Autobiographical

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 [email protected]) 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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Elisabeth Sifton has a long and thoughtful piece in the current issue of The Nation. I disagree with the fundamental premise — that the woes of the book business are primarily due to bad decisions or judgments by the leaders of the business rather than large forces that are changing the ground on which the book business walks. Nonetheless, there’s a lot to like in the piece and some interesting history in it as well.

I was reminded of a story my Dad used to tell by these words from Sifton:

“Publishers and writers have for centuries conspired and fought over words, sentences, chapters, fonts, illustrations, paper, trim size, binding materials, jacket design…G.B. Shaw insisted on a specific typeface…Edmund Wilson on an unusual trim size…”

In the 1950s, Len Shatzkin was in charge of manufacturing for Doubleday before he got a much larger brief as “Director of Research” (and how that happened is a story I have promised to tell and someday I will.) Doubleday owned its own presses in its Garden City plant. Each printing press works with an optimum size paper (a sheet size with two dimensions if sheet-fed; a roll width if a web press) and that optimum paper size delivers an optimum trim size. By optimum, I mean the trim size that puts all the paper into the book, not trimming off and wasting some of it. For example, the trim sizes that worked best with the sheetfed presses I was familiar with early in my career were 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 and 6-1/8 x 9-1/4. If you used a size that was slightly smaller than that in any dimensions, you just cut off paper and threw it away.  But if you wanted a trim size larger in either dimension, you couldn’t print 64 pages on one side of a sheet, so you would throw away even more paper and would increase your costs of folding and binding at the same time.

Being a very practical man and one who hated waste long before any green movement pointed it out to him, Len set about to standardize trim sizes at Doubleday to deliver only the most efficient sizes. Those efforts in the early 1950s constituted the first time trim size standardization was attempted in the trade publishing business (although it had already been done for rack-sized mass-market paperbacks.)

One of Doubleday’s top authors — Len told me it was Eudora Welty; my Mom told me after Dad died that it was somebody else, but I can’t remember who she said it was and now she’s also not available to be asked — had, her editor pointed out, always had her books of a particular size, which was about 1/8 of an inch larger in one dimension than the maximum the sheets could efficiently deliver. The editor insisted that it would be simply impossible to live with a change in the trim with such an established and successful author. Publishing then being not so dissimilar from publishing now, the editor (presumably also speaking for the illustrious author) carried the day.

Now you’re going to find out why my incredibly smart, charming. and accomplished father might not always have been the most popular person in any company he worked for.

A few months later, Dad invited the editor in question up to his office. The new Welty (or whoever…) book had just been printed and Len put two copies on his desk, one on each of the corners facing his guest, the editor. The editor was excited to see his important author’s new oeuvre delivered and he picked up one of the copies. Of course, he quickly noticed that there were two copies.

“Take a look at both of them,” Dad said.

So the editor did. He opened each of them. He flipped through the pages of each. He looked at them together and said, “is there anything different about them?”

“Yes,” Len said. “This one is the one I wanted to manufacture, but you told me the size would be unacceptable. And this one is the size you insisted on, which we have delivered at an extra cost to the company of X cents per copy.”

It became considerably more difficult after that for editors to persuade management to deviate from the standard trim sizes.

One frequent topic of Len’s derision was publishers printing for margin rather than strictly for need. He was very fond of making this point: “It isn’t the unit cost of the copies you print that matters; it is the unit cost of the copies you sell.” The point is: avoid printing books you won’t sell. So don’t print for margin, print for need.

At one point in the early 1990s, I happened on the information that there had been paper rationing right after World War II when Dad was production manager at Viking. “Boy, that must have made them smarter about what they printed,” I said to him. “I’m thinking how painful it would be that you couldn’t reprint Book A because you had overprinted Book B and you didn’t have any more paper to allocate.”

“Oh, they were smarter then,” Len said. “But that’s not why.”

“Then why?”

