|
Writers' magazine |
|
|
|
|
|
News stories from the book world 2008You can check older stories in our archive. News archive 2007 Archive 06 Archive 05 Archive 04 Archive 03 Archive 02 Archive 01
Dragons and 'a sense of awe and wonder'Christopher Paolini is a publishing sensation to rival J K Rowling. In these difficult times his is an inspiring story of raw talent with a large dose of hard work and a dash of luck. Paolini was home-schooled by his mother, a trained Montessori teacher, and from an early age became fascinated by fantasy, particularly stories involving dragons. He has cited Tolkien and Anne McCaffrey as formative influences. When he came to make his first attempt at writing a novel, as he himself explained in ‘Dragon Tales’, he tried to imbue his story with the same elements he found most compelling in books: ‘an intelligent hero; lavish descriptions; exotic locations; dragons; elves; dwarves; magic; and above all else, a sense of awe and wonder’. At fifteen, he was writing the book he wanted to read himself: ‘When I started Eragon. I was really trying to please myself as a fantasy reader and I thought maybe my parents would read the book and maybe my sister if I was lucky.’ The book that resulted, Eragon, was about a fifteen-year-old boy who finds a dragon's egg, and when the egg hatches and a magnificent blue dragon emerges, the boy names her Saphira and the two become inseparable. It is fairly remarkable for a fifteen-year-old boy to write a full-length children’s novel, but what happened next was in some ways even more extraordinary. Paolini’s parents read and edited the manuscript and decided that the whole family should work to self-publish it. The author said: ‘We wanted to retain financial and creative control over the book. Also, we were excited by the prospect of working on this project as a family.’ It’s hard to make a self-published book work in such a way as to support a whole family. In due course, after a major promotion campaign and in spite of doing pretty well, they were close to admitting defeat when they had a stroke of luck. The stepson of the writer Carl Hiassen read and enjoyed Eragon and Hiassen recommended it to his own editor at Knopf. A six-figure deal for the three books in the series followed, and Paolini’s future as a writer was assured. His sales have built rapidly since then and by the time Brisingr, the third book in the Inheritance Cycle, was published in summer 2008, over 15 million copies of the first two books, Eragon and Eldest, had been sold worldwide. The US hardback sold 550,000 on its first day on sale and in the UK it has been the fastest-selling children’s book of the year. The series has been translated into 50 languages and Eragon has been turned into a major Hollywood film. Paolini says that he has allowed himself one extravagance, a replica Viking sword, which he carries with him around the house. At 25 he still lives at home and is working on the concluding book in the Inheritance Cycle.
Publishers go for print on demandRandom House UK has just announced that it is to launch its print on demand list, Random Collection, in January. It has been producing print on demand titles for a year and a half, but now has sufficient critical mass to see this as a separate list to be marketed as such. POD is also driving Faber Finds, but the difference here is that this is a backlist publishing programme for which most of the titles are from other publishers. It launched in May with 100 titles and will have around 300 by the end of the year. The break-even on each title is just 50 copies, so, says Faber MD Stephen Page, the top 100 titles are ‘racing past the finishing post’. With titles like Philip Ziegler’s The Black Death and Richard Hoggart’s classic The Uses of Literacy, perhaps this is not surprising, but all credit to the publisher for this enterprising initiative. Faber editor John Seaton says: ‘The point of the list is that it enables us to publish deep backlist which would have been stocked in some bookshops, but which has now become vulnerable to the shift towards frontlist … These books did sell, but not in sufficient numbers to make them viable. Now, thanks to new technology, we can make them work.’ In some ways trade (general) publishers are way behind the trend. Specialist, professional and academic publishers with higher-priced books have been using POD for some time. Cambridge University Press has been working on a massive print on demand programme for several years. It has systematically brought its backlist back into print, at low cost to the company but contributing a substantial and growing amount to the bottom line. From a publisher’s point of view, reprinting books from their archives is highly economic. If they still have the rights, it enables them to keep a book in print and go on selling it at minimal cost, as efficient digitisation of texts that they already own is a relatively minor cost compared to the expense of originating new books. For the author it is very gratifying to have their book back in print. As Seaton suggests, it is becoming harder and harder to persuade bookshops to stock a wide range of backlist. Worryingly, American publishers and bookstore chains have commented recently on the difficulty of selling anything other than heavily promoted front-of-shop bestsellers or big-name authors. Amazon has played a big part in the renaissance of the backlist, with its very wide range of titles. Books which could not make their way through bookshop outlets can now be sold to an informed book-buying market, which knows what it wants, through online bookshops. For authors who have already published a number of books, just as much as for as yet unpublished writers considering self-publishing, this channel is going to become increasingly important as the book trade is ravaged by what increasingly looks like a retail slump. The Advantages of Print on Demand Print on demand and the Long Tail in Changes in Publishing. WritersPrintShop, our self-publishing service
'The storm clouds are gathering'‘More Armageddon or Christmas is coming?’ The book trade was anxious but not yet showing signs of the downturn. That was what we reported just a month ago in News Review 13 October. Now the storm clouds are gathering faster as the big western economies slip into recession. There are still big hopes for Christmas, but everyone seems agreed that next year is going to be very difficult. The American book trade may be suffering especially badly. Publisher and CEO of Simon & Schuster Carolyn Reidy says all major accounts have reported that in-store: ‘Traffic is down, and what traffic is in there seems to by buying the tried and true.... They're not buying the second book. The brands and name authors that are landing are selling.’ She notes: ‘Backlist is where we are seeing the drop-off and that is worrisome, obviously, because it is a very profitable part of our list.’ S & S is having its own problems, as it is part of CBS, whose biggest shareholder Sumner Redstone needs to raise a lot of cash. Chairman of giant book chain Barnes & Noble, Len Riggio, said recently: ‘Never in all of the years I've been in business have I seen a worse outlook for the economy. And never in all my years as a bookseller have I seen a retail climate as poor as the one we are in. Nothing even close. We are bracing for a terrible holiday season, and expect the trend to continue well into 2009, and perhaps beyond.’ He noted however that Barnes & Noble had a solid balance sheet and was debt-free, which means that it is strongly placed to sit out the recession. Big international romance publisher Harlequin/Mills and Boon says that their sales are holding steady. However health publisher Rodale has just announced that it is cutting 10% of staff, citing its difficulties in finding a strategic partner to help it expand because of weakness in the credit markets. HarperCollins’s worldwide sales for the quarter are 4.5% lower than a year ago. In the UK things don’t look so bad, although nervousness is gripping the trade. W H Smith has said it has seen a 4% drop in sales in its high street stores in the last 10 weeks. Nielsen, looking at the market as a whole, says that sales are down on last year. Simon Juden, CEO of the UK Publishers’ Association, says: ‘Historically, we have always done all right in tough times. I don’t think anyone is expecting major growth – but equally I don’t think we will see anything catastrophic. The fundamentals are strong and the sector will do well.’ As regards Christmas, his view is supported by the latest report from Deloitte, which has struck an optimistic note in noting that books are growing in popularity on consumers’ must-have Christmas lists. Its annual Christmas Retail Survey reported that 59% of UK consumers said they intended to spend the same amount of money as last year. 63% of those surveyed said they would buy books this Christmas, up from 55% last year. Another 65% said they were hoping to receive something to read this year. These are very positive numbers, so Christmas sales might be fairly good. So, it could be worse, but that may be exactly what it will be in the New
Year, when book-buyers face an almighty hangover, not just from Christmas but
from many years of a boom fuelled by rises in the property market and credit
card spending. 2009 doesn’t look a pretty picture.
Great price and great serviceAmazon’s latest figures don’t look all that good, as they too have been hit by the recession. They are projected to fall between $6 billion and $7 billion in the final quarter and their operating income could be down as much as 46%. This sounds alarming but it will probably just be a blip in the onward march of the giant Internet retailer. Amazon was set up by former investment banker Jeff Bezos in 1994, going public in 1997, and it focused on books right from the start. As the stock market rose, shareholders were able to take a relaxed approach to the company, in spite of the fact that by 2001 it was losing $1.5 billion annually and only managed to hit profitability in 2004. This autumn marks the internet retailer’s tenth anniversary in the UK. Amazon had already been operating for three years in the US when it bought Bookpages in the UK in 1998. The company relaunched the site with aggressive discounts of 40%, just three years after the end of the Net Book Agreement in the UK. Earlier this year there was a dispute over terms with Hachette, the UK’s biggest trade (general) publisher, and Amazon showed its teeth by removing the ‘buy’ button from Hachette titles. It’s been a bumpy ride in other ways. In the US the company was condemned when it insisted that publishers should use its print on demand facility, Booksurge, for POD books to be sold on Amazon.com. It has not built this insistence into its recent UK and German POD launches. It does not currently offer this service to self-publishers but it might do so in the future. American owners of Amazon’s Kindle are now able to pick from 185,000 titles. The wireless facility which enables them to get the e-books downloaded directly onto the device has indeed proved to be a killer application. It is a bit of a puzzle why Amazon has not yet released the Kindle outside the US, but no doubt there is some improvement in store which the company thinks will give it the edge internationally. Of course for many years Amazon had competitors, but these all dropped away and it is only recently that the bookshop chains have reinstated their websites, with a huge loss of competitive advantage. Amazon has successfully used books as a starting-point to build itself into a giant Internet retailer, selling a large range of goods, and for several years no-one has had any chance of catching them. Recently the company has taken the acquisition trail and just this year it bought Audible, giving it a dominant position in the audiobook market, Abebooks, the giant second-hand book site, and social networking site Shelfari. Perhaps it’s too late to talk about the danger of one company dominating the market so completely. As regards the book business there is nothing to stop Amazon flexing its muscle more and more. Will Atkinson of Faber says that Amazon has been a boon to some smaller, independent publishers: ‘because it offers something like a level playing field’. But an independent publisher says: ‘Every monopoly is detrimental to the market and if they are too powerful imbalance occurs’. Alan Giles, the former CEO of HMV Group, which owns Waterstone’s, says of Amazon: ‘Instead of opting for just great price or great service they opted for both and they had first-mover advantage and enormous support from the capital markets.’ The rest is history.
Google settles copyright suitA ground-breaking agreement was reached in New York this week in the case of the Authors’ Guild and the Association of American Publishers v Google. Google will make payments totalling $125m. Whilst recognising the entitlement of rights holders, the agreement will allow for the expansion of online access to millions of in-copyright books from the libraries taking part in Google Book Search. This issue has been controversial for some time. Google’s plans to make in copyright books available was challenged because of suspicions about the company’s ultimate aims and anxiety about protecting copyright and the right of authors to license their work. Mark le Fanu, General Secretary of the Society of Authors in the UK, said: ‘The decision recognises that authors and publishers must have control… It’s a compromise for Google but a major breakthrough for authors.’ This has been an issue for two years, ever since Google announced its intention of scanning in copyright books, as well as those out of copyright, from the libraries it has been working with. The Authors’ Guild described their plans at the time as ‘a massive copyright infringement’ and sued Google, with five publishers doing the same in a separate suit. The case has now been settled out of court, with Google in effect recognising that it cannot ride roughshod over authors’ copyright. The compensation Google has agreed to pay includes $45m to authors and publishers whose books have already been digitised without approval and $34.5m to establish a new copyright registry, to which it will pay 63% of revenue derived from an author’s work. The new Book Rights Registry in the US will locate rights holders and collect the money, rather as ALCS and CLA already do in the UK. Google will now be able to provide access to out of print books, whilst the authors of these books will benefit from them being made available. For the Internet giant it is a good outcome and will enable it to pursue its aim: ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ With 60% of worldwide Internet searches and 86% of total UK searches, Google had a market value of $140 billion (a September figure). The company already makes about $20 billion a year from online advertising. This deal may seem expensive, but for Google it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the opportunities it unlocks. And for writers? They can all breath a sigh of relief that a solution has been found which acknowledges and protects their rights.
The Booker goes global tooThe spectacle of meltdown in world banks and stock markets has meant that the Booker Prize has passed us by, but it’s worth backtracking a little to look at this most international of prizes. It’s odd that it should have such a global effect, as it’s by no means the biggest or even the most prestigious of literary prizes. The IMPAC’s 100,000 euros (£79,859 or $127,000) outguns it and the Nobel is worth much more and also has far more prestige but generally, in the UK and US at least, it doesn’t sell books. The proliferation of literary prizes, News Review 21 July, looks at the enormous number of literary prizes which dominate the literary fiction scene. Many of these have a major impact, but the Booker, now in its 40th year, soldiers on as the biggest of them all. Last year’s not particularly popular winner, Anne Enright’s The Gathering, sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide and each of the 2007 shortlisted titles sold over 100,000 copies. These are astonishing figures for literary novels, so the Prize is certainly successful at getting a lot of people to buy literary fiction. Partly this is because of the controversy the Booker seems to engender. Year after year the judges are reckoned to have chosen the wrong winner, which generally means not the most readable, nor the most salesworthy, nor even from the most well-known author. It’s almost a cliché that major authors often do not make it on to the shortlist. This year even the New York Times blared on its front page: ‘Rushdie snubbed by Booker’. Tibor Fischer, a previous judge, says: ‘If you go for established names, you are criticised for playing safe, if you go for unknowns, people ask "Who they?" There will always be a big stick to beat the judges with.’ Alex Clark, editor of Granta, and one of this year’s judges, wrote in the Observer: ‘The problem with literary culture is not that there bad novels and good novels, but that there are so many that can be described as average, or good enough. But good enough for what?’ The question of who defines the ‘what’ is also relevant. Judges for big prizes will generally choose what they individually think is best, so the outcome depends a lot on who the judges are. Victoria Glendinning, a previous judge, also pinpoints the effect of compromise in the final discussions: ‘Novels with strong support can quickly cancel each other out.’ This year there was controversy, not altogether unwelcome to the Prize’s administrators, when Jamie Byng of Canongate posted a note on the Booker website to say that he could not respect a judging committee that had overlooked Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, which he had published, for a book like Tom Rob Smith’s crime novel Child 44. Byng might be considered a little partis pris, but his posting demonstrated the way in which everyone feels they are entitled to a view on the winner. The Booker’s global reach and importance in stimulating sales of literary novels is growing. The publisher Morgan Entrekin of Grove/Atlantic Inc shouted ‘Three years in a row!’ on hearing of Aravind Adiga’s win this year with his debut novel The White Tiger. Grove published previous winners Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Anne Enright’s The Gathering in the US, whilst Atlantic Books, a British publisher co-founded by Entrekin and in which Grove has a majority stake, released The White Tiger in Britain. The world of book prizes is becoming more global.
The Frankfurt Book Fair goes globalIn the midst of all the gloom and doom, the Frankfurt Book Fair has been pretty much business as usual. Writing on the last day of the Fair, visitor figures are so far up 8.1% on last year, although there has been a slight drop in exhibitor numbers. The Fair’s success is partly a sign of the increasingly global nature of publishing, and the fact that publishers need this huge international marketplace to buy and sell rights across the world. This year Turkey was the guest of honour and had a record 165 publisher stands, showing the impact of this special status. Nobel prize-winner Orhan Pamuk used his opening addresss to decry the ‘oppression’ of Turkey’s writers, describing ‘a century of banning and burning books, of throwing writers into prison, killing them or branding them as traitors’. Some intriguing new initiatives were announced, many of them tending towards a more international view of the world. The publisher Bloomsbury has set up a joint venture with educational organisation the Qatar Foundation to launch a new publishing house which will publish books in both English and Arabic for readers in the Middle East. The plan is to publish across a wide range of adult, children’s and academic titles. Bloomsbury’s CEO Nigel Newton said: ‘Our brief is to identify literary talent and develop a knowledge transfer. It will be very much working in two directions, into and out of the region.’ Interestingly, the publisher also aims to organise creative writing classes for developing writers and to help develop translation skills into and out of Arabic. Also from the Middle East, a plan has been announced to translate thousands of books and build a new Arabic language library for 21st century readers. The UK’s Society of Young Publishers, a lively group of not-always-so-young publishers, has announced plans to set up a web portal for young publishing professionals across the globe. Next year’s Fair will have China as guest of honour and that country has already surprised observers by asking Taiwan to participate. The increasing globalisation of the world economy is reflected in the way the book world is becoming ever more international. This is good news for writers, as it opens up new markets for them, and those fortunate enough to write in English have an added advantage in reaching a huge global audience.
More Armageddon or Christmas is coming?Since News Review last looked at the global financial crisis three weeks ago (A week of Armageddon 22 September) the situation has deteriorated markedly and seems poised on a knife-edge. The financial crisis has tipped over into the rest of the economy and the interbank credit crunch has created such a panic that global recession is staring us in the face. So how is the book world faring now? The UK autumn lists look strong and book sales are holding up, at the moment at least. The usual caveats about books doing well in recession have been applied, but the truth is that the possible effects of the turndown have still to make themselves felt. The latest Nielsen Bookscan figures show that overall sales are currently up marginally on a year ago, but it could be another story if there is a sharp retail turndown. Tim Hely-Hutchinson, CEO of Hachette UK, the UK’s biggest publisher, says: ‘Sales are remarkably buoyant given the current economic doom and gloom… Traditionally in times of tough economic conditions, books are perceived as very good value. To date, we have had a very good year across the board. Next year, of course, things may get tougher.’ UK publishers are anxious about big wholesaler Bertrams, which has been affected by questions about the financial health of parent company Woolworths. Bankruptcies are what businesses fear in a recession, exposing any company which is not financially secure, but there’s also the question of the companies’ share prices. In general the picture looks worse in the US, although it’s notable that debt-free bookselling chain Barnes & Noble has been in a strong position. Random House worldwide reported that its results for the first half of the year were 8% down on the same period last year, although the UK part of the company is doing well. Borders’ share price is down 44% since September 11. Books-a-Million has fallen even further, losing 49% since September 11, shedding 25% in the past 6 days. Amongst international publishers Hachette parent Lagardere’s share price is down 31.5% since 12 September and News International, parent company of HarperCollins, is down 36% since the same date. Bloomsbury bucks the trend and its shares have gone down just 3.5% in the last month. In the bookshops books are still selling and nobody knows whether the
global crisis will be resolved, or will lead to a major recession. In the
meantime Christmas is coming up, the gift-buying frenzy which deliver the most
important few weeks of the whole bookselling year in those countries which
celebrate it. The UK has already had ‘Super Thursday’, 2 October, when no less
than 800 new titles were released to great excitement. And this week publishers
are winging their way to the Frankfurt Book Fair, the biggest annual jamboree of
the international book trade, to buy and sell their wares. So life goes on as
usual, we hope.
Do-it-yourself word definitionsThe launch of a new website which encourages everyone to upload videos of themselves delivering their own definitions of their favourite words could offer freedom from the dead hand of the past or be the last straw for pedants, depending on your point of view. Wordia.com is powered by YouTube and borrows many of its techniques of using personally recorded video to reach a wide audience. But this new site is supported by the publisher HarperCollins UK, perhaps with an eye to the advantages of publicising its own reference books (although the underlying message appears to be that you don’t need their definitions, as you’re better off making up your own). Such august bodies as the UK’s National Literacy Trust and the Open University also support the initiative. Samuel Johnson will not be the only one to turn in his grave. Generations of scholars and editors have laboured to produce towering scholarly edifices like the Oxford English Dictionary with its carefully vetted annual addition of new words. How can people who know nothing at all about it think they are qualified to make up definitions, and then not even write them down but just produce a video of themselves defining them? Many who respect and seek to preserve the English language from the depredations of email and texting, not to mention YouTube and poor spelling, will be horrified by this. The two young Americans who have just been fined $3,035 (£1,640) for correcting a sign in the Grand Canyon National Park which had a misplaced apostrophe and a missing comma, would surely take this view. The two founded Teal, the Typo Eradication Advancement League, which seems now to have been eradicated itself online. So, what’s the positive angle on Wordia.com? The people running the site say: ‘We’re a team of language enthusiasts and general word nuts who have joined forces to create a new kind of dictionary – a democratic ‘visual dictionary’. A place where anyone with a video, webcam or mobile phone can define the words that matter to them in their life. We believe that everyone wants to express themselves more clearly, whether to win debates, spark conversations or simply make people laugh with a well-chosen word.’ So should words be democratically defined, or is there a right definition which everyone should use? Well, it really depends on your point of view. This debate could run and run. The Chicago Tribune on the Typo Eradication Advancement League
A week of ArmageddonAfter what many are calling the most extraordinary week on the stock market since the Great Crash, how is publishing faring? Can we even begin to guess what the terrifying events dominating the world’s financial stage might mean for the international book trade? The answer is that it’s too soon to tell yet but the private equity buyout of Informa, which calls itself ‘the leading provider of specialist information to the global academic & scientific, professional and commercial communities’ has been stopped in its tracks by the credit crunch. The consortium of private equity groups led by Providence Equity have found that they just can’t raise the cash. In China there has been a rather subdued 15th Beijing Book Fair, relocated to Tianjin, as required by the authorities, to avoid the Olympics. Fair attendees covered the 75 miles in a 200 mile an hour bullet train, so it was easy to commute from Beijing. A quieter fair still meant a great deal of solid business was done. The 21st Moscow Book Fair ironically had Ukraine as the country of honour, a decision presumably made before the current tensions were exacerbated by events in Georgia. The Fair was well-attended by the public, but was overshadowed by a slump in the Russian stock market which required the Russian Central Bank to step in to shore up the rouble. As for the rest of the financial carnage, it’s too soon to tell yet what effect the upheavals will have, but publishers without solid balance sheets and with too little liquidity may well find that they too are in trouble. Let’s hope that people will still be buying books (see News Review 25 August, Are books recession-proof?) but expect cutbacks in publishers’ output. And that, unfortunately, means that it could be even harder for new writers to find a publisher until the market improves.
Good news/bad news from the webThe Internet is profoundly affecting what is happening in the staid old world of books. Two bestselling authors have waded in recently, as web threats and opportunities change the way books are written, published and sold. Stephenie Meyer has brought her bestselling Midnight series (see News Review 18 August) to an abrupt end because her work in progress was pirated and made available online. The author explained her view in a letter to fans on her website: ‘I did not want my readers to experience Midnight Sun before it was completed, edited and published. I think it is important for everybody to understand that what happened was a huge violation of my rights as an author, not to mention as a human being. Unfortunately, with the internet, it is easy for people to obtain and share items that do not legally belong to them. No matter how this is done, it is still dishonest. So where does this leave Midnight Sun? My first feeling was that there was no way to continue. Writing isn’t like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything. If I tried to write Midnight Sun now, in my current frame of mind, James (a vampire tracking Bella) would probably win and all the Cullens would die, which wouldn’t dovetail too well with the original story.’ Fortunately the other big Internet news is more positive. In a groundbreaking move, the UK’s Daily Telegraph will serialise Alexander McCall Smith’s new novel, Corduroy Mansions, online. Author of the highly successful No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, featuring his character Precious Ramotse, McCall’s books are sold in more than 40 languages. A new chapter of the novel will appear each weekday, starting on 15 September and running for 20 weeks, and it will be available by email. Daily Telegraph readers will be invited to make plot suggestions as the story unfolds, and there will be a daily download of a podcast read by actor Andrew Sachs. The story follows the fortunes of a group of neighbours who live in the Pimlico area of London and it will be a novel of character, enlivened no doubt by McCall Smith’s trademark light humorous touch. This seems a brilliant way of involving readers and is a great coup for the Telegraph, which has always had good book pages but is not known for being in the vanguard of new technology. The Internet is a great equaliser though and offers a wealth of opportunities for writers, whether well-known or completely unknown, to reach readers. Corduroy Mansions on the Daily Telegraph site
Groundbreaking new initiative from BloomsburyBloomsbury has dipped into its reputed £50m ($88.32m) Harry Potter war chest to set up an innovative new publishing venture, Bloomsbury Academic. The new business will publish a new list online for free, with the venture sustained by sales to libraries and academic institutions. Print on demand will be used for the actual publishing but the books will be made freely available to students online. The list will consist of academic monographs, rather than reference titles, initially concentrating on humanities and social sciences, building thematic lists on "pressing global issues". The intention is to go for fast growth, with 50 titles in 2009. The publisher of this new venture will be Frances Pinter, a distinguished academic publisher who started her own publishing house at 23 and, after selling this in 1994, took on a role at the Soros Foundation. Pinter is a proselytiser for Creative Commons and has contributed an article on the subject to WritersServices. Bloomsbury Academic will make use of Creative Commons licences to allow non-commercial use of all its titles on publication. Pinter said the new venture would have: ‘a major commitment to spreading knowledge more easily throughout the world with a sustainable business model’. Bloomsbury Academic will be breaking new ground in its plans to make books freely available online. This and other initiatives should provide a new direction for the company too. The publisher recently announced results which showed its revenue and gross profit shrinking by 18% and 11% respectively in the first set of post-Potter results. Bloomsbury’s American company has suffered recent high-level losses of staff and redundancies as it faces up to a difficult market with a relatively small backlist to cushion it. Life after the Potter years is not going to be easy, but if the firm invests carefully it believes it can develop and acquire new businesses which will take it forward. New Executive Director Richard Charkin (who used to write the provocative Charkinblog) rebuts recent talk of closing down Bloomsbury US: ‘People don’t understand: it’s not about America. You publish your authors to the best of your ability wherever people want to buy their books.’ Certainly it is unthinkable that Bloomsbury would back away from the most important English language book market. The company’s expansive new internationalism is based on using the web to publicise books by making them freely available as a way of promoting sales. Although it will not be equally applicable to all areas of publishing, we are probably now in a position to see that this approach will represent a major way forward for the book business. Frances Pinter's article on Creative Commons Inside Publishing on Creative Commons
All change in the travel marketTravel books have rarely been so much in the headlines as they were in the UK last week when Tony Elliott, the pugnacious founder of Time Out, used a speech at the Edinburgh Festival to lambast the BBC. The public broadcaster has recently acquired Lonely Planet’s travel guides and Elliott is not alone in thinking that the BBC is getting out of control and offering unfair competition to commercial businesses. But travel publishing is going through bigger changes than that. It has seen years of boom as people from the richer countries of the world have travelled more and more, and increasingly have opted for long haul destinations. The growing market for guidebooks has brought about intense competition amongst the different travel publishers. Now the twin changes wrought by people’s concern about their carbon footprint and the global economic downturn are bringing that era to an end. Americans, affected by the weak dollar, have been travelling less, but Europeans have been making up for it and there’s been huge growth in the number of tourists touring the world from countries such as China. In the UK 2006 was not a good year for travel publishers, with intense competition. But in 2007 this trend was reversed, with travel book sales up 5.95%, compared to a 2.93% fall in 2006. Discounting took a heavy toll of publishers’ profits and Stephen Mesquita, author of a report on sales for the Travel Publishing Yearbook, estimates that £19m ($35m) was given away in unnecessary discounts. But the biggest change in travel publishing is only now making itself felt. Mark Ellingham, who sold his Rough Guides imprint to Penguin last year, said then: ‘We are on the cusp of major change. In the next five years guidebooks will be almost completely digital.’ Publishers are responding to the changing market by developing exclusive online content and focusing on other ways of delivering the information. Ellingham predicts that by cutting out paper costs and substituting PDF downloads to devices such as the iPhone, information will be delivered directly on a subscription model. He says: ‘The book market is stagnating and beginning to decline and the digital medium becoming properly useful. There will be a thinning out of travel guides – there are too many at the moment. A lot won’t make the transition to digital.’
Are books recession-proof?The book trade is beginning to wonder if books will weather the economic storm. The received wisdom is that they do well in a recession because they are small-ticket items, but is this really true? The recession of the early nineties, the worst downturn in the UK since the war, seems not to have affected the book trade too badly. The sector was still buoyant after three years of slump in consumer spending. John Monk, then of Books Etc, said: ‘Books were in a much better position than big-ticket items such as holidays, electricals and furniture, which really suffered’. Since the problem this time started with the housing market, as the property boom has turned to bust in both the UK and the US, areas usually stimulated by extra spending generated by moving house will be affected much more badly. It’s cheaper of course to stay at home with a book when times are tough, and books can also be sourced more cheaply if necessary, through libraries, friends and families, or from special offers or second-hand. In the UK the big difference from the early nineties is the end of the Net Book Agreement, which has brought vicious discounting to the UK market. And effectively book-buyers around the world are benefiting from lower book costs due to the competition from Amazon, supermarkets and price-cutting stores. So the outlook looks gloomier than it has been, but not disastrous. A downward trend perhaps, but not something that booksellers cannot survive. The independent bookshops which have survived so far are lean and well-adapted to their local environment, with loyal customer bases of book-buyers who do not shop on the basis of price alone. In the US, Barnes and Noble, the nation’s biggest bookseller, has just shown a 2% decline on the same quarter last year, although their internet sales were up and store sales fell by 4.7%. In spite of Stephenie Meyer (see last week’s New Review), things are down a bit and the company is planning to open just 20-25 new stores next year, rather than the 30-35 it will open this year, because of the knock-on effect of the cancellation of new malls by developers. This is not deep recession though. At least books are regarded as essential by many book-buyers. And authors can comfort themselves with the idea of more readers across the world as literacy increases and English spreads ever more widely.
A new supersellerA new star has burst upon the publishing firmament. Stephenie Meyer, whose new book Breaking Dawn already has 1.3 million copies in print in the US, recorded the largest-ever first-day sale when it was published there on August 4th. The book is the 745-page fourth book in her high school vampire series The Twilight Saga. Meyer is not exactly unknown outside the US, as her books sell into 20 languages and she has sold over 10 million copies worldwide, but many fellow-writers will not have heard of her because she writes for a teen audience. Stephenie Meyer is also a most unlikely person to write vampire novels. A 34 year-old Mormon housewife from Arizona, she had never written anything, not even a short story, just made up stories. Then she had a dream about a teenage girl who met a surprisingly courteous vampire who said he really wanted to drink her blood but couldn’t bring himself to kill her. She couldn’t get the story out of her mind, so started writing it down. She says: ‘I wasn’t intending that anyone read it; it was just for me.’ The sexual abstinence of her characters may be what makes her books unusual, but it seems to be the accessible, fast-paced story and the emotional content which makes them sell. Even bestselling authors get rejected. Close to J K Rowling’s 12 rejections, Meyer received nine rejections and five of the publishers the first book was submitted to didn’t even reply (which suggests they didn’t read their slush-pile). The fifteenth offered her $750,000 for a three-book deal. No doubt there’s an editor somewhere feeling pretty pleased with themselves. Meanwhile Stephenie Meyer is writing away, and her life has not changed that much. Her accountant husband now handles her business affairs, but Meyer plans just to keep on writing: ‘Now I’ve found out that people actually like my stories, it’s definitely not a problem coming up with ideas about what to write next.’
The e-book wars - starting soon?It looks as if this autumn will finally see the worldwide availability of e-book readers, and then at last we’ll find out exactly what difference this is going to make to book-buying and the publishing world. The e-book reader story has been running for some time. News Review’s headline on 18 February this year was ‘The e-book arrives – or does it?’ and on 26 November 2007 we asked: ‘Is the Kindle the future of the book?’ There are still three devices available, although others are thought to be in development. The Dutch-originated iRex iLiad has been available in the UK since May 2007, selling exclusively in Borders for £399 ($767), and does not seem, to the wider world, to have made much impact, although it may be of special appeal to academics. Then there’s the Sony Reader, launching with much fanfare in the UK in Waterstone’s stores on 4 September at a price of £199 ($382). It is slightly smaller than a hardback and weighs 260 grams (just over 9 ounces). It can store up to 160 e-books and has been selling in the US since September 2006, currently at $299, although there doesn’t seem to be much information about how successful it has been. Joe Svetlik, news editor of gadget magazine T3, said: ‘It does have the potential to be massive, to have hundreds of books on something the size of a notebook is appealing.’ Finally, there’s the Kindle, which currently costs $359 (£182) in America, and has built-in free wireless Internet connection, allowing users to download titles direct from Amazon’s website. It can store 200 titles and weighs 10.3 ounces (292 grams). Other firms’ readers require ebooks to be downloaded onto a computer and then transferred. Amazon have been selling it in the States since November 2007. On launch the online retailer went instantly out of stock in five and a half hours and did not make the Kindle available again until April 2008. This looks very much like laying down a marker to scare off the opposition, whilst waiting for the market to develop. In June 2008 Jeff Bezos of Amazon said that the e-book version was taking 6% of the sales of books available in both paper and e-book formats. There are now more than 145,000 titles available and many observers think that Amazon will dominate this market when they launch internationally, which is widely expected to be this autumn. It’s a bit of a puzzle why Waterstone’s should go with the Sony Reader, except that Amazon is now just too threatening a competitor for them to go with their Kindle. The big question is going to be whether readers will actually want to read books on a gadget at all, and how many of them adopt it. Richard Charkin, Executive Director of Bloomsbury says: 'There will continue to be a market for printed books for a very long time. I believe the bulk of people will still prefer to hold, feel, treasure, give, receive, display and read a printed book. Unlike CDs, I do not think books will be displaced by downloads.' It could be a very interesting autumn.
The end of an eraThe closure of Publishing News on 25 July marked the end of an era in book trade journalism. MD Jo Henry and editor Liz Thomson thought they had a year to try to turn it round, but time was called after nine months, due to the relentlessly declining advertising revenues. Founded 29 years ago by Fred Newman and Clive Labovitch, the magazine has always provided a challenge to the UK book trade establishment, in the form of The Bookseller, which coincidentally celebrated its 150th anniversary a few weeks ago. But Publishing News always took a different approach. Regarded at first as a bit of a rag, it was more fun to read than its august rival, up-to-the-minute, slightly irreverent and fleeter of foot. It was really directed at publishing rather than booksellers, so always had a more personal, less institutional feeling about it, as well as all the best gossip. There has really been no exact equivalent to PN in any other publishing market, although perhaps Publishers’ Lunch brought something of the same irreverence to an Internet generation, but with nothing like the coverage that PN had as a full print magazine. American publishing has suffered from the lack of anything other than the rather staid Publishers’ Weekly. UK readers will mourn PN’s passing because the two magazines read together gave a fuller view. Fred Newman, writing in the final issue, should have the last word: ‘So whatever else PN may have been, it was never dull or boring. Its journalism reflected what I felt a good trade paper should be doing: writing about the personalities and events that were being talked about, and digging more deeply into the major issues that demanded informed analysis and interpretation…
The closure of Publishing News was a sad and difficult decision to make. The staff who have worked on PN, and not least myself, have a considerable emotional investment and commitment to the publication but, over the past 29 years, there have been enormous changes in the book industry. Its "village" days are long over and gone, and the element of trust that once existed between publishers and booksellers has been greatly eroded. Much of the fun has been dissipated as the book business has been forced to respond to the brutalities of conglomeration and globalisation, which have been the inevitable consequence of the drive for greater efficiency.
The proliferation of literary prizesSalman Rushdie’s win of the Best of the Booker last week with Midnight’s Children was no surprise. He had long been regarded as the quintessential Booker winner and had already won the Booker of Bookers in 1993. He was also a clear favourite with the members of the public who took part in the voting. The past decade has seen the most extraordinary rise in the number and visibility of literary prizes. They come at us from every direction and seem to get bigger and more attention-grabbing all the time. The Booker itself has often been controversial and over the years has made a significant number of literary careers. Anne Enright last year was a case in point, a well-regarded but not well-known author who is now celebrated across the world. The Orange Prize, controversial still because only novels written by women are eligible, has done much to democratise book prizes, as the judges have generally chosen accessible and well-written books which have had wide appeal, and the Prize has always been well-promoted. Ireland’s IMPAC Prize offers a superb 100,000 euros (£79,234 or $158,426) to its lucky winner and has done much to promote this year’s winner, De Niro’s Game, by Lebanese Canadian Rawi Hage, although the sales have not been all that spectacular. The Whitbread, now renamed the Costa Book Awards, has over the years done a fabulous job of promoting different genres, with its unusual two stage process giving prizes to a novel, a first novel, a children’s book, a poetry book and a biography, as well as the overall winner. The Nobel Prize for Literature offers huge international recognition and kudos, without perhaps always conferring the sales that its reputation might lead one to expect. That may be because its international and very literary nature means that the Prize is not really promoted in quite the same way. Some American prizes, such as the National Book Awards, have been accused of focusing too much on very literary books of narrow appeal. Other prizes promote specific forms of literature. The Samuel Johnson Prize, announced last week, does a good job for non-fiction. The Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Awards in the UK and the Edgars in the US promote crime writing. And the T S Eliot, Griffin and Forward Prizes have over the years given much support to poetry. Novelist Zadie Smith launched a stinging attack on literary prizes in February: ‘Most literary prizes are only nominally about literature. They are really about brand consolidation for beer companies, phone companies and even frozen food companies.’ This may be true, but the sponsorship of the beer companies and other backers does a tremendous amount to support literature and to ensure that good writers are more widely read. Robert McCrum wrote recently in the Observer that: ‘The literary prize has become one of the most reliable guides to the literary maze, a map to the perplexing contours of the book landscape.’ At a time when newspaper reviews seem to be losing their impact, prizes give readers a compass to guide them to good reading. Kate Mosse, founder of the Orange Prize says: 'Prizes, far more than star reviews, are what make books succeed now and it's also prizes that give readers the confidence to trust a new writer.' Readers are made to feel that the prize-winning book is something they should read. Winning a big prize can have a spectacular effect on a writer’s career and everyone in the book world should celebrate the boom in this very effective means of promoting books.
