Rocket Bomber

I’m writing a set of articles — a mini-series if you will — nominally part of the Rethinking the Box columns, but also something special — hence the subject line above: “unique experiences”

Previously:
Study your History. Recognise your Motives. Location, Location, Location. Know your Customer Base, and your Staff. Hire folks who love books. Find your Niche. Consider your Product Lines, Stock Your Shelves, Set your main-aisle displays, consider Alternative display strategies, take a second look at What the Customers Want and Why Even Annoying Customers are Important. Answer for yourself whether raw dollars or customer service is more important to your store, and its future. Stare again in dismay at the Profit Margins. Try calculating your upper-limit affordable rent and affordable salaries along with revenue from inventory (with a side of coffee) and compare your numbers to average industry per-storefront sales.

Chronologically: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9 – 10 – 11 – 12 – 13 – 14 – 15 – 16 – 17 – 18 – 19 – 20 – 21 – 22 – 23 – 24 – 25 – 26 –

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In the new, post-e-book era, it’s not going to be enough to just sell books. You can stock your exhaustive shelves, hire bibliophiles, put out comfy chairs and sell a fine cuppa out of your café. You can host author signings and book clubs, do story time with the kids and “coffee talks” with the moms, reach out to your community: work with schools, churches, clubs, conferences, charities, chambers of commerce…

You can work your ass off, and still have people say, “Well, I love that you’ve been able to spend this time with me, to help me focus on just what I needed and heck, I didn’t even know about the book you recommended until you mentioned it and it’s perfect … but since you can’t beat Amazon on price I’m afraid I won’t be able to buy it from you.”

Whether it’s a single person looking for a single book, or an institutional order — or a big special event where we’d order dozens of copies of dozens of books, help you sell them, and process the returns of unsold books for you — doesn’t matter: First and often last words are “Well, why does this cost more than the price I found online?”

[facepalm]

Expertise costs money. Experience costs money. Sure, some people give it away for free but those people are nuts. In the hallowed, oft cited name of “Customer Service” I have to entertain many, many demands from visitors to my fair store, some of whom are downright snotty — and the worst of which don’t even come into the store; they insist on hassling us over the phone.

Sure, I can do computer searches that you could easily do yourself. Sure, I can order that for you. But: Just because I’m a person, someone you can actually talk to, and not an online sales site or automated voice at a toll-free number, doesn’t mean that I’ll be cheaper or faster. I can’t haggle. This isn’t “Let’s Make a Deal”. $22 worth of overnight shipping extended for free just because I didn’t happen to stock a book isn’t a “service” – it’s extortion, and you should be embarrassed for even asking.

Most folks who take advantage of my time and expertise in the name of “Customer Service” really like to stress the service part but ignore the Customer half of that: I’m willing to go the extra mile for paying customers but you are not a customer just because you have my telephone number. And this isn’t a relay: I don’t run my ass off and bend over backwards to help, just to hand the sale off to a website.

THE WEBSITE IS CHEAPER BECAUSE THEY DON’T HAVE TO PAY BOOKSELLERS! The nice folks who help you find things? The ones who put up with your crap? Remember them? I’d love to pay them more than minimum wage, but more and more the customers refuse to recognise the benefits of service, or to compensate us accordingly:

It’s not even like we charge extra for this — all we’re asking is that you pay the actual, listed price of the book. It’s right there on the cover.

##

As a bookstore, there is only one way to compete: Go Big.

More books on more shelves. Books in stock today — not available from a warehouse, but here — heck, turn the warehouse into a bookstore if that’s where the books are.

Become a landmark. Build a reputation. And of course, hire staff that help you achieve those goals.

In a world where books can be downloaded, though, and where some websites seem to be selling physical books way below cost [if I can’t explain basic retail to customers, I’m not even going to attempt a discussion of used books and secondary markets] — just having a book in stock isn’t going to be enough. When a customer can scan a barcode with her smartphone and pull up the “same” “book” for a tenth the price – and can buy it from her phone, no problem – then even the act of putting physical stock on shelves is suddenly turned on it’s ear: a book, in store, becomes just another “service” we provide to “customers” free of charge. All our careful organization, our research, our buying decisions, our merchandising; the attempt to generate a convivial atmosphere and inviting aspect, and enjoyable shopping experience — well, all that is secondary to price and booksellers (individuals, storefronts, and corporations all inclusive) might as well give up now.

##

Once upon a time, being a bookstore was enough. Bookstores were unique experiences; your town likely only had one (and maybe you had a library, too, but the bookstore was different) and very few wandered in looking for a title (a specific title, only this one will do) instead we went shopping for a new book — of course we all have our favourite authors, and genres, but it was enough that there was a book we hadn’t read yet, and we could buy and take it home today.

The internet has ruined this. I might even go so far as to say the hobby of reading — or perhaps, of reading books for the sake of reading books — is dead. 95% of customers aren’t looking for a good read, or a new book, they must have “this specific book” — it was on Glenn Beck, or reviewed by the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, or mentioned in passing by Oprah.

Almost extinct is the process of browsing shelves and the accidental discovery. It’s not that patrons and customers don’t want bookstores — while not everyone buys books, those that do love bookstores — it’s that other factors are slowly killing us. We can’t compete on price, and if one insists on buying based solely on lowest price, we’re dead. We can’t compete on selection — or if we can, say we run our own massive warehouse and website, suddenly the issue becomes speed: “What, you can’t have that here tomorrow? What, aren’t you a bookseller? Frak, man, you’re not even trying.”

Customer expectations are unrealistic and non-negotiable — and they defect to Amazon, and other web sites, all of which suffer from the same limitations of logistics — but since it’s all click-click-click and instant gratification very few stop to think that, hey, wait, it takes a week for Amazon to get that book to me, and the bookstore said the exact same thing — why didn’t I just buy the book from the nice bookseller who recommended it to me?

##

So: it’s not enough to be a bookstore. It’s not even enough anymore to be a landmark, destination bookstore, the sort that stocks hundreds of thousands of books, and sells CDs and DVDs besides, and has a cafe with National Brand coffee — and the chairs and tables and the hands-off approach to, you know, the actual-sales-of-books-thing.

The two major and at least two regional chains all do that already, and even in communities where the major chain bookstore outpost is beloved, indeed, is being fought over — that’s still not enough to keep the doors open.

##

The New Model Bookstore

criteria: multi-use space, multiple revenue streams, destination shopping, curated collections, weekly events and big-name, newsworthy ‘events’

What we want is The Landmark, Destination Bookstore — like Powell’s City of Books, The Strand, or Shakespeare & Co. — but since that’s not enough anymore, we also need a “hook” — hopefully the hook also involves another revenue stream [20 years ago, adding a café was the “hook”; coffee was enough] but in a post-internet age you have to bring more than that: not just a Bookstore, but a Unique Experience.

18 months ago, I posted five case studies outlining specialty, niche concepts that I felt would still be viable bookstores, even moving forward into the internet era — but now e-readers throw one more monkey wrench into the works. The last five

— Cookbooks
— Mysteries
— Travel guides, photography essay, and travel writing.
— Foreign & domestic newspapers & newsweeklies, politics, current affairs, and other select non-fiction (* with a coffee shop/bar)
— and large format, full colour art, design, & photography books on all sorts of topics; the so-called “coffee table books”

are all still valid (& I plan to revisit #4 in that list) but just selling books is no longer enough.

