London Book Fair

The fact that Publishers Launch Conferences will stage half-a-dozen or more events before our next big multi-day Digital Book World blowout next January doesn’t change the DBW calendar. Now is the time of year when we have to start thinking about what the big issues will be at the turn of the year so we can start planning the program. As we did last year, we’ll be calling a meeting of our Conference Council (the 2012 group is currently in formation) at the end of June to brainstorm the topics and our approach to covering them.

It’s my job to anticipate now where we’ll be in nine months. What aspects of digital change will be most important to us when we convene again at the New York Sheraton and have a couple dozen sessions to explore the issues? This post exposes the current state of my thinking on the subject; I am shamelessly using the opportunity to engage the very smart audience gathered here to help me refine these thoughts and point out what I may have missed. I count 15 discrete subjects here (some of which can certainly be combined) which have made my list so far. (I’ve italicized them so you can count along with me; they don’t all get their own paragraph.)

The biggest subject of all, of course, is “global.” The reality that every publisher anywhere is now able to reach any reader everywhere with no local presence, no inventory barriers, and many of the same intermediaries that deliver content to local customers is an industry-changer that will take a long time to deliver its full effects. Territorial rights allocation is only one of the many long-time conventions of publishing that will be challenged by the reality of global. It looks like the biggest publishers — those with local organizations in many countries — have the biggest challenge to adjust to the new global reality. We see this now as we’re putting together panels for our BEA and London events on the first biggest opportunity of global: the new ease of selling books in any language and of any origin to the biggest ebook market developed so far: ours in the United States.

Perhaps the second biggest subject is one we’ve discussed in this space for a long time: “vertical.” Even the most avowedly “general” of the big “general trade” houses are beginning to recognize the urgency of direct contact with individual customers. Once that becomes an objective, it quickly becomes apparent that audiences cluster around subjects or genres: verticals. We anticipate some dramatic reorganizing of the imprint, publishing, and marketing structures of the major houses as they develop their audience-centricity. There might even be enough development along those lines to warrant conversation about it at DBW 2012.

Two more categories of change will be in the “sales models” and “product models” publishers will employ, neither of which have had anything but the most minor adjustments since the mass-market paperback became a force just after World War II. We’d expect somebody big to try a subscription model, a la O’Reilly’s Safari or what we get with cable TV, for the consumer market sometime soon, maybe before next January. (In fact, a James Patterson Book Club, which is a sort-of new subscription model, was announced just today!) And the new Amazon Singles program for shorter-than-book-length content is accelerating the awareness of publishers and authors that the length requirements for printed books do not extend to digital ones.

All of this will lead inexorably to more “ebook first” imprints, divisions, and initiatives. I’d guess that by January, several (if not all) of the major houses will have “programs” offering content for sale which is too brief to be delivered as a bound book. We first reported on a program of this kind from Harlequin at BISG’s Making Information Pay conference several years ago. It was an outlier then. It’s more of a pioneer now. This week we heard that Hachette has a short fiction program in its Orbit imprint. Last week in London we talked with friends at Pan Macmillan about a short ebook program they created at the end of last year to capitalize on the many Kindles and iPads that were delivered as presents for Christmas. (Of course, we’re putting that on the program for our London conference; the coordination challenges within an established operation to pull off something like this are not trivial.)

Part and parcel of verticality is direct audience contact and retention. When we wrote a couple of posts last summer about direct marketing techniques publishers had to make part of their standard operations, we were a bit early to get the true trade publishers’ attention. By next January, every publisher’s consumer emailing list will be a component of its marketing effort. A part of this work, of course, is effective use of social media, a subject publishers keep learning more about and which we’ll certainly try to cover — in our way, which is looking for scale and replicability — in January.

Metadata is a subject that just doesn’t go away. It is disappointing to hear from industry bodies and retailers that many publishers haven’t gotten the core metadata totally under control yet. We covered the basics at Digital Book World 2011; in 2012 I hope we’ll be talking about things like rationalizing the BIC (British) and BISG (US) subject codes, which have developed separately to address each market’s idiosyncrasies but which need to be harmonized to enable the full potential of globalization.

