Frankfurt Book Fair

The recent news that digital revenues have reached approximately 20% at some of the Big Six houses makes me believe that we are on the verge of a tectonic shift in the industry. It provoked me to think through the logical extension of well-established trends and comment recently that I see an 80% ebook world for straight narrative text coming in two to five years. (By “straight narrative text” I mean books of just words.)

One of my most respected sometimes colleagues privately told me the 80% number was “absurd”. But considering the logic and evidence that was offered up to refute my projection only made me more convinced that I’m right. So it’s time to expose the thought process to one of the most acute groups of critical thinkers I know: the readers of this blog.

When the Kindle came on the scene in November 2007, almost exactly four years ago, ebook sales were in the neighborhood of 1% of major publishers’ sales revenue. Since then it has risen, by my calculations, between 2 and 2.6 times per year. So we’re at 20% of revenue now in October 2011; we were a bit under 10% a year ago, around 4% this time in 2009, and about 2% at this time in 2008, when Kindle was in its infancy and its only device competition was the Sony Reader. (When you look at “annual” numbers for each of those years they’re lower, but that’s because share was gained throughout those years, fueled by new device releases; I’m talking about where things stood at about this point of the year.)

I interpret 20% of Big Six sales revenue to mean something closer to 25% of units sold, because ebooks bring in substantially less revenue per copy sold than print on major hardcover books (although they can bring in a bit more on paperbacks). But many books were not yet ebookable: most juveniles and illustrated books are not represented in that figure. So I don’t think it is a stretch to figure that ebooks are constituting 30% of the units sold for straight narrative text.

(Working backwards, that means I think ebooks were about 15% of the straight narrative text units a year ago, about 6% of the units in 2009, 2-3% of the units in 2008, and probably fewer than 1% of the units in 2007, before Kindle.)

Although the following analysis was widely misunderstood when I offered it on a prior post (the misunderstandings are evident in the comment string), the way I’m defining the measurement of this — what percentage of a straight text book’s total sale will be ebooks? — the number cannot exceed 100%. So, clearly, it is impossible for the rate of share growth which has been sustained for four years, since the introduction of the Kindle, to continue for more than about another 18 months.

In fact, at some point the switchover from print to ebooks will slow to a crawl. Sales of straight text books won’t reach 98% digital for many years, perhaps decades. What I’d expect is that we’ll reach a point of print resistance and adoption will slow down dramatically. We can argue about where that point will be. I think it is 80%. A major executive was reported to have said in Frankfurt that he thinks ebook sales will “plateau” at 40%. (Maybe he meant 40% of revenue, which, depending on how much of the house’s output was straight text, would probably be nearer to 60% of straight text units.) Everybody’s entitled to their opinion and only time will prove us right or wrong.

There are a lot of reasons to expect a continuation of the recent trend of share doubling every year, at least for a while longer. Ebook readers and tablet computers are getting cheaper and more widely distributed, by which I mean that more and more places are selling them. (One hears widespread speculation that next year we’ll see offers for devices to be free with the purchase of a number of ebooks.) The number of titles available in multiple languages continues to grow. The price of new books in digital editions is established at about half the publisher’s suggested hardback price for the hottest new releases (and also much less than most stores would sell the print book for). Everybody who hasn’t yet switched to a digital device yet knows people who have successfully and comfortably done so. More and more libraries have ebook offerings (although they can’t obtain a lot of the bestsellers at this time.)

Cheaper books, more to choose from, and more plentiful and cheaper devices would not imply any slowdown in adoption in the short term, except that those most receptive to switching have already done so. But I don’t find that a persuasive argument for an imminent slowdown; some of the late adoptees, particularly the young, just couldn’t afford the devices until the prices came down.

In fact, one thing Amazon established very early in the life of the Kindle is that the heavier book purchasers tend to move to the readers faster. It makes intuitive sense that the price of a reader is amortized more quickly by somebody who buys more books. So, in fact, we could reach 80% of the units being purchased digitally if a much smaller number, say 40% of the people who buy books, make the transition.

Among those reading this post who would fervently hope I’m wrong would be anybody with an interest in a brick bookstore, whose survival challenge is only made more difficult if the trend to ebook reading accelerates. What this says to me is bookstores would be wise to specialize in books that make great gifts and children’s books (and there is some anecdotal evidence that the stores doing well have done exactly that; the most often cited being Books and Books in Coral Gables, FL).

So except that we know the adoption rate must (at some point) slow down as we approach saturation, I find little reason to assume that it will do so anytime soon.

If the trend that has been unbroken for four years continued for another year, ebooks would constitute 40% of big publisher sales volume and 60% of units for all straight text books by a year from now. At that rate, we’d reach 80% units on straight text in the quarter after Christmas 2012.

When I say I think we’ll hit it in two to five years, I’m being consciously restrained. To get there in two years would require that consumers switch from print to digital at about 60-70 percent of the speed they have for the last four years over the next two. Were it to take five years, it would mean the conversion rate would have slowed to a crawl compared to where it has been.

So the outer edge of the prediction I stated (five years) is, to my way of thinking, unlikely because it is too slow. Predicting the current rate for 18 months is probably too aggressive, but 2-3 years is not. Having it take longer than that would surprise me and I’d love it if anybody predicting that would explain what they think will slow things down so drastically in the months to come compared to the recent past.

The colleague who thought I had taken leave of reality offered some logic. First of all, it was observed that ebook sales rose most rapidly in 2011 right after Christmas, particularly as a percentage of total sales, rather than steadily throughout the year. That didn’t surprise me. It is due to an effect I have written about previously which last year was not softened by new device releases midyear and previously had been.

Ebook readers make great Christmas gifts (better every year than the year before because there are more to choose from and they get cheaper). This has turned Christmas Day into a great sales day for ebooks but the process of new device owners “loading up” apparently continues for a couple of months after Christmas. So ebook sales in the first quarter are artificially inflated and will continue to be until we reach saturation on readers, which will probably be at least two more years. When just about everybody who reads many books already has an ereader, the post-Christmas bump will diminish markedly.

But, at the same time, the print sales reported are depressed in the first quarter. Returns come in from what have too often recently been disappointing print sales at Christmas and, at the same time, the purchase of new titles in the first quarter is dampened because some stores give up the ghost after a failed Christmas season and others are jolted into greater conservatism in their stocking by declining sales.

Since print book sales net of returns are depressed and ebook sales are stimulated by gift devices, the percentage of sales that are digital reaches a dramatic new height in the first quarter. This has happened in recent years and will happen again in 2012 and maybe in 2013.

Ebook sales in dollars were also reduced in the past two years by switches to agency pricing. Five of the Big Six went agency on April 1, 2010, when the iBookstore opened. Random House went to agency in early March, 2011. When publishers switch from the wholesale model to agency, the amount they get from each ebook they sell goes down. So even if the book continues to sell at exactly the same velocity (and it might not, since agency also raises prices to the consumer), the publisher’s revenue will decline.

These changes, which have raised the price of major publisher ebooks, have not prevented the year-on-year growth described in this piece, but the timing of the agency switches did tend to make the increases look like they are grouped in one big step increment at the beginning of the year.

To an extent they are but not as much as they look. And we’ll be taking that step again when the calendar turns over to 2012.

(The dampening impact on revenues of the switch to agency by the five publishers in April 2010 was mitigated, indeed overwhelmed, by the impact of all those iPad devices creating new purchasers for ebooks. And there were new devices that year from Nook as well.)

Another piece of evidence I was asked to consider that would apparently contravene the 80% prediction is that music sales are still split 50-50 between digital downlads and shrinkwrapped CDs. I love knocking down comparisons with the music business (I started doing it in the very early days of the blog) but this one is almost too easy.

While sales of music may still be split 50-50 between downloads and CDs, consumption is almost certainly not. People can acquire their music on CDs and still consume it through digital devices. By doing that, they get additional value in metadata (those little books that come with the CDs) and they get a copy of the music that they can readily give away as a gift.

But when somebody switches over to consume their books digitally, purchasing the hard copy version is not an option. So it isn’t helpful or indicative to look at how music sales divide; we’d have to look at how music consumption divides. And I’ll bet anybody who wants the wager that it is not 50-50! When was the last time you saw somebody playing a CD?

It was also offered up to me that Bowker polling of book consumers has found consistently this year that only 15% of the people report having bought an ebook each month. I’d say that is entirely consistent with my hunch that 30% of straight text units are digital. We’ve observed throughout the digital transition that ebook purchasers are heavy purchasers. In fact, I’d have been surprised (and felt I had some explaining to do) if the number of ebook purchasers were higher than 15% at the moment.

Until the leap this year, the switch from print consumption to ebooks was deceptively easy for a publisher to absorb without making drastic changes to its organizational structure. That time has passed. The book business we see today — how titles are acquired, developed, marketed, and distributed — is still built on the basic industry that was constructed over the past 100 years. Unless there is something wildly wrong with my logic (and I’m counting on my readers to make me see it if there is), we’ll see more fundamental change in the way straight text books are published over the next 36 months than we have over the past 36 years.

The implications of this shift require a lot more thought than I’ve been able to give it so far. But one thing I think it will mean is that trade publishing will trifurcate in the next few years. With bookstores as the primary distribution channel, it was no problem for one publisher to do straight text narrative, children’s books, and illustrated books. They shipped to the same customers in the same box. If bookstores aren’t the primary channel, these different kinds of “books” will not have a lot of commonality: in sourcing, creation, marketing, or distribution channels. I wonder how many publishers are thinking about their publishing programs with that in mind.

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The week I spend each year at the Frankfurt Book Fair is always the most stimulating week of my professional year. The concentration of the best thinkers and most powerful people in publishing always seems to lead me to a new burst of understanding about our global publishing world, particularly in these times of rapid change.

I saw one Big Six CEO who noted that I had said last week that I expected the US publishers to be living in an 80% ebook world pretty soon although the global head of another of the Big Six companies had just stated the belief that the switchover to digital would stop, or slow down significantly, at 40%. I respectfully disagree, but will save that argument for another post. The one I talked to, who chuckled about the wide disparity in these two predictions, didn’t express an opinion about which of us was right, but the implications of the two predictions are so different that it behooves the people running the biggest companies to at least consider mine, even if they believe his.

I also talked to a business development executive for one of the tech companies that has been converting backlists from print and pdf to epub. He made the point that his business remains robust but moves around the world as new markets discover serially that they need to get their intellectual property into digital form. We agreed that those of us who make a living on the digital transition — and that certainly includes me at the moment (what are you reading this blog for?) — have a few more years ahead of us before we’ll have to figure out how to make a living on the new reality (if we need to keep making a living when it arrives…)

With the deals announced at Frankfurt by Kobo with the English retailer WHSmith and the French retailer Fnac along with the quickening pace of store openings by Apple and Amazon, the future shape of the ebook retailing landscape has been more clearly defined. It looks to me like we’ll have three principal global players that will be active in every market — they being Amazon, Apple, and Kobo — plus perhaps a local contender in each market as well. Barnes & Noble has played the latter role extremely successfully so far in the United States; Waterstone’s will attempt the same in the UK starting next Spring; there is local competition in Germany; and certainly there will be in many other countries as the ebook revolution laps at their shores. Google, being Google, will not go away, but they will remain a relatively marginal player unless and until they put considerably more energy into their solution and into promoting what they have.

The Kobo deals are the game-clarifiers, if not game-changers. A sage observer of the digital scene stopped at my stand here in Frankfurt to discuss the WHSmith-Kobo arrangement with me and he wondered whether this was the best deal for both sides. Should Kobo have been trying harder to make a deal with Waterstone’s? Is it wise for WHSmith to be making a deal where they sell the devices but connect them to a Kobo-branded store?