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A Unique Experience: Books and Brews

Concept: Either a gastropub with books on the walls, or a bookstore that has a pub/restaurant in it instead of (or in addition to) a café
Related: Well, whatever type of bookstore you want: Call the bar MI-6 and only stock spy novels – Agatha’s could specialize in cozy mysteries and English pub fare – The Bar at the End of the Universe could be sci-fi themed (with Romulan Ale and Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters) – Straight-up Irish with something like Ulysses’s, or Joyce’s – or maybe even Dodgson’s Pub, with a Lewis Carroll theme
Relevance: Folks gotta eat. Folks like to drink.

Here, Let me sell it to you: Actually, it was a conversation I had with a friend/co-worker while we grabbed a quick meal before a Emily Giffin book-launch party, at a local gastropub called TAP [warning, flash site with music] [aside: lovely place] – being book geeks and booksellers, of course the conversation over lunch was about books, and the business; but the venue — and the fact that we were off-site for an author event — also shaped our discussion. Books & Brews as an idea took shape that afternoon. Of course, I’m pretty sure I’m already on record as saying I’d love to open up a bookstore with a bar in it (rather than a café) but here is the new thing: a bar, where books are just a ‘theme’ and decorations on the walls, and a handy hook for events: book signings, launch parties? Hey, we’re already a hot spot, just come on in.

Killer App: Beer & Liquor
Alternate Profit Centers: Well, in this case, any book sales are the alternate — we keep the doors open and make the payroll off of the sales of beer, wine, and food. The “Book” side of the business can be as large as the market allows, or as large as our given storefront — even just putting a bookshelf on any and all available walls would be enough. Ideally, this would be more of a bookstore than a bar — but the reality is that one can make a lot more money off of a restaurant. This isn’t a “corporate” idea and it’s not scalable – but as a single, landmark location: this not only works, I think it would pay for itself in under a year.

[and this is 1 of 5 case studies for this topic]

If tomorrow’s ‘mystery’ announcement doesn’t have the word ‘mirasol’ in it, I think I’ll have to seriously rethink my current employment.

…and that’s about all I can say on the matter.

I love comments on the blog — but I love personal, directed email more. Obviously the blog is a tax upon my time and mental effort; conversation with readers is my only recompense.

Hi Matt,

I love your blog. And reading it the other day, it occurred to me that you might be the person to ask about something that has been troubling me about book sales numbers. (I’m a bookseller, too, as well as an author — www.cassandrachan.com.) Month by month, the sales of MMs go down by a lot. August was 21%. And yet, that’s not what I’m seeing in my store. There, hardcover sales of bestsellers are solid, but otherwise I’m selling nothing but MMs and trade paperbacks. The number of customers who ask me if a hardcover book comes in paperback and then, when the answer is no, don’t buy the hardcover has risen astronomically since the economic downturn. And yet trade paper sales are usually down a bit, too, though not as much as MM.

So what’s up? I’ve thought up a couple of possible explanations, but none that satisfy me. First is that my store is an anomaly. Second is that the majority of sales are taking place online and people don’t buy MMs online because of shipping fees. In which case, I would love to see the numbers broken down into sales from physical stores and sales from online (is there such a breakdown available?)

Maybe you don’t know any of this, and maybe this email has just made your eyes cross with boredom, and if so I apologize. But if you felt like giving me some pointers, I’d appreciate it.

Thanks,
Cassandra

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When it comes to mass market paperbacks, there are five things to remember.

Three about how (& why) they are published:

1. The very name, mass market refers to the past history of this format being sold through non-traditional outlets: newsstands, supermarkets, drug stores.
2. The format, since it was much cheaper, was used extensively by small genre publishers to reprint material that had previously been serialized in magazines: the so-called pulp paperback. As time marched on and the anthology magazine as a category began to wither and die, Mass Markets were also used (primarily by romance publishers but also by sci-fi and mystery imprints) to publish mass-market original novels — cheap editions of material from first time authors or others who might have some appeal within their genre but which weren’t expected to sell well.
3. Sales of just about anyone’s backlist, but particularly prolific NYT-Bestselling-Author types, is primarily in the mass market format. I’m sure there are some outliers in the group, and as a readership gets older they pop for more expensive trade paperbacks [easier on the eyes] but for the most part, perennial backlist titles are also mass market paperbacks.

& two additional points about the market:

4. Buyers of Mass Market paperbacks are cheapskates. Perhaps not scroogian, legendary cheapskates, but price point is their primary motivator…
5. And they read a lot – Addiction levels. Harlequin (and perhaps others?) even had subscription programs. These heavy readers tend to specialize, but they are still our most loyal customer: maybe they just jones for one author, but buy Everything that author touches, or they love cat mysteries [still don’t understand the cat mystery people], or they read epic fantasy or hard sci-fi or police procedurals or supernatural romance or spy novels or epic hard sci-fi police procedurals with a hefty dose of romance and at least the trappings of common supernatural tropes…

[he’s not a vampire, he’s from an alien species that acts exactly like vampires for whatever reason, and he’s come to Alpha Hemoragic 5 as a diplomat for the Nosphatarians – but he’s really a spy – and he’s just been framed for murder! and only brave Earth Special Agent Mary Sue knows the truth, both about the strange death of Senator McGuffin and the hot passion that burns behind and beneath the pale blue eyes and pallid skin of Mandark, Prince of The Ashenfallus Mountain — plant tongue firmly in cheek and have some fun with the proper nouns & adjectives and these things write themselves]

…and I kind of wish I were kidding about the genre-bending that is going on. Some days I can’t tell our romance & sci-fi/fantasy sections apart.

##

Mass markets have a different returns process — you might have read the admonishment on the copyright page at some point: “If purchased without a cover etc” — as retailers have only to return the cover for proper credit, and then trash the rest of the book.

I’ll give you greens & other recyclers a moment, as we need to pause anyway for the librarians and other book lovers to also shudder in horror at the process:

Yes, mass market “pulps” are so cheap, and so little valued after their sales cycle is over, that it is literally too much trouble to ship the books back. They aren’t worth the return freight charges. Mass market paperbacks are ‘destroyed’, the stripped cover returned as proof. These cheaply printed books, made of the most common newsprint-grades of paper, are doomed to an early death anyway; their pages grow yellow and brittle in as little as two decades time.

A cheap, disposable form of a book; one that will hold up to some repeated reading, and that might even be handed down from one generation to the next, but will not make it to the grandchildren. There are technical limitations built into the medium that can only be overcome with periodic and continual re-publication of the work.

Yes, indeed: the first e-books were introduced in the 1930s — except back then we called ‘em paperbacks, and it wasn’t online sales but rather sales through newsstands that was the “new media” market place.

I don’t have historical numbers, but I’d be willing to bet paperbacks saw triple digit growth through their first years as well, eventually claiming up to 9% or 10% of the market in as little as five years from their first major introduction — and here’s the modern reiteration of the hype — Anyone at Penguin [now owned by Pearson] or Pocket [now owned by Simon & Schuster] care to comment on the first decade of their sales?

Books are books are books, and we (as a literate species) have invented progressively faster and cheaper ways to produce them — and the latest twist is e-books. But from where I sit, e-books aren’t that different from the mass market paperbacks printed in the 30s, or the 60s, or 5 years ago. There has been a steady progression of books into all sorts of markets, and inflation-adjusted prices remain steady (or get just a bit cheaper) year by year.

