Publishing

The headline in a number of places was that Amazon was now aggressively going after exclusives for their Kindle line and actually bid against the publishers for Amanda Hocking’s trade books.

The enabling component, as reported in Publishers Lunch, was that Houghton Harcourt is now Amazon’s trade book distributor. Except please don’t call it that.

Lunch reported that Harcourt had acquired a range of titles from Amazon’s Encore and Crossings imprints, as well as securing a first-look relationship.

From one standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. Amazon can sell the hell out of a book online, and they have long made print available through their CreateSpace program. But they can’t merchandise books in stores. Even paying extremely high print and ebook royalties, as they do, they can’t maximize an author’s revenues if they can’t deliver store sales of print in today’s world.

On the other hand, virtually all of the Big Six CEOs (a club Houghton Harcourt stands just outside of) have said that they wouldn’t acquire print only, a clear signal to authors that their ebook rights were hostages to secure their print sale. After all, they wouldn’t have ever given up book club rights or paperback rights when those were important and didn’t require a scale organization to reach.

Harcourt’s adult trade publisher Bruce Nichols told Lunch that his arrangement did not constitute Houghton Harcourt doing a print-only deal. Quoting from Lunch:

“I’m sure some people will say in principal ‘we never split print and electronic’” rights, but he sees the Amazon deals as “no different than licensing reprint rights,” in which ebook rights are not available. Just as Houghton still intends to compete with Amazon on new projects, Nichols says the house will not bid for print-only rights to new properties. While “there are certainly agents and authors who want to” split rights, he underscores that “we’re refusing” to do so. “This is different; Amazon already owns all rights.”

So, there you have it. Houghtons’ full-fledged print publishing efforts are a subsidiary right.

This simply reflects the most fundamental publishing economics. Somebody can afford to write a check (the initial advance, or what might be called “the enabling transaction”) to buy the opportunity to exploit a copyright because they control the means of reaching the largest single piece of its revenue and the relationships to license others to generate revenue from smaller pieces.

Five years ago, the lion’s share of the revenue from any book-type property would have come from the sales of print in retail stores.

Five years from now, the lion’s share of the revenue from any book-type property will come from the sales of print and ebooks through online channels.

We’re in a period of transition. Houghton’s deal, just like Barry Eisler’s decision two weeks ago to decline a half-million bucks from a house so he could self-publish, are first times for business practices that will soon be normal.

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I had already been in the “publishing futurist” game for a few years when my frequent project partner Mark Bide and I put together a day-long conference in March 2000 at the London Book Fair called “Publishing 2010.” (As I look at what I wrote for that conference, I can see some things I got right, some I got wrong, and some look like good predictions for the next few years, but haven’t happened yet.)

Although it was an “innovation” when I included agents in the digital change conversation at Digital Book World in January 2010, Mark and I actually did it for the first time at that conference 11 years ago. One of the agents we recruited for this conference was Michael Carlisle. Just a week before the conference, and the day before I was leaving for the UK, Carlisle called me with bad news. One of his literary clients was the driver of Lady Diana Spencer’s car in the crash that killed her in August of 1997. The driver’s book was coming out, Carlisle represented it. The promotional book tour needed to take place during the week of London Book Fair and Carlisle just had to cancel his trip across the pond.

“But,” he said, “I can give you a replacement. I know you don’t know him, but his name is Michael Cader and I can assure you he’ll do a great job as my substitute.” With no time to find somebody else, or even to vet this fellow Cader, I just said thank you and good luck with the book tour.

The conference was a success. We made a little money, had a very provocative day of conversation, and a few people even told me it was the best such conference they’d ever attended. Cader was, for my money, one of the stars of the show. I hadn’t ever heard anybody say so many things about digital change in publishing that I agreed with but hadn’t really thought of before. It was easy to agree that we should stay in touch.

A month or two later, Michael sent me a prototype for an idea he had and was about to start: a newsletter called Publishers Lunch. It was a great concept: links to stories about publishing from all over the internet with a graf or two of summary, explanation, and comment. I was bound to think this was a great idea because I’d had a similar thought about six or seven years earlier, just before the Web changed all of our lives. I had suggested to my friend (and one of my very favorite people to work with) Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners that the publishing world needed a service. Since a story about publishing could appear in any one of several newspapers or magazines on a New York newsstand on any day, we should hire a kid to read the papers at 3 am and send out a FAX at 6 in the morning telling people what stories they shouldn’t miss!

We didn’t do it. Cader’s version, with the advancements of technology, was an infinitely better iteration of the idea. As it turned out, his ongoing commentary also added more value than we could possibly have added (unless, of course, we had his help, but we didn’t know him then!)

In the decade-plus since that London Book Fair and the start of Lunch, Cader and I have had the opportunity to work together from time to time on conferences and industry events. We’ve shared stages. At the last BEA in Washington a few years ago, I interviewed Michael in a 1-on-1 session. And we have endlessly discussed our views about publishing and digital change.

We are both, in different ways, already making our living delivering “industry education.” For public consumption, Michael delivers each day’s facts with a few words of wise context; my less-frequent Shatzkin Files posts select a context or a paradigm to explain with, usually, some supporting facts. The consulting assignments of my company often involve teaching a tech company about the publishing business or helping an industry service get a better handle on what their client base needs or can accept. We’ve talked about ways to formalize a partnership over the years. Before it disappeared, we talked with the Stanford Publishing Course about delivering a new digital curriculum. We’ve fiddled with live event ideas.

When David Nussbaum, the Chairman of F+W Media, came to me two years ago with his concept for a new conference called Digital Book World and asked me to organize the program, I suggested strongly to him that he figure out how to engage Cader as his marketing arm. David agreed, and for the past two years, Michael and I have happily collaborated on programming and promoting a 2-day event which, in two short years, has grown to the same size as the 5-year old, very successful, and very worthy Tools of Change.

Today, Michael and I have announced a formal partnership called Publishers Launch Conferences to deliver live events — globally and throughout the year — on publishing and digital change. It is an anchor of this business that we will continue to do the 2-day Digital Book World event in January 2012 and for years thereafter. We call Digital Book World a “State of Play” event, covering the landscape of digital change.

DBW is aimed primarily at US trade publishers and the extent of the show — 2 days and 4 parallel programming tracks for half of the time — allows us to cover more than two dozen distinct topics with panels and presentations. Publishers Launch Conferences will, in its first year (ending next January with DBW 3), deliver about seven shorter (1 day or 1/2 day) and more focused events in New York, London, Frankfurt, and San Francisco. Our first day-long conference will be at (and in conjunction with) BookExpo America in May, aimed at international visitors and the Americans who are doing business with them. Our event in London on June 21, being presented in partnership with the UK’s Publishers Association, will address digital change from a UK perspective.

It has already been an education for us to think things through from the point of view of the different audiences we’re delivering for. Our plans for our London show were greatly informed (and modified) by meetings we had three weeks ago (thanks to our partners at the PA) with about 20 different players in UK publishing to discuss what needed to be addressed, how, and by whom.

Some of the Publishers Launch Conferences events will be topic-targeted. We’re planning two niche shows in the Fall: one on juvenile publishing (which both Michael and I see as the segment of the book business facing the most potential intrustion from outside players because of digital change) and one we’re calling internally “ebooks for the rest of us”. That one will focus on the mechanics of ebook publishing — from content conversion to the ultimate sale — for the smaller publishers, agents, and authors who don’t have the IT and marketing resources of the big publishers. A number of small publishers and entreprenurial authors have achieved notable success in the ebook world already. We’ll focus on what it takes to do that so that more small players can follow in their footsteps.

