We're nearing the end of the year and, like pretty much everyone else, feeling reflective about the past 12 months. And since we're BookNet, that includes how the past year has shaped up in terms of the Canadian book market. So this month we have BookNet president and CEO, Noah Genner, as our guest to chat about the state of the market, the biggest books of the year, the biggest shakeups in the industry, what we can expect for next year, and, of course, lots about Margaret Atwood.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
Our free webinar on bibliographic standards will be held on Jan. 16 at 1 p.m. ET. Find more info and register here.
Transcript
Zalina: Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I'm your host, Zalina Alvi, the marketing and communications manager at BookNet. We're nearing the end of the year, so like pretty much everyone else, feeling reflective about the past 12 months. And since we're BookNet, that includes how the past year has shaped up in terms of the Canadian book market.
So this month, we have BookNet President and CEO, Noah Genner, as our guest to chat about the state of the market, the biggest books of the year, the biggest shakeups in the industry, what we can expect for next year, and, of course, lots about Margaret Atwood. Let's jump right in.
So we are nearing the end of 2017. I know we are all excited, and although we will be patient and wait until the new year to actually release our annual overview of the trade market that includes, among other things, how many print books were sold in Canada, and what formats and subjects were the most popular, I thought I'd ask since, you know, we always have new data coming in, whether from consumer survey or from sales data, if you already have the sense for how the year is going to shape up, whether it's in terms of units sold, book formats, channels that buyers are preferring, or really anything else?
Noah: Sure. You know, 2017 looks like it's gonna be somewhat similar to 2016, at least in the print book sales. Most of the numbers we're seeing come in so far are indicating a fairly flat market for this year for print book sales with not a big variance up and down, but as you mentioned, Q4 even the last three weeks of the year, which are still to happen, can really dictate a lot of what's gonna happen in a year.
The last three weeks of the year leading after Christmas, a large portion of the book sold for the year than in those three weeks. So we'll see, obviously, what's gonna happen, but it's looking like it'll be a similar year to the year before at least in print book sales. And we're hearing the same thing in other English language markets like the UK and the U.S. They're either slightly up or slightly down but mostly pretty flat. So I think that that's the way it is.
There wasn't any massive series this year that really can lift the whole market. No Harry Potters, no new YA titles that really jumped up a lot. And, in fact, all three of the main subject categories being juvenile, YA, non-fiction, and fiction are all pretty flat. So there's not one that's up a lot and one that's down a lot, which we have seen in other years. It's pretty flat across the board, at least in the print book space.
They're always within that kind of broader look at the market. There are certain categories that move up and down, you know, fairly significantly every year, and there may be lots of cultural or sociopolitical reasons that a certain category moves up and moves down, or it may just be a hot book that happened in that year.
So, you know, in the nonfiction area, we're seeing some categories bounce up quite a bit like poetry for obvious reasons, which I think we're gonna discuss in a little bit, but poetry's been up for the last two years quite a bit.
And then a lot of, you know, I think, you know, again, certain books in certain subject categories, the self-help category has been huge this year. There's a couple of big titles in there, but it's also just a broader lift across the whole category. And then some other, I don't know if, you know, religion is down but science is up, so we can read something into that or not if we want, but science is up significantly this year.
And there are, you know, within that, as I said, within non-fiction, there are categories that go up and down in the print books. And then similar in fiction, the last two years, thriller, crime, true crime, which is actually non-fiction, those categories are up, where others like romance are down. So, you know, but again, the whole category when taken together is pretty much flat. So a couple of books or a couple of series can make a huge difference, especially in fiction.
Zalina: Yeah. So you almost touched on specific titles. We got a little close there, so I'll just jump into that. So something you did already pull is a list of the best-selling books of the year, and you can find that on our blog. It's all based on print book sales in the English language trade market, and we have a top 10 list for fiction, nonfiction, and juvenile on there.
And as you mentioned, a lot of the books on the fiction list were all thrillers actually, so that falls in line with what you were saying. And it's probably not terribly surprising that in the fiction category two out of the top 10 bestselling books were 2 different additions of "The Handmaid's Tale" by, of course, Margaret Atwood, one of which was the TV tie-in edition. So she obviously had a huge year. We don't need to go into that too much because everyone knows. But do you think that interest will continue into 2018?
Noah: Yes. These things tend to have a bit of a life of their own, right? And so this, you know, I think that it's mostly tied to the TV and movie information, that is going on that has lifted Margaret Atwood, but there, again, maybe some social-political things going on that also lift those titles up, but she was everywhere both in Canada and the U.S. on media, on TV.
