The future of the book trade?

My hope is that it has one.

I picked up Freedom by Jonathan Franzen on Saturday. Not really an impulse buy (I'd've bought it anyway) but unplanned insofar as I didn't know it was out yet and had my attention grabbed by the 'Half Price' sign in the window as I walked past.

Happy as I am to help out with their half-price promotion, the whole concept has been eating at me for a while. So I got talking to the guy at the counter, who explained in broad terms how it works: shops generally operate on roughly a 40% margin, but for the initial very limited discount period publishers push an extra 20% at them. So Freedom, with has a cover price of £20 and hence a normal take for the seller of £8, in week one sells at £10 with £2 for the bookshop. The whole thing is publisher-led and therefore presumably aimed at creating footfall and buzz.

But the whole idea of turning your bonanzas from moneyspinners into lossleaders just does not work in any conception of the trade that I can come up with. And Freedom is far from the worst example on that score - a new Harry Potter or Dan Brown is rumoured to net the shops pennies.

Waterstone's results earlier in the year revealed profits of under £3m from total sales of over £500m. I know they're trying to diversify and they now have basically the market to themselves, but that leaves almost no scope for anything to go wrong. And presumably they're in a better position than anyone else.

i can see it continuing for books that make little money. and hopefully for an amount of back catalogue. i don't want another computer-type object, and i have enough unread books to last me.

But the whole idea of turning your bonanzas from moneyspinners into lossleaders just does not work in any conception of the trade that I can come up with. And Freedom is far from the worst example on that score - a new Harry Potter or Dan Brown is rumoured to net the shops pennies.

this is just the supermarkets innit, the fuckers. it's a classic business question, whether these trends are inevitable or whether the industry made some bad decisions. i can't really get my head around the disparity between the insane number of titles produced annually and the lack of diversity among 'actually profit-making books'. i guess a lot of titles are manuals, textbooks, and other crap.

will they be selling the franzen in supermarkets (my guess is not)?

i'm also guessing that it's places like wh smiths that have been hit hardest by the supermarkets, and that it's amazon that has really hurt waterstones, independent bstores etc, as amazon are offering big discounts on the kind of literary bestsellers (amis, franzen etc etc) that used to be the real bread and butter for 'proper' bkshops, rather than yr grishams and kings etc.

it amazes me that publishers still mostly stick to the hardback/paperback business model which just seems insanely outdated to me (and a real motor for bk piracy and so on)

I've idly thought that there's more hope for the specialist small bookshop than there is for the large chain. Waterstones mutates more and more into WH Smiths.

Used to be in the book trade myself, and the profit margins are terrifyingly small. 40% margin is often the case with mainstream fiction and big shifters, but with academic books, classics, more marginal books, you're sometimes looking at as low as 12.5%. With these sorts of margins, you need to buy big to make it worthwhile (unless you prioritise the sort of books you have, and your reputation over maximising profit), but of course, most of the books as this level

Back when I was in the literature department, big sellers were the Wordsworth and Penguin £1 (then) classics, on which you make very little for an awful lot of shelf space. Did we sell enough to accommodate this? No, not really, and ended up vastly reducing the amount we bought.

Every now and then you have a massive success (I stocked Anatomy of Melancholy NYRB edition when it was reissued, and no one else in London was carrying it - it proved one of the most profitable buys, selling in large amounts). But other than that you're looking at v popular fiction, true crime, computer books, medical books, and required academic books (set texts for English and history degrees as well, but they aren't as expensive as medical books - are these on the internet now anyway?). The other stuff, arguably more interesting for book browsers, there just isn't space/money for.

So you'll have large stores reducing their levels of low profit books and increasing best-sellers and stationery. Discounts are a no win situation, and I think it's a losing battle for stores to be fighting against the internet - you want cheap? go to amazon. You've got to have another pull (Daunts in London is pretty good at this, being predominantly a travel shop, and with much of its fiction and history being put under the specific country shelving.)

xpost - Yeah, I guess publishers still have a prestige thing attached to h'back, although I know some now either go straight into paperback or do a dual release.

Hence the reason that I think trusted and idiosyncratic bookshops are likely to do better than branches of Waterstones (flagship stores like Piccadilly the exception, tho look at what happened to their oxford st store.

otoh look at what happened to Calder in the Cut. Although there were other issues at work there, sadly.

flagship stores like Piccadilly the exception, tho look at what happened to their oxford st store

That's the real curio that I found when looking for the results figures - Waterstone's recently received planning permission to turn the Piccadilly upper floors into a cinema.

