There are some days that the news I see just makes me feel so good about the programming we’re doing for this year’s Digital Book World. One of those days was earlier this week when the news pointed directly to three items on our program.
As I wrote in the last post, we have an entire unit on “company transformation”, headlined by John Ingram of Ingram Content Group and Mary Ann Naples of Rodale presenting on the main stage. The six other companies are in three pairs for break-out sessions, structured specifically to allow questions from the audience. One pairing is Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks and Marcus Leaver of Quarto. Both of those companies made real news yesterday that is relevant to their transformation.
Quarto just announced the acquisition of Harvard Common Press. In the announcement, Quarto’s US president and CEO Ken Fund noted that the acquisition delivered Quarto 25,000 recipes. Why would they be mentioning that? Because the transforming Quarto uses its database of recipes both as part of its QuartoKnows information repository and to add power to its This Is Your Cookbook custom cookbook creation service. Quarto’s transformation has already created a situation where the components of books have value in addition to what is delivered by sales of the book in its published form.
Sourcebooks’s news also comes from its custom book creation capability, Put Me In the Story. The publisher just announced collaboration with Barnes & Noble by which those customized children’s books will be offered at 200 B&N stores. PMITS, which licenses big brand children’s books from across the industry for its unique customization engine, has already been a significant contributor to the company’s bottom line. This partnership, which will fuel discovery and awareness as well as sales, should supercharge the growth.
We also are excited to be featuring Fred Argir, the new Chief Digital Officer of Barnes & Noble, for a main-stage conversation, so this is timely news from that perspective as well.
And, finally, yesterday a story hit my radar that is a couple of weeks old but ties right in to a panel discussion we’ve been organizing for months on “Women at the Intersection of Publishing, Technology, and Finance”. The study it references, called “Elephant in the Valley”, contains some pretty shocking statistics about what the tech world is like for women. Our awareness that this was an important subject for discussion had been piqued by the controversy last Fall when the South by Southwest conference (SXSW) first announced a panel to discuss sexual harrassment in the gaming world, then cancelled it because of…harrassment of and physical threats against the prospective speakers! An immediate protest followed, including some big companies announcing they would boycott SXSW unless they corrected their error. That did it. They rescheduled the panel.
We have always been among those who believed that publishing is a female-friendly environment, but we know that women in publishing have to interact with the tech and finance worlds. So we put together a panel to discuss how the world looks to publishing women interacting with reputedly less-female-friendly industries. Chaired by Charlotte Abbott of Abbott Communications, the discussing group will be Dominique Raccah of Sourcebooks, Susan Ruszala of NetGalley, Joanna Stone Herman of investment bankers DeSilva + Phillips, and Katherine McCahill of Penguin Random House. “Elephant in the Valley” certainly provides plenty of grist for that panel’s mill.
It is always a challenge to put together a program that discusses the future of publishing and tech some months in advance. It is really bolstering to see pieces put into place many weeks ago of such current interest as we count down the last 30 days before the event.
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And since I’m posting today, I have a word or two on this.
A Wall Street Journal story has propelled a rumor that Amazon will open 400 or more stores in malls into industry discussion. Nobody really knows whether it is true and, as I write this, Amazon has not commented for the record.
If it is true, then I certainly am guilty of one wrong prediction. When Amazon opened their store in Seattle last year I figured it to be a one-off and a learning experience for them. I have always thought they’d steer clear of bricks-and-mortar for many reasons. One of those reasons, which made more sense when they were much smaller than they are now, is that their stock valuation was based on the fact that they are in future-oriented businesses, not stuck with the pre-internet limitations and cost structures of physical stores.
But, on the other hand, the network of distribution centers they have built could also be a great asset for a retail network. The WSJ story has spawned a subsequent explanation, or rumor, that they’re planning lots of stores, not just bookstores.
You don’t have to think too hard to come up with disruptive things Amazon could do if they made this move. Heres one example. They have a print-on-demand capability. They try hard to get publishers to give them files for that so that they don’t have to rely on publisher supply from press runs. Publishers are highly resistant to that idea, which is understandable. They figure that if Amazon can print their own, they won’t buy from the press run. That reduces the runs and makes all their other business less efficient, as well as probably costing them margin on their Amazon sales.
But think about the implications of POD if Amazon has stores. POD books have never been intended for bookstore shelves. They are in a repository to be manufactured “on demand”. They are often non-returnable because publishers don’t want to pay the (higher) POD unit costs and face returns as well.
But what if Amazon said “make your books available for our POD and we are more likely to put them on our shelves”? Why would they do that? Because the “cost” of that inventory would be a lot less than the wholesale price; it would be their print cost.
That would be a truly disruptive rock if they threw it into the publishing ecosystem pool. It isn’t a reason for them to open up stores, but it would surely be a benefit they could capitalize on if they did. With their infrastructure and resources, Amazon almost certainly could open “profitable” retail stores that would put pressure on other retailers and their suppliers. Whether they’ll see that as an opportunity worth pursuing is what we’re going to find out.
There’s an early-bird pricing deadline for Digital Book World coming up at the end of the day Monday, February 8. For the best discount, use the Publishers Lunch code: LUNCH. The 7th DBW program looks at the Four Horsemen (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google), company transformation, and modern marketing in great depth. And we’re really proud of our Mostly Marketing Masterclasses, running alongside our Publishers Launch Kids conference on Monday, March 7, the day before the “official” DBW. Check out the whole program on the DBW website.