But that, of course, is the key to the deal. The economics of the devices don’t work unless you also can sell the ebooks to go into them. (That’s the answer to all the geniuses who think Barnes & Noble is being thick not implementing an international rollout of the Nook!) Neither WHSmith nor Fnac is principally a book retailer: books are just another product line in stores that sell other things and have a broader identity. By selling a reader attached to an ebook store that serves customers well, they buy themselves relevance to the book consumer during the transition and extend their lives as booksellers. They demonstrate recognition that building and maintaining a ebook store is not a trivial undertaking and, in the face of several global competitors, not something they want to undertake from their position as a country-specific, and more general, retailer.

By tying up with Kobo, both WHSmith and Fnac can get into the market with ereading devices at about the same time as Amazon brings in the Kindle. And WHSmith launching for Christmas 2011 should be terrifying Waterstone’s, which will be months behind with devices and almost certainly delivering a less consumer-friendly store off the bat than the experienced Kobo offering will be.

Barnes & Noble has achieved startling success at establishing a strong second-place position in the US ebook market, but their situation may prove to be unique. First of all, they’re in the biggest single ebook market (by value, even though poorer markets may pass them sometime sooner in units) we’re likely to see for a decade or more. Second, they are a very serious book retailer that has built strong relationships among book publishers worldwide over many years. And third, their execution was nearly flawless. Even with their precedent as an example, there is no guarantee that Waterstone’s, or anybody else, can pull off what they did in another market.

So if it is a global game and you have to be a global player to be competitive, as well as a “whole ecosystem” game that requires devices attached to a well-stocked and well-presented econtent retailing environment to succeed, we can see the steep uphill fight to be waged by the other players trying to compete with Amazon, Apple, and Kobo, whether they be Google, Copia, Sony, Baker & Taylor’s Blio, or the new entrants financed by publisher collaboration: Anobii in the UK and Bookish in the US.

All other things being equal, I can see a global ebook marketplace that some years from now is 90-95% controlled by Amazon, Apple, Kobo, and a local player in each country, with Google getting most of the rest. Google may punch above its weight on the long tail because discovery of the obscure or highly niched content might be their forte; one scholarly publisher told me at Frankfurt that he is already seeing some real growth in his Google sales, which no trade publisher has said in my earshot yet.

But all other things may not remain equal. One informed member of the European digerati told me he believes that the European Competition Commission may outlaw the agency model in the European Union. Were that to happen, that would tilt the playing field substantially toward Amazon. It is ironic that the biggest, strongest, and most deep-pocketed competitor for global ebook sales could be handed an enormous competitive advantage by bureaucrats ostensibly trying to foster a competitive marketplace. Publishers may have deficiencies in their understanding of the digital transition, but it would appear that the government bureaucracies the world over might be far more confused than the publishers are.

I’m posting this before I leave the Frankfurt Book Fair on Sunday afternoon, European time. I won’t have the opportunity to respond to any comments until at least Monday night London time. I drive with a friend and the charming little hotel we stay at in Monschau doesn’t have wifi and I don’t have the digital dexterity (with “digital” in this case referring to “fingers”) to do lengthy replies on my iPhone.

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Ed Nawotka, the editor of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s online publication “Publishing Perspectives”, is running a series of pieces responding to his question “what was the most dramatic event in publishing in 2010?” Here’s the answer from The Shatzkin Files.

The most dramatic event in publishing in 2010? That’s easy. It was the face-down between five of the six biggest publishers in the US and Amazon over trading terms in the ebook marketplace: the shift from wholesale pricing to agency.

Even in theory, the shift was complicated. Publishers’ established prices went from near-print to about half-print. Margin offered to the channel was reduced from 50% of the established price to 30%. Control of pricing shifted from the retailer, who could charge whatever it wanted in the wholesale scenario, to the publisher who required the same price across all consumer touchpoints under agency.

But in practice it was even more complex than it was in theory. Shift of pricing control meant shift of responsibility at the point of sale and that meant publishers were now responsible for sales taxes, not the retailer. (Oddly enough, and the lack of public discussion of this point is a dog that didn’t bark, it did not result in the publisher, now seller-of-record, being told exactly who the customer is: the name and email address are still only known to the retailer.) Lawyers advised (at least some) publishers that agency required a contractual relationship between the publisher and each point of distribution, resulting in deal-making complexity that leaves some retailers without a full shelf of agency publisher books more than six months after the shift.

And literary agents representing the top authors required a lot of handholding. Ebook royalties are a raw point in negotiations these days between agents and publishers, and the agency model reduced the royalty per copy on all books, at least during their hardcover life. Of course, the publishers’ take per copy also was reduced, a point the publishers no doubt made as they prevailed on the agents to accept a change they believed was necessary to prevent a potential perpetual monopoly on ebook sales by Amazon.

Adding to the drama surrounding the shift to agency was the fact that the biggest of the Big Six trade houses, Random House, sidestepped it. This put them in a position where they a) sell their books for more per unit, b) see their books offered to the consumer for less per unit, c) can tell agents their royalties are higher per unit, d) are not offered in Apple’s iBookstore (but are available on all Apple devices through Kindle, Nook, and Kobo, at least), and e) have earned the enmity of the other publishers in the Big Six.

The Agency 5 see themselves, not without reason, as having sacrificed revenue at a difficult time for the industry’s long run good while Random House takes tactical advantage of the shift (and, in the words of one CEO, are “gloating” about it.)

(My editorial comment: this may all be true, but isn’t it the job of a company’s management to take tactical advantage of changing industry conditions? The overall point to this piece, of course, is that I applaud the move to agency. But it is hard to see exactly why, from Random House’s point of view, you’d voluntarily give up an advantage that makes all your competitors grind their teeth. As some analysis I did looking at royalties shows, the tactical advantages of wholesale are distinctly greater for hardcover and it may even be disadvantageous for paperbacks, but that’s a balance Random House is very capable of calculating.)

The most dramatic single moment of this long-playing dramatic event was last January when Amazon made a brief, and vain, effort to stop the whole agency movement in its tracks by pulling the buy buttons for Macmillan, apparently because they were the first publisher to officially notify Amazon of the forthcoming change. The giant retailer retreated in about 48 hours marking the first time in anybody’s memory that the publishers had forced them to back down.

