Publishers Weekly recently hosted a stimulating and smart online session about AI and publishing, thanks to the organizing and moderating skills of Peter Brantley and Thad McIlroy. The day began with a presentation by former PRH CEO Markus Dohle and ended with one by thought leader Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School, which framed the day perfectly. Both of them were enthusiasts for AI. But they also presented what, to me, was the stark contrast on display for the whole day between people who think book publishing is largely the business it has always been and those who are seeing it isn’t and ..read more

The case has been made here repeatedly over years that the business and operating model of book publishing as it has been throughout my 50+-year career is irretrievably broken. And it is increasingly obvious that this is the case across all “content” businesses — newspapers, magazines, movies, TV, and radio — and for very much the same reasons. The primary challenge is that no content ever becomes unavailable anymore. So every book in the history of publishing is competing for attention with everything “newly available”. The other delivery forms suffer from a variation of this theme. For TV an ..read more

Three decades ago, if you wanted a trade book, you went to a bookstore or a bigger merchant like Wal-mart or a department store with a book “section”. It was actually hard to get a book any other way. That really changed starting with Amazon in 1995 and has continued to splinter since with a large number of online retailers making books available that they (mostly) source through Ingram. So we have gone from a world where about 95 percent of books were bought in stores to a world where that number is now more like 20 percent (by my guestimate.) When you think about it a little bit, that makes ..read more

The idea that general trade publishing and general trade publishing houses were going to have to change or die was first floated here in a post in 2007 and then expanded upon in a post called “The End of the General Trade Publishing Concept” in 2019. The announcement this week that Madeline McIntosh, a very good person and a very competent publishing leader, is stepping down from Penguin Random House, undoubtedly the world’s biggest trade publishing house, makes it relevant to update the analysis and predictions from those two prior posts. The book publishing business in which I have spent my ..read more

I was very pleased with my post of last week, about how my friend Ed Rogoff could possibly self-publish a book about health called “Scary Diagnosis” better than it would be delivered to the public by a professional publisher. I put it up. My subscribers got it by email. And then Google put a big bright red WARNING screen on my site saying “malware here, don’t go!” So my team went into action. The first several scans executed by the experts at Oxford Mediaworks found no evidence of malware. But then the hosting outfit we employ under their direction, WP Engine, did a number of additional scans ..read more

We’ve previously explored what I called “the end of the trade publishing concept”, which stems from the now wide-open opportunity to publish available to anybody with a computer and something to deliver as a book. It feels like we may have reached a new benchmark: admittedly a very fuzzy one. But it looks like it has become very difficult, bordering on impossible, for a commercial entity to make money consistently publishing new titles. Let’s summarize the facts that have changed on the ground that make that the case. **Thirty years ago, each new book coming into the world in English was compe ..read more

Judge Florence Y. Pan ruled today that the acquisition of Simon & Schuster by Penguin Random House could not go forward. The ruling was explicitly to protect the “competition” for the “anticipated top-selling books”. In other words, the big books by big authors for which only the Big Five can compete regularly (with occasional bids coming in from a couple of other next-tier houses) will continue to have five well-funded suitors. The judge ruled that cutting that number from five to four would reduce the spend among that cohort of books, which is almost certainly true. (I comment on the fac ..read more

Open Road Integrated Media has been an active client for the past couple of years. I have been intrigued by their claim of having the only really automated ebook marketing system in existence. I can’t say I have the inside knowledge of every other big player’s operations to confirm that is true, but it certainly looks that way from the outside. Near as I can tell, the other players do their digital marketing, for ebooks, audio, and print books, using human beings to pursue opportunities on the titles their digital tools tell them are the most susceptible to improvement across the thousands of ..read more

My book business career (on the fringes since 1958 and pretty fully immersed since 1973) has been spent considering the path from “intellectual property creator” to “book purchaser”. This is a world occupied by authors and packagers and agents; by publishers of various sizes and capabilities coordinating the many tasks and steps from the raw material to the purchased book; and by the many in different seats in and out of publishing houses who are in their own way handling the marketing challenges of a world that has changed from almost-all-bookstores (for consumer books) to digital marketing a ..read more

There are, at this moment, still five US commercial book publishers of mega-size. Penguin Random House is the biggest; HarperCollins is 2nd; and Hachette, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster round out the Big Five. PRH is, approximately, as big as the other four combined (about $4 billion in sales) and HarperCollins is, approximately, as big as the three behind them combined (about $2 billion in sales). By acquiring Simon & Schuster, which PRH is attempting to do, they would widen their lead over Harper as the biggest player in the market. The US Department of Justice has chosen to oppose ..read more