Autobiographical

I was extremely fortunate in my “choice” of parents. I had both admiration and affection for them, and I always had a great time just shooting the bull with my dad, Leonard Shatzkin. He was a real visionary about the publishing business and was also very witty and cogent. A great deal of what passes for my insight is really just a recycling of his.

He died in May of 2002. Until the last six months or so of his life when the heart failure that killed him so weakened him that he couldn’t really think anymore, he was still working hard on what he always considered to be the most important commercial challenge for book publishers: how to manage the inventory in retail locations. In fact, he was developing a system he hoped to commercialize as a solution for independent stores. I didn’t want to say “what independent stores?” to him back then, even though it was already obvious to me that their existence was seriously threatened. Dad had shaped his view of publishing during the 1950s, when the industry was near the front end of what was nearly half-a-century of unfettered growth.

That period of growth was over by 2000, and those of us who were trying to measure the trajectory of digital change in the early 2000s couldn’t avoid seeing it. Dad might have seen it 10 or 20 years earlier, but he was intellectually and emotionally incapable of accepting it in the last few years of his life. In fact, while taking control of the inventory in independent bookstores had been the key to the growth Dad fostered at Doubleday in the 1950s and in building the Collier Books imprint, which he created, for what we now call Macmillan I in the 1960s, it didn’t present the same level of opportunity in the 2000s. He had been right for many years about this, but he wasn’t anymore.

Another immutable truth in my father’s picture of book publishing which also turned out not to be permanent was his belief that book publishers should just keep expanding their lists, pretty much without limits. When Dad launched Collier Books by doing 600 titles a year in 1962, the entire industry only produced about 10,000 titles. In Dad’s time, it was probably true that most books big houses did contributed to profits, so the more titles you did, the more profits you made. Tom McCormack, who was a protege of Dad’s in the late 1950s and then went on to a long and successful career as CEO of St. Martin’s Press (now part of Macmillan II), attributed much of his success and St. Martin’s to Tom’s own recycling of Dad’s insight.

There is this beast in publishing known as the “title P&L.” The “title P&L” proceeds from the mistaken premise that titles, standing alone, deliver profits or make losses. In fact, that’s not true, because a substantial chunk of a publishing house’s costs are not title-specific; some costs are not really attributable in any sensible way.

The way “title P&L”s normally work is that “overhead” — rent, salaries, etc. — is figured as a percentage of sales (which, if you look back to last year, is, indeed, a calculable number across any company.) By “distributing” the unattributable costs that way, the logic says, you make sure that each book covers its “share” of the costs of keeping the doors open. But, as McCormack pointed out many times over his career, the rent didn’t go up because he signed a new title and it was nonsensical to charge each title, let alone each sale, for the rent.

Dad had a very succinct and persuasive way to explain the folly of the “title P&L” logic. What he suggested is that every house do a recalculation of their overall P&L at the end of each year. To do it, they should take out every title that failed to earn back the overhead charge (usually somewhere between 35% and 45%) because those had, by the internal logic, “lost money.” Surely, if you take out all the titles that lost money, you would see your overall calculation of profits rise. Right?

But it never does, it always falls. Why is that? Because most of the titles deemed to have lost money by “title P&L” logic actually made a contribution to overhead. That is, the direct revenues attributable to that title were greater than the direct expenses charged to it; they just weren’t sufficient to be scored as profitable when the overhead tax was deducted. But if you subtract all the books that earned 6% or 10% or 19% or 34% margin on sales, you subtract actual dollar contributions to overhead and profit.

Important point: overhead and profit are both produced by gross margin on sales. When enough margin has been generated to cover all the overheads, the margin becomes profit. So titles don’t earn profits or losses, they contribute more money or less to overhead and, in some cases, actually don’t recover their direct costs. The titles that don’t recover their costs clearly have lost money; all other titles contribute to overhead and, if it is covered, to profits, but they aren’t, strictly speaking, profitable in and of themselves.

All that was true in Dad’s day and is still true today. What has changed (I think; I haven’t actually done the analysis with a real house’s numbers) is that the percentage of titles that don’t even recover their direct costs is rising. It is actually getting harder and harder to publish new titles successfully, even if the standard of success is lowered to “recovered all costs” from “delivered its pro rata contribution to overhead.”

That’s because each title published today is facing a much more challenging commercial environment than each title published two, three, four, or five decades ago. Each title competes with more titles in the marketplace and more new titles coming into the marketplace: print-on-demand and online used books have snared a great deal of market share that used to be available only to new titles and backlist kept alive in print-run quantities by publishers. And, for the past 10 years, each new title is coming into a marketplace that has less shelf space available for books overall than it had for the last title.

So the “keep publishing more and more” paradigm that Dad believed in and that McCormack credited with St. Martin’s growth may not actually work anymore. In fact, any sentient publisher today would have to look at their output regularly to recalibrate what new title publishing is actually profitable. I expect that analysts in every major house are slicing and dicing their lists, trying to figure out whether they can discern — by level of advance or subject matter or by imprint or editor or agent — which bets will return the cash invested and bring profit to the house.

We can assume those analyses are being done, but can we assume they’re being done right? Without any inside view of the details (and I don’t have one), we’ll assume (hope) that the crude application of a single overhead percentage to each title is not the standard for analysis. If it is, the house doing that will almost certainly be led to erroneous conclusions, just as Dad and Tom pointed out they were if they saw a book that contributed 30% margin as “unprofitable” and would think they’d be better off not publishing it.

The big publisher of 2010 has another problem besides the reality that new titles are harder and harder to launch to any standard of acceptable return. They also have to feed a machine built to handle a certain volume of printed books when the decline of print book sales is being accelerated by the shift to digital. The additional margins in digital (which are being produced as long as prices can be maintained) are not very helpful if they need to be diverted to pay for warehouse space, field sales forces, and higher unit printing costs because there is less print “throughput” to support them.

Big publishing management is aware of this challenge; it is part of what drives up the value (and prices) of big brand franchise authors. The big authors are still the fastest way to guarantee the volume of print output and sales necessary to fill those volume-guarantee contracts with the printers, absorb the warehouse space, and cover the cost of calling on accounts that sell print only. And look at the irony. With less volume, unit costs per book go up, which reduces total gross margin. And if warehouse and sales organization costs are fixed (they aren’t but it is hard to adjust them quickly, the way you can cut a press run or a marketing spend), then the percentage of sales they will consume will go up. So much for calculations of overhead as a percentage!

The big variable publishers have to deal with today is marketing cost. The most common rationale for list-cutting is that it will allow a greater amount of marketing attention to the books that are published. But that articulation actually begs the question, because marketing resources are variable. If you add more, you increase the overhead nut you have to cover before you get to profits. And if you reduce those resources, then you’ll be chasing your tail trying to put more marketing effort behind each title.

The analysis of how to cut has to be done; it is pure insanity for publishers to keep cranking out new titles if they are losing on many of them. Some of the ones they lose on have the potential to be big but just don’t make it; some aren’t even seen to have that potential. But the ultimate answer is not in how or how much a publisher can reduce title output, but in how they focus it. That’s the secret to reducing marketing costs and it is something we will certainly explore in another post someday.

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Although the decline of newspaper book review sections is just a sub-set of the larger sadness of the overall demise of newspapers, I was struck by the recent report of the mighty Los Angeles Times Book Review being stripped down to practically nothing.

I haven’t read it for years, but this news made me think about a time when book reviews in that paper were important to me.

Something over 40 years ago (wow!), I was an undergraduate at UCLA fortunate enough to take a bunch of courses from Robert Kirsch, who was then both the Book Review Editor of the LA Times and the daily book critic. Kirsch wrote six daily book reviews a week and edited the Sunday section. He also taught a course or two each quarter at UCLA, assigned more writing than any professor I ever had, and put more editing and commentary marks on the stuff we turned in than any other professor did too. He also clearly had plenty of time to have fun.

Obviously, there had to be a trick to it.

Kirsch explained to one of our classes that he had invented a speed-reading technique for himself in the early 1950s before he had ever encountered Evelyn Wood. The key, Bob said, was that you had to stop “silently reading aloud”, effectively articulating each word to yourself (as we all did, he said) as you processed it. He said if you put your hands to your throat you could feel yourself doing it. Avoiding that, he claimed, allowed you to pull in whole sentences and paragraphs at a time.

I just didn’t get it. It didn’t make any sense to me. I always read “word by word” and still do. But Kirsch read at a speed that I would call “scanning” (his eyes moved over the page) and he turned pages like a person who was looking for something that would stand out. (Let’s say you were looking for a series of capitalized words on a written page: “United States of America” or “American Civil Liberties Union” and think about how fast you could scan text and be sure you weren’t missing that.) But he remembered everything he’d read.

(Years after I left school, I met my wife who reads in these chunks the way Kirsch did. I always finished every reading test I ever took before time was up; Martha reads narative books about 2 or 3 times as fast as I do. She’s not as fast as Kirsch and she didn’t consciously “teach herself” the way he did, but she also does what I just can’t get: she reads in chunks, rather than word-by-word.)

Kirsch loved writing those daily book reviews and teaching the classes, but he hated the admin involved in being the book editor. So around the time I graduated from college, he took his best student from UCLA, Digby Diehl, and made him the Book Review Editor. (I am deliberately not checking this story with Digby — with whom I have a friendship that goes back to those days — prior to posting but I’m going to tell Digby about the post and invite to “revise and extend” my remarks as he sees fit as a comment.) Kirsch once, in a weak moment, said I was the best (or maybe he said “one of the best”; I didn’t have hearing aids yet back then but needed them) student he’d had, but I wasn’t old enough to be considered for the job. I wouldn’t have been as good at it as Digby was anyway.

The first course I took from Kirsch was on “Criticism” and the first assignment he gave us was to write “Your Critical Credo.” What are your rules for yourself when you write criticism of literature or movies or art? What are your standards? This was typical of Kirsch, assigning you something that forced you to think about how you think.

Another assignment that stands out in my memory was a movie review we did for his class. Bob arranged for us to see a movie screening of a Campus Christian Crusade film called “Up with People”. We saw the film in an evening screening and had to turn it our reviews at class the next day, just like real film critics!

A number of us stayed in touch with Bob Kirsch after our college years. I remember an assignment he had in London in the early 1970s and recall his pretty and youthful and blonde wife wearing a leather skirt she had bought on Carnaby Street in London (according to Bob.) We lost him far too young; he succumbed to pancreatic cancer in the late 1970s. Even the nature of his death, as it was told to me, bore his special stamp. When he got the diagnosis, he and his wife moved to a beach cottage in Santa Barbara where he lived out his few remaining weeks without treatment or any fanfare. He accepted reality. I think that was a hallmark of his intellect.

Of course, the realities of Kirsch’s time didn’t include disappearing newspapers and disappearing book review sections covering a disappearing trade book business. But I can only begin to imagine what he would have done with digital reading. Plenty, I’ll bet.

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I lost a very dear friend who was a unique figure in the publishing world two months ago when Caroline Latham died in Novato, California. I am pretty sure she was 68 or 69; her close friend Joan was sure she was 70. Even Caroline didn’t know for sure.

I met Caroline in 1978 when my family’s Two Continents Publishing Group, a distributor along the lines of PGW or NBN, and her Latham Publishing Company, a packager of college textbooks, were in their last days. Two Continents was desperately looking for more books to distribute; Caroline was desperately looking for additional ways to monetize content assets she held. We couldn’t solve each other’s problems then, but we became friends and I got to know one of the most extraordinary people on the planet.

Caroline had been raised in an oil-industry family; her father was an engineer. She had grown up in various places in the US and in Iran, and went to Oberlin College very young. She graduated from Oberlin at the age of 16 or so (later events established that she didn’t really know) and, as she put it to me, married the richest young man in town who had a job as a college traveler for Macmillan, putting Caroline in touch with the college textbook business. For several years, Caroline lived a relaxed life, bearing a son and daughter and indulging her lifelong passion for the written word. She read extraordinarily fast and could literally devour several full-length books a day. By the time she was in her early 20s, she had read more books than most well-read people consume in a lifetime.

Then, after they had moved to New York so he could move from sales to being an editor, her husband suddenly disappeared from her life. As I recalled the story, he was discovered a few years later, having had a total emotional breakdown, in Detroit. Caroline abandoned his family’s fortune to him for a variety of reasons — one being that she knew he would need it to live out his life — and immediately shifted to writing textbooks to earn a living in New York for herself and her children, Scott and Sarah Bridge. Her kids were just about grown and out of the house when I met her and she began to work in trade publishing.

The first project we worked on together was for a Warsaw Ghetto survivor named Jack Eisner, who had made a fortune in the US after World War II and then, in the late 1970s, was underwriting the telling of his story through all available means. Caroline ghost-wrote his book, “The Survivor”, and Abby Mann was hired to write the play of the same name (which closed very quickly despite Jack’s efforts to build a success on Broadway.) Caroline and I together made a deal for the book with William Morrow; then she supervised a team following scripts I wrote to augment the house’s sales efforts with calls to bookstores all over the country, an effort that seems rather quaint today but actually produced measurable results back then.

Caroline was really good at the ghost-writing thing. She could “become” any person and produce an appropriate style or voice. She never violated the trust by telling me his name, but I know that she ghost-wrote many of the books and articles signed by the head of the business school of one of the country’s better-known universities. She also ghost-wrote a sociology 101 textbook that became a standard in the field.

From ghost-writing and a brief unsuccessful stint as a literary agent, Caroline moved on to authoring. She wrote celebrity bios of movie and pop stars (many of them penned in a few short weeks): her bio of Michael Jackson hit the bestseller list. She co-authored “Life with Rose Kennedy”with Kennedy secretary Barbara Gibson, another book that hit the lists. She did a bio of David Letterman 20 years ago. Our Filedby web site has pulled together the biggest list available of her credits, but I’m quite sure it isn’t complete.

