Kobo

As the shift from a print-centric book world to a digital one accelerates, more and more digital publishers are creating themselves.

The biggest publishers, with the resources of sophisticated IT departments to guide them, have been in the game for years now and paying serious attention since the Kindle was launched by Amazon late in 2007. But as the market has grown, so has the ecosystem. And while three years ago it was possible to reach the lion’s share of the ebook market through one retailer, Amazon, on a device that really could only handle books of straight narrative text, we now have a dizzying array of options to reach the consumer on a variety of devices and with product packages that are as complicated as you want to make them.

Free or very inexpensive service offerings through web interfaces suggest to every publisher of any size, every literary agent, and every aspiring author “you can do this” and, the implication is, “effectively and without too much help”. Indeed, services like Amazon’s KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) service, Barnes & Noble’s PubIt!, and service providers Smashwords and BookBaby, offer the possibility of creating an ebook from your document and distributing it through most ebook retailers, enabled for almost all devices, for almost no cash commitment.

Is it really that simple? One suspects not, since literary agencies are creating ebook publishers (for example: The Scott Waxman Agency’s Diversion) and baskets of services (for example: The Knight Agency in Atlanta) and consulting to help their authors. And a bit further upstream, ebook distribution companies (for example: MintRight) and ebook-first publishers (for examples: Open Road, Rosetta, and the granddaddy of them all, Richard Curtis’s e-Reads) are creating more alternatives, sometimes propositions explicitly addressed to the agents. If publishing ebooks to all channels were really a simple matter of uploading a file, it would hardly seem necessary to build all this infrastructure.

We know that small publishers, literary agents, and authors are becoming publishers at an astounding rate. Two years ago when I was trying to organize a panel of literary agents to talk about working with authors on a charge-for-services basis instead of a share-the-royalties basis, it was hard to get volunteers to discuss new models. Two weeks ago, a major agent outside New York said to me, “we all have to think about it now; we have no choice.”

In short, it isn’t just the big publishers who are compelled to develop a digital strategy to adjust their businesses to changing times. Their smaller competitors, the agents they depend on to deliver their content, and even the authors that have always just depended on the publishers to handle the business of getting a book from a manuscript to a purchase, are all assessing the new landscape. They are considering what new approaches might reduce or eliminate their need for a publisher, or at least reduce the publisher’s share of the take.

Although the correct strategy for any entity would depend on the factors that prevail in each case, there are things it would seem that everybody entering this arena needs to know and understand.

First of all, what are all the things publishers do to get from manuscript to sale, are all the steps necessary, and what do they cost? Developmental editing, copy-editing, mark-up for design, creating metadata: these are all things publishers do routinely. Are they critical for every book? Would a purchaser-reader notice if a publishing newbie left any of them out? Will the services that promise to make and distribute an ebook without a cash investment do these things well?

The ebooks themselves have gotten increasingly complicated. The ebook standard epub (used for just about every ebook not intended for the Kindle ecosystem) has risen to the challenge posed by apps to be able to accommodate color and video and audio and software elements. Everybody who knows that “you get what you pay for” expects complicated ebooks to take more effort and money to create than ebooks of straight narrative text. But what constitutes “complex”? And how much more money does that additional effort cost the publisher that wants to deliver an ebook more complicated than just simple text?

Marketing ebooks also requires a whole new set of knowledge and skills. The key to all ebook marketing is the accompanying metadata: coding that travels along with the file specifying its core bibliographic information and price, but which can also tell a retailer or a search engine much more than that. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of delivering metadata that makes the book more likely to be found in response to various searches and queries; that’s yet another set of understandings new ebook publishers have to acquire.

That is just the beginning of what is possible (and therefore necessary) in ebook marketing. Sample chapters can be given away. Web sites can be invoked as partners.

And authors and publishers can, and therefore must, engage in “social network marketing”: using Twitter and Facebook and commenting in high-profile streams to catch attention and gain credibility with core audiences for the books. This is more knowledge to acquire.

