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As a result of spending my college days at UCLA, I had a handful of contacts in the Hollywood community when I came back East to live in 1969. When I started becoming familiar with New York publishing in the 1970s, I found myself, on occasion, shopping movie or TV tie-in projects. Armed with a script and a release plan, one could make the rounds of editors at the mass-market houses that had been assigned specific responsibility for this kind of acquisition.

At the time I was doing this kind of thing 30 or 35 years ago and more, the book business was growing wary of tie-ins to TV movies. They didn’t have the same promotional life as theatrical releases, even in those days when about one-third of the country was watching any network broadcast. Films that ran in movie theaters were definitely preferred as desirable book properties.

In the decades since then, the link between Hollywood and New York publishing has not exactly been severed, but it certainly hasn’t strengthened. One agent I spoke to told me that interest from Hollywood can definitely help raise the profile of a book project being peddled in New York, but the same agent agreed that the tie-in sale, where a script is novelized to just take advantage of the exposure the title and story will get through the movie, is all but dead.

Another agent, one with strong Hollywood connections through his office, had a slightly different point of view. He says it is still “humbling” to see how much being tied to a movie or TV show (“or even radio”) can “move the needle” on a book sale.

To the extent that the agent who believes in the power of Hollywood exposure to move books is right, the relative reduction in interest by New York publishers only increases the opportunity for Hollywood entities who exploit publishing through ebooks (and judicious and selective use of print) on their own.

(I recall two specific deals from my past relevant to this post. In around 1977 or 1978 I sold the book tie-in rights to a TV movie called “Cotton Candy”, which was produced by Ron Howard. In 1985, I sold the rights to two books to tie into the third “Nightmare on Elm Street” movie: one was a novelization of the first three films and the other a heavily-illustrated “making of…” book. I’d say the “Cotton Candy” deal today couldn’t possibly happen and “Nightmare”, which went to a major publisher, would be a real long shot.)

New York’s interest in Hollywood-originated content was, of course, centered on big properties. Hollywood’s enthusiasm about getting a book deal was often not very great. It didn’t add a ton of revenue (big publishing money for a big movie was small money to the movie producer) and the “promotion” done by publishers was trivial compared to what the movie studios did for the film.

In fact, there were often rights issues that got in the way. Even if the screenwriter had conceded the tie-in rights to sell the script, the studio might still be required to get clearances on the novelization, which would be a nuisance for a book project that often had annoyingly tight deadlines and not much benefit. If the screenwriter had held the tie-in rights and was the one selling to the publisher, it could become a bureaucratic nightmare to get art and logos from the film, which would be controlled by the studio, to promote the book.

New York’s incentives were often too limited to interest Hollywood. Hollywood’s unpredictability on things as basic as release dates, as well as the diminishing likelihood over time that any particular movie property would enjoy enough theatrical success to give real legs to the tie-in book, made systematic efforts unproductive for publishers. There haven’t been dedicated tie-in editors for decades.

But digital publishing changes many things. The relationship between Hollywood and the book business, because of the changes brought on by ebooks, will almost certainly be one of them.

In the digital age, what it takes to succeed as a publisher are access to commercial properties to publish and an ability to let an audience know an ebook of interest to them is available. Those are the core requirements. Everything else can be put together from services, and they can be put together one project at a time (although most people in Hollywood aren’t really aware of that yet.)

A Big Six CEO told me last week that the two core skills and competencies that publishers require are “editorial”, picking the books and developing them, and “marketing”, letting the interested public know the book is there. This CEO would be happy to outsource just about everything else. Starting where this executive wants to end up — with commercial properties in hand and an ability to tell an audience about them but with no overhead or organization to support — is essentially where Hollywood entities get the chance to begin.

Things have changed in Hollywood too. Digital tools make it cheaper and easier to make a movie, just like it is now cheaper and easier to make a book. But, just like book publishers, producers of Hollywood content find the growth in competition mushrooming. The corrolary to the fact that making movies can be cheaper is that promoting them is that much harder and, much more than decades ago, every revenue stream counts, even pretty small ones.

The change in both industries means that Hollywood has enormous opportunities through the digital publishing world, as soon as they figure it out (which we plan to help them do).

There are some early signs that this is beginning to happen.

The most ambitious project we’ve become aware of so far comes from Warner Brothers Digital Distribution. They’ve announced their Inside the Script series that will issue 300 classic scripts (think “Casablanca”) as ebooks, starting with a release of four titles. Doing an entire program enables them to take a templated approach to creating the ebooks, which will cut their costs of making really good products. Whether classic scripts will sell robustly is an open question, of course. But the cost of the experiment is low in a Hollywood context, and they gain the additional benefit that their classic films get a shot of recognition and reader-adrenalin which can only increase Netflix views and DVD sales.

NBC has established NBC Publishing to begin to exploit this opportunity. Michael Fabiano, the NBC VP who is the General Manager of this operation, says that “In general, text will come from titles already published, direct relationships with authors and, in some cases, from the staff of NBC News. We will also utilize a network of professionals as needed.” They make it clear that NBC will continue to work with established publishers. (Left unsaid, but I’d assume: they’ll work with established publishers for projects that have a big print component or where they can get substantial advances.)

ABC has a venture called ABC Video Books. This is being done in conjunction with the publisher they own, Hyperion. They position the initiative as “a new storytelling experience, enhanced with ABC video.”

Thinking about this has led me to believe that every network, every studio, every producer, every agent, and every screenwriter in Hollywood needs to have a digital publishing strategy. If fledgling novelists with no Hollywood presence can blog and tweet their way to commercial success, and some do, certainly a Hollywood-developed story would have an even better chance. Novelizing a screenplay (which is just one of a number of ways to do a Hollywood tie-in as an ebook) isn’t a trivial job, but it isn’t a massive one either. And publication as an ebook can be done for less than the cost of a few lunches. Even cheap lunches.

Broadly speaking, there are two categories of opportunity here. One is for legacy brands: all the stories (like “Casablanca”) that have been made famous over a century of film-making. Publishing scripts or novelizations are the simplest things that can be done. Why not publish all the Seinfeld or All in the Family scripts as ebooks? How would they sell? We don’t know, but the cost to find out is low and the availability of the book constitutes additional promotion, even of a long-established film or TV show.

The other category of opportunity is to build interest in a developing property. This will work better for projects that are about something substantial: a historical event or person or an issue (divorce, alcoholism, etc.) that people would search under looking for reading matter. If you’ve written a screenplay about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and you’re trying to develop interest, you could do worse than publish the script or a novelization as an ebook. People searching their favorite ebook retailer for Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig will find it (and this happens every day) and some will buy it. You can develop fans and a following. You can get revenue.

Of course, you can also get more creative. Characters can “write books” (an approach that has already been tried.)  And successfully.

Discussing these ideas with players in Hollywood today, I have learned that there is a growing awareness of the ease of ebook publication with another motivation as the catalyst. It is apparently easier for the owner of a screenplay to keep ebook rights out of their movie deal if they’ve already published the ebook. There would seem to be very little risk in that strategy. As we’ve seen, movie studios don’t much care about book tie-ins so they’re not likely to walk away from a deal because these rights have already been exploited. And book publishers are increasingly aware of self-published ebooks as a farm system. No book publisher would decline to buy rights to a book becoming a movie because an ebook had already been issued. (The owner would almost certainly have to pull the self-published ebook off sale, but that would be painless if a publishing deal made it worth it. That precise strategy has been executed by indie publishing star Amanda Hocking and her new full-service publisher, St. Martin’s.)

The first step for networks and channels and producers in Hollywood is to learn how to utilize their new revenue and marketing tool: ebooks. We’re going to jumpstart that effort with a Publishers Launch Conference at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel on Monday, October 22 called “FILM/TV-TO-BOOK: How Digital Publishing Creates New Revenue and Marketing Opportunities for Hollywood”. We’ll be co-located withF+W Media’s Story World Conference. We think this could be the start of a long-running conversation.

Publishers Launch Hollywood will emphasize what the Tinseltown players can do on their own, which is the big opportunity presented by digital change. But we’ll also present players from the publishing world: both new entrants from the “ebook first” world and established players. None of them want to do every pr0ject Hollywood should do, but when they want to be involved, they’re still almost always the best path to the biggest market.

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It is hard to believe that we’re starting to plan the fourth annual Digital Book World conference, which will be held January 16-17, 2013 at the Hilton in New York City. But we are.

The first DBW was held in 2010. Planning for it began the June before when David Nussbaum and Sara Domville of F+W Media called me to say “we think there can be a better conference than any we’ve been to about digital change in publishing.” They challenged me to come up with an approach and to take on programming the event.

What I hit upon then as a differentiating proposition was to make Digital Book World focus on the business issues created by digital change in trade book publishing. We wouldn’t focus on tech, per se. We wouldn’t focus on how digital change would affect publishers who didn’t rely primarily on bookstores to reach their customers. It has long been my belief that general trade publishers would be the most challenged by the digital transition because their core proposition, their key value-add, was putting books into bookstores.

That’s worked for us very well. Not only have we had three very successful DBWs, I believe we have really helped focus the conversation about the digital transition. When we booked agents to speak at DBW 2010, it was the first time they had been featured at an industry event on digital change. Of course, the agents’ role — and the nature of their organizations — has changed as much as publishers and booksellers have in recent years. We’ve looked at the globalizing impact of the digital transition, how bookstores are coping with it, how publishers’ relationships with libraries are changing, and, repeatedly, how digital change is affecting trade publishers’ organizations, staffing, and workflows.