Of course, the Eisner book doesn’t show up on Filedby under Caroline’s name; it was ghost-written. Another project we worked on together that was ultimately published was a book to reveal the duplicity of Nixon and Kissinger in the Vietnam War by a Denver lawyer and peace activist name Joe Amter. There were others…

By 1990, Caroline’s kids had moved to the West Coast: Scott was pursuing a career in Seattle as an agent for exotic travel and Sarah was in the real estate business in San Francisco. Caroline moved to the Bay Area and, with Sarah, started a new business called RealFacts. RealFacts is a database surveying rents and occupancy in multi-family housing, a business Caroline grew and ran — sometimes with Sarah’s help and sometimes without — until her death.

But none of this — not raising two kids without a husband; not writing dozens of books; not even picking up, moving on, and starting a completely new business at about age 50 — describes what made Caroline so extraordinary. You see, she couldn’t. That is: she couldn’t see.

From the time I met her, I was aware that she had trouble with her vision. She wouldn’t know me if I passed her on the street (we lived not far apart in New York, so that happened.) She had to hold written material very close to her face or look at it through very thick glasses. She drove a car, but admitted to me that she probably shouldn’t (she drove slowly and, as with everything she did, with a huge application of intelligence.) Apparently she had an accident earlier in life that rendered one eye absolutely useless; the stark worsening of diabetes in her 50s, concurrent with the ailment that compromised her heart, robbed her of much of the rest of her vision and for the last years of her life she was legally blind.

But, somehow, she read; she wrote; she built and ran a business.

It was in the late 1990s that Caroline suffered an infection which lodged in her heart and induced congestive heart failure. The Mayo Clinic branch in Phoenix told her in 1998 that she had three months to live. She then took over the custodianship of her own health care, pretty much telling the doctors what to do from that time on. A few years later her kidneys also started to fail, which is when I learned (from her) that just about everything that helps the kidneys hurts the heart, and vice-versa. She was managing a very sensitive balance, which she did — for years.

Her health issues became further compounded with a digestive malfunction that, as far as I know, was never successfully diagnosed. But it meant she was deprived of one of her great pleasures — eating. What used to be a source of great joy and amusement became a chore and a challenge. But she persevered and, although she went from being a rather large and round lady to a lean and frail one, she cheerfully lived with the condition for the last several years of her life.

Caroline was a totally unique mixture of a brilliant intellectual with eclectic tastes that ran from very middle-American to quite sophisticated, the former being perhaps a product of her family’s tight connection to a little town called California, Missouri (she called it “CalMo”) right in the center of the state. She could parse professional material in business, science, medicine, statistics, and real estate. But she loved gossip about movie stars and celebrities, spending time at the beach (when I met her her “ambition” was to own and run a small hotel on a Caribbean island), sports, and pop culture. (A CD of her favorite music that she gave out at her 65th birthday party was testimony to that: it starts and ends with Ray Charles and in between you find artists as diverse as Frank Zappa, Leonard Bernstein, and the Beatles, and June Carter Cash!) She was not a beautiful woman, but she usually had an affectionate and caring boyfriend, often a Caribbean man with a limited education. She related to everybody.

And she cared about everybody. She not only wrote more books than any two people I ever knew, she also lent a personal helping hand to more people than anybody I ever met. Over the years, RealFacts had employees who were down on their luck or otherwise found themselves in dire need. Whether through fault of their own or not, Caroline was always there to help them. Sometimes they let her down and she had to let them go, but if they got on new meds or turned a corner some other way, she’d take them back.

I found out that Caroline didn’t now how old she was when she had her 65th birthday party in Novato in 2005. She celebrated the party because she found out that Social Security thought she was 65, even though she thought she was 64! I remember getting that party invitation in about January and her birthday was in June. We wondered whether she’d make it; she was already frail, it was years past the 6-month death sentence from the Mayo Clinic, and she was on the heart-and-kidney teeter-totter that was the story of the last decade of her life.

But she did make it; she made it to that party and for several years beyond, including a wonderful 1-week trip back to Manhattan, along on which she brought an entourage and took an apartment on West 55th Street. She continued to consume books (by audio now, with the help of a friend named Don Christensen in New York who remotely picked out the books to be delivered to her for her from the local Marin County Library System.) She put a program on her computer that blew type up to a huge multiple of its normal size — so big that you had to move the type across the screen with the mouse to read more than a word or two at at time, and she continued to read and write. (I know because she answered my emails!)

Being Caroline’s friend for the past several years has meant knowing a phone call delivering news you don’t want could come at any time. I got the call last May from Caroline’s friend Joan Winer Brown, who told me Caroline was about to die. She had been taken to the hospital with blocked intestines, unable to take in any more food. Doctors were telling her there was no point to surgery; Joan felt they were about to stop heroic efforts.

But a month later the news had changed. Caroline had, from the depths of her illness, mustered the strength to tell the doctors and her caregivers, “yes you will operate. Do whatever you can that might save my life.” And they did. Caroline moved to a rehab facility by the end of June.

I last spoke to her on the phone when she was in that rehab facility and about to go home. Talking on the phone was something Caroline always loved to do. Her voice was weak, but her mind was clear. She knew the odds against her were long, but she was determined to manage things toward a solution as long as one was possible. She was happy to be going home.

I’m glad she got that last couple of months in her own house and the feeling, to the end, that she was in some ways at least the master of her own fate. She leaves a daughter and granddaughter and son and brother and countless friends who will never forget her and her kindnesses, and will certainly never meet another like her.

I am indebted to Caroline’s close friend Joan Winer Brown for some key information that is in this post.

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To regular readers of this blog: I know I haven’t posted much lately, and this post has almost nothing to do with publishing (although there’s a book link in it!) I’m in London on my way to the Frankfurt Book Fair as I write it. I will resume more regular contributions to the dialogue about publishing and digital change, but posts may remain sparse for a couple more weeks…

Last weekend, the New York Times carried an obituary of a Polish cardiologist, socialist, and Warsaw Ghetto survivor named Marek Edelman. One untold part of his life story touched my family.

Marek Edelman was one of the leaders of what were (according to the Times) 220 armed fighters who constituted the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of April 19, 1943. Two of the others were a man named Friedrich (whose first name I’ve forgotten if I never knew…and, as you’ll see, I’m running out of people to ask who might remember) and another named Bernard Goldstein. Goldstein came to the US in 1948 and I knew him well in my early youth; Bernard died on December 7, 1959, which was the only day of my childhood when I remember seeing my father cry.

Friedrich was credited with being the man who followed the tracks out of Warsaw that carried the railroad cars that took Jews being removed from the ghetto to an unknonwn destination. Friedrich reported back that the destination was a concentration camp where the Jews were being exterminated. For that effort, and for his part in the doomed uprising of April 19, he was deemed a hero by the survivors after the war, particulary those in the Jewish Socialist Bund, which also claimed Edelman, Goldstein, and my grandparents on both sides as members.