Any new publisher will need to understand the paths to market. Yes, Amazon gets more than half of the US ebook sales and Barnes & Noble gets half of the rest. But it isn’t that way on every book, ignoring the others leaves a big chunk of the market unexploited, and things are changing quickly. Amazon’s market share has dropped by a huge percentage in the past two years.) OverDrive is the primary path to libraries. Ingram aggregates many independent stores. Baker & Taylor is opening up markets among mass merchants. Kobo is as important in Canada as B&N is in the US and works in markets all over the world. Google has the ebook ecosystem making the most serious penetration of independent book retailers. Sony is about to introduce new devices that could increase their importance. And Apple is doing its best to dominate sales to its own device holders, who constitute a large wedge of the ebook customer pie.

One can go to all of these channels directly but there are also a slew of services to handle what is the increasingly complex job of delivering to and administering the multiple channels. Perseus Constellation, Ingram Digital, INscribe Digital, LibreDigital (just bought by Donnelley), and Bookmasters as well as the automated services like Smashwords, BookBaby, and MintRight we mentioned above, and others offer service packages to do that and to help with the creation and marketing needs as well.

As we said at the top, nowhere is the change in publishing greater than in the agent community. What has been a stable business model for generations is now, suddenly, changing. There seem to be as many new models and approaches as there are literary agencies. That adds another thing that all of the fledging epublishers — some of which are agents, others being small publishers and authors — need to know about and understand. The relationships among authors, agents, and publishers are getting much more complicated and everybody needs to spend some time thinking that through and discussing what it means.

If all this strikes you as a set of topics worthy of a day’s discussion, we’re in agreement. We think it is too. And that’s why our new Publishers Launch Conferences partnership with Michael Cader is delivering a day-long event called “eBooks for Everyone Else” in New York (in conjunction with The Center for Publishing at New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies) on Monday, September 26 and in San Francisco (co-located with F+W Media’s new StoryWorld conference) on Wednesday, November 2.

Not only do we have an expert-packed lineup to deliver the information, we’ve carved out time for our attendees to get their own specific questions answered by the experts and by the providers of many of the services that are part of the new ecosystem. If the business of ebook publishing is part of your future strategy, you’re bound to get the knowledge and make the connections you need at eBooks for Everyone Else.

Among the leading service providers who will participate in eBooks for Everyone Else in New York and be available for “speed-dating” conversations with attendees are our global sponsors Copyright Clearance Center, Constellation, and Bowker, as well as supporting sponsors Ingram Content Group, INscribe Digital, B&N’s PubIt!, Kobo, and BookBaby. (Kobo and PubIt! will be speaking from the main stage as well.)

Our New York show features an all-star lineup of literary agents including Jane Dystel, Robert Gottlieb, Sloan Harris, and Scott Waxman. We have a distinguished group of publishing veterans — including Jack Perry and David Wilk, Smashwords founder Mark Coker, Renee Register, Iris Blasi, Rich Fahle, Ron Martinez, and Joshua Tallent — who will present advice and insight to help you develop a comprehensive ebook strategy. Most of them will be available at the breaks and alongside the speed-dating sessions to lead small group discussions and answer your questions about creating, marketing, and distributing your ebooks. (The San Francisco roster is slightly different, but just as powerful.)

Michael Cader and I will be moderating all the day’s activities, asking questions, and helping to put an enormous volume of facts into a strategic context for an audience with a staggering array of choices as to how to proceed with ebook publishing.

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Anybody who doesn’t find the publishing business interesting in its time of digital change is simply not paying close enough attention. No matter what story we’re focused on, scratch the surface (or scratch your head) and you find you are pondering something else. This was a week for the press to be asking me (and many others) about the lawsuit against Apple and the publishers surrounding the implementation of agency. I have little expertise to comment on the suit’s legal merits, but a week of thinking about agency has made me (and others) realize implications that hadn’t been evident to us previously.

As I was reviewing my last blog post before publishing it, I had the new thought (referred to in a brief postscript) that Amazon was actually doing the Big Six publishers a favor by denying agency terms to everybody else. Since big authors have a common interest with big publishers in maintaining retail prices for ebooks that don’t undercut print and which deliver a per-copy revenue flow comparable to print, there is reason for a big author to prefer a publisher that has the power to maintain the ebook price across the retail network. Full-fledged agency publishers have that capability; the others do not.