“When I was a young man at Viking, it was Harold Guinzberg’s company. The money to print things was his money. If he spent money in September to print books he didn’t need until next June, he might not have the cash to take his family to Florida in the winter. The money wasn’t theoretical, like it is in these big corporations with MBAs making the decisions. It was real.”

I saw this effect a few years later when I was consulting at Sterling just before they were bought by Barnes & Noble. Like Harold Guinzberg, Sterling’s principal owner, Lincoln Boehm, made the printing decisions and took home about half the cash profits at the end of every year. Lincoln also made extremely conservative printing decisions, perhaps aiming for a year’s supply, but being rigorous in not printing more at any time than he was pretty sure he could sell in the foreseeable future.  During Boehm’s tenure, Sterling did second printings of virtually every book they published — more than 90% of them — and hardly ever had a significant quantity to remainder. 

More publishers would be more prosperous if they had a greater respect for the value of cash and were less zealous about pursuing illusory margin that is purchased by tying up their dollars and escalating risk. Since we are in a time when de-leveraging is occurring throughout the economy, these truths are likely to be rediscovered even without the advantages of owner-management.

I’ve got three BEA appearances coming right up. “Stay Ahead of the Shift”, a speech about publishing’s future at 11 on Thursday. “XML for Editors”, a panel with Brian O’Leary and Laura Dawson at 3 on Thursday. And “Digital Debuts Tool Time” with BookOven, Smashwords, Cooler Reader, and Filedby at 9:30 on Friday morning.

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I have been a baseball fan since the middle of the 1955 season. I have written books about baseball. I have a web site dedicated to baseball. I have built whole life adventures around baseball. My wife and I spent the 2000 season living across the street from (what was then called) Pac Bell Park in San Francisco, and I went to every Giant game except five (when a client insisted I be in London to speak…) I wasn’t a Giant fan; I did it because I love baseball and a “walking life” and I realized when I saw where the new SF ballpark would be that one could comfortably live right in the vicinity.

That summer, Barry Bonds, the Giants leftfielder, became the favorite player of my adult life. This was the year before he started hitting home runs like a machine. From my seat in the stands, I admired his batting eye and plate discipline; the fact that he never threw to the wrong base from leftfield; the fact that he only attempted stolen bases in late innings of close games and was almost always successful. Ellis Burks, the Giants rightfielder, was our upstairs neighbor that year. Ellis told us that Bonds was an unbelievably hard worker. The press couldn’t stand Bonds, but that’s because he wasn’t particularly cooperative or friendly with them. As a fan, I couldn’t have cared less. What was there not to like? 

Well, we all know now, don’t we. STEROIDS!!! CHEATER!!! The sporting press has made an industry of ferreting out these miscreants. We know who they are.

I wasn’t a Giant fan, but I am a Yankee fan. ARod is another great favorite. Yes, he’s a recent additon to the steroid dungheap.

And this past week we have Manny Ramirez. I’m getting sick of this. Nobody can tell the truth.

What’s the truth?

The truth is that — whether it was 30% or 50% or 80% — a huge number of players were using PEDs (that’s “performance-enhancing drugs”) for many years. The owners knew it and encouraged it. The players were relaxed about it. The union did nothing because the union’s job is to fight with management and there was nothing to fight about! Management loved it because PEDs create home runs and (when pitchers take them) strikeouts. Home runs and strikeouts put fans in the seats.

So can Bonds or Tejada or Palmeiro or ARod or Clemens or Manny or any of them tell the truth? “Yes, I used these drugs. But, frankly, everybody was using them. I was competing against players who were using them. Nobody seemed to care or mind.”

No, they sure can’t. If they did, everybody — the Commissioner’s office, their ownership, their teammates, and the leadership of their union — would be down on them like a ton of bricks. If there is a “crime” here,  just about everybody’s guilty. So everybody’s much more comfortable letting the unlucky ones be consecutively outed, each one being treated as an isolated example of immorality. The collective hypocrisy — including on the part of the sportswriters who strut their purity — is nauseating. It’s really just pandering to an anti-drug hysteria which, if we give it a chance, might prove to be as passe as a lot of the other mistaken political and social ideas of the past three decades.

