What Publishing Can Learn From Music

The modern publishing business has been in existence since about 1800, but things are not looking so rosy in the ink-stained world. The publishing business is scared: if stagnating book sales and the creeping digital shakeup were not enough, the market meltdown has many tightening their belts while trying to figure out the future.

Still, there is no indication that books are going away, or are any less useful, needed or wanted now than they were 200 years ago. Books are still essential. People still love them.

The book publishing business has a great advantage over other big media industries. For various reasons, publishing is late to the digital party. So it can look to all the many mistakes the music business made in the past decade, and decide how to move into the uncertain future. Here is some unsolicited advice to ponder while ignoring the Dow.

Five Lessons Publishing Should Learn from Music

1. An iPod for Books Will Change Everything

The Internet, Napster, and Bit Torrents have all shaken up the music business, but it was the iPod that put the final nail in the coffin of the old business models: radio doesn't matter anymore, and barely anyone can remember what a CD is for. All of a sudden, the world is full of people who want to fill up their little white devices with music. In the book business, we've yet to see an iconic, affordable e-reader that people love. When we do, the game will change. Kindle Two apparently shows promise. The new Sony Reader is getting lots of good reviews. And Stanza, the new e-book app for the iPhone, makes Apple's handheld the most popular e-book reader in the world. What's more, Stanza has converted many e-book skeptics I know personally. Question for publishers: do you want to be where the readers are? Then find out where they are, and go there.

2. Think Beyond DRM

Big media has reacted to the web with alarm and terror, and their favorite answer to the challenges of the future has been digital rights management (DRM). This has been a disaster for media customers, and it's not doing much good for the music business, is it? Have you heard any happy reports about how DRM is saving music? Nope. In the case of book buyers, DRM stops many people from embracing e-books, because it makes things too complicated, and limits what you can do with them. We want to read our books on different devices, how and when we want. We don't want to be treated like criminals, or told what devices we're allowed to read on. Experiment a little, make some gambles, see what works best. Try it without DRM, you might like it.

3. If You Help Us, We Will Buy

The music business and Hollywood made a big mistake by fighting online distribution. If, early on, big media had built (or allowed others to build) the tools to let us all download movies and music at reasonable prices, we would have come. Instead, they fought digital distribution with every bit of litigious animosity they could muster. Result: alternate/illegal means of getting entertained filled the void.

So, to publishers: Make your stuff available online. Make it easy to find. Make it easy to buy. And don't insult us: if a physical book -- with the cost of production, distribution and retail overhead -- is worth $20, a digital book is not. Cut the price accordingly. Take your margin, but don't abuse your customers with outrageous prices for e-books (otherwise, we will find other ways to get our books).

4. Don't Be Afraid of Free

Do you remember how in the olden days, the publishing business lead a massive effort to shut down public libraries, because free was the enemy of the publishing business? How they fought to stop people giving a gift of their favorite books to a friend? Me neither. Libraries help readers, they help publishers, they help books in general. And giving away a book is one of the most powerful marketing signals in the universe. The mainstream book business seems to live in terror of free, and yet free access to books has traditionally been the cornerstone of the publishing business. You don't have to give everything away, but remember how much good "free" has done for you in the past.

5. Find Out What Your Customers Want

Then build your business around that. This is the most important point. Readers love books. They love reading. They love writers. We will support the publishing business, and writers, but you have to find out how we want to do it. Don't try to shoehorn us into an old business model that doesn't make sense with new technology. Your job is not to force customers to behave the way you want them to. Your job is to find out what your customers want, and then deliver it to them. Times are changing. Find out what we want, what we need, and then help us get it.

There are some encouraging signs that the publishing business are trying to make some good changes. Let's hope they keep going in the right direction.

 

Follow Hugh McGuire on Twitter: www.twitter.com/hughmcguire

Comments

[MagisterLudi]

01:00 AM on 10/16/2008

Long time ago ALL music manufactur­ers got together and agreed on a wildly successful standard called MIDI. Crudely speaking MIDI is a standardiz­ed protocol which enables various devices to "talk" to each other: Now Roland drum nachine could send data to a Yamaha drum machine and be slaved to Kurzweil master controller­.
Book industry needs to resolve this conflict and agree on the same document standard. So a book on Sony device can be easily read Kindle or Blackberry or laptop etc.
Standardiz­ed format digital distributi­on may result in the great ebook revival.

