DMC

A year ago — even six months ago — it seemed like Amazon and its Kindle device had an insurmountable advantage in the ebook device and platform competition. Despite our admonition that Amazon’s dominance of ebooks was much more fragile than their dominance in online print bookselling, even we were impressed and sometimes daunted by the enormous percentage of ebook sales that were being made through the Kindle ecosystem.

Then Barnes & Noble introduced the Nook through their 700 stores last December and Apple brought the iPad to market in April. Nearly overnight, it seems, Amazon has gone from the dominant player to the leading player with a share that was often in the 80s for many titles having fallen to the 50s.

Three entirely new ebook platforms are now poised to make their debut. Each of them has an angle, or a USP, that the others don’t and that the vendors, devices, and platforms that preceded them — notably Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, and Sony — don’t. The three new platforms are Google Editions, Blio, and Copia.

Google’s special proposition is ubiquity; Blio’s special proposition is enhanced feature sets; and Copia’s special proposition is building social networking right into the content consumption platform.

The new entrant that is subject to the greatest anticipation, of course, is Google Editions. Whenever they go live (which they say they “hope” will be sometime this summer, which has another 6 weeks or so to run), they are likely to be offering the largest selection of ebooks from any single source. Google has a staggering number — millions — of public domain books but they will also have professional and scientific books not published on most of the prior ebook platforms. Their well-promoted proposition is their cloud model, which will allow their ebooks to be read on any device that can support a browser.

Google is also offering a wholesaling service to enable any bookstore or any web site to sell their ebooks. (What that means, of course, is that their “largest single source” claim could be usurped by their own resellers, who might have added other titles from other places.) Their arrival adds another option for potential ebook sellers who had previously been served by Ingram’s wholesaling operation or their competitor, Content Reserve, which has also reached the book trade through Baker & Taylor.

Google is working the OEM channel as well and not limiting themselves to Android-powered devices in doing so. They’ll have apps available in multiple marketplaces, including Apple. And they are offering to power sales on publishers’ own sites. We’ve seen no announcement of publishers who have accepted this proposition, but it would seem likely that some, particularly smaller ones, will find it attractive.

Baker & Taylor has been developing its own ebook platform, Blio, in concert with futurist Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation of the Blind. We were first shown Blio last December and were really impressed with its crisp presentation of integrated text-and-pictures pages. They showed us a tool kit that made it pretty easy for publishers to enhance their print books for electronic delivery with sound and video, and even to fiddle with the design in the Blio platform. Because of Blio’s roots as a tool to bring reading to the sight-impaired, the ability to adjust font sizes, a capability which all ebooks offer, had to be integrated into their delivery of complex page layouts.

We have been expecting Blio’s debut in the market for some time, and we’ve been expecting to see many highly-illustrated books, like college texts, that have not previously been in the offerings of Kindle, Nook, and Kobo. Highly illustrated books would work fine on the iPad, of course, but they were not a priority for initial inclusion for iBooks (the dedicated Apple ebookstore) and they were not what publishers would put into the eink-reader platforms that didn’t handle that material well.

Blio has announced that it will power the store Toshiba is creating to support its tablet release. Since that is expected in the next month or so, Toshiba’s offering of Blio titles will probably be their debut in the marketplace.

The tool set for Blio was what really captivated us when we saw it last December. When we saw it at the time, Blio was delivering a Blio-ready ebook from the publishers’ print PDF, and then, within Blio, the publisher could enhance the ebook. At the Untethered conference in June, Blio announced a partnership with Quark by which Blio files could be created directly from Quark. Blio says they expect the Quark release to be in beta later this Fall. Blio plans to integrate its tools into other creation software in the months to follow.

Blio introduces another format into the ebook world: rather than epub or PDF, they are using Microsoft’s XPS platform. Right now, Blio itself is handling the conversion of titles from either PDF or epub into XPS, but the Quark arrangement and the others that will take place will allow publishers to deliver XPS-ready files to Blio, cutting past the conversion queue that now exists.

The open questions have been: when will Blio arrive and what will be the retailing environment for it when it arrives? They say they have 200,000 titles committed to their platform. (They can’t just pick up the ebooks of others; they’re not vanilla epub.) The Toshiba store won’t contain them all because titles are coming in faster than the conversion process can ramp up. Blio, like Google and Copia, expects lots of OEM installation. They project that Blio could be on more than 50 million devices by the end of 2011 and that they will be working with “traditional retail partners” in 2011 as well.

Copia made a splash last week when they announced their line of ereaders, including a larger-than-a-phone-screen color model which will be $99 when it comes out in September. Since Copia is a creation of DMC, and DMC is historically a hardware company, using their own hardware to launch the platform makes great sense. But OEM relationships, and an ability to deliver their platform to any device through client apps as well as through web browsers, are part of the strategy too.