There is a permanance to a leather-bound folio of vellum or parchment, though — or in a carefully bound modern book printed on acid free paper — when stored in a proper library, and cared for over generations. Sure, we can get a “book” today—in scant seconds with ebook downloads—for the price of a burger

[historically, paperbacks and mass market editions: also priced equal to your lunch, most places, most decades]

but past a single read: will you keep these “books”? Will you treasure them? If you treasure them enough, will you eventually want an archival copy, up to and including a leatherbound omnibus?

##

One can buy a used clunker for $500 or a Tesla Roadster for $128,000 — and both get you from point A to point B. A rolling heap and a range-limited electric model both have their trade-offs, their limitations, their advantages. Drivers instinctively know this, or quickly pick it up [given the opportunity to experience one or the other or both]

Books are a good bit cheaper than fully-electric sports cars and it could be argued that most of us have much more experience with books. In some of the arguments about e-books, though, I have to stop and think that I’m being sold an electric racer for the clunker’s price — and being pitched that this new ‘e-book’ has the best features of each, while also (quietly, secretly) being burdened with the limitations of both.

Cheap also means disposable – and replaceable only with a new cheap version. Electronic means I’m dependent on expensive hardware, and on an outlet, and on near constant hardware & software upgrades — which at some point may stop being backward-compatible.

Open standards and honest, open archival efforts offset these concerns, partly. We’re still entrusting the whole accumulated corpus of human knowledge to a format that may not survive even a generation, and reliant on a physical base [infrastructure, hardware, software, file formats, encryption & DRM & copyrights] that might cripple the whole thing even if we still know (or could figure out) how the other 99% of the New Model Library works.

##

So far my ranting is far afield of what Cassandra originally asked — Mass Market Paperbacks: apparently, still selling in bookstores; so what’s up with the trend?

First up, month-to-month and year-to-year trends are subject to outside forces [Dan Brown, Oprah, movie adaptations of Dan Brown novels followed by Tom Hanks interviews on Oprah] that have nothing to do with books-per-se and publishing is a gambler’s game to start with, and hard to build a living off of in the long term. Oh, sure, back in Epstein’s Day publishers sought out talent, and good books, and hoped that one pick out of twenty — or a hundred — ended up as a bestseller so they could earn back enough to do the same thing next year – but it hasn’t been the 1920s for ninety years now and all the publishing houses have been bought up by Media Conglomerates and all the capital-E Editors are gone — or are now Vice Presidents in charge of this or that and “Publishers” and editors-in-chief of progressively larger-in-scale but smaller-in-scope imprints — often imprints that, at least in name, used to be publishing houses in their own right before consolidation.

Good books are still coming out – but I have to wonder how much of that is in spite of the new corporate structures, not because of them.

Wow. Even trying to get back on topic, I can still manage a rant.

Anyway:

This is the oft posted presentation of numbers from publishers.org, the Association of American Publishers, who release monthly press releases with sales figures compiled from their seventy-odd members.

We all love and treasure these numbers, which is why so many [book] news sites link to them each and every month, and republish their conclusions like it’s delivered by a burning bush, or at least carved in stone. As I myself have recently pointed out, though, we often conflate publisher revenue with retail sales – and even though we all “sell” “books” it doesn’t quite work that way. [Compare for yourself: AAP numbers ≠ Census retail numbers]

For the past two years, when it comes to bookstore sales, you’ve been able to rely on my blog for three things: a willingness to find original sources, a proclivity toward math that borders on the downright obsessive, and a drunken disregard that adds that, flavour, a certain je ne sais quoi

Here, let me process those numbers for you: so, sure, there are sales reported in the millions. Bully for publishers. Book sales are great.

But.

And.

Assuming a hardcover book price of $26, a trade paperback price of $15, a mass market paperback price of $9, and an ebook price of $10 — we can twist the AAP numbers closer toward actual units sold

And now we have a storyline.

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Aparently ebooks were crap until January 2009. Sure, growing, etc, but not enough to impact the other book sales trends. Throughout 2009, ebooks were trending slowly up, showing much improved sales but not impacting unit sales of other formats to any degree, yet. In 2010, the whole mess goes bonkers.

So What Changed?

Was it the simultaneous introduction in November of 2009 of the Apple iPad, which pulled in the early-adopter geek audience, and the B&N nook, which similarly engaged the die-hard book [weekly mass-market buying] audience?

I’ll leave that as an exercise to the student.

We’ve only nine months of data since i- and e- took my chosen field and new-technology-a-fied it. The picture is incomplete; we’re going to need data from this upcoming holiday sales period [Nov-Dec-Jan] to square the circle and see how ebooks [bought exclusively for personal consumption; you can’t “gift” an ebook to someone yet] affects (or doesn’t) the usual sales of books during Q4.

Still, it’s a pretty graph – just what can we learn here?

If you break it down by unit sales [given assumed price points, as stated above] why yes, indeed, e-book sales exceed hardcover sales, not only in January when Amazon Famously Announced This Feat but also in July and August of this past year — though one wonders why they didn’t similarly announce that hardcover sales exceeded e-book sales in March, April, May, and June – and presumably, given larger trends, Amazon’s sales of hardcovers in April were double the sales of Kindle e-books. Hm? Amazon? Am I wrong? You have your actual numbers, all I have are industry statistics and larger sales trends. If it is so important to note the first month Kindle sales exceed hardcovers (in units, not dollars) why don’t you report All the Sales Data from every month since?

Oh, because that might make you look bad, I suppose. It’s hard to admit that even e-book sales are seasonal, and that a January spike in e-book sales might perhaps be related to recipients of gifted Kindles trying out e-books before dropping the device in a drawer, never to be used again. [the same applies equally to B&N’s nook, and to all other devices even more so]

Those of us who can read a graph and who know book store sales are seasonal, and additionally, admit we’re in a freakin’ recession, look at the numbers graphed so far and wait with baited breath for the next three months of figures, from both publishers.org and the census bureau.

And three more months of e-book numbers will also help; to date — that is to say, from September of 2009 — it looks like ebooks are cannibalizing sales of both the new hardcovers and the mass market backlist: New Hardcovers, because e-books beat them on price (often by as much as $10) and the backlist not only due to price but also accessability: you can read that 12-year-old book next week, if a bookstore orders it for you, or in 10 minutes if you buy the ebook.

There are several classes of books that don’t do well e-, yet, but both hardware and software are catching up. Comics and Graphic novels are on this wish/hit/list. I can’t say if that’s a good thing or bad thing, yet.

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And once again I manage to riff on the given topic for long minutes without answering the damn question: Mass Market Paperbacks: apparently, still selling in bookstores; so what’s up with the trend?

Part of that is market consolidation. When was the last time you saw a stand-alone news stand? And if you have, where was this rare beast? The “Mass Market” option for books is an anachronism; today “mass market” refers only to the format [smaller paperbacks, 4×6 or thereabouts, on the cheapest grade of print stock just above Russian Toilet Paper] and not to the sales outlets: Mass Market paperbacks are books, and sold through bookstores.

Many Traditional “mass market” retailers now sell hardcovers and trade paperbacks. – and sure, the smaller pulps are still there, too, but Oprah isn’t recommending ‘em. Books have moved from a specialty retail item to a general commodity; great, as one can pick up a book, even a hardcover book (if it’s a NYT bestseller) just about anywhere, but this also means there is little-to-no distinction between the book “trade” edition and the “mass market”

With the advent of the internet, both the Book of the Month Clubs & direct subscription services are dead. yeah, sure, you can bring up the anecdotal story of the 60-year-old grandma in Omaha who still waits for books [4-6 weeks] to arrive after mailing in the tear-out coupon from the back of her last great romance read — but this was an old model even in the 1980s when I was kid. Actually, I think the advent of Big Box Bookstores in the 90s killed this publishing model off long before internet sales of physical books or even e-books were the issue:

When a quality bookstore is available in 90% of cities and suburbs, what’s the need for an alternate sales strategy or channel? Drugstore paperbacks went the way of the general store dime novels of 1890-1910.

