The Challenge Rambles and riff raff about all this and that

Dear Publishers

Dear Publishers:

People would tend to think that someone who runs a Book publishing company would be well educated, informed and intelligent.

Books aren't dead, but what about the publishing industry?

As usual, preconceptions seem to be wrong.

Unlike your cousins at the music industry you could foresee the changes your industry is currently undergoing and learn from the mistakes others have done before you.

Yet, from my point of view I feel déjà vu.

Your industry, as you know it, will disappear. Now get over it. And get over it quickly. Hey! at least you had 550 years to profit.

The sooner you assume the unavoidable the sooner you can start transforming your companies to adapt to a new reality, a new set of rules and a reading habits revolution that has only just started.

If you start acting stupid and doing things like delaying the availability of titles in electronic format you will only accelerate your fall.

Traditional books will not disappear, much like vinyl records they will, eventually, represent a niche market. If you look at it from an econometric perspective the energy cost of publishing a print book versus an ebook is so huge that the old model has no way to compete.

The question you need to start asking is "what role do we have  in this play now?". The publishing company that nails the answers will have the upper hand in the time that comes.

Many will argument that there is no place for publishers in the future. It is a very tempting statement, but one I think will not be true. There is a place for a new breed of publishing companies in the new, all-digital, book world. That role will have a few common places with what publishers are used to do but will mostly be a new kind of thing based in 2 very basic premises:

1. Marketing
2. Content curation

Marketing you already do. But you will have to rethink the way you do it. The best-seller ideology will still play a major role (particularly as e-book pricing goes down) but it will be the long tail / low cost / low sales / hyper-niche books that will account for most sales in 10 years. The first publishing company that takes full advantage of the focused targeting capabilities that modern internet marketing has to offer and puts that to the service of selling niche books (in a semi-automated way, may I mention) can make a fortune out of it. Yet, in order to sale niche products you need to own them, which brings us to point #2:

Content curation is becoming increasingly important. Soon everyone will have the ability to write, publish and sell books on their own. That does not mean that all books will be good. Amidst all those books that are not good the next Dan Brown hides. And between the not so bad books will lay a lot of books that can fill gaps in the ever-increasing number of specific taste and interest niches.

Telling what books are good, bad, can sale or not is a task that no machine or software can be assigned to. No matter how complex the semantic algorithms get, how accurate the intelligence virtualization becomes, how many million iterations a neural network may perform humans will always be the right entities to recommend books for humans.

As for piracy: that will always exist, get over it. The one thing you can do is what the brilliant Ian Rogers told the music industry back in 2007: Convenience Wins, Hubris Loses. If your books are more conveniently bought than stolen piracy will unavoidably decline, don't make the same mistake the music industry did and continues to do: annoy your customers (aka: your-source-of-income). Trust me: it is much better business to pass as smart enablers rather than as greedy idiots.

Yours trully,

A book lover.