Industry Events

Book publishing is still very much in a time of changing conditions and circumstances. There are a host of unknowables about the next several years that affect the shape of the industry and the strategies of all the players in it. But as publishers, retailers, libraries, and their ecosystem partners prepare for whatever is next, it becomes increasingly evident that — from the perspective of trade publishing at least — we have already lived through the biggest period of transition. It took place from sometime in 2007 through 2012.

At the beginning of 2007, there was no Kindle. By the end of 2011, there was no Borders. And by the end of 2012, five of America’s biggest publishers were defending themselves from the US Department of Justice. The arrival of Kindle and the exit of Borders are the two most earthshaking events in the recent history of book publishing and its ecosystem. The Justice Department suit first distracted and then ultimately strait-jacketed the big publishers so it was both difficult to focus and then difficult to react to further marketplace changes.

Paying close attention to what we then called “electronic publishing” started for me in the early 1990s, with a conference other consulting colleagues and I organized for Publishers Weekly which we called “Electronic Publishing and Rights”. This was before Amazon existed. It was when the big transition taking place was from diskettes to CD-Roms as the means of storage. And it was even before Windows, so the only device on which you could view on a screen anything that looked at all like a book was a Macintosh computer, which had literally a sliver of the market. The most interesting ebook predecessor was the Voyager Expanded Book, and it could only be used on a Mac.

In this speech I gave in 1995, I put my finger on the fact that online would change all this and that publishers shouldn’t spend too much energy on CD-Roms.

The period from then until when it was clear Kindle was establishing itself — the awareness that it was for real slowly dawned on people throughout the year 2008 — was one where the inevitability of some big digital change was generally acknowledged. But dealing with it was the province of specialists operating alongside the “real business” and largely performing experiments, or getting ready for the day when it might matter. There was a slow (and inexorable) shift from store-purchasing to online purchasing. And the online purchasing almost all went to Amazon. But even that wasn’t seen as particularly disruptive. Neither ebooks nor online purchasing called for drastic changes in the way publishers saw their business or deployed their resources.

The first important new device for books in 2007 didn’t start out as one at all. It was the iPhone, first released in June of that year. Although Palm Pilots were the ebook reader of choice for a big chunk of the then-tiny ebook community, they lacked connectivity. The iPhone was not seen as an ereader when it came out — indeed, Apple head Steve Jobs still believed at that point that ebooks were not a market worth pursuing — but they could, and did, rapidly become one when it was demonstrated that there was a market. And they vastly expanded the universe of people routinely paying for downloaded content, in this case music from the iTunes store.

Then Kindle launched in November of 2007. A still unannounced number of Kindles sold out in a few hours and Amazon remained out of stock of them for several months! Because the original Kindle was $399, it was only a “good deal” for the consumer who read many books on which they could save money by buying electronic. What this meant was that Kindle owners bought ebooks in numbers much greater than the relatively small number of devices placed would have suggested. Throughout 2008, the awareness dawned on the industry that ebooks were going to be a significant business.

And that awareness rapidly shook loose a raft of competition. Barnes & Noble saw that they had to compete in this arena and started a crash program to deliver the Nook, which first appeared almost precisely two years after the first Kindle, in November 2009. Months earlier, Amazon had released the app that put Kindle on the iPhone. Meanwhile, Jobs had become persuaded to take ebooks seriously, and, anyway, he had a store selling content downloads to devices like crazy. Now, about to launch his new tablet format, the iPad, he had what looked like the perfect vehicle with which to launch ebooks. The iPad and the iBookstore debuted in April 2010. A month later, Kobo entered the market as a low-priced alternative with their first device. And by the end of the year, Google reorganized and rebranded what had been Google Editions into Google eBooks. The original concept was that they would populate the readers that were using epub, which meant Nook and Kobo at that time.

All of this change within three calendar years — 2008 through 2010 — created a blizzard of strategic decisions for the publishers. Remember, before all this, ebooks were an afterthought. Amazon had applied pressure to get publishers into the Kindle launch in 2007. Before that, no publisher that I can recall made any effort to have ebooks available at the time a book was initially launched. There were workflow and production changes (XML FIRST!) being contemplated that would make doing both print and digital editions a less onerous task, but they were seldom fast-tracked and doing ebooks meant taking on and managing a book-by-book conversion project.

During the period when Amazon was pretty much alone in the game (the pre-Amazon market leaders, Sony and Palm, faded very quickly), they started pricing Kindle titles aggressively, even willing to take losses on each sale to promote device sales and the ecosystem. This alarmed publishers, who were seeing small Kindle sales grow at what were frightening rates and raising the spectre of undermining their hardcovers. It didn’t hurt that the retailers with whom they (still, then, though not now) did most of their business were also alarmed. Nook arrived and Barnes & Noble would never have been as comfortable as Amazon with selling these new products at a loss. But B&N also worried about the impact that cheap ebooks might have on more expensive print book sales. Amazon didn’t.

So when Apple proposed in late 2009 and early 2010 that there could be a new way to sell called “agency” which would put retail pricing power for ebooks into the publishers’ hands, it met a very receptive audience of publishers.

And that, in turn, led to the Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the big publishers which was instituted in April of 2012.

Coinciding with and enabled by all of this was the huge growth in author-initiated publishing. Amazon had bought CreateSpace, which gave them the ability to offer print-on-demand as well as Kindle ebooks. The combination meant that a huge audience could be reached through them without any help from anybody else. When agency happened (2010), they started to offer indie authors what amounted to agency terms: 70 percent of the selling price for ebooks. This was a multiple of the percentage an author would get through a publisher.

Agency pricing fell right into Amazon’s and the self-published hands. Getting 70 percent on the ebook, the indie author got $2.10 pricing at $2.99 and $2.80 pricing at $3.99, royalties comparable to what they’d get from full-priced print. Many bestselling indie ebooks were priced at $0.99. The very cheap ebooks indie authors would offer juxtaposed against the publisher’s agency up-priced (many at $14.99) and undiscounted branded books created a market opening that allowed the Kindle audience to sample (aside from the free chapter that is standard in ebooks) cheap ebook authors for peanuts. Suddenly, names nobody had heard before were on the map, selling millions of ebooks, and taking mindshare away from the industry’s output. And it also handed the publishers’ authors an alternative path to market that could only have the effect of improving their negotiating position with the publishers.

Meanwhile, Borders sent the most persuasive possible signal that the shift in sales from stores to online, accelerated by the ebook phenomenon, was really damaging. They went out of business in 2011. That took the account that sold upwards of 10 percent of most publishers’ books, and a far greater percentage of the bookstore shelf space for backlist, off the board. Or, viewed another way, publishers went from two national retailers who could place a big order and put books in front of the core book-buying audience to one.

So the authors’ negotiating position was stronger and so was Barnes & Noble’s.

And all of those events — the devices, the ebook surge, the introduction of the agency business model, and the Department of Justice suing most of the big publishers, a very noticeable rise in successful independent publishing, and the increased leverage of the trading partners with whom publishers negotiate their revenues and their costs — were head and body blows to the titans of the industry. Every one of them threatened the legacy practices and challenged the legacy organizations and resource allocations.

During this period, Random House (the number one publisher) merged with Penguin (the number two publisher) and created a super-publisher that is not far from being as big as the four remaining members of what were called “The Big Six” in 2007. If you are viewing the world from the perspective of HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, or Macmillan, that might have been the biggest development of all.

Compared to the sweeping changes of that era, what has happened since and what is likely to happen in the next couple of years is small beer. There are certainly clear trends that will change things markedly over time.

Amazon continues to grow its share, and they are around 50 percent of the business or more for many publishers these days.

Barnes & Noble is troubled but in no immediate jeopardy and is still, by far, the number one brick-and-mortar account for publishers. But the optimistic view is that their book sales will remain flat in the near future.

Independent bookselling continues to grow, but even with their growth since Borders went down, they are less than 10 percent of the sales for most publishers. It is true that ebook sales for publishers have flattened (we don’t know the overall trend for sure because we don’t really know the indie sales at Amazon, and they’re substantial) and don’t seem likely to grow their share against print anytime soon.

These things seem likely to be as true two years from now as they are now. Nothing felt that way in from 2008-2012.

Digital marketing, including social network presence, is an important frontier. The industry has a successful digital catalog, called Edelweiss, which has obviated the need for printed catalogs, a cost saving many publishers have captured. And another start-up, NetGalley (owned by Firebrand), has organized the reviewer segment of the industry so that publishers can get them digital advance copies of books, which is cheaper and much more efficient for everybody.

Owning and mining email lists is a new skill set that can pay off more each year. Pricing in digital seems to offer great opportunity for improved revenue, if its effects can be better understood. International sales of American-originated books are more accessible than they’ve ever been as the global network created by Ingram creates sales growth opportunities for just about every publisher. That should continue and requires new thinking and processes. Special, or non-traditional, markets increase in importance, abetted by digital marketing. That will continue as well.

Audio, which has been one of the big beneficiaries of digital downloading, will continue to grow too. The problem from the publishers’ perspective is that Audible, owned by Amazon, owns most of that market. So they have a sophisticated and unsentimental trading partner with a lot of leverage controlling a market segment that is probably taking share from print and ebooks.

And with all of this, what will also continue to grow is relentless margin pressure from the publishers’ two biggest accounts: Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

But the challenges of today aren’t about change of the magnitude that was being coped with in the period that ended five years ago. They’re more about improving workflows and processes, learning to use new tools, and integrating new people with new skill sets into the publishing business. And there are a lot of new people with relevant skills up and down the trade publishing organizations now. That wasn’t so much the case when things were changing the fastest, 2007-2012.

It isn’t that there aren’t still many of new things to work on, new opportunities to explore, or long-term decisions to make. But the editor today can sign a book and expect a publishing environment when it comes out in a year or two roughly like the one we have today. The editor in 2010 couldn’t feel that confidence. The marketer can plan something when the book first comes up for consideration and find the plan will still make sense six months later. And while things still very much in flux in sales, a blow comparable to the loss of Borders isn’t on the

Of course, there could always be a black swan about to announce itself.

This post explains why, among other reasons, I will no longer be programming the Digital Book World Conference, as I did for seven years starting with its debut in 2010. At its best, DBW anticipated the changes that were coming in the industry and gave its attendees practical ways to think about and cope with them. Future vision was a key perspective to programming although we always strived to give the audience things they could “take back to the office and use”.

It has been harder and harder over the past couple of years to find the big strategic questions the industry needed answers to. The writing was on the wall last year when most of the publishers I talked to felt confident they understood where books were going; they wanted to hear from other segments of the digital world. That was a sign to me that the educational mission I had in mind for DBW since I started it was no longer in demand.

To their credit, the DBW management, as I understand it, is trying a new vision for the show, more focused on the immediately practical and the hands-on challenges of today. I wish them the best of luck with it.

The mission of the Digital Book World conference is industry education around digital change. There is a plethora of programming for this year’s event that will serve that purpose particularly well for literary agents. Of all the people in the industry, it would seem to me that agents would get the fastest and surest “return on investment” for the time and expense of attending DBW.

At the top of the “definitely not to be missed” list for agents are two items: the main stage presentation and breakout Q&A by Data Guy, the stats guru of Hugh Howey’s “Author Earnings” website, and the panel discussion called “Finding Common Ground: How publishers and authors — regardless of what path they’re taking — are working together”.