Friedrich had a daughter named Elsa, born on December 18, 1936. Elsa was smuggled out of the Ghetto to live in hiding with a Catholic family in about 1941. Thus she escaped being killed when the Jews in the Ghetto were virtually exterminated during and after the uprising.

As the Ghetto was burning, Friedrich and Edelman were on a rooftop watching the final carnage. Friedrich extracted the promise from Edelman that if Edelman survived the war and Friedrich didn’t, Edelman would take guardianship of Elsa.

And, indeed, that came to pass. Elsa had been about 5 years old when she was “adopted” by the Catholic family, and although she recalled the necessity of concealing her story during the war, she was apparently happy in her new home. So when Marek came and took her away from her familiar and comfortable surroundings, honoring the promise he’d made to her father, it was a wrenching experience for a child then only about 9 years old.

The global organization of the Bund knew about Friedrich and knew about Elsa’s circumstances. They considered it anathama that the daughter of a hero could be consigned to such a bleak future, growing up in poverty-stricken, anti-Semitic Poland, even as the control of the hated Soviets (the socialists were very anti-Communist) was being established in the country.

So, using their power as a global organization, the Bund hunted for an American family that would take Elsa in and raise her in this country. My father’s parents, Julek and Helen Shatzkin, agreed to accept the responsibility. They were then in their early 50s; my father and his younger brother, Uncle Sock, were both in their 20s, married, and starting their own families. My grandparents moved from New York City, where they had lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn since arriving as immigrants in 1920, to northern Westchester. They built a house and prepared for a new life, raising a daughter in suburban post-World War II America. The political clout of the Bund found sympathetic help from New York Republican Senator Irving Ives, who sponsored the special legislation that allowed Elsa to immigrate legally to the United States.

Elsa was a girl of great talent: very beautiful and also brilliant. She was also always troubled, always haunted by the lives (intentionally plural) she had left behind. The spiritual gap between this young woman striving to be a “normal” American and my grandparents, who were culturally still very Old World, created strains. My grandmother was never particularly comfortable with the arrangement; my grandfather was smitten with his new daughter and wanted to spoil and indulge her. From the perspective of her 10-1/2 years younger nephew (which I was), Aunt Elsa was hip and pretty and virtually unapproachable for most of my childhood.

In the mid-1950s, Elsa graduated from Lakeland High School and went off to Cornell, majoring in English, from which she graduated in about 1957. She went on to study for a master’s at Columbia, where she met and fell in love with ayoung historian named Robert Dallek. They got married in about 1958. By that time, Elsa had changed her name to Ilse. I remember that Robert always pronounced it as she spelled it; she remained Elsa to the rest of us.

In about 1960, Ilse had a nervous breakdown. I remember visiting her in a mental institution of some kind (once again; I’m short of surviving family old enough to give me more details.) But she got out, ostensibly recovered; her marriage to Robert resumed. He continued to study for his PhD and she for her master’s.

Bernard Goldstein, like Marek Edelman, was a leader of the armed resistance. For the ten years I knew him in my childhood, he was much like a 3rd grandfather. My father had translated his memoir into English and it was published by the house Dad worked for, The Viking Press, as The Stars Bear Witness in 1948. (We have a copy of The Wallinscribed to Dad from John Hersey because Bernard’s book was critical research material.)

Elsa was always very uncomfortable in Bernard’s presence, which was very painful for him. He wanted to relate to her affectionately; he had known her father; to him, she was a flower that had amazingly survived the conflagration of Warsaw. But to her, he was a reminder of the beginning of her traumatic life and the loss of her real family. These perspectives could never be reconciled.

I remember spending the night at the apartment of Aunt Ilse and Uncle Robert in my early teens along with my friend,Tony Klein (now a Vermont State Legislator), after a rained-out Yankee game we had intended to go to. Ilse was then in her mid-20s. She and Robert came in from an evening out and Ilse proceeded to change into short shorts and start cleaning up the apartment. Tony was agog. This is your aunt, he said? His aunts were all old and dowdy; mine was young and vital and attractive. And tortured.

In October of 1962, Ilse committed suicide. She checked into a hotel on the upper west side, near where she and Robert lived, and took an overdose of sleeping pills. Apparently she left a note; I never saw it. My father got the task of identifying the body at the morgue. My grandfather went into an immediate depression; the pain of losing an adopted daughter he loved was compounded by the feeling of having failed in a political responsibility to the Bund. The electro-shock treatments prescribed at that time to snap him out of it were blamed by my family for the blood cancer that ensued and killed him in November of 1964.

In college, Ilse’s best friend was a woman whose married name was Faith Sale; her husband was the historian and social thinker Kirkpatrick Sale. Faith became an editor at Putnam. She died, much too young, of cancer a decade ago. Before Faith died, I had lunch with her to talk about my Aunt. This was more than 30 years after Ilse’s death, but Faith was still touched to uncontrollable tears by recalling the tragedy and pain of her friend’s existence.

In 1980, my parents’ proclivity for going where the revolutions were (a story that requires some research for another blog post some day) took them to Poland, where Solidarity was leading the change which ultimately swept across the Soviet-dominated countries. Marek Edelman, by then a prominent cardiologist, was a key player in Solidarity. He and my parents connected.

As I understood it from Dad, Edelman regretted that he had ever taken Elsa from her Polish Catholic family. He had done that to honor the commitment he had made to her father, and then he relinquished her to the Bund’s equally well-intentioned and equally ill-fated desire to find her a better life in America. He felt pain similar to my grandfather’s. He had tried to save this girl, but the demons within her played cruel tricks with those intentions.

There are few of us left to remember Elsa: my Uncle Sock’s widow; my sisters; and my cousins in Sock’s family. What we’re left with is the lesson that great tragedy can come from the best of intentions, and the fact that some victims of Hitler died two decades after he did, my aunt and my grandfather being among them.

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The transition from print to digital is going to be a continual lesson in branding for publishers and in merchandising for retailers. I got a dose of that trying to make use of modern technology to deal with an old common problem last week.

I knew two or three weeks before that I was going to Boscobel to see Much Ado About Nothing on Friday night. If you’ve never been there to see Shakespeare, I recommend you put it on your calendar for next summer (this season being about over.) Boscobel is a beautiful site above the Hudson on the eastern shore opposite West Point, with beautifully manicured gardens leading to a stunning river overlook.

They put on Shakespeare under a big tent. The direction is uniformly excellent and imaginative; the performances often very good. (I am not an expert in theater, but I did have the good fortune to act in several Shakespeare plays in my youth, including a turn as Tybalt in a Romeo and Juliet that had subsequently famous actor Peter Strauss playing Benvolio. Our duel in the first scene is a story I’ll save for another time.)

I didn’t think I had ever read Much Ado, and it turned out I hadn’t. But I was both busy and dilatory. So it was only last Thursday, the day before the show, when I got back from London, that I finally went on BN.com to buy a copy of the play to put in my iPhone so I could get it read over the next 24 hours.

And that’s where I encountered some branding lessons.