The Copia platform’s unique proposition is that they combine social networking right into the platform in which content purchasing and consumption take place. Amazon’s announcement of an integration with Facebook moves them in a similar direction, but Copia would seem to be going much further than Amazon: enabling the sharing of the content consumption experience itself among friends or a personal network. This could be critical for reading groups, areas of common (vertical) interest, or for educational applications. Inside the Copia network, users can readily share their notes and annotations. And to make it easy for people to get started on their platform, Copia enables the import of existing contacts from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Other ebook platforms have demonstrated the power of syncing the reading experience across platforms; you can pick up your book on one device and it will tell you where you left off on the last device. Copia takes that a step further, syncing the social experience, including the sharing of notes and recommendations as well as the reading itself, across all the devices you want: smartphones, tablets, computers, or ereaders. We saw this demonstrated on their forthcoming iPad app.

What also impressed us about the last Copia demo we saw is that they have apparently licked the problem of allowing an epub file using Adobe DRM to move painlessly into their platform, regardless of from what ebook store it was purchased.

In addition to the hardware plans they revealed last week, Copia has also announced that they will be a launch partner for Windows Phone 7, the mobile operating system Microsoft is putting forth to compete with iPhone and Android. [Maybe we know a bit more about Copia than others do because they are our client, but like all the players in this very competitive market, they're not tipping their cards before they play their hand any more than their competitors. Even to us.]

All three of these operating systems come from substantial players. Blio is being delivered by one of the two book wholesalers in America with true national and international reach and relationships with every publisher in the country. Copia is being delivered by a company with long hardware development experience and a long history of partnership with consumer electronics retailers and phone companies. And Google Editions, of course, is coming from a tech company that has had deep involvement with virtually every book publisher in the world as it has developed Google Book Search over the last seven years.

Of all the current players, Sony would seem to be the most challenged. They have the weakest device, the weakest store, and the weakest strategic position with the industry and with the public. All of the rest either have something important and unique for the developing ebook marketplace and, in many cases, they also have an outside proposition that will keep them in the ebook game regardless of how well they do in it. Whether Google’s ebooks sell 10% of their projections or 10 times their projections, they won’t be going away. Same with Apple. Same with Amazon. So I think we can expect a multi-player ebook market, with some incompatible formats and a lot of incompatible DRM for some years to come. And the players currently in the game can expect their sales to go up but their market share to go down when the three new entrants join the fray this fall. That much seems certain, but very little else does.

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Sometimes expressing your opinion can have unintended consequences.

In a post last week, I observed that the explosive growth of ebooks made it likely, in my opinion (shared by others, some of whom are in high places), that as many as half the book purchases could be online purchases by the end of 2012. I see many consequences of that change, but one of them is likely to be a complete reconsideration of the long-standing industry policy of accepting returns from retailers and wholesalers of unsold inventory.

My reasoning was that once returns only help you reach half the potential market, viable publishing becomes possible without them. And with perhaps more than half of the brick-and-mortar outlets (by that time) for most books (excluding bestsellers, which are sold in mass merchants) being accessed through a single retailer (Barnes & Noble) that has its own distribution centers and a managed supply chain, returns would start to fade away. (With their robust supply chain capabilities, B&N will be able to work the new marketplace, which will undoubtedly feature a higher discount no-returns option, to their competitive advantage.)

I didn’t deal with my feelings about that (mixed) or the impact on sales I would expect (damaging), but I’m moved to do so today because my prediction has led to a celebration in anticipation of that turn of events, a 2-part series (Part 1 is here and Part 2 is there) called “Publishing 3.0: A World Without Inventory” by agent, ebook publisher, and digital thinker Richard Curtis. He casts preprinted inventory distributed with returns as “the speculative model” and a no-returns marketplace supplied largely with books printed on demand as “the prepaid model.”

Richard characterizes returns as “a bargain with the devil” and “an addiction”. He cites return rates in the neighborhood of 50% (which they are — and even higher — on some books but which they are not for any publisher across their list) as the killer of publishing profits. But I think Richard leaves two very important realities out of his analysis:

1. Inventory creates sales that would not take place without the inventory placement.

2. Publishers (and Richard’s clients: authors) have a great deal to gain from the publisher’s practice of selling returnable.

In fact, this piece effectively argues that a responsible agent will prefer a publisher that allows returns to one that does not for their client, if the royalty rates are the same (and often if they are not.)

Before making the two arguments promised above, let me deal with three realities that are often elided when returns are discussed.

First of all, book publishing is not the only business with returns, despite frequent claims by returns skeptics that it is. Newspapers and magazines have returns, of course. But, apparently, so does technology hardware! I learned this hearing our client Copia present itself and its parent company, DMC, to publishers. DMC is very deep-pocketed. They make the point that putting out six ereader devices (which they are doing) requires the financing to put tens of millions of dollars of inventory onto retail shelves, and taking them back, eating the cost of producing them if they don’t sell. That’s one reason why there are few upstart manufacturers of consumer electronics. Even if you could get in the door at Walmart and get an order for your gadget, the financing required to fill the order would be beyond anything but a large and well-established company. So the principle that the manufacturer insures the retailer who stocks speculative inventory is not applied to books alone.

Second: publishers are customarily asking retailers to put books on their shelves before there has been any public exposure to the title. It hasn’t been reviewed (except possibly by the diminishing industry sources for pre-publication reviews); it hasn’t been sampled by the public; it hasn’t been read by the sales rep pushing it or by the buyer deciding about investing in it. The promotion plans are promises that are sometimes not kept. It is a competitive requirement to offer returns in that situation if the publisher wants the books in place at retail on publication date. I have never heard a clear narrative about the introduction and spread of returns in publishing. Curtis’s account, which confirms my understanding, is that the practice began in the 1930s. This was before my Dad’s time in the business; he thought it was Viking Press that began the practice. But the practice apparently spread so quickly that nobody got clear credit for starting it. And we all got a lesson about the competitive requirement when Harcourt Brace Jovanovich tried to eliminate returns (in favor of much higher discounts) in 1981 and rescinded the policy in about 90 days because the trade just wouldn’t stock their books.

And third, publishers’ practices affect returns. Most returns from major retailers to publishers are on big books for which the publisher wants to force out a quantity that creates a noticeable presence in the stores. There are occasions when the over-ordering is due to retailers being zealous or concerned that they’ll have trouble getting replenishment inventory. But, more often, they are due to publishers pushing out bigger quantities because they know that bigger stacks in the store make the book move faster. Or because the rep wants credit for a bigger sale. Or because the publisher’s discount schedule rewards a larger buy with a better price.

(It is commonly suggested by no-returns advocates that publishers at least eliminate returns on backlist. It would be a dumb publisher that did that. The way you entice the trade to buy without returns is by increasing the discount, shifting margin from the publisher to the retailer. But backlist returns are already low for most publishers. So following this suggestion would lead to a publisher giving away margin to reduce returns on the segment of the list on which there aren’t many returns. It is worth noting that no publisher that I know of has taken the bait to eliminate returns on backlist.)

And all that leads to me making the first point: that inventory creates sales that wouldn’t otherwise occur. The point is made over and over again, most recently by Bowker PubTrack data (click that link and take a look; it’s quite startling) that what happens in the store — how books are displayed and what clerks say (which is also affected by how books are displayed) — influences a lot of purchases. If we don’t have retail locations with books merchandised to entice people to buy, I believe overall book sales will go down. And as long as we do have stores (which we will for quite some time, even after the end of 2012), then the books well displayed in them will have a competitive advantage over the books that are not.

And the first point leads to the second point. The author, in effect, “hires” the publisher to maximize the sales of the author’s book. Pushing out inventory and taking the returns that enable pushing out inventory are part of what a publisher does for an author that the author can’t do for herself. While I believe that publishers will move to no-returns and no-inventory models for many books, and that will enable the publication of  books that would have been too risky the conventional way, the sales expectations for these books will definitely be lower than for those published with inventory and risk. And let’s remember that the cost of each book produced is substantially higher printing one at a time compared to a press run. Press runs are distinctly more profitable if returns aren’t astronomical and very few books are published with the expectation of astronomical returns.

So the days of returns may be numbered, just as the days of brick-and-mortar bookstores likely are numbered, but that’s not a good thing for overall book sales or even for the profits of publishers. For the books with highly-targetable audiences the effects will be less damaging but for the books that sell the most — the kind that agents represent to publishers — it will mean a great reduction in the chances that the book will take off and reach big numbers. And for the publishers that step down from returns by managing them before they eliminate them, there will be a real competitive advantage.

I didn’t make it to London. I’m in good company. My friends who are in London are wondering exactly how and when they’ll get home. Of course, there are far worse places to be stuck.

I see in today’s Shelf Awareness that The Bookseller in the UK has been sold by its corporate owner to an entrepreneur (its publisher, Nigel Roby) just a week after Publishers Weekly in the US was sold by its corporate owner to an entrepreneur (its long-ago former publisher, George Slowik.) There are powerful structural and institutional forces that have weakened the inherent position of a trade magazine for trade publishing in both markets and making a success of them will be a real challenge. We wish the bold new owners luck with their ventures.

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