Thoughts on reading an ebook

Let me confess something. While it has been years since Pothi.com has been selling ebooks and it has been years since I have been talking and thinking about ebooks, it is only recently that I read a complete book on a dedicated reading device.

The book was Lean Analytics published by O'Reilly Media. But this is not a review of that book. This post is about what it felt like reading a fairly long book on an e-reader. I read part of it on Kindle and part of it on Nook touch.

The first thing I noticed was that e-readers these days are very good and you don't miss the paper version all that much. I have said this to many people who express doubts about e-readers - Try one out for 1-2 days and do some serious reading on it. I bet a lot of people would change their mind one they try out a device. The key is to not see it as a replacement of paper books - the only way they are represented in most media coverage. Instead take them up as a device on their own and see if you like them. Amazon Kindle is quite fantastic and Nook is not far behind. The text is sharp, controls very non intrusive. Once you get into the rhythm, you won't even notice the pressing of button or the tap on the screen. They are lightweight and you can curl into a chair with them just fine. Yes, there is no smell of new (or old) books but I am sure couple of trips to your bookshelf can take care of that.

The best part is the instant availability of almost any book. So you come to know about this lovely book at 12:00 AM from a friend and have an urge to try it immediately. Guess what! you can. And you will. Once you have that kind of power on hand, it is hard to not exercise it. And since you cannot see the books pile up, there is nothing to guilt you into not buying that book instantly.

However, there are also not so good things about the e-readers. Having to wake it up and unlock the screen again and again is certainly one of them. I don't like my books to go to sleep and I want them to open immediately. And more importantly, I want them to remain open while I close my eyes and ponder over what I just read. Part of your brain learns pretty fast that this book tends to go to sleep and it sets up an alarm in your subconscious that makes you check every 2 minutes to make sure the device has not gone to sleep. This gets annoying pretty quickly.

The other annoying thing is perhaps specific to the kind of book I was reading. Lean Analytics is a non-fiction book that requires good engagement on part of the reader. It is the kind of book that begs you to underline and take notes and go back and forth. It is also a book with content that can be skipped for reading later.

For such a book, navigation is very important. This is where I started to admire the amazing navigation capabilities of the humble paperback. Its physicality gives it a simple but powerful navigation mechanism. You instantly know how long it is, how much have you read and how much is left. Random access is effortless. You can skip ahead 10-20-30 pages almost instantly. You can flip the pages to glance through them.

In the e-reader, random access is not possible. Table of contents provides a poor substitute but even that is at least 2 actions/clicks away. You cannot flip through the book to glance at the contents. Clicking the buttons quickly or tapping rapidly makes the device squirm as it tries to render each page in quick succession. You get the delay but not a chance to look at what is there.

Referring to something you have already read in the book is also a chore. In part because you cannot use one finger to hold on to where you are currently reading and quickly come back. It has to be a complete trip through multiple page flips and back. The maneuver is also made difficult since there is no muscle memory to fall back on to guess where you need to go. I realized that while reading a paperback, you form a rough subconscious map of content to book pages since the object you are holding is constantly changing. In the e-reader, the physical artifact remains the same. So the map has to be drawn along the time axis - how long ago I read it. This does not work as well. Although e-readers do have a progress bar at the bottom of the page to help you anchor where you are in the book but that doesn't help much with the problem.

Through out reading Lean Analytics, I found myself quite comfortable at the act of actual reading or moving around in close neighborhood around the current page. What I struggled with was holding the bigger picture in my head which is very important while reading a book like this. I constantly found myself referring back to Table of Contents to get a grip on where I was, what I had read and what was left. Not in terms of number of pages but in terms of the conceptual flow of the book. I found it hard to easily go back and forth to reinforce what I was reading. In the end, I was left unsatisfied and feel that I would have to get a paperback version to really get on with this book.

As I said in the beginning, my experience is specific to the kind of book I was reading. I think e-readers are excellent for fiction/non-fiction where the primary mode of engagement with the book is a linear reading. I am yet to read a complete fiction on an e-reader but I have read significant part of The Invisible Man on my phone and found the experience just fine (save for the small screen size of the phone, a problem e-readers do not have).

What has been your experience with e-readers?

शहर के फूल

छोड़ कर शाख क्यों सड़कों पे चले आते हैं,

फूल मासूम हैं, नाहक ही सज़ा पाते हैं।

स्याह पड़ती हुई इस शहर की बेनूर शकल,
रंग दो पल को झलकते हैं, गुज़र जाते हैं।

भागते दौड़ते इस शहर के कुछ वाशिंदे,
साल भर फरवरी की याद में बिताते हैं।

फूल इंसान की उम्मीद के सितारे हैं,
आँख उठती है दुआ में, तो नज़र आते हैं।

शहर के फूल अभागा बड़ी किस्मत वाले,
ठोकरों से नहीं, कारों से कुचले जाते हैं।

The problem with building what people want

One of the mantras of entrepreneurship is to build something that people want. The road to success is lined with geeks who dreamt of beautiful solutions existing in perfect worlds for problems that no one seemed to have. Lean startup formalizes this in terms of customer development. The aim is to identify a customer who is willing to pay you money today for what you can deliver tomorrow.

Recently there was an article in NYT about how the American fast food industry  has filled people's plates with more salt, sugar and fats in an effort to sell more junk food. Many of the executives, when confronted with questions about these practices, defended themselves on the pretext that they were only giving people what they wanted. If they do not give it to them, someone else will.

Why is it that these executives seem to be doing something wrong (or bad if wrong sounds too strong)? They were merely following the oft repeated advice for building a successful business. In fact, making food more addictive seems very similar to making something viral. Already the terms from fast food business are making their way into how we talk about online habits - heavy consumers, information snacking. Is it the case that the advice is lacking something?

Of course, there is an implied limit in the advice - you are not going to do something that is illegal even if you have many customers who want it. But that limit is problematic in at least two ways. One is that if you really only stop at the legal limit, you may already have gone quite far - legal loopholes allow companies like Apple and Google to play double Irish with their taxes. On the other hand, many a times, laws get old and do not represent the reality of the times. Successful business can be built by challenging the laws and thus pushing for change.

If legality can't be used as the guiding light, perhaps we have to fall back to a inner compass? How much are you willing to let the world compromise your original vision? What part of the original dream is open for negotiations? I heard Dr. Nachiket Mor in IIT Kgp recently. He believes that one ought to hold on to the original vision and not let the world distort it. Every vision comes with certain assumptions and those assumptions should be open to testing. Changes should be made to the original vision to make it clearer and more concrete based on the result of that testing. But following the market, going where the money takes you and changing your vision because the original seems too radical, will limit your ability to truly disrupt the systems, instead leading you to a local maxima.

Blast from the past!

जब इस बार मिलें हम तुम, कुछ अलग सा मुझको पाओ तो,
हाथ पकड़ लूं मैं बढ कर, तुम मुझसे शर्मा जाओ तो?

नींद नही आये पर सपनो से बोझिल होकर पलकें,
मुंद जाएँ और तुम काँधे पर सर रख कर सो जाओ तो?

गर साथ हो बस दो पल का और फिर जीवन भर का इंतज़ार,
दो पल न बीतें कभी, समय बस वहीं कहीं रुक जाए तो?

जो कहना चाहें दोनो कुछ पर बात जुबां पर ना आये,
और देख हमारी दुविधा चन्दा बादल में छुप जाए तो?

कभी आँख तेरी गर भर आये और मेघदूत बन कर बादल,
तेरी आँखों के मोती मेरे आँगन बिखरा जाए तो?

Trademark Skill Set

Over at HSI, Vijay Anand of Startup Centre and Proto.in fame, posted some excellent thoughts about the wannabe entrepreneurs who are looking for technical co-founders:

A Trademark Skillset (and I am reiterating) is that one thing you are absolutely known for - it might be people skills; to be able to bring people together around a problem, form a solution and build an enterprise around it, it might be more specific around technology, or design, or fundraising (sic), or sales / business development - but it has to be one quality that you have, that the entire organization (sic) can bet on. 

You should read the full post on HSI.

The Discounted Insanity

There has been a lot of talk in the Indian media recently about the lack of profitability of major Indian e-commerce players. Many of them are also trying out different strategies to manage finances while maintaining growth. While Flipkart has been tweaking discounts and raising limits for free shipping (a move that was quickly followed by almost everyone), IndiaPlaza has excused itself out of the discount race by saying that they want to be the "only money making e-commerce company" out of the top 3-4 players and not the biggest.

However HomeShop18 seems have sensed an opportunity here and has put almost the entire books category on unprecedented discounts! I was hard pressed to find any title that has less then 29-30% discount. Most of the titles are as highly discounted as 35-40%. This includes even the titles which they might be importing from outside. In all my searching, I came across one title which was at 10%. This is insane! And if this was not enough, they have free shipping on any order value, even below Rs.100! Consider that the cost-to-company for such a transaction would be discount + CoD/gateway charges + logistics which can easily get to 45-60% of MRP. That kind of discounts (from suppliers to retailers) are only available for best selling trade books or for old inventory clearing. What this means is that HS18 makes no money on most books even at a per transaction level. This is a true loss leader strategy. It doesn't matter if they capture the 100% market share, they will never make any money. So the only hope is that this rubs off on other, more profitable, categories on the site.

Being a reader, I am scrambling to see which books I can buy under this VC/Corporate subsidy program. I am not a reliance shareholder but if they are willing to pass me some dividend in form of book subsidy, I will happily take it. (Reliance made a major investment in Network18, the parent company of HomeShop18 in Jan, 2012).

As a book publisher, I am not very happy seeing my entire category being used as a loss leader. It is only a matter of time before they turn around and demand higher discounts from their suppliers.

Will HS18 be able to capture a larger market share with this strategy ( not only in books but in other categories as well)? I can't comment on that since being so near to these companies (have friends working there or have business relationships with them), I have pretty low loyalty to anyone of them. They all seem safe enough. I do not know how does it look from the perspective of an average customer who discovers them through online search or TV ads. I hope people in charge of e-commerce companies have a better guess. :-)

Great customer service is about consistency

Couple of years ago at Pothi.com, we were working on a Hindi poetry book. It was a collection of poetry of the father that the son was publishing.  It was a very big deal for the son. He had organized a family gathering and book launch in his home town. We were working on a tight schedule but the books were shipped with time remaining on the clock. The book launch was on Tuesday and the consignment reached the client on Saturday afternoon. Shortly afterwards, I received a call from them.

Getting a call or an email from the clients after they have received the books is not uncommon. There is something about holding your own printed book in your hands that moves people. It is usually a time to celebrate after the long time spent working on the book. However sometimes, things go wrong.

When our clients opened the consignment, shiny new books came out. However on leafing through the pages, they realized that while the cover was of their book, the interior was something entirely different! At 16:00 PM on Saturday, I came to know of this. Family members were coming from all over India for the launch. Our client was to catch his flight in 2 hours. Something needed to be done quickly if we wanted to avoid the disaster.

The courier services usually pick up their last consignment at 21:00 PM. This left us with 5 hours to reprint the books, bind them, trim them and handover to the courier. With some exceptional work from our production people, we somehow managed to put the consignment in before courier cutoff time. To put it in perspective, it usually takes 3-5 days to produce and ship the same order under normal conditions.

However, due to time crunch, we were not able to laminate the covers on this set. Also we were not sure if the direct shipment to the small city would reach in time. So we printed another set of 100 books next day with proper lamination and shipped them to Delhi on Monday to one of the relatives who was driving down to the home town on Tuesday for the book launch. By God's grace, all the copies reached the client in time and they had a memorable book launch.

I sometimes relate this story to friends and they all look reasonably impressed with how we dealt with the situation. Someone suggested that this is an example of great customer service and we should mention it more prominently. However I do not agree.

As humans when we are faced with a crisis situation, we are often able to pull off things that we wouldn't be able to do normally. This is true for both physical as well as mental abilities. Given that we, as entrepreneurs, keep hearing that having a satisfied customer is very important, we often go out of our way to achieve that in a crisis situation. A well known startup in Bangalore offered a client an air ticket in lieu of a bus ticket when the bus didn't show up!

But this has nothing to do with customer service. This is crisis management. The customer service is the part that makes sure that such crisis do not happen in the first place. It means that as a company, you are consistent (hopefully consistently good) in your service delivery and in your communication with customers. The best example of Pothi.com's customer service would be the author who never had to call me up to resolve any issues. Good customer service is a boring story that is repeated with every customer every day with no drama thrown in.

Why is it important to keep this distinction in mind? Because it is easy to confuse your crisis management with your customer service. Let us say you have a standing offer of a full refund in case a defective product is delivered to your client and you actively fulfill it whenever the need arises. Given the situation of most companies in India, you will be doing something quite rare and your customers will be happy. The more the need arises, the more chances you get to make a customer happy and you feel good. Unfortunately, more such cases mean that your primary service delivery is not working up to the mark. While as a customer, I would be happy that you made up to me in a crisis situation, I will quickly move to someone else if they are more consistent in their service delivery.

The other difference is that the promised delivery levels should be set keeping in mind the sustainability. What you can deliver is a crisis situation may not be sustainable on an ongoing basis. If you require maximum 3 days for delivering something, promise 3 days even if you can deliver in 2 80% of the time.

So in summary, while the grand stories of crisis management make for interesting story telling, a good customer service needs to be exactly the opposite - predictable, consistent and sustainable. In other words, a boring story.