What you get on the first screen from BN.com when you search ebooks for “Much Ado About Nothing”, in order, is the SparkNotes Guide for $4.95 (that’s a dormant Barnes & Noble-owned brand, and I’m sure the notes are good, but at that point I wanted the play); a “Digital” (that’s presumably a brand) eBook for $2.99 on which I could get a free sample; then 8 free versions each labeled “from Google Books.”

I should have loaded the “Digital” sample (but didn’t at the time; I am not familiar with the brand) and I would have seen it was well worth the $2.99 to buy it. I tried 3 from Google; they all turned out to be from Princeton’s “William Seymour Theater Collection” and they were, to put it gently, unsuitable. The typography, design, and editing were old and impractical.

So I changed my search criteria to “Shakespeare’s Comedies” and bought a Modern Library volume by that name that came up on the first page of the search. It came equipped with a Table of Contents and it is quite readable. Only twenty bucks. I paid it. I needed it and in my disappointment over what I got from Google I had forgotten the much-cheaper “Digital” edition of the single play above all the Google-branded ones.

But then on Friday afternoon, I had hardly cracked the play and I was running out of time. I remembered that last year at Boscobel time I had bought a copy of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare for my Kindle. I found it stashed at Amazon online and downloaded it to my iPhone. When I looked at it, I remembered what was wrong with it: no Table of Contents. Last time I had to scroll through the entire book page by page to find the play I wanted to read. I remembered that what I had done was make the font on the Kindle the smallest possible size to make that laborious process go faster.

Then I remembered that I had figured out after the fact that I could search on the Kindle for the play title and find it! Great. But the Kindle for iPhone doesn’t have the search function! So I retrieved the Kindle from my wife (who got it as a hand-me-down when decided I could do all my reading on the iPhone), searched for “Much Ado About Nothing” and was taken to the opening page of that story. I noted the Kindle text chunk number, found that chunk on the iPhone and, bingo, I was in business.

That wasn’t easy. It uncovers a number of points worth noting as we enter the digital book age.

1. Google’s books will be acceptable if they are the only choice available for the title. They will almost certainly not be the version of choice if something really prepared as a digital version in a modern way is available. Their “brand” will rapidly be seen as “last choice” if you have a choice. This is not good.  And if they intend, as they suggest, to sell new books as well as giving away PD books, they better do something about it. Imprint branding may not be the most highly developed skill set at Google (but don’t get advice from a publisher!)

2. And the retailers shouldn’t interpret downloads as popularity when they present choices. It wasn’t good merchandising for BN.com to show me all those identical Google editions for Much Ado so near the top, which one might assumes might have happened because they are free.  B&N should note, if they’re keeping score, that I downloaded them because they were free. If they’re looking into my ereader for useful information (in ways that will give many people the creeps, of course), they will see that they’re already deleted.

1A and 2A. Both Google and any retailer selling their books would be very well-served if they tagged (”branded”) the books which are uniquely available in Google editions.

1B and 2B. Both Google and any retailer selling their books would be very well-served if they refrained from displaying multiple copies of what is effectively exactly the same thing, particularly since they do so without making that clear.

3. Random House’s Modern Library brand sold me a $20 book of Shakespeare’s comedies because I wanted to read this play and didn’t have time to fiddle around once I’d found that a presumably competent commercial publisher had an edition available. This undercuts my supposition that publisher brands are meaningless. I still think that’s true for most purposes, but in this case it wasn’t and the brand was worth a high-priced, high-margin sale to them.

4. Kindle for iPhone isn’t as functional as Kindle on the device. There’s no text search capability. There is such a capability in BN.com’s ereader, however. That’s a reason I’ll be buying and reading from BN, not from Amazon.

5. Non-functional (unlinked) Tables of Contents are a real no-no in an ebook.

Having found the right spot in Lamb’s, my wife and I were both reading the story of the play in our seats during the ten minutes before it began, she on the Kindle and I on my iPhone. This attracted a great deal of interest around us and no small amount of envy. I think it is highly likely that we inspired some of our neighbors to be doing this themselves next summer. By then there’s hope they will have a smoother shopping experience than I just did.

Two codas to this piece.

Right after I finished it, I got a note from Ami Greko of Macmillan to tell me that Tor is making its Wheel of Time series available on Kindle for the first time and, to do it, the full text of the books has been retypeset to better accommodate the ebook format and all original illustrations and maps will be retained in these new releases. Tor appears to be the industry leader in establishing a 21st century sci-fi brand and taking this kind of care with a flagship series is good for their readers and good for the brand.

On another front, a great discussion broke out on Brantley’s list about publishers trying to squeeze textbooks onto iPhones. A number of us made the point that books originally intended for 150 square inch presentation need to be rethought to be effective within 6 square inches. Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly was the most articulate and compelling on the point when he said:

The bigger issue I see is that thinking of the problem as “how do we get a textbook onto an iPhone” is framing it wrong. The challenge is “how do we use a medium that already shares 3 of our 5 senses — sight, speech, and hearing — along with geolocation, color video, and a nearly always on Web connection to accomplish the “job” of educating a student.” That’s a much more interesting problem to me than “how do we port 2-page book layouts to a small screen.”

Even when all a publisher is doing is presenting the same text in an ebook, the way Andrew suggests we be thinking is the right approach. And almost every publisher has a long way to go to cover even the basics on a consistent and competent basis. Defining what “competent” ebook-making consists of in 2010 will be a topic at Digital Book World.

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Back in 1993 or so, my friend Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International and I went to a free half-day conference sponsored by Microsoft. At the time, Microsoft was really pushing the computer manufacturers to install CD-Rom drivers into new computers. They had a definite selfish interest, which was to reduce the cost of goods for their software, which was being delivered on multiple floppy disks. One CD-Rom could hold what a dozen or more floppies would hold and would cost Microsoft considerably less. Since the consumer was paying for what ended up in their computer, not the manufacturing cost of the shrink-wrapped product that got it there, Microsoft knew that making the delivery mechanism cheaper wouldn’t oblige them to cut the cost of their software; they’d just make more money.

So on this particular day, they were hosting the publishing community to tell them what CD-Roms could mean to them. This was the first time that I was aware (although perhaps it had happened before) that the mainstream tech community was talking to the consumer trade publishing community and saying “have we got something for you!”

What Microsoft tried to demonstrate was that many things could be done with all the data that could be packed on a CD-Rom. They were in the process of creating their own CD-Rom encyclopedia, Encarta, and they wanted all publishers to get on the CD-Rom bandwagon. The message essentially was: “you’re the creative people; you’re the content guys. Look at all this cool stuff that CD-Roms can do. Now we don’t know what the product should be exactly and we don’t have a business model for you, but, don’t be Luddites, get off your duffs and start making some CD-Roms!”

