualche suggerimento.

ChatGPT diventerà il miglior alleato per smaltire la vostra montagna di manoscritti. Grazie alle sue capacità di analisi logica e grammaticale, essa potrà valutare automaticamente se un libro è (ragionevolmente) ben scritto o meno. Potrebbe non riuscire a scovare le gemme editoriali, ma riuscirà a separare i materiali accettabili dal resto. Ah, direte voi, ricordando uno di quei bestseller che è stato rifiutato da centinaia di editori — ovviamente anche GPT potrebbe fallire. Sì, esattamente com’è successo a quei cento professionisti.

La Produzione

La maggior parte della produzione di libri, stampati e digitali, è già completamente automatizzata o semi-automatizzata, per lo più tramite software basati su regole.

La produzione tipografica automatizzata è evoluta e migliorata negli anni — il sistema di composizione “programmabile” di Donald Knuth, TeX, è apparso per la prima volta nel 1978. Molta della produzione di Adobe InDesign è automatizzata attraverso macro e script e i sistemi di pubblicazione centralizzati funzionano abbastanza bene.

L’AI colmerà alcune delle poche lacune rimaste, ma le attuali inefficienze della produzione esistono in gran parte perché l’Editoria rappresenta ancora, e per scelta, un processo altamente manuale, basato sulla quella inamovibile convinzione che il valore dell’intervento umano superi la perdita di produttività fornita dall’automazione. Questo è assolutamente vero per alcuni generi di libri. È totalmente falso per altri.

La Distribuzione e la Pubblicità

Nel mondo editoriale, la distribuzione e la pubblicità online hanno contribuito a creare uno spaccato tra gli autori e i propri lettori. Gli autori indipendenti (o selfpublishers) hanno dimostrato che il numero di vendite di libri, e in generale la probabilità di avere successo con il proprio progetto editoriale, è direttamente proporzionale alla capacità di comunicare direttamente con il proprio pubblico. Da una parte le grandi piattaforme online mantengono un ruolo di aggregazione, con la loro capacità di presentare i contenuti a una grande varietà di lettori, dall’altra l’AI promette una nuova possibilità di disintermediazione, in cui gli autori possono tornare a comunicare direttamente con i propri lettori.

Amazon rappresenta ancora oggi la migliore opportunità per gli autori emergenti, ma allo stesso tempo è chiaro come sia diventato ormai un intermediario troppo costoso per gli Editori con un business consolidato.

La posizione dominante di Amazon non è in discussione, tuttavia l’AI potrebbe offrire al mondo del libro quella possibilità di trasformazione che potrebbe davvero minare il suo predominio nella filiera. I media evolvono e l’AI darà vita a nuovi canali di distribuzione. Amazon proverà a dominare ogni nuovo canale tramite nuove acquisizioni, come già fatto brillantemente con l’acquisto di Audible nel 2008 per 300 milioni di dollari. Ma riuscirà a superare, ancora una volta, il “dilemma dell’innovatore” (dal libro di Christensen: The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail)? Ad esempio, nel mondo del gaming, dove grazie all’AI si stanno sviluppando nuovi canali di intrattenimento, Amazon sembra essere rimasta un po’ indietro.

Personalmente, vedo un futuro molto positivo per le librerie. In un mondo freddo e meccanico dominato dall’AI, le librerie rimarranno un luogo di confortevole aggregazione sociale.

Il Marketing

Il marketing sarà l’ambito dell’industria libraria in cui l’AI avrà l’impatto maggiore. Qui la posta in gioco è altissima. Uno degli aspetti che potrebbero ostacolare questa rivoluzione è la mancanza di dati sulle vendite in tempo reale. Gli editori abbonati a BookScan avranno un vantaggio competitivo. Sono curioso di vedere cosa farà Ingram per migliorare il suo prodotto Marketing Insights, e Firebrand con il suo Eloquence on Alert.

I motori GPT possono elaborare delle ottime analisi di vendita dei libri della concorrenza, possono disegnare un quadro in tempo reale delle dinamiche di quei libri che stanno deviando le vendite e identificare nuove opportunità di mercato. Finalmente, possono rivoluzionare quei servizi che aiutano i lettori a scoprire nuovi libri da leggere. Sarà più facile per gli autori individuare il proprio pubblico ideale, così come per i lettori scovare il prossimo libro da leggere.

Parliamo ovviamente solo della punta dell’iceberg. Come vorreste vendere e pubblicizzare i vostri libri? Potrebbe GPT aiutarvi a farlo?

L’Editoria Scolastica

Pensate alla trasformazione dell’editoria scolastica negli ultimi due decenni.

Nella società in cui viviamo, il desiderio di imparare e formarsi non è assolutamente diminuito — al contrario, ogni giorno sempre più persone vogliono scoprire nuove competenze per avanzare nella loro carriera o per semplice interesse personale. Ma ormai gran parte di tutto questo avviene sulle piattaforme online, come YouTube, Udemy, Coursera o su altri siti dove è ormai molto facile ed economico reperire materiale di qualità (e anche queste piattaforme stanno cambiando, in gran parte in meglio, grazie a GPT).

Negli ultimi anni, l’Editoria scolastica ha subito una drastica riduzione a causa della diffusione di queste piattaforme. Allo stesso modo, un nuovo ciclo di sviluppo tecnologico potrà avere lo stesso impatto sull’intera Editoria trade.

Inoltre, non posso non menzionare il self-publishing (l’auto-pubblicazione), che tendiamo tutti a sottostimare a causa del fatto che i relativi dati di vendita non sono tracciati in nessun modo: il self-publishing ha eroso svariati miliardi di dollari all’anno alle case editrici tradizionali e rappresenta un fenomeno che non è certo destinato a fermarsi.

Le Industrie dell’Intrattenimento

Non possiamo perdere di vista il mondo dell’intrattenimento, molto vicino a quello del libro, e l’impatto che l’AI sta avendo su di esso. Cinema, giochi, musica, e i social media in generale — tutte queste industrie stanno subendo un impatto su una scala simile a quella del mondo editoriale. E per gli adulti, tali attività sono mediamente più importanti rispetto alla lettura. Gli studi relativi a come spendiamo il nostro tempo mostrano come gli adulti dedicano meno del 5% del loro tempo libero alla lettura, e una percentuale sempre crescente del loro tempo ai videogiochi e alla visione di video online.

Gli ebook “arricchiti” non sono mai decollati, mentre le vendite degli audiolibri sono esplose oltre le più rosee previsioni. Il cinema è stato il “miglior amico” dei libri per oltre un secolo, con un buon livello di cooperazione tra le due industrie per alimentare le vendite, anche se ciò non è mai sfociato in una collaborazione davvero completa e funzionale. Potrà avvenire ora? L’industria cinematografica va ormai a braccetto con quella dei videogiochi, mentre quella del libro è rimasta sempre in disparte… potrà l’AI cambiare questa situazione?

Io credo che l’AI consentirà all’oggetto libro di trasformarsi in ulteriori formati che potranno generare vendite aggiuntive in modo totalmente inaspettato.

I Pericoli dell’AI

Voglio essere chiaro: penso che tutte queste chiacchiere sui problemi e sui pericoli dell’AI siano solo una grande perdita di tempo. Sarebbe molto più produttivo cercare di comprendere quali possano essere le opportunità che l’AI può presentare al mondo del libro.

Con ciò, non voglio assolutamente sminuire la discussione sui pericoli dell’AI, né suggerire che tali preoccupazioni siano infondate o poco importanti. Tuttavia, ritengo che oltre a parlare dei pericoli dell’AI, occorra parlare anche delle sue promesse, perché sono entrambe discussioni importanti e dovrebbero essere portate avanti in parallelo.

Non potremmo mai cogliere le opportunità all’orizzonte se continuiamo ad affrontare la questione con timore e paura.

Come possiamo fare un buon lavoro di regolamentazione dell’AI nell’industria del libro se siamo sempre e unicamente focalizzati sui pericoli imminenti?

Possiamo certamente provare a introdurre delle regole e limitazioni per evitare questi pericoli, ma il problema è che sarà complicatissimo farle rispettare nella pratica (ad eccezione, forse, di ciò che potrà essere bloccato per legge). Gli imprenditori avranno sempre la libertà di avvicinarsi al mondo del libro con le soluzioni più semplici a loro disposizione, indipendentemente dalle regole che cercheremo di imporre dall’alto (così come gli autori autopubblicati non ci hanno ascoltato quando abbiamo detto: “No, non potete farlo!”).

Io voglio mantenere la mia linea libertaria: il modo migliore per capire i pericoli derivanti da una nuova tecnologia è quello di aprirsi curiosamente alle opportunità che essa offre.

Andiamo Avanti

In questo articolo ho voluto brevemente descrivere come ogni ambito dell’industria libraria può essere efficacemente automatizzato con l’aiuto dell’AI generativa. Se ciò fosse vero, l’editoria libraria per come la conosciamo oggi diventerà presto obsoleta. Non è che i libri non verranno più scritti, pubblicati e letti, bensì tutti i meccanismi con cui sono sviluppati e venduti saranno in gran parte guidati dalle macchine, e questo cambierà totalmente i connotati della filiera del libro. Nuove opportunità appariranno dietro quelle porte che si stanno chiudendo velocemente.

“La più grande trasformazione nell’Editoria dall’invenzione della stampa” è un vecchio cliché che tenta di evocare la scala di un’innovazione nel mondo del libro. Siamo sicuri di essere davvero di fronte alla grande svolta? Alla conferenza PageBreak dello scorso autunno, parlando dei motori GPT, Tim O’Reilly ha detto che “mi sento come mi sentivo quando abbiamo scoperto il World Wide Web nel 1992” e ha continuato audacemente con “questa trasformazione è paragonabile ai primi fogli di calcolo, al PC, e al browser web”.

Siamo tutti consapevoli di quanto sia cambiato il mondo dopo l’invenzione della stampa. E allora, come sarà la nuova Editoria dopo che l’AI generativa sarà integrata completamente nei nostri flussi di lavoro? Come si trasformerà la lettura quando i libri saranno soppiantati dalle capacità di risposta immediata dell’AI? Quando l’AI sarà in grado di raccontarci incantevoli storie?

Non sono preoccupato da questi scenari, anzi non potrei essere più entusiasta.

Questo articolo è stato tradotto in Italiano dal sottoscritto, Giacomo D’Angelo, su gentile concessione di Publishers Weekly e dell’autore Thad McIlroy. L’articolo originale in inglese è stato pubblicato su Publishers Weekly il 2 Giugno 2023 ed è disponibile a questo link.

Thad McIlroy è un autore e analista editoriale, vive nella West Coast degli Stati Uniti e il suo sito è The Future of Publishing. È uno dei fondatori di Publishing Technology Partners.

Today I want to talk about ebooks. I want to show how their real popularity is often not fully reflected in the publishing industry reports we draw upon to assess our target book markets.

Whether we are focussed on a single country like the US or the UK, Italy, Sweden or Germany, or a wider market in Africa, Asia or South America, or wanting to reach a truly global audience, data matters. But often data is in short supply, is only partially collected, or is misrepresented to suit a particular agenda. And that can warp our perspective of the book markets as they exist today, how they are trending, and what opportunities present themselves for the future.

As CEO of a digital publishing platform based in Italy but with global reach, I am constantly challenging Italian publishers to look beyond the domestic market, exciting as that is, and to embrace the global opportunities digital brings to the table. And through our industry journal The New Publishing Standard, we try to send that message to the world:

That publishing today is a truly global opportunity in a way quite inconceivable back in the 2000s, when Amazon launched its first Kindle store in the US (2007), available at the time only in the US to American authors and publishers.

In 2023 the world of digital books is a different planet. Ebooks are just one component in a far broader digital publishing spectrum embracing print (POD), regular ebooks, online reading (serialisation and subscription), audio (audiobooks and podcasting) and emerging formats. And with the affordable AI revolution dawning, our opportunities to reach new audiences in new ways are growing exponentially.

Authors and publishers globally need to be paying attention to this phenomenon if they don’t want to miss out on some of the greatest publishing opportunities of this decade.

In saying that, I nail my colours clearly to the mast: StreetLib is a digital books platform! But let me make one thing clear right away: I love books in all their forms, including paper. I love contemplating my personal physical library in search of something indefinable, and I couldn’t live without that magical immersive experience that only a beautiful paper book can provide. And that’s one reason why StreetLib is committed to expanding the reach of print books, through rapidly developing print-on-demand (POD) technology. In Italy, our POD project is well-advanced and we are working hard to roll this out across other markets.

Print is an essential component of the publishing industry, and in most of the world print is, unquestionably, king. But printed books, beautiful as they are, are not always the best option, or even an option at all, for some consumers. Price, availability and accessibility mean that in some parts of the world printed books are not easily available or affordable. Those of us that live in rural areas in the US and Europe will know how challenging it can be to get the books we want.

Ecommerce has helped make more books available, where delivery services are able to reach. But most of the world’s population do not live within easy distance of a bookshop, and even fewer have the delivery services we take for granted in the developed countries. Which is where digital — in the form of ebooks, online reading and audio, can open up new market reach hitherto off limits to authors and publishers. But even in developed markets where print books are readily available, many consumers prefer digital. And it will surprise some to learn that this is not always a minority.

In Thailand, for example, 42% of the book market is digital. In the Nordics, it’s over 50%. And even in the big western markets like the US and UK, the scale of digital is likely bigger than you think.

Let me focus here on the US, universally recognised as the biggest book market on the planet, but where conventional wisdom has it that ebooks make up just 20% of the market. The reality may surprise you.

You see, here at StreetLib we are a digital publishing platform that caters for all publishers, from corporate to small press to self-published authors. And that gives us insights into a side of the industry often unreported, or at least under-reported, by the mainstream publishing industry media. Of course, the experience of one company, and one that is openly digitally-focussed, cannot tell the full story, so let me set aside StreetLib ‘s experience and look at the bigger picture.

We will all be familiar with the invaluable reports from the Association of American Publishers that show us the US book market. But as the AAP readily admits, this is not the full market, just those publishers that report to it. A substantial part of the US market, no question, but not all of it. The reports from Nielsen BookScan (now called Circana BookScan) similarly capture a substantial part of the US book market, but not all of it. To see the full picture we need to turn to BookStat (now owned by Podium), which in a break from tradition has this year offered us new insights into the true scale of digital reading in the USA, and which paints a very different picture from that we are used to seeing.

Summarising a report from BookStat in Publishers Weekly earlier this year, Jim Milliot told us that total online book sales rose 5.6% in 2022, to $12.13 billion, while unit sales increased 6.6%, to 1.12 billion.

Sales are broken down by format as follows:

• $3.04 billion in audiobooks (up 22% over 2021)

• $2.57 billion of ebooks (up 6% over 2021)

• $6.52 billion of print books (down 0.6% from 2021)

In terms of sales units, the situation is instead as follows:

• 188 million audiobook units sold (up 23% from 2021)

• 526 million ebook units sold (up 8% from 2021)

• 403 million units sold of paper books (down 1.3% from 2021)

Let us focus on those revenue numbers — $12.3 billion — for online book sales, and consider that “only” $6.52 billion of that was for print. Meaning $5.78 million of those online sales were for digital books. And then factor in that, of that 5.6% rise in online book sales revenue, print contributed a negative number, actually falling 0.6%.

While print book revenue fell 0.6%, ebook revenue rose a full 6.0%, to $2.57 billion. Meanwhile audiobooks jumped 22%, to $3.04 billion, meaning audiobooks outsold ebooks in revenue terms.

(We shouldn’t be surprised there. Revenue is the total money paid for the books, and of course audiobooks are notoriously more expensive than their print or ebook counterparts. Sell ten audiobooks at $20 and you have $200 revenue. Sell ten print books at $15 and you have $150 revenue. Sell twenty ebooks at $5 and you have $100. Clearly in this example audiobooks make more money for publishers than ebooks. Yet ebooks in this example outsold other formats. And keep in mind revenue is not profit. Once we factor in the production costs of audio and the production and distribution and returns costs of print, there’s not a lot of profit left from those sales to share among the publisher and author.)

But let’s switch our attention from revenue to unit sales. That is, how many print books were actually sold (excluding returns). Again, print books (unit online sales) took a tumble. Down 1.3% to 403 million units. Unit sales of audiobooks by contrast jumped 23% to 188 million units. Ebook sales rose 8% in 2022 to 526 million units, making ebooks by far the most popular format for online book sales.

Combined digital book sales — ebook and audio — in unit terms outsold print to the tune of 311 million units.

The difference in revenue and unit values is of course because ebooks can be produced, and therefore sold at a lower cost than either audio or print and still leave the publisher a nice profit.

Self-publishers are especially aware of this, and they typically take home anything from 60% to 80% of cover price for their ebooks. Meaning a self-published author can sell an ebook at, say, $5, and even at only 60% collect a $3 royalty. That’s much more than a traditionally-published author can hope for.

Nor do the surprises stop there. Because while self-published authors have a hard time competing in bricks & mortar bookstores, online it’s a different story. Per the Bookstat report, self-published titles accounted for over half — 51% — of all unit sales in the US, and 34% as measured by revenue.

In ebook sales alone self-published authors sold $874 million worth of ebooks in the USA last year. And those authors will also be selling in other countries.

As you can see, digital publishing is much more complex than at first seems. The reality is, reading and listening habits often tend to evolve independently of the policies of mainstream publishers with their print-first focus. New generations are finding new ways to source the content they want to read. Very often, these manifest themselves within new, digital, fluid contexts, and may be almost impossible to measure with the classic ink-on-paper book publishing models.

Let me provide some concrete examples:

First example: Kindle Unlimited (KU) is the Amazon Kindle subscription program to which you can subscribe for $9.99 a month to access a catalog with millions of ebooks.

In 2022, KU’s annual pot globally totaled an astronomical $552 million, up 16% from 2021.

What is the KU “pot”? Unlike other subscription programs, KU offers a remuneration (to all small publishers and independent authors who decide to include their ebooks in the program) which is calculated starting from a sum, known in jargon as a “pot”, which Amazon decides unilaterally to allocate each month. For clarity, this sum indicates the net income of publishers and authors who have decided to be included in the KU program, and not the value of sales at cover price, as in the AAP and Circana reports. APub authors are paid separately from the pot.

We are therefore talking about over half a billion in additional revenue (up by over 70 million dollars compared to 2021) which was collected by independent publishers and authors through this subscription formula, with a sales model different from the a la carte model used for paper books and a la carte ebook sales.

Second example: let’s analyse the world of serialised content, or serial content.

During her presentation at Digital Book World in New York about a month ago, which I was lucky enough to witness firsthand, Yonder’s Annie Stone confirmed that fiction serial content has a market value of $100 million in the US (June 2022 data), with a growth of 21.7% over the previous year.

Yonder is the brand new Webtoon/Naver app dedicated to serial fiction content, in whose description we read this beautiful claim: “Wherever you want to go. Whenever you want to go. Reading for the modern world.”

As if to say that anyone, anywhere, thanks to the “samples” of short but valid content provided by Yonder, now has the opportunity to stop and read for at least a few minutes a day, even during the dead times of the day.

There is a plethora of new blockbuster mobile apps providing a digital/serial reading experience to a new generation of readers (such as Wattpad, Webtoon, Tapas, Radish and the brand new Yonder), and on which heavy investment is being concentrated mainly from of South Korean companies. For those wishing to learn more about the topic, I recommend reading this article on TNPS.

These examples show clearly that the ebook and broader digital books markets are decidedly more complex than we might think, showing us that readers are exploring new services, new formats and new ways of consuming books that often are only partially catered for by traditional publishers, if at all.

Back in 2007, when Amazon launched the first Kindle store, there were just 1.3 billion people online in the entire world And just 219 million of those were in the USA. Other countries were way behind.

But fast forward 2023, and there are 5.5 billion people online. The USA’s 312 million internet users today are dwarfed by the one billion people online in China, the 834 million online in India, and the 590 million people online in Africa.

For the first time in human history, a gigantic number of people have the ability to access all the information that was once available to a very small percentage of the global population. Our innate desire to inform ourselves, to learn, or simply to be inspired or entertained, finally finds an answer in that precious luminous screen.

Finally, we can take all the digital books we want with us and read them at the time of day that best suits us, without any kind of physical limit. The smartphone has now become an extension of our body, and this has exponentially increased the likelihood of our being entertained by the digital text content it conveys. Obviously the same is true, perhaps even more, for audiobooks and podcasts, which don’t even require exclusive attention to the content.

Finally, everyone in the world, from any latitude, can satisfy the desire to access the information and cultural heritage produced by those artists, writers, and poets they love — who perhaps live or work on the other side of the planet and who they likely discovered in the first place thanks to social media.

The level of demand for digital content has grown exponentially in recent years. and has never been as high as it is today.

The competition to monetize that demand has never been fiercer, with thousands upon thousands of services and apps continually innovating and evolving just to capture the attention levels of us as readers, listeners, and consumers.

And right now, we are at the very start of a whole new revolution in digital content creation and delivery as AI, with sweet irony, moves from the realm of science fiction books to everyday reality for authors and publishers anywhere in the world.

That’s another topic, and one we at StreetLib are enthralled by. I’ll return to this in a future post. But here, just to wind down this essay, with its ebook focus, with a few words about the practicalities of ebook publishing in 2023.

The official industry reports must be read carefully, but it is necessary to always be aware that they can only capture a part of what is happening in the colorful digital world… and it therefore becomes essential for publishers to go further and try to understand what the reading habits of the new generations are and the evolution of digital publishing in a broad sense.

What are the advantages of placing the ebook at the center of your editorial strategy? Here are some very concrete ones:

1- The ebook never goes out of print: a book simultaneously produced in digital version lives forever and has no expiration date.

2- The ebook can be purchased at any time of the day, with availability 24/7/365, and from almost anywhere in the world and arrives on our device within seconds.

3- Producing an ebook costs relatively little: very often less than $100 for a full professional format.

4- Distributing an ebook is cheap: very often digital distribution has no fixed costs, but retains a percentage equal to or less than 10% of the cover price.

5- The ebook has no warehouse costs and is not affected by the enormous problem of returns.

6- The ebook offers the publisher maximum flexibility on the cover price: the publisher can change the price as often as desired, at no cost, and thus easily support all marketing activities and promotions.

7- The ebook offers the publisher maximum flexibility in terms of bundling: the publisher can create and offer packages by combining the ebook with other digital content, with physical gadgets, to support a special event or in combination with any promotional activity.

8- The ebook offers the publisher maximum flexibility in terms of updates: the publisher can correct and update the content even after it has been distributed, it can include additional complementary chapters and can insert special pages to support its own promotional activities forward in time.

9- Thanks to reading, listening and subscription apps, the ebook presents the publisher with the opportunity to monitor the reaction of its readers to its content, for example by monitoring up to which page a given ebook is read.

10- Thanks to the new AI techniques, the ebook presents the publisher with the opportunity to create the corresponding audiobook version narrated by digital voice at very low cost. It is still early days, but this is something that Google and Apple are already doing, and this genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

11- The ebook does not cannibalize the paper book: time and again reports from digital platforms show consumers reading ebooks also buy more print, not less.

12- The ebook is not the cause of piracy: the ebook increases the accessibility of a work and thus reduces the pirate’s incentive. The best strategy to reduce piracy is to produce your catalog in ebook format, and to embrace new business models designed to follow the needs of new generations of readers (eg subscription programs).

13 — The ebook is inclusive: to those people who have difficulty reading texts in traditional formats, the ebook offers the possibility of changing the size of the font, the contrast of the page background, and in some cases even the sound reading in text-to-speech.

What exactly would be the activities that a publisher should start doing right away in order to start seizing the opportunities offered by the digital market? Here are some very specific ones:

1- Produce quality ebooks: obviously I’m not talking about the content but about the container, and the latter must be impeccable from a technical point of view. The cover must be in high resolution, the epub must be valid and therefore comply with all the requirements dictated by the latest version of EPubCheck, the final file must not be heavier than 3–4 Mbytes (unless there are special cases).

2- The publication date of the ebook and the paper book must coincide: to do this, it is necessary to organize an ebook production process parallel to the paper one within the publishing house. If the ebook is published on a later date than the paper book, the paper book may also be penalized by some online bookstores!

3- Avoid publishing the ebook on a single retailer: nowadays there are many ebook sales platforms and my advice is to rely on a digital distributor who can guarantee the best possible digital distribution coverage, in order to maximize the exposure of one’s work and seize all the opportunities in the various market niches.

4- Avoid selling the ebook only with the classic a-la-carte model: it is important to adopt all the digital business models that make sense for the ebook genre in question. These new models have been designed to meet new audiences and new needs for using content, and it is good to make the most of them.

5- Avoid using outdated territorial restrictions. These may still have a place with certain printed books, where distribution options are limited, or rights-holders dictate limits, but digital can be truly global, and putting any restriction on where an ebook might be sold is to leave money on the table.

6- Choosing a digital distribution partner capable of offering added value — for example by providing additional services integrated with the distribution or proposing additional and experimental distribution channels on new markets or with new digital business models. The correct choice of partner or production service is essential.

Long live ebooks!

Oggi voglio parlare di ebook. Voglio mostrare come la loro reale popolarità non sia ben rappresentata nelle ricerche di settore e sottovalutata dagli operatori editoriali. E come gli Editori, Italiani e non, dovrebbero iniziare a fare attenzione a questo fenomeno se non vogliono perdersi una delle più grandi opportunità del prossimo decennio.

Metto subito in chiaro una cosa: adoro i libri in tutte le loro forme, compresa quella cartacea. Adoro contemplare la mia libreria fisica personale alla ricerca di qualcosa di indefinibile, e non potrei vivere rinunciando a quella magica esperienza immersiva che solo un bel libro cartaceo può fornire.

Sono quindi molto felice nel constatare che, secondo AIE (Associazione Italiana Editori), l’oggetto libro nel 2022 abbia mantenuto saldamente la sua quota di mercato nel panorama editoriale italiano, risultato per nulla scontato.

Secondo i dati ufficiali AIE sull’andamento del mercato del libro in Italia, nel 2022 il mercato dei libri cartacei di varia in Italia vale 1,775 miliardi di euro, in calo di un timido 2.5% rispetto a quello che era stato un formidabile 2021 — l’anno della ripresa post-pandemica, in cui gli editori hanno investito molto nella filiera della carta e i lettori hanno ricominciato a frequentare le librerie fisiche.

Ma oggi voglio parlare di ebook, dicevo.

Secondo la stessa ricerca, il mercato degli ebook in Italia vale meno del 5% di quello della carta. Si è passati da un valore di mercato di 86 milioni di Euro nel 2021, a un valore di 79 milioni nel 2022, con un calo dell’8% in un solo anno.

Nella ricerca AIE si legge che gli Editori Italiani nel 2022 hanno introdotto nel mercato 76.575 novità editoriali in formato cartaceo, e soltanto meno della metà sono state pubblicate anche nella versione digitale. Le novità in ebook pubblicate dagli Editori nel 2022 sono esattamente 35.200, in calo del 28.6% rispetto al 2021 quando le novità in ebook erano 49.313, e addirittura del 27.8% rispetto al 2019 quando erano 48.763.

Ritengo che la situazione del reparto digitale sia molto più articolata di quanto emerga da questa ricerca, e che questi numeri rappresentino soltanto una parte del mercato, per altro fortemente influenzati dalle scelte dei principali operatori rappresentati.

Le abitudini di lettura e ascolto evolvono indipendentemente dalle politiche editoriali. Le nuove generazioni trovano nuove modalità per rifornirsi dei contenuti che vogliono leggere. Molto spesso, queste si manifestano all’interno di contesti nuovi, digitali, fluidi, e pressoché impossibili da misurare con i classici schemi dell’editoria libraria.

Mi prendo la libertà di allargare un po’ lo sguardo e di fornire degli esempi concreti:

Primo esempio: Kindle Unlimited (KU) è il programma subscription di Amazon Kindle a cui ci si può abbonare a 9,99€ al mese per accedere a un catalogo con milioni di ebook. In Italia i contenuti sono principalmente forniti dagli autori indipendenti o da pochi Editori pionieristici.

Nel 2022, il “pot” annuale di KU, a livello globale, è arrivato all’astronomica cifra di circa $552 milioni di dollari, in crescita del 16% rispetto al 2021.

Cos’è il “pot” di KU? A differenza di altri programmi subscription, KU offre una remunerazione (a tutti gli editori e gli autori indipendenti che decidono di includere i loro ebook nel programma) che viene calcolata a partire da una somma, chiamata in gergo “pot”, che Amazon decide unilateralmente di allocare ogni mese. Per chiarezza, tale somma indica il guadagno netto degli editori e degli autori che hanno deciso di essere inclusi nel programma KU, e non del valore delle vendite a prezzo di copertina, come nel report AIE.

Parliamo dunque di oltre mezzo miliardo di fatturato aggiuntivo (in crescita di oltre 70 milioni di dollari rispetto al 2021) che è stato incassato dagli editori e autori indipendenti di tutto il mondo tramite questa formula di abbonamento, con un modello di vendita diverso da quello tradizionalmente utilizzato per i libri cartacei.

Per maggiori dettagli su questo tema, vi consiglio la lettura dell’articolo scritto dal mio collega Mark Williams per la nostra rivista digitale The New Publishing Standard (in inglese).

Secondo esempio: analizziamo i dati delle vendite online negli USA diffusi qualche giorno fa da BookStat e condivisi in questo articolo da PublishersWeekly (articolo in inglese dietro paywall).

Secondo BookStat, le vendite online di libri dagli store Apple, Amazon e Barnes&Noble nel 2022 hanno generato un giro d’affari di $12.13 miliardi di dollari americani, in crescita del 5.6% sul 2021. Le vendite sono così suddivise per formato:

1. $3.04 miliardi di audiobook (in crescita del 22% sul 2021)

2. $2.57 miliardi di ebook (in crescita del 6% sul 2021)

3. $6.52 miliardi di libri cartacei (in calo del 0.6% sul 2021)

In termini di unità di vendita, la situazione è invece la seguente:

1. 188 milioni di unità vendute di audiobooks (in crescita del 23% rispetto al 2021)

2. 526 milioni di unità vendute di ebook (in crescita del 8% rispetto al 2021)

3. 403 milioni di unità vendute di libri cartacei (in calo del 1.3% rispetto al 2021)

Quindi, nel 2022 l’ebook è stato il formato più acquistato online negli USA e il numero di unità vendute in digitale supera ampiamente quelle in forma cartacea.

Tra gli ebook, sempre secondo BookStat, i titoli autopubblicati dagli autori indipendenti compongono il 51% delle unità vendute e il 34% del fatturato nel 2022. Ne consegue che, nel 2022 gli autori indipendenti hanno maturato un fatturato complessivo di $874 milioni di dollari dalle vendite online degli ebook.

NB: BookStat stima che la sua copertura del mercato delle librerie online è pari al 93% per gli ebook, al 95% per gli audiobook e al 93% per i libri cartacei. BookStat è di proprietà di Podium Audio, editore di audiolibri tra i primi 10 negli USA.

Terzo esempio: analizziamo il mondo dei serialized content, o contenuti seriali.

Durante la sua presentazione al Digital Book World di New York di circa un mese fa, che ho avuto la fortuna di assistere in prima persona, Annie Stone di Yonder ha confermato che negli USA i contenuti seriali di genere fiction hanno un valore di mercato di $100 milioni di dollari (dati di Giugno 2022), con una crescita del 21.7% rispetto all’anno precedente.

Yonder è la nuovissima app di Webtoon/Naver dedicata ai contenuti fiction seriali, nella cui descrizione leggiamo questo bellissimo claim: “Wherever you want to go. Whenever you want to go. Reading for the modern world.”.

Come a dire che chiunque, e ovunque, grazie agli “assaggi” di contenuti brevi ma validi forniti da Yonder, ora ha la possibilità di fermarsi a leggere per almeno pochi minuti al giorno, anche durante i tempi morti della giornata.

Esistono tantissime nuove app mobile di grande successo che forniscono un’esperienza di lettura digitale/seriale a una nuova generazione di lettori (come Wattpad, Webtoon, Tapas, Radish e la nuovissima Yonder), e su cui si stanno concentrando forti investimenti soprattutto da parte di aziende Sudcoreane. Per chi volesse approfondire il tema, consiglio la lettura di questo articolo su TNPS (in inglese).

I precedenti tre esempi, pur essendo tarati su una dimensione globale e quindi non necessariamente sovrapponibili al mercato italiano, suggeriscono che il mercato ebook è decisamente più articolato di quanto considerato dalle attuali ricerche nazionali. In particolar modo, ci mostrano che i lettori stanno esplorando nuovi servizi, ancora poco, o per nulla, proposti dagli editori. Il rischio, così, è di perdere nel corso del tempo una quota importante dei propri lettori.

L’introduzione degli smartphone ha concesso a circa 5 miliardi di persone nel mondo la possibilità di accedere a ogni tipo di contenuto digitale, in ogni momento della giornata e in totale mobilità. Internet e i social media non diffondono solamente fake news e video di simpatici gattini, bensì consentono a un numero incredibile di persone di esplorare nuovi orizzonti informativi e culturali.

Per la prima volta nella storia dell’umanità, un numero gigantesco di persone ha la possibilità di accedere a tutte quelle informazioni che un tempo erano a disposizione di una piccolissima percentuale della popolazione globale. Il nostro desiderio innato di informarci, di apprendere, o semplicemente di lasciarci ispirare o intrattenere, trova finalmente una risposta in quel prezioso schermo luminoso.

Finalmente possiamo portarci dietro tutti i libri digitali che vogliamo, e leggerli nel momento della giornata che più ci aggrada senza nessun tipo di limite fisico. Lo smartphone è diventato ormai un’estensione del nostro corpo, e ciò ha incrementato esponenzialmente la probabilità di lasciarci intrattenere dai contenuti digitali da esso veicolati. Ovviamente lo stesso discorso vale, forse ancora di più, per gli audiobook e per i podcast, i quali non richiedono nemmeno un’attenzione esclusiva nei confronti del contenuto.

Finalmente tutti nel mondo, da qualsiasi latitudine, possono soddisfare il desiderio di accedere allo stesso patrimonio informativo e culturale prodotto da quegli artisti, scrittori, e poeti che amano — che magari vivono o lavorano dall’altra parte del pianeta e che probabilmente hanno scoperto grazie ai social media.

Il livello di domanda dei contenuti digitali è cresciuto esponenzialmente negli ultimi anni e non è mai stato così elevato come oggi.

La competizione per monetizzare tale domanda non è mai stata così feroce, con migliaia e migliaia di servizi e app che innovano ed evolvono in continuazione al solo fine di catturare i livelli di attenzione di noi lettori, ascoltatori, e consumatori.

I report ufficiali vanno letti con attenzione, ma occorre essere consapevoli che essi possono catturare solo una parte di quello che succede nel variopinto mondo digitale… e diventa quindi fondamentale per gli Editori andare oltre e provare a capire quali sono le abitudini di lettura delle nuove generazioni e l’evoluzione dell’editoria digitale in senso lato.

Quali vantaggi comporta posizionare l’ebook al centro della propria strategia editoriale? Eccone alcuni molto concreti:

1- L’ebook non va mai fuori stampa: un libro prodotto (anche) in versione digitale vive per sempre e non ha una data di scadenza.

2- L’ebook si può acquistare in ogni momento della giornata, con una disponibilità 24/7/365. Inoltre può essere acquistato anche su piattaforme non italiane e arriva nel nostro dispositivo entro pochi secondi.

3- Produrre un ebook costa relativamente poco: molto spesso meno di 100€.

4- Distribuire un ebook è economico: molto spesso la distribuzione digitale non ha costi fissi, ma trattiene una percentuale uguale o inferiore al 10% del prezzo di copertina.

5- L’ebook non presenta costi di magazzino e non è afflitto dall’enorme problema dei resi.

6- L’ebook offre all’Editore la massima flessibilità sul prezzo di copertina: l’Editore può cambiare il prezzo tutte le volte che vuole, a costo zero, e così supportare in modo agevole tutte le proprie attività di marketing.

7- L’ebook offre all’Editore la massima flessibilità in termini di bundling: l’Editore può creare pacchetti di offerta combinando l’ebook con altri contenuti digitali, con gadget fisici, a supporto di un evento speciale o in combinazione con qualsiasi attività promozionale.

8- L’ebook offre all’Editore la massima flessibilità in termini di update: l’Editore può correggere e aggiornare il contenuto anche successivamente alla messa in distribuzione, può includere capitoli aggiuntivi complementari e può inserire pagine speciali a supporto delle proprie attività promozionali portate avanti nel tempo.

