Pub guru Mike Shatzkin: Time for publishers to do all titles in E and almost all in POD—and start thinking ‘Niches’
Reading the TeleBlog, you’re in Niche Land. Whether the Iranians nuke D.C. or the Devil appears as a winged Afghan Hound in Times Square, you can bet we’ll try to find an e-book angle.
But what about big book-publishers? Even when they think E, too many of them still mess up on the details of the niche approach. For example, they promote their general URLs rather than directing people to in-house niche sites for baseball fans or origami enthusiasts. Small publishers, especially the specialized ones, can actually outperform the big boys in many cases.
Clueful comments from a major industry guru
With the above in mind, I nodded as I read some recent speeches by Mike Shatzkin, a publishing guru who has pounded the table for both e-books and the need for a niche approach. “Every book should be an e-book,” he said, “and just about every book should be loaded for print-on-demand. POD is not just for end of life; for many books, it can be critical during mid-life.” Right now, it would appear that Hachette is the only major publisher releasing all titles in E—partly, I myself suspect, because it’s standardized on ePUB as a distribution format and can enjoy its economies.
I also liked Mike’s interest in the elderly as a market for POD, although I wish he’d really played up pure-E for them as the best approach to take, despite the need for format choices.
Free wisdom from Mike
Via the PersonaNonData blog of Michael Cairnes, another outspoken consultant and also the ex-president of R.R. Bowker, I ran across links to the Shatzkin speeches. Even with some repetition among them, they’re well worth a read, whether you’re a big publisher who needs shaking up, or a small, niche-hip guy or gal who would enjoy a little vindication, or a writer pondering whether to self-publish or go the traditional route:
- End of general trade publishing (completely retold), Jan. 22, 2008—delivered for Random House’s Digital Day
- Publishing in the Digital Age panel remarks, March 10, 2008, for the Book Business Conference and Expo.
- The digital state of play in the U.S., April 16, for U.K. publishers at the London Book Fair.
- The Future for Publishers and Booksellers, May 7, for Danish publishers and booksellers in Copenhagen.
Another good point Mike makes: The fact that use of e-books within the industry—for sales reps “carrying” around many manuscripts, for example—will help led to general use of e-books.
On dedicated e-devices and formats: “When research I did…demonstrated pretty convincingly that most e-books sold in the US are not read on devices, but are Adobe files that are most likely read on PCs,” Mike said, “I was surprised. Only about a third of sales are of Palm, Mobi, or Microsoft dot lit formats that we’d expect to be read on a handheld. The emergence of the Kindle and the vitality of Sony Reader may change that balance soon, but that’s what it has been.”
A related aside: I’ve queried a Sony PR rep for the latest on Adobe Digital Editions for the Sony Reader—just when will we see it available? Digital Editions is to let people read DRMed PDFs, not just Sony’s proprietary BBeB format. Let’s hope that ePub is also still on tap.
Detail: Unlike Mike, I continue to believe that cellphones will matter far, far more as e-readers than will Kindle-style devices, and I also wish he’d pay more attention to the eBabel crisis and the damage that the DRM mess has done to the book industry. But, hey, he’s entitled. Furthermore, I agree with him that the Kindle has done e-books a service in encouraging more publishers to digitize. It’s just that the real action, as I see it, will be on cellphones as they improve and rollout E Ink displays become common. Wireless, as an easy way for people to get books, can in effect be built in.
Image: CC licensed from Kapungo.
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