From Joe Torre’s current bestseller (I’d cite the page number, but I’m reading it on my iPhone in eReader so that wouldn’t mean anything):

Said one former All-Star and steroid user who competed against those Yankee teams, “Everyone around baseball did what they could possibly do. It was the survival of the fittest.”

…The player said that everybody in the game just understood that attitude was acceptable. “Now whether it was right or wrong, now you’re talking about a moral issue, but there were no rules. You did what you did. It was the wild, wild west.”

How should we regard performances during an era when steroid use was, as a practical matter, allowed and encouraged by the entire baseball establishment? Remember that when Mark McGwire was hitting 70 home runs, he had “andro” in plain view in his locker and it was written about during the season. Lenny Dykstra showed up one at Spring Training one year looking like he’d been inflated with a bicycle pump. Brady Anderson went from a gap hitter to a 50 home run guy in 1996. Suddenly lots of players were hitting 50 or more home runs in a season, which used to be a rare accomplishment.

The era is going to define itself statistically. As the dead ball era did. As the 30s (an era of very high batting averages and low strikeout totals) did. As the stolen base era ushered in by Maury Wills and extending to Rickey Henderson did. But it is really unfair to judge the people of the 1990s and early 2000s by a a standard that was developed when people noticed the size of Barry Bonds’s head in 2003.

If the Truth and Reconciliation Commission concept ever came to baseball on this topic, the list of villains would be far more extensive than the ones whose drug tests were leaked.

May 28 at 11 am at Javits Center: “Stay Ahead of the Shift.” Publishers are chasing their tails trying to figure out how to keep getting paid adequately for content. It will just get harder and harder to do. Use your content to build community. That’s where equity is in the long run. The good news? This shift will take a while. And publishers are well equipped to stay ahead of it.

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After Making Information Pay on Thursday, I had lunch with Michael Cader. One of our topics was some statistical research he is doing on the question “how many orphans”? This is his research to reveal, but I will only tell you “not nearly as many as I thought.”

Part of what I learned from Michael is that the annual output of new titles as measured by Bowker from the 1920s until the 1970s was about ten thousand titles per year. It is several hundred thousand now. This put a piece of Shatzkin family publishing history into an entirely new perspective for me.

My father, Leonard Shatzkin, had created the Dolphin Books imprint at Doubleday in the late 1950s. Jason Epstein had gotten Doubleday into the “quality paperback” business early when he founded Anchor Books in about 1953. Len was “Director of Research” (that’s another story) at that time, with a big focus  on strengthening the sales organization. He did so largely through a 1950s version of “automation” (which required a large roomful of worker bees at Doubleday’s plant in Garden City): a vendor-managed inventory plan that wrote the orders for the stores based on physical inventory counts the Doubleday reps sent from the accounts (instead  of orders!) 

In 1957 or 1958, they put 800 stores on the Doubleday Merchandising Plan. Backlist sales quadrupled. Cost of sales quartered (they had added a lot of sales reps, so travel expenses were cut sharply.) They wanted more books! 

But the Doubleday editorial department said, “there really aren’t any more books. We see all the books that are made available; we buy the ones that are worth publishing.” So management created a new imprint, called Dolphin Books, and it reported to Len. 

Tom McCormack, later the dynamic CEO that built St. Martin’s from a relatively insignificant player importing Macmillan UK titles to an industry powerhouse, was a young editor there at that time. Dad had Tom start making lists of all the public domain books and what editions were available of them. As I heard the story (and Tom may read this and correct me), Tom said to Len: “I get it; we’ll figure out which books haven’t been done and do those.” To which Len said, “No. We have the strong sales force. We pick the ones that everybody does, because those are the ones that sell [no BookScan back then; no B&N or Amazon either]. We’ll push somebody else off the shelf.”

Anyhow, Dolphin was a big success. Two other things about those times:

Buying a paperback houses was seen as the way to get into the paperback business because of the perceived need of a backlist to be viable. That was the way to get one.

Mass markets really were paperbacks. The trade paperback business was small and academic. And mass market was distributed through IDs.

Well, Len didn’t believe in ID distribution; he believed it was inherently inefficient and the mass market business would ultimately choke on its growth. (It took 20 or 30 years for that to become obvious, but he was right.) So he wanted to create a paperback line which created its own outlets, using the same rack-jobbing (inventory selection)  techniques he had developed for the Doubleday Merchandising Plan.

Len also thought he had a better way to get to a backlist than to buy one. He would create one by publishing a very large number of titles — 50 new ones per month. The plan was to do this for three years which would give him 1800 titles in print. Presto, instant backlist.

Ray Hagel, the CEO of the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company, was recruiting Len from Doubleday and bought into this idea. Hagel was early in the curve of the go-go 60s, acquiring companies with stock. While Len was there, he acquired Macmillan Publishing, Free Press of Glencoe (bringing the soon-to-be-legendary Jeremiah Kaplan to New York publishing), Brentano’s Bookstores, and, if memory serves, a planetarium-creating company in Baltimore. And he financed Len’s vision: a new company called Collier Books.

So, starting in about early 1962 I think, a box of 50 new Collier Books titles would arrive at our house every month. And did for about a year or so. Collier Books started branching out. They created Modern Masters for Young People, children’s books from famous authors (Robert Graves, Louis Untermeyer) in a series overseen by a young neophyte editor named Harlin Quist, who also later made quite a name for himself publishing original children’s books. They had a line of study guides. They started publishing hardcovers. They even had a line of books that anticipated computerized teaching: you read a chunk, you get a question, and a choice of four answers. You turn to a different page based on which of the answers you chose, which told you if you were right or wrong and addressed your specific misunderstanding if you were wrong. Lots of smart stuff!

But then the stock market turned sour. Crowell-Collier stock went down. All the transactions they’d done using the stock for leverage were now jeopardizing management’s control of the company. Expenses had to be cut. And the very ambitious Collier Books rollout had to be curtailed.

This meant my father had to fire a lot of people. Although Ray Hagel offered him a 50% salary increase to stay at the company (and, by this time, Dad was running other divisions, including Brentano’s), Dad took the whole Collier Books thing too personally to consider it. He left and went to McGraw-Hill a few months later.

But here’s the thing talking to Cader made me realize on Thursday.

When Dad published 600  new titles a year (more really, because 600 was the number for the rackable paperbacks) at Collier Books, he was increasing the industry output by SIX percent! To put that into context, we’d be talking about a new company today publishing about TWENTY THOUSAND new titles a year to have an equivalent effect on industry output. I have known this history for a very long time. I have a whole new appreciation for what Dad did in this context. It’s one of those times I wish I could tell him.

From now until May 28, every post will end with a word about my speech at BookExpo at 11 am that morning. Called “Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Product-Centric Publishers Can Do to Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World. ” If you’ll be in NYC that day, please come. Posts between now and then will tell you a bit more.

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This is the first of what will be 3 or 4 posts about the birth and development of BaseballLibrary.com, a sterling Internet 1.0 site still chugging along (barely) deep in the Internet 2.0 era. It shows that a good idea can sustain itself for a long time, even in the face of erratic and sometimes incompetent management (and both the idea and the mismanagement are mostly mine.)  This first post tells the story of the creation of the book The Ballplayers, which was the key building block of Baseball Library. The next installment relates some interesting history about how the model for compensating for content changed in the late 1990s, but this foundation is needed first.

In late 1985, at what was one of the more difficult times of my consulting career, I was invited to a meeting to brainstorm the commercial possibilities for “The World Classics of Golf”, a book club. One person who was supposed to come to the meeting couldn’t make it. “Oh, Rodney’s working on his baseball encyclopedia.”

