Episode 23: Mark Herschberg How Books Might Escape the Page

In this episode we are joined by Mark Herschberg, publisher at Cognosco Media, author of The Career Toolkit, Essential Skills for Success That No One Taught You, and the developer of a new app that is attempting to promote a new take on reader interaction with book content.

I was a bit skeptical of Mark’s approach from the offset, having seen so many ebook apps and new ideas about digital engagement flame out over the years. However, Mark and I had a great conversation about how the relevant content in a book might be more or less than the actual page count, how so many new technologies are just like sticking a fake horse head on the front of an automobile, and more. Mark shared some of the ideas behind his app, most notably the notifications feature that can help readers recall key points from books they have read.

If you’re interested in learning more, you can check out Mark’s publishing company, Cognosco Media (https://www.cognoscomedia.com) and take a look at both his book and the related app (https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com).

Transcript

Joshua Tallent 

This week on the BookSmarts Podcast, I have Mark Hirschberg. Mark has been teaching at MIT’s Career Success Accelerator for 20 years and is the author of The Career Toolkit: Essential skills for success that no one taught you. He created a lot of new ventures and startups over the years, authored over a dozen patents, and is a former ballroom champion. Mark, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

Mark Herschberg 

Thanks for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, this is a pretty interesting conversation I think we’ll have today. So, you’ve self published a book, The Career Toolkit. And as part of that book, you also have produced an app, you created a companion app. And you have this idea that the future of books, the future of publishing is not going to be confined to the page or the linear format of a book or a movie, that it’s involving more interaction. So talk to us about this. What is your proposal here about why you think the future of publishing looks like that?

Mark Herschberg 

Just to give a little more context, my background includes working in digital media, I helped NBC with a business unit they later spun out and it’s now called Hulu. And I worked at some other digital media startups. I’ve been in this space long before I just published the book. And we’ve been seeing a trend moving slowly towards how people are choosing to interact with media in different ways. I can do a whole long talk on this, we don’t have time for that. But consider, for example, we went for—within fiction—the story that goes just from start to finish, you might do that in a book, you might do that a TV show or a movie. But now people want to engage with that in nonlinear ways, which for fiction, typically is a video game, or some other interactive experience. Now, nonfiction doesn’t lend itself quite as easily to video games, as much as we try to gamify everything these days. But still, people don’t always want to access the content in that linear way. They don’t want that restriction. We know many people don’t read books cover to cover anymore. And really the consumer, especially the ones who watch the 60 second, TikTok videos and just want NOW, just give it to me. They are saying I want the content, when, where and how is best for me. So, we as creators of nonfiction, need to take our content, move it from the restrictions of that linear format of a book, and provide it in nonlinear ways through alternative channels. And that is going to be the future of publishing.

Joshua Tallent 

Okay, so the future of nonfiction publishing, I might posit. In thinking about even a video game, a video game still has at least in the single player mode that you think of with a storyline—still has a flow, it still has a linear flow that you’re following, that may branch or have options, but really, there’s still a linear flow to that.

Mark Herschberg 

I would say—I gave that as a quick example, if we had time to really explore down into that we can talk about ways that still breaks the mold even further. There’s more ways we can go in the fiction world, though my app is very much for nonfiction.

Joshua Tallent 

Okay, so thinking of nonfiction, this is almost the same thing as saying, well, the Encarta you know, back in the day to Encarta CD ROMs, was a different way to engage with a, you know, an encyclopedia, than just having the book. I’m never going to read an encyclopedia linearly from start to finish, I’m going to go in the book even to the right location, but giving an interactive way of doing that with hyperlinking back and forth between different articles and making it easier to transact with that book, that makes a ton of sense. How do you see this working say—stick with nonfiction for now? How do you see this really working in the future? You know, is there going to be an app for every book, do you think? Is it really that we need to be rethinking something in a much deeper level on the publishing side?