Really necessary knowledge will also be delivered by Michael Cader, immediately preceeding Data Guy’s appearance, when he reviews the sources of industry data and clarifies what can realistically be discerned from them and what can’t. One more set of information no informed agent can be without will come from Rand Fishkin, the founder, former CEO, and Wizard of Moz, who knows more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and explains it better than anybody on the planet. Understanding SEO today is as important for everybody in our business as understanding “advance sale” or “coop advertising” was in years past.

And, speaking of “coop advertising”, DBW will also feature an appearance by Fred Argir, the new Chief Digital Officer at Barnes & Noble. In a conversation with me, he will be laying out some insights from the biggest bookstore chain on new ways they might collaborate on marketing with publishers in the future.

The Author Earnings website scrapes and interprets Amazon data, breaking down Amazon bestsellers by publisher type: Big Five, indie authors, and others. Then AE goes further, trying to calculate what share of the revenue went to authors. Recent enhancements to AE’s data collection have improved the precision of their sales and income estimates. They’re showing steady market share gains by indie authors with their lower-priced books, particularly since in their new contracts the publishers have “succeeded” in preventing discounting from their agency prices.

Any agent trying to advise an author curious about or tempted by self-publishing really must know what Data Guy is up to. This will be DG’s first public presentation. His breakout Q&A will be moderated by Michael Cader, so the most knowledgeable industry perspective will be present as DG delivers his compelling alternative view of our sales universe.

The “Common Ground” panel explores the new reality that author efforts constitute a critical component of all book marketing today. Jane Friedman, the leading indie author Sherpa in our business, will moderate a panel of two agents and two editors with extensive experience working with authors who have published both indie and through houses. Jane Dystel of Dystel & Goderich and Julie Trelstad of Writers House are the agents; Johanna Castillo of Atria (S&S) and Jaime Levine of Diversion Books are the publishers. These five people will draw on recent experience with dozens of authors to help us understand the current state-of-the-art for author and publisher collaboration around marketing.

The challenge of “discovery” or helping readers find their “next book” has been moving up the industry agenda since Digital Book World started in 2010. Rand Fishkin of Moz will be focusing on “choosing the right web marketing channels for your book”. Agents who might previously have pushed for an ad in New York Times Book Review or a 5-city author tour need to understand what is the most effective use of support dollars today. Fishkin’s talk is also expected to provoke a lot of questions so he, like Data Guy, will have a breakout session that will allow attendees to get him to address their personal cases.

There are two other whole categories of information agents need to know about that are big components of our DBW program.

The four additional sessions on marketing could also be considered “can’t miss” for the agent keeping up with the digitally-affected ecosystem: one on ebook pricing; one on tracking “the book buyer’s journey” from discovery to purchase; a third on inbound and content marketing; and a fourth on email marketing. Since authors are critical players on the content marketing front and many also possess substantial email lists , it’s obvious that any agent would benefit from these!

(And on the day before DBW officially opens, when we have a full slate of other programming including our Publishers Launch Kids conference, we have four “Mostly Marketing Masterclasses” — on SEO, audience research, managing paid digital media, and sales data analysis — which are a separate ticket but also worth considering for any agent that wants to do a deep dive into modern book marketing.)

The other big category is understanding the larger ecosystem in which publishing exists, mostly shaped by the biggest tech companies. For the past 20 years, publishing has been increasingly dependent on and has given up a great deal of control to the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Those “Four Horsemen” are the ongoing focus of NYU Stern School of Business Professor Scott Galloway, who will describe them and their strategies in a Main Stage talk. Two speakers with a skeptical view of tech’s impact on publishing economics are Jon Taplin of USC’s Annenberg School and anti-trust attorney Jonathan Kanter. Taplin will lay out his theory about how Silicon Valley has steadily devalued content in favor of tech and what the content industry can do to fight back. And Kanter will explore the near-term possibilities for anti-trust activity that could loosen the grip those companies, each bigger than the whole book industry, have on our ecosystem. In the same vein, Jessica Saenger of Germany’s Boersenverein will update us about anti-monopoly activity taking place in Europe that could affect those companies and, since every US company and author gets real revenue from Europe, is important to all of us.

There’s tons more: the company transformation talks (eight of them); author Virginia Heffernan on how the Internet is changing culture as well as how we buy and consume content; a session on sales reporting and analytics chaired by Hachette’s former CMO, Evan Schnittman. And what is actually a core topic for them, every agent needs to hear the panel discussing potential changes to copyright law being chaired by Roy Kaufman of Copyright Clearance Center.

It seems pretty certain that the agent who attends Digital Book World will be better prepared to do the jobs of advising authors about marketing and business, as well as negotiating their deals, than the agent who doesn’t.

There are some days that the news I see just makes me feel so good about the programming we’re doing for this year’s Digital Book World. One of those days was earlier this week when the news pointed directly to three items on our program.

As I wrote in the last post, we have an entire unit on “company transformation”, headlined by John Ingram of Ingram Content Group and Mary Ann Naples of Rodale presenting on the main stage. The six other companies are in three pairs for break-out sessions, structured specifically to allow questions from the audience. One pairing is Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks and Marcus Leaver of Quarto. Both of those companies made real news yesterday that is relevant to their transformation.

Quarto just announced the acquisition of Harvard Common Press. In the announcement, Quarto’s US president and CEO Ken Fund noted that the acquisition delivered Quarto 25,000 recipes. Why would they be mentioning that? Because the transforming Quarto uses its database of recipes both as part of its QuartoKnows information repository and to add power to its This Is Your Cookbook custom cookbook creation service. Quarto’s transformation has already created a situation where the components of books have value in addition to what is delivered by sales of the book in its published form.

Sourcebooks’s news also comes from its custom book creation capability, Put Me In the Story. The publisher just announced collaboration with Barnes & Noble by which those customized children’s books will be offered at 200 B&N stores. PMITS, which licenses big brand children’s books from across the industry for its unique customization engine, has already been a significant contributor to the company’s bottom line. This partnership, which will fuel discovery and awareness as well as sales, should supercharge the growth.

We also are excited to be featuring Fred Argir, the new Chief Digital Officer of Barnes & Noble, for a main-stage conversation, so this is timely news from that perspective as well.

And, finally, yesterday a story hit my radar that is a couple of weeks old but ties right in to a panel discussion we’ve been organizing for months on “Women at the Intersection of Publishing, Technology, and Finance”. The study it references, called “Elephant in the Valley”, contains some pretty shocking statistics about what the tech world is like for women. Our awareness that this was an important subject for discussion had been piqued by the controversy last Fall when the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) first announced a panel to discuss sexual harrassment in the gaming world, then cancelled it because of…harrassment of and physical threats against the prospective speakers! An immediate protest followed, including some big companies announcing they would boycott SXSW unless they corrected their error. That did it. They rescheduled the panel.

We have always been among those who believed that publishing is a female-friendly environment, but we know that women in publishing have to interact with the tech and finance worlds. So we put together a panel to discuss how the world looks to publishing women interacting with reputedly less-female-friendly industries. Chaired by Charlotte Abbott of Abbott Communications, the discussing group will be Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks, Susan Ruszala of NetGalley, Joanna Stone Herman of investment bankers DeSilva + Phillips, and Katherine McCahill of Penguin Random House. “Elephant in the Valley” certainly provides plenty of grist for that panel’s mill.

It is always a challenge to put together a program that discusses the future of publishing and tech some months in advance. It is really bolstering to see pieces put into place many weeks ago of such current interest as we count down the last 30 days before the event.

******************

And since I’m posting today, I have a word or two on this.

A Wall Street Journal story has propelled a rumor that Amazon will open 400 or more stores in malls into industry discussion. Nobody really knows whether it is true and, as I write this, Amazon has not commented for the record.

If it is true, then I certainly am guilty of one wrong prediction. When Amazon opened their store in Seattle last year I figured it to be a one-off and a learning experience for them. I have always thought they’d steer clear of bricks-and-mortar for many reasons. One of those reasons, which made more sense when they were much smaller than they are now, is that their stock valuation was based on the fact that they are in future-oriented businesses, not stuck with the pre-internet limitations and cost structures of physical stores.

But, on the other hand, the network of distribution centers they have built could also be a great asset for a retail network. The WSJ story has spawned a subsequent explanation, or rumor, that they’re planning lots of stores, not just bookstores.

You don’t have to think too hard to come up with disruptive things Amazon could do if they made this move. Heres one example. They have a print-on-demand capability. They try hard to get publishers to give them files for that so that they don’t have to rely on publisher supply from press runs. Publishers are highly resistant to that idea, which is understandable. They figure that if Amazon can print their own, they won’t buy from the press run. That reduces the runs and makes all their other business less efficient, as well as probably costing them margin on their Amazon sales.

But think about the implications of POD if Amazon has stores. POD books have never been intended for bookstore shelves. They are in a repository to be manufactured “on demand”. They are often non-returnable because publishers don’t want to pay the (higher) POD unit costs and face returns as well.

But what if Amazon said “make your books available for our POD and we are more likely to put them on our shelves”? Why would they do that? Because the “cost” of that inventory would be a lot less than the wholesale price; it would be their print cost.

That would be a truly disruptive rock if they threw it into the publishing ecosystem pool. It isn’t a reason for them to open up stores, but it would surely be a benefit they could capitalize on if they did. With their infrastructure and resources, Amazon almost certainly could open “profitable” retail stores that would put pressure on other retailers and their suppliers. Whether they’ll see that as an opportunity worth pursuing is what we’re going to find out.

There’s an early-bird pricing deadline for Digital Book World coming up at the end of the day Monday, February 8. For the best discount, use the Publishers Lunch code: LUNCH. The 7th DBW program looks at the Four Horsemen (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google), company transformation, and modern marketing in great depth. And we’re really proud of our Mostly Marketing Masterclasses, running alongside our Publishers Launch Kids conference on Monday, March 7, the day before the “official” DBW. Check out the whole program on the DBW website.

Company transformation is a major theme at this year’s Digital Book World conference. By “transformation” we mean substantial changes in a company’s business model or core competencies or revenue streams. We found eight worthy companies to speak on this subject. Six of them — Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Ingram, Quarto, Rodale, Sourcebooks, and Wiley — are long-established players in the book business that have changed considerably in some fundamental ways compared to what they were and did ten years ago. Two of them — NetGalley and Diversion Books — started relatively recently to bring digital innovation to the publishing business and have moved considerably beyond their original goals and business models.

What got us started on this whole line of thinking was an article in the Nashville Tennessean last summer about Ingram. It documented what has been a pretty massive transformation over the past two decades from a company that was a traditional book wholesaler to one that has a big technology component providing a variety of services to the global publishing industry.

As Chairman and CEO John Ingram will discuss in detail with me on the stage at DBW, the changes we see today at Ingram really date from the creation of Lightning Print in 1997. The idea of “print on demand” — manufacturing a single copy of a book to order — became extraordinarily powerful when it was incorporated into the supply chain through the global supplier with the biggest network of bookstores and libraries. Ingram could put the book they manufactured this afternoon on an even footing with those titles for which they stocked inventory from publishers. At first this was just for paperbacks with pretty strict limitations on trim size and bulk. As time went by, Lightning improved the technology to deliver much higher quality, color, and hardcovers.

The ebook revolution dawned at about the same time as Lightning began. It didn’t take long for the repository of digital files Ingram held to become an even more valuable asset. It is now called CoreSource, and it drives both POD and ebook distribution.

