New Zealand publishers set action plan to boost digital industry
Martin Taylor reports. April 6th, 2009 ·

I’ve just returned from running a series of seminars around New Zealand called Digital Publishing - What It’s About, How We Get Started.

They were the first events from the newly-formed Digital Publishing Forum which I head and we wanted to see some specific action steps coming from it. If you want to read a bit about the seminar presentations, here’s a piece from Beatties Book Blog.
The “we” in the title was deliberate because, while the seminars gave individual publishers pointers to getting their own lists into the digital realm, it was also about coming up with a roadmap for some shared initiatives — things we can do as an industry to jumpstart digital publishing and ebooks in New Zealand.

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

A shared digital warehouse. A digital warehouse fills many of the functions in the online world that a traditional warehouse and distribution operation performs in the bricks and mortar book industry. It stores, manages, distributes and accounts for the digital “stock”, mostly at a wholesale level. Having easy access to one can be a big boost to a publisher and an industry, just as lack of one can be a big hindrance.

At last week’s seminars, we road-tested the idea that, early in the market here, we might be better to support a single digital warehouse to get economies of scale and, perhaps, a more united marketing voice. The idea seemed to get a good hearing from the local indie publishers. And among the major multinationals, who already have digital warehousuing through their parent companies, there was a willingness to also support a local shared initiative, provided it met certain requirements chief among which was security and DRM support. DRM support was a common bottom line among the majors but local indies were far less wedded to it.

Read Martin's full report on his excellent website (that all who wish to keep in touch with the

e book and digital publishing should visit regularly, I certainly do).