Our mission is to establish .book as the most preferred top level domain for book consumers and the global book industry stakeholders that serve them. Our objectives are:
• To expressly democratize, simplify and cost-efficiently expand the discoverability of book titles and information about books.
• To enable authors, book publishers and other industry service providers to directly and intuitively be found by their prospective customers.
• To facilitate a contemporary path for continuous promotion and an extended digital shelf life for books.
• To empower stakeholders to leverage the low cost and massive reach of the internet as an alternative global platform for increased discovery and competition in the distribution of books.
• To promote a modern and universal semantic definition of ʹbookʹ that reinforces efforts by book industry stakeholders to market increasingly unique book products and services.
• To increase international trade by preserving the profitable growth of an innovative, yet defined, book publishing market within the larger information footprint and in accordance with existing contractual agreements.
• To help drive the decentralized, stakeholder-driven production of natural language words and phrases in .book domain strings that will help consumers around the world efficiently discover and purchase books.
People have been using books to organize the worldʹs information for centuries but only a small percentage of our global population has been afforded the chance to access these materials or even find out more about them. This is because book publishing and distribution models have been trapped in outdated supply chain practices and imbalanced economic models that have impeded a transparent book market and disadvantaged each of the industryʹs key stakeholders. But the internet, as a global information platform, has the power to improve economic sustainability for all book publishing stakeholders while providing maximum choice for consumers.
Universal discoverability and accessibility are the $29 billion book industryʹs greatest economic challenges. Independent bookstores, chain book retailers and even big-box stores cannot allocate sufficient physical space for print inventory to make true universal discovery and continuous availability of books economically feasible. A 2007 estimate of the total size of the frontlist, or current titles in print and marketed for sale, was approximately 1.7 million; yet in 2010, Google estimated there were about 130 million unique books in the world. By some estimates, up to 52 percent of frontlist titles are not even sold in bookstores and consumer are challenged to find them. Numerous books are merchandised sporadically via mail order and online catalogs, through book clubs, direct sales channels and in other nontraditional retail outlets. Some estimates suggest another 18-20 million books are scattered across a plethora of websites and discoverable only via serendipity. Moreover, retail stores that do carry books are famous for returning them, often at the publisherʹs expense. Typically 25-36 percent of all books printed and supplied to retailers for sale are physically returned to the publisher for a refund. The economics of a brick and mortar business model will always necessitate a limited catalog of mostly current and blockbuster titles. With a very low investment however, almost anyone who can read and write can access information about a book on the internet through a .book title domain or distribute such information directly to millions of people around the world, and at a price point they set for themselves.
Books are still the single best documented recording of the hearts and minds of the human race. We may live in an electronic age but the human output captured in books is worth preserving and making accessible to every interested citizen of the world who can access the internet. The internet has become the worldʹs ultimate global distribution platform. While the scarcity of shelf space once prevented the true lifetime value of a book from being realized, the adoption of .book title domains will allow any book to become instantly and abundantly available for an extended period of time, or even in perpetuity if the economics support it. This new system of .book TLDs will accelerate the ability of publishers and authors to develop more targeted domain schemas for faster and more cost-effective worldwide distribution for those not restricted by legacy territorial agreements.
Despite the fact that physical pages of books are slowly disappearing, the universal definition of the word ʹbookʹ is hardly foreign to global book consumers. The number of world nations who print the International Book Standard Number on the back of every printed book currently stands at 160 countries, according to the International ISBN Agency. As such, most consumers will not require training or rigorous bookmarking to search for books as the term ‘book’ is already a universally comprehended and highly regarded organizing label for information. Some industry pundits worry that the notion of a book is unraveling and quickly becoming a relic of the ancient past. Indeed the definition of a book as ʺthe matter printed between two coversʺ is fast becoming outdated. We are in the throes of a mighty transition from a print to an online publishing model. E-book sales in 2011 in the U.S. accounted for 21% of book sales, up from just 9 percent in the prior year. It has also been widely reported that Amazon sells more e-books than print books, a mere four years after launching the Kindle.
In February, market analyst Nielsen reported that e-book production in the UK outpaced hardcover production for the first time in 2011. Market researcher Gfk also found that e-book sales increased 77% in Germany over a one-year period, totaling EUR 38 million in 2011. According to a recent Harris Interactive poll, nearly three out of ten adults in the U.S. use an electronic device or tablet to read electronic books, up from 15 percent in July 2011. And eMarketer estimates that by 2014, the number of tablet users will rise to nearly 90 million, or 27.7 percent of the U.S. population. As Angela Bole, Deputy Executive Director at the BISG summarizes, the “e-book market is developing very quickly, with consumer attitudes and behavior changing over the course of months, rather than years.” Ironically, readers are embracing digital books in every flavor but still lack the ability to easily discover the full range of book titles that map to their interests. In 1925 there were 397 book publishers. Today there are over 80,000, with up to 10,000 new publishers entering the field every year. The adoption of new .book domains will lower the cost barrier for authors to publish their own works and reach their intended audiences. The New York Times reported in 2002 that “81 percent of people feel that they have a book in them…and should write it.” In the U.S. alone that statistic represents over 200 million people who might be persuaded to author a book in their lifetime. The definition of what constitutes a book and how it can be found must be allowed to evolve. An independent .book registry that is not specifically affiliated with one of the primary stakeholders is the best recipe for engendering consumer and stakeholder trust. Our goal as an impartial entity is to preserve the future of books and book publishing by uniting all industry participants around consumer-centric use cases without distorting some and preventing the development of others. Industry adoption of the .book domain will advantage all economic stakeholders by lowering the overall cost of matching each book with its intended reader. As Kevin Kelly, one of our more thoughtful thinkers of the modern digital age states: ʺA book is complete in the sense that it contains its own beginning, middle, and end.ʺ Now is the time for this next chapter |