Publishers: About to make all the same mistakes as the music biz
Hello book publishers. You’re starting to scare me.
I work in publishing but was a record label executive from 1990-2001 and am fascinated by parallels between the two industries. When it comes to the digitization of product and attempts to master/mangle the phenomenon of social media, the publishing business is where the music business was about 10 years ago. And although publishing probably sets its collective IQ (not to mention good manners) as superior to the music business, I can’t find evidence that their reactions to industry sea change are substantially different.
While attending this week’s O’Reilly’s Tools of Change in Publishing conference, I heard a lot of this:
There is still time to change course and we’ve got to do something now—but we don’t know what.
In the meantime, let’s co-opt whatever new trends we see out there by assigning some low-level marketing person to troll Twitter or hiring a social media consultant.
Please, please don’t let us end up like the record business.
If there’s anything to be learned from the recent past, it’s that none of these thoughts are worth pursuing. The “somebody do something” mentality duplicates the kind of hoping-for-the-best attitude espoused by long-time executives in music who simply could not or would not question the viability of the professional cocoons they’d built for themselves. And who can blame them—corporate mega structures are schooled in consolidation as the primary means of growth, not fleet-footed, shape-shifting responsiveness to change. But now we’re in a world where getting bigger is not the answer, getting smaller is.
The question I hoped would be addressed at the conference was: How will publishing avoid being trapped by its own environment? But it never was. Instead, I noticed a lot of talk of waiting and seeing how things are going to work out before making any earth-shaking, world-class responses to a world that has already changed.
At the conference, I was excited for a keynote aimed at comparing the music and publishing industries. Although entertaining, it lacked vision. The speaker talked about how only wimps fear the freedoms of the digital marketplace and attempt to control intellectual property rights and that at least we’re not going to start arresting people like those thugs over at the RIAA. I was disappointed not to hear a more sophisticated dissection, beginning with debunking the idea that digital downloads killed the music business, or could kill publishing.
Downloads did not kill the music business. Shortsightedness and turf-protection on the part of music business executives did. Piracy and changing distribution schema will not kill the publishing industry. Shortsighted infrastructure-protection on the part of publishing houses will.
What offed the music business—and what the publishing industry is facing—is a corporate structure built to churn out hits to subsidize an entire product line. (For more detail on how this happened–boring to everyone but me–see this 2007 post.) Rather than developing artists, exploiting regional marketplaces, and building financial models that can support a mid-range list, both industries sold their souls out to entertainment at the expense of art and expression. Both are in the business of selling many copies of a few items, not a few copies of many items—the kind of product that can be shot out of a cannon, dominate the retail market, and then basically disappear—because anything else is simply too complicated for a similarly bulked up corporate retail environment to track. The appearance of downloads and file sharing could almost be seen as a desperate measure on the part of consumers to listen and read in an un-mandated manner.
Commodification of bookselling is the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room, not e-books or DRM (Digital Rights Management) or the Kindle.
Without making friends with this beast, my guess is that in 2-5 years we’ll see a publishing industry that looks like the music business does today: Super-downsized major companies selling a product line aimed at an older demographic and a jillion new companies creating the next generation of publishers, retailers, and readers. Just like in the music business, some in publishing will be mourning the death of the business while others will be wildly excited because all they see is opportunity.
At Tools of Change, Sara Lloyd of Pan-MacMillan nailed it when she said, “Publishers understand markets, but not customers.” As anyone in the music business could have told you years ago, the customer is now a human being, and publishers—who still see retail as their customers—don’t know how to build products for individuals who might want to discuss, interact with, congregate around, or add their own $0.02 to the content. The customer has stepped out of the bookstore and into the foyer of the publishing houses, they are knocking on the doors of authors, and asking to be addressed as individuals. They will consent to purchase, not when coerced by a front-of-the-store display or fabulous media coverage, but when their friends start talking about how awesome/helpful/inspiring/powerful the actual book itself is. And this—the book itself—is what publishing has lost sight of in the attempt to build market share. To change this kind of corporate culture will require super-human “change management” to flip a mega-entity staffed by people who are petrified of losing their jobs into a business that can be one step ahead (instead of ten steps behind) consumption trends.
