ON WHAT THE BOOK INDUSTRY PRESAGES FOR MAINSTREAM MEDIA

END OF STORY

Instead of talking about a good book review this Mother's Day Sunday, I thought I'd highlight this New York Times article titled "The Greatest Mystery, making a Best-Seller".

It describes the challenges of predicting which books will succeed in an industry that apparently has not changed much since the 1600s.  And it offers a slight glimpse into how the online revolution has just begun to nudge the industry. 

This first excerpt lays out the problem, how to identify which books will work critically and commercially, and which won't:

“It’s an accidental profession, most of the time,” said William Strachan, editor in chief at Carroll & Graf Publishers. “If you had the key, you’d be very wealthy. Nobody has the key.”

The hunt for the key has been much more extensive in other industries, which have made a point of using new technology to gain a better understanding of their customers.

Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions.

Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.

Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors."

And here's the eye-opener quote:

“We need much more of a direct relationship with our readers,” said Susan Rabiner, an agent and a former editorial director. Bloggers have a much more interactive relationship with their readers than publishers do, she said. “Before Amazon, we didn’t even know what people thought of the books,” she said."

The piece then goes on to give a good perspective on the size of the book industry, and the mathematics of hits and misses.  Another excerpt:

"The industry does follow trends to pursue growth, but when it comes to acquisitions, methods have not changed much in hundreds of years, says Al Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University.

IT’S the way this business has run since 1640,” he says. That is when 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were published in the colonies. “It was a gamble, and they guessed right because it sold out of the print run. And ever since then, it has been a crap shoot,” Professor Greco said."

But what struck me the most was that in this age of online technologies, and ubiquitous distribution opportunities for content of every type, to be delivered to countless devices to consumers at a time and place of their choosing, the current fate of the book industry, might be the one that awaits much of traditional, mainstream media.

The realities that the book industry has long-faced in the analog world, are about to be visited on much of the mainstream media industry in the digital world.

Where most traditional content production and distribution networks have historically enjoyed either regulatory and/or geographical monopolies, duopolies or oligopolies, the internet obviously neutralizes those earlier advantages going forward.

Whether it's a cable network, or cable channel, a newspaper, a magazine, a movie studio, a TV or radio station and/or network, the product from each of these entities is going to be less predictable in terms of it's hit or miss calculus going forward, for the very same reason that the book industry has faced for hundreds of years.

In other words, the book industry has had to live with the realities of the long-tail, and distribution to the edges (i.e., the hands of consumers), for centuries.  Their customers have generally had so much product to choose from at a time and place of their choosing, at relatively affordable prices.

To bring the comparison to a personal level, just think about the first impression you get whenever you walk into a Barnes & Noble or Borders book store.  Thousands of books laid out on hundreds of shelves, across multiple floors. 

Even if you're armed with a title or a best-seller list in hand, the first thing that goes through in your mind, is "where do I start"?

Now imagine the same experience anytime you want to watch a movie or TV show, it's not just a few dozen channels, or video-on-demand (VOD) choices on your cable TV. 

Instead, we increasingly have potentially thousands of choices via the internet, courtesy of YouTube, Joost, Brightcove, CBS's Inner Tube, or any of hundreds of online "networks".

And this is also increasingly the reality for radio, for music, a magazine article, or a newspaper.

On the latter front, this excerpt from another New York Times  article on Rupert Murdoch's annual get together for News Corp. executives, makes the point vividly, (the a key phrase bold-ed by me):

"Jeremy Philips, a 34-year-old former Internet executive who joined the company last year to oversee strategy and acquisitions, followed Mr. Murdoch with a presentation that brought the challenges and opportunities facing the newspaper industry into sharp focus.

Online news is typically free, and advertising rates for it are comparatively low. Mr. Philips calculated that for every print reader a newspaper loses, it currently needs 100 online readers to generate the same amount of revenue.

The more encouraging news is the costs of reaching those readers are less expensive through the Internet than through print — indeed, The Times of London, which recently revamped its Web site, is regularly visited by more users outside of England than within.

Another slide posited that of the millions of readers who come to various newspaper sites in a given month, a huge majority come only once, a consequence of all those referrals from search engines and aggregators."

Again, none of these observations are new for many of us who've been watching the internet and traditional media industries for years. 

But they do bear repeating, at a time of such relentless, blistering change.

Comments

[Brian H]

You can't reliably pick winners; if there was a system everyone would soon learn and use it, and all would come out about the same. Or some other factors than those in the formula would spread out the results. The BEST such a formula could achieve would be a universal improvement in quality, especially if, e.g., the best-seller formula included somewhere in the fine print the statement "write a good book."

Competition means winners and losers; it's not necessarily a zero-sum game, but the spread can be very wide even in a positive-sum game.

Remember the old leftist motto, "Everyone should have above-average incomes"? Good luck with that.