Over the next two years, I’m expecting the most disruptive change to take place in children’s book publishing and illustrated book publishing. When the catalyst for ereading was the Amazon Kindle, as it was starting in late 2007, straight text worked but not much else did. Now that Barnes & Noble’s Color Nook and the iPad are devices of choice for millions of people, illustrated material and rich color can be delivered as well as text. In the children’s book area, there have been a slew of new entrants, probably led by big publishing veteran Rick Richter’s Ruckus Media. The illustrated book business hasn’t really surfaced in a big way yet, but it almost certainly will by next January’s Digital Book World. I’d expect it to be a major topic of conversation since illustrated books are far more complex to “convert” and present the opportunity to enhance in ways that may soon become requirements.

The recent news from O’Reilly that they are using Ingram’s services to be able to deliver printed books without holding stock signals another new topic that will be of widespread interest: building a virtual inventory infrastructure. This topic also came up in a discussion at London Book Fair with Sara Lloyd and James Long of Pan Macmillan, one company we’ve found that is very consciously preparing for a 50% ebook world. Decentralizing their print production to reduce inventory and manufacture closer to the point of delivery is very much on their radar screen. (In fact, the whole question of how publishers have to adjust their organizations and overheads to cope with a 50% or more digital book marketplace is one we’re featuring at our Publishers Launch show in London.)

As I write this, it has been nearly a month since we’ve had a lot of conversation about authors doing their own publishing, but we got very familiar with the names Amanda Hocking, John Locke, and Barry Eisler in recent weeks because they’re doing just that. That trend can do nothing but accelerate between now and next January.

This is requiring agents to reconsider their own business models. We’re at the dawn of an era where agents will be publishers themselves and business advisors, not wholly dependent for their revenue on their ability to get advances and royalties from publishers. The first Digital Book World conference in 2010 was the first digital publishing conference to feature agents prominently in the conversation and we talked then about how business models might change. This January I expect we’ll be able to stage some conversation about how new models are working out for those who have tried them. (One of the agents we’ve put on the program at DBW is Scott Waxman, and his Diversion division doing ebooks has 20 books in the market and 10 more about to hit.)

And the last two subjects that we almost certainly should be discussing at DBW 2012 are the still-critical but diminishing segments of a publisher’s marketplace for printed books: brick-and-mortar retail locations, particularly bookstores and mass-merchants and the place so many people have discovered and acquired their reading material, the public library.

The decline of bookstores has been duly noted in The Shatzkin Files and, of course, the bankruptcy of Borders has everybody’s attention. Less well-publicized has been the decline of book sales in the mass merchants. (Tactics for arresting that slide will be the topic of a presentation by Tara Catogge of Charles Levy at BISG’s Making Information Pay conference, another one we get our hands dirty on, taking place on May 5.) As the brick channel for printed books continues its inevitable decline into insignificance, the state of play and the tactics to adjust to the loss of sales and, perhaps more important, merchandising exposure, will be a topic we’ll discuss again, as we did with independent bookstores and heads of sales departments last January.

And how to deal with libraries in the ebook world is a question vexing many publishers. Two of the Big Six just don’t sell them ebooks at all; one company has tried a number-of-loans limitation. We are intrigued by a solution pioneered by Bloomsbury in the UK — a “shelf” of books the library licenses a year at a time for online reading only. We aren’t covering it in our London show because we think most of the UK market is familiar with it but we’ll be putting it on the agenda for Digital Book World next January.

Next week I’ll give you a preview of the first two Publishers Launch Conferences programs: for international visitors to BEA and the Americans who work with them (on May 25) and, with the Publishers Association, our program for UK publishers (on June 21.)

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I had already been in the “publishing futurist” game for a few years when my frequent project partner Mark Bide and I put together a day-long conference in March 2000 at the London Book Fair called “Publishing 2010.” (As I look at what I wrote for that conference, I can see some things I got right, some I got wrong, and some look like good predictions for the next few years, but haven’t happened yet.)

