Booknet Canada

As many have already stated 2009 was a year full of change and innovation in the book authoring, publishing and retailing world. Digital was/is the agent of change…eBooks, eReaders (of all kinds), digital workflows and networks (be they social or internet)…for the industry in 2009. It really seemed that many digital areas that had been bubbling under for the last while came to a head in 2009…all at once. I’m not sure there was outright panic in the publishing world in 2009, but there was definitely a lot of concern. I think that the apprehension felt in 2009 might have been the biggest story of the year. Change is afoot, but isn’t it always?

1. Google. Perhaps not just in the book industry? Have you looked at the mobile space lately? They either have, or will have, the books/content, the devices, the delivery and discoverability platforms. Does any of this seem familiar? The impact of this one player will continue to be huge (see Morgan’s post below).

2. Mobile in general. Not sure about other people’s co-workers, friends and family, but most of mine have a smart phone, laptop or some mobile computing device. This was the year that mobile computing went mainstream. Not everyone is reading on these devices, but they sure are using them to do a lot of other things that I bet they never thought they were going to use them for. Familiarity is here, reading is inevitable, and the change started this year.

I’ll lump this under mobile…and do a little prognosticating…2010 is likely going to be the year of the tablet. It would seem that everyone has, or is working on, a tablet based computer (again…wasn’t this a big thing 6-7 years ago?) and someone might actually get it right. How will it affect the book industry? I’m not sure, but the effect will be felt in newspapers and magazines very soon. I’m sure the eBook platforms will follow shortly. Is the allure of e-ink, and great battery life, enough to keep someone from a multi-use-reasonably-sized-good-battery-life-app-packing-tablet-computer?

3. Digital workflows. This has been something the industry has been talking about for a while, but I think it actually started to really happen, or at least be thought about widely in 2009. Unfortunately, there is no one perfect digital workflow for creating, editing and distributing books, be they in ‘p’ form or in ‘e’ form. However, one of the only responses to the rapid change and future unknowns in the industry are to make sure you; a) have your data/content/books in a format (xml, database, tagged, etc…) that can respond to rapid change; b) make it easy for non-techies; c) if you haven’t already started…start small, but do start.

I think that perhaps 2009 was the year that the industry started thinking more about ‘content’ and less about the ‘book’.

4. Twitter. Marketing, collaborating, sharing. There were other social networking platforms that had an impact on the book industry, but last year was definitely the year for Twitter.

5. eReaders, eBookRetailers, eFormats. An explosion of devices (Nook, KindleV2, Sony, many others) and reading applications throughout the year. New retailers (i.e. Shortcovers/Kobo), and new retail partnerships, seemed to be launching weekly. All these devices and players echo the rapid change in the industry right now, but things will settle down at some point…consolidation?

6.  Pricing. The difference in frontlist ‘e’ vs. ‘p’ and the difference in hardcover vs. all the other formats.

Bring on 2010!

Hugh McGuire is the mastermind behind LibriVox as well as the co-mastermind cooking books at Book Oven

I started off 2009 with a trip to London, to attend BookCampUK - an unconference about books. While there were big rumblings of fear and hand-wringing about the arrival of the digital age in the publishing world, BookCamp was a great start to the year: a group of publishers, technotypes, writers and book-lovers collecting in one place for some open discussions about the future of books. I left more enthused about books than ever, and promptly started organizing BookCampToronto, leading into another group of West-coasters putting together BookCampVancouver.

By March, the rate of change in the business had become positively dizzying. At BookNet Canada’s Tech Forum, Neelan Choksi, of the beautiful iphone ereader Stanza, presented a slide listing all the major announcements in the ebook space in the first three months of 2009 (Amazon’s new Kindle, Google Book Search, Indigo’s Shortcovers which has since become Kobo, and on and on). By there end of 2009, there would be no font small enough to allow all the significant announcements in publishing and digital to fit on one slide.

So, where are we, and more importantly, where are we going?

Digital is Here

Firstly, ebooks have arrived, there’s no getting around it. If you can believe Amazon’s opaque data regarding the Kindle, in many cases ebook sales are already outstripping hard copy sales from Amazon. Ebook sales remain a small part of the publishing business (~5%), but once you get up to around 10% - and if the growth curve remains exponential, that will happen soon - a business with notoriously thin margins gets turned on its head.

You Want How Much?

It gets turned on its head because profit margins start looking very worrisome at $9.99, which appears to be the consumer comfort-level for ebooks. Publishers want to charge more and it’s hard to blame them: would you rather get 50% of $34.99 for a hardcover or 50% of 9.99 for an ebook? Publishers rightly claim that manufacture and distribution are relatively small parts of the the cost of a book, with the real costs sunk in advances, editorial, and marketing.

But whatever the publishers want to tell you about pricing, ultimately the consumers will decide what they are willing to pay. And the problem with books is not so much consumers comparing the price of a hardback, a paperback and an ebook, but rather all the other things readers might do with their time. Humans these days are bombarded with leisure and information-delivery options, and books now compete with so many other forms of entertainment (Xboxes and Facebooks and Youtubes, and on and on). The business has to keep making it easier to get books, and part of that means pricing so that readers want to buy.

Go and Get Them

Which brings me to a prescriptive, rather than descriptive, observation: publishers are going to have to go out and find their readers, find new ways to engage with them. As many have said, Twitter won’t save publishing, but at least the idea is right: go out and find your audience, and talk to them. This is a difficult adjustment for many publishers who traditionally have left that messy part of the business to book retailers.

Yet books are far more than words on a page. They are the stuff that ideas are made of, they are primarily conversational. This conversation happens between reader and writer, between reader and reader, and in order to help their books compete in a crowded marketplace, publishers will have to embrace this conversation, and not leave it to others to manage.

Everyone in the business knows how to get words on a page; the real art of publishing is getting people to engage with those words. If you want any hints on how to do this well, take a look at Harlequin, O’Reilly and Tor.

Pirates and Formats

I won’t say too much about piracy and Digital Rights Management, except this: we need a standard format for ebooks, otherwise readers will get very annoyed when they can’t move their books from one device to another. And if you are considering Digital Rights Management to help stop piracy, please follow Brian O’Leary’s research on the topic. He has actual data about sales and piracy, and every publisher should be forced to read it. Conclusions thus far: DRM doesn’t stop piracy; and maybe you don’t want it to.

Where Are We Headed?

So with all this, where are we? Well, here are my predictions:

• Thin margins will get thinner, and publishing houses will get leaner.
• More digital and paper book sales will be split 50-50 by … oh … 2016.
• There will be more consolidation at the top, and a proliferation of small publishing houses at the bottom of the pyramid.
• Self/independent-publishing will explode.
• More people than ever will be writing books, but fewer people than ever will be reading books.
• Publishers who continue to think of retailers as their main clients will suffer and die.
• Publishers who spend their time asking what readers want (not just what kind of books) will survive and thrive.
• There will be fewer well-paid writers at the top.
• There will be more poorly-paid writers everywhere else.
• There will be a great golden age of wonderful writing and reading.