Book sales have been squeezed in recent years by e-books and the huge success of Amazon.Com’s Kindle reader, but India’s booming book publishers market is proof of the physical book’s staying power, said participants at Asia’s largest literary event, the DSC Jaipur Literary Festival.
“You read something on Twitter and you know it is ephemeral,” said Patrick French, a best-selling historian and biographer who has written extensively on Asia. “Yet the book is a solid thing. The book endures.”
Regional language novelists and poets rubbed shoulders with Nobel laureates and Booker Prize winners at the seventh festival to be held in the historical pink-tinged city of Jaipur, the capital of India’s northwestern Rajasthan state.
Hundreds of book lovers attended a debate on the fate of printed books in the sun-drenched grounds of a former palace as part of the free five-day event.
“The idea of the book dying comes up all the time. It’s wrong. I think this is a wonderful time for books, to enlarge the audience of the book and draw in more readers,” said John Makinson, Chairman and CEO of the Penguin Group of publishers.
“Books matter more in India than anywhere else we publish them,” added Makinson, whose Penguin Group is one of the world’s largest English-language book publishers.
While book sales slip in most western countries, the non-academic book market in India is currently growing at a rate of 15 to 18 percent annually, as rapid economic growth swells literacy rates and adds millions to the middle class every year.
At the festival, schoolchildren from around the country chased their authorly heroes through the lunch queues to get autographs on newly-purchased books.
Makinson noted that the pressure on physical bookshops in countries like the United States — where bookseller Borders Group Inc is in talks to secure a $500 million credit line — doesn’t exist in India, adding that books have a key role to play in Indian society.
Indian critic Sunil Sethi, who presents India’s most popular television program on books, said the digital age presented an opportunity, rather than a threat, for printed matter. “Even before I finish my show, the authors are on Twitter to say they are on TV talking about their book. Technology is merging things, but the book is still at the center,” Sethi said.
French agreed that technology, if well-managed, could actually help win books new friends and wider sales.
“Digital e-books have created a space for discussion. Books now have websites and forums, and so reading books on electronic devices has created communities and interaction,” he said.
Nearly 50,000 writers, critics, publishers and fans are expected to attend the festival.
For the book publishers and authors perspective, Borders was once a worthy rival to Barnes & Noble. Perhaps even bigger than B&N. The two brick-and-mortar chain bookstores were able to offer better prices than independent bookstores and drove many out of business. But that was before the success of Amazon and other online retailers brought the phrase “brick and mortar” into regular use — and once that happened, everything changed; indeed many UK book publishers watched in horror last year the UK divison of Borders hit the wall.
Barnes & Noble, if buffeted by Amazon’s success, has remained afloat; Borders has been taking on water.
On Dec. 30 Borders announced it would not make payments owed to some publishers, without specifying whom. Hachette confirmed that it was among those who would not be paid by Borders.
Borders has nearly 200 Waldenbooks and Borders Express outlets slated for closure before the month of January is out. Additional Borders stores are also set to close, including Westwood’s.
Borders is also cutting back on staff. On Wednesday, Borders announced that it would close a distribution center in Tennessee, eliminating more than 300 jobs; 15 management positions were eliminated Friday. And the resignation of two top executives — the chief information officer and general counsel — was announced at the beginning of 2011.
Meanwhile, Borders is seeking to restructure its debt like the frantic chess of a brutal endgame. On Thursday, Borders met with publishers and proposed that the payments owed by the bookseller be reclassified as a loan, as part of that refinancing. “But on Friday, publishers remained skeptical of the proposal put forth by Borders,” the New York Times reports. “One publisher said that the proposal was not enough to convince the group that Borders had found a way to revive its business, and that they were less optimistic than ever that publishers could return to doing business with Borders.”
Nevertheless, Borders — which lost money in the first three quarters of 2010 — remains the second-largest bookstore chain by revenue. Its loss would have a significant effect on book publishers across the United States.
Investors, however, seem cheered by the recent news swirling around Borders. Shares rose 12% on Thursday after reports that the bookseller was close to securing financing.
The iPad 2 release date remains inexact pending an announcement from Apple but in the mean time the world continues to shift from paper and ink books to e-books and are investing in e-book publishing readers like the Kindle, Nook and potentially iPad.
