Larry Kirshbaum, LJK Literary Movement; Ken Cader, PUblishers Lunch; Ken Brooks, Cengage Learning; Evan Schnittman, Oxford University Press; Mike Shatzkin, moderator
If you were publishing a book this month and did an ebook simultaneously what percentage of total sales would it sell?: They answer: 17% at highest to 5%; 10% now and 35% lifetime; 6% to 15%; 10%
Apple and Google enter the market, what will this do?: They answer: good news for publishers because add big players to compete with Amazon; Amazon will continue to grow but its share will fall; Apple is just an experiment at this point, but Google will have a major impact; Amazon becoming device agnostic with release of Blackberry app and huge potential for further growth; industry needs Amazon, bookstores and big box stores and has to find a model that works for all of them
Erights: new Amazon 70/30 deal will not affect major best sellers but will be beneficial for smaller titles
International rights: will territorial rights survive with ebooks? don’t see why it should change anything and technology may mak
e it easier to enforce; defining territories will be a real mess – where you are, where you bought the device, where you are when you buy the book, etc?; maybe better to split rights as “world English” and “translation”;
Will legacy publishers need to scale down in the next few years: physical infrastructure will need to go down; fixed costs will be cut throughout the supply chain; publishers have cut to the bone and don’t need to be smaller they need to be more responsive; large publishers have one major thing on their side – they can still create “magic”; science of aggregating audiences may take away from the necessity for “magic”
Other comments: in audiobook world a Netflix model has been very successful and this will work well and get bigger in the library model;
This reminds me of what the major recording labels thought when they signed up for iTunes back in 2003. At the time they were convinced that Apple was an experiment and that Microsoft would have a real impact.
The irony here is that Google’s past attempts to sell digital content have been experimental (and mostly failed), while Apple has had a big impact.
Google “books” are a joke. I do agree with you that Amazon’s “Killerapp” isn’t the kindle hardware, it’s whispersync and the relationship with the customer.