Working Titlez

Rudy Shur is one of the country’s finest independent publishers. He knows the publishing industry, and when he comments, people listen. Whenever I see his name on a column or program, I know the perspectives he’ll provide will be full of common sense, and often with a take that is a little different from the prevailing hoopla. As this year’s BEA just closed, his comments on where will we find our future readers are all the more apropos. ~CHU

From Publishers Weekly:

The Light At the End of The Publishing Tunnel? On Finding Fans, Not Formats

The question isn’t which format the reader will choose, but if there will be readers in the first place.
By Rudy Shur

While the English-language edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold 44 million copies over three years, the video game Bad Company 2 sold more than five million units in one month. Facebook, with its 116 million U.S. users, draws people in for an average of more than seven hours each month. And while watching videos on TV and the Internet accounted for only nine hours of Americans’ time per month, they more than made up for it by watching TV 84 hours monthly.

For years, I’ve thought that those publishers most affected by the e-book evolution would be the big six that dominate bestseller lists. Judging from the latest reports, it seems that while their hardback sales have declined, their revenue from e-books has taken a dramatic upward jump. As an independent publisher, I have not been greatly affected by the digital changes taking place. I do sell e-books, but most of my niche titles still sell as paper books.

More . . .

Surprisingly few authors have asked me about the Google Settlement, perhaps because most articles about the digital scanning/copyright infringement issues are mind-numbingly written in legalese. I’ve prepared a couple of letters to send to our authors, only to have the status change overnight. While waiting patiently for the “real and final deal”, here’s today’s update from Publishers Weekly.

In a nutshell, some years back, Google started an ambitious plan to scan every single book ever published and making them findable online via key search words. They invited Stephens Press to participate and we agreed, providing copies of our books for scanning. The results of a search offers a small section of a book that includes the search term — a few paragraphs or a page at the most. The search results also offered links to where to buy the book, starting with the publisher. We thought it was a good way to further our reach and help people find our books. We don’t really have any mechanism in place to track a search all the way to a sale, but we’re eternal optimists and assume some books have, in fact, been purchased as the result of a Google search.

The waters got murkier when Google acquired the rights to digitize the holdings of several major libraries, including many out-of-print books. Now it was the libraries giving Google permission to scan these books — but the libraries don’t own the copyrights, just physical copies. Some are out of copyright but others aren’t. It may well require the tracking down heirs and long-defunct publishers in order to acquire permission to scan. Google argues that it is for the greater societal good that these books be made available to the world via their vast, well, vastness.

So you can see the sticky questions that have popped up. Certain entities, including the Authors Guild, took Google to task, and to court. Google agreed to a settlement, but the so-called settlement hasn’t been settled and seems to morph into new complications daily. The Department of Justice ruled on September 18 that the settlement is flawed and all sides need to return to the table.

The issues are complicated and strike at the heart of current copyright law. We can’t very well say no one can help themselves to someone else’s writing without permission except for Google. And what will Google do in the future? Once it “owns” essentially all the books of the land, will it start selling them? On the other hand, should researchers and ordinary folks have access, at least in some limited form, to everything ever written? Weighty questions.  Stay tuned.

Book production is up . . . and down. Bowker, the international agency that issues ISBNs and tracks publishing statistics reports in Publishers Weekly that traditionally published book production fell 3% in 2008, down to 275,232 titles. Meanwhile, on-demand and short run digital production is up a whopping 132% to 285,394 titles. On-demand and short run printing is the production method of choice for self-publishers. Thus publishing growth is attributed primarily to authors publishing their own works, mostly through publishing services companies like Xlibris, AuthorHouse etc. These books, which are rarely stocked in bookstores sell, on average, less than 99 copies total. Although the growth in the production method is substantial, the growth in book sales is not. With major New York houses cutting or eliminating acquisitions of new titles in the past six months, and national chains like Borders and B&N putting moratoriums on new inventory purchases, book publishing has been turned upside down. I’m not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. In the past five years, the growth of new titles published in the United States has exploded. Sadly, the number of readers buying new books has not, resulting in massive numbers of unsold books ending their short unread lives in landfills or recycling centers. Perhaps a better balance between books published and buyers ready to buy them will be an odd beneficial result of the economic meltdown.