9- Grazie alle app di lettura, di ascolto e di abbonamento, l’ebook presenta all’Editore l’opportunità di conoscere esattamente la reazione dei suoi lettori ai propri contenuti, ad esempio monitorando fino a che pagina viene letto un determinato ebook.

10- Grazie alle nuove tecniche di AI, l’ebook presenta all’Editore l’opportunità di creare a costi molto bassi la corrispondente versione audiolibro narrata da voce digitale. Ancora è presto per l’Italia ma questa è una cosa che Google e Apple stanno già facendo con i contenuti in lingua inglese.

11- L’ebook non cannibalizza il libro cartaceo: il lettore abituato al digitale molto probabilmente non comprerà il libro cartaceo, anche se l’ebook non è disponibile. Anzi, magari andrà a cercarne una copia pirata…

12- L’ebook non è la causa della pirateria: l’ebook aumenta l’accessibilità di un’opera e in tal modo riduce l’incentivo del pirata. La migliore strategia per ridurre la pirateria consiste nel produrre il proprio catalogo in formato ebook, e di abbracciare i nuovi modelli di business progettati per seguire le esigenze delle nuove generazioni di lettori (ad esempio i programmi in abbonamento).

13 — L’ebook è inclusivo: a quelle persone che hanno difficoltà a leggere i testi nei formati tradizionali, l’ebook offre la possibilità di modificare la grandezza del font, il contrasto dello sfondo della pagina, e in alcuni casi anche la lettura sonora in text-to-speech.

Quali sarebbero esattamente le attività che un Editore dovrebbe iniziare a fare da subito per poter iniziare a cogliere le opportunità offerte dal mercato digitale? Eccone alcune molto specifiche:

1- Produrre ebook di qualità: ovviamente non parlo del contenuto ma del contenitore, e quest’ultimo deve essere impeccabile dal punto di vista tecnico. La copertina dev’essere ad alta risoluzione, l’epub deve essere valido e quindi rispettare tutti i requisiti dettati dall’ultima versione di EPubCheck, il file finale non deve essere più pesante di 3–4 Mbyte (a meno di casi particolari).

2- La data di pubblicazione dell’ebook e del libro cartaceo devono coincidere: per farlo, è necessario organizzare all’interno della casa editrice un processo di produzione dell’ebook parallelo a quello cartaceo. Se l’ebook viene pubblicato in una data successiva a quella del libro cartaceo, anche il libro cartaceo verrà penalizzato dalle librerie online!

3- Evitare di pubblicare l’ebook su un solo retailer: al giorno d’oggi esistono tantissime piattaforma di vendita degli ebook e il mio consiglio è quello di affidarsi a un distributore digitale che possa garantire la migliore copertura distributiva digitale possibile, in modo da massimizzare l’esposizione della propria opera e cogliere tutte le opportunità nelle diverse nicchie di mercato.

4- Evitare di vendere l’ebook solo con il classico modello a-la-carte: è importante adottare tutti i modelli di business digitali che abbiano senso per il genere dell’ebook in questione. Anche in Italia finalmente iniziano ad emergere piattaforme digitali che propongono ai lettori nuovi modelli di fruizione come l’abbonamento mensile o il prestito digitale. Questi nuovi modelli sono stati concepiti per incontrare nuove audience e nuove esigenze di fruizione dei contenuti, ed è bene sfruttarle al massimo.

5- Evitare di rendere l’ebook disponibile solo in Italia: abbiamo oltre 11 milioni di Italiani che vivono e lavorano oltre i confini nazionali. Si tratta di Italiani che hanno mediamente un alto livello di cultura e di propensione all’acquisto di contenuti digitali in italiano, per i più svariati motivi. Perché tagliarli fuori?

6- Scegliere un partner di distribuzione digitale capace di offrire valore aggiunto — ad esempio fornendo servizi aggiuntivi integrati alla distribuzione o proponendo dei canali di distribuzione aggiuntivi e sperimentali su nuovi mercati o con nuovi modelli di business digitali. La corretta scelta del partner o del servizio di produzione è fondamentale.

Lunga vita agli ebook!

→ Link alla versione in Italiano

Wow! My fourth year at the helm of StreetLib opens with 2022!

I can only start with some thanks: Thanks to all the publishers and indie authors who are entrusting us with their most precious assets: their books. Thanks to all our partners, to all operators and professionals in the industry for their continuous support. Thanks to all the StreetLib team. Thanks to my family. Thank you all!

At StreetLib, we believe that there is still a lot to do in the world of books and we still feel at the beginning of our journey.

The book industry is becoming increasingly digital, both in formats and processes, and this requires a paradigm shift at all levels, as well as an ability to understand and sustainably use the new technologies available.

The book industry is becoming more and more global, not only thanks to digital books and audiobooks that can cross continents at the speed of light, but also thanks to e-commerce and print-on-demand that finally allows us to overcome many physical barriers and to open up to new opportunities and new markets.

Digital changes everything, and it does it for the better, even in the world of books. For this reason, also in 2021 we worked to the maximum of our abilities to provide increasingly advanced technological services and tools to many publishing houses and indie authors who wanted to follow us in this exciting journey.

In this post I’m going to share some details of the work we are doing, starting with some numbers that are very significant for us.

From January 1st to December 31st 2021 a total of about 61,000 titles were published on StreetLib in the three formats natively supported by our platform: ebooks, audiobooks and paper books (in print-on-demand).

We are proudly Italian but we have never hidden our international ambitions, and this is also reflected in our catalog! As you can see below, in 2021 the titles distributed through StreetLib in Italian language are about 28% of the total, those in English 25%, those in German 19% and so on. Also in 2021, around 34% of our titles were uploaded by publishers or indie authors based in Italy, around 26% by customers based in Germany and around 13% by customers based in the USA, and so on:

Globally, in 2021 we welcomed around 300 new publishers and 1,500 new indie authors to the platform who have chosen StreetLib as a non-exclusive service for the production, distribution and sale of their titles worldwide.

To date, over 700 customers — mixed between publishers and indie authors — have purchased at least one of our editorial services or have subscribed to Write: this makes us very proud because we have designed these services with the aim of giving absolute priority to the quality of the editorial content, and this approach is proving to be the best choice at all levels along the supply chain.

StreetLib started producing and distributing digital books over 10 years ago and to date our platform manages more than 400,000 ebooks!

In 2019, thanks to the partnership with “Il Narratore Audiolibri”, we also started distributing digital audiobooks, which represent a format increasingly appreciated by a growing number of readers and listeners.

The supply of audiobooks in the world is still very limited compared to that of ebooks, especially in Italy. Nonetheless, the “listening activity” of narrated contents, be they in the form of podcasts or audiobooks, is not only increasingly appreciated by the new generations, but allows people to enjoy the content while doing other things during the day, and this makes the new “audio industry” very promising.

In Italy, our base country, we are still in an initial and somewhat complicated phase of the audiobook market, but despite this StreetLib currently distributes over 7,000 digital audiobooks on various platforms such as Apple, Storytel, Kobo, Google Play, Spotify, Scribd, BookBeat and others.

Of course, we don’t want to limit ourselves to digital formats, far from it. Digital brings innovation also in the processes of creation, production, distribution and sale of paper books, and thanks to the partnerships with some of the best digital printing companies, StreetLib provides our Italian authors and publishers with an innovative print-on-demand (POD) service, fully integrated within our publishing platform.

We expect to roll this out internationally during 2022, but for now here’s a flavour of what to expect:

During 2021 we have completely renewed our print-on-demand service and today we offer both the possibility of printing short-runs (down to the one-copy), and the possibility of activating the distribution of authors’ or publishers’ paper books catalog on online and physical bookstores. Of course, we offer all this with no up-front costs, without returns, with billing and monthly payments, and by providing an online dashboard to monitor the books sales on a daily basis.

Today, we distribute a catalog of about 10,000 paper books in print-on-demand across multiple channels like Amazon, Feltrinelli-IBS, The Garden of Books, Libraries Mondadori and other independent bookstores, as well as through our B2B wholesale channel StreetLib Totem.

That reach will of course be much wider when we launch our international POD service.

Passing now to the analysis of the sales data, the following are the best-selling categories in our catalog in 2021:

In summary: fiction, classics and spirituality lead our rankings, with comics and digital manga rapidly growing. We wanted to keep the representation in general BISAC in order to provide the most accurate detail possible.

In the following graph, on the other hand, we can see how about 63% of our turnover in 2021 was generated by the catalog in Italian, about 24% by that in English, and the remaining 13% by other languages, mainly Spanish, German and French:

These sales have been generated by our network of over 70 distribution partners, and one of our priorities for 2022 is to further expand our network with new partnerships around the world.

The continuous expansion of our distribution network, the native support of the three fundamental formats — ebook, audio and print, and the continuous development of our multi-service publishing platform, represent the three areas of development for StreetLib in 2022.

Publishers and indie authors can find in StreetLib a modern and effective one-stop shop publishing service, which allows them to seize new opportunities in terms of visibility and revenue, and at the same time to maintain maximum control over their catalogs and cash-flows.

This is our job and this is what we will do better and better, as we tried to show in our new video:

Happy 2022!

Giacomo

→ Link alla versione in Italiano

→ Link to the English translation

Wow… con l’inizio del 2022 si apre il mio quarto anno alla guida di StreetLib!

Non posso che iniziare con qualche ringraziamento: Grazie a tutti gli editori e autori indie che ci stanno affidando i loro beni più preziosi: i loro libri. Grazie a tutti i nostri partner, a tutti gli operatori e professionisti del settore per il continuo supporto. Grazie a tutto il team StreetLib. Grazie alla mia famiglia. Grazie a tutti!

In StreetLib, siamo convinti che ci sia ancora molto da fare nel mondo del libro e ci sentiamo ancora all’inizio del nostro percorso.

L’industria libraria diventa sempre più digitale, sia nei formati che nei processi, e questo presuppone un cambio di paradigma a tutti i livelli, oltre che una capacità di comprensione e di utilizzo sostenibile delle nuove tecnologie a disposizione.

L’industria libraria diventa sempre più globale, non solo grazie ai libri e audiolibri digitali che possono attraversare i continenti alla velocità della luce, ma anche grazie all’e-commerce e al print-on-demand che finalmente ci consentono di superare molte barriere fisiche e di aprirci a nuove opportunità e a nuovi mercati.

Il digitale cambia tutto, e lo fa in meglio, anche nel mondo del libro. Per questo motivo, anche nel 2021 abbiamo lavorato al massimo delle nostre capacità per fornire servizi e strumenti tecnologici sempre più avanzati a tanti editori e autori indie che hanno voluto seguirci in questo entusiasmante percorso.

Con questo post vorrei provare a condividere qualche dettaglio del lavoro che stiamo facendo, iniziando con alcuni numeri per noi molto significativi.

Dal 1° Gennaio al 31 Dicembre 2021 su StreetLib sono stati pubblicati un totale di circa 61.000 titoli nei tre formati supportati in modo nativo dalla nostra piattaforma: ebook, audiolibro e cartaceo (in modalità print-on-demand).

Siamo fieramente Italiani ma non abbiamo mai nascosto le nostre ambizioni internazionali, e ciò si riflette anche nel nostro catalogo! Come si vede sotto, nel 2021 i titoli distribuiti tramite StreetLib in lingua italiana sono circa il 28% del totale, quelli in lingua inglese il 25% e quelli in lingua tedesca il 19%. Sempre nel 2021, circa il 34% dei nostri titoli sono stati caricati da editori o autori indie con sede in Italia, circa il 26% da clienti con sede in Germania e circa il 13% da clienti con sede negli USA, e così via:

Globalmente, nel 2021 abbiamo dato il benvenuto in piattaforma a circa 300 nuovi editori e 1.500 nuovi autori indie che hanno scelto StreetLib come servizio non-esclusivo per la produzione, distribuzione e vendita dei propri titoli nel mondo.

Fino ad oggi, oltre 700 clienti — tra editori e autori indie — hanno acquistato almeno uno dei nostri servizi editoriali o hanno sottoscritto l’abbonamento a Write: questo ci rende molto fieri perché abbiamo progettato questi servizi con l’obiettivo di dare assoluta priorità alla qualità dei contenuti editoriali e i risultati appaiono davvero ottimi.

StreetLib ha iniziato a produrre e distribuire i libri digitali oltre 10 anni fa e ad oggi la nostra piattaforma commercializza più di 400.000 ebook!

