It is safe to say that The Washington Post, like every other high-circulation paper in the United States today, has developed a passion for e-books.
by Sarah Vogelsong
It is safe to say that The Washington Post, like every other high-circulation paper in the United States today, has developed a passion for e-books. When revenues soar even during a persistent economic downturn — according to Publishers Weekly, e-books shot from 5 percent of the publishing market in October 2010 to 13 percent in January 2011 and a staggering 22 percent in the second quarter of 2012 — the media and the business world are sure to take notice.
Newspapers, of course, are both media and business, and a struggling business at that. Digitization, once hailed as the next frontier for the news industry, has proved a mixed bag as companies have stumbled over the issue of whether to adopt pay walls for viewing. Casting about for ways to keep themselves afloat, it’s only natural that papers would eventually seize on the very solution to which they’ve devoted hundreds of articles: e-books.
The news media have been loud in lauding this new technology but surprisingly quiet about their own experiments with it. Around 2010, several major American newspapers began to develop and sell their own e-books. Although not the first, The Washington Post was an early entrant to the field, launching its own program in June 2011 with the publication of The Hunt for bin Laden, a Kindle Single that brought together a series of articles on the father of al-Qaeda, edited by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and editor Tom Shroder.
Since then, the Post and its partner, the New York City e-book publisher Diversion Books, have issued four additional e-books. The topics of these works have run the gamut from Watergate to Bryce Harper, the 19-year-old sensation of the Washington Nationals baseball team. According to Wendy Chen, the Post’s manager of consumer marketing, the newsroom, which controls the content of the e-books, has primarily used its archives to put together the books.
Herein lies the beauty of the union between e-books and newspapers. By repackaging content that has already been checked for accuracy and quality, the paper is able to tap into a new source of revenue and keep its expenses down while offering readers a valuable product. No one knows a subject more thoroughly inside and out than a journalist who has devoted 20 years to the oil industry beat or the Middle East beat, and no one knows better how to convey a large quantity of information to a public that frequently cannot read above an eighth-grade level. In the constant churning of the daily news cycle, the thread of an ongoing story can easily be lost. The e-book format allows its disparate pieces to be reassembled, with the added benefit of hindsight.
At the same time, the e-book format also allows breaking news to be quickly assembled into an up-to-the-minute story. Only two days after the 2012 elections, the Post released Obama vs. Romney: The “Take” on Election 2012, a compilation of articles on the two candidates’ campaigns by senior political correspondent, Dan Balz.
To Mary Cummings, editorial director at Diversion, e-books are uniquely suited to this type of publishing. “We’re able to take news up to the last minute and incorporate it into these books,” she says. Had Obama vs. Romney not included the November 6 election outcomes, “the book wouldn’t have had as much appeal and wouldn’t have been as complete a story.”
So far, the Post has been pleased with the results. “We hope to apply this turnkey approach to future e-books,” Chen wrote in an e-mail.
Future plans also include the incorporation of multimedia capabilities into the e-books. Currently, the Post/Diversion books include photos. Other newspapers, such as The Wall Street Journal, have experimented with the inclusion of both audio and video in their products, providing an indication of where news e-books may be headed.
Another locally based news source, Politico, has made an even deeper foray into e-books. In 2011, the paper forged an agreement with Random House to produce a series of four books on the unfolding presidential election. Unlike the model used by many newspapers, including the Post, the agreement relies on the production of original content to be published in e-book form almost in real time. Although a far more resource- and time-intensive endeavor, the Politico/Random House books make it possible to extend reporting beyond the space constraints that dog all print papers today, while remaining timely.
Whether other papers will adopt that model remains to be seen. At the moment, the possibilities seem endless.
“We’ve seen great things happen so far,” says Cummings. “For these companies, it makes so much sense as a way to monetize content in a way that adds value to readers. I see it as being a really promising future.”
Sarah Vogelsong is a freelance writer and editor from Richmond, Va. Her work has also appeared in The Neworld Review and Pleasant Living Magazine.
