What did Pearson really buy when it acquired Author Solutions?

On the IndieReader blog, David Gaughran writes about last week's acquisition of self-publishing company Author Solutions by Pearson. Author Solutions will become an independent business within Penguin. Gaughran writes that Bertram Capital, the private equity company that owned Author Solutions, has been looking for a buyer for the company since March. The company grossed $99.8 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year, of which 63% came from the sale of services to authors, and only 37% came from the sale of books.

According to Gaughran, "Industry watchdogs such as Writer Beware have received a litany of complaints about Author Solutions and their subsidiaries over the last few years: misleading marketing, hard-selling of over-priced services, questionable value of products provided, awful customer service, and, after all that, problems with writers being paid." He points to Author Solutions' "web-optimized press release" priced at $1,199 as an example of wildly overpriced services, and writes "In case it isn’t obvious, you would likely receive greater promotional value from setting fire to that money on YouTube." Gaughran says that "...the average customer spends around $5,000 over their “lifetime” with the company, but only sells 150 books." Customer dissatisfaction could explain in part why the average author only publishes 1.3 books through Author Solutions (the company claims that it's published 190,000 titles by 150,000 authors.)

It's possible that Penguin could clean up Author Solutions' operations, but first, the publisher has to believe that there are problems. Penguin CEO John Makinson said the following in Pearson's press release announcing the deal:

“No-one has captured this [self-publishing] opportunity as successfully as Author Solutions, which has rapidly built a position of world leadership on a platform of outstanding customer support and tailor-made publishing services.”

Books: The container is not the information

Update, March 4, 2010: Penguin Group is well on its way to implementing the future of eBooks that I described in this post. John Makinson, Chairman and CEO of Pearson's Penguin Group spoke at the Financial Times' Digital Media & Broadcasting Conference in London on March 2nd. He showed some concepts for how Penguin plans to transform books into interactive applications for Apple's iPad.

Not a lot has changed in the structure of printed books since the time of Gutenberg. A typical book has a title page, a table of contents, a forward and/or introduction, a set of chapters, and sometimes, an index. Books were organized the way they were because it made it relatively easy for readers to navigate through the content. Today, most eBooks follow the same design and organization as print books, many even going so far as to precisely duplicate the layout of the original print book. However, an eBook is not a print book, and there's absolutely no reason why it needs to be interacted with in the same way as a print book.

In the simplest possible terms, a book is a container for information. The conventions that have developed over the centuries for organizing that information were appropriate for a print medium, but once a book is digitized, the ability to access and utilize the information contained in the book increases exponentially. For example, why bother with an index when a search engine will let you find anything in the book faster and more easily? If you can search for topics and relationships, why do you need a table of contents? Why bother to organize the book into pages when there's no standard page size for eBook readers and text will reflow according to the display or window size being used?

Is there a reason for a book designer to sweat over the details of specific typefaces and sizes when the user can change them with a push of a button or a mouse click? Instead of the page references used by writers and teachers to direct readers to a particular place in a book, why not use named anchors and hyperlinks to identify and navigate to important "landing zones"?

Once a print book is digitized, it can be incorporated into databases and searched along with other documents and information sources. Why limit the reader to just the information contained in the eBook in question? If the reader enters a query and the search engine finds better (or more recent, or more detailed) information from a source other than the eBook itself, shouldn't it point the reader to that information?

If an eBook can be read on a computer that supports audio and video playback and interactive content, why should the eBook itself be limited to text and static images? Replace the static illustration of a physics experiment with a dynamic animation that readers can interact with. Instead of a color image of an elephant, show a video of elephants in the wild. Instead of simply including Walt Whitman's poem "America", link to an audio recording from 1890 of Whitman himself reading the first four lines of the poem.

In short, a book is a container, not the information itself. eBooks limit their potential if they're nothing more than an electronic facsimile of the original print book. The contents of a print book should be the starting point for an eBook, not the end point.