Kindle

One very lucky thing for those of us who are in the habit of predicting the future is that very few people keep score on us. We mostly keep score on ourselves. When I want to remind readers of something I said previously, I link back to it and call it forward it again.

But there is one belief I had and stated repeatedly early in the ebook era that was wildly wrong, hopelessly wrong, and then proven clearly to be wrong. I bring it up now because it belongs in this post identifying a more current error, one which hasn’t been proven yet but about which I’ve learned enough to want to walk back.

When I started reading ebooks in about 1999, there were a couple of dedicated ereaders just becoming available: the Rocket Book and the Softbook. Neither of them interested me or very many other people either. Both failed pretty quickly.

Just about simultaneously, ebooks were first being delivered to hand-held devices. I discovered the magic of putting books on my Palm Pilot, a device I had in my pocket all the time. I had started carrying a personal digital assistant in 1986; that was a Psion Organiser with a 2-, then a 4-line screen, which would not have worked for ebooks. But the Palm, which could carry a chunk not so different in extent from what I see now on my iPhone, worked fine.

The original dedicated devices came and went without much notice from anybody. Meanwhile, I continued to read on my Palm and its successors. The shopping experience at Palm Digital was terrible, the choice of titles was extremely limited, and the ebooks cost just about as much as the print books. But I shifted over, as much as I could, because I was hooked both on the utter convenience of always having books in my pocket and because I genuinely found it preferable to read on something so small and light and have book reading, for the first time, totally manageable with one hand.

When the Sony Reader arrived and didn’t do much, I wasn’t surprised. Sometime before it debuted, I wrote or said somewhere that if you carried a personal digital assistant, nobody should have to explain the value of ebooks to you. And if you didn’t carry a personal digital assistant, they might not actually have any value for you. At that point, most ebooks purchased were read on laptop and desktop computers.

That’s why I was pretty sure the Kindle wouldn’t work. Who wanted another device to carry around just to read books, I figured? What’s the advantage in that?

I neglected to think through that people do things for lots of different reasons. And I really underestimated the degree to which the book-sized page is a requirement for a lot of people, even though it might be a transitional one. Anyhow, I was really, really, really wrong. And even though I switched back from Kindle to iPhone reading the minute the vast selection available through Kindle (and now through Nook, Kobo, Google, and Apple) was available to me on the device I was always carrying, I fully accept that most people are willing to carry something around to do their reading on a regular-sized page. Lesson learned.

It is now clear to me that another concept that was an important part of my future view is in pretty desperate need of reassessment. It also appears to be being proved wrong.

It was evident pretty early that the Net facilitated the formation of communities around interests. Putting that together with my thinking about the distinction between the unit of sale and the unit of appreciation (shortcut to understanding: the former is the album and the latter is the song; the former is the cookbook and the latter is the recipe) made me think that the big online aggregation of content for sale would also ultimately be challenged. If you went to a web community to get advice about how to build a deck or plant a vegetable garden, I figured, you’d just pick up whatever were your content purchases — books or whatever else, physical or virtual — from that same site. You wouldn’t need a separate site to go buy content from.

In other words, I expected one of the ways to monetize a community would be that you could sell it stuff, particularly content.

Although I know that O’Reilly operates in a special marketplace, I saw the success they have had selling directly to their community — both their own publications and their subscription aggregation Safari — as a sign of what we could expect to develop in other verticals.

I don’t think so anymore.

The first rude awakening for me was when OpenSky changed its business model. OpenSky began with the proposition that they would facilitate just about any web site to sell just about anything. As I understood it, if you had a blog about cooking, you could arrange to sell your favorite pots and pans right off your own site. OpenSky would source the product and operate the back end. You’d just have to pick out what you wanted and decide how much margin you could demand.

Well, apparently that business model just didn’t work. They’ve switched OpenSky from a commerce platform for bloggers to a “social network for shopping” with celebrity, expert, and author curators. I’m not much of a shopper, online or offline, so I’m not one to judge how appealing it might be compared to competition. There is some evidence that the new model works and OpenSky feels like they are now taking off. But it isn’t any longer the perfect match for the vision that I had when I first saw it, and it probably didn’t work because my vision was wrong.

By extension, I had been figuring that publishers needed to sell direct as well. Big publishers had good reasons to resist that idea which I understood, but which in themselves make me question the idea. Big trade houses are highly dependent on the goodwill of Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as other retailers, and going into competition with your key channels is risky and problematical. And my vision of the future wasn’t really built around general publishers, anyway.

This month, J.K. Rowling opened her Pottermore site, which is intended to be the exclusive vendor of Harry Potter ebooks. Now, there’s a vertical. It appears you won’t be able to get them at Amazon, B&N, or Google (although Google checkout is “the preferred third party payment platform”); if you want them, you’ll buy them from the Pottermore site (or, as some would point out, get them from a pirate source if that’s easier.) In a ‘d’uh” moment, I read this piece making it clear that this kind of fragmentation didn’t work for musicians and ultimately wouldn’t work for authors. (The book business isn’t the music business, but some lessons do carry over.)

So mark me much less bullish on publishers selling direct than I used to be. It can add value and margin to a vertical site if the costs of running the store can be tightly managed, but it is not likely to produce much in sales very quickly.

In fact, I’m quite sure that fewer Harry Potter ebooks will be sold by the Pottermore strategy than if they were just made available through the standing ebook retail network. The margins might be higher with no retailer to pay, assuming that advantage isn’t completely swallowed up by their own costs of infrastructure (and it probably won’t be.) But not everybody who buys a Harry Potter book from Amazon or B&N (or a Nora Roberts book or a Janet Evanovich book or a James Patterson book) is a devoted fan. Some of them are just choosing their next read and if Roberts or Evanovich or Patterson wasn’t shown to them, they would have bought something else on offer.

There is evidence out there to contravene this post and confirm my original thesis. Our friends at F+W Media, with whom we deliver the annual Digital Book World conference, report success building their retailing business through their communities. A senior executive there tells me they are selling “tens of millions” in content, product, and services through 25 stores attached to the community sites they have developed over the past few years. They achieve an average order value of $40 — not too shabby — and credit a combination of true community focus which builds them large and powerful databases of names, unique curation that includes offering things that aren’t available elsewhere, selling content in multiple forms (book-like, video, webcasts), delivery of “online learning”, and special bundled packages for their success.

F+W is not unique. A smaller company that is their competitor in some spaces, Interweave, also has a community focus and sells direct. Both companies have the content to build a number of different verticals to amortize the cost of a common merchandising and retailing platform.I don’t doubt F+W when they say they’re making it work, and apparently Interweave is too, but that still leaves the question of whether they, like O’Reilly, are sufficiently unusual cases that it would be very hard for other publishers to follow their lead.

I still have my fingers crossed that the Google ebooks program could spawn some unique shopping experiences that will make a difference to the ecosystem in the long run. (This is taking powerful faith at the moment because Google has only barely detectable sales in their first half-year of operation.) By offering the opportunity for curation with personality to be done by a large number of different entities (about 300 bookstores have already started with the program in the US), the Google initiative still offers the possibility of a wide variety of curation choices, or bookstore front ends.

Of course, none of these individual Google ebook stores will have the resources of the big retail players to apply technology to their merchandising. But perhaps they can provide selection and positioning that will create its own following. Whether they apply what they know and their own unique intellectual resource base (because every bookstore has one) to highly local subjects or other verticals with global appeal, they have the opportunity to create online stores that at least some people will prefer to shop. Thousands of such entrepreneurs around the globe might produce hundreds — or dozens — of survivors with large enough customer bases to create the kind of diversity in the ebook retail network that would offer publishers the kind of opportunity they need to add value for a long time. And to do it the way they always have, by managing intermediary opportunities, not by selling direct.

This is not to suggest that publishers don’t need to be building direct contact with as many consumers as they can. Just as authors should do. But forget the idea of a huge number of vertical purchase points for ebooks all over the net. I will.

Google also announced an affiliate program for Google ebooks. That will enable any web site to sell their ebooks and get paid, extending a concept that both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have employed successfully for print books. It looks to us like Google pays more. An affiliate can earn 6-10% from Google, 6% from B&N, and 4-8.5% from Amazon.

This isn’t the original OpenSky vision, however, because that was about all kinds of products, not particularly (or even necessarily including) books or ebooks. Of course sourcing could always have been done through Amazon, but there were differences in the merchandising and pricing opportunities in the original OpenSky model.

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A big ebook shoe dropped on Sunday. It dropped on Kobo first. And it has nothing to do with Borders.