Although the Nook and iPad devices certainly have something to do with it as well, agency seems to have accomplished its purpose of preventing Amazon from maintaining a stranglehold Kindle share through their deep-pocketed ability to forgo margin for a pricing advantage. The other retailers in the ebook market have their margin protected. With Google Editions still to join the fray, there is reason to believe that there can be a truly broad-based ebook marketplace for the next few years. What the Agency 5 publishers did was politically and logistically difficult and, because it involved reducing unit margins, somewhat counterintuitive. It would appear more than six months later that the tactic has achieved its most desired result.

Control of pricing immediately challenges publishers to get sophisticated, modern, and scientific at how they approach pricing. That would require, in a formulation I first heard from Peter Wiley (Board Chair of John Wiley & Sons), “constant, controlled experimentation.” Surely, that is taking place on a daily basis at Amazon.

So far, of course, the sales agent is controlling all the customer contact. Sooner or later that is likely to become a point of contention between publishers and their “sales agents.” It might be pushing things to expect that dispute to begin with the next round of agency contract negotiations in 2011, but expect that issue to make its way to the table in 2012 or 2013.

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At the conclusion of another Frankfurt Book Fair — my thirty-somethingth — here is something I actually knew before but have taken on board in a whole new way: there is an enormous gap between the US and everyplace else in the Western world (at least) in consumer ebook takeup and acceptance.

Here is what I think: it can’t stay that way forever.

Here is what I deduce: the rest of the world is in for what will be, for many, a vertigo-inducing ride while they catch up.

It seems pretty obvious why the US is so far ahead: 300 million people in a single developed economy with a single currency and a single language. Those same factors also largely explain why the US is also so far ahead in Internet print book purchasing. (There is another big cause at play there: the service infrastructure provided by our national wholesalers, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, without which it would have taken a multiple of the initial investment to get Amazon.com off the ground 15 years ago.)

One thing leads to another. Because Amazon had, by the end of 2007 when it introduced the Kindle, built a loyal customer base of tens of millions of book buyers, they had the pillars in place to roll out an ereading device. That really required two things nobody else in any other country has even today: a big enough customer base to reach a critical mass of consumers without any assistance or partnerships and enough leverage with the publishers to get them to put their books into the ecosystem that supported their device.

One thing leads to another. Amazon’s Kindle, with a much larger selection of titles and a smoother path from file server to device than had previously been offered by other ereading platforms (which were, before Kindle, the Sony Reader device for some and reading on PCs or handhelds such as Palm Pilots for others, with me in the handhelds group), gained pretty rapid uptake. That led Barnes & Noble, which also had leverage with the publishers to get titles into their store and access to and brand credibility with millions of book readers, to follow on with their Kindle-like device, the Nook, almost exactly two years after the Kindle. As most of us know, the iPad followed the Nook shortly thereafter, coming onto the US market in April 2010.

All of this has resulted in getting the US to the point as of Frankfurt 2010 where a US publisher launching a book of straight text can expect ebook sales to be a mid-teens percentage of the book’s total sale, with occasional reports that are even more dramatic (such as the anecdote that the first wave of Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” was one-third ebooks!)

One thing leads to another. As has been written on this blog many times, all these Internet-based sales put enormous pressure on brick-and-mortar stores. We see shelf space diminishing and there are those among us who believe that over the next ten years it could pretty much disappear.

The Kindle hasn’t had nearly as dramatic an impact abroad as it has in the US for a host of reasons. Amazon doesn’t have the same audience share. They don’t have the same huge number of titles available as they do in the US. And they haven’t had two other big and influential companies (B&N and Apple) pushing the device-reading experience into the public consciousness. It seems Nook and iPad’s arrival have only served as catalysts for Amazon to sell even more Kindles and for the ebook uptake in the whole US market to accelerate further.

So we find ourselves today with this massive gap between the penetration of ebooks in the American market and the penetration in any other country’s market outside of Asia (I didn’t talk to any Asian publishers at the Fair, and I don’t know the situation there.) Certainly (assumption alert: a priori argument not based on any data) this is a situation that cannot last forever. In five or ten or fifteen years the percentage of book sales that are digital and the percentage of print book sales that are transacted online will be pretty much the same in all developed countries.

If that assumption is right, then other countries — starting with the English-speaking ones and then moving on from there — are going to experience the changes we’ve felt in America in a much more compressed period of time.

There are legal and institutional barriers to change which have already been “effective.” The world’s largest natural moat has protected the Australian book market, keeping print book prices high and the retail book trade healthy. It was evident from conversations I had with some Australian booksellers at last May’s BookExpo that they are feeling the winds of change beginning to blow a gale, fanned by the arrival of Kobo ebooks in the market. (Kobo is a sleeper from the US perspective: a small almost-an-afterthought ebook platform in our country but painstakingly building a presence around the globe and some impressive OEM relationships everywhere, including in the US.) Ingram’s POD setup in Australia will surely introduce a lot more titles into the print marketplace. That’s important because POD drives consumers to online purchasing by offering more titles than any bookstore could ever stock.

All of this is frightening to any sentient Australian bookseller.

Retail price maintenance, territorial and language rights restrictions, and variable rules about applying VAT (sales tax to us Americans) to books seriously complicate the development of the ebook marketplaces in Europe.

But the biggest complication of all, in the short run, will be the paucity of titles available in the epub format in languages other than English. Epub enables reflowing of text, which is essential to deliver a reader-friendly ebook experience to a multiplicity of screen sizes. We have hundreds of thousands of titles in epub in English; no other Western language is close. This is a subject that first surfaced for me in Brazil when I was there in August.

One thing leads to another. The epub gap spawns another serious issue for the European book trade as it catches up with the US. Most educated people in most European countries are comfortable reading English. A publisher in tiny Slovenia (formerly part of Yugoslavia) told me that one-sixth of the books sold through the largest chain of bookstores and the largest online bookseller are already in English. Somebody else told me that 25% of the books sold in Denmark are in English. In Holland, I was told, there has been recent legislation requiring “windowing” of English ebooks on titles that have a Dutch edition, holding back the English edition until the Dutch edition has had a minimum time of availability.