Mark Herschberg 

I think we are going to see apps as standard with books for a number of reasons. Now, first, the book itself, I think will change as well. Books are the size they are because of the need for spine width. And it’s why for years, I would read these books and say, really great information for 40 pages. And then there was another 130 pages of fluff of beating the idea to death, but need of the spine width. So already, we’re saying well, we don’t need all that fluff. When we put ebooks the spine width is far less important, because we’re selling everything online these days. But now we also need to say well, if it’s just those 40 pages of content, the idea that fits in there. How do we take that—maybe we keep the additional 130 pages but provided as supplemental content. But now the reader doesn’t have to go through the whole thing and sift out what is the main points versus supplemental. If you can put it in this nonlinear format, someone can go and access the main idea, and then can do the examples, the follow up, the subtleties with it, if that reader so chooses. So that’s one option. More philosophically, consider that our job as content creators is not to sell paper. Paper was just the medium. Our job was to change how people think, and behave. If the book does that, great. If I can do that through a different tool, that is my job, not to put words on paper. And so especially today, when we see the younger generation likes apps, likes to engage in this way, I think, again, that’s going to lead us more towards apps. And then the third reason is the fact that when you have a book, that book you’re typically reading—I’m gonna say at home, obviously, there’s more physical places we read it. But now contrast that with the number of places you have your phone, which is pretty much everywhere. And when people want your information everywhere, the book is no longer the proper format for it—or not the sole proper format for it.

Joshua Tallent 

Okay, this is an interesting topic, because I’ve heard some of these arguments before, way back in the early days of ebooks. There’s, there’s always been arguments about you know, where ebooks will take on the role of the, you know—the digital version of the book will be different than the than the print book in these are great ways. And you will have this interactivity and will have the ability—I saw a lot of startup companies back in the early ebook days were like, I’m gonna build an e book app, and it’s going to be this great thing that’s only for this one book, and it’s gonna, you know, change the market and change the world. You know, there were a lot of options for that back in the day, and they just kind of—you know, kind of failed. So when it comes down to it—I, I told you, I think before we started this whole this, this conversation, before we started recording, I was going to be a little skeptical because I’ve seen some of these ideas before and they haven’t caught on. And as a matter of fact, we’ve seen the ebook market—despite the pandemic surge in ebook sales, just kind of a result of how people started consuming that content—we’ve seen that ebook sales drop back down again to close to where they were before. I just wonder if we actually are going to—if we have enough people who are interested in the digital side of content to really warrant saying, this is where the future is headed.

Mark Herschberg 

I happen to be one of the people who likes traditional books I don’t think I’ve ever bought an e book because I like the paper, but an ebook is our refer to that as a “horsey horseless”

Joshua Tallent 

“horsey horseless”…

Mark Herschberg 

That was a term for these cars that they built right around the turn of the century, where they took the head of a horse—fake head of a horse—and stuck it on the front of the carriage to make it look and feel a little more like a traditional carriage. Oh, we we’re sitting in the carriage. And look, there’s a kind of horse-looking thing on the front. And they retrofit this new technology, automobiles, to look like the prior technology. That’s what we did with ebooks. We said, let’s take this new technology as digital content, but we’re going to mold it to really behave exactly like the limiting format we’ve had before. Surely we all remember there were the page flips, right? Where it can look like you flip the page and try to make it look and feel the same. That was the “horsey horseless”—that was sticking the horse’s head on. This is not simply a book that’s electronic. This is taking the very concept of the book and mixing it up. When we think about—and I’m blanking on the name of—Infinite Jest, the author of Infinite Jest said, “Well, there’s lots of different ways to read this book, you don’t have to do it in linear order. In fact, you can rip out every page, toss it all in the air and just read it in whatever order it comes out in.” He said, “This is a valid way to read my book.” That is what we’re going to do to other books, is you can read it in whatever order you want, perhaps Choose Your Own Adventure wouldn’t be a better analogy. It’s my brother-in-law’s favorite type of book. And so we’re letting users guide their own path through the content. That’s something that ebooks have not done. They might have been capable of doing that, but that’s not how they were designed. That’s not how they were marketed. That’s not how most people use it. And so I’m not simply talking about taking the book and doing another electronic, another format—instead of EPUB, there’s a new format. But taking the content itself, and using it, accessing it, in a whole different way.

Joshua Tallent 

So let’s talk about a real life example. You’ve done this for your book. You’ve created an app, what makes that companion app function differently? What lets you interact with that content in a different way in the app than you could just in the book itself, or in the book and the ebook together, or even the book and a website on its own.

