I recorded a piece about ebooks, digital change and self publishing for the media show last week. It’s right at the top of the show and I think it went pretty well:
There’s also a fascinating piece with the editor of the Irish Independent talking about the digital change going on at Independent (kicks off around 13.00 mins or so) and Brian Fallon from Distilled media talking about TheJournal.ie and the other brands in that group.
Baldur Bjarnason has a great post on his blog this week, Which kind of innovation? In it, he asks whether ebooks can be considered a true disruptive innovation (as per the work of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma) or whether they should be considered a sustaining innovation that the publishing industry flubbed.
It’s a great question and he supports it well, but I think he’s wrong in his assessment for a number of reasons. Firstly his premise is mistaken, ebooks are not the disruption, merely the manifestation of the disruption (of which more below) and secondly even if we are to accept his categorization of ebooks as the disruption/sustaining innovation, he misses a key point about the nature of the trade publishing industry that undermines his argument.
On Disruption
The error Baldur makes in looking at ebooks as the disruptive innovation rather than considering ebooks as part of a wider context. I would contend that ebooks themselves are simply one symptom of a much wider and radical transformation that is underway, digital creation and distribution of content.
This process has actually been ongoing for quite some time and began with the emergence of tools that digitized the back-end of the business; word processors, computers, design software, email and much more (which changed writing, editing, typesetting, design etc) and has over time moved from there towards more front facing aspects of the industry (production, distribution, selling) before starting to make a large impact on the consumer side of the industry, consumption in the form of ebooks and web-reading (not to mention making many other forms of content from music to games available to those consumers).
It is this process which is causing the disruption, not ebooks which are merely one, now obvious, fork that it enables. What’s more this process is very much a disruptive one. It enables self publishing, which Baldur points out has the potential to be very disruptive and I would argue already has been and will continue to be. It also makes real the competition between all forms of content in a very cutthroat way. Digital creation and digital distribution pits amateur against professional, curated against random, quality against crap and, probably most importantly of all, form against form and past creation against current creation. It makes accessible all things ever created (once digitized) and pits them against all other things ever created.
So yes, the ebook is just a format change, but it is not a sustaining innovation in any true sense of the word. Rather it is a symptom of an ongoing, radical and endless disruption of the creative content industry in all its guises (and one which is replicated across most industries that have an information/content/data/entertainment component which is to say, them all).
On Trade Publishing
But let us move beyond the argument of whether it is or isn’t disruptive in itself and onto Baldur’s case of why eooks are just a format change the industry flubbed. One of Baldur’s key points is this:
Unlike most disruptive innovations, ebooks were very quickly adopted by the publishing industry’s most profitable customers, people who buy the most, spend the most, and talk the most about books.
The problem here is that those consumers are not publishers’ most profitable customers, rather they are the customers of their most profitable customers, bookstores.
So when Baldur says:
Amazon’s release of the Kindle was like the iteration of the Thinkpad or the Powerbook that first made them viable as desktop replacements, not a disruptive innovation but a discontinuous sustaining one.
He needs to consider the impact on bookstores before he can say the Kindle was a sustaining innovation. Ebooks might be just a format change but they are a format change which would, if they were adopted by a large enough group of consumers, wipe out publisher’s key trading partners. That is what makes them so disruptive to the industry even though they are only a symptom of the real change.
To ignore this key fact is to misunderstand the trade publishing industry as a whole.
Baldur also says that:
Ebooks are a sustaining technology that are being mismanaged into devaluing an entire industry (that mismanagement is a subject worthy of a series blog posts) while the true disruptors get to work in peace. (In the long run, Google is the real winner here.)
I have much to fault in this section.
First Baldur notes that ebooks have brought about a considerable devaluation across the industry (which presumably has been a boon for readers) something I question and isn’t really held up by the figures either even if you look at the most recent figures from the UK, print sales were down modestly but digital sales more than made up for it.
He rests the fault for this at the door of publishers who have flubbed the transition to a new format. BUT how else might they have acted? Ebooks threatened, and still threaten, to close their most profitable route to market, bookstores.