Then in 2012, Michael Cader and I formed Publishers Launch Conferences because, as big and sprawling and complete as DBW is (and with 30 different breakout sessions plus a ton of plenary programming, 150 or more speakers, and about 2000 attendees, it is definitely the biggest conversation about digital change for trade publishers held anywhere on the planet), we can’t cover everything there and we need interim conversations throughout the year.

As it happens, PLC is letting us focus on subsets of the broader conversation — one might call them “verticals” — that require a deeper dive. Last year we used that capability to deliver “eBooks for Everyone Else”, the primer for ebook publishing without an IT department, in New York and San Francisco and a half-day show dedicated to children’s book publishing in Frankfurt. Both of these ultimately enriched DBW itself; we made “eBEE” a breakout track and did our own full day Pub Launch standalone on children’s book publishing as a co-located event at DBW 2012.

We have two exciting vertical shows lined up for Pub Launch 2013 that will definitely spawn programming for DBW tracks.

“Publishing in the Cloud”, which we’ll stage on July 26 at Baruch on 25th and Lexington in Manhattan, is about SaaS (“Software as a Service”) for publishing. We think SaaS is starting to change publishing practices, workflows, and the IT departments themselves. SaaS will mean a totally different deployment of technology resources for big publishers and enable capabilities that were previously out of reach for smaller publishers.

Although almost all the from-stage presentations at “Cloud” will be by publishers who are using SaaS services, the suppliers will be there too. They’ll meet the delegates at their sponsor tables during breaks and will also participate in “speed-dating” sessions, where the attendees meet sponsors and the speakers in small groups that enable exchanges about the very specific challenges attendees come to the conference to have addressed.

“Publishers Launch Hollywood”, which will take place on October 22 at the Hollywood Renaisssance, will be the first conference event specifically designed to introduce the movie and TV communities to the new opportunities created by digital publishing. Networks, studios, producers, screenwriters, and agents in LA all control properties that would make books that can sell and can now be delivered at a nominal cost. We know of one major studio about to announce a program to sell 300 “classic” scripts as ebooks. NBC, the one major network not already affiliated with a publisher (CBS has S&S, ABC has Hyperion, and Fox has HarperCollins) has started its own ebook publishing operation. These initiatives are the tip of an opportunity iceberg and we plan to bring that message to Hollywood and deliver the information about all the new ways that exist for film and TV properties to generate more fame and more revenue that are now readily available.

Both SaaS and publishing’s Hollywood connection will find their way to the DBW program for next January. They join a list of topics we think are moving up on the agenda for publishers and that we’ll want to cover pretty thoroughly at DBW 2013..

Digital is making the world smaller. That creates opportunity for US publishers to sell more abroad and opportunity for foreign publishers to sell more here. We will feature more on export, more on import, and more conversation with international publishers in general next January. (There’s quite a bit of this on our PLC BEA show, which will take place on June 4.)

Pretty clearly, DRM (digital rights management) is an element in transition in our dymanic ebook world. We’d say that conversation began in earnest at DBW 2012 when Matteo Berlucchi, the CEO of ebookseller Anobii, made his plea to eliminate DRM as a way to combat Kindle lock-in. Now Pottermore is selling DRM-free ebooks, getting heretofore inconceivable concessions from Amazon and other ebook retailers as a result, and Macmillan has just announced that their Tor.com division will make the same switch in the next two months. The future of DRM, and, more to the point for us, the impact on piracy and on the overall marketplace, will be front and center at DBW 2013.

Discovery is a topic that has been on our minds for some time, but it is getting increasingly crucial as bookstores decline. Discovery is about metadata, of course, and that’s a subject we’ve covered at DBW before (and will again.) Many social reading and sharing options are being developed. Whether these give publishers and authors the tools they need to propel a book to the level of awareness necessary to get sales and word-of-mouth rolling is something we’ll definitely be trying to learn more about at DBW 2013.

The importance of brand and community is increasingly obvious. I’ve been thinking about a whole conference on verticals (which we’ll probably do as a Publishers Launch event in 2013), but we’ll start that process at DBW 2013. The best example we know of a multi-niche publisher is F+W Media, the owners of DBW. I think 2013 may be their time for a more featured role in the programming. Under the same heading, we take note of name-gathering efforts at several major houses. How names get gathered, how they get segmented and used, and what difference it is making to increase sales and reduce marketing costs will be a prime topic at DBW 2013, particularly now that Pottermore has shown us a whole new way name-gathering efforts might work.

As the traditional paths to market (bookstores) atrophy and sales of books prove more difficult to get, alternate revenue opportunities are going to grow in importance. We know of some. For one thing, international markets are more accessible. There are also new business propositions like Semi-Linear “citia” apps for high-concept non-fiction and Yummly for recipes and food content that offer publishers licensing revenues. And publishers may learn that some of their future dollars will come to them in pennies. Micro-transactions enabled by Copyright Clearance Center (a Publishers Launch global sponsor, but also the purveyors of Rightslink, a capability we think publishers will increasingly find indispensable as a rights marketing tool) and AcademicPub, among others, will likely deserve a real airing by DBW 2013.

We’re also seeing new models developing inside and outside of publishing houses and we’ll be putting examinations of them on the program too. Late last year, Penguin launched Book Country (a portal to help fledgling writers improve their work and get to market) and Sourcebooks is pioneering an “agile” publishing model with futurist David Houle (a hit with our DBW 2012 audience whom we’ll probably bring back in 2013.) Sourcebooks and F+W are also trying subscriptions, a model pioneered by O’Reilly with Safari a decade ago. To the extent that DRM fades, experimentation is further enabled. New models will be an important topic by next January.

We’ll also be gathering data from any source we can and as we have at all DBWs past. Self-publishing is a subject that is bound to get coverage beyond Book Country; I’d love to assemble a panel of self-publishing authors that have turned down major deals (and have really done it themselves instead, not signed with Amazon as their publishers!) And, of course, ebook pricing will be a topic we’ll figure out a way to cover even though most of the retailer and publisher players feel highly constrained talking about it.

The digital transition won’t last forever. Transitions don’t. At some point, the transition is over and we’re into a new world. But if one prediction for eight months from now is safe, I think it would be that we’ll still be in a state of flux next January, with a year away as hard to predict then as it was last January. Digital Book World every January and Publishers Launch Conferences throughout the year still have a lot more value to deliver.

What I want from writing this piece are suggestions for what we should cover at DBW. What do you think the burning issues will be in publishing’s digital transition by next January? We’ll be convening the DBW Conference Council at the end of June to discuss this question, but we’d love to be further informed by your thoughts by then. Comments are fine; sending us emails (to [email protected]) is fine; making suggestions to us when you see us at other shows is also fine. But please tell us what you think.

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The DoJ lawsuit and settlement, Amazon’s next giant step of growth in sales,  the Business Week article on Amazon pushing publishers to allow them to print slow-movers on demand, and then this morning’s New York Times story about a book driven down to a price of zero on Amazon (presumably by an algorithm), combine to raise again the questions of whether the traditional legacy publishing model is worth saving and whether it can be saved.

It really isn’t hard to appreciate the modernist, digitalist, Amazonian point of view. Trade publishing has historically been one of the least efficient businesses in existence. Most books don’t sell well; most authors are frustrated; and getting into the game requires jumping numerous hurdles to even get to the starting line.

The ebook model and online print distribution really are much more efficient than store distribution of printed books has been in reaching the part of the market that buys online. Returns really can be eliminated. In many cases, perhaps most cases, you really can just print the book when it is ordered, not on a wing and a prayer weeks or months before it is ordered.

If you start from the point that the manuscript is completed, it is easy to see why many aspiring authors would choose self-publishing, primarly through Amazon (because they reach the most customers), rather than take weeks or months to find an agent who will take weeks or months to put a proposal in shape to then take weeks or months to find a publisher. And the publisher will then take months, at least, to put a book into distribution. And that’s if you succeed. Most attempts even to secure an agent — just the first step — fail.

Failures overwhelmingly outnumber successes at every step. But, of course, they do in self-publishing as well.

You look at what the publisher will contribute, which is often described as making the book better and more saleable by copy-editing, putting on a decent cover, listing it for sale in places the industry and public can find it, and — for a while longer — putting print copies into stores. All of those things can be purchased, so theoretically you don’t have to give them up just because you self-publish, if you think they’re worth paying for.

And, of course, the author who goes the self-publishing route keeps a lot more of the consumer dollar than the one going through a publisher.

If you’ve got the manuscript in hand and you have a choice between going that route and having books to show your friends within days at just about no cost, why wouldn’t you seriously consider it? Why wouldn’t you do it? It seems like a no-brainer. That explains the conviction with which writers who have succeeded through this means, even those who didn’t quite do it themselves but instead just agreed to be published by Amazon, are so unsympathetic to the concern that Amazon’s business practices could cripple the legacy publishing business.

Inefficiency gets its just desserts.

But it isn’t yet that simple and it may never be that simple.

There are (at least) four serious qualifiers to the logic advocating self- or Amazon-centric-publishing. One is in these words: “if you start from the point that the manuscript is completed.” A second is the assumption, never explicitly stated but tacit in the recurring arguments from Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath (who are the proud poster boys for Amazon-instead-of-a-publisher), that the print-in-store component already doesn’t matter.

Third is that legacy publishing delivers an integrated business model that bundles all the services an author needs together and also includes a shift in risk from the author to the publisher. Self-publishing shifts the risk back.

And fourth, and not trivial, is that legacy publishers sell ebooks for higher prices than the self-published authors do. Expressing things in percentages might elide realities in dollars.

Requiring the whole manuscript before you start doesn’t change things for most unpublished novelists because most publishers won’t buy a first novel on an outline. And it might change little for the most established novelists because they’ll presumably make money on whatever they do, so they just keep writing.

But most other books published by the existing publishing establishment are financed from a point long before completion, unlike the situation for every self-published author. And that financing model is a risk-shifter that any author who can get it should be reluctant to relinquish.

(Yes, I know that Amazon is now publishing books and paying advances, including a substantial one to Eisler. But, remember, when they do that the royalty differential isn’t four times the legacy publisher ebook royalty rate [70% to 17.5%], it’s double, because Amazon pays 35% to the authors they sign, not 70% as they do for self-published. And there’s still no store distribution, which reduces revenue and marketing. The Amazon retail price will be lower. That may drive up units, but it also confounds the straight percentage comparison of the author’s take. A meaningful comparison between the marketing Amazon can do that nobody else can to the publisher-like marketing Amazon might do but hasn’t demonstrated yet is simply not possible until they publish a lot more books.)

Publishers actually weaken their own case when they articulate their value as “curators”. That makes it sound like they’re squeezing our cantaloupes for us. Who needs that, right? We can be our own judge of what’s ripe and what’s not!

They’re doing much more than that. Publishers aren’t squeezing the cantaloupes. They’re deciding which cantaloupes to invest in before the seeds are in the ground. They’re deciding based on the farmer and the climate and the soil and the weather forecast which cantaloupe growers get to participate in the market. And, if they don’t invest, those cantaloupes don’t get grown and they don’t get squeezed by anybody.

And although I’ve been as Cassandra-like as anyone fearing the creeping trivialization of the bookstore channel, it is definitely not dead yet. In-store sales of printed books still constitute most of the sales for most of them (although, admittedly perhaps less than half for a lot of fiction.) And experts like Peter Hildick-Smith of Codex believe that in-store discovery is still a critical driver of online sales, print and digital.

There is no doubt that a lot of what legacy publishing spends its money on will no longer be necessary in a few years. If the stores are mostly gone, or aren’t critical to discovery or sales, then printing expertise, warehouse and distribution capabilities, and all the investments and workflows required to maintain them won’t be necessary either. However, that day certainly hasn’t come yet (even if the digerati think it has!)

But, even more important, and so frequently elided in the discussions of the value of legacy publishing and whether it is worth an effort to preserve it, are the investments publishers make in books that would simply not be written if they didn’t.

If legacy publishing had been run by modern business principles, much would have changed years ago. For example, the trade would get smaller discounts on the biggest titles. After all, if part of the margin given to retailers is for “marketing” (i.e. “discovery”), they need a lot less of it for Harry Potter or the latest Patterson than they do for a first novel. With today’s computers and business acumen to work with, it would seem silly to offer the same margin across all titles on a list, when some clearly need less than others to get placed and sold.

It is partly the standard treatment across all books that is coming back to bite publishers now. Amazon doesn’t discount all titles equally; nor does any other bookseller. They give back the margin on those where it benefits them to do that, selectively. The publishers could have pre-empted that opportunity, or at least made it much more difficult, by varying the margin they offered by the sales appeal of the book. They adjust margins on the royalty side of the equation by paying advances that don’t earn out to big established names, effectively delivering them a higher percentage of the take. But they give the same margin on every title, regardless of cost or appeal, to the trade.

Sharing media attenton with the accounts of Amazon and DoJ recently have been stories about Robert Caro, who wrote The Power Broker about master builder Robert Moses 40 years ago and leveraged that success into a life’s work series of books about Lyndon Johnson. Caro was working on negative cash flow — selling his house and with his family being fed on his wife’s paycheck — until Knopf took over supporting him. If they’re printing 300,000 copies of his next book (which they say they are), that’s probably five million in billing on the first printing, plus ebook revenue, in the immediate offing. They’ll get their money back.

But they had to decide to risk it. Publishers do that every day. Sometimes they don’t get that money back.

Yes, there is Kickstarter as the new spec funding source. But how many publishers would fund projects if they couldn’t manage the creative process or understand and control the marketing and distribution that would take place when the project is finished? Even “finished’ is a complicated concept in the world of publishing. It brings to mind the saying I heard once, but can’t attribute, that “works of art are never completed; they are only abandoned.” Deciding when a manuscript is “ready for publication” is a judgment call that is essentially commercial: when will more work no longer lead to more sales?

Since Kickstarter funders won’t have that kind of control, believers in a rational market would also have to believe that projects that many publishers would fund won’t attract the investment they require through Kickstarter. Perhaps a private equity fund tied to authors would work better, but that would require margins to pay authors and acquiring editors and repay the investors. Even then, you wouldn’t necessarily have the integration of services combined with assumption of risk that makes the current system, which is so beneficial to so many authors, also work for the publisher/investor.

Publishers may never have unbundled the big books from the others in how they treat them commercially, but an Amazon-led marketplace is now doing that for them. The less help an author needs from a publisher, the more appealing the fatter margins of self-publishing look. The less value there is in the retail channel for print, the less lost by giving up the retail distribution in favor of an online-only sales outlet.

Despite that, few big authors  have gone for Amazon’s money. Tell the truth: wouldn’t you have expected that with Amazon’s power, deep pockets, and an experienced book acquirer at the helm, they’d have attracted some bigger “gets” by now? I’ll admit that I did.

Besides delivering widespread print distribution and funding projects speculatively within a system that bundles services and accepts risk, there is one other thing that separates publishers from Amazon as a route to the marketplace for authors. It might be the most important thing.

Amazon ultimately only cares about sales made through Amazon and, if they were candid, would admit that any sale not made through them or an affiliate is a target for future growth. Publishers want as diverse a distribution network as possible; it maximizes sales and exposure for the books they’re charged with and, not at all incidentally, gives them a reason to exist.

This difference in perspective has big implications. USA Today, for example, considers the breadth of a title’s sales across retailers as a component of its bestseller calculations. A book that sells through only one retailer (and that would mean Amazon) doesn’t get the same consideration as one that sells the same number in multiple channels. Similarly, how would the New York Times feel about reviewing a book that isn’t available in stores or in all ebook formats? They might legitimately balk at reviewing something that many, if not most, of its readers won’t encounter commercially.

The divergence in point-of-view is illustrated in the conflict over print-on-demand that is discussed in the WSJ piece. From where Amazon sits, it is simply more efficient to print what they need of slow-movers when they need them. They can probably make an offer to publishers that looks “margin-neutral” or even more favorable. But publishers know they have to print for everybody else, and taking the Amazon demand out of the print equation — particularly for slow-movers — would really disrupt the overall economics for any title that weren’t already printing on demand. These overall marketplace economics aren’t Amazon’s concern.

So as Amazon continues, as any commercial entity would, to set prices, seek margins, and adjust practices and workflows in ways that work for its own business, it drives the industry to “efficiencies” that take the margin that finances all publishing activities — those that will fade away like print distribution and those that are indispensible like funding and developing new projects — out of the commercial equation.

That can only really improve things for authors that don’t need or want those functions. Since the most reliable big authors with savvy and competent agents are already getting 60 to 80 percent of the revenue their books produce guaranteed to them, it is not clear that even the notionally higher ebook royalties deliver a better deal than the publishers do now for that group. But  the scads of authors who can’t get, or don’t think it is worth the effort to find, an advance-against-royalties publishing deal will be happy with Amazon. Indeed, they’re probably happy now.

As bookstores continue to diminish, though, it will get harder for the publishers to continue to compete for the big authors, particularly if Amazon is the one picking up the share the bookstores relinquish. That could change the status quo and Amazon might start to get big authors then. If and when enough of the big authors move on, the legacy model will break and we’ll be in a different world.

When that day comes, I’m sure Amazon will recognize it and change their margins and practices to suit. Perhaps the Department of Justice will want to reconsider its thinking then as well.

Remember, the DoJ wants to hear from us about the settlement unfortunately (in my opinion) agreed to by three major publishers. We still have several weeks to get those in. I hope this post contains useful thoughts for some people formulating their response, which I am still doing. Whenever you’re ready, send your letter to:

John Read, Chief, Litigation III Section, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of Justice, 450 5th Street, NW, Suite 4000, Washington, DC 20530

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Jane Litte at the DearAuthor blog has written a remarkably concise, clear, and cogent piece about the DoJ case. This whole paragraph is a link to it. That’s a signal.

In fact, if this is a subject of high interest to you and you are not a lawyer, I would encourage you to read Jane’s post before you read this. I am not in any way attempting to substitute for or contest anything in Jane’s piece, which explains the law and the issues in terms that really helped this layperson feel like a participant in the discussion. A number of things struck me as I read it, but there were three paragraphs Jane wrote that called for answers. I hope she and others will find this a useful addition to her mighty contribution to the discussion. Quotes from Jane’s piece are in italics.

There are two elements that stood out for me in reading the DOJ’s complaint. First, Apple set the pricing floor and ceiling for ebooks and every publisher accepted those terms. Did the publishers individually attempt to negotiate for differing floor and ceilings? Why was it the same for every publisher? No other app in the app store has a pricing floor or ceiling like the books in the iBooks store. Why were books treated differently?

No other app in the app store has a print equivalent. The pricing floors and ceilings are, as I understand them, all expressed in relation to the print retail prices. That logic cannot be extended to other apps in the app store. These restrictions, almost certainly sought and engineered by Apple, were to assure them that there would be an understood relationship between the print competitor and the ebook. Whatever that means, I find it hard to see how it constitutes publishers colluding with each other.

And the publishers chose their print prices, so, in effect, they chose their ebook prices as well. Without collusion. Publishers don’t talk to each other about what retail prices they’re setting.

Second, the David Shanks email to Barnes and Noble. In the email, Shanks urges Barnes & Noble to punish Random House for not hopping aboard the pricing agreements that the other publishers had agreed to with Apple. This type of email is evidence that the DOJ will point to as attempting to police or enforce a collusive agreement. In other words, if there is only conscious parallelism why would Shanks need Random House to engage in the same type of pricing. That is one piece of evidence that seems to rule out independent action.

There is absolutely nothing strange about this nor is there any reason to think Shanks wasn’t acting totally independently.

Remember that Barnes & Noble entered the ebook market with the Nook in November 2009. They were very explicit and clear with all their trading partners that the Amazon pricing was a big problem for them. You don’t need to have it spelled out to you or be a rocket scientist to see the unpleasant consequences of having to give away all that ebook margin: fewer brick stores, less resources to develop the Nook against the Kindle, and perhaps the need for more margin from the publishers on the print and store side. All the publishers were aware of that.

When Random House stayed out at first, some people were confused about that choice but the insiders understood that they had “gamed the system”. Now they’d sell their ebooks to Amazon at the old (higher) wholesale prices and get the benefit of the lower retail prices because they had the branded loss leader category to themselves. And perhaps they’d even get better treatment from Amazon on their print books too, because, after all, their titles were the ones Amazon could promote which would promote their ebook pricing policy at the same time.

I can tell you that this caused massive teeth-gnashing at all the other houses. But there was, actually, not a damn thing they could do about it. They had to swallow lower revenue per copy for their books as well as a price-disadvantage in the marketplace and they did it because they thought leveling the playing field on price was so critical to their futures. Meanwhile, from their perspective, the biggest player sat out the fight.

And from Random House’s perspective, they did the best thing for their owners and their authors.

At the time, all the other houses were aware that they had done all this partly for B&N and that B&N was presumably being hurt by Random House’s unwillingness to go to agency, and, dammit, why wasn’t Barnes & Noble doing something to push Random House in the right direction?

Executives from many of the other firms, although not David Shanks, asked me why Barnes & Noble wasn’t pushing Random House into line on this. In fact, I made the observation to people at Random House that the question got asked by their competitors. It would have been neither polite nor politic to push the conversation any further than that, but nobody registered any surprise.

My own read of the B&N-Random House relationship is that it has been strong for years on many levels and it therefore withstood this blow to it without disrupting most of what else was going on. I have no doubt that B&N expressed displeasure about it and that making them happy was one of several factors that motivated Random House to move to agency pricing a year later.

But David Shanks was representing a point of view that every informed executive at every major publishing company had. He didn’t need to talk to anybody else to come up with it and it is totally appropriate within the context of a frank and open relationship with a major trading partner for him to have said what he did to B&N.

The problem here is that Apple was not (and is not) a dominant player in the digital publishing market. I don’t know if iBooks has even a 1% market share. The hub in a hub and spoke conspiracy ordinarily has a dominant market share such as the two theatre houses that controlled the majority of the market in which they had first run theatres. The DOJ identified the relevant market in its petition as trade ebook market. I find that definition too narrow and wonder if it won’t spike the DOJ’s suit.

What I can tell you is that major publishers put Apple’s share of the ebook market to me at between 10 and 20 percent. Because they don’t have as wide a selection of titles as the others, it is likely that their overall share is something slightly less than that. Dominant? No. Third in the market in the US.

And these italics are me again, not Jane. I have another post just about ready that I was holding for tomorrow morning but now might hold another day.

I am going to do all I can in the next 6 weeks to encourage an understanding of the DoJ case (which I think Jane makes clear is not close to overwhelming) and the necessity of people in the industry registering their concerns with the settlement, which could be devastating if it became law. When I saw Jane’s post a couple of hours ago, I thought I could usefully add to the discussion and I want to encourage as much traffic to her as I can. I think she presents some foundational understanding here that is very important for people to have about the law. I was encouraged by her explanation and analysis that there is more hope for what we need as an industry to happen than I had previously thought.

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I spent last Friday at the On Copyright 2012 conference staged by my clients at Copyright Clearance Center. CCC is an organization dedicated to generating revenue for content creators from what is referred to as “secondary” licensing, or uses that are not core to the publisher’s revenue stream and which are often impossible to manage from an individual publisher’s point of view. CCC has the interests of copyright-holders at heart and at the core of their enterprise, but they also live on the cutting edge of digital content consumption where mash-ups, fair use, and the reality that piracy often happens because rights are too difficult to license can’t be avoided.

I’ll admit that discussions of the nuances of copyright itself leave me mostly befogged. Fortunately, this event was much more about the practicalities of the marketplace than about the theories of the law.

The most engaging and interesting speaker of the day was Robert Levine, author of “Free Ride”, an analysis of content and the Internet that deeply questions the increasingly ingrained notion that getting paid for content is inherently contradictory with the growth of digital media. Levine is smart and open-minded about content models and DRM and piracy and enforcement. Indeed, one of the noteworthy features of the entire day was its willingness to entertain notions that might be considered heretical by copyright and old model zealots.

In fact, Maja Thomas, the chief digital thinker and strategist for Hachette Book Group USA, opened the door just a bit to the idea that DRM on ebooks might be counterproductive (at worst) or futile (at best). Maja’s background is extensive in audiobooks. She told the conference that she had been assigned to monitor the destruction of her audio business when DRM was removed from those products a few years ago. And, in fact, there was no destruction!

When the program ended, I dashed down to the front to introduce myself to Levine. He knew me before I said my name and “reminded” me that he had interviewed me during his research for his book. (Somebody else later told me, “oh yes, you’re in there.” I’ll have to read it…) I don’t know whether to blame the fact that my memory for these details is a sieve or that I do an interview or two a week with somebody about something and am seldom called upon to remember them later.

What triggered further thoughts for me (and, ultimately, the point to this post) was a discussion in that last panel, chaired by Michael Healy and including Levine and Thomas, about branding. There was a reprise of the frequent (and mostly accurate) meme that author brands are the ones that matter to consumers, not publisher names, with rare exceptions such as Harlequin.

I think that could be changing. Certainly the circumstances around it are. As publishers are challenged to think about and articulate the value they bring to the process, they often cite curation (publishing just the good stuff and filtering out all the inferior stuff) and editorial development (helping the author improve the work before it is published) as significant contributions. Thomas seemed to suggest that a lot of thinking is going into articulating a publisher’s value at her shop.

I have said for some time that the core value proposition for a trade publisher is “we put books on shelves.” That’s looking at it from the author’s point of view. From the consumer perspective, the curation function is seen to be performed by the bookstore and the hurdles that stores create to getting on those shelves assure that only well-conceived and well-edited books make it there. (There have always been exceptions, of course.) As the shelves for print books diminish and are replaced by virtual shelves that are not nearly so limited, books that might not have made the selection grade in a physical world are sharing space with the carefully (and expensively) selected and edited works of major houses.

And that brings us back to branding. Brands are shortcuts for their users, telling them in a name what they can expect from a product or service they haven’t sampled yet.

Publishing brands until the digital era were really shortcuts for the trade, not for the consumer. The buyers at chain and independent bookstores, the collection development team at libraries, and the editors of major book review media all believe they understand the difference between a Farrar Straus or Knopf book and one from a “lesser” house. That figures into the “hurdles” I cite above. Top publishing imprints found it easier to get placement and reviews and get their books in front of the purchasing public.

That fact (alongside the fact that big publishers grew by acquisition of smaller companies and often would preserve the name of the company they bought, which is how Knopf ends up a Random House imprint and Scribners is an imprint at Simon & Schuster, to cite two of far more examples than you’d care for me to name) started the proliferation of imprints we now see. It has been fueled by publishers’ use of imprints as way to attract and award top acquisition talent.

Imprints have dedicated editorial teams and usually some internal marketing resources, but their value as identities is diminishing. The point to them was always to provide useful branding for business intermediaries, not the end consumer. And, as they proliferate, their value for their original B2B purpose is diluted.

(It is currently fashionable to castigate publishers for their focus on the supply chain rather than the end purchaser. This fashion, along with the totally ignorant bashing of the convention of “returns”, is based on apparent indifference to the history and development of the business. When the entire imprint structure of publishing houses is built around B2B brand recognition and has been built up that way over a century, you’d think people would think twice before being reflexively dismissive of the B2B focus. It is really only recent developments that have turned it into a questionable idea.)

But times really have changed. Attention on the end user is rising; the intermediary structure is declining. And publishers should be rethinking their branding strategies, at the core of which are imprints, as they address the emerging marketplace realities.