While many iPad users make use of the device as an e-reader, its 1.5 lbs. and somewhat cumbersome shape does not make it the ideal choice for someone who wants to relax with a book. In its quest to be the ultimate book reading machine the Kindle has resisted “features” like a touch screen that adds to screen glare, color that so far requires an LCD screen that shines in your eyes and a range of applications that might be useful but take away from the phenomenal 1 month battery life.
Because of Amazon’s single minded e-reader focus the Kindle has remained the premier tool for its main job, comfortable book publisher reading.
But budget constraints, the desire for fewer devices, users who are not devoted to reading but do it occasionally, make a place for those who want to forgo the Kindle and use an iPad as their exclusive gadget. It’s not completely exclusive of course because they still need a mobile phone and probably a camera and probably a real computer or laptop, but hey, who’s counting?
So Amazon provides its Kindle e-reading applications on virtually all book publishing platforms and christian book publishers‘ platforms including tablets, computers and smartphones. Serious readers should not rely on the iPad or iPad 2 for that matter. Pick up a Kindle first for a few bucks, curl up with an eBook and consider whether you really need a tablet too.
In a move that could signal an expansion of its e-book strategy, Google has purchased the online book publishing company eBook Technologies. Terms of the deal were not announced.
In a note on its web site, eBook said “working together with Google will further our commitment to providing a first-class reading experience on emerging tablets, e-readers and other portable devices.”
eBook Technologies supplies intelligent reading devices and licenses technologies that the company said “enable automated publishing and control over content distribution.” The offerings include an online bookstore, an online “bookshelf,” software that converts content to the format used by the company, and e-reading devices.
The book publishing company is headed by President Garth Conboy, an e-book veteran. In the late 1990s, he was vice president of software engineering for SoftBook Press, which developed one of the first dedicated e-book readers, and he owns several related patents.
The acquisition is the latest public move in Google’s positioning in this new and growing market. In December, Google announced Google eBooks, a service for buying and reading digital children’s book publishers ISBN publications. The service doesn’t require that a user have dedicated hardware, such as Amazon.com’s Kindle, but makes titles available via the cloud.
Google Books, which has developed a large library of public-domain books, has become part of Google eBooks, for a total of more than three million titles available. Of those, some hundreds of thousands are for sale.
As a device-agnostic service, Google eBooks also offers reading apps for Apple’s iOS and the Android operating system, currently the most popular for tablets and among the top OSes for smartphones. Since the titles are cloud-based, syncing between devices is irrelevant — the cloud remembers you.
Ads on Books?
The cloud is also a big bookshelf, so customers can buy titles from Google or its bookseller partners, such as Alibris or a variety of smaller retailers. Titles purchased from any source are stored in a user’s account.
As part of its stated objective to organize the world’s information, Google has also been working with university and public libraries to scan, store and make available their collections. But the effort has run into trouble, first with the Association of American Publishers and the Author’s Guild for copyright infringement, then with the U.S. Department of Justice. A registry backed by a $125 million settlement has been in the works, but there are still legal issues pending.
Laura DiDio, an analyst with Information Technology Intelligence Corp., views Google’s moves in e-books as an “extension of their core market of advertising.” She added that, eventually, Google is likely to offer ads with at least some of the digital reading material, in addition to outright sales.
She also noted that Google is positioning itself to remain a relevant source of reading content via mobile devices, rather than allowing Apple, Amazon and Barnes & Noble to control that access.
By: executivepublisher,
on 1/9/2011
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Gayle Shanks has fought a sometimes frightening battle against national book chains (mainly in the business to sell and publish a book) for 36 years, so one might expect the independent Tempe bookseller would be overjoyed at news that the goliath Borders is in dire straights.
But that would be like judging a book by its cover.
Sure, Shanks figures the chain’s death would lure its former customers to her Changing Hands store in Tempe.
Yet she sees peril for bookstores, for readers and for the nation’s culture.
Michigan-based Borders is the nation’s second-largest book retailer and its large debts to vendors could take down small book publishers and hurt the surviving ones, Shanks said. That could limit what even the most independent-minded bookseller could offer adventuresome readers.
“I think my biggest concern, really, is what it means for the book publishing world and ultimately what it means for diversity and finding a marketplace that will be diminished,” Shanks said. “We will have fewer authors finding publishers for their books. We’ll find fewer books being published and that might in fact mean that only huge, commercially viable authors will find their books going to market. That worries me.”
Borders has stopped payments to some children’s book publishers, who have in turn cut off shipments of new merchandise. Published reports include speculation that Borders will be forced to reorganize under bankruptcy protection or that its declining sales, market share and stock value will doom it.
Border’s troubles became more apparent after the holiday season, Shanks noted, when it reported disappointing sales even as most retailers and rival Barnes & Noble saw small to large improvements. Amazon.com would likely benefit from a Borders’ failure, but Shanks finds that troubling, too.
“That’s just the best-sellers and one level below,” said Shanks, the store’s co-owner and book buyer. “Unless you know exactly what you want to read, it takes the adventure and the curiosity factor out of what’s involved with finding a new author.”
Borders was the chain that mostly directly challenged Changing Hands, a store Shanks helped found in 1974 in downtown Tempe. Her initial 500-square-foot store expanded multiple times on Mill Avenue, where, roughly a decade ago, Borders opened a 25,000-square-foot store three blocks from Changing Hands.
The independent store opened a second location on McClintock Drive and Guadalupe Road in 1998, closing the downtown one in 2000. Borders later shuttered the downtown store.
Shanks believes Borders’ woes are a typical example of a chain not keeping up with e-book publishing industry trends — especially electronic readers — and not a sign books are obsolete. She’s seen an interest in people reading, whether its books on paper or on e-readers. Even on a weekday afternoon, Shanks said, Changing Hands can be full of customers.
“We really have been doing fine and 2010 was close to a record year for us,” Shanks said.
Borders and Barnes & Noble overbuilt, she said, adding it’s impossible for them to sell the number of books required to pay rent on all the square footage they occupy in the Valley.
A Borders failure would leave three empty stores in the East Valley, at Superstition Springs Mall in Mesa, at a mostly empty shopping center east of Fiesta Mall in Mesa and at the Chandler Pavilions. By comparison, Barnes & Noble operates five East Valley stores.
It’s unclear who would win Borders’ customers – especially from
By: executivepublisher,
on 12/1/2010
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Google aims to use its position as the world’s most popular search engine to erode Amazon’s dominance of e-books in the book publishers industry, while Apple Inc harnesses the iPad tablet and iTunes online store to make its own inroads. The competition means Amazon’s share of digital books will decline to 35 per cent over the next five years from 90 per cent in early 2010, New York-based Credit Suisse Group AG estimated in February.
With Google’s effort, each publisher is negotiating different revenue-sharing arrangements, though all of them will keep the majority of the money from each sale, the person said.
Michael Kirkland, a spokesman for Google, confirmed the company’s plan to start an online bookstore this year. He declined to comment further about the project.
Google Books, a separate initiative to scan books and offer publishers ways to sell them online, has been held up in court until a settlement with publishers is approved.
Fair advantage?
An accord between Google, the Authors Guild, and other authors and book publishers would resolve a 2005 lawsuit that claimed Google infringed copyrights by making digital copies of books without permission. In February, the US Justice Department recommended altering the agreement. The agency argues that Google will gain an advantage over competitors.
Amazon.com, Microsoft Corp, AT&T Inc, and the governments of Germany and France also objected to the agreement, saying it would give Google unfair control over digitised works.
Google fell $26.40, or 4.5 per cent, to $555.71 yesterday on the Nasdaq Stock Market, following an announcement by the European Commission that it’s probing the company’s business practices. The shares have declined 10 per cent this year.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the e-book store yesterday.
By: executivepublisher,
on 11/27/2010
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One of Japana’s major book publishers, Futabasha Publishing, claims that a first print run of 10,000 copies of “Occupation, Thief; Annual income, Y30 million” has almost run out in the 10 days since publication.
Hajime Karasuyama – the pen name of the career burglar – claims to have developed the uncanny ability to guess just where the occupant of any home will have stashed the cash and valuables and provides tips on how to gain access to a locked property and then get away again without leaving any signs.
Karasuyama says he earns around $470,000 a year from burglary. The Japanese police are investigating.
