Who Won The Digital Book Wars?

 

How did the digital revolution in book publishing, shape the book world that it is today? 

A recently published book, Book Wars, by John Thompson, offers a comprehensive and insightful look at how the 21st century disruption in books unfolded. 

The flap of the book sums it up perfectly: “This book tells the story of the turbulent decades when the book publishing industry collided with the great technological revolution of our time. From the surge of e-books to self-publishing explosion and the growing popularity of audiobooks, Book Wars provides a comprehensive and fine-grained account of technological disruption in one of our most important and successful creative industries.” 

The battles are all in the book: Amazon. E-books- Apple. Audiobooks. The fall of Borders.  Self-publishing explosion. Crowd funding. Blogs. Social media. It’s all there.  

Below are selected excerpts: 

Amazon

“If we had to pinpoint one thing brought into being by the digital revolution that has done more than any other to disrupt the traditional structures of the book publishing industry, it would not be ebooks: it would be Amazon. From its humble origins in a suburban garage in Seattle in July 1995 to its position today as the single most important retailer of books - both physical books and ebooks - and the world's largest retailer, Amazon has seared itself into the consciousness of every player in the publishing world. Given Amazon's overwhelming market dominance, it is very difficult for publishers to do without it - for many publishers, Amazon has become their single most important account. And yet the more dominant Amazon becomes, the more challenging it is to do business with them, as it uses its continuously growing market share as a tool to extract better terms from publishers in negotiations that are sometimes fraught and have on occasion become the focus of public controversy.” 

Ebooks

“But then something equally dramatic happened: the growth suddenly stopped. It levelled off in 2013 and 2014 and then began to decline. No one at the time had expected this - even the most unswayable sceptics were surprised by this sudden reversal of fortune. In 2013, ebook sales did not continue their meteoric rise but actually fell slightly - from $1,543 million in 2012 to $1,510 million in 2013, a decline of 2.1%, as shown in table 1.3 and figure 1.3. Ebooks showed a small increase in 2014 and then fell more sharply in 2015, down to $1,360 million, a decline of 15%, which was matched by a similar decline in the following year.” 

Copyrights

“The year 1923 is important because all books published before 1923 are in the public domain. Books published from 1923 on may or may not be in the public domain, depending on various considerations. The general rule in US copyright law is that books remain in copyright for seventy years after the death of the author, though there are various conditions that can affect the application of this rule.' So books published in the seventy years from 1923 to 1993 formed a vast ocean of backlist content where ebook rights were still potentially available. The right to exploit this content in ebook form, as distinct from the printed book, might still rest with the author or the author's estate and could, at least in theory, be assigned to some party other than the publisher of the printed book. 'Might' because many publishers, seeing the risk, took action pre-emptively to close the loophole by writing to authors, agents and estates and agreeing addenda to their pre-1994 contracts that expressly assigned ebook rights to the publisher.” 

Reaching Out To Readers

“As we noted earlier, Amazon, with over 70 per cent of the ebook market and over 40 per cent of all new book unit sales, print and digital, in the US, has exclusive proprietary information on the browsing and purchasing practices of a large proportion of book buyers, far more than any retail organization ever had before. It's hard to overestimate the historical significance of this. Even in its heyday, Barnes & Noble probably had no more than 25 per cent of retail book sales in the US.14 Moreover, since many books bought in physical stores are bought at the till rather than on a customer account and the browsing practices of individuals in a physical store are not tracked and recorded, the amount of information that Barnes & Noble would have been able to capture and store on its customers was much less than Amazon, for whom every online customer is by definition a registered user whose browsing behaviour, as well as purchasing history, is tracked, recorded and stored. The quantity and detail of the customer information now held by one retailer is historically unprecedented and this produces a structural asymmetry between publishers and Amazon that is far greater than anything that existed previously in the retail space for books. It is for this reason, as well as their dominant and growing market share, that many in the publishing world worry about Amazon's power: the CEO quoted at the beginning of the previous chapter was by no means a lone voice.” 

Self-Publishing Explosion

“Throughout its 500-year-plus history, the publishing business has always been based on selectivity. No publisher ever published everything that came their way: they sifted through the range of possibilities and chose a selection of texts to publish. The criteria of selectivity varied from sector to sector and publisher to publisher - estimates of likely costs and likely sales, judgements of quality and importance, and considerations of appropriateness or suitability for the list are among the many factors that have played, and continue to play, a role in shaping the decision-making processes of publishing organizations. Publishers vary enormously in how selective they are: some are relatively indiscriminate and will place the bar fairly low (the 'throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks philosophy of publishing), while others are much more selective and will take on only a very small number of titles - an extreme example of the latter being Twelve Books, an imprint of Hachette that was launched in 2007 with the aim of publishing just twelve books a year, one a month, in order to maximize the potential of each book. 

“But while the criteria and extent of selectivity vary from one sector and one publisher to another, the function of selectivity does not: all publishers exercise some degree of selectivity, deciding which books to invest their time, expertise and resources in and which to pass over.

Publishers are gatekeepers, to use a well-known metaphor, deciding. which projects will be turned into books and made available to the public and which will not. And in the world of trade publishing, it is not just publishers who act as gatekeepers: agents do too, and in practice it is the agents who are the first to decide which projects should be taken seriously as potential books and which should not - the outer ring, as it were, of the circles of gatekeepers in publishing.

Publishers and agents have always dealt in and perpetuated relative scarcity: by selecting out and publishing only a small sub-set of the range of possible books, they created a market that was populated by a small fraction of the number of books that might have existed if different processes had been in place. Even if the number of books being published was increasing significantly year on year, it would still be a small proportion of the total number of books that would be published if no mechanisms of selectivity had existed. 

“All that would change with the digiral revolution. The very fact that publishers and their content suppliers are selective means that there has long been a large number of would-be books that never made it through the gates. What happened to all those would-be books that fell at one of the many hurdles that lie in the path of aspiring authors? 

“No doubt many were consigned to the dustbin or languished in a drawer somewhere, covered with other papers and eventually forgotten. But the very existence of a large pool of would-be books and aspiring authors meant that there was a demand to be published that outstripped the willingness or ability of established publishing organizations to meet it (and possibly outstripped the demand to be read too). And it was this pent-up demand that provided the driving force behind the self-publishing explosion.”

 

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Brian Feinblum, the founder of this award-winning blog, can be reached at brianfeinblum@gmail.com  He is available to help authors promote their story, sell their book, and grow their brand. He has over 30 years of experience in successfully helping thousands of authors in all genres. Let him be your advocate, teacher, and motivator!

 

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About Brian Feinblum

Brian Feinblum should be followed on Twitter @theprexpert. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2023. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids, and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s The Independent.  This award-winning blog has generated over 3.3 million pageviews. With 4,400+ posts over the past dozen years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” For the past three decades, including 21 years as the head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and two jobs at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen, Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard, Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C. Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler. He recently hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America, and has spoken at ASJA, Independent Book Publishers Association Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, and Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association. His letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester) and The Washington Post. He has been featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald. For more information, please consult: www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum.