General Trade Publishing

As the shift from a print-centric book world to a digital one accelerates, more and more digital publishers are creating themselves.

The biggest publishers, with the resources of sophisticated IT departments to guide them, have been in the game for years now and paying serious attention since the Kindle was launched by Amazon late in 2007. But as the market has grown, so has the ecosystem. And while three years ago it was possible to reach the lion’s share of the ebook market through one retailer, Amazon, on a device that really could only handle books of straight narrative text, we now have a dizzying array of options to reach the consumer on a variety of devices and with product packages that are as complicated as you want to make them.

Free or very inexpensive service offerings through web interfaces suggest to every publisher of any size, every literary agent, and every aspiring author “you can do this” and, the implication is, “effectively and without too much help”. Indeed, services like Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) service, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!, and service providers Smashwords and BookBaby, offer the possibility of creating an ebook from your document and distributing it through most ebook retailers, enabled for almost all devices, for almost no cash commitment.

Is it really that simple? One suspects not, since literary agencies are creating ebook publishers (for example: The Scott Waxman Agency’s Diversion) and baskets of services (for example: The Knight Agency in Atlanta) and consulting to help their authors. And a bit further upstream, ebook distribution companies (for example: MintRight) and ebook-first publishers (for examples: Open Road, Rosetta, and the granddaddy of them all, Richard Curtis’s e-Reads) are creating more alternatives, sometimes propositions explicitly addressed to the agents. If publishing ebooks to all channels were really a simple matter of uploading a file, it would hardly seem necessary to build all this infrastructure.

We know that small publishers, literary agents, and authors are becoming publishers at an astounding rate. Two years ago when I was trying to organize a panel of literary agents to talk about working with authors on a charge-for-services basis instead of a share-the-royalties basis, it was hard to get volunteers to discuss new models. Two weeks ago, a major agent outside New York said to me, “we all have to think about it now; we have no choice.”

In short, it isn’t just the big publishers who are compelled to develop a digital strategy to adjust their businesses to changing times. Their smaller competitors, the agents they depend on to deliver their content, and even the authors that have always just depended on the publishers to handle the business of getting a book from a manuscript to a purchase, are all assessing the new landscape. They are considering what new approaches might reduce or eliminate their need for a publisher, or at least reduce the publisher’s share of the take.

Although the correct strategy for any entity would depend on the factors that prevail in each case, there are things it would seem that everybody entering this arena needs to know and understand.

First of all, what are all the things publishers do to get from manuscript to sale, are all the steps necessary, and what do they cost? Developmental editing, copy-editing, mark-up for design, creating metadata: these are all things publishers do routinely. Are they critical for every book? Would a purchaser-reader notice if a publishing newbie left any of them out? Will the services that promise to make and distribute an ebook without a cash investment do these things well?

The ebooks themselves have gotten increasingly complicated. The ebook standard epub (used for just about every ebook not intended for the Kindle ecosystem) has risen to the challenge posed by apps to be able to accommodate color and video and audio and software elements. Everybody who knows that “you get what you pay for” expects complicated ebooks to take more effort and money to create than ebooks of straight narrative text. But what constitutes “complex”? And how much more money does that additional effort cost the publisher that wants to deliver an ebook more complicated than just simple text?

Marketing ebooks also requires a whole new set of knowledge and skills. The key to all ebook marketing is the accompanying metadata: coding that travels along with the file specifying its core bibliographic information and price, but which can also tell a retailer or a search engine much more than that. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of delivering metadata that makes the book more likely to be found in response to various searches and queries; that’s yet another set of understandings new ebook publishers have to acquire.

That is just the beginning of what is possible (and therefore necessary) in ebook marketing. Sample chapters can be given away. Web sites can be invoked as partners.

And authors and publishers can, and therefore must, engage in “social network marketing”: using Twitter and Facebook and commenting in high-profile streams to catch attention and gain credibility with core audiences for the books. This is more knowledge to acquire.

Any new publisher will need to understand the paths to market. Yes, Amazon gets more than half of the US ebook sales and Barnes & Noble gets half of the rest. But it isn’t that way on every book, ignoring the others leaves a big chunk of the market unexploited, and things are changing quickly. Amazon’s market share has dropped by a huge percentage in the past two years.) OverDrive is the primary path to libraries. Ingram aggregates many independent stores. Baker & Taylor is opening up markets among mass merchants. Kobo is as important in Canada as B&N is in the US and works in markets all over the world. Google has the ebook ecosystem making the most serious penetration of independent book retailers. Sony is about to introduce new devices that could increase their importance. And Apple is doing its best to dominate sales to its own device holders, who constitute a large wedge of the ebook customer pie.

One can go to all of these channels directly but there are also a slew of services to handle what is the increasingly complex job of delivering to and administering the multiple channels. Perseus Constellation, Ingram Digital, INscribe Digital, LibreDigital (just bought by Donnelley), and Bookmasters as well as the automated services like Smashwords, BookBaby, and MintRight we mentioned above, and others offer service packages to do that and to help with the creation and marketing needs as well.

As we said at the top, nowhere is the change in publishing greater than in the agent community. What has been a stable business model for generations is now, suddenly, changing. There seem to be as many new models and approaches as there are literary agencies. That adds another thing that all of the fledging epublishers — some of which are agents, others being small publishers and authors — need to know about and understand. The relationships among authors, agents, and publishers are getting much more complicated and everybody needs to spend some time thinking that through and discussing what it means.

If all this strikes you as a set of topics worthy of a day’s discussion, we’re in agreement. We think it is too. And that’s why our new Publishers Launch Conferences partnership with Michael Cader is delivering a day-long event called “eBooks for Everyone Else” in New York (in conjunction with The Center for Publishing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies) on Monday, September 26 and in San Francisco (co-located with F+W Media’s new StoryWorld conference) on Wednesday, November 2.

Not only do we have an expert-packed lineup to deliver the information, we’ve carved out time for our attendees to get their own specific questions answered by the experts and by the providers of many of the services that are part of the new ecosystem. If the business of ebook publishing is part of your future strategy, you’re bound to get the knowledge and make the connections you need at eBooks for Everyone Else.

Among the leading service providers who will participate in eBooks for Everyone Else in New York and be available for “speed-dating” conversations with attendees are our global sponsors Copyright Clearance Center, Constellation, and Bowker, as well as supporting sponsors Ingram Content Group, INscribe Digital, B&N’s PubIt!, Kobo, and BookBaby. (Kobo and PubIt! will be speaking from the main stage as well.)

Our New York show features an all-star lineup of literary agents including Jane Dystel, Robert Gottlieb, Sloan Harris, and Scott Waxman. We have a distinguished group of publishing veterans — including Jack Perry and David Wilk, Smashwords founder Mark Coker, Renee Register, Iris Blasi, Rich Fahle, Ron Martinez, and Joshua Tallent — who will present advice and insight to help you develop a comprehensive ebook strategy. Most of them will be available at the breaks and alongside the speed-dating sessions to lead small group discussions and answer your questions about creating, marketing, and distributing your ebooks. (The San Francisco roster is slightly different, but just as powerful.)

Michael Cader and I will be moderating all the day’s activities, asking questions, and helping to put an enormous volume of facts into a strategic context for an audience with a staggering array of choices as to how to proceed with ebook publishing.

Share this post

I hope it is a mistaken impression — it certainly isn’t scientifically arrived at — but I have the feeling that there is widespread sentiment among self-published writers opposing publishers’ attempts through the agency model to keep ebook prices up. I have said before that I think agency pricing has, in many ways, saved the ebook business from monopoly control by its strongest retailer. Today I want to posit another virtue of the model: that it boosts the revenue of all writers, whether they are published by an agency publisher or working entirely on their own.

When some workers are in a union and others who can do a similar job are not, bad feelings can arise. The union workers fight to keep wages and benefits up and they use the power of the union to express a workers’ point of view about conditions on the job. And they see workers who are willing to do the same job for less as “scabs”. Inherent in that view is the belief that agreeing to work for less undermines the objectives of the union (which the union workers pay for through dues, of course) and the opinions people hold readily take on the coloration of moral positions, not just commercially-motivated ones.

From the point of view of the non-union worker, of course, a job is a job and a wage is a wage. Union membership might not be open to them anyway, for any number of reasons, and, even if it were, the cost-benefit relationship between the union dues and the wages and working conditions might not look like an attractive bargain. For example, union benefits that deliver advantages through seniority might not be much of an attraction to somebody who doesn’t expect to stay in the job or the area for a long time.

Another aspect of this is that the unions’ ability to bargain for workers raises the costs of production for management which raises prices for everybody. The unionized workers, benefiting directly from the higher costs, may either not notice that point or not care. The workers outside the union, unemployed or less gainfully employed, might well care.

Unionized workers and union officials would argue, and I would generally agree, that the benefits the union achieves for its workers actually pull up the wages and working conditions for all workers. It might literally be more “democratic” for employers to be free to hire non-union labor and for workers to be free to take non-union jobs, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t in the vested interest of all the workers for the unions to be pushing to improve wages and working conditions in those situations they can influence.

An analogous situation is now developing among writers of books, thanks to the democratization of access for authors created by the ebook revolution.

I think of the agented authors, published by the Big Six and other major publishers, as the unionized workers. Their union management is the agent community. The structure is different that it is for auto workers in a factory or miners in a pit, but the effect is very similar. Agents control the access that major publishers have to the labor they want: the writers who can deliver the books they can most readily sell. With that control comes the ability to drive up prices and improve working conditions.

The prices — which we call advances against royalties — that publishers have to pay for agented writers is part of the industrial cost structure of publishing. And the prices that publishers are charging consumers for ebooks through the agency model are necessary to maintain revenue levels that will support the industry as it has developed over the past century.

Agented writers pay “union dues”: 15% commission to the agents. And, like a union, the opportunity to get the privilege of paying those dues is limited, not democratically distributed. But those writers get the benefits of an environment negotiated between powerful industrial capability (the publishers) and controllers of a critical labor source.

This explains a longstanding anomaly in publishing, by which the big publishers have not only been the ones paying the big advances but have also generally paid higher royalties as a percentage of the sale price than smaller ones. Smaller publishers seldom pay 15% of retail royalties, as big publishers routinely do. They’ll often ask for (and get) 50% of foreign rights revenue, which big publishers very seldom do. So the players with the leverage and the checkbooks pay more than the players without it. That shows the power of controlling the labor supply, which agents do, coupled with professional negotiating skills, which agents have.

Of course, book consumers aren’t buying a “union label”; they’re buying an author’s name, perhaps sometimes undergirded by a known publisher’s branding, or the subject or the pass-along affects of branding (reviews and notices in credible places), or the recommendation of a friend (who bought the author’s name or subject or the endorsement.)

Thanks to agency, the most obvious way to for a consumer to distinguish between the “union” books and the “non-union” books is by price. The major publishers are (generally) maintaining prices of $9.99 to $14.99 for ebooks available in print as hardcovers for two or three times that amount and then, usually, at $7.99 and up when the printed book is in paperback. The non-union books — the self-published books by authors who (again, generally) couldn’t get into the “union” — are most often available for $2.99 or less, often for as little as $0.99.

This price differential, along with it being obvious to the purchaser that the unit cost of what the consumer receives when an ebook is purchased must have been trivial, has led to pretty widespread excoriation of the pricing levels of agency books.* This should not be confused with any apparent reluctance on the consumers’ part to buy them; the biggest books in print appear to also be the biggest ebook sellers, despite the fact that the print versions have far fewer direct competitors overall and none at the great price differentials that exist for ebooks.

That those consumers who are price-consciopus see it as a matter worth protesting that their favorite author’s book is $12.99 or $14.99 when there are many books available that are superficially comparable (same genre, same length) at a fifth or a tenth of that price, is not surprising. When you meet the consumer that says “I want to pay more”, you’ll have met a breed considerably rarer than the rich person who comes out for higher taxes. (Thank you, Warren Buffett.)

But I want to argue here that all authors, including those who self-publish for $0.99 or $2.99, should be applauding the big publishers’ efforts to keep the perception of value for branded books high by keeping prices high and stopping retailer discounting. Authors should be vocally supporting price maintenance and the agency model, even if they are not “in the union”. There are several reasons for this.

1. Although the standard big publisher split of ebook revenues (75-25 in favor of the publisher) allows a self-published author to gain comparable or even greater revenue at a lower price, those are just today’s transient conditions. It will be easier for authors (through agents) in the future to improve the split than it would be for the publishers to raise prices in the future to get authors more money. If the consumer is putting more money in the pot, then there’s more to divide. The division is something to fight over; keeping prices and value perception high benefits both sides.

2. If big publishers were to sharply reduce their ebook prices, print would die much faster. That would further reduce revenues in the pool for publishers and authors as well as accelerating the disappearance of bookstores, eliminating free visibility and marketing responsible for millions of book sales.

3. If big publishers reduced their prices sharply, the key marketing distinction that fostered the discovery of such writers as Amanda Hocking and John Locke would be eliminated. On the comment stream of a blogpost I read on this subject (can’t find it so can’t link it), one person posted a string of suggestions for major publisher survival strategies that included “cut all your prices to $2.99.” Why? Because it would eliminate all the competition from the self-published riff-raff that is using price as a marketing tool. So not only would the publishers and branded authors make less money, the aspirants would find their path to success cut off as well.

(This suggestion actually makes the point that self-publishers who scream  ”big publishers are stupid and they should cut their prices like us” should be very careful what they wish for.)

A cost-driven print book commercial model has created a legacy business which has made consumers willing to pay $25-30 for what is for many an 8-10 hour immersive reading experience. Millions of readers conditioned this way find paying around half that price to be a great bargain. The entire mechanism by which those printed books have been selected and delivered — the aggregation and curation of the major publishers’ offerings — is depended upon by the consumers who spend all that money.

No doubt, over time this will change. The print book infrastructure, which has inventory and supply chain costs that are responsible for the pricing conventions that have developed, will not last forever. Almost certainly, books will get cheaper and cheaper. But writers will also make less money when there is less to divide, not more. All writers, whether they’re among the fortunate ones that have a publisher pushing them or whether they’re trying to do it themselves, should be grateful that publishers are doing their damnedest to maintain prices and the perception of value for writers’ work. If that segment of consumers that complains about prices finds fault with agency pricing and the publishers’ insistence that the digital discount from the highest print price be limited to about 50% at the moment, that’s understandable.

But if writers join in that bashing, I think that’s a failure of understanding and, in effect, opposition to their own self-interest.

* It would be misleading not to mention that much of the “consumer” opposition to agency-priced books has been egged on by the self-interested. That’s one way it is in the (short-term) interest of the self-published author to be vocal in opposition to agency. If you sell that as a point of “principle” to a reader, you’ve steered them away from your competition.

Share this post

OK, now we know another new paradigm for book publishing in the digital age with the announcement of self-publishing author John Locke’s new deal for print distribution with Simon & Schuster.

The big publishers have said for a while now that they won’t be signing up books for print rights only. That makes sense, up to a point.

It is logical that with print declining and digital sales rising, publishers don’t want to be investing in an author only to control the getting-smaller part of the sales. We’re in this moment when print sales are still vitally important but less so every day. Ebooks don’t require the same organizational scale as distributed print, so authors legitimately feel that they can get the substantial part of that sale without giving up the 75% of the ebook royalties big publishers demand as the price to gain access to the print distribution capability that makes real use of big publisher scale.

But there are limits to the publishers’ logic to walk away from print-only deals. Publishers also have the challenge of feeding the big organization they’ve built to deliver print to its shrinking marketplace. It is hard to ignore sales volume you need to support expensive operations.

The first crack in the wall of “we don’t do print-only” was Houghton Harcourt’s deal with Amazon to publish the print edition of some titles originated by Amazon imprints. Houghton made the point that although it might look like what they were doing was a print-only deal, it really broke no precedents. They pointed out, accurately, that when a publisher acquires paperback rights to a book another house did in hardcover (the most common sort of licensing deal 30 or 40 years ago but not so common now), the ebook rights would stay with the originating publisher. That, they said, was all that was happening in this case.

As a fan of Locke’s Donovan Creed books (I just finished reading another one yesterday!), I had already done some analysis and written that I thought he was leaving a lot of money on the table working exclusively on the ebook side. (I ignored a deal he had with “Telemachus Press” to do print of his books because I figured they’d hardly sell any; the deal announced today would tend to confirm that assumption.)

Although the details of the Locke deal with Simon & Schuster haven’t been revealed, it is characterized as a distribution deal. Strictly speaking, that would make Locke himself the publisher and the party responsible for the cost of inventory. S&S would warehouse that inventory and handle all the mechanics of distribution, including billing and collecting. Then they would remit the larger portion — probably more than 70% and less than 80% — of the revenue they receive to Locke.

How profitable Locke’s print sales will be for him depend on his costs for print (which are in turn a function of how well he and Simon & Schuster match what is printed and distributed to the demand for his books), the retail price he sets, and, of course, the numbers he can sell.

There is another way Locke will profit. The increased awareness of his books that he’ll gain by having them in stores should generate more ebook sales and he presumably doesn’t share those with his print distributor.

There have been a number of signs this year that the publishing world is changing dramatically.

In March we had Barry Eisler, who had sold many books through conventional deals with major publishers, decline a six-figure deal with a major house. At first, Eisler was going to self-publish, but then he decided to take a (presumably) six-figure deal to be published by Amazon instead.

Amanda Hocking, who had started (like Locke) as a startlingly successful self-publishing author, accepted a deal with a major house to continue her career, pretty much the opposite of Eisler’s originally-intended path (although closer to what he actually did in the end).

Then J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series, announced she was creating her own online destination, Pottermore, to deliver ebooks. Rowling is apparently not just disintermediating her publisher from her ebook sales; she’s leaving out many of the online retail channels as well.

Last week we had the news that superstar non-fiction author Tim Ferriss became the first truly marquee signing for Amazon’s own publishing efforts.

And now we have Locke entirely self-publishing, but working through a major house to get his printed material into the supply chain.

When we discussed Eisler’s original decision, we talked about the fact that self-publishing left the substantial revenues from print untapped. The Hocking and Ferriss deals are similar, even though hers is with a traditional publisher and his is with Amazon. They are both pursuing what they think will be the most lucrative alternative for them, choosing from among options by which they get paid and somebody else does all the non-writing parts of the work.

Rowling’s initiative and Locke’s are both real self-publishing plays. I am skeptical that Pottermore is worth tracking as a commercial example by any but a small handful of wildly successful authors. It’s an anomaly in many ways. Harry Potter to publishing in the past decade is like the Beatles to music in the 1960s; nothing else comes close to its level of commercial success. What Rowling is doing might work just fine (although I have my doubts that it will reach more readers than if she used more conventional means, she might make more money and she might build a platform for other opportunities), but that doesn’t mean it would work for anybody else.

Locke might be an outlier as well. Nobody else except perhaps Hocking has achieved his level of self-publishing success. And, unlike Hocking, who is a writer who just wants to be a writer and is delighted to have a publisher take over her business responsibilities, Locke is an experienced businessperson who seems to prefer managing his own commercial affairs.

In the Locke deal, though, we can see the outlines of future arrangements by which publishers can reconfigure their dealmaking to adjust to changing times. It isn’t just agents who are changing their business models or offering new services to accommodate the reality of self-publishing fostered by the growing ebook market share (and Locke’s agent, Jane Dystel, is one that has announced that her office is doing just that), publishers will adjust as well.

The model of “self-publishing through a major house ” can be a workable one for all sides if it is restricted to authors whose commercial appeal has already been established. Since all the major houses have distribution deal models, it might not be long before there’s a person at each one assigned to making sure that authors and agents are as well taken care of as “clients” as they were in the past working through their editors.

These deals will morph. For example, does Locke really have to pay the printer, or will S&S cover him on that and just take the costs out of proceeds? If S&S were doing a deal like this for books that hadn’t already been published digitally, would they be able to extract a modest share of ebook sales as compensation for doing the ebook setup? And deals like this could evolve to also include some other costs — like copy-editing or cover creation – being fronted by the publisher, or I guess I should say “the distributor”.

Share this post

Anybody who doesn’t find the publishing business interesting in its time of digital change is simply not paying close enough attention. No matter what story we’re focused on, scratch the surface (or scratch your head) and you find you are pondering something else. This was a week for the press to be asking me (and many others) about the lawsuit against Apple and the publishers surrounding the implementation of agency. I have little expertise to comment on the suit’s legal merits, but a week of thinking about agency has made me (and others) realize implications that hadn’t been evident to us previously.

As I was reviewing my last blog post before publishing it, I had the new thought (referred to in a brief postscript) that Amazon was actually doing the Big Six publishers a favor by denying agency terms to everybody else. Since big authors have a common interest with big publishers in maintaining retail prices for ebooks that don’t undercut print and which deliver a per-copy revenue flow comparable to print, there is reason for a big author to prefer a publisher that has the power to maintain the ebook price across the retail network. Full-fledged agency publishers have that capability; the others do not.

A moment of explanation might be required for any readers who might be lost in the details of the agency, wholesale, and hybrid models of ebook-selling. Agency is the term for “the publisher actually sells the ebooks to the consumer, not the retailer; the retailer gets a cut but cannot change the price from what the publisher has set.” Wholesale is the term for “the publisher sells the ebooks to the retailer, based on the notional retail price set by the publisher; the retailer can then set the consumer price keeping all, part, none, or less than none — selling as a loss-leader — of the margin that the publisher’s discount provided.” And hybrid is the term for “the publisher has to agree to giving Apple a fixed percentage of the selling price; Amazon insists on a wholesale arrangement by which they set the price; therefore, Apple’s standard arrangement by which it can lower prices (and the publisher’s share) to match any other retailer on the web makes the publisher vulnerable to having its revenue from Apple readjusted downwards based on discounts offered by somebody else.”

The short story is that only under a total agency model does the publisher control price. In any other case, the price is effectively controlled by the retailer willing to offer the lowest price. That would be the retailer willing to live with the least margin and, as was amply demonstrated by the discounting that took place before agency came to publishing, that might be a negative margin. Retailers in the US (although not in all countries) can sell below cost if they think it is to their advantage to do so.

All the actors are rational here. Amazon extends agency terms to the Big Six publishers because, after the Macmillan dust-up of January 2010, Amazon has been persuaded that they could lose the ebooks of those publishers from their shop if they don’t. Losing the ebooks from one of the major houses would damage what has been one of Amazon’s main strategic advantages since the Kindle was launched: the widest selection of commercially-attractive ebooks in the marketplace. They take the gamble, which appears to be a winner, that publishers smaller than the Big Six will not want to withhold product from the world’s biggest ebook retailer, the one that still accounts for substantially more than 50% of the ebook sales for many titles.

And, in some cases, publishers have avoided the discomfort of the hybrid model — which requires them to commit to Apple that Apple will have the lowest price on the Web when they can’t actually control everybody else’s price  – by not selling to the iBookstore because Apple won’t buy on wholesale terms. So Amazon yields where they think they must (to the Big Six) and continues to enjoy the advantages of price control with the rest, while at the same time discouraging some publishers from making their titles available through a competitor. This all makes sense to me as I understand their point of view.

What I noticed while writing the last piece is that there is an unintended consequence here for Amazon way upstream from the ebooks sale: the policy is strengthening the Big Six’s already powerful grip on the biggest titles from the biggest authors. Amazon wants to compete for those authors and can offer a better royalty on Amazon sales to entice them (when Amazon pays 70% to the author, the author keeps it all; when they pay 70% to the publisher, the author does not get it all, even if s/he succeeds in negotiating something better than the industry standard of a 25% ebook royalty share.) But Amazon reportedly wants ebook exclusivity, which cuts out a big chunk of the ebook market, and they are seriously handicapped getting a print sale through brick retailers.

(If you want a more thorough explanation of the way ebook revenues get split up, I wrote in detail about ebook royalties under the agency and wholesale models here and here.)

Because print sales in stores still matter (and for as long as they do) there is a risk and a sacrifice for any author giving exclusivity to Amazon, although there are also clearly compensating considerations as well.

At about the same time I was noticing this, my friend Eoin Purcell in Ireland was noticing something else. Apple’s new policy on apps, by which you can’t sell through an app without giving Apple its standard 30% cut, also offers up a sparkling new opportunity to agency publishers that would be accessible only at some risk to any but the Big Six.

The immediate consequence of Apple enforcing this policy of theirs was to drive the direct-to-our-store connection from the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Google apps. Because those retailers only get 30% margin from the publishers, they can’t afford to give 30% to Apple for the privilege of in-app selling.

But publishers don’t have that margin problem. They already pay 30% for their sales, and if they put their own apps up with sales enabled through them, they’d only be paying what they already are to a retailer for the privilege. So apps for authors or genres or series of any kind could be offered as free downloads through the App Store with direct-purchase buttons inside. These could send you to the iBookstore, if the right kind of landing environment could be created, or to the publisher’s own landing page where sales commissionable to Apple could be made.

Of course, the same thing could be done as a Nook app in the B&N ecosystem, and it would be smart for the publisher to offer one, as well as a web app that constituted an Amazon version (which wouldn’t be offered through the Apple App Store but would have to get to you another way), to keep relative peace among its customers. But a publisher can only do this if it is sure its prices won’t be undercut, which would force a further margin reduction under Apple’s rules.

Like Eoin, I have no idea whether any of the Big Six publishers are working on this idea or whether any of the major agents have suggested the possibility. But we’re talking about literally hundreds of smart people here, so it would be surprising if nobody’s exploring this possibility (except if Eoin and I are both missing something that makes it a non-starter.)

The transformation of publishing is rich with circumstances to amuse anybody who appreciates irony. Cheaper ebooks, which consumers love, are making bookstores, which consumers also love, gasp for the breath to survive. The closest thing to a monopoly threat in the business, Amazon and Kindle, work to drive consumer prices down. Apple’s great success with new devices coupled with their very slow start at retailing, generates agency pricing and sales opportunities for other retailers that probably benefited Barnes & Noble the most. B&N, the brick retailer most skilled at logistics but only newly-minted as any sort of tech company, finds not one but two unoccupied niches in the eink product suite: color and touch-screen.

And now, Amazon’s policy limiting the publishers that can fully implement agency, designed to isolate the Big Six and enable discounting of everybody else’s ebooks, may be spawning a new opportunity for big authors and big publishers to work together that other publishers can’t compete with. Perhaps denying this capability to other publishers actually helps Amazon be alone as a 7th competitor, but it certainly has its ironic aspects at a moment when Amazon is putting on a full-court press to persuade big authors to work directly with them!

Share this post

Recent performance reports from Simon & Schuster and Penguin, which can be taken as indicative in some ways of what’s going on at the rest of the Big Six and instructive about what’s happening across trade publishing, say that revenue is flat or down, profits are up, and the ebook share of revenue is growing. The most recent reports were that ebooks grew to 14% of revenue at Penguin and at Simon & Schuster.

First a few observations about what those numbers really mean, and then some thoughts about the implications for the months to come.

We must remember we’re comparing apples and oranges when we talk about the percentage of sales that are ebooks versus print books. This percentage is, presumably, arrived at by adding print book sales (which are shipments subject to returns) to ebook sales (which are actual consumer purchases with zero or negligible returns) and then dividing the ebook revenue number by the total revenue number.

This explains the apparent anomaly pointed out in the S&S reporting which sees the ebook percentage higher in the first quarter than in the second, which has occurred in successive years. This is not actually hard to understand. One report I saw pointed to part of the explanation: that Christmas recipients of ereading devices are loading them up in January, an effect which is absent in the second quarter. But what is also the case is that Q1 print sales (which are shipments, let’s remember) are depressed by two factors: they contain returns from Q4 Christmas sell-in and Q1 is not normally a big one for new book shipments.

So as long as there are larger shipments of returnable print taking place in anticipation of Christmas sales and large numbers of new device owners created each Christmas, we can expect the Q1 number to be artificially inflated and the Q2 number to show an apparent decline.

The annual Q2 decline is only apparent; it is not real.

The percentage of revenue number lends itself to misinterpretation. It is an average. You will pardon me for repeating the truth that “the six-foot tall man drowns walking across a river that is an average of three feet deep.” Averages are misleading. That mid-teens percentage number, quite aside from the apples-and-oranges base of it, is also misleading. (I hasten to emphasize that nobody is being deliberately misleading; there is no suggestion intended here that the number isn’t real or that there is any desire to lead people to mistaken conclusions by reporting it.)

But 14%, or about 1/7, could lead people to think that the book that sells 35,000 copies is selling about 30,000 print and 5,000 digital. That’s seldom the case. First of all, “on average” ebooks generate lower unit revenues than print, because so many of them sell for less than half the print retail price when books are in hardcover. So if 14% of the revenue is digital, something more than that percentage of the units are digital. Let’s say that number is more like 17% or maybe 20%.

Secondly, that number is, at least to some extent, historical. It certainly isn’t a forecast. Everybody’s forecast would be for that number to go up. And everybody would agree that (if you factor properly for the Q1 to Q2 and shipments-to-sales anomalies) it has gone up between the period being reported and the reporting.

Third, not all of S&S’s or Penguin’s print list is available as an ebook. (As short form publishing enabled by ebooks grows, the reverse will also be true, but it isn’t in any appreciable numbers yet.) That means the title base for the 14% of revenue and (notional) 17% of units is a smaller number of titles than the print title base. So for books available as both print and ebooks, the percentage of units sold that are digital is substantially higher than that. I’m not familiar enough with the houses’ lists to make a truly informed guess about many titles are heavily illustrated or children’s book titles or deep backlist on which ebook rights are too confused to allow an edition to be published. But it would certainly be reasonable to assume that for straight-text narrative books, the percentage of ebook units to the total is routinely 30% or more.

The power of the ebook marketplace was underscored by a recent Simon & Schuster report of first day sales for a major bestseller. USA Today reported on July 13 that S&S claimed 175,000 total units sold on the first day of availability of Jaycee Dugard’s “A Stolen Life”, of which 100,000 of the sales were ebooks. (The article doesn’t spell it out, but presumably these are apples-to-apples, cash register sales of books and audio as reported by BookScan and, as always, cash register sales of ebooks. If they compared print shipments to ebook sales, the number would probably be more like 40% than the 57% this reporting implies.)

Because ebook sales are, at the moment, revenue dollar-for-dollar, more profitable than print book sales, publishers are able to report revenues flat or down and profits up. With the industry standard of 25% ebook royalties having prevailed for a year or two now, this news definitely catches the attention of smart agents. But, the agents’ future success in negotiating better terms aside, is it likely to stay that way?

One big relevant variable that is hard to predict is how successful publishers can be keeping retail prices up for ebooks with a diminished print price benchmark. If you’re getting something for $9.99 or $14.99 that you believe lots of people are paying more for in another form, there’s evidence that it is a bargain. It will be a bigger challenge to keep prices, and therefore revenues and margins, up — even with the power of agency, which only six publishers in the world today are really equipped to deliver — when the printed book price isn’t seen as a basis for comparison.

In fact, the current improvement in the profit picture suggests that the big houses have done a remarkably good job of managing the transition from print to digital so far. What is implied by the reported numbers, but receiving little attention, is that print sales are down pretty dramatically. Print runs are down with one trade house telling me that their midlist non-fiction first printings having typically declined by 40%. A larger house suggested that the print being shipped from their warehouse is down 35% in less than two years. I’m not close to the numbers but that might mean that for segments of their list shipments are half what they were less than two years ago.

Smaller press runs mean higher unit costs for printing and binding but they also mean fewer units are sharing the cost of design and page make-up. Many of the fixed overheads in publishing houses: warehouses, production departments, catalog creation, and lots of IT, are really only necessary to support the print component of the business. For the past two decades, commercial success in book publishing (and, as the demise of Borders has made clear, in book retailing) depended on an efficient supply chain. Being in stock but not overstocked, shipping quickly, being able to get fast turnaround on reprints, processing returns promptly to facilitate collecting accounts receivable, and providing accurate data to accounts as well as to internal stakeholders all require investment but generate value that shows up in profits.

Until the Kindle came out in November 2007, the question about ebooks was “will this ever be a business?” Since then we’ve watched the ebook share double or more every year, including last year. Since 2008 or 2009, the question has been “how long can this kind of growth go on?” When the share is upwards of 30% for most narrative books, which I think it is now, we know that can’t go on for two more years because that would be a mathematical impossibility.

So the questions about ebooks now are “when will this slow down?” and “is there a plateau at which there is a sustainable and substantial print book business?” If the answer to the first question isn’t “very soon”, then the answer to the second question must be “no”.

The other question being called here is whether the publishing of straight narrative texts becomes a separate and distinct business from the publishing of illustrated books. As long as the print component is commercially important to the success of narrative books, it’s perfectly logical for a publisher to do both. The narrative books and illustrated books, after all, can ride in the same box to Barnes & Noble, Ingram, or any local bookstore. Sometimes they are even manufactured by the same printer (although far less often than they were decades ago.) Their inventory can certainly be monitored with the same capabilities and people (if somewhat different algorithms).

One great imponderable is what the market for ebooks will be beyond the verbatim replication of narrative text. That’s where the growth has been. For illustrated or enhanced or apped ebooks, the success stories are anecdotal, not indisputable trending. It’s true that the right devices aren’t as widely distributed yet, but it is also true that we have no clear evidence that those ebooks will be as compelling to the consumer as the narrative text ones. We do know they’ll cost more to create.

One smart ebook head of a major house remarked to me the other day that their cookbook editors were still preparing their content primarily for the printed page and the digital versions were developed after that. “If our editors are still doing it that way two years from now,” this person said, “then as a company we’re doing something terribly wrong.” That statement is correct, and encompasses the possibility that something like the packages of cookbook content within containers won’t have a profitable market even in digital form, and will have to be monetized completely differently. We don’t know yet as an empirical fact that people will buy digital “cookbooks”, the way we know for sure that people will read narrative text on devices very happily and not look back.

(Cooking and food content? A perfect candidate for the subscription model!)

What we do know is that a high percentage of illustrated book sales is for gifts. To the extent that’s true, it adds a barrier that has nothing to do with design or functionality to the migration to ebooks. And those books, presumably more than narrative text books, benefit from the showroom effect that bookstores provide. And we know what’s happening to bookstores.

The rate of migration from print to digital for narrative text over the past four years would take us to a smidgen of a print business for that kind of book in only a couple more years if it does not abate. If publishers find their print throughput down another 35% over the next 18 months, most of the biggest narrative books are selling upwards of 75% of their units as ebooks, and most of what publishers ship from their warehouse is a different title base than their bestseller business, the game will have changed completely.

We could evolve so that the skills and organizational requirements to publish narrative content, if print becomes a small component of the revenue, will be quite different from what’s required to publish the illustrated content for which print remains an important part of the revenue. In that world, what constitutes a sensible portfolio of offerings for what we today call a “book publisher” might be defined quite differently.

One thing that occurred to me for the first time writing this piece is that Amazon’s apparent resistance to giving any publisher except the Big Six the ability to sell under agency terms gives the Big Six a useful card to play with agents on the biggest books. Agents for big authors tend to like the agency sales model. (This is inherently confusing; the “agents” being referred to have nothing to do with the “agency” in the model…Oh, well.)

The stakeholders who care most about maintaining retail prices for “branded” books (big authors and big efforts, like heavily-researched biographies that take years to write) are the most powerful agents and the Big Six publishers. If I’m right about this, I think we can safely categorize it as an “unintended consequence” on Amazon’s part to have a policy in place that actually strengthens the Big Six’s hand against the rest of their competition for big authors.

Share this post

Agents work for authors and sell books (mostly) to big general trade publishers, but there’s really a partnership at work there. Nearly all the books big publishers buy, and almost without exception those for which big money is paid, come to them from agents. There’s a symbiotic dependency between them.

Publishers depend on agents to sort through the possibilities to discover new talent, develop proposals to a professional level, and handhold and cajole the author through the lengthy process of actually delivering the manuscript a contract calls for. Agents live in a world where the big publishers are really the only source of substantial revenue.

So they have lunch a lot to discuss what amount to joint efforts. I don’t know if it is unique to publishing, but our industry’s convention that the buyer (the publishing editor) pays for the seller’s (the agent’s) lunch must be very unusual. By constantly monitoring what the editors are looking for and are inclined to buy and each house’s current frame of mind of what will work and what won’t, agents get the information that, in turn, directs them to what will sell. What will “sell”, to an agent, means what people who are personally known will want to buy. It doesn’t require the agent to think in terms of what the public will buy; that’s the publisher’s job. The agent’s job is to deliver what the publishers have decided is commercially viable.

There is, in general, a great deal of mutual respect here. Obviously, there is a point where the partnership becomes adversarial: publishers want to pay as little as they can for books and agents want to get as much as they can. But, in general, these competing interests are resolved in ways consistent with the need both sides have to continue working together in the future. There are only six very large houses and only a small handful of others that can occasionally play at that level. And while the agent community is somewhat less consolidated (you can be a very successful agent with only one or two big clients; you can’t be a very successful big publisher with only one or two big authors), both sides do each deal knowing there will be a next deal they’ll want to do with each other coming along soon.

This symbiosis is important to remember when we consider that one of the big publishers’ defenses against disintermediation is their ability to curate, to filter. There is a school of thought (which is an attractive one to publishers thinking about their role in the increasingly digital world of books) that when content choices become more plentiful, reliable branded filters become more valuable. All sides recognize that the principal brand value lies with the author. I am increasingly coming to the view that the big publisher name — Random House or Simon & Schuster — also communicates “value” to the consumer, although it doesn’t describe the potential reading experience with anything like the specificity that the author name does. The agent name, of course, means nothing at all to the public. So the publisher is essentially getting credit for a filtering process for which they are the last step after agents have done a lot of weeding out before them.

Two years ago, when we were organizing the first Digital Book World conference, we foresaw that ebooks would lead to much cheaper and more accessible self-publishing opportunities that some authors, at least, would be keen to explore. When we started to organize a panel on the subject, we learned that the rules of the AAR (which is, effectively, the agents’ trade association, although it doesn’t act as such in many ways because of its highly independent-minded membership and the potential for restraint-of-trade violations) were interpreted by many to mean that agents could neither set up publishing operations nor charge authors for services. In that ancient time, very few agents would openly discuss the possibility of working with authors in anything but the time-honored way of selling their proposals to publishers on commission.

But times have changed. A quick check of recent news and announcements in our office turned up nine agencies with announced digital propositions. These range from Waxman Literary Agency’s Diversion Books, an ebook publisher, to the Ed Victor Agency’s Bedford Square Books publishing arm working through Open Road, to, in most cases, consulting services for the agency’s clients on ebook development and distribution.

The other seven on our list right now are The Knight Agency, BookEnds, Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, McDermid Agency, Levine Greenberg, Curtis Brown UK, and Andrea Brown Literary Agency. There are certainly some we’ve missed. And there will undoubtedly be more in the weeks to come.

The Knight Agency did a really nice job of laying out the suite of services they’re going to provide through their offering. It’s very impressive, including content editing, line and copyeditor referrals, ISBN number assignment, copyright registration, cover copy, cover design and consultation, file conversions to ePub and mobi, uploading files to major retailers, dynamic pricing, metadata, search engine optimization, marketing plans, subsidiary rights, royalty tracking and payments, oversight of existing contracts and obligations, and, down the road, arranging for print publication through POD or other means.

But what really surprised me was that the Knight Agency says they are absorbing all costs except copy-editing and working for 15% of the revenue. The range of services they are offering, even without the copy-editing (which can be anywhere from $500 to $3000 or more, depending on the length and complexity of the manuscript), requires real humans to spend real time doing the work. They seem to be offering to design the cover at their expense, which is a value of anywhere from $200 to $2000. The Knight Agency is undertaking a substantial investment in each book that will be done in this program and, if I’m reading them right, will only get that money back at 15 cents on the revenue dollar before they earn any profit.

That’s a commitment! And even though the service is being offered only to existing clients of the agency (at least for now), it’s an impressive one.

So with that context, I’d offer a few observations.

I don’t know what other agents have planned, but Knight has definitely thrown down a marker that other agencies will be highly challenged to match. (Of course, the first thing to see is how well Knight can do against their own checklist!)

Many of the agents, but not Waxman with Diversion, are specifying that their services are only for existing agency clients. That’s a good way of putting a toe in the water and it’s a good way to minimize the concern of publishers. But it’s not likely to last as the policy for any of them that do this kind of work successfully. If their ebook publishing services actually work and the business is shifting in that direction, why would you turn down an opportunity that came from outside the client base. Why would you turn down the opportunity to offer the same suite of services to all the clients of some other agency that doesn’t want to build this themselves? (That’s an opportunity almost certain to arise for all of them.)

Publishers are also working on self-publishing services. Distributors have been noodling for some time about packaging these services for agents. Knight has promised to do a lot, including a substantial per-book investment, for 15% of the revenue. Are any of these other players now going back to the drawing board to reconsider their pricing? I would think so.

How everybody is going to feel about these agent service offerings is going to depend a lot on how they’re used. To the extent that they are used as leverage by authors with big backlists to push publishers to higher ebook royalties, the big houses won’t be pleased with them. But if they turn out primarily to be “farm systems”, giving exposure and building awareness for an author who can then “graduate” to a “real” publishing deal, everybody might be all smiles. If that’s what happens, these services become something like the new digital world’s equivalent of an agent getting an author to write a piece for the New York Times Sunday Magazine or to start blogging to build a following: a career-building step that leads to a major house. If that ends up being the prevailing effect, everybody will be smiling.

Let’s remember that Amanda Hocking went from self-publishing to a major publisher deal and that Barry Eisler decided that taking Amazon’s offer to publish him was more appealing that truly doing it himself.

Perhaps for as long as five or ten years, the print component will remain an important part of any book’s total revenue potential. None of these agents can do much to help there (although a distributor could.) Even if what Knight offers turns out to be high quality across the range of services and what they’re offering to cover out of their pocket versus what they’re planning to take in revenue is sustainable (hard to say from here), they’re still going to want to sell lots of books to publishers. Will this service offering help them or hurt them in that regard? Will publishers see them as developing competition? Or will the commercial proposition of each book on offer remain the key element of each negotiation?

We’ve come a long way in the past two years, from a time when many agents thought getting involved with self-publishing was a non-starter to a moment now when, in the words of one agent I spoke to last week, “none of us has any choice” but to provide digital publishing advice or capabilities to their clients. The next two years will probably bring much more change than that.

We’re putting together a new Publishers Launch Conferences show called eBooks for Everyone Else for both New York (on September 26) and San Francisco (on November 2). More details will be announced shortly. “Everyone else” is anybody without an IT department, and we always knew agents would be an important part of our audience (along with authors and small- and midsized-publishers) and our program. Looks like that show will be very well timed.

Share this post

One very lucky thing for those of us who are in the habit of predicting the future is that very few people keep score on us. We mostly keep score on ourselves. When I want to remind readers of something I said previously, I link back to it and call it forward it again.

But there is one belief I had and stated repeatedly early in the ebook era that was wildly wrong, hopelessly wrong, and then proven clearly to be wrong. I bring it up now because it belongs in this post identifying a more current error, one which hasn’t been proven yet but about which I’ve learned enough to want to walk back.

When I started reading ebooks in about 1999, there were a couple of dedicated ereaders just becoming available: the Rocket Book and the Softbook. Neither of them interested me or very many other people either. Both failed pretty quickly.

Just about simultaneously, ebooks were first being delivered to hand-held devices. I discovered the magic of putting books on my Palm Pilot, a device I had in my pocket all the time. I had started carrying a personal digital assistant in 1986; that was a Psion Organiser with a 2-, then a 4-line screen, which would not have worked for ebooks. But the Palm, which could carry a chunk not so different in extent from what I see now on my iPhone, worked fine.

The original dedicated devices came and went without much notice from anybody. Meanwhile, I continued to read on my Palm and its successors. The shopping experience at Palm Digital was terrible, the choice of titles was extremely limited, and the ebooks cost just about as much as the print books. But I shifted over, as much as I could, because I was hooked both on the utter convenience of always having books in my pocket and because I genuinely found it preferable to read on something so small and light and have book reading, for the first time, totally manageable with one hand.

When the Sony Reader arrived and didn’t do much, I wasn’t surprised. Sometime before it debuted, I wrote or said somewhere that if you carried a personal digital assistant, nobody should have to explain the value of ebooks to you. And if you didn’t carry a personal digital assistant, they might not actually have any value for you. At that point, most ebooks purchased were read on laptop and desktop computers.

That’s why I was pretty sure the Kindle wouldn’t work. Who wanted another device to carry around just to read books, I figured? What’s the advantage in that?

I neglected to think through that people do things for lots of different reasons. And I really underestimated the degree to which the book-sized page is a requirement for a lot of people, even though it might be a transitional one. Anyhow, I was really, really, really wrong. And even though I switched back from Kindle to iPhone reading the minute the vast selection available through Kindle (and now through Nook, Kobo, Google, and Apple) was available to me on the device I was always carrying, I fully accept that most people are willing to carry something around to do their reading on a regular-sized page. Lesson learned.

It is now clear to me that another concept that was an important part of my future view is in pretty desperate need of reassessment. It also appears to be being proved wrong.

It was evident pretty early that the Net facilitated the formation of communities around interests. Putting that together with my thinking about the distinction between the unit of sale and the unit of appreciation (shortcut to understanding: the former is the album and the latter is the song; the former is the cookbook and the latter is the recipe) made me think that the big online aggregation of content for sale would also ultimately be challenged. If you went to a web community to get advice about how to build a deck or plant a vegetable garden, I figured, you’d just pick up whatever were your content purchases — books or whatever else, physical or virtual — from that same site. You wouldn’t need a separate site to go buy content from.

In other words, I expected one of the ways to monetize a community would be that you could sell it stuff, particularly content.

Although I know that O’Reilly operates in a special marketplace, I saw the success they have had selling directly to their community — both their own publications and their subscription aggregation Safari — as a sign of what we could expect to develop in other verticals.

I don’t think so anymore.

The first rude awakening for me was when OpenSky changed its business model. OpenSky began with the proposition that they would facilitate just about any web site to sell just about anything. As I understood it, if you had a blog about cooking, you could arrange to sell your favorite pots and pans right off your own site. OpenSky would source the product and operate the back end. You’d just have to pick out what you wanted and decide how much margin you could demand.

Well, apparently that business model just didn’t work. They’ve switched OpenSky from a commerce platform for bloggers to a “social network for shopping” with celebrity, expert, and author curators. I’m not much of a shopper, online or offline, so I’m not one to judge how appealing it might be compared to competition. There is some evidence that the new model works and OpenSky feels like they are now taking off. But it isn’t any longer the perfect match for the vision that I had when I first saw it, and it probably didn’t work because my vision was wrong.

By extension, I had been figuring that publishers needed to sell direct as well. Big publishers had good reasons to resist that idea which I understood, but which in themselves make me question the idea. Big trade houses are highly dependent on the goodwill of Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as other retailers, and going into competition with your key channels is risky and problematical. And my vision of the future wasn’t really built around general publishers, anyway.

This month, J.K. Rowling opened her Pottermore site, which is intended to be the exclusive vendor of Harry Potter ebooks. Now, there’s a vertical. It appears you won’t be able to get them at Amazon, B&N, or Google (although Google checkout is “the preferred third party payment platform”); if you want them, you’ll buy them from the Pottermore site (or, as some would point out, get them from a pirate source if that’s easier.) In a ‘d’uh” moment, I read this piece making it clear that this kind of fragmentation didn’t work for musicians and ultimately wouldn’t work for authors. (The book business isn’t the music business, but some lessons do carry over.)

So mark me much less bullish on publishers selling direct than I used to be. It can add value and margin to a vertical site if the costs of running the store can be tightly managed, but it is not likely to produce much in sales very quickly.

In fact, I’m quite sure that fewer Harry Potter ebooks will be sold by the Pottermore strategy than if they were just made available through the standing ebook retail network. The margins might be higher with no retailer to pay, assuming that advantage isn’t completely swallowed up by their own costs of infrastructure (and it probably won’t be.) But not everybody who buys a Harry Potter book from Amazon or B&N (or a Nora Roberts book or a Janet Evanovich book or a James Patterson book) is a devoted fan. Some of them are just choosing their next read and if Roberts or Evanovich or Patterson wasn’t shown to them, they would have bought something else on offer.

There is evidence out there to contravene this post and confirm my original thesis. Our friends at F+W Media, with whom we deliver the annual Digital Book World conference, report success building their retailing business through their communities. A senior executive there tells me they are selling “tens of millions” in content, product, and services through 25 stores attached to the community sites they have developed over the past few years. They achieve an average order value of $40 — not too shabby — and credit a combination of true community focus which builds them large and powerful databases of names, unique curation that includes offering things that aren’t available elsewhere, selling content in multiple forms (book-like, video, webcasts), delivery of “online learning”, and special bundled packages for their success.

F+W is not unique. A smaller company that is their competitor in some spaces, Interweave, also has a community focus and sells direct. Both companies have the content to build a number of different verticals to amortize the cost of a common merchandising and retailing platform.I don’t doubt F+W when they say they’re making it work, and apparently Interweave is too, but that still leaves the question of whether they, like O’Reilly, are sufficiently unusual cases that it would be very hard for other publishers to follow their lead.

I still have my fingers crossed that the Google ebooks program could spawn some unique shopping experiences that will make a difference to the ecosystem in the long run. (This is taking powerful faith at the moment because Google has only barely detectable sales in their first half-year of operation.) By offering the opportunity for curation with personality to be done by a large number of different entities (about 300 bookstores have already started with the program in the US), the Google initiative still offers the possibility of a wide variety of curation choices, or bookstore front ends.

Of course, none of these individual Google ebook stores will have the resources of the big retail players to apply technology to their merchandising. But perhaps they can provide selection and positioning that will create its own following. Whether they apply what they know and their own unique intellectual resource base (because every bookstore has one) to highly local subjects or other verticals with global appeal, they have the opportunity to create online stores that at least some people will prefer to shop. Thousands of such entrepreneurs around the globe might produce hundreds — or dozens — of survivors with large enough customer bases to create the kind of diversity in the ebook retail network that would offer publishers the kind of opportunity they need to add value for a long time. And to do it the way they always have, by managing intermediary opportunities, not by selling direct.

This is not to suggest that publishers don’t need to be building direct contact with as many consumers as they can. Just as authors should do. But forget the idea of a huge number of vertical purchase points for ebooks all over the net. I will.

Google also announced an affiliate program for Google ebooks. That will enable any web site to sell their ebooks and get paid, extending a concept that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have employed successfully for print books. It looks to us like Google pays more. An affiliate can earn 6-10% from Google, 6% from B&N, and 4-8.5% from Amazon.

This isn’t the original OpenSky vision, however, because that was about all kinds of products, not particularly (or even necessarily including) books or ebooks. Of course sourcing could always have been done through Amazon, but there were differences in the merchandising and pricing opportunities in the original OpenSky model.

Share this post

A big ebook shoe dropped on Sunday. It dropped on Kobo first. And it has nothing to do with Borders.

Kobo just delivered a new iOS (that’s Apple’s operating system for iPad and iPhone) app that no longer contains the direct link to the Kobo bookstore within it. That means that buying new Kobo books requires going to Kobo.com through the browser (not hard, but additional steps) rather than from a single click from within the app.

Later news on this developing story is that the Google app has been “pulled” and that the Nook Children’s app no longer has a link to the store. We have to expect that the Kindle and main Nook apps will undergo the same change very shortly. That will mean that the simplest and most seamless way to buy and read ebooks on the iPad or iPhone will be through Apple’s iBookstore. It will almost certainly mean a growth in iBookstore market share at the expense of all the other ebook retailers. It will also almost certainly mean that a lot of people who read their ebooks on an iOS device (I’m one of them) and prefer to use any of the other ebook retailers (and I’m one of those too) will be inconvenienced and annoyed.

However, it is also true that Apple will benefit from this move that many of their customers will resent.

The point most emphatically made by all of this is that the book business is a cork floating on a digital device stream. We don’t control our environment. We must keep adapting to what bigger players, some of which have pretty minimal bandwidth to engage us in a dialogue and pretty minimal interest in what’s best from our point of view, see as the best strategy for them.

I have been guilty of a publishing-centric view of the possibility that Apple would enforce the rule that leads to this change since it was first prominently rumored last February. That is: with wishful thinking, when I first heard about this possibility six months ago I thought they wouldn’t do it. I talked myself into believing that because Apple had benefited substantially from the presence of the book apps on their platform, and because there are millions of us who read ebooks on our Apple devices with a distinct preference for using other readers and other ebook stores, that Apple would not enforce the rules which, through a couple of iterations of clarification, say that the way these apps and stores operated was outside their rules.

I will try to remind myself not to be making that mistake again. One of the other big companies recently congratulated me on the ease with which I accept the idea that companies (and people) act in their own self-interest. That’s what Apple has done here.

What this means depends very much on where you sit.

Barnes & Noble (Nook), Google, and Kobo all benefited enormously from Apple’s arrival on the scene in April 2010 because they brought with them the “agency” sales model that leveled pricing across all outlets for the ebooks that come from the biggest publishers. Without agency, many believe (and I’m one of them) that Amazon Kindle’s aggressive loss-leader pricing policies on the biggest books would seriously have diminished the competition.

B&N needs every penny it can spare to invest in device development and marketing; they’d be seriously handicapped if they had to give away margin to compete for consumers.

Google has signed up about 300 independent stores in the US to be partners in its ebook program. They might not have 10% that many if the indies thought they had to compete with loss-leader pricing on the biggest books even to play. When Random House switched over to agency at the beginning of March this past year — 11 months after it began — one of the motivations they cited was to respond to the desire of independent stores to sell ebooks which they heard over and over again depended on agency pricing.

Kobo has always had a global strategy that could enable them to thrive even if they had also-ran status in the US market. But they were trying hard to compete with Amazon pricing in the pre-agency days and as the smallest of the big global ebook players, they would have to be considered the most vulnerable in an environment characterized by loss-leader price warfare.

This change must mean they’ll all lose sales. It is hard to see that it could mean anything else.

Amazon will lose sales too, but they may win overall just because life gets a bit harder for B&N, Kobo, and Google.

All of these retailers have gotten an enormous (but unquantified in data revealed to them) lift from the massive success of iPads and iPhones and the retailers’ ability to access all those devices pretty seamlessly and at no cost. Amazon and Barnes & Noble sold many Kindles and Nooks, of course (Kobo’s device has been a competitor and Google is about to have one), and they’d be selling lots of ebooks if there were no iOS devices. Publishers know that, of the 55-65 percent of their ebooks sales that go to Amazon and 20-30 percent of their ebooks to Barnes & Noble, some of those sales go to the dedicated devices and most of the rest to the iOS devices. But they have no idea what the split is. Now they will start to find out as they see those sales shift from the other retailers to the iBookstore. (Sales to iBookstore, Kobo, Google, and others constitute no more than 15-20 percent of sales and often far less.)

Anyhow, the unambiguous benefit that Apple and the iOS devices used to represent to the retailers is now reduced in value, but agency pricing remains (cheering everybody but Amazon), as does the ability of their customers to use iPads and iPhones to consume their content.

Some publishers will need to reconsider their strategies.

Because Amazon will only allow agency terms to the Big Six publishers (they have ways to offer a competitive 70% share of sales, but they won’t play ball with giving up control of pricing), because some publishers aren’t comfortable with the agency model, and because the iBookstore has not been as aggressive about sourcing content as their competitors (I don’t know this for sure, but it definitely feels like all of the other ebook players have much bigger teams chasing content than iBookstore does), there are publishers selling to the other players and not to Apple. I’d imagine those might be expecting a sudden drop in sales through iOS purchases, although they never actually knew how much of their sales were iOS purchases.

And this points out a big difference between the publishers and the retailers. The retailers know how much of their sales are coming through their app customers. They also know how much of the reading of their ebooks is done on iOS devices. Publishers have no idea. In the longer run, this shows how publishers can benefit if the new players they are creating — Anobii in the UK (who has told us they will share data with publishers) and Bookish in the US (which we have heard less directly will do the same) — get some market share and can provide visibility into consumption that publishers do not have now.

And that takes me back to the book business cork bobbing in the larger digital device stream. There was no ebook business to speak of until Amazon delivered the Kindle device, put massive muscle behind selling it, and used the ability they had then to sacrifice margin to create a powerful commercial proposition that was the catalyst to create the market. There was no serious competition for Amazon until Barnes & Noble’s new management delivered the Nook with an equally powerful commitment to establishing it, using their presence in stores to introduce ebook reading to new audiences and, with further innovation of the devices, contributing to the explosive growth of reading in digital formats.

There was no restraint on Amazon’s ability to use their deep pockets to discount publishers’ content in pursuit of their own market share growth until Apple’s new device, the iPad, created a whole new sales model that forced price stability in the marketplace and, at the same time, handed publishers a new capability to maximize revenue and to use price as a marketing tool.

There was no effective way to introduce book readers to the convenience of digital reading without the investment in a dedicated device until the iPad put the capability into millions of hands that didn’t know they wanted it.

There was no great motivation for ebook retailers to introduce interoperability across devices until many ebook device owners also became iPhone and iPad owners.

We note that all these changes in the marketplace were created by others, not by publishers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, or even a new thing. Publishers also didn’t spring for the investment that created superstores and then Amazon in the 1990s, all of which increased their sales. A publisher’s role is to use the channels that are available to get books into the hands of readers.

From most publishers’ perspectives, this change might have very little impact. Any iPad or iPhone reader who wants a book can still find and buy one. If the Apple store is strengthened at the expense of Kindle and Nook, that constitutes marketplace diversification that is good for them. (If the impact somehow fell disproportionately on Nook, though, that might not be.)

But the happy symbiosis between the ebook retailers and Apple, by which the retailers got access to customers they would not otherwise have had and Apple was able to readily deliver their customers content they hadn’t otherwise aggregated, appears to have come to an end. And the iBookstore, which had been fighting others for the scraps after Amazon took half or more of the US ebook market and B&N took much more than half the rest, is about to be a much more significant competitor.

Share this post

The end of Borders took place within a larger context.

I was in Italy for the IfBookThen conference last February when Borders’ impending bankruptcy was a rising expectation. Somebody in the audience asked me if I attributed Borders’ difficulties to ebooks. I said:

“When the flu hits town, the old and sick die first.”

Ebooks present an enormous challenge to brick-and-mortar stores. And the growth of ebooks over the past three years or so has been nothing short of astonishing, even to somebody like me who expected a more gradual rise to have started much sooner. (The IDPF chart which shows the growth in the market, sharing data actually collected by the AAP, has apparently not been updated for the past two quarters, but this gives you the idea.)

But the disruption to brick stores started before ebook sales were even visible with a microscope, more than a decade sooner, when bookstore customers started migrating to online buying. Ebooks just accelerated what had been a trend of traffic and sales erosion that had existed for quite some time.

Ed Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives has a nice account of some serious errors Borders made around the turn of the century. Replacing a book-experienced management with merchants from outside the book trade was the gateway mistake. Eliminating the local marketing function was one that probably came from it: the local differentiation and customization required for a successful bookstore is much greater than what is needed for pets or groceries and successive managements from outside the book trade wouldn’t have known or understood that.

Turning over ecommerce to Amazon showed a shocking lack of digital vision. It is often forgotten that Barnes & Noble once made half the same mistake: they originally owned their BN.com ecommerce capability jointly with Bertelsmann until they bought their partner out. And Barnes & Noble had obvious challenges reconciling their online business with their overall business until they brought in new management that clearly saw the online business as the future. That wasn’t until much later in the century’s first decade. The problem both chains probably saw is that the skill sets required to run a successful brick store chain didn’t apply to creating a digital business so they were nervous about investing too heavily in it. When the time came that it was obvious that they had to do so, Borders was too weak to recover and Barnes & Noble, despite a web operation that had serious flaws, at least had a platform and customer base to build on.

And they had strong cash flow from a healthy, well-managed in-store print book business.

The category management idea Borders tried to implement and which Nawotka documents was a fiasco in every way: poorly conceived, poorly executed, and an idea that, if it could work for the book business at all, would have to be selectively applied, not forced on every section of the store.

The reduced selection concept that was underlying category management suggests that perhaps Borders had an early and accurate read on the fact that the Internet had diminished the power of selection in a brick store as a magnet for customers. It is true, and it was true then, that the power of aggregation had shifted from offline to online. It is just impossible for any physical location to deliver the choice that an online bookstore can. Most people now know that if you want to choose from the widest possible selection of just about anything the the last thing to do is go to a store. And that’s particularly true of books, which you don’t have to smell or taste or try on for size.

In my opinion, the defect in Borders that led to their ultimate demise was “none of the above.” It was their supply chain, which for well over a decade has been an inefficient mess.

The irony is that when Borders started, inventory management was their signature strength. The Borders brothers developed a tracking-and-purchasing system which was state of the art at the time (the 1980s) and turned it into an expansion opportunity. It all worked so well that they were able to sell the chain to K-Mart, which already owned the mall store chain, Waldenbooks, in 1992. That was probably the beginning of their downfall.

Borders and Barnes & Noble were on parallel paths building out superstore chains, featuring bookstores that pulled over 100,000 titles together under one roof. Until Amazon arrived in 1995 and started gaining traction, this was a nearly-irresistible proposition to the heaviest book consumers. Both chains, fueled by Wall Street investment, grew their number of large stores quickly. The stores were free-standing destinations, not in large shopping malls.

But this is where the chains diverged. Barnes & Noble made a substantial investment in a supply chain infrastructure. They built what was effectively an internal wholesaling operation, putting backup supplies of the books their stores carried within one day’s delivery of most of their chain and within two day’s delivery of just about all of it. They built systems to set stocking levels and maintain them. My first client work at B&N was in the late 1990s when they were crawling with logistics experts to make inventory management rules and policies, but they were also smart enough to want some book inventory expertise from outside their company (not that they didn’t have plenty of it on their own payroll) to help with the planning as well.

Meanwhile, Borders was working on gimmicks like category management and their supply chain became increasingly bureaucratic and convoluted. They pushed books through a warehouse, but only to put stickers on them. This compounded the irony. In the 1970s, the B. Dalton chain that B&N owned had virtually invented computer-assisted inventory management based on stickers they put on the books carrying an SKU number. Walden, in the days before they were owned jointly with Borders, had leap-frogged Dalton in that regard by scanning the ISBN instead of needing a sticker. Now, 15 or 20 years later, B&N regained that same advantage over Borders. Borders suffered the delay and the cost of stickering new books as they came in and B&N didn’t have to.