Although it was an “innovation” when I included agents in the digital change conversation at Digital Book World in January 2010, Mark and I actually did it for the first time at that conference 11 years ago. One of the agents we recruited for this conference was Michael Carlisle. Just a week before the conference, and the day before I was leaving for the UK, Carlisle called me with bad news. One of his literary clients was the driver of Lady Diana Spencer’s car in the crash that killed her in August of 1997. The driver’s book was coming out, Carlisle represented it. The promotional book tour needed to take place during the week of London Book Fair and Carlisle just had to cancel his trip across the pond.

“But,” he said, “I can give you a replacement. I know you don’t know him, but his name is Michael Cader and I can assure you he’ll do a great job as my substitute.” With no time to find somebody else, or even to vet this fellow Cader, I just said thank you and good luck with the book tour.

The conference was a success. We made a little money, had a very provocative day of conversation, and a few people even told me it was the best such conference they’d ever attended. Cader was, for my money, one of the stars of the show. I hadn’t ever heard anybody say so many things about digital change in publishing that I agreed with but hadn’t really thought of before. It was easy to agree that we should stay in touch.

A month or two later, Michael sent me a prototype for an idea he had and was about to start: a newsletter called Publishers Lunch. It was a great concept: links to stories about publishing from all over the internet with a graf or two of summary, explanation, and comment. I was bound to think this was a great idea because I’d had a similar thought about six or seven years earlier, just before the Web changed all of our lives. I had suggested to my friend (and one of my very favorite people to work with) Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners that the publishing world needed a service. Since a story about publishing could appear in any one of several newspapers or magazines on a New York newsstand on any day, we should hire a kid to read the papers at 3 am and send out a FAX at 6 in the morning telling people what stories they shouldn’t miss!

We didn’t do it. Cader’s version, with the advancements of technology, was an infinitely better iteration of the idea. As it turned out, his ongoing commentary also added more value than we could possibly have added (unless, of course, we had his help, but we didn’t know him then!)

In the decade-plus since that London Book Fair and the start of Lunch, Cader and I have had the opportunity to work together from time to time on conferences and industry events. We’ve shared stages. At the last BEA in Washington a few years ago, I interviewed Michael in a 1-on-1 session. And we have endlessly discussed our views about publishing and digital change.

We are both, in different ways, already making our living delivering “industry education.” For public consumption, Michael delivers each day’s facts with a few words of wise context; my less-frequent Shatzkin Files posts select a context or a paradigm to explain with, usually, some supporting facts. The consulting assignments of my company often involve teaching a tech company about the publishing business or helping an industry service get a better handle on what their client base needs or can accept. We’ve talked about ways to formalize a partnership over the years. Before it disappeared, we talked with the Stanford Publishing Course about delivering a new digital curriculum. We’ve fiddled with live event ideas.

When David Nussbaum, the Chairman of F+W Media, came to me two years ago with his concept for a new conference called Digital Book World and asked me to organize the program, I suggested strongly to him that he figure out how to engage Cader as his marketing arm. David agreed, and for the past two years, Michael and I have happily collaborated on programming and promoting a 2-day event which, in two short years, has grown to the same size as the 5-year old, very successful, and very worthy Tools of Change.

Today, Michael and I have announced a formal partnership called Publishers Launch Conferences to deliver live events — globally and throughout the year — on publishing and digital change. It is an anchor of this business that we will continue to do the 2-day Digital Book World event in January 2012 and for years thereafter. We call Digital Book World a “State of Play” event, covering the landscape of digital change.

DBW is aimed primarily at US trade publishers and the extent of the show — 2 days and 4 parallel programming tracks for half of the time — allows us to cover more than two dozen distinct topics with panels and presentations. Publishers Launch Conferences will, in its first year (ending next January with DBW 3), deliver about seven shorter (1 day or 1/2 day) and more focused events in New York, London, Frankfurt, and San Francisco. Our first day-long conference will be at (and in conjunction with) BookExpo America in May, aimed at international visitors and the Americans who are doing business with them. Our event in London on June 21, being presented in partnership with the UK’s Publishers Association, will address digital change from a UK perspective.