Amazon stand-off continuesThe stand-off between the Internet retailing giant, Amazon, and the biggest trade (general) publisher in the UK, Hachette, is continuing. It’s a full seven weeks since News Review looked at Amazon’s massive growth and huge ambitions (News Review 26 May) but in all this time, to the amazement of observers, Hachette titles appearing on Amazon’s pages have continued to have the ‘buy’ buttons removed. This has effectively frozen the publisher’s sales through the online retailer. The details are not public, but the dispute between the two parties relates to a terms negotiation. Amazon has demanded an improvement in its no doubt already generous discounts on books bought from the Hachette group publishers, and the publisher has refused to concede this. It is significant that Hachette is the biggest, as a rather smaller publisher, Bloomsbury, seems to have conceded when the same tactic was tried on them. No one knows what negotiations may be going on behind the scenes with other publishers, but this has now become a test case. Other publishers and agents are supporting Hachette’s stance. Philippa Milnes-Smith, President of the Association of Authors’ Agents, said: ‘We understand the pressure being brought to bear on publishers by retailers, and it’s good to see someone standing up to them’. Authors lose out when big discounts are given to retailers because the high discount clause in their contracts is invoked. This means that they receive a lower royalty on these sales, and thus less income overall. In a market where trade discounts have become higher and higher, a large proportion of a big author’s sales may be at a high discount through Amazon, the supermarkets and the bookshop chains, so the effect on authors can be substantial. Hachette authors, of course, are currently losing out in a very specific way, in that their books are not being sold by Amazon. There is also a question of whether this is any kind of restraint of trade, although presumably the Hachette lawyers will already have dismissed this possibility. No doubt the publisher realises that it is hard to have an ongoing business relationship with your customers if you start taking them to court. With the widespread view in the book trade that Amazon are set to launch the Kindle e-reader in the UK and the rest of the world this autumn, there is growing anxiety about the Internet retailer’s other plans. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says that their results on selling e-books for the Kindle in the US show that those who buy the downloads continue also to buy as many traditional books as they did before. For many publishers, that is reassuring as regards the future of the traditional book - but not at all confidence-building in relation to Amazon itself. E-book downloads look like another area the Internet giant will dominate, as it continues its plans to become the biggest online retailer. Books were only the beginning of this plan, but they remain an area in which Amazon looks set to continue its dominance.
Cape Town stages successful Book FairThe success of this year’s Cape Town Book Fair reflects a healthy and growing interest in books in South Africa. The Fair doubles as a literary festival, with many authors and events, and this year it attracted just under 50,000 visitors, more than twice as many as in its inaugural year two years ago (see News Review 3 July 2006). In the meantime there’s been a growth in African publishing and in the visibility of African writers, although the Fair’s original aim to attract African publishers has not yet been achieved. Of the 293 exhibitors 34% were European, Asian, Latin American or American and only 3% were from the rest of Africa. The Publishers’ Association of South Africa and the Frankfurt Book Fair, which jointly run the Fair, have further work to do attracting African publishers to what is already replacing the Zimbabwe Book Fair as the biggest pan-African fair. A lively blog on Book Southern Africa gives more details of the events, but the sheer exuberance and enjoyment comes through in the report written for Publishing News by Isobel Dixon, literary agent and poet, who described this year’s Fair as having ‘a triumphant buzz to it’. In the meantime the international publishing world is beginning to pay more attention to African writers and their increasing success on the worldwide stage is promoting the energetic and talented new voices coming from the sub-continent. But there’s still room for plenty of development in the number of books available in Africa. Last year the South African Book Development Council reported that more than half of South African households have no leisure books, and the Fair reflected a particular attempt to attract more families, with a consequent increase in children attending. Elsewhere the picture still shows that there is a long way to go, with many African countries struggling to provide books for school-children and students, let alone being on the way to developing a reading culture. Book Aid International, which works to send books to Africa, is rapidly expanding the reach of its programmes, and reckons that it costs the charity just £1.25 to send a book to Africa. Its Reverse Book Club sends four books a month to Africa for just £5, making it a wonderful charity for everyone in the book trade to support.
Wikipedia's 683 million visitorsWikipedia has long been a rather controversial reference source. The fact that it is open to anyone to edit the entries has always been regarded with suspicion by academics. Last year they launched Citizendium as a counterblast. This is intended to replace Wikipedia as the web’s leading reference work and it is being directed by expert editors. Contributors will use their real names and it is not open for anyone to edit like Wikipedia is. The new reference site is led by Larry Sanger, a co-founder of Wikipedia who left to become a critic. He says: ‘ Wikipedia has accomplished great things but the world can do even better. By engaging expert editors, eliminating anonymous contribution and launching a more mature community under a new charter… The result will be not only enormous and free, but reliable.’ The site describes itself as ‘Wiki with stricter editing rules and obligatory disclosure of editors’ real names’. Can the new reference source catch up with Wikipedia? It looks unlikely, as the giant online encyclopedia now attracts 683 million visitors annually, having been set up just seven years ago. These visitors currently read more than 10 million articles in 253 languages – and this is before the next billion people come online in the next ten years. Its founder Jimmy Wales, argues that the different points of view on Wikipedia are part of the point of the online encyclopedia: ‘This is what I truly want from an encyclopedia; I do not want to be fed one side of the story. I want to know what the legitimate claims are.’ On 12 May News Review asked whether it was the end of the line for print encyclopedias, and concluded that it probably was. The challenge that Wikipedia and other online reference sources provide is terminal. Once you have got used to researching online, it’s hard to go back to any other approach, as it simply starts to feel dreadfully slow and cramped. So Wikipedia and Citizendium will slug it out, but in the meantime anyone researching online will benefit from both sites being available. Online research is brilliant for authors and the Internet has made it possible to do most kinds of research from your own computer. Jimmy Wales should have the last word: ‘The internet has created greater opportunities for access, debate and transparency in the pursuit of knowledge than ever before. It is not a threat to diversity, nor a reason for postmodern retreat from the pursuit of absolute truths. As we will see when the next billion come online, there are many cultures in the world but only one reality.’ On the WritersServices site: Using the web as a research tool and Advanced Searching
Rights tussles dominate the newsIt’s been one shock after another in the publishing world, with lots of changes and some tussles which might yet develop into full-blown war. In the US both Random House US and HarperCollins have new young heads and this has been hailed as the handing-over of the reins to a new generation. The thinking may be that the ‘new boys’ will be better able to cope with the many challenges facing publishers today (see News Review 9 June). Recent figures from the US predicted unit sales falling in 2008 and recessionary fears dominated Book Expo 2008, the biggest annual American book fair, earlier this month. By all accounts BEA has now slipped back into its original identity and is no longer much of a focus for international publishers. Barnes & Noble and Borders were virtually unrepresented, but independent booksellers and librarians came from all over the US. It is still a very significant fair in the American book trade’s calendar, but the London Book Fair has effectively taken over as the dominant spring fair for international rights. nternational rights are high on everyone’s agenda at the moment. American publishers, relatively late to the table in terms of international sales, are making a determined pitch for India, traditionally part of the British publishers’ market (see Inside Publishing on The English language publishing world). They are well behind, as most of the bigger British publishers have already established flourishing companies in India, with Penguin taking the lead, but this huge country with its burgeoning English-speaking middle class is becoming an increasingly important market. A possible shift in international rights is reflected in the fact that in the reshuffle mentioned above, Victoria Barnsley, the CEO of HarperCollins UK, has been put in charge of International, ie all HarperCollins’ outposts outside the US. It seems unlikely that she will want to support the American part of the company grabbing places like India. Perhaps it’s time everyone stopped thinking of India and other countries as territories ‘owned’ by British or American publishers, but instead saw them as vibrant and growing book markets producing a whole skew of wonderful new writers. The other fight relates to e-book rights. American publishers are trying to lay claim to global rights, on the basis that e-books can be downloaded anywhere in the world. That argument completely undercuts the current territorial division of the world, which derives extremely specifically from the original author contracts. Working through their agents or directly with publishers, authors bestow the right to publish in each country, or the right to sub-lease these rights, through their original publishing contracts. American publishers may want to claim that world English language e-book rights should go to them, but this undercuts the entire territorial basis of publishing rights so it will be resisted by agents and also by publishers internationally. Why would a British publisher want to buy UK rights to an American author if they knew that American publishers would retain the e-book rights for the UK? The author, as the creator of the intellectual property, has the ultimate right to decide how their work will be licensed and used.