We decided on doing a few things differently than most other conferences. We won’t have a zillion sponsors; we’re limiting sponsor participation in the interests of our audience and in the interests of the sponsors themselves. Our first two Global Sponsors, Copyright Clearance Center and Perseus’s Constellation service, have embraced our unconventional practices. There will be no sponsor pitches from the stage during our programs. There will be no email spam sent to attendees by sponsors after the programs. Even our printed program will be designed to be helpful and worth keeping and we’ll do our best to have it contain the information that our audiences need to take home, reducing their need to take notes during the show. As readers of this blog know, organizing conferences engages me in conversations that often turn into posts.

Part of my value — and Michael Cader’s — comes from talking to people who are smart and well-informed about the topics that all of us in publishing must inevitably wrestle with if we want to stay in publishing during this time of constant and roiling change. Planning these events and recruiting speakers for them as a continuous and year-round process will be a new ongoing feature of my life, and therefore of these posts as well. I hope we’ll see you at some of the shows but, whether you’re there or not, they should result in you should be reading a more informed blogger when you come to The Shatzkin Files.

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I wasn’t planning to write a post this past weekend for Monday morning publication. But then Joe Konrath and Barry Eisler contacted me on Saturday to tell me what Barry is up to. I’ve read their lengthy conversation about Barry’s decision to turn down a $500,000 contract (apparently for two books) and join Joe (and many others, but none who have turned down half-a-million bucks) as a self-published author.

To use a metaphor that connects with the current news: this is a very major earthquake. This one won’t cause a tsunami and a nuclear meltdown, but you better believe it will lead everybody living near a reactor — everybody working in a major publishing house — to do a whole new round of risk-assessment. Because, in its way, this is more threatening than the earthquake that just hit Japan. This self-publishing author will much more assuredly and directly spawn followers.

As news of Eisler’s decision spreads, phones will be ringing in literary agencies all over town with authors asking agents, “shouldn’t I be doing this?”

I submit a bit of perspective from another part of publishing: scholarly journals. A few years ago I asked my very smart friend Mark Bide, who knows that part of publishing much better than I do, how I’d know if the business model for journals — by which they publish work the university paid the professor’s salary to write and then sell the published version back to the university’s library — was threatened. Mark told me to watch their submissions. As long as the scholar-authors felt the need to be published in journals, the journal business model would continue to function.

I am not alone in having long known that self-publishing would ultimately present big authors with the opportunity to disintermediate their publishers, but I wouldn’t have thought when I asked that question that the sci-tech journal would hold its ground longer. Now I wouldn’t be so sure.

The decision for Eisler, at its core, was pretty simple. On the basis of what he’s learned from his friend Joe Konrath, who seems to be banking in the mid-six-figures self-publishing annually after a career as a non-bestselling author for established publishers, and what Eisler learned himself by self-publishing a short story, he figures he can earn more, much more, in the long run by publishing himself. This is not about ego or vanity; it is not about hating the publishing establishment. It is a coldly calculated decision (by an author who should make those well; he started out in life as a covert CIA operative) that says, in effect,  ”it would not be smart to take half-a-million bucks considering what I’d have to give away to get it.”

In the conversation between them which they just published, Konrath and Eisler touch upon many aspects of the publisher-author interaction and the author’s self interest. The conversation is smart, sophisticated, and mostly entertaining (although it is definitely too long; should they have hired an editor?) It is a conversation that everybody in the industry thinking about its future will likely read more than once (particularly the highlights, which are sure to be extracted by many people from the entire text.) Contained within it are certainly a number of points made to which there are valid rejoinders that could be offered. And certainly some will point out that Eisler’s BookScan figures suggest a decline in commercial appeal. But, in the overall scheme of things, the contentious portions are minor and the fact that his sales through publishers have been declining would mitigate the expectations for him somewhat and make any success he achieves on his own even more noteworthy.

The overall thrust is that an author has just made an entirely rational decision to turn down half-a-million bucks of big publisher money to self-publish. And what is said in their dialogue, but perhaps not emphatically enough, is that the direction of change makes this decision likely to make more sense to more authors each successive week than it did the week before.

What we do here at The Shatzkin Files is try to provide insight about the implications of news events rather than be the best reporter of them. If the implications of self-publishing to the business models of established publishers interests you (and what are you doing here if it doesn’t?), then you need to read the entire exchange they’ve published and the reporting others will do of it. I will limit this post (longer than mine usually are as it is) to a few points which for the most part are intended to extend their discussion, rather than contend with or correct it.

1. They didn’t do the math on what the loss of print sales and print merchandising might mean in dollars and cents and how to address it.

One of the themes that I’ve been working on for some conferences I’m planning (more on that upcoming later this week) is how the arguments about rights, royalties, and publisher leverage change as the balance between digital and print sales continues to shift. What this conversation can make you forget is that far more than half of most books’ sales, perhaps more than 70% for the majority of titles, are still print copies selling because they’re on-hand in a physical retail location. And that’s in the US. The number is higher in the UK and is almost certainly more than 90% in most other places in the world. So even if the math Konrath and Eisler put forth showing that the author share of ebook sales can increase by three or four times through self-publishing; even if we ignore (as they did) the fact that the higher percentage will be on a lower retail price (they trumpet the lower retail price they can charge as a key motivation for the shift); and even if we forget about the costs in time and actual expense involved in self-publishing, the author who follows this formula has to take into account the loss of presence and revenue from the retail channel.

But, having said that, the shift to digital seems to be increasing in speed worldwide. The percentage of print sales will keep declining. Eisler would have been signing a contract for a book that would come out a year from now and digital will be more important then, perhaps twice as important then, as it is now. And, as he points out in the conversation, the book a publisher would put out a year from now will have been selling and delivering revenue for a year before the publisher would have had something in the marketplace. To paraphrase the great author and publisher, Mark Twain, “the self-publisher will be halfway round the world before the legacy publisher can get his boots on.”

And that leads me to…

2. I’d be amazed if Barnes & Noble doesn’t detect an opportunity here to do a completely different kind of deal. What if B&N went to Eisler and said, “we’d like to buy print rights to sell your books just to our own customer base”? I can’t see why he wouldn’t just say “yes.”

What I’m envisioning here is something like a book club deal. B&N pays an advance and licenses the right to print its own copies for display and sale through its own stores and dot com. This could work many ways, but one might be for them to pay a royalty based on the actual selling price for every copy shifted. That would allow them to manage their downside risk on the printing because they could cut the price when sales slow down.

That might lead (or even trail) a wholesaler like Ingram or Baker & Taylor or Charles Levy to make a similar offer to print copies for sale through other retail outlets. The big publishers have taken a firm position (which, in my opinion, they’ll be figuring out how to walk back in a year or two) against buying print rights only, but one has to figure that a smaller publisher or a trade book distributor, looking at lots of underutilized capacity to handle print in the coming months, might see commercial merit in handling the print side of a major ebook bestseller.

Konrath does tout his sales through Amazon’s CreateSpace, which enables his books to be available in print for their online customer base. But he doesn’t talk about B&N’s PubIt program or setting up his title at Lightning Source, which would make it available as print online more broadly. None of these solutions put speculative inventory in stores, though, and that’s necessary to get the full marketing and sales impact for any book today (and probably for a few more years to come.)

