New Digital Initiative: Indigo Takes Wheel, Tries to Reinvent?
A couple of years ago Saturday Night magazine asked several architects to reimagine the master plan for Canada’s capital — Ottawa. They asked an American architect for suggestions. He proposed a modest change to the modest boulevard that runs perpendicular to the nation’s parliament. After all Canada is a modest power. Why misrepresent ourselves with a grandiose mall? Why go big, when small will do?
After reading first news of Indigo Books’ plans for a new e-content platform, as vague as it is, I am tempted to play a similar role to the American architect. I am tempted to suggest Indigo go small and simple, in spite of their ambition to go big. Usually I am all about innovation, but in this case I think Indigo should simply sell (e)books not try to shift the entire ebook/mobile marketplace. That is too much.
Let me backup for a second.
I want ebooks. I want ebooks on my iPhone. I want ebooks on my computer. I want them to be cheap(er). I want them to be future proof. And I want to buy them from Indigo.
I want to buy them from Indigo now.
To make me happy, all Indigo needs to do is set up a digital warehouse of DRM-free ePub/audio files and sell them to me. I would love that. I would buy heaps from them. Done right the addition of ebooks to Indigo’s pre-existing product pages would be to the Kindle marketplace what Amazon’s MP3 store is to iTunes. A killer.
POW! Right back at you Bezos!
The ePub standard is set. It is device agnostic as well as platform agnostic. The standard has been shaky these past two years but it is a standard.
DRM is done. Indigo could use its clout to convince publishers to come around.
The most nuanced decision to make is whether to offer ‘a shelf in the cloud’ for customers with low-storage handhelds or not. Other than that, it is as simple as signing the terms and building the data warehouse. No? 
By the sounds of it Michael Serbinis, Indigo’s chief technical officer, has other ideas. The Quill story says that he wants to create ‘an application’ for delivering publisher and user-submitted short content. I have something on my iPhone that does that already — it is called the internet. Forgive my pithiness Michael. I mean no disrespect but speaking as your target customer, I don’t want another layer — like this, this, this or even this — between me and an ePub file. I appreciate that you are trying to build value, but please, I beg you sell me a product not an ecosystem. That is my plea.
The one other thing in the article that had me worried was the focus on short content. Does anyone remember the Wired cover story on snack culture? See rebuttal here. It doesn’t work with books for two reasons: 1) Sampling a chapter mid-volume has to be the most unsatisfying reading experience of all time. Try it, you will see. Content chunking needs editorial intervention. End of story. 2) The filter problem just gets bigger as the content chunks get smaller. You can read the book excerpts in the newspaper because an editor already has. They are preselected for you. How should I know what chapter of War and Peace is the best to read out of sequence? How should I know what magazine article from Rolling Stone has stood the test of time? I don’t and I can’t.
Yes there are subway novels and twitter novels. But at the end of the day those are simply just novels too.
That said, I am fully prepared to be blown away in January. I would love if Indigo could change the way I consume content. As an iPhone and a Blackberry owner I am ready. And I am willing to pay. I hope they can go from standing start to success in no time. I hope they bring some innovation to the filter problem. But I still want a regular modest ebook store. Sell me ePub ebooks. I will be happy with that. No major architectural changes required.
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