Speeches
We have provided links below to a number of speeches, reports and articles that Mike Shatzkin of The Idea Logical Co., Inc. and Len Shatzkin, a highly respected publishing executive for several decades, have presented at various venues including the American Booksellers Association and Vista Computer Services Publishing in the 21st Century Conferences.2010
Making Information Pay 2010: Points of No Return
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented at Making Information Pay, May 6th, 2010."We have a program packed with information which we always strive for here at Making Information Pay. This conference, as usual, is about what’s changing in our publishing world right now and how we should address it. Before I walk us through this morning’s program, I want to give you two snapshots of the future, first as I see it and then as it was reflected in the answers you and others gave to the survey that tied into this year’s event."
2009
VIDEO: Planning for a Long Career in an Industry That’s Changing
By Mike Shatzkin - for The Publishing Point, December 10th, 2009"Mike's speech to a packed house at Hachette, as part of a lunchtime lecture series known as The Publishing Point. Delivering what proved to be a thought-provoking and farsighted view of the future of the book industry, Mike had some clear advice for those planning a long career in publishing: the companies that will succeed will be those that focus on building compelling content for well-defined “vertical communities.”..."
Stay Ahead of the Shift: What Publishers Can Do to Flourish in a Community-Centric Web World
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented at BookExpo America, May 28th, 2009."Speech given at BEA 2009. Focusing on the changes that will take place in publishing in the next 20 years. With a look back to the last 20 years, we are able to look forward and predict not only how publishing will be in the future, but also how information will be shared."
2008
A New Project: “StartwithXML, Why and How”
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to the BISG Annual Meeting, September 12, 2009"We have turned our attention to a problem we believe will occupy just about all publishers in the years to come, the opportunities and challenges presented by an XML workflow that starts with the author, or even before there is an author. Why should you care? Because the world we live in is changing, and XML is the key to mastering the change..."
Where the Web Is Taking Us: The Inevitable Future and the Publisher’s Role In It
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented in Los Angeles to PMA's "Graduate School", May 29, 2008"The basic premise under which we're operating here, I'll summarize for those of you have never heard or read my work before, is that horizontal, format-specific media entities are oh, so 20th century, and won't work very deep into the 21st. The reason for that is the web, which almost forces vertical organization. Horizontal presentations across subject matter -- like CBS, Random House, or The New York Times -- were the products of a capital-intensive, limited-distribution universe..."
The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented in Copenhagen to the Danish Book Trade, May 7, 2008"There is a big picture and a long arc within which our day-to-day activities are taking place. The 20th century consumer media were horizontal in their subject matter -- that is, very broad -- and format-specific. In the States, that means entities like CBS or NBC in television, The New York Times, or Random House. All of these companies provide content across the full range of human subject interests, but they pretty much stick to their formats: broadcast, newspapers, and books, respectively..."
The Digital State of Play in the US
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at the London Book Fair as part of a report to the UK publishing community on the state of digital change in the US, April 16, 2008"...in the 21st century, the net is flipping this on us. The net tends to self-organize us by subject niche, so the eyeballs and human bandwidth are linked to the niches, which are vertical, not horizontal. And because web interaction is about file exchanges, format specificity is meaningless. The file can hold text, art or photographs or other graphics, animation, moving images, sound, games, or code that helps us combine, sort, or tag things..."
Keynote Remarks: Publishing in the Digital Age
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented at the Book Business Conference and Expo, March 10, 2008"We're going to start with a view of what digital technology could mean to the overall world of communication over the next decade or two. What the history of the Internet seems to be telling us so far is that we will see a growth in niche organization -- what people like to call "community" on the web -- and a corresponding decline in horizontal media, which is much more threatening to magazines, newspapers, and broadcast than it is to us in the book business. But it will change us too..."
End of General Trade Publishing Houses (Completely Retold)
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to Random House's "Digital Day", January 22, 2008"I am not predicting that everybody will read on screens. You probably know that I'm a fan of the Kindle and perhaps you know that I've been an avid ebook reader on a Palm for almost 10 years. But I've learned that other people's attachment to paper is greater than mine. And anyway, it would be a good thing for general trade publishers if there were more screen takeup; it would mean keeping the readers for their content and not necessarily any loss in margin..."