A moment of explanation might be required for any readers who might be lost in the details of the agency, wholesale, and hybrid models of ebook-selling. Agency is the term for “the publisher actually sells the ebooks to the consumer, not the retailer; the retailer gets a cut but cannot change the price from what the publisher has set.” Wholesale is the term for “the publisher sells the ebooks to the retailer, based on the notional retail price set by the publisher; the retailer can then set the consumer price keeping all, part, none, or less than none — selling as a loss-leader — of the margin that the publisher’s discount provided.” And hybrid is the term for “the publisher has to agree to giving Apple a fixed percentage of the selling price; Amazon insists on a wholesale arrangement by which they set the price; therefore, Apple’s standard arrangement by which it can lower prices (and the publisher’s share) to match any other retailer on the web makes the publisher vulnerable to having its revenue from Apple readjusted downwards based on discounts offered by somebody else.”

The short story is that only under a total agency model does the publisher control price. In any other case, the price is effectively controlled by the retailer willing to offer the lowest price. That would be the retailer willing to live with the least margin and, as was amply demonstrated by the discounting that took place before agency came to publishing, that might be a negative margin. Retailers in the US (although not in all countries) can sell below cost if they think it is to their advantage to do so.

All the actors are rational here. Amazon extends agency terms to the Big Six publishers because, after the Macmillan dust-up of January 2010, Amazon has been persuaded that they could lose the ebooks of those publishers from their shop if they don’t. Losing the ebooks from one of the major houses would damage what has been one of Amazon’s main strategic advantages since the Kindle was launched: the widest selection of commercially-attractive ebooks in the marketplace. They take the gamble, which appears to be a winner, that publishers smaller than the Big Six will not want to withhold product from the world’s biggest ebook retailer, the one that still accounts for substantially more than 50% of the ebook sales for many titles.

And, in some cases, publishers have avoided the discomfort of the hybrid model — which requires them to commit to Apple that Apple will have the lowest price on the Web when they can’t actually control everybody else’s price  – by not selling to the iBookstore because Apple won’t buy on wholesale terms. So Amazon yields where they think they must (to the Big Six) and continues to enjoy the advantages of price control with the rest, while at the same time discouraging some publishers from making their titles available through a competitor. This all makes sense to me as I understand their point of view.

What I noticed while writing the last piece is that there is an unintended consequence here for Amazon way upstream from the ebooks sale: the policy is strengthening the Big Six’s already powerful grip on the biggest titles from the biggest authors. Amazon wants to compete for those authors and can offer a better royalty on Amazon sales to entice them (when Amazon pays 70% to the author, the author keeps it all; when they pay 70% to the publisher, the author does not get it all, even if s/he succeeds in negotiating something better than the industry standard of a 25% ebook royalty share.) But Amazon reportedly wants ebook exclusivity, which cuts out a big chunk of the ebook market, and they are seriously handicapped getting a print sale through brick retailers.

(If you want a more thorough explanation of the way ebook revenues get split up, I wrote in detail about ebook royalties under the agency and wholesale models here and here.)

Because print sales in stores still matter (and for as long as they do) there is a risk and a sacrifice for any author giving exclusivity to Amazon, although there are also clearly compensating considerations as well.

At about the same time I was noticing this, my friend Eoin Purcell in Ireland was noticing something else. Apple’s new policy on apps, by which you can’t sell through an app without giving Apple its standard 30% cut, also offers up a sparkling new opportunity to agency publishers that would be accessible only at some risk to any but the Big Six.

The immediate consequence of Apple enforcing this policy of theirs was to drive the direct-to-our-store connection from the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Google apps. Because those retailers only get 30% margin from the publishers, they can’t afford to give 30% to Apple for the privilege of in-app selling.

But publishers don’t have that margin problem. They already pay 30% for their sales, and if they put their own apps up with sales enabled through them, they’d only be paying what they already are to a retailer for the privilege. So apps for authors or genres or series of any kind could be offered as free downloads through the App Store with direct-purchase buttons inside. These could send you to the iBookstore, if the right kind of landing environment could be created, or to the publisher’s own landing page where sales commissionable to Apple could be made.

Of course, the same thing could be done as a Nook app in the B&N ecosystem, and it would be smart for the publisher to offer one, as well as a web app that constituted an Amazon version (which wouldn’t be offered through the Apple App Store but would have to get to you another way), to keep relative peace among its customers. But a publisher can only do this if it is sure its prices won’t be undercut, which would force a further margin reduction under Apple’s rules.