Oh wow. Doesn't surprise me at all tbh. Top floor is currently eating and drinking, as is their basement.

it surprises me a bit - cinemas aren't exactly raking it in are they? not sure what they're thinking - "we should diversify into other struggling, once-great industries". whereas eating and drinking remain as popular as ever.

similar to indie booksellers maybe doing better, niche screenings are being touted as the next big thing

showing cult movies, art movies, etc

haven't hmv have been trying to offload waterstones for a while now - sorta like a guardian/observer situation?

cinemas are doing pretty well, i thought? tho again, can't really see a waterstones cinema competing w cineworld or whatevs

It's to be another Curzon I think - which considering I've never once managed to get into Curzon Soho might be no bad thing.

yeah cinemas are doing ok, despite it all. the niche thing isn't direct competition.

however, it prompts bullshit like this:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/say-a-long-goodbye-to-the-multiplex-2003094.html

a few doors down from the waterstones piccadilly site there used to be a great/sleazy cinema that - well into the 80s - wld show things like russ meyer dbl bills, arty porno movies like 'the beast' or 'flame in my heart', and first run exploitation trash - i saw romero's day of the dead there, for example - they should stick something like that on the top of waterstones! (tho from what nrq is saying it sounds like they'll be going for more of an academy oxford st vibe, which i guess makes sense)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/sep/09/pop-up-cinema-takes-hold

How the pop-up craze is giving cinema back its soul
A grassroots movement, where audiences get to participate and experience films communally in unique locations, is the perfect antidote to the passivity of the modern multiplex

*dismissive wanking gesture"

a few doors down from the waterstones piccadilly site there used to be a great/sleazy cinema

Isn't this the one in An American Werewolf in London? It had changed from your description somewhat, but I also saw Eraserhead there when I was about 17.

think it's a different one from the AWIL one, but might be the same (wld need to rescreen) - london had loads of sleazy cinemas, back in the day, showing all sortsa bizarre stuff. they were all owned by dear old Cannon at one point

So back to books...hardcovers have a huge market in school and library sales, btw, and sometimes s&l sales will keep a book in print in hardcover long after the PB market has dried up in stores. This may be a little weighted toward children's books, though, since they tend to have longer lives in the backlist than adult books do.

I don't know anything about retail sales, store management, or etc, but I do know that the first person or company to come up with a satisfactory alternative to the current business model between publishers and bookstores will never have to work again. Because the bookstore practice of returning unsold copies of books THAT YOU PURPOSEFULLY OVER-ORDERED to the publisher is going to kill pubs eventually (possibly quite soon). It's an enormously inefficient system in which store buyers & wholesalers have all the leverage, because if publishers don't fill the orders when the stores want them, you risk them not buying & selling your next book.

Also it just plain wastes natural resources, which is bad business as well as bad environmentalism.

For instance, an example that was used in a meeting here yest: Suppose Barnes & Noble buys 50,000 copies of a big new book, and they send half to Washington state and half to Texas. It sells out in TX but hardly sells any in WA. What will B&N do?

The answer, unfortunately, is that they will ORDER MORE COPIES from the pub to be shipped directly to TX, and they'll let the unsold books sit in WA for as long as possible and then return them to the publisher at the PUBLISHER'S EXPENSE and get re-credited for the cost of the unsold books. The pub will then either destroy the books or sell them to a discount chain or remainder house at a loss.

All I've heard says, yes, Waterstone's not doing so well. HMV getting more serious about being shot of it, cost-cutting everywhere. Can't compete at all online - was told about a year ago that their site does about the same business as a largish branch. Hard to see what happens when it comes undone: what do all those shops turn into? Zavvi IIs? Cafes? I just don't think there is really much profit in bricks & m bookselling.

I think HM's take is right: supermarkets have taken down WH Smiths, Amazon have destroyed waterstone's. Old booksellers might say it's waterstone's own fault, right? They were the about the first to undermine the net book agreement (50-something publishing bookselling types always on about the NBA iirc).

otoh, gamrat prob right about smaller booksellers: boutiquey places likely to be helped by the chaos, and might do even better more stuff goes digital (like vinyl?). The prob there is that they'll likely be confined to boutiquey areas (see Daunt), & will have limited stock - Waterstone's have done a good job of making sure there's a half-decent bookshop in a lot of towns that might not support a marvellous little place, such character, etc.

(I think I dislike Daunt, though I might just be challopsing. They always look expensive and prissy. Sort of place people who are sent books and don't buy them - journalists, authors, Mariella Frostrup - approve of. I just like a lot of cheap books in a shop I guess.)

Cinema on top of Waterstone's Picadilly? Good idea! They've never managed to get the bar/food up there working properly. Something feels wrong when I've been up there, certainly never felt like the kind of place you'd go if looking to enjoy yourself round Piccadilly.

I precipitated a bender by having a couple of martinis up there a couple of weeks ago.

Don't think Daunt dislike is challopsy - though that's kind of a Marylebone thing as well for, and I don't know their Notting Hill/Campden Hill/Holland Park branch. But they do seem to know what they are doing - lots of specialist evenings, and slightly different take on how to organise their material, which makes browsing a bit more idiosyncratic than yer average mainstream bookstore.

as well for me.

as a reader, still think the idea of print on demand for out of print books is a v attractive proposition, but dunno what the economic model for it is like

Expensive.

I was initially cautiously in favour, but I really think it can be an elephant's graveyard. Rights bought up at a pittance, no promotion, no editorial, just catering to those already in the know, and in the case of the on demand books they tend to be a tiny audience. I've even come to think it's kind of anti-book in a way.

It's a kind of stagnation, yes. And I think it dooms books to eventually have an audience of zero, because the residual audience will eventually find it used, order it POD, or get it out of a library, and then...there's no new market.

Yeah, I can think of at least one writer who could have had some loving attn from a passionate & engaged (but not really established) publisher; instead the estate gave rights to Faber, so there's no publicity, care, anything. It just sits in Faber Finds.

But since digital assets are storable basically indefinitely and basically take up no real space, there's no real incentive to move the books to any other production stream. So what if only one person per year wants a certain work, if he's willing to pay for it?

I think there is a niche in POD that works for some books, scientific books certainly, old memoirs with an already-existent audience in a certain field of interest or study, etc, but publishers tend to use POD to keep books "in print" when they don't want the rights to revert, and there's no real downside for the pub (except for the slow die-off of interest, but that doesn't count).

I draw your attention to this essay by Norman Spinrad.

I read as much as I could stand but he's at the very least eccentric, and also as an injured party in a certain subset of the publishing world, has a very particular view. I haven't worked in editorial for 10 years but the eds I knew then and the ones I know now are all extremely involved with and cultivating of their authors and their authors' projects.

Obv, there will still be authors and there will still be publishing in the future, and there will still be 'books' in the sense of extended writings, with or without illustrations. The bigger questions would be:

- what form will books take?
- how will authors be compensated for their work?
- who will play the role of the publisher?
- what will the distribution channel be?

Used books will be around for quite some time, and physical books will still be printed, too, I am pretty sure. But the economics of printing physical books and the competition for readers's time and money would seem to dictate an ever-shrinking pool of customers for physical books. As the economies of scale become less available, costs will rise, too.

So, presumably, full scale, full length books will just become more and more of a luxury item, as they were for much of their existence. Leaflets, broadsides, chapbooks and other small scale printing would seem to have a more secure future.

Ebooks make me very very nervous as a model because the readers STILL cost like $150 or something. That closes that route to A LOT of people who DO have access to books through the library system, at least in this country and presumably many others. An electronic device is always going to have a price-tag and therefore a bar to general entry, unless you propose a model in which libraries give them out for free -- or authors do, or bookstores do, or SOMEONE subsidizes 100% of the cost of distributing an unlimited number of ereaders to the general public.

I feel like that entry bar will be broken by the education sustem eventually. There's a not-impossible future where you get a basic reader at school because it ends up marginally cheaper than textbooks.

Plus phone/reader convergence likely to make a device good enough for casual readers.

is there technology yet that can print on existing books? put white opaque ink over existing text, and print over them?

Lololol the problem isn't the inks, it's that printing presses (for 1-color "text on page" printing, anyway) use an unbroken roll of paper that's pulled through the machine in one big strip, and then folded and cut by machine into 32-page sections called "signatures" (more or less). Once the books are printed and bound, you really can't get that paper back.

Hey we were talking about this on the librarian thread last week but some libraries (including the one I work for) are already lending Kindles and other e-readers. I think most of them are academic libraries, because most public libraries still can't afford the devices, or at least not enough to feasibly meet demand. Also it's weird because no one can get Amazon to indicate their policy about whether it's OK for libraries to lend the devices and/or the e-books, so the legality of it is still very uncertain, though the consensus seems to be that Amazon isn't going to go after libraries that do this.

wouldn't it just be a matter of fitting a printer head over those devices they use to automatically scan in books?
i imagine very low-cost epaper could kill it, but we're a whiles away from that yet?

There's no way that something like a single printing head could EVER be as productive/efficient as a full-sized web or even a sheet-fed press (which picks up one large sheet of paper at a time, prints it, then does the folding and cutting just like the web version). Web offset presses can print 3000 linear feet of paper PER MINUTE -- imagine the paper roll on an adding machine, but now imagine the machinery of the adding machine is the length of a football field. Now imagine an equivalently blown-up roll of paper passing between high-speed rotating drums with ink on them. It prints and is pulled to the next station faster than you can focus on a line of text.

Anyway, opaque white inks aren't very good. ;)

but the poor trees! i guess the polar bears killed to make the white inks aren't much better.

Tbh most of the trees that are killed to make paper were planted by humans for later harvesting anyway. It's still an enormous waste when you consider how many unsold books are destroyed/remaindered every year, but until the ordering conventions are changed at the bookstore and customer level, there's currently not a magic vaccination against overprinting.

maybe if they could develop some kind of electrically reactive ink that turns invisible on contact with current so you could turn remaindered books into moleskine notebooks by zapping them with a taser...

AFAICS, the present system, which incorporates editors, publishers, critics and booksellers as intermediaries between authors and readers has generally served both readers and authors pretty well. It weeds out a vast number of crappy manuscripts, so they never see the light of day, at the cost of supressing a certain number of readable, enjoyable books that publishers have no idea how to market, or who to market them to and therefore refuse to accept into the system as being too difficult to extract a profit from.

If we are moving toward a blog-like model of publishing, where the author simply launches his or her writing into the public space, with no way to channel readers to their writing, then I think we shall be the poorer. We'd be moving back toward the time when authors were rarely paid, manuscripts circulated according to word of mouth, and audiences for any one work were mostly tiny.

Everything about literature was amateur at one time. Yes, it produced some masterpieces, but on the whole it was a time of illiteracy and paucity.

Some unfocused thoughts:

* I miss good 2nd-hand bookshops you could browse in--they've all gone round here, and while ABE etc are great for finding a specific book you want, there's none of the serendipity that used to have me leave a 2nd-hand bookshop with a dozen books I'd never heard of before

* I still buy what I can at a local indie bookshop, but do so through loyalty and a desire to see it survive, rather than because I really want to. I DON'T buy from Amazon, because they're cunts, but do buy stuff I can't get locally from Book Depository. Not helped by the fact that, except for big big blockbusters, everything published overseas still takes about 3 months to appear in the shops in Australia. And if you ask a bookshop to order in a book from, say, Penguin, it can take 6 weeks to arrive, whereas Book Depository will deliver it internationally in a week. This is maddening--if even a big publisher can't get its shit together on something like this, what hope do the rest have?

* While I liked the idea of things like Faber Finds originally, the difficulty of even buying the books is maddening. They're not in bookshops, and most aren't available from any online shops (except Amazon),and if you try to order them direct from Faber, they refuse to tell you what the postage is going to be until you place the order. I've been stung like that before, so I'm not willing to risk having to pay 50 quid postage on 2 books.

* I'm very anti ebook, partly for reasons and partly through blind prejudice. I love having access to all my books in my house, and dread the idea of losing hundreds of volumes because of technical problems, or data storage/programs becoming out of date and inaccessible.

Aimless, I'm with you, but there's a couple of things that I'm not really sure about. One is how well that publishing system actually works at the moment. As discussed above, it seems to me to be an industry of extremely small margins and is increasingly chary of taking risks. Readers are generally very good, and there are small publishers who do good work with semi-classics, but small publishers publishing new stuff with the heft to get profile in bookshops and the media? Not sure this is really happening. Others will know more than me (others usually do anyway), but I'm not sure that system works any more.

The second thing is how much the publishing industry is going to be able to keep the book as an object alive other than as a prestige sell (hardbacks=lim ed vinyl sort of thing). There just isn't the money. Shelf space is an issue, especially when the margins are so small (it's such a boring point to reiterate, but it's so important I think), rents, particularly in London (to take my local example) are high.

To my mind an electronic publishing route is going to be the best path for an awful lot of stuff that just isn't going to find it's way otherwise into the public domain. Which brings on to the other point - gatekeeping. Well, of course, it's less gatekeeping, than networks of recommendation. I can sketch one version of a future in my head, where localised communities on the internet/blogosphere connect to proved places for fiction to be produced and consumed, with a wider critical network with necessarily more catholic tastes than the newspaper critical pages. Things like this already exist to a certain extent.

I think people are getting better at ordering their information intake, and better at working out how to get the best from the internet through communities. Sure you're going to get a lot of chaff, 17th century England counterblasts and pamphlets if we're lucky! But internet literacy is high, whether that translates into creative literacy is perhaps a different matter, possibly an irrelevant one, as the creative literacy will adapt to the medium.

Money? Well, money's the big problem at the moment, apart from for the lucky ones. Nobody starts writing to make money surely, unless they are one of those Mills and Boon socks. Academia will have to take care of academic texts.

I should stress that I absolutely adore the book as an object, walk in libraries and lending libraries are a thing of wonder. The book is portable, generally, and as a whole represent the ordering and structuring of information way more recondite than anything the internet holds.

Actually right now I'm loathing the book as an object, because I've got to move house, and fuck that: a house, a house, my kindle for a house. But when somebody suggests I should have a weed out, I show a ghastly pallor; my attachment to even the least appealing of my books is almost pathological. These fragments have I shored against my ruin. Think the point about serendipity that James makes is an excellent one as well, and is an issue in more ways than just books, I think.

here's a recent wall street journal article on book publishing

I DON'T buy from Amazon, because they're cunts,

could you elaborate on this?

it seems most of the discussion itt is predicated upon the idea of keeping the book as physical object alive. it seems to me that the amazon/itunes model of e-readers, centralized digital distribution system is going to be the way forward. perhaps if we're lucky they'll produce printers that will allow us to print and bind books at home.

Shelf space is an issue, especially when the margins are so small (it's such a boring point to reiterate, but it's so important I think), rents, particularly in London (to take my local example) are high.

It's not that this isn't true, it's that most of the book-buying world isn't London -- OR New York! And the rest of this country has lots and lots of places where square footage is relatively cheap, tbh, and stores are gargantuan.

Now what they DON'T want to devote space to, is storage, because books in storage are not available for the customer to buy so they're not adding value to your space. Bookstores HATE to store books -- I won't even say "warehouse" books because I haven't seen a storage room that counted as a ware house, ever. (Also because it would be verbing the noun "warehouse" and I'm again' that.)

So stores have gone to this "just in time" model where they only want enough copies to fill one shelf space and they want those copies continuously refreshed without having to keep any extras on the premises. This is why the system has wholesalers.

I'm very anti ebook

They will have to pry printed books from my cold, dead fingers.

Bookstores HATE to store books

Speaking of storage, the following key legal decision drastically changed the economics of the publishing backlist:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor_Power_Tool_Company_v._Commissioner

Sorry Laurel, you're right, of course - I wasn't trying to be all London is the world, but was just using an example I know. I think it's the sharp end of what will happen anyway (and I reckon quite often the publishing industry is London and New York centred).

Agree what you say about wholesalers - it's the easy option, although would point out that in general, for all but the ones they discount, their margins are smaller, so it doesn't really make the soundest financial sense either. Wholesalers do provide a useful service for customer orders, mind.

Wd agree with dayo, want my own printing press! Is it James who's been printing books with those amazing self-designed covers?

Actually right now I'm loathing the book as an object, because I've got to move house

I don't know, books are heavy but actually pack up really well! They're more or less square and fit neatly into boxes of an appropriate size, don't need special padding or bubblewrap to protect them, and fill up the boxes to the top so they're strong enough to be stacked 6 high or so. They're pretty much the MOST conveniently sized & shaped thing I've ever had to move!

Fill up the boxes to the top so they're strong enough to be stacked 6 high or so this puny wede doth sa 'fie' and rupture his shecklers.

I moved not a couple of years ago, and I understand what you say to a certain extent, but god I hated books. Also I'm really bad at packing books - 'Ooh, forgot about this one!' and 'Wait, this bit's great!'

Have you ever had to pack all the dishes and cookware? Have you ever noticed how no two pieces actually fit together properly, so half the box is actually wasted space because your mixing bowls don't fit inside your colander, and the knives you wrapped up have cut through the packaging and fallen out all in between the pans so reaching in to unpack anything is taking your life in your hands? Give me books any day.

it seems most of the discussion itt is predicated upon the idea of keeping the book as physical object alive

My central concern, related but not quite the same thing, is keeping the bookshop as space alive. I love those places, though I'm at the other end from the hardcore, I think, in that spacious shops with comfy seats to flop on are my thing. But for ^ all these reasons they are struggling - my locale just got a Waterstone's and it is rarely busy, and it pains me. And yet - amazon just is cheaper and more convenient, and frankly provides a better service when it comes to the books and not the 'social' part of it, and I do my bit to kill my love by amazoning most of the time. I use the cafe when I can, but I know it's not enough.

An interesting possibility, if you add all the bits of the thread together, is essentially Arts-Centre-as-business - bookshop, cafe, cinema, wireless space, whatever. Would this work? I tend to think not, actually - they'd have to be pretty big spaces, and few locales could combine the high traffic and low rents that I'd expect to be needed to make it work. Also problems with being undercut by public facilities (though this may prove less of a problem in the next few years).

surely the bookshop as physical space will become the provenance of libraries, kept open through government subsidies as it would be unsustainable otherwise?

err, provenance = province I think?

I can't really see bookshops disappearing. I mean, what will people buy each other for Christmas without them? Too many people are too disorganised to buy online in time, and anyone who gives me a downloaded file of a book for Xmo is getting a malkie back.

Hahaha. Plus where would men go when they take their wives out shopping?

That is p crucial for bookshops I guess: place to buy acceptable present for a keen reader or a child. Children's sections dominate many small bookshops. That sense that children should read books will help keep them going.

you haven't seen a kid play with an iPad yet have you

I have! But it's the present trade I'm talking about, ie buying books for other people's children. It's an easy (or lazy) and socially acceptable gift. Faint aura of virtue always there with reading, even Darren Shan.

you haven't seen a kid play with bite/slobber all over/spill milk on/drop/throw an iPad yet have you

Darren Shan seems like a totally lovely person, fwiw.

curry on books is pretty standard for me tbf

xp Did I forget "color on", "feed to dog", "bury in the sandbox", and "leave out in the rain"? It's a long list of damages, is what I'm saying here. Do that to an ipad over a year or two and see how yr replacement budget stacks up against buying some picture books.

They will have to pry printed books from my cold, dead fingers.

not trying to target you specifically here, but I see this sentiment a lot in the library world (big surprise) and it's always suspicious to me: it seems like a fetishization of the object over the purpose that the object serves. Like what do you really love: books or reading?

obv printed books are still superior to digital books in terms of access/distribution/etc especially in lower-income areas but I'm just talking about people who express an aesthetic distaste for e-books because they "love books" so much. Esp. in the library world, there are so many people who have built their identities around "loving books" that I think they lose sight of what books are for.

Xxxp yeah, when I've worked on articles by/about him Shan seems sound, funny. Always imagined his books are prob dece. Just cheaply picked him as current kiddie HORROR GORE champ.

btw ismael cheers for the heads up on half price franzen.

Like what do you really love: books or reading?

I can't read for long without the physical object. I can read articles and blogs, but there's an upper limit on the readable length. Maybe the two things, reading and physical books, are cathected together because of my childhood experience. Maybe the generations since mine don't have this limitation.

I haven't addressed the heart of your question. Somehow engagement with an extended narrative or argument is not reproduced by reading lots of briefer texts, and -- this is a strong claim about reality, or life -- there are areas of experience that are not addressed by anything short of such engagement. I'm sure if I didn't have the desire for them, I could get by happily with a browser and a kindle and this wouldn't be an issue.

That's a true account. It's also true that I'm basically like Smaug, but the one thing doesn't negate the other.

could you elaborate on this?

The full refund feature sounds good, but Amazon forces it all back on small publishers. Often what comes back is unsalable so it's a total loss for them.

I just read where someone put up a short story in ebook form. Cost: 99 cents. Somebody paid that, read the story, then extracted a refund.

Even big publishers can't afford to keep going on that model, frankly. It's a completely retarded way to run an industry, and it should be an embarrassment that books have been somehow exempt from any sensible industry model when everything else already is. Expecting books to some how be "above it all" is just foolish & short-sighted, and if we want print to have a future we have to fix this giant, giant lapse.

Well... we consider public education to be "above it all" -- think of the children! -- even though everyone knows it isn't and the cost to the taxpayers is enormous. I wouldn't mind exempting publishers from the Thor Power decision and giving them other breaks.

re: physicality of books -- this is cribbed from a lot of articles about computer UI, but books apparently have affordances built-in to the structure of being a physical book. i.e., you can tell how close you are to the end just from the relative thickness of the pages read vs pages left, things like that, that ebooks may or may not provide equivalent mechanisms for, and even so, they will feel contrived because it will have to mimic a thing it intrinsically lacks.

I do think eventually ebooks will give way to epaper, and a book bound with epaper will have all the affordances of physical books with all the advantages of ebooks.

Libraries around me seem to already have seen the writing on the wall, and are morphing into coffee shops/community rec centers.

Anyone have an idea what role Google will be playing in future shake-ups? They've got their ridic library, with millions of titles (and bad metadata). They just in legal quagmire? Or waiting for (or developing) a format/medium that'll make selling texts easy for them?

If they had cheap, one click, plain covers POD for out of copyright works in Google books, I'd find that almost irresistable. (tho POD, as per all above, more a niche than a real future).

This publisher made money...

Oh we're making money, the problem is making MORE money than the other guys, ie becoming or staying a leader among yr competition. Also, as fuel prices go up, warehousing costs go up (for various reasons), and all industry in general moves toward a "just in time" (JIT) or "lean manufacturing" model where you don't have completed goods sitting around and the focus is on trimming processes, improving logistics, etc...the book business is taking notes from Dell/UPS and lots of other innovators.

The next trick is going to be convincing the bookstores/book buyers that it's worth their while to do things differently, which means finding and nicely presenting the advantages of scale, efficiency, whatever.

btw ismael cheers for the heads up on half price franzen

argh!

xp Did I forget "color on", "feed to dog", "bury in the sandbox", and "leave out in the rain"? It's a long list of damages, is what I'm saying here. Do that to an ipad over a year or two and see how yr replacement budget stacks up against buying some picture books.

― I've got ten bucks. SURPRISE ME. (Laurel), Wednesday, September 29, 2010 11:57 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

point taken, but every day I see young children, as young as 3-4, play around with their mommy and daddy's ipads and iphones while out and about

I DON'T buy from Amazon, because they're cunts,

could you elaborate on this?

― caek, Wednesday, 29 September 2010 20:48 (Yesterday) Bookmark

Firstly, the way they treat their employees: see http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article5337770.ece (there are other stories like this that I can't find)

Secondly, the way they treat small publishers. I vaguely know a few people who run small presses, and Amazon's always trying to extort more and more money from them just to make their books available in the first place (and then they basically have to seel at cost or a loss to cover Amazon's discounts). And even then half the time the books are listed as being unavailable, when you can get them easily from any other e-bookshop or order them from a real one.

They will have to pry printed books from my cold, dead fingers.

not trying to target you specifically here, but I see this sentiment a lot in the library world (big surprise) and it's always suspicious to me: it seems like a fetishization of the object over the purpose that the object serves. Like what do you really love: books or reading?

Re this, I really love both! I mean, reading wins, but I love the feel and functionality of a book, its physical presence, and also I am a total cover art tart. A well made book is a little work of art you can enjoy for its contents AND its physical appearance.

I can't read for long without the physical object. I can read articles and blogs, but there's an upper limit on the readable length. Maybe the two things, reading and physical books, are cathected together because of my childhood experience. Maybe the generations since mine don't have this limitation.

What alimosina said. Once an article gets beyond a certain length (like something in the LRB or NYRB), I'm only going to read it if I print it off and take it away from the PC.

Interesting side note. Last night I was speaking with a friend, who was recently divorced and has moved into a small apartment above a garage in the past year. He said he'd recently bought a Kindle and liked it a lot. He found himself reading more often and in more locations.

He also said he'd been more reluctant to buy physical books since his living space had become so restricted, because it would fill space and have to be stored or disposed of in some way, but that the Kindle solved this problem.

Btw, he is a devoted reader and the sort of person who can afford new books and has always bought them.

So awesome that the example Ismael chose upthread was Frantzen's: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/01/jonathan-franzen-book-pulped

Oh, come on - does this business actually want to have a future?! Maybe for his next book they can just print directly onto pound notes.

Assuming his next book is coming out in 1988 or earlier of course - that's a curious lapse on my part.

http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?permalink=20101008234604

Launched earlier this year by translator Stefan Tobler, And Other Stories is a Community Interest Company, which in our case means that we’re a not-for-private-profit publisher. We gather circles of people, virtually and physically, who are also into reading powerful and unusual literature from around the world; we track down books in some of the languages that we can read between us (Spanish, French, German, Lithuanian, more soon); we translate samples and pass them around; eventually we pick the best, the novels and stories that we think good enough to demand full translation and publication in English.

We’re already near the end of this process with our first book – about which I can tell you nothing because the fine print is being worked out in Frankfurtas you read this. But soon you’ll hear all about it and the other three books we’re planning to publish next year.

Apart from our democratic editorial process, another feature that distinguishes us from the mob of publishers currently going down the pan is our subscription-based sales method. As well as choosing what we publish, you subscribers are the first to receive copies, contribute to our website and general decision-making, attend all our talks and parties for free – and should be proud to be supporting one of the most economical, outward-looking and broad-minded publishers in existence..

Subscription based sales go back at least as far as Alexander Pope's translations of Homer. It's a good method for books not expected to support wide distribution.

what are the chances this could stimulate a Resurgence in the use of Capital Letters at the Liberty of the author?

which words shldnt be capitalised there?

see, That's the spirit.

Total tangent to thread really, but: When fooling around on Amazon etc, I've noticed these weird-looking books, strangely narrow in scope, from this one publisher:

http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b356/olem/llcbooks.jpg

...until it dawned on me: surely they're just collecting Wikipedia articles belonging to single WP categories and printing them on demand! Well, that's an idea, I suppose...

So that's what they are! I've come across them before too, and assumed they were some weirdly all-over-the-place textbook publisher. I can see why people are selling them used.

Or you could be like this chap (http://booktwo.org/notebook/wikipedia-historiography/), and do a complete history, with revisions, in hardback, of the Iraq war entry...

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4132/4963527724_185a17ef00_o.jpg

Though this is an experiment, not a book for sale

A thing about physical books (the only kind I have, still).

They get damaged so easily. Today I picked up a lovely Elizabeth Bishop book. An hour or two later I put it back on my shelf. In doing so, I dropped it a foot or two and it bounced off a futon. And now it has a run of pages that are bent, creased, vexed.

This would presumably be totally insignificant to some. But I am tiring of it - of how often I can't pick up one of these cherished objects without doing it an injury and changing it.

Presumably for people just reading electronic texts, this problem doesn't arise?

(Though if it were me I would probably become attached to my e-reader thing and get upset when I banged it against a desk.)

i would have thought that books were more durable than an e-reader

But would you care if the e-reader broke, or was stained or chipped?

Would have thought it was in the book trade's interest to include a free electronic version with any physical purchase - just like you can how you can sometimes get a free mp3 download you buy a vinyl album.

otm

yeah i was saying the same thing to a friend of mine, seems like the way forward

I've never been very bibliophilic, and sometimes feel relief when a new book starts to get battered - like 'now we can work'. I like wear, don't mind creasing, but dislike stains.

Been thinking more seriously about a kindle or iPad for reading. I think basically want something that can swallow and present lots of pdfs from google books. I'm not bothered about search, so don't think I need them OCRed into text (and straight PDF would be good for poetry formatting I guess). I feel like there isn't much point any more in playing that game where you hunt down the cheapest poss copy of eg English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, or idly wishing you could have Hazlitt's Napoleon knocking around the flat: it's all there, and on the right sort of reading device

Wait, why is google books not previewing English Thought in the Eighteenth Century by Leslie Stephen? It is so out of copyright! They do this so much. They need a button that you can click saying 'this is out of copyright u dopes, it is safe to show it'.

Don't know how the final sentence of the second par there was going to finish. Can't have been important. '...it could be a pleasure' or similar.

Would have thought it was in the book trade's interest to include a free electronic version with any physical purchase

I would love this! Though possibly mainly so I could read pdfs of the books I buy as gifts for my mother. Don't tell publishers that.

(It would've been useful for the China Mieville book I was going to give her last year - she loves SF and has asked to be kept up to date with what's new and supposedly good - because after buying it I had second thoughts in case it was full of something mother-unfriendly, but I didn't want to read the book itself because I'd crease the spine. And then it fell off the shelf and the back cover is too creased to be a present even though it's never been read. Bringing this full circle...)

I've noticed it getting better since Daunt came in, but was in Waterstone's Piccadilly at the weekend & now think it's an amazing bookshop - lots of tables with interesting books, independents like NYRB & Dalkey have their own sections, bought out my booklust like nowhere else in a while (w/o feeling quite as boutiquey as a Daunt proper). Don't actually know how it's doing, but bought a copy of The Tunnel to support things and stuff.