Publishers seem to recognize that the competitive statement they need to make going forward is about quality, expertise, and investment in professional support for the creative effort. This will distinguish theirs from the swelling mass of self-published books which are usually sorted out today by their pricing. On the agency model, the Big Six books are $9.99 to $14.99 (a few bucks cheaper on the backlist) while the self-published books cluster around a band centered at $2.99.

That may actually work, for now. But what if big publishers want to compete at the lower price points but still make a “quality” statement? And some indie writers are trying to nudge pricing up a bit while publishers are experimenting with bringing them down, so what if we start to see both indie and branded ebooks in the $5.99 range? Can the big publishers do anything that would help them then?

I think they can, but it will be require a decision that is painful to make, considering their history. They should, for the most part, get rid of their imprints. They should brand every general trade book they publish for quality and professionalism, and that only requires one name per major house and could never benefit from more than two.

That is, knowing that a book is from the Random House family of books is all the quality branding the consumer needs. They don’t benefit from from the more nuanced distinctions between Crown and Knopf, and Random House scatters its consumer firepower to its disadvantage trying to establish multiple names in the consumer mind. (In fact, I’m not sure the big houses even try to establish all these imprints as consumer brands. If they’ve already abandoned that effort, they’ve taken the first step in the direction I’m trying to encourage here.)

If this idea is right, then each Big Six house should select one name (and logically, the single best known name they now have among consumers would be the most sensible choice), or perhaps two, and promote it. (The second name might make sense if there is an imprint already known for “quality”, like Farrar Straus or Knopf.) No other name should be promoted to consumers unless it is establishing a clear niche identity (Fodor travel books or tor.com science fiction, as examples). There’s no point establishing brand identity unless you expect consumers to return to it repeatedly, the way they return to stores to buy reading material.

Consumers can’t keep dozens of imprint names straight in their heads, but they can learn the names of six big houses, particularly if they’re starting with names they already know. Like the possibility that Random House should preserve the brand equity in Knopf in addition to building Random House as the general trade imprint, there are nuances to consider in other houses to best implement this strategy.

For example, should Penguin perhaps restrict the use of the Penguin name to classics and established backlist and use something different (Viking?) for everything else? Penguin, because of its publishing history, means something to some people, although I’d argue that not restricting the use of the imprint name to classics and the most distinguished backlist actually dilutes the meaning it might have.

Should Hachette, a name that probably has very low recognition to US consumers as a quality book imprint, be ditched as the brand? Should the company use Little Brown, the most venerable and best known of its imprint names, even though it has created an internal distinction between LB and its relatively new (and therefore mostly unknown to consumers) Grand Central imprint?

What’s the best known name the company now known as Macmillan has? Is it Macmillan? Or is it St. Martin’s or Henry Holt? Farrar Straus might have a cachet worth preserving at the high end, but it would be diluted if it were the overall brand. I suspect that should be Macmillan, but that’s not what they’ve ever called their books; it is just what they have recently started to call their company!

America’s biggest consumers of books can readily remember a few company names to signifying “quality”, and perhaps a few more to mean premium content. Knowing a book comes from an established company with a long list of previously-published titles that book readers are familiar with is the kind of signal people need to be persuaded to part with a few additional bucks for an otherwise unknown author. But that’s all we can ask the brand to do: signal professionalism and quality. The much more nuanced distinctions that the imprint names have been intended to communicate within the trade can’t possibly be delivered cogently to the public at large.

And since the public is now the brand target that matters, it is time to align brand strategy and the brands themselves to that reality.

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Pottermore changed the game this morning. Congratulations to Charlie Redmayne, their CEO.

The “aha” moment for me was when somebody on a listserv mentioned they’d bought Kindle editions of the seven Harry Potter books which, it had been announced, were available only from the Pottermore site.

Penny drops. First thought: Hnh? How did that happen?

Then the news came that Amazon was referring people off its site to Pottermore to buy the Kindle editions of Harry Potter ebooks. (It turns out that Barnes & Noble is doing the same.) There they register themselves and then can buy the ebooks.

This is, by far, the biggest concession that has been wrested from Amazon since John Sargent faced them down over the buy buttons on Macmillan print books on that January weekend in 2010 following the Thursday when Sargent flew out to Seattle to tell them Macmillan was going to the agency model.

In January at Digital Book World, in what turned out to be a prescient presentation, Matteo Berlucchi of Anobii (an ebook retailer based in the UK that is partly owned by three major publishers) observed that only by eliminating DRM could he sell to Kindle customers. He pleaded with publishers to do that.

Now Redmayne, who until November was working for HarperCollins, has demonstrated the truth in what Berlucchi said.

Back in about 2007, HarperCollins was instrumental in turning LibreDigital into an ebook delivery platform. At the time, Brian Murray, Harper’s CEO, articulated the vision that the publisher would just serve all the ebooks to customers, with no need to entrust retailers with digital copies. I believe one of the stated motivations was to reduce piracy by reducing the number of points of distribution of files. The idea was shut down pretty quickly because Amazon and other retailers wouldn’t go along. They would have said, and it would have been a reasonable point, that they had to control the service levels to their customers.

Redmayne and Pottermore have now demonstrated that if you will live with the anti-piracy protection of watermarking, rather than insisting on a digital hammerlock through DRM, you can gain extraordinary leverage.

Without DRM, as Berlucchi explained, anybody can sell ebooks that can be read on a Kindle. Once Pottermore decided they could live without DRM, they faced Amazon with a very difficult choice. The ebooks were going to go on Kindle devices whether Amazon wanted them there or not. Either they could ignore them or they could play along. I am sure the “play along” deal includes compensation to Amazon for the sales they refer (as it does B&N and, according to a quote from Redmayne, other distribution relations and affiliations will be enabled going forward.)

In other words, in a refreshing change from recent history, the content owner was able to present Amazon with a “take it or leave it” proposition. They decided to “take it”. They were wise. The game was changing either way.

The $64 million question is how the Big Six executives and strategists are viewing these developments. There is no author in the world with the power of J.K. Rowling to do this; she’s the Beatles. But, how about a big publisher? What would happen if Random House or HarperCollins (or one or more of the other four) told Amazon, “we’re taking off the DRM and we’re going to serve all our ebooks ourselves; you’re welcome to continue to sell our books on a referral basis”?

Could this change the strategy for Bookish going forward?

Obviously, this tactic won’t work if it is done by a publisher without tons of bestsellers and must-have backlist. In fact, it could generate a huge advantage for big publishers, assuming they can pull it off and smaller ones can’t.

I’ve been posing two questions in recent posts. “When does Amazon’s share growth stop?” and “Who’s left standing when it does?”

I put a new one at the top of this post. If publishers can overcome their fear of piracy, they will have, as Matteo Berlucchi proposed and Charlie Redmayne has just demonstrated, an enormous weapon to fight Amazon.

One entity that will definitely be “left standing” is Pottermore. And they’ll have the names of the people that were referred over to them by Amazon.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department has notified the Agency Five (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) and Apple that it plans to sue them for colluding to raise the price of electronic books. I have no standing to comment on the law here. But if this does mean the end of the agency model, it would seem to be a cause for celebrating at Amazon and a catalyst for some deep contemplation by all the other big players in the book business.

Agency pricing, for those who have not been following the most important development in the growth of the book market, enabled the publishers to enforce a uniform price for each ebook title across all retail outlets. This was Apple’s desired way to do business, and it addressed deep concerns the big publishers had about the effect of Amazon’s loss-leader discounting.

Although the WSJ article and Michael Cader’s follow up in Publishers Lunch make no “agency is dead” declaration and there are quotes from publishers and others indicating that there are a range of possible outcomes, including a version of agency that is modified to allow some discounting, everybody in the industry now has to contemplate what it would mean if the agency model is legally upended.

To Amazon, it would mean they would be free to set prices on all books again, including the most high-profile and attractive ones that come from the big trade houses. That is an opportunity they are likely to seize with loss-leader discounting of the biggest marquee titles.

To Barnes & Noble, it would mean they have to devote cash resources to ebook discounting that they might have preferred to dedicate to further development of the Nook platform, maintaining the most robust possible brick-and-mortar presence, and improving the user experience at BN.com. Unconfirmed stories abound that B&N is about to announce an international expansion. Whether that will produce cash flow immediately or require it for a while is not yet known. For B&N’s sake, it would always better if it were the former, but if they’re about to fight discounting wars, it might be critical.

To Kobo, it would mean that they also will need to devote cash resources to subsidizing price cuts to match Amazon. With their new ownership by Rakuten, they should have the capital they need to fight this battle. They must be glad that deal got done before agency was upended.

To Google, it would mean that the bookstore service piece of their ebook business will suddenly be highly challenged. Many independent stores might be pushed out of the ebook game completely; it certainly would be extremely difficult for them to support competition with Amazon’s prices. To Google itself, with their new Google Play configuration, it means they will have to both spend more margin and more management energy to be a serious competitor in the retail marketplace. There’s no clear evidence that they have the interest at the top to do that, although they certainly would have the resources.

To Apple, it would mean that their entire iBookstore model is in question. They apparently didn’t want to take on all the normal responsibilities of a merchant, which would include setting prices. Now they may have to.

To all the big publishers, including Random House (the one of the Big Six not being sued, because they stayed out of agency for the first year and therefore were not considered part of the “collusion”) it would mean that they will have to painfully reverse the re-pricing and systems adjustments they went through to implement agency in the first place.

