Wiley announced a few months ago that they wanted to sell some of their most consumer-oriented lines of books (although, as Cader makes clear, what they announced they wanted to sell constituted only about 20% of the sales volume of the division that houses these titles.) The first sale under that initiative was announced this week: Google bought the Frommer’s travel books for a price apparently somewhere between $23 million and $25 million.
Google had previously purchased the Zagat’s guide business, and the Frommer’s acquisition was (properly) seen as part of Google’s effort to ratchet up its content for travel and for local searches. Attention has been focused on whether they would continue to publish the books (they say they will for now, but plan to reassess) and whether this means publishers should now worry that Google will become a competitor.
Another common, and accurate, observation is that this transfer signals a shift to a different monetization model for content, from selling packaged bundles like books (or ebooks) to delivering nuggets of information at the point of need.
But there’s one relevant observation I haven’t seen, at least so far. Wiley’s Frommer’s travel line is one of two, to my knowledge, that has created a real B2B content-selling business. (The other one is Random House’s Fodor’s travel line.) Indeed, the New York Times, in their story about the transaction concluded with this:
Google also declined to comment on what will happen with companies that have worked with Frommer’s to show its reviews, including Kayak and The New York Times, which licenses destination-related content from Frommer’s for its Web site on an annual basis.
There are two possibilities here and I don’t know Google well enough to predict with confidence which one is right. One is that they like the model of licensing content to websites, will continue it with Frommer’s, and will learn from it to extend it to other businesses somehow. The other — which intuitively seems less likely — is that they are happy with their already-developed model of being the key aggregator of dispersed content and would prefer that this content be found through general search or through the many tools they provide sites to provide customized Google search on their sites. If that’s the case, perhaps they’d unplug those deals as contracts allow.
If the former is true, Google might create opportunities for other companies to syndicate content without building the infrastructure to do it. If the latter is the strategy, then an opening just got created for one or more of the other travel brands to pitch Kayak and The New York Times and all other Frommer’s customers on replacement content. So there will be a few players watching developments here very closely (or maybe they already know the answer).
************
Also this week, Royalty Share CEO (and attorney) Bob Kohn filed an additional brief for Judge Cote to consider before she rules on the DoJ settlement with Hachette, Harper, and Simon & Schuster. Kohn’s brief is full of new information for those of us who aren’t lawyers (and perhaps for many who are who haven’t done as much homework as he has!)
New to me from reading Kohn’s paper:
1. Apparently, the law, as defined by the same court where this case is now (the 2d Circuit) in a ruling in 1981, defines pricing below marginal cost as “predatory pricing”, which is “presumptively illegal”.
2. Kohn interprets the Sherman Act to allow conduct that results in raising “illegally-low” prices.
3. The DoJ’s finding that Amazon’s pricing wasn’t predatory because the ebook unit was “consistently profitable” was inconsistent with the Court’s ruling in 1981.
And, for good measure, Kohn wants DoJ to turn over to the court (the linked article contains the whole Kohn brief) the evidence that led them to that conclusion. (I’m sure the whole industry would like to see that!)
Kohn is also urging the Judge to hold a hearing before ruling. He argues that to determine if the settlement “is in the public interest, it would be perverse if this decision were made without a public hearing.”
I find it hard to quarrel with his logic. I leave it to the lawyers to argue about his legal citations.
************
OK, this one isn’t really from this week. But here is a survey of published authors from the UK, which I discovered this week and found to be very interesting. Seems like they got something over 300 responses (as of these results) with most coming from authors who were published by big houses.
Most seemed quite happy with the development of their book: the editing, the cover, the presentation. They were less enthusiastic about the marketing efforts they saw on their behalf. But, all in all, I thought it spoke to pretty high satisfaction with the publishers, particularly when you consider the highly disproportionate effort the big publishers put into a very small number of books whose authors are mostly getting very large advances and whom I doubt would take time for a survey like this.
What I found really interesting, and counterintuitive, is that of those authors who expressed an opinion about whether they’d have a publisher in 5-10 years, they thought by about 4-to-1 that they would. But asked if they’d have an agent in that time span, the margin was only 2-to-1 that they would.