Bait 'n' Beer

I've recently been working on consulting assignments involving evaluating vendors and solutions to publishers' issues. In every case, the publisher is looking to solve or simplify a basic problem without using multiple vendors or software packages and the Requests for Proposals also included a specification for a 'global solution'. We weren't looking for a front-to-back publishing system...just a solution for a specific problem.
 
Know what? Complete single-vendor global solutions for many typical problems don't exist. You can find all the components, but putting together a complete package (at reasonable pricing and with a good chance of success) typically involves combining pieces from two or more vendors. This raises the price (and the amount of brain damage) significantly. There are exceptions, of course, but if you want, for example, to sort out contracts, royalties, rights and permissions with one vendor you're, as a practical matter, out of luck.
 
Now, this is not a reflection on those providing products and services to the industry. They're smart and hard-working and many of their offerings are first-rate. What it reflects is the speed with which the ground is shifting under the industry's feet and a notion we have of ourselves that publishing is a snowflake, unlike any other business category.
 
There's a big opportunity here to serve small to medium-sized publishers with light, nimble solutions to problems like global digital distribution, workflow management, rights and permissions. We tend to think that each publisher's issues are unique and require a bespoke solution when in fact if an off-the-shelf product could solve, say, 90% of these kinds of problems, it could be immensely useful and, I'd guess, profitable. Sometimes a Chevrolet works as well as a Bentley. (If you're interested in an example, have a look at PressBooks [pressbooks.com/about ], which uses the lightweight WordPress platform to produce multiple format outputs...avoiding the conversion process entirely).
 
I'm not one of those who typically calls for publishing to "think more like Silicon Valley", but in looking for answers to some of these knotty problems, rapid development of 'good enough' solutions would give many publishers a chance to move ahead without taking on major projects and the attendant costs. These aren't easy problems, but they're not as complex as we want to believe.
 
Go for it. There might not be an Easy Button, but there might be some "Easier" Buttons that could be low hanging fruit for vendors.
 
 
 
 
 

Comes news today that Independent Publishers Group (www.ipgbook.com/) has taken a stand against Amazon with respect to Amazon's demand for 'improved terms of sale' (Read: "Bigger Discounts") for Kindle ebooks from IPG's publisher clients. You can read Publishers Weekly's account here: bit.ly/xfXzM8 but it's a significant move by both parties.
 
For a long time, Amazon has preferred to deal with aggregators (such as distributors) in dealing with smaller presses simply to avoid the aggravation of handling multiple vendors when one distributor can feed Amazon print and digital titles for a couple of hundred publishers. I remember well my days at Consortium when Amazon begged us to supply data feeds so they wouldn't have to manage 125 accounts for each of our client publishers.
 
I suppose that with improved technology and the practice Amazon has had with the Kindle Direct and other self-publishing programs, they're no longer intimidated...at least on the digital side...by the number of vendors. And of course that makes sense in the digital world. IPG and other distributors (and publishers) are just another intermediary in Amazon's eyes and we know how they feel about intermediaries.
 
Now those of you who've been reading this blog for a bit know I'm no Amazon hater and in fact I've been a booster some of the time. But ALL of the time, I've said if you don't like how they compete, then change the game. Mark Suchomel, who's a friend, has decided to do that by refusing to be forced into new terms that he knows will ultimately make it difficult for him to maintain his business. He also apparently has the support of his publisher clients, which is huge. Amazon can hardly say it is selling 'any book you want in print or digital format' if they don't carry digital titles from IPG's 400+ clients.
 
It's a gutsy move and we'll see who blinks first, but I applaud Mark and wish him and IPG's clients luck because this is only the first of many of these battles that distributors and those who sell direct will face on this front. Distributors play an important role in maintaining the vitality of smaller, independent presses and their disintermediation would be an unfortunate event in the lives of those presses (who seldom publish books about Snooki or Justin Bieber).

There's going to be a panel at Digital Book World 2012 (www.digitalbookworldconference.com/ehome/24240/36095/ ) on Tuesday, January 24, called "A CEO's View of the Future Redux: Lessons Learned, Future Forecasts". A panel of five publishing industry CEO's (brave men and women, they) will look back and forward at their businesses and answer questions about the future from a CEO's point of view. I'm looking forward to hearing what they have to say.
 