But, in fact, Ingram had transformed, and transformed the industry, once before. That happened in the 1970s, right about the time I started working full-time in the trade book business. And it is a story that everybody trying to understand today’s transformation would appreciate and learn from.

I had forgotten until I searched that I had written about this before, nearly seven years ago when this blog was brand spanking new. Here’s an edited version of the story as I told it then.

***********************

Before the early 1970s, wholesalers to the trade were local and carried a relatively small number of titles. Their main job was to provide back-up stock of bestsellers very quickly. Most bookstores went directly to the publishers for just about everything else. Baker & Taylor was national, but focused on the library market. And Ingram (which was Tennessee Book Company until the Ingram family bought them) was a small and pretty insignificant player. Harry Hoffman was their president.

Most of those local wholesalers to the trade actually leaned on other business for most of their volume: school supply, library supply, or mass-market books and magazines. They looked to the trade book business for multiple copy sales of a handful of titles that were hot.

The wholesalers’ challenge was that they couldn’t carry everything, and for anything except the top titles, there was no assurance of any demand.

And that created the retailers’ challenge. Most of what they ordered from a wholesaler wouldn’t get delivered. The “fill rate” (percentage of what’s ordered that is delivered) was terrible. On average, it was well below 50%.

The flip side of this was bad for the wholesalers. Most of the orders they got from stores couldn’t be filled, but still required some level of processing and communication to tell their customers what they wouldn’t get. So, cumulatively, they spent a lot of money on the orders they couldn’t make a nickel on.

And here was everybody’s shared challenge: all of this took a lot of time and effort that was unproductive and didn’t get books back on the shelves.

One day in about 1972, a former colleague of Hoffman’s from his tenure at Bell & Howell stopped by to visit and showed the Ingram team a new gadget called a microfiche reader. The reader enabled one to see what was on a piece of film that was about 3 inches by 5 inches and was literally packed with information. What somebody saw in that meeting (and Michael Zibart, a longtime friend of ours who did the buying at Ingram then and is now owner and publisher of BookPage, thinks it was Hoffman himself) was that Ingram could put the inventory count for every book it stocked on a single microfiche. So if somehow the stores could have a reader, they could get the inventory of Ingram’s books mailed to them each week.

(Yes: mailed! Isn’t it amazing how klunky life was before email and the web?)

If stores could see what books were actually there, they’d stop ordering books Ingram didn’t have. And they’d know, with reasonable certainty, what they were going to get when they placed an order. And the very good news for Ingram was that they would no longer have to process orders they couldn’t fill.

The challenge for Ingram was to get the microfiche readers Bell & Howell made, which were not inexpensive, into the stores’ hands. They decided to do that by renting them, asking the stores to pay a monthly fee (memory says it was $10 a month) to have them. So they went to the ABA Convention (American Booksellers Association, which sold the convention to Reed Exhibitions in the 1990s and which Reed turned into BEA) in Los Angeles in 1973 to peddle the readers. They had no idea what reaction they’d get.

It turned out to be overwhelmingly positive. The stores, many of which didn’t yet know Ingram, were enthusiastic about the concept and willing to pay to rent the reader. Ingram was able to charge the publishers for the cost of creating the microfiche (I think that started at $1 per month per title listed). So they created self-liquidating efficiencies which immediately supercharged their fill rate (into the 90s), boosted their volume and customer base, and eliminated lots of waste: the money they spent processing orders they couldn’t fill. As a bonus, Ingram was able to put their unique title number, which they needed to fill an order, on the microfiche so the stores did the “coding” for them, writing those numbers on orders that they sent in by mail. (We didn’t even have faxes yet.) More costs eliminated.

Within a year or two, Ingram was the first really powerful national trade wholesaler. Baker & Taylor, national but much more library-focused, copied the microfiche innovation later in the 1970s. Stores were able to stock backlist much more efficiently because they could single-source multiple publishers and order with much greater frequency.

This was really a transformation story before we thought about companies changing in this way. But it wasn’t just a company that changed that time, it was the whole industry. And it probably was changed more by the microfiche and the growth of effective wholesaling than by any other single thing that happened after that until…Lightning Print.

Two worthy extensions of this piece. John Ingram did a nice little interview with Daniel Berkowitz at the Digital Book World blog.

And my good friend Joe Esposito published a piece about a year ago citing the Ingram microfiche innovation for the significant milestone that it was. Esposito made the further point that what Ingram did for the industry was subsequently what Jeff Bezos did with Amazon for the consumer. That is, of course, particularly ironic, since it was Ingram’s inventory and rapid fulfillment capabilities that Bezos used to get Amazon started.

(Note to my readers. This longer-than-usual post is really two. The first half is a recital of what I believe is very relevant history. The second half is about how things are now. Although I am personally fascinated by the historical context, if you get bored with the history, the bolded text below marks the spot you can skip down to to get to “today”.)

Book publishing has always adapted to an environment shaped by larger forces. That hasn’t changed.

Andrew Carnegie provided a big lift early in the 20th century when he financed a lot of libraries, taking books and reading into every corner of the country. In the 1930s, publishers led by Putnam and Simon & Schuster made “returns” a part of the commercial equation between publishers and bookstores because the depression was making stores especially wary of taking on inventory.

After World War II, the mass-market paperback revolution was made possible by a network of magazine wholesalers (also called “IDs”, or “independent distributors”) who could push product out to hundreds of thousands of points of purchase.

In the 1960s, shopping center development boomed. The mall developers wanted “bankable” entities to sign up for their stores before the projects were built. Banks providing mortgage cash liked national brand names for that purpose better than unknown local entrepreneurs. That fact spawned the mall chains, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, which each grew into the hundreds of stores by the 1970s. All those new stores opening created pipelines for publishers to fill that made the book business grow even faster.

Then in the late 1980s, Wall Street believed the destination superstore was a good bet and happily financed Borders (which bought Walden) and Barnes & Noble (which bought Dalton) to build out the 100,000+-title store model. This again created huge pipelines for publishers to fill and, unlike the situation when 25,000-title mall stores were proliferating, the orders to fill them went deep into publishers’ backlists.

All of this 20th century growth fit a similar model for publishers, leaning on booksellers to present their books to the public and to manage the inventory in an ever-expanding number of bookshops. So publishers continued to focus on business-to-business marketing, honing their expertise at positioning their titles for reviewers, bookstore buyers, and library collection developers but only occasionally addressing the public, or any segment of any book’s consumer audience, directly. And they continued to focus their sales efforts on persuading stores to make commitments to their books. The ability to get “buys” from the booksellers really drove marketing and revenue.

Then in 1995, Amazon arrived and changed the game in many ways. And we can see in retrospect that the birth of Amazon heralded an even bigger change in the commercial context for publishers. Amazon’s arrival began an era which is now in full flower, where the environment for book publishers is largely influenced by major tech companies for which publishing is a hardly-noticed activity even though their impact on the world of publishing is profound. Although there are certainly others who figure in, the environment today for marketing and delivering books is shaped by what Professor Scott Galloway of NYU Stern School of Business calls “The Four Horsemen”: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

Amazon, like booksellers before them, handled the direct relationship with consumers and evolved, after an early period of depending on Ingram for their stock, to staging the inventory to serve them. It pretty quickly became apparent that they were much more disruptive than prior innovators in many ways. Among them:

Amazon operated in an environment without geographical constraints; their sales weren’t constrained by local boundaries like the physical bookstores. They could effectively provide service to customers from anywhere. So even in the beginning, when they were taking such small share away from each of the existing market players that they hardly noticed it, Amazon was building a substantial customer base for itself.

Pretty early in the game, Amazon persuaded Wall Street that it was “different” and didn’t ultimately have to make its fortune selling books. Books were just the key to the first step: customer acquisition. The profits would come from subsequent steps: selling those customers other things (and — the more sophisticated part — selling the infrastructure it was creating at scale). Once the investment community was on board to finance that strategy, Amazon was liberated to price-compete in a way that, it is clear in retrospect, no book-centric retailer could keep up with.

The number of shipping points for Amazon, which have recently proliferated and is now in the dozens at least, grew slowly, so Amazon was inherently more “efficient” with its purchases than bookstores could possibly be. Each book shipped to them had a much bigger sales base than it would in a single store and therefore also had a much lower chance of being returned. At the same time, as they took sales away from brick-and-mortar stores, returns from that side of the business tended to go up, at first because the publishers’ sales forecasting was unconsciously working with a diminishing base, and then later because moving to fewer titles in stock became part of the solution to reduced sales and returns were part of how they got there.

The book-buying public adjusted very quickly to Amazon. For several decades leading to the 1990s, publishers and bookstores had learned that a massive in-store selection was a powerful magnet to draw customers. The choice of books has always been so granular that it is virtually impossible for any retailer to stock everything a customer might want. Jeff Bezos knew and understood that, and he had the vision to understand how an online retailer could benefit from the impossible challenge a brick-and-mortar bookstore faced.

Amazon used a Baker & Taylor database that hadn’t been “cleaned”, so it had a lot of out-of-print books in it. Amazon turned that into a benefit for their customers, because it gave Amazon a platform to tell a searcher that the book they wanted was no longer available if that were the case. (If you just don’t find your book when you search, you would be inclined to look again elsewhere. But if you find it and are told it is out of print, you would perhaps look for a substitute.) Combining that with rigorous “promise dates” telling customers when their books would arrive progressively lured, and then satisfied, more and more book buyers. The less likely the buyers thought it would be that they’d find a book in a store, the more likely it would be they’d just order it from Amazon. In a story we’ve told on this blog before, we learned on a consulting assignment with Barnes & Noble in the first couple of years of this century how dramatically the buying habits of academics had shifted away from store-shopping to buying from Amazon.

By the end of the first decade of this century, the future had arrived with a vengeance. Amazon dominated the rapidly-growing ebook business, driving the publishers into an embrace with Apple (one “Horseman” come to save them from another) that brought them into conflict with the Department of Justice. And then Borders, one of the two dominant national bookstore chains and proprietors of more than four hundred 100,000-title stores nationwide, shut down, taking a big double-digit percentage of the nation’s bookstore shelf space with them.

The collapse of Borders had an impact on the publishers’ ecosystem comparable to what the effect will be on sea levels when the Greenland or West Antarctica ice sheets break off: a sudden surge of change reflecting a long-term trend. As Hemingway wrote about the way things often happen: “gradually, then suddenly”.

And this brings us to the world we live in today. Like a frog in gradually heated water, many of us have lived through the change so we may think we’re more adjusted to it than we actually are.

Publishers now live in a world where more than half the sales for most of them — the exceptions are those who are heavily into illustrated books and children’s books — occur online through varying combinations of print and ebooks. Their two biggest accounts — Amazon for online sales and Barnes & Noble for stores — each reign supreme for their channel of the business. (And although Amazon has opened a store and Barnes & Noble has an online sales capability, they are likely to remain the leading player where they are now and much less important in the other channel.) Because they’re so important, they can be increasingly aggressive in how much margin they insist on as discount from the publishers’ price and various merchandising fees.

When bookstores were the distribution path for books, they were also the primary avenue for “discovery”. That was what the big store was about. People could browse it and find things they had no idea existed that they wanted to buy. But, as we all know, “discovery” now is largely an online thing, driven by some magical combination of “search engine optimization”, social media promotion and word-of-mouth, and online retailer merchandising.

So the model that has served publishers for a century, putting out books through a network of stores that both draw in the public and contextually position the books for them (in topical “sections” and some featured placements like windows or front tables), has been seriously eroded. What has replaced big parts of it are online purchases of books “discovered” through a variety of mostly online channels. And that’s where the Four Horsemen become so prominent.

Amazon and Apple are, along with Barnes & Noble, where most of publishers’ sales will take place. Each retailer does its own merchandising, of course. All of them will undoubtedly be increasing the variety and sophistication of its offerings, but will also have different rules and algorithms influencing how they respond to descriptive copy and metadata triggers the publishers will be providing. Understanding how this all this works at Amazon and Apple as well as publishers always did with Barnes & Noble and other brick-and-mortar retailers is a clear agenda item for all publishers. And they get it.

What some are still learning is “the fallacy of last click attribution”. (This is one of the more important nuggets of knowledge I’ve picked up in the past couple of years from my partner, Peter McCarthy, as we’ve been building our Logical Marketing business.) In a nutshell, that means that where somebody buys something is not necessarily where they made the buying decision. If you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber getting free shipping on your books, you go to Amazon to buy regardless of where you learned about the book. And that’s why all four horsemen are so important.

Although Google is also a retailer, a much less potent one than Amazon or Apple, Google’s importance is that it dominates search. And despite the penetration of apps on both the iOS and Android platforms (more everybody needs to understand about Apple and Google), search is still the primary way almost everybody looks for things. Google still has in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 percent of search activity (even though Microsoft’s Bing now powers AOL and Yahoo search). Many of the sales transacted on Amazon and Apple are made because of search results delivered by Google. According to the latest SimilarWeb numbers, approximately 25% of Amazon’s traffic originates as a Google search. One quarter. And Amazon is one of Google’s very largest advertisers.

Google also has an enormous impact on an author’s ability to be part of the merchandising process. Google Plus hasn’t turned out to be much of a social interaction platform, but an author’s profile there can have a big impact on how the author and his/her books rank for search. This has long been true but is not, even now, universally appreciated.

In short, Google Plus author pages are nearly as important as Amazon author pages, a fact totally independent of the traffic either of them gets.

Facebook is the only one of the Four Horsemen that doesn’t (for now, anyway) actually function as a retailer at all, but Facebook is increasingly important to book marketing. Something north of two billion people use Facebook, a billion of them every day. Nineteen percent of the world is on Facebook; forty percent of Internet users. More and more time is spent there by more and more people.

As anybody who uses it knows, Facebook makes it incredibly simple to share content or links. More and more authors and publishers are learning how to use Facebook as a marketing and advertising tool. Everybody’s there. Rule #1 of marketing: fish where the fish are.

So the transactions take place primarily at Amazon, often at Barnes & Noble (still) and Apple, and occasionally at Google. But the drivers to the transactions are Google and Facebook. (And others, of course, but none approaching the importance of those two.) How successfully publishers will sell books in the future will largely depend on how well they master the opportunities presented by Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.

One of the big new opportunities, beyond the scope of this piece to cover in detail but very much part of the new operating environment, is “nearly effortless global” sales. All of the Four Horsemen reach every corner of the planet. The structural barrier there is that the responsible sales operators haven’t historically had to think about many different global sales opportunities.

Another is to make better synergistic use of author relationships. What authors do on Facebook and Google Plus (and a host of other social networks) needs to become part of the publisher’s overall picture of the book and its marketing. And the structural barrier there is that the editor is too often forced to be the conduit for this coordination, a task for which they are neither prepared nor supported.

Operating through and with these behemoth companies is a big challenge for our industry. David Young, who just retired from Hachette UK, shared an observation with me when he was CEO of Hachette US a few years ago. The CEO of a big publisher in the past could always get the CEO of his or her biggest accounts on the phone if necessary. That was no longer true eight years or so ago when he made the observation, talking about Amazon. (And talking about Amazon a few years before Hachette and Amazon had a very public dispute that hurt Hachette sales very badly.)

There are two legacy accounts for publishers that remain critical to their future: Barnes & Noble, the industry’s one omni-channel wholesaler, and Ingram, which began as a book wholesaler but which has morphed into a service provider helping publishers with all sorts of modern challenges, including global distribution, print-on-demand, and now, with the acquisition of Aer.io, the ability to promote and sell through new technology Ingram and Aer.io offer. Ingram, unlike any of the other players, is helping smaller publishers with tools to enable them to punch above their weight. That is likely to be a growth proposition in the years to come.

But B&N and Ingram, just like all the publishers, will have to understand the strategies and activities of the four big companies driving change and creating a new ecosystem for the book business. They’ll also have to do it without a direct line to their CEOs. But, then, not very many publishers were able to get Andrew Carnegie on the phone 100 years ago either.

Digital Book World 2016 has a lot of programming addressing the issues raised in this piece. Professor Scott Galloway will talk about the Four Horsemen. Professor Jon Taplin of USC will analyze how revenue has moved from content creators to tech companies and suggest some ways some if it might be clawed back. Rand Fishkin, founder, former CEO (and now Wizard) of Moz and perhaps the most knowledgeable person in the world about search, will offer the latest insights into how search is being affected by “local” and “mobile” and then have a session to take questions.

Virginia Heffernan, author of Magic & Loss will discuss the cultural and economic impacts of the digital age for content creators.  Antitrust attorney Jonathan Kanter  will look at the relationships among book publishers, major technology players, and consumers from a competitive and regulatory perspective

Roy Kaufman of Copyright Clearance Center will moderate a panel talking about changes in copyright law, something also driven by big players affecting the publishers’ commercial environment. And we have a slew of presentations about companies “transforming” — changing how they do business in fundamental ways while maintaining the revenues that sustain them. That will include a presentation from Ingram Chairman and CEO John Ingram. And Barnes & Noble’s new Chief Digital Officer, Fred Argir, will talk about how they are building out an “omni-channel” strategy and what they can offer publishers in the way of improved digital discovery.

And there will be panel discussions of both the issues we identified as publishing opportunities: global sales and marketing collaboration with authors.

DBW 2016 takes place in New York March 7-9, 2016.

The challenge for the book business for the past decade has been rapid and less-than-predictable changes in the ecosystem because of digital. There are two underlying shifts that fundamentally alter the ecosystem: people substituting ebook consumption for print book consumption and people substituting online purchase of printed books for buying them in stores.

These two shifts, and a host of corollaries around product type, product creation, and marketing, are what people come to Digital Book World to be enlightened about and to discuss. Our job for the past seven years has been planning the program and booking all the speakers for that 3-day conference. The whole process takes months; there are about 35 or 40 discrete “sessions” and as many as 150 speakers and moderators involved.

Creating a timely and relevant program when we’re leading the target by several months — deciding on topics and recruiting speakers starting now for an event that will take place March 7-9, 2016 — is a challenge. More perspectives on the task add real value; we structure things so we can get a lot of help. We recruit a “Conference Council” — volunteers from publishing companies and their service providers and trading partners — to help advise me in shaping the event. This year we’re going to broaden the outreach for opinions about this and anybody reading this blog can be involved.

Here are the main topic headings we’re considering with a brief description of what we see as the current issues around each. The Survey linked to again at the end of this post allows you to express yourself on how important you think each topic will be to the publishing community next March when we hold the conference.

1. Data. This is a wide-ranging topic. We look for original data about what’s going on in the ecosystem wherever we can find it and we have done sessions in the past (and could again) about “Big Data” and what publishers need to understand about it. With pricing of ebooks becoming an increasingly important financial consideration for publishers and data being such a crucial component of doing that well, this is bound to remain a top-of-mind subject.

2. Global. Publishers used to be pretty much limited to their home market for marketing and sales. That’s why there is a robust international business in territorial and language rights. In the digital world, that limitation is not nearly as confining. US and UK publishers are learning there are big markets for their books all over the world, and global ebook distribution and print-on-demand make it possible for them to work those markets far more effectively than ever before from their offices, wherever they are.

3 Marketing and discovery. This is the topic that cuts across books regardless of topic or format. For fiction or art books or anything in between, whether delivered in print or as ebooks, publishers are embarked on a long journey of learning about how discovery and SEO works in the most complicated consumer product marketplace imaginable. There are a variety of topics that we entertain under this heading and, you could tell from my own checklist in my last post, I could probably build the whole conference around discovery and figure the audience was getting a large percentage of what is most important.

4. Authors and self-publishing. Authors didn’t used to have much alternative to publishers; now they do. As a result, authors have developed marketing capabilities and support services have grown up to help them. This all raises a host of issues for publishers. They have to learn how to capitalize effectively on what authors can do on their own, but they also need to provide great marketing support to authors and be seen as collaborative and as adding real marketing value.

5. M&A and investment. Most publishers, and all big publishers, are looking to acquiring smaller publishers with complementary lists (and, of course, there are different ideas about what that means). And there are a host of start-ups with capabilities publishers want to see available which are also tempting investments. Quite aside from publishing, we live in a moment with a lot of investment capital available for start-ups and acquisition and publishers certainly need to stay aware of investment flows.

6. Is the book morphing into something else? With each new cycle of Moore’s law and each new delivery mechanism — whether hardware or platform — the question of what the “product” should be gets called for reconsideration again. The history of ebooks has been commercially discouraging for those who want see the book concept rethought from the ground up, but the topic never dies and never will as long as capabilities to present stories and information and to interact with content in new ways are put in front of publishers.

7. Managing and exploiting rights. The rights marketplace for books has changed dramatically in the past two decades. In the 20th century, book clubs and paperbacks were the big-revenue rights opportunities, with serialization to print periodicals also very important. Those markets are all dramatically diminished and the rights action today mostly is about foreign languages and territories. Now, even those rights are being rethought as we see the beginings of publishers thinking about controlling multiple languages for the books they acquire themselves.

8. Agents and editors, how they relate in a mutually-supportive way. They share ownership of each author’s personal loyalty, they both might shape the book editorially, and they both will hear the author’s career ambitions and influence him or her about self-publishing and their publishers’ efforts. If publishers are going to start collaborating meaningfully with authors about marketing, that suggests agents and editors are going to be working together differently.

9. Libraries. Aside from being important customers for publishers, libraries are increasingly being seen as a venue for discovery and perhaps even for book retailing. Whatever they will be in the future, it is likely their role will be different than what Andrew Carnegie envisioned a century ago.

10. Bookstores. Since the collapse of Borders, Barnes & Noble has continued to shrink and independent bookstores have appeared to grow. Books-a-Million and Walmart have become mainstays of the US trade, but they don’t replace Borders. The UK bookstore picture is even less diverse. The ebook market seems to be consolidating in the US with Amazon and Apple leading the pack and independents not really in the ebook game at all, at least at the moment. The key skill set of a publisher is to manage a diverse system of retail intermediaries that gets their books to customers. How the intermediary ecosystem will change in the months and years to come is therefore of existential importance to publishers.

11. Standards. There are evolving tech standards around content that live outside the book business. The question for publishers, particularly big publishers, is how much effort they should expend on standards-creation efforts which are, mostly, the domain of other media and tech interests. Can they let industry bodies like IDPF and BISG handle this, or do publishers have to involve themselves in these issues?

12. Outsiders coming in. We are seeing publishing coming from non-publishers and we see non-book retailers starting to peddle books online. These are trends that industry incumbents need to monitor and understand.

13. Millennials. Some believe that the human propensity to be a book reader is changing in fundamental ways as people born into the internet age become an increasing part of the market. There are other data points suggesting that the millennials aren’t so different from their predecessors. How should publishers approach marketing differently to different age groups?