3. Because Konrath has proved to be such a multi-talented combo do-it-yourselfer and finder-of-resources, the conversation doesn’t touch on the range of service providers that can help the potential self-publishing author for fees or for a much smaller percentage than a publisher would take. There’s mention of Smashwords, which is one, and of CreateSpace. But the self-publishing giant Author Solutions and lulu.com aren’t mentioned. Neither is BookMasters, a company we’ve worked with in Ashland, Ohio, which offers a range of self-publishing services, including access to all the editing requirements discussed by Konrath and Eisler along with some human-intermediary handholding that many authors will need. Perseus is building a similar set of services, extending its Constellation service, which began as the means to enable their roster of print distribution clients break into digital publishing. And Ingram has a suite of capabilities that could be extended, if they chose to make the investment, to be an author-service platform. The Scott Waxman Literary Agency is the first to have created a digital publishing arm that, with tweaking, could provide an author with the help they’d need. They won’t be the last.

The single greatest shortcoming of the Konrath-Eisler conversation, to me, was its Amazon-centricity, although there is one place in the conversation that begins to acknowledge that Barnes & Noble’s Nook sales are becoming significant. (Some publishers have told me that Kindle has declined from a share well north of 80% to one in the mid 50s while Nook is now accounting for 25% of their ebook sales in the US.) They don’t mention Kobo, which might have as much as a 7% share now. Sony is still a player. Apple’s iBookstore really shouldn’t be ignored. And Google ebooks is the lifeline for independent bookstores to sell ebooks. No author who wants to stay sweet with independents can afford to ignore putting their books into Google. In fact, Random House executives told us that the growing use of Google by indies was a factor in their decision to level the pricing playing field by moving to agency pricing last month.

And as the build-out of pathways for English-language books abroad continues, these non-Amazon, non-B&N players become even more important.

When Konrath started doing his self-publishing two or three years ago, working exclusively through Amazon made complete sense on an effort-to-reward basis. It is becoming increasingly important to cover more points of distribution, even digitally.

But that doesn’t change the calculation that much for Eisler’s decision. There are already helpers in the marketplace to extend beyond Amazon and there will, undoubtedly, be more. The conversation imagines this kind of service provision. And (if they’re competent) the ones now in the marketplace will be falling over themselves to introduce Eisler to what they can do for him.

4. OK, here’s what these guys really got wrong. They made a mistake about baseball. Their post is full of line drives off the wall, but their interpretation of baseball history is flawed.

I refer to Konrath’s observation about the Negro Leagues in baseball, suggesting that the reason the majors brought in black players was that Negro League baseball had become superior to Major League baseball. Actually, that wasn’t true at all. Although some integrated barnstorming over the years did result in black teams beating white ones from time to time, it was seldom suggested — and certainly no major league owners or fans thought — that the overall level of play was higher in the Negro Leagues. It wasn’t.

Beating a competitor that had somehow demonstrated its superiority was never the motivation for the major league teams to integrate. It was all about them competing with each other and not ignoring talent. The real history might contain a useful lesson for the legacy players in publishing today.

What drove Branch Rickey to sign Jackie Robinson was pure competitive zeal. He wanted to win. He wanted good ballplayers to help him win. If he was missing some good ballplayers by ignoring blacks, he’d stop ignoring blacks.

When he did that, other teams followed. And, in pretty short order, the Negro Leagues were destroyed because the best ballplayers they had were playing in the Major Leagues.

A similar effect has weakened, if not quite destroyed, Christian publishing in the US. A quarter century ago, Christian publishing and bookselling existed in a parallel universe to secular trade: different publishers, different stores, different commission rep groups. Just different. Then superstore expansion and some major Christian bestsellers led to the major chains starting to carry the best titles from the Christian publishers. That weakened the Christian booksellers, who were the ones that carried the wider range of titles from the Christian publishers which, in turn, weakened them.

Of course, Eisler hasn’t succeeded yet. He has a book to put out this Father’s Day that he turned down $250,000 to have come out next Father’s Day. If the over-under is whether he’ll have earned his $250,000 by then, which way would you bet? It would strike me as extremely ambitious, but if he can sell at $4.95, not entirely inconceivable. And, of course, you could set the bar at which you’d call it “success” a lot lower than that.

If the legacy publishing establishment can develop tools to deliver marketing at scale, adjust its contracts to pay higher digital royalties, and, perhaps, offer a “fee for service” model alongside its “advance against royalty” model, it might, like Major League Baseball did, weaken the infrastructure that is developing that will increasingly tempt authors (and readers) to abandon it. But it also could be that I was right four years ago when I said that the general trade publishing house was a dinosaur in the emerging world of 21st century publishing. Wasn’t it a natural disaster that was the catalyst for killing the original dinosaurs as well?

Konrath made the point that self-publishing just gives him more time to write. He and Eisler both expressed frustration about living with the long schedules and companion limitations of traditional publishing practices. From their perspective, it is wasteful to not start monetizing IP quickly after it is finished in the digital age and it is unnecessarily constraining sales and income to publish only one book a year, or even one per publishing season.

I’ve tried to recruit Joe to speak at conferences, with a total lack of success, because he thinks the best marketing he can do is just to keep writing. New stories help him market himself more than public appearances do. Since he also enjoys writing more than speaking and would rather be home than on the road, it’s a pretty tough sell to ask him to lose a day of editorial output to have a conversation with a bunch of strangers.

The portion of their conversation about staying focused on generating editorial output was one of the most persuasive elements of it. A publisher would help itself a lot if it focused on that question too and thought of a writer’s time as a valuable resource that should be devoted, as much as possible, to doing what that writer can do that nobody else can. And that’s “write.”

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The ebook revolution is really beginning to remind me of the mass-market papeback revolution.

The mass paperback was really “invented” by Sir Allan Lane when he created Penguin in Britain before World War II. (Wikipedia credits a German publisher with the first cheap paperbacks a few years earlier, but Lane was certainly the first in English and deserving of some extra credit because the company he started continues in the same business to the present day.) Pocket Books in the US was also born just before the war. During World War II, historian and polymath Philip Van Doren Stern (who wrote, among other things, the New Yorker short story on which the movie classic  “It’s A Wonderful Life” was based) ran a program for the US military by which inexpensive paperbacks were made available to the troops.

After the war ended, mass market publishing really grew. Many houses — Ballantine, Bantam, Signet, Avon — were launched immediately following the war. The key to mass-market publishing was that it achieved distribution through the network of wholesalers that put magazines on newsstands and in local stores (often drugstroes) nationwide. Unlike trade books, which required an agreement between publisher and bookseller to get a copy of any book on a retail shelf, mass markets were “allocated” by the publisher to the wholesaler and in turn pushed out by the wholesaler to the racks they controlled.

The advantage of this distribution technique was that it enabled lots of copies to be pushed out to lots of places with much lower sales and distribution costs. The disadvantage was that it really only worked if books were treated like magazines, with “on sale dates” when they went out and “off sale dates” when they were pulled back and, like magazines, had their guts pulped while only the covers were returned for credit.

The paperbacks were typically priced at 25 cents when hardcover books were $2 or $3. (Compare that 8-to-1 or 12-to-1 pricing ratio to what exists today. It doesn’t.) And mass-markets were available in tens of thousands of locations nationwide, perhaps more than a hundred thousand, when bookstores were few, department stores tended to have only one location, and trade books were typically available in hundreds of locations, or at most a couple of thousand.