As I was reading through the program, I began to think about what I'd like to ask publishing CEO's (not just this group) in January 2012...not in a combative or "gotcha" way, but because I'm genuinely interested in what our industry's leaders think about some of the issues facing all of them (and all of us). Despite the changes in publishing that allow virtually everyone to be a publisher, these CEO's still are important drivers in the direction the industry will take.
 
I wouldn't expect many of thm would want to go on the record with their responses for all sorts of reasons, but I'd love to be a fly on the wall in a room where CEO's and publishers of large and small publishers from across the industry spectrum answered these questions candidly. It would the rest of us, I believe, a way to understand their thinking and how we might all work more collaboratively toward growing the size of our shared audience of readers.
 
So here's some of what I'd like to know:

1. What do you think is the appropriate length of life for copyright on an author's work?
2. What do you think is the appropriate length for the rights an author grants in a publishing contract?
3. What are your thoughts on agents acting as publishers?  Is it appropriate in any circumstances? How does it affect your relationships with agents, if at all?
4. What are your thoughts on bricks-and-mortar and online retailers (okay, Amazon) entering the publishing business? How, if at all, does it affect your vendor-customer relationship with them? Should it?
5. Do you think online piracy is a significant factor in your business? If so, can you quantify its impact?
6. Would you be supportive (financially and otherwise) of an industry-funded study by an independent party to determine (using Brian O'Leary's words) both the "instance and impact" of piracy on the industry?
7. Do you believe library lending (or for-profit ebook lending or subscription businesses) represent lost sales to your business?
8. Do you believe libraries are a source of discovery that lead to some number of book sales for your business? If so, why? If not, why not?
9. Do you believe it's possible to find a digital model that's both fair to your business and meets libraries' goal of  providing acces to digital books for those who may not otherwise have it? If so, could you describe such a model in concept? If not, why not?
10. Using a three year time horizon, what do you see as the biggest opportunity facing your company? Are you investing proportionately to the size of that opportunity? What are the biggest obstacles to successfully exploiting that opportunity?

Those are my ten questions. What would you add to the list?
 
 

I've been reading lots of bloggers', pundits' and other industry particpants' and observers' publishing predictions for 2012. Some very exciting things are said to be forthcoming (or at least hoped for) for the coming 12-24 months. Some may actually happen.
 
While we have the usual crop of device announcements and predictions about what Amazon, Apple, Google, Kobo, Barnes and Noble and other content purveyors will or won't do, there's also a lot of talk about new business models built around such things as new forms of discovery and recommendations, subscription-rental-lending, direct-to-consumer, and self-publishing and marketing platforms. See such entities as Small Demons and JellyBooks, 24Symbols and ExpressReads, (still to be launched) Bookish, and Penguin's BookCountry, respectively, as examples of new entrants in these categories.
 
There will be others from both start-ups and from established publishers. I think that's exciting since we have to find new approaches to rebuilding the traditional system.
 
While we're making product and service predictions though, let's not forget that we'll need lots of new systems, software, infrastructure and yes (in many cases) people to make these things work properly.
 
For example, it's great to have new discovery tools, but for better or worse, actual book sales (both print and digital) still rely on identifiers and other metadata to facilitate an actual transaction. Subscriptions and rentals require the ability not only to ingest and display titles and the accompanying metadata, but also to serve content in multiple formats, to interface with accounting and royalty systems and to provide a data mining tools for publishers, among other things.
 
Direct-to-consumer businesses, both on the sales side and on the self-publishing side require skills not typically found in book publishing businesses, including customer acquisition, understanding the lifetime value of customers/users, customer service and the ability to deal with many small transactions rather than a relative handful of larger orders from more traditional wholesale and retail customers.

This is to say nothing of workflow, title management, content management and new distribution systems upgrades that most publishers require in the new environment.
 
All of these are do-able, but none is easy, and they all require a level of attention to detail combined with scalability that makes for a daunting task for long-overlooked operations groups within publishing companies. Some of these can be outsourced but even so, investment and close supervision are required.
 
This is why my big prediction for 2012 is called 'Revenge of the Plumbers', the nerds, geeks and dirty-fingernail men and women who make things work behind the scenes so that the shiny new products and services the public sees work when customers come a'calling. They'll be the heroes, even if largely unrecognized, this year. Publishers overlook them at their risk.
 
 

I've been thinking a lot about my friend Brian O'Leary's address, "The Opportunity in Abundance" (www.magellanmediapartners.com/index.php/mmcp/article/the_opportunity_in_abundance/ ) that he delivered at the Books in Browsers conference a couple of weeks back. It's a thoughtful (and at the same time rousing) call to action for the publishing industry to collaborate effectively in order to reinvent the business of publishing to the benefit of all stakeholders. In Brian's words, "survival is not adequate [as a goal]. " If you're a part of, or interested in the industry, you owe it to yourself to read this piece.
 
As I thought further about the call for an "all stakeholders" organization to hammer out the thorny issues that are hindering our progress (and putting us at a severe disadvantage to non-traditional publishing players), it became clearer that we've had the organizations in place for decades to make this work, but for whatever reason, they've largely looked after their individual interests to the detriment of the industry as a whole. To be blunt, our institutions have failed us.
 
Now don't misunderstand me. The Boards and executives of these organizations are neither evil nor stupid. They've been acting on behalf of their primary constituents (who pay the dues) and acting rationally according to their lights. What's happened however (in contrast to O'Leary's example of the "Law of the Sea" negotiations), is that a Tragedy of the Commons (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) situation has occurred and as a result, all parties have suffered by acting in their respective self-interests.
 
I call attention particularly to the old guard organizations like the American Booksellers Association, the Authors Guild, the American Association of Publishers, the Association of Authors' Representatives and the American Library Association, all of whom have been deeply invested in maintaining the status quo (and litigating vigorously against perceived injustices whether or not these alleged wrongs actually benefit readers...our most important stakeholders). But I would also call attention to newer organizations such as the Book Industry Study Group and IDPF who have moved at a glacial pace in establishing and agreeing upon standards (and in some cases even common vocabularies) due to underfunding and internal bureaucratic wrangling.
 
We can't move quickly enough to compete (or even to collaborate when appropriate) with new entrants to our industry when we're bogged down fighting the last war or arguing arcane points of future standards that we needed yesterday. Amazon, Google, Apple and others don't care and, more importantly, neither do readers.
 
Brian's call for collaborative action is not just important; it's urgent. Let's move it out of the "interesting topic for conferences" category and urge our respective trade organizations and industry leaders to put this project in motion. Tweaking the old organizations is not the answer. We need a streamlined, well-funded, collaborative, empowered team to break away from tired thinking and processes. Not to do this or something similar in the very near term is to surrender our current and future customers (and borrowers) without even fighting the battle.
 
 

I was only at Frankfurt Book Fair for about 48 hours last week so it was a bit of a blur, but I did manage to walk all the Halls, to speak with quite a few people apart from 'official' appointments and to look around. Here are a few impressions, in no particular order, some perhaps of significance, some just random. Don't take them too seriously...this is the definition of anecdata.
 

• Confirmed once again that there are way too many books. Childrens books seem particularly grossly over-represented.
• In the childrens category, there are lots of lame efforts at enhancement. N.B.: Sticking a DVD in the back of the book doesn't count as an enhancement anymore.
• Visitor numbers felt comparable to last year...a fact confirmed by the Fair's official statistics saying visitors increased about 1% over 2010 to just over 280,000.
• I *thought* I saw lots of agents and it turns out that the number of agents was up 11% over 2010. I'm not entirely sure what to make of that.
• Agent Andrew Wylie continues to say outrageous things like "distribution fees should be zero". This doesn't advance the conversation.
• It's been widely reported that worldwide demand for English language books is huge. I don't doubt that's true but after talking with a number of international publishers and distributors, it seem that availabilty is the primary reason for that. The locals would really (unsurprisingly) prefer titles in their native languages.
• Markets are still seriously fragmented for structural (read "rights") reasons as well as nationalistic reasons. If the former could be resolved, the latter would collapse. Nobody has a clue how to do it intelligently.
• Interesting distribution networks for digital books are being built in lots of places. Have a look at A2 Electronic Publishing (www.a2ep.de) for a good example.
• As an aside, don't try to do things in overseas markets without a local partner. You're making it harder.
• International publishers are gobbling up information on the transformation of the industry. Panels were mostly well-attended. I would guess the slope of their learning curve is pretty steep and that they're gaining on US publishers (the conventional wisdom having been that they're two years behind).
• The Fair itself is behind its audience, using slogans like "Let's Get Digital".
• There were an inordinate number of nuns in attendance. Were they agents in disguise?
• Also noted several large American publishers either had much smaller stands or located themselves in the American Collective Stand.
• Asian publishers (and visitors) attended in droves, especially Chinese.
• With twitter and real time reporting, "Show Dailies" are becoming redundant and a waste of paper. Related, Ingram buys a ridiculous amount of ad space in the dailies for reasons unclear to me.
• Small Demons was far and away the coolest start-up I saw. It'll be interesting to see how it goes from here.
• Metadata and discovery are words on everyone's tongues. Progress.
• I flew over with my friend Martin Levin who was attending his 62nd Frankfurt Book Fair.
• The little lady who cleaned the men's room in Hall 8 all day for years wasn't there. Perhaps she'd seen *ahem* enough of us.
• Overall, the 'deer in the headlights' look from most publishers had been replaced by a realization that action was necessary and they were taking it. Some of them are doing smart things, others trying to do more dramatic and risky things. I suspect the former will be more successful.
• Once again, more than a few large publishers told me they weren't sure why they did this (attend the Fair) every year and that they might not come back again. I'll bet they do.
• The bratwurst from the street vendors is better than restaurant brats any day.

Summer in publishing is generally a quiet time and while we had the final demise of Borders, the withdrawal of John Malone's offer to buy Barnes & Noble (he ended up buying less than 20%), the running battles over Amazon and taxes, and what seemed like hundreds of new ereading devices devices announced or introduced with the usual fanfare, this summer was no exception. The business took its Summer Fridays,  spent time at various beaches and launched (and shut down) its quota of imprints while a few notable people moved around from publisher to publisher. Oh, and we had conferences. Lots of conferences.
 
Meanwhile, as we were looking elsewhere, a couple of potentially important things were happening on the less-glamorous perpiphery that could have a big impact going forward. I say "could" because in each case, execution will be critical and each of the players involved still has something to prove on that front.
 
The first event was printer R.R. Donnelley's acquisition of Libre Digital, "a leading provider of digital content distribution, ereading software, content conversion, data analytics, and business intelligence services to book, magazine, and newspaper publishers as well as to ereader device provider" (bit.ly/rj5YZh ). This marks the first time, to my knowledge, that a printer has backward integrated into providing publisher services and, if successful, would be able to offer publishers a soup-to-nuts solution for content creation and production. The "if" is huge here, as LibreDigital has been through more incarnations and had more strategies, none of which has been particularly successful, than most businesses, but it marks an interesting vertical integration strategy from a major printer.
 
Another notable event in supply chain managment was Ingram/Lightning Source's announcement (bit.ly/rfu6DW ) that it had entered into an agreement with Brazil's Singular Digital, a leading book manufacturer in Brazil with extensive regional distribution. This not only gives Ingram a huge footprint in the fast-growing South American and Latin American markets but provides them with virtually worldwide capability to distribute content (print or digital) globally. If done properly, this could give publishers the ability not only to significantly reduce costly inventory, but also to have that inventory in the right place, at the right time, just in time to the benefit to the entire supply chain. Again, execution is critical and coordination among the various Ingram services has proven difficult in the past, but this is a hopeful development.
 
Third, in an announcement last week, Perseus' Constellation and UK publisher Faber and Faber's Faber Factory said they would form a joint venture to provide digital distribution services to publishers in the UK, Ireland and the Commonwealth (bit.ly/aqpIyt ). This move marks further consolidation in the digital distribution chain, hinting at a day when ebook retailers can minimize the number of vendors they must deal with and when digital distribution is truly global. The rights situation continues to be a barrier here, but cross border consolidation only adds pressure to resolve controversies over global rights. (As an aside, Edwards Brothers, another sizeable commercial printer has an arrangement with Perseus' Constellation platform that provides some of the proposed Donnelley/Libre services. As Edwards Brothers continues to expand its POD/short-run printing capabilites worldwide, this could be competitive to the Ingram move discussed above.)
 
And finally, in a differrent arena, Random House announced that it would be going with strictly digital catalogs from now on and NetGalley reports it's gone from less than 50 publishers to over 120, including all of the Big Six, in a little over a year. These developments signal the beginning of the end of paper catalogs and ARC's and should be welcomed and embraced by publishers and readers alike.
 
In short, the "boring and mundane" parts of our business continue quietly to work on transformative innovations while the chattering classes prattle on about the latest shiny thing. Supply chain management, demand planning and seamless global distribution are huge and fundamental building blocks toward publishing's future.
 
Welcome back from your vacation. Get your hands dirty (or get some help from someone who will).

With Borders in its final death throes, lots of people have been asking the question, "Is there an opportunity for indie booksellers here?" My answer is, "If you're smart about it, yes."
 
First, let me be clear that I feel no joy in Borders' death, self-inflicted wounds notwithstanding. There is nothing to celebrate in 11,000 people losing their jobs, including some very talented buyers and booksellers. While I think the stores' closing is preferable for the industry as a whole to having the chain limp along under the ownership of yet another corporate, non-bookish owner, it's hard to see it as a 'good thing' for publishers, authors and those whose full time job was supporting sales and distribution to Borders. So this isn't about grave-dancing. It's about recognizing an opportunity and acting on it.
 
So a few suggestions (in no particular order) for indie booksellers and their national and regional associations, and for smart folks willing to make a bet and work hard :
 

1. If you ever thought about opening a bookstore, or if you're an indie thinking about expanding, look over the list of closed (closing) stores and see where there are opportunities. As I've mentioned here before, my community is relatively affluent, sufficiently populous and underserved by existing stores within a reasonable distance that it could (subject to futher investigation and analysis) provide an opportunity. South Portland, ME, is another location that's been mentioned. I'm sure there are others. Remember that there are experienced booksellers looking for jobs in these locations, so you don't have to re-invent the wheel.
2. Related, indie booksellers have an opportunity to add some tremendously talented and passionate people to their staffs. Problems at Borders were primarily headquarters/management problems. There's lots of talent among the book people there. Seek them out.
3. Another suggestion for indie booksellers is to actively market to Borders' customers. Consider things like making special offers to customers based on the number of Borders Rewards points they have. (Verify, of course.) Or holding special events with special promotions for customers with Borders cards. You're more creative than I am, but I wouldn't let those customers default to online booksellers without a fight.
4. As for the ABA, Jack McKeown and I wrote an article earlier in the year called "Will Independent Bookstores Seize the Day?" (bit.ly/eLF4qy ) in which we proposed a National Bookstore Development Bank to finance indie booksellers opening new stores or expanding existing ones in the case of Borders' demise. ABA has not acted on this proposal other than to mention some 'pilot program' to help new bookstores. Nothing has come of that to my knowledge and probably won't since the major component of the assistance was to come from 'favorable terms' from vendors. I'd urge ABA's management and Board to dust that proposal off and see whether it, or something like it, might be appropriate now. Any plan (as long as it's executed quickly) would be better than no plan.
5. Another action ABA might consider (as suggested by a prominent indie bookseller to me last night) would be for ABA to use some of its approximately $30 million in cash and securities (which has been idle for years) to attempt to purchase the database of Borders' customers from the liquidators. This database could be the foundation for a VERY robust e-commerce platform for indie booksellers.

I suppose my real suggestion is
DO SOMETHING WITH THIS OPPORTUNITY!
There's no question that the bricks and mortar bookselling business is risky, but I'd argue that if you're in it (or want to be in it) action is less risky than inaction.
 

Yesterday, Salon.com carried a post by Kevin Mims called,  " I Don't Support the Bookstores I Love" (bit.ly/nW48le ) * that generated a fair number of comments around the Twittersphere and on Facebook. You should read the post yourself to form an opinion, but the gist of Mr. Mims' apologia is that while he loves independent bookstores and the experience of shopping in them, he buys virtually all of his books from Amazon or other online sources and, surprisingly to me, nearly all of his purchases are used books. Another interesting data point is Mims' statement that he buys 'several hundred books a year'.
 