The biggest adjustments even for the players in the US book trade are still ahead of them. As far as I can tell, big publishers have not really taken on board that bookstores are pretty much going away in the next ten years and, one thing leading to another, taking the big publishers’ major value proposition with them. There is almost no visible acknowledgment of the shift from IP to eyeballs that I believe is coming. But the change we’ve had and the change we’re facing in the US publishing world is dwarfed by what will be seen and felt by our friends and trading partners in Europe and elsewhere in the next decade.

Some of what this post is about had already been anticipated as we prepared the program for the Digital Book World conference taking place January 25-26. We had already planned a panel on how territorial and language rights trading will be affected as ebook uptake spreads. Now I think I’ve found somebody who can lay out the European landscape as US publishers and agents should be thinking about it. I’m working with her to prepare what I think will be a significant addition to our program covering a topic that is, as it should be, increasingly important to American rightsholders.

Another topic for another day is that the world is getting smaller and publishers in every country will need to understand what’s going on in their foreign markets better. We’ll be delivering just one compressed seminar and a panel or two at Digital Book World because that’s what bandwidth we think conference attendees this January will be comfortable investing in the topic, relative to a lot of other things that need to be discussed. By a year from January, I think understanding how the ebook markets work in countries around the world will be a top-of-mind concern for every publisher and agent in America.

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My professional background —  indeed, most of my life that isn’t family, friends, baseball, and politics — is trade publishing: the publishing that is intended for consumers and which got its name becaiuse it has been transacted primarily through “the trade”: bookstores.

But this past week I spent two full days with the Publisher Advisory Group for my client Copyright Clearance Center where trade is a small part of the total picture. In addition to the program, I had conversations there to prepare for a talk I’ve been asked to give at the IFRRO (International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations) meeting CCC is hosting at the end of October. So, while I always think about trade publishing, this week I’ve been doing it within the context of other publishing — indeed, in the context of the whole world of intellectual property, one that goes well beyond publishing and includes music and art and photography. These are businesses that don’t think about bookstores at all.

There was a point at the CCC meeting (at which people who work at The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and Associated Press were among the participants) where it was useful to offer my own articulation of why the problems caused by digital change for newspapers and magazines and record companies were so much more grave than they were for book publishers (so far.) It is simply stated.

For those businesses, the unit of appreciation does not match the unit of sale.

By that I mean that record companies sold us albums when what we wanted were songs. That’s what their economics were built on. The minute we could buy songs, it blew up their business model. Newspapers sell us the weather when what we want are the box scores, or the horoscopes when what we want are the comics. There are many books which will be read cover to cover. Newspapers and magazines are rarely read cover to cover. It was never thought of as wasteful or uneconomic that most people actually consumed a small percentage of every newspaper and magazine they bought. But it gets harder and harder to make that sale in a digital environment.

Of course, we have felt some impact of this effect in the book business. When you get beyond fiction and certain components of non-fiction (memoir, biography, some history and science), the books aren’t read cover to cover either. You usually use (what we now call) chunks of travel books, gardening books, cookbooks, computer books, crafts books. Even in the bookstore environment, sales of these books are suffering because a more granular offering is available online.

Grasping the significance of the “unit of appreciation, unit of sale” paradigm makes me believe that the “album” (do we still call it that?) of music, the newspaper, and the magazine are ultimately doomed as organizing principles. They were built to meet the requirements for content distribution in a world where physical practicalities had to be addressed. The Times couldn’t drop sports and economics on my doorstep and world affairs and theater reviews on yours. And The New Yorker couldn’t deliver Talk of the Town to me and the cartoons to you. The units of appreciation were far too granular to be delivered as units of sale.

It would be a reasonable guess that about half the units that bookstores sell are cover-to-cover reads, where the unit of sale equals the unit of appreciation.

Brainstorming with publishing colleagues about what I need to say at IFRRO gave me a new realization about what’s likely to happen with the half that’s not.

Exploring non-trade publishing — academic, professional, sci-tech, college texts, and schoolbook publishing — makes you realize everybody else is headed in the same direction. They’re anticipating that the “unit of appreciation” for their content will always be defined by the context of either (depending on the customer base) a “learning system” or a “workflow.” The content won’t be the point. Learning something or accomplishing something will be the point and content will be delivered within a framework designed to deliver on the objective.

Pretty much without exception, smart publishers in these non-trade areas see the day coming where controlling the platform is the key and the controller of the platform will be the gatekeeper for, if not the creator of, the content. Since that tracks pretty closely to my notions about “verticals”, it all seems very logical.

But if you think about it a little harder, peel back one more layer of the onion, you realize that much of the rest of our non cover-to-cover publishing — much of what we now call trade — will also be housed within platforms. There will be platforms providing workflow, and content in context, for chefs and knitters and gardeners. They too will be buying “solutions”, not “information”, and the material we now put in the books will be served up, as needed, inside the workflow. It won’t be so much about “units of appreciation” as “units of need” or “units of purpose” for the content because the entire system will be the unit of appreciation and the unit of sale.

That is: the instruction as to how to do a particular knitting stitch will pop up or be linked to the place in the “pattern” (or whatever digital delivery has made the pattern become). The explanation of how to broil or baste something will be linked to the direction to broil or baste something. It won’t be housed in a different physical volume; it won’t even be housed in a different program or file! The beginnings of this are already evident in some apps and enhanced ebooks.

The world in which we will be living this way and routinely getting content this way is not around the corner; it is a few years off. Not twenty, I don’t think; but maybe ten. We’ll be solidly in a cloud world by then with just about all the content we consume — music, movies, TV, and what we get from newspapers, magazines, and books — and all the software we use coming to our devices from remote servers rather than from a hard drive.

In that kind of a world, I think the idea of “owning” content will be nonsensical. Everything will be licensed. “Owning” is really a tangible object-based concept. We discover the reality of that whenever we try to apply the principles of first use — like lending and resale — to the digital things we “sell” today. And, when you think about it, purchasing access to whatever you want or need whenever you want or need it is the perfect matching of the unit of appreciation to the unit of sale.

If you’ll be at Frankfurt next week and you like talking about what I write about, please come by stand 8.0 L916 and if you can catch me when I’m not in a meeting (about half the time), please say hello. I am speaking twice at the Book Fair. On Wednesday, October 6 at 10:30 am, Mark Dressler will interview me about the 2011 Digital Book World Conference program.You’ll find us at the Sparks Stage, 8.0 P923. On Friday, October 8 at 12:30, I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on “The Ebook Business – Who’s in Control” which will take place in the “Entente” room in hall 4.C. I understand Victoria Barnsley of HarperCollins UK and Ronald Schild of the German ebook-selling consortium will be my partners for the conversation whose focus will apparently be on the big companies in the ebook space: Amazon, Apple, and Google. Maybe I’ll be a lonely voice saying “don’t forget that B&N and Kobo are very much here — which Google isn’t yet — that Blio and Copia are coming and that the collective power of yet-unaggregated sites and communities, which could be harnessed by yet another player, will be considerable.”

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There is certainly more than one way to build a conference program. I have been putting them together since long before I learned about the concept of “crowd-sourcing”. I’m a bit of a plowhorse about some things so the Digital Book World conference program comes together pretty much the same way as the first digital book conference aimed at trade publishers I organized, Electronic Publishing & Rights, back in 1993. I put together a list of topics for panels or presentations and a roster of people who could either speak or lead me to speakers. Then I engender a lot of conversations between the conference-creation team and the potential speakers and audience to craft the topics, the framing, and the ultimate presentation.

Two other important conferences which appeal to an audience that overlaps Digital Book World, O’Reilly’s Tools of Change in February and SXSW in Austin in March — seem to take a different approach. As near as I can tell, they do crowd-source a lot of their programming. It appears to me that Tools of Change throws out suggested topics and requests that panels and speakers put themselves forward as components of the show. Then, presumably, the people in charge at O’Reilly (the heads of the conference are Andrew Savikas and Kat Meyer, and both of them are smart, knowledgeable, and discerning) choose what will comprise the show. At SXSW it appears that the candidates are selected by an online vote. It seems to me that you therefore guarantee that you’ll get the panels sponsored by the best campaigners, but not necessarily what would give your ultimate audience the best show. But I guess it works for them.

I should declare myself here. I am a fan of Tools of Change. I participated in a day-long brainstorming session several years ago which O’Reilly Media organized to plan the first conference. I missed that one, which was in California in the summer of 2007, but I’ve attended the three annual February conferences in New York, 2008-2010. It’s a great show and a great rendezvous for people thinking about technology and publishing. As this piece makes clear, we can’t handle every worthy subject in two full days of conference programming at Digital Book World; there’s room for lots of other conversation and TOC is a useful one. On the other hand, I have never attended SXSW. The program didn’t look like it had much relevance to commercial trade publishing (although it covered a lot of other things that neither TOC nor DBW does.) Plus it comes in the same month that has a chunk taken out of if for me by baseball spring training. There are things in life besides digital change…

As I think through what we do and how it all works, it is hard for me to see how we could produce nearly as good a show without the conversations. We are helped considerably in our work by a Conference Council of more than 30 top players in the industry from across houses large and small, agents, members of industry bodies like BISG, Association of Booksellers for Children, and the Frankfurt Book Fair, and some other consultants. We talk to literally dozens of other people as we put the show together, getting advice about whom to contact to speak and shaping and re-shaping our formulation of the panels and presentations.

This does, indeed, start in my head. I wrote a post in May outlining what I thought might be the major topics. We got comments on the blog and then we pushed the list out to the Conference Council in formation to get more input.

Once the Council was formed, we put the topic list up on Survey Monkey for them to give us feedback. What we were mainly looking for is “of what we postulated might be on the program, what’s essential and what’s a yawn?”, but we also got thoughts about things that could be combined or reframed. Then at the end of June, we had an exciting and rigorous 2-hour meeting with many of the Council and a number of our F+W colleagues at which we solicited even more ideas and honed our thinking further.

This process eliminated a number of topics that were on my initial list. Some of them were dropped because the group thought interest would be low (usually because they were too narrow or specialized); for others we couldn’t see who could speak to them effectively. But among those we knocked out were:

* Will non-US publishers start to establish a virtual sales presence in the US as ebook sales grow?

* How do publishers deal with image rights for old titles becoming new ebooks?

* What changes are on the horizon for publishers’ relationships with the library market?

* Are trade shows becoming an anachronism in the age of digital communication?

* How much of the solid print backlist is still locked up by rights issues?

* To what extent do publishers view single-title marketing as a practical endeavor?

All of these topics are “worthy” but, against very stiff competition, they didn’t make the cut.

The survey and Council conversation also helped us refine how we’ll approach a number of subjects.

Author royalties for ebooks will be handled as a survey and presentation, not, as first occurred to me, primarily through a panel of agents.

Our Council felt that how publishers make the business decisions to acquire content not necessarily intended for first use in a book was worthy of discussion. A subsequent conversation with potential speakers convinced us that “making books out of content that started another way” would be a relevant extension and should be in that same discussion.

Marketing and metadata were identified as topics that I should have included but hadn’t. As a result, we will have two metadata panels (one on core, one on enhanced) and we’re getting great help from BISG Executive Director Scott Lubeck (on the Conference Council, of course) putting these together. Although we have several panels that touch on marketing, I’m still thinking about the best way to tackle how single-title promotion has changed (which it has: profoundly).

What I had imagined as “The Tools Every Publisher Must Have in 2011″ morphed into a conversation about “industry solutions” — such things as Edelweiss and NetGalley and Filedby. A further refinement from our first idea is that we’ll have a panel of publisher-users discuss these, rather than go with my initial idea of inviting the companies themselves to present their solutions.