15 Trends To Watch In 2008
by Mike Shatzkin - Publisher's Weekly, January 07, 2008"You won’t catch me climbing out onto any billion-dollar limbs as I offer my forecast for book publishing in 2008, but some of the changes I envision do call for fundamental changes in how the business operates. There is an overarching theme to the changes already taking place. Consumer media in the 20th century tended to be horizontal and format-specific. The New York Times and Random House define “horizontal”: they publish across all interests and markets. The Internet will drive 21st-century publishing enterprises to be more like what professional publishing has always been: highly vertical and format-agnostic..."
2007
Publishing and Digital Change: The Implications for the Book Business in Australia
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to "Publishing the Story of the Future," a conference sponsored by Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts, in Sydney, July 17, 2007"...even though we've seen our business get tougher in many ways, some of the predictions made at the turn of the century for big changes in this decade, such as disruptive ebook takeup, just haven't come true. The book business has, arguably, been less affected than any of the other major media by digital change. Or maybe I shouldn't say "arguably." Maybe I should say "apparently." And CERTAINLY I should say "so far."..."
End of General Trade Publishing Houses: Death or Rebirth in a Niche-by-Niche World
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to Book Expo America 2007, in New York City, May 31, 2007"What I hope to make clear is that the world of information and entertainment which constitute the ecosystem in which trade books live is changing in already defined ways. Even though we can only see a hundred feet in front of us an the journey is bound to be many miles, we know that many of the business forms and commercial models that succeeded in the 20th century will not make it far into the 21st. No big news there; we've watched media models come and go so often that we're actually getting used to it..."
Success in a Parallel Universe: Perhaps with Some Help from Your DAD
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to the Book Industry Study Group's "Making Information Pay" conference, May 10, 2007"We're going to discuss a subject this morning that was on hardly any radar screens a year ago; it would not have been a compelling subject for presentation at last year's Making Information Pay. But today, Digital Asset Distribution is on a lot of minds. What happened? After all, book content has been going out on the web for quite a while. My company did a digital marketing program for a book called "Longitude" in late 1995 which centered around offering a free chapter through relevant web sites. For several years, Amazon has had a program showing interior book pages, starting out as "Look Inside" and now "Search Inside the Book". Lots of publishers participated, but didn't instantly express a need to manage their own digital distribution..."
2006
Analysis of the BISG Used Book Study
by Mike Shatzkin - A report analyzing the study of the used book marketplace, published by the Book Industry Study Group, March 23, 2006"...the study makes clear what we all know: that the dynamic growth is online and in the trade book area. The used book market for college textbooks has been organizing and developing for many decades and it benefits from a geographical concentration of used book buyers and sellers that does not exist for trade books. And the online market is where the used book action is growing by leaps and bounds, not in shops of any kind. Focusing on the action for used trade books online will produce a much more useful study and probably would reduce the cost..."
Publishing and Digital Change: What’s Next?
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia annual retreat at Qualicum Beach, British Columbia, February 11, 2006"In the late 1990s, ending sometime in the year 2000, the apparent pace of change in publishing was breathtaking. Many propositions we can barely remember: Ebrary, Questia, eRights, eContent, Hungry Minds, Softbook, Rocket Book, and so many others, competed for publishers' attention, for publishers' content, and, a bit painfully, for publishers' staffs. We had barely heard of Google then, Microsoft seemed like a force that would dominate the rest of our lives, and Apple was barely breathing. The idea that Publishers Lunch might become more important than Publishers Weekly would have seemed laughable to almost anybody except Michael Cader. A whole host of things that really matter today - iPods, blogs, and podcasts among them - had not yet arrived on the scene..."
2005
Making Printing Decisions: Metrics & Mechanics
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to the 28th Annual Supply Chain Specialists meeting at the Frankfurt Book Fair, October 18th, 2005"With the exception of a handful of companies worldwide that chase big books with big advances, most of the money publishers spend is spent on printing. Even though many publishers write off overenthusiastic author advances, most of the money publishers lose is lost printing books that were never needed. And another chunk of it is lost financing inventory that is printed well before its necessary time. With the pressure on publishers to be more efficient growing daily, getting the printing decisions right -- or at least getting them better -- should be a priority for every publisher..."