14. Digital production tech and operations. Is there already a “new normal” for integrated print and digital publishing? Do publishers need to continue thinking about investing in technology for creation and delivery?

15. Audio. Audio publishing has gone all-downloads much faster than print. An even bigger technological disruptor may be coming as TTS (text-to-speech) technology gets better and better. What the linkage will be between audiobooks and ebooks in the future is something else every publisher needs to consider.

16. Publishing automation. From content management to product generation, automation has been part of every publisher’s life for the past several years. It might be fruitful to explore how people in publishing houses feel about the automation that has taken place — has it helped? — and get a sense of what needs to be automated in the future.

17. Mobile. Because of mobile, there are shifts in consumption and an impact on search and discovery and where the transactions take place. Many publishers have worked to optimize their websites for mobile use but there’s a lot more to know about the mobile shift that could affect what they publish and how they market it.

18. Video. This topic runs a gamut. Publishers can be tempted by YouTube stars with big audiences as potential bestselling authors. But how reliably can those audience be converted to buy books or ebooks? What do publishers need to know about video production? Do videos really help with book marketing?

19. Privacy. Should publishers or booksellers be doing anything to address potential compromises to reader privacy in the digital age?

And then we have six questions for all publishers that could inform or suggest additional topics.

* What growth opportunities do you see for today’s publishers?

* What potential change in the landscape are you most worried about?

* What “problems” are you trying to solve?

* Where are you investing your capital?

* When you hire today, what skills are you looking for that you might not have ten years ago?

* Can you tell us any topic you think is important that isn’t mentioned here?

This link to our survey is intended to allow you to participate in helping us decide what’s important for DBW to cover. Even a program as extensive as ours has to make choices and your input will help us do that more wisely. In case you’re interested, here is my personal list of what publishers should be thinking about, which is a very-much-abridged version of this post.

Under the direction of our Conference Chair, Lorraine Shanley, and co-Chair Jess Johns, we are following a parallel process for our Publishers Launch Kids show which will kick of DBW on March 7. If you are kids book publishing interests you, the survey for that show is here and you’re welcome to participate in that one as well.

(This is a longer-than-usual Shatzkin Files post reviewing the topics and speakers for the 26 breakout sessions at DBW 2015. It serves as a checklist of “things to think about right now” for book publishers living through the experience of digital change. The entire program is here. We decided not to link to each and every speaker.)

The main stage speakers get most of the promotional attention leading up to Digital Book World. That’s just good marketing because there are many important names. Some have written big books (in addition to many other things they’ve done) like Ken Auletta, Seth Godin, and Walter Isaacson. We have a number of CEOs on the main stage as well, including Brian Murray of HarperCollins, who has just been named PW’s “Person of the Year”.

But half of Digital Book World is the six breakout session slots, at which attendees select from several choices. I take some pride in saying that we’re requiring some of the toughest decisions our attendees will have to make in 2015 very early in the year when they decide for each slot which session to attend and which ones they have to skip.

What we tried to do was to schedule things so that our “tracks” — two or more sessions on marketing, data, global, transformation, kids/education, technology, and new business models — are set up to allow people to attend all the sessions in that track. But there is overlap, of course.

“Marketing” is definitely the marquee subject for DBW 2015. We have seven sessions under that heading. On the first day we have a conversation about the skill sets required for marketing today, chaired by my Logical Marketing partner Pete McCarthy and featuring Jeff Dodes of Macmillan, Angela Tribelli of HarperCollins, Rick Joyce of Perseus, and Hannah Harlow of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Since two of the panelists are recent imports from outside publishing, presumably hired precisely because they had skill sets that publishing training wouldn’t have produced, this group is bound to help all publishing marketers identify what they need to bring on board.

That will be followed by a session on Smarter Video Marketing, which will be chaired by Intelligent Television founder Peter Kaufman, leading a discussion among video marketers Scott Mebus of Fast Company, Sue Fleming of Simon & Schuster,  Heidi Vincent of National Geographic Books, and John Clinton of Penguin Random House. In a world where authors are making their own videos and YouTube is the second leading search engine, this is a topic that suddenly needs to be on everybody’s radar.

The third marketing track session on Day One is on mobile marketing. Since tracking data is now showing that people now do more searching on mobile devices than on PCs, making sure books are optimized for mobile discovery has rapidly become essential. Thad McIlroy, a consultant with a long history in publishing, did a report on mobile for Digital Book World and will present some of his findings to kick off the session. Then he will lead a discussion including Nathan Maharaj of Kobo, Kristin Fassler of Penguin Random House, and CJ Alvarado of Snippet, a reading app that has been specializing in creating mobile reading experiences for branded authors/musicians /personalities, to detail how publishers and retailers are responding to this new reality.

Also related to marketing and also running on Monday, we’ve set up a break-out session for Joe Pulizzi, head of the Content Marketing Institute, who will have done a presentation on the main stage. Content marketing is something publishers need to learn from. Certainly all the techniques that are employed by non-publishers to market themselves with content created for a marketing purpose should be employed by publishers who have tons of content available for marketing. Pulizzi knows all the tricks and will have talked about many of them from the main stage. The breakout session will give attendees that want to learn more, and ask questions, an opportunity to do that.

The marketing track continues on DBW’s second day. One session, being moderated by my Idea Logical colleague, Jess Johns, will examine case studies of successful marketing campaigns. We’re featuring representatives from two of the platforms publishers can work with for marketing: Ashleigh Gardner of content platform Wattpad and Alex White from marketing data aggregator Next Big Book. They’ll each be joined by a publisher who has worked with them (about to be announced). Wattpad and Next Big Book, along with their publisher partner, will walk through what they’ve done in marketing that would have been impossible to imagine a couple of years ago.

Also on Day 2, we’ll be examining the new world of digital paid media. This has been a big challenge for publishers. Digital media is apparently cheap; you can do marketing that matters for hundreds of dollars in “media” cost, it doesn’t require thousands. But there’s also a lot of work and management involved to using digital media right. We were glad to get digital marketers from three leading publishers, Alyson Forbes from Hachette, Caitlin Friedman from Scholastic and Christine Hung from Penguin Random House as well as Tom Thompson from Verso Advertising. This session will be moderated by Heather Myers of Spark No. 9.

A marketing topic that has become top-of-mind for many publishing marketers is “price promotion”. A business has been built around it for the ebook business called BookBub, and its founder and CEO Josh Schanker will be on our panel discussing it. He’ll be joined by Matthew Cavnar of Vook, Rachel Chou of Open Road, and Nathan Maharaj of Kobo. We went for three retailers and service providers here because publisher experience with price promotion is still pretty limited, although the ebook pioneers at Open Road are an exception. Laura Hazard Owen of GigaOm will moderate this session.

Our data conversation begins on the main stage on the second morning of DBW with data scientist Hilary Mason, the CEO and Founder of Fast Forward labs. She started looking at Big Data at Bit.ly, the link-shortening and -tracking service. Mason is going to look at data across a content set that is the only one more granular than books: the content on the web. Her presentation will help us all understand how to interpret audiences for very small portions of the available content. Because we expect her presentation, like Pulizzi’s on Day One, to generate lots of questions, we also gave her a breakout session to facilitate questions and further explanations. DBW sponsor LibreDigital, which has a new offering to help their client publishers turn data into business intelligence, will help Hilary manage the Q&A.

Our panel on “Authors Facing the Industry” will be prefaced by two presentations.. Judith Curr, president and publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Atria Publishing Group, will have done a main stage presentation on the choice “self-publish or be published” that authors face. Then the breakout session will begin with a short presentation from Queens College Professor Dana Beth Weinberg of DBW’s annual “author survey”, giving a data-grounded underpinning to the panel discussion that will follow. Bianca D’Arc, an extremely successful writer of paranormal sci-fi and fantasy romance (and a former chemist), will be joined by two non-fiction writers for this conversation. Both David Vinjamuri, a marketing professor, and Rick Chapman, a computer programmer, have marketed their books themselves because they make more money doing it that way to their highly-targeted audiences. The panel will be moderated by Jane Friedman, one of the industry’s thought leaders about self-publishing.

The data we’ve never had before that is just beginning to be appreciated is the subject of our “How People Read” panel. It has become obvious that the platform owners know more about how consumers “behave in the wild” around reading than publishers do. Multiple device use, response to free samples, whether people read more than one book at a time, and how fast they read various books are all clear to those who serve up the ebooks, as well as differences in behavior that are geographically based, including uptake of English-language ebook reading. In a panel which will be moderated by Chris Kennealley of Copyright Clearance Center, Micah Bowers of Bluefire, Michael Tamblyn of Kobo, Jared Friedman of Scribd, and David Burleigh of Overdrive will share data insights their companies have gained by seeing many consumers of many genres in many contexts. Evan Schnittman, who had senior executive positions with Oxford and Bloomsbury and most recently with Hachette, will be moderating.

Of course, that last session is not just about “data”, it is also about “global”, which is another track at DBW 2015 with two sessions on Day Two.

The first of these, moderated by BISG Executive Director Len Vlahos, is on “Global Publishing Tactics”, designed to help publishers know what to do to sell outside their home territory. Speakers from three companies that provide global ebook distribution — Gareth Cuddy of ePub Direct, Marcus Woodburn of Ingram, and Amanda Edmonds of Google — will talk about what it takes to make your ebooks discoverable and get them purchased outside your home market. All of these entities distribute to just about every market in the world on behalf of a wide variety of publishers large and small. They see what works in metadata, pricing, and marketing, and they know what doesn’t. They are in a unique position to help publishers hoping to expand their global sales know what it will take to do that.

Our other dedicated global track session is the “Global Market Spotlight”, which will help our US- and English-centric audience understand the opportunities in four of the biggest emerging digital markets. It will feature local experts Carlo Carrenho from Brazil, Thomas Minkus of the Frankfurt Book Fair speaking about Germany, Marcello Vena from Italy, and Simon Dunlop of Bookmate, the ebook subscription service from Russia. Following a general introduction about how to look at new markets from Gareth Cuddy of ePub Direct, each of them will talk about how both online and ebooks are taking hold in their market, what local competitors are doing (and there is a very interesting ebook competitor coming from Germany), and what the prospects are for English-language sales in their market. This session will give very directed advice to publishers trying to get sales in four of the most promising new digital territories in the world.

Education is a subject on the agenda for trade publishers because how their books will get to students is undergoing dramatic change they’ll need to understand.

College textbook publishing has been remade in the past decade. In a panel moderated by veteran industry executive Joe Esposito, we will have the four giants of college textbook publishing talk about what that has meant in each of their shops. Simon Allen of Macmillan, Ken Brooks of McGraw-Hill, Clancy Marshall of Pearson, and Paul Labay of Wiley will discuss how their businesses have changed over the past few years, and why. Each of the biggest college publishers has changed their organizational structure, their workflows, and even their products themselves in the past decade, sometimes responding to and sometimes anticipating the changes taking place in the market. All of them have essentially switched from selling textbooks to selling learning platforms. Publishers that sell content into the college market will want to understand the new platforms these players have created and how outside content will now make its way to this market.