There's a lot of tie-in with audiobooks and things like that. So I think that that will likely continue, and who knows, maybe more of her properties will be optioned for TV and movie, which will make a big difference, right? So we'll have to wait and see. But, again, those kinds of authors and those kinds of happenstances are somewhat unique and they're harder to reproduce. So it's really hard to know what will happen next year.
There might be another Canadian author that takes off like that, or maybe not. We'll see, right? Or it could be a different author completely. So, again, TVs and movies as we've talked a lot about at BookNet and is on our blog and is everywhere, TV and movie tie-ins really make a difference to consumer behaviour. It's partly because people wanna read the books that the movies are about, and it's partly just all of the media attention that goes along with those movies and TV shows help lift the books as well.
So we'll see something else next year as well as Margaret Atwood or maybe in addition to Margaret Atwood. We'll have to wait and see who that is. But there will be someone.
Zalina: Well, she would probably be okay with sharing the limelight a little bit. I don't think she will disappear for sure.
Noah: I agree with that.
Zalina: Yes. So along those lines, we did...so we published an update to a study we originally did in 2012 called “Canadians Reading Canadians”, which looked at how much Canadian book buyers care about reading Canadian authors and subjects. And in both the 2012 and 2017 studies, when book buyers were asked to name a Canadian author, once again, not surprisingly, Atwood was the number one answer, but that number increasing from 21% in 2012 to 37% in 2017.
But at the same time, interest from Canadian book buyers in reading Canadian authors increased over that five years from 75% to 84% being somewhat or very interested. So that combined with all the attention that was placed on Canada and Canadian books this year because of Canada 150 makes me think that, yeah, readers could start paying more attention to other Canadian authors who are not named Margaret Atwood.
Even on our blog this year, our post on the 150 bestselling books by Canadian authors had twice as many page views as the second most popular blog post. So I do think the interest is there for sure. And you've already touched on this, but, yeah, I think you agree with me that there is room in the hearts of the book-buying public for more than one Canadian author because there are so many.
Noah: I do. And I think that, you know... I hate to say that Canadian authors or Canadian books are going through a renaissance, but we seem to have some pretty strong authors, but fiction authors. Non-fiction authors as well but strong authors across the board right now. So I think that there's, you know, definitely room for more big hits in the Canadian landscape.
And as you've touched on, in all of our consumer surveying or in a lot of our consumer surveying, there is an appetite on the side of consumers to consume Canadian content. They want it. They've told us again and again that it's important to what they're going to read and what they're gonna purchase. So I think that there's definitely room in their hearts or in their pocketbooks to purchase more Canadian content.
There may be an issue still with awareness. We do hear that and some of our surveying shows that. That you know while authors are our brands, sorry publishers, the authors are our brands in the book industry., There's still a bit of a gap when it comes to consumers identifying Canadian authors or even Canadian subjects, but let's stick with Canadian authors for a moment, and being able to look through the numerous books that are published every year and finding those authors is difficult.
And so, you know, we've been working with the supply chain for a long time to identify Canadian authors. And I think the tools are there, at least on the publishing side and perhaps on the author side, but there's still some gaps on the retail and library side maybe. And some of our data bears that out that perhaps if the books were more labelled as Canadian, they would be more easily found and that could raise some Canadian authors into their hearts.
So I think there's...you know, there's always a bunch of things at play here, and the media is one thing, and, you know, media coverage story is one thing, and then just being able to find the voice. And so the discovery and awareness part is something we're all working on but maybe isn't quite there yet.
Zalina: So equal parts publishers, the supply chain retailers, libraries, media, everyone.
Noah: Yeah, everything. You know, the supply chain when it comes to awareness and consumers finding stuff and purchasing things that they want, you know, it takes multiple touches. It's the rule of seven. It takes maybe a lot of touches before a book buyer purchases the particular fines and then purchases the particular thing they want.
They may be going to a library, so maybe they're not purchasing, and so there's a lot of touchpoints there. So all the participants of the supply chain that you just mentioned, retailers, libraries, publishers, media, all of those people need...are a factor in how the book is discovered, right?
Zalina: So you touched on this earlier when you talked about poetry sales and how they were up and then up again. So obviously, Rupi Kaur had a big year. Two of her poetry, collections "Milk and Honey," which was her first anthology, and "The Sun and Her Flowers," which just came out, were among the top 10 bestselling non-fiction books of the year.