The only booksellers who have successfully launched rival ebook offerings have done so only with great difficulty. Barnes & Noble has sunk considerable cash into the project and struggles to gain further traction in the US or any beyond the US, even as it has successfully spun out the entity and sucked in money from Microsoft. Kobo was started as an independent entity and recently sold by Indigo to a non-booktrade player.
If Ebooks were indeed sustaining and just a format change, we should be seeing the old order of trade publishing flourishing, we are not, our bookstores are dying. Publishers can and will survive ebooks, but their major customers look almost certain not to. Print booksellers are looking like the major casualty of a “format change” which seems to me an unlikely occurrence of that “format change” were indeed sustaining.
One thing Baldur certainly gets right about the implication of this true disruption wreaking havoc up and down the supply chain is that Google is happily egging the disruption on, but he misses that Amazon is too. if he got that, he might see this for what it is.
One of the least explored and analysed questions of the Random House/Penguin merger is why? Why did these two giant publishers feel combining and increasing their scale was so important? Because scale is the key to understanding the merger, just not the scale you think.
Scale is not always good, at a certain point scale can actually create its own problems, especially when scale attracts regulatory attention and increased oversight. Scale also creates management problems and scale created through mergers offers the possibility of management turf fights as rival teams deal with the inevitable right-sizing of the new combined entity. So why merge at all? What scale was being sought?
The most regular suggestion offered was that the companies wished to brace for the forthcoming battles with tech giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and others. I find this somewhat plausible but not really convincing, any alliance between publishers would still be in the ha’penny place with regards to those giants.
Even more though I think publishers are not in Amazon’s business (despite Amazon’s efforts to in fact be in everyone’s itself which you can take seriously or treat as a very clever distraction tactic), nor Apple’s, nor Google’s nor do they have the resources internally to be in those businesses. Barnes & Noble have shown us just recently what happens when you try to compete in a business you don’t know, it can be costly even when you do it very, very well. So scaling to compete in a field you don’t really have skill or abilities for would be exceptionally foolish.
Another possibility floated was that by combining they could make savings and that has more justification Sales teams will surely be slimmed down where there is duplication, IT infrastructure can surely be streamlined and cost savings made. All that has value, but equally the risk of not being able to carry off those savings, of instead finding it difficult and failing is pretty high. Many a merger has fallen down on the lack of delivery on the promise. I think if they merged just for savings then the merger will probably be a disappointment.
Where does that leave us? Well we know, from subsequent actions, that Pearson was keen to move further into educational publishing and services and keen to shift its trade publishing assets. I wrote about this urge some time ago. That explains one side of the deal, but not the other and even then we might expect Pearson to seek the highest bidder rather than a merger or alliance. Still not getting very far along the road, are we?
Let’s assume that the leadership at Random House and Penguin (or Bertelsmann and Pearson) are smart capable folks who can to some extent look at the future trends and sense where their industry might be going. One important aspect of those trends is for content that plays well across platforms. Not just a book, but an app that does something interesting maybe even a casual game based on the book and, if everything looks right, a movie.
The cost of developing such content (at that point intellectual property or IP is probably a better term) is dramatically higher than the cost of publishing books. Developers, designers, producers and a host of other skilled and expensive staff are required just to get the IP to market in salable form. This is not an attack on editors or narrative books in general, just that on average the cost of developing a book is predictable within a certain range. Obviously some books are more expensive than others but few require the scale of investment a well thought through app or game requires.
Combined with this rising cost of creation, the cost of acquiring content from authors, as I mentioned earlier in the week, is increasing especially for those with proven market power. The more likely a property or an author’s work is to translate across platforms, the more expensive it is likely to be.
Finally in cost terms, marketing across platforms is also expensive. This is a double pronged problem. On the one hand different platforms have different demands for marketing and different costs too. What works for a book will not always work for an app or a game. The second problem is that the cost of production being higher means that revenue expectations for a product will be higher too, hence the audience required to generate that revenue is larger meaning that niches probably won’t suffice(1) and marketing to a wider audience becomes much more important.
These kinds of projects can have lucrative pay-offs when they strike the big time. Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, The Twilight Saga and Fifty Shades of Grey have all moved beyond being simple books and into the realm of media franchises each with a different set of products on offer.