The Future of Distribution
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to the Stanford Professional Publishing program, July 20, 2005"The future of distribution" is simply too big a subject to be covered in an hour, even by a fast-talking New Yorker like me. So we're going to focus our attention on "distribution" as defined by the companies that call themselves "distributors" and by publishers who offer "distribution services" to other publishers. That is, we're going to talk about how it works when a publisher hands off important distribution functions to another entity..."
Sensible Metrics
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to the Humber College "The New Face of Publishing" conference, April 15, 2005"It is a virtual certainty that every major trade publisher could increase their profits if the people setting the price and print order had no idea how much the house paid for the book or what the total sunk costs are. Of course, it is valid to know things about market expectations today: how big a market, how much promotion are we doing, and what are the sales of recent comparable books? All of those things tell us important things to consider for the pricing and printing..."
Keynote Address – “The New Face of Publishing” Conference
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented to the Humber College, April 14, 2005"One of the first times I talked to a book publishing audience trying to visualize the future that digital change would bring was about ten years ago at Book Expo America. It was already apparent at that time that the music business might have a major problem and there seemed to be ways that publishing might follow..."
2004
Under the Radar: There’s more to supply chain management than influencing reprint decisions and allocating existing inventory
by Mike Shatzkin - Printed in Publishing News Frankfurt Show Daily, October 9, 2004"...making the best use of the available data requires going beyond the objective of right-sizing reprintings and allocating scarce stock. It can also be used to identify under-distributed books that are "flying under the radar". Teasing out that information has been a new challenge for publishers large and small. Publishers' customers are almost universally able to provide regular data feeds and are, with few exceptions, willing to do it. And publishers are increasingly finding that proper management of the data they are receiving can surface opportunities to increase sales of books that were languishing because they weren't available in quantities sufficient to meet discernible demand..."
Account-Specific Sales and Inventory Data Analysis
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair, October 5, 2004"Today I want to talk about important opportunities that are available to increase sales and reduce obsolete or unneeded inventory by methodically archiving and using account-specific sales and inventory data. This data could be delivered by an industry-wide service..."
Supply Chain Data and Canada’s Opportunity
by Mike Shatzkin - Presented at BookExpo Canada under the auspices of BookNet Canada, Toronto, June 11, 2004"I don't have to tell a roomful of people from the Canadian publishing industry that Canada is the most difficult market for publishers in the English-speaking world. You know it, although it may add to my credibility with you to assure you that I know it too..."
Actionable Analysis of Account-Specific Data
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered to the Book Industry Study Group "Making Information Pay" conference, New York, February 4, 2004"We have found that the right reports make competent business analysts out of reps whose great strength had always been that they were good “presenters”, not good numbers people. And those who were already good with analysis can save time if they are working with the right reports. They find what they need to know faster and, perhaps more importantly, have a vastly simplified task presenting “evidence” to a buyer because they can present a summarized report of the inventory performance for every book..."
2003
Adult Trade Publishing: Mixtures of growth and decline
by Mike Shatzkin - Published by the Book Industry Study Group in their book "Book Industry Trends 2003""The TRENDS projections for the adult trade segment of the industry over the next five years can be summed up in a word: flat. Projections for unit sales—hardcover and paperback—hardly deviate from a straight line. Dollar projections lift gently, fueled entirely by price increases. And even this is an improvement from the most recent reality..."
Supply Chain Impact of Internet Bookselling
by Mike Shatzkin - Speech to ePubLondon Conference, March 14, 2003"The first “supply chain impact” of Internet bookselling, perhaps the only channel for most publishers’ sales that is growing at the moment, is that it has its own supply chain components that we didn’t really have to think about before there was an Internet..."
2002
Remarks at the Seybold Conference in New York
by Mike Shatzkin - New York, February 21, 2002"The trade book business seems daily to become ever more unprofitable for publishers; every day it is harder to get the sales books deserve and to avoid painful and costly levels of returns. It is now possible to use data to solve those problems, title by title and store by store, if there is the will to learn the way..."
2001
Facing up to the Big Questions
by Mike Shatzkin - From The Bookseller, 10 August 2001 edition"For the most part, book publishing is a business that requires looking well into the future. Once books are commissioned, they take months, if not years, to be completed editorially before they can even be introduced into a lengthy production and marketing process, and then be launched into what a publisher usually hopes will be a lengthy period of sales. Up until very recently, readers' interest in the subject matter of a book was a moving target for publishers: would it survive, or grow, between the time of commitment and the time of publication?..."
