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Yes, ebooks are a disruptive force in book retail and publishing.
Yes, ebooks represent a new distribution model with many new benefits and advantages.
Since then, another whole year of data is available, including both the holidays and the post holiday ebook binge associated with recipients filling newly-gifted gadgets with content.
Of course, this kind of analysis has certain limitations:
The only data available to me are ebook sales as reported by the Association of American Publishers: so these correspond only to US ebook sales from established publishing houses and does not include self-published ebooks.
Merely looking at a dollar sales figure (again, the only data available) glosses over the fact that ebooks are sold at lower price points: unit sales of books will be higher than the dollar figure might suggest
My projection is not the only interpretation – but I’ve tried some other models and ebooks sure look like they’re following a fairly common sigmoid growth curve
…however, if ebooks do not merely cannibalize sales of other formats but instead push books into new genres, new business models, new retail channels, and effectively blow up books as we know them: why sure, I guess there’s no upper limit & my projection is wrong. You can make any assumptions you like along those lines. My graph represents a fairly short future time frame (3-5 years out) and a relatively stable publishing industry. (Well, stable other than the disruption currently happening due to ebooks.)
Let’s look at the numbers anyway:
This graph is a little different from the one I posted last year, even though it looks similar. Growth is occuring more slowly than I assumed last year, so I had to “stretch” my graph a bit to fit. (Instead of a ten year overall time frame, this one is twelve years.) The other adjustment was more surprising: the estimate for where monthly ebook sales will eventually ‘top out’ and reach equilibrium went down by about $50 Million.
If the new projection is more accurate, we’ll see average monthly ebook sales of $250 Million rather than $300 Million – and we’ll hit the midpoint of the sigmoid curve before the end of the year.
This isn’t a tipping point in quite the way you think. Growth is still going to be quite dramatic through 2013 and 2014, and the data is messy enough that even as we approach equilibirum in mid-2015, it’s still going to look like growth.
For centuries before the steam-powered printing press, books were rare: to be scrounged for in small shops, bought used more often than not, each a treasure, and each treasured.
I don’t think most people [the ones who only buy one book a year] understand the bibliophile’s need for books, or the comfort of a personal library full of them.
Digital is fine. Ebooks can be exceptionally convenient. The ebook may eventually supplant certain types of cheap paperback; in fact is already doing so. I also hope the ease of ‘production’, ‘printing’, and distribution ushers in a new Age of Pulp.
(scifi is chugging along fine, but certain types of adventure & mystery stories could use a shot in the arm.)
However: there’s nothing like a book, a physical book in hand with some serious heft, to soothe one’s soul and decorate one’s house. And you can read them! Amazing things.
This is something basic I and many others understand. We were already buying books (much more than one a year) and after the general public’s fling with digital books: we’ll still be buying them. You can predict the death of the bookstore chains, and of the big publishers, and that’s fine. It may even be true. But even when the damn things were made by hand – there was an unquenchable demand for actual books that centuries of writing, printing, and constant reproduction of older titles did nothing to slake.
Books will be scrounged for in small shops, bought used more often than not: each a treasure, and each treasured.
Industrial Bookselling doesn’t have an exact date we can point to as an origin — though if I had to pick a year, it would be 1931 and the inception of the paperback — which then languished for a bit until business models caught up to technology. [I leave the direct comparison of paperbacks to ebooks as an exercise for the student; pull quote from wikipedia: “then-huge print runs of 20,000 copies to keep unit prices low”]
The lower price points caught on with a penny-conscious consumer (there was a recession on) and slowly the new format was fully embraced by readers — but even before consumption patterns (and resultant residual persistent demand) were apparent, whole new genres of books made possible by cheaper production costs and concommitant lower barriers of entry appeared [once again, I leave the direct comparison to ebooks as an exercise for the student; pull quote from wikipedia: “While the steam-powered printing press had been in widespread use for some time, enabling the boom in dime novels, prior to Munsey, no one had combined cheap printing, cheap paper and cheap authors in a package that provided affordable entertainment to working-class people.”]
Decades before the first nationwide chains, technology opened up publishing in both directions: both downward in price, and laterally — across publishers, genres, and markets. Books were available on racks at newsstands and drugstores; books became a popular entertainment, and not just the purview of the literati.
So — important point — prior to the chains, there was demand: massively increased demand fueled by the cheaper format and many new genres enabled by new technology. At the same time, larger societal changes [a century-long shift away from the general store, town square, and mail-order catalog toward shopping ‘malls’ and strip centers and other car-enabled options] were apparent in the ways we shopped for everything, not just books.
Seen in both the larger context of retail [regional shopping centres] and publishing [paperbacks enabling a new rennaisance] the emergence of nationwide book store chains in the 60s was a given. Obvious. Well, obvious to folks like me.
(I’d link direct to a wikipedia entry for Bookstop/Bookstar, but for whatever reason the company has been de-wiki’d and re-directs to Barnes & Noble’s entry, with absolutely no mention of Bookstar — note: at one point a national chain, an Austin-based company with it’s own history and which contributed to the book-superstore-concept B&N leveraged to nationwide prominence. In fact, one could argue that before 1989, B&N was a college bookstore chain trying to figure out how to expand, and that Bookstar was the catalyst that differentiated B&N from, say, Follets — with multi-billion-dollar consequences. Guess that’s not ‘relevant’ enough for wikipedia.)
And starting 15 to 20 years ago, the independents (and Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, too) were about to discover what a major chain really is: while a number of firms (Crown, Powell’s, BookStop, even Barnes & Noble at the time) were opening up ‘discount’ bookstores — warehouse stores full of current bestsellers on sale, remainders, and other discounted titles — this isn’t necessarily what the public wanted; or rather, not everything we wanted. B&N took the downtown New York bookstore and cloned it, throwing up huge boxes in suburbs and smaller cities across the U.S., selling us books and coffee and CDs and most importantly: atmosphere. Other chains quickly followed suit, re-purposing old brand names and converting the discount store of the 80s into the Book SuperStore of today.
B&N wasn’t necessarily first: lucky urbanites have long had such superior bookstores as City Lights, the Strand, or Powell’s City of Books — and the best of the indies are arguably better than yet another cookie-cutter box out by the mall. The point isn’t that the BigBoxBookstore is better, the amazing thing is that they’re everywhere. (Well, almost everywhere; my apologies if you don’t live near one, or if your local is in danger of closing)
Collectively B&N, Borders, and Books-a-Million operate 1500 or so outlets that are touted as superstores, and if we add in another 100? or so large independent (often landmark) bookstores then there are more places to actually find and hold, even read, a book then ever before. Obscure titles, novels, reference, classics, even comics — hundreds of thousands of titles. It’s a great time to be a bookseller, and reader. It’s a great time to be alive.
In the 20th (let alone the 21st) century, it’s impossible to run a ‘local’ bookstore. There are at least six million books in print, and at least another 12 million books available used — and if you can’t quite wrap your brain around that: your local grocery store carries at most 60,000 SKUs — so a bookstore has to manage 200 to 300 times as many items as a supermarket, and no other retailer comes anywhere close to that number of items stocked. It’s not only ridiculous, it’s impossible.
Bookstore inventory management was only made possible by computers. In this one case, “industrial” practices were only enabled by information revolutions. Perhaps it is because book retail is removed twice from production: once, because demand must be communicated from customer to retailer (assuming the customer even knows they want something: there is no demand without knowledge) and twice, as publishers produced books in expectation of demand, without knowing for sure if this year’s slate was in fact what the reader wanted. The Major Leap made in the 70s [made by Borders, in fact] was to apply analysis to sales and tailor stock in local stores to fit.
Computerized inventory drove sales across all chains through the 80s and into the early 90s, when major players parlayed their success and segment knowledge into the New Big Box Bookstores. It seemed bulletproof: build upon years of sales data across authors, publishers, and book genres to stock shelves in new footprints two-to-five-times the size of existing bookstores, with expected increases in profits.
What the chains ignored (or perhaps, did not realise) is that their computerized models could be used to build computer-only bookstores. Amazon showed up in 1995 and proceeded to eat everyone’s lunch.
[It wasn’t guaranteed: Amazon didn’t report an annual profit until 2003 — they had 8 years of ‘free passes’ from investors and honestly, I don’t know why. Any other company, even a dot-com 2.0 start-up, would have been closed after 5 years of losses and sold for parts. 98% of Amazon’s success has to be attributed to ‘being in the right place at the right time’]
My complaints about Amazon aside: they show that advanced computerized inventory models can serve physical bookstores very well — but that computer models best serve web retailers even better.
Decades of bookselling, advances in inventory management, hand sales and impassioned bookselling, market expansion and careful curation of niche markets – all this just fed into Amazon, and the new [parasitic] model that was determined to put us out of business.
Amazon is a parasite. Sure, they prosper while the whole organism [Books, publishing, book retail, and impassioned handselling] prospers, but they provide nothing to enable the organism to grow. Amazon does everything I can do, but better — but also, only in a derivative, [dare I say, stolen] second-hand way. When both Borders and Barnes & Noble are gone — will Amazon really be able to fill the void?
The whole industry is in flux, no one knows exactly what is going on…
Well… unless they are students of history and looked at the last format change: the introduction of paperbacks in 1931.
The new format that threatened to overturn publishing was, in fact, thoroughly adopted – and subsequently expanded commercial publishing into new markets, new genres, and to new heights.
My bookstore may, in fact, die. [not looking forward to it] But ‘bookselling’ seems to be an activity independent of actual sales; if Amazon doesn’t recognize the skill or chooses to to ignore it, well, I have a Plan B.
I’ve been tracking these numbers for a while. Obviously, the big headline is about the growth of the ebook format; here’s what the chart looks like with the latest
[image: ebook baseline]
I think we can all see a trend. It’s not quite exponential growth; that would be even more dramatic of an upward trend. In fact, I tried to graph it — messing around with numbers, seeing if there was a formula I could use to predict ebook sales. [a fool’s errand, but once I started playing with the math I was having too much fun to quite let the idea go.]
Eventually, it occurred to me to try looking for other mathematic models, beside 2x or some other exponent in the formula. Eventually I remembered sigmoid functions and after playing around with a few of these I hit the operator that produced a best-fit curve. Thankfully, it was not only blessedly simple — tanh(x) — but also something that is supported by OpenOffice Calc.
[image: bestfitcurve]
The original data is messy, and this is an awfully small sample, but hey – I’m just playing with numbers. I ended up with
ebook(t)=k * (1 + tanh(t))
Where k is a constant one selects out of one’s ass (a surprising number of scientific constants work that way) and t is the time variable. t, in my graph above, is counted off in units of [roughly] π/60, and t=-π at some arbitrary point in the past —in this case, November of 2006: one year before the kindle came out.
After all the trial and error to squeeze the math into the data I had, it turns out these have some meaning: constant k is equal to sales at the inflection point of the curve, and as such is roughly 1/2 of ‘equilibrium’ sales, and by counting in units of π/60, we’re looking at the dynamic part of the graph [tanh(-π) to tanh(π)] over the course of 10 years [120 months]
So those were my assumptions – and the function used – and I like this graph.
Even using the same math — the exact same function — one can mess with the constant and time variable though, to make a very similar graph
[image: projection2]
that at first blush seems to be the same. In this case, instead of t=-π at Nov 2006, I pushed it forward to t=-π at Nov 2007 — in effect saying the growth in ebooks didn’t really start until a year later. To make the new graph fit the same numbers, I had to change my constant k.
That’s hard to see above, but let me project both graphs out to 2015.
[image: to 2015]
The red line, my first projection, shows ebook sales perhaps hitting $200 Million a month as early as January of 2013. At this point, ebook sales would constitute about half of all book sales (currently at an average of about $575 Million a month for trade books, at least over the past 5 years — a number that includes ebooks) and that soon after, the growth of ebooks would level off.
Using the same function but with different assumptions (the yellow line) you can see that ebook sales will continue to grow almost out of control, increasing by about $100 Million every sixth months through 2012 and 2013, and not really levelling off until 2016. At that point, ebook sales would be $750-$800 Million each month – about 50% bigger than the entire current trade book market, all by itself.
Please note I only included the second projection to show how the math can be manipulated, and that even the models that seem to fit the available data can also be made to fit someone’s assumptions and conclusions.
