You're right about a great many things. Sure bookstores will persist. In New York we still have vinyl record stores. We still have candle stores for that matter. But they're hanging on, not growing. Big difference.
We have reached an evolutionary Choke Point.
The new technology came along at the same time as a global economic unraveling plus rising commodity prices. Paper is a commodity. So is the fossil fuel that gets paper books into bookstores. Twenty five dollars for a name brand hardcover, ten dollars for the ebook of that hardcover.... or $2.99 for some indie author hawking his ebook right next to Anne Rice. Plus the indie guy has a snazzy blog and Anne has a cheezy website that hasn't changed in ten years. This is what military planners call a huge frigging hole in your perimeter.
Do you know what I see when I go into Barnes & Noble? I see a bunch of people sitting in the cafe and fooling around with computers.Clearly people are using the bookstore as a showroom to look at stuff they will buy online.
And that is why Barnes & Noble is down to less than 700 stores and shrinking. Think of that: less than 700 chain store outlets to serve a nation of 300 million people. Most Americans don't live within 200 miles of a bookstore!
Numbers, numbers, numbers, businessmen care about that sort of thing.
Hi Nathaniel,
Let me give you a look at things from my perspective. I work in trade publishing, and in fact my job title is Digital Editor, which means I am employed to try to bring us in to the 21st century. We have been, admittedly, quite slow to start the transition. There are some good reasons for that; I'll get to those, but let's just look at the fin-de-siecle business model that existed, and still exists for the most part, for print.
Part of your analysis is about how digital businesses will outcompete us on logistics - print and distribution costs - by eliminating them entirely. The thing is, those are relatively low costs. We know that paper is cheap: it accounts for about 10% of the cover price of a book. Printing books and punting them around the country is not one of the principal reasons why publishers exist.
We exist, essentially, to do two things.
The first is to purchase services efficiently. An editor can edit and manage the publication of, say, six novels a year, while also retaining responsibility for the backlist performance of her authors - dozens and dozens of books. The publisher can get all this expertise and attention for a couple of thousand pounds a month and be fairly well assured of reliable, consistent performance. Freelance costs would be much, much higher. The same goes for your cover designers, typographers, accountants, lawyers, PR people, marketeers, web designers and ebook conversion gurus. It's much more efficient to buy their skilled labour in bulk, and plus they all get to sit in the same building and talk face-to-face now and again.
Our second main raison-d'etre is to manage risk. We pay advances to writers and take on all the costs detailed above. The author pays out nothing. If the book fails to sell a single copy, the author still walks away with his money, and the publisher is left out of pocket.
A lot of books don't make money. A few make a lot of money. Our top 5 authors last year contributed 80% of our revenue. It's a risky business, publishing a book; a publishing company is supposed to spread that risk over a lot of bets, and generate enough of an edge to cover the losing bets with a little profit on top.
That profit is not enormous. If you average it out across everything we publish, I think we're taking about an equal share with our authors. The rest of the money pays for the actual work of polishing, packaging, marketing and selling the book.
For every indie guy with a snazzy blog, and for every indie success story selling a million copies in a manner we would struggle, just now, to emulate; for each one of them, there are a hundred indie guys with cheesy blogs, and a thousand indie failures selling no copies in a manner that is costing them time and money. We are there to provide some insurance against those risks, and to guarantee that the author walks away with money in their pocket.
Reasonable people can disagree about precisely how much risk, in any given contract, each partner in this relationship ought to take on. But then, that's what agents are for: deciding how much of the back end an author is willing to pay for access to top-notch editing, design, etc.
The thing is: neither of those functions really disappear along with the logistics of making and selling physical objects. You'll notice that Amazon is hiring publishers - making little publishing companies, gatekeepers and all, inside itself. That's because our business model is still pertinent: shaving 10% off our costs doesn't appreciably change anything.
I get that there are niches we've failed to exploit. The Amanda Hocking episode was instructive. I feel that, in hindsight, ebooks implied the return of pulp. You don't have to worry about the selection in the rack at the bus station, or feel embarrassed by a lurid cover; you get your books instantly, and for less than the cost of a sandwich, and there are plenty of them. That terrific mutant genre, paranormal romance, also comes in to play, welding a crossover audience together from all sorts of disparate readerships. There was a vast sucking pressure we weren't aware of until, like a bicycle tyre dipped in a bucket of water, money began to bubble out of the puncture in our business model. I think my metaphor just exploded; sorry.
(Amanda Hocking eventually decided it was worth having a trade publisher so she could obtain skilled publishing services more efficiently, and free up her time to be a writer.)
Anyway. Maybe we can't compete in that market - the pulp fiction market, the 99p thriller market. It's possible there's not enough room in that price point to pay our wages. On the other hand, there's not a whole lot of room in there to buy a copyedit or a proofread: it's a risky bet for an author, too. So I think it has indeed opened up a new tier of publishing: for books that we wouldn't taken a chance on. They're cheaper than ours, and there are a hell of a lot of them. But I think it's a new tier, not the barbarians at the gate. There are plenty of ways we can differentiate our books. (One of those is gatekeeping. The consumer will have to reinvent us gatekeeper if we ever disappear: we're too useful, economically.)
In ten years time, the book trade will look very different, structurally. However, I predict that publishing skills, and publishing experts, will be in demand at about the same level as now. We might find that we work for editorial services companies, or for retailers, or tech companies, or indeed good old-fashioned trade publishers - print isn't going away any time soon; but we'll still be doing largely the same things in largely the same ways, if not the same offices.
ETA: Ah, I never got to the good reasons for being slow to hit the 21st Century. Briefly, we were a business whose only asset, beyond its people, were the rights to make bundles of paper available to the general public with certain forms of words inscribed on them. We stamped these forms of words on to hot metal or transparent film and ran off copies on mechanical presses.
Ebooks come along. Suddenly, we wonder if we have ebook rights to our books. Often the answer is no. Sometimes it's yes. Most often, the contract is amazingly vague and useless. Dozens of lawyers and agents toil day and night to resolve these issues. Finally, after a lot of paperwork and emails, we have agreement. Let's make some ebooks! But, no, the book exists essentially as a photographic negative and a bunch of archive copies. So we retype it, or (pace Medievalist) we scan it and OCR it, and there's a whole new round of proofing and correcting... All this takes time and money.
We're getting nimbler, I assure you. It's just that we're carrying a lot of valuable, but delicate, baggage.