Ultimately, the music business sacrificed music to save the business. Hopefully, publishers will realize that if books are similarly sacrificed, what will be left is an industry that doesn’t care about its product, focuses on creating grandiose supply chains instead of amplifying demand, has no idea what its customers want, sees value only in commodification, and has to keep spinning out hit after hit after hit just to keep the doors open. The result? A beast that consumes itself. I truly wish I had heard some mention of this at the conference. Maybe next year.
19 comments
Excellent and timely article!
I meant to add this kind of backward thinking has adversely affected us in Vancouver to the point where all the independents died and only one big mega store chain is left giving us ONE choice unless we want to go through the online process which is slow and tedious ie waiting for a book and incurs shipping charges. We are straight jacketed to accepting the choices the mega store makes. And now HarperCollins Canada has just shut down its non-fiction section. Is it any wonder when I go to Powell’s in Portland Oregon that I spend 300 bucks on books? I like the feel of books in my hands but if want to review a book I increasingly go online to read some excerpts, reviews, etc. Digital print drives my purchase decisions. As a sidebar we now have one classical music store left in Vancouver. I will never understand why record/cd stores never made it easy for me to walk into their store and for a fee download directly lps I want onto my mp3 player which of course is always with me. Think of the retail model one could create with that? People like to go into stores. When stores go out of business or move to big malls stores get boarded up crime jumps. Crime jumps and people don’t want to go out anymore. This can not be good.
@KayBallard Absolutely. Blogged about it yesterday. “Publishers: Totally about to make same mistakes as music biz.” http://snurl.com/bronx
Nice post by @spiver (Susan Piver) http://bit.ly/CIZSp “Publishers: About to make all the same mistakes as the music biz”
Yes, strait-jacketed is totally appropriate. Harper Collins Canada shut down it’s non-fiction division?! That is astonishing.
What you point out–that there should be ease of switching back and forth between digital and analog–would be so great. We’ll see how it all shakes down…
Big publishers, like all big American corporations, are primarily concerned with selling stock to investors; readers and booksellers come second. Recent events have shown that this approach can have unpleasant consequences. As you observed, “getting bigger is not the answer, getting smaller is,” or at least getting to a size that can be sustained by selling goods and services.
The analogy to the music business is a good one, but it overlooks an important part of the publishing industry: Textbook publishing. Big publishers make most of their profit on textbooks, and they don’t follow the same pattern as entertainment media such as trade books, music, and movies. Textbooks aren’t a consumer business, because students don’t choose their textbooks. In public primary and secondary schools, students don’t even pay for textbooks, the school system does.
This doesn’t mean the textbook industry is immune to the radical changes in how content is distributed. In one way, it’s more vulnerable, because textbook authors are often willing to give away their content for free, since most of them earn their main income from teaching and research.
The survival of textbook publishers will depend on them leveraging the most important difference between entertainment business and education. Entertainment just has to be, well, entertaining. Educational content has to be complete and accurate. Who has the editorial team to guarantee that what an author wrote is correct? Textbook publishers. Who has the production team to create a successful user interface for educational content, regardless of the delivery medium? Textbook publishers.
What’s keeping them from making the shift? Most of their revenue still comes from the sale of ink-on-paper books. But that revenue stream will dry up as surely as it did for the music business. Publishers have the ability to beat the rebels at their own game, but only by changing their business model to one that reflects the real value they add by guaranteeing that content is correct and user-friendly.
[...] speaks Susan Piver in an article in which she implores publishers not to make all the same mistakes as the music biz. What offed the music business—and what the publishing industry is facing—is a corporate [...]
RT ing myself (is that allowed?!) on book publishers making all the same mistakes as music biz. http://snurl.com/icl0t
Great article Susan. I think publishing has forgotten that information transfer has become democratized. Publishers always held the cards with distribution, but that is not the case today. It’s not a difference of writers vs. publishers. It’s now a case of writers and publishers who get it vs. those that don’t.
I’m seeing the publishing industry like a forest fire right now. The old growth has to burn off so that the new model can grow.
Thanks, Chris. I totally agree with all your points, especially the forest fire analogy. And, just like the music biz 1o years ago, some small, fast, and smart players will have tremendous opportunities in the next 1-3 years.
RT @spiver: On book publishers making all the same mistakes as music biz. http://snurl.com/icl0t
Susan Piver’s insightful post post~music vs publishing industries. http://ping.fm/z5Jsh
I guess I’m a little late to this discussion, but I’d still like to add my $.02.
I agree that the publishing industry is following the same path as the music industry. I was never a music industry insider, but I’m a music fan and for the last ten years I’ve been following the music industry’s death by a thousand cuts closely. Music has made so many mistakes: shutting down Napster and expecting file sharing to just vanish, resisting the mp3 and insisting on only selling CDs, embracing DRM, installing rootkits and other monitoring software on fans’ computers, suing their fans, and most recently writing legislation that will enforce draconian punishments on computer users who are accused of file sharing.
Not one of those strategies has worked. All have backfired, and if the publishing industry thinks it can employ the same tactics and get different results, they are delusional. Right now, the popular tactic is to wrap ebooks in DRM and cripple the functionality of ebook readers. But every form of DRM ever tried has been cracked (often in just a matter of days following its release) and any DRM used on ebooks will be cracked too. If ebooks and ebook readers start to replace textbooks in schools and universities, I promise that the DRM on those ebooks will be cracked, the files will be shared, and students will finally have a way to avoid the outrageous and obscene prices publishers charge for textbooks. Then, following the music industry’s model, publishers will begin suing everyone in sight: file sharing sites, students, professors, universities — everyone. But of course, that tactic will backfire and fail too.
Publishing corporations, like the music industry, just seem to be entirely clueless about how to proceed. The buzzword lately is “platform” — authors gotta have online platforms if they want to be published! But when I read agents and publishers write about “platforms,” what that says to me when I read between the lines is, “We have NO IDEA how to market books online, so we need you, our authors, to do our marketing work for us.”
I think the publishing industry, if it really wants to save itself, ought to take some lessons from the one group of authors that it has historically gone out of its way to ignore: self-published authors. It seems like most of the innovations in electronic marketing and distribution are being developed by self-published authors who have mostly embraced the Internet, since the Internet allows self-published authors to compete on a more level playing field with established authors backed by the publishing corporations.
But something tells me the publishing corporations will “play it safe” and just adapt the music industry’s strategies to themselves. If they do, the publishing corporations deserve to die — and the sooner the better.
Publishers: About to make all the same mistakes as the music biz. http://bit.ly/CIZSp
Publishers about to make same mistakes as music industry – http://bit.ly/DALWx – Excellent article by @spiver #book #writers
Publishers: About to make all the same mistakes as the music biz http://short.to/hpd8 (via @spiver )
Timely! http://bit.ly/g8yZJ
via @addthis
Great post. Corporate publishing focuses on serving the offline community because the industry margins are so skinny that developing an appropriate model for the online community is seen as deadly risk. There is much talk of “platforms” and the “tipping point”. The root of the problem is generational. Many boomer execs just don’t know that you can set up a blog for free and start an immediate conversation with your future customers. The online world is viewed as a magic and shallow playground for Gen Y . This is all wonderful news for any entrepreneur willing to have a go at developing relevant content for a sea of hungry people.
@thinkingshop A blog post I wrote on how book publishing is heading down the same road as music biz. http://bit.ly/cygqx