That said, I think the available data does in fact support a modelled sigmoid growth curve, which means ebook sales will eventually level off. When, and at what level, is the hard part to figure out.
To me this only makes sense, as there will be a natural saturation point — everyone who wants an ebook reader (or who already owns a smartphone or computer) will have one, and everyone who wants to read ebooks will be doing so. The market for ebooks can’t grow past a certain level, except of course as all markets naturally grow given inflation and growth of population.
At any rate, I think we’ll have enough data in one year’s time to be able to better model the ebook market. I’ll save this spreadsheet and break it out again when we have another six to eight months of sales data.
I could spend a lot of time doing research and providing links and spelling out for you just what Amazon is and what they do. Halfway through my research, though, I was scooped — thankfully, as the grinding process was killing me and stalling other writing. Please enjoy the following slideshow presentation made available by faberNovel under a Creative Commons license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Stéphane Distinguin, Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire, faberNovel, May 2011.
I could make all sorts of points about how Amazon.com has made fundamental changes to retail. I can’t say Amazon is bad; I use Amazon myself [mostly for computer stuff. I understandably prefer another source for books, and typically buy my anime DVDs from RightStuf, who rock]. I can’t say Amazon is wrong; obviously in a free market customers can choose whichever retailer or provider of goods & services they like — I might argue that Amazon shouldn’t have been given $3 Billion Dollars and a 7 year grace period without showing a profit, as that seems hardly fair, but in the world of corporate finance and stock market machinations there is no fair – and the ability to sell the concept to investors was at least as important as the ability to sell books through a website.
But Amazon didn’t really make any fundamental changes; it’s just an old business sped up by the internet.
1. The Catalogue
Some have said Amazon has revolutionized bookselling.
Sure. Whatevs. (But I’m a bookseller, you know I’m biased.) Let me cast it this way:
What Amazon did is revive and revolutionize selling books by catalogue, a practice that dates back to at least 1888 — and was lamented by booksellers even at that early date as a practice that was “taking advantage of the confusion between [the] two methods of selling books” and additionally of concern because: “the discount system developed until the nominal or advertised price of books did not correspond to the practical selling price. The result of this has been to decrease not only the number of bookstores in proportion to the community, but probably the actual number of book-stores throughout the country”
Publishers Weekly, January 7, 1888. Matter of public record & in the public domain, available on Google Books and also found [text only, with some typos due to scan interpretation] at Archive.org
Well worth a read, and a good think besides.
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Amazon is a giant book catalogue.
Actually, that’s kind of a great thing: every book ever, right! Neato!
Yeah, fine, but Amazon is not unique. Every bookstore—and several websites—have bought or built a book catalogue — and Amazon isn’t even unique in putting their catalogue online, as every sales site is basically an online catalogue — and for books, there is even an official arbiter & authority on the matter
In fact, Amazon wasn’t even founded to sell books. “Bezos perused roughly 20 different products, including magazines, CDs, and computer software, that he deemed appropriate for sale on the Internet. Eventually, Bezos decided to pursue books, believing that the electronic searching and organizing capabilities of an online site could help to organize the industry’s sizeable and varied offerings. At the same time, the small size of most books would simplify distribution efforts. Bezos also believed that customers would be more likely to make their first online purchase if the risk was minimal; an inexpensive object like a book might prove less intimidating than something more costly, like computer equipment.” [source]
So even in building the massive book catalogue upon which the initial success of Amazon was based… well… turns out everyone has/had the same database. Pretty simple, in fact. Even with 6 or 8 or 12 million or so titles to worry about [opinions vary as to how many books are still in print] the basic database — Title, Author, Publisher, city and year of publication, and ISBN, will fit on a single disc. (Used to fit on a CD, Bowker sold one in 1986; I think you’d probably need a DVD-R at this point though of course the internet makes that redundant.)
“Ah yes,” I hear you [or at least, an Amazon fan] say, “but Amazon added pictures of the cover, and item descriptions, and user reviews, and the ‘customers who bought this also bought’ feature, and they’re cheaper” etc etc etc.