Nel 2019, grazie alla partnership con “Il Narratore Audiolibri”, abbiamo iniziato a distribuire anche gli audiolibri digitali, i quali rappresentano un formato sempre più apprezzato da un numero crescente di lettori e ascoltatori.

L’offerta di audiolibri nel mondo è ancora molto limitata in confronto a quella degli ebook, soprattutto in Italia. Allo stesso tempo però, l’attività di “ascolto” di contenuti narrati, siano essi sotto forma di podcast o audiolibri, non solo è sempre più apprezzata dalle nuove generazioni, ma consente di fruire del contenuto mentre si fa altro durante la giornata, e questo rende la nuova “industria audio” molto promettente.

Negli ultimi mesi del 2021 abbiamo parlato delle opportunità nel mondo degli audiolibri sia al Salone di Torino che a Più Libri Più Liberi di Roma, e se vuoi saperne di più qui è disponibile la registrazione video della nostra presentazione.

In Italia, siamo ancora in una fase iniziale e per certi versi complicata del mercato degli audiolibri, ma nonostante questo StreetLib distribuisce ad oggi oltre 7.000 audiolibri digitali in diverse piattaforme come Storytel, Kobo, Google Play, Apple, Spotify, Scribd, BookBeat e altre.

Ovviamente non ci vogliamo limitare ai formati digitali, tutt’altro. Il digitale consente di innovare anche e soprattutto nei processi di creazione, produzione, distribuzione e vendita dei libri cartacei, e grazie alle partnership con alcune tra le migliori aziende di stampa digitale, StreetLib fornisce un innovativo servizio di print-on-demand (POD) completamente integrato all’interno della nostra piattaforma di publishing.

Nel corso del 2021 abbiamo rinnovato completamente il nostro servizio di print-on-demand e oggi offriamo sia la possibilità di eseguire la stampa delle tirature (a partire dalla singola copia), sia la possibilità di mettere il proprio catalogo cartaceo in distribuzione nelle librerie online e fisiche senza costi di magazzino e senza resi, con fatturazione e pagamenti mensili, e con controllo e monitoraggio delle vendite in piattaforma.

Ad oggi, distribuiamo un catalogo di circa 10.000 libri cartacei in print-on-demand su diversi canali come Amazon, Feltrinelli-IBS, Il Giardino dei Libri, Librerie Mondadori e altre librerie indipendenti, in aggiunta alla distribuzione B2B tramite il nostro canale wholesale StreetLib Totem

Passando ora all’analisi dei dati di vendita, quelle che seguono sono le categorie più vendute nel nostro catalogo nel 2021:

In sintesi: fiction, classici e spiritualità guidano le nostre classifiche, con i fumetti e manga digitali in rapidissima ascesa. Abbiamo voluto mantenere la rappresentazione in genere BISAC in modo da fornire il dettaglio più accurato possibile.

Nel grafico seguente invece si vede come circa il 63% del nostro fatturato 2021 sia stato generato dal catalogo in lingua italiana, circa il 24% da quello in lingua inglese, e il restante 13% dalle altre lingue, principalmente spagnolo, tedesco e francese:

Queste vendite sono state generate dal nostro network di oltre 70 partner di distribuzione, e una delle nostre priorità per il 2022 è quella di allargare ulteriormente la nostra rete distributiva con nuove partnership in Italia e nel mondo.

L’ampliamento continuo del nostro network di distribuzione, il supporto nativo dei tre formati fondamentali — ebook, audio e cartaceo, e il continuo sviluppo della nostra piattaforma tecnologica multi-servizio, rappresentano le tre aree di sviluppo per StreetLib nel 2022.

Editori e autori indie possono trovare in StreetLib un servizio di publishing one-stop shop moderno ed efficace, che consenta loro di cogliere le nuove opportunità in termini di visibilità e fatturato, e al tempo stesso di mantenere il massimo controllo sui loro cataloghi e flussi di cassa.

Questo è il nostro lavoro e questo è quello che faremo sempre meglio, come abbiamo provato ad illustrare nel nostro nuovo video:

Buon 2022!

Giacomo

→ Link to the English translation

2020 was a rollercoaster ride for the publishing industry globally, and no doubt for you as authors and publishers.

That’s certainly been the case for all of us at StreetLib: We started the year with big plans to kickstart the new decade, only to have our roadmap torn to shreds as Italy became the frontline of what quickly became a global pandemic.

As we closed 2020, there would be a lot to be said about what happened during the last twelve months in the media landscape. As an industry, we definitely had five-years-progress in terms of digital content awareness and consumption… there are plenty of articles and interviews out there about this topic, so that’s all I would say about that.

Rather, in this short essay I intend to take a look in what we’re building at StreetLib while trying to balance into the new year, with the aim of understanding how the post-2020 publishing era will unfold.

People love books in any formats. Reading and listening activities are increasing everywhere around the world, wherever good content is made available to people at accessible prices.

For authors and publishers out there, that’s great news!

But we believe that the ones who will benefit the most out of this new Renaissance of Publishing will be the ones willing to publish their stories in multiple formats, to experiment with different business models, to explore all the possible available consumer and marketing channels, and to implement modern and effective publishing workflows.

At StreetLib, our practical approach is leading us into building something that is specifically targeting each of those opportunities… and the following are some bites of what we’re working on.

Implementing multiple Formats

One of our main goals is to provide a seamless and effective publishing experience to publishers of all kinds.

We do this by supporting all book-formats natively within our software infrastructure, connecting the “content supplier” with the “consumer point” in a very secure, reliable and efficient way.

The new StreetLib cloud-publishing platform that we’ll be releasing in the coming weeks will allow the native digital distribution of ebooks, audiobooks, POD books and podcasts:

We strongly believe that authors and publishers should explore every possible avenue for exploiting their own Intellectual Properties. Making books available in digital, audio, POD and podcast formats, when appropriate, is a smart strategy: we want to make it easy for authors and publishers to implement it.

Embracing new business models

Nowadays, new business models like digital lending and digital subscriptions are increasing in popularity, especially among the young people.

There’s much more to digital publishing in 2021 than just selling books and ebooks on Amazon: companies like OverDrive, Axiell, MLOL, Odilo, Audible, Storytel, Scribd, Kobo, BookBeat, Nextory, Izneo, Perlego, YouScribe and others are becoming household names in different countries and regions of the world, thanks to their mobile apps for accessing digital content in new and modern ways.

Most of them are already part of the StreetLib distribution network, and our job is to make it easy for our authors and publishers to enjoy the benefits of all the innovative apps that are popping up in every corner of the globe.

As part of our effort, we’re going to release a new version of our StreetLib Analytics service that will allow advanced sales analysis across different markets and business models:

Thanks to StreetLib Analytics, authors and publishers can monitor and track sales across multiple formats, genres, channels and business models… and they can even do that with our native mobile app.

Exploring sales and marketing channels

We’re going to provide authors and publishers increasing levels of control over their distribution options, as we grow our network and add new and promising distribution channels to our platform.

Each author and publisher has its specific needs, and the new StreetLib cloud-publishing platform will allow each of them to manage how and where their catalog is distributed:

At the same time, though, we believe that authors and publishers need much more than just relying on 3rd-party distribution channels. That’s necessary, but on its own not enough anymore.

By trying to connect with their audience directly, without any intermediary, authors and publishers can better understand and evaluate who their audience is, what they need and what they respond to.

The reality is that many of our authors and publishers already understand this and have been asked for a solution for a long time.

So we listened, we kept on building, and after many iterations we came up with a new service that we called StreetLib Direct:

StreetLib Direct is a D2C (direct to consumer) marketing service that, among other features, provides a “giveaway tool” allowing authors and publishers to setup landing-pages for specific campaigns and to monitor the usage of the coupon codes on their ebooks and audiobooks catalog.

If you want to take part of the beta-test or just provide your feedback, you’re welcome to send us a line.

Digital publishing workflows

The pandemic has not only increased the consumption of digital content across the board. It has also shaped remote work in general, internet-based collaboration patterns, and editorial workflows within media companies and publishing organizations of any size.

At StreetLib, we have always encouraged authors and publishers to embrace and implement digital workflows to streamline their daily operations, and starting from 2021, we will also start providing some of these services within the StreetLib platform.

We have identified many pain points along the publishing value chain and our goal is to address most of them in order to provide superpowers to our authors and publishers :)

To be very concrete, one of the biggest need that we see among the modern publishing organizations is the urgency to streamline the management of their publishing assets, from production to distribution, to marketing and sales.

Publishers need to manage a lot of files nowadays, and the situation gets worse as they have to deal with multiple formats, files requirements for different sales channels, and so forth. And even worse with audio files which are usually quite big. Also, these assets have to be arranged and archived securely and reliably, and oftentimes in a way that need to be easy to share and to reference among different teams and online collaboration apps.

As always, we try our best to build useful tools and services for everybody to use, and in this context we came up with the new StreetLib Storage service:

With StreetLib Storage, authors and publishers can easily upload their assets onto our platform, they can activate a number of intelligent actions to fix, rename and process their files, they can securely archive them, organize and share them, and eventually attach them to their publications.

We’re building these services with the collaboration of a group of selected customers, but of course our goal is to make all our publishing services accessible for everybody to use with just a bunch of clicks as part of the platform.

And in fact, this is our mantra: that we are inclusive for all publishers, of any size, anywhere in the world.

2020 was a year like no other. Yet it didn’t stop us from achieving some remarkable milestones and working to support some of the most amazing authors and publishers out there.

Your books have the power to change people’s lives and to improve the world we’re living in, and we feel extremely honoured to serve you every single day.

I wish you all, on behalf of the StreetLib team, a prosperous New Year.

Giacomo D’Angelo, CEO at StreetLib.com, giac@streetlib.com

Credits: Photo by Jose Mizrahi on Unsplash

November marked my first full year as the new CEO of StreetLib, and as we close 2019 and prepare to start not just a new year but a new decade, I’m taking time out to review where we are today, and what my aspirations are for the company in 2020 and beyond.

Note I say aspirations, not plans, and that’s because publishing is still in a transitional stage where things have, are and will change fast as new technologies and new opportunities evolve, and old ones fall by the wayside.
A company that makes concrete plans, carefully mapping out step by step the next five years, or even the next twelve months, is always going to be at a disadvantage in a fluid and fast-moving environment like global publishing.

For StreetLib, being able to respond to and adapt to new conditions is essential. But more importantly still is to for StreetLib be proactive as well as reactive. That is to say, that we do not just respond to industry developments as they happen, but are often at the forefront of those new developments.

Some of Our Recent Milestones:

At StreetLib, for example, we were:

• The first of the indie-friendly English-language aggregators to offer both audiobook distribution (through partners as varied as Audible, Storytel, Ubook and many others) and audiobook production services (through our partnership with Il Narratore Audiolibri).

• We were the first to offer podcast distribution through our partnership with Spreaker.

• We were the first to offer a Blockchain-enabled royalty payments option via our partnership with SureRemit.

• We were the first to offer IP Rights management through our partnership with Nakiri.

• We were the first to offer a localized digital publishing portal for every country in the world.

• We were the first to offer authors and publishers an option to make money through a serialized fiction reading app thanks to our partnership with STARY’s Dreame.

• We were the first to offer free distribution of global indigenous language content through our partnership with Storyweaver.

• We were the first to offer a free journal covering the global publishing scene — our (mostly) daily The New Publishing Standard.

• We were the first to offer free B2B newsletters for Africa, for the Middle East, and for self-publishers, and to offer free slide deck presentations showing digital opportunities around the world (like this).

And that’s before I even begin to talk about the more than fifty other distribution partners that mean StreetLib offers the widest possible distribution available.

Everything Started with a Why

Why would we need to do all this?

Because gone are the days when there was only one way to publish a book, only one way to reach readers, and only one or two markets where that book could be sold.

When I took over the helm in November 2018, I decided to not follow the craze of competing in the self-referencing ultra-rich US-centered publishing world, but I rather turned my gaze in the opposite direction and started exploring the immense diversity of the rest of the world.

What a trip! At every step on the way, I found myself in front of huge opportunities and monumental problems to solve.

Little by little, among many adversities, our playing field started to look enormous and our competitors started disappearing from our radars: in front of us there were only new customers with tons of problems to solve, and we relentlessly tried our best to make them happy.

We clearly are still far from finding all the solutions, but I’m extremely proud of and grateful to my team for what we achieved so far.