Smaller publishers and distributors might be beneficiaries if agency is eliminated, but they might not. The agency model is a great advantage for those publishers who are able to fully implement it. But that is only six publishers — the Big Six — because Amazon has simply refused to let anybody else sell to them that way. That creates problems for the smaller publishers but an even more threatening one for distributors. All but the Big Six, if they want to sell to both Amazon and Apple, must operate a “hybrid” model, selling Apple on agency terms and Amazon on wholesale terms. The two are inherently in conflict. What is ultimately a threat to the distributors is that distributees that desire agency terms, and many would. might seek distribution deals from one of the Big Six. (It might be coincidental, but it is worth noting that IPG, the company having a fight with Amazon at the moment over terms, is a distributor.)

Of course, we don’t know how the Big Publishers will respond if they’re forced off agency. It’s long been my opinion that the 50% discount for ebooks is unworkable. It leads to ridiculous and unrealistic retail prices. (Publishers operating on the hybrid model have to have two retail prices: one on which to base the wholesale discount and another at Apple operating agency-style. It’s crazy.) Would the big publishers, if they couldn’t do agency, keep the 30% discount and their current prices? Would they go back to the 50% discount and jack the suggested retail prices back up? If they did the former and nothing else changed, the smaller publishers could be at a much greater disadvantage than they are now.

Over time, the biggest losers here will be the authors. The independent authors will feel the pain first. Agency pricing creates a zone of pricing they can occupy without much competition from branded merchandise. When the known authors are only available at $9.99 and up, the fledgling at $0.99-$2.99 looks very attractive and worth a try. Ending agency will have the “desired” effect of bringing all ebook prices down. As the big book prices are reduced, the ability of the unknowns to use price as a discovery tool will diminish as well. In the short run, it will be the independent authors who will pay the biggest price of all.

But, in the long run, all authors will just get less. They will join the legion of suppliers beholden to a retailer whose mission is to deliver the lowest possible price to the consumer.

Seth Godin has recently made the argument that this is simply inevitable. Perhaps it is. The laws of supply and demand would support that contention. But from my personal perspective, I don’t like seeing the government hasten the process along.

But what about the reader? The reader gets lower prices, cheaper reading. What the reader won’t see is that s/he’s not getting what s/he won’t pay for. Some of the best books won’t get written and the biggest casualties will be in the area of highly-researched non-fiction, like major biographies, in my opinion. Twenty years ago they used to say that a conservative was a liberal who’s been mugged. I’m not about to become a conservative, but I sure see how easy it is for the government not to understand how their decisions might affect the dynamics of a business. Or, in this case, a culture.

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This post is the second that is contemplating two big questions facing the publishing industry:

When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop?

Who will be left standing when it does?

Amazon applies pressure and generates angst among publishers from two directions. As they grow to be 30% or more of many publishers’ business, they are in a position to push to improve their margins at publishers’ expense. And they do, indeed, push.

At the same time, they are both offering authors attractive opportunities to self-publish and wielding a checkbook to build their own publishing program. Both threaten to constrict publishers’ access to the ultimate source of all their revenue, the output of authors looking for a path to readers. And even when Amazon doesn’t sign a book they go after, they could well be pushing up the price a publisher has to pay to get it.

This pincer maneuver is really unprecedented in its power, even though elements of it have existed before.

Joint ownership of publishing and book retailing is definitely not new; it has been a part of the industry for my entire 50 years in it. My first book publishing job was on the sales floor of Brentano’s Bookstore on 5th Avenue in 1962. My dad was a publisher. He was a vice-president of a company then called Crowell-Collier, which bought the first Macmillan in the early 1960s, eventually changed the corporate name to Macmillan, and was then purchased by Simon & Schuster in 1994. None of these entities have anything to do with the company now called Macmillan, which took its name from the British company the owning Holtzbrinck family had also acquired.

Anyhow, when Crowell-Collier bought Brentano’s, Leonard Shatzkin became the responsible corporate executive. He had gone to Crowell-Collier from Doubleday, which also owned bookstores. Across the street from Brentano’s was the Scribner Bookstore, owned by Charles Scribner’s Sons. They were the publishers of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, among others. (Scribners exists today as an imprint of Simon & Schuster.)

And, of course, it has only been about 10 years since book retailing giant Barnes & Noble expanded its proprietary publishing program by purchasing independent niche publisher Sterling. That doesn’t appear to have worked out particularly well for them; they are apparently having trouble selling Sterling today, even at a fraction of the price they paid for it.

And, in fact, Amazon’s publishing efforts haven’t been particularly disruptive to publishers so far. Their big “gets” to date are Tim Ferriss and Deepak Chopra, two big authors who are unusual because their pattern has been to write for different publishers rather than having a lengthy run at one particular house. The very biggest names, which would be fiction authors, have not yet been enticed to make the jump, although Jackie Collins created a stir last week with some self-publishing plans that don’t have entirely to do with Amazon. It has been nearly a year since Amazon signed former Time Warner Books head Larry Kirshbaum to lead their attempt to woo big trade authors. That was very concerning to the big houses but, so far, the sky has definitely not fallen.

Whether we will really see profound changes that justify the questions that head this series of pieces or whether this turns out to be a totally baseless bout of nervousness by the established players depends on what happens in the overall marketplace in the next few years.

The percentage of a publisher’s business that Amazon represents is largely channel-dependent. If ebook sales go up overall, then Amazon’s share will probably go up. If purchasing shifts from brick stores to online, then Amazon’s share will certainly go up. If print sales in brick stores hold their ground, then Amazon’s sales won’t rise.

I think you’d have to look hard to find a credible voice making the case that print sales in stores will hold their ground. To the extent there is a debate, it revolves around how fast those sales will decline.

AAP says we’ve seen double-digit declines of print sales in 2011 over what they were in 2010. They say print revenue was down 17.5% in adult hardcover and 15.6% in adult paperback.

Forrester’s survey of publishing executives finds few expecting such a big decline in the coming year, but then, few expected such a steep decline last year. Forrester’s own prediction is for sudden drops. I would agree that sales will tend to decline in “step-increments”, as players exit the game. Borders may be responsible for a lot of the loss we saw in 2011. There wouldn’t seem to be any shelf space loss that great on the immediate horizon, but we do see B&N reducing both the number of stores and the percentage of shelf space within them devoted to books and there are many predicting that books might lose their appeal to the mass merchants as well. They are fully capable of substituting other merchandise for books and making that switch very quickly whenever they decide it should happen.

My own expectation is that over the next five years we’ll see the share of sales that are ebooks more than double. (This should be seen as a startlingly conservative prediction, since that number has doubled annually for the past five years!) That would put ebook unit sales at about 65% for commercial immersive reading. (I’m grossing up the 20% of revenue number the big houses are reporting because ebooks produce less revenue than print hardcovers and because many titles in the print revenue base aren’t in the ebook revenue base.)

Of the remaining 35% allocated to print, I’d expect half of the sales, at least, to be online. If those numbers are right, then 17.5% of immersive book sales would be in brick stores.

If Amazon remains about 60% of ebook sales and 90% of print books sold online, that would put their share of immersive reading sales at about 50%. And were a book available in Kindle that people knew about and wanted to read and not available in other formats, Amazon could pick up a lot of the ebook sales they would otherwise miss. (Remember, anybody using a Nook or Kobo app as opposed to a Nook or Kobo device could just switch to the Kindle app to read that particular book.) All that is really hard for them to capture is the 17.5% allocated here for print sold in stores. And even the loss of that share wouldn’t be total, since, for any really big book, in-store buyers would buy online if they had to. So they’d be in a position to reach well more than 70%, perhaps even more than 80%, of the market for all books that are principally text. (And those are the books that lead the industry.)

Imagine what that will do for Kirshbaum’s ability to go get big authors. Today an author considering an Amazon publishing deal must figure that half or more of the market is unreachable through that arrangement. No matter how much money Amazon is willing to pay, no matter how much they increase the ebook royalty over the publishers’ offers (which they have ample margin to do), it is a pretty tough sell to get an author to write off more than half the marketplace, particularly the half most visible to the public.

In other words, overall trends are moving things increasingly in Amazon’s direction. Even if nothing changes in the deals offered or resources available to the competitors for author attention in the next five years, Amazon’s position will have grown considerably more powerful. And, in fact, Amazon’s share of publisher sales just about assures that any changes in deals and resources in the meantime will favor Amazon as well.

Of course, there is more to successful publishing than just signing up a book and managing an online audience. Editing and presentation count. A marketing plan that goes beyond just reaching online bookstore customers counts. Rights sales count. And pricing to maximize a particular title’s revenue, not a bookseller’s overall share and customer loyalty, also counts. None of these are things that Amazon’s experience naturally leads them to do. All of them require investment and development of infrastructure and team skills. Will Amazon invest in and perform these functions?

And the more books a publisher does, the more challenging it becomes to manage all these things. Title growth might also challenge Amazon’s marketing resources, such as they are. There are only so many slots on the home page for a category of books to use to feature your own titles. (And there’s a risk of alienating your customers if they think your featuring and recommendations are just shilling for your own books.) There are only so many emails you can send pushing your own books before you lose people’s attention (and perhaps their permission). The special sales and vertical marketing functions that will be increasingly important for publishers are not natural fits at Amazon. Will they do these things?

