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Blog posts have been scarcer for the past couple of months because I’ve been so engaged with a major responsibility: putting together what amounts to 7-1/2 days of conference programming that will be presented on four days next month in New York City.

As most readers of this blog probably know, we’re responsible for the programming of the two-day extravaganza that is Digital Book World. DBW 2013 — taking place on January 16 and 17 at the Hilton New York Hotel — will be the fourth iteration of the event, which aims to explore the commercial challenges facing trade publishing in the digital transition. DBW is not about technology per se; it is about the business problems publishers must cope with in an age of technological change.

DBW’s main two days are divided between morning plenary programming — all 1500+ people in one big room — and afternoon breakouts. We’ll have up to five simultaneous breakout sessions in each of three slots each day. So we have what amounts to 4-1/2 days of programming in the breakouts plus one on the main stage.

Because people really do come from all over the world to attend DBW, we were delighted to agree when they asked us at Publishers Launch Conferences (the conference business I own with Michael Cader) to add a show on each side of theirs to build out a week of programming. (The team at DBW itself are also putting together some pre-conference workshops that will run on Tuesday.)

So on Tuesday, January 15, we’ll do our second annual “Children’s Publishing Goes Digital” conference at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium (put together with the invaluable assistance of our Conference Chair and close friend, Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners). And on Friday, January 18, we’re presenting (in conjunction with the DBW team) a new program called “Authors Launch“, a full day of marketing advice for publisher-published authors. (Self-published authors are welcome and will learn a lot, but the program is framed for authors who are working with publishers, not looking for ways to avoid them.)

Programming the “Children’s Publishing Goes Digital” show revealed what we think will be the most important theme in the children’s book space for the next few years: the development of  digital “platforms” that, like subscription offerings (which some, but not all of them, clearly are), will “capture” consumers and make them much less likely to get ebooks and other digital media from outside of it. The list of platform aspirants in this space is long and varied: Storia from Scholastic; RRKidz from Reading Rainbow (the TV show brand); Poptropica from Pearson (which launched Wimpy Kid before it was a book); Magic Town; Disney; Capstone; and Brain Hive. All of them are presenting, as well as NOOK, which, like Amazon Kindle, has announced parental controls on its platform that encourage parents to manage their kids’ reading experience there.

There are other big issues in children’s publishing, particularly the creation of original IP by publishers so they can better exploit the licensing opportunities that follow in the wake of successful kids’ books. We’ll have data presentations from Bowker and from Peter Hildick-Smith of Codex to help our audience understand how kids books are found and selected outside the bookstore in today’s environment.

But we know that the digital discovery and purchase routines will be markedly affected by the platforms as they establish themselves. Publishers are faced with an interesting conundrum. They can’t reach the audiences that are loyal to a platform without going through the platform. But it is the presence of many publishers’ books that strengthens the attraction of the platform and, once it gains critical mass, the value of the content to it (and probably what it will be willing to pay for the content) is reduced. So publishers licensing content to these platforms may be strengthening beasts that will ultimately eat them. I think the roundtable conversation Lorraine and I will lead at the end of the day, which will include publishers Karen Lotz of Candlewick, Barbara Marcus of Random House, and Kate Wilson of Nosy Crow, will have interesting things to say about that paradox.

We’ve developed some “traditions” in the four years we’ve been doing Digital Book World. As we’ve done the past two years, the plenary sessions will open on Tuesday with the “CEOs’ view of the future” panel organized and moderated by David Nussbaum, the CEO of DBW’s owner F+W Media and the man who really dreamed up the idea of this conference. David will be joined this year by Marcus Leaver of Quarto, Karen Lotz of Candlewick, and Gary Gentel of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. And Michael Cader and I will — as we have every year at DBW — moderate a panel to close the plenaries, “looking back and looking forward” with agent Simon Lipskar of Writers House; Harper’s new Chief Digital Officer, Chantal Restivo-Alessi, and Osprey CEO Rebecca Smart.

Among the presenters on the main stage who will be unlike what our audiences usually hear at a digital publishing conference will be Teddy Goff, the digital director for the Obama campaign, who will talk about targeting and marketing techniques that might serve us well in the publishing world; Ben Evans of Enders Analysis in London, who will tell us how publishing fits into the strategies of the big tech companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) that he tracks regularly*; ex-Macmillan president and now private equity investor Brian Napack, talking with Michael Cader about the investment climate in publishing; and Michael D. Smith, Professor of Information Technology and Marketing from Carnegie-Mellon, talking about a study he and his colleagues have done on the real commercial impact of piracy.

(We’ve also scheduled a breakout session for Teddy Goff so he can talk more about the Obama campaign for those in attendance who want to learn more of its lessons to apply.)

We’re also delighted to have gotten Robert Oeste, Senior Programmer and Analyst from Johns Hopkins University Press, to deliver his wonderfully insightful, entertaining, and informative presentation on XML, the subject so many of us in publishing need to understand better than we do. And we will after he’s done. (We’re also giving Oeste a break-out slot to talk about metadata which I’ll bet a lot of our audience will choose to attend after they’ve heard him on XML.)

Some authors have had remarkable success without help from publishers in the past year, but few or none more than Hugh Howey, the author of “Wool”, who has just signed a groundbreaking print-only deal for the US with Simon & Schuster. His dystopian futurist novel has sold hundreds of thousands of self-published ebook copies and rights all over the world and to Hollywood. We’ll have a chat with Howey about how he did it and we’ll be joined by his agent, Kristin Nelson, for that dialogue. Kristin will stick around to join a panel of other agents (Jay Mandel of William Morris Endeavor, Steve Axelrod, and Jane Dystel from Dystel & Goderich) to talk about “Straddling the Models”: authors who work with publishers but are also doing some things on their own.

We will have several panels addressing the challenges of discovery and discoverability from different angles. One called “Closing the New Book Discovery Gap” teams Patrick Brown of Goodreads with three publishing marketers — Matt Baldacci of Macmillan, Angela Tribelli of HarperCollins, and Rachel Chou of Open Road — and is chaired by Peter Hildick-Smith. That will focus on what publishers can do with metadata and digital marketing to make it more likely their titles will get “found”. Barbara Genco of Library Journal will share data on library patron behaviors and then helm a panel discussion with Baker & Taylor, 3M, Darien Public Library, and Random House exploring the role of libraries in driving book discovery and sales. Another session called “Making Content Searchable, Findable, and Shareable” introduces three new propositions from Matt MacInnis of Inkling, Linda Holliday of Citia, and Patricia Payton of Bowker, along with SEO expert Gary Price of INFODocket. Publishing veteran Neal Goff (who is also the proud father of Obama’s digital director) will moderate that one. MacInnis, Holliday, and Payton offer services that will help publishers improve the search for their books. Price will talk knowledgeably about how the search engines will react to these stimuli.

We’re covering new business model experimentation (with Evan Ratliff of The Atavist, Brendan Cahill of Nature Share, Todd McGarity of Hachette, and Chris Bauerle of Sourcebooks) where publishers discuss ways to generate revenue that are not the old-fashioned ones. We’ll underscore the point that we’re about changes caused by technology rather than being about technology with our “Changing Retail Marketplace” panel, featuring publishers and wholesalers talking about the growth of special sales (through retailers that aren’t bookstores and other non-retail channels).

The future for illustrated books will be discussed by a panel with a big stake in how it goes: John Donatich of Yale University Press, Michael Jacobs of Abrams, Marcus Leaver of Quarto, and JP Leventhal of Black Dog & Leventhal. Two publishers who have invested in Hollywood — Brendan Dineen of Macmillan and Pete Harris of Penguin — will talk about the synergies between publishing and the movies with consultant Swanna McNair of Creative Conduit.

We will have major US publishers and Ingram talking about exports: developments in the export market for books — print and digital. And we’ll have some non-US publishers joining Tina Pohlman of Open Road and Patricia Arancibia of Barnes & Noble talking about imports: non-US publishers using the digital transition to get a foothold in the US market.

One session I think has been needed but never done before is called “Clearing the Path” and it is about eliminating the obstacles to global ebook sales. That one will start with a presentation by Nathan Maharaj and Ashleigh Gardner of Kobo where they will enumerate all the contractual and procedural reasons why ebooks are just not available for sale in markets they could reach. And then Kobo will join a panel conversation with Joe Mangan of Perseus and agent Brian Defiore to talk about why those barriers exist and what might be done in the future to remove them.

Oh, yes, there’s much much more: audience-centric (what I call “vertical”) publishing; the changing role of editors; the evolving author-publisher relationship; and a conversation about the “gamification” of children’s books. David Houle, the futurist and Sourcebook author who wowed the DBW 2012 audience, will return with his Sourcebooks editor, Stephanie Bowen, to discuss their version of “agile” publishing: getting audience feedback to chunks before publishing a whole book.

We will also do some stuff that is more purely “tech”. We have a panel on “Evolving Standards and Formats” discussing the costs and benefits of EPUB3 adoption, which will be moderated by Bill McCoy of IDPF. Our frequent collaborator Ted Hill will lead a discussion about “The New Publishing IT Department”. Bill Kasdorf of Apex will moderate a discussion about “Cross-Platform Challenges and Opportunities” which is about delivering content to new channels.

But purely tech is the exception at Digital Book World, not the rule.

And purely tech won’t show up at all at Authors Launch on Friday, January 18, the day after Digital Book World.

Authors Launch is what we think is the first all-day marketing seminar aimed squarely at authors with a publisher, not authors trying to work without one. It is pretty universally taken as a given that authors can do more than they ever have before to promote themselves and their books and that publishers should expect and encourage them to do that. But, beyond that, there is very little consensus. What should the publisher do and what should the author do? That question is going to be addressed, in many different ways, throughout the day.

The Authors Launch program covers developing an author brand, author involvement and support for their book’s launch, basic information about keyword search and SEO, use of metrics and analysis, a primer on media training, when and how to hire a publicist or other help, and a special session on making the best use of Goodreads. We’ll cover “audience-centric” marketing, teaching authors to think about their “vertical” — their market — and understand it.

The faculty for Authors Launch includes the most talented marketers and publicists helping authors today: Dan Blank, co-authors MJ Rose and Randy Susan Meyers, journalist Porter Anderson, David Wilk, Meryl Moss, Lucinda Blumenfeld, agent Jason Allen Ashlock, and former Random House digital marketer Pete McCarthy.

We have assembled a group of publishers and an agent to discuss how an author should select the best places to invest their time from the staggering array of choices. (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etcetera.) That panel will include agent Jennifer Weltz of The Naggar Agency as well as Matt Baldacci of Macmillan, Rachel Chou of Open Road, Rick Joyce of Perseus, and Kate Stark of Penguin. Matt Schwartz, VP, Director of Digital Marketing and Strategy for the Random House Publishing Group, will conduct the session on metrics.

A feature of both our Kids show on Tuesday and the Author show on Friday are opportunities for the audience to interact with the presenters in smaller groups so each person can get his or her own questions answered. At Kids we’ll do that at lunchtime, seating many of our presenters at tables with a sign carrying their name so our attendees can sit with them and engage. At Authors Launch, we’ll be conducting rounds of workshops, crafted so that the authors can get help in their own vertical (genre fiction, literary fiction, topical non-fiction, juvies, and so forth), and on the topics of greatest need for them.

We are sure the week of January 15-18 will prove to be an energizing and stimulating one for all of us living in the book publishing world. We hope you’ll join us.

Digital Book World Week | January 15-18, 2013

Children’s Publishing Goes Digital | Tuesday, January 15, McGraw-Hill Auditorium
DBW Pre-Conference Workshops | Tuesday, January 15, Hilton New York Hotel
Digital Book World Conference + Expo | January 16-17, Hilton New York Hotel
Authors Launch | Friday, January 18, Hilton New York Hotel

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My eye was caught at the end of last week by a story in The Bookseller that acknowledged that ebooks just haven’t worked for illustrated books. It appears that the publishers of illustrated books they spoke to for the piece think that situation is temporary. The Managing Director of Thames & Hudson, Jamie Camplin, is quoted as saying “you have to make a very clear distinction between the situation now and the situation in five years time.” And Dorling Kindersley CEO John Duhigg emphasized that his team is being kept up to date with digital workflows and innovations, so they can “be there with the right product at the right time.”

But maybe, except for an opportunity that will arise here and there, for illustrated book publishers trying to exploit the same creative development across both print and digital, there won’t ever be a “right time”. There certainly is no guarantee there will be.

Duhigg characterized what he called “the black and white digital business” (but which I think would more accurately be described as “the immersive reading digital business”) as “flowing along” while admitting it is “very different” for the companies with “fully-illustrated lists”.

That’s accurate. Expecting that to change could well be wishful thinking.

Illustrated books in printed form depend on bookstores more than novels and biographies do. If the value in a book is in its visual presentation, then you might want to look at it before buying it, and the view you’d get of it online might not be doing justice to what you’d see if you held the book in your hands.

Camplin sees that optimistically. He has an aggressively modernist view of what will happen with novels. “I don’t see why print should survive at all for fiction, beyond the odd bibliophile” which he apparently believes could open up more bookstore display space for illustrated books.

But if the buyers of Patterson and Evanovich and 50 Shades of Gray aren’t visiting bookstores to make those purchases anymore, will there be any traffic to look at the illustrated books, however prominently they are displayed?

This problem has been nagging at me for a while. Books are illustrated for two reasons: beauty or explanatory purpose, more the latter than the former. When they’re illustrated to better explain, such as showing you how to knit a stitch or make a candle or a piece of jewelry, wouldn’t a video be a better option most of the time? If the illustration is a map, isn’t it likely that being able to manage overlays digitally (for the movement of the weather or the troops on the battlefield or the adjustment of borders over time) will deliver more clarity than whatever stills were in the book?

Of course, these things can be done by book publishers for the digital versions. But they require creating or licensing and then integrating new content assets and rethinking and redesigning the presentation. And that’s not even accounting for the work involved in adjusting the content to multiple screen sizes, a problem that just keeps getting more challenging as more different tablet and phone screen sizes are introduced.

One major publisher I know really endeavors to make ebooks of all their new title output, which includes some imprints that do a lot of illustrated books. Like everybody else, they frequently see ebook sales of 50% and more of their fiction, and 25% or more on immersive-reading non-fiction. But the illustrated books are in the single-digit percentages most of the time, with some of the more successful categories in the very low double-digits.

This is in the US — two years or more after the launch of the iPad and Nook Color and nearly a year after the launch of the Kindle Fire. Poor sales of illustrated ebooks can no longer be attributed to a lack of devices that can deliver them effectively.

And the ubiquity of these highly-capable devices brings its own new set of headaches. We were discussing the recent Bowker reporting that more people are reading ebooks on multi-function devices than on dedicated e-ink readers with our favorite expert on reading habit data, Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group. He concurs and says that, as a result, the ebook consumption per reader threatens to go down.

Hildick-Smith points out that the tablet is a sea change in the history of content and consumption. Up until now, each content form had its own delivery mechanism. Records and cassettes and even MP3s were delivered through devices made just for them, just like the programming on TV and radio. Books on Kindles and Nooks replicated that paradigm. When you turned on your Kindle, you were as buried in your book as you were when it was in paper.

This is no longer true. If the book you’re reading on an iPad or Kindle Fire or Nexus 7 gets boring or you get tired of it, you can switch to a movie, The New York Times, your favorite song, or Angry Birds with the same device. Or the chime on your iPhone will ring taking you out of your book to answer an email.

For the publisher of novels, this means the book is competing with other media that would accomplish a different purpose. For the publisher of illustrated books, the book also must compete with media accomplishing the same purpose (how many new instructional videos of knitting stitches or jewelry-making techniques are posted to YouTube every day?) But they can’t do it for the same price, because that price is free.

So the illustrated book publisher not only has to learn how to make videos (a skill they were never previously required to possess), they also have to come up with a business model that enables their videos to be part of a priced commercial product, competing with legions of them that are free. And they have to finance a substantial creative component that isn’t contributing value to the print version at all.

We know our industry is changing radically. Different business models are challenged in different ways. Most of our time on this blog, perhaps too much of it, is spent contemplating how that affects the biggest publishers and the biggest books. There’s a reason for that. Big books have always driven the consumer book business and that seems to be more true than ever, not less.

But the challenge for — very specifically — “general illustrated book publishing” seems much more severe. The big publishers I’ve talked to apparently see that. Nobody has been explicit about it, but it sure feels like they can see a profitable path to navigate digital change with immersive reading books but not with illustrated ones.

I’ve also talked to mostly-illustrated publishers. Nobody says “you’re wrong, Mike. This is how we’re going to continue succeeding using our content-development skills, marketing capabilities, and talent network when bookstore shelf space is insignificant.” A couple of them have said “I don’t agree” without specifics. Most admit that they see the problem but haven’t yet figured out a solution.

There may not be one.

Camplin of Thames & Hudson is quoted at the end of The Bookseller piece saying, “I think it’s sort of a waste of money to assume the market is there [at the moment]; however, it would be foolish to say it will be this way forever.”

It might be equally foolish to say, or bet, that it won’t.

Of course, there is one strategy that can work: a vertical one. If you’re using illustrated book output to build a community of the interested, then you’ll presumably be able to sell them other things (software, live events, databases, services) when illustrated books are past their sell-by date. That’s the Osprey and F+W strategy and you can see sense in it because books are only part, and almost certainly a diminishing percentage, of their sales portfolio.

In fact, it is companies like these that might use technology like Ron Martinez’s Aerbook Maker tools and be able to use their books as a springboard to digital products with commercial value. They’ll probably also want to discover fotoLibra’s “advanceImages” scheme for micropayment of royalties instead of advance licensing fees for photographs. What Aerbook and fotoLibra offer can reduce the cost of creating an illustrated or enhanced ebook by 80%. That would certainly help.

It’s been obvious to me for a long time that managing the cost side of enhanced ebook creation is critical, which is why I was a sucker for the original Blio pitch in December of 2009.

For any publisher who claims a vertical strategy is their solution, the metrics to track are the sales they make of things other than books and the sales they make outside of bookstores. That is: track what is sustainable and has the potential to grow, not what is bound to shrink.

Relevant piece of anecdata: I remember being told by somebody at Wiley a couple of years ago that a large portfolio of photographs added measurable revenue on their travel sites. For very little cost, they could make a selection of photographs available for browsing. People clicked through them pulling up a new ad each time they did. That’s the “illustrated book publishing” of the future, but it starts with having the audience.

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Much of the change we are living through in publishing is plain as day to see. The shift from print to digital, like the shift from stores to online purchasing, is evident to all of us, inside the industry and out.

But there’s another aspect of the change that is not nearly as visible and that’s around systems and workflows. Publishing, even in the pre-digital age, was a systems-driven business. The big companies are producing 3,000 to 5,000 titles a year: each one with its own unique contract, metadata, editing requirements, and (in most cases) market. I like to observe that “each book published presents the opportunity to make an unlimited number of decisions, which must be resisted.” Most of the time the systems don’t help so much in making the decisions, but it takes a lot of support just to keep track of them all and report them to each person who needs to know!

Over the years, the companies with stronger systems have tended to acquire the companies with weaker ones. It doesn’t always work out that way, but it has most of the time. And over the years there have been stories about when publishers almost lost their business because systems broke down. The original Macmillan (now a division of Simon & Schuster) almost died in the 1960s when they fell so far behind on returns processing that they couldn’t properly dun bookstores to pay their bills. In the late 1980s or early 90s, Penguin had a warehouse crisis that was a similar existential threat. A friend of mine with a process-oriented consulting practice really made his year working on that problem.

In the digital age, systems are once again front and center. Every publisher is facing new requirements and seeing the parameters change for the old ones. Most of a trade publisher’s revenue, for at least a while longer, comes from print but the digital side is where the growth is. Systems have to support both.

Until recently, publishers ran on systems that were, primarily, housed on their own computers, either created or heavily customized by their own IT departments, and the operators in the publishing house (editors, production people, marketers, salespeople) were at the mercy of their IT department queues. If they wanted something done, they had to get on line for tech support.

And smaller publishers doing 50 titles or 100 titles or 200 titles a year had to make do with less robust, less customized, and often less capable systems even though their outputs also required thousands of decisions to be tracked and they are no less affected by the shift from print to digital.

But this is changing. Or maybe we should say it has changed. The new systems in publishing are Cloud-based. They are frequently referred to as SaaS: software as a service. They don’t live on a company’s own computers but are hosted by the service provider. They often don’t require an IT department to customize them and they certainly don’t require an IT department to keep them up to date. And the best news of all is that they are cheaper to acquire and faster to install in a company’s workflow than the systems of the past.

Within this change, there is enormous opportunity. Big publishers can sidestep the tricky question of scaling down their print-based systems and scaling up their digital ones. Small publishers can now use systems and workflows that give them capabilities equivalent to their much larger competitors.

But nothing comes pain- or hassle-free and neither do Cloud systems. Executives in big companies find their IT-led systems configuration challenged. When an operator in the production department decides they need a Cloud service like Dropbox to move files around, they don’t need to get IT support to put it in. But IT departments are still responsible for providing support and integrating all of a house’s technology. So “unsanctioned technology” starts to abound and IT departments don’t like that.

They might also not like the fact that Cloud systems could result in cuts to their budget and headcount. Can non-technical executives feel comfortable that their IT departments will look at cost-reducing Cloud systems the same way the CEO or CFO would?

In smaller companies, Cloud systems are a much less ambiguous benefit providing, as they often do, capabilities a smaller house would never be able to afford as a stand-alone system. But without an IT department, how do you know which Cloud offering is best? And how does a company without much in the way of inside tech knowledge and almost no surplus labor cope with implementation?

It was these questions that moved us to stage our first technology-centric Publishers Launch Conference. It is called “Publishing in the Cloud” and it will take place at Baruch College on 25th Street and Lexington Avenue on July 26.

Our conference really has three groups of resources for attendees: big publishers, smaller publishers, and suppliers of Cloud services. For the most part, the publishers will speak from the stage and the suppliers will be available at breaks and during a 2-hour “conversations with the experts” session when both the suppliers and the speakers will be available to talk in small enough groups so that all the conference attendees can get their own specific questions answered.

Some context and stage-setting will come from my Publishers Launch Conferences partner Michael Cader, whose Publishers Lunch and Publishers Marketplace enterprise has been a heavy user of Cloud services, which he will explain. Ted Hill of THA Consulting, who was the one who first clued me to this topic, will sketch out the landscape, segmenting the service offerings, spelling out the suppliers in the various niches, and providing a “checklist” for publishers looking into these services. And our Platinum sponsor TCS, Tata Consulting Services, did a survey of hundreds of companies using Cloud services from which they will deliver useful insights.

Looking at this from the perspective of big publishers, we have Ken Michaels of Hachette and Yuvi Kochar of The Washington Post. Michaels will kick off the day with his take on why Cloud services are critical to publishers at this time. Michaels is the Chair of Book Industry Study Group, so he speaks from an industry-wide perspective. In fact, he was instrumental in persuading us that the overall topic of Cloud services for publishing was worthy of an all-day conference, which it never had before.

Michaels will also talk about tools that Hachette developed because they needed them and they didn’t exist which they are now able to offer to other publishers on a Cloud model.

Kochar is the CTO of The Washington Post companies. He uses a Cloud model to distribute both internally-developed and outside services to his constituent companies, which include the newspaper and Kaplan Publishing. Kochar will talk about his company’s service model and the organizational structure it takes to make sure things will all work a level removed from the solution provider.

Another presentation from a large company discussing an implementation will be from Alfredo Santana of John Wiley. They have just put in the RightsLink capability offered by our global sponsor, Copyright Clearance Center, to automate the licensing of permission requests directly from the publisher’s website. RightsLink, which is used by many top publishers, can be a big labor-saver and revenue-producer, but it takes planning and work to do a proper implementation, particularly at a company like Wiley that has such a range of markets to serve.

And we’ll have a panel of big publishers, including Ralph Munsen of Hachette, Rick Schwartz of HarperCollins, Bruce Marcus of McGraw-Hill, and Chris Hart of Random House discussing “The Changing Role of the IT Department”, addressing the many issues I referred to earlier in this piece.

We have two speakers who have a broad view of the challenges smaller publishers face. Rick Joyce of our global sponsor Constellation serves the needs of more than 300 publishers who use their services and, among other things, rely on them to vet Cloud offerings for them.

Michael Covington will call on his previous role with the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association where he was responsible for vetting and inking partnerships with various cloud-based service companies such as Firebrand Technologies, Metacomet, and Bowker.  Now serving as the Director of Digital Content for David C Cook, an international non-profit which publishes trade books, music and curriculum for the Christian church worldwide, Covington will also discuss the opportunities and challenges publishers face in moving from legacy systems and “tribal knowledge” to a “Service Oriented Architecture”.

Andrea Fleck-Nesbit of Workman has an interesting case history to talk about. Workman is taking the Title Management capabilities developed as an in-house system by its Canadian distributor and helping turn it into a hosted offering so they can use it too.

Covington and Fleck-Nesbit will be joined by Patricia Gallagher of Liberty Fund and Bonnie Russell of Wayne State University Press, both of which have just completed their own switchover to a Cloud service for core functions. As a panel they will extend the discussion about smaller publishers finding and implementing Cloud services.

For two hours in the afternoon, our attendees will be able to meet with our expert speakers and our sponsors in small groups to facilitate more focused discussions, In addition to CCC, Constellation, and TCS, event sponsors for “Publishing in the Cloud” include Firebrand Technologies, IBM, Klopotek, and Virtusales.

Cloud computing for publishing is a big subject and an important one that has gotten no focused attention before now. We think our conference will give our attendees, and the industry, a quick start getting a handle on the opportunities and how to take advantage of them.

On this coming Wednesday, July 11, we will have a FREE 1-hour webinar on this subject. Michael Cader and I will be joined by conference speakers Ken Michaels of Hachette, Rick Joyce of Perseus, and Ted Hill of THA Consulting as well as by John Wicker of TCS. The webinar will touch the high spots of this very important topic. And, as I said, the webinar is free!

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What are the important topics to discuss today concerning publishing and digital change? I think we’ve got most of them covered at Publishers Launch BEA, the one-day conference we’ll stage at the Javits Center next Monday, June 4.

Our all-day event has sixteen distinct presentations and panels. There may be a topic of interest to somebody somewhere that we won’t cover, but we’re definitely not missing much.

The day will begin with a review of recent industry developments from Publishers Launch co-founder Michael Cader. As I write this, the news of the moment is “Waterstones will sell Kindles”. That event, and others that may follow between now and then, will be put into context by the man who prepares our daily Publishers Lunch. Michael likes to point out the topics we spend more time discussing than they’re worth. Those observations are always amusing and insightful.

We’ve noticed that cloud solutions — commonly called SaaS, “software as a service” — are becoming increasingly important in the operations at publishing houses. We think the topic is so important, in fact, that we’ve scheduled an all day conference called “Book Publishing in the Cloud” for July 26 in New York. Ken Michaels, the COO of Hachette Book Group USA, is a big proponent of SaaS and believes it could change the way we work, together and separately, as an industry. He’ll kick off our conference describing what he sees as the opportunity for publishers represented by cloud solutions.

Then a panel of four publishers will talk about a very much related subject: how publishing houses are remaking their processes and workflows to respond to the demands of the digital age. Publishing veteran David Wilk will chair that panel, which will include Chris Bauerle of Sourcebooks, Sara Domville of F+W Media, Joe Mangan of Perseus, and Carolyn Pittis of HarperCollins. All of these companies are doing some very basic things quite differently than they did only a couple of years ago and these executives will discuss how things have changed, how hard it was to change, and what benefits have come to them because they did change.

We like to feature short conversations with industry players who have a unique view. One of these is Molly Barton, who is the global digital director for Penguin. Molly is the only digital head I know today who started out inside the publishing house as an acquiring editor. Now she has a view of digital change around the world from the top of one of the world’s biggest book publishing empires and within an even larger publishing company that has many digital irons in the fire. I’ll have an onstage conversation with Molly, and we’ll cover a wide range of topics from DRM to enhancement to whatever might have arisen earlier that morning.

After Molly, we’ll move to a new feature of Publishers Launch Conferences: the Publishers Launchpad sessions. Launchpad is our slot for introducing new products and services. When we debuted it at Digital Book World last January, we were pleased to recruit a consulting client of my Idea Logical Company, Linda Holliday of Semi-Linear, to moderate the sessions. On June 4, Linda’s own new product will be the kickoff Launchpad subject.

And Linda’s new product, Citia, has as its objective nothing less than reinventing the presentation of high-concept non-fiction in the digital age. It is a shamelessly ambitious undertaking, literally deconstructing and then reconstructing the ideas in a book. The debut Citia title will be “What Technology Wants” by Kevin Kelly, from Penguin, the house of the previous speaker, Molly Barton. Barton is one of the biggest fans of the new Citia presentation of material. Michael Cader will interview Linda and they’ll show you how the complex ideas we previously could only access through narrative text and illustrations can be rethought and made clearer with what I call, for simplicity, “Cliff’s Notes for the Digital Age” but which is really much more than that.

Then Linda will bring on two other new propositions as part of the Launchpad session. Both of them are new SaaS services to make ebooks.

The simpler proposition is from Hugh McGuire and is called Pressbooks. It is a free XML ebook-making tool built on WordPress that enables users to produce epub and PDF files on the web.

The other tool is called Aerbook Maker, created by Ron Martinez of Invention Arts. Aerbook makes enhanced ebooks and both HTLM5 and native apps. It is a tool that allows mixing in audio and video and interactive elements without advanced programming skills.

Then, before lunch (aren’t you hungry already?), we’ll have our agents panel. Laura Hazard Owen of paidContent will moderate a great agent group that includes Laura Dail of Laura Daily Literary Agency, Tim Knowlton of Curtis Brown, Simon Lipskar of Writers House, and Jennifer Weltz of The Jean V. Naggar Agency. They’ll be discussing both the changes in the business of agenting and the dynamic negotiating climate with the publishers. We’ll learn what they’re thinking about managing their digital backlist and what new skill sets they think their authors will be demanding of them.

Kelly Gallagher of Bowker will kick things off after lunch with with the latest report from their new Global eBook Monitor (GeM), a global look at ebook uptake around the world. Gallagher will feature “country level data” to a degree that hasn’t previously been revealed. We’re looking forward to it.

One key premise about digital change is that the world is getting smaller and publishers will find it easier to sell books, particularly ebooks, in territories other than their own. Our panel called “Sales Across the Borders — Import” will look at the increased penetration of ebooks from abroad, particularly in languages other than English. I’ll moderate a group of three panelists: Patricia Arancibia, Editorial Director, International Digital Content, for Barnes & Noble, consultant Javier Celaya from Spain, and Spanish publisher Blanca Rosa Roca of Roca Editorial. Blanca Rosa is doing some very innovative things to get her books into the US market in both Spanish and English. (She’s just created an English language ebook publisher called Barcelona eBooks and forged a partnership with Open Road for marketing and distribution.) Javier consults to companies throughout Europe and will report on how publishers, particularly in Spain, Italy, and France, are viewing this opportunity. And Patricia wrangles content for B&N to sell from all over the world. There are very few people, if indeed there is anybody, who knows more about this subject than she does. One wrinkle on this topic is that other-language publishers are now translating their own books into English to hit the English-speaking ebook market. One thing we’ll want to learn from our panelists is how commonplace they expect to see that practice become.

The complementary panel, which will be moderated by longtime sales executive Jack Perry, is “Sales Across the Borders — Export”. For this one we’ve gathered three experienced export sales executives: Chris Dufault of Random House, David Wolfson of HarperCollins, and Dan Vidra, who has just this month left Simon & Schuster to work for the new German-based (but global and multi-language) ebook platform, textr. They’ll be joined by David Cully, the President Retail Markets/EVP Merchandising for Baker & Taylor, the US wholesaler that has long been a global leader helping US publishers sell their books abroad. This panel will tell us what markets are showing the most promise for US publishers, how the sales growth of ebooks is affecting the sales of print, and how the growth of export might be impacting the related business of selling foreign translation rights. (We’ll be able to cross-check what they say with what the agents will have told us a couple of hours before.)

Michael Tamblyn of Kobo is always a popular speaker at publishing events because he shares interesting data. This time we’ve asked Michael to focus on what Kobo has learned from its recent experience in new markets, particularly the UK and France where Kobo tied up with major retailers. What we’ll want to know for non-English markets particularly is how powerful the draw of wide title selection in English is. Will ebookstores in other countries really expand the sale of our books in English around the world? Tamblyn will certainly get us started on answering that question.

Our final chunk of programming in the afternoon is all about change.

Fritz Foy is Macmillan’s EVP for digital. Macmillan made news a couple of weeks ago when they announced that they would be going DRM-free with their Tom Doherty Associates imprints including Tor, Forge and other related sci fi and fantasy imprints. We immediately called him and got him to agree to talk about that on the program. Foy is going to do a presentation that recaps Macmillan’s thinking about this question, which he says goes back several years. Thanks to Cory Doctorow, the anti-DRM crusader who is one of Tor’s key authors, Macmillan had already experimented with it. Foy promises us there will be surprises and at least one news announcement coming from his presentation. We’ll be surprised right along with you when we find out what it is.

Phil Ollila of Ingram Content Group accepted our challenge to comb their sales data for clues about how bookstores and other retailers have been changing their stocking decisions in recent years. The short summary of Ollila’s findings, which are summarized in an article he did for our conference book (all Publishers Launch Conferences have a printed conference book!), suggest that fiction is down, some surprising categories are up, and that what publishers can expect is more titles in more different stores with fewer sales per store per title.

We’ll have a bit of a change of pace with a presentation by David Steinberger, the one who is Founder and CEO of the Comixology platform. (There is another David Steinberger, of course, who is the CEO of Perseus.) Comics constitute a very big global business that operates in silos by language and by country. Will it stay that way? Will the rights and cultural issues that have kept the market from globalizing continue to do so in the digital age? As the creator of the most successful comics-selling platform in the US and a man with an eye for the world stage, Steinberger is in a unique position to speculate on the answers. And perhaps we’ll get some insight about how other highly-illustrated genres with strong localized content — travel and food come to mind — might change because of the digital transition.

There is a growing consensus in the industry around two points that would have been controversial only two or three years ago. One is that bookstores are declining rapidly and will, unfortunately and in the not-too-distant future, atrophy to the point that they are a subsidiary channel for book sales, not the primary one. The other point is that the marketing exposure that books get in retail stores is a critical component of their early exposure, leading to the “discovery” by consumers that is the key to getting commercial traction. Our last two sessions of the day will focus on that challenge.

Peter Hildick-Smith of Codex has been conducting studies of book purchasers for a decade, including careful tracking of how they learned about the books they bought and read. Peter is one of the greatest champions of the bookstore’s role in discovery, and perhaps the leading skeptic that search engine optimization and social network marketing can be an adequate substitute. In this presentation, Peter will make his case thoroughly backed with data from the years of research his company has done.

Then Peter will join our final panel of the day, one focused on “The Future of Book Discovery.” Two publishers that are doing a lot of work in this area, Amanda Close of Random House and Rick Joyce of Perseus, and Scott Stein, who heads up the book coverage for USA Today, will be part of that discussion, which will be moderated by Michael Healy of Copyright Clearance Center. One of Hildick-Smith’s key points is that there is a Catch-22: if you don’t know something about a book, you’re not likely to search for it. And unless somebody gets the ball rolling for a book, there’s nobody to comment on Facebook or Twitter to get you started that way. The publishers on the panel and the overseer of one of America’s most widely read book pages will talk about their efforts to build something new that will tell us about books the way window displays and stacks and face-out displays have for years.

After that, Cader and I will wrap up the day. Very briefly. We’ll all be very happily exhausted!

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I’ll admit that I would have thought a few years ago that by the time we got to the point when more than a third of unit sales for major houses had gone digital — and perhaps more than half for fiction — that the future shape of the book business would be discernible. But, at least according to what I learned from one Big Six house last week, we have reached that level of ebook uptake and despite that, the business still looks very much as it has. It seems impossible to me that it will stay that way.

Here are a few bits of information that came onto my radar last week.

One Big Six executive told me that ebook sales in their shop had reached the mid-30s as a percentage of units sold. That broke down to about 50% of fiction units and 25% of non-fiction.

Nonetheless, that same executive noted a real slowdown in the rate of ebook growth. This is to be expected as the base of sales grows, of course, but it slowed down faster than this house expected. They had seen a 120% increase in ebook units in 2010 and figured they’d see an 80% growth in 2011; it came in at 60%. In short, the rate of increase was cut in half.

These numbers gave this particular executive reason to believe that print demand was begining to stabilize and that it was reasonable to assume that 50% print units might persist into the future, with commensurate new stability for brick-and-mortar stores. I have since been told that a leading executive at another of the Big Six houses shares the same expectation, or hope. Perhaps they all do.

On the other hand…

Another publisher, substantial but not Big Six, has seen much more explosive growth continuing in ebooks and, for that publisher, unit sales for fiction have already gone to well beyond 50% digital.

A paper by the accountants-consultants at Deloitte in the UK, reported in the Guardian, predicts a decline of 40% in all brick-and-mortar stores over the next five years. That’s because books are not the only item for which sales are migrating from brick stores to online. We’ve already learned that books are among the items most susceptible to online purchasing for a myriad of obvious and well-established reasons. We also know that buying public in the US is at least as receptive to online purchasing as the British.

I’ve written time after time after time about the diminishing retail network for books and its potential impact. I have always seen this as existential for big trade houses, whose distinguishing value proposition for authors remains their ability to put books on retail shelves. (There are other things that matter, but I’d argue that all of them put together don’t equal that.) Publishing printed books is a complex endeavor best done by a large organization that can perform its various functions — warehousing, shipping, billing, commissioning the manufacturing, sales representation, and contact with marketing megaphones — at scale.

A proliferation of online marketing channels with real influence could once again challenge the under-resourced (authors working alone or smaller publishers) or otherwise-preoccupied (Amazon) who are trying to substitute for what the big publishers do. So far, the platforms that matter (to the extent they do…more on that below) have been limited in number, Facebook being the most prominent one. (One sales executive said to me yesterday, “Facebook isn’t a platform. It’s a requirement.”) If Tumblr becomes really important and Pinterest really were the next Facebook and, over time,  online influencers become as dispersed as our 20th century media world was, it opens up opportunity for big organizations to add value that smaller ones can’t.

So even if the Big Six optimists are wrong that their business proposition will be preserved by a slowing switch from print to digital (and, with no more knowledge than they have, my intuition against their intuition, I wouldn’t bet a dime that they’re right), perhaps we’re heading for a world where any author in her right mind would want a publisher to cover all the digital marketing bases, with the help of technology and dedicated staff, rather than trying to do it herself.

Nobody’s predicted that yet that I’m aware of, but let me be the first on the block to acknowledge the possibility.

The future of bookstores and the future of publishers if the bookstores diminish much futher in importance should be one of the most important topics on the minds of all stakeholders in the book business. We’re going to try two different ways to explore it at our next Publishers Launch Conference, taking place at BookExpo on June 4. Both of them involve one of the distinguishing features of our events: delivering insightful data about our industry that is not delivered by other industry conferences.

All of the current industry data reporting, including the recent effort called BookStats put together by the AAP, BISG, and Bowker, are unable to isolate sales and inventory in stores by type of book. To plan future publishing programs (and to sign up books this month and next), publishers need to understand with some level of granularity whether it is true that stores are shifting their buying (and selling) from immersive reading to illustrated books and, if so, which illustrated books. Among the reasons that the industry stats fail to capture this properly is that they don’t look beyond the sales publishers make to wholesalers to find out what happened with the books the wholesalers bought.

But the wholesalers know whether the book they just sold went to a brick store, a library, an online store, or an individual. We’ve been fortunate to get Phil Ollila of the Ingram Content Group to examine his company’s records to give us a more detailed and granular understanding of what is really happening in the retail marketplace. Are bookstores really stocking fewer novels and more illustrated books? Is the proportion of sales made online versus in stores changing at different speeds for straight immersive books and illustrated books? Ingram is mining its data to come up with answers to those questions. Ollila will report some findings at our conference.

We will also have a data-rich and sobering presentation from Peter Hildick-Smith of the Codex Group. Hildick-Smith and his team have been surveying book consumers on a quarterly basis for nearly a decade. Their work is high-level and expensive and is normally only available to the big companies that can afford to subscribe. But Hildick-Smith sees a crisis ahead for the industry in his data, and he cares enough about our collective future to want to sound an alarm. He’ll be doing that our June 4 event.

And what he sees and documents is the critical role bookstores play in consumer discovery of new books and authors. He demonstrates with data and logic that SEO and social media are totally inadequate substitutes. Hildick-Smith thinks a future without bookstores will be very different than the present. He makes the case that author brands established in the bookstore era will be largely unchallenged when the bookstore ladder gets pulled up and future authors can’t climb it. And he believes that publishers don’t appreciate that all measures, even desperate measures, are called for to preserve the brick store base as long as possible.

When you start trying to figure out how publishers could do that, you appreciate very quickly that you’re tackling a very challenging problem.

Six decades ago, long before there was any bookstore crisis, my father, Leonard Shatzkin, then at Doubleday, recognized that bookstores were the publishers’ lifeblood. He didn’t see the logic in giving bigger discounts to wholesalers than to retailers. After all, wholesalers primarily put their books in warehouses waiting for orders that publishers’ marketing efforts and a book’s inherent appeal create while retailers put them on shelves in front of customers, stimulating demand. His solution, implemented ever-so-briefly, was to eliminate the wholesalers’ discount differential and offer them the same terms as retailers.

Unfortunately, this is a story about which I didn’t capture all the details while Dad was around to give them to me. I know that the wholesalers went ballistic and demanded meetings with Doubleday management (presumably including Dad, who implemented policies like this from the relative safety of the “Research Department”, not from the front lines of the Sales Department.) The policy was reversed and the wholesale discount was restored.

But I can personally attest to the enduring bad feelings this initiative engendered. In 1974, around two decades after the failed experiment, I was working for Dad selling books for Two Continents. As the top sales guy, it was my role to introduce the company to Bookazine, a wholesaler that then occupied a warehouse on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Bill Epstein was the owner of Bookazine and, when he met me, all of the anger from that Doubleday discount change came to the surface, as if he’d been waiting 20 years to complain about it again.

The day has perhaps come again when publishers will want to consider offering the highest discount incentive for placing a book on a retail store shelf. (The idea exists in the world of commerce: it is called a “retail display allowance”, although the concept would need to be extended to favor all retail display, not just favored positioning.) This would be a devilishly difficult policy to design and implement to avoid alienating the wholesalers the way my Dad did. (There is no way a policy like this would be well-received by Amazon.) But after publishers hear Peter Hildick-Smith at Pub Launch BEA, it is bound to strike some, at least, as an idea well worth considering.

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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.

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The recent news that digital revenues have reached approximately 20% at some of the Big Six houses makes me believe that we are on the verge of a tectonic shift in the industry. It provoked me to think through the logical extension of well-established trends and comment recently that I see an 80% ebook world for straight narrative text coming in two to five years. (By “straight narrative text” I mean books of just words.)

One of my most respected sometimes colleagues privately told me the 80% number was “absurd”. But considering the logic and evidence that was offered up to refute my projection only made me more convinced that I’m right. So it’s time to expose the thought process to one of the most acute groups of critical thinkers I know: the readers of this blog.

When the Kindle came on the scene in November 2007, almost exactly four years ago, ebook sales were in the neighborhood of 1% of major publishers’ sales revenue. Since then it has risen, by my calculations, between 2 and 2.6 times per year. So we’re at 20% of revenue now in October 2011; we were a bit under 10% a year ago, around 4% this time in 2009, and about 2% at this time in 2008, when Kindle was in its infancy and its only device competition was the Sony Reader. (When you look at “annual” numbers for each of those years they’re lower, but that’s because share was gained throughout those years, fueled by new device releases; I’m talking about where things stood at about this point of the year.)

I interpret 20% of Big Six sales revenue to mean something closer to 25% of units sold, because ebooks bring in substantially less revenue per copy sold than print on major hardcover books (although they can bring in a bit more on paperbacks). But many books were not yet ebookable: most juveniles and illustrated books are not represented in that figure. So I don’t think it is a stretch to figure that ebooks are constituting 30% of the units sold for straight narrative text.

(Working backwards, that means I think ebooks were about 15% of the straight narrative text units a year ago, about 6% of the units in 2009, 2-3% of the units in 2008, and probably fewer than 1% of the units in 2007, before Kindle.)

Although the following analysis was widely misunderstood when I offered it on a prior post (the misunderstandings are evident in the comment string), the way I’m defining the measurement of this — what percentage of a straight text book’s total sale will be ebooks? — the number cannot exceed 100%. So, clearly, it is impossible for the rate of share growth which has been sustained for four years, since the introduction of the Kindle, to continue for more than about another 18 months.

In fact, at some point the switchover from print to ebooks will slow to a crawl. Sales of straight text books won’t reach 98% digital for many years, perhaps decades. What I’d expect is that we’ll reach a point of print resistance and adoption will slow down dramatically. We can argue about where that point will be. I think it is 80%. A major executive was reported to have said in Frankfurt that he thinks ebook sales will “plateau” at 40%. (Maybe he meant 40% of revenue, which, depending on how much of the house’s output was straight text, would probably be nearer to 60% of straight text units.) Everybody’s entitled to their opinion and only time will prove us right or wrong.

There are a lot of reasons to expect a continuation of the recent trend of share doubling every year, at least for a while longer. Ebook readers and tablet computers are getting cheaper and more widely distributed, by which I mean that more and more places are selling them. (One hears widespread speculation that next year we’ll see offers for devices to be free with the purchase of a number of ebooks.) The number of titles available in multiple languages continues to grow. The price of new books in digital editions is established at about half the publisher’s suggested hardback price for the hottest new releases (and also much less than most stores would sell the print book for). Everybody who hasn’t yet switched to a digital device yet knows people who have successfully and comfortably done so. More and more libraries have ebook offerings (although they can’t obtain a lot of the bestsellers at this time.)

Cheaper books, more to choose from, and more plentiful and cheaper devices would not imply any slowdown in adoption in the short term, except that those most receptive to switching have already done so. But I don’t find that a persuasive argument for an imminent slowdown; some of the late adoptees, particularly the young, just couldn’t afford the devices until the prices came down.

In fact, one thing Amazon established very early in the life of the Kindle is that the heavier book purchasers tend to move to the readers faster. It makes intuitive sense that the price of a reader is amortized more quickly by somebody who buys more books. So, in fact, we could reach 80% of the units being purchased digitally if a much smaller number, say 40% of the people who buy books, make the transition.

Among those reading this post who would fervently hope I’m wrong would be anybody with an interest in a brick bookstore, whose survival challenge is only made more difficult if the trend to ebook reading accelerates. What this says to me is bookstores would be wise to specialize in books that make great gifts and children’s books (and there is some anecdotal evidence that the stores doing well have done exactly that; the most often cited being Books and Books in Coral Gables, FL).

So except that we know the adoption rate must (at some point) slow down as we approach saturation, I find little reason to assume that it will do so anytime soon.

If the trend that has been unbroken for four years continued for another year, ebooks would constitute 40% of big publisher sales volume and 60% of units for all straight text books by a year from now. At that rate, we’d reach 80% units on straight text in the quarter after Christmas 2012.

When I say I think we’ll hit it in two to five years, I’m being consciously restrained. To get there in two years would require that consumers switch from print to digital at about 60-70 percent of the speed they have for the last four years over the next two. Were it to take five years, it would mean the conversion rate would have slowed to a crawl compared to where it has been.

So the outer edge of the prediction I stated (five years) is, to my way of thinking, unlikely because it is too slow. Predicting the current rate for 18 months is probably too aggressive, but 2-3 years is not. Having it take longer than that would surprise me and I’d love it if anybody predicting that would explain what they think will slow things down so drastically in the months to come compared to the recent past.

The colleague who thought I had taken leave of reality offered some logic. First of all, it was observed that ebook sales rose most rapidly in 2011 right after Christmas, particularly as a percentage of total sales, rather than steadily throughout the year. That didn’t surprise me. It is due to an effect I have written about previously which last year was not softened by new device releases midyear and previously had been.

Ebook readers make great Christmas gifts (better every year than the year before because there are more to choose from and they get cheaper). This has turned Christmas Day into a great sales day for ebooks but the process of new device owners “loading up” apparently continues for a couple of months after Christmas. So ebook sales in the first quarter are artificially inflated and will continue to be until we reach saturation on readers, which will probably be at least two more years. When just about everybody who reads many books already has an ereader, the post-Christmas bump will diminish markedly.

But, at the same time, the print sales reported are depressed in the first quarter. Returns come in from what have too often recently been disappointing print sales at Christmas and, at the same time, the purchase of new titles in the first quarter is dampened because some stores give up the ghost after a failed Christmas season and others are jolted into greater conservatism in their stocking by declining sales.

Since print book sales net of returns are depressed and ebook sales are stimulated by gift devices, the percentage of sales that are digital reaches a dramatic new height in the first quarter. This has happened in recent years and will happen again in 2012 and maybe in 2013.

Ebook sales in dollars were also reduced in the past two years by switches to agency pricing. Five of the Big Six went agency on April 1, 2010, when the iBookstore opened. Random House went to agency in early March, 2011. When publishers switch from the wholesale model to agency, the amount they get from each ebook they sell goes down. So even if the book continues to sell at exactly the same velocity (and it might not, since agency also raises prices to the consumer), the publisher’s revenue will decline.

These changes, which have raised the price of major publisher ebooks, have not prevented the year-on-year growth described in this piece, but the timing of the agency switches did tend to make the increases look like they are grouped in one big step increment at the beginning of the year.

To an extent they are but not as much as they look. And we’ll be taking that step again when the calendar turns over to 2012.

(The dampening impact on revenues of the switch to agency by the five publishers in April 2010 was mitigated, indeed overwhelmed, by the impact of all those iPad devices creating new purchasers for ebooks. And there were new devices that year from Nook as well.)

Another piece of evidence I was asked to consider that would apparently contravene the 80% prediction is that music sales are still split 50-50 between digital downlads and shrinkwrapped CDs. I love knocking down comparisons with the music business (I started doing it in the very early days of the blog) but this one is almost too easy.

While sales of music may still be split 50-50 between downloads and CDs, consumption is almost certainly not. People can acquire their music on CDs and still consume it through digital devices. By doing that, they get additional value in metadata (those little books that come with the CDs) and they get a copy of the music that they can readily give away as a gift.

But when somebody switches over to consume their books digitally, purchasing the hard copy version is not an option. So it isn’t helpful or indicative to look at how music sales divide; we’d have to look at how music consumption divides. And I’ll bet anybody who wants the wager that it is not 50-50! When was the last time you saw somebody playing a CD?

It was also offered up to me that Bowker polling of book consumers has found consistently this year that only 15% of the people report having bought an ebook each month. I’d say that is entirely consistent with my hunch that 30% of straight text units are digital. We’ve observed throughout the digital transition that ebook purchasers are heavy purchasers. In fact, I’d have been surprised (and felt I had some explaining to do) if the number of ebook purchasers were higher than 15% at the moment.

Until the leap this year, the switch from print consumption to ebooks was deceptively easy for a publisher to absorb without making drastic changes to its organizational structure. That time has passed. The book business we see today — how titles are acquired, developed, marketed, and distributed — is still built on the basic industry that was constructed over the past 100 years. Unless there is something wildly wrong with my logic (and I’m counting on my readers to make me see it if there is), we’ll see more fundamental change in the way straight text books are published over the next 36 months than we have over the past 36 years.

The implications of this shift require a lot more thought than I’ve been able to give it so far. But one thing I think it will mean is that trade publishing will trifurcate in the next few years. With bookstores as the primary distribution channel, it was no problem for one publisher to do straight text narrative, children’s books, and illustrated books. They shipped to the same customers in the same box. If bookstores aren’t the primary channel, these different kinds of “books” will not have a lot of commonality: in sourcing, creation, marketing, or distribution channels. I wonder how many publishers are thinking about their publishing programs with that in mind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The end of Borders took place within a larger context.

I was in Italy for the IfBookThen conference last February when Borders’ impending bankruptcy was a rising expectation. Somebody in the audience asked me if I attributed Borders’ difficulties to ebooks. I said:

“When the flu hits town, the old and sick die first.”

Ebooks present an enormous challenge to brick-and-mortar stores. And the growth of ebooks over the past three years or so has been nothing short of astonishing, even to somebody like me who expected a more gradual rise to have started much sooner. (The IDPF chart which shows the growth in the market, sharing data actually collected by the AAP, has apparently not been updated for the past two quarters, but this gives you the idea.)

But the disruption to brick stores started before ebook sales were even visible with a microscope, more than a decade sooner, when bookstore customers started migrating to online buying. Ebooks just accelerated what had been a trend of traffic and sales erosion that had existed for quite some time.

Ed Nawotka of Publishing Perspectives has a nice account of some serious errors Borders made around the turn of the century. Replacing a book-experienced management with merchants from outside the book trade was the gateway mistake. Eliminating the local marketing function was one that probably came from it: the local differentiation and customization required for a successful bookstore is much greater than what is needed for pets or groceries and successive managements from outside the book trade wouldn’t have known or understood that.

Turning over ecommerce to Amazon showed a shocking lack of digital vision. It is often forgotten that Barnes & Noble once made half the same mistake: they originally owned their BN.com ecommerce capability jointly with Bertelsmann until they bought their partner out. And Barnes & Noble had obvious challenges reconciling their online business with their overall business until they brought in new management that clearly saw the online business as the future. That wasn’t until much later in the century’s first decade. The problem both chains probably saw is that the skill sets required to run a successful brick store chain didn’t apply to creating a digital business so they were nervous about investing too heavily in it. When the time came that it was obvious that they had to do so, Borders was too weak to recover and Barnes & Noble, despite a web operation that had serious flaws, at least had a platform and customer base to build on.

And they had strong cash flow from a healthy, well-managed in-store print book business.

The category management idea Borders tried to implement and which Nawotka documents was a fiasco in every way: poorly conceived, poorly executed, and an idea that, if it could work for the book business at all, would have to be selectively applied, not forced on every section of the store.

The reduced selection concept that was underlying category management suggests that perhaps Borders had an early and accurate read on the fact that the Internet had diminished the power of selection in a brick store as a magnet for customers. It is true, and it was true then, that the power of aggregation had shifted from offline to online. It is just impossible for any physical location to deliver the choice that an online bookstore can. Most people now know that if you want to choose from the widest possible selection of just about anything the the last thing to do is go to a store. And that’s particularly true of books, which you don’t have to smell or taste or try on for size.

In my opinion, the defect in Borders that led to their ultimate demise was “none of the above.” It was their supply chain, which for well over a decade has been an inefficient mess.

The irony is that when Borders started, inventory management was their signature strength. The Borders brothers developed a tracking-and-purchasing system which was state of the art at the time (the 1980s) and turned it into an expansion opportunity. It all worked so well that they were able to sell the chain to K-Mart, which already owned the mall store chain, Waldenbooks, in 1992. That was probably the beginning of their downfall.

Borders and Barnes & Noble were on parallel paths building out superstore chains, featuring bookstores that pulled over 100,000 titles together under one roof. Until Amazon arrived in 1995 and started gaining traction, this was a nearly-irresistible proposition to the heaviest book consumers. Both chains, fueled by Wall Street investment, grew their number of large stores quickly. The stores were free-standing destinations, not in large shopping malls.

But this is where the chains diverged. Barnes & Noble made a substantial investment in a supply chain infrastructure. They built what was effectively an internal wholesaling operation, putting backup supplies of the books their stores carried within one day’s delivery of most of their chain and within two day’s delivery of just about all of it. They built systems to set stocking levels and maintain them. My first client work at B&N was in the late 1990s when they were crawling with logistics experts to make inventory management rules and policies, but they were also smart enough to want some book inventory expertise from outside their company (not that they didn’t have plenty of it on their own payroll) to help with the planning as well.

Meanwhile, Borders was working on gimmicks like category management and their supply chain became increasingly bureaucratic and convoluted. They pushed books through a warehouse, but only to put stickers on them. This compounded the irony. In the 1970s, the B. Dalton chain that B&N owned had virtually invented computer-assisted inventory management based on stickers they put on the books carrying an SKU number. Walden, in the days before they were owned jointly with Borders, had leap-frogged Dalton in that regard by scanning the ISBN instead of needing a sticker. Now, 15 or 20 years later, B&N regained that same advantage over Borders. Borders suffered the delay and the cost of stickering new books as they came in and B&N didn’t have to.

But, much worse, Borders backlist ordering was haphazard (almost totally human-controlled, whereas B&N’s was largely automated) and infrequent. B&N literally ordered from many publishers every day; Borders was ordering from major publishers as infrequently as every six weeks.

When you order infrequently, you face two choices. You can be overstocked on many things or out of stock of many things. There is no other alternative.

The complications to inventory management posed by the granularity and diversity of book selection utterly defeated the non-book veterans that serially ran, or mis-ran, the company. The lack of a digital strategy compounded the problem, but the supply chain lunacy was the problem. The cost of inventory is the greatest variable expense of running a bookstore. If you don’t get value for your inventory dollars, your leases and your staff couldn’t save you, even if they were good.

What this means for publishers’ sales is a bit difficult to predict and will even be harder to discern. Sales this year have been skewed by the Borders inventory dump. Publishers’ editions elsewhere and the stores their books are in have been competing with liquidation sales. This depressing effect on other retailers’ business and, as a result, their willingness and ability to order from the publishers, will be coming to an end.

Publishers Lunch got together with Bowker a couple of months ago to ask questions of Borders customers to try to discern where the business would go. They have hard data to the extent that it is possible to develop it, having asked people how their purchases would be affected and where they would buy when their Borders was gone. Only 8% said they’d buy fewer books, although nearly 20% said they’d use the library more.

My own totally hunchy math, checked out in a rigorous conversation at dinner with a good friend who is a publisher, is that Borders constituted about 10% of a publisher’s business until very recently. My guess is that half that business goes to Barnes & Noble, most of the rest is split between online purchasing and independents (with online getting more, much of it in ebooks), and maybe 1% or so, or 10% of the old Borders business, will be “lost.”

Of course, the movement of sales from print in brick-and-mortar to print and ebook online will continue, so how much lift from this will actually be felt by chains, independents, and mass merchants is still up for grabs.

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In theory, the more books are sold online the more sales should move to the long tail. Online bookstores have the advantage of “unlimited shelf space”. Nothing has to be left out of the assortment because of constraints on capital to stock inventory or room to hold it. Furthermore, as Konrath and Eisler pointed out in their extensive discussion of online versus print within the larger conversation about self- or publisher-issued, the differential impact of display when one title has a stack and another has a single spine-out copy is eliminated in the digital world.

But it doesn’t seem to be working out that way. While overall ebook sales in the US are still calculated in the 8-10% range of publishers’ revenues, so we’d reckon perhaps 10-12% of unit sales (ebooks generally, though not always, yield slightly less revenue per copy than print) or maybe even 15% for a publisher still drawing big print sales on books not available as or suitable for ebooks for whatever reason, we’re hearing frequent reports of big books selling 50% or more of their units as ebooks, particularly in the early weeks of their life.

So it would appear that ebook sales are even more concentrated across a smaller title band than print.

Furthermore, the occasional reports of enormous unit sales by the new crop of online author-stars like Amanda Hocking (coming next year to the bookstore that remains open nearest you) and John Locke also tend to support the idea that ebook sales are more concentrated, not less, than print sales. Unlimited shelf space and more uniform “display” don’t seem to be having the expected affect.

I recall a recent stat I believe came from Bowker, which tracks a large panel of book consumers, suggesting that bookstores still account for the largest single share, by far, of “book discovery.” What I recall hearing was that thirty percent of people report having learned about a book they bought from a bookstore display, much more than from any online source.

Of course, that’s certainly not true for Locke and Hocking and the books by Joe Konrath that aren’t in bookstores (although, as Joe points out, he does sell in print through Amazon’s CreateSpace print-on-demand program.) I haven’t seen anybody else talk about this subject, but Konrath also says that he gets a wildly disproportionate share of his overall sales from Kindle, much  more than the 50-60% market share one hears anecdotally attributed to them by publishers. I know from private exchanges that Amazon themselves believe they do a better job than the other ebook formats for the self-published author in proportion to their size. We’d certainly want that confirmed by more authors than just Konrath, but if they’re doing that as a strategy, it’s a good one. A self-publishing author won’t need a lot of persuasion to not bother with other outlets if s/he can get 90% of the expected sale from one (which is what Konrath leads me to believe is the case for him, even though he is widely set up among the other platforms.)

Be that as it may, the fact is that none of the online retailers have figured out how to come close to what a bookstore can do in giving a consumer real choices-per-second. And the principal tool that online booksellers could be using to overcome the disadvantage of 2-dimensional presentation — customized choices for each online customer — is very little in evidence (except as top-of-the-page suggestions) in my personal shopping experience (which extends on a regular basis to Kindle, Nook, and Kobo and on an occasional basis to iBookstore and Google).

The impact of presence and display was understood by all in the bricks world. A book that is in the store in which a customer shops has a nearly infinitely larger chance of being purchased than a book not in the store. Sophisticated merchants like Barnes & Noble know how much sales lift to expect from a front table display. We all expect the book that it is faced-out on a shoulder-level shelf to sell better than the spined book you have to bend down to see.

For years, aggressive sales reps would move their books around. In the years before computerized inventory record keeping, it was incumbent on reps to count the books that were on the shelf to coax out a backlist reorder; that gave them ample opportunity to face books out, move books up, and point it out when a book was displayed in something less than the optimal subject section.

Now the paradigm has changed. The default front table is the choice of titles on the screen that comes up first when a store’s program is opened. That’s almost always that retailer’s bestsellers (and, as far as I can tell, it isn’t customized for me at any of these retailers; you or my wife would see the same default screen that I would.)

Then there are a bunch of pre-packaged choices — think of them as “tables” too — for NY Times bestsellers or (at Nook I noticed) “ebooks under $5″ or under menu-driven choices of subject (they’re like “store sections.”) Of course, the earlier and more often a book is presented to a consumer in their online shopping experience, the more likely it is to sell.

The standard technique is that there are a set and limited number of titles a customer sees “at a click.” If you want to see more, you have to click again and (depending on connection speed) perhaps wait for more titles to load, which will usually be another 10 or 12 or maybe 25. If you shop the same sections repeatedly (and who doesn’t), most of what you see will be titles you’ve seen before and either bought or rejected. If you shop often, trying to find something new can be exhausting and ridiculously time-consuming.

Even the simplest assistance that would help avoid this duplication — such as displaying books in reverse order of publication (most recent first) instead of “by title” or “by author” — is not (or seldom) available.

Online shopping is great if you know exactly what you want (by title or author.) The online book shops can find you the most obscure book much more quickly than the average clerk in a brick store, and certainly faster than you’d find it yourself. Searching by title or author also almost always works extremely well.

But when it gets more complicated than that — perhaps you’re searching for “baseball history” or “Civil War economics” — the combination of inadequate publisher-provided metadata and insufficiently-mediated retailer choices will deliver you a menu of options that contains some titles so off base that a clerk would be fired for suggesting them.

The Lockes and Hockings of the world benefit from the same effect. They’re betsellers and every retailer has a button to deliver those, by genre and sometimes by pricing band. Getting bestseller status is so valuable that self-published authors seem to frequently employ the technique of  lowering their price to 99 cents to get bestseller status and then popping back up to a more profitable price like $2.99 until the effect wears off.

So ebook purchasers make their choices from what is presented to them, which is a limited number of titles. Let’s not ever leap to the conclusion that there is something about ebooks or about ebook consumers that is biased to the most popular. It is merchandising practices which create that result, not consumer taste.

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