Wednesday, August 22, 2007
On retailers becoming publishers

Once upon a time, when I was a medical editor at Oxford University Press (incidentally did anyone else notice this rather intriguing headline Oxford Publishing Sold last week?) I came across an internal memo from earlier days saying something like 'since Blackwell's have failed to achieve higher discounts from scientific and medical publishers they have decided to go into publishing themselves'. This signalled the foundation of Blackwell Scientific Publishing which, after various mergers and acquisitions, was sold last year for £600m, many many times more valuable than the wonderful bookshop which spawned it.

Blackwell's

The concern at the time was that Blackwell would favour their own publications when it came to retailing, thus disadvantaging other publishers. I don't think this ever happened and in any event the Blackwell shop was never a dominant part of the overall market for scientific or medical books.

However, I was reminded of this by an announcement from Amazon yesterday. I urge you to follow this link to a blog by Timo Hannay commenting on the announcement. Please read his thoughts, read the press release from Amazon's CreateSpace, read Timo's piece again. Sit down and think about it from a book publisher's point of view. Is Timo right? Could Amazon succeed where Blackwell were only partly succesful (albeit £600m richer)? Interesting times.

On a lighter note I was at a meeting yesterday which included a number of academics. One of them reminded me of a marvellous quote which he attributed to C.P.Snow but which appears to belong to Henry Kissinger. Either way, it's a great quote and applicable to many situations:

'University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.'

The stakes in the publishing business right now are not small, so let's hope the politics are therefore not vicious.

#    |  Comments [12]  | 
8/22/2007 9:08:00 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Don't forget WHSmith tried this to some extent when they bought Hodder Headline in around 1999. Then the management talk was of vertical alignment and other such guff. The WHS/HH lasted aboput 2 years before they seemed to decide it wasn't working.

Far from being a strategy to cut out the publisher, you may find this is a tool publishers can use themselves. As a small UK independent with no hope of any real presence in the US, this might be a service we would consider. It seems a pretty good way for us to get our titles on amazon.com 'in stock'.

I see no reason why print on demand has to be an exclusive service. If more retailers come up with print on demand solutions it might help the industry reduce all the over stocking we get so hung up about.

What is to stop Macmillan putting their backlist straight into this program?

Matthew
Matthew
8/22/2007 11:45:27 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
The power is with the mainstream publishers : Amazon has always, from day one, been a predator content to carve out their own territory when it is handed to them on a plate by the traditional outlets.

Nothing really new with all this CreateSpace blurb ; at least not for industry watchers who have been checking on the Basin's progress in this decade.

Amazon, and its faithful third-party listers, will only ever hold a smallish percentage of the total market - say 10/12%max : it is how the mega publishers adapt to the demands of the 600lb gorillas who aim to be the last man standing in their own retail fields which will decide what happens to mainstream trade publishing.

Of course Macmillan could ensure that their whole back catalogue is available from them in POD format : only problem is that at the moment they are totally incapable of producing POD copies at a reasonable retail price.
Clive Keeble
8/23/2007 6:38:51 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Matthew/Clive, I think you're both missing the point. Unless book publishers (both academic and trade) there may be a real risk to them of disintermediation. Personally, I'm not sure Timo's analysis is correct (because publishers do a lot more than arrange print and load on to Amazon) but I do think that the industry has to work out how it has to adapt to thes enew technologies, threats, routes to market and author relationships.

PS Clive, We price our books irrespective of whether they are produced 'normally' or on-demand. Low-price mass-market paperbacks are not yet economic to produce on demand and so we don't. High quality high value academic books are economic and we do. POD will become cheaper and more available throughout the industry.
richard charkin
8/23/2007 8:07:31 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
At first sight, my feeling is that the noise generated on distribution platforms such as Amazon (cf. David Smith | August 22, 2007 04:12 AM comment on http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2007/08/amazon_a_new_kind_of_publisher_1.html) will quickly enhance the value of trusted filters.
Obviously, the CreativeSpace imprint, seemingly being non-selective, won't filter anything.
Author's names and titles won't be very discriminating either.
Will Amazon offer the authors tempted by the venture kick-off promotion?
This would take them back to a kind of pre-filtering...
Alain Pierrot
8/23/2007 8:50:14 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Would it be worthwhile for independent Aussie or UK publishers to stick some of their books into Amazon's new program, or even Lulu, to make them available to overseas readers without eye-watering import and/or postage costs?

Same text, same cover art ... it'd be equivalent to printing the books in the target market but with no stocks, warehousing or freight.