We knew we needed to discuss the future of bookstores. Our Conference Council meeting yielded the suggestion that we have analysts who follow industry stocks discuss that topic (and a hat tip to Michael Cader for that idea.) We’ve recruited Marianne Wolk, a market analyst who follows Amazon and Google, to speak, and she’s helping us look for other analysts or investors to join that discussion. And we’re also putting together a panel of independent bookstores; we’ve already talked to more than half-a-dozen and will talk to several more to pick the three or four that can deliver the freshest, most relevant, and most articulate content for our conference. (I would hate to leave this to self-selection.)

A panel I’d thought we needed on “ebook first” was dismissed as old news and too narrow.

We lean heavily on expertise that we know and trust.

Apparently, sometimes our technique gives us the same result as our counterparts’ crowd-sourcing. Liza Daly is the most compelling thinker I’ve encountered on ebooks. Last year we had her do 20 minutes on “ebook basics” which was one of the most-praised components of our program. I knew we had to have her back and a fast conversation with Liza quickly yielded the subject. She’s going to talk about “cost-effective development of enhanced content: how to display on multiple platforms without multiple headaches.” I’ll bet many attendees will find this the most useful 20 minutes at the show. I see that O’Reilly has her on their Frankfurt TOC program. That’s a good decision no matter how they arrived at it. (And I’d advise SXSW to make sure the ballot box is properly stuffed for Liza if she’s a candidate for their event next March.)

We had outlined three different research projects we wanted to present. Two are follow-ons from last year. Verso Media has a panel of “book” consumers and Bowker, working with BISG, has a panel of “ebook” consumers. This year, Digital Book World is sponsoring a follow-up effort with Verso and so the reports from both of those groups of consumers will be updated. (The BISG-Bowker effort was already ongoing.)

But then we discovered a new data-gathering opportunity with a company called iModerate, which does both surveys and online qualitative research, and we put them on an assignment of studying in depth a particular subset of ebook readers: those that read on multi-function devices like iPads and smartphones. Michael Cader suggested some ways to help the audience get maximum value from the data. As a result, we put those presentations together on the program, will distribute some data to the audience in advance, and have the presenters join in a panel after they say their own pieces. We thought that was a great idea; we’re doing it.

Maria Campbell, the veteran scout who has been on the foreign rights scene for decades, knows the players trading international rights better than anybody. So we drafted her to help us find the right person to lead a discussion of how the growth of ebooks will affect territorial rights. That right person is Cullen Stanley of the Janklow and Nesbit Agency, with whom we’re now working to craft the right combination of agents and publishers, American and foreign, to make this a balanced and informed discussion. The inclusion of agents is a key point of differentiation between Digital Book World and just about every discussion about the digital future I’m aware of. There are many aspects of the conversation about the digital future that simply can’t be sensibly conducted without the involvement of agents.

Lorraine Shanley, a member of our Council, is not only a consultant but also one of the leading executive recruiters in publishing. We wanted to examine how skill sets are changing in publishing. I thought I’d put together a panel of recruiters. Lorraine suggested that it made more sense to create a panel of executives who came to publishing from other industries. We liked her idea better and we now have Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins as the first of the executives who will join Lorraine for that conversation.

I don’t mean to suggest we’re unique in doing things the way we do. Mark Dressler, who puts together programs for BookExpo America and for the Frankfurt Book Fair (and who will interview me about the Digital Book World program at a Halle 8 stage on Frankfurt Wednesday), is also a micro-programmer and very highly consultative and interactive in his program creation. I am sure some of what you see at TOC and SXSW resulted from interaction, too. I just can’t help thinking when I hear “calls” for programming how much the conversations we have inform and improve what we offer. Although I’m the proud Conference Chair who gets credit for putting together the Digital Book World program, it’s consultation with the most knowledgeable players in town that makes it what it is. Perhaps it is “crowd-sourcing” of a different kind.

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We had a very successful debut annual conference for Digital Book World last January, even though we didn’t conceive the idea until June, put together a group of helpers (which we now call our Conference Council) until July, or draft the initial program until August. This year we’re way ahead of that schedule. We’ve put together a fabulous Council to advise us this year and we’re having a meeting of many of them next week to discuss the agenda and to start getting suggestions for speakers.

The Council gives us wide exposure and connections to the trade publishing industry. That way we make sure we don’t miss any ideas and we don’t miss knowing about any talented people whom our audience would want to hear.

We have several publishing company presidents and CEOs (Sara Domville of F+W, Marcus Leaver of Sterling, Maureen McMahon of Kaplan, Brian Napack of Macmillan, Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks) and some presidents and CEOs from other companies and support organizations in the industry (Kristen McLean of the Association of Booksellers for Children, Tracey Armstrong of Copyright Clearance Center, Peter Clifton of Filedby, David Cully of Baker & Taylor, Joe Esposito of GiantChair, John Ingram of Ingram Content Companies, Scott Lubeck of The Book Industry Study Group, and Steve Potash of Overdrive Systems.)

We have other senior level executives, many with specific digital responsibilities (Peter Balis of Wiley, Ken Brooks of Cengage, Mark Gompertz of Simon & Schuster, Madeline McIntosh of Random House, Thomas Minkus of the Frankfurt Book Fair, Larry Norton of Borders, Kate Rados of F+W Media, Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins, Adam Salomone of Harvard Common Press, John Schline of Penguin, Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press, Michael Tamblyn of Kobo, Maja Thomas of Hachette, and Tom Turvey of Google.)

We have agents (Sloan Harris of ICM, Simon Lipskar of Writer’s House, and Scott Waxman of the Waxman Agency) and industry consultants and commentators (Michael Cairns of Persona Non Data, Ted Hill of THA Consulting, and Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International.) And because he is our media partner, we have help from Michael Cader of Publishers Marketplace as well. And we also get great input from others on the F+W team: David Nussbaum, David Blansfield, Cory Smith, Guy Gonzalez, and Matt Mullin.

So we have all the Big Six represented, as well as small publishers, industry-wide associations and service providers, wholesalers, digital distribution partners, retailers, and agents. All of these people have real input into the topic list and speakers. Many of them are joining us for a meeting next week to review our ideas for the program, which we previewed on this blog about a month ago.