Amazon compiled all that, yes: but the cover images and item descriptions are provided by the publisher, who wants to sell books through Amazon — it’s not like some intern in the warehouse was scanning covers for 10 straight years (and even the publishers’ interns didn’t have to do it as most covers existed digitally already) (or maybe some poor schlub did have to do this, but it wasn’t on Amazon’s dime)
The “item description” is usually the same as the jacket copy: already written and also, likely already digital.
‘Customers who bought this also bought’ … man, I think even I might figure out how to code this.
And of course the customer reviews.
Written by customers.
Uncompensated customers. And asking for an opinion from the internet is like asking for nitrogen from the atmosphere: Free for whomever figures out how to fix it — even bacteria can do it.
##
SO.
Amazon bought their initial database, plugged in some free publisher info, dressed it up with free content from their own customers [& actually, full props to Amazon for implementing social media years before anyone thought of Myspace or Friendster — let alone Facebook, or “social media” as a term] and ran it for years at a loss.
1995-2002. Seven years. Massive outside investment. No profits.
[…hand me a sweet deal like that and I could probably churn out a multi-billion dollar corporation, too.]
Amazon did have to spend money. Even with free databases and free descriptions and free reviews, someone still had to correlate and compile that mess [and write the software, databases, and user interfaces to make it automatic].
And of course, you can’t sell anything if you don’t buy inventory. Inventory means warehouses, warehouses means logistics, and shipping software, and inventory tracking software, and at least a few people to work in the warehouse, box the book, slap a label on it…
Ah, yes, but before I give Amazon too much credit:
Amazon had the advantage of selling a book before they bought the inventory. They had a massive catalogue, fancy user interface, all important credit-card processing, and a customer who wants to buy a book — This customer wants the book bad. Positively jonesing for it. Searched for it on the 1995-era-internet — maybe even willing to wait two weeks to get it, in fact.
Amazon doesn’t need to know which book this is. They just wait until one is ordered. They charge the guy’s card, tell him it’s on it’s way! — and then they order the book from the publisher. Or from Ingram, an established book distributor & one of the largest, whose Roseburg, OR facility is a short six-hour drive from Seattle, and Amazon. —This was a massive competitive advantage & significant cost savings in the early years.
The publishers — and book distributors like Ingram — were used to this. Small bookstores order just 1 copy of a book all the time. It’s all bookstores need. This system has been in place for decades, and Amazon shows up one afternoon in 1995 and so far as the system is concerned they’re just another bookseller.
No need for massive warehouses yet — the publishers do that already. No need to stock a store or guess at the bestsellers or pick worthy books or even read the damn things — just wait for the orders, and the computer heuristics figure out the rest.
A motivated customer, with money, who is willing to wait weeks for delivery, just bought a book. Get her that book, and order a spare [to speed up delivery to the next customer] and slowly build your own stock of warehoused books. Enough of these transactions, and you’ve built yourself quite the “bookstore”, even though it’s just a warehouse. Enough of these transactions, and you know your backlist: what sells and in how many numbers [nationally! annually!] and can order up to suit.
Build a history and you can guess how many books to order next year, how sales fall off after a book is a couple of years old, how the hardcover suffers once the paperback is out — which books are your perennials, your evergreens, your annuals. Build a history for seven years (without profits) and suddenly, OMG, you not only start to make money — it seems like you’re the only bookstore that knows and that you’ve been at this forever! How did we ever live without you, Amazon?
And if you guess wrong? Hell, that’s not a problem: just take advantage of the massive distribution systems already established to feed bookstores: it’s not like selling out of your stock of a book is a bad thing: you can order just one more copy of a book, if that’s all you need. And since you’re Amazon, and buy in bulk, you get the best discount available.
Sure Amazon has distribution centers coast-to-coast now and they’re building even more — but how many of you have been Amazon customers since the very beginning? It didn’t start out this way. The Massive Multi-Billion Dollar Edifice seems like it’s always been there — but Amazon didn’t post a quarterly profit until 2001, and needed the Q4 holiday shopping binge to finally go from red-to-black for that one quarter. It was another two years before they were able to claim annual profits.
An analyst at the time was quoted by CNN: “It’s high time they learned the ropes… It’s like you’re giving a student credit for not getting an F.”
like I said: allow me to build a business for 6-going-on-7-years with a seemingly unstoppable influx of capital and no expectations to make a return on investment and I could build a trillion-dollar-company too.
