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Can the publishing industry adapt to the Internet?
July 12, 2010 | 5:30 pm
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By Chris Meadows
Nic Boshart, the Digital Services Coordinator at the Association of Canadian Publishers, has an interesting editorial at The Literary Platform about the Internet vs. bookstore dichotomy, and what the publishing industry can and should do to win back the public’s hearts and minds.
Boshart writes of the closing of one of Toronto’s largest remaining independent bookstores, This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, and of the devaluing of such bookstores as community centerpieces—places people hang out and talk to each other about shared experiences, such as books they have read in common.
And this is coming about because of the Internet:
Online fills the old role of books. Online is the new tool to educate, experience and commune with fellow revolutionaries and share ideas. Online poker tables can replace card games, Club Penguin replaces a playground, and World of Warcraft replaces your partner because you spend too much time on it. So here’s the bigger problem; how do we bring real-life back to publishing and the written word?
Boshart identifies two challenges facing the publishing industry: how to get more people reading books (he rightly points out that illiteracy is not the problem, because you have to be able to read and write to some extent to use the Internet at all), and how to get publishers to “act more like the skilled craftspeople they are.”
He contrasts the way that tech people are in the habit of explaining what they do in blogs and trying to help outsiders find the solutions that meet their needs with the relatively closed nature of the publishing industry.
What do publishers do? Close Book Expo America to the public. You seriously can’t hire some underlings for a day to work a table and gain some new readers?
This reminds me of the post I made back in May about Brett Sandusky’s epiphany about who the publishing industry’s real customers are. Publishers need to start waking up to the new realities of the Internet where an inability to connect to consumers looks like you’re ignoring them.
Of course, that might be good for the publishing industry, but whether it can save independent bookstores is another question. Depending on how many people stop buying printed books altogether in favor of e-books, things might still go badly for them—unless Google’s plan to let bookstores resell e-books bears fruit.
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Comments:
Why do we need to “bring real-life back to publishing and the written word”? Some things simply belong to an earlier era. They’re gone, save for a coterie who prefer the way that things used to be done.
My wife and I enjoy going to stage plays. Some other people do, too. But it’d be absurd to imagine that the huge numbers of people who prefer television, movies, and now Internet video will ever be enticed back to live theater.
My advice to bookstore-lovers: you can’t save all of the great bookstores. You can’t even save most of them. Instead, try to figure out how to preserve a niche for yourselves.
The hardest part: someone’s got to pay for it.
My issue is that I am very tired with people framing this whole thing like an all or nothing zero-sum game. There are some books I never would have bought in hardcover even in the only-paper days. There are some books (cookbooks, for example) that I always bought in hardcover and continue to prefer that way. There are other books I never would have bought at all and now buy, in ebook. There is room for all of this—maybe not as much room in each niche, but room just the same. The problem, as always, is in differentiating yourself and making it worth (for example) an out of my way subway ride to the one location of This Ain’t the Rosedale Library when the local chain half a block up the street from me has the vast majority of print books I would want. It has nothing to do with the internet or the community or what have you. It has to do with that store failing to offer a product or service I could not get elsewhere more easily—or offering it, but failing to reach potential customer me in a way so that I was aware they offered it.
Anyway, my understanding was that this particular store was driven out of business by a rent increase in their trendy neighbourhood which had nothing to do with ebooks or the internet, so it’s maybe a bad example
But you get my drift, I think 
The closure of “This Ain’t The Rosedale Library” wasn’t so much a result of independent bookstores … “their old role as community centerpieces has been devalued” … as simply not responding to evolving customer needs. I lived across the street from TATRL for many years; they moved last year to save on rent and closed only months later unable to pay rent at the newer location.
In its day, it was a very fine store. You could get much of what they offered elsewhere … but not “filtered” into such an intelligent selection. It responded well to its niche as every indie bookstore needs to do.
One of the changes in publishing that gets overlooked is what role magazine sales play in keeping bookshops afloat. The magazine industry — mainstream and specialty mags — has shrunk enormously in the past few years and the culprit again is the Internet. Bookstores, especially smaller ones, derive major profits selling magazines. No magazines … no sales … no ability to pay the rent.
The second thing overlooked is the role of special orders which used to handled by such shops. But with both Amazon and Abebooks as a source for new and used titles, and often much more efficiently than any indie can do, this second important revenue stream dried up.
What’s left? Lattes and poetry readings — neither of which TATRL pursued.
Becoming a focal point and expert in a specialty, and reaching out beyond the premises’ front door onto online and in partnerships with others are important ways to avoid being devalued. But it’s a funny thing: partnerships are exactly what indie folks — normally fiercely independent — are least likely to have the skills or inclination to explore.
Ultimately, if the enterprise lacks value for the evolving consumer, it’s the enterprise that is responsible for the “devaluation”, not the Internet and not the customer. “High rent” is neither here nor there.
@Doug – I wasn’t saying it was a zero-sum game, I just think that publishers have alienated themselves from the average person. Publishing isn’t going anywhere, but I think it can be done better, and part of that is to stop trying to make people come to us.
Publishers should match the mindset of online. I think that a lot of people are mistaking the online mindset as the demand for free content, whereas it’s been proven that people will pay for things they value. Publishers don’t have to give away their books, but they do have to, or should, open up and allow everyone to see how they do what they do. That’s the Internet.
@Alexander Inglis – Actually, TATRL had plenty of events.
@Nic Boshart – re: TATRL had plenty of events.
Then those events did not result in enough additional sales to drive the business and boost its importance within the community. TATRL lost its way with its customer base. People continue to read and buy books; but they stopped using TATRL in sufficient numbers and the shop closed. Other bookshops carry on by staying relevant to their core audience.
Yeah, that’s not actually what happened. They were doing pretty well, but were hit with unexpected expenses that no small business no matter what they sold could have accounted for.
All excellent point above guys.
“how do we bring real-life back to publishing and the written word?”
What on earth does that mean ? Reading is a purely solitary experience. And I believe this whole local bookstore as a community focus is seriously over-hyped.
The big Publishers are living in leathered ivory towers where they have become accustomed to easy profits for decades and have suddenly woken up to the whole world of the ebook and are thrashing around trying desperately to maintain their profit margin without giving in depth thought to the future of their business model.
Joann is abs right in trashing this whole zero-sum game nonsense. eBooks will grow the market of reading significantly. There will be a big surge to ebooks but hard copy books will continue, though sliding every year in percentage terms. But I really think it will stabilise about 20% even in ten or fifteen years.
Meanwhile Dog is also right about moving on. Then is then and now is now. The web gives readers a FAR FAR better forum to discuss books of common interest and the new generation of successful publishers and ebook web sites will offer this kind of interaction.
Real world reading clubs are spreading fast and will stay with us in my view – independent of how we read.