There was an interesting article in the NY Times Business Section this week about how e-books can/might/do change business models for publishers — with a focus mainly on the economics of slashing twelve bucks or so off the cost of a new hardcover by putting it on an e-reader. “At a glance,” writes Times resident book-lover Motoko Rich, “it appears the e-book is more profitable,” though she adds several caveats about how small the e-book share of the market is, and the kookiness of comparing e-books to hardcovers as if paperbacks don’t also exist.
Rich also adds that making e-books too successful would reduce actual paper books to nothing more than a curiosity for “collectors and aficionados”, thus spelling the end of bookstores — and then she quotes “a consultant to publishers” who I can only hope publishers don’t actually listen to that much:
“If you want bookstores to stay alive, then you want to slow down this movement to e-books,” said Mike Shatzkin, chief executive of the Idea Logical Company . . . “The simplest way to slow down e-books is not to make them too cheap.”
Basically what this boils down is that in order to save an already struggling distribution channel, Shatzkin thinks we should artificially cripple the clear alternative — which makes about as much sense as pounding on your left foot with the cast already on your right. It seems to me that rather than pretending the shift to “books as items for aficionados” can be prevented — and making idiotic business choices to try and do so — the publishing industry should accept that shift and try to nurture the aficionado market at the same time as unrestrainedly growing the e-book one.
There are two ways to do this, that I see. The first is to make the product more desirable, and the music industry provides a good model here: everyone knows that MP3s killed the CD market over the last decade, but in that same period vinyl sales have been soaring. That’s because vinyl albums provide better sound quality, and, with their beautiful cover art and tactile heft, provide a much more satisfying visceral experience than a cheap ‘n’ flimsy jewel case — and aficionados eat that stuff up. So what publishers need to do is spend more time creating a similar experience for books: better cover design, better page design, nicer paper, etc., for a start; but also imbuing books with a much more tangible sense of cool. McSweeney’s has already done just that, and, especially if the success of their recent foray into newspapers is anything to go by, the market for print-as-collector’s-item is ready and waiting. (Penguin’s Designer Classics series is also a step in the right direction.)
The other obvious solution, if aficionados are the only ones buying books anymore, is to create more aficionados. To a certain extent that just means better marketing in general, but I think the most important thing publishers can do is take a page from Philip Morris’s book: the best way to create addicts (read: aficionados) is to start ‘em young. An overwhelming pattern I’ve noticed among people in the MFA program at Emerson is that we were all keen readers as children — and look at us now, all still buying and reading books as if it were going out of style. (Oh, wait.) If publishers want to still be selling books to adults in twenty years, they need to be selling books to kids NOW, and as aggressively as they can.
But what they certainly don’t need to be doing is shooting themselves in the foot by artificially “slowing down” the movement to e-books. Change might be hard, but stasis is suicide.
Tags: Andrew · publishing industry5 Comments
The Atlantic breaks down where the $26 goes differently than that NYT article:
$2.00 for lunches
$0.05 to $7.00 for the book party
$1.05 for the author tour
$0.65 for seven editors to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair
$0.60 for lunches at the Frankfurt Book Fair
$1.50 for drinks at the Frankfurt Book Fair
$2.00 to cover wild overpayments to 15-minute celebrities or Washington bigshots for books that will never earn back their huge advances but the cost has to be amortized somehow
$0.50 for lawyers
$0.40 for editors
$6.00 for free review copies
$17.50 for employee health care
$1.60 Whoops! Forgot these lunch receipts from last month. Sorry.
Though I disagree with your immediate assessment of Mike Shatzkin (he’s got a lot of amazing idea/theories that will do great things for the industry), I think you have a great point: many of the conversations publishers have about the next generations focus on meeting their digital demands 100%, not on meeting them halfway. The industry has to have some faith in the printed page–after all, it’s still our bread and butter–and with that faith should come investment in a printed future. Not an investment to the detriment of the digital book, mind you, but an investment.
There certainly are some publishers already working very hard to instill a love of books in young hearts. Look at the spectacular children’s book market. It’s easy to go into a bookstore and identify the truly collectible new editions of the classics, the coveted Caldecott winners, the soon-to-be favorite new picture books. It’s much harder for me to identify a popular middle-grade/YA book that presents an entirely unique reading experience as a printed book. Maybe I’m just distracted by the colors of the children’s section, but I think it’s the more skilled, confident readers getting “lost” along the way.
Do you have any thoughts about how to get those readers hooked? Is it just content? The physical presentation of the book? What about the in-print reading experience would one-up the digital reading experience?
Right on man. I’m not Mr Invisible Hand or anything, but that kind of protectionism is exactly what is killing the Australian publishing industry. Whopping a huge tax on books published in America to make the expensive Australian publishing system more viable just means I pay $50 for a hardback. It suffocates the “precious but sickly” artform it wants to protect, and the only result is that both forms will remain expensive.
They’ve been talking lately about removing the tariff, but the damage is done and, as in the identical case with CDs in the 90s, prices never fall, and then the whole country burns and is overrun by British backpackers. Don’t let it happen to you!
I should clarify that I never meant to imply Mike Shatzkin was an idiot — only that this idea in particular struck me as a little idiotic. Anyway.
As for hooking young readers, I think the best tactic, first of all, is what I said above: making books cooler through better marketing. I’ll leave the specifics to the marketing experts, though it strikes me that celebrity endorsements would be a good start (we already have celebrities telling kids to drink milk and practice safe sex and not to smoke and so forth — why not telling them to read?).
I also think we just need more books that young adults are interested in reading. They don’t have to be great novels, or even fiction — they just have to be BOOKS so that the habit gets formed (and sticks). Biographies? Video-game/movie tie-ins? Etc. etc.
Also, an added bonus of marketing aggressively to kids rather than adults is that lit snob adults can carry on pretending that their art form isn’t being driven/perverted by commercial interests. Winners all around!
Sorry to revisit an old thread, but I just came upon another shining example of marksmanship in market foot-shooting.
This is taken from an article on the online trombone journal about bebop trombonist JJ Johnson-
The flurry of sessions Johnson made that month was brought about by an impending ban on new recordings. American Federation of Musicians President James C. Petrillo had decreed that as of the close of 1947, union musicians would cease recording for commercial labels. It was his belief that the proliferation of recorded music was hurting union members; that musicians were losing work to their own records. The ban ended early in 1949, with no real progress having been achieved; in fact, it was the beginning of a dramatic downturn in the fortunes of many jazz careers. Record companies had agreed to higher-scale wages for individual sessions, but this in turn increased the cost of recording. This led to a concentration of company resources on material that would sell in greater quantities, making jazz less of a priority in the industry. The effect of the ban as it loomed in late 1947, however, was that any artists under contract were encouraged to record as much material as the record companies deemed necessary before the deadline. Studios and engineers eventually found themselves working right up until midnight on December 31st.
Christopher Smith http://www.trombone.org/articles/library/jj47.asp
I might add that bebop, regardless of the many berets worn by the artists, never really received the groundswell of support from the proletariat. However, I can personally attest that JJ was the most outstanding jazz trombone player of the 40s and 70s. I don’t include the 50s and 60s because he was a blueprint inspector for a gyroscope company during these decades…