It has already been an education for us to think things through from the point of view of the different audiences we’re delivering for. Our plans for our London show were greatly informed (and modified) by meetings we had three weeks ago (thanks to our partners at the PA) with about 20 different players in UK publishing to discuss what needed to be addressed, how, and by whom.

Some of the Publishers Launch Conferences events will be topic-targeted. We’re planning two niche shows in the Fall: one on juvenile publishing (which both Michael and I see as the segment of the book business facing the most potential intrustion from outside players because of digital change) and one we’re calling internally “ebooks for the rest of us”. That one will focus on the mechanics of ebook publishing — from content conversion to the ultimate sale — for the smaller publishers, agents, and authors who don’t have the IT and marketing resources of the big publishers. A number of small publishers and entreprenurial authors have achieved notable success in the ebook world already. We’ll focus on what it takes to do that so that more small players can follow in their footsteps.

We decided on doing a few things differently than most other conferences. We won’t have a zillion sponsors; we’re limiting sponsor participation in the interests of our audience and in the interests of the sponsors themselves. Our first two Global Sponsors, Copyright Clearance Center and Perseus’s Constellation service, have embraced our unconventional practices. There will be no sponsor pitches from the stage during our programs. There will be no email spam sent to attendees by sponsors after the programs. Even our printed program will be designed to be helpful and worth keeping and we’ll do our best to have it contain the information that our audiences need to take home, reducing their need to take notes during the show. As readers of this blog know, organizing conferences engages me in conversations that often turn into posts.

Part of my value — and Michael Cader’s — comes from talking to people who are smart and well-informed about the topics that all of us in publishing must inevitably wrestle with if we want to stay in publishing during this time of constant and roiling change. Planning these events and recruiting speakers for them as a continuous and year-round process will be a new ongoing feature of my life, and therefore of these posts as well. I hope we’ll see you at some of the shows but, whether you’re there or not, they should result in you should be reading a more informed blogger when you come to The Shatzkin Files.

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I have gotten some requests, in comments and off-the-blog, to write what I was going to say to the AGM of the PA in an appearance I was supposed to make there on Wednesday, April 28. I felt terrible about having to cancel an engagement that was booked many months ago but it was tied into a trip to the London Book Fair which was cancelled due to the Iceland volcano. Since I was really prepared for the talk, updating the “Stay Ahead of the Shift” speech from last year’s Book Expo and adding some thoughts about the immediate future in the US market that I think British publishers should take on board, the suggestion is one I can readily respond to.

The premise underlying this piece (and really much of my work) is that all of us, to function, must have a view of how we think things in publishing will change. Change has been a constant in publishing forever, of course. In my lifetime, in the US, mass-market paperbacks and mall stores have risen and fallen; wholesalers have gone from local warehouses that replenish bestsellers to national operations that can provide hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of titles to any store in 24 hours; general trade publishing has consolidated from tens of real competitors to a Big Six; and, in the past 20 years or so, the superstore, usually run by a chain, with over 100,000 titles has became about the only brick-and-mortar formula that seemed sustainable. (NB: On that last point, I think more focused, smaller stores would actually work better, but it would take a large player with a real supply chain to try them to find out.) When I started in the 1970s, the big national accounts were less than 20% of a publisher’s sales and the field reps were responsible for much more than half the business. It would be inflating the importance of the field now to say that those numbers have reversed.

But the changes we’ve been experiencing in the last ten years have been much more dramatic. The combination of used books and the Long Tail enabled by print-on-demand, all delivered by Internet retailing, has eaten relentlessly, if invisibly, into the market for publishers’ new offerings and estabished backlist. The growth of Internet ordering has sapped the viability of the brick-and-mortar network and in the past decade we’ve seen shelf space shrink following relentless growth since the end of World War II.

And, at the same time, even before the recent growth in ebook sales provoked a new digital consciousness, marketing opportunities have been shifting from the print and broadcast world to online.

Publishers have adapted to these changes by changing their sales force deployments, discovering the virtues of social network marketing, and, more recently, going to XML-based origination procedures that make it easier to deliver a book’s content in a variety of ways (the principal ones being as a book, as an ebook, and as a web page.) Publishers who saw the future coming were able to prepare for it. Cambridge University Press, for example, had tens of thousands of old backlist titles set up for print-on-demand long before other publishers did and they reaped a harvest of sales and profits in the past decade as a result. Last year, Simon & Schuster shifted resources from field reps to telemarketers. In an age when Skype allows free face-to-face phone calls and gas prices do nothing but rise, one can’t help feeling they are also getting ahead of a curve by doing that.

Changes of this kind make it clear that a publisher is required to have a view about where things are likely to be going  to plan their business intelligently. It is our purpose to explore that: first with a long view, looking perhaps 20 to 25 years out, and then with a more immediate one thinking about changes that are literally “coming right up.” Because it’s what I know best, this view is US-centric, but because the US is the largest English-speaking market in the world and the view from where I sit (intellectually, not geographically) is that the world is now any and every publisher’s market, these thoughts should be relevant to a UK publisher even if they aren’t primarily centered on the UK market.

I hope we can agree on two things before we start, though. One is that increasingly profound change is inevitable. And the other is that all future planning, just as inevitably, depends on one’s view of what that change will be.

So, with that as preamble, I want to try to envision two futures: one long-term — which we will call “the next 20 years” — and one short-term, looking ahead just two or three years.

Before tackling the 20 year vision, which will be disturbingly dissimilar to where we are now, I want to remind you from recent history how much can change in 20 years. Once again, I cite US-based examples, but I think these will probably be reminiscent of some aspect of local history for every market in the world.

In 1968, television in the United States was dominated by three over-the-air networks that divided pretty much 100% of the national audience, approximately in thirds on average, but it was not uncommon for a single show to have half the national audience. Major cities had a few local stations available in addition; most of the country did not.

By 1988, cable television penetration had reached well over half US households, delivering a choice of many dozens of channels and network TV’s share of the audience had plunged. Today there are five national TV networks in the US and they share substantially less than half the total audience. Top-rated shows fight for the attention of 15% of the country, not fifty.

In 1982, record companies were on the verge of explosive growth. The Sony Walkman and other portable cassette players were joining cassette players in cars, creating an incentive for maturing boomers to re-buy music they’d purchased 10 or 20 years before on records. A very few years later, the same phenomenon repeated with CDs. Back catalog in new formats became a gold mine for established companies.

But by 2002, the CD sales had turned into a curse. They were gold masters, easily ripped by any computer into the new digital formats which ultimately meant iTunes and iPod for the most part. The transition from analog to digital, which stripped the record companies of the power they had which was based on their ability to put product on store shelves, was accelerated by the CDs that all consumers had by then. The fuel for the final burst of record company profitability in the 1990s resulted in the fire that burned them up.

Newspapers in the US had their biggest year yet for advertising sales in 1989. Things got even better in the early 1990s, with growth in classified ads leading the way.

But then along came the Web. Classified advertising moved to Craig’s List, in some ways to eBay, and to many niche sites for camera buffs and auto aficionados and a host of online real estate communities. Google and Yahoo and the web itself disaggregated and reaggregated the content newspapers produced. Both the advertising model and the circulation that drove the advertising were challenged. Twenty years later, many newspapers have died and those that survive are hanging on by their fingernails and desperately grasping for a formula that will allow them to sustain their business online.

In 1975, the mass market paperback business in the United States was the tail wagging the hardcover dog. Agents and authors were balking at the idea that the hardcover house would get 50% of the subsequent paperback income, even though it had always been that way. In 1979, Crown Publishing sold the paperback rights for the long-forgotten novel “Princess Daisy” to Bantam for $3.1 million, a number that still stands as the record for a mass market licensing deal. As my father predicted in his seminal book, In Cold Type, published in 1982, the distribution model for mass markets was inherently inefficient and couldn’t last for trade-type books. It didn’t. By 1995, mass market publishing was a genre business, which was how it started after World War II and what it is, for the most part, today.