Kobo just delivered a new iOS (that’s Apple’s operating system for iPad and iPhone) app that no longer contains the direct link to the Kobo bookstore within it. That means that buying new Kobo books requires going to Kobo.com through the browser (not hard, but additional steps) rather than from a single click from within the app.

Later news on this developing story is that the Google app has been “pulled” and that the Nook Children’s app no longer has a link to the store. We have to expect that the Kindle and main Nook apps will undergo the same change very shortly. That will mean that the simplest and most seamless way to buy and read ebooks on the iPad or iPhone will be through Apple’s iBookstore. It will almost certainly mean a growth in iBookstore market share at the expense of all the other ebook retailers. It will also almost certainly mean that a lot of people who read their ebooks on an iOS device (I’m one of them) and prefer to use any of the other ebook retailers (and I’m one of those too) will be inconvenienced and annoyed.

However, it is also true that Apple will benefit from this move that many of their customers will resent.

The point most emphatically made by all of this is that the book business is a cork floating on a digital device stream. We don’t control our environment. We must keep adapting to what bigger players, some of which have pretty minimal bandwidth to engage us in a dialogue and pretty minimal interest in what’s best from our point of view, see as the best strategy for them.

I have been guilty of a publishing-centric view of the possibility that Apple would enforce the rule that leads to this change since it was first prominently rumored last February. That is: with wishful thinking, when I first heard about this possibility six months ago I thought they wouldn’t do it. I talked myself into believing that because Apple had benefited substantially from the presence of the book apps on their platform, and because there are millions of us who read ebooks on our Apple devices with a distinct preference for using other readers and other ebook stores, that Apple would not enforce the rules which, through a couple of iterations of clarification, say that the way these apps and stores operated was outside their rules.

I will try to remind myself not to be making that mistake again. One of the other big companies recently congratulated me on the ease with which I accept the idea that companies (and people) act in their own self-interest. That’s what Apple has done here.

What this means depends very much on where you sit.

Barnes & Noble (Nook), Google, and Kobo all benefited enormously from Apple’s arrival on the scene in April 2010 because they brought with them the “agency” sales model that leveled pricing across all outlets for the ebooks that come from the biggest publishers. Without agency, many believe (and I’m one of them) that Amazon Kindle’s aggressive loss-leader pricing policies on the biggest books would seriously have diminished the competition.

B&N needs every penny it can spare to invest in device development and marketing; they’d be seriously handicapped if they had to give away margin to compete for consumers.

Google has signed up about 300 independent stores in the US to be partners in its ebook program. They might not have 10% that many if the indies thought they had to compete with loss-leader pricing on the biggest books even to play. When Random House switched over to agency at the beginning of March this past year — 11 months after it began — one of the motivations they cited was to respond to the desire of independent stores to sell ebooks which they heard over and over again depended on agency pricing.

Kobo has always had a global strategy that could enable them to thrive even if they had also-ran status in the US market. But they were trying hard to compete with Amazon pricing in the pre-agency days and as the smallest of the big global ebook players, they would have to be considered the most vulnerable in an environment characterized by loss-leader price warfare.

This change must mean they’ll all lose sales. It is hard to see that it could mean anything else.

Amazon will lose sales too, but they may win overall just because life gets a bit harder for B&N, Kobo, and Google.

All of these retailers have gotten an enormous (but unquantified in data revealed to them) lift from the massive success of iPads and iPhones and the retailers’ ability to access all those devices pretty seamlessly and at no cost. Amazon and Barnes & Noble sold many Kindles and Nooks, of course (Kobo’s device has been a competitor and Google is about to have one), and they’d be selling lots of ebooks if there were no iOS devices. Publishers know that, of the 55-65 percent of their ebooks sales that go to Amazon and 20-30 percent of their ebooks to Barnes & Noble, some of those sales go to the dedicated devices and most of the rest to the iOS devices. But they have no idea what the split is. Now they will start to find out as they see those sales shift from the other retailers to the iBookstore. (Sales to iBookstore, Kobo, Google, and others constitute no more than 15-20 percent of sales and often far less.)

Anyhow, the unambiguous benefit that Apple and the iOS devices used to represent to the retailers is now reduced in value, but agency pricing remains (cheering everybody but Amazon), as does the ability of their customers to use iPads and iPhones to consume their content.

Some publishers will need to reconsider their strategies.

Because Amazon will only allow agency terms to the Big Six publishers (they have ways to offer a competitive 70% share of sales, but they won’t play ball with giving up control of pricing), because some publishers aren’t comfortable with the agency model, and because the iBookstore has not been as aggressive about sourcing content as their competitors (I don’t know this for sure, but it definitely feels like all of the other ebook players have much bigger teams chasing content than iBookstore does), there are publishers selling to the other players and not to Apple. I’d imagine those might be expecting a sudden drop in sales through iOS purchases, although they never actually knew how much of their sales were iOS purchases.

And this points out a big difference between the publishers and the retailers. The retailers know how much of their sales are coming through their app customers. They also know how much of the reading of their ebooks is done on iOS devices. Publishers have no idea. In the longer run, this shows how publishers can benefit if the new players they are creating — Anobii in the UK (who has told us they will share data with publishers) and Bookish in the US (which we have heard less directly will do the same) — get some market share and can provide visibility into consumption that publishers do not have now.

And that takes me back to the book business cork bobbing in the larger digital device stream. There was no ebook business to speak of until Amazon delivered the Kindle device, put massive muscle behind selling it, and used the ability they had then to sacrifice margin to create a powerful commercial proposition that was the catalyst to create the market. There was no serious competition for Amazon until Barnes & Noble’s new management delivered the Nook with an equally powerful commitment to establishing it, using their presence in stores to introduce ebook reading to new audiences and, with further innovation of the devices, contributing to the explosive growth of reading in digital formats.

There was no restraint on Amazon’s ability to use their deep pockets to discount publishers’ content in pursuit of their own market share growth until Apple’s new device, the iPad, created a whole new sales model that forced price stability in the marketplace and, at the same time, handed publishers a new capability to maximize revenue and to use price as a marketing tool.

There was no effective way to introduce book readers to the convenience of digital reading without the investment in a dedicated device until the iPad put the capability into millions of hands that didn’t know they wanted it.

There was no great motivation for ebook retailers to introduce interoperability across devices until many ebook device owners also became iPhone and iPad owners.

We note that all these changes in the marketplace were created by others, not by publishers. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, or even a new thing. Publishers also didn’t spring for the investment that created superstores and then Amazon in the 1990s, all of which increased their sales. A publisher’s role is to use the channels that are available to get books into the hands of readers.

From most publishers’ perspectives, this change might have very little impact. Any iPad or iPhone reader who wants a book can still find and buy one. If the Apple store is strengthened at the expense of Kindle and Nook, that constitutes marketplace diversification that is good for them. (If the impact somehow fell disproportionately on Nook, though, that might not be.)

But the happy symbiosis between the ebook retailers and Apple, by which the retailers got access to customers they would not otherwise have had and Apple was able to readily deliver their customers content they hadn’t otherwise aggregated, appears to have come to an end. And the iBookstore, which had been fighting others for the scraps after Amazon took half or more of the US ebook market and B&N took much more than half the rest, is about to be a much more significant competitor.

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Our Publishers Launch Conferences venture is doing two shows in Frankfurt: a full-day “eBooks Around the World” program on Monday, October 10 and our first conference dedicated to children’s book publishing, “Children’s Publishing Goes Digital”, which will be a half-day program on Tuesday, October 11. We’ve enlisted the capable help of Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners International to program the children’s show. This post will talk about what I’ve been developing for the all-day Monday program.

There are other things going on, but there are two central themes for Monday: data and retail.

We are always focused on data about digital change because in this transitional time we’re in, none of us can get enough of it. Things are changing fast and if you haven’t looked at the thermometer in the past week or two, you probably don’t know the temperature. That’s even more true on a global scale, because global data is that much harder to get and track.

We are focused on retail because the list of “major accounts” for all publishers will be changing in the next few years. Global players will often (but not always) be replacing local ones as each publisher’s biggest intermediary customers. The ebooks marketplace in the US demonstrates how rapidly new channels can rise with the Kindle and Nook.

To begin the day at Frankfurt, we will have what we believe is the most comprehensive research report yet produced about the digital transition country-by-country and region-by-region. The Milan office of the global consulting firm, A.T. Kearney, working in conjunction with Italy’s Bookrepublic, will update and expand some substantial research they did at the end of last year. They presented their findings at the IfBookThen conference in Milan in February.

The Publishers Launch Conferences team — Michael Cader, Emily Williams, and I — have suggested some additional lines of inquiry around the intrusion of English and the expansion of the global players’ activity which we believe will enhance the already-robust research the Kearney team did before.