Mark Herschberg 

I’ve been in education for a number of decades, and one of the most successful tools we have in education is spaced repetition. That’s a fancy word for what most people know as flashcards. Look back at the content—because how often do we read a business book or a self help book and we think, “Oh, that’s really great information.” But three weeks later, we forgot most of it, we’re on to the next book, we’re busy in life. And again, our job as content creators, is to help people change—not to have them buy the book, look at once and put it down. So, we want people to better retain the content. We know spaced repetition does that. Now there are lots of flashcard apps out there. But no one is going to open a flashcard app each day. I happen to take notes on the books I read. But I’m probably not the average for—I’m sure some people in the audience do as well, we’re not the average reader. So what we needed to create was a way for people to passively engage with the content, through minimal effort, still be able to refresh their knowledge of the content. And the big breakthrough, what we patented, was the concept of taking the content, putting it on the server, getting it downloaded to the app and then having the app just do a simple notification. Just like any notification you get on the phone, you have a new text message, an email, you get a notification with one of the tips from the book. So the user can set when and where she wants to engage that content. We’ll start to expand that were part to be geo-fenced in terms of where you might access it or advanced things we can do in the future. But for now, say, “Well, I want as I walk into the office, let me get it on my phone.” And you get that little reminder, you look at, it takes two seconds, you swipe it away, done. And that’s going to help the reader better retain the content. That’s going to help the author and publisher stay top-of-mind to the reader, which is going to help with those word-of-mouth sales. So there’s a benefit to both parties here.

Joshua Tallent 

Okay, interesting. Yeah, I can see that, especially I guess for a business book or self help book, something that I’m digging into and wanting to remember the things I’m learning. That’s a pretty specific part of the publishing industry, and one that I’ve had great conversations with people before. I actually had a conversation a couple weeks ago, for those who missed it, with Todd Sattersten, who’s the publisher at Bard Press about business publishing and how some of that process works. This is—yeah—I don’t know, part of me—I don’t want to be—I don’t want to come off as too much of a skeptic on this. But, you know, part of me just says, “Do I want another notification on my phone? I have so many already. Do I want to be doing having that that thing interrupting me or telling me something?” You know, it makes sense if it’s one book that I’m currently reading, that I’m engaged with, or a book that I’m trying to build my entire business world around—I need to remember these concepts over the next couple of months is I really think through some major thing. I would not want that for the last 10 books that I’ve read happening constantly for me, right? So yeah, it’s an interesting concept. Again, I come back to the question of the app, and whether the app is still the best way to do that. I would love to see this kind of functionality happen in a in a singular system, right? Where I have a library of books, and I can pick and choose which ones are giving me those kinds of notifications and interact with those things in different ways. That, to me sounds more interesting than just individual apps.

Mark Herschberg 

And by the time this episode airs, that will exist, because while I built that app for my book, that’s exactly it. People in the ebook world—you pointed out mistakes made when ebooks came out. People used to say, “Oh, we’re gonna have a download. That’s our ebook,” which was really just wrapping a PDF. And eventually people said, I don’t want to have 200 apps on my phone, I want one app—maybe a few, the Kindle, the Nook—and let me just download the relevant content. That is exactly what will be ready, about one month from the date that we’re recording in early February. It is a universal app. And then you can download the content that you want from the books that have been put on the server, you can turn on notifications for whichever books you’re actively interested in trying to better recall. Otherwise, you can just keep the content silently on your phone. And that’s how you’re going to engage with content the future.

Joshua Tallent 

Okay—actually, that’s—I should make the point that I did not know about this when we started the conversation, I was not leading to that point. But that’s really awesome that you’re coming out with that kind of app. Yeah, it—it makes a lot of sense, right? It’s especially for certain types of titles, certain types of content, as a publisher to be thinking outside the box and thinking about how you can keep people engaged with that content. And even as an individual author, you know, you’re thinking about pitching a title to a publisher, and you have lots of content that you don’t necessarily need to put in the book or that you can’t put in the book or that makes more sense outside of the context of the printed page. Yeah, I think I could see that very easily being something to interact with and engage with in a digital form.

