We’ve been reading Victoria Barnsley’s ‘Media’s Last Diehard?’ speech and can’t quite agree on one point. In fact, it’s not that we disagree but just that we see things differently! Here are Michael and James’s views – please feel free to add your own.
MICHAEL says:
Victoria Barnsley, CEO of HarperCollins UK and Founder of literary imprint Fourth Estate, recently gave a very interesting talk on how digital is impacting on publishing. She has been one of the most important and influential people in British publishing over the past 30 years and I have a great deal of respect for what she says.
However one claim in the talk seems egregious. She says ” I will predict that in 10 years more than half our sales will come from digital downloads.” This is a bold claim, and while I would sincerely and burningly like this to hold true I think it might be an instance of the hyping of ebooks I’m so keen to avoid. This figure might hold true for academic imprints- I would say that our sister company Palgrave would be more likely to make this figure than us- but for trade will require too much of a consumer revolution.
For half of all books to be bought in digital versions then there will have to be a wholesale and unprecedented shift in reader experience in ten years. Looking at the experience of the music industry, which is say, seven to eight years ahead of us, they now have roughly 15% of their revenue as digital. Given that many people think reading to be less immediately suitable for digital formats than books I would personally post my projections more towards this figure (15-20%). This will still represent a hugely important revenue stream for publishers and will be a major part of the business. So while I wholeheartedly agree with pretty much everything Victoria Barnsley says in the speech, and while I would love it to come true I don’t believe we will be looking at half of total sales coming from digital.
JAMES says:
I see “in 10 years more than half our sales will come from digital downloads” as a viable prediction because I believe (today, anyway – ask me again in a week) that Barnsley’s point about “granularisation” is the key.
10 years from now, publishers and consumers will both be mining the long tail of digital book content more deeply and effectively than they do now. There will be long tails not just The Long Tail, serving each niche and sub-section of the market and shifting as interest shifts; and the corollary is that there will be profitable and over-active short heads – not just The Short Head. What will enable and sustain this granularisation? The sorts of things Barnsley mentions (and others highlight): piecemeal purchases integrated into the digital lifestyle (can one write ‘digital lifestyle’ still without an alarm going off somewhere? Probably not…) – education, academic, and entertainment content. Subscription products will push digital downloads out the server door that are not necessarily even consumed, but which will contribute to that 50% of sales in 10 years time.
Alongside the granularisation of consumption, I think we’ll see a change in content – creation, production and delivery – not to all of it, but to some. And this will probably be highly granularised too, and more responsive and ad hoc – incorporating the mainstreamification of read/write activity. Don’t you think we’re just at the beginning here, and we’ll see new forms emerge and see publishers change their business a bit and begin to sell new kinds of entertainment-by-book-concept content? I’m steaming off into predictions of my own here – sorry – but my point is that I think Victoria Barnsley’s not wrong nor is she – probably – over hyping the future of digital publishing (I might be, though!).
Personally, this talk and discussion has been timely and useful, as I need to pull together my thoughts to present at the SYP conference this month – any particularly insightful comments on this duologue will be fully credited, I promise!
5 Comments
I think predictions over a decade are generally a bad concept anyway – ten years ago would people be predicting that apple would be the biggest music retailer (let alone still exist), amazon the biggest book retailer and we would have a US President named Barrack Hussein Obama. But whatever the figure it will be high – also her point about ‘our’ sales should be considered – ten years from now who is ‘our’ – what will the publishing space be like? Google will certainly be pretty large in the digital book market as will Amazon and probably some companies and as mentioned – methods that don’t even exist and the concept of a digital book – it’s format, delivery and consumption (e.g. fictional blogs such as Belle du Jour ).
So my point, I guess, is that this prediction is almost impossible to make and then verify 10 years from now (although doesn’t stop wanting to guess). If what we perceive to be a book changes as much as how the internet has changed our perception of knowledge and how we interact with it and each other then this figure could even be higher or more likely non-definable.
I’m with Rich. The first blogs were popping up ten years ago. Facebook is only four years old. The iPhone… you get the point.
It’s a valid point and well made – but on the flip side, I would say you need to look ten years ahead to have a meaningful strategy, although obviously you will adapt that strategy all the time.I’m sure Google have an idea of what they want the publishing landscape to look like in 10 years.
While it’s true that digital will continue to conquer market shares and a 10-year plan does have value for a forward-thinking company, I agree with Michael’s incredulity in the face of Ms. Barnsley’s prediction.
Books, unlike music recordings and television/film, have been in their print form so long that I can’t imagine the mind-meld to digital occurring in ten years for a majority of the older two generations. In fact, she begins her point with an admission of its resiliency (“the [print] book is a very resilient beast…it’s very difficult to out-do the [print] book”) and I do think that a major task for any involved in digital publishing is not only providing compelling digital content, but winning over those consumers who don’t care how compelling the content is if it isn’t in print. (Which one has to do on a large scale to arrive at that sales prediction.) She also mentions Paulo Coehlo’s comparison of reticent publishers to “copyist monks bewailing the arrival of the printing press” (amusing, but a bit supercilious) and Jeff Bezos’ comparison of print books to horses rendered “obsolete” as beasts of burden by the combustion engine. Both are extremely poor analogies (I suppose you could say automobiles comprised 100% of Ford’s sales ten years after their invention, ha-ha), since no such industries had previously existed (at least not in the sense that automobile manufacturing and printing presses exist now). While that may seem to indicate that ebooks have a shorter distance to cover, it also means that the business and product models built on print are firmly entrenched in the minds of all parties involved. As such, the “persuasion” task again rears its ugly head.
Ms. Barnsley’s mention of sustainable forests brings to mind the paper industry. While 50% digital means that there still be a large number of print books, it also means that there will be a huge scaleback of industries dependent on the present model, or something like it, for their own projections. If digital jumps in dramatic proportions, publishers will put in smaller orders for paper (& ink, etc.) for their presses, and the suppliers of such materials will undergo a rather drastic restructuring. Such events may be in the cards anyway.
It’s easy, and quite understandable in the face of revolutionary technology, for an insular perspective on predicting revenue percentages to incubate. It’s just as easy, however, for one to cling to old methods and the present model to prevent “uninvited” change (even when it’s badly needed), and she’s certainly not prophesying the death of print. And she may indeed be proven correct in 2019 (just writing that number seems odd). Other, well-fortified mindsets and markets will have to lose a lot of weight in order for that to happen. So I do admit it is possible–but highly unlikely. I suppose that’s the nature of any prediction.
In the sentence about Paulo Coelho and Jeff Bezos, I should’ve said “reluctant publishers” and spelled Coelho’s name properly. Look at me, making literal mistakes whilst pointing out figurative flaws.
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