We’ll have a data presentation of a different sort from Jonathan Nowell of Nielsen, the company which both is the guardian of a worldwide bibliographic database and the operators of BookScan, which collects point-of-sale information around the globe. Jonathan is going to focus on how metadata affects sales and specifically how deficient metadata costs sales. The lessons here will be the ones everybody will take home and implement immediately. Nowell will point publishers to the metadata fixes which are absolutely necessary to avoid sales leakage.

The retail conversations and presentations will be sprinkled throughout the day.

We wanted to focus our audience on what we consider to be a remarkable story, the resurgence of Barnes & Noble in the digital realm since the introduction of the first Nook device 20 months ago. B&N’s success in using their brick-and-mortar presence to combat Amazon’s two year head start with the Kindle is a case history that retailers in every country in the world will want to examine carefully. That’s why we’re giving it close attention.

Theresa Horner, B&N’s VP for Digital Content and Patricia Arancibia, Manager, Digital Content, International, will join Michael Cader and me for a conversation about how they did it. They started out with a Nook that was pretty similar in price and features to the monochrome e-ink Kindle, but then they carved out their own device niche by offering Nook Color and a touchscreen version which, to this point, nobody else has matched. The color capability enabled B&N to expand their ebook product offering to include content, like magazines and children’s books, that wouldn’t work well on a Kindle or original Nook device.

But they also expanded their content base of non-English publications, building a Spanish-language store for their domestic US market that is more comprehensive than any other in the world!

All of this has propelled B&N to a spot where they are a significant challenger to Amazon’s ebook supremacy in the United States. There have been some recent indications that Nook devices may now be outselling Kindle devices, although not everybody agrees with that proposition.

Many countries have a dominant brick-and-mortar retailer that is contemplating an impending challenge from Amazon. Whether or not the B&N formula is replicable in other markets, perhaps by licensing the Nook or the Kobo reader or the new Google reader or another device, is still a fair question. The answer might be much clearer after the B&N section of our show.

But B&N has not (yet) announced any plans for a global presence. Four other ebook retailers that will grace our Frankfurt stage are declared global players.

David Naggar of Amazon.com will talk about what publishers around the world should do to best benefit from Amazon’s continuing global expansion. We know that Amazon will be a market leader in every country they enter. They are the biggest account for most US publishers today and they will be a top account soon for every publisher in the world if they aren’t already. Tips from their experience about what works best for publishers to increase their sales are useful to every publisher in every language. We had a presentation from Amazon at our Digital Book World show in New York last January which attendees all agreed was helpful and enlightening; we’re expecting the same at PLC Frankfurt.

Tom Turvey of Google will also have a lot to talk about at PLC Frankfurt. Google has just announced a Google ereading device and we keep hearing rumors (although not yet directly from them) that they will be pushing their ebook capabilities hard this Fall when a host of new tablet computers hit the market. Google’s program is the only one really built for participation by retailers and web sites everywhere and there has been a pretty widespread uptake by independent stores in the United States in the program’s opening months. If the biggest dominant chains in each country will want to pay close attention to what B&N has to say, the independent stores around the world, and the publishers that depend on them, will be paying close attention to what Google has to say.

Kobo just opened a store in Germany, following quickly on Amazon’s heels in the biggest single European market with a title base larger that is larger than Amazon’s and larger than the German aggregator, Libreka and with a special reader for the German language. They have said they’ll have stores opening in Spain, France, Italy, and Holland in the next few months. We’re working out the details with Kobo about what they’ll discuss in conversations early next month, but we know they’ll be on the program. Kobo has been distinguished among their competitors so far by their declared willingness to share sales data with publishers and, indeed, they have established a reputation for revealing things we didn’t know about the market at presentations they have made before. Kobo is the purest ebook play among the global competitors that have been in the market for some time; all the rest have other fish to fry.

But there’s a new entrant to global ebook retailing that, like Kobo, is (at least for now) purely about ebooks. That would be the UK-based start-up, Anobii.Their CEO, Matteo Berlucchi, will explain their very enticing proposition to enable crowd-sourced curation and taxonomy for books. On Anobii’s format-agnostic discovery-social platform, you’ll be able to follow a book, an author, a reader, or a topic, and you’ll be able to name your own topics. The basic functionality is supposed to go live in the next month or so and we believe our October conference will be a debut of sorts for what promises to be an entirely new approach to ebookselling. And publishers will be excited to hear that Anobii intends to share data with their vendors as well.

It could well be that the retailers we will have on the stage at PLC Frankfurt will be delivering half the sales or more for most of the world’s publishers in a few years, or perhaps even sooner than that.

Data and retail are our features, but there will be much more covered in the show.

Tracey Armstrong, the CEO of Copyright Clearance Center (which is, along with Perseus Constellation, one of our Global Sponsors) will talk about the importance of collective licensing to capture revenue that will otherwise be lost in a world where any fragment of any book might be a key component of somebody’s new app or web site.

A panel of agents will discuss the emerging new models in that segment of publishing’s value chain.

We’ll have what I think will be a very provocative panel of trade publishers who are benefiting from the fact that their company works in segments other than trade which made the digital transition sooner.

Octavio Kulesz did a pioneering study of the digital transition in the developing world that suggests that entirely new tactics will be called for if publishers are going to realize revenue from the masses who will read books on cell phones, but can’t afford to pay much.

Chris Bauerle, the Director of Sales for Sourcebooks, a mid-sized (or perhaps we should say small-major) US trade publisher, will explain their transition to a digital workflow, done a few years ago but paying off in big ways now that they want to use their content in new creative ways.

And Michael Cader and I will have a thing or two to say as well.

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Last year at this time, the people I know in the consumer electronics world were saying that Christmas 2010 would be the season of the ereader. That proved to be correct, resulting in both a sharp surge in ebook sales in early 2011 and, according to Pew data, a continued acceleration of ereader adoption in the first six months after Christmas.

This year is expected to be the year of the touch-screen tablet computer. With tens of millions of iPads already in consumer hands and a plethora of devices with Windows or Android operating systems coming on to the market this Fall, the shelf space in the consumer electronics stores is positioned to fulfill that expectation.

And somewhere between the monochrome eink ereader and the tablet we have the Nook Color, which has a color screen, some tablet-like capabilities, and more of an ereader-like (cheaper than a tablet by half) price.

I don’t know exactly how many of these devices are out there; it is hard to pin that down. But Apple has apparently sold around 45 million iPads and is on track to sell 100 million iPhones this year. Those are global numbers. They are reputed to have about 75% of the tablet market now, although that percentage will surely drop as competition proliferates. The tablet shipments for 2011 are estimated to be in the neighborhood of 53 million. Gartner says there will be nearly 100 million smartphones in use in the US by the end of this year.

That’s an awful lot of portable screens on which people can well view much more than type on a page.

It was becoming obvious a year ago that the children’s publishing business was being joined by digital competitors betting on the fact that the widespread distribution of color touchscreens would open up opportunities for children’s product that hadn’t existed before. And since publishers have tried to improve on simple book technology for young consumers for years — think about pop-ups, die-cuts, and computer chips that made the books talk and sing — it seems like a reasonable assumption that more and more parents will hand their kids the iPad to “read” in the car (or in bed) rather than a book.

When making book-like product for young people to be consumed on a color touch-screen device, employing many of the “tricks” of enhancement: audio, animation, and interactivity, is obviously called-for.

But as tablet use spreads, should we also expect to see expanded opportunity for illustrated books? My guess is that the answer to that is “yes”, but figuring out exactly what the cost-effective and reader-attractive solutions are to present illustrated books for the new display opportunities is far from self-evident. We’ve sold illustrated books to adults for years without the need to do anything except put ink on paper.

Last month, FutureBook held a conference in London about new product development. The takeaway seemed to be “nobody is making any money”. What was revealed about development costs and sales pointed to large losses. But if the number of devices which can effectively display these enhanced or enriched or app-like book-based products grows like Topsy, we should see the revenue potential go up.

At the same time, new players are developing tools to make the costs of development go down. Every day publishers have developers knocking at their door looking for content to test and develop their systems for new product construction. At this point, it appears that many of them are willing to work either of two ways: fee-for-services or development-for-a-share. For publishers, this adds organizational complexity to the deal-making since the arm of a publishing company that usually sells licenses (subsidiary rights) doesn’t often make publishing investment decisions (editors and publishers) and they could be choosing between the two models with any developer.