Twenty years ago, we went online through very slow modems to very limited and klunky online portals: Prodigy, Compuserve, and the seemingly-modern America Online. The World Wide Web hadn’t yet been invented!

Today we carry the world’s information in the palm of our hand and we’re annoyed if we can’t get a connection, 24/7/365.

And twenty years ago, the book business was on the verge of its last great boom. In the US, Wall Street was just discovering that very large free-standing bookstores, offering consumers 100,000 titles or more under one roof, were cash-generating machines. They opened the vaults for Barnes & Noble and Borders to open hundreds of such stores across the United States. In the mid-1990s, Amazon.com was founded, enabling sales even deeper into the backlist.

But, although it wasn’t as dramatic as the record companies’ distribution of CDs, there were the seeds of old publishing’s destruction sown. Amazon also enabled the sales of used books and the Long Tail, books that had — before Amazon and Ingram’s Lightning Print made the idea of “out of print” an anachronism — stopped competing with the new offerings of publishers. Now they were alive again. That alone would have made things much more difficult. In addition, the impact of growing online sales steadily weaken bookstores and consequently undermine the primary USP  publishers always had: that they could put books on retail shelves. These factors have made establishment publishing an increasingly difficult proposition every day of the past decade.

This admitted stage-setter is the first of what will be a four-part post. The next installment will spell out a vision of the world of communication into which publishing will fit 20 years from now. The third piece will suggest what a publisher will look like then. And the fourth will cover some changes we can expect over the next three years which, among other things, might call for some recalibration of the competition between UK-based publishers and US-based ones. I’ll publish one each day that I don’t have something else until all four are up. And I’ll have added links to the subsequent pieces in this postscript as they’re made available.

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I spent a chunk of yesterday working on this post while, with one eye, I was watching the news about the volcanic eruption in Iceland that shut UK air traffic. As I post this on Friday morning with a flight scheduled to leave tomorrow night near midnight, I’d guess the chances of actually getting there might be as low as 50-50. In fact, the post has already been edited because two people from one client I was going to work with there — Copyright Clearance Center — already had to cancel because of the air travel disruption. I hope the post will be of interest no matter how this turns out.

It’s been a running joke between me and my oldest friends (none of whom are in the book business or digital space or anywhere near it, having chosen careers long ago as teachers, lawyers, engineers, TV directors, and other “normal” comprehensible things) that all of them wonder “what the hell does Mike do?”

It has occurred to me that readers of The Shatzkin Files might wonder very much the same thing. So while I’m thinking through my planning for what promises to be a very busy time next week at the London Book Fair, it seemed to me that writing about it would both help me think and spell out a bit about how a book business consultant adds some value and earns a living. And hey, maybe we’ll promote some clients and some of these activities of mine at the same time!

My principal mission next week is to talk to UK publishers, mostly to the digital strategists but also to some senior management, about the following initiatives:

1. I am just starting to organize the program for the second annual Digital Book World conference, which will take place in New York in January, 2011. I’ll be doing a post here sometime after London to enlist the help of all my readers in brainstorming and planning this, but what I’m going to do next week is tell publishers what I have in mind and get feedback and suggestions. It is an article of faith among the US publishing community that we’re “way ahead of them” and, indeed, I am not aware of conferences dedicated to publishers in the UK that are comparable to Digital Book World, O’Reilly’s Tools of Change, or the Book Business Conference and Expo. (There is London Online, but that is not a conference focused on book publishing.) Since it would seem that the world of digital would bring publishers of different nationalities closer together, not further apart, I’ll be looking for possible speakers as well as ideas, and probing whether it makes sense for our partners at F+W to really market our conference in the UK to look for paid attendees as well.