Global Distribution

This path led us to understand what is our innate mission: to build a truly global tech-publishing platform for indie-authors and publishers for every country of the world.

Today, not only are we helping indie-authors and publishers to adopt the digital formats in a world where more and more literature will increasingly be consumed in digital forms, but we also enable them to reinvent their physical books production chains thanks to digital technologies.

We are working to build the best possible technology platform to support and empower any kind of book publishers: from indie-authors to big corporate-publishers, from micro-publishers and small-presses to education and academics publishers, we want to serve them all with our tailored publishing services.

We provide a format-agnostic global distributor that will be at the centre of a truly global, truly inclusive publishing eco-system for the 2020s, where print and digital not just co-exist but compliment one another to deliver a uniquely fulfilling experience to consumers, while rewarding both content creators and the necessary “middleman” partners that make it all possible.

And all importantly this is not one-way. This is gateway distribution, whereby we want to be able to take the works of any author and publisher, anywhere in the world, and make them available to readers anywhere in the world.

As we start 2020 the sobering reality is that the USA has less than 7% of the world’s internet users.

Not that 312 million people online is not exciting, but in China there are 854 million online, and in India 560 million. The USA is at 95% internet penetration and has no room to grow. China is at just 60% and India at less than 41%. Both are growing fast. But not as fast as Africa, which already has more internet users than the USA (522 million) and is at less than 40% penetration. In the Arab world, another region few authors and publishers give a second thought to, there are more than 200 million Arabs online.

We see this as an exciting opportunity for our authors and publishers, and we want to support and enable them to catch these opportunities with our technology platform.

Already our catalogue fields titles in over 90 languages, but we won’t rest until we offer content in every language.

Already we provide one of the broadest distribution networks with more than 50 retail, library and subscription partners, but we won’t rest until we offer a retail, library and subscription channels in every country of the world.

Also, we’ll be stepping up our efforts to inform and educate as we go: it’s extremely important for us to drive the debate and lead from the front, not waiting until the ground is proven before we take action.

That’s our attitude as we start the new year and the new decade.

Closing Remarks

This is the time for me to express my personal gratitude to my exceptional team, to all our collaborators, to our customers, to our partners, to our investors and to everybody who believed in us. Thank you!

I’m grateful to have been invited to speak at publishing conferences and book fairs as diverse as Thessaloniki in Greece and the IPA Africa Seminar in Nairobi, among many.

And to have been able to meet in person so many incredible and passionate publishing professionals at International Book Fairs in London, Bologna, Turin, New York City, Frankfurt and Rome.

Happy Holiday for those who are celebrating, and best wishes to everyone around the world for whom the western holidays will be just another working day.

I’m sure we planted something good this past year at StreetLib, and I look forward to what comes next in 2020 with humbleness and excitement!

Giacomo D’Angelo, CEO at StreetLib.com, giac@streetlib.com

Credits: Photo by Sushobhan Badhai on Unsplash

(This speech was presented by Giacomo D’Angelo at the IPA Annual Seminar in Nairobi, Kenya, on June 14, 2019)

Hello everybody,

I’m Giacomo D’Angelo, CEO at StreetLib.com.

First, I want to thank you the International Publishers Association and the Kenyan Publishers Association for the invitation. I am really honored to be here today, thanks for having me.

I grew up in Italy, lucky enough to be surrounded by books, and got my first computer when I was 12. My career as a software developer was set in motion as I discovered the internet.

The Internet was a beautiful place at the beginning: it was made by a set of open technologies and protocols that anybody can use, reuse, and mix together without constraints and limitations.

The HTTP, SMTP, FTP, all these open protocols were made available to build better communication tools for everybody. For instance, you could have chosen the SMTP open protocol to start building a new email service for everybody to use over the Internet.

No constraints. No borders. No control. No limits. The Internet was born to be open, borderless and democratic.

But along the way something changed.

Decentralization gave way to centralization. Some very smart companies started to arise with their own proprietary technology stack and they were able to amass an incredible amount of power in just a few years.

FAANG is an acronym for the market’s five most popular and best-performing tech stocks, namely Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet’s Google.

Our society leverages the Internet to fulfill most of its basic needs, and these companies control it. They control how we buy stuff, how we socialize, what are we interested in, what we eat, what we watch, what we listen and what we read.

Somehow these companies deserved their success because they have changed the way we live, the way we work and the way we enjoy our free time. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes Not.

Centralization was also a predictable phase, and one StreetLib was created to help counter.

StreetLib is a publishing facilitator and global gateway distributor of ebooks, audiobooks, and pod-books for publishers big and small. From 2006.

From the beginning we advocated to our publishers and authors a policy of “going wide”, getting the benefits of the big corporations but avoiding being dependent on them.

With StreetLib, publishers can upload all their books and send them out to hundreds of retailers and subscription services and tens of thousands of libraries around the globe. StreetLib does all the heavy lifting of managing the books catalog and metadata, of dealing with the retail partners, and of paying out revenues to publishers at the end of each month.

Then the question is: Doesn’t StreetLib represent another level of centralization? Yes, it does!

So, why should authors and publishers trust StreetLib?

Trust is the keyword of our times.

Trust is the new emerging property in the open blockchain networks.

Blockchain networks are new types of networks where the unique capability is trust between users, developers, and the platform itself. This trust emerges from the mathematical and game-theoretic properties of the system, without depending on the trustworthiness of individual network participants.

In an era in which the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of large tech incumbents, it’s more important than ever to create the right economic conditions for developers, creators, and entrepreneurs.

Trust also enables new kinds of governance where communities collectively make important decisions about how networks evolve, what behaviors are permitted, and how economic benefits are distributed.

Today, any organizations in the world need to be able to operate on the Internet to be competitive and relevant in their marketplace. Likewise, in the near future any organizations need to operate as an open blockchain network if they want to stay in business.

You won’t trust “StreetLib the company” anymore in 10 years. You’ll trust “StreetLib the network”.

Looking at what’s happening today, the first example of this is money. Nowadays we use banks and other financial institutions to manage money.

StreetLib, like any other organizations in the world, works on top of the traditional financial system to operate with their customers.

If, for instance, a Kenyan publisher uses StreetLib to publish his digital book on Amazon, then StreetLib receives the proceeds from the book sales from Amazon, and then StreetLib pays royalties to the publisher via bank transfer, Paypal, Western Union or Payoneer, according to his will.

These payment methods involve high fees and delays because there are many legacy layers involved in the payment process.

While the rise of a financial crisis in 2008 highlighted some of the risks associated with the traditional banking system, 2008 was also the birth year of Bitcoin — the first cryptocurrency to be created.

In contrast to fiat currencies, such as the US dollar or British pound, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are decentralized, which means they are not controlled by a national government or central bank. Instead, the creation of new coins is determined by a predefined set of rules — by the protocol.

Bitcoin is open, public, borderless, neutral and censorship resistant.

Bitcoin is The Internet of Money.

Suddenly, money becomes information and can be exchanged across borders in a peer to peer fashion, quickly and inexpensively, with no central control and no renter fees.

Another great example of this technology (even if not as good as Bitcoin, imho) is the Stellar technology, which has been built to create very efficient borderless digital payment railways, and on top of which a group of very smart people in Nigeria built a blockchain company called SureRemit.

In March, StreetLib partnered with SureRemit to offer to authors and publishers an alternative to those expensive traditional payment transfer options.

SureRemit uses the blockchain and the Remit token (RMT) to facilitate global payments, allowing StreetLib authors and publishers worldwide to be paid instantly with negligible fees, even if they have no bank account and no access to Paypal.

In a world where almost 50% of the adult population does not have bank accounts, SureRemit enfranchises more people to participate in the global digital economy!

Users of the SureRemit app receive the RMT token in their in-app wallet and the RMT can then be spent on leading brand vouchers/gift cards to purchase groceries, clothing, medicines, school fees, mobile top-ups, pay bills and more.

And from today, they can use the RMT tokens to buy books and audiobooks in the StreetLib Store!

But let’s try to open up a bit our vision now, in order to understand how this technology can impact the Book Industry at different levels.

Most blockchains function as a distributed ledger that records and protects digital data through the use of cryptography.

The decentralized network can be configured as a transparent database, visible by all participants, and this provides the ability to create a distributed and immutable registries.

As such, authors and publishers can leverage them to produce a trail of records for all their publishing activities. They can create timestamped proofs of existence and ownership for any books, and they can register the cryptographic fingerprint of the book in a publicly verifiable and immutable ledger.

Availability and affordable local pricing: these are the two keywords to help solving the piracy problem in the book industry.. And this technology will play a key role on books copyrights protection and piracy issues.

Furthermore, blockchain technology can be used to create a platform where authors and publishers have an immutable and transparent record of who is buying, reading or listening to their content. Such a platform can also facilitate payments through smart contracts — which are basically self-executing digital contracts.

Right now we have to accept on trust that the number of digital books a retailer tells us have been sold is correct. Or there’s the number of pages read or hours listened to in a subscription service. Not to question the integrity of any service, of course, but how can we know for sure what happens to our digital products?

Blockchain ledger accounting can solve these problems by simultaneously offering transparency and security.

Thanks to this technology, both the content provider and the dispenser can simultaneously see how much of what has been consumed, and payments can be collected from consumers to content providers the same day.

Isn’t this revolutionary? It is, and we’ll see it happens in the foreseeable future.

It’s never easy to predict the future. And it’s not easy to predict how and when the technologies I talked about today will be rolled out in our beloved book market.

But there’s no IF: this technology is coming up.

What StreetLib is doing with SureRemit is still very little. This technology will allow us to make the Book Market more open, more democratic, more accessible, more secure, and more efficient. So, we’re still scratching the surface here.

It’s really important that we’re talking about these topics here in Nairobi, because I believe emerging countries — like Kenya — are the ones that will benefit the most from this technology. Thanks to open blockchain networks we can create systems to enable any author or publisher, truly anywhere in the world, to have their work available, to any reader and listener truly anywhere in the world.

An impossible dream in the pre-digital books era.

An impossible dream even today, in this corporations-driven digital books era, where they have not enough economic interests in most of the emerging countries. But digital books will eventually become unstoppable.

I see a future where Africa’s publishers and authors have a friction-free ride.

With 474 million Africans online today, rising to 800 million in the next decade, the digital opportunity in the African Publishing World has never been more exciting.

(A seguire la versione in Italiano)

Dear friends,

I’m starting a new and exciting chapter and I can’t resist sharing some of the details with all of you…

A few days ago I was appointed the new StreetLib SRL CEO :)

I had been working at StreetLib for many years… until July 2018. I started as Software Developer, then I was CTO, and, eventually, CEO and Founder of StreetLib USA, the successful American branch, located in New York City.

StreetLib, don’t forget, is one of the coolest companies in Digital Publishing. We provide cutting edge online platforms for producing, distributing, and selling books.

A complex, ambitious, and authentic company, StreetLib has a strong track record and a rich history. And today it begins a new life, fulfilling even greater goals, achieving even greater accomplishments.

I strongly believe that StreetLib is going to be the leading actor in the Publishing Renaissance and will have an increasingly flourishing presence around the world in the coming years. It won’t be easy to get there, but I’m sure we’re well-positioned to accomplish this ambitious goal. That’s not wishful thinking: I’m aware of our real value and wouldn’t be here otherwise. Please join me in my confidence in StreetLib and in my amazing Team.

I’m just getting started with my new job and I’m sure I’ll have many more details to share with you in the coming weeks.

Today, a new StreetLib is born. Wish us good luck!

Giacomo

CEO, StreetLib.com

Email: giacomo.dangelo@streetlib.com

Cari amici,

Sono all’inizio di una nuova entusiasmante avventura e non posso trattenermi dal condividere con voi qualche dettaglio…

Pochi giorni fa sono stato nominato nuovo Amministratore Delegato di StreetLib SRL :)

Ho lavorato in StreetLib per molti anni fino al Luglio 2018, prima come Sviluppatore Software, poi come Responsabile Tecnico, infine come Amministratore e Fondatore di StreetLib USA Inc., la fortunata Filiale Americana di New York City.

StreetLib rappresenta una bella realtà nel mondo dell’Editoria Digitale Italiana ed Internazionale, vantando una delle piattaforme di produzione, distribuzione, e vendita di libri digitali e cartacei più avanzate in circolazione.

