Industry Survey July - Septmeber

This quarter sees less interest in the printed book but there a few things worth mentioning. ‘Everyman’ who produce cloth-bound, hand stitched books with a heavy cream paper have a feature in Bookseller. Reinforcing the idea that physical books will need to be beautiful and that the ugly paperback will die. There’s more mention of the physical book selling as a gift and an interesting idea that a free e-book should be given with every physical purchase. This would also solve the problems around DRM as all of the tablets would have to make their readers able to use these files.

Within the e-book world there was a great statement that sums up current feeling ‘you need a digital strategy – even if that strategy is not selling anything digital.’ This is further highlighted by this quarter being dubbed ‘the kindle simmer.’ There are more and more adverts for digital partners advertised in the pages of Bookseller, which is also interesting. There is a suggestion that children are platform agnostic and expect content across media. This content is expected to be of a good standard, with weak links or weak material quickly rejected.

There are a couple of issues raised in that mid-list authors are beginning to really struggle. Amazons 70/30 sales ratio again at the heart of the problem. The issue of discoverability is also raised; as you can’t browse the web in the way you would a shop for a book. One article suggests that this can be solved through SEO and the use of widgets.

The market sees the vast majority of focus in this quarter with a lot of column inches going to Amazons bid to take over the Book Depository. This is a move which is being met with great hostility from the rest of the trade as Amazon already control the majority of the market and have been using books as a loss-leading selling tool. All resulting in a call for an investigation to be conducted by the Office of Fair Trading -by the Society of Authors, The Publishers Association and The Independent Publishers Guild. In other legislative related moves the government has issued the Hargreaves’s Report which has found that there is a growing problem between what is the law about copyright and what people actually do.

Other than that online booksellers have realised that it is totally unsustainable for physical bookshops to continue acting as their showrooms. There is some suggestion that they will have to start paying the physical booksellers or that people will have to pay a subscription to use them like a museum. Both of which sound a tad half-baked to me as ideas. Waterstones have ended their 3 for 2 offer, which has been met with a lot of positivity as it had become very dominant in the market. Then finally more and more orgainisations are getting involved with digital Oxford and Cambridge being two of note. Overall the mood is a tad hysterical with a lot of doom mongering about Amazon, but behind that there are some great ideas and products getting off the ground.