Ellora’s Cave

An aphorism that I picked up years ago that crosses my mind frequently in my professional life is that “a six-foot tall man drowns walking across a river that’s an average of three feet deep.”

The point is that aggregates and averages might mask important truths.

I thought of this when I read the news from the Forrester study of ebook take-up announced earlier this week. NB: Forrester is in partnership with my colleagues at Digital Book World and will present data — although not on this ebook study, but on another project — at the DBW conference in January. I haven’t been involved in those discussions and, like most of the readers of this blog, only know about the ebook study what I read in the releases and commentary.

Kat Meyer on O’Reilly Radar expressed her doubts about the Forrester data, and data just announced by Bain Consultants in France. Kat’s concerns go to methodology. Although I don’t know if we’re in a position to evaluate the methodology because I’m not aware that much has been revealed about it, I’d say her point is well-taken but it isn’t what really concerns me.

(My own first take on the headline numbers is 1) $1 billion in ebook sales now? If this trade only  – and there are some indications enumerated below that it might not be — then it is out of $15 billion which seems reasonable. If the number includes non-trade, which is $30 billion, then it is shocking for being low, not high.  2) Forecasting growth to $3 billion by 2015 from either base seems very conservative and the reduction in the growth rate over the next five years over what it has been the last two years is the story. I don’t think I’ve seen any accounts of the report that have characterized it that way. Being alone with this analysis makes me wonder whether I am missing something and don’t know enough to comment yet. That’s why this paragraph is in parentheses. It makes me feel better.)

The Forrester presentation of an industry study is one of several rooted in serious research that we’re planning for the conference. Last year we had reports from Verso Media about book readers, tracking their switch from print to electronic. Guy Gonzalez and his Digital Book World team have taken over that study and will update it for us with Verso. We also had a presentation last year from Bowker and BISG, who were just starting their study of ebook readers. They have done four fieldings since and will also be able to give us an update.

In both these cases, as long as the methodology of the studies has remained consistent, we’ll get important trending information, whether or not the precise percentages reported for various behaviors are accurate or not.

We got an opportunity to do another study when the team at iModerate, which has an online “chat” methodology to personalize research, volunteered to demonstrate what they do for our audience. We got to choose the topic and we decided to study the ereading habits on portable multi-function devices (smartphones and tablets). We chose that topic for two reasons: it is a new and rapidly-growing group of ebook readers and the color touchscreens and connectivity of the devices makes enhanced ebooks that might be hobbled on the Kindle or first-generation Nook fully accessible.

We will also debut work Bowker has done on the children’s book market supported by several publishers and organized with the Association of Booksellers for Children.

The headlines from the Forrester reporting were that ebook sales are approaching $1 billion and they expect that number to triple in five years. Also eye-catching was the fact that, three years into the Kindle era and more than six months after the iPad introduction, more ebooks are read on full-function personal computers than any other way. I say that was eye-catching; it goes to the heart of my concern about the data. It’s about the six-foot tall man.

It is my strong hunch that the content that is read on PCs is qualitatively different than what is read on portable and mobile devices. I am fully aware of the dangers of generalizing from one’s own experience, but I have never met a person who reads trade books on a PC. I know people who read on Kindles, Nooks, smartphones, and iPads. I am aware from having talked to people in the romance ebook business that people in offices reputedly read romances on their office machines (at lunch, of course).

But my intuition tells me that big chunks of that PC reading is professional and informational, not recreational and that this is where PDF sales are most likely. If 30+% of ebook readers consume content on regular computers, I’ll bet the percentages for O’Reilly’s Safari (whether reading a chunk of an ebook from that service is counted here is a good methodology question, but my intuition about interpreting the device data tells me it must be) are much higher.

So ebook reading is the river that’s an average of three feet deep. But it is only a foot or two deep near the shore (where the trade ebooks are read) and it is 15 feet deep in the middle (where the professional ebooks are read.) And the important point is that publishers who do one or the other are not usefully enlightened by data that puts those two distinctly different markets and environments together as if they were one.

This is not to suggest that nothing can be learned from Forrester’s research nor that any other study has a firm grip on this granularity. I asked a data-driven colleague who’s done a bunch of work in this area whether he shared my hunch about who’s reading those PDFs on PCs. He went into his files and ultimately agreed that the market parsing I was looking for was not evident in the extensive research he had done.

Obviously, there are people who know this. Amazon and B&N and Kobo know what devices the books they sell are read on. O’Reilly knows what devices the books they sell and the ones used in their Safari library are read on. When I interviewed the publisher of Ellora’s Cave at Digital Book World last year, she was quite conscious of the fact that many of her books were still sold as PDFs, implying a computer reader. The fact that this data has not been made ubiquitously available and parsed suggests that it is seen as having proprietary value by the people who possess it.