Like Eoin, I have no idea whether any of the Big Six publishers are working on this idea or whether any of the major agents have suggested the possibility. But we’re talking about literally hundreds of smart people here, so it would be surprising if nobody’s exploring this possibility (except if Eoin and I are both missing something that makes it a non-starter.)

The transformation of publishing is rich with circumstances to amuse anybody who appreciates irony. Cheaper ebooks, which consumers love, are making bookstores, which consumers also love, gasp for the breath to survive. The closest thing to a monopoly threat in the business, Amazon and Kindle, work to drive consumer prices down. Apple’s great success with new devices coupled with their very slow start at retailing, generates agency pricing and sales opportunities for other retailers that probably benefited Barnes & Noble the most. B&N, the brick retailer most skilled at logistics but only newly-minted as any sort of tech company, finds not one but two unoccupied niches in the eink product suite: color and touch-screen.

And now, Amazon’s policy limiting the publishers that can fully implement agency, designed to isolate the Big Six and enable discounting of everybody else’s ebooks, may be spawning a new opportunity for big authors and big publishers to work together that other publishers can’t compete with. Perhaps denying this capability to other publishers actually helps Amazon be alone as a 7th competitor, but it certainly has its ironic aspects at a moment when Amazon is putting on a full-court press to persuade big authors to work directly with them!

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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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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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Sometimes something seems very obvious to me, but other people — smart people I respect — don’t see it that way and it makes me wonder if I’m missing something.

What I’m thinking about that way today is the future of “open territories” in the ebook world.

When English-language rights are sold to US and UK publishers, some territories outside the home markets are “closed” and others are kept “open.” Closed territories are reserved to the publisher who owns them; in open territories a US edition and a UK edition can both be legitimately sold.

For most of my career in publishing, Europe was an open market. Both the American and British editions of a book would be available there. Although currency fluctuations came and went and could temporarily change these things, most times the US edition carried a lower cover price (when converted to the local currency) but the UK editions were usually more widely available. Sales reps from the UK tended to call on the once-small but persistently growing number of bookstores that carry English-language books. British publishers had warehouses that were closer, shipping costs that were lower, lead times that were shorter, and customer service groups that were more comfortable dealing with Europeans.

With the coming of the EU, British publishing has moved to formalize and make contractual what was previously just their natural advantage. British publishers pointed to the fact that once an American edition was sold in Europe, EU rules would allow its importation into the UK itself! So unless the European market were closed to US editions, Britain itself was not closed to US editions. And that, quite naturally, was not a situation that British publishing could accept.

Of course, for an American edition to wind up on a British shelf would require two trips across the water: one from a US warehouse to Europe and then another from Europe to the UK. It might seem that this double-shipping would wipe out any presumed US pricing advantage, and I don’t recall any evidence of US-published imports showing up in any number. Nonetheless, for the past several years, UK publishers have succeeded frequently, if not universally, in excluding the American editions from Europe.

As with all things in publishing this subject is being revisited as publishing adjusts to ebooks.

As we know, the ebook market started to take off in the US in late 2007 and has grown to be a solid double-digit percentage of publishers’ sales with much higher numbers, often 50% or more, of the units sold in the opening weeks for major titles. In the past few months, British ebooks have started on a similar, perhaps even more accelerated, growth trajectory. So ebook revenue is squarely on the radar screen of the English-language publishers who are increasingly cognizant of English’s position as the world’s leading second language. Nowhere is this effect more evident or the future sales expectations greater than in Europe.

Right now, the European ebook market is still miniscule. Germany, one of the countries with the most advanced local-language digital infrastructures, recently reported ebook sales of one-half of one percent of the market. But it is not uncommon for German bookshops to see double-digit sales percentages of English-language books in their shops so we know there’s an English-language market there. English-language publishers, with the experience of explosive growth in their home markets under their belts, have good reason to expect the same thing to happen in Europe and for them to be among the principal beneficiaries.

But there’s a problem. Or, at least, I think there’s a problem.

The open-market competition for print books is waged primarily around service. The reps that call on the stores tend to take business away from the companies that call less often. The advantages of proximity and familiarity favor the British; sometimes the advantage of price can favor the Americans. But no trade publisher in either country tries to create cheaper, locally-priced editions of trade books for the European market.

In the ebook market, the competitive factors that prevail in print are moot. If a store sets up to sell ebooks, it will list every one in the catalogs it offers. As the ebook market matures, that will mean that, if the territory is open, both the UK and US editions will be available to the consumer. And with no other basis on which to make the decision of which to buy, the customer will almost certainly choose the ebook edition with the lowest price.

The logic of this seems inexorable to me. As the market grows, as the publishers become more aware of it, and as the consumers learn more about what is on offer, offering a lower price will be the only effective way to grow share in an open territory. This is damaging to everybody except the ebook consumer, who will get windfall price cuts. The publishers will gain share, but lose revenues. The authors, operating on a piece of the sale price, will lose revenues. And the lower prices for these English-language ebooks will further erode local-language sales and further undercut brick bookstores.

(European bookstores are extremely vulnerable to sales erosion as the market shifts to digital because the English-language selection they offer will look increasingly paltry compared to what will be available online.)

But some very smart agents seem to see something different from what I see. At our “eBooks Go Global” conference at BEA last week, Simon Lipskar of Writers House specifically declined to insist on closed markets and celebrated the virtues of “competition” on behalf of his writers. In another BEA session, Stephanie Abou at Foundry was quoted by one reporter saying “our goal to get authors the best shot at being published the best way. what that means is we have this fight to keep Europe non-exclusive.”

Of course, timing is everything in life and in dealmaking. There really is no European market for ebooks to speak of yet. There are structural impediments to growth. A panel including Google, Kobo, Ingram, and OverDrive at “eBooks Go Global” spelled out some of the complex local compliance issues that make it take time to set up a store in each new country. My concern about a “race to the bottom” assumes a much more developed market than we have today, with both US and UK editions made ubiquitously available in a European ebook market that resembles what we’re seeing today in the UK, if not in the US. That may be two years away, or even more.

So maybe Simon and Stephanie do see what I see but they might also see it as far enough away not to be relevant yet for deals they’re making now. But maybe our difference is more fundamental. They both referenced “competition” in expressing support for open territories. It is precisely my concern about the effects of price competition that it seems to me they’re ignoring.

It feels to me like I must be missing something somewhere. Not only do I think the agents should be moving to close markets in the interests of their clients, I think publishers in both New York and London should be moving to close markets because they’ll ultimately make no money on the books for which the markets are open. I’d say it is better to control a closed market for half your list (or even a third of it!) than have an open market for all of it.

This subject is of great interest in the US but it is existential in the UK. Sales made in Europe are already critical to UK-based publishers, on titles where Europe is open as well as on titles where they control it contractually. Since UK publishers are already trying to close the market in their favor for print, one can hardly expect them to be less zealous about closing it for digital books. But their leverage to close Europe, for digital or print, is primarily based on their ability to sell print in the UK. Those are the sales they can make that nobody else can. And those are the sales that finance serious advances that nobody else will pay.

But will that leverage vanish as bookstores diminish and the sales of print become less important?

The panel that will explore this subject at our “Global Perspective on Digital Change” conference in London on June 21 will be my next chance to be enlightened on this subject and shown the flaw in my thinking if open territories for ebooks are not a race to the bottom. We’ll have publishing CEOs Richard Charkin of Bloomsbury and Toby Mundy of Atlantic Books and agent David Miller of Rogers, Coleridge and White discussing this topic with Philip Jones of Future Book moderating. I’m sure this panel, along with many others on that day, will be opening some minds. Mine is lined up to be among them.

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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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The Wall Street Journal wrote last week about what we have been concerned about for some time: how hard it will be for publishers to sustain book prices as supply (of books) rises faster than demand because of all the self-publishing being done.

WSJ built their story around John Locke, whose thrillers are 99 cents and who earned well over $100,000 in March selling them on Kindle. Locke himself put the pricing in perspective. If his books are 99 cents and most ebooks from big publishers are $9.99 and up, he doesn’t have to prove he’s as good as they are; they have to prove they’re 10 times better than he is!

I can tell you this. I’ve read one of John Locke’s books. Nobody I can think of is ten times better than he is. By his own criterion, he could readily sell for $2.99 (and be earning a higher percentage royalty) because nobody is three times better than he is, either.