The school market is also undergoing extreme change. Partly spurred by the new Common Core standards but also by the fact that digital devices are increasingly integrated into the lives of today’s youth, the classroom experience is being changed dramatically. Neal Goff, who has had senior executive positions in several companies, most recently My Weekly Reader, and who is currently consulting with Highlights, will moderate the discussion about the changing K-12 environment. Three companies with very different perspectives on the market will participate. Chris Palma of Google will describe the operating system that works on the district, building, and classroom level that Google is making available free to school systems, achieving remarkable penetration very quickly. Of course, Google also provides hardware (Chromebooks) and content (through Google Play). Neil Jaffe is the CEO of Booksource, which has been providing print and digital content to schools for many years and sees a continuing need to provide both in the future. And Erica Lazzaro speaks for Overdrive, the company that has dominated the ebook library lending business and is making its way in the school market through its penetration of school libraries. They each have a unique view of how this market is changing. Publishers who sell books read by K-12 students will find this session invaluable.

It is becoming increasingly understood that “gamification” is a way to engage a lot of people who might choose non-reading content, particularly potential readers among the young. Our panel on this subject includes two publishers that are using gamifying to create more engaged “readers”. Keith Fretz will speak for Scholastic, which has made this work more than once already, most notably with “39 Clues”. He is being joined by Greg Ferguson of Full Fathom Five, a collaboration created by James Frey among HarperCollins, Fox, and Google’s Niantic Labs. Another way to employ gamification to engage younger readers is being employed by panelist Thomas Leliveld of Blloon, a subscription ebook service that uses “virtual money” both to reward its users and for them to use to pay for what they read. Also on the panel will be Sara Ittelson, Director of Business Development at Knewton, an adaptive learning company that has developed a platform to personalize educational content and which has lots of data showing how students engage with educational content across ages. This session is moderated by publishing attorney Dev Chatillon.

You could call it “education” or you could call it “tech” (another one of our tracks), but either way DBW attendees will learn about some important new propositions on our Publishers Launchpad session on ed-tech. Our Launchpad sessions are moderated by Robin Warner, a tech investor through her role as Managing Director of Dasilva & Phillips. Launchpad seeks to feature companies that many won’t yet have heard about, but we think they should. Johnjoe Farragher, CEO and Founder of Defined Learning has a new approach to mapping skills to curriculum for the K-12 market. Neal Shenoy, CEO of Speakaboos, will explain his subscription platform for digital picture books which is pedagogically designed to promote education. And Jason Singer, CEO of Curriculet, will explain how his company provides a rental model combined with enabling teachers to annotate and structure the student experience. All of these companies effectively become “gatekeepers” for trade content in schools, making their models very important for publishers who want their books delivered to K-12 students to understand.

The other Launchpad session, also moderated by Robin Warner, is more clearly “tech”-centric. Kevin Franco, the CEO of Enthrill, will talk about how his company “makes ebooks physical” by the use of cards with codes, which is now being trialed in Wal-mart in Canada. Peter Hudson of BitLit enables publishers to provide a free or discounted ebook to people who own a print copy and, along the way, has also developed a really nifty technology that will identify the books on anybody’s shelf from a picture (which they call a “shelfie”). Andrew Dorward of BookGenie451, will explain how his company uses semantic search to make books more discoverable. Beni Rachmanov of DBW sponsor iShook, which has a social ebook reading platform for readers, authors, and publishers, will also present at this session.

Following the Launchpad session, we have our techiest session, moderated by my personal “go-to” guy for understanding tech development in book publishing, Bill Kasdorf, Vice-President at Apex Content Solutions. Bill’s panel’s topic is what might be thought of publishing tech’s “magic bullet”: HTML 5, a format that enables the nirvana of “write-once, use-many-ways” content creation. With the need to manage both print and digital formats and with digital now being rendered on what seems like an infinite variety of screens, the need for publishers to make use of this technology has never been greater. The panelists will include Bill McCoy, head of the International Digital Publishing Forum, and publisher practitioners Phil Madans and Dave Cramer of Hachette Book Group USA, Paul Belfanti of Pearson, and Sanders Kleinfeld of O’Reilly.

Because DBW is relentlessly “practical”, we don’t program much that is far from the current commercial mainstream. An exception this year is our “Blue Sky in the eBook World” panel, which will feature three perspectives that are clearly pushing the envelope beyond where we are today. Chris Kubica and Ashley Gordon have been convening a lot of industry thinkers around the invention of a new kind of bookstore, the publishers’ “dream” to compete with Amazon. They’ll be describing what they and their co-brainstormers have come up with. Peter Meyers, until recently at Citia, is author of “Breaking the Page” and the industry’s leading thinker about how straight-text ebooks can be improved. He’ll put forth his thoughts on that. Paul Cameron is the CEO of Booktracks, a company which puts sound tracks to ebooks and has evidence that the music along with the text improves recall and comprehension. All of these propositions are not (yet) commercially employed, but for DBW attendees who might be looking for the big things AFTER the next big thing, this is the session that will talk about those possibilities. This session is moderated by Professor John B. Thompson, author of “Books in the Digital Age” and “Merchants of Culture”.

Although what the educational publishers are doing might also qualify, we have a track dedicated to “transformation” that has three distinct groups of panelists, each demonstrating how radical change can occur in different ways.

The session on “building the trade publisher of the future” focuses on companies that are remaking themselves from what they were before. Carolyn Pittis, now Managing Director of Welman Digital and formerly on the cutting edge of change management with HarperCollins for over two decades, will moderate. We are proud to be the first industry event to host Daniel Houghton, the new CEO of Lonely Planet, a several-decades old travel book publisher, founded as an upstart, and now rethinking its publishing role in a very challenging travel book market. Lucas Wittman is at ReganArts, Judith Regan’s start-up venture which has an entirely different literary character than the art book publisher she’s working within, Phaidon. Andrea Fleck-Nisbet of Workman is in a company that has just reorganized to be better positioned for change. And Sara Domville, President of F+W (owners of Digital Book World), will describe the experience of turning a “book and magazine publisher” into a “content and commerce company” with a diminishing footprint in print and a growing dependence on ecommerce.

We aren’t neglecting publishing start-ups that are really entirely new propositions as well. Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners will moderate a session bringing together a few of them. Liz Pelletier is the publisher of Entangled, a publisher with new economics that rewards the service providers that support authors as partners in the projects they work on. Georgia McBride is the proprietor of Georgia McBride Media Group, a lean publishing start-up that is developing its properties for multiple media, not just books, taking advantage of her background in music and Hollywood. Jason Pinter of Polis Books is a bestselling thriller writer and has worked for a number of publishers (St. Martin’s, RH, Grove Atlantic, Warner Books) before he founded this digital-first genre book publisher with high author royalties (beginning at 40% of net) against advances. And Atria executive Peter Borland heads up an in-house start-up, Keywords Press, which seeks to leverage YouTube fame into bestsellers with the nurturing of an experienced publishing team.

But it isn’t just book publishers and entrepreneurs who are capitalizing on the digital transition. Former DBW.com editor Jeremy Greenfield, now with The Street, will moderate a session of media companies using digital as an opportunity to change their business models. Sometimes ebooks are very important to this effort and sometimes not so much so. The speakers in this session are Mike Perlis, the President of Forbes, Lynda Hammes, the publisher of Foreign Affairs magazine, Jay Lauf, President and Publisher, Quartz (The Atlantic), and Kerry Dyer, Publisher and Chief Advertising Officer of U.S. News & World Report. The tactics being employed by these three media companies to take advantage of their content and their audiences are harbingers of what all non-book media will be thinking about and doing in the years to come. Publishers can find new collaborators in their ranks, or they’ll be facing these entities as new competitors.

The sessions in the track we call “transformation” are also really about “new business models”. But we have two sessions that are more strictly about publishers exploring new business models.

One of these is on “publishers selling direct”, something that made very little sense for any but the nichiest publishers before the digital era. Dominique Raccah, the founder and CEO of Sourcebooks, pointed out to me that I needed that session (she surely was right!) and will appear on it. She’ll be joined by Eve Bridge from F+W Media, Mary Cummings of Diversion, and Chantal Restivo-Alessi of HarperCollins, the biggest of the publishers to aggressively pursue the direct sales option. The panel will be moderated by industry consultant David Wilk.

Publishers are also exploring new business models with their attention to “verticals”, audience-centric marketing that sticks to a topic in ways that might ultimately allow selling things other than books. This is also a big subject for DBW’s owner, F+W Media, and Phil Sexton, who runs their Writer’s Digest community, will speak about it. Mary Ann Naples, SVP and Publisher at Rodale, Adrian Norman, VP Marketing and New Products at Simon & Schuster, and Eric Shanfelt, Senior VP, eMedia, of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, show us that both specialist and general trade publishers are investing in building these enduring audience connections. Ed Nowatka of Publishing Perspectives moderates this conversation.

There are two panels that will be among the best-attended of all, but which don’t fit comfortably under any of the track headings.

Probably the two most-discussed digital change issues in 2014 have been subscriptions for ebooks and Amazon. We’re pleased to have breakout sessions on each that should really shed some new light on topics that have already been the subject of much conversation.

The subscription conversation will be moderated by Ted Hill, who co-authored a White Paper on subscription for Book Industry Study Group early in 2014 which has looked increasingly prescient as the year has gone along. The session will begin with a brief presentation by Jonathan Stolper of Nielsen Bookscan, who will deliver data from Nielsen’s recent research into subscription sales. Hill will be joined by the two biggest players in ebook subscription, Matt Shatz of Oyster and Andrew Weinstein of Scribd, to describe how their companies have fared building this new model in 2014. He will also have two publishers with books in those services, Doug Stambaugh of Simon & Schuster and Steve Zacharius of Kensington, to talk about how it is going from the publishers’ point of view. As a bonus, Zacharius also has real sales experience with Amazon’s new subscription service, Kindle Unlimited. This will be most people’s first opportunity to get a wide-ranging view of how the subscription model is really working in the marketplace for the subscription services and the publishers themselves.

And, finally, we’ll have an Amazon conversation that is extremely timely against the backdrop of a year when contentious relationships between Amazon and their publisher-suppliers became a matter of public record. Our discussion is on the subject “Can Amazon Be Constrained? And Should They Be?” and it is moderated by Ken Auletta of The New Yorker, a journalist with several decades of experience tracking both media and tech. (Auletta will be appearing earlier that day on the main stage.) He will be talking with Barry Lynn, a scholar at the New America Foundation, who has recently proposed that Amazon be investigated for anti-trust; journalist Annie Lowrey of New York Magazine, who has expressed skepticism about whether the anti-trust rubric fits; and Amazon and indie author Barry Eisler, who has been a full-throated supporter of Amazon’s position against the major publishers. No conference has ever presented such a balanced and provocative conversation about Amazon before; we’re proud it is taking place on the DBW stage.

So there’s a lot to choose from at DBW 2015. We probably won’t settle all the questions around where book publishing is going in the future, but we’re certainly providing engaged conversation about the issues that matter most. And remember after you read this: the highest-profile speakers are mostly not mentioned. We’ll talk about them in a later post about what’s taking place on the main stage.

PS: The last Early Bird discount for Digital Book World expires on Monday, December 15. Save money by registering now!

I’ve spent more than half-a-year of my life in Frankfurt, one week at a time. My first Fair was 1976 so this would have been my 39th if I attended them all. I think I missed two, so that’s 37. I love it and I get enormous commercial benefit from it. I can’t understand people who are in our business who don’t; it attracts the top executives from just about every publishing company in the world.

But, like just about everything in our business, it is affected by the digital revolution.

