BookScan

BookExpo America, trade publishing’s industry-wide gathering, just completed what must be considered another successful year at Javits Center last week. Attendance was pretty much what it had been last year and the lines for autographs on the convention floor certainly gave off the feeling of enthusiasm and excitement that publishers want to see.

Convention roundups are best delivered by people like Laura Hazard Owen and my Publishers Launch partner, Michael Cader, who make a real effort to take in the breadth of what is going on. I, on the other hand, have my meetings and chats with friends that seem to fill up the days so my impression of the overall is just that: an impression. An ad hoc impression.

One thing that seems pretty clear is that my forecast for the future of BEA from 2009 was unduly pesssimistic. I like to get to what I think is the heart of the matter, but in this case I was overly simplistic. I got it right that bookstores would continue to decline but I got it wrong to think that would doom BEA within three or four years. Although other retailers stock books more than they used to, there are nowhere near the number of opportunities for publishers to talk to customers that there were even in 2009. But publishers are that much more interested in talking to any source of shelf space that they can and, in fact, non-book retailers often aren’t hit by the field sales forces.

So there continues to be sufficient reason for publishers to exhibit to keep them coming (albeit with smaller stands and less staff than the big guys used to bring). And that brings a whole slew of other players, including the ever evolving set of companies with digital propositions looking to get the attention of publishers large and small.

Aside from our Publishers Launch conference, which made lots of news and was an altogether satisfying event from an organizer’s perspective with a number of really fabulous presentations, I had a handful of takeaways from BEA 2012.

1. Metadata is still a mess. For a BEA panel outside Publishers Launch, we reunited the incredibly engaging team of Newlin and Toolan to discuss metadata. Bill Newlin of Avalon, a division of Perseus, and Fran Toolan, the “Chief Igniter” (CEO) of Firebrand Technologies, know it all about metadata and are both passionate and extremely entertaining in discussing it. I heard from somebody who saw the session or talked to them afterwards that they might be getting bored with presenting on the subject. I checked in with Bill afterwards and he said he just had to freshen up the presentation; it remained important and he wouldn’t stop.

Then I talked to Karina Luke, who had spoken about metadata for us in London last year when she was at Penguin and who now is in charge of Book Industry Communication (BIC), the BISG equivalent in the UK which has, among its responsibilities, the monitoring of industry complicance with metadata standards and certifying publishers for competence. “Is this really still a problem?” I asked her. “Yes.” “Even among the big publishers? Don’t they have it all straight?” “No.”

Since metadata has, as Karina makes clear, literally replaced catalogs and sales reps as the most important and mission-critical source of information about a publisher’s books, this is a bit shocking. We had Jonathan Nowell of Bookscan do a presentation at Pub Launch Frankfurt last year which demonstrated pretty emphatically the relationship between metadata and sales. He’s repeated the presentation, first for us at Digital Book World, and then under other auspices. Apparently not enough publishers have seen it.

2. Still, nobody reports selling illustrated books effectively as ebooks. I have asked the question over and over of every illustrated book publisher I know. One Big Six house that is doing ebooks for all the titles in one of their divisions with a lot of illustrated titles, told me that most of the time sales of the digital edition are in the single digit percentages of the total sale. Very successful illustrated ebooks might do 15% of the print sale. For immersive reading, that percentage is a big multiple of that.

Illustrated books as ebooks have not yet demonstrated that they will work in the marketplace.

3. Still, nobody reports a formula that can deliver repeated commercial success with enhanced ebooks. We all know about a few instances that have worked, but, so far, no publisher has come up with a formula to make enhanced ebooks commercially sound propositions.

We introduced Ron Martinez’s “Aerbook Maker”, a cloud-based technology that makes it easy to build complex ebooks and apps and cuts the cost of doing so dramatically. Martinez’s technology will definitely reduce the cost of experimentation and allow a lot more titles to hit the marketplace. Maybe that can jump-start a business both by making the costs go down and by making it easier for the creative people, including the author, to engage with the technology.

There certainly isn’t a business yet.

4. Publishers still haven’t focused on creating rights databases (which I identified as the biggest problem of the decade over a year ago.) This is a knotty problem for publishers. Sales of books are, in general, flat or down. Sales of rights, particularly in small bits and pieces (chunks), are going up. But without rights databases, the cost of those transactions can often eat the all revenue.

Exactly what to do is an extremely complex problem for any house to tackle and requires some high-level consideration, planning, and resource allocation. But I think it is obvious that the correction must begin with properly databasing the rights in current contracts as they are signed. Even this is apparently not happening yet in most places, according to the “support” industry that would help publishers change this.

Meanwhile, the “in” baskets in the permissions departments will continue to be piled higher and the number of unattended=to opportunities that might have been really remunerative or helped with the marketing of the book will be a subject to be considered at some future time.

(I recall now that my wife, Martha Moran, increased sales by some huge multiple in the 15 months she was doing special sales for Crown in the late 1970s. Her singular innovation was to create a set of form letters that allowed her to answer every request within a couple of days. The impact was immediate. It might well be the same when some publisher creates such a policy for its Rights and Permissions requests.)

5. The problems that distributors are facing with ebooks in the public library market are being duplicated in the K-12 library market. People in that space tell us that they suffer from the same concerns on the part of publishers that keep some players out of the public library market. Is there any way to offer ebooks in school libraries that won’t cannibalize sales of multiple copies in school settings? That’s as much a conundrum as the public library one, but it gets a lot less attention from the public or the publishers.

6. The slowdown in ebook share growth got a bit of conversation. Did I believe it was real? Sure, it is. And it is probably a very natural state of things. Before ebook reader prices plummeted, which they have really done in the past year or two, the readers only made real economic sense to people who read a lot of books. The first mover advantage Amazon gained with Kindle (which was the first device that was easy to load and also hooked up to a lot of titles) was huge because they self-selected the heaviest readers with their pricing. I’ve never seen figures that would prove it, but I’ll bet Nook also has found that ebooks sold per new device is declining from what they saw at first.

Another reason for this, besides the bias of heavy readers to be early adopters, is that so many devices being sold now are replacements. There is a tendency to “load up” on a new device. That’s not necessary on a replacement, particularly a replacement within the same retail ecosystem. So device sales have lost their power as a leading indicator of ebook share growth.

7. The most stimulating and exciting conversation I had at BEA was with Marcello Vena, the director of digital business at RCS Libri, a large book publishing group that owns Rizzoli and Fabbri Editori. RCS Libri is part of RCS Mediagroup, one of the largest EU media holding companies. They own a lot of media businesses including newspapers, magazines, radio, and online advertising.

RCS Libri is doing a large number of innovative things with ebooks, both illustrated and straight text. They’ve done an illustrated ebook on museums that has been a huge success in Italy and will be delivered in English by Rizzoli. They’re starting two new vertical imprints dedicated to genre series in Italian: Rizzoli Max for thrillers from Rizzoli and Fabbri Editori Life for romance novels from Fabbri Editori. All titles will be issued simulaneously as inexpensive hardcovers and ebooks starting this week. The initial list of the thriller series includes a book by my favorite self-published author, John Locke.

RCS is thinking globally and also innovating locally, including in the way they manage promotional pricing of their digital products online. Of course, what’s stimulating for me will probably be stimulating for an audience as well, so I’ve booked Marcello Vena to speak at the Publishers Launch Conference in Frankfurt on October 8.

I turned 65 during BEA. People older than I am are getting harder to find at industry events. But I really enjoyed seeing two of them at BEA.

Martin Levin is in his 90s. He went to law school after he retired from his publishing career, which concluded after he was chairman of Times Mirror Publishing, which then owned Abrams and New American Library. For the past two decades he has done M&A with the law firm Cowan, Liebowitz, and Latman. Martin greeted me with a big smile saying how happy he was that my career has gone so well. But he pointed out, accurately, “you’re not nearly as smart as your father.” Then he recalled some of Dad’s accomplishments, including putting in a vendor-managed inventory program at Doubleday in the 1950s.

Joe Friedman was a new sales rep at Doubleday when that program was instituted. He went on to a career leading sales at Penguin and then working for the ABA. He’s 76 now and hasn’t been in the business for a decade or more. He came in to Manhattan from Long Island on two separate days just “to see if anybody remembers” who he is. I was glad to see him. I wish I’d gotten his email address. I hope he found a few others with whom to discuss old times.

One thing we try to do at Digital Book World is to present our audiences with useful, relevant, and, when we can, original data. It is a familiar complaint in our industry that we drive blind. Part of that is due to the sheer diversity and granularity of the “book business”. And another part is due to the blistering rate of change. The net result is that we are constantly trying to read tea leaves. We do our best to deliver some useful tea leaves to our DBW audience.

I make no pretension here to telling you all you’ll hear at DBW (which would be bad business even if I were able to do it!) But here is a roster of the data presentations and a small taste of what the DBW audience is going to get from each one.

We’ll start off with James McQuivey of Forrester Research doing a reprise of a high-level survey of publishing executives that they inaugurated at DBW 2011. Forrester got good participation in the survey, including getting fully filled-out responses from at least two of the Big Six executives.

One very interesting fact from the Forrester research is that the consensus for when the trade business will become 50% digital has moved up from 2015 to 2014. When Forrester announced the original number at DBW 2011, it seemed to many to be aggressive. A year later, it is not likely that the new prediction that it will come sooner is going to surprise a lot of people. We are apparently now used to the accelerating pace of change, but perhaps just in time to have to readjust to it slowing down. (More on that to follow.)

The team of the Milan office of A.T.Kearney (the big global consulting firm) and the Italian ebook retailer Bookrepublic have been tracking the spread of digital reading worldwide. They presented research at last year’s IfBookThen conference in Milan and followed it up with additional research presented at the Publishers Launch conference in Frankfurt. They’ve extended their investigation further — about devices, about internet purchasing, about ebook uptake, market-by-market around the world — for this year’s Digital Book World. They have added questions about self-publishing and piracy to the research they did previously and responses to them will be reported at Digital Book World.

One insight they’ve had is extremely provocative. They say, “We should stop thinking of self-publishing simply as a nice way for indie authors to be published. Viewed another way, measuring self-publishing activity calculates the amount of money Amazon (and others) are no longer sharing with publishers. And it’s growing.”

The data that will justify that insight will be part of the presentation we’ll see at Digital Book World.

We decided to take an intensive look at the romance genre because it is often considered to be the consumer segment that has moved most rapidly into the digital future. We were fortunate to enlist the help of the ebook retailer AllRomanceEbooks.com in our investigation. They circulated a survey that got responses from almost six thousand of their customers. The results of that survey will be announced at DBW and will be followed by a panel discussion with special attention to what other genres and segments of trade publishing can learn from what has happened in the romance market.

What caught my eye from the preliminary results was that only 4% of the ebooks All Romance sells have DRM. Since they carry the ebooks of all the major publishers, and all of those have DRM, what this statistic tells us is what a vast business exists in romance publishing outside the realm of the biggest players in the industry. I’ll leave the analysis to the experts we’ll have on stage for this discussion, but I personally wouldn’t leap to the conclusion that DRM-free is the only reason that 96% of the sales were of that category. Those books are undoubtedly cheaper as well. They may score higher on All Romance’s unique “flame” scoring system (which is all about how frequent and explicit the sex scenes are). But I would imagine that any big publisher hearing that statistic would, at the very least, have its curiosity piqued.

It turns out that a big component of All Romance’s sales success is that they took it upon themselves to add sub-categories describing romance — such as that flame index referred to above — that didn’t exist in the industry’s BISAC standard. That’s metadata!

Metadata isn’t ever going to be a “sexy” subject but it is certainly becoming an increasingly popular one. Our early polling of Digital Book World registrants indicates that our breakout session on metadata might be the most heavily-attended of the 30 breakouts on the schedule. (And everybody who goes will be glad they did. We just reviewed the content of the session with presenters Bill Newlin and Fran Toolan; it’s going to be great!)

Having been told for months and years that good metadata enables sales and bad metadata prevents them, I wanted to get some factual confirmation of that. So I asked Jonathan Nowell, the UK-based head of BookScan and the bibliographic source BookData, if he could do some research to connect the two (his being the only organization that has the information to tie metadata to sales data.) Jonathan did a presentation on this subject for Publishers Launch Frankfurt; he’s updating it for Digital Book World.

The most arresting takeaway last October at the Frankfurt presentation was that adding “enhanced metadata” elements to a basket of backlist books not only stopped their normal sales decay, it reversed it and actually made sales of those books rise after the metadata was improved. Everybody will really be able to visualize the importance of metadata after they hear Jonathan’s presentation.

Verso Media is an advertising agency with high digital consciousness and a deep interest in book purchasing and consumption habits. They survey book consumers looking for insights about the digital changeover. The single most startling takeaway for me from the preliminary results I saw from this year’s research is that the number of people who actually resist the idea of reading digitally has gone up from 49% to 51% of respondents. This data point is in line with other tea leaves that suggest that we might have started to hit real resistance to ebooks, slowing down the digital switchover from the rates of the past few years. And that certainly would not have been what I would have predicted. Jack McKeown, who has held senior positions at three major publishing houses, oversees the Verso research and will present it.

At our Publishers Launch “Children’s Books Go Digital” show on Monday, Conference Chair Lorraine Shanley recruited two trend analysts who are offering interesting trend and data observations of their own.

Amy Henry, VP of Youth Beat, observes that parents and kids are sharing personal experiences more than we remember from our youth. More than 2/3 of teenagers listen to music with their parents! The takeaway is that parents can be marketing conduits to their kids; they’re not just gatekeepers you need to sneak your way past, which is how they have often been characterized in the past.

Ira Mayer, Publisher of Youth Market Alerts, delivers data that tells us that two-thirds of the apps Moms get for their kids are either free or under a buck. Fewer than 10% are more than $3. These are sobering facts, but anybody entering the app space to make money better know them!

Kelly Gallagher, Vice-President in charge of research at Bowker, will have important data to share at both shows. His team has been surveying a pool of book purchasers on behalf of BISG for a couple of years and has charted the growth of the ebook market for the industry throughout that time. The data he’ll be reporting from the latest fielding is so fresh that it misses the deadline for this post. But it would seem likely that the data will show that the ebook switchover is finally slowing down after about five years of doubling or more than doubling annually. That would be of meaningful interest to everybody in trade publishing and would tend to confirm Verso’s finding that the point of more determined ebook resistance grows nearer.

Bowker also runs a study of the children’s book market and he will share appropriate data from that research at the Pub Launch show on Monday. Kelly showed me a couple of slides that suggest that young children’s print could be around for a while. Parents like the idea that a book isolates kids from what are otherwise constant digital stimuli. And what attracts kids to digital is portability (having access to more titles) which, broadly speaking, is more important as kids get older. And he’ll reprise that data presentation at Digital Book World on Tuesday, followed by a panel discussion among participating publishers in the study, including Disney, Scholastic, and HarperCollins. That discussion will be moderated by Kristen McLean, founder of Bookigee and former executive director of the Association of Booksellers for Children.

I don’t mean to suggest that data is all we do at our conferences, or even most of what we do. It isn’t. But we see it as part of our job to encourage the development of original information, such as we did in conjunction with All Romance and Nielsen, as well as to deliver information from efforts already underway within the industry, like the reports we’ll get from Bowker.

Digital Book World will also feature main-stage presentations from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo which we expect will also be data-rich (as well as one on business model experimentation from Oren Teicher of the American Booksellers Association), helping us all understand what happened this past Christmas. Keeping up with this pace of change is hard enough; doing it without data is impossible.

Recent performance reports from Simon & Schuster and Penguin, which can be taken as indicative in some ways of what’s going on at the rest of the Big Six and instructive about what’s happening across trade publishing, say that revenue is flat or down, profits are up, and the ebook share of revenue is growing. The most recent reports were that ebooks grew to 14% of revenue at Penguin and at Simon & Schuster.

First a few observations about what those numbers really mean, and then some thoughts about the implications for the months to come.

We must remember we’re comparing apples and oranges when we talk about the percentage of sales that are ebooks versus print books. This percentage is, presumably, arrived at by adding print book sales (which are shipments subject to returns) to ebook sales (which are actual consumer purchases with zero or negligible returns) and then dividing the ebook revenue number by the total revenue number.

This explains the apparent anomaly pointed out in the S&S reporting which sees the ebook percentage higher in the first quarter than in the second, which has occurred in successive years. This is not actually hard to understand. One report I saw pointed to part of the explanation: that Christmas recipients of ereading devices are loading them up in January, an effect which is absent in the second quarter. But what is also the case is that Q1 print sales (which are shipments, let’s remember) are depressed by two factors: they contain returns from Q4 Christmas sell-in and Q1 is not normally a big one for new book shipments.

So as long as there are larger shipments of returnable print taking place in anticipation of Christmas sales and large numbers of new device owners created each Christmas, we can expect the Q1 number to be artificially inflated and the Q2 number to show an apparent decline.

The annual Q2 decline is only apparent; it is not real.

The percentage of revenue number lends itself to misinterpretation. It is an average. You will pardon me for repeating the truth that “the six-foot tall man drowns walking across a river that is an average of three feet deep.” Averages are misleading. That mid-teens percentage number, quite aside from the apples-and-oranges base of it, is also misleading. (I hasten to emphasize that nobody is being deliberately misleading; there is no suggestion intended here that the number isn’t real or that there is any desire to lead people to mistaken conclusions by reporting it.)

But 14%, or about 1/7, could lead people to think that the book that sells 35,000 copies is selling about 30,000 print and 5,000 digital. That’s seldom the case. First of all, “on average” ebooks generate lower unit revenues than print, because so many of them sell for less than half the print retail price when books are in hardcover. So if 14% of the revenue is digital, something more than that percentage of the units are digital. Let’s say that number is more like 17% or maybe 20%.

Secondly, that number is, at least to some extent, historical. It certainly isn’t a forecast. Everybody’s forecast would be for that number to go up. And everybody would agree that (if you factor properly for the Q1 to Q2 and shipments-to-sales anomalies) it has gone up between the period being reported and the reporting.

Third, not all of S&S’s or Penguin’s print list is available as an ebook. (As short form publishing enabled by ebooks grows, the reverse will also be true, but it isn’t in any appreciable numbers yet.) That means the title base for the 14% of revenue and (notional) 17% of units is a smaller number of titles than the print title base. So for books available as both print and ebooks, the percentage of units sold that are digital is substantially higher than that. I’m not familiar enough with the houses’ lists to make a truly informed guess about many titles are heavily illustrated or children’s book titles or deep backlist on which ebook rights are too confused to allow an edition to be published. But it would certainly be reasonable to assume that for straight-text narrative books, the percentage of ebook units to the total is routinely 30% or more.

The power of the ebook marketplace was underscored by a recent Simon & Schuster report of first day sales for a major bestseller. USA Today reported on July 13 that S&S claimed 175,000 total units sold on the first day of availability of Jaycee Dugard’s “A Stolen Life”, of which 100,000 of the sales were ebooks. (The article doesn’t spell it out, but presumably these are apples-to-apples, cash register sales of books and audio as reported by BookScan and, as always, cash register sales of ebooks. If they compared print shipments to ebook sales, the number would probably be more like 40% than the 57% this reporting implies.)

Because ebook sales are, at the moment, revenue dollar-for-dollar, more profitable than print book sales, publishers are able to report revenues flat or down and profits up. With the industry standard of 25% ebook royalties having prevailed for a year or two now, this news definitely catches the attention of smart agents. But, the agents’ future success in negotiating better terms aside, is it likely to stay that way?

One big relevant variable that is hard to predict is how successful publishers can be keeping retail prices up for ebooks with a diminished print price benchmark. If you’re getting something for $9.99 or $14.99 that you believe lots of people are paying more for in another form, there’s evidence that it is a bargain. It will be a bigger challenge to keep prices, and therefore revenues and margins, up — even with the power of agency, which only six publishers in the world today are really equipped to deliver — when the printed book price isn’t seen as a basis for comparison.

In fact, the current improvement in the profit picture suggests that the big houses have done a remarkably good job of managing the transition from print to digital so far. What is implied by the reported numbers, but receiving little attention, is that print sales are down pretty dramatically. Print runs are down with one trade house telling me that their midlist non-fiction first printings having typically declined by 40%. A larger house suggested that the print being shipped from their warehouse is down 35% in less than two years. I’m not close to the numbers but that might mean that for segments of their list shipments are half what they were less than two years ago.

Smaller press runs mean higher unit costs for printing and binding but they also mean fewer units are sharing the cost of design and page make-up. Many of the fixed overheads in publishing houses: warehouses, production departments, catalog creation, and lots of IT, are really only necessary to support the print component of the business. For the past two decades, commercial success in book publishing (and, as the demise of Borders has made clear, in book retailing) depended on an efficient supply chain. Being in stock but not overstocked, shipping quickly, being able to get fast turnaround on reprints, processing returns promptly to facilitate collecting accounts receivable, and providing accurate data to accounts as well as to internal stakeholders all require investment but generate value that shows up in profits.

Until the Kindle came out in November 2007, the question about ebooks was “will this ever be a business?” Since then we’ve watched the ebook share double or more every year, including last year. Since 2008 or 2009, the question has been “how long can this kind of growth go on?” When the share is upwards of 30% for most narrative books, which I think it is now, we know that can’t go on for two more years because that would be a mathematical impossibility.

So the questions about ebooks now are “when will this slow down?” and “is there a plateau at which there is a sustainable and substantial print book business?” If the answer to the first question isn’t “very soon”, then the answer to the second question must be “no”.

The other question being called here is whether the publishing of straight narrative texts becomes a separate and distinct business from the publishing of illustrated books. As long as the print component is commercially important to the success of narrative books, it’s perfectly logical for a publisher to do both. The narrative books and illustrated books, after all, can ride in the same box to Barnes & Noble, Ingram, or any local bookstore. Sometimes they are even manufactured by the same printer (although far less often than they were decades ago.) Their inventory can certainly be monitored with the same capabilities and people (if somewhat different algorithms).

One great imponderable is what the market for ebooks will be beyond the verbatim replication of narrative text. That’s where the growth has been. For illustrated or enhanced or apped ebooks, the success stories are anecdotal, not indisputable trending. It’s true that the right devices aren’t as widely distributed yet, but it is also true that we have no clear evidence that those ebooks will be as compelling to the consumer as the narrative text ones. We do know they’ll cost more to create.

One smart ebook head of a major house remarked to me the other day that their cookbook editors were still preparing their content primarily for the printed page and the digital versions were developed after that. “If our editors are still doing it that way two years from now,” this person said, “then as a company we’re doing something terribly wrong.” That statement is correct, and encompasses the possibility that something like the packages of cookbook content within containers won’t have a profitable market even in digital form, and will have to be monetized completely differently. We don’t know yet as an empirical fact that people will buy digital “cookbooks”, the way we know for sure that people will read narrative text on devices very happily and not look back.

(Cooking and food content? A perfect candidate for the subscription model!)

What we do know is that a high percentage of illustrated book sales is for gifts. To the extent that’s true, it adds a barrier that has nothing to do with design or functionality to the migration to ebooks. And those books, presumably more than narrative text books, benefit from the showroom effect that bookstores provide. And we know what’s happening to bookstores.

The rate of migration from print to digital for narrative text over the past four years would take us to a smidgen of a print business for that kind of book in only a couple more years if it does not abate. If publishers find their print throughput down another 35% over the next 18 months, most of the biggest narrative books are selling upwards of 75% of their units as ebooks, and most of what publishers ship from their warehouse is a different title base than their bestseller business, the game will have changed completely.

We could evolve so that the skills and organizational requirements to publish narrative content, if print becomes a small component of the revenue, will be quite different from what’s required to publish the illustrated content for which print remains an important part of the revenue. In that world, what constitutes a sensible portfolio of offerings for what we today call a “book publisher” might be defined quite differently.

One thing that occurred to me for the first time writing this piece is that Amazon’s apparent resistance to giving any publisher except the Big Six the ability to sell under agency terms gives the Big Six a useful card to play with agents on the biggest books. Agents for big authors tend to like the agency sales model. (This is inherently confusing; the “agents” being referred to have nothing to do with the “agency” in the model…Oh, well.)

The stakeholders who care most about maintaining retail prices for “branded” books (big authors and big efforts, like heavily-researched biographies that take years to write) are the most powerful agents and the Big Six publishers. If I’m right about this, I think we can safely categorize it as an “unintended consequence” on Amazon’s part to have a policy in place that actually strengthens the Big Six’s hand against the rest of their competition for big authors.

Sometimes, and it would seem quite often these days, the future comes faster than you expected it.

Followers of this blog, and of my speeches before there was a blog (this one’s from 2001!), know I’ve long been expecting ebook reading to supplant print book reading for many people. I’ve been wrong about the timing. (Ten years ago I’d have expected to be where we are now three or four years ago.) I’ve been wrong about whether a dedicated device for reading would make much of difference. (I read so comfortably on a phone, and before that on a PDA, that I figured few would want yet another device for reading only.) And I’m rethinking my expectations around enhanced ebooks and the utility of social reading.

But it has seemed clear to me for a long time that ebooks offered compelling advantages over print — portability, ease of purchase, and a lower cost basis that must inexorably lead to lower prices — that would increasingly sway many of the inevitably growing number of people who had a readable handheld screen in reach most of the time. And my long experience dealing with bookstore economics made it clear to me that the consequent sales subtraction from brick-and-mortar stores would lead to closures, which would lead to longer travel times for customers to get to the stores, which in turn would drive more people to purchase print or digital books online. And that would lead to more closures. This is a virtuous circle if you’re in the ebook business or sell print online. Or if you want to see Americans consume less gasoline.

It is a vicious cycle — a death spiral — if you’re a bookstore.

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch reported (you have to subscribe to use the links) that BookScan numbers show a drop in unit sales of printed books of 4.4 % from 2009 to 2010. But don’t take that number to any bank. It is already out of date. Cader did a further analysis of more recent BookScan data shortly thereafter showing that print book sales have dropped by over 15% compared to the prior year over the first six weeks of 2011! And the share of print sold online keeps rising, so that almost certainly means that print sales in stores has fallen even faster. Could print sales in stores have dropped 20% or 25% from a year ago? They certainly could!

Sales of iPads, Kindles, and Nooks exceeded most expectations for Christmas 2010. Dominique Raccah, the head of independent publisher Sourcebook, a company with a diverse trade list, reported on her blog that dollar sales at her company in January were 35% digital!

No wonder she says, “We may well be at the tipping point. I suspect that we’re going to see some dramatic reassessment when publishers look at their numbers at the end of the first quarter, 2011.”

I have heard the argument from very smart people that ebook adoption will plateau at some point. Since it has been doubling or more for the past three years and was often placed in the mid-teens for new fiction and narrative non-fiction by the last quarter of 2010, we know that it can’t continue to double for the next three years without exceeding 100%. Nonetheless, predictions that ebook sales would achieve 50% in the next five years and that bookstore shelf space would drop by 50% in the next five years — which is what I thought would be the case — seemed pretty aggressive six months ago.

They don’t seem aggressive anymore.

The Borders share of the publishers’ revenue is estimated to be about 8%. They could be 10% or 12% of brick-and-mortar. So if Borders were to completely disappear tomorrow (and they aren’t about to do that) and even if every book they sold in their stores were somehow purchased at somebody else’s store (which won’t happen), the reduction of book sales in stores is so large that all the other stores would still, collectively, be looking at a substantial year-on-year sales decline.

All this means that 2011 that is going to be a real “fasten your seat belts” year for publishers. And Raccah is right that publishers are going to be a bit stunned at what they see when they look at their numbers for the first quarter of this year.

One impact that sophisticated publishers are well aware of but that is not obvious to the untrained eye is that as sales go down, returns percentages, inevitably and inexorably, go up. When a publisher calculates a returns percentage for any period — a week, a month, a quarter, or a year — they are measuring the returns received and credited in that period against the sales made in that period. But the returns actually come from the sales made in prior periods; even in the worst of situations, very few books are returned less than three months following their purchase.

So what’s happening right now is that shipments out are being depressed — no or very little Borders and diminished expectations everywhere else — while returns are rising because they’re coming back from orders placed against the higher expectations of the past six to 12 months. That means that the net sales numbers being created right now — shipments out minus returns — might, for many, be a disappointment verging on devastation.

And returns percentages aren’t the only percentages that are going to be troubling. Two others that publishers look at are also going to get more challenging.

The percentage of a book’s print price that is constituted by the “unit cost of manufacture” is one. The unit cost is extremely run-sensitive. If you’re printing fewer books and if you have to hold the line on retail prices (both of which will almost certainly be true), the percentage of revenue spent on creating the print books is going to rise.

The second trouble spot is that publishers like to think about the cost of “fixed overheads” as a percentage. Many publishers still follow the unwise practice of putting a percentage calculation of overhead into their unit cost calculations for every book. But if sales volume falls faster than overheads can be reduced, that percentage rises too. And you can’t fire your way to rapid overhead reductions very effectively. Shedding staff is often an illusion anyway; we keep hearing about freelancers getting work because publishers have fired the staff that used to do it. But, besides that, warehouse and office space costs and systems investments don’t rise or drop with volume (which is exactly why it is a logical error to calculate them as a percentage of revenue!) Publishers who are using a percent figure for overhead to calculate their margins on each title they acquire to sell are going to find those numbers need to be reconsidered as well.

While Barnes & Noble will be feeling the margin pain of all brick-and-mortar booksellers, they are, no doubt, also very well aware of their growing importance to all publishers in an upcoming Borders-less (or less-Borders) world. B&N will almost certainly be looking for better trading terms and publishers will almost certainly feel the weakness in their negotiating position dealing with those requests. And that’s aside from the fact that publishers really and truly want a healthy Barnes & Noble maintaining its ability to show their wares to the public.

So sales are going down, returns are going up, the cost of goods is going up, margins from sales are going down, and right-sizing overheads is going to be an accelerating problem. The good news is that ebook sales are rising and the margins from them — at least for now — have been pretty well preserved.

But the first significant sign that ebook prices are going to tumble has arrived with the news that 99 cent ebooks are now beginning to appear on the mainstream media’s ebook and combined bestsellers lists which come from The New York Times and USA Today. This creates some nasty problems. It puts previously unknown authors selling 99 cent books before the public as bestseller creators. And it encourages the established publishers to cut prices to register unit sales to get on those lists themselves.

At the very least, I’d expect publishers to start asking The Times and USA Today to consider the total revenue a book generates at retail (price times units) when creating the lists, not base them on unit sales alone. Since the established publishers buy a lot more ads than the 99-cent-book authors do, we should expect them to, at least, get a hearing.

Publishers are going to be scrambling to keep their business profitable and having second thoughts about many of their most time-honored practices in the weeks to come.

The necessity for publishers to reduce their hard-copy operating costs, the reality that smaller as well as fewer bookstores are inevitable, and the overall question of shrinking shelf space are topics we have explored before.  But it is intrinsically difficult for those of us who have been in the book business for decades to envision life without a robust bookstore channel. The current unfortunate news about Borders suggests that it won’t require a great imagination for very much longer.

One thing that has changed considerably in the last 20 years is the huge increase in information available to publishers about what is going on in the supply chain: that is, they can track the books between their own warehouse and the end consumer purchase. The Big Kahuna of information, of course, is provided by BookScan, based on cash register capture of data as books are sold at outlets all over the country. BookScan not only lets its subscribers see the activity on their own books; it gives everybody a view of every book in the industry.

But as valuable as the BookScan data can be to discern trends and the performance of competiton and potential competion in the marketplace, it has real limitations as well. Knowing the sales without knowing the inventory is like knowing the number of hits a batter had without knowing how many times the batter came to the plate or knowing how many games a team won but not knowing how many games they played. Some books that are scoring low in BookScan’s data never had a chance: there weren’t enough copies in stores to enable a robust sale. And some books that are scoring high in Bookscan’s data are not going to be profitable because the number of distributed copies that won’t sell (and which will end up back in the publisher’s possession) is higher than the number that do.

Over a decade ago, pioneered by Barnes & Noble and Ingram, the biggest retailers and wholesalers started to provide publishers with data about how their inventory was performing for that trading partner. This data had the advantage of being far more complete and analyzable, but a publisher could only look at their own books’ performance. Because BookScan presented summary global sales numbers and everybody’s books, the BookScan reporting was what tended to be of interest across a company: to editors and marketers and top executives. But the more granular view of a company’s own inventory provided by the individual account reports was pure gold for the sales department and for the then-emerging supply chain management function.

When we first started helping publishers mine these reports in the early part of the decade, the practice at most publishing houses was for somebody in the sales department to look at the weekly spreadsheets, extract whatever insight they could, and then throw them out when the next week’s reports arrived. We were handed an assignment by our friend Charlie Nurnberg, then VP and Director of Sales at then-independent publisher Sterling. (It is a pure coincidence that Charlie’s name never appeared in the blog until my last post and now he’s in two consecutive ones!)

Charlie said, “for years we had 1000 titles on our backlist. I got the B&N green bar report (there was a time when all computer reports were green bar reports) each week and went over it with a fine-tooth comb and I knew everything that was going on. Now we have 5000 titles on the backlist, I have delegated the coverage of B&N to two people, and I know things are falling between cracks. Can you help me get a handle on it?”

To respond to this request, we did two simple things. First we databased the reports, so we could look at data across a longer period than one week at a time. (For fast-moving titles, a week in a chain can tell you a lot, although it certainly can’t give you trending insight that multiple weeks give. For slower-moving titles, a week’s sales might tell you almost nothing at all.)

The second thing we did was to contruct some simple metrics, so we could sort the reports by something other than the total inventory and total sales for stores and distribution centers that B&N provided. There were two key things we looked at right off the bat: the percentage of the week’s store-on-sale inventory that had sold and the percentage of the book’s stock that was kept in the distribution center. The first trick was to look for books that had a high percentage sellthrough but a relatively low number of copies on sale in stores. Presumably putting more copies out in stores would increase sales to everybody’s advantage. The second trick was to find the books which had a high percentage of inventory in the distribution center. Those books, we felt, were in greater danger of being returned. In general, publishers prefer to keep excess inventory in their warehouse.

These weekly Flash Reports quickly proved to be very valuable. The first day I showed them to Charlie and his team, we sorted the warehouse percentage in descending order. The two books at the top had 5000 copies each in stock, all of them in the warehouse! It turns out those books had been there for three months. There was a flaw in the B&N system — repaired almost immediately as a result of this discovery — that allowed a bulk purchase to be made by a buyer but didn’t require a distribution plan for the books. Sales management at the publishers, focused on looking at books in descending order of sales (which is what Sterling and just about everybody else did with those reports), might never notice that books sitting in the warehouse and not distributed to stores were also reported in the same spreadsheet.

This tool for discovery was well-received by Sterling, but it was also well-received by B&N. Their very enlightened inventory management team understood that having publishers doing sound analysis of the data they provided could be helpful to them. After all, the books sitting in the warehouse were painful to B&N as well to Sterling; that inventory investment was on their balance sheet (and, as it turned out, these particular books had been purchased on a “no returns” basis!)

In time, the business of doing sales data analysis grew for us. In addition to the weekly Flash Reports, we designed Stock Turn Reports to enable meaningful analysis of slower-moving backlist. We started computing the overall stock turn for a publishers’ books by store section, which was necessary to really decide whether a title’s stock turn was good or bad. Turning 1.3 might be nowhere good enough in fiction, but it might be heroic in philosophy or poetry. All of this analysis began to demonstrate the realities of bookstore economics to the sales reps and it got them thinking the way the store buyers do, where stock turn is a critical metric.

It wasn’t long before other publishers were using what we called the Supply Chain Tracker service and asking us to provide the same insight from the data provided by other accounts. Soon we were doing similar analysis for data from Borders, Books-A-Million, Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and Amazon. For publishers using us across accounts, we were also able to provide a much wider view of how their inventory was performing. We built spreadsheets showing what the percentage sellthrough was across retailers and across wholesalers and distribution centers. This information helped our clients match the growth and shrinkage of inventory across all accounts to respond to rising, and then usually declining, sales of a title.

We discovered a great opportunity in cross-account exception reporting. We’d look for the books that sold well in Borders but were under-represented at B&N and, of course, the larger number of titles that were the opposite: selling well in B&N but not well represented at Borders. That, and the stark differences in stock turn and percentage sellthrough between the two chains, would have told a perceptive sales director many years ago to expect the problems the Borders chain faces today.

At its peak, about four or five years ago, we were delivering Supply Chain Tracker reports to quite a few publishers, including Hachette, Harcourt, Chronicle, and Motorbooks. We did tutorials on our techniques for several major publishers, among them S&S, HarperCollins, Penguin, Perseus, and Scholastic. And B&N supported our efforts to teach the analytical techniques to university presses, including Harvard, Yale, California, and Chicago.

David Young learned what we were doing when he was running Little Brown UK and soon we found ourselves applying our techniques to data provided to them by Waterstone’s. When TimeWarner was sold to Hachette, our efforts were spread further around the Hachette UK companies and, at one time, we were doing Waterstone’s reports for four different Hachette divisions in London.

But, over time, big companies saw the importance of this kind of supply chain analysis and they brought it inhouse and, in many cases, extended it. That wasn’t good for Supply Chain Tracker, but it was the right thing for those companies to do for themselves. We stopped doing this work for US clients two years ago; we’ve just had our last two British clients take the function in-house. So for the first time in eight years, sales data analysis is no longer part of what we do.

The level of sophistication of inventory management in the supply chain by big publishers has taken a huge leap in the time since we started doing this work. I think we provided some impetus for that leap. This analysis will, paradoxically, be of increasing commercial value as brick-and-mortar sales decline in the years to come. Getting inventory levels right in years of relatively stable print sales was a key to profitability. Getting inventories and printings right in the period of print sales decline we face for the forseeable future will be a key to survival.

I wear with pride the fact that nobody else programming a conference on “digital change in publishing” has chosen to feature agents — both their challenges and their opinions —  the way we do on the program at Digital Book World. But we’re also covering the topic of this post. We’ve put together a panel of very experienced sales executives (Jaci Updike from Random House, Michael Selleck from Simon & Schuster, Alison Lazarus from Macmillan, and Rich Freese from National Book Network and moderated by David Wilk, who has years of trade sales experience) to talk about the evolution of the sales department. Find that on somebody else’s digital change program! And good luck to the trade publisher who rides into the future without agents and managing down the print and physical supply chain top of mind.