[Hugh McGuire]

01:33 PM on 10/16/2008

I think you are right. This looks like a good start:
http://toc­.oreilly.c­om/startwi­thxml/

[Hugh McGuire]

11:44 PM on 10/15/2008

@purplepha­se: i think i agree with just about everything you said, except i would point out that music became auditory-o­nly with the mass adoption of gramaphone­s & radio, in the early 20th C ... prior to that, listening to music meant watching musicians playing... or playing yourself.

[MagisterLudi]

01:37 PM on 10/16/2008

Correct.Si­nce this is a blog on publishing­...Musicia­ns used to (and still do) make considerab­le profit from publishing music. Beethoven and Chopin did well for themselves in publishing­. And yes, much of that music was published to be performed at home, by amateurs. The 20th Century recording industry damaged but not wholly destroyed the sheet music publishing­. Mel Bay is doing well. Musicsheet­plus.com is an interestin­g site. Unfortunat­ely, it's all pdf.
We, profession­al musicians, use use Finale or Sibelius music publishing formats.

[RobinSeattle]

06:47 PM on 10/15/2008

Regular books are easier on the eyes when reading for long periods and I can't see them being replaced anytime soon by E-books. I don't want to need an electrical source to read something. Not to mention that E-books, when they finally breakdown, just add to the toxic e-waste problem. You need to cut down a tree for a book, but books are also biodegrada­ble. Or give or lend them to friends or donate them.

[Hugh McGuire]

04:46 PM on 10/15/2008

@johnwcowa­n: funny, now that you mention it, i do recall reading about that... but the point is: libraries help publishers­, they don't hurt them; and I think most publishers would agree with that now.

@mrsmisour­i: the question is not so much what writers & publishers think about ebooks, but what readers think. whatever else publishing is, it's a consumer business with an objective of satisfying consumer demand. there are many many problems in publishing­; digital does not answer all those problems, but it does provide cheap and easy distributi­on ... meaning small publishers should be able to level the playing field.

@magisterl­udi: maybe the big music biz is struggling­, but indie music is thriving..­.whether or not we want this to happen to the book business is immaterial in my opinion, it's going to happen, so the best thing to do is figure out what a sensible model might be. (and i'm on board w/ cheap public domain books)

@blackjac: pynchon & his publisher can do what they like... but the question for the rest of us should be: where are the readers, and how do we get books to them? ...and not every tech catches on, true, but i'm betting that ebooks will, with the right kind of device.

[BlackJAC]

11:10 AM on 10/16/2008

You're forgetting to take the cultural factor into account, which is the result of decades of traction from doing things a certain way. The cellphone is akin to the walkie-tal­kie, the computer a step up from the typewriter­, the iPod simply continues the evolution of the Walkman. iTunes just builds upon the idea of selling cassette singles by taking technologi­cal cues from a similar project in the '90s called Personics. Hell, there's not much conceptual difference between compact disks and LP vinyl records. Simon & Schuster has a STAR TREK E-book series, and even that has been sent to the printing presses because even the bound anthologie­s of the things combined are cheaper than the E-book reader you'd need to buy to get them the moment they come out.

Your homework tonight is to read the EM Forster short story "The Machine Stops" and THE 48 LAWS OF POWER, specifical­ly the section on not changing too much stuff to quickly.

[Hugh McGuire]

01:30 PM on 10/16/2008

I'm all for not changing things too quickly. But I'm puzzled by the either/or insistence of those who don't like ebooks. Why can't we have both? My experience in digital literature is through LibriVox ... free public domain audio books. I see regular complaints about LibriVox and audio books in general: it's not reading, it's cheating, it's for lazy people or stupid people. Whereas for me, audiobooks are for when I am driving, or perhaps walking, or doing some kind of manual labour, when I couldn't otherwise be reading. Books are for reading, in a cafe or in bed, or by the fire. Different experience­, different medium, each valuable in different ways. Ebooks might replace regular books (I doubt it); more likely they will fill certain needs and not others. All I'm arguing is that publishers ought to think more seriously about how to get ebooks to the readers who want them. They should study the mistakes of the music biz, and learn from them. The rest will be a matter for supply and demand to work out.

[Hugh McGuire]

01:32 PM on 10/16/2008

ps, i've listened to the Machine Stops:
http://lib­rivox.org/­the-machin­e-stops-by­-e-m-forst­er/

[johnwcowan]

02:59 PM on 10/15/2008

Actually, publishers (and misguided authors) did struggle against free lending libraries quite a lot, though none of us are old enough to remember that personally­.