It stands to reason that gatherings of publishing people (or any other kind, really) that require travel time and expense should diminish in a world where email and Skype and Google Hangouts are a normal part of everyday life. But the venerable events just keep going on. It was more than five years ago that I wondered how long BEA could last. They have an extreme challenge because BEA’s DNA is that it is for publishers to show their wares to bookstores, and the number of bookstores has dropped precipitously for years. And London Book Fair, despite venue issues over the years which have them moving again next year, seemed from my visit last April still to be going strong.

The concerns I expressed five years ago that BEA might disappear have, so far, proven unfounded. Good show management that has brought in other players ranging from bloggers to meetings of BISG and IDPF, digital publishing’s trade association, have, at the very least, postponed what seemed to me to be inevitable. Of course, they have their own venue change to navigate and it will be a tougher one because they’re leaving NYC for Chicago in 2016. That is going to be extremely disruptive.

Frankfurt is an entirely different beast. It is really two mega-events that stretch over five exhibit days: Wednesday through Sunday. Set-up day is Tuesday, so it is really a week-long commitment. For the global book trade, and specifically for those of us in the English-speaking world that are the dominant players in worldwide publishing, it is a unique opportunity to trade rights face-to-face, on metaphorical steroids. Books published in English can have anywhere from zero to a dozen or more foreign language editions which, cumulatively, can bring in very significant revenues. What Frankfurt has done for us for years is provide an efficient venue for those deals to get made.

For German publishers, however, Frankfurt is also an opportunity to meet the public. For the non-German exhibitors and attendees, this is mostly a nuisance but a minor one because the English-language hall has been as far as is geographically possible in the Messegelende (which is about a dozen Javits- or McCormick Place-sized buildings on a vast campus connected by buses and moving walkways; 5-7 minute walks from one meeting to the next can be minimized by experienced fairgoers’ planning, but are unavoidable) from the hall which houses the Germans. (Art book, sci-tech, and other language publishers are a lot closer.)

Global companies use Frankfurt as an opportunity to hold global meetings. I could see on the meeting signboard at my hotel that Hachette and Quarto had meeting rooms booked for the day before the Fair opened from 9 to 5. These are senior management meetings that bring the heads of various regions into the same room; the rights directors and acquiring editors who will be working hard at the Fair aren’t necessarily part of those conversations. This is built into the travel rhythms of the big global companies. And the CEOs are often not fully occupied at the Fair itself. I don’t know if it is part of Frankfurt’s marketing plan to help facilitate these global meetings, but it should be. It cements the commitment of the biggest companies to that spot on the calendar.

(By the way, the global meetings combined with the long-in-advance planning publishers do for Frankfurt make it particularly challenging to run a successful conference ahead of the Fair. Michael Cader and I had a Publishers Launch event for three years — we didn’t do it this year — and both recruiting speakers and gathering an audience was harder than it has been for any other event we’ve done. People schedule their Frankfurt time tightly, and in advance, so you have to have powerful programming posted well before the event to compel people to plan to take a full day of Frankfurt time to attend.)

But it was really obvious this year that Frankfurt — at least that part of it which is about English-language publishers buying and selling with non-English markets — is shrinking.

I stay at the (now Meridien) ParkHotel, which has the Casablanca Bar off the lobby. It has, for years, been the main hangout for the Brits at Frankfurt and, in years past, you could hardly get through the lobby to your room on Tuesday night, Wednesday night, or Thursday night. This year, the crowd hardly spilled out of the bar at all.

But what was really stark was the empty Halle 8 (this year for the last time, the English-language hall) on Friday. Up until about ten years ago, Frankfurt ran through Monday morning and Sunday was the last “real” day of action. My pal Charlie Nurnberg of Sterling was always the last big US executive there working; he always made deals there on Sunday. The biggest big shots had all gone home, and Charlie made himself accessible to lots of smaller players, who were delighted to sell to (or buy from) Sterling. The important point is that there were people for him to meet that day to do business with. Powerful people went home early, but lots of business was still being done.

People hated staying through Monday so the Fair in one recent year relented and eliminated the Monday, and Sunday became the last day. Pretty rapidly, Sunday became a desolate day. This was so much the case that in the past couple of years I’ve managed to persuade Gwyn Headley of fotoLibra, my British pal with whom I share a stand and then — most years — drive back to London, that we could leave on Saturday afternoon and get back to London on Sunday evening, rather than doing it all 24 hours later.

Doing this requires some arranging. The story is that you get “fined” if you abandon your stand early. (I have seen lots of deserted stands over the years and I haven’t actually met anybody who admitted to having been fined. But I have friends who work for the Frankfurt Book Fair, I have partnered with them on conferences — I know them — and they all insist to me that it is true, so I take it seriously. I never yet left not wanting to have my stand again next year so I figure they can enforce the fine.) To avoid that problem, you hire a local young person to sit at your stand. They can’t do any business for you, of course, but they prevent you from being fined. This year doing that cost me 180 Euros. It’s worth it to get back to London a day earlier.

In the past few years since Monday was eliminated, Saturday became quieter but Friday continued to be kinetic and active. It was well known that the top execs, particularly the British ones, left after Thursday, but top editors and marketers were there in force through Friday. Not this year. Friday was the new Saturday. My Logical Marketing partner Pete McCarthy and I had a dozen meetings or more each day on Wednesday and Thursday. I had three on Friday. I had none on Saturday. We made a wisely efficient decision having Pete go home on Friday morning. (Frankly, his time is much more valuable than mine.)

You could have rolled a bowling ball down just about any aisle in Halle 8 on Friday and not broken any legs.

This is not really surprising. Global rights trading used to be an annual event, particularly for illustrated book packagers and publishers who had bulky samples and boards that needed to be seen for decisions to get made. Now it is a continuous effort with PDFs easily moved around the world in milliseconds. And that’s on top of the fact that there are fewer and fewer illustrated books and a consequent reduction in illustrated book packagers and publishers.

Next year the English-language publishers move from Halle 8 to Halle 6. On one hand, this takes us closer to the rest of the Fair and we do a lot of business with Europeans who will be more proximate as a result. It moves the English-language publishing world closer to the kids’ books publishing world (and they overlap, of course) and that’s good. But it also takes us from a hall where we’re all on one floor to one with a smaller footprint where we have to navigate three floors. Going up and down escalators only might pad time between meetings by three minutes or five, but when you’re scheduling a sit-down every 30 minutes (as many of us do, at least on Wednesday and Thursday), that can mean reducing the productive time by 15 percent or more.

And while it puts us considerably closer to the tram stop that can take us into the Fair, it also puts the German public which uses that same tram that much closer to us as well. This is going to be particularly disruptive to the b-to-b trade business on Saturday and Sunday.

The Frankfurt Book Fair will remain an indispensable stop for the global publishing community, but it might have a real battle on its hands trying to remain a five-day event. I don’t have 37 more Frankfurts to go, but I think I’ll see more changes in publisher behavior around it before I’m done than I’ve seen since I started attending.

The estimable Clay Shirky has written a lengthy piece called “Amazon, Publishers, and Readers” on medium.com saying, essentially, that an Amazon-dominated world would be an improvement over the Big Five “cartel”-dominated world of publishing we have today. This is an apples to oranges comparison. The Big Five are not nearly as broad a cartel as Amazon — which reaches way beyond the consumer books they publish — is a monopsony. Amazon touches much more of the book business than the Big Five publishers do. To make his case, Shirky recounts some very questionable history and employs some selective interpretation to get from his own impression of the current Hachette-Amazon dispute (about which he says “Amazon’s tactics are awful, the worst possible in fact”) to a completely different conclusion.

My complaint with the facts and logic start at the top: with the two paragraphs Shirky uses to set up his argument and establishes the “holier-than” context for his position. He says:

Back in 2007, when publishers began selling large numbers of books in digital format, they used digital rights management (DRM) to lock their books to a particular piece of hardware, Amazon’s new Kindle. DRM is designed to transfer pricing power from content owners to hardware vendors. The publishers clearly assumed they could hand Amazon consolidated control without ever having to conspire with one another, and that Amazon would reward them by passing cost-savings back as inflated profits. When Amazon instead decided to side with the customer, passing the savings on as reduced price, they panicked, and started looking around for an alternative conspirator.

Starting in 2009, five of the six biggest publishers colluded with Apple to re-inflate ebook prices. The model they worked out netted them less revenue per digital sale, because of Apple’s cut, but ebooks were not their immediate worry. They wanted (and want) to protect first editions; as long as ebook prices remained high, hardback sales could be protected. No one had any trouble seeing the big record companies as unscrupulous rentiers when they tried to keep prices for digital downloads as high as they had been for CDs; the book industry went further, violating anti-trust law as they attempted to protect their more profitable product.

Almost every sentence of this is subtly or blatantly wrong.

1. Publishers did not begin selling large numbers of books in digital format in 2007. Amazon started Kindle in late November 2007. Significant sales of ebooks didn’t start to occur until after Christmas and continued to grow rapidly thereafter.

2. Although an uninformed person would be led to infer from reading this that DRM was somehow created for Amazon, in fact DRM was routinely used for ebooks for their entire existence before Kindle. DRM on Kindle continued current practice; DRM was not created for Kindle or at Kindle’s behest.

3. DRM maintains pricing power for content owners as well as hardware vendors. In fact, I’d say it is more for the content owner than for the hardware owner. What it does for the hardware owner, particularly Amazon because they eschew the industry standard Adobe, is lock customers into their ecosystem. Of course, it is that lock-in that Shirky is telling publishers they can overcome by going DRM-free. (This precise antidote to Amazon was offered up by Matteo Berlucchi, then the CEO of Anobii, at a talk we put him on stage to give at Digital Book World in 2012.) In fact, it is not transparent that eliminating DRM would curb Amazon; it might fuel them. How well would the other retailers stand up to Amazon having easy access to their customers? Because that would happen at the same time.

4. Publishers did not believe — let alone “clearly assumed” — they were handing Amazon any sort of consolidated control. Perhaps that was a failure of vision, but it was a justifiable expectation since nobody had succeeded at selling ebooks before Kindle.

5. Amazon’s discounting was entirely at their own expense and was a tactic designed, at least originally, to sell devices and create captive customers. The publishers’ “inflated profits” (if that’s what they were) were not at issue in 2007 or 2008. So Amazon “sided with the customer”, but they also “sided with their own interests”. Some might say that’s not relevant; I think it is. Either way, it should be acknowledged, not elided or ignored.

6. Amazon was partly enabled to give the big discounts to consumers because publishers gave discounts too big to them, foolishly aping the print book business model even though a retailer’s costs drop much more than a publisher’s do with the change to digital. Stock turn is the key profitability metric for retailers. Stock turn on digital books is “infinity”. (I’d note that these are small points in this piece but are really really big points that go ignored in most of the discussions about ebook economics, which are almost always “fails” at understanding the core economics of publishers or retailers.)

7. The reduction in publisher revenue per book sold which resulted from Agency pricing (pejoratively characterized by Shirky as “colluded with Apple” rather than the at-least-equally accurate “using Apple’s established app store business model”) was not due to “Apple’s cut”. “Apple’s cut” was less than “Amazon’s cut” had been under the wholesale model. And, if you doubt that, you should take note that Amazon prefers not to switch to “Apple’s cut” so they don’t allow any but the biggest publishers to sell on the agency model with its lower margin. (Publishers can get 70% of net direct through KDP, but they have to stick to the $2.99-$9.99 price band and are at the mercy of KDP’s terms.)

8. It is misleading to attribute the publishers’ desire to keep “hardbacks” (really, all print) alive as a desire to protect “first editions”. It was primarily a desire to protect the brick-and-mortar bookstores. It should be said that way for accuracy but also to make the motivations of the sides clear. Publishers want to strengthen or maintain bookstores because their ability to reach them is a core competence that keeps them in business. Amazon wants to weaken or eliminate bookstores because it is clearly established that many customers of each bookstore that closes come to them. Another motivation for the publishers was to maintain a diverse ebook ecosystem, which at that time had just added Nook to its ranks and was about to add Apple. It is likely that Amazon’s discounting — thanks to the DoJ’s and court’s actions weakening agency — did as much to weaken Nook as any mistakes made by Barnes & Noble. And let’s not forget that Kobo has also abandoned active marketing in the US ebook market since then as well.

The other piece of Shirky’s screed that is misleading and inaccurate is his history of paperbacks.

Whether you date the beginning of paperbacks in the US to Pocket Books’s founding and Penguin’s establishing itself in the US in 1939 or to the period right after World War II when paperback publishing writ large discovered the magazine distribution system and really took off, there were decades between their arrival on the scene and their consolidation into the larger book business under joint ownership with hardcover houses. So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that, to the degree that the ebook disruption is analogous to the paperback disruption, the reaction would be even more extreme on the part of the incumbent establishment dealing with the lightning-quick change that has transpired since ebooks took off in 2008.

And that is quite aside from the fact that the paperback revolution was not 60-to-70 percent controlled by a single account that also controlled a substantial and growing chunk of the rest of the book sales as well. Be that as it may, Shirky is simply factually wrong to say that what happened was that the hardcover houses just bought up the paperback houses and consolidated them into the existing business. The acquisitions took place in both directions. In at least three cases, the paperback house bought the hardcover house (Avon bought Morrow, Penguin bought Viking, and Bantam bought Doubleday) in order to assure themselves a steady supply of good books.

And before the consolidation even began, real troubles had started to develop with the distribution through the magazine ecosystem. Returns were climbing (that is why prices of paperbacks went up) and paperback publishers were finding they needed to sell directly to many accounts, which made them more like the hardcover publishers. And over the couple of decades between the end of World War II and the beginnings of consolidation, almost every “hardcover” house had started doing its own “trade” paperbacks: not rack-sized and sold through the same network that sold hardcover books.

In other words, the analogy is not analogous in many important ways.

It is true that Amazon, at least in the current competitive environment, has everything to gain by pushing prices down and everybody else in the publishing world does not. And it is also true that the lower the prices of books are, the more accessible they are to more people. And accessibility is definitely a “good”.

Even so, I really resist the Manichaean view that it is “the Amazon way” or “the publishing cartel way”. It seemed like Shirky himself tried to dismiss that idea near the opening of his piece, when he attacks Steve Coll for writing “about book-making and selling as if there are only two possible modes”, which Shirky describes as maintaining the current “elites” or seeing Amazon become a “soul-crushing monopoly”. But that is precisely where he ends up. To look at things this way rejects not only what the publishers keep trying to tout as their “added values” (curation and editing, yes, but also marketing, distribution, and rights management) but it also ignores the interests of academic and professional publishing, textbook publishing, bookstores, and a diverse book retailing — and therefore book recommending — ecosystem.

There will be many Hachettes fighting their version of this battle over the next few years. But there will only be one Amazon.

Russ Grandinetti of Amazon.com is joining us for an interview by Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch and me at Digital Book World 2015, coming up next January 14-15. 

This post invites you to help us shape the agenda for Digital Book World 2015.

It was five years ago this summer that David Nussbaum and Sara Domville of F+W Media took me out to lunch and said they thought the book business could have a more useful digital conference — one, in their words, that would give you things you could go back to the office and use — than the existing set of conclaves, led by Tools of Change, then provided. And they flattered me and provoked my imagination by saying “we think you’re the guy to program it”.

At the time, I was in a partnership with O’Reilly Media, the owners of Tools of Change, working on an initiative called “StartWithXML”. We had a conference in London coming up as part of our team effort that was only a few weeks away. I wasn’t looking for a way to compete with them.

But, when I thought about it, I realized that by changing the focus of our conference from “technology and publishing” (which was theirs) to “the business challenges created by technology for trade publishers”, we would be able to do something quite different than they had. Agents would be included, and, this being long before the agents were hiring people with digital publishing expertise to help their authors, they weren’t invited to be part of Tools of Change. I knew their voices were important when you talked about how the business of publishing would be affected by digital. And real challenges around resource deployment and marketing, which weren’t strictly-speaking about technology but which were top of mind for trade publishers, would make our agenda when we framed it this way as well.

They named the new conference Digital Book World.

This recommendation really just followed my own advice. I had been observing that book publishers needed to become more “vertical”, by which I meant “audience-specific”, in their thinking. Tools of Change was horizontal; it was about all publishing and technology. We’d focus Digital Book World on a particular segment of publishers and therefore be able to make it more meaningful for them.

Now we are planning our sixth Digital Book World conference for January, 2015. A lot has changed. Tools of Change shut down in 2013. Perhaps partially aided by the disappearance of its biggest competitor, Digital Book World has continued to grow, with more than 25 percent growth in 2014 over the year before.

But a big part of the distinction that guided us as we built DBW, the emphasis on trade publishing, is eroding in importance as the trade itself — which means the bookstores and libraries and the wholesalers that serve them — become less robust paths to the consumer. The challenges for an industry beginning to move from physical goods in stores to virtual goods online are different as the new paradigm becomes the dominant paradigm.

Except for self-published genre fiction (and perhaps even for publisher-issued genre fiction too), that paradigm shift hasn’t really happened yet, but the day when it will is in sight. At some future Digital Book World — not 2015, but maybe 2016 and almost certainly before 2020 — we will be looking at a “trade” book industry which does most of its business online, not through brick-and-mortar stores.

(In fact, the world has changed so much that one thing on my list to discuss is a DBW 2015 panel that would reconsider the whole StartwithXML premise. When we were thinking about this in 2009, we figured the biggest payoff from going through what could be a painful workflow change was that you’d be able to make ebooks of complex books much more efficiently. That’s probably still true, but the ebooks for complex books also haven’t sold very well and their future is a bit cloudy. Knowing that, how important was that change to make, really? We’ll ask some publishers who have gone through it and, depending on what reports we get, perhaps put it on the program for discussion in January.)

All of this not only means that what we have called trade publishers may be renamed, they will also find themselves with new channels to consumers and a new set of competitors. The prospective new landscape will get a great deal of attention from us next January and we are beginning to interact with players that wouldn’t really have belonged at DBW in 2010 or 2011 but who might be smack in the middle of our business by 2017 or 2018.

Who are they? They are educational publishers, both K-12 and college. They are newspapers, magazines, and advertising agencies. And they are digital-first publishers, coming out of web sites and other content creators and brands, who see the opportunity to reach audiences efficiently through a book business that no longer requires a big investment in printed inventory and an organization reaching thousands of small sales outlets for meaningful participation. And they are start-ups and technology companies too.

We are going to start this year by looking for the Venn diagram “overlap” between these new audiences and the trade publishing audience we’ve served for half a decade.

For newspapers, magazines, and advertising agencies, that means we’ll be looking for the players who have already found opportunity in the book publishing ecosystem. Although for all of them ebooks are really a highly complementary opportunity, it looks like newspapers have made that discovery more rapidly than the others. Newspapers and magazines, particularly, have content and consumer-facing brands that create a natural fit for ebook creation and marketing. For advertising, the stretch is a little greater and, frankly, we’ll be looking for pioneers that see the opportunity to promote their clients’ wares using ebook discovery and word-of-mouth as tools. It is inevitable that they will but finding the early visionaries will be the first challenge.

There is a new component of the advertising business called “content marketing” which also, ultimately, seems like a fit for the ebook business. What it means today is that a digital ad agency creates content which promotes a client or product; content which is meant to be found online and delivered for free.

There are two ways that book publishing could — and almost certainly will — be part of this new component, although neither seems to have happened with any regularity yet. One is that the agency-created content could be delivered as an ebook, not just as discoverable web content. This has probably not been the first instinct of the agencies for two reasons. One is that they figure that nobody would “buy” what they’re willing to give away for free. The other is that there’s a bit of a learning curve about how to process content into an ebook and put it into distribution. (Frankly, if you’re willing to live with the ebook being made available only through Kindle — which gets you much more than half the market — the learning “curve” is just about a straight line. Amazon makes it pretty damn simple.)

My niece, Kailey Moran, writes a blog about cars for women for a marketing company called Reynolds and Reynolds. It seems to me like a short step for her to put together an ebook for the same audience on the same subject. Her company isn’t doing that yet. I’m betting that within the next couple of years, they will.

There will also be new interactions occurring between college textbook and school publishers and their counterparts in trade. The educational publishers are moving from being primarily creators and distributors of “textbooks” to becoming creators and managers of “learning platforms”. These not only attempt to contain the syllabus and pedagogy that was in the textbooks, they also provide teachers with monitoring and assessment capabilities. And they will also be the environment in which the required and supplementary reading — often of trade-published books — will take place.

That will increasingly put the educational publishers in the role of aggregators for their institutional customers. This is likely to be a difficult and contentious area for the next several years because trade publishers will have to be satisfied with a new business model. They have historically sold printed books either to institutions (the normal way things happen with public schools) or to the student end-users (the normal way things happen in private schools and colleges). In the latter case, they often are able to make a sale for every user. Doing so is an artifact of the physical world and will get increasingly difficult to do, but trade publishers are understandably reluctant to move quickly to models that pay them less for each use, even if they already sell one printed book for multiple users (over time, because the books don’t wear out) in school situations now.

So the school and college publishers and trade publishers are going to have to talk and I think interaction at Digital Book World could jump-start some conversations.

We are guided in our programming at DBW by our Conference Council, a group of leading industry thinkers — some independent but most of them executives within the industry — who meet with us to discuss the program and then provide suggestions on an ongoing basis for speakers and topics. To prepare for the meeting we schedule to discuss the agenda, we offer our Council the opportunity to offer their opinions about each of the sub-topics we’ve identified under the major headings. (It’s a 2-hour meeting with 30 people or so; we can’t discuss everything and I need the guidance to put things in priority order for time allocation.) This year, for the first time, we are seeking that same input from readers of The Shatzkin Files.

We will be looking to create good programming under seven major themes:

Publishing in a global economy
The changing publishing ecosystem (roles and relationships)
Data-driven publishing
Rethinking marketing
Developing business models
Technology and living on the cutting edge
Education and book publishing are developing a new relationship

If you want to help us decide what are the most important sub-topics under these headings, you can see how we break them down and register your opinion about them on our survey monkey poll. When our Conference Council meets, we will make them aware of the results of this voting, as well as the separate tally we’re keeping of the vote by the Conference Council itself.

And an extra robust thank-you for anybody who can suggest a sub-topic that should have made the list and didn’t.

We don’t really understand the ways of Feedburner, our current (but soon to be past) distributor of the email version of this blog, but it didn’t distribute my last post about when an author should self-publish. So if you’re getting this one by email and didn’t get the last one, we’re trying to make it easy for you to read it now by clicking this link. We will soon be moving over to Mail Chimp so these problems will be in the rear view mirror.