Lorraine and I walked out of that meeting thinking, “this isn’t very helpful” to the content publishers who were our client base. So our two companies joined forces with another consulting company owned by Dan McNamee, got PW as a sponsor, and staged a full-day conference called “Electronic Publishing and Rights” (which turned out to be the first of two.) We had a plenary session in the morning, and then the afternoon proceeded on three tracks: consumer, education, and professional. (When we did the second show, we made it five tracks: consumer, school, college, sci-tech, and legal/accounting.) Both shows were sellouts and what I learned putting them together really pushed me, before the Web, before Amazon, and before ebooks had anything more than a 4-line display on an early Sony device, into the business of thinking about what the impact of digital delivery of content would be on consumer trade publishing.

Before long, the conferences we did led to the “Publishing in the 21st Century” program I described last week and the regular reminders that book publishing is many  businesses with quite different characteristics, not just one (which we had acknowledged at our EP&R shows with our afternoon tracks.)

And that leads us to Digital Book World, the new conference on digital change for consumer trade publishers that was announced yesterday. We’re now having conversations that go beyond our very illustrious Advisory Board about speakers and topics. What comes back to us over and over again is how important the trade book focus is.

For example, earlier this week we spent the day working with a client — a large aggregator — that wanted a little “ebook seminar” for their team to be part of our visit. In order to really focus the conversation, I asked for a list of questions and concerns. It became evident very quickly that this company needed information about sci-tech, college, and school ebooks and, of course, what I know best is trade. But I knew enough about the others to know that they are quite different, so I checked in with two smart industry colleagues (both of whom are members of our Advisory Board, as it happens) who know both the trade and non-trade spaces. We came up with a list of distinctions, but one really stood out to me.

In the trade space, one of the big ebook topics (which we plan to explore in depth at DBW) is “pricing.” What should ebooks cost the consumer? The convention among trade publishers has been to peg ebook retail prices to the least-expensive edition available in print. So if there is a cloth edition and a paperback edition, the publisher would be guided on ebook pricing by the paperback (usually setting at or slightly below the print book price.)

But in academic publishing, hardcover and paperback editions are often published simultaneously. The publisher figures that the paperbacks are for the students; the hardcovers are for the libraries. Since ebooks in the academic space are considered primarily library items, and because they have often become part of larger searchable databases, the academic publishers would set their ebook prices based on the hardcover, the more expensive print book available. He also said that sometimes they are even more expensive than the hardcover, because of the additional functionality they have, like links and embedded video.

This was important information for our client, who works across publishing segments. But if presented without a clear contextual frame, it could well be confusing information to a consumer trade publisher (or an academic publisher) trying to figure out a pricing strategy. Because we are tightly focused on consumer trade publishing, our panel(s) at DBW might not mention a tie-to-hardcover pricing, but if we did, we’d pose the model and talk about why it made sense in some other context, but not in ours. We’ll be talking about lots of other things that affect price: discounts, retailer strategies and control, the impact of the publisher selling direct to the consumer, and the extent to which there is enrichment or enhancement, for example. All of those things, as well, are somewhat different in the consumer space than in the others, where aggregation and value-added capabilities are critical components of ebook development.

Now that DBW has been announced, we’re engaged in conversations to refine the topics list and speaker suggestions we’ve gotten from our Advisory Board. We’ll be announcing speakers and panels as they are nailed down. We’re striving for a show that will scream “this is for me!” to consumer trade publishers. While we’re not doing a “call” for topics and panels (we did that ourselves, internally and with our Advisory Board, already), we certainly will happily entertain suggestions. If you have any you want us to consider, better to email my colleague Sophie Shepherd (at sshepherd@idealog.com) than to post them here (though you can also do both.)

This post and my last post last week and many you will see in the weeks to come will be making the distinction between “general trade publishing” and other book publishing. That distinction is a remarkably important one, but it is also going to be a disappearing one. In fact, the distinction between “book publishing” and “publishing” is going to be a disappearing one over the next couple of decades; we have talked before about the fact that format-agnosticism will increasingly characterize all media, not just publishing, as will verticality. While that means that there is a real need for Digital Book World, which emphasizes that distinction, it also means there is a place and need for the more tech-centric and publishing-type-agnostic program presented at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change. Personally, I’m planning to attend both.

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The sui generis Malcolm Gladwell wrote a provocative piece in the May 11 New Yorker, “How David Beats Goliath”, that demonstrates that the underdog can often win by adopting an unconventional strategy. The examples were numerous, and included Lawrence of Arabia, but the central point-maker was a girls basketball team. Their coach, an Iranian national who was not terribly familiar with basketball, couldn’t understand why basketball teams were routinely coached to simply allow the offense to bring the ball into the forecourt, essentially not defending about 70 feet of the court’s 94 foot length.

Gladwell explained the near-irrefutability of the coach’s logic which was underscored by the team’s success against much more skillful opponents. (They made it to the finals of the state championships before they lost and, according to this article, the referees working on their opponents’ home court were largely responsible for that.) And he did a bit of research, relying heavily on an interview with longtime pro and college coach Rick Pitino to get some historical perspective and to understand how the fullcourt press strategy worked at higher levels of the game.

Pitino had been a scrub guard on the University of Massachetts basketball team that had Julius Erving, the immortal “Doctor J”, as its star player. UMass had been defeated by a scrappy but presumably inferior Fordham team in 1971 because Fordham used a fullcourt press and disrupted the better team’s offensive flow. That Fordham team had a star forward named Charlie Yelverton who was about 6-foot-3, nowhere near tall enough to play that position on most successful college teams. But the press mitigated the height disadvantage.

A few years later, Pitino was a young coach at Boston University and used the press to get the team into the NCAA tournament, an unusual event for them. Pitino has made a career of using the press successfully at Providence, the University of Kentucky, and Louisville. But, oddly enough, as Gladwell notes, nobody else has.

All of this demonstrated, to me, that research is great, but you can’t beat a long memory unless you do all the research. And my long memory beats Gladwell’s research with Pitino.

The first coach to use a tip-off to final buzzer full court press as a staple tactic was John Wooden, undoubtedly the most successful college basketball coach of all time. Wooden had been the coach at UCLA for 15 years when he put the press in for his UCLA teams, which also lacked height, for the 1963-64 and 1964-65 seasons. These were the first two UCLA championship teams. And they beat presumably superior teams from Michigan and Duke to win those championships.

It’s too bad Gladwell didn’t know this, because the Wooden history confirmed and validated his “David and Goliath” paradigm. Those first two UCLA champions were, indeed, “David”s. They lacked height and conventional basketball star power. They needed to change the tactics, as Gladwell says Davids do, and the press worked perfectly for them. They made use of the unique talents of 6-foot-5 Keith Erickson (who was a star volleyball player in the basketball off-season), making him the roving backstop for their press. Erickson’s quickness and jumping ability frustrated opponents who tried to beat the press with a long pass.

But the success of those two UCLA teams led to Wooden being able to recruit far superior talent to UCLA in the future. In 1965, Lew Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) arrived on the campus and, from then on, UCLA was Goliath, not David. (By the way, fellow freshman Mike Shatzkin arrived on the campus at the same time, which is how he knows all this stuff so well!) Wooden gave up the press as an all-game tactic and won 7 championships in 8 years by more conventional means.