Consumer Publishing Today: A Model Under Threat?
by Mike Shatzkin - From the book "Publishing 2001: Attitude to Technological Change", sponsored by VISTA Computer Services, Inc. and published by BPI Communications, Inc."Publishers want to be sure that whenever the market is ready for e-books, they have the rights to publish e-books for the titles they have already established in the print format..."
Toward a More Fragmented Future – Publishing’s Era of Consolidation Nears an End
by Mike Shatzkin - Published by the Book Industry Study Group in their book "Book Industry Trends 2001""...if you ask the big bookstore chains what is their biggest concern about the marketplace, they say 'consolidation among the big publishers.' This little informal survey accurately depicted the dominant trend across publishing of the last quarter of the 20th century..."
2000
A Vision of Publishing’s Future
by Mike Shatzkin - Published by PublishersLunch.com on August 10, 2000"This is how it will be in the long run. And no commercial force on earth can change it. Every "work" (books and more) will be made available in virtually any form somebody could want: printed and bound in a book, printed but not bound, suitable for reading on the computer screen or in any hand-held reader or personal digital assistant or, when appropriate, telephone screen..."
Crossing the Chasm – Getting from the Physical Here to the Digital There
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered to the VISTA "Blinded By the E-Light" Conference, New York, June 15, 2000"Times are getting tougher and tougher for established publishers doing things in established ways This is structural. Change is making doing what they've always done a lot harder to do..."
Getting to 2010 – The Implications of Change
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered to "The Book Trade in 2010" conference, London, March 22, 2000"The scenario we have presented for The Book Trade in 2010 differs almost entirely from the The Book Trade of 2000 that we know. We prepared the scenario over a considerable period of time, and included the thoughts of dozens of people. I think my colleagues Mark and Hugh would agree with me that, while we are humble about our ability to predict all the particulars of change, we are very comfortable that the magnitude of the change we are predicting is entirely reasonable within the next ten years..."
Dismantling the publishing industry!
by Mike Shatzkin - Print article in "Publishing News London Book Fair Daily", March 19, 2000"Here's the choice facing publishing enterprises. You can have profit and cash flow today, or you can have survival tomorrow. It is increasingly unlikely that you can have both..."
1999
Sales and Marketing in the Digital Age
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at the VISTA "Information in Action" Conference, London, November 18, 1999"It is past time for every company to consciously formulate a sales strategy to compete in the channel that is already for many books the single most important, and the one which we know is only bound to grow for the foreseeable future..."
Book Distribution Between Now and 2005: Building the Infrastructure for the New Paradigm
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair, October 12, 1999"...the change required to build a whole new paradigm is much greater than we've experienced. In the inevitable future I've described, printers and shippers are obviously in peril. Publishers, wholesalers, libraries, bookstores must certainly change form, even to serve the same purposes they serve today. The expertise at the logistics of moving physical goods which is so critical to make our current value chain work will be less highly valued..."
Summary Address to the First Meeting of the New Technology Interest Group
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered to the Book Industry Study Group, New York, September 16, 1999"The technology-driven change we are headed for in the months and years to come is going to dwarf all the change we have seen in publishing throughout our entire careers until now. Yet the next round of changes we will experience are really preliminary, permitting us to maintain the basic forms of the book business as we have understood it, at least for a little while longer..."
Databases and Networks – The Core Competencies of 21st Century Publishing
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at the VISTA/Publishers Weekly "Information in Action" Conference, New York, June 9, 1999"What has defined us so far has been the configuration of our end product: the book. That has seemed to be quite enough definition..."
Publishing & Bookselling: From Now to 2005
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at the Book Expo America Convention Panel, Los Angeles, April 29, 1999"There is no doubt that digital technology changes the way publishers and booksellers handle their most basic business processes, but it is likely that the most profound changes digital technology will create will be in the marketplace itself..."
Territorial Rights
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at the Booksellers Association of Great Britain and Ireland Annual Conference, Amsterdam, April 13, 1999"The erosion of the English-language publishing "territory" controlled from London has been accelerating for about three decades. Whether or not this erosion is an inevitable consequence of the end of what once was the British Empire, it is, of course, disconcerting to the publishers who once controlled more than half of the global English market..."
