Digital Book World: Competing in a Changing Marketplace

As the second Digital Book World conference began in the ballroom of the New York Sheraton Tuesday morning, Forrester analyst James McQuivey encouraged the crowd to "pat yourselves on the back for choosing to believe" in the e-book market; according to a recent survey, he said, 89% of the publishing executives consulted were optimistic about how the digital revolution would affect the industry, and 83% believed their companies were ready to compete in the changing market place (although, on a more sobering note, not all of them had a plan for that yet). Good thing, too: as e-reader prices had dropped "dangerously close" to $100 two years earlier than Forrester had anticipated, e-book sales were expected to rise another 139% this year, to $1.3 billion, and quite possibly encompass half of all book sales by 2014--a prediction which left some audience members nonplussed.

The heat came back on quickly, however. During the q&a session of Tuesday morning's "CEO panel," Sarah Wendell of the romance blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books asked Macmillan president Brian Napack why, if his company was committed to getting its books into the hands of readers, its e-book offerings were not available to libraries. Napack answered that Macmillan was "looking for a business model" that would justify putting electronic copies in circulation through libraries. Open Road Integrated Media CEO Jane Friedman immediately countered that the time to get e-books into libraries is now--the idea that people who borrow books from libraries don't buy books was becoming outmoded, she argued, and it is time to take those people seriously as a potential audience.

The following morning's presentation of data from the Digital Book World/Verso consumer survey certainly seemed to support Friedman's hypothesis. Of those surveyed, 44.7% obtained books from their local libraries, with substantial engagement at all income levels. Furthermore, 51% of the women surveyed had obtained at least one book from a library--a point of data that became significant when subsequent presentations by BISG/Bowker and iModerate refined a portrait of the e-book market's "power buyer" as a urban or suburban woman, age 30 to 44, who was highly likely to be fully employed. (In other words, noted Bowker's Kelly Gallagher, the driving force behind e-book sales is "looking more and more like the core book buyer.")

So enthusiasm for Wednesday afternoon's "E-books: Where Do Libraries Fit?" panel was high, and it got off to an aggressive start when Christopher Platt of the New York Public Library announced that "current content is king" where library patrons looking for e-books are concerned. "If the publisher of Freedom made [an e-book] available to us, we would buy multiple copies tomorrow," Platt said. Instead, because patrons don't know that Macmillan is withholding digital titles from libraries, they blame the libraries for not carrying a book they want to read.

George Coe of Baker & Taylor reinforced the importance of frontlist content, reporting that, on the print side of things, "98% of public library spend is within 18 months of publication." Random House's Ruth Liebmann stressed her house's commitment to getting libraries the books they want, in both digital and physical formats, on publication day, while Steve Potash, CEO of the eBook distributor OverDrive, insisted--without calling Macmillan out by name--that any publisher still looking for a viable business model for selling e-books to libraries is missing out. OverDrive's digital checkout system, which limits each e-book to access by a single patron at any given time, works, he said; it not only circulates books while protecting them from piracy, but simply having the books in the library's online catalogue improved their visibility and could even spur sales, especially when the library's website included buy buttons, as the New York Public Library's has for the last few weeks. (The program is so recent, Potash noted, that it is still too early to draw conclusions about the impact of those buy buttons on patrons' online experience.)

Meanwhile, independent booksellers could take comfort in a finding from the DBW/Verso survey: 80.7% of the participants said they would likely purchase e-books online from their local indies if the books were available at competitive prices. In a panel called "Indie Bookstores Still Count," Stephanie Anderson, manager at WORD, Brooklyn, N.Y., discussed her store's experience implementing Google eBooks into its website, as part of a larger effort to make that site "as much an extension of the bookstore as possible." Although indies seem to be in a resurgence, many attendees worried about the fate of Borders and Barnes & Noble; as BooksOnBoard president Bob Livolsi framed it at another panel, "The showcase for books is the bookstore," and at the chains at least, "the bookstores are closing up."--Ron Hogan

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Children's Books as a "Crystal Ball"

In a day of back-to-back children's programming on Wednesday during Digital Book World, the themes that kept rising to the top were "adaptability" and "discoverability."

Kristen McLean moderated two of the three panels. "Understanding the Children's Book Marketplace" focused on findings of the Bowker/PubTrack study of the buying habits of parents with children 0-12 and of teens themselves, commissioned by the Association of Booksellers for Children (while McLean was ABC's executive director; the ABC merged with the ABA earlier this month) and five major publishers. Her second panel, "Connecting with Kids," addressed how to reach these readers. At the start of each panel, she charged the audience to see the survey results as a predictor: "If we're trying to figure out the future of our whole industry, there's no better crystal ball about where reading is going."

The study's most surprising finding for McLean was "the destruction of the myth that YAs are universally adapting to all technologies and also that they're disconnecting from their families." Teens use technology for their social networking but prefer books in their hands rather than on e-readers. Bowker's Kelly Gallagher labeled it "digital fatigue." Gallagher also pointed out that while e-books are not social, paper books are social. "As e-books open themselves up for more potential to share, it will be interesting to see if this changes," he said. Jacob Lewis, founder of Figment validated Gallagher's theory (in the later panel) when he spoke about the beta testing of Figment.com last year: the kids were not interested in replicating a Facebook experience elsewhere, but they were interested in socializing around the creation of their own content. "Kids don't look at reading as a solitary experience," Lewis said. "They want to have communication around it, which makes it possible to build social tools around those things."

Also, to McLean's point about the myth of teens' disconnectedness from their families, the Bowker/PubTrack survey showed that parents, friends, other family members and teachers are trusted resources for books--even for teens. That means publishers must take an online/offline "integrated approach," according to Judith Haut, senior v-p, communications and marketing, for Random House. "Bookstores, schools and libraries will continue as gatekeepers. That's the offline," Haut said. "We also know that kids are online, and it can't be an in-your-face billboard approach, but rather a meaningful dialogue from a trusted source."

Scholastic's Alison Morris, who spent 12 years as a bookseller, pointed out that it can also go the other way: "Parents often find out about books from their kids." Morris added, "What's missing is a good way to discover new books. Where do people get most of their recommendations? [According to the survey] they are all over the map." McLean agreed: "There's a filtering experience that goes on in a bookstore that's going to be very hard to replicate. With 290,000 books published every year, the consumer needs help making sense of it."

For all the talk of "vertical" marketing for adult books at DBW, McLean said, the model doesn't work for children's books. Is it possible or even desirable "to develop a cradle-to-college" marketing strategy?" McLean asked of the later panelists. Lewis said, "It's possible to curate communities of readers that gives them a chance to discover new books, new content, authors. Whether that takes them from cradle to college I don't know, but there are ways to be active participants in these spaces." Deborah Forte, president of Scholastic Media, said the goal is for children to fall in love with the content and want to come back to it in a variety of experiences. "How do you keep that personal relationship with the child as they navigate the digital spectrum and all that noise?" she pointed out, "When they go into a bookstore, it's a quiet environment [dominated] by books. As they go on the screen, you have to create an ecosystem with marketing touchpoints."

Young readers want to know the authors are authentic. Alloy's Sara Shandler pointed out that years ago, pseudonymous authors on series were the norm. Now kids want to have a relationship with the author, read his or her blog, see pictures of the author's desk.

Will there be a trigger that sends teens to the e-reader, and if so, what will it be? As Forte phrased it, "How do you create the value proposition of e-reading? No one knows yet what it is. What's going to drive it is something they really love."--Jennifer M. Brown

 

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