—so, more and more, the success of bookstores as a new class of retailers, and the slow death of newsstands, and retailers like Costco and Walmart stocking hardcovers, and mail-order subscription services slowly giving way to internet sales sites — which can often sell you a trade paperback or hardcover for very close to the same price as a retail MM paperback — and we see sales of the $5-$10 mass market books declining wholesale.

Mass Market Paperback sales are down.

Since publisher revenue is not the same as reported sales of “book retail”, a source like Publishers.org reports declines in the Mass Market format because there is no “mass market” for books anymore — or at least, there’s no differentiation between the sales mix at a supermarket, a Target, a Wal-Mart, the club warehouse, or the bookstore: we all sell hardcovers and paperbacks of various types.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, one of the few remaining places to find these formally “mass market” books – is what used to be the specialty retailer: the bookstore.

The only remaining distinction between bookstores and the “mass market” is that at a bookstore, we sell books: we have a much deeper backlist of individual authors, better representation of genre titles, the abilty to special order titles, and booksellers to recommend them.

Given the economy, the customer who used to buy a hardcover, a couple of trade paperbacks, a couple of magazines, and a Mass Market format backlist title is cutting back: now they buy just the magazines (though fewer of those) and the $8 or $9 paperback – because they still love books and love reading.

So we have both the perception (in bookstores) of increased Mass Market Paperback sales, and their increased percentage of overall sales (as unit sales of hardcover books are certainly down) and a certain pickup of sales that used to go out through other channels, even while the total sales numbers for the format (for publishers) decreases.

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Hope that answers your question, Cassandra. And thanks for the email.

Primary Source: publishers.org – AAP Reports Publisher Book Sales for August Year to Date, E-Book Sales Comprise 9.0% of Trade Book Sales

Repeated by:
Publisher’s Weekly, Shelf Awareness, mediabistro.com, Mashable, Authorlink.com, and by digitalbookworld.com whose headline asks, Does Ebook Growth Mask Market Share Declines?

digitalbookworld.com also links to this article at the Los Angeles Times

Turns out the iPad has actually helped Amazon. Not only are sales of the Kindle device expected to grow 140% this year to nearly 5 million units from 2009, but digital book sales via the Kindle store are on track to grow 195% to $701 million in 2010, according to Cowen and Co., which released a report Monday on the digital book market.

I have no idea who Cowen & Co. are, and where they get their numbers — but $701 Million would be an average of $58 Million a month (just for Amazon, while the AAP reports to date show a record breaking high of ebook sales in July of $40.8 Million) and that seems, um, optimistic? There aren’t enough smaller publishers & independents/self publishers selling (even collectively) the millions required to make up that gap. The L.A. Times also calls Cowen on this point:

Cowen estimates Amazon currently having 76% of the ebook market, which would put the overall market at approximately $922 million, while the AAP/IDPF sales data is only tracking sales of $259.5 million year-to-date. Ebook sales of the twelve publishers they track would have to average $132.5 million/month through the end of the year to match Cowen’s projections, a highly unlikely occurrence.

My independent analysis of Amazon (based on things like Amazon’s own annual reports and a quartet of industry trade associations & tracking sites) points toward Amazon having at least $2 billion (and perhaps as much as $5 Billion, though that seems unlikely as Amazon reports total ‘media’ sales of $5.9 Billion, and that includes CDs, digital music downloads, DVDs, Blu-Ray, video on demand, and PC & console games — which in a nutshell is why my estimate of Amazon was only, only $2 Billion in books.)

I don’t know how much of Amazon’s book business is e-book downloads, but I doubt it’s anywhere near 50% yet — no matter how popular the Kindle is. 5 Million Kindles is still only one Kindle for every 60 Americans (and the Kindle is sold not just in the US, but internationally) and out of the other 59 Americans, I bet at least 2 (just 4% of the population) buy physical books through Amazon, and do so in enough numbers to make e-books (even those bought by gonzo, insane early adopters) only a fraction of the total.

It’s a growing business, sure. And that’s why it gets all this press, and the high expectations and the inflated reporting and all the rest.

Triple Digit Growth! It’s New! It’s E! It’s Digital!

Yeah… about that. I mean, sure, it’s early days yet – so of course there’s massive growth. But does no one remember the tech bubble, just 10 years past? Don’t bet the farm on ebooks.

Here’s what it looks like, to scale:

That’s for the past 30 months. Publishing is a huge industry, and ebooks are new and flash and doubling in sales each year —

and are still hardly a blip.

##

I hate to do it. I mean, I really hate to drop actual math on top of what MBAs and financial analysts do for a living; but I know books and I like to kid myself that I know numbers.

And there isn’t any money to be made telling folks that trends may be going up, but not by as much as you think. (commissions are made by making hay off of things that seem significant in the short term but which don’t pan out.)

So far, using the numbers actually reported by publishers, e-book sales are growing – in fact they are growing geometrically, but not exponentially.

Here, let me run some projections:

Given sales to date and apparent trends, I predict e-books will constitute at least $100 Million in sales and may account for as much as $180 Million each month in 2½ years time — but compared to an industry that manages $500 Million in sales per month, and often much more, and even making a comparison to only trade books and assuming any e-book sale cannibalizes other retail book sales — retail of actual books will be at least twice and more often triple e-book sales.

Sales of books have been more or less static for quite some time. Retail Sales are still more than $500 Million each and every month.

E-books are here, and the segment is growing. but the business isn’t all-E, all the time yet. If anything: e-books represent the growth of the industry while older formats and business models continue, and continue to be profitable — it isn’t e- versus book, but both, and both at the same time.

Book retail looks bad, for now, but we’re in a recession. After a couple years of recovery, ask me again what I think about the future of bookstores.

• public restroom facility

• “quiet place” to take that phone call on your mobile
  [It was quiet, before you showed up]
• …or a handy ‘public’ phone for when your battery dies
  […sure the battery on your phone just died. What’s that? Why, I guess you can’t make long distance calls on this phone; I’m as surprised as you are]

• a place to ask for directions
• …or restaurant recommendations
• …or tourist info
• …or a nearby bakery “so I can send a birthday cake to my son who happens to live in your city. Of course you’re going to know exactly the right store to recommend, and you’ll be able to give me their phone number; I mean, you work at a bookstore.” Duh, right?

• reading room
• study hall
• reference library
• …and an all-purpose reference and information line: for the spelling of difficult words (so I can use them in a search on the internet, natch) – or to convert celsius to fahrenheit – or to explain the difference between Siam and Thailand, or the name of that Korean fermented cabbage (what was that called again?), or to give a brief rundown of the late surviving eastern rump of the Roman Empire based in Constantinople (and why is it called the Byzantine Empire, anyway?), or the difference between a Philharmonic and a Symphony Orchestra, or to list composers and intial debut dates for the ten most popular Operas of the Standard Repertoire — “I mean, I can’t be bothered to look this stuff up on the internet, and you’re a bookstore. Who else am I supposed to call?”