However, in the meantime, Karasuyama who has a forensic history as a Japanese thief, and who describes himself as a gentleman cat burglar, has taken the book publishers by storm by become a best-selling author after writing a book giving tips on how to carry out burglaries.
“Once we get inside a house, us thieves have an instinct for knowing where the money is squirrelled away,” Karasuyama told the Shukan Taishu magazine in an interview about his book — which carries the warning “Please do not attempt to copy me” as its subtitle.
Karasuyama provides details on how to pick any lock and silently use a glass cutter on a window. In this exclusive book publisher edition, he reveals that placing a jeweller’s magnifying eyepiece against a door peephole reverses the view and enables him to look inside the house, while he recommends a hybrid car for going on “jobs” because they are very quiet.
The publisher dismissed suggestions putting out what amounts to a manual of how to become a burglar is irresponsible. “This book is not targeted at people who might want to be a burglar but more at homeowners who want to know how they can better protect their home,” Kenichi Nakazawa, the book’s editor, said.
By: executivepublisher,
on 11/21/2010
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Sarah Palin’s book publishers have been forced to file a lawsuit after pages of her upcoming memoir were leaked.
HarperCollins Book Publishers filed legal papers on Friday against the company Gawker Media after they refused to remove pages from Palin’s second book America By Heart: Reflections On Family, Faith And Flag from their website.
on Saturday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order against Gawker, saying it had to take down the pages — which it did, removing the images and commentary relating to them — most shockingly, perhaps, without making any further comment.
Publisher HarperCollins — which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which also owns Fox News, the network that employs Palin as a commentator — brought the suit in New York district court on Friday.
HarperCollins Publishers spokeswoman Tina Andreadis told the Wall Street Journal Saturday evening, “We see the ruling as a victory. Gawker shouldn’t have posted this. It’s a copyright infringement. We are defending our author and our publication.”
But is it infringement? What harm was there in bringing Palin’s pages to light last week? The book is not in draft form — in fact, it’s completely finished and will be in bookstores on Tuesday. Barring some kind of strange machinations, every page that Gawker put on its website will be available for anyone interested to see in just a few days.
The hearing about Gawker’s posting of Sarah Palin’s “America by Heart” is scheduled for Nov. 30.
According to The AP, a judge has now ordered Gawker to remove the offending pages until the issue has been resolved in court.
They had uploaded around 20 pages from the book to their site ahead of its publication date of November 23.
The lawsuit against Gawker will begin in a hearing on November 30.
By: executivepublisher,
on 11/16/2010
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The bill, which is expected to pass the National Assembly later this month, would let book publishers set e-book prices. The idea is to prevent publishers from being undercut by the likes of Amazon or Apple.
The French Senate has passed the first reading of a bill that would allow book publishers to set a fixed price on e-books, in a bid to try to protect publishers and smaller retailers as the e-book market takes off.
But since the first reading on October 26, several objections have been raised – not least of which are whether the law is even legal.
An extension of a 30-year-old law
The law proposed by centre-right senators Catherine Dumas and Jacques Legendre aims to replicate the 1981 Lang Law, which prohibits the sale of physical books for less than five per cent below a cover price set by the publisher.
This law has proved popular in France, helping to maintain one of Europe’s best networks independent bookstores by protecting them from competition from large chains.Dumas and Legendre’s bill was the result of a year of consultations with writers, publishers and retailers, who are concerned that their revenues will be hit by the expanding online market. But for now, industry figures show that e-books make up less than one per cent of France’s book market, but that is expected to double in the next year.
“In 2011, we will see the beginning of a really strong market,” said Clément Hering, an analyst with Gfk, in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
“Till now, it’s been quite a tiny market because of the price of products, which is quite high in France, and the number of platforms that are selling e-books which is quite tiny too, but that is changing.”
According to Hering, the e-book market so far has been a way of generating extra revenue for publishers rather than something that erodes profits, but that could change. In the US, digital literature accounts for more than eight per cent of the book market.
Enforcability remains an issue
But as the Internet is international, it is difficult to see how this law will work in practice. There seems little to stop a French consumer buying a book from a website based in another country, unless the government decides to geo-block e-book retailer websites. Otherwise, a French consumer could just as easily buy the same title at a lower price from Belgium or Luxembourg.