2. We’re also on the verge of formally announcing a new program in partnership with F+W Media: E2BU, Enhanced Ebook University. The White Paper, being written by Pete Meyers, is expected to go out for “peer review” next week. Kirk Biglione of Oxford Media Works, our CTO, has been leading our effort to craft a multi-track webinar program that will also be part of the initial E2BU offering. Since this effort is all virtual, we’ll definitely want to market it in the UK. I’m expecting UK participants in our webinar sessions (as “faculty”) and we’re recruiting peer reviewers from the UK for the White Paper as well.

3. As readers of this blog know, we’ve been working with Copia, a new ebook platform with social networking integrated in (and six ebook reader hardware offerings as well). Copia offers some unique marketing opportunities to publishers that are simply not a part of any competitive platform. So we’ll be using the London Book Fair to meet with the digital heads of UK houses to jump-start the awareness of this new platform and sales channel among non-US publishers. The response to the Copia presentation among publishers and agents in New York has been unanimously enthusiastic. Meanwhile, from the Copia side, we’ve been seeing that we need to engage with publishers well beyond their ebook departments; really taking advantage of Copia will require the involvement and creativity of editors and marketers. I’m looking forward to seeing how the UK publishers react to the opportunity.

4. London Book Fair ends this coming Wednesday, April 21. Exactly one week later, I’ll be addressing the AGM of the PA (which everybody in the UK knows is the “annual general meeting of the Publishers Association.”) My remarks are already thoroughly planned, of course. I’ll be talking about where the world of content and publishing will be in 20 years, predicting a world where owning IP won’t be of nearly as much commercial value as owning eyeballs. And I’ll be talking about a couple of publishers who are already getting ahead of that change. Then I’ll discuss where the US book marketplace is going in the next three years, which I think has very significant implications for UK publishers thinking about territoriality and global markets. But I’ll be using the book fair to get somewhat more acquainted with how UK publishers see their market today, hoping to find additional bits of relevant information to sprinkle into the talk.

The London Book Fair is not just about meeting publishers and publishing operatives from “across the pond” or around the world. Sometimes it is presenting an opportunity for us to work in person with US clients who are not based in New York, or to introduce clients to US publishers who are not based in New York, as with these:

5. I have also written on the blog about our “freight forwarder” client, SBS Worldwide and their eDC supply chain solution. Steve Walker, the Chairman of SBS, is speaking at the BIC (that’s Britain’s Book Industry Communication, their rough equivalent to our BISG) Supply Chain Meeting, an annual London Book Fair event. So, of course I’ll go see that. In addition, we’re using the London Book Fair to introduce Steve and eDC to a couple of US publishers from outside NYC.

6. In the same vein, we’ll use London Book Fair to meet with our clients at Bookmasters. They have a very broad suite of author- and publisher-support services, which have grown organically from their roots as a short-run printer. The range of their services really extends across the entire publishing value chain: literally from getting the book written (if necessary), getting it set up for printing or digital distribution with an XML workflow, content conversion, printing (POD, short run digital, or offset), and all sales and distribution services up to and including a toll-free number to take orders. And, unlike others that approach that range of services, they’re a willing on-ramp to publishing for individual authors and tiny publishers. Bookmasters is based in Ashland, OH and they’ve just created a new position called Business Development Manager for Integrated Solutions and put a new executive named Bob Kasher in place who is making their very complex set of solutions accessible to potential customers. LBF gives us a chance to meet and refine the way the propositions are being presented in light of real customer reactions and responses.

Oh, that’s not all, of course. I’ve been invited to speak in Ljubljana at a digital publishing event next year and the person who invited me will be available for a chat in London. I’m having dinner with the head of one of the big DADs (digital asset distributors) that I hadn’t yet had the opportunity to know personally. I’m seeing a Boston-based publisher with which I’ve had some conversations about digital change to see if there’s a potential engagement. I’m meeting with an Irish publisher to be interviewed for a thesis he’s writing. And I’m seeing lots of old friends before my wife comes in and we head off with two of those old friends (and their dog) to spend a weekend seeing Scotland from our base at The Pineapple in Dunmore.