Trying to understand a strand of the market that might be distinct was behind our thinking when we decided to have iModerate focus on portable multi-function devices. We figured that those readers might use and value enriched ebook features more than Kindle or Nook readers and we also see them as the market segment of ebook readers likely to grow fastest. So understanding that market segment in some more detail might help publishers lead the target a bit on product development.

We have written many times before that the book business is not one business. The professional ebooks read on a laptop by a programmer in the middle of an assignment don’t tell you much about what format you should publish a romance novel in. The big change in the ebook world that hasn’t really happened yet but will in the next couple of years is greater adaptation and consumption of illustrated books in digital form. Anything heavily illustrated now pretty much has to be delivered as PDF to a laptop; that won’t be true anymore at the outer edge of the current forecast window, which is 2015.

On the day I’m writing this, new ebook sales data was announced and Cader analyzed it in a post that is behind his paywall. He calculated that ebook sales comprise 9.5% of adult trade sales but only 1.7% of children’s. That’s really charting the river bottom in a useful way.

So we’d say give us data, let us try to understand its limitations and gain insight from it at the same time, and let’s remember that the world of digital change in publishing is simultaneously dynamic and diverse and that no single body of data is likely to give us the answers to what we should do next or what we should expect in the years to come.

It is precisely because data needs to be interpreted that we set the Verso-DBW, BISG-Bowker, and iModerate sessions at Digital Book World back-to-back-to-back and will follow their presentations with a panel discussion meant to shine some light on what we can conclude from what they say.

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The tactic of keeping the ebook off the market to “protect” hardcover sales, first executed by Sourcebooks this month on behalf of Bran Hambric, is becoming more widespread. At the same time that Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol was released simultaneously in cloth and digital, Ted Kennedy’s posthumous True Compass was released in print with the ebook withheld. Now Harper has announced that the new Sarah Palin biography will come out in cloth in November, but the ebook will be held back until the day after Christmas.

The Kennedy case is a bit different because the book contained color pictures that would not render on the most popular ebook platform (the Kindle), but in all these cases the primary motivation of the publisher seemed to be to avoid having a low-priced ebook competing with its hardcover sales.

Kassia Kroszer has written a nice little rant about the counterproductiveness of this strategy, with which on purely economic and marketing grounds, I substantially agree. She points out that there is no evidence that ebook sales come at the expense of hardcover sales (of course; there’s also no evidence that they don’t…) She also posits that the ebook reader and print reader are often different people. If that’s true (and it is a general notion I’m inclined to share), then holding back the ebook is bound to just lose sales because the title won’t be available as an ebook during “maximum buzz.”

If a publisher’s concern is that reckless ebook pricing bleeds sales away from the hardcover, there is another solution. (One that can work; I have proposed solutions that can’t work.)  The publisher could just sell the ebook exclusively at its own site and price it any way they want. It would be like the publisher download is the ebook “hardcover” (i.e. expensive) which is replaced by the ebook “paperback” (i.e. sold at retailers and priced more aggressively) with whatever timetable for that the publisher wanted.

If publishers maintain their retail prices and their discounts, then the aggressively-priced ebooks aren’t costing them any margin. In that case, they’d be making more money per unit on the ebook than on the print books. There’s a degree to which the retailers’ aggressive pricing constitutes a gift to publishers and authors, even if none of them seem to be seeing it that way.

But there are also two other elements  major publishers have to  considere when they make ebook decisions: their relationship with Amazon.com and the health — even the existence — of a brick-and-mortar retail book trade.

Amazon is the driving force behind cheap ebooks, and they’re doing it to herd more and more people into their closed market with the Kindle. That’s a perfectly reasonable objective from their point of view, but it is very threatening to everybody else in the industry, all of whom would prefer a more diversified ebook market for their own reasons. That’s part of why I think selling direct off the web site at the higher price is something you might see happen. It’s a polite way to stick a finger in Amazon’s eye.

The retail book trade is important for many reasons, but the under-appreciated one is that bookstore shelf space, at 45 to 50% discount off retail, is the cheapest marketing investment publishers can make. It sorts their books out and puts them on display (hey! sometimes even in shop windows!) in front of people who want to buy a book. There isn’t any better product placement than that. Every ebook sold weakens the trade, accelerates the reduction of opportunities to put books in front of readers in the most efficient possible way. Publishers have a real interest in preserving that asset.

Earlier today we interviewed Raelene Gorlinsky of Ellora’s Cave as part of our preparation for Digital Book World. (They will be on the program!) I was aware that Ellora’s Cave existed and vaguely aware that they were an ebook-first publisher, but, not being a romance reader I was not as clued in to them as I should have been. They’re nine years old and the company is quite a story.

I’ll save the story for another time but I want to pass along one piece of wisdom from this morning’s conversation that is relevant to this post. Ellora’s Cave publishes printed-on-demand editions of those books of theirs that they can (many are too short to be print books and are only put into print as part of anthologies.) Raelene explained to us that they generally hold the print book back for 18 months after the ebook is published (and they publish about 10 new titles a week!)

Why does Ellora’s Cave hold back the print book? Because they make more money on the ebooks, of course, even though the print books cost somewhat more! (They have to pay for that paper, presswork, and binding somehow…)

Of course, I’d tell them to just raise the price of the print book for the first 18 months rather than withhold it. They’re making a close cousin to the mistake I’m accusing the conventional publishers of. But at least they’re preserving the higher margin sale, not the lower margin one.

Sometimes being in publishing makes you feel like Alice in Wonderland.

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There’s a new publishing model afoot, which is to lead with the ebook and just print what you need. That might be POD, and it might be press runs, if you can sell out whole press runs. If the ebook becomes a substantial chunk of sales and if ebooks maintain their prices, this looks like it could be a new way to do much lower-risk publishing.

Some very smart publishing people are moving in this direction. It had been the plan of the meteoric Quartet, which has already flamed out. It is part of the plan of Richard Nash, an experienced publisher (Soft Skull Press) and a budding entrepeneur. It is the model for a young and aspiring Irish publisher named Eoin Purcell. And last week, tor.com announced that it would be publishing books (this is distinct from its “parent”, St. Martin’s sci-fi imprint Tor) with an ebook first and POD methodology.

Can no pressrun publishing work? That’s a subject for discussion at Digital Book World in January, but, based on an interesting post by Kassia Kroszer, one of the four principals in Quartet, I have real doubts.

Kassia’s post makes it clear that direct sales at “full margin” (meaning no cut to anybody else in the supply chain) were an important part of Quartet’s budget and plan. They figured that by sticking to niches, and the first one was going to be romance, they’d be able to build up a direct audience and avoid sharing revenues with retailers and wholesalers. Kassia points out that savvy ebook readers (who apparently also hate DRM, high prices, lack of interoperability, etc.) are willing to support their “local” publisher, knowing that more money gets to the author that way.

This all makes me more skeptical about the model.

Savvy ebook readers are a large part of the current readership, but they won’t stay that way. If ebooks are going to become a business, than casual and uninformed ebook readers will have to join the party. Although I’ve been reading ebooks for 10 years, I’m one of those. I don’t shop around for my ebooks; I buy from what I deem to be the most convenient source. When I used to read on a Palm (in pre-Kindle days), there was no such animal, but Peanut Press followed by Palm Digital followed by ereader had to serve. Then Amazon and Kindle changed the game. And now B&N is providing me exactly what I need for my iPhone.

If a web site I was on anyway offered me an ebook I wanted that would work in my BN reader software, I wouldn’t be reluctant to buy it. But I will only be shopping at places that offer me a choice of things I want. It’s hard to imagine a single publisher doing that.

The web constantly reminds us of the value of monopoly. Amazon has a huge advantage in being the best place to shop for books because they’re the biggest. The size of the purchasing community adds value: more reviews, more data to make better suggestions or respond better to search queries, and it gives them the scale to add unique content through Kindle and BookSurge. In the same way, we’re likely to see a dominant horizontal ebook retailer emerge.

So no matter how good you are at selling your own stuff, if you want to sell to the public at large, you’ll almost always have to use intermediaries. And if you want to sell stuff to your own niche, you’re going to have to be an aggregator, not just a creator, to offer enough product to keep even a niche audience interested. And, if that’s true, then even within the niches, most of the small creators will have to share their revenue with an intermediary.

The loyal and informed crowd of romance readers may have learned that they can find the books they want at Harlequin.com or Ellora’s Cave, but there has to be a limit to the number of individual romance publisher sites the community will support. The right move for Harlequin would be to imitate tor.com and start selling their competitors’ books. (Tor hasn’t done this for ebooks, yet, but they have done it for print.)

The idea of building a niche presence for most subjects simply through publishing in it, rather than by building a real vortal or community site, seems futile. Another lesson from the web (so far; it could change) is that making your own content and selling what you make is not a viable model, except at the very highest price points. You have to figure out how to leverage other people’s content and community participation. That’s what Google does. That’s what PublishersMarketplace does. That’s what the future successful publishers I envision in the Shift speech will have done.

Cutting costs and cutting waste, which ebook-first publishing does, would certainly seem like a path to financial viability. But it takes revenue to pay the bills. If you don’t go out and reach customers where they are — at the big Internet retailers — you need to be selling ebooks to a very large community for sales to be substantial enough to run a business. And if you do use those retailers, they (quite reasonably) extract their share of revenue for delivering access to the customers.

It may be too soon for the ebook-first model to succeed, except in niches more tightly defined than “romance” (which, indeed, is a big part of Purcell’s initial approach) or when it is supported by another business (which is, if you think about it, tor.com’s approach.)

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