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:
- Marketing
- 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.
Reading habits
I don't read as many books as I use to (5 to 7 per month), but I read a lot more content than I use to. Blams blogs and RSS for that.
Here are my Google Reader stats for the past 30 days:
My Google reader trends
So, assuming that 1750 posts average 400 words, I read some 700,000 words. If an average book has 70,000 words, I read 10 books per month.
And that is only of stuff that goes through the reader. I'd say that I read at least 400+ other posts sent by friends over Twitter, FriendFeed, del.icio.us, email and other means.
So, the point is made: I read too much. But what about quality?
I mean, I don't expect to suddenly come around Michail Sholokhov, but what is the overall quality in terms of the information delivered (not so much on the form or "beauty" with which is delivered)? Well, I'd say rather good. There is a certain degree of redundancy, whenever something big happens (Chrome, Steve Jobs Keynote).
To prevent too much repeated stuff I try to keep my feeds variate. I'd say it is 20% Social Media, PR & Marketing, 20% Geek stuff (linux, ajax, design, usability, etc), 20% science, and the rest is randomness that I come across with (music, literature, arts, etc).
Another thing I usually do is rotating feeds. I'd say I add and delete around 5 feeds per month, thus my feed reader is not static, but always changing and evolving.
In comparison to when I read just books and magazines I can say today there's less quality, more variety and infinite availability.
Finally, I'd like to share a couple of the "best blogs you probably never heard about". I'll toss in some of this nice discoveries every now and then.
- Cheaper than Therapy: Music business and economy. If you want to know what record companies are up to read this blog
- Bits or Pieces: Amazing thinking regrading cloud computing.
Feel free to share your own reading habits and "feed gems".
Reading Queue: History.
Back to normal reading, which means 3 to 6 books per month, hopefully. I seem to be inclined to read history.
This is a subject that I have been wanting to read for a very long time. I have always felt some sort of fascination with the arab people and culture.
It was the Arabs who allowed Europe to rediscover the ancient knowledge of greeks and romans. It was them who took math into a whole new era.
Yet so little is known or taught about them.
Historical Novel about Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known as "Caligula". Author Maria Grazia Siliato is an Italian archeologists who tries to bring Caligula back to life from a more humane and less-of-a-tyrant point of view. What drove the man to become a blood thirsty ruler? What lead to his assasination?
The emperor was surrounded by plots and plans to overthrow him. starting from his rise to power to his assassination at age 29, Caligula's history is rich in all sorts of plans within plans.
Crusades have been a passion of mine since I can remember. As a kid I remember regarding them with a certain romanticism. As I grew up and went from a naive and romantic vission of what they were to a more realistic and crude oppinion that passion grew.
One of my "dreams" is to write a historic novel that takes place in Istambul at the time of the second crusade.
This books ought to keep me entertained for a while.