• an incubator from which to launch your own small business
• …and do all the research to incorporate
• …and business forms
• …and internet marketing
• …courting angel investors
• …and grant writing for your non-profit sideline
• …and all that for free
• “Say, where’s your copy machine?”
  [we don’t have one, and I’d explain why but it’d just confuse you and the resulting conversation will give me a headache]

• meet-up
• hang out
• time killer
• date spot
• blind date spot
• awkward break-up spot

• homeless shelter
• … and public restroom. Don’t forget the all important public restroom. Why, one can even take a resonable sponge bath in the sink…
• a place where one can take off one’s shoes and relax
• convenient and apparently ‘safe’ spot to take a nap
• and a free storage locker for the luggage you just happened to ‘forget’ & left there overnight.

• coffee shop
• lunch counter
• picnic spot. “I mean, sure it’s fine if I bring in my own food, right? The sandwich shop is right next door, and the fried chicken place just down the street. You let people eat food in here everyday.”
  sure, for the food we sell

##

There are 1001 uses for a bookstore.

Hey, you know what? We also sell books.

##

This is a bit of a filler post; I’m still very much engaged in turning the store upside down in order to set all the holiday promos my corporate overlords would like us to have done by November 2nd — while continuing to conserve every last minute of payroll and doing at least three other things simultaneously.

And all customer questions, comments, concerns, polite objections, and bookstore/bookseller expectations indicated above are real — garnered from a decade of experience and mostly off the top of my head.

I’ll try to flesh this out into full essay on Bookstores: What Are They Good For? [insert reference here] when I have more time.

But for now, just pity me. Bookselling is harsh and it’s been a lot rougher this year than any I’ve worked yet.

In previous posts, I’ve often conflated publisher revenue with book retail sales — after all, a book sold is a book sold whether it’s the retailer or the publisher banking the sale, right?

Actually, no.

Publishers sell books to bookstores (and others: warehouse club stores, supermarkets, Wal-Mart, Target… & libraries, don’t forget the libraries) and the retailer then stocks the book on a shelf and hopes it sells.

There are all kinds of reasons a book will sell [Oprah] and twice as many why it might not, but bookstores buy lots and lots of books and merchandise them every which way to get you, the book buying customer, to part with some hard-earned money.

It doesn’t always work. And sometimes we send the books back to the publisher, maybe 3 or 4 months after it was initially “bought” and listed as a sale on the publisher’s bottom line.

##

Since no one else called me on it, I’m forced to correct myself and illustrate the point with another handy graphic.

So far, I’ve previously posted two data sets:

Book Retail numbers from the Census Bureau

and Publisher Revenue as reported by the Association of American Publishers at publishers.org

In that big-picture publishing post, I also separated out the “trade” publishing from the overall book revenue by excluding sales of text books, which turns out to be a really profitable (and rather large) chunk of the business.

& given these three data streams, I can extrapolate a fourth:

Follow the green (money) line and compare it to the blue one: In this case, blue is Total Book Retail (including text books) and the green line is my best guess at the “trade” book number — adult and children’s paperbacks and hardcovers.

The spikes that result from massive text book sales in August and January are gone, so my formula must be doing something right, but I’m at a loss to explain the predicted drop in September/October — I know sales slow a bit in early fall but didn’t realise it was this drastic a drop. Since the bookstore is gearing up for the holidays during this time period, I’m more than busy (I’m typically exhausted) so I can’t say I’ve noticed this phenomenon before — and it may just be an artefact of the math.

The other 10 months look pretty close, though. I’m fairly confident in this estimate.

##

To guide you to some other points of interest: Comparing blue (retail) to pink (total publisher revenue) you can see first, the 35% or so margin retailers enjoy — total book retail is a good bit more than publisher revenue. You can also see retail lagging a month behind reported publisher sales (which only makes sense, as it takes time to ship things)

There is less of a correlation between trade book sales at retail and the corresponding trade book revenue reported by publishers.

You can see the bookstores ramp up orders in the Autumn, resulting in greater trade book shipments (& revenue) but the December spike doesn’t seem to trickle down to Publishers. At retail, we’re selling all sorts of books that have been in the store for 3 months, 6 months… or years — and we’re also selling board games & gift wrap & calendars & boxes of Christmas cards and all kinds of crap lovely and valued seasonal merchandise — so perhaps this disconnect should have been expected.

Graphing it out is kind of interesting, though. From a peak in Dec. 2006 (followed by expected, average sales through August of that year) it appears to me that trade books have been showing a general decline (unrelated to e-books, as this merely reflects prevailing economic trends) and while that single month of December is still a great time to be a retailer, the dips are getting deeper — and if you squint a bit you can see the trend, and it’s going down.

As a baseline, though: that first mark on the y axis above zero: That’s 500 Million Dollars — oh, sure, it looks like the market for books is bottoming out, but the downward trend isn’t all that drastic yet, and a half a billion dollars (per month!) is still a great business to be in.

I’ve read a number of blogs — initially Kuriousity but with notable reactions at both Comics Worth Reading and Robot 6 — the buzz going round is that Del Rey (a Random House imprint) may not be retreating from graphic novels, but their slate of licensed manga content is about to disappear.

[Like many bloggers/reporters, I’ve submitted the question to what contacts I have, but to date the response is ‘no comment’]

However, I personally have a second source — the manga rankings [consolidated online comparative sales rankings] which I’ve researched independently of bookstores or publishers [or Diamond Comics/Book Distributors], relying solely on online sales sites.

So here’s what I have for Del Rey.

Ranked titles were actually bought (or for some other reason appeared in my sources) while reference titles (“last ranked” or “ref”) previously appeared in the online sales rankings and continue to be tracked. However, I typically only look up publication info when a title first ranks, so the listings below may have been delayed or cancelled since they first appeared in my sources. All that said: Here’s what I have for Del Rey:

370. ↑31 (401) : Fairy Tail 12 – Del Rey, Sep 2010 [23.3] ::
447. ↓-6 (441) : Shiki Tsukai vols 7-8 collection – Del Rey, Sep 2010 [17.2] ::
449. ↑132 (581) : Orange Planet vols 3-5 collection – Del Rey, Sep 2010 [17.1] ::
. (last ranked 5 Sep 10) : Avatar The Last Airbender (Movie Tie-In) 2 – Del Rey, Sep 2010 [0.0] ::

167. ↓-4 (163) : Negima! 28 – Del Rey, Oct 2010 [58.4] ::
288. ↑56 (344) : xxxHolic 16 – Del Rey, Oct 2010 [33.6] ::
355. ↑18 (373) : Arisa 1 – Del Rey, Oct 2010 [25.6] ::
1035. ↑ (last ranked 8 Aug 10) : Hell Girl vols 7-9 collection – Del Rey, Oct 2010 [0.7] ::
1313. ↑ (last ranked 4 Jul 10) : Wallflower vols 22-24 collection – Del Rey, Oct 2010 [0.1] ::
. (ref) : Code: Breaker 2 – Del Rey, Oct 2010 [0.0] ::
. (ref) : Fairy Navigator Runa 2 – Del Rey, Oct 2010 [0.0] ::

273. ↑12 (285) : Psycho Busters vols 6-7 collection – Del Rey, Nov 2010 [36.0] ::
412. ↓-13 (399) : Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle 28 – Del Rey, Nov 2010 [19.7] ::
. (last ranked 15 Aug 10) : Papillon vols 5-6 collection – Del Rey, Nov 2010 [0.0] ::
. (ref) : Ghost Hunt 11 – Del Rey, Nov 2010 [0.0] ::
. (ref) : Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei 8 – Del Rey, Nov 2010 [0.0] ::

