Retreading the print edition

It’s been a busy week+ since my last post and it has born some interesting fruit. What began as a reader question about ebook availability of our print edition blossomed quickly into a back-office science experiment and then on to a viable technology solution with revenue potential. That’s the short version…the longer follows.
Based on a reader inquiry about being able to subscribe to The Gazette in ebook format, I kicked off what I thought would just be some personal research into the various ebook file formats, open source tools and other technology ins and outs. What I quickly realized was a potential revenue stream was sitting almost in our collective laps and we needed to move and move now. To explain the technology process I have put together, I will highlight each step/status and the discovered action at each step/status to move forward.
Starting at the far end of our pagination process, our print edition resides as a collection of Adobe pdf files (one for each actual page in the paper). ebook format is, at least for papers, just one big file. The easy solution was to utilize existing investments in Adobe Acrobat (or we could use any number of freeware pdf programs) to merge them all into one big pdf file (usually weighing in at a hefty 28-30 MB per weekday edition). Part of this merge is a manual reordering of the files since our file naming conventions, while close to being alphabetically correct, does have a few quirks that requires manual intervention. Easily enough – just rearrange in Adobe as needed before merging.
The next hurdle was converting this file into an ebook format. Which one? There are, well, more than a couple choices…some highly proprietary, some nearly consumable by all ebook readers and most other platforms with open source client tools. I settled on the .prc format since it is readily ingested into the Kindle, Sony readers, and Mobipocket clients for laptops/desktops, iPhones, Blackberries and even Windows Mobile. I utilized the MobiPocket Creator software to import the large pdf and generate a directory of an xml-based html file and a large number of jpg files. That’s not the solution, as it then has to be through a “build” process (yes, sort of along the lines of a compiler) to generate a single file in the .prc format (which has averaged between 5.5 and 6MB for the daily edition). Sort of an electronic, low-cal version of the paper, huh?
As you can notice from the above, this process does rely on some human button pushing and brain power, but not much. I’ve personally been able to neck it down to just over 5 minutes. We have engineered a process that, while not automated, requires zero investment in infrastructure and tools, is repeatable on a daily basis for a time investment of less than 10 minutes and thus has, in a mathematical sense, an infinite ROI (discounting labor time, that is). Pretty sweet! It’s awfully rare to uncover such a gift.
The real question to all this is how widespread it will become. For a nominal price, many of these ebook users may likely jump at the chance to have all the content of their print edition paper on their reader device. For the record, The Gazette’s prototype ebook format includes all content (text, pictures AND ads)…not the case with some ebook papers out there. Sorry-tooting our own horn is bad form. I think the ever-increasing breadth and depth of customized content delivery (blogs, RSS, etc) will eventually render even the most fetching of ebook paper offerings boring, predictable and unworthy of a minimal subscription investment. When? Ah, great question and I would hazard a prognostication of not within 2-3 years. So, put that in economic figures in your mind for a second. Just imagine 500 readers (Kindle, Plastic Logic, Sony, Mobipocket, etc.) subscribing to The Gazette for the next 12 months at, for ease of round math, $5 a month (a bargain considering the weekday price is $.75 and most major papers are charging $9+ for their ebook version). That’s $30,000. Again, keep in mind our internal investment is about 10 minutes a day. Depending on the subscription vehicle, much of that $30K is profit. Assume a guess of a 10% margin to the subscription clearing house: we end up with $27K of NET PROFIT per year for an investment of just over 1 hour per week. I know I have probably grossly over-generalized some of the business case stuff (sorry…IT geek here). Just imagine if the ebook world really takes hold and the 500 figure used in this example is way, WAY low.
I thought I would share with some thoughts on the ebook world, especially considering business forecast for absolute explosions in the Kindle and Plastic Logic reader markets over the next 18 months (some sources put it at a $1B market). First, those people are going to need something to read. Books are great and the readers (meaning the device) will provide people a wonderfully new means of establishing a library. Don’t be shocked – people used to have HUGE collections of records…now they have all their music in digital format. Why not the same with books?

For those convinced the print edition paper was officially old, tired and unable to compete in a digital world, you might take notice of the new tread being put on that tire.