I pondered that as I walked home. What could that be? And then an idea hit me (although I still don’t know what Rodney’s idea was!).  The Baseball Encyclopedia, then published by Macmillan and also known as Big Mac, was the complete statistical compendium, player by player, of baseball history. And what struck me was that, because of Big Mac and its power, nobody had created a normal, regular, plain vanilla  baseball encyclopedia: one where you could look up a player (or a team or an umpire or a baseball announcer) and read about him.

The idea of creating such a thing fascinated me and felt like something I could do. I had spent more hours of my waking life on baseball than on any other single thing. I knew (and know) a lot. I was also a member of a young organization called SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, and I knew there were lots of people who knew even more than I did who could be rounded up to help. But I also knew this was a big project and I’d need help to figure it out.

So I went to Jim Charlton, an experienced book packager and a fellow baseball aficionado with the idea. My startlingly naive notion was that Jim would just execute my idea for half the take. Jim probably just didn’t believe that I meant he’d do all the work, so he agreed. And together, we planned out the book that was later called (somewhat misleadingly) The Ballplayers.

At that time, if memory serves, there were about 14,000 people who had been active major leaguers in the 20th century (which is when the “modern era” of baseball begins.) By eliminating hitters who had fewer than 500 at-bats and pitchers with fewer than 100 innings of work, we got the number down to a manageable one, about 5,000. With the addition of some other players (from the 19th century and some who were worthy of inclusion despite having missed the cut-off), teams, leagues, announcers, sportswriters, owners, and umpires, we developed a list of 6,000 individuals who would get bios. By ranking all of them for their historical value (arbitrarily), we divided them into groups so that the most important players would get proportionately longer listings. And that enabled us to estimate the total length of the book, which was around 700,000 words and (we thought this was smart) about 500 photographs.

Thanks largely to Jim’s contacts and sales skills, we sold the book in a mini-auction to Arbor House, an imprint of William Morrow, for $165,000, a pretty huge sum at that time. And then we got to work, paying a small per-entry fee to a long list of writers we recruited, mostly through SABR. We then recruited two recent college graduates, Shep Long and Steve Holtje, to help us coordinate and manage the project. Holtje stayed until the end and became Managing Editor.

But by this time, Jim had figured out that I really was serious about him doing all the work and, for half the money, that wasn’t a very good deal. So we had to renegotiate. I cut the pie and then offered him his choice of slices. We’d split the take 85-15. The one who got the 85 would do all the work and have to pay all the expenses. Jim decided to take the 15. So this project became my baby.

We completed the manuscript on time (with the help of an extended schedule) in the Fall of 1989. John Thorn, a veteran baseball book creator with an extraordinary list of credits, was commissioned to provide the photographs, which he did with his colleague Mark Rucker. And in Spring 1990, The Ballplayers, a 7-pound, 1330-page tome, hit the bookstores with a retail price of $35.

By this time, Morrow had shuttered the Arbor House imprint. The Ballplayers may have been the last book released with that colophon. That meant nobody in the shop had a stake in the book. So they printed 35,000 (probably the number required for the house to break even; that was an even more common practice in those days.) They advanced about 20,000 and ended up selling about 22,000. And by the end of 1993, the book was ready to be remaindered and for the rights to revert to me. 

The work had achieved a little bit of fame: a kind review in Sports Illustrated and an appearance by me to promote it on Good Morning America were the highlights (thanks to an independent publicist I hired; we got almost no PR from our publisher.) It was still the only reference book of its kind. In the meantime, Jim Charlton had created The Baseball Chronology, which was a day-by-day account of baseball history. That was really the only competition to The Ballplayers. It was published by Macmillan which should have given it a better chance. But a couple of years later, it joined The Ballplayers on the remainder table and out of print.

I was aware that we had made a major publishing mistake with The Ballplayers by including the 500 photographs and setting it in a pretty loose design and a big trim size. These things made the book bigger and heavier than it needed to be. A straight-text rendition with smaller type might would have been more portable and could have been priced at $20. But that was water over the dam.

On the other hand, I now owned several hundred thousand words of baseball biography text and the internet era was just beginning. That would create a new opportunity, which will be where we will take up this subject again in a subsequent post.

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