Meanwhile, on a much less signficant level commercially, the ebook of The Shatzkin Files is now out from Kobo for $3.99. How did the price get set? Kobo said, “let’s put it there.” Their first thought was that it should be $4.99 but then they suggested scaling it back because, after all, the entire body of content in the ebook is on this blog, which is available free. (This establishes that anybody who buys the book is paying for the convenience afforded by the container, not for the content itself.)

I don’t know what the dilutive impact on “real” ebook sales is of The Shatzkin Files, but it is, like John Locke’s material, additional competition for books that are issued by legitimate publishing houses. It is more supply competing for the same demand.

Trying to understand the actual impact of price is very difficult. Amazon tells us that books on which they control the prices are seeing share growth over books on which the publishers control the price. That is shorthand for “99 cent and $2.99 books by self-published authors are growing share over $9.99 to $14.99 books published by the big agency publishers.” That would tend (and is certainly meant) to suggest that pricing high (and ignorantly) is hurting the big publishers’ and big authors’ revenues, but we can’t actually draw that conclusion from the data.

Locke makes the point that the $9.99 book needs to be “10 times better” than his to be an equivalent value, but I’d make the point that they need sell only 1/10 as many copies to deliver the same amount of revenue. Penguin is still selling Ken Follett’s “Fall of Giants” for $19.99. Would it sell twenty times as many copies if they priced it at 99 cents? And, if it did, would it do so by stealing sales from the hardcover, which, with a list price of $36, is yielding a margin in the ballpark with that nearly-$20 ebook.

I don’t know if $19.99 is the right price for “Fall of Giants”, but I’m pretty sure 99 cents wouldn’t be.

In other words, the big publishers are not crazy to resist following ebook prices to where the new self-publishers would lead them. To be fair, one should not suggest that Amazon would set their prices at that level, even if they had freedom from agency constraints. For one thing, unless pricing schemes changed completely, Amazon would have “bought” an ebook (wholesale) at a price that would limit their willingness to mark it down. They did scare publishers by taking losses on some ebooks, selling for $9.99 what they bought for $12 or $15. But they never sold those books for 99 cents!

In fact, it would appear that Amazon does not have control of Locke’s book pricing, because the Journal article makes it clear that he will stick with 99 cents even if he can make more money at $2.99. (Amazon pays a 35% royalty for books under $2.99 and 70% royalty for books between $2.99 and $9.99, so Locke would get $2.10 a copy at $2.99 and he gets about 35 cents pricing at 99 cents.) Presumably, Amazon would have priced him where he (and they) get the most revenue, not where they get the most unit sales, which we would assume would rise with every drop in price down to free.

But the fact that publishers aren’t necessarily wrong to try to maintain prices at near $10 and up doesn’t obviate two very cogent truths here that it would be a mistake to ignore.

One is that the downward pressure on price is inexorable, because the number of entreprenurial authors like John Locke will grow and they will be discovered and “branded” so that many readers will find them as substitutes for the more expensive big house authors. And because the number of offerings that come like The Shatzkin Files ebook did — from people who weren’t writing for the profit from the content, but who built an audience and had a book issued anyway — will continue to add supply to meet what is relatively static demand.

And the second — made before here and not long ago — is that publishers don’t know nearly as much as they could and should about how price affects unit sales and total revenues.

Sooner or later, a big publisher or two will start seriously experimenting with this. They will gain knowledge that will enable them to tell an author or agent, “we know things about pricing that are worth real revenue to you if you publish with us.” When that happens, it will likely be more significant to an author than an increase in the ebook royalty rate would be. Maybe a publisher can even add enough value with pricing savvy to pay for their cut!

So far, only one author we know of has turned down a significant advance from a major house to self-publish. That’s Barry Eisler, and we wrote about him when he made the decision to give up a half-million bucks to self-publish. We’ve just booked Barry to speak at our first Publishers Launch Conference at BEA on May 25. I’ll be interviewing Barry and focusing on questions of interest to our target audience of international visitors to BEA and their trading partners. We’ll be very interested in how much he anticipates in the way of foreign sales and how he’ll handle translation rights, but we’ll also be looking for Barry’s thoughts about how he’ll set prices for his books when the power is entirely in his hands.

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