Children's authors stage mass rebellionChildren’s authors have staged a stunning rebellion against age-ranging on children’s books. More than 50 British authors, led by Philip Pullman and all five children’s laureates (Anne Fine, Quentin Blake, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Rosen) have launched an extraordinary campaign. The group of authors have taken ads in the Bookseller and Publishing News, and set up a website to campaign for their point of view. They say:‘We are agreed that the proposal to put an age-guidance figure on books for children is ill-conceived and damaging to the interests of young readers.’ The UK Publishers’ Association Children’s Group, backed by the majority of children’s publishers, announced in April that it would introduce printed age guidance for children’s books. So how did this initiative go ahead without securing the agreement of the authors, and what is going to happen now? On the face of it, there are good arguments for adding age-ranging to children’s books. The proposal passed in April was that a black and white design would be placed on the back of the books, near the barcode, with the categories of 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+/teen. Guidance levels were to be the responsibility of the individual publisher and would be an indication of the reading level interest rather than ability. It’s easy to see why publishers and many retailers have been pushing for this. Most books for children are bought by adults, but not necessarily by adults who know which books are appropriate for particular ages. Research conducted in 2006 showed that 86% of book buyers would back the plans for age guidance on books, with 40% saying that they would be more likely to buy more books if they featured guidance. Pullman and his fellow-signatories believe the idea is: ‘ill-conceived… and unlikely to make the slightest difference to sales’. They are backed by some independent booksellers and children’s librarians and their website says: ‘Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless’ and states their ‘passionately-held conviction that everything about a book should seek to welcome readers in and not keep them out’. Elaine McQuade of Scholastic, who chairs the Publishers’ Association Children’s Book Group said: ‘I’m very sad that there are some authors, librarians and specialist booksellers who feel so angry… The people who are objecting are people whose lives are all about children’s books. The people we are trying to help – particularly when it comes to fiction – are people who don’t feel confident about buying children’s books, people who perhaps don’t have children.’ And there you have it. The group of authors, booksellers and children’s librarians who make up the children’s book world are coming from a different place, an enlightened milieu where there are skilled booksellers and trained librarians to help adults find the right books for children. But more and more children’s books are being sold in supermarkets, chains such as W H Smith and online, where there is no help, and where the adults buying them don’t know which books to choose. Age-ranging is for them and its implementation might well increase sales of children’s books through these outlets, as the publishers had hoped. In the meantime the row will go on and it looks as if publishers will have to concede that authors who say no to age-ranging will not have it added to their books.
The latest despatch from the Turf WarsNo sooner had the dust settled on Bertlesmann’s surprise appointment of German print supremo Markus Dohle to succeed Peter Olson as CEO of Random House US, than another unexpected change hit the American publishing world. Jane Friedman, the successful and popular head of HarperCollins, also announced her immediate departure. The American publishing scene has been relatively stable in recent years, so two top-level departures at once are a surprise. At Random House the less-than-sparkling financial results seem to provide a likely reason, although Olsen says he had made a personal decision move on. For HarperCollins the change is harder to read, as the company’s recent success would seem to dictate retaining the existing management. In both cases corporate thinking is at work. Bertelsmann’s Random House is the biggest publisher in the US and the second biggest in the UK. The company also owns publishing companies throughout Europe. HarperCollins is owned by News International, which has massive media holdings around the world. The insatiable search for corporate profit must go on. Publishing, like everything else, has become more global. The credit crunch is making corporate life tougher and comes at a time when publishing has many new challenges to face. Not the least of these are what are being called the Turf Wars. American publishers are trying to insist that contracts for American authors should give them global e-book rights, cutting across agreements on terrestrial rights. Their argument is that an e-book can effectively be downloaded – and therefore sold - anywhere in the world. As the Bookseller said: ‘This may seem a mere technical point while e-books represent a fraction of print sales, but it has dramatic implications. As digital content mushrooms, British and international publishers could be reduced to mere distributors of "dead tree" products, while the US hoovers up 100% of online sales.’ British and other international publishers have no choice but to assert the primacy of territorial rights, as otherwise they risk losing control of the books they have contracted and are working to market. Simon Juden, CEO of the UK Publishers’ Association, said that he would expect digital rights to come with print rights, as ‘among other things, the publisher who puts money into marketing the book should reap the rewards’. On the face of it the 25% royalty offered for e-books by American publishers looks a better deal for authors than the 15% that British publishers are trying to establish as a norm. However if the resolution of digital territoriality means sweeping away the existing structure of the world book market, authors have a lot to lose. In their contracts they licence publishers to sell their work in certain formats and territories, and it is not in their interest to split off e-book rights in this way. Above all, it is essential to preserve individual authors’ right to decide who shall sell their work in each territory - and not to let this control be ceded to the corporations. Inside Publishing on The English language publishing world
'New Regulars' join the heavy readers‘Heavy readers’ are changing. Book covers do influence purchase. Three recent reports relating to book consumers paint a striking picture of changes in book purchasing. Book Marketing Limited has just published new research which shows that a third of British adults think the cover is important in influencing purchase. Three out of five of those surveyed say they are more likely to buy a book if it is on offer, but recommendations by friends and family are still very important, as in previous studies. Measuring the response against actual purchases, supermarket buyers are just as keen on browsing for books as those using specialist bookshops. Perhaps surprisingly, online book buyers are more likely than those using other channels to consider the look of the cover to be important. An American survey conducted by Ipsos in 2007 showed that, although 27% of Americans had not read a book in the past year, a further 27%, the ‘heavy buyers’, had read 15 or more books. When Americans who had not read a single book were excluded, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8% who read 51 books or more. Although what people read and what they buy is not the same thing, new research by the Bookseller and consumer insight agency Next Big Thing suggests that a new segment of heavy readers is emerging in the UK. Lured by the supermarkets and the Internet, this group is buying as many books as those who frequent bookshops. These ‘New Regulars’ are fans of crime fiction and true life stories, and they look to recommendations on the television and radio, as well as advertising, to guide their purchases. They now make up more than a third of the ‘heavy readers’, who are defined as people who buy one or more books every month. The ‘Highbrow Browsers’ who make up the rest of the heavy readers are the well- educated bookshop visitors familiar to the book trade around the world. The new study shows that this combined group of heavy readers is more responsive than other readers to a book’s price. This makes sense as they are buying a lot more books and price therefore becomes a significant issue. What has changed is that, for the first time in history, readers can go online to check out book prices. Also, since value is a key element of the big supermarket chains’ offer across the globe, they are finding that heavily discounted books make a perfect non-food item to promote. For the shopper, putting a discounted book into the trolley along with the week’s shopping is painless, and may be turning a lot of light buyers into the ‘New Regulars’. We should all be grateful to the heavy readers who keep the book trade afloat. Although it is causing pain to traditional bookstores - chains and independents alike - this restructuring of the book market does offer hope for the future. The emergence of the ‘New Regulars’ and their buying power may be crucial to the future of the book trade.
Amazon goes for brokeAmazon has dominated the headlines in the book trade press over the last few months, as it has taken a more aggressive approach to its plans for growth. Back in 1997 Jeff Bezos said he wanted the internet retailer to be one of only ‘two or three leading players’ Actually it’s done much better than that. Like it or not, Amazon is now the only global online book retailer and it dominates the market. But Bezos’s plan is far more ambitious than that. Books were just a good place to start and his eyes are now set firmly on becoming the international online retailer for a huge range of goods. Amazon’s initiatives have been coming thick and fast. Each one has moved the goalposts around in an innovative way which is often uncomfortable for both publishers and booksellers, but which provides benefit for the consumer. Last year Chris North, Amazon UK VP books, said that: ‘Jeff Bezos’s strategy for Amazon from day one was price, selection, availability and obsessive customer focus. We have the same strategy today… in five years we are still going to be obsessed with the same things.’ So, how has Amazon’s pursuit of these aims contributed to the growing sense of unease amongst publishers? First there was the introduction of second-hand book sales for third parties on the site. Many thought these would cannibalise new book sales but in fact they have contributed to Amazon’s revenues and prevented many book-buyers going elsewhere to sites such as Abebooks. The ‘Search Inside’ programme caused consternation when it was first launched, but now publishers are recognising that the browsability of real books can be successfully replicated on the web, and are developing their own similar programmes. In February Amazon bought the US audiobooks giant Audible, cementing its position on this front and opening up the possibility of extensive cross-marketing which may bring this rather under-recognised format to the attention of many more book-buyers. The Bookseller said: ‘At a stroke Amazon has gone from languishing far behind rivals in digital audiobooks to becoming the clear market leader.’ CreateSpace, launched in the US only last year, is a print on demand service run by Amazon for authors, but margins are so tight it look as if they would find it hard to make any profit from getting involved in this enterprise. The Amazon Kindle, so far launched only in the US, looks set to play a major part in kick-starting the e-book market, with its access currently to 200,000 e-book titles for purchase from Amazon’s site. Two recent spats have been quite serious, and may show a change of approach by the Internet giant. Last month Amazon told American publishers that all print on demand titles would have to be printed at Amazon’s own fulfilment centres by its new programme BookSurge. The alternative is to provide it with five copies of each title via its Advantage service, but this costs publishers $29.95 a year and Amazon demand 55% of the list price, making it at best marginal. Finally, there’s the recent arguments in the UK this spring. In the midst of a terms negotiation Amazon has used its muscle to threaten publishers by removing the buy button from their books on the site. Publishers who have been developing their own online sales have been experimenting with discounting books on their own websites. Amazon tried to stop this by threatening to use the publishers’ online discounted price as the retail price and apply its discounts accordingly. Amazon seems set on being Amazonian, now that it is big and secure enough to flex its muscles. It doesn’t look as if publishers - and possibly therefore also authors - have an easy ride ahead. For book-buyers interested in a great range of books and good prices, it is clearly another story.