It would also avoid the problem of distributing these imported books to stores. Usually imports (from the independents) are only available as special orders anyway, and a locally produced POD book would probably be cheaper than an imported TPB.

None of the above addresses marketing or publicity, of course. I was just wondering whether it would be an option for a small press that was shipping the occasional small order to overseas distributors.

(Edit - Just before I clicked Submit I read Matthew's comment above. I guess it could be worthwhile.)
Simon Haynes
8/23/2007 11:06:33 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Perhaps I am missing some hidden point but Amazon is merely using its (at times slightly clunky) technology to give book digital file holders the same opportunites as have previously been granted to CD and DVD rights holders.

At the time Amazon purchased BookSurge they fired a salvo across the bows of the publishers battleships.

Ironically, the antiquarian and secondhand booktrade has for the past fifteen years feared that POD will decimate many of their sales opportunities : however, many publishers have looked down on POD as though it is of little consequence.

Perhaps publishers are now waking up to the big new world : they really should have worked co-operatively to develope state of the art POD and head Amazon and the newcomers off at the pass.

At this time publishers very much need the cushion of their specialist booksellers on the high street.

In many ways unsuspecting authors are helping to destroy their own futures by demanding that their books appear prominently on Amazon : the Basin demands special terms and holds the publishers by the nuts. Only problem is that Amazon only has a very small percentage of the actual sales for many books : it is all psychological warfare which Amazon is exploiting.
Clive Keeble
8/23/2007 5:42:04 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
The Book Depository (www.bookdepository.co.uk) has been reissuing nearly 200 titles a week through its imprint, Dodo Press. The imprint is not even a year old and we have a list of over 4000 titles.

We are also launching a Lulu/Blurb business in the next few months and are very confident in its prospects. The Photobook market in North America alone is reckoned at $2bn.

Another area is to work out how to reissue the 8 million titles in the twilight zone (in copyright, but out of print). Ironically, copyright rarely protects the work or author when the title is no longer commercially viable. The work becomes more obscure, and potential readers have to scavenge through used booksellers where titles in reasonable condition may be sold at premium prices.

P.O.D. offers huge opportunities for retailers and makes moving into publishing quick and effortless. We still have a lot to learn, but by experimenting we are learning fast. It is surprising that so many publishers have still not taken P.O.D. seriously.

Personally, I think that retailers stand a better chance of becoming publishers, than publishers becoming retailers. We are closer to the consumer, and our consumers are authors too. It will be interesting to see what happens over the next 10 years. I don’t think any retailers will turn into publishing behemoths, but there will certainly be a few surprises.
Crawford
8/23/2007 10:18:28 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Have you ever actually bought a POD book from lulu ? I have. They`re vile. The same looks as if it will be true of createspace. Nasty gloss laminate covers, bad binding. Yuk
SUSAN HILL
8/24/2007 6:31:20 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
There are not many instances of publishers successfully moving into retailing. Bertelsman of course own both Random House and many book clubs and Hachette control much of the travel book retail in France but I think these may be exceptions.

Re Susan's comments about the quality of PoD. She is, of course, right but the quality improves daily andwe cannot assume PoD books will remin yuk.
richard charkin
8/24/2007 7:59:13 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
When books are no longer reprinted, do the rights return back to the Author from the Publisher? If so, wouldn't a sensible step be to retain digital rights to push onto 3rd-party services such as Amazon's POD, and thereby extend the 'shelflife' of a title from disappearing into obscurity?

If enough publishers were to do this, the signal-to-noise ratio of the vanity-publishing crowd would be considerably diminished, and Publishers could possibly get added value from 'retired' titles...
Anne-Lise Pasch
8/24/2007 8:30:17 AM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
For an ill-fated expensive venture into publisher/retailer marketing - via the internet - one has to look no further than the, as was, Barnes and Noble/Bertlesmann enfant terrible barnesandnoble.com , now re-formatted after millions of wasted dollars for B&N without Bertlesmann "investment".

I've seen some fantastic state of the art POD ; not the public domain titles which anybody can reproduce, but rather specialist academic copyright titles from US university presses.

I long for the time when the entire Picador backlist is reproduced at a regular price in POD format instead of all this RPU bore : heck, then I'll even open up an account with MDL. Its up to the established publishers to ensure that they have control of the market place.
Clive Keeble
8/24/2007 1:35:23 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)
Regarding Picador and POD, I wholeheartedly agree. We are moving forward with digitisation of our backlist, and as costs and technologies improve it should not be long before the bad-old-days of RUC are behind us.
Andrew Kidd