StreetLib è un’azienda complessa, ambiziosa, e autentica. Ha una storia importante. Oggi vuole guardare avanti e rinnovarsi per poter ambire a obiettivi ancora più prestigiosi.

Le opportunità all’orizzonte sono enormi, così come le insidie e le difficoltà che io e il mio team dovremo affrontare. Ma vi saprò comunicare qualcosa di più su tutto questo nelle prossime settimane.

Oggi nasce una nuova StreetLib. In bocca al lupo a tutti noi!

Giacomo

CEO, StreetLib.com

Email: giacomo.dangelo@streetlib.com

Photo by Emma Frances Logan on Unsplash

Dear friends,

Unfortunately, I no longer work at StreetLib.

Yeah, it’s been an intense experience. I learned a lot in nine years. I worked on many different and exciting projects. I changed my professional hat many times with all my enthusiasm and energy, and I met many great people from around the world who taught me invaluable things.

I owe a big thanks to all of them. To all my customers, colleagues, partners, and everybody who trusted me in many years.

In particular, I owe a special thanks to my team: Thank you, guys, I couldn’t have accomplished anything without you. Together we’ve had a beautiful journey that I’ll always be proud of.

To me, working at StreetLib has always meant working to realize a dream, and that has taken precedence before anything else. I believed in that dream until the very end.

And I still believe in it. Today, my collaboration ends but my dream doesn’t, because nobody can steal that from me, no matter what. I’ll start back up again, with a more concrete vision, and ramped-up motivation.

Someone once said, “cleverness is a gift while kindness is a choice.” This sentence has inspired me daily since I first heard it. In the end, we are our choices, and I want to be what I choose to be: To be kind, to be honest, to be a builder and not a cynic, to be an adventurer and not a follower, and to leave a great story for the world.

My next adventure begins now, and I’m certain I’ll have a lot of fun.

Please use the following addresses to keep in touch with me. I know that some of you are still contacting me at giac@streetlib.com, but unfortunately this was blocked some days ago without any notice. I didn’t get your messages, so please accept my apologies for that, and get in touch with me again.

NB: At the moment, I don’t have any further comments about my former company, StreetLib, but please consider my name completely detached from them from now on.

Thank you everybody,

Giac

Cari amici,

Purtroppo la mia esperienza lavorativa con StreetLib si chiude qui.

Sono stati nove anni molto intensi. Ho imparato molto e ho lavorato senza mai risparmiarmi mettendomi più volte in gioco in diversi ruoli professionali. Ho conosciuto persone eccezionali sia in Italia che all’estero.

Voglio ringraziarle tutte in queste poche righe. Grazie a tutti i clienti, colleghi e partner di lavoro che mi hanno dato fiducia in questi anni.

Voglio dedicare un ringraziamento particolare al mio team che ha sempre creduto in me, dal primo all’ultimo giorno: Grazie di cuore ragazzi, non avrei mai combinato nulla senza di voi.

Lavorare in StreetLib per me ha sempre significato lavorare per un sogno, prima di tutto il resto, un sogno a cui ho creduto con tutto me stesso fino alla fine.

E ci credo ancora a questo sogno. Questa esperienza lavorativa si chiude qui, ma il mio sogno continua, perché quello non me lo toglie nessuno, nemmeno sotto ricatto. Ed è da quello che ripartirò, con una motivazione e un’ispirazione ancora più forti e concrete di prima.

Qualche anno fa ho letto questa frase “cleverness is a gift while kindness is a choice”: è una frase che mi è rimasta dentro e che ha continuato a ispirarmi fino ad oggi. Alla fine tutti noi siamo il risultato delle nostre scelte, e io voglio essere quello che scelgo di essere: Voglio essere gentile, voglio essere onesto, voglio essere una persona costruttiva e non una sanguisuga, voglio essere un avventuriero e scegliere sempre la strada in salita e magari meno affollata, e voglio costruirmi la mia migliore vita possibile.

E con questi presupposti voglio fare spazio al mio futuro, che comincia adesso, con il vento in poppa e tanta voglia di divertirmi.

Vi prego di scrivermi utilizzando i contatti che seguono. Purtroppo ho perso tutti i miei messaggi che mi avete mandato al mio solito indirizzo giac@streetlib.com. Perdonatemi e abbiate pazienza, e riscrivetemi per favore.

NB: Al momento non ho nessun commento da aggiungere nei confronti della mia ex-azienda, StreetLib. Da ora in avanti, vi prego di considerare la mia persona completamente indipendente e slegata a ogni loro iniziativa futura.

Grazie a tutti,

Giac

Email: giac.dangelo@gmail.com

Telegram: https://t.me/GiacomoDAngelo

Whatsapp: +39.339.7269940

And opening doors for everybody: we’re opening access to distribution, access to publishing professionals, and access to the fantastic privilege of working in book publishing

Exactly two years ago I arrived in New York City to set up StreetLib USA, our American branch, with the aim to expand our business in North America and continue building our global platform to enable more and more people to participate in what we called The Renaissance of Publishing.

Starting from scratch, I learned a lot. Today I sometimes feel I didn’t know anything before moving here. That’s how big of a change it’s been!

It took a few months to establish our ebook distribution business with our first American customers, and fast forward to today, we recently closed the first fiscal year with a big smile on our face and an honest awareness that we’re just at the beginning of a new, exciting chapter of StreetLib’s life.

I have to say that our first American customers took a big leap of faith to start working with us. At the time our system was quite rough and we didn’t know much about their specific needs and wishes. I’m very grateful to all of them, because it’s thanks to them that we were able to learn and to gradually improve our system, day after day.

I consider our publishing platform a work-in-progress, and being a “product-guy,” I’m always asking for more features and better usability from our stellar technical team. But honestly today our system is way better than it was two years ago.

I’m saying that because we just silently released an additional feature that looks boring and like nothing special, but that reflects something much bigger:

The StreetLib Tax Interview Process

All of the authors, publishers and publishing professionals that want to deal with StreetLib via StreetLib USA, Inc., have to invest two minutes of their time to complete the StreetLib Tax Interview:

We did our best to design a simple and quick process, and you can find a clear explanation of how it works in the following article:

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@streetlib.com.

If you want to start working with StreetLib, you’re more than welcome to complete the process as soon as possible! Because it’s required for us to pay your books’ sales royalties and any other funds, such as those you might receive through StreetLib Market.

Once you have completed it, regardless of how many books you’re selling or the amount of your sales, or the country you live in, we’ve got you covered, and you can start using our services and take part of the digital publishing revolution without worrying too much about tax issues and any book-related bureaucracy.

But there’s more behind the scenes, and now I want to tell you more about that.

Just the tip of the iceberg

At the heart of our technology platform, at the very bottom of the engine under the hood, there is a module that we internally called StreetLib Bill.

Regardless of the billing situation and the country of residence of our authors, publishers, and publishing professionals, Bill is responsible for helping them get paid quickly and without any administrative hurdles. This is what really enables more and more people to be part of the new Global Digital Publishing revolution.

Let me explain this with a very simple example:

I live in New York City, and there are many publishing professionals working for the big publishing corporations here. Among them, many started working as freelancers, offering their high-quality and expensive services to the growing number of independent authors and publishers. This usually makes all of the involved parties happy, because they all love books and all do their best to make more and better books available. But in addition to dealing with books, freelancers also have to deal with invoices, taxes, and royalties. That can be a real pain. Furthermore, this pain gets worse, much much worse, if we think about dealing with international tax laws and other hoops to jump through.

If you want the kinds of interactions between author and publishing professional that make for world-class books to happen anywhere in the world, you need help.

StreetLib Bill is the system that makes it easy for a publisher in Bangladesh to hire a publishing professional in New York City, or vice-versa, helping both of them to deal with different currencies, with local taxes, seamlessly dealing with one another as if they were working for the same company.

The ultimate goal of StreetLib Bill is to make the bureaucracy disappear for all of our customers, and it is already working under the hood on the StreetLib platform. It enables thousands of authors and publishers to sell books all around the world and get their royalties automatically paid every single month. It also enables them to deal with any publishing professionals on StreetLib Market, managing necessary paperwork on their behalf. And it now makes it even easier for them with a simple and effective Tax Interview.

We’re excited to be able to connect books and book professionals across borders, to the point that we just coined a new claim: Going Really Global. We did that on StreetLib Connect, the forum for Reading, Writing, Publishing and everything else about Books. It’s open to everybody and you’ll welcome to join the discussion!

A few days ago, I attended the opening session of the second round of the International Innovators Initiative (IN2NYC) in New York City:

As journalists and diplomats came to me after the session to know more about my first-hand experience with the program, I realized that it’s already been 5 super-intense months since I started! So, I think it’s time to tell you more about this program, what it means to me, and why all this has been very important for the growth of the StreetLib project.

IN2NYC, New York City, and Queens College

IN2NYC is a City-led program that helps international entrepreneurs expand or relocate their businesses to New York City by facilitating collaborative partnerships that qualify them for cap-exempt H-1B visas. The application for the second year is now open until 14th November 2017, and I really encourage all you brave entrepreneurs out there to seize this opportunity.

The NYC economy is large and diverse: according to NYCEDC data, 47 Fortune 500 companies are based in New York City and 46% of the city workforce is born outside of the United States. NYC is a major hub for finance, fashion, media, advertising, and healthcare. And it’s now the 2nd largest tech ecosystem in the world.

From a personal point of view, I see living in New York City and managing the StreetLib project in this incredible ecosystem an achievement in itself. And on top of that, I was chosen as one of the first entrepreneurs — out of 200 applicants across 5 continents — to be part of the IN2NYC program, which is one of the world’s best entrepreneur-visa schemes.

However, it’s about more than that: I was also lucky enough to set up our business office at the Tech Incubator of Queens College (TIQC). The 80-acre university campus is actually located in the most ethnically diverse urban area in the world, just a few miles outside Manhattan, at the heart of the Western Publishing World.

Am I the only one who thinks all this is rather fitting for what I’ll be doing here? StreetLib’s founding values are inclusivity, openness and technology: we couldn’t be more at home.

Queens College is a liberal arts college that offers undergraduate degrees in 78 majors, master’s degrees in 24 departments and 20 doctoral degrees. Queens College students represent 170 countries and speak over 90 different native languages. It’s part of the City University of New York (CUNY), the largest urban university system in the United States. It’s definitely the perfect environment to nurture our project!

No man is an island

Queens College is the prime example of a large, inclusive organization that succeeds thanks to the diversity and the creativity of its community. Working with its students and like-minded teachers and professionals is not only an honor and inspiration, but also extremely rewarding and fulfilling.

This environment resonates very well with our long-term vision, as we want to overcome any geographical boundaries and use technology to give books a truly universal reach.

We want to serve all book lovers, regardless of their religion, the color of their skin, their country of origin, their social condition or their political ideas. These are virtual boundaries that still exist only in our heads.

I firmly believe in this project: I wouldn’t have crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean alone otherwise. And I cannot deny that working towards these objectives is something that makes me really happy, even if I know this is just the beginning.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were:
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
by John Donne

Where we’re going

StreetLib provides an end-to-end publishing platform where authors and publishers can manage their entire business: they can create and sell books; take advantage of our editorial services or the ones provided by our affiliated publishing professionals; seamlessly make their books available for everyone around the world; and be fairly and quickly paid without any exclusivity or limitations.

The fact that our service is used by thousands of authors and publishers keeps us motivated and committed to our mission. I’m delighted that, in the last few months, we have taken major steps forward in reaching and empowering a true global community.

First, at the start of summer, we improved our payout system by adding the possibility for users to be paid their royalties in every country in the world, via Paypal or Payoneer, on a monthly basis and with $0 threshold:

Those solutions open up our services to countries and people through secure, safe and low cost money transfers from any country to another.

Last month, we also upgraded the pricing section of our distribution system. Our authors and publishers can now set a different price for each online retailer in any supported currency. Not only that, the system automatically provides price suggestions according to current exchange rates (powered by the ECB), all of which can be customized with no limitations:

On top of that, we continue our globalization efforts by widening our distribution reach: this summer we added to our list great partners with the likes of Legimi.de, Skoobe (both via Libreka) and eSentral:

And to end on a high note, we are delighted to start a partnership with Bowker, a 149 year-old American company and the world’s leading provider of bibliographic information. The sole official ISBN agency for the US and Australian markets, it now recommends StreetLib as the best publishing platform for its customers:

Over the years, StreetLib has built numerous tools to help independent authors and publishers connect their books with readers. The progress we have made in recent months clearly shows that we are still striving hard every day to open our platform’s doors to the world.

We are not going to rest on our laurels. We will continue to develop new technology for the book industry and book lovers alike. And given how big, diverse, complex and beautiful the world is, we are only just getting started. Let’s go!!

Giac

Our StreetLibers are the foundation, brick and mortar of our company. We are only the workers. StreetLib stories are a way to learn about these foundations, one StreetLiber at a time. We discover today Sharolyn G. Brown’s publishing story as told by herself. Thanks Sharolyn for sharing it with us! Here is her story:

Over 10 years ago I realized I wanted to be a writer. At that time I joined a writer’s group and set about learning what it meant to write a novel. I had ideas, I just didn’t know how to make those ideas into stories people would want to read. I learned a lot from my writer’s group, Humble Fiction Cafe, but then life intruded, as it often does. My job moved me to another state, and I wasn’t able to find another group of writers to replace Humble Fiction Cafe. So, my dream of being a writer was put on a shelf.

Nevertheless, the ideas kept coming. The characters kept speaking to me, telling me about their lives and their thoughts. For me, that’s how writing works; I get an idea based on a “what-if” scenario, then I get a picture of the primary character or characters involved in this scenario, and then their story kind of unfolds in my mind, like a movie almost. For my first novel, The Heaviness of Knowing, Book 1 of The Conscious Dreamer Series, the “what-if” scenario was inspired by a conversation I was having with one of my friends about how she never remembered her dreams. This was astonishing to me because I regularly remember my dreams.

So, I started thinking, why with some people remember their dreams, like me, and why would some people, like my friend, never remember their dreams? And in an instant, the idea came to me: what if only some people remembered their dreams because they were being used or manipulated by some otherworldly force? After I had that “what-if,” next came the characters. First I saw the woman on Earth, Lauren, who was being controlled by an otherworldly force, aliens in another dimension, through her dreams. Then I saw the alien woman, Roxal, who was manipulating Lauren.

Each of these characters fascinated me. Over the years, the more I thought about Roxal, the more I realized she was manipulating Lauren not because she wanted to, but because she had to. As in if Roxal did not manipulate Lauren, she would be killed. And Lauren, well she had absolutely no idea she was being controlled. At least, not initially.

The story continued to grow, and expand, and develop in my brain. And it wasn’t until 2015 when I finally decided that either I was going to try to become a published author, or I was going to ignore these characters and their stories. So, I dusted off my dream of being a writer and began writing what would become, The Heaviness of Knowing.

When I started writing it, I did so with the full expectation of following the traditional publishing path: write the novel, find an agent who liked it enough to take me on as a client, and then sell it to a publisher. However, about halfway through writing my novel, I read a book written by a self-published author, and I really liked it.

The story was interesting, it looked professional, and the only way I knew the author was self-published is when I went to her website she talked about being self-published. Further, she had a link on her website dedicated just to self-publishing. I was completely amazed once I read the information she had on her website. I was so amazed, in fact, that I went on to purchase the self-publishing guide that she had for sale on Amazon.

And what I read in her self-publishing guide really opened my eyes to the self-publishing industry. I had no idea about the self-publishing revolution that had taken place in 2011. When I thought of self-publishing, I still thought of people who wrote novels, and then had to buy hundreds if not thousands of copies of these books to sell themselves. And they had storage spaces and garages full of these books. And they would try to sell them to their friends, and their family members, and anyone who would take one of these books off their hands.

It wasn’t until I read that self-publishing guide that I realize that more and more people were buying e-books. And further, for the people that did still purchase physical books, companies like Amazon had print on demand options, which meant I didn’t have to buy a certain number of physical books to keep on hand anywhere. Also not only could you work with Amazon to sell your novels, but you could work with pretty much any major bookseller to sell e-books. This information was truly eye-opening to me.

So armed with this new knowledge, and a guide to resources like editors, and formatters, and cover designers, I decided to take the plunge and become a self-published author.

Once I decided to become a self-published author, I started publishing just on Amazon. I did this because it’s one of the largest sellers of e-books in the world, and it’s a fairly easy system to learn and to navigate. However once I got the hang of it, I decided that I wanted to publish on as many platforms as possible, and that’s where StreetLib comes in.

I chose StreetLib because I wanted to have access to Google Play, and I wanted to work with a company that came highly recommended by other authors. And StreetLib met both of those requirements. Further, for a newbie like me, having someone that’s responsive to any questions or concerns I might have is very important. And every time I’ve had an issue or question, someone from StreetLib has been there to answer my questions and to help me however I needed it.

StreetLib has been a great company to work with. So far, I’ve published two novels and one novella with them, including my recently published The Peril of Knowing, Book 2 of The Conscious Dreamer Series. I don’t have any regrets since making my choice to become a self-published author, and I look forward to publishing many, many more books with StreetLib.

Are you a StreetLiber? Do you want your publishing story to be featured on the StreetLib blog? Please send your story to support@streetlib.com with the subject “StreetLib Story”.

In Italian, “espresso” means “expressly made” or “fast”. It doesn’t make coffee, but he does make paperback books, quickly and expressly for you. That’s right - real, live, toasty books.

First thing first: the machine starts the job printing the front and back cover of the book.

It goes through an “Epson Stylus Photo R2000” printer which sits just on the side of the “big machine”.

After a few seconds, the big machine starts making some creaky sounds… what’s going on?

Less than 5 minutes after the machine created my 80 pages paperback book, impressive!

John told me he usually prints between 40 and 60 books on demand every single day.

Guess what? This looks quite promising!

The idea of “Km 0 books” is not bad at all, IMHO.

Bye bye polluting and expensive trucks, you don’t need to carry books around anymore!

What if everybody would be able to make their paper books available on demand in any bookstores of the world?

We’re working on that, stay tuned!

StreetLib.com

A very short story on digital rights management:

I, the content provider (= the entertainment company, such as a book publishing house or film studio or a music label), don’t entirely trust you, my customer.

I, the content provider, have leverage with the content distributors (= the tech companies), because they cannot legally distribute my copyrighted content to you without my permission.

I, the content provider, want your money. And you won’t pay me unless I give you my content, so I came up with an idea: I’ll use my leverage with the content distributors and force them to implement some technical hacks. That way, you can enjoy my content, but only in a way that I can control.

And thus DRM was born.

The purpose of the DRM was neither to prevent copyright violations nor to fight piracy: it was always about market control and user lock-in. It was invented to give content providers leverage with the creators of playback devices, and a measure of control over the user experience.

The Book Industry and the DRM

Let’s narrow the DRM topic down to the Book Industry: in the US, the Amazon Kindle Store approximately accounts for 75% of the ebook market, while almost all the remaining 25% has been taken by 4 major online retailers: Apple iBooks, Nook by Barnes&Noble, Kobobooks US and Google Play Books.

Amazon has its own proprietary format(s) for books, on which it applies its own proprietary DRM, so books bought on the Kindle Store can be accessed only on Kindle ereaders and reading apps with a limited and controlled set of features.

The other four major online stores don’t have a proprietary format or DRM (Apple actually has, but this differentiation is not relevant in this post), and they sell content in the EPUB file format (the de-facto industry standard developed by the IDPF organization) and use the Adobe DRM (that is a proprietary DRM file format developed by Adobe).

The established and huge book publishing companies have always tried to stop the advancement of the digital technologies. In fact their main concern has always been to hold their status quo and defend their printing business. So it goes without saying: they were and are still happy to sell their ebooks with DRM either on Amazon and on the other major retailers, because in this way they can control what you can do with their content.

The result is that even if you’re willing to buy a piece of digital content, which is supposed to be fluid by definition, the reality is that it is not! Because you can’t freely copy and share the content, highlight it, or annotate it. You can only use the limited amount of features that are provided by the DRM system on Amazon or other platforms.

Fortunately, you’ll need no more than two minutes to remove the DRM from your ebooks, just google “books remove drm” and you’ll soon find out about it. Under the DMCA in the US (and the EUCD in Europe), removing DRM is against the law. Nevertheless accessing an ebook without DRM is pure joy: you can enjoy it with your preferred reading app, you can annotate the text, you can highlight it, share it, etc… the creativity of the app developers is the limit.

Bingo! That’s the key point: the DRM is not only useless, it’s not only a pain in the ass for all the honest people who buy content legally, but mostly the DRM stifles innovation on the ebook market.

Entrepreneurs are not stimulated by the idea of developing new reading/sharing/whatever solution for ebooks if most of the content in the market is locked with the DRM and won’t allow any of that. Very sad.

Wait a minute: what about the IDPF, the organization devoted to the standard formats development? Isn’t the standard a foreground for the technical innovation in the market?

Sadly, the IDPF is completely gone. It was born with the mission to establish a standard for ebook publishing, and after many useless, unsuccessful and expensive projects (EPub3, Readium, etc…), it’s currently busy with the implementation of an open-source License Content Protection standard named Readium LCP. What is that? It’s a DRM for protecting EPUB! Even better: it’s a DRM for controlling the way you can access the ebooks in EPUB file format.

Are you fed up yet? Well, take a seat because we’re still scratching the surface of what’s going on in the DRM space.

The W3C and the DRM

Even worse, the W3C is gone as well: the W3C is currently struggling with different forces: its financial debts, the competition that siloed apps present to open-web browsers, and the huge pressure from the entertainment companies to redesign browsers to protect the corporations’ businesses instead of improving the user experience. These reasons are bringing the W3C, led by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, into a disastrous compromise that betrays the founding principles of the open Web: they are going to standardise DRM-enabling Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) in the browsers.

Not only is this going to be a huge and useless effort like explained above.

Not only is this going to compromise the vision of the Web as a global commons for the free exchange of ideas because streaming video, audio, images, e-books, even Web pages, are going to be cluttered by DRM.

But they will make us all less safe, because they are also criminalising the legitimate security-research. In fact, researchers will no longer be able to take things apart and break them in order to make them better in the “new closed and DRMed Web”, because they need to reveal security defeats in browsers only when the W3C will approve this kind of activity. That means malicious hackers, who already engage in other criminal activities, may freely take advantage of all the vulnerabilities they find in these DRM implementations before companies discover them on their own. Quite indefensible, isn’t it?

Other two alarming events happened during the last few weeks.

First of all, Chrome won’t allow users to disable the DRM plugin anymore starting from the next stable version (version 57).

Uh oh! Do you see how it’s going to work?

Chrome and Firefox use Google’s Widevine DRM, while Microsoft’s Edge browser uses the company’s own Windows 10 native DRM.

The major DRM service players are Google, Microsoft and Apple, and they are also the companies who own the three main operating systems. Is there an incentive for them to support other platforms with their DRM solutions? Not at all! Other platforms will have no chance to survive without DRM and so without content from the entertainment industry. It’s an oligopoly, and the guilty companies are mainly Google and Microsoft.

Then, the merge between IDPF and W3C has been officially announced. As thoroughly analyzed in this article, there’s a strict connection between the IDPF, the Readium “DRM” project and the fact that the W3C is soon to implement a “standard DRM implementation” for the “Open Web”.

The problem is not the merge, the problem is the fact that the “new W3C” is going in the direction of making the Web and the Digital Publishing World less open and more controlled by the big companies, and that’s what is going to happen in the short term.

The Renaissance of Publishing

Still, I’m deeply optimistic.

We’re still at the beginning of the beginning of a new Publishing Era where people will enjoy more content in more ways, and where content will freely flow in even more ways.

The DRM is just a vain attempt of the archaic content companies to protect their old and endangered business models, but the good news is that, thanks to the quick evolution of digital technologies, something new is on the horizon.

In that regard, in a world where very few companies are going to control — because of the DRM — the way we read, share and enjoy our books, the Renaissance Of Publishing is not only inevitable, but also foreseeable; and it’s important to know it’s coming, regardless of the above described intricated issues.

Let the Content Flow: this is the mantra of our company, which makes money by partnering with all the people willing to let their content flow without any DRM or any other constraints, in order to have the biggest possible reach and to be enjoyed in any way from other people all around the world.

Our partners are authors, self-publishers, independent publishers, small-presses, creative people, people who are willing to innovate. People who are passionate about their job and happy to find new solutions and try new technologies. People who are not afraid to change the status quo. People who are happy to experiment and move quickly, people who like combining and recombining everything that came before in order to find something better.