Illustrated books can hit the digital market through two paths: they can be an “enhanced ebook” or they can be an “app.” The distinction has largely been one of capabilities: apps are platforms that can support far more capabilities and interactivity than an ebook. But that’s changing. The developers of the epub standard (epub is the industry-approved format that makes books “reflowable”) are building in support for functions that used to be the exclusive domain of apps.

At least until now, apps have generally cost more to develop than ebooks, have been sold in an app store environment that is less search- and user-friendly than the various ebookstores are, and apps are generally much less expensive (for the consumer, not for the publisher) than ebooks. This has been an unattractive combination for a content-seller. App pricing is driven by many models that are independent of profit from the app sale itself. So far, the ebook business model is like books: the publisher makes money selling the content, not from any other activity.

When ebooks for narrative text were young, the term and concept we all had to learn was “reflow”. It is necessary to deliver text in a format that can be adjusted, or “reflowed”, to fit the screen size and font size selected. As we know, among the great advantages ebooks offer is that the user can change the type size, which changes the number of words in a line and the number of lines the screen can display. Another great advantage is the ability to read the book on multiple devices, which also requires the capability to “reflow” because the screen on your phone isn’t the same size as the screen on your Kindle or Nook and your iPad (which aren’t the same size as each other!)

The new term and concept we’ll need to learn in the illustrated ebook era is “fixed page layout.” That means delivering the page in a way that does not reflow, so that artwork and text maintain the same positions in relation to each other. Of course, that means that different size screens will require different fixed pages. You will have to actually design an illustrated book (or most of them anyway) for each form factor. In fact, you’ll frequently have to do it twice for each form factor to accommodate the page being viewed either portrait or landscape, a change the user can command with a flick of the wrist.

That’s time-consuming and expensive. And that’s just the beginning of the challenge. Here’s the really hard part. We have 500 years of experience figuring out what makes an illustrated book that the person holding it will find appealing and useful. Designers learned how to use spreads (placing content across two facing pages), which don’t exist on digital screens (unless they are artificially created there.) They learned how to use sidebars to hive off some content from the narrative flow. They understand how to approach things differently if they’re designing primarily for function, like a cookbook or a crafts book, than if they’re designing for beautiful pictorial presentation (your classic “coffee table book”).

When we get to the digital version, we have the opportunity, or perhaps we should say the temptation, to add much more, not just change the layout. There will be many situations, particularly in how-to illustrated books, when a video would be more useful than a still photo. One can add animation, sound, and functionality that can test or measure or calculate.

But, in fact, just the “fixed page layout” (different for the iPad than the iPhone, of course) along with the simple ability to put the pictures on their own page with pinch-and-spread capability, could add enormous value to the user (quite aside from the portability and reduction of weight that are inherent in moving from print to devices.) Whether you’re talking about a collection of beautiful pictures of Paris or of puppies, being able to blow up a picture to be able see a close-up of a part of it could be an enhancement that costs nothing to deliver.

And if that were all the value you needed to add, many books could be switched over for iPad viewing with a minimum of redesign. (But not all. One person I talked to last week talked about a book he was working on that had text on the left-hand pages referring to full-page photos on the right-hand pages. It has to be completely rethought for digital presentation.) What I’m thinking is that the beautiful pictorials — the coffee table books — might be the best and simplest things for publishers to move over to digital to start capturing revenue from those tens of millions of screens.

Best and simplest, of course, except for the rights issues.

This post is written with an admittedly short-term view. The interaction between content and users will sophisticate both iteratively and unevenly. My presumption (this is faith and intuition, not fact) is that those of us steeped in the habit of immersive reading will retain that desire so that the erosion of audience for that material will be very slow and probably mostly generational. Therefore, investments in enhancement of that kind of book will be hard to recover.

Illustrated books definitely are different. Digitally-enabled enhancement can add indisputable value in some cases, overcoming real limitations imposed by print. My guess is that books whose purpose is to feature fabulous art or photography can deliver added value with screen presentation with a minimum of additional investment or trial-and-error. At least for a while.

It has long been my contention that simpler digital products which are inexpensive to make are far more likely to make money than complex ones. Getting repaid for delivering everything the tech can do is very hard.

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There are lessons that can be taught or learned in one segment of publishing that can then apply to another. Well over a decade ago, Mark Bide and I were discussing the business model for journals. The way it works is that the university pays the professors a salary and rewards them with promotions and tenure for writing publishable material for the journals. Then the journal publisher pays nothing for the article (although they spend lots of money managing peer review and doing other things associated with editing, curating, and delivering the content.) Then the university pays for the IP all over again by buying (now licensing) the journal.

From our earliest understanding of the Internet and its potential for disintermediation, this seemed like a very vulnerable model. “How will we know when there’s a problem developing with the model?” I asked Mark. “When the publishers are having trouble getting submissions,” he said. “The problem will become obvious on the supply side before it becomes obvious on the demand side.

One of the challenges for a retail player trying to be a publisher is the difficulty of getting other retailers to play along. Even the most dominant US retailers, Amazon in the online world and Barnes & Noble in brick stores, don’t have a total monopoly on the customer base. People buy books online through outlets other than Amazon and people buy books in stores that aren’t owned by Barnes & Noble. And, of course, either of the two delivers grossly incomplete access to the total customer base without the other.

Barnes & Noble has been acquiring content directly for a long time. They’re very aware of the dichotomy between having a monopoly on content for your stores’ benefit versus making it more broadly available in the content’s best interests. Almost from the minute B&N acquired Sterling, Borders stopped stocking Sterling books (a problem that matters much less today than it did a few years ago.) And Sterling had a real sales force, retailer-friendly sales policies, and all of the systems necessary to support moving their books through intermediaries. Amazon does not.

Amazon took the first steps to fill that gap by making a deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt a few months ago, giving HMH a right of first refusal (apparently) to purchase paperback rights (excluding Amazon, we’d assume) to the books Amazon was publishing through their proprietary imprints. I have no inside information, but I would assume that one of the things Larry Kirshbaum will figure out early in his new role there will be how to get real print book distribution for the books he will be acquiring.

Amazon’s strategy appears to be that they’ll use their checkbook, the offer of 70% ebook royalties from the most powerful ebook platform, and their close connection to the online consumer, to get the books they want on the terms they want. And what they seem to want most for the books they pay for is “Kindle exclusive”: the ability to build up an inventory of titles available through Kindle but not through Nook, iBookstore, Google, or Kobo, let alone the stores here and abroad served by Ingram and OverDrive.

Barnes & Noble is familiar with that idea. They wouldn’t let other stores sell their Sparknotes study guide line. They never made it generally available through Sterling’s organization because they perceived value in having it be uniquely available through their stores and online channels.

But they didn’t avoid that dichotomy. The value they perceived is to the retailing entity, not to the content holder. Since their retail business was something like 50 times bigger than Sterling, it might not have been seen as a terribly difficult decision even though the content holder is always better off if the book is sold in as many places, online or offline, as possible.

Last week, PW did a story introducing Amazon’s “summer list”: ostensibly the books being published by them in the next few weeks. Obviously, these books were signed up before Kirshbaum’s arrival.

I’m not a bookseller. I have no expertise to apply to look at a list of books and decide what should be in any particular bookstore. But nothing on this list looked like a “must have” for an independent bookseller. To make sure, I reached out to a smart one I know and asked her to look at the PW list. “Would you stock these books?” was my question.

Her answer was interesting. “I don’t know about any of these,” she said. “For the most part, I learn about books by sales reps visiting our store and telling us about them. Nobody has ever told us about these.”

I had my staff do a little bit of searching. We couldn’t find a consolidated list of Amazon’s summer offerings online. What we found was the press release announcing 32 titles that PW referred to, but that release only listed 19 of the 32. We couldn’t find anything on any of these books at the Houghton Harcourt web site. We were able to find 14 more titles by looking under the various Amazon imprints (including Seth Godin’s Domino partnership with them) for a total of 33 coming or having been released from last March through November. Is this the “summer list”? Maybe, with global warming…

We found nothing about any of the titles on the Houghton site. Oddly enough, they did publish a prior title by one of the Amazon authors, Max Allen Collins, but they haven’t listed the current one, a collection of short stories.

(Here’s an ironic thought. You think Amazon will place an ad in the PW Announcement Issue to get this all straight?)

So, as far as we can tell, the Amazon summer list contains very few books that the old publishing guard, publishers or booksellers, will suffer much for having missed.

Except, of course, that maybe Amazon can create demand among the millions of online customers they have for books and ebooks. If they do, and the word of mouth grows to a point that independent booksellers find they must stock these books, Amazon will really have created a new publishing paradigm. That certainly seems to be what Godin is counting on.

