The Platform Play is the business strategy of turning your app book software into a platform for publishing lots of app books. The logic is that publishers, and indie authors, will want to move into this space and they will be looking for a platform - a turnkey software solution rather than custom development. If you look at some of the players that have produced more than a few books you can see the platform play in action. Be it Oceanhouse Media, ScrollMotion, or ComiXology (for comics) they are out there. If you take time to look at the smaller publishers they are looking in the same direction. Everyone wants to create a platform. Why? The reason isn't reuse. The reason is that selling at retail is a difficult business. Faced with lower returns than expected companies are looking to providing either a tool or a service.
The problem is, the playing field just isn't big enough for 20 or 40 different app book platforms. Publishers are going to try a few here and there and then they are going pick just a few as the industry favorites. The rest are going to fail. So, if its The Platform you are shooting for in your business strategy than you better have a much, much, much better platform than anyone else or you'll just end being an also-ran.
The nice thing about the Platform Play is that the exit for the successful ventures is going to be really good money. I can easily see a publisher or some software tool vendor paying 20 to 50 million dollars for the best App Book platforms within the next three years. But there won't be a lot that going around - maybe three or four app book platforms will get buy out offers at best. The rest, well, they will probably go bye-bye.
I won't make any predictions about which producers of App Book platforms will win the Platform war yet, except for one whose success seems assured: ComiXology. ComiXology, whose platform is used by none other than the two biggest comic book publishers in the industry (Marvel and DC) are bound to get a very nice offer to sell probably within the next 18 months. I'm guessing a sale price of about 40 million, but its also a big guessing game at this point.
So if the future of our industry going to be left to just a few platforms. Yes and No. I think for a lot of publishers the use of an existing platform is going to be very attractive and a lot cheaper so they will gravitate to those vendors. However, I believe (and hope) there will always be a market for the custom made app books. App books that are designed from the ground up for a specific work of literature. The folks who do this kind of boutique work will obviously try to reuse as much code from previous projects as possible, but they also innovate and stretch our definition of an app book more than any of the platform plays. They have to innovate in order to survive. And for these folks, quality will be a huge differentiator as well. A platform limits your flexibility which limits your choices which limits the quality of work you can create.
The truth is both the Platform Plays and the Boutique are both necessary. The Boutiques will push the envelope and innovate and the Platform Plays will lower the cost for publishers to enter this new market. The question is: Who do you want to be?
