E-books may get a boost if more booksellers follow Borders’ recent move to display more books with covers facing out. The number of titles at the chains superstores will decline five or ten percent, according to the Wall Street Journal. Notice the photo from a Neil Gaiman book signing at Borders? Most of the books in the background are facing spine out, not cover out.
Could Borders’ plans actually be good news in the long run for small publishers, which may suffer the most right now? It sends a message to them of the need to go E. Of course, if they go out of business due to the here-and-now crunch, we can’t be so optimistic. And what about the small publishers trying to both E and P? In that sense, the news from Borders could be better. See Liden Quillen’s Twilight Times Books: Bridging the gap between E and P.
Related: Borders to reduce inventory, show more book covers, from Jason Marcuson, a national account manager at John Wiley & Sons, via Mike Cane.
And speaking of Mike: He finds that the iPod Touch browser isn’t as good as the iPhone’s.
Photo credit: CC-licensed image from Icelight on Flickr.
In a way, books have always been long-tail. Unlike television, which was until recently limited to three networks, there have been thousands of books for thousands of years. Those of us in publishing, know, however, that the “mid-list” has been hurting for at least a decade. Which means, there may be a long tail but an increasingly disproportionate share of total book sales take place in the swollen head–the JK Rowling/Nora Roberts/John Grisham/Stephen King/Tom Clancey best-sellers.
I don’t blame Borders for doing cover-out–they’re trying to make a buck and it’s hard to get rich inventorying books that sell one or two units a year. Considering the “special” economics of bookstores, I suspect they’ll even charge publishers for the honor of having their books displayed face-out (just like they charge to be on the new and exciting shelves or on end-caps). It certainly does highlight the need for long-tail distributors, though.
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com
That’s a misinterpretation of my post. To get the upshot of it all, see the update that explains the fussiness of Safari and the wonkiness of WordPress:
More On That iPod Touch Mystery
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/03/16/more-on-that-ipod-touch-mystery/
All of it should be worked out by summer. WordPress will be adapting to Safari and, I hope, doing some sort of iPhone/iPod Touch software.
I should have done this months and months ago. But it also irritates me that no one else did it.
Rob Preece says “In a way, books have always been long-tail.” Absolutely. And that swollen head he refers to in book sales may not be all that swollen, either. Take the last Harry Potter novel, which was guaranteed to sell faster than iced tea in hell, as book sales go. First printing, according to Entertainment Weekly’s Harry Potter wiki (which says it got the number from PW) — 12 million. EW says the total number of books sold worldwide from the series is 325 million.
US population is about 300 million. World population is about 6.5 billion. The sales, while enough to make the writer, her publishers, and her agent rich, don’t show that a huge percentage of the population has bought a Harry Potter. And these are books that “everybody” is buying.
Books that sell a million copies or more tend to be news in the bookbiz — but the books don’t necessarily sell to a large percentage of the populace. When former Treasury Secretary William Simon’s book A Time for Truth came out in paperback, something like 30 years ago, the cover proclaimed that 50,000 copies had been sold in hardcover. Which figure wasn’t bad then for a current events title.
But if that number was something to crow about on the cover, if a book that sells copies to 1/3 of 1% of the US population is a huge success, then how far out in the long tail is that swollen head? And so should we be surprised if things haven’t happened as quickly for ebooks and dedicated reading devices as they have for mp3s, Ipods, DVDs, and downloadable music and video?
Will publishers regard boosting ebooks as a way to salvage sales numbers hit by the decision to face-out more books? Or redouble their efforts to make sure that their own high-end-of-the-curve titles get the exposure, while paying even less attention than they do now to ways to move long-tail spine-out titles? I’m guessing the latter, but then I’m a pessimistic sort. And I’d be glad to be wrong in that guess.
Bests to all,
–tr