Nobody — or at least very few — outside Amazon knows what new capabilities will be put in place to support the publishing programs Kirshbaum will build. Barry Eisler indicated at our Publishers Launch BEA conference that he had received a six figure advance for the book he just signed directly with Amazon to publish. He seemed to expect, or at least had hopes for, a robust bricks-and-print strategy along with his high ebook royalty. But he’ll have the same problem with Barnes & Noble and independents that Sterling had with Borders: it will take the perception of a very high level of demand to compel them to stock a book from a company they think is taking the bread right off their table.

A related development is that Arthur Klebanoff, one of the original ebook publishers founded on the idea that the big publisher standard of 25% ebook royalties creates opportunity for entrepreneurs, told the British AAA (the agents) this past week that he’d be delighted to publish their backlists and pay a 50% royalty. To agents who are already planning to do this themselves (and quite a discussion has broken out in the UK about whether that is a legitimate thing for agents to do; the AAA has decided it is) Klebanoff points out that things can go wrong with ebook publication (it might not sell, for one thing) and agents would be wise not to jeopardize their relationship with an author client when there are alternative ways to get a high royalty.

Klebanoff seems here to be jumping squarely into competition with Jane Friedman’s Open Road, which has been signing up content with very much the same pitch. (Open Road also has other attributes to tout, primarily some very talented digital marketers and a focus on developing tools and techniques to do that work effectively.)

Meanwhile, other agents are setting up their own digital publishing capabilities and service offerings continue to mushroom. Agents tell me — two were in the office this week talking about this — that their authors are frequently asking about self-publishing.

Does the insight Bide offered to me late in the last century about scholarly journals end up applying to trade publishers? Will the most obvious sign of a challenged model become the resistance of authors to their blandishments and their advances? There seem to be a lot of entities betting on the idea that it will.

It is worth noting here that there’s one dog that hasn’t barked. Richard Curtis was the first ebook publishing agent. He set up his E-Reads business over a decade ago. He also pays 50% royalties. Richard did not create E-Reads to compete with publishers on royalties but because when he did publishers just wouldn’t do the ebooks. He has built his enterprise since that time to nearly a $1 million annual business (meaning that he’s delivering half-a-million a year to authors for properties that, at least until very recently and perhaps still, would never have been put into ebooks by a publisher.) But his name is noticeably absent from the chorus using higher ebook royalties as a public prod to bedevil publishers.

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My new buddy and client over at iobyte, Dan Lubart, inspired a post last week about Amazon’s new Sunshine promotion because he documented its impact on their bestseller list.

Since then he’s put up two new posts that are only worth reading if you care at all about the effect of price on today’s ebook market. I think that includes most of us.

There is legitimate debate about how bestseller lists should be organized in the ebook age. I pointed out last winter that it really wasn’t tenable for ebook lists to keep score on unit sales only when the price range extended from 99 cents to $19.99. And, in fact, that kind of price variation has already led to clever authors and publishers gaming the system: lowering prices to get on bestseller lists and then raising them to capitalize on the additional discovery that takes place once they’re on. My suggestion was that the grading be on “price times units”.

Those who like that idea quickly see that this is similar to how movies work; they report the box office receipts, not the number of tickets sold. Those who don’t like the idea say that what a bestseller list is supposed to communicate is what books are being read by the most people.

Dan’s two most recent posts illuminate how this question plays out in the real marketplace.

In the first, he appears to have discovered that Barnes & Noble may have arbitrarily decided that an ebook priced at $2.99 or less won’t be placed in the top 125 of their bestsellers. This conclusion is based on convincing circumstantial evidence. What Dan first noticed was that only one book in the Sunshine promotion, and then two, had hit the Nook bestseller list. Watching those books, he saw one, “My Horizontal Life”, fall from rank number 1 to rank number 127 in one day.

That’s beyond a statistical anomaly. That’s damn near an impossibility, unless the rules of the game were changed.

So Dan checked further and found that all the inexpensive ebooks had dropped below rank 125, but that they were dominant from 126 to 200.

Since I’m the guy who pointed out a few months ago that lumping 99 cent ebooks with $19.99 ebooks was mixing apples and broccoli, I think it is fine that Barnes & Noble has taken this additional curatorial step. The New York Times makes it clear that its ebook bestseller list does not “actively track” a variety of titles including those that are self-published. I think it is fair to say that neither has a “transparent” methodology. But putting their thumb on the scale might be delivering a more useful result for the users of their lists.

I found Dan’s next post even more revealing about the nature of the ebook marketplace, particularly at Amazon.

What he showed, through analysis of the price of the titles and their rankings, was that the disruptive effect on the bestseller list of the Sunshine promotion was very brief. It lasted about a week. Seeing this recalled a story my Dad once told me and therein lies the explanation.

In the 1950s, Doubleday tried an experiment of putting books into supermarkets. What they found, repeatedly, was that the books sold well the first week and then sales collapsed.

The explanation for this was very simple. Bookstores see their customers — even most of their best customers — relatively infrequently. But supermarkets see their customers weekly or even more often. So a display of books is quickly seen by just about all who might be interested. They either buy something or they don’t. But after a week, everybody who visits that store has seen it and, unless the choice of books the next time they pass it is very obviously different, they will have no need to shop from it again. (By the way, this is a reason to create automatic title rotation by not assigning one title per pocket, but that’s a different subject than we’re discussing in this post.)

What Dan’s Amazon data would suggest is that the low-priced shopping cohort is a herd that responds quickly. When Amazon announced their Sunshine promotion, the most avid low-price buyers shopped it immediately and made their purchases. That created the spike in low-priced bestsellers which we acknowledged in our prior post.

But in the second week, with the same selection of books in the Sunshine promotion, that effect virtually disappeared. The low-price shoppers had done their purchasing from that selection. The normal buying patterns on the site reasserted themselves on the list. What one can see from Dan’s data is that the highest-priced band of ebooks took a real hit in ranking during the first week of the Sunshine promotion but in the second week the impact was much reduced and the lowest-priced books were apparently taking share only from the next band up. The highest-priced band had totally regained its pre-promotion share of the list.

Dan always reminds me that “ranking” and “sales” are not the same thing. It is possible that the Sunshine promotion elevated the spotlighted inexpensive books without reducing the sales of the books knocked down or off the list. In fact, I am one who believes that the purchasers of low-priced books are really a different group of people, for the most part, than those who buy the higher-priced books.

But since those bestsellers definitely lost the discoverability created by their presence on or high up on the list, it would open up a whole new set of questions if they got the same sales without what most of us assume is the important lift to discovery provided by bestseller ranking.

The ebook world is rapidly shifting and changing. With the pool of ebook consumers continuing to grow quickly, the buying patterns are bound to be temporary. The next batch of ebook customers might be more price-sensitive or less; they might respond to a price promotion as quickly as the Kindle customers did to Sunshine in the future or they might get slower. But what Dan Lubart is making clear is that the impact of price promotion is visible, if you have the right tools to look.

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I have always been in the process of reading at least one book since I was about 8 years old. When I was a little kid, I’d find them in the house (Dad was in publishing) or at the library in my home village of Croton-on-Hudson or in the school library. Sometimes extraordinary measures delivered a lot of reading material. On the fourth to the last day of second grade, I got the chicken pox and was in bed for a couple of weeks. I had already developed an affinity for a Random House series of children’s books on American history called Landmark Books, which are still available. Dad knew the person at the printer responsible for the Random House account and a box of 40 of them arrived the day after I was diagnosed and was completely read through by the time I was back on my feet.

When I was in junior high school, I found that a big drug store in the retail space at 42nd and Vanderbilt in Grand Central Station had a massive selection of mass-market paperbacks and that became a shopping destination for me for a while.

As an adult, the shopping and discovery moved to bookstores. And although I did occasionally get my ideas of what to read next from book reviews or friends’ recommendations, usually I just shopped. I would go browse American history or biography or sports (baseball always had its own shelves within sports).

It never took me much time to find what I wanted to read next until I started reading ebooks.

In the pre-Kindle ebook era, I was a captive of the Palm Digital store, because I read on a Palm and their commercial approach was to not allow other retailers to sell their format. The choices were limited because the publishers before the arrival of Kindle were reluctant to make the investments required to deliver ebooks to me and the four other people who read them at the time. That changed immediately when Kindle arrived and, because of Kindle and the other major formats that have hit the marketplace since then, the choices are robust. Just about every new book I’d want to read is available for my device of choice (the iPhone) and the digitization of the backlist just carries on going deeper and deeper into publishers’ repositories.

But the merchandising, at least for somebody who shops on the iPhone (it’s a bit better through the ereading devices or PCs), leaves a lot to be desired. My shopping experiences are actually a bit of a random walk. I ask my ebook retailer to show me books by category and, since my categories don’t change much (and haven’t since I was a kid) I tend to see the same books over and over again, far too many of which I have already read (perhaps in somebody else’s format.)

A short time ago I was shopping for my next read on the iPhone. I started out shopping with Kindle and then Nook and a few minutes on each of their mobile sites didn’t turn up anything that moved me. Then at Google Ebooks I found “Making of the President 1968″ by Theodore White. That was definitely one I wanted to read. I bought it and I’m in the middle of it.

There is no particular guarantee that I’ll find my next book on Google. I haven’t found any clear pattern yet among the four stores I shop regularly (Kobo being the fourth). Obviously, if I know I want to read another James Patterson or John Locke thriller, any of them would deliver it to me quickly and painlessly in response to a search. It is when I am hunting by subject that the search returns seem to be pot luck. I’m probably not making it any easier on the retailers by spreading my shopping around; if any of them actually did have a good engine to take my purchasing and reading profile and make the next great recommendation, I’d be screwing it up by spreading around my data.

All of this underscores how difficult is the challenge being faced by Bookish in the US and aNobii in the UK, two “find what to read next” sites financed by major publishers. And they join a long line of sites that have tried to build recommendations and community conversation around what people are reading: Goodreads, Shelfari, Library Thing, and the new ebook platform, Copia.

It happens that our office is now going through the exercise of placing the book of “The Shatzkin Files” on platforms other than its originator, Kobo. (Kobo’s 60-day exclusive is about up.) When we encountered a limit of seven keywords in loading process for Kindle, I inquired about it. Why limit this, I wondered?

I got a good answer when I asked. It turns out that any author or publisher’s inclination would be to put in lots and lots of keywords. That was my intention. I was going to take every keyword from every post and put it in for the book. But, on reflection, as my friend at Amazon pointed out, that really wouldn’t be helpful to the reader who was searching. The fact that one blog post is about a holocaust survivor doesn’t mean that somebody searching under that topic would want my book, of which more than 99% is about things totally unrelated.

It turns out that Amazon uses algorithms created by full text searching to enhance what they can deliver in response to searches in ways that the publisher and author would not necessarily think about when creating metadata. As an example, he pointed to a book that you’ll discover on Amazon if you search  for “erasure coding”, a term of art that might very well not have been included by any author or publisher inserting keywords but which their more sophisticated methods enable you to use for discovery.

My friend at Amazon didn’t say this, and maybe I’m reading too much into what they do, but it almost seems like the keywords we put in could be superfluous and the capabilities they have through full-text analysis and algorithms actually govern what is discovered. Of course, if the solicitation of keywords from authors and publishers is a placebo, that’s not something I’d expect them to reveal.

I was just looking for “American history” when I found “Making of the President 1968″ on Google (and didn’t find it anyplace else in the time I allotted to look.) So Amazon’s sophisticated capabilities didn’t deliver it to me and now their engine doesn’t know that this was a book I wanted because I bought it someplace else.

But I’m really glad I found this book, which was probably pretty recently made available in ebook form. I was active in that campaign and at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where I was Pierre Salinger’s assistant on the first McGovern campaign. (George McGovern declared late to give the Bobby Kennedy supporters who couldn’t abide Gene McCarthy a place to go. I had been one of those; I left the Ambassador Hotel an hour before Kennedy was shot on June 4, 1968 because the security was tight and I couldn’t get into the party. Ironic.) The author of the Making of the President books, Theodore White, was a friend of Salinger’s and I met him at the convention. But I’m saving the stories of that campaign for another post on another day.

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Amazon began a program on June 1 that will apparently run for two weeks. When you go to the Kindle home page, there’s a banner across the top reading “Sunshine Deals, Over 600 Books on Sale for $0.99, $1.99, and $2.99″.

These books are not from the big agency publishers, who set their own prices. Amazon apparently reached out to smaller publishers and worked out deals with them. Amazon could have simply cut these prices themselves, but doing that would require them to take a big margin hit. More likely, the markdown is being shared. (And, in addition, Amazon has plenty of books priced in that band all the time that could simply be featured in this promotion.)

Amazon gains a great price promotion. The publishers in question gain substantial additional visibility for their titles.

Fortunately, there is one entity tracking the impact of price on ebook sales able to tell us: this is having a real impact.

Dan Lubart of iobyte’s “eBook MarketView” blog tracks ebook sales rankings by price band at Amazon. (He tracks it at other retailers too, but, in this case, Amazon is the one that matters.) Dan’s graph tracking the average price of Kindle bestsellers shows a pronounced impact from this promotion.

The average daily price of Kindle bestsellers took a leap on March 1 when Random House moved to agency and a whole slew of bestselling titles could no longer be discounted by Amazon. The Sunshine promotion has very suddenly brought that average bestseller price down to about where it was on March 1!

Dan has another chart showing the distribution of bestsellers among four price bands: up to $2.99, $3-$7.99, $8-$9.99, and $10 and up. Most agency-priced ebooks of titles whose currently available print versions are hardcovers are in the top two price bands. Since the promotion began, the number of bestsellers in the cheapest band has grown from 31 to 47. (He’s charting the top 100, taking out anything that he recognizes as “not a book.”) Half of the increase came out of the top-priced band with the other half distributed between the middle two bands.

In a conversation with Dan about this research, he pointed out that what he’s tracking is ranking, not sales. The movement of titles on and off and up and down on the bestseller list (top 100 rankings) doesn’t tell us anything about unit sales. That’s the piece of the puzzle that the publishers do know (for their own books).

There are a some critical points here, all of which are more important than they are surprising.

1. Amazon can create pricing promotions that will have an immediate and dramatic impact on the ebook bestseller list. (We observed three months ago that publishers might suddenly have a pricing problem with bestseller lists.)

2. Agency publishers are disadvantaged by this fact. The only way they can participate in a price promotion with Amazon is if they lower their agency price across all retailers (which isn’t going to be that exciting to Amazon). On the other hand, publishers on wholesale terms have much more flexibility to “buy into” a promotion (although that flexibility isn’t complete: Robinson-Patman would probably require them to participate in similar promotions with other retailers if other retailers wanted to create them).

3. Since Amazon has demonstrated so clearly that price has a major impact on ebook sales, and since agency publishers can control their prices, it follows that agency publishers need to be experimenting with the impact of price promotion (as self-published authors have already been doing, by the way).

But experimentation only makes sense if you can evaluate the results of what you test. As far as we know, the iobyte database is the only tool that exists right now to help publishers do that. That’s why we’ve started to work with Dan to introduce what he’s doing into the routines and workflows of the major houses.

One observer of Amazon’s new program speculated that it might be a step toward “dynamic pricing”, which is what airlines and hotels use to maximize their revenues for seats and rooms. I’m not sure that forecast makes sense. Airline seats and hotel rooms are limited in number; if you sell one too cheap, you can’t sell it to the next person for more money.

But ebooks are infinitely replicable. The trick for the airlines and hotels is to maximize revenue over a limited — fixed — number of sales. The trick for publishers is to maximize revenues over an unlimited — variable — number of sales. Cutting price to get on a bestseller list that might increase discovery and awareness and maybe generate sales at a newly-raised price is a tactic that almost certainly should be routinely, but not capriciously, employed.

It can’t be a good thing for agency publishers if the only price promoting taking place is with their competitors’ books.

I also discovered looking closely at this promotion that Amazon is not flawless. When I go to the Kindle store on my iPhone and tap on the Sunshine deals, I find lots of agency books listed, which, of course, are not price-promoted. Obviously a mistake — and from my experience a pretty rare one — by the folks at Amazon. (Since I know there are a few readers of The Shatzkin Files in Seattle, perhaps this will be corrected before you have the chance to see it but I first noticed it yesterday — Saturday — and it is still that way as I post much later in the day on Sunday.)

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The first Publishers Launch Conferences show outside the United States, “A Global Perspective on Digital Change”, will be at the Congress Centre in central London on June 21, with the Publishers Association serving as our partners in putting on the event. We also owe special thanks to the PA’s group of Digital Directors, who were extremely generous with their time and insight. If you can be in London that day, you couldn’t find a better way to spend it than with us.

We’re still putting the finishing touches on what will be a one-day conference packed with illuminating conversation, but we can tell you quite a bit about it already. We aim to deliver strategic, practical, and focused discussion of near-term issues and opportunities. This won’t be a showcase for cool products or a venue to debate what the future might look like some day. We’re examining essential issues — ebook “export” opportunities; what happens to territorial rights; hiring and retraining to meet today’s challenges; revamping publishing systems for a dual print and digital paradigm; getting “found” on digital shelves — that publishing professionals should focus on now to thrive in the days to come.

The UK market is in between the US and the rest of the world in its migration from print to digital reading. Kindle and iPad sales really took off last Christmas and, while ebook penetration may be a fourth or less of what it is in the US, it has grown enough to be disruptive and to generate a consensus acceptance that very substantial change in the industry is inevitable.

On the one hand, my PLC partner Michael Cader and I have followed the developments in the US very closely so we have some firsthand experience with some aspects of what the UK trade is going through. On the other hand, we know history won’t repeat itself precisely. There are important differences in the markets and there is a substantial group of companies with experience and capabilities developed in the North American market that can hit the ground running in Britain or anywhere else in the world. That alone will make everybody else’s experience different than what happened in the US.

In order to be sure we were talking with the UK industry, not at it, we took some preparatory steps. In February, we put a large number of ideas for panels and topics up on Survey Monkey and invited 70 players in the UK book trade to express their opinions on them. In five days, 40 of the people responded.

Then we followed up by spending three days in London meeting with about 50 people to discuss our ideas and theirs. Our partners at the PA provided invaluable assistance, hosting our conversations and inviting us to join a regular meeting of the Digital Directors to get the insights of the most knowledgable people in the UK market. Those conversations were crucial in helping us focus properly on topics and in locating some key sources of insight. Frankly, despite our long experience working with the British publishing community (I have visited London on business three or four times a year for 35 years), putting this conference together would have been impossible without the help we got.

But because of that help, I think we’ll be presenting the UK publishing community with a lot of very useful discussion that hasn’t taken place at the many prior gatherings that have discussed book publishers and digital change.

One topic that we identified very early is the opportunity we see for publishers in Britain and Ireland to sell into the US market now without payng for a distributor infrastructure or taking an inventory risk. When we started to explore this topic, we learned that, of course, people are definitely starting to plan for it. Some are starting to exploit it. This was something we thought should be happening below the radar, and it is.

This is a peculiar opportunity, because it might be more important for independent UK publishers large and small than it is for the biggest global players. We’re still filling out the panel for this one, but we have Helen Kogan of Kogan Page, an independent whose company was already working in the US market (and therefore has some helpful experience to pass along) but who is seeing the expanded opportunity presented by digital, and Jean Harrington of Maverick House Publishers in Dublin. Jean is also President of Publishing Ireland and we invited her to join this particular conversation for a reason. The Irish diaspora in the US has a particularly strong identity with the old country and we expect books of Irish history and Irish fiction will find a substantial additional market through ebook sales in America.

We’re working on adding another British publisher and an agent to that dialogue.

Another topic arose out of a conversation that longtime UK consultant Mark Bide and I had while we were at Tools of Change in New York in February. How long will it be, I wondered, before half of UK sales are digital? Mark said he wasn’t sure about the timing, but he was sure that the publishers’ systems, overhead allocations, staffing, and infrastructure would require a lot of adjustment to be ready for that day. That’s a good conference topic, we thought.

Then, in our conversations at the PA 10 weeks ago, Anthony Forbes Watson, the MD of Pan Macmillan, told us he had charged his team with thinking through the question exactly as we had defined it. Anthony wants to know “what does 50% ebooks look like? What do we have to do to be ready for it?” The next day we talked to James Long of Pan Mac who told us that, yes, he was actually the person in the company with the primary responsibility for thinking this question through.

We decided the best frame for this conversation was “thinking about the future.” James, as he will tell us on June 21, is largely focused on what Pan Mac needs to do in systems development and integration, workflow changes, and skills development to be ready for a 50% digital world.

But there are two other aspects of preparing for the future we felt could be illuminated by other panelists we recruited.

Perseus, a US company whose Constellation division that provides digital services to smaller publishers is a global sponsor of Publishers Launch Conferences, is one of several companies in the world (Ingram in the US is another; so might Random House be in the US and the UK) that are investing in warehouses and print book distribution capabilities at precisely the time many publishers are disinvesting in them, precisely because they know that most publishers will have to disinvest in them. They’re trying to be there for publishers who want to dispose of fixed cost overheads for the shrinking print book market. We put Rick Joyce of Perseus into this conversation to cover the sensitive topic of consolidation on the physical side (a subject that Dominic Myers, the MD of Waterstone’s, famously put on the UK publishing community’s agenda a couple of months ago.)

Copyright Clearance Center, the US RRO which is also a global sponsor of Publishers Launch Conferences, has steadily called our attention to another industry-wide challenge: the need to manage rights more effectively and on a more granular level to take advantage of emerging opportunities to license chunks and fragments for apps, ebooks, and web sites. We thought that the voice for this topic in London should be local, and we were pleased that Sara Faulder, head of the Publishers Licensing Society, agreed to join this conversation.

Mark Bide has agreed to moderate this group in what I think will be a dialogue about publishers and the digital future unlike any the audience will have heard before. (Except, that is, if they are at our Publishers Launch BEA show on May 25, where we’ll have a different version of this conversation, one more focused on export and rights sales than infrastructure, but also covering the change we’ll see to selling more and more fragments.)

We’re not above stealing our own ideas and giving them a local spin. One panel that was extraordinarily successful at Digital Book World last January was one we describe in shorthand as “new skill sets”. It’s about capabilities publishers need to get that they don’t have and it is about process and workflow changes and the use of cross-functional teams as well as hiring in or training people with new skills. Charlie Redmayne of HarperCollins did that panel for us in New York in January and is reprising it at our BEA show. In London, he’ll be joined by Juan Lopez-Valcarel of Pearson and Jacks Thomas, the CEO of Midas Public Relations, on a panel moderated by Jo Howard of Mosaic Search & Selection Ltd. One of the key elements in the New York discussion of this, which we expect will arise again in London, is “when is it best to hire in the skills and when is it better to retrain the people I already have?” This is a subject every publisher needs to be thinking about that isn’t discussed in public very often.

We’ll have three of the top digital leaders of UK houses — George Walkley of Hachette, David Roth-ey of HarperCollins, and Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan — joining Michael and me for a dialogue about the big companies who have cut their teeth on the US market and are now taking their capabilities worldwide, starting in the UK. We’ll be talking about Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Ingram, and Overdrive (the six clearly-declared and clearly-capable global ebook players) as well as Sony, aspirants like Copia and Blio, and US titan Barnes & Noble (which has shown no clear signs of global interest yet.) It looks to us like there is only one UK player with a global perspective, still-tiny cell phone provider Mobcast, but we’ll be learning from our panelists whether there are others we should be considering. And our audience will learn more about the North American companies which are bound to be a big part of the local market’s ebook life in the years to come.

We’ve reached a time when “metadata” is an important subject to discuss, no matter how dry or back room it has seemed. We were fortunate to get Graham Bell of EDItEUR to moderate a dialogue about this for us. He’s recruited Jon Windus of Nielsen and Karina Luke of Penguin to discuss it with him. We’re now looking for a retailer to join them. The condition of metadata in the marketplace is not good enough in enough places yet. This is costing publishers sales. This panel will explain why that is and what every publisher should do to make sure this isn’t a huge hole in the side of their boat as online sales, print and digital, grow and the impact of metadata grows right along with them.

We are also going to have a discussion of the future of territorial rights. Richard Charkin of Bloomsbury, a well-known skeptic about them, and David Miller, an agent with Rogers, Coleridge and White Ltd., have agreed to participate. We’re looking for a full-throated defender of the current territorial regime to join them in what will be more of a conversation than a debate. We wonder whether territorial rights make as much sense in a 50% ebook world as they do in the 5% ebook world we might now be in. The agent’s voice in this conversation might be the most important one because, after all, they decide whether the deals are acceptable or not.

One thing that the territorial rights dialogue will certainly entertain is what we should expect to see in terms of author initiatives. That topic is bound to come up in two other discussions as well. There’s one we’re now calling “experiments, best practices, and out of the box thinking” which is really about innovation. But we are going to focus on innovation in business models and practices and innovation in marketing, not on product innovation. We are still working on putting this group together, but we were very impressed with our preliminary conversations with two of the panelists.

Marc Gascoigne is at Angry Robot, a sci-fi imprint started by HarperCollins and then bought by Osprey. Angry Robot’s better mousetrap is its community focus; Gascoigne will make the case that doing that right (which many publishers say they want to do) requires that everybody, and that means every editor and everybody else, communicate directly with the audience. It is hard to see putting that across in many established trade houses.

Richard Mollet of the PA will moderate the conversation with the innovators.