I personally think it'll be very interesting to see if the interest in her work will expand to other poets or if there's only room for one Instagram poet on the bestseller lists. It remains to be seen. I don't think we've seen it yet, but we'll remain hopeful, I suppose, maybe.
Noah: Well, I think people reading and people purchasing books is a good thing across the board. And so, you know, if this is reaching an audience that maybe wasn't reached before, that's a good thing too. We're all about building community and audiences within the industry. And so we should go where the consumers are and we should give the consumers what they want or the book buyers or book readers what they want.
So if that's what they want, I think we're gonna have to do that. I imagine... I'm interested to see where it's gonna go too. I imagine that there's a fair number of publishers, perhaps surfing Instagram, looking for poets. I don't know. Or maybe there's a lot more poets who are gonna start publishing their poetry on Instagram to get found.
You know, there's probably a lot of factors at play here, and, again, it may be hard to reproduce, but, you know, I think there's an audience there, and so that, it behooves the rest of the industry to see if they can deliver more stuff to that audience to keep them happy, right?
Zalina: Yeah. And on the subject of discoverability for Canadian talent, how much awareness do you think there is around the fact that she's Canadian? I mean, she's been very popular on the "New York Times" bestseller list. She's had a lot of success in the States. I don't know if it's been very...like she's not wearing a Mountie outfit in any of her author photos I've noticed. Do you think there is some room there for making sure people know that she is Canadian?
Noah: Yes. Well, maybe we should be sending Mountie outfits to all of our Canadian authors everywhere.
Zalina: I'm gonna write that down for my to-do list for 2018.
Noah: There's an awareness and discovery strategy right there. So it's a good question. You know, I think we claim our authors in Canada. When they get to be really popular, we claim them very much our own, right? And I know not just when they get popular, but obviously, that we take pride in our culture being found.
And so I think that there is, you know...we identify with her as being Canadian. I'm not sure if, you know, in the U.S. if you went into a bookstore, they're not going to say she's Canadian. She's not gonna be on the Canadian shelf. So I think that's something we identify within our country, but I don't think it's as known as in other countries. It goes back to even maybe Margaret Atwood. If you asked a Canadian or if you asked an American book buyer or a book reader if they knew Margaret Atwood was a Canadian, I'm not sure that they could answer that question.
Zalina: Yeah. And I'm not sure they would care.
Noah: Yeah. And they don't care. They may not care at all, right? But maybe there's an opportunity there too for us to market our culture more broadly, right? Our cultural properties more broadly.
Zalina: Yeah. So expanding our focus a little bit from specific titles and authors to the whole industry, I have some thoughts on what the year's biggest developments were, but first, I'd like to hear what you think. Was there a particular change or announcement that you think will have a significant impact on the Canadian book industry in 2018?
Noah: Well, I know that, you know...you and I have talked about them. We talk about them in the office a lot. You know, there's a bunch...the strong push in audiobooks, both with the entrance of Audible into the Canadian market, and Kobo launching their audiobook platform, and a lot more library lending happening in the audiobook area. In fact, we've heard from many public libraries that by far it's the format that's being lent with the biggest year-over-year change, and it's an incredible amount of year-over-year change.
So I think there's audiobooks, which we've been talking about for a while. The audiobook renaissance, the audiobooks shift in format from CDs to digital and from perhaps an older audience, which is what some of our data shows, to a younger demographic, that could be a pretty significant change going forward.
You know, there seems to be demand there. So it's whether we as an industry can deliver on the demand in a way that makes business sense and in a way that consumers can find what they need. So I think the audiobook push, I mean, this year, in the next year, perhaps the year after, that could be a big, big change, and especially in the Canadian market, there was a lot more entrance.
I mean, we didn't talk about the publisher side of that, but there are a lot of publisher projects afoot to create more audiobook content. So I think that that's one big area that we'll see next year I think, hopefully, bearing the fruits of next year, but it will continue.
You know, Indigo perhaps opening in the U.S., which we've talked about, next year. I'm not sure how much that's gonna affect the Canadian market. It may affect the overall book market and especially the U.S. book market considerably.
You know, there seems to be a bit of a void with the closing of borders in the U.S. and, you know, and maybe the need for a little upscale chain action, which seems to be something that Indigo's hoping to fulfill. So I think that still remains to be seen. And, again, I'm not sure what the impact will be on our Canadian market, but perhaps that gives us an opportunity to export more Canadian culture to American book buyers.
Zalina: Yeah. It'll be interesting to see how Canadian they let themselves be across the border.
Noah: Yeah. And, you know, I think that some of that may be, you know, hopefully, they're going where the consumers are too, right? And so some of it'll be dictated by obviously, what the consumers in the U.S. market want.
Zalina: Funnily enough, those were my two big developments.
Noah: I guess the other one that I probably should have talked about in the back, at the beginning was that we have seen over the last few years, you know, or sorry, over the last year, I guess, a year and a bit, a little bit of a tick back up in the ebook format.
So, you know, we're talking about the print book market right at the very beginning. And one of the things that we're monitoring is that we saw over the last up to probably 2016 or the latter part of 2016, ebook sales going down as a portion of the market, but we've seen that tick back up again over the last three or four consecutive quarters. So it's something we're watching. It's not a big change, but we have been... Our market for ebooks seems to be increasing by 1% or 2% per quarter.
And so, I think that that is primarily a product of self-published ebook content and micro published ebook content. And perhaps that will be...I think it was a big factor this year, but it will be another big point going forward into 2018. Well, A, to monitor that ebook number to see if it continues to climb along with the audiobook and other digital formats, but also the self-published number is there. The self-published market seems to be growing at a faster pace than the other portions of the market. And so, that'll be something really interesting to monitor in 2018.
Zalina: And about the halfway point of this year, we did mention, based on some of our surveying, that smartphone reading was on the rise, and a bit at the expense of dedicated e-readers, right? So I'm sure that plays a bit of a part in that as well.
Noah: I think some of that may be both. You know, there's always the devices have gotten bigger and easier to read on, but I think some of that is also digital audiobooks being consumed on mobile devices.
Zalina: So on that note, what do you think businesses and the supply chain should be focusing on this year, from publishers all the way to retailers? I mean, should it just be doubling down, tripling down on audiobooks all the time, or, like, what do you think people should have at the top of their to-do list for the new year? Or if I can phrase it this way, what do you think... If you could choose three New Year's resolutions for the Canadian supply chain, what would they be?
Noah: Number one, do everything you can to increase reading. So it's not just book buying and we shouldn't be looking... And so maybe I can give a little more context to that. We don't need to just look at formats. It's not a format war, and I think we've talked a lot about that too.
What we want is books to be cool, and we want people to read books, and we want people to buy books. And so what can we do as an industry to make books cool? And so, you know, maybe it's Instagram, maybe it's other things, but I think keeping people reading, that would be my number one resolution. And so, everything we can do, and everyone is...the nice thing about that is that everyone in the supply chain can buy into that, right? And culturally, we can buy into that. So that's not a big gap. So the number one resolution would be, keep them reading. Do whatever you can to keep them reading.
Zalina: #readingisrad.
Noah: Reading is rad. I like it. Number two, my second resolution I guess would be, and maybe this is tied to the first one, and I've already kind of touched on it, go where the consumer is. So if they are discovering their new authors on Instagram, that's where we need to go. Or if it's Wattpad or it's some other new platform or maybe it's subway advertising, like, we need to go where they are. We need to make sure that reading is a part of the life of everyone all the time. And so, where can we get those books? I think that's, you know, a little bit tied to number one, but I'll put it as a separate point.
And the third one is discovery. I think that these are all kind of linked together now that I'm thinking about it, is look at the new channels to help with the discovery of books, right? So how can we leverage new digital channels and new social media channels, and what can we do to make sure that the books are in front of people? And those are all somewhat related, but I think it boils down to keeping reading rad and keeping books findable.
Zalina: And I'm just gonna throw this out there because I'm hoping I'm gonna force you into a spot where you need to explain blockchain technology to me.
Noah: Oh great.
Zalina: We have a particularly interesting session at Tech Forum this year, our book industry conference happening this March. That's all about how blockchain could impact the publishing supply chain. And I'm sure that it's very, very early stages, really just the thought experiment, but I am wondering how much people in this supply chain need to be paying attention to what's happening in that arena?
Noah: Yeah, it's a good question. So, you know, we programed Tech Forum as you know, with the idea that it's a technology forum. So we touch on how to apply current technology into your business practices and marketing and all of those things, but we also wanna make sure we're looking forward a little bit, what's potentially coming down the pipeline.
So in other years, we've looked at, you know, eye and cerebral tracking to see where consumer awareness goes when they walk into a bookstore. You know, these may be things that people take away and consider as part of their businesses or maybe not. Maybe it's so blue sky that it doesn't really happen, but people should still be aware of what's going on out there. So I think the idea behind blockchain, the blockchain session anyway at Tech Forum, and the discussion that's happening on our blog in other areas is that there's a lot of potential there.
And the potential could help move information around with less friction, shall we say? And so one of the things that BookNet and our other organizations like the ISG in the U.S. are always discussing is how can we make the movement of books and information easier so that more effort can be put into creating cultural works than moving them around.
And so, the idea behind blockchain is that there's a lot of proprietary, transactional information in our industry that could probably be moved more efficiently and more securely using blockchain. And so, there are certain areas where it seems to be right for this kind of this...you know, this kind of, I guess, development would be financial data. So there's a lot of financial data that moves around in our area and or rights and contract information.
And so, how can we securely make sure that these are stored in a central space and that other people can interact with them without changing them? Because that's really what blockchain is. It's a secure storage method, right? And so, I think the opportunity is there. I think we're still a little ways away. And there's always technologies we should be watching, right? So this is one of the ones that we think has potential. And so, that's why we're programming for it, and that's why we're watching it.
Zalina: Well, you have a whole panel of experts who seem like have a lot of really interesting forward-thinking ideas about it. Yeah. So that'll be really interesting. And just to make sure we don't forget about standards in our discussion.
Noah: Not standards.
Zalina: No. Are there any specific updates in the standards landscape that you think we should be paying particular attention to?
Noah: Well, there are. There are changes that have been ongoing for a while that seem to be picking up some steam now that we've been trying to push. So the switch potentially from the industry from ONIX 2 to ONIX 3, which is going to allow the industry to better convey things like rights information or license information on e-books and some of the discoverability stuff that we need in the modern kind of digital discovery platforms and things like that. That seems to be, it's happening and it's been happening for a while, and actually, Canadian publishers are on board with that, but I imagine we're gonna see a fairly big push on that next year with some of the efforts that are going on in Canada and the U.S.
Thema, which we've also been talking about for a while is our subject standard. It was a potentially new subject standard for the world and a particular note for Canada that allows us to add Canadian specific subject codes that may be of interest here in Canada, like indigenous subject codes that would really help some of the discovery and awareness problems that we're having here in Canada.
We've had requests from lots of different actors in the supply chain for information like that. So we see that happening. I think in transactional information, those are kind of the big standards, changes we're seeing come and develop. But there may be other things as well, but we'll have to, you know, wait and see what the industry wants.
Zalina: Yeah. And if any listeners have a specific interest in bibliographic standards, and frankly, you all should because it really does affect us all, we'll be hosting a free webinar on this very subject on January 16th, going over all the major updates that happened this year with a focus on subjects and what to expect for 2018. So I'll post a link to that in the podcast notes. So you can go ahead and register before you disappear for the holidays andforget all about it.
So before we go, is there anything in particular that we're working on at BookNet for the next year that you're excited about?
Noah: Yeah, well, you know, there are a few projects that we've been working on for a while that seem to be bearing some fruit, I guess. So some of those are our library circulation project. So similar to sales data, we're hoping to capture library circulation data from the public libraries in Canada and be able to share that back to the supply chain to help understand what's going on in the library, user's mind, patron's mind, and how that might affect sales and discovery.
So we expect to see some reports coming out of that system early next year in 2018. We're also just keen on getting more and more intelligence and business intelligence, I guess, baked into our products to help people make better decisions about how they're moving books around or books along.
So, I expect that we'll see some more intelligent layers added into sales data and some of our other products to help people make decisions. And then, you know, we're constantly doing research that we think is really valuable in understanding where the consumer's headed and where the market's headed. And so we'll be doing some new research in 2018.
We'll also be expanding some of our consumer research to include more responses and some focused areas around how CBC impacts book discovery in sales in Canada and some of the other media platforms. So I expect to see a lot more of that throughout 2018 as well, but we're always looking for ideas, so people should get in touch with us and we'll see if we can help you out.
Zalina: Well, thank you, Noah. That sounds very exciting, and, you know, happy new year to all of our listeners and we'll see you in the new year.
Noah: Happy holidays, everyone.
Zalina: Thanks to Noah for joining me on this month's episode. Thanks to the government of Canada for their continued support through the Canada Book Fund. And, of course, thanks to all of you for listening to the third season of our podcast. We hope you've been enjoying the episodes, and we're looking forward to bringing you a whole new series of nerdy book chats in the new year. Have a great holiday season, and we'll see you on the other side.