The much more widespread availability of these titles combined with their much lower prices created legions of new readers. And, in the beginning, most mass-markets titles tended to fit into “genres”. Westerns were a really big one fifty years ago. Bantam’s perennial bestselling author of westerns, Louis L’Amour, may still be the biggest-selling author in unit sales in (what is now) Random House history. Crime and science fiction lines were also popular as were raunchy books. I’m not sure that romance lines existed in the way they do now (although I’ll bet that among the readers of this blog are people who will tell me that answer); at that time there were lots of magazines peddling romance stories (as there were for other genres.)

If this is ringing some bells for an observer of the ebook transition who didn’t know paperback history, it is entirely intended to. Let’s ring a few more.

The hardcover publishers were very snobby about the paperback houses. Over time it developed that the mass-marketers were able to create enormous additional revenues from books previously published as hardcovers. (This did require the mass-market publishers to keep some titles on sale for longer than a normal cycle, which was not simple, but worth the trouble for books that sold really well.)

The name recognition of successful books, along with the ability to put words which said “established bestseller” on the cover, could be converted into huge sales given the much lower prices and much wider distribution mass-market could achieve. Over time this led to rapidly rising paperback license payments from paperback publishers to hardcover publishers. These were, by traditional contract, shared 50-50 with the authors. They provided a substantial, if temporary, bonanza for the trade houses in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

But the new marketplace also led to the growth of genre authors whose audiences were established for low-priced paperbacks. It was often difficult for those authors to move “up” to more expensive hardcover publication. Their audiences didn’t want to pay the higher prices, but they also didn’t necessarily shop in the bookstores and book departments where those books were found; they were used to buying their books at newsstands and in drugstores.

When I was first coming into New York from the suburbs as a kid in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there was a fabulous selection of paperbacks at a drug store that occupied the corner location in the Grand Central building at 42nd Street and Vanderbilt Avenue. I found a series of baseball biographies there published by Sport Magazine. I remember a book about 1001 things you could get for free by writing away for them. And, of course, the public domain classics were all there. And I got some great trash like “I Sell Love” and a book about airline stewardesses whose title now escapes me but which was great naughty reading for an early teenager.

Then in the summer of 1962, when I was 15, I worked a 2-month stint at the very classy Brentano’s Bookstore on 5th Avenue and 47th Street. My assignment was downstairs in the brand new, just-opened, paperback department. The center of the basement contained the “trade” paperbacks, mostly academic, on shelves. Around the outside were the mass-markets in racks. The mass-markets were on racks arranged by publisher, because the publishers’ reps serviced them on a weekly basis.

Scribners Bookstore, across the street, didn’t deign to stock paperbacks for some years thereafter.

My dad, Leonard Shatzkin, told a story about the legendary Jason Epstein’s Anchor line of paperbacks at Doubleday (perhaps the first line of quality, or trade, paperbacks, but almost certainly the first such line to come from a mainstream trade house). Dad’s responsibilities as Director of Research extended to the sales force and he ran the sales conferences. At one such conference when Anchor Books (and Jason) were very young, Dad told me that Sid Gross, the head of merchandise for the company’s Doubleday Book Stores, tore into the whole concept of the cheap paperback. He hated them. From his perspective, it was bad for a book retailer to be selling 25 cent items instead of $3 items! Many other booksellers back then felt the same way.

My father’s reaction, pretty typical for him, was to support the contrarian and revolutionary view. He pushed the reps to make Anchor Books a success and, a few years later when Epstein had moved on to Random House, Dad created the Dolphin Books line of quality paperbacks to complement Anchor, whose title selection was pretty highbrow, with public domain and more popular current titles.

That anti-paperback snobbery was widespread and the separation between trade and mass-market publishing persisted for a long time. For at least a couple of decades, paperback houses didn’t do hardcovers and didn’t try to put their titles directly into bookstores (as bookstores started to carry mass-markets, at first they bought them from the wholesalers who racked them) and the trade publishers didn’t try to access the mass-market distribution system. This changed in the 1970s. First Peter Mayer and Bill Shinker pioneered the use of mass-market techniques for oversized trade paperbacks published by a mass-market house (Avon). Then a few years later, Bantam starting publishing hardcovers with distribution to mass accounts.

In the end, mass-market distribution was dismantled by a number of forces. The best retail accounts started buying direct from publishers rather than through the local wholesalers. The number of titles grew so that the “allocation” methods wouldn’t work anymore; there were too many publishers and too many titles for a diminishing number of pockets to handle, so the more expensive negotation method became required.

Patterns are being replicated now with inexpensive and widely-available ebooks. New authors are being spawned. Genre fiction works best. Books that were previously successful in more expensive formats can find new audiences as their prices come down and they go where new customers are shopping. And traditional publishers are sure that their “quality” protects them from low-brow competition, even while that competition is taking millions of customer dollars and countless hours of customer mindshare off the table.

But here’s how that old story ended. Mostly, the mass-market publishers won. Penguin bought Viking. Bantam bought Doubleday and then Random House. Simon & Schuster survived largely because they merged very early with Pocket Books. What is now Hachette is largely called Little, Brown, which was a hardcover house, but it really developed over the last two decades of the 20th century as Warner Books, a mass-market house. Really, only HarperCollins and Macmillan of the current Big Six are true descendents of the trade publishers that were dominant when mass-market publishing arose.

There are a slew of differences between the transitions; ebook publishing has a title glut to deal with just like mass-market did, but the challenges are not the same when you don’t have printed books to manufacture and ship around and your distribution isn’t limited by shelf space or pockets to display them. And authors couldn’t do it themselves in the mass-market era the way they can today. But there is a very basic lesson I think publishers better take on board from this history.

Much-less-expensive editions, combined with access to audiences for authors that couldn’t get past the gatekeepers in the established houses, can create millions of new readers that weren’t available to the legacy products at the legacy prices.

And that can lead to economic power that can ultimately swallow up large chunks of the legacy publishing establishment.

I posted more than six months ago that I had read my first self-published ebook, a history of the 1962 New York Mets called “A Year in Mudville”. Then I had an exchange in the comments string of my last post with Joe Konrath, who used to be published by NY publishers but is now finding it much more lucrative to do it himself, and a reader named Chris. They urged me to read a self-published ebook bestseller, “Wish List” by John Locke. It was fabulous, sort of a cross between contemporary bestselling author Carl Hiaasen and a relic of the early mass-market days, Jim Thompson: bold, caustic, and funny with characters you like who suddenly do outrageously anti-social things. Locke has apparently come out of nowhere with just his talent to help him and is selling shedloads of ebooks. (He’ll certainly sell another one or two to me!) I am not price-sensitive about my reading and I haven’t ever shopped the 99 cent pile, but Locke is certainly evidence that there is stuff in there that is the equal of anything the big publishers are doing at major multiples of that price point. It will be an interesting challenge to see if any major publisher can deliver enough added value to make a deal with Locke or Amanda Hocking, another writer who has found a huge market without any help from the establishment.

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It was just about two years ago that I appeared on a panel at a meeting of agents with, among others, Macmillan CEO John Sargent and Sargent made the point that maintaining ebook pricing and margins was one of the critical challenges facing publishers. Ebook sales were still hovering around one percent of the business. Or maybe two. Nowhere near five. Sargent was prescient.

It was about six months ago that I did a couple of posts on direct marketing techniques. I engaged a publishing friend named Neal Goff, whose background is mostly outside of trade books, to help me with those. I had him walk me through some fundamentals because I didn’t know them and, I feared, neither did the trade houses that were now — because of agency — required to set prices on their own books without the requisite expertise.

