Larry Kirshbaum

The idea of an “Ebook Tipping Point” panel for Digital Book World arose when I wrote a blogpost last August on the occasion of the regular monthly release of the IDPF’s ebook sales figures. It was clear then that very substantial percentages of the sale of new narrative fiction and non-fiction were going to move through ebook channels and this post raised the point that this would be disruptive right after Dominque Raccah and Sourcebooks started last Fall’s cascade of strategic moves by publishers to try to slow things down, at least for Kindle.

In October, really writing about the same situation I predicted that major publishers would be challenged to cope with the problem of de-scaling.

When I wrote the August post, I was in the early stages of organizing the program for Digital Book World and I decided to put together the “Ebook Tipping Point” panel. I knew that current C-level executives, focused as they must be on making numbers for this quarter and this year, not to mention always having to be aware of the impact their statements could have on their companies, wouldn’t be the right panelists. So I just decided to recruit the four savviest people I knew — about ebook publishing, about the finances of publishing houses, and about the ecosystem publishers live in — to discuss the topic with me on stage.

Yesterday that panel — Ken Brooks of Cengage; Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch; Larry Kirshbaum, ex-TimeWarner Books CEO and currently a literary agent; and Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press — met in my office for a preliminary conversation to help me formulate the questions that will trigger the discussions.

Ken Brooks is my go-to person for all things related to ebooks and digital production. He the SVP, Global Production & Manufacturing Services at Cengage Learning. Before that, Ken created and sold a company called Publishing Dimensions that did digital format conversions in the early ebook days. He’s run warehouses and other operations for Bantam and Simon & Schuster and he even had a brief stint setting up an early attempt at ebook distribution for BN.com ten years ago.

Michael Cader is the creator Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace, the new nexus for conversation and information about the publishing business, which he developed from scratch starting with a free email newsletter less than ten years ago. Before that, he was a book packager. Cader is the single person who knows more about book publishing — the people, the deals, the business practices, the view of the business from the standpoint of the investment community — than anybody else I’ve ever met.

Larry Kirshbaum turned over the reins at TimeWarner Publishing to David Young three years ago, just before the company was sold to Hachette. He was known for his eye for bestsellers and his ability to make them work. Since then, he’s been a literary agent. Kirshbaum knows exactly what it is like to run a big publishing company; he did it for more than two decades.

Evan Schnittman is Vice President, Business Development & Rights at Oxford University Press. In that role, Evan combines the zeal and focus of a sales executive with targets to hit with the vision of a strategic digital thinker, a very unusual combination. Oxford is a university press, of course, not a trade house, but they have a trade list big enough to make them real players in that sandbox. Evan knows and understands trade, but he has the objectivity and vision of somebody who is not entirely dependent on that business. He’s also a really entertaining and insightful blogger.

One scorecard worth keeping is this: Brooks, Kirshbaum, and I were all sure ten years ago that ebooks would happen much faster than they did. Cader was sure they wouldn’t. Michael has been the hardest among us to persuade that ebooks would substantially displace print anytime soon.

We had a rollicking two hour conversation that would have entertained anybody who could have heard it. I am not going to steal the panel’s thunder by revealing much about it except to say that there was a strong consensus that big publisher overheads are going to have to shrink dramatically, and soon. Michael Cader is particularly articulate — and particularly experienced — about the point that legacy businesses carry legacy cost structures that handicap them making a transition to a new paradigm. He lived that advantage as the David that slew the Goliath of PW.

So I awoke this morning to get the news in my mailbox that Simon & Schuster has redesigned its sales coverage to be “more phone”. Cheaper. Less overhead. But also (likely) less effective and (certainly) less differentiated from what any small publisher based anywhere can do.

So what distinguishes the big publishers from their competition are the capabilities of “scale.” And the albatross for big publishers going forward is the cost of “scale.” This is a tough box to get out of.

I think some eyes are going to be opened when this panel takes the stage on Wednesday, January 27.

I am getting increasingly excited about the 2-day Digital Book World conference coming up January 26-27. Now that the work of recruiting nearly 100 speakers and moderators (and, boy, do we have GREAT moderators!) is done, I am able to take some satisfaction from the body of work. (Take a look.) I am also really appreciative of the great marketing job that has been done by our partners in this endeavor, F+W Media. Just about everybody really is going to be there. Are you?

