Booksquare

So what with this, that, and the other, Booksquare has been a bit quiet lately. The world of digital publishing has been amazingly active, and — oh! — filled with more rumors, speculation, and nonsense than even I can stomach*. Which means the important news gets buried as the digerati chase the next bright and shiny thing.

I have been very much focused on Moving Forward. Which means thinking about how publishing can position itself for the next year, the next five years, the next ten years, heck, the next century. One thing I know for sure is that nobody knows for sure how things will look at any one of those points in time. The best publishers can do is to figure out what they do (not as easy as you’d imagine!), and, more importantly, how they can best position themselves to take advantage of the inevitable shifts in the business.

So, today, a small discussion about a small aspect of this change. I say small because I am addressing an isolated incident. I think it’s worthy of attention because it covers so many of the big issues facing publishing right now.
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Today’s links of interest:

• Random House Hires Ruth Reichl
  Good move for Random House.
• TOC Frankfurt Preview: “Customer Experience” is What Matters Most
  While we put about missing this year’s Tools of Change Frankfurt, this article about a session focusing on customer experience tells us this year’s event will be awesome!
• Federal appeals court tosses out method for calculating music streaming royalties
  Nearly missed this one. Appeals court sides with Yahoo (and, essentially, other music streaming services), indicating the formulae used to determine royalties was not proper.

Read more…

The shifts in today’s publishing business are happening lightening fast and iceberg slow. Epiphanies strike at odd moments. Brett Sandusky had one. Below is where he ended up; read his entire post (linked below) to see how he got there.

In the end, no amount of market research, anecdotal evidence, kaffee klatsches, or cocktail parties can ever replace actual and real interaction with our customers. Recently, I attended a conference where a panelist kept repeating throughout her presentation, “The reader is the consumer who is your customer. I openly admit that, at the time, I begrudged this panelist for stating the obvious. Of course the reader is our customer.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized what she was really saying: in an age of digital books, in an age where many of this industry’s institutions are, one by one, going away or becoming irrelevant, we are no longer the industry we thought we were. And, the reality is this: we can no longer afford to act as a B-to-B business. The future, if we have one, depends on our ability to reconfigure as a B-to-C business and start interacting with readers directly free of buffers and intermediaries. From product development, to consumer feedback, to buyer-less sell-in for digital products, to direct to consumer sales, to verticality, to providing readers with what they want, a new wave of customer interaction needs to guide us along our paths to the future.

Now, do you remember that money which we took from marketing budgets slated for BEA? What if we funneled that money into establishing direct consumer contact? Think of the awesome changes we could make in place of printing thousands upon thousands of galleys that end up in the hands of someone who could get the book for free regardless.

I can only repeat these wise words, something I didn’t fully understand just a few months ago, “The reader is the consumer who is your customer.”

• The Proverbial Sex Reassignment Surgery: what this transition is really about — Brett Sandusky on the elephant in the digital transition room.

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  January 17th, 2011 · 13 Comments

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• The Most Wonderful Post of the Year, 2010
  December 23rd, 2010 · 7 Comments

  No matter where you stand on the various issues surrounding the future of publishing, one thing is clear: without readers, what we do doesn’t matter very much. We sometimes take the privilege of our bookish lives for granted, forgetting how many people out there would give anything to be able to pick up a book [...]

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