It was only last week that Random House announced it was shifting to agency pricing and I said I hoped they would be more ambitious about experimentation with price than their competitors in the arena had been.

All of these thoughts came together for me when I read this post on CNET that has two real wake-up calls in it for the big publishers.

One they are increasingly aware of: very cheap ebooks are selling very well and, with at least two major bestseller lists (The New York Times and USA Today) now counting ebook sales in units for their rankings, there is a real threat that the established business at established price points could be chased from the biggest market-maker there is. (It is important to note that the Times and USA Today methodologies are still a bit opaque and it is not clear how lower-price books are weighted. Some clear successes in the low-price realm haven’t shown up yet.)

The other point is more subtle. Individuals and little publishers are fiddling with price in ways to maximize bestseller positioning and revenues. The rules are complicated. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have programs that reward pricing above $2.99 by paying higher royalties. But it would certainly appear that there are many consumers who are limiting their shopping for ebooks to those that cost 99 cents or below. So some authors have learned that cutting their price increases unit sales to put them on a bestseller list, then raising their price results in more revenue. Apparently one very useful strategy for revenue maximization is to shuttle between prices.

The point that “cutting price boosts sales” isn’t exactly surprising, and it also isn’t exactly news. J.A. Konrath, perhaps the first established author to really start raking in shekels self-publishing through Amazon, has been experimenting with pricing and proving this point for a long time. Konrath’s data was charted for clarity by blogger Dave Slusher a few months ago. Konrath’s work and Slusher’s analysis of it further emphasizes the central point Neal Goff made to us. Experimentation matters. (Neal called it “testing.”)

Another author has demonstrated that cutting price is important, and promoting lower prices is also important.

Although I have heard one major publishing CEO suggest that the house is doing some fiddling with pricing, there was no suggestion there of controlled and monitored experimentation. And I believe it is safe to say, without doing any research, that no major publisher is doing that on a consistent and persistent basis, let alone algorithmically-programmed price management such as the major ebook retailers almost certainly do.

There is another hugely ironic point buried in the CNET story. It is built around the work of an author named Christopher Smith, who has mastered the shuttle-pricing technique. Turns out Smith has a new fan named Stephen King. King, of course, has not only published successfully with major houses for decades, he was one of the first great ebook experimenters around the turn of the century when he tried to do author-direct publishing of ebooks before there was a market. King’s blurb for Smith has been very helpful to the lesser-known, lower-priced author.

Might Smith return the favor for King by teaching him the revenue-maximization techniques he’s developed so King can get back into the self-publishing experimentation game? I think that possibility encapsulates the major publishers’ biggest nightmare. Publishers are going to have a devil of a time defending their 25% royalty rate into the future, which just feels intuitively unfair to authors. They can get away with it for the time being because print sales still matter. But they won’t for long and if publishers don’t use their scale to do a better job managing dynamic pricing to extract the maximum revenue from ebook sales than an author might do on his or her own, the challenge of retaining their top talent will become even more difficult.

There is a reasonable suggestion that publishers should be making in a hurry about bestseller lists in the ebook era. In print, books are separated by format (hardcover, trade paperback, mass-market) by The Times and identified by format by USA Today  so that apples-to-apples comparisons are possible for consumers. It is really a stacked deck to rank on unit sales alone any book at 99 cents and Ken Follett’s bestseller “Fall of Giants”  at $19.99. Format in print creates a reasonable proxy for price. I think price-tiered bestseller lists would be a stretch, but going to the movie studio “box office” concept would not. Publishers, while they still have clout as advertisers in media that promote bestseller lists, should suggest a “units times price” ranking as one that provides a more useful comparison for many consumers.

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Now the Big Six are all selling ebooks on the agency model. Random House has joined their five competitors.

It is almost a year since Apple launched the iPad, opened the iBookstore, and delivered big publishers an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the ebook marketplace, at least for their books and at least for a while. As readers of this blog almost certainly know, five of the top publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster) used the opportunity presented by Apple’s arrival on the scene to implement the change to agency for all their customers. Random House, for reasons that made sense to me at the time and almost certainly delivered some competitive advantages to them over the past year, judging by the open annoyance of many of their similar-sized competitors, stayed with the original wholesale model.

The competitive advantaged stemmed from the fact that all the agency publishers “forced” a 30% selling margin in to the ebook retail channel whereas Random House may actually have drawn margin out of the retail channel.

Here’s what I get out of this change.

1. Agency has been successful in cracking Amazon’s hegemony over the ebook market. A year ago, it seemed possible that Amazon could have an enduring 75% or 80% of the ebook market. While they’re still the biggest piece, and almost certainly have more twice as big a chunk as anybody else, agency has enabled real competition to develop from the iBookstore, B&N’s Nook, Kobo, and Google. And the independents served by Google, Ingram, and Overdrive all over the world offer a lot of potential marketing leverage, if they’re not driven out of the game by price competition. Amazon is still the behemoth, but they’re no longer the only game in town. Agency delivered competitive advantage to Random House, but also to Amazon. If they had continued to be 80% of the market, you might not be seeing this switch.

2. Google may not (yet) be selling a lot of ebooks (as in having a big market share), but they are opening the business up to more and more independents. Independents talk to sales reps, and Random House has more sales reps than anybody else. I would imagine the company began to feel some discomfort about the feedback they were getting from the retail network they very much want to keep alive.

3. So far, none of the major publishers has taken the step of aggressively selling ebooks direct to consumers online. But they’re ultimately going to have to. You may recall that Random House’s CEO, Markus Dohle, told me last summer that he realized publishers needed to become B2C. He wasn’t suggesting he’d sell books direct-to-consumers then; in fact he insisted that there were other ways to manifest that vision other than selling direct. But, if it ever enters your mind to sell direct and you think about it for fifteen minutes, you realize that you either have to do it under agency terms or face complicated and very troubling conversations with your retailers.

And here’s what I’m watching for.

So far, as near as I can tell, there has been very little use made by the big publishers of their ability to manage prices in the market. I am not aware of much experimentation. I am not aware of any direct-marketing or dynamic pricing expertise (both of which would be relevant) being brought on board by major houses to help them realize the potential of the opportunities. And I can only think of one senior executive I know who takes much of a personal interest in pricing dynamics.

Maybe Random House will be different. They’ve been the traditional industry leader in operations and analytics. They do vendor-managed inventory for retail accounts; I’m not aware of any other major publisher who does. They’ve done sophisticated supply chain management for years.

Now they’ve had the advantage of seeing what their competitors have done, and not done, over the first year of agency pricing. It will be worth watching to see whether they approach the pricing opportunity more energetically than the other publishers seem to have done so far.

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Sometimes, and it would seem quite often these days, the future comes faster than you expected it.

Followers of this blog, and of my speeches before there was a blog (this one’s from 2001!), know I’ve long been expecting ebook reading to supplant print book reading for many people. I’ve been wrong about the timing. (Ten years ago I’d have expected to be where we are now three or four years ago.) I’ve been wrong about whether a dedicated device for reading would make much of difference. (I read so comfortably on a phone, and before that on a PDA, that I figured few would want yet another device for reading only.) And I’m rethinking my expectations around enhanced ebooks and the utility of social reading.

But it has seemed clear to me for a long time that ebooks offered compelling advantages over print — portability, ease of purchase, and a lower cost basis that must inexorably lead to lower prices — that would increasingly sway many of the inevitably growing number of people who had a readable handheld screen in reach most of the time. And my long experience dealing with bookstore economics made it clear to me that the consequent sales subtraction from brick-and-mortar stores would lead to closures, which would lead to longer travel times for customers to get to the stores, which in turn would drive more people to purchase print or digital books online. And that would lead to more closures. This is a virtuous circle if you’re in the ebook business or sell print online. Or if you want to see Americans consume less gasoline.