265. ↑3 (268) : Ninja Girls 4 – Del Rey, Dec 2010 [37.5] ::
291. ↑60 (351) : Rave Master vols 33-35 collection – Del Rey, Dec 2010 [33.2] ::
396. ↓-24 (372) : Shugo Chara! 10 – Del Rey, Dec 2010 [20.6] ::

. (ref) : Code: Breaker 3 – Del Rey, Jan 2011 [0.0] ::

428. ↓-5 (423) : Yagyu Ninja Scrolls vols 8-9 collection – Del Rey, Feb 2011 [18.6] ::
. (ref) : Fairy Tail 13 – Del Rey, Feb 2011 [0.0] ::

346. ↑20 (366) : Negima! 29 – Del Rey, Mar 2011 [27.6] ::
528. ↑new (0) : Negima! Neo 7 – Del Rey, Mar 2011 [10.8] ::
. (ref) : Night Head Genesis 3 – Del Rey, Mar 2011 [0.0] ::
. (ref) : Pink Innocent 3 – Del Rey, Mar 2011 [0.0] ::

. (ref) : Moyasimon 3 – Del Rey, Apr 2011 [0.0] ::

##

Someone with an enterprising spirit (and more time than I have, currently) should double check these titles vs Amazon and other sales sites — but my main point would be that merely because something isn’t listed with the primary direct market distributor (Diamond, for comic shops) doesn’t mean the books aren’t being put out via other channels.

And rankings listed above are for 12 September, just because I’m behind and haven’t posted data since.

So,

[*sigh*]

OK, so everyone in publishing and book retail and certain investors & investor groups and of course, Barnes & Noble employees (& I’m sure, other booksellers) have been looking at and looking into the current skerfluffle happening with Barnes & Noble stock.

I’ll note here: this is only about the stock. While ownership of stock does at least theoretically correspond to ownership of the company, ownership of the stock doesn’t run the stores, doesn’t affect the appetite or enthusiasm of the shopping public for books, and doesn’t reflect, affect, or deflect the much larger trends in both publishing and street-level retail sales of physical goods —

…and any goober with a pile of cash can buy stock; If you have enough cash, you can buy a lot of stock:

while possession of money is seen as a virtue in our current [western, capitalist, greedy, consumerist, commoditized&packaged-for-sale] society, usually big money only derives from one of three sources:

you’re lucky, you’re ruthless, or you’re really, really smart.

(Not all smart people are rich, mind you. Some luck/greed/ruthlessness also usually is a factor)

& While some smart people are rich, possession of cash is not a guarantor of either general intelligence or business acumen. The ability to buy a thing does not correspond to the knowledge of the proper use of the thing. The ability to buy a company’s stock on the open market only has one meaning:

You have money.

##

Meanwhile, the knowledge needed to run a single bookstore, or a city-wide chain of a dozen bookstores, or a regional player with multiple dozens of bookstores — or a nation-wide chain of bookstores with hundreds of stores, millions of books, billions of dollars in sales, and a website and ancillary sales [* see below] – seriously, Dude: just because one can buy a stock doesn’t mean one knows jack about how that business is run.

Bookselling, these days, isn’t about selling books. I hate it, you don’t understand it, and it makes no sense. And now, I have to explain it to you.

[here’s the important bit]

With the transition of bookstores from the local independent retailers of the 60s to the major retail chains of the 90s and today, there was also a shift in mindset, from the sale of books as books – to the sale of books as just another retail commodity

[/important bit]

If one’s mission statement is to operate the “best specialty retail business in America” (& that has been and is still B&N’s mission statement) then you open yourself up for all kinds of distractions

* (CDs, DVDs, audio books, stationary, calendars, stuffed animals, bookmarks, journals, board games, book lights, magnifying glasses, reading glasses, tchotchkes, coffee mugs, coffee, and a whole lot of crap non-book merchandise that I have to deal with, on a daily basis, as a corporately-owned bookseller) —

Retail is broad, open, messy, and undefined. The exchange of goods for money includes things like prostitution, the grey market, the black market, street-corner drug dealers, human trafficking; the sales of pelts, horns, organs, meat, glands, other derivatives & messy bits of endangered species; or of the mere rights to buy and sell something, whether one actually owns said somethings before the rights to buy and sell them are extended to the open market.

“Retail” ideally means I actually have the item, here, in a store on a shelf, and I can sell it to you. It hasn’t actually meant this for decades, perhaps enough decades to constitute centuries.

“Oh, sure, I’ll have that in next week; if you pay for it today, I’ll hold it for you as soon as it comes in.”

This statement is not only a supporting pillar of retail bookstores, it is the bald lie that all online retail is built upon. — key quote: “Oh, sure, I can get that to you next week.”

Promises, Promises.

##

I’ll take a step back from retail theory [while once again noting that investors, particularly investors of the scale that take “ownership stakes” should endeavour to educate themselves about the companies they buy and sell like Monopoly™ gameboard spaces] to get back to what I originally wanted to comment on:

See, there’s this guy with a lot of money, who is trying to buy up quite a bit of the company I work for [whatever beef I have with current management, it is still the company I work for] and he’s filing lawsuits, haranguing stock-holders, whining, complaining, and generally distracting major stake holders, the board, the management, and the shopping public (at least those who read financial mags and newspapers) from the business of the company: the exchange of dollars for words.

And, as stated, while I have my own beef with current ownership and management, this dude Burkle isn’t helping.

The latest newsworthy bit is that Burkle is bitching that current management is using “Company resources and the company’s internal communications systems on multiple occasions to solicit votes for Leonard Riggio and his hand-picked nominees to the Board of Directors”

Here, let me state something Burkle doesn’t know and is piling much grief upon: All official press releases of my employer, Barnes & Noble, are also distributed to all employees (stockholders or not) via an intranet known as “Barnes & Noble Inside” — the letters of Len Riggio and William Lynch were also official B&N press releases, & official company statements, in as much as they are addressed to everyone and propagated to Businesswire.com (the same host for Burkle’s press releases) & also barnesandnobleinc.com [the official corporate site] before they were made available to employees of Barnes & Noble, whether they are shareholders, management, or just the folks I have working part time on a register to help me through the weekends. If any statement from Corporate has been made public through other channels, we like to be sure our employees can read it as well.

Thus, Burkle is complaining that B&N makes official B&N press releases easily available to all B&N employees. Pray tell, what should they do otherwise, if this is wrong?

Burkle – as a shareholder – can bitch that he doesn’t has access to internal B&N communications, but since he holds no executive position in B&N, he has no basis to complain:

If he would care to submit a resume and application to Barnes & Noble, for a specific job in our organization (“owner” isn’t available; & “owner” means nothing, contributes nothing, and doesn’t sell books) then I’m sure we can re-evaluate his standing and address some of his complaints.

##

Instead I’m going to call him out on his research.

[Here I’ll insert a link to the wikipedia entry on McDonalds — not that micky-d’s is immediately germane to the discussion of book retail, but I want to plant that seed in your head, before I get to my conclusion.]

##

In his letter to B&N employees Burkle shows his ignorance at least a dozen times, but I’ll pull just a few:

“Leonard Riggio isn’t a Barnes or a Noble, but he considers himself THE founder because he writes the history. The Barnes & Noble company’s roots go back over a century and its history is full of innovation. Many of Leonard Riggio’s businesses can trace their history to these families.”