I certainly won’t be bored at the London Book Fair and now you know why new posts from me might be sparse until I get back to the States on April 29.

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Just had a very busy day at the London Book Fair. It is hard to post from here; I don’t have my normal 12 or more hours a day at the keyboard of my laptop. But what Book Fairs are all about is the compressed opportunity to encounter smart and knowledgeable people and I had the chance to check out and validate some thoughts I’ve been having about ebooks.

1. The proliferation of formats, devices, screen sizes, and delivery channels means that the idea of “output one epub file and let the intermediaries take it from there” is an unworkable strategy. Here are two simple reasons for that (I’m sure there are many others):

*Epub can “reflow” text, making adjustments for screen size. But there is no way to do for that for illustrations or many charts or graphs without human intervention (for a long while, at least.) Even if you could program so that art would automatically resize for the screen size, you wouldn’t know whether the art would look any good or be legible in the different size. A human would have to look and be sure.

*The link between text and footnotes, and the easy ability to jump back, is a huge variable among ebooks in different formats. There is apparently some sort of manual work and quality control here that isn’t necessarily done by a downstream converter.

Publishers will find that they must do a QC check on every version of their ebooks which is offered, and a “version” can occur every time a component of the supply chain changes.

2. The branding of ebooks is a mess. The publisher brand is being obliterated. You are buying a Kindle ebook or a Stanza ebook or an Iceberg ebook or an eReader ebook and not Random House, HarperCollins, or Hachette. Publishers are apparently just allowing this to happen. This is pretty ironic because most of the same publishers are mistakenly trying to imbue their brands with consumer significance. For the general trade publisher, that’s not actually possible (since they are not distinguished by their content or their audiences). But if it were possible, the quality of their ebooks should be a big part of it going forward and they’re relinquishing the role of “owning” that voluntarily.

In some ways, they’re also relinquishing their primary responsibility as a publisher, which is to control the quality of the product they deliver for their authors to the authors’ readers.

3. The evolving discount structure for ebooks can’t possibly be sustained. Retailers always use margin to gain share. If publishers sell ebooks to eretailers for 50% off, consumers will soon be buying them at 40% off.  On the one hand, we are ten years into a paradigm of imitating brick-and-mortar pricing and terms and it is difficult to change it. On the other hand, ebooks are still only 1% or so of most publishers’ sales, so any change made now will be “early” in the overall scheme of the ebook business.

Somebody’s got to start building a glide path to a sensible structure. This will be complicated, because publishers in the long run will be much more likely to sell digital downloads direct to consumers than physical books. That means that just going to net pricing wouldn’t be much of a solution. With the publisher selling the books online, any intermediary would be able to calculate what percentage of the retail-to-consumer they were being asked to pay.

The conversation about the prices of ebooks have centered around the costs that publishers don’t incur: printing, binding, cash tied up in inventory, warehouse, returns. But publishers say the manufacturing cost of a book is only about 10% of the retail price and we still have to maintain the operation to do all the printed book stuff and we are still investing to build the infrastructure to do the estuff.

Everybody’s right, but we’re ignoring the retailer side of it.

Retailers also avoid a lot of cost: rent, clerks, cash tied up in stock, shelving, returns. They also have front end investing to do to build an infrastructure to process a digital download business.

I think if I were a big publisher, I would make it clear that the era of 40, 50, 55, 60% off retail for digital downloads is one that must come to an end. I’d lean to a phased reduction and, in the short run, all kinds of support (including additional margin) to help “retailers” (Stanza, B&N Fictionwise, Apple’s and RIM’s App Stores, and every store served by Ingram and Content Reserve) build their offering and their capability. 

The big publishers will have extraordinary leverage to recreate the paradigm. When there’s an ebook market of a size that matters (getting close), people will search Google for their favorite title if the search at their favorite ebook retailer doesn’t deliver the title. There will definitely be retailers that will take the business at lower margins, as can the publisher itself. Boycotting high profile books will be a very dangerous strategy for a retailer.

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