Also on that panel will be Peter Cox, an agent with Redhammer. Cox is changing his own business model (providing more in the way of services to his authors, but charging them more for it and looking to represent fewer authors, not more) but he’s effectively changing the author-publisher relationship as well by making the author an active marketer and community gatherer. He’ll have examples and he’ll have ideas that will challenge the thinking of many publishers and agents in the audience.

The last panel of our day is intended as a Grand Finale. Michael Cader and I will sit with Stephen Page of Faber, Rebecca Smart of Osprey, John Makinson of Penguin, and agent Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown. We’ll get their take on the speed of the ebook takeup and its consequences.

How will British publishers cope in a market that may soon have no full-line bookstore chain? How will the industry cope with the rise of self-publishing? Is there any real danger of a consolidated English-language world in which London becomes subsidiary to New York? Or, in some companies, might it be vice-versa? Will both agents and publishers be changing the core business models which have prevailed for the past century over the next few years?

What excites me about the last panel — aside from the sheer smarts and savvy of the people we got to join us — is the diversity of their perspectives. The publishers run companies of different sizes and with very different approaches to building their publishing lists. The agent joining us has gained a reputation as one of the most digitally savvy players in the UK market. Michael and I thrive on spirited conversations with very smart people; we think we’re going to finish the day very stimulated and with big smiles on our faces.

And we think our audience will too.

Of course, before we get to London, we’ll be running our “eBooks Go Global” show aimed at international visitors and their trading partners at BEA. At that show, we’re particularly excited about two panels we won’t be doing in London. One is with a few booksellers already working with the new Google Ebooks capability reporting on how it is functioning for them. The other takes a slightly different approach to the “selling in the US” opportunity. Patricia Arancibia of Barnes & Noble, which has aggregated about ten times as many ebooks in Spanish as most people in Spanish markets will tell you exists, will open a lot of foreign publishers’ eyes to the possibilities that exist for them in the US market. We’ll also have a chat with Barry Eisler, the author who turned down half-a-million bucks to self-publish. And that’s not all. Tickets still available… And tickets still available for London as well.

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Although the value chain in trade publishing for the last century has, for the most part, kept retailers between publishers and consumers and kept publishers between retailers and authors, that has never been 100% true. Doubleday covered the whole value chain in the 1950s, when it not only owned the Doubleday Book Shops and the Literary Guild book clubs, it also owned printing plants. In the early 1960s, the Crowell-Collier Publishing Company bought (and eventually renamed itself) Macmillan (and that’s the old Macmillan that became part of Simon & Schuster in the 1980s, not the new Macmillan which was what the renamed Holtzbrinck group became a few years ago) and they also bought the Brentano’s bookstore chain.

I sold books to both Brentano’s and Doubleday in the 1970s and I don’t recall it ever being an issue that they had publisher ownership. Of course, that was before trade publishing consolidated into anything remotely resembling a Big Six.

After those two chains were sold in the 1980s (and I’m going to admit that I forget whether Walden which became Borders or Dalton which became Barnes & Noble bought each of them), in a period of two decades when publishers and book retailers grew enormously, the neatness of the division between the publisher’s role and the retailer’s was mostly respected. A number of retailers — notably B&N and Borders, but suppliers to the mass merchants as well — bought bargain books directly from packagers during that period, but joint ownership of significant publishing and retailing capabilities was, temporarily, suspended.

But Barnes & Noble was particularly aggressive at direct sourcing of book content and around the turn of the century announced the goal that 10% of their volume should come from directly-sourced product. To further that objective, in late 2002, B&N outbid several other companies (including at least one very large publisher) for the independent niche publisher, Sterling. Immediately, Borders stopped buying Sterling books and Barnes & Noble started stocking a lot more of them than they had in the past.

Meanwhile, the Internet was forcing everybody to rethink the paradigm. Even before the Kindle was launched in November, 2007, Amazon was encouraging authors to “publish” with them directly. All they could offer was the connection to the vast majority of online consumers — no print runs, no presence in any brick stores — but this could still be attractive and productive for some authors. My friend and client, David Houle, a futurist who blogs at Evolution Shift, published his “Shift Age” book with Amazon before Kindle and has sold thousands of copies, many of them at his own speeches. He’s very happy earning about $7 on every sale of a $17 book. No publisher was going to offer him as much as a third of that per copy.

As online sales grew, and then were further fueled by ebook sales starting in late 2007, it became increasingly obvious to many that publishers would have to start selling direct themselves. Some did. Harlequin has done so for years. F+W Media, one of the most aggressive publishers employing a vertical community strategy, announced a year ago that they would use Ingram to sell their books as well as those of their competitors to their direct audiences. Macmillan announced a similar plan for science fiction through Tor.com, although that idea has apparently never been implemented.

Part of what has discouraged the big publishers from selling direct is the threat of retaliation by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, both of which are much happier if the customer contact for big books is through them, thank you very much. Since both companies really exercise direct influence on many consumers, big publishers are inclined to respect their concerns.

To a certain extent.

And then we had the events of last week.

Amazon, which had previously established imprints for author-direct publishing and for translations of foreign works and had created a relationship with Houghton Harcourt to address their prior inability to get brick store distribution for books they owned, announced a new romance imprint called Montlake Romances. (Personally, I thought it was a bit strange that they announced it with just one book coming this Fall, rather than 10 books coming next week!) That put them squarely into the publishing business in a new way, and one could only imagine that the mystery shoe and thriller shoe and sci-fi shoe will be soon to drop.

In the same vein, Barnes & Noble has a program called Pub It! to enable authors to by-pass publishers and earn bigger royalties. They also still own Sterling, which gives them in-house the distribution capabilities that Amazon had to team with Houghton Harcourt to get. And with Sterling they also have the entire infrastructure in place to deal with authors and their care and feeding which could constitute competitive advantage when the gloves come off chasing brand-name authors.

So both of the giant retailers are looking more and more like publishers.

But it turns out the publishers were cooking something up too. On Friday, we learned about a new business called Bookish, which will be the “new digital destination for readers.” In its announcement release, Bookish promises to use content and software tools to promote discussion and discovery around books and to answer the reader’s question: “what book should I read next?”

What was most eye-catching about Bookish was its backing by three of the Big Six: Hachette, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, who have apparently been planning this move for quite some time.

What was downplayed, but perhaps most significant, is that Bookish is trying to straddle the same fence that Google, and, to a lesser extent, Kobo are: being an ally of existing retailers while selling direct to consumers itself.

It really is impossible to speculate intelligently about Bookish’s potential for success. What they’re suggesting they’ll do is reminiscent of Copia and Goodreads and Library Thing, and none of them have yet replaced the marketing power of the brick store, a fact which is front and center in the minds of the trade publishers who depend on that merchandising.

But it will certainly accomplish one thing: giving the big publishers a direct path to the consumer. The hunch here is that if any one of these three big publishers had gone aggressively into direct sales, they would have risked serious retaliation from both of their two biggest customers: Amazon and Barnes & Noble. But it will be hard for them to retaliate against three publishers who, among them, deliver about half the biggest commercial books in the marketplace.

Let’s remember a year ago January when Amazon briefly sought to block agency terms for ebooks by removing buy buttons from Macmillan books when they briefly thought they could stop the plan from being implemented. As quickly as it became clear that the five publishers determined to implement agency would not be deterred from doing so, Amazon retreated. (In fact, they graciously joined Macmillan in compensating authors who might have lost sales during the brief period the buy buttons were inactive.)

And that brings up another important point about Bookish: what it says about the common interests among fierce adversaries, which the trade publishers certainly are. The times call for collaboration among competitors in trade publishing. It is a little bit nuts that several of them are building competing romance, mystery, and science-fiction “communities”, which only leaves the field wide open for a third party to be the biggest aggregator in each of the verticals and also allows much smaller competitors to look comparable on the web. But collaboration models have to withstand anti-trust concerns. Presumably three of the biggest publishers jointly investing in this web venture will.

Whether or not the Bookish team can invent the general book marketing future, or, through competition, spur Amazon and BN.com to be more creative about online merchandising, remains to be seen. But this past week certainly gave us further indications that the publishing value chain is being drastically reshaped and that the neat roles we’ve been used to for 100 years have less and less applicability to publishing’s future.

I chuckle when I think about a very smart person from a major house who was telling me just about a year ago, right after agency was implemented, “whew, now I think things can settle down for a while.” Actually, “things” are just getting moved over to the fast track so they can really change. Montlake and Bookish within a day of each other; Barry Eisler (who’s speaking at our “eBooks Go Global” show at BEA on May 25) and Amanda Hocking going in opposite directions within a week or so of each other a couple of months ago; these are significant events but they’re also signs of accelerating change.

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