So it turns out that Gladwell’s entire case could have been proven with one example: John Wooden at UCLA.

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The New York Times had a story on Tuesday morning about an advantage the Ford Motor Company had over its competitors at GM and Chrysler: it is still family-owned. As the Times explained, the family ownership was able to take a longer view than their competitors. In fact, we still don’t know whether the re-tooling the family has ordered up will work in the long run. But we do know that they have had a steadier and more far-sighted management because the family cared about the long-term health of the business, not just the next quarter’s profits.

This recalled to me a conversation that I had with Peter Wiley, currently the Chair of the Board of John Wiley & Sons, over dinner 15 or more years ago. Peter said then that he believed Wall Street undervalued family ownership. As Peter put it, “just about all our competitors are focused on quarter-to-quarter results. Mike, my family has owned this company since 1807. I am not thinking quarter-to-quarter.” Wiley’s financial results (even though they have suffered in this recession along with everybody else) over time have certainly vindicated Peter’s opinion.

Family-controlled businesses have been  been ubiquitous in publishing through my whole career. When I was young, there were Scribners at Scribners, Doubledays at Doubleday, sometimes two Roger Strauses at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. When family-controlled but publicly-traded Barnes & Noble acquired Sterling in 2002, they acquired it from the founding families: the Hobsons and the Boehms.

I have consulted with several family-owned or -controlled businesses. Wiley, Barnes & Noble, and Ingram are distinguished by how well managed and basically competent they are as organizations. They really do the “blocking and tackling” well. A big part of the competitive edge of all three companies is in the quality of their operations.

They make the investments, particularly in infrastructure, that are critical to the business. I once asked Peter Wiley why it was that his company’s travel web sites were so much more commercially successful than those of other publishers with equivalently-strong travel brands. “Constant, controlled experimentation,” he said. “What worked for us was on the third try. We didn’t get it right the first two times.” Family ownership — with belief — can make those kinds of investments and stay with them. And it can support a second and third attempt to make a good strategy that is tricky to execute succeed.

John Ingram, the member of the owning Ingram family who runs the book industry-related businesses, got a clear vision of the potential in print-on-demand a little over a decade ago. Very few other owners, and almost certainly no publicly-traded owner, would have made a bet of the scale, in relation to the size of the company, that he did with Lightning Print. But John could see that POD would become extremely important and that Ingram, because of its position in the supply chain, was in a great position to apply the technology. And although it took a few years for him to be proven right, the family had the commitment to see it through and, as a result, Lightning occupies an increasingly central place in the US supply chain and is the linchpin of Ingram’s plans for future growth as the traditional book wholesaling business contracts.

What most distinguishes the successful and still-profitable Barnes & Noble from its once equal and now reeling competitor, Borders, is the quality of B&N’s supply chain. That required investments in warehouses and systems that Borders, long ago sold by its founding family, didn’t have the long-view management to make.

Now I’m working with another family business called BookMasters, in Ashland, Ohio. BookMasters started out as a printer in the 1960s. Their operations have grown in both directions along the value chain from printing. They have a business, BookMasters Digital, that provides an XML workflow from concept to the press. And they have another division, BookMasters Distribution, that takes the output from the presses and provides warehousing, sales, fulfillment, and collection. The Wurster family that owns BookMasters has many business characteristics in common with the Wileys, Riggios, and Ingrams. They have a high degree of loyalty with many long-standing employees. They have a persistent commitment to operational excellence. And they have a high degree of strategic consistency: they are willing to build things over a long period of time.

John Ingram saw over a decade ago that the book wholesaling business Ingram was in was living on borrowed time. He saw Lightning as a bridge to the future. Dave Wurster knows that printing is not a growth industry and he’s building his bridge to sustainability with service offerings that expand his importance to his customer base. Over time, both of these family owners can see the possibility of a totally transformed businesses. Their focus primarily is on how to make sure their business survives a long time, not on immediate profit. In a time of great change, I believe it’s a competitive edge.

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Leonard Shatzkin was trained in printing. He left City College of NY a semester short of a degree in the social sciences to go to Carnegie Tech for three years to get a BS in Printing, which he received in 1941. His first job was as production manager at House Beautiful magazine when he and his college bride, Eleanor Oshry (who was, I suspect, at least part of the reason he abandoned the CCNY degree for three more years of undergraduate school in the first place!) moved to New York after graduation.

But Len shortly had to leave the House Beautiful job because of World War II. Rather than military service, he found a spot as a research scientist on The Manhattan Project (another story for another blog post). After the war, he landed a spot as production manager at The Viking Press and his career in book publishing had begun.

I don’t know the specific suggestions or ideas that led to this, but after a couple of years at Viking, proprietor Harold Guinzberg told Len to find a job at a bigger publishing house. “You have lots of big ideas,” Guinzberg told him. “I’m not interested in big ideas; I just want to publish the books that interest me. You should find a place that is more compatible with your ambition.” So, in 1951, when a former professor of Len’s from Carnegie Tech named Charles Pitkin offered Len a job at Doubleday, he took it.

Doubleday had its own printing plant in Garden City, Long Island. At first, Len’s main responsibilities had to do with running the plant. It was unusual, perhaps unheard of, for production managers to move into the senior executive ranks at a book publishing house, but Len found the way.

There was a committee at Doubleday that determined the first printing quantities for all new books. Len was on that committee, whose key members were, of course, the representatives of the sales department who, it was assumed, would be the first to know how many books were needed. In his first year on this committee, Len lived with the frustration of the sales department’s refusal to make timely decisions about printings.

The consequences of this were severe. These were the days before computers (of course) which meant that when 12 new books were scheduled to ship on March 20, invoices had to be prepared in advance to meet the shipments as they left the plant. If one of the 12 books didn’t make it, a paperwork nightmare was created. So all 12 books had to make it. If time was tight, and with late decisions on printings, time was just about always tight, each “first printing” effectively had to become two printings. First the plant would produce the number of books needed to fulfill all the prepared invoice shipments and then, after all those were done, they all went back on press to complete all the “first” printings.

Sometime in 1953, Len got permission to hire a mathematician: a young Polish immigrant named George Blagowidow. Len set George to work doing a regression analysis of the orders received from the sales force and, using techniques that are pretty much the same as what the networks use to predict election returns from key precincts, was able to predict the total advance sale from a small sampling of orders. (It is necessary to mention here that, while there were multi-outlet department store “chains” all over the country, there were almost no large national buys equivalent to what Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders would place today.)

When George’s work was well in hand, Len was prepared for the next meeting of the first printing committee. The sales management opined that, on a number of books, they did not have sufficient data to make a printing decision. Then Len handed them a sealed envelope. “In here are the numbers for what will be the total of advance orders for all these books,” he told them. “You can open it now or you can open it later, but don’t tell me there isn’t enough information to know what to print. There is.”

As a result of that stunt, Len was appointed to a newly-created position, Director of Research.