It is a vicious cycle — a death spiral — if you’re a bookstore.

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch reported (you have to subscribe to use the links) that BookScan numbers show a drop in unit sales of printed books of 4.4 % from 2009 to 2010. But don’t take that number to any bank. It is already out of date. Cader did a further analysis of more recent BookScan data shortly thereafter showing that print book sales have dropped by over 15% compared to the prior year over the first six weeks of 2011! And the share of print sold online keeps rising, so that almost certainly means that print sales in stores has fallen even faster. Could print sales in stores have dropped 20% or 25% from a year ago? They certainly could!

Sales of iPads, Kindles, and Nooks exceeded most expectations for Christmas 2010. Dominique Raccah, the head of independent publisher Sourcebook, a company with a diverse trade list, reported on her blog that dollar sales at her company in January were 35% digital!

No wonder she says, “We may well be at the tipping point. I suspect that we’re going to see some dramatic reassessment when publishers look at their numbers at the end of the first quarter, 2011.”

I have heard the argument from very smart people that ebook adoption will plateau at some point. Since it has been doubling or more for the past three years and was often placed in the mid-teens for new fiction and narrative non-fiction by the last quarter of 2010, we know that it can’t continue to double for the next three years without exceeding 100%. Nonetheless, predictions that ebook sales would achieve 50% in the next five years and that bookstore shelf space would drop by 50% in the next five years — which is what I thought would be the case — seemed pretty aggressive six months ago.

They don’t seem aggressive anymore.

The Borders share of the publishers’ revenue is estimated to be about 8%. They could be 10% or 12% of brick-and-mortar. So if Borders were to completely disappear tomorrow (and they aren’t about to do that) and even if every book they sold in their stores were somehow purchased at somebody else’s store (which won’t happen), the reduction of book sales in stores is so large that all the other stores would still, collectively, be looking at a substantial year-on-year sales decline.

All this means that 2011 that is going to be a real “fasten your seat belts” year for publishers. And Raccah is right that publishers are going to be a bit stunned at what they see when they look at their numbers for the first quarter of this year.

One impact that sophisticated publishers are well aware of but that is not obvious to the untrained eye is that as sales go down, returns percentages, inevitably and inexorably, go up. When a publisher calculates a returns percentage for any period — a week, a month, a quarter, or a year — they are measuring the returns received and credited in that period against the sales made in that period. But the returns actually come from the sales made in prior periods; even in the worst of situations, very few books are returned less than three months following their purchase.

So what’s happening right now is that shipments out are being depressed — no or very little Borders and diminished expectations everywhere else — while returns are rising because they’re coming back from orders placed against the higher expectations of the past six to 12 months. That means that the net sales numbers being created right now — shipments out minus returns — might, for many, be a disappointment verging on devastation.

And returns percentages aren’t the only percentages that are going to be troubling. Two others that publishers look at are also going to get more challenging.

The percentage of a book’s print price that is constituted by the “unit cost of manufacture” is one. The unit cost is extremely run-sensitive. If you’re printing fewer books and if you have to hold the line on retail prices (both of which will almost certainly be true), the percentage of revenue spent on creating the print books is going to rise.

The second trouble spot is that publishers like to think about the cost of “fixed overheads” as a percentage. Many publishers still follow the unwise practice of putting a percentage calculation of overhead into their unit cost calculations for every book. But if sales volume falls faster than overheads can be reduced, that percentage rises too. And you can’t fire your way to rapid overhead reductions very effectively. Shedding staff is often an illusion anyway; we keep hearing about freelancers getting work because publishers have fired the staff that used to do it. But, besides that, warehouse and office space costs and systems investments don’t rise or drop with volume (which is exactly why it is a logical error to calculate them as a percentage of revenue!) Publishers who are using a percent figure for overhead to calculate their margins on each title they acquire to sell are going to find those numbers need to be reconsidered as well.

While Barnes & Noble will be feeling the margin pain of all brick-and-mortar booksellers, they are, no doubt, also very well aware of their growing importance to all publishers in an upcoming Borders-less (or less-Borders) world. B&N will almost certainly be looking for better trading terms and publishers will almost certainly feel the weakness in their negotiating position dealing with those requests. And that’s aside from the fact that publishers really and truly want a healthy Barnes & Noble maintaining its ability to show their wares to the public.

So sales are going down, returns are going up, the cost of goods is going up, margins from sales are going down, and right-sizing overheads is going to be an accelerating problem. The good news is that ebook sales are rising and the margins from them — at least for now — have been pretty well preserved.

But the first significant sign that ebook prices are going to tumble has arrived with the news that 99 cent ebooks are now beginning to appear on the mainstream media’s ebook and combined bestsellers lists which come from The New York Times and USA Today. This creates some nasty problems. It puts previously unknown authors selling 99 cent books before the public as bestseller creators. And it encourages the established publishers to cut prices to register unit sales to get on those lists themselves.

At the very least, I’d expect publishers to start asking The Times and USA Today to consider the total revenue a book generates at retail (price times units) when creating the lists, not base them on unit sales alone. Since the established publishers buy a lot more ads than the 99-cent-book authors do, we should expect them to, at least, get a hearing.

Publishers are going to be scrambling to keep their business profitable and having second thoughts about many of their most time-honored practices in the weeks to come.

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There’s a new Big Six in town. Or maybe not “in town.” But “on the planet.”

The Big Six is a term commonly used to collectively designate the behemoths of US trade publishing: Random House, Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. Although there are other large players, some of whom occasionally can compete with these companies for seven-figure authors, the lion’s share of the biggest author brands are published by one of these six houses.

But from the perspective of publishers or booksellers outside the United States, there is a new North American Big Six. These are the companies that have direct relationships with publishers — all of them that matter in the US (with one noteworthy exception) and, increasingly, those that matter overseas as well — to secure the rights to distribute ebook files wherever in the world the publishers have rights.

Why does this Big Six matter so much? Because as dedicated ereaders and tablets and smartphones that can effectively serve as ereaders gain increased market penetration anywhere, the appetite for ebook content will grow proportionately. In languages other than English, the number of published books currently in epub — and therefore deliverable as reflowable ebooks — is paltry compared to what we have. It will take a long time for the publishers in most countries to make enough content ready to satisfy that growing hunger in their local markets.

And the Big Six companies have the infrastructure, and, most importantly, the rights, to satisfy that appetite everywhere.

Three of the North American Big Six are well known and would be immediately identified just about anywhere. Although Amazon, Apple, and Google have not yet opened their ebook “stores” in every country in the world that can buy ebooks, it won’t be long before they will. These three global giants all derive more revenue from outside the book business than they do from ebooks (and only Amazon, of the three, has any commercial interest in selling books except for ebooks.) But they are past (Amazon), present (Apple), and future (Google) game-changers: companies that have such an enormous presence that their entry into any area, certanly including ebooks, causes every other player in the market to sit up and take notice.

There is a fourth player like them, relatively tiny Kobo,.Kobo is also an ebook retailer. Over the past two years, they have been extraordinarily successful at getting publishers to establish direct relationships with them. (I didn’t track this with great precision, but I believe Kobo was the only company besides Amazon to have all the agency publishers on board the day agency selling started last April.) Kobo has “white-labeled”, or powered, an ebook store for Borders in the US and Red Group in Australia (two booksellers who, coincidentally or not, have just filed for bankruptcy protection). Kobo also has, according to their executive, Michael Tamblyn, at Tools of Change, “more than two million registered users.”