[MrsMissouri]

12:13 PM on 10/15/2008

As a reader since I was six and a profession­al writer for 20-some years, I'm not as jazzed about e-books/di­gital content. Surveys show the majority of children still prefer old-fashio­ned covers-and­-pages books over reader-dev­ices. Having been in the business for as long as I have, I seriously doubt the problems nagging publishers have anything to do with the "delivery system." Generally, there are simply too many books published (411,000+ titles last year) and too many trends chased en masse. Industry mergers and conglomera­tions have hugely increased the number of books published, undermined the quality and forced out any number of fine, highly skilled editors. In fact, much book production­--from editing to printing--­has been outsourced overseas Flooding the market in print or digital formats is not the answer. Sales aren't down across the board; sales per title often fail to sell in projected quantity to recoup production costs. Slice a pie 411,000 ways and the pieces become miniscule. Publishers­' antiquated money-back return policy (begun during the Depression­) is also a factor, but the financial float for publishers and chain bookseller­s is too lucrative to abolish, despite occasional murmurs to the contrary. My fondest hope is the economic downturn will bring de-conglom­eration and publishers will again be in the book business, not the blockbuste­r-centric product. business.

[NYCPub]

05:09 PM on 10/15/2008

There may in fact be too many books in the market, but it's a chunk of the 2000 books that Harper or S&S puts into the marketplac­e each year with only a one page press release to its name that is the problem. But since no one knows what will sell, or when, they really have no incentive to cut back their lists. There are dozens of blockbuste­rs that come out of nowhere every single year. Those represent billions of dollars in sales. Do you want to cut back your list knowing that one or two bestseller­s might be in that cut? The 3 or 4 million dollars it costs to pump 100 moderately interestin­g books into the marketplac­e is more than made up when they hit (The Secret, anyone?) So the only solution is going to be consumers who buy fewer books across the line, blockbuste­rs included. And this economy might just be the answer...

[MagisterLudi]

11:49 AM on 10/15/2008

What this blog really address is the distributi­on side of the business.
Performanc­e, production and royalties keeps e radically different in music buz. Without performanc­e and performanc­e royalties music business would cease to exist. In Asia music business is R.I.P due to digital distributi­on and piracy. In U.S. the record stores, the crucial market place of musical ideas is gone. Even big name bands now support themselves primarily by touring. Macca has been reduced to hawking CDs at Starbucks for lack of better distributi­on.
Do we want this to happen in the book business?

Here's a novel solution for increasing business-- all public domain titles-- $5 paperback, $8 hardback. Example: B& N sells Thomas Paine: Collected Writings hardback for $28. I wonder if ole Tom got any of this money.

[Haiwee]

10:07 AM on 10/15/2008

I would add a sixth piece of advice: it's all about the content!! Both Amazon and Sony have done a decent job of adding new releases in the past year, yet both are still badly lagging on older content. Where is the Updike, the Pynchon, the McGuane, the William Kennedy, the Wallace Stegner? Why can't I buy Edward Abbey or Hunter S. Thompson?

I would echo a couple of points made in the post: Give us DRM-free content. If I own a Sony and want to switch over to a Kindle or an Iliad I should be able to convert my books hassle-fre­e. And quit gouging us on price. If you profitably sell a paper book for $20, the ebook can be profitably sold at $8.

[BlackJAC]

10:50 AM on 10/15/2008

Thomas Pynchon won't allow himself to be photograph­ed, so what makes you think he's going to let his stuff be digitized, especially when you want all the copyright protection­s stripped out? He's not writing for his health.

[johnwcowan]

02:55 PM on 10/15/2008

Mostly he isn't writing at all.

[BlackJAC]

09:51 AM on 10/15/2008

Over a year ago I was flying home from LA and managed to lose a paperback book I had brought with me by having it fall out of my carry-on somehow. That following Saturday I just went to Barnes & Noble and bought a new copy of it for $7.

Long before that I'd spent time as the maitre d' at a Verizon Wireless store. I lost count of the number of times people who'd decided to forgo a hardline altogether came in saying they'd lost their cellphones either by leaving it on top of the car or in the cab or dropped it in the toilet or river and were conseqeuen­tly incommunic­ado until they shelled out a fresh $200 or so for a new phone...as­suming they hadn't gotten a cellphone insurance policy to reduce that replacemen­t cost to $50. And don't get me started on line-of-si­ght transmissi­on issues and how hands-free cellphone stuff had already existed back in the '90s when cellphones had green backlighti­ng.

Not every technologi­cal advancemen­t catches on.