A couple of years ago, I presented a print-on-demand workshop at what turned out to be the last iteration of BookExpo Canada. At the end of the trip, severe thunderstorms stranded me in Toronto.
After weighing my options, perhaps poorly, I decided to drive home rather than wait at the airport for another 24 hours (or more). Most of the drive would take place at night, but I wasn’t tired and traffic was light.
By 12:30 a.m., I had made it around the lake and was just outside Rochester, NY on the New York Thruway (their spelling, not mine). I looked down to pick up a cup of coffee I had bought at the last rest stop, and I looked up to see a deer in headlights.
Things got worse after that – I swerved, caught a guardrail, bounced off the road and landed deep in a marsh – but I missed the deer. As I passed it (on my way to a date with the guardrail), the deer was frozen in the same spot, either uncertain what to do or hoping for the best.
It’s the end of a year, so we’re waist-deep in retrospectives and prognostications. Reading them, I’m reminded of the way that deer looked.
A Mashable thought piece, “5 E-Book Trends That Will Change the Future of Publishing”, started me down the path. Predictions like “The $9.99 e-book won’t last forever” (he didn’t think the price was high) and “Publishers will be more important than ever” were enough to make me swear off end-of-year reading.
Unfortunately, I didn’t stop. When the New York Times ran an obligatory roundup that might have been better titled “Big Trade Publishers Realize E-Books Are Popular”, this stopped me in my tracks:
“My No. 1 concern is the survival of the physical bookstore,” said Carolyn Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster. “We need that physical environment, because it’s still the place of discovery. People need to see books that they didn’t know they wanted.”
Yes, this is the same Carolyn Reidy who stood with Jeff Bezos at BookExpo in 2008, announcing the digitization of the S&S backlist.
That took place before publishers realized that you don’t need a publisher to sell a book on the internet. Apparently publishers haven’t yet learned that people can also use the web to see books they didn’t know they wanted (they can even sample them!).
Of course, only people with trade relationships can get books on shelves at major retailers. That’s what things look like at the end of being proud.
Over the last two years, we’ve seen two U.S. car companies fail (“people will always drive cars”) and several major banks collapse (“people will always need money”) . TimeWarner, which less than ten years ago was twice the size of its largest media competitor, now ranks behind the likes of Comcast and DirectTV.
You can swing a cat at a New Year’s Eve party and not hit anyone who thinks “people will always want news in print”. Per-capita newspaper consumption has been declining for 63 years. The newsweekly Time reaches less than 70% of the circulation it had two decades ago, and its last remaining competitor has had three owners this year.
Market structures change. The competitive mix shifts. New technologies support and even encourage new entrants. Sure, I may always drive a car, but that doesn’t mean I buy your car. Companies saddled with infrastructure and overhead costs can hope that consumers will pay higher prices, but that’s just hope.
For a few days after my accident, whenever the phone rang, I’d say it was probably the deer calling to thank me for avoiding him. The deer never called, and I doubt that it learned a lesson watching me careen into the marsh. Deer are like that. We don’t have to be.
Via Brian O’Leary’s Magellan Media Partners blog
I’m just commenting on the Google ads for this. I don’t normally even notice what the ads are as I scroll from the post to the comments, but this time I did.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen Towing and Emergence Road Service ads on Teleread before. I had to snicker a little.
To continue your parable, I am reminded that many folks are injured and killed trying to avoid wildlife in roadways. A deer is a big animal that can cause a lot of damage to a car and its occupants, but small animals, not so much. Sometimes, as harsh as it sounds, the better thing is just to keep on going….
So soozzie, are you saying that Publishers and Physical bookstores are the deer and that the reading public are going to run them over on their way to purchasing ebooks?
Brian,
Can’t we have it both ways?
S&S and other large publishing houses waking up to the fact that bookstores with physical books are going to decrease in the next several years and that eventually it will not only cost more to have a physical books, but most of them will end up being printed on demand?
Or are you saying that the big corporate publishing companies are going to have to learn how to change their focus completely or die out?
The publishing houses are going to have to decide if they are in the business of pushing dead tree pulp or enabling writers to connect to readers.
If they choose the former, there is a death-spiral waiting for them to slide their way to oblivion. If they choose the latter, they need to rethink their strategy and business process and start reversing 30+ years worth of (really) bad choices.
Excellent article … and comments 🙂
I had to laugh when you quoted Caryolyn Reidy. That same quote made me sit up when I read it too. I couldn’t help but wonder under which basket she keeps her head.
Don’t get me wrong, I love physical bookstores, but decades ago when I discovered Amazon’s online bookstore, I was amazed at the number of books and authors out there that I had never heard of and would never have known existed, (and that I definitely “wanted”), if it hadn’t been for Amazon’s MUCH larger selection.
It has been years since I’ve thought of b&m bookstores as anything other than a luxury..great ambiance, but totalling unnecessary to my reading pleasure. The last time I stopped at one the front was taken up with large displays of well known authors, (nothing new there), but where were these fresh books and unknown authors about whom Ms. Reidy seems so concerned? Nowhere that would encourage discovery or an impulse purchase possible, that’s for sure.
Teleread community: I love you, but why are we so utterly incapable of seeing things from a different perspective?
Carolyn Reiddy is absolutely correct that bookstores serve an important advertising function for publishers. Amazon’s entire North American media sales (all media, not just books) are just over 6 billion. Borders and BKS alone account for more than 9 billion in sales every year. Lots of people still go to physical stores in spite of the higher prices, and in spite of the fact that publisher’s ALREADY offer samples online.
E-books will do fine no matter what. But if the bookstores go away, do you really think that all of those other customers would just suddenly start going online or using e-books when they aren’t willing to now?
Peter you ask a fair question – but my response is to ask you what is the business model for making money for bookstores ? In a world transitioning to eBooks. In a world where paper books will be printed in smaller runs, causing distribution costs per item to increase and retail prices to increase significantly ? In a world where more and more non-best-seller titles will not be considered worth printing on paper ?
I have opined many times that my own personal view is that only a print-on-demand based bookshop is viable. What do you think ?
Peter, your point that “Carolyn Reiddy is absolutely correct that bookstores serve an important advertising function for publishers” is correct. The operative phrase, however, is “for publishers.” They obviously have a vested interest in preserving the bookstore, because that’s their chief advertising outlet. And if the bookstores went away tomorrow, it would primarily be those publishers that would suffer. Those who self publish would actually see their lot improve.
Also, you ask: “Do you really think that all of those other customers would just suddenly start going online or using e-books when they aren’t willing to now?”
If they want to continue reading new material: Yes. Or they’ll find a print-on-demand service and cough up the extra dough for that. If they don’t want new material, they’ll buy used books until there aren’t any more, or they’ll start watching television. Like it or not, times change, and we either change with them, or fall behind.
Either way, it’s up to them, and the vast majority of those who try ebooks will experience the reality of Jordan’s Theorem: You get used to… what you want to get used to.
@Steven
I agree; if bookstores go away more people will watch television and spend time dorking about on the internet, they will also reread books they already have. Bookstores (or rather, the salespeople and marketers working for bookstores) whole job is to make people interested in buying new books. The people at Amazon also drum up interest, but starving out the competition won’t make them do their job better.
Even though CDs are phasing out, Itunes is actually in decline right now.
@ Howard
Honestly, I don’t know how to save bookstores; Barnes and Noble seem to be transitioning very well, but there’s nothing to stop them from closing locations. Print-on-demand would probably help- I would certainly recommend it for any independent bookseller.
The only thing the publishers can do is extend the agency model to the real world. Customers won’t like it, but lets make that Amazon and the bookstores problem to solve. Customer relations is their job, after all. Also look for more Harry Potter’s- the key was that there were seven of ’em in the series. So the movies came out and made the last couple of books HUGE sellers.
But then, I’m not a publisher- I work in the landfill industry.