Category: Publishing

On ABC RN’s Late Night Live (1 Dec) there was a rather subdued discussion with Henry Rosenbloom from Scribe and Mark Rubbo from Readings about the Australian book industry. They both sounded very pessimistic calling this last year one of the worst for the industry. While there was some attempt to finger the move to digital books with the drop in business, the real culprit, it appears, is the huge rise in the Australian dollar making it much, much cheaper to purchase print books online from overseas book sites (OK we’re talking Amazon).

Whereas, in the past, the postage paid on Amazon purchases somewhat evened out the price paid, now the differential is so great it is much more economic. A US or UK book is currently pretty much half the price or less of the same book published here. I can see this would depress Henry Rosenbloom as Scribe, like Text, are good at spotting quality overseas titles to publish here, and this must be an economic mainstay for them. Scribe, for example, publishes Norman Doidge’s very popular The Brain that Changes Itself. (Available as an epub, I notice, from the Dymocks website).

A smidgin of light in the gloomy atmosphere of the LNL discussion came when they let slip that Scribe and Readings were going to work on developing a site to sell ebooks. It wasn’t made clear what form this would take but they did mention value-adding on a portal the way an independent bookstore assists and directs its customers. I also like the idea (not talked about on LNL) of in-store downloads – where you could go in and browse around the print books, choose what you want and then have the genuine choice to buy an e-edition or a p-edition, and, in that scenario the bookshop would get a cut as the download hub. LNL podcast here.

There has been some controversy of late about the fate of the literary magazine, Meanjin. The fear is, that with the leaving of the editor, Sophie Cunningham, the publishers (MUP) will have the excuse to get rid of the print version and put the magazine online. There was much hue and cry about this, most notably by Peter Craven writing in The Age. He says Meanjin will “shrivel in the online desert” and “disappear into the evanescence of the internet”. The print version is necessary, he says, so “a kid might pick [it] up in a library or a punter might see [it] in a book shop”.

I, too, have a fondness for print. I was disappointed to hear the The Sleeper’s Almanac will only be available digitally from next year. But is this nostalgia? Certainly, for a writer, to be published means first and foremost to be published in print.  But can we, and should we, be trying to turn back the tide? If Meanjin, and other serious literary magazines, are supposed to be cutting-edge shouldn’t they acknowledge new forms of reading?

Let’s look at Australia’s literary magazines. There are perhaps ten or twelve well-known and well-established ones: Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Overland, Island, Heat, Griffith Review, Quadrant, Voiceworks, Wet Ink, Going Down Swinging and probably as many small, not so well known ones: Cut Water from Sydney, Harvest and Kill Your Darlings from Melbourne, for example.

Let’s now look at Peter Craven’s punter. At $20 to $25 a pop, your average punter might subscribe-to/buy regularly one of these magazines. It’s beyond the punter’s budget to support all of them.  Okay, our punter can go to his/her local library, but if it’s like my local library, they will only hold one of the above. This means, really, that most punters won’t read much of the new writing available in Australia. And that’s the tiny, tiny minority of people who EVER buy a literary magazine. Look in your local newsagent, are they there? Rarely. Look in your local bookshop. Do they stock them? Again, rarely.

So now we get back to the digital possibilities. I have an iPad. I would either buy an online literary magazine as an  app or iBook (at say half the print price) or I would also love to be able to purchase an essay I was interested in, or a short story, for a token amount, say $2 a go. These pieces are just the length to read on the train, or over coffee and toast in the morning. But, of course, such availability is not here yet in Australia (we are way behind the US).

I currently subscribe to Kill Your Darlings email feed from their blog and regularly get something interesting to read on email – just the right thing for my iPad. They must think such pieces whet the recipient’s appetite to buy the print version but I’m reading these articles online and would be happy to pay a certain amount to do so in a properly formated way with graphics etc. There are also online only magazines currently out there: Perilous Adventures, Cordite, Mascara, Jacket, Stylus. These are all currently free and that’s the problem, or the opportunity.

The way we read, and the way we value what we read, is changing. Those of us with ebook readers know that when we’ve purchased that copy of a new novel we want to read, the novel is just as weighty, important, absorbing, valuable (or not) as any print book we own. I will admit that I miss beautiful colour covers but with the iPad, you get a virtual wooden bookcase where the colour covers of your books reside, the way you have cover flow on your iPod.

Paper will give way to digital, eventually. Those publishers/journals that move over now, in the beginning, will be the venerable online journals of the future that have staked out their readership. Hand held devices like the Kindle and the iPad will be continually adapted to make them extremely usable for the “punters”. BTW Peter Craven, your kid stumbling across a Meanjin in a library. Yes, he/she will stumble across it, but it will be online. Libraries will still be the free gateway, but they’ll be the gateway to what’s online, just as they will increasingly make ebooks available for loan.

A 2010 US  survey of book buying behaviour finds two thirds of avid readers (ie spend more than five hours per week reading books) are female, one third male. The percentage of avid readers increases with age ie there are more avid readers in the 45-54, 55-64 and 65+ categories than in the younger age groups. Older people also buy more books. The most favoured place to buy books is the local bookstore, closely followed by chains and online. The survey also found most people who browsed in independent bookstores did not then go on to make their purchase on-line (only 10% did this).

Very interesting is what influences the purchasing decision. Top of the list is reputation of the author, next personal recommendation, then price. Book reviews were fourth (37%), cover, art work and blurbs was next (22%) and advertising came in last at 14%.

With regard to ebooks, the survey found ereader owners buy pbooks as well as ebooks and that ereader owners’ purchasing patterns were similar to those of “avid” readers ie they buy more books than the average. The survey can be viewed here.

I’m no economist but interesting to see Slate.com backs up my criticism of the Wall Street Journal article (see “Ebook blamed again”) – the WSJ article has “more holes in it than Albert Hall”, they say. Also, depressingly enough, they note the publishing industry’s “rule of thumb is that nine out of 10 books will not earn back their advance”. See the Slate piece here.

Publishing news coming out of the Frankfurt Bookfair is that there are no comprehensive data on sales figures for ebooks so there is no real way to tell how ebook sales are affecting pbook sales. The difficulty in getting any reliable figures, Tim Coronel says in Publishing Perspectives, is the international nature of ebooks. So sales data would need to include figures from Kobo, Apple’s iBookstore, Google Editions and Kindle and the stats would need to be broken down by country and “then be combined with local ebook sales data in each market”. Or, he suggests, publishers could pool their information. I don’t think Tim holds out much hope for the latter.

Some interesting comments in the Wall Street Journal about the impact of ebooks on returns for literary fiction writers. The journalist, Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, says that the smaller return from ebooks for publishers (albeit compared to the US hardcover price) is making it much harder for agent’s to sell literary fiction to the big publishers, and when they do, the advances paid are much smaller.

It is possible we are starting to see a structural shift in book publishing, and it is starting in the US where ebook sales are much more advanced than in Australia. However, the article states that ebook sales are still only 8% of total book revenue. It’s projected this might rise to 20% – 25% by 2013 (and eventually over take print books).

If ebook sales are only 8%, it’s hard to see why this should be having such a drastic effect on publishers willing to publish debut fiction, or on advances generally. I was staggered to read that big New York publishers typically paid a debut fiction advance of $US50,000 to $100,000 (let’s all move to NY) but now the dreaded ebook monster has reduced that to $US1,000 to $5,000 (welcome to Ozland!).

There’s something about the WSJ article that doesn’t stack up. There are a lot of other pressures on publishers besides ebooks plus there’s no acknowledgement that ebook sales don’t necessarily mean pbook sales forgone.

One thing that was pointed out in the artice that not much has been made of so far in the whole ebook debate, is the promotion/selection of books on the ebook platforms, especially Amazon. Essentially a potential book buyer has to know what they are looking for and this overwhelmingly favours established writers. There is almost zero chance of just stumbling across a title the way we all do in our local bookstores.

Read the WSJ article here.