A celebration of new wordsSusie Dent is the author of Oxford University Press’s Words of the Year, which will come out in September. In Publishing News she writes about the process of capturing new slang as it enters our vocabulary, and deciding which words will go in the new edition of the book. Collecting information about language is much more efficient than it used to be. The Oxford English Dictionary’s continuous monitoring reading programme collects evidence throughout the year. The two billion words in the Oxford English Corpus make it a database of current language and into it are fed journals, newspapers, novels, blogs and transcriptions of chat-room and street conversations – in short English as it is used everywhere today. It is then possible to observe changes and to track and document trends in the way people write and talk. Naturally OUP work on this endeavour to keep their main database as up to date as possible for new editions of the Oxford English Dictionary. But Words of the Year is intended to be ‘a first charting of current trends’ and provides a fascinating snapshot of changes in the language. This means that many of the words that Dent chooses to include will be ephemeral – and many have already proved to be no more than words of the moment. New words such as bling, blog, hoodies and footprint (of the carbon variety) have established their place in the vocabulary, but others, such as Y2K and the millennium bug proved to be only of their time, and many words such as TMI (text message injury) and memail (an attention-getting email) have not lasted the course. Slang moves fast and in these days of instant communication a new word can race across the globe in no time, often adopted out of English and used by many non-native speakers as well. Many would decry the increasing informality of the way language is used, especially in email and text messages, but Dent reckons that new slang has always been with us and has added many new words to enrich our vocabulary. Although Chinese is spoken by a vast number of people, English has become the language of international communication and is spoken across the globe. New words often come from social or technological developments and these can take place anywhere. American English has major sway in the scientific arena and American culture still dominates the airwaves, but the distinctions between that and English English are being lost in a new international version which draws on both. Writers for whom English is their native language have a huge advantage in reaching a worldwide market, so much so that many non-native speakers are now writing and publishing in English. We should celebrate the rich and changing diversity of the language, and grasp the opportunities it offers to write for an international audience, now easily reached through the Internet.
The end of the line for print encyclopedias?Are print encyclopedias dead? It rather looks as if they might be. The mighty German encyclopedia Brockhaus is about to put all its content online. It's the paper death of a classic, as the company has been printing its encyclopedias for nearly 200 years, and anyone who's had the money has boasted a collection of the handsome volumes on their bookshelves for all the world to admire. Brockhaus will be putting online all 300,000 of its articles, which have been vetted by scholars over 200 years, and hopes to produce revenue by selling ads on its site. In a sense the German encyclopedia company is well behind the curve in reacting to the online developments which have spelled the death of the print version. So will this new initiative work? The omens are not good but the company may feel it has little choice. Encyclopedia Britannica has passed this way before. This venerable encyclopedia dates back even longer, to 1771, when the complete set with its 2,659 pages cost £12 (which is almost impossible to equate to a dollar value at the time). In 1998 the print version was abandoned and a web portal was set up to offer a free version online. At that point the competition was not the web but Microsoft’s Encarta Encyclopedia on CD Rom for home computers. Britannica led the pack in coming to terms with the fact that the public no longer viewed owning a multi-volume encyclopedia as a mark of middle-class status. The company fired its legendary 1,000-strong sales force, already down from 2,000 in the 1970s. But revenues generated from advertising proved disappointing, the approach seemed suicidal in business terms, and the print version was re-established three years later. The printed Britannica set currently retails for £995 (nearly $2,000), a substantial amount even for a library (or perhaps especially for a library, given their funding shortfalls). Mostly they now take the £39.99 ($782) CD and make it available through the libraries’ computers or subscribe to the online version). The company has successfully reinvented itself by using its massive database to produce many different products. The content is sold to overseas distributors, often for use in a local encylopedia or co-branded website. And print is now firmly back in the equation. The current print version comprises 32,000 pages in 32 volumes, but around 50 books are now derived from the database and this number is set to double in the next two years. The publisher’s hybrid site, Britannia Online, has a certain amount of free access and the option to subscribe to get in-depth information. Since it is online, it can all be updated weekly. The current edition has a massive 65,000 articles and 44 million words and it is still a byword for reliable information. Perhaps this success story negates the New York Times pronouncement that ‘the long migration to the Internet has picked up pace, and that ahead of other books, magazines and even newspapers, the classic multivolume encylopedia is well on its way to becoming one of the first casualties in the end of print.’ Reference publishers undoubtedly do have Wikipedia to contend with and next week News Review will look at the web encyclopedia and how it has transformed the world of reference.
Is this 'wholesale theft'?J K Rowling’s argument against the publisher which is intending to publish a Harry Potter Lexicon written by Vander Ark seems a clear one. The case, which was in court in New York last month and is now awaiting a verdict, raises a number of issues relating to copyright. Warner, which owns the Harry Potter trademark through its acquisition of the film rights, is actually fighting the case, but the author clearly feels threatened by it in a very personal way. Although sales of the seven Harry Potter books have now topped 375 million, part of the reason that J K Rowling feels under pressure is that she herself planned to write a Harry Potter encyclopedia, and to give the royalties to charity. Worse still, the Harry Potter Lexicon has come out of a free fan website with the same name, which claims 25 million annual visitors. So, is it just a case of a rich author turning on her fans? Well, not really, as the publishing project comes from publisher RDR Books, a Michigan-based independent. Rowling claims that 2,034 of the book’s 2,437 lines are lifted straight from the Harry Potter titles, saying: ‘I believe this book constitutes wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work. It adds little if anything by way of commentary; the quality of that commentary is derisory; and it debases what I worked so hard to create. What particularly galls me is the lack of quotation marks. If Mr Vander had put quotation makes around everything he had lifted, most of the book would be in quotation marks.’ The case rests on two distinct alleged offences. The first of these is infringement of copyright, which should not be hard to prove in view of the amount of material taken from the books, as the law requires publishers to seek permission when reproducing substantial amounts of copyrighted material. There’s also the charge of ‘passing off’, in that the book misleadingly implies that it has been officially endorsed, which may be harder to prove. The judge may consider that the author’s support of this and other Harry Potter fan sites in the past implies endorsement of unofficial guides. Rowling takes the whole thing very personally: ‘These characters meant so much to me, and continue to mean so much to me, over such a long period of time. It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand. The closest I can come is to say to someone, "How do you feel about your children?' On the other side of the equation, there are concerns that the outcome of the case could cramp freedom to publish, particularly reference and scholarly works. The publisher is being represented by lawyers who are working pro bono and their view is that Rowling ‘appears to claim a monopoly on the right to publish literary reference guides and other non-academic research relating to her own fiction. This is a right no court has ever recognised… It would threaten not just reference guides but encyclopedias, glossaries, indexes and other tools that provide useful information about copyrighted works.’ The Internet and the changes it has brought continue to put copyright under threat and to throw up new challenges such as this. We await the verdict with interest. The protection of copyright is essential to authors, if they are to have control over their work and the reassurance that they will receive the income from the fruits of their labour.
'Two upbeat and lively book fairs'April has seen two big book fairs, the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and the London Book Fair. Bologna was buoyant this year, with demand for rights in good projects strong internationally and the East European and Asian publishers proving keen customers. Fiction is still a very strong genre, with increasing interest in horror, described as ‘the new fantasy’. Non-fiction is holding up well however, with solid business on a large number of projects. Publishers had selected only their best picture books to take to the Fair and interest in them was stimulated by the announcement by the UK Children’s Laureate Michael Rosen of the results of The Big Picture, Booktrust’s campaign to find the UK’s 10 best illustrators. British publishers have long been known for their terrific picture books, and this showed that the recent downturn in international demand for picture books may be past, although only the very best projects are selling. Two high-profile launches showed the way the children’s market is going. Scholastic announced its 39 Clues, a ‘ground-breaking’ ten-book series for 8-12 year-olds teamed with an elaborate online game and sets of cards packaged in book form. HarperCollins presented Bella Sara, a horse-fantasy property for girls. The cards and website launched last year, and it already has 2 million registered online users. Digital innovation was also in evidence in the new e-book playbook for Julia Donaldson and Alex Scheffler’s Room on the Broom, which delivers a ‘slightly animated’ story with audio and three games. The London Book Fair also had an upbeat feeling. The British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, made a surprise visit to the Fair and pointed out that Britain’s creative industries represent 8% of the economy and are growing at twice the rate of the economy as a whole. Margaret Hodge, the UK Culture Minister, took part in a seminar and praised publishing as ‘our most robust creative industry’. There weren’t many signs of the credit crunch hitting the book world, although the pace of company acquisitions seems to have slowed down at present. With the added impetus of a series of seminars organised by Publishing News, digitisation was the theme of the Fair, with a strong feeling that the tipping point for the e-book may be close. The major publishers are investing heavily in digitisation and increasingly promoting their books online, with a blurring of roles between publisher and bookseller. Co-edition sales held up surprisingly well, although traditionally important markets such as the US and Western Europe were weaker, being offset by strongly developing markets in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Far East. In summary, these were two lively and upbeat book fairs, showing that the global book business is in surprisingly strong shape. Authors can take heart from this, and from the traditional view that books do well in recession, providing a relatively cheap form of entertainment. However there’s no doubt that it remains hard for new authors to find a publisher, unless their work seems destined for the bestseller lists.