All four of these companies will be competing as ebook retailers in every market in the world and in every language in the world. They all start out with a robust aggregation of US-published ebooks. Apple is the laggard here. They don’t carry Random House books yet — the “noteworthy exception” referred to in the third paragraph above — and they have fewer available titles than any of the other three. But Apple comes with its own significant advantages in the form of the wildly popular iPhone and iPad. These devices assure a certain minimum amount of traffic to their iBookstore, even if Apple doesn’t move ahead with in books with the power play they’ve just exercised over subscription sellers of magazines and newspapers. (And so far we have only rumors and stretched intepretations of what they’ve said and done to suggest that they will do that anytime soon.)

Because American hegemony is resented in much of the world, Kobo may have a built-in advantage in international competition against the other three. Kobo is a Canadian company. They are also not disrupting people’s lives or terrifying them by monopolizing online print sales in any market (like Amazon), or by delivering devices designed to capture audiences and wall them off from competitors (like Apple), or by digitizing first and asking permission later (like Google.) All three of the Biggest Three (of the Big Six) have enemies and detractors. Kobo doesn’t.

Kobo doesn’t have their effectively unlimited resourcces either.

There are already retailers active in every country in the world, operating in the local language, who want to be the ebook resellers of choice in their own countries. For them, the other two members of the North American Big Six are potentially critical resources: Ingram and Overdrive.

Ingram is well known throughout the book business worldwide (and is sometimes, and currently, a client of ours.) As the biggest and most innovative wholesaler in the US for four decades, they have built both a customer base and a supplier base all over the world. They’ve been the principal wholesaler of ebooks to US independent ebook retailers since the begining of ebook time. They have deep and strong relationships with every US publisher of any size, rooted in their wholesaling business. They can set any retailer up with a wide selection of US ebook titles.

Ingram’s competitor for the role of delivering English-language (and, ultimately, all non-local language) ebooks to resellers all over the world is Overdrive. Overdrive has been in the digital content business since the 1980s and pioneered ebook distribution to libraries from the dawn of the current ebook era in the late 1990s. They also have a very broad base of publisher suppliers and can, like Ingram, provide an ebook reseller local to any country with a robust selection of other-language ebooks to vend, with an emphasis on those provided by American publishers.

Could any upstarts join the Big Six as credible providers for local competitors to the four global ebook retailers? I see three possibilities.

Barnes & Noble certainly has the relationships with publishers globally to assemble an ebook title selection that can rival anyone’s (and they’ve done it.) They are already the number two ebook reseller in the US market, miles ahead of Apple and Google and Kobo. But, so far, they have continued their brick-and-mortar strategy of sticking to the US market. It seems to me that the economics of their successful Nook family of devices and the ebook store they run would benefit from extending to a global base. But every company has to make choices about resource allocation and focus, and it is hard to quarrel with the success B&N has had competing with Kindle and iPad considering their prior experience with hardware (none). They’ve leveraged their retail presence to do it and they don’t have that resource to employ outside the US.

Copia and Blio are upstart ebook platforms. The independently-owned Copia has its social component as a unique feature (although Kobo has some pretty cool social stuff and there’s an upstart called Rethink Books with some technology that provides social capabilities around books independent of the ebook platform.) When Blio started, they seemed to offer an opportunity for publishers to enhance their ebooks readily. But the tool set that would enable hasn’t been delivered. Both of these offerings have a distance to travel to catch up with the Big Six, all of which have been in the game a long time and built up a network of suppliers and customers that it is not a trivial challenge to duplicate.

If there’s going to be a Big Seven, my bet would be on B&N.

Right now, publishers and retailers seeing the book tsunami coming closer to their shores will want to focus on the North American Big Six. If I were a publisher in any language, I’d be sure they all had my books. If I were a retailer in any country, I’d be looking at them as possible competitors or collaborators. Understanding who these companies are, what they have to offer, and what they have in mind is going to be an important component of every publisher’s and retailer’s strategic thinking for the foreseeable future.

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This comes up often and I grit my teeth every time.

You can’t have a discussion of any length about ebook sales and pricing and DRM in any sized group of digital publishing observers before you hear that it is somehow wrong or unfair that a “purchaser” can’t do everything with an ebook they’ve bought that they do with a print book they’ve bought.

That is: various “controls”, sometimes deliberate (DRM) and sometimes circumstantial (tech doesn’t always work smoothly) make it hard or impossible to lend, give, or re-sell an ebook in the same way that you do a printed book. Have enough of these conversations and you will become educated about “first sale” rights, which are enshrined in law, which basically say that when you buy something you own it and can lend, give, or re-sell it.

So the way the complaint often goes is that those damn publishers are putting this damn DRM on my ebooks so I can’t do all the things with them I can do with my print books.

This has always struck me as highly questionable on its face. First sale rights make complete sense with something physical. They make no sense with something digital. When you lend, give, or re-sell a print book, you don’t have it anymore. When you lend, give, or re-sell a digital file, you still have it and you could lend, give, or re-sell it again and again without limit. Surely, that’s a distinction that justifies a departure from the physical world paradigm.

The complaint that first sale rights are being abused — often delivered as a complaint about publishers — proceeds from a fundamental misunderstanding that publishers themselves are entirely responsible for creating. You don’t actually “buy” an ebook the same way you buy a physical book. What you actually buy is a license to access a digital file, which — in the developing world of the cloud — you may or may not ultimately “possess” in any machine or device you own. (Of course, you can own the machine or device, which is physical. If you lend, give, or re-sell it, you won’t have it anymore.)

Publishers promulgated this misunderstanding. From the beginning, publishers analogized ebook distribution to print book distribution. They started out using about the same retail price and about the same discount structure to intermediaries as they did with print books. Some, at the very beginning, even tried to make the royalties the same (in the neighborhood of 5 to 15 percent of the retail price.) It seemed simple and it seemed logical. It has turned out to be neither.

There is a core reason why publishers promote this nomenclature of misunderstanding. Publishing contracts vary widely, but one thing is pretty common among all of them and has been for a very long time. They enumerate the splits between publishers and authors on rights sale revenue for a long list of possible transactions: first serial, second serial, book clubs, paperbacks, cheap hardcover editions, foreign editions in English, foreign editions in foreign languages, and others.

And then they almost all say — almost forever have said — that all rights transactions not enumerated will see revenue divided between authors and publishers 50-50. In fact, according to some agents, even in contracts where an ebook royalty is specified, the sale of electronic book rights are almost always specifically designated as a 50-50 split.

So if publishers called their ebook transactions what I believe they really are — rights licenses — they’d have what looks to me (but I’m not a lawyer) like a contractual obligation to pay authors half the revenue. Since that is double what many publishers, and all the big publishers, think is “fair” and commercially viable, there’s no motivation to move the conversation back in that direction, even if it would make the consumer interaction, and the restrictions policed by DRM, sensible.

Of course, smart agents have been thinking about this question too. They see very clearly that ebook sales are different from print book sales. First of all, ebook sales are — almost without exception — governed by a contract between the publisher and the consumer’s source. That’s not true (with very rare exceptions) for relationships between publishers and print retailers or wholesalers. But it is true for the relationship between publishers and book clubs. In fact, the book club paradigm has much more in common with the ebook marketplace than the publisher-bookseller relationship does. Book club deals are covered by licenses. Book clubs “print” their own editions, just as ebook resellers deliver the books in their own proprietary format or DRM.