Another more serious obstacle is the European Court of Justice - this protectionist measure might turn out to run contrary to the idea of a single European market.
The Court has dealt with similar cases, including ones resulting from the Lang law, by determining whether the rule would be discriminatory against imports.”If they would be discriminatory then, prima facie, they would be unlawful unless the state imposing the restriction would be able justify it in some way.” said Angus Johnston, an EU law specialist at Oxford University.
The protection of national culture can be adduced as a justification, but Johnston says it is difficult to argue that a country’s literary heritage is protected by allowing the country itself rather than the importer to set the price of a book.
“On the face of it seems it would be challengeable successfully under EU free trade law,” he added.
Slowing innovation
The French parliament will take up the debate again in the next few weeks, when an amended version of the bill will be brought before both houses a final time before it can be signed into law.
Another problem with the proposed law, industry watchers said, is that it may inhibit innovation in this relatively new marketplace. The bill doesn’t make a distinction between books that are distribut
By: executivepublisher,
on 11/15/2010
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A quickly assembled home team in the Canadian book publishers industry has claimed victory over the so-called “Toronto multinational book factories” with a deal to bring out another 40,000 copies of The Sentimentalists, Johanna Skibsrud’s largely unavailable, Giller Prize-winning novel.
Under the terms negotiated between tiny Gaspereau Press of Nova Scotia and Vancouver-based publisher Douglas & McIntyre, the Friesens Corp. of Altona, Man., has agreed to print a new paperback edition by this Friday. “Because of the urgency of the situation, we will pull out all the stops,” Friesens sales manager Doug Symington said.
The deal brings “three proudly independent Canadian entities” together to solve the crisis that emerged when Skibsrud’s unheralded debut novel won Canada’s most prestigious literary award, according to publisher Scott McIntyre. “With our sales, marketing and distribution system onside, an exceptional novel will quickly reach the wide audience it deserves,” he added.
The books should be available for sale early next week, according to McIntyre. Printed in paperback with a pumped-up cover image and the signature red sticker of a Giller Prize winner (as well as the Douglas & MacIntyre Book Publisher imprint on the spine), they will sell for $19.95 compared with the original edition’s $27.95 cover price.
Booksellers snapped up the entire new edition within hours of its being announced, according to McIntyre, and Friesens is reserving paper stock to print another 20,000.
Gaspereau Press made headlines across the country last week when it turned away Toronto publishers eager to bring out more copies of the award-winning book, which it had hand-printed in an edition of 800 copies and was reproducing at a rate of 1,000 copies a week even after it won the award. But even as the company attempted to justify the go-slow approach, calling the Giller win “an interesting opportunity to slow the world down a hair and let people realize that good books don’t go stale,” Gaspereau co-publisher Andrew Steeves was negotiating a new deal with Douglas & McIntyre.
“D&M had always been my back-pocket doomsday scenario,” Steeves said yesterday, adding, “I was as surprised as anyone when we actually won.” He added that the company will continue producing its deluxe edition with a wrapper printed on a hand-cranked letterpress.
Both publishers emphasized the advantage of the new deal to Skibsrud, who had remained quiet last week while her publisher vowed not to compromise its principles by selling large quantities of her novel to an eager public.
It was patience well rewarded, the author wrote yesterday in an e-mail to The Globe and Mail from Istanbul, where she is vacationing. Admitting that she “doesn’t have much knowledge or interest in the business end of things,” Skibsrud said she was “so glad that a solution has been arrived at that allows the books to be distributed widely without sacrificing any of Gaspereau Press’s practices and ideals, which make them so unique and special to work with.”
Even Friesens, a $70-million, can-do book manufacturer, is sympathetic with the Nova Scotians. “I get where they’re coming from and I can also somewhat understand the Toronto-versus-the-rest-of-the-world mentality that they’re showing,” Symington said, adding that Friesens and Gaspereau are a good philosophical fit.
“We’ve been around for 103 years, we’re employee-owned, we’re a privately held company, so all the staff out here has a high concern and a high regard for books,” he said. “We’re big, but we’re not so big, so to speak.”
The book is such a “cause célèbre it will just shoot out of the gate,” McIntyre predicted, saying that opinion on the matter
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