As usual, that got me thinking about the paradox of wanting what we in the book world say we love and value (independent bookstores, great books, smaller independent presses, well-designed and manufactured print and digital books) compared with many of our actions.
 
I should start out by saying I'm not an Amazon hater, nor am I so wedded to great literature, poetry and non-fiction that I shun online shopping or don't read blockbuster novels or non-fiction. As I've said before here, when I lived in the middle of nowhere for twelve years, Amazon was pretty much my only contact with the bookworld unless I made a day trip to shop in a bricks and mortar store. And the ease of shopping for both e and p books there provides a very nice user experience, and is particularly useful in finding deep backlist titles. I probably buy half my reading materials there.
 
By the same token, given  the economics of publishing non-fiction today, many titles in two of my favorite categories (Biography and History) are often available only from Big Six publishers and I still love a good summer blockbuster read from those same publishers. Again, I'd guess about half my reading comes from large houses.
 
However...
 
Not to shop at indie bookstores deprives us of community cultural centers and that intangible bookstore experience that Mims says he would hate to lose. Indie stores are businesses...for profit entities that need more than moral support to survive. This is not to say that all of them should or will; their businesses need to evolve just like the rest of our industry. But without our support, they cannot evolve and continue to be a thing we love.
 
The same is true of independent presses, which are producing some of the finest titles released today. Readers, reviewers and booksellers share some blame in these books' not reaching the broad audience that many deserve, despite cries from each of them that 'we want something other than commercial dreck' to read, review and handsell. Great things can happen when reviewers devote adequate space and booksellers really get behind a book from an indie press (even one with a very limited marketing and publicity budget). If you don't believe that, check out 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner Tinkers from tiny Bellevue Literary Press (www.blpbooks.org/ ) which sold hundreds of thousands of copies but which began by being championed by one independent bookseller, Michelle Filgate, at River Run Bookstore (www.riverrunbookstore.com/).
 
Now, some will say that both indie bookstores and indie presses are relicss of the past like Tower Records (and they'll point out that the same people making the "support your local bookseller" case download all their music from Apple, Amazon, et al. There may be some element of truth there but it's illustrative of the point I'm trying to make here. (If you loved Tower, why didn't you shop there?)
 
What is undeniably true, however, is that we don't necessarily get what we want unless we make the effort to ensure those things survive. What Mr. Mims describes as "a tiny hypocrisy" is bigger than he thinks in terms of its potential effect.
 
Devote a meaningful percentage of your reading dollars to both indie bookstores and to indie presses . In most cases you'll have a great experience and you'll be helping both the local community and the wider cultural community in the long run.
 
* If you're interested, a longer version of Mims' post can be found here:  open.salon.com/blog/kevinmims/2011/07/08/my_tiny_hypocrisy
 
 

Saturday of a long holiday weekend is just the time for mischief and this weekend's culprit is DropBox (www.dropbox.com/), a self-described "free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily"...[so that you will] "never email yourself a file again!" Kind of a handy service using The Cloud for personalized storage.

 
Except that DropBox modified its Terms of Service effective immediately to say that the stuff that they store for you is also theirs to the extent that they and the "people they work with" can use your files pretty much however they want. Daniel Sawyer of Literary Abominations has a summary of the change and his thoughts on it here: jdsawyer.net/2011/07/02/put-it-in-the-cloud-are-you-nuts/. 
 
I was unaware that The Cloud was a Marxist utopia where what I thought was my content (according to my abilities) belongs to The Cloud's host (according to its needs).
 
There are two morals to the story for me:

1. The Cloud may be a wondrous thing but don't forget the particular cloud you're using is owned or controlled by someone; and
2. All things social and/or useful on the internets are data collectors, privacy invaders, and content land-grabbers. It's time we all understood that.

Happy Fourth.  In celebration you may want to consider declaring declare your Independence from DropBox.
 
UPDATE: SInce this piece was published, Dropbox has 'clarified' their position saying, "We don't own your stuff." The entire post is here: blog.dropbox.com/ . It's unclear whether the 'clarification' was in fact a change in response to the outcry about the revised TOS or whether, as Dropbox says, the outcry was a result of a misinterpretation of the new TOS by its users. Whatever the cause, event, good on Dropbox for backing away from what was clearly a bad idea.