It is worth emphasizing here that the publisher is (in today’s world) very seldom delivering the file directly to the end consumer. The fact that the publisher gives the intermediary a clean digital file, which the intermediary then manipulates and copies (or, we could say, “prints” in its own proprietary edition) to deliver to its customers underscores that there is activity betwixt publisher and consumer that falls under a license. And it is a license that is spelled out in a contractual relationship.

But agents have apparently chosen, at least for now, not to fight the royalty battle with publishers on these terms. For any agent to do so would be employing a sort-of “nuclear option”; they might be right and they might even win in court (eventually), but they’d effectively deal themselves out of the game from the moment they attempted to enforce this position.

This is symmetrical with the publishers’ restraint on the non-compete clause. From the publishers’ perspective, it is transparent and obvious that an ebook edition competes with a print book edition of the same book. All book contracts have non-compete language. But no publisher has yet used that particular argument to strongarm an author who wants to self-publish an ebook when their print contract didn’t contemplate ebooks. Both sides — despite the flare-up that occurred last year when Andrew  Wylie appeared to go toe-to-toe with publishers for a little while before he apparently backed down — want to continue doing business and prefer to negotiate solutions rather than attempt to impose them, even if they have a very strong position.

And agents are aware that they and their authors might also benefit from the misunderstanding about whether the ebook transaction is a sale or a license. If it is a license that doesn’t explicitly grant first sale privileges (and, by the way, it actually often is already: check your Kindle agreement with Amazon!), then consumers might insist on paying less for it than they do for print. At least, that has been a component of their restraint. Now that ebook prices, most dramatically for hardcovers, have been coming down in relation to the print prices (first through Amazon’s deep-discounting initiative, and then made permanent by publishers lowering their established prices when they switched to agency), consumers are getting a dollars-off deal as compared to print much (though not all) of the time.

Even though authors don’t sell their copyrights to publishers (they license their use) and publishers don’t sell inventory or even production masters to ebook resellers (they license them to replicate and distribute the publishers’ ebook files), the fiction that Kindle or Nook or Kobo or Google or iBookstore is selling the book to you or me will persist. If we had truth in labeling here, it would make the restrictions comprehensible. It would even make consumers understand why Amazon was within its rights (and upholding its responsibilities) when it chose to “cancel” the licenses it granted erroneously for an edition of “1984″ a couple of years ago. We can all recall the high dudgeon among many observers when they infamously reached into people’s Kindles and erased a file they were given by somebody who did not have the rights to grant those licenses to it. But truth in labeling would also eliminate an ambiguity that works in favor of publishers’ margins today.

What would worry me if I were a publisher is that someday somebody who is not an agent trying to keep things sweet with publisher customers will file a lawsuit to make the case that ebook sales are licenses already covered in just about every publishing contract. That would suggest a potential liability equal to half the ebook revenue minus what has been paid so far on every ebook ever sold under any contract where that kind of rights split language still governs. Publishers have perhaps mitigated their exposure by putting new ebook agreements in place with many authors, but they still wouldn’t want a court poking its nose into this particular problem.

On the other hand, it would certainly make things a lot clearer and stop a lot of silly conversations if we all understood that ebook access is granted by license, not sale.

Looking forward to lots of hellos at Tools of Change this week. I’m sure, as always, it will be a jam-packed and stimulating couple of days.

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I had breakfast last summer with one of the titans of 20th century publishing who is now in his senior years running his own smaller operation. He’s a notorious non-techie.

When we talked, he was trying to come to grips with what the problem for publishers was with this digital transition. From his perspective, publishing just gets cheaper (no books to print) and there should be room to lower prices, pay good author royalties, and still make a profit under something pretty close to the traditional model.

Well, I said, that would be true, but the problem is you’re going to face a lot more competition. Demand may go up and costs may go down but if supply in competition with publishers’ outputs rises too fast, there could still be a very difficult period in front of the industry’s legacy players.

That is: it could get increasingly difficult to get consumers to give you money.

Of course, increased competition from anonymous authors — many of whom would have been filtered out by the curation activities of agents and editors in the past — didn’t scare him. But, I pointed out, it won’t be limited to that. Do you think ESPN, for example, with all its content and all its market reach, will need a publisher to do a book or book-like thing? Or CBS News? Or The Museum of Modern Art?

When I shifted the conversation from stray authors he would have rejected as a big publisher to brands he sought deals with, the point had more impact.

Then, earlier this week at Digital Book World, David Nussbaum’s panel of publishing CEOs and presidents took up a related subject: ebooks being given away for free as a promotion. Brian Napack of Macmillan expressed a concern I’ve felt previously (and wrote about a year ago): that if there are enough free books around out there being distributed to promote an author or series, many readers will just choose from what’s free and stop buying books. Jane Friedman of Open Road declared on the same panel that “free is not a business model; it may be a marketing model, but it isn’t a business model.”

What the CEOs were focused on was what their company policies were and what they hoped others would be. Everybody’s learned that giving away a free book can serve as a promotion for other books by the same author, particularly if the book given away is the first in a series. But if enough people are promoting, that can generate a lot of free ebooks for any consumer to choose from any day of the year.

In a presentation of consumer data the following day, both the joint effort from BISG and Bowker (who were surveying the ebook consumer) and the research from iModerate (who were surveying readers who use multi-function devices) revealed findings that suggested that half or more of the ebooks being read these days are being obtained for free! How much of that is public domain material, how much of it is unknown authors promoting themselves, and how much is branded content from major houses is not yet known.

These two things — non-publisher brands and entities competing with publishers to deliver content and free content competing with content for sale — connect in a painful way at the publisher’s balance sheet. And there isn’t a lot publishers can do about them.

This morning comes the report that the New York Times is tackling the question: “How do you monetize the content when it is not news anymore?” Would you be surprised to learn that the answer is “publish an ebook”?

Their new ebook, “Open Secrets”, further amortizes the large volume of work they did to comb the wikileaks material. The ebook is available for $5.99 in most places ebooks are sold. Will there be more of this? You bet there will! Jim Schachter, the paper’s associate managing editor, is tasked with making sure there will.

The same approach is being tried by a newer brand with similar content, the independent journalism farm, ProPublica, which heretofore has teamed with various newspapers, including the Times, to deliver their investigative journalism to the public. Their entrant is “Pakistan and the Mumbai Attacks: The Untold Story” by Sebastian Rotella and it is available only from Amazon through their new singles (short works) program for $0.99.

Ten or fifteen years ago, “Open Secrets” would have been an “Instant Book” from a major publisher (if it were anything at all.) The Times could have an opportunity like this 10 or 20 or 30 times a year. They provide themselves with brand extension, revenue, an opportunity to give more exposure to their reporters and their reporting, and total flexibility without the need for the complexities, including contracts and corporate interactions, that arise when getting a book published by somebody else.

According to Richard Tofel of ProPublica, their goal is primarily dissemination of the information. After all, they’re a mission-driven organization to begin with. So they seem quite happy selling high-quality, curated content for 99 cents. Not free, but if you’re a publisher trying to sell content at prices that make commercial sense, not much better than free either.

These two unrelated realities — consumers being diverted from purchases by free ebooks and sources of content being diverted from publishing contracts by alternate paths to the market — make it clear that traditional publishing faces challenges both upstream and downstream from where they sit.

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