While I don’t yet have the evidence of it, I believe that these franchises are but the early examples of the trend towards bigger and more lucrative hits that will see publishing become an even more hit driven business than it currently is*.
If I’m correct about this shift I expect to see large publishers shedding distractions and concentrating more on their top brands or their brands with the most potential (occasionally producing titles/IP with prestige status). I’ve written before about the kinds of changes publishers must make and as Mike Shatzkin writes, they are beginning to make those changes:
Both Hyperion and Wiley are showing us what the publisher of the near future is going to look like. They will be more focused. They will be shedding overheads so they can expand or shrink their offerings more readily to respond to opportunities and circumstances. They will be less dependant on the trade bookstore and book review trade networks. And Hyperion’s decision says something more about the future that Wiley’s doesn’t: book publishing will increasingly be an activity operating in tandem with or in service of other objectives of the owning organization.
But how does this relate to the merger? The biggest and most obvious demand that the increased costs suggests to me is for a significantly larger capital base to secure, fund, manage and protect IP projects that require much larger creation and marketing costs. Seen in that light the Penguin/Random House deal is not a defensive move designed to protect publishing from the technology sector but an offensive move that places the new entity as a leader of equal if not larger scale to the movie studios like Sony, Time Warner, Disney, NBC/Universal and the like.
As transmedia and cross-platform content becomes more important the real rivals of publishers are not the platforms that enable them to reach their customers** but the creators of content which might be chosen by those very consumers in the place of their own. In short the book publishing industry is facing convergence with other forms driven by digital distribution and consumption.
In that world, where all content is now in competition with all other content, publishers need to increase their firepower to enable them to acquire, create and market the best content they can and in so doing enable them to charge the highest price they can, all the time facing down their rivals trying their damnedest from the other direction.
That to me explains why Penguin and Random have chosen to combine. In short, it’s all about the money, but for investing in projects rather than profit (that will come later when they get some hits). I fully expect other publishers to do the same, we might even seen publishers combine with other major content creators be they games developers, movie studios, I could be wrong of course, but I hope I’m right.
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(1) To be clear, I don’t rule out the viability of certain niches, nor the ability of some publishers to thrive as more modest sized entities publishing across several different niches or indeed solely focused on a single niche, but this piece is about larger publishers.
* With the obvious caveat that not all books will be hits and not all writers and publishers will be able to compete in that pace. But that’s okay, some writers and some publishers will make a decent living in the space below, perhaps many perhaps few, that is yet to be determined.
** Of which I have long believed anyway there is only one, The Internet!
Really fascinating move by Hyperion. I think it marks an intelligent strategic shift but one that wont work for everyone. It allows them to concentrate capital on core brands and remove the distraction of less essential brands that might well be better housed under other houses. It will be interesting to see how their rivals react. It certainly provides an alternative to merger mania which has been prompted by the Penguin/Random deal:
The decision means that Hyperion is migrating away from the traditional book-publishing model of actively competing with other publishers for new titles. Instead, Hyperion, which is part of Disney’s ABC Television Group, will look for books either linked to ABC television properties or that it believes can be extended to television or other corners of Walt Disney.
Great piece by Joe Esposito over at the Scholarly Kitchen about the end of the revolution. I’m not sure I totally agree with the ultimate sense of something being over. I personally think there’s a great deal more to the current wave of disruption than we are allowing for right now (indeed I highlighted that the other day). What’s more I worry as I’ve said before, than many publishers think they have the transition down when they simply don’t, but I do agree that the basic precepts of the revolution ‘so far’ have become baked in to the planning and thinking of most publishers!
In an entertaining but mostly uninformative presentation, the self-described futurist commented that if you can change the way people think about the future, you can change the future. This is not itself a radical idea. Outside the sanctum of a high technology conference, this is what is known as marketing; someone with a darker disposition might call it Orwellian. Activists for an ongoing publishing revolution as distinct from those who work for consolidation put people on the defensive rather than engage them with new projects, new plans. It’s time to send our revolutionaries home and work to build new practices on a practical foundation.
via The Digital Publishing Revolution Is Over | The Scholarly Kitchen.