“Leonard Riggio doesn’t want anyone else in his story. Not the Barnes family, the Noble family or even the shareholders. Over the years, he charged the Company over $32 million dollars just to use the Barnes & Noble name, but he doesn’t invite members of the Barnes family or the Noble family to cut the ribbons at store openings. He believes this is his company…except he doesn’t own it…not even half of it…but he acts like he does. Until just a couple of years ago he owned about as much as Yucaipa does.”

“Barnes & Noble has been around over 100 years. If it’s allowed to operate with good governance and without conflicts of interest that have siphoned off billions of dollars into transactions that have benefited Leonard Riggio and his family, I believe it can be around for another 100 years.”

Here’s your history, and I can quote Wikipedia — and while that doesn’t mean it’s true, it certainly means anyone with scant minutes could “verify” these facts:

“Barnes” was Charles Barnes who began a book printing (not book retail) business in 1873. He was based out of Wheaton, Illinois — not New York, a publisher not a retailer, and soon to fade to black if it weren’t for…

His son, William Barnes: who entered into a partnership with G. Clifford Noble in 1917 to open up a physical bookstore in New York — not more than 100 years ago, Mr. Burkle, but merely 93 years past.

For someone as detail oriented as you, Mr. Burkle, who specifically called out the members of “the Barnes family or the Noble family” in your letter, I’m surprised you missed this point. Even at it’s inception, no matter the name, the bookstore that became the Barnes & Noble chain was more than the sum of it’s parts, more than a mere congregation of names, and 40 years removed (in 1917) from “Barnes” the publisher —

What is now known as the “flagship” Barnes & Noble bookstore only opened on 18th & Fifth in 1932.

The bookstore, the business, the brand name; Barnes & Noble was purchased by Leonard Riggio in 1971. While Ronald Burkle would love to characterise this as a late development in the long, storied B&N history, in fact, this is just when B&N as a national brand was started.

##

In Burkle’s version [and likely also the general public perception] “Mr. Barnes” & “Mr. Noble” worked for 80 years to build a company that by the 1970s was an established New York bookseller that was then bought out by Riggio, but everything you know or think you know about B&N leading up to that point is likely wrong.

Mr. Noble exits the picture in 1929, before the “flagship” bookstore [the proto-big-box that later was a model for the whole chain] even opened, & the last Barnes who ran B&N died in 1969 and at that point the company was sold to Amtel, which as a conglomerate had all kinds of product lines, but didn’t know books. The book division quickly declined, and Amtel was looking to sell.

In 1971, Len Riggio already owned 10 bookstores — having started his own bookstore business 6 years prior at the age of 24 — and the research I’ve done points toward Barnes & Noble only having 4 branches at that point, though the 5th Avenue store was certainly a landmark and among the largest bookstores anywhere. After Riggio bought the name (& the company that went along with it) he immediately rebranded his 10 college bookstores with the B&N moniker. Len Riggio came to B&N with bookselling experience and more locations than the stores he purchased in 1971. Sure, “Barnes & Noble” began—in one way—in 1873, and the original bookstore opened in 1917, but the company that is now a massive corporation began in 1965 when a 24-year-old bookseller started his own chain of independent college bookstores. The name you and I now know that company by came later, and was purchased on the cheap (just $750,000) and bought second hand — since Noble had left 42 years prior and John Barnes [grandson of William, the founder] was 2 years dead.

Given Riggio’s background — and also, the past retail and distribution activities of the pre-1971-B&N — Barnes & Noble was primarily a college bookseller throughout the 70s and early 80s. Starting in the late 70s, though, B&N began acquiring other book store chains leading up to the 1986 acquisition of B. Dalton, a nation-wide chain with close to 800 stores.

For more detail, I’d heartily recommend the well-researched article at fundinguniverse.com — which took me all of 5 seconds to find via a Google search, and I don’t even own 20% of the company.

And for more information on how bookstores changed from local retailers to big box superstores, I’ll point you to my first Rethinking the Box Column.

##

The Brothers MacDonald opened a restaurant in 1940 in San Bernardino, California. Their name is all over the burger franchise that now dominates the planet. But heirs and descendants of that particular “McDonalds” clan have nothing to do with the fast-food empire that serves us hot apple pies and meat nuggets of dubious origin

Ray Kroc is the businessman who took a single idea (burgers and fries, in this case) to a billions-of-dollars market-leading business.

“Barnes” and “Noble” both deserve their place in the history of bookselling, and on wikipedia, and both on the store-front signs and in the minds (& hearts?) of book lovers everywhere.

But Barnes & Noble as a company was built from scratch by Len Riggio, and he was well on his way toward his goals even before he bought the B&N name.

##

And booksellers are smart cookies; we know how to use the internet, and quite a few of us are skilled at research as well. On top of that, those of us who are stockholders-of-record have received — [*sigh*] do not doubt we’ve received — multiple communications from both sides and honestly, we’re all a little sick of the whole thing.

Mr. Burkle, your side of the story got out. You didn’t need to throw out a last-minute smear against current B&N management about censorship or insider boosterism.

I’ll note, as a Barnes & Noble employee, I did see some some internal communications noting that the deadline for proxy votes for the shareholder’s meeting was approaching — but these were presented to me as informational statements, that I needed to submit either the gold or white proxy card by a certain date, and not as exhortations to vote the company line.

Any propaganda from the company to support the company were first sent out as official press releases, and merely repeated via internal channels, so it’s likely you saw all of these statements before I did.

##

At this late date I believe the point is moot. All deadlines are past, all shareholders have cast their vote. We’re waiting for the shareholder’s meeting on Tuesday (28 September) and I’m not sure if we’ll know immediately what the results are — my vague recollection of SEC filing rules may give the company four business days before they have to report the results of the voting — but given the stakes and the public scrutiny I expect there will be PR from both sides coming out after the markets close on Tuesday.

It doesn’t matter anyway. 3 board members out of 9 won’t change any votes, and doesn’t change any of the company executives who run the company day-to-day, and who have already made plans for the rest of this year and likely most of the next.

Barnes & Noble’s Holiday and Digital strategy for 2009 is already cast — not set in stone but formed in fairly durable plastic (wrapped around the electronic guts of an e-book reader). The battle for ownership of the shares, and all this grumbling and rumbling, is a distraction that *I* certainly didn’t need, as much of my energy and both mental and physical effort should have been poured into the bookstore as we prepare for December (and it’s tougher this year than any I’ve worked yet) — and also constitutes an expense for the company – as we have to publicly conduct this exercise; what is essentially a bigger-dick contest between Riggio & Burkle with some bearing on what B&N looks like in 5 years, but doesn’t do anything to explain, ameliorate, or resolve Problems in Publishing and Book Retail which affect my business but which is due to much larger culture and technological shifts.

It’s like the passengers voting on which lifeboat to take, as we all prepare to debark from the Titanic — yeah, sure, we can make this a point of debate and if one insists and yells with sufficient volume, it certainly seems like it matters, but there are larger issues.

And while a couple of first-class passengers shout at each other about whether the port or starboard side is better, us working proles are making our way to whichever lifeboat is closest – and it’s women, children and booksellers first.

##

This post is not a defence of Len Riggio: I personally think that Len is a dick, and suffers from a napoleon complex. The whole B&N College vs Barnes & Noble [retail] split prior to the 1993 B&N stock IPO was a classic dick-move, and I’ve commented at length about it.

The continued and continuing quarterly dividend payment is one point that really sticks in my craw [in a depression! and while the company loses money!] on top of the fact that B&N had to pay a half billion to re-acquire the B&N name from Riggio’s pocket College Bookstore Company (though the purchase also included 700 or so college bookstores — and full ownership of the brand and reunification of the two Barnes & Noble companies is a big plus… but) shows that Riggio is shrewd, if nothing else, and protective of what he sees as his.