1998
Fixing Broken Meters and Gauges – New Business Indicators for Publishers
by Mike Shatzkin - November 1998"There is a fitting irony in the fact that a big publisher on neither side of the Atlantic published one of the biggest Anglo-American bestsellers of the 1990s, the book "Longitude" by Dava Sobel. The irony is that the true story of "Longitude", in which James Harrison struggles for the better part of a century to persuade the powers-that-were that he has solved the problem of accurately computing longitude at sea, actually analogizes the real reasons that consumer book publishers don't make money..."
Vendor-Managed Inventory
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at the 20th International Distribution and Supply Chain Specialists' Meeting, Frankfurt Book Fair, October 6th, 1998"In the British and American markets, it is clear to us that our supply chain is not nearly as effective as we would like. Returns are high, possibly as high as fifty percent of the copies of new titles shipped for many consumer segments in the US. Returns are not as dramatic, but they are climbing, in Britain..."
1997
Restoring Health to the Book Trade – Vendor-Managed Inventory for Books
by Mike Shatzkin - November 1997"It is safe to assume that everybody in this room read Ken Auletta's piece in The New Yorker a month ago which described in somewhat frightening terms the current state of consumer publishing in the US. It was a piece that didn't make any publishing insiders very happy and which had flaws that made it easy for some to dismiss. And while I agree that it fails in economic analysis, I think Auletta's piece was pretty good journalism..."
Taming the Inventory Tiger
by Mike Shatzkin - June 1997"The argument I want to make to you today is that our current buying-and-selling system, which my father Leonard Shatzkin has dubbed "distribution by negotiation", actually is responsible for the prevalence of unprofitable buying decisions and that a vendor-managed inventory system could make these decisions considerably more profitable for everybody..."
Staying Competitive in a Wired World
by Mike Shatzkin - UK Booksellers Association, April 1997"...we know that the medium of the Internet is perfectly suited to selling books. That is because what nothing can do better than the Internet is to deliver information arranged in databases, permitting searches by various criteria. And since the day arrived, so long ago we can't remember when it was, that a bound volume of Books-in-Print became so fat it isn't even wieldy for the customer in a bookstore, providing access to information about *all* the books has been a challenge for every bookseller..."
Books as Bytes: Death of the Paper Book?
by Mike Shatzkin - Spanish Book Publishers, February 1997"The technology is evolving to make it increasingly possible for the content-driven mind to understand what the technology can do, and to have useful ideas about how to do it."
1996
Selling Books on the Internet
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at Vista's NYC Conference in November, 1996"Many observers estimate that we'll see $1 billion in book sales on the Web in the next 3-to-5 years. Of course, if it is $1 billion in three years, it may be $3 billion in five years..."
Surprise!
by Mike Shatzkin - Delivered at Vista's New York City Conference on June 26, 1996 (London in June 1996: Surprise!)"...we must recognize that we are now in a period of transition. The potential to shift away from printed books will be more obvious when publishers start selling enhanced electronic versions of current books on the Internet. As we will see in a moment, movement in that direction will accelerate in the next few months. The shift will get further impetus a year or two from now when the first book simulators hit the market..."
1995
Turnover vs. Discount Calculation
by Len Shatzkin - June 1995"The Vista Publishing Perspectives report entitled "Profiting from Future Customers" states that an additional turn adds the same profit for a bookseller as 15 additional points of discount. In his speeches at the Conferences presenting the report (in London on June 5 and in New York on June 26), Mike Shatzkin put the equivalent to a turn of *7* additional points. For both calculations, he had relied on his father and master publishing mathematician, Leonard Shatzkin. The difference in the calculations and the way to do them is explained here by Leonard Shatzkin."
Some Aspects of the Retailing of Books
by Len Shatzkin - Delivered at the 1995 ABA Convention in Chicago for the Harvard Business School Press"In our country, leaving aside the copies going to libraries, 70 % of books reach their readers through bookstores. There is no doubt that the well-being of book publishing in America - for the author, for the publisher and for the general public - rests solidly on the shoulders of our retail bookstore network. The health of those shoulders - the health of the retail bookstore - is very important to the health of every aspect of American publishing, to the author, the publisher, and the general public..."