Mark Herschberg 

And as you note, you could have other types of content—certainly, I think of the tens of thousands of words I cut from my book, might find a second life there. We’re looking at doing similar things a little later this year with podcasting, for example. Podcasters, the same issue: you have content, but people engage with you once for a very brief period of time, and then put you away until your next episode comes out. But how can people better engage with that content, better retain the content, and how can you as a creator better stay top of mind? We can use the app again. In fact, it really works across mediums, because this isn’t that “horsey horseless,” it’s not taking the old paradigm and sticking it just onto the phone. It’s taking a new paradigm, stripping it down to the base that is the content, and then saying, How can we take the content you’ve put elsewhere in a podcast in a blog in a book, but employing it in a new way to be more useful and timely to the reader?

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s good. That’s an interesting idea. I think, you know, obviously, we’ll see how things go in the next decade or two. It’s a—it takes time for these things to catch up. Publishers, I think, have a very hard time with new technologies, because the question is always ROI. How much am I going to invest in that? What’s the return on that investment? And where’s the audience going to actually care about that? So it’ll be interesting to see how this gets built out over time and how many, how many people think of this as a core way to consume content Because as that happens, more publishers can look at that and say, “Okay, now I see the value in doing that.”

Mark Herschberg 

You bring up a very good point. I’ve built a number of tech startups, I know technology, I know how to build apps. That’s not something publishers traditionally do well. So not only do I have the patent making this unique, but I have the experience building tech and distributing it. And so the good news is publishers don’t have to think about how to do this themselves. That’s why we’re building the general app, so they can just come on board. The other key point that you implied earlier on: there are a handful of major brands that could probably have their own apps, something like a Chicken Soup for the Soul, or Seven Habits, where they have millions—tens of millions—of followers, where they could download a significant number of installments. But when you think about a moderately successful book that might be selling 20,000-30,000 copies, there’s no way you’re going to get enough of a return building an app to justify that. However, if you just come into this larger community of readers, it’s a much lower cost of entry. And in fact, just like you can do with the Kindle, we can start doing recommendations down the road—we can start saying given what you’ve read, here’s some other content you might be interested in. And that’s going to also allow the smaller titles, meeting everything, but those really big bestseller mega hits, to find additional audience.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, cool. I don’t want this to turn into a sales pitch. But I am curious about how you plan to approach this from an author—from a publisher perspective. Is that a licensing approach? Is it—are you just a retailer of the book and you do the work of splitting out pieces and making those flashcards, or what is your approach on that?

Mark Herschberg 

It’s initially—but we’re definitely open to feedback, and anyone can talk to me to me ideas, because I want to listen to the industry for what works. But initially, we’re thinking, the content owner obviously has the copyright on this, we’re not going to take anything and just stick it on there without their permission. The owner can chop it up, however they like. They can put all of the book, some of the book, book plus other content, whatever seems appropriate, putting that into the app and making that available. And then people can begin to consume it. And we’ll start giving them feedback on what content are people engaging with? What are they liking? This is also helpful for your market research, because when you see people responding to this content over that content, it helps you understand what people want.

Joshua Tallent 

Yeah, that’s very true. Okay, Mark, it’s an interesting idea. I’m very, very interested to see how it goes in the future. So for people who are interested in chatting with you more about this or reading your book, give us a little bit of contact info, where should people reach out to you?

Mark Herschberg 

You can reach me one of two places at the publishing company, which is putting out the app cognoscomedia.com, or on my book’s web page, thecareertoolkitbook.com. If you go to that site, you can go to the app page, and that’s going to take you to the Android and iPhone store. And there you can download a free version of the app for my book to get a sense of what it will be like. And we’re gonna do a version—again, a general version for everyone. So cognoscomedia.com and thecareertoolkitbook.com.

Joshua Tallent 

Okay. All right, thanks, Mark. I appreciate you coming on the podcast and, yeah, looking forward to seeing how things go. That’s it for this episode of the BookSmarts podcast. If you like what you’ve heard, please leave a review or rating an Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to the podcast. And also please share this podcast with your colleagues. If you have topic suggestions or feedback about the show, you can email me at joshua@firebrandtech.com. Thanks for joining me and getting smarter about your books.