Agents and 'an industry blood-lust for new things'In the weekend before the London Book Fair it is agents, not publishers, who are in the news. With the launch of United Agents and a new agents’ forum established in the UK, and an American agent heavily criticised for her author’s fraud, agents are very much under the spotlight. No author who has struggled to find an agent to represent them should be indifferent to what is happening amongst the agents’ ranks. New York agent Faye Bender was taken in just as much as the rest of the world by imposter Margaret B Jones, aka Peggy Seltzer, whose Love and Consequences was a smash hit. Although Bender has been heavily criticised, the author/agent relationship relies heavily on trust and cannot withstand a determined and thorough fraudster. Agents rely on publishers’ contracts with the author to enshrine warranties relating to accuracy. Gail Hochman, President of the US Association of Authors’ Representatives, says: ‘Every contract has a warranty clause and an agency clause. Those are my protections… It’s the author’s job to turn in honest copy.’ In the meantime, times are tough in the agenting world. Peter Cox of Redhammer has criticised the long-established UK Authors’ Agents’ Association and is in the process of setting up Agents Talking Shop, intended to be an informal discussion forum. He says: ‘This year is going to be horrible for most authors… And obviously, if our clients’ income drops, ours does too. As agents, we have to take an increasingly assertive approach towards revenue generation, and there has never been a better time to carefully examine our options in developing multiple income streams.’ The biggest news in the agency world is still emanating from PFD. Last week the book department heads of breakaway agency United Agents gave their first interview in the Bookseller. The new agency is a really big affair, with 35 agents and 75 staff in all, working across books, actors, film, tv and theatre. The book department claims that 99% of their authors have transferred to the new agency. The break with parent group CSS Stellar has been a long time in the making, and the agents have been unhappy for some time. Top literary agent Pat Kavanagh says it is ‘inappropriate’ for a literary agency to be owned by a third party or to be publicly listed ‘because you can’t be thinking about what’s happening to the share price, or whether shareholders are going to be cross with you. All that matters is doing the right job for your writers, even if it means turning something down that’s very lucrative.’ United Agents is based on an unusual model, as the start-up costs have been raised by staff taking a share in the company, although no single individual has contributed more than £100,000 ($197,000). Agenting is not as cash-intensive as publishing, but 75 heads represents a big salary bill in a difficult year, especially since the lucrative backlists of the PFD agency have had to be left behind. Contracts negotiated whilst the individual agents were at PFD will stay there and the agents’ commission will not follow the agents (or authors) to United Agents. Peter Cox’s comments warn of a difficult time to come, and the rumour mill is full of stories of small agencies facing problems. How can such a big new agency survive without the cushion of a backlist? Simon Trewin says: ‘Publishers are still as excited about new authors as they ever were. The challenge is to get them to take a duty of care over the third book if the first or second haven’t taken off. The danger is an industry blood-lust for new things.’
The Friday Project crashes/Borders US for saleThe collapse of The Friday Project with debts of £360,000 ($718,000) has startled the book world, especially since their turnover in the last year was only around half of their costs. Child of the Internet, it commanded the headlines and seemed to have a golden halo of success. Set up to source book projects from the web, the company was based on an idea whose time seemed to have come. Scott Pack, formerly of Waterstone’s, joined the original founders and proved a controversial and highly visible figure, guaranteeing the company a stream of publicity. But this week The Friday Project went into liquidation and many unhappy creditors will see little of the money they are owed, although it looks as if the skeleton of the company will be bought from the liquidators by HarperCollins UK. So where did The Friday Project go wrong? Anthony Cheetham, a major investor, said this week: ‘In retrospect, you can say the company was overvalued, but in my view they never raised enough funds in the first place to be able to invest enough in the bigger projects that would have pulled their profits up.’ Small can be beautiful in publishing, but only if a publisher has small ambitions and is very carefully run. If you are trying to play with the big boys you need the deep pockets of the corporation to buy potential bestsellers and promote them heavily. Meanwhile the world credit crisis is beginning to affect the book world. Borders, the second biggest book chain in the US, has been forced to put itself up for sale and was valued recently in the stock market at only $30m (£15m), 8% of its total annual sales. Group sales in 2007 were $3.8 bilion (£1.9bn), but it made a loss of $157m (£787m) and the total group debts were $554 million (£278m). The company sold its British and Irish arm to the entrepreneur Luke Johnson for £10m ($20m) last year, incurring a charge of $125 million (£62.6m) in dong so. It seems unlikely that Barnes & Noble, Borders’ major competitor, will be able to raise the cash to buy Borders, even if they wished to do so. Perhaps Amazon, which has had a considerable effect on Borders’ sales, will seize this opportunity to marry clicks with bricks. Unfortunately the current instability in the bookselling world does not bode well for authors or for readers, both groups being extremely dependant on the bookselling chains’ continued ability to get books to readers.
Agency launches POD plan as number of books published soarsWon’t anyone stick to what they’re good at? The latest instance of everyone trying out everyone else’s roles is big London literary agency PFD setting up an agreement with print on demand printer Lightning Source to bring their authors’ work back into print. It’s easy to see why this is an attractive idea, as plenty of good books are out of print and PFD have access to the rights, so they can present it as a service for authors. The only problem is that publishers and bookshops do perform a useful function, which can be summarised as getting books to readers, and that’s a job that PFD don’t have much experience of doing. Kate Pool of the UK Society of Authors says: ‘An agency sitting back and saying "you can find this book listed on a website" is very different to trying to find a publisher who’ll take the titles on and bring them back into print.’ You’d have thought that PFD are in enough trouble already. Not only have nearly all of its agents departed to set up another agency, but most of their authors have gone with them. The backlist usually stays, as the rule is that under the terms of any contract negotiated through an agency payments continue to be made to the author through that agency. A new threat has just loomed though, as Evelyn Waugh’s estate has been lost to PFD, after the Waugh family decided they were unhappy with the turmoil at the agency. The notorious American agent Andrew "the Jackal" Wylie made a successful lightning strike and the estate has decided to move all the Waugh titles to his agency. But what of print on demand? It’s flourishing, as many writers realise they can self-publish, and publishers finally get round to using it as a way of keeping their backlist in print. As a result the overall number of titles published in the UK soared last year to 118,602, up a whopping 36% on 2006, with backlist titles (published before 2007) also jumping by 28%. Lightning Source is opening a new plant in Milton Keynes shortly, equipped with the latest new machines to cope with the increasing demand. Very soon they will be able to produce colour books in the UK, as they do already in the US, and that will transform many areas of publishing, especially children’s books and the illustrated book market. WritersPrintShop self-publishing service Inside Publishing on Print on demand Print on demand –
and how it can make more money for you - an article by Morris Rosenthal
in the WritersServices site.
Writers' income under pressureWriters’ income is under increasing pressure. The recent meanness of the British government in cutting the amount paid to authors whose books are borrowed from libraries as part of the Public Lending Right scheme has highlighted this trend. The real situation is obscured by the fact that those authors who strike it rich tend to mop up most of the money. A study by the British Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society last year showed that although £907.5m ($1,798m) had been earned by the 55,000 authors in Britain the previous year, 50% of that money went to just 10% of the authors. This means that 5,500 bestselling authors got an average annual income of £82,500 ($163,509), while the other 49,500 authors shared the rest, earning an average of just £4,000 (nearly $8,000) each. The moral has to be ‘Don’t give up the day job’ until your earnings are substantial and secure, for it has become harder than ever to get your book taken on by a publisher because their focus is on bestsellers. The fantastic sales generated by the Richard and Judy show in the UK and by Oprah Winfrey’s show in the US show that books, even sometimes quite challenging ones, can have a mass sale if they are well-promoted. Conversely, it has become harder to build a novel from a new author if they are not included in one of these shows or in one of the big chains’ promotions. The pressure that the Internet has placed on copyright is another threat to writers’ income. People feel that everything on the web should be free and attempts to get them to pay for content through micro-payment systems or subscription models have proved hard going in the fiction and popular non-fiction areas, although academic and specialist publishing are having more success with this. Perhaps paid-for e-books will provide the answer. There are three positive things about this rather depressing situation. Firstly, the dynamic growth of creative writing courses in both the US and the UK has offered many established writers the opportunity for paid employment. Many poets, in particular, pay their bills by teaching others how to write, an opportunity which did not exist fifteen years ago. The second thing is that print on demand has now made self-publishing a real possibility at a reasonable cost and given every writer access directly to the market. Even though the hard work involved to make a success of this should not be underestimated, at least writers can now take things into their own hands and for some self-publishing has proved the route to sales success or to a deal with a publisher. Thirdly, the Internet itself offers fabulous opportunities to reach a global market in a way which would not have been possible until recently. This low-cost means of getting to readers has transformed book publishing and will continue to do so, as the publishers themselves are now realising with their website developments and viral marketing campaigns. Few authors will have the deep pockets of publishers and be able to commission videos for online use, which are the current fashion. But individual authors can use their ingenuity and imagination to make their book visible on the web, as Russell Ash has done in this week’s Writer’s Success Story. WritersPrintShop self-publishing service Back to Top
Half of all book sales at a discountThe Friday Project, which was set up to ride the crest of the Internet wave by adapting material from that medium into book form, is shortly to go into liquidation after a pretax loss for the 13 months to 31 December of £705,713 ($1,425,632), and sales for the same period of just £357,000 ($721,186). This dispiriting news doesn’t necessarily mean that their publishing venture was a bad idea, although it may well mean that their costs outran their sales growth. But this was also the week in which Gail Rebuck, CEO of Random House UK, gave a major speech extolling the virtues of the book and saying that it did not matter whether it was delivered via a traditional paperback or a hand-held device: ‘As a publisher I am happy to supply either to customers, and the essence of what I am selling will be the same, whatever the technology transmitting it. I think there is an irreducible quality to reading that means the book will never die.’ Book sales through the Internet continue to grow, as was shown by the UK’s annual Books and the Consumer report this week. In this market they now amount to a fifth of all book sales by value, less than the US but more than most of the rest of the world. Growth in 2006 and 2007 came mainly from supermarkets and the Internet, and the value of purchases through each of these channels has doubled since 2004. Perhaps more notably, the volume of books bought at a discount last year was greater than those bought at full price for the first time. The UK must be one of the most heavily discounted book markets in the world and this shows the fundamental effect that deep discounting is having on book sales. However we should not despair just yet, as the survey showed that consumers aged between 12 and 79 years bought 6% more books in 2007 then the previous year, 342 million books at a value of £2.454bn (nearly $5bn). The discounting, especially three for two offers and deep supermarket discounts, meant that more books were sold. In spite of dour prognostications, a very large number of people in this difficult market are continuing to buy and read an increasing number of books. Scott Pack of the Friday Project on paperback sales in our Comment column Back to Top
Do reading promotions work?World Book Day |