His next big assignment was probably partly a result of his having undermined the credibility of the sales management. Doubleday had two sales forces: 13 reps covered the trade and 10 sold “Garden City Books”, which was a promotional line Doubleday had in those days (like Outlet Book Company was in relation to Crown until that independent publisher was sold to Random House in the 1980s.) The company was going to wind down the Garden City imprint and combine the sales forces. They knew they needed to get rid of some reps, but a) they didn’t know how many and b) they didn’t trust the sales management to cut the force sufficiently. So they handed the question to Shatzkin — and his cohort Blagowidow — to determine the new configuration.

Len and George set out to scientifically determine what a sales rep contributed to sales. They did that by calculating the discretionary income by territory (I did this exercise under my Dad’s supervision about 20 years later, using the county-by-county data provided by Sales Management Magazine). That gave them an index of how much they should be expecting in sales from each territory. Then they calculated how many accounts there should be (theoretically) in each territory, and compared that to what the rep covered. Then they looked at the sales they got from accounts where the reps called and compared them to sales from accounts where the rep did not call.

Their conclusion was that, indeed, Doubleday did not need 23 reps, they needed thirty-five! (At that time, the 13 reps in the Doubleday sales force might already have been the largest sales force fielded by any publisher.) The new large sales force led to other innovations, including the creation of the Dolphin Books imprint, which I covered in a prior post.

Of course, field sales forces peaked in size some years ago and have been shrinking since. (And although it would drive Dad crazy, I’m sure his analytical techniques would support a field force reduction. Most likely, though, using his techiques would also create territories that are configured differently than they are in most houses.) But Random House copied the Doubleday practice and today’s publishing “old timers” remember the days in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s when Random House and Doubleday had the largest and most powerful field sales organizations, which gave them an edge over everybody else.

Today is when the Big Six publishers need a Director of Research. There are more decisions to be made today that require research, quantification, and analysis than what Doubleday faced in the 1950s. What Len Shatzkin did in that position more than 50 years ago anticipated the MBA-rich IT and corporate staffs that exist today.

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I went to my first ABA (American Booksellers Association) Convention in Washington, DC in 1970. I had just written “The View from Section 111″ for Prentice-Hall, about the New York Knicks’ first championship season, which was going to be published that October. Prentice-Hall threw a party for authors with a book coming that Fall, and among the others the only name I knew was Senator Barry Goldwater.

I started to attend regularly beginning with the 1973 ABA in Los Angeles. Since then I think I’ve missed one, so this year would make number 37, including that first one at the Shoreham.

The ABA at the Shoreham was in the basement of a not terribly huge hotel. It was probably a bit bigger than this, but it felt like it was about the size as the exhibition at Book Business Conference & Expo at the Marriott was this year. The 1973 show in Los Angeles was bigger, indicating, I think, that there was growth the Shoreham wasn’t large enough to handle, because the ABA had been at the Shoreham for many years. After that it bounced around: frequently at McCormick Place in Chicago, split between two hotels in New York (before Javits existed) in 1975, San Francisco when they opened Moscone in the late 1970s. 

When I was a pup, the ABA was definitely an order-writing show. The number of independent bookstores who bought a big chunk of any trade list properly presented to them was in the thousands. (Now: what would you say? the dozens? wouldn’t hundreds be an exaggeration?) Only a few of the biggest publishers had sales forces large enough and disciplined enough to really cover them all, so most exhibitors encountered retailers who would do immediate business. Everybody had some sort of show “special” to encourage ordering. I think for many years it was “blue badges” that signified booksellers: you kept an eagle-eye out for them as the traffic streamed by and you knew exactly what and how you were going to pitch them.

Each night at the main convention hotels, several publishers — and all the mass-market publishers — ran “hospitality suites” offering liquid refreshment and munchies very deep into the evening. You’d make the rounds of those after you had gone to whatever events, dinners, and parties had taken place in other locations. I always found the time in the hospitality suites to be a highlight of the convention.

The show floor for many years was open all day Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday morning. Friday was set-up day. On Tuesday night was the ABA banquet, and people stayed and went to it!  Those who know me that banquets aren’t my cup of tea, but for some reason I was at the one at the San Francisco ABA in 77 or 78. I remember it well because I was seated at a table with Jill Krementz, the noted photographer and wife of Kurt Vonnegut.

Roysce Smith was the longtime Executive Director of the ABA and he was the Major Domo of the burgeoning convention. Toward the end of his career Roysce’s legs couldn’t carry his large-ish body around the growing acreage of convention floor, so he cruised the aisles in a motorized vehicle.

Daisy Maryles was one of PW’s key reporters then. Daisy didn’t work from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, so she really worked the hall on Friday while people were setting up. In those days, of a smaller industry and smaller companies and the ABA being a very important annual event, the executive team (maybe the CEO, certainly the sales execs) was in the hall in blue jeans on set-up day making sure everything was shipshape. So Daisy actually got much more bandwidth and information by working the hall on Friday than she would on Saturday, when the publishers’ attention turned to the booksellers.

The Walden and Dalton chains grew fast in the 1970s and 1980s, but the independents continued to thrive as well. So the ABA Convention continued to just grow and grow. I remember there was a point when there were only a handful of places in the country that could host it because the convention hall acreage required was so great.

Then in the 1990s, new ABA Director Bernie Rath, who had replaced Roysce when he retired. sold the show to Reed Exhibitions. First Bernie sold Reed 49% of the show in 1992 and then the additional 2% that gave Reed control of the show in 1996. After that, its name changed to BookExpo America.

Although “education” had become part of the show during the ABA’s tenure, Reed set out to expand that aspect of things and to make the show bigger and better. But their timing was terribly unfortunate. The long expansion of the US book trade, which had continued pretty much unabated from World War II until the mid-1990s, stopped and started to reverse in the internet age. Even worse for the industry trade show, consolidation of both big publishers and retailers accelerated. That meant fewer publisher customers to buy the booth space, and fewer retailers walking the aisles to make the booth space valuable.

Last year’s convention in Los Angeles was the first where it really felt slower and sparser. At the time, BEA was scheduled to go to Las Vegas in 2010 and it seemed to me that, if they did, it would be the last convention. Things had evolved to the point where publishers were paying good money for booth space to be sitting targets for consultants and new tech propositions to put forth their propositions. How long, I wondered, would publishers pay good money to make prospecting for work efficient for me and others like me?

The BEA got the same message. It has been announced that the show is in New York from now on. That makes sense in that the publishers who pay the most for booth space can now, at least, avoid the great expense of flying New York staff somewhere else in the country and putting them up. That forestalls Armageddon, but it can’t be permanently avoided. New plans have been announced to make the trade show run mid-week, rather than across the weekend. That anticipates what will be this year’s embarrassment, which is that hardly anybody will be there on Sunday.

The BEA of today isn’t the ABA of old. The booksellers are just about gone. The late-night hospitality suites don’t exist anymore. And hardly any publisher goes to the show expecting to write orders. It is time to organize a betting pool where the question is: how many more BEAs before, like its Canadian counterpart, it simply ceases? Three? Four? Hard to see more than that.

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