Bookmark It:

Here’s a prediction that has almost no chance of being wrong. Every major player in the trade book industry is about to develop a new obsession: how must our business model change when we reach a level of ebook sales that is dynamically disruptive to the print book ecosystem?

This might not be exactly a “tipping point”, since that implies a point at which growth accelerates from some people to most people, or nearly all people. But print publishing will be seriously disrupted long before ebooks are used by “most people.” That’s because print publishing is a “critical mass” business: we need to sell enough to make a sensible print run, to keep the bookstore open, to support the sales organization and the warehouse. Our bestseller lists (with one exception) capture exclusively print sales, our author-publisher contracts and sales terms with accounts are based on the notion that we’re selling a physical object, and the biggest publishers in the land use their scale to perform capital-intensive functions that are, as much as any editorial or marketing expertise, what the authors need them for.

This presents a problem to all the incumbent players. Every powerful company in the print book supply chain: the big publishers, the big retailers (including Amazon!), the wholesalers, and certainly the independent retailers have a huge investment in competencies that revolve around print books. They can design them, jacket them, price them, print them, ship them hither and yon and keep track of each separate ISBN in the package, put them on shelves so customers will find them when they arrive and calculate when to take them off the shelves to send them back. Although there are other skills that these companies have that might port to an all-ebook or ebook-dominant world, none of these do.

Whether the challenges get acute when 20% of the sales of a narrative title are predictably e, or whether the number is 25% or 30%, the day is coming faster and faster. Growth in sales of the simplest kind of ebook — a direct lift of what is published in print — are exceeding the most aggressive predictions. The IDPF just announced that year-over-year ebook sales for August are triple what they were a year ago! Michael Pietsch, Publisher of Little, Brown, reports that 15% of total sales is the level many of their top authors are reaching now.

(Ruminative interlude: it has been my surmise that big authors will have their ebook sales “capped” at a lower level than smaller authors, just because their print books are on sale in so many more places. However, ebook sales are also very sensitive to “brand”; you don’t and can’t “browse” as many titles when you shop electronically, particularly on a device. I know that smaller publishers with less effective total distribution report Amazon sales of 60% and 80% of sales, so their ebook sales proportions are also bound to be much higher. But how the midlist authors of big publishers fare on overall ebook sales relative to the big ones is a question I haven’t asked. I will. Or, I am…)

Meanwhile, ereaders keep improving and proliferating; there have been several announcements of new devices in the past week, including the forthcoming “Nook” from B&N, which will really raise the stakes for Kindle. It will “see” Kindle’s e-ink screen and “raise” one LCD panel for link viewing, plus a 3G connection and Wifi use in B&N stores, all at the same price. B&N has the same power Amazon does to amass a robust list of titles (they have deep contacts with all the publishers) and they have at least as good a skill set for curation and merchandising to make a great shopping experience. And they’re putting their reader front and center in their bookstores (with the free wifi and some special in-store content features) which will expose the concept of the device to many people who don’t shop at Amazon and did not get blasted with a sales pitch every time they bought books.

Barnes & Noble had entertained being the ebook market leader a decade ago, losing interest when the Palm format became the early format frontrunner and wasn’t made available for intermediary distribution (one of the first in a string of futile attempts to install an iTunes device-capture model for book content, and before the iPod, at that.) Then B&N let Amazon get the jump on them in the ebook world with the Kindle; their Nook will be following more than two years later. In the meantime, B&N may have realized what all the big publishers know: that when the customer shifts to ebooks, it threatens all their business models, sunk investments, and longtime marketplace advantages. That, along with the sour experience of trying to lead on ebooks and being frustrated by what was actually a self-destructive policy by Palm, may have fed their apparent disinterest in ebooks until recently.

But it was clear to everybody that the first round of ebook growth shifted power dramatically to Amazon. Publishers have been frustrated and humbled by the Kindle’s rock-bottom, loss-leading pricing of the hottest new titles. And Barnes & Noble had to figure that, recession aside, some of those same-store sales they were missing were from shoppers who stopped coming to them because they had bought a Kindle and were now locked into the Kindle store for their purchasing to use the device.

Incidentally, the sales levels that the IDPF and Michael Pietsch are revealing are for legitimate ebook sales. Nobody knows the size of the pirate ebook market. There are some who guess it is rather small despite the robust number of files available in various hard-to-quell locations on the Internet, but if it includes any significant number of current or recent print-book customers, it only magnifies the impact on the legacy businesses.

There are a multitude of questions facing the industry about the expanding ebook market: how (some, including some highly credible voices, would say “whether”) to use digital rights management (DRM), how to price ebooks, what enhancements or updating can make commercial sense and how to manage them in the marketplace, when they should be made available, and, most important of all in the long run, what the “deal” is for the consumer (and then, based on that, for the author) who is actually licensing something rather than taking possession of something. But the questions about the declining print side are just as acute.

The brick-and-mortar bookstores, led by Barnes & Noble, are going to have to figure out how to keep their stores enticing with might be a smaller selection of print books. Nothing can grow the market for print books in the years to come, but keeping the number of points of purchase as high as possible and the traffic as high as possible are in the industry’s interests. It will require some real creativity to figure out what other activities or product offerings are compatible to keep people coming and how to drive traffic with online activity.

Amazon is not unaffected by this shift, either. Their big early lead in the ebook world was really built on the back of their superior print-book supply chain. From the very beginning, when they put out a database that had out-of-print books in it and then gave the customer a reliable delivery date for what they could sell, they created an unmatched print book shopping experience, provided a) you knew pretty much what you wanted and b) you didn’t have to have it right this minute. Their logistical capabilities are nonpareil but don’t do them nearly as much good with an electronic customer as a physical one. Their grasp on the ebook market really depends on the Kindle remaining a favored device and I think you could get good odds if you wanted to bet on that. Making hardware is not a core competency for them.

As the print business declines, Amazon continues to win if real print book demand falls more slowly than brick-and-mortar availability. But their hammerlock on the ebook market will probably not last; there will be too many better devices and they have to make a concessionary shift to selling the epub format before they can even begin to compete for those customers. They’ll do it someday, and probably soon, but they loosen the grip they have on the Kindle owners the day they do.

Publishers have an interest in continuing to support bookstore survival because the display they get there is great promotion and because being seen by a browser who put themselves at a bookstore section is still a great way to be discovered and bought. And there will still be, for some time, books which are not narrative reading which are simply better in print than in any electronic rendition. Publishers still sell a lot of these books (many of them juveniles) and bookstores, or some appropriate retail setting, are essential to them.

But publishers are going to have to rethink their operations. Sales staffs will probably contract; warehouse space will become redundant; investments in IT systems for the print operation will have to be more rigorously controlled. Publishers will likely combine, of course; the big houses now all gladly take competing publishers into their back office operations to help support them. But downward shifts in scale are not only inevitable, they will probably happen in more dramatic lurches than we’ve known in the past.

Wholesalers and distributors will both win and lose in this shift, but the shape of their business will certainly change. On the one hand, they, like everybody else, will lose sales that they have today because accounts go under and publishers they distribute cease operating. On the other hand, they are in the business of converting fixed operating costs to variable ones, and the number of customers for that proposition will grow as the apparent costs of operations (as a percentage of sales) get out of control at many companies.

Agents and the top 500 authors (an arbitrary number) are most likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of these changes in the short term. Because they themselves are powerful, searchable brands, they could actually sell ebooks themselves off their own websites, keep all the money, and make considerably more than their contracts would give them for ebook sales today even with sales of a quarter or less than the publisher and retailer get for them. (And the sales might not be that low.) I have talked to big publishers about the threat that top authors might just make their ebook deals first (you can cover the market in 4 or 5 stops and branded authors would have their own websites to sell from as well) and offer publishers print-only. Without exception, the big publishers tell me “no way we do the deal on that basis.” But if what is contended in this post is true — that keeping the print business viable is going to depend on amassing volume for it any way you can — they might not actually feel that way when presented with the problem. I think they will be getting the opportunity to make the choice.

I’ve posted on variations of this thought before. I had already decided it needed to be the topic of a keynote panel at Digital Book World. I’ve recruited Ken Brooks, Michael Cader, Larry Kirshbaum, and Evan Schnittman to join me on stage there to discuss it. Continually rebalancing the business between print and electronic, and maintaining the scale to run still-vital print operations, will be a topic of interest for just about all of us in the months and years to come.

Apologies for the paucity of posts lately. I’ve had a lot of work, been traveling, and had a bout of food poisoning. The food poisoning’s about gone, but the work and travel schedule remain robust for the rest of the month. I should become a more reliable correspondent again in a couple of weeks.

