On October 1st, Britain’s best-selling author, J. K. Rowling, intends to launch Pottermore, a website which will enable fans to interact directly with the world of Harry Potter and gain access to new features and content. More importantly, fans will also be able to buy e-books of the series for the first time, exclusively from Pottermore. Rowling, who owns the rights to the e-books, has become the most prominent author yet to turn her back on traditional publishing houses, a trend which is proving to be an additional problem for an already ailing industry.
At the other end of the scale, online retailer Amazon hired publishing expert Lawrence Kirshbaum in May, a move widely seen as confirming their intention to expand into the world of publishing by giving aspiring writers a chance to also reject traditional publishers. Only a year previously, the strained relationship between traditional book publishers and Amazon broke down, resulting in Amazon temporarily removing from their site all books published by Macmillan, an international publishing house. The dispute over the price of e-books, though uneasily resolved for the time being, remains one of the major issues in publishing today, and Amazon’s prominence and success has shaken every aspect of the traditional hierarchy of the industry.
The system as it stands is antiquated in the extreme, and needs to be completely rethought in light of the new technology available. The structure of author to publisher, to retailer, and finally to consumer is both time-consuming and expensive. Whilst the current system doesn’t benefit anyone, the greatest loss is to the author, who will frequently have to wait more than 90 days to be paid, and will usually only receive between 5 and 10% of the retail price of their book. Authors are losing out to publishers, while those same publishers are feeling the pressure of having their sales undercut by books sold for half the price as Amazon Kindle editions.
For publishers, the threat of e-books is very real. This February was the first month in which more books were sold as e-books than in any other publishing format, and recent reports show the negative effect e-books are having on traditional publishing companies. The conflict between Macmillan and Amazon over the price of e-books proves just how determined publishers are to keep the price of all books relatively high and just how difficult that is to achieve. And if Amazon and e-books are causing problems for publishers, the negative impact on brick-and-mortar bookshops is far worse. Only a few weeks ago, my favourite bookshop chain, Borders, went into liquidation, having closed all of its UK stores last year. This leaves only three remaining chains in the UK (Waterstones, WH Smiths and Blackwells), all of which are under pressure.
For bookshops and publishers alike, the future looks bleak. The system was never designed to cope with the new speed at which books can now progress from author’s manuscript to the hands of readers. But if it is technology which has hit publishers, retailers and authors so hard, surely there is a way to harness social media to save the struggling industry, especially since the demand for books is still high. Clearly the landscape of the publishing industry is changing drastically, but that doesn’t mean it has to fail. In fact, books are a leisure product based entirely on language, and are therefore more suited to the interactive world of social media than many other products. The book industry can use social technologies to help itself adapt,– the question is how, and who will benefit.
In my next post I will further assess the challenges e-books and self-publishing websites pose to the publishing industry.