But if one were to ask me who I’d trust a bookstore to:

I’m backing Len, and Burkle can skip and go eff himself.

UPDATED 23 September 2010:

I’m changing my mind about the colour e-reader that I think will be out before Christmas: not color e-ink, but Qualcomm’s Mirasol

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/08/qualcomms-mirasol-display-hopes-to-create-e-reader-tablet-hybrids/

original article follows
##

Starting with a year-old article:

electronicdesign.com, William Wong in an interview with Sriram Peruvemba, Vice President of Marketing for E Ink Corp.
11 November 2009

What is the future direction of ePaper? ePaper displays have enjoyed tremendous success in the eBook application (over 40 models launched world wide) and moderate success in a whole host of other applications including wrist watches, smart cards, electronic shelf labels, signage etc. The eNewspaper application is emerging (larger displays, favors flexible display product) and is likely to be a significant market opportunity. I believe that the killer application will be eTextbooks for students. This trend has already started and with the arrival of flexible displays and color ePaper in 2010, that market is likely to ramp quickly. Flexible Active Matrix (because the segmented SURF displays are already flexible) and Color ePaper are the future trends.

When is color coming? We have demonstrated color ePaper and are scheduled to mass produce them by the end of next year. Here is what was said about our color ePaper:

“Then there was E-Ink Corp., which blew me away with a color e-book prototype, a flexible display no thicker than a laminated piece of paper and large-form e-ink displays that would make for low-power, high-contrast signage. Maybe I’m swayed by the newspaper industry’s need for technology like this, but if the future of e-books is as colorful and flexible as what I saw at SID, and if it gets here soon enough, the future might not be so grim for this industry after all.” By Omar Gallaga for NPR

##

Prototypes and projected release dates don’t mean a whole heck of a lot.

Business deals, parts numbers, production samples; that’s slightly more promising:

Joint press release from E Ink Corporation and Seiko Epson Corporation posted to businesswire.com
18 May 2010

TOKYO—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Seiko Epson Corporation (“Epson”)(TOKYO:6724), a global supplier of imaging products and semiconductor solutions, and E Ink Corporation, the leading developer and marketer of electronic paper display (EPD) technology, today announced a new jointly developed display controller IC. The S1D13524 is a high-performance EPD controller with a built-in color processor for E Ink’s Vizplex™-enabled electronic color paper displays. Targeting color and very high resolution B&W applications, the new IC is based on the same powerful engine as the first two models, the S1D13521 and the S1D13522, but also includes a color processor that allows simple customization.

Found in most major electronic reader devices, Epson EPD controllers and E Ink’s EPD low-power consumption screen technology have been key factors in the rapid growth of the eReader market and the expanding range of mobile applications, such as eBooks, eNewspapers, tablet PCs, laptop secondary displays, eNotebooks, and eDictionaries.

The new Epson display controller includes a high-performance color engine that can be easily configured to match customers’ color and CFA needs. It has a built-in dither function to minimize host overhead, and can be connected to any host processor through a 16-bit parallel or TFT LCD bus.

“IC” for those who don’t know or can’t recall, is an “integrated circuit” – a chip. The new colour chip is built on the same architecture as chips used in today’s e-readers: indeed, in a device you may already own.

This new chip has a part number. Read the rest of that press release; samples of the new chip have been available for developers/prototypers since June, and “Production quantities will be available in Dec 2010.”

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A quick look at E Ink’s Corporate Website reveals that the largest screen they’re currently pushing in the Vizplex™ line is a 9.7” 1200×825px with 150dpi (and given that screen sizes are diagonal measures… hand on a sec, need to run the pythagorean and assuming a rectangular display based on the golden ratio) looks like it’s awfully close to 5×8 — 5.15 × 8.3: same size as your manga, or a common trade paperback.

Mechanical / Dimensional – 9.7” Display
Pixel Count: 1200 × 825 (SVGA)
Active Area: 202.9 × 139.5 mm
246.38 mm (9.7”) diagonal
Display Thickness: 1.2 mm
DPI: 150

That’s the screen size, add a bezel and the whole unit would be about the same size (top to bottom, side to side) as a hardcover book, but only 50 pages (50mm) thick — the same thickness as your current e-reader, just about, as all the internal electronics are upgraded [level up!] but essentially the same.

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Same tech, same manufacturers, slightly larger form factor; and of course the innovative twist is colour.

Make the whole thing a touch screen and I’ve built a category killer: E-reader in a hardcover-analogue-size in colour with a full-screen touch screen, built on existing e-reader architecture and sourcing components announced six months to a full year ago with projected “production” quantities available in December 2010.

Plenty of time to prototype a unit, write the software, test it, and get units out before 25 December.

Hi, my name is Matt, I’m a bookseller and a blogger. I drink a lot. [you have no idea…] — *I* figured this out, this afternoon, just by looking stuff up on the internet. Granted, I went to Georgia Tech, so my knowledge base has more tech-y bits in it than your average-bear bookseller, but this is neither brain science nor rocket surgery:

If there isn’t a touch-screen, full colour, e-ink/digital paper e-reader announced in the next 6 weeks by a major corporation then a whole cohort of junior execs and senior engineers seriously dropped the ball.

(and someone needs to start picking up my bar tabs and hire me as ‘research’ staff right quick)

Heck, put in an order for, say, a half-mil to a million components and pay in advance and I’d be willing to bet Epson and E Ink would be deploying burly men and haughty women with whips to make sure the plants beat those December delivery dates.

I think the telling fact here is that E Ink hasn’t really said anything more about colour since May (their last major press release was about the pearl b&w screens, 1 July, ~2 months ahead of the Kindle 3 announcement/release) — any exclusive deal would handily explain the long silence on colour e-ink.

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Apple has the iPad: and it’s all that, a bag of chips, and guaranteed salvation for your immortal soul — so no new Apple reader this year, or next.

Amazon is doing the incremental-improvement-thing: folks seem to like the Kindle, and the new Kindle is all that folks like and more, with the thinner, slimmer form factor and fancy new black-and-while high-contrast e-ink screen. It’s a lovely unit. And, also, it means there isn’t going to be another Amazon game-changer before 2011 (or 2012).

While the gap between the two (colour touch screen and low-power e-ink) was previously insurmountable, well, this is the future and engineers solve impossible problems before breakfast, most days.

Call it the Rocket Bomber Reader: exterior dimensions 6 × 9 x .25”, screen 5.1×8.3” color e-ink, full touch-screen, android OS (since whatever-Amazon-is and iOS4 are precluded) — and while I have no idea who is going to release it, someone has to — and they’ll likely make a lot of money.

Newspapers & especially magazines have been waiting for this platform — actually, reverse that: Magazines and especially newspapers, as most mags would be quite happy with iPad and Web distribution if they could figure out how to make money off it.

I’d price the Rocket Bomber Reader at $249 (not sure of component & manufacturing costs, but half-an-iPad seems like a good entry point even if I have to subsidize it) and pitch it as a textbook/artbook/comic/magazine reader — though I haven’t seen the colour tech myself.

Re: Colour, Though… we all loved 4-tones-of-spinach-green when the original GameBoy came out (even washed-out E-ink colour might succeed, if it’s the first-and-only-option) — though the Gallaga-NPR quote from that first link points to something special with this new tech.