Because Digital Book World tries to be at the cutting edge of trade publishing and digital change, we often face one or both of two challenges. Sometimes we believe something should be happening, or be about to happen, but we may not know where or whether the publishers leading the charge will talk about it. Several topics come to mind that fit that description: vertical efforts inside general trade houses; what houses are doing to adjust to reduced expectations for print sales in bookstores; how houses are gearing up or changing their sales efforts to compete in and serve a growing list of digital intermediaries; how enhanced ebook and ebook first creation change the traditional order of things in product development.

The other challenge we have to work around is when people can say things privately but not publicly. One topic that is very tough to talk about is ebook royalties, which is a major point of contention between publishers and leading agents at the moment. The big houses are pretty adamantly trying to hold the line (publicly) at a royalty of 25% of net receipts. But upstart publishers like Jane Friedman’s Open Road appear to be willing to pay 50%; publishing through Smashwords yields 85% (but sells the books without DRM, which would frequently scare the copyright owners of valuable properties); and self-publishing through a distributor would deliver a yield somewhere in between. (Remember: self-publishing ebooks carries no inventory risk.) In that environment, some agents are able to wring some concessions from some publishers. But the agent can’t talk about that without jeopardizing her ability to get concessions for her clients and no publisher will volunteer to reveal the isolated concession and start turning that into a policy.

Some things are just hard to discuss. Do booksellers, or even the publishers and wholesalers who supply them, want to talk about the possibility of their impending demise? But how can one plan for the future and ignore that elephant in the room? If a publisher suddenly sees the necessity of developing direct selling relationships with end users, after years of telling booksellers he was against it, does that publisher want to talk about those efforts in public?

When competitors participate in industry education initiatives, they must draw lines around what they will reveal and what they won’t. One ebook-responsible executive we know at a major house is persistently reluctant to reveal what he’s doing or what he’s thinking. But he has a boss, one who is proud of what he does and what their house does, who pushes him forward as a speaker.

Frankly, I think these challenges are greater for us than they are for other conferences on digital change that focus more on technology than they do on business practices. Very few publishers are masters of tech; usually they’re working with outside suppliers who are happy to share best practices. But business practices are different; they’re more sensitive. Sometimes the reluctance to share them is sound. Sometimes constraints are even legally required. Since our job is to focus on business practices, we’re glad to have relationships with very knowledgable players who will candidly engage with us on these challenges so we can figure out the best way to protect true proprietary knowledge but still disseminate valuable information.

We’re really proud of the illustrious group we have gotten to advise our efforts, and we get great value from them even though their first responsibility is to the company they work for. We feel confident that this group helps us cast a net that is wide and broad enough to assure us that any major development in the trade book world will hit our radar screen and that we’ll know if there are informed people willing to talk about it.

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Dinner Saturday night. 12 of us. Three spouses who had no particular interest in the BEA. Eight of us with one interest or another in the book business, but no possibility of personally being an exhibitor. And one publishing company CEO with a stand.

Of course, I got my money’s worth. I got in free as a speaker and live in Manhattan. I had several meetings with publishers and distributors on stands they were paying for that could result in assignments. I had other meetings with a bookstore chain and some technologists that came because of the publishers too that also could result in work.

An ROI of pretty much infinity. We all felt that way. Except for the exhibitor.

“No way it is worth it,” he reported. He even had to plan on having four people at the show on Sunday, just to cover the booth when he knew in advance there’d be hardly any productive business conversation. (BEA is fixing this next year by shifting to a mid-week schedule.)

I am always skeptical of any individual’s ability to characterize a show like this based on their own experience. After all, there were considerably more than 20,000 people there. There were dozens of panels going on that had great impact that I didn’t even know were happening, because I was engaged doing something on the floor. But, speaking for me, it was a great show. Lots of fun and lots of business.

Martin Levin, whose first ABA was in 1950 and who commented on my previous BEA post, argued with me about my prediction that BEA would soon come to an end. I had to remind him not to confuse what I say I think will happen from what I would hope would happen. It is work to keep those things separate.

Martin said, “being fat is no reason to commit suicide. This show is fat. It needs to go on a diet!” Another trade show veteran from one of the supporting technology companies said very much the same thing.

But wait, there’s another point of view. Make it bigger! Richard Nash and Michael Cairns (two smart guys I agree with a lot, but not this time) both suggest “open the show up to the public.” Frankfurt does! Book festivals in Los Angeles and Miami attract huge crowds! 

Sorry, public participation is not the “solution” for this show. What ails this industry is horizontality! What ails this industry is dedication to the book as a form! Publishers need to understand niches better; they don’t need to try to replicate the horizontal world that is disappearing in newspapers and bookstores through trade shows!

What made BEA such a fabulous experience for those of us for whom it was that was the aggregating of all of the industry players from around the world. And not just publishers! What do Bowker, Bookmasters, and Klopotek (just to name three exhibitors who were important to me at this past weekend’s show) have to gain by having the public come in? The smartest publishers who are beginning to understand verticality — like Wiley or F+W or  Taunton — need to meet the public in verticals. They don’t need to spend a beautiful Sunday fending off people looking for a free novel or a free children’s book. (And, of course, the German model isn’t “free books for the public”. Exhibitors sell the books to the public off the stands! I wonder what the sales tax authorities in New York would say to that…)

I’d love it if Reed would keep BEA going for years and years, particularly when they bring the mountain to me on my very own home island. But I’m still having trouble seeing why publishers will keep paying and, if they don’t, no more show. I’m afraid that what will work for publishers is smaller and more focused, not larger and more horizontal. That may very well not work for Reed. I expect very shortly it won’t work for Reed. I think the rights-trading piece can be revived in a much cheaper form. The retailer-facing piece — horizontally — is a dinosaur. And all the PR opportunities occur because of the size and glitz. Like most horizontal PR opportunities for books, that won’t get replaced either.

My message of verticality is clearly not getting through! The Washington Post was kind enough to feature me on the front page of today’s Style section with a lengthy and, as far as it went, accurate summary of my Shift speech from last Thursday. But, you know what? Not one mention of the central theme: verticality!

These are twilight times for the good old days.

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