But, much worse, Borders backlist ordering was haphazard (almost totally human-controlled, whereas B&N’s was largely automated) and infrequent. B&N literally ordered from many publishers every day; Borders was ordering from major publishers as infrequently as every six weeks.

When you order infrequently, you face two choices. You can be overstocked on many things or out of stock of many things. There is no other alternative.

The complications to inventory management posed by the granularity and diversity of book selection utterly defeated the non-book veterans that serially ran, or mis-ran, the company. The lack of a digital strategy compounded the problem, but the supply chain lunacy was the problem. The cost of inventory is the greatest variable expense of running a bookstore. If you don’t get value for your inventory dollars, your leases and your staff couldn’t save you, even if they were good.

What this means for publishers’ sales is a bit difficult to predict and will even be harder to discern. Sales this year have been skewed by the Borders inventory dump. Publishers’ editions elsewhere and the stores their books are in have been competing with liquidation sales. This depressing effect on other retailers’ business and, as a result, their willingness and ability to order from the publishers, will be coming to an end.

Publishers Lunch got together with Bowker a couple of months ago to ask questions of Borders customers to try to discern where the business would go. They have hard data to the extent that it is possible to develop it, having asked people how their purchases would be affected and where they would buy when their Borders was gone. Only 8% said they’d buy fewer books, although nearly 20% said they’d use the library more.

My own totally hunchy math, checked out in a rigorous conversation at dinner with a good friend who is a publisher, is that Borders constituted about 10% of a publisher’s business until very recently. My guess is that half that business goes to Barnes & Noble, most of the rest is split between online purchasing and independents (with online getting more, much of it in ebooks), and maybe 1% or so, or 10% of the old Borders business, will be “lost.”

Of course, the movement of sales from print in brick-and-mortar to print and ebook online will continue, so how much lift from this will actually be felt by chains, independents, and mass merchants is still up for grabs.

Share this post

Our Publishers Launch Conferences venture is doing two shows in Frankfurt: a full-day “eBooks Around the World” program on Monday, October 10 and our first conference dedicated to children’s book publishing, “Children’s Publishing Goes Digital”, which will be a half-day program on Tuesday, October 11. We’ve enlisted the capable help of Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International to program the children’s show. This post will talk about what I’ve been developing for the all-day Monday program.

There are other things going on, but there are two central themes for Monday: data and retail.

We are always focused on data about digital change because in this transitional time we’re in, none of us can get enough of it. Things are changing fast and if you haven’t looked at the thermometer in the past week or two, you probably don’t know the temperature. That’s even more true on a global scale, because global data is that much harder to get and track.

We are focused on retail because the list of “major accounts” for all publishers will be changing in the next few years. Global players will often (but not always) be replacing local ones as each publisher’s biggest intermediary customers. The ebooks marketplace in the US demonstrates how rapidly new channels can rise with the Kindle and Nook.

To begin the day at Frankfurt, we will have what we believe is the most comprehensive research report yet produced about the digital transition country-by-country and region-by-region. The Milan office of the global consulting firm, A.T. Kearney, working in conjunction with Italy’s Bookrepublic, will update and expand some substantial research they did at the end of last year. They presented their findings at the IfBookThen conference in Milan in February.

The Publishers Launch Conferences team — Michael Cader, Emily Williams, and I — have suggested some additional lines of inquiry around the intrusion of English and the expansion of the global players’ activity which we believe will enhance the already-robust research the Kearney team did before.

We’ll have a data presentation of a different sort from Jonathan Nowell of Nielsen, the company which both is the guardian of a worldwide bibliographic database and the operators of BookScan, which collects point-of-sale information around the globe. Jonathan is going to focus on how metadata affects sales and specifically how deficient metadata costs sales. The lessons here will be the ones everybody will take home and implement immediately. Nowell will point publishers to the metadata fixes which are absolutely necessary to avoid sales leakage.

The retail conversations and presentations will be sprinkled throughout the day.

We wanted to focus our audience on what we consider to be a remarkable story, the resurgence of Barnes & Noble in the digital realm since the introduction of the first Nook device 20 months ago. B&N’s success in using their brick-and-mortar presence to combat Amazon’s two year head start with the Kindle is a case history that retailers in every country in the world will want to examine carefully. That’s why we’re giving it close attention.

Theresa Horner, B&N’s VP for Digital Content and Patricia Arancibia, Manager, Digital Content, International, will join Michael Cader and me for a conversation about how they did it. They started out with a Nook that was pretty similar in price and features to the monochrome e-ink Kindle, but then they carved out their own device niche by offering Nook Color and a touchscreen version which, to this point, nobody else has matched. The color capability enabled B&N to expand their ebook product offering to include content, like magazines and children’s books, that wouldn’t work well on a Kindle or original Nook device.

But they also expanded their content base of non-English publications, building a Spanish-language store for their domestic US market that is more comprehensive than any other in the world!

All of this has propelled B&N to a spot where they are a significant challenger to Amazon’s ebook supremacy in the United States. There have been some recent indications that Nook devices may now be outselling Kindle devices, although not everybody agrees with that proposition.

Many countries have a dominant brick-and-mortar retailer that is contemplating an impending challenge from Amazon. Whether or not the B&N formula is replicable in other markets, perhaps by licensing the Nook or the Kobo reader or the new Google reader or another device, is still a fair question. The answer might be much clearer after the B&N section of our show.

But B&N has not (yet) announced any plans for a global presence. Four other ebook retailers that will grace our Frankfurt stage are declared global players.

David Naggar of Amazon.com will talk about what publishers around the world should do to best benefit from Amazon’s continuing global expansion. We know that Amazon will be a market leader in every country they enter. They are the biggest account for most US publishers today and they will be a top account soon for every publisher in the world if they aren’t already. Tips from their experience about what works best for publishers to increase their sales are useful to every publisher in every language. We had a presentation from Amazon at our Digital Book World show in New York last January which attendees all agreed was helpful and enlightening; we’re expecting the same at PLC Frankfurt.

Tom Turvey of Google will also have a lot to talk about at PLC Frankfurt. Google has just announced a Google ereading device and we keep hearing rumors (although not yet directly from them) that they will be pushing their ebook capabilities hard this Fall when a host of new tablet computers hit the market. Google’s program is the only one really built for participation by retailers and web sites everywhere and there has been a pretty widespread uptake by independent stores in the United States in the program’s opening months. If the biggest dominant chains in each country will want to pay close attention to what B&N has to say, the independent stores around the world, and the publishers that depend on them, will be paying close attention to what Google has to say.

Kobo just opened a store in Germany, following quickly on Amazon’s heels in the biggest single European market with a title base larger that is larger than Amazon’s and larger than the German aggregator, Libreka and with a special reader for the German language. They have said they’ll have stores opening in Spain, France, Italy, and Holland in the next few months. We’re working out the details with Kobo about what they’ll discuss in conversations early next month, but we know they’ll be on the program. Kobo has been distinguished among their competitors so far by their declared willingness to share sales data with publishers and, indeed, they have established a reputation for revealing things we didn’t know about the market at presentations they have made before. Kobo is the purest ebook play among the global competitors that have been in the market for some time; all the rest have other fish to fry.

But there’s a new entrant to global ebook retailing that, like Kobo, is (at least for now) purely about ebooks. That would be the UK-based start-up, Anobii.Their CEO, Matteo Berlucchi, will explain their very enticing proposition to enable crowd-sourced curation and taxonomy for books. On Anobii’s format-agnostic discovery-social platform, you’ll be able to follow a book, an author, a reader, or a topic, and you’ll be able to name your own topics. The basic functionality is supposed to go live in the next month or so and we believe our October conference will be a debut of sorts for what promises to be an entirely new approach to ebookselling. And publishers will be excited to hear that Anobii intends to share data with their vendors as well.

It could well be that the retailers we will have on the stage at PLC Frankfurt will be delivering half the sales or more for most of the world’s publishers in a few years, or perhaps even sooner than that.

Data and retail are our features, but there will be much more covered in the show.

Tracey Armstrong, the CEO of Copyright Clearance Center (which is, along with Perseus Constellation, one of our Global Sponsors) will talk about the importance of collective licensing to capture revenue that will otherwise be lost in a world where any fragment of any book might be a key component of somebody’s new app or web site.

A panel of agents will discuss the emerging new models in that segment of publishing’s value chain.

We’ll have what I think will be a very provocative panel of trade publishers who are benefiting from the fact that their company works in segments other than trade which made the digital transition sooner.

Octavio Kulesz did a pioneering study of the digital transition in the developing world that suggests that entirely new tactics will be called for if publishers are going to realize revenue from the masses who will read books on cell phones, but can’t afford to pay much.

Chris Bauerle, the Director of Sales for Sourcebooks, a mid-sized (or perhaps we should say small-major) US trade publisher, will explain their transition to a digital workflow, done a few years ago but paying off in big ways now that they want to use their content in new creative ways.

And Michael Cader and I will have a thing or two to say as well.

Share this post