[charleski]

Yes, a nice presentation. I think there are a few things he didn't really address, though.

Clearly, since they came to market in the middle of 2009, they were entering a market that had been distorted for several years by Amazon's huge presence, which is where 9.99 comes from. I notice he didn't mention Amazon once in the entire talk, but they were obviously the elephant in the room. Still, interesting to see that they sold as many books that cost above 9.99 as they did at the 9.99 point. Price came in at No. 5 out of 7, with convenience factors topping the list.

It's dangerous to take current data and use it to extrapolate future trends. The ebook market is still very immature and mostly driven by those who seek out new technology. As devices capable of ebook reading become more generally accepted and penetrate further into the market the demographic will change, and so will buying patterns. Right now, the bulk of their sales go to people who are reading on a smartphone, which suggests they're basically serving commuters looking for something to read on the train. It would have been interesting to see a breakdown of reading habits by device-type, since those willing to fork out a couple of hundred dollars for a dedicated ereader probably have a different relationship with books than those who are content with reading something on the tiny screen of their Blackberry.

It was very interesting to see how many times he went back to the need for more sophisticated back-end metadata management systems (ONIX etc). This is something that consumers will never see, in that such metadata isn't going to be present in the files they actually purchase, but it's clearly a major problem in the supply chain. I think he's absolutely right, and the lack of a standard and easily-manageable communication interface between all the players in the market has been the root cause of many of the snafus that have happened with pricing and availability.

The 'powered with Kobo' initiative is very interesting. What dedicated ereading devices desperately need a model which makes it easier for software writers to roll out new and improved functionality swiftly without having to rely on the hardware manufacturers approving a new firmware.

He's absolutely right about the quality of epubs. All of them could do better, but some (cough, Penguin, cough) really stink.

Oh, one last thing regarding the slide about changing revenue returned to publishers - a business model that relied on retail partners making a loss was never going to work long-term and I suspect there was more going on behind the scenes that we will ever know until people start publishing their memoires. The one thing that's surprised me about the agency system is the ban on loyalty schemes (probably at Jobs's request since Apple gets a rash even thinking about cutting their own margins).