Bookmark It:

I was flattered to be asked to speak to the AAR last night as part of a very distinguished group. My fellow panelists were John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan; Morgan Entrekin, the CEO of Atlantic Monthly Press; the agent Larry Kirshbaum, who was CEO of TimeWarner’s book division (now Hachette Book Group);  and Susan Katz, the CEO of Harper’s juvenile division. The topic was the “future of publishing.” We each got ten minutes to introduce our thoughts about “the future of publishing”. I went feeling the need to make three points:

1. The shift from horizontal to vertical is inexorable, unstoppable. People need to understand what that means and, as uncomfortable as it is for many leaders of today’s trade, they need to start adjusting their business to meet that shift. I wasn’t expecting any agreement, or even any recognition of this fact, from my fellow panelists. It’s still sort of my own private little point in trade publishing circles (but I’ll keep making it).

2. The impression I was getting from our BISG research for “Shifting Sales Channels” is that a) big publishers are feeling the pain more than smaller ones, b) people are seeing backlist erosion they hadn’t seen before (although that was contradicted at a lunch I had yesterday with a publisher who follows BookScan numbers closely and said backlist was holding pretty firm); and that the pain was much worse in Q408 than in Q109. Publishers are feeling excess pain at the moment, of course, because they’re taking returns from the Fall against smaller frontlist buys. But, in any case, books are down a lot less than a lot of other discretionary things.

Short conclusion: books may not be recession-proof, but they might be recession-resistant.

3. Trade Books live in an ecosystem. The publishers and agents in the room last night were mostly in the business of fiction and narrative non-fiction and juveniles. But if sales of travel books, craft books, and cookbooks go down, it hurts the stores. And if a store loses 10% or 15% of its business, it could close. Whatever publishers are seeing in growth of online sales, they should never forget that retailers give priceless exposure of their books, and only fullline bookstores give that exposure to just about all their books. The agents and writers and publishers can be just as smart as they’ve ever been, but if the bookstore shelf space shrinks, and it is doing that, the results will not be the same as they’ve always been.

All of my fellow panelists had useful contributions to make but I took most note of John Sargent’s points. He made it clear that big publishers are in troubled times. He pointed out that all big publishers work with borrowed money and want to be working with less of it. So they’ll be “de-leveraging.” That means smaller advances to authors, smaller printings, and tighter financial controls all around. He also reported that Macmillan had invested many more millions in ebook infrastructure last year than they had realized in ebook sales (in response to suggestions from some, including publisher-turned-agent Kirshbaum, that perhaps ebook royalties should rise.)

I made one point at the end that I was a bit surprised seemed new to just about everybody. Very few had taken on board that the difficulties in the trade book business are partly due to the Long Tail: the fact that Amazon’s retailing and Ingram’s Lightning Print (particularly) is making it easy for people to buy books that would have been dead a decade or two ago is just increasing the competition for every book that is newly published tomorrow. (And, of course, throw used books in there too, part of the Long Tail and largely enabled by Amazon.)

This is the same phenomenon that has made it harder for new bands to break out for years: a kid today can still “discover” the Beatles or Bob Dylan and have dozens of songs to listen to and learn without any regard to what is “new”, because the Beatles and Dylan are new to them! We haven’t (yet) had the situation where a multi-book novelist from the 1880s or the 1930s becomes a new addiction, but we’re bound to eventually. And in the meantime, all those Long Tail units are just making the slope to success a little steeper for every new book.

I also told the agents (and, because I did, I want to tell you) about a brand new business I’m involved in called Filedby which, I’m happy to say, is addressing the Long Tail question from another direction. Filedby is now live with a web page for 1.8 million authors — every single one with a live ISBN in the US or Canada. The pages, already mounted, are “claimable” by the authors, providing a big head start on a personalized web page that Filedby has provided largely through  automation. We see an enormous opportunity in helping authors help themselves. There are a lot of them not getting much help from their publishers. Frankly, except for Morgan Entrekin — who explictly spoke about working the internet finding the audiences for books that would sell between 6,000 and 25,000 copies — nobody was offering much hope that the publishers would be doing more for the authors in the days to come. Everybody seems to be looking to authors to do more for themselves. I think my co-founder Peter Clifton and I picked a very good time to be starting this business.

Bookmark It: