96 Percent Stupid
Reading Ken Auletta’s New Yorker piece on where publishing is headed in this bizarre new digital world, I kept hearing the words of the Prince from Visconti’s Il gattopardo: “If we want things to stay the same, everything must change.”
I get the feeling that this would be the utterance by a lot of the players who came up in this business longer before books had anything to do with binary code. For instance, Roxanne Coady, owner of R. J. Julia Booksellers:
The analogy of the music business goes only so far. What iTunes did was to replace the CD as the basic unit of commerce; rather than being forced to buy an entire album to get the song you really wanted, you could buy just the single track. But no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books. Publishers’ real concern is that the low price of digital books will destroy bookstores, which are their primary customers. Burdened with rent and electricity and other costs, bricks-and-mortar stores are unlikely to offer prices that can compete with those of online venders. Roxanne Coady, who owns R. J. Julia Booksellers, an independent bookstore in Madison, Connecticut, said, “Bookselling is an eight-inch pie that keeps getting more forks coming into it. For us, the first fork was the chains. The second fork was people reading less. The third fork was Amazon. Now it’s digital downloads.”
Reading Auletta’s piece, I can hear Coady and others longing for those forks to get the hell out of her business. That’s not to say that they’re going to, nor that Coady and booksellers can’t continue to survive–but they do need to make like Burt Lancaster and realize that if they want to preserve the wonderful world of browsable bookstores and paperbacks that they love they’re going to have to seriously reconsider how they do business.
For instance, here’s why publishers absolutely love the Kindle (even @ $9.99 a book) and why they were ready to welcome the iPad as the Messiah:
Late in 2007, Amazon released the Kindle, which presented a decent simulacrum of printed pages and could wirelessly download a book in sixty seconds. Arthur Klebanoff, the co-founder and C.E.O. of the e-books publisher RosettaBooks, said that, once the Kindle became available, “it took Amazon ninety days from launch to generate more revenue from my hundred-book backlist than I was getting from all my other distribution platforms combined.” There are now an estimated three million Kindles in use, and Amazon lists more than four hundred and fifty thousand e-books. If the same book is available in paper and paperless form, Amazon says, forty per cent of its customers order the electronic version. Russ Grandinetti, the Amazon vice-president, says the Kindle has boosted book sales over all. “On average,” he says, Kindle users “buy 3.1 times as many books as they did twelve months ago.”
That’s not to say that bricks-and-mortar stores can’t stay relevant with POD technology or in-store digital sales, but clearly they’re not going to beat this by trying to stock every backlist title a whimsical consumer could conceivably suddenly develop a taste for.
So then, they need to be thinking about what they can do that Amazon and Apple can’t. Obviously there’s a huge potential for bookstores to be relevant with events and community-based experiences that Amazon and Apple can’t reproduce. They can also leverage the fact that by and large they’re dedicated to reading and literary culture, whereas Amazon sees books in roughly the same terms a microwave oven and Apple wants to sell devices and digital content as cheaply and efficiently as possible.
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Ms. Coady’s 2nd fork is a wrong conclusion. People are not reading less. In fact, people are likely reading more. They’re just doing it in digital format, online, on their mobile devices. They read more often throughout the day but in shorter spurts. This is the behavior that writers and publishers need somehow to tap into. This is why the Kindle, Nook, and now the iPad are attractive possibilities to keep selling “books” to people on the run.
I think the analysis in this article is pretty good. Small booksellers are going to have to serve where they are wanted, as locuses of the literary community where they are based. Events are key, and in an atmosphere where books are less apprehended as physical objects there may be a need and desire by some readers for more opportunities to meet authors in person, to establish that physical connection.
He was on Fresh Air last night. Haven’t listened yet, but here’s the link:
Fresh Air Interview: Ken Auletta – ‘Can The iPad Or The Kindle Save Book Publishers?’ : NPR http://n.pr/alhlJN
i think the most effective change would be for authors to become public figures and to eliminate the distance and detachment between them and their readers. this could mean having a website/blog, twittering, doing more live appearances, chatting on forums, making youtube videos, just generally being available to readers in more ways than on the page. most authors will say “but i need that time for writing” or “that’s silly nonsense, serious writers don’t DO those things,” but i think such activities would not only hook writers back into the main ebb and flow of culture, but it would also be in itself an artistic or philosophical statement (I am not ABOVE my readers, the mainstream culture, the internet, I am of/through/around/flitting in it). for an example of how this can be effective, i present: Tao Lin: http://heheheheheheheeheheheehehe.com
@stephen, tao lin has been uniquely effective in marketing himself and keeping in contact with his fans. He’s also been criticized for his “stunts.”
As far as the local bookstore goes, Clay Shirky nailed their problems a few months back.
Rich and Steve: Precisely. And good indie bookstores have begun combining these two things into money-making, business-driving initiatives. It’s these stores that get it who will still be around when Amazon and chains have seized the rest of the market.
i think dave eggers has set a wonderful example too, obviously. he’s in the community, creating unique, positive tutoring centers, organizing cross-country lit & music roadshows, he’s got a website with regularly updated content (from the readers themselves, in some cases!), several magazines, one with a dvd, etc. etc. etc. this is the future, like it or not.