Of course, we need to remember that while Amazon signs up titles directly, they pressure competitive retailers as well as publishers. There are two approaches Amazon can take in that circumstance and one can imagine them choosing which approach to apply by title.

Either they are a supplier of titles to the rest of the trade, which gives them a different kind of power. Or they withhold what they’ve got from the rest of the trade, which means the Amazon title selection is advantaged over the competition.

You have to excuse publishers if it makes them nervous to think about living in a world where the company through which they get 50% of their sales is also competing with them to sign up titles directly. This is a situation where it is accurate to say that any other player in the ecosystem who is not at least mildly panicked probably doesn’t fully understand what’s going on.

The challenges faced by Amazon as they try to grow as a publisher are not trivial, but neither is the strength they bring to address them. The world five years from now where Amazon is stronger because they can reach 80% of the market rather than somewhat less than 50% is also one where the big players with whom they’re competing for authors are also weaker. In fact, if the number following “Big” isn’t smaller than “6″ by then, I’ll be one very surprised prognosticator.

It’s taken me two posts (here’s the first one) to lay out what I see as the dynamic forces tilting the trade book business toward Amazon. I have at least three more components of this story to consider: how these changes look from each spot in the value chain (author, agent, large and small publisher, retailer, reader); a discussion of the “cultural gap”, which can be traced as much to different objectives as to the lack of shared history, between Amazon and the legacy book business; and a discussion of the Amazon antidotes: what other players in the industry can do, within the constraints of the law and practicality, to slow down or reverse the Amazon share growth before it changes the nature of the industry, and its cast of characters, beyond recognition.

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A lot of people in publishing would pay a lot of money to get a reliable answer to these two questions:

When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop?

Who will be left standing when it does?

I won’t attempt to answer those two questions in this post. In fact, the purpose here is to begin to generate agreement that those are, indeed, the way the industry’s existential strategic questions should be framed going forward. In my consulting work, it is often my role to provide “synthesis and articulation.” This post will begin to document the synthesis that led to articulating the questions, which are actually implicit statements, above. The catalyst for these ruminations was the news last week about Amazon’s dust-up with Independent Publishers Group (IPG), a demonstration of its power and willingness to exercise it that recalls an incident almost exactly two years ago when they were unsuccessful at bullying Macmillan (or the other big publishers) into giving up their notion of implementing agency pricing.

Amazon was not the first online bookseller. But they appear to have had several distinctions from all others from the beginning. One is that they always saw bookselling as a springboard to a much larger business. That meant that bookselling was, perhaps primarily, a customer acquisition tool, not an end in itself. A second is that they saw, long before it was accepted general wisdom, that perfecting the “customer experience” online was the core requirement for success. And the combination of those two things, in concert with the ubiquitious availability of capital for promising Internet propositions that characterized the late 1990s, fueled growth powered by aggressive pricing that has had their trading partners and competitors agape for nearly two decades.

Any discussion of Amazon’s success must acknowledge that the other key component, aside from the strategic components of long-term vision, smart use of capitalization, and customer-centricity, has been the quality of their execution. This has been true from the beginning and it is still true today. Some of this is subjective, but it still looks to me like they offer a better print searching-and-buying experience than BN.com and a better overall ebook ecosystem than Nook or Kobo. I read on an iPhone and use all the ebook purchasing systems from time to time, but I use Kindle the most because it is the best. I am close to somebody who prefers to buy from BN.com because (she says; I don’t do this research…) they give money to Democrats and Amazon gives money to Republicans, but she still does her searching at Amazon because it works better before she hops over to BN.com to make her purchase.

[An update on that last point since the original posting of this piece. I was challenged on the "Amazon is red" statement by a couple of people whose opinions I trust, so I asked my favorite Democrat for citations and I got two. You'll see (if you care and if you look) that both of the analyses that delivered this characterization are squarely within the Bush presidency, so they could constitute a company hedging bets rather than expressing political conviction. On the other hand, B&N was blue throughout the Bush Administration. And the point about the search engines, which was the one germane to this piece, remains true.]

Some of these advantages have become structural; having more customers means more having more customer reviews, more consumer knowledge, more product to sell, and, of course, higher rankings for many searches. There isn’t much their competitors can do about that. But they also keep innovating, most recently announcing an X-Ray feature for Kindle books that does outlining and annotating that could add value for readers of immersive fiction and non-fiction that it will take a while for other ebooks to match.

That’s the good news: good for consumers and good for producers of books that want consumers to buy and appreciate them.

This post is not all about good news.

Amazon’s relentless customer focus doesn’t prevent them from keeping a close eye on threats to their business, whether they come from obvious competitors or whether they are more tacit challenges that spring from trading partners.

This goes back to 1997. Ingram, well aware that Amazon had started its business by simply using Ingram to supply most of the books its customers wanted (Bezos put his business in Seattle because Ingram’s Roseburg, OR warehouse was within a day’s trucking distance), decided they could put many retailers in business the same way. So they announced the formation of I2S2: Ingram Internet Support Services. I2S2 would provide the tools to allow any bookstore to start selling online. Prominent industry thinkers saw I2S2 as the way all booksellers could start to reap the opportunities of the Internet as a sales channel.

Had Amazon not quickly reacted to this threat, they could have gone away so fast that we’d have trouble remembering their name now. But they did. They promptly cut their sale prices so deeply on most of what they sold that the other retailers, focused as they were on their stores, saw no point to expanding into unprofitable web business. Almost as quickly as I2S2 was announced, it was dead.

I2S2 was the first instance of Amazon successfully using price as a weapon but it has been an important part of their arsenal ever since. It has been a powerful one. It works for them commercially because they aren’t just a bookseller; they use book pricing to acquire customers and nurture their loyalty. They lock in that loyalty with their Prime program, by which the customer pays a fixed price annually for benefits that include expedited shipping, thereby making an investment which pays off in direct proportion to how much they buy from Amazon. The more they buy from Amazon, the better deal Prime is for them.

But using price as a weapon has another benefit; it puts the customer on your side. Even when Amazon’s lower prices are subsidized by their being excused from sales tax responsibilities that fund state and local governments and disadvantage local retailers who could be their friends and neighbors, consumers want it and defend it.

Amazon opened its virtual doors in 1995. Soon after they fended off the I2S2 challenge, they discouraged their first really well-financed competitor. They competed with BN.com (in which Bertelsmann, owner of Random House, bought a half-interest in 1998 to become partners with B&N) by extending their anti-I2S2 strategy and discounting so deeply that the online book channel hardly made any margin for the retailer. From Amazon’s perspective, acquiring customers for a long haul that was going to include selling many other things besides books, this made sense. From Bertelsmann’s, a company that made money selling content, owned book clubs that made money, and with no interest in being a multi-product online retailer, it made none. They sold back their half to Barnes & Noble in 2003.

And B&N faced the complications of not wanting to cannibalize their own store business with cheaper prices online. They also didn’t want to invest in the site and the search engine for it the way Amazon did. By the middle of the last decade, it was pretty clear that Amazon would be the dominant online bookseller for the foreseeable future and that those sales efforts would be subsidized by margins earned on other products.

Until the Kindle debuted in November 2007, however, publishers didn’t need to see Amazon as anything but their principal online channel and, for trade publishers, that was still ancillary to their principal channels to the consumer. Barnes & Noble was still growing its store presence. Borders was not doing as well (and still recovering from the mistake of handing Amazon its online business earlier in the decade), but was still a robust brick-and-mortar bookseller. The online share of total sales was rising, but even the bookstore component of sales was still a growing business. And expectations that ebooks would change any of that were limited to True Believers (like me) who had been predicting a change from paper- to screen-reading that had not yet gained any traction.

I recall in the late 1990s the suggestion was made by some pundits (but definitely not this one) that publishers should combine to compete with Amazon. If they had, they almost certainly would have failed as ignominiously as I2S2 and the Bertelsmann-B&N combination did. Publishers wouldn’t have gone into online bookselling to lose money and it would have taken vision and guts to use books the way Bezos did, as a springboard to create a global online Walmart. The point I want to emphasize is that it was not a failure on the publishers’ part to have “allowed” Amazon to grow their online hegemony. It was not in their power to have changed it. And, in the meantime, Amazon was making all their books available and selling much more than they would have if they had been trying to produce more margin on book sales. (Of course, store sales would have atrophied more slowly if the publishers had managed to keep online prices higher, but it wasn’t the publishers’ or booksellers’ choice to make even if they had full cognizance of what was to come.)

Of course, since 2007, ebook sales have doubled or more every year, print sales are declining, print sales in stores are declining even more rapidly, Borders has gone away and closed hundreds of stores, independents and small chains keep disappearing, and even B&N is drastically reducing the shelf space it devotes to books. eBooks have enabled commercially viable self-publishing in ways never before anticipated, giving authors leverage in their negotiations with publishers they never had before. And agents now have to share the concern of the publishers and retailers that Amazon could disintermediate them as well by providing their publishing and distribution services to authors directly.

Aside from the pricing pressure and the arm-twisting of Macmillan and now IPG, Amazon has shown in other situations that they will use power when they have it. A few years ago, they tried to pressure publishers who wanted to sell print-on-demand titles to do that printing for Amazon with CreateSpace, not with Lightning. Recently they have instituted charging publishers for posting supporting material for books online that a few years ago they would have begged them to make available at all. There are now reports that they are pressuring for more margin and more coop (Amazon has apparently recently “invented” ebook coop).

This kind of pressure is not surprising. Retailers who account for a large percentage of a manufacturer’s business apply it routinely. What is new and unprecedented is that Amazon sales now constitute 30% or more of many large publishers’ business, between print and digital, and that number is rising.

This would all be difficult enough if there weren’t a huge cultural gap between Amazon and the rest of the publishing industry. But there is. More and more, people who have been in publishing for years see Amazon as “in” the book business, but not “of” the book business. That attitude is exacerbated because the answer to the second question above (“who is left standing?”) for many is “perhaps not me.”

In fact, what we know is that Amazon’s share of the trade book business has done nothing but grow since the company began in 1995. And however direct or indirect the connection, we’ve lost a lot of players in the business since then, and we continue to.

(Of course, if Amazon had failed in 1997 and I2S2 had succeeded, we would have had a different online and digital history, but there still would have been a digital change and brick-and-mortar would still have declined over time.)

The cultural gap will be covered in an upcoming post that analyzes the impact of Amazon’s growth in each segment of the publishing value chain. Then we’ll start trying to tackle the questions at the top. I expect to get a lot of help with that from the comment strings of this post and the next one on the big questions. From what I can tell, every player thinking about their own future in a world where Amazon just gets more and more important is looking for some help answering those questions as well.

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A couple of major (Big Six) publishers have acknowledged that ebook revenues for them have passed 20% of their revenues. Of the 80% that remains print, I think it would be conservative to estimate that 20% of that is sold online. That’s an additional 16 percent of their business. Adding those together tells us that, for at least some very major companies, 36 percent of of their sales are being transacted online. That would leave, on average, about 64% of the sales for print sold through brick-and-mortar retail and other more minor channels. ”On average” should not be read as “typical” on a title-by-title basis. It isn’t. For immersive reading, or straight text like novels and biographies, the percentage sold in stores is already almost certainly substantially lower. My hunch, and nobody really keeps these figures (but I think I’ve found a way to get at them, which we’ll try to show at a future Publishers Launch conference) is that it may already be down to 50% print in stores for new titles.

(It adds both confirmation and confusion to note that Bowker’s PubTrack estimated that 30% of the dollars spent on books in 2010 were spent online. But they figured that only 2.2% of the dollars that year were ebooks. My own estimates are based on the picture of things we get from big publishers, who are perhaps more skewed to straight text than the industry as a whole. There are all sorts of explanations that would narrow the apparent differences between what Bowker describes and what I infer from what I know, but they’d require a different piece which, I think, would be less helpful in painting an overall understanding of where we’ve been and where we’re going than the one you’re about to read.)

Five years ago, early in 2007, it was a virtual certainty that 80%, and probably much more, of the sales of any trade book that sold a significant number of copies would take place in stores. There were almost no ebook sales. (The Kindle did not make its debut until November 2007; sometimes I feel like I was the only person reading ebooks before the Kindle arrived.)

Five years from now, by the start of 2017, I’d bet that 80% of the sales of any trade book that sells a significant number copies will be transacted online.

And that, even more than the ebook uptake that is a mere component of the store-to-online shift, is the story of our times that matters in trade publishing.

One thing I believe but won’t try to prove (which means “take it on faith”) is that more attention has been paid to the change from print reading to screen reading than to the change from store purchasing to screen purchasing. But the change in purchasing behavior is by far more significant in its affect on the industry than the change in consumption, at least in the medium term.

The shift in the way we consume what is now print may become more important as new presentation forms enabled by digital delivery — making use within the content itself of video, animiaton, links, social connections, and alternative content and navigation paths — are improved and gain commercial traction. (I’d argue that no enhanced or illustrated ebook solution has achieved that so far.)

But being halfway through the change in consumer buying habits in our decade of change has profound implications for all the big players in the publishing value chain. It would appear that publishers in both the US and UK are now accepting that the decline in numbers of bookstores and the shelf space they offer for merchandising is not temporary and not primarily recession-driven. (We heard that said more than once last year and the year before.) It is a fundamental societal shift that is inexorable and which shifts power away from publishers to their trading partners on both sides of them: the authors and the retailers.

In fact, even though the share of the overall business commanded by the brick-and-mortar retailers is declining, even they will, at least in the short term, gain clout with the publishers. The exposure they offer any book they carry will be increasingly appreciated as shelf space diminishes. And for illustrated books, print is really the only proven game in town because there is no digital presentation of such books that has demonstrated enduring viability in the marketplace.

The fact that we are halfway to a complete reversal of the online-offline sales ratio explains some conflicting behavior see in today’s marketplace. It is still true that brick-and-mortar placement is instrumental to building the reputation of a book or an author. And it is widely accepted that only a publisher employing a real infrastructure and customer network (its own or through effective use of a powerful distributor like Perseus or Ingram) can deliver that placement. At the same time, sales through online channels, particularly of ebooks, has reached a level of real commercial significance and those sales can be delivered with a fraction of the organizational capability that the declining model requires.

So we have authors like J.A. Konrath. He is perfectly content to eschew the bookstore exposure in favor of doing it himself. He keeps much fatter margins on the ebook sales, even though he probably has to charge lower prices for the same book than a publisher would. Konrath has argued for a long time that he is thinking of the future. He may be giving up some sales today, he acknowledges, but he believes he’ll be compensated for his foresight as the sales base moves away from bookstores and he has avoided forever paying 50% or 75% of his ebook royalties in an exchange for bookstore sales that will inexorably diminish.

Of course, he gives up advances against royalties too.

On the other hand, we have the author Amanda Hocking who built herself an online sales machine from scratch but yet happily sold her next four books to a publisher. She got significant advances, will now get bookstore exposure she never had before, and, from her perspective, also laid off many of the non-writing tasks of delivering a book to market. Those were tasks she found onerous; she’d rather write. I think she’s right that it is hard to do it oneself and I think it might get harder.

And then, taking a middle-ground position between these two, we have John Locke and Barry Eisler.

Locke was like Hocking. He started from scratch and built a big sales base online. He also was not getting the bookstore sales and exposure he’d get through a publisher. But Locke doesn’t mind the marketing work and he likes controlling his online presentation and pricing. So he made a “distribution deal” with Simon & Schuster for his print, getting the muscle of a real publishing sales and distribution organization working for him on a fee-for-services basis.

Eisler, who had done several books with major houses, turned down an advance from a publisher (ironically, the publisher was St. Martin’s, the same one who signed Hocking) and initially intended to self-publish. Instead, he took a deal with an Amazon imprint. This cuts the baby in half. He gets an advance. He gets the marketing attention of a big organization with unique capabilities. But he does not get bookstore exposure.

The reason all these different approaches actually make sense is that we are still in a period of transition. Konrath is banking on the fact that my analysis is right. From his perspective, he’s giving up bookstore revenue and marketing now because he doesn’t want to be paying forever for what he gets today. The same is true for Locke. Eisler and Hocking are pursuing more immediate benefits. Eisler is betting that Amazon’s direct marketing to consumers they know will propel him further and faster than going back to bookstores for sales yet again. And Hocking is banking on the fact that the bookstores and the publishers’ ability to place books in them will accelerate the growth of her fan base as well as laying off a lot of work she doesn’t want to do on somebody who is willing to fatten her bank account for the privilege.

The transition has another dynamic which is the growth of Amazon’s power in relation to every other player in the value chain. Going back to the stats at the top of the piece, the publisher who is seeing 36% of total sales and perhaps nearer 50% of immersive reading sales taking place online, is also seeing the percentage of their sales through Amazon grow as well. Amazon has about 60% of the ebook sales in the US and perhaps 90% of the online print sales. That would make Amazon (12% of the 20% sold as ebooks and 16% of the 80% print) about 28% of such a publisher’s volume now.

But using an overall number like that understates the reality of Amazon’s dominance. Their share of the sales of straight text books is almost certainly higher (because they sell most of the ebooks), so that share is almost certainly above 30% now. If things proceed as this piece contemplates for the next five years and nothing drastic has happened to change the shares retailers have of the ebook and online print channels, Amazon is likely to be something more than 50% of a big publisher’s business. All they won’t have is the 20% that is brick-and-mortar print, a sliver of online print, and the chunk of the ebook business that is sold by other vendors. And, as now, the percentage sold online will be higher on straight text.

Going from 80 to 90 percent of book sales being made in stores to that same percentage being made online in a decade’s time certainly justifies anybody’s pronouncement of profound and disruptive change. Having a single account that delivers half of publishers’ business — more on many titles — is unprecedented and perhaps unsustainable.

Although what we’ve seen in the past five years looks to me like it points very clearly to what we can expect in the next five years, it is hard to tell whether these realities are being taken on board by the players from whom power is shifting away. (Nobody is going to call me and say “Mike, our business is melting away!” even if that’s what they’re thinking.) I’m pretty sure it is all well understood, and expected, by the player who is seeing the power move in its direction. But they aren’t calling to tell me that either.

The death of the senior John Sargent last week – he was for a time my father’s boss at Doubleday in the 1950s — gave me reason to recall this piece I wrote in the blog’s very early days on Leonard Shatzkin breaking the color line at Doubleday in the 1950s. I didn’t have very many readers then compared to now. I thought it was worth calling my now-much-larger audience’s attention to it, even though it has nothing to do with today’s post. I think many of you will enjoy it.

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