Amazon is smart: they deal in information, and information is produced by every customer transaction. That’s why they send you the reminder email after you buy something, “Please review your recent purchase” — because your review is a block-o-text they can add to their item listing page (all the better for search engines) and your rating, 1 to 5 stars, is a data point they add to their crystal-ball-methods: “hey, a lot of people seem to really like this sparkly-teenage-vampire stuff, maybe we should keep an eye on it.”
But Amazon is not a book store.
Amazon doesn’t need to guess at worthy titles, and order 6 copies (each per store, times hundreds of stores) to stock tables — A table that can hold 50 books — one of a dozen or so tables in each store — and which changes out once a month.
Amazon can wait for customers to order from their catalogue, and then commit to a book.
[fine, for Amazon. Not so good for début authors]
Amazon doesn’t need to stock a hundred thousand titles, categorize, ship, receive, sort, and shelve them [by category] [thousands daily] because the computers do all that. Since there are no bookcases, only database entries, Amazon doesn’t have to do much of anything except accept your money and then figure out how to get the book. Of course, with all that data, they can write up a quick algorithm to guess at sales, order up [to say, 80% of expected sales – at least to start, for the first week] and now can have the books waiting in warehouses — $3 Billion in logistic infrastructure investments goes a long, long way, and it’s only gotten better in the 7 years since 2003.
2. The Next Bridge Too Far.
Amazon built a [*cough*] bookstore, but doesn’t have a monopoly yet. In fact, the actual bookstores seem to be running a successful “Pepsi vs Coke” campaign where number two is still a great place to be, has its own adherents and partisans, and will manage to be a thorn in Amazon’s side for decades yet.
— At least until all of us who were raised in libraries and spent our college years in bookstores are dead. *I* might not last more than 17 more years, given my lifestyle and massive beer consumption, but many members of my cohort will live on into their 60s (70s, 80s, 90s & beyond) and we’re preceded by curmudgeons of the first order, and a secondary wave of the Baby Boomer “me first” generation, who still must be appeased and catered to in ways Amazon has yet to realize.
[Please, Amazon, figure out how to take these needy bastards off my hands.]
Amazon [or Apple, or Google: pick your winner] could be the last sole provider of content that downloads direct to my nerve-stapled cortex — ‘content’ meaning professionally produced video & music & novels — but ‘content’ in this context is not the internet. Amazon is just one part of the internet, or perhaps I should say, Amazon conducts business using just one small chunk of internet. (Of course they hope to expand; everyone does)
— but you know, actually, this ‘print’ thing is available for direct ocular input and seems to do quite well for the transmission & propagation of information: almost singularly so. The paper page may die but ‘print’ lives on. The World Wide Web was “born” in 1993 and so for 18 years, we as a species have been converting everything we know into internet-capable resources, and in the end it is the web the succeeds books — not Amazon or Google. “Print” is dead; long live print — words are a wonderful thing, on screen or on paper — so long as we use words, letters, pinyin, kanji, abjad, and other black-on-white written systems, words will always be available on the net, and some will see value in hard-copy, dead tree editions, even if the primary copy is digital, even if books go digital-native.
And the Web is “free press” in a way ebooks never will be.
You’re still reading, chief — pixels or pages: we’re stuck with ‘print’.
What we are considering is delivery of print: Do you read the screen, or page, and on which device? [“device” can be considered synonymous with “format” now.]
I’ll give it 500 years. Gutenburg introduced mechanised (& eventually industrialised) print 500 years ago, and yet we still write things down, pen to paper — I doubt I’ll be here 500 years hence [would absolutely *love* to write *that* blog post] but honestly, we have to give digital at least a century to displace books.
[Music is different; unless you are a singer yourself, and sing daily, you can’t propagate copies of your music — but anyone with a stick of charcoal and a flat surface, or the modern equivalent—the graffiti spray can, can commit “print” as an act faster than authorities can clean it up or paint over it.]
##
3. “I Need This Book”
Dateline, 30 years ago: 1981. Your ‘chain’ bookstore was a Waldenbooks or B. Dalton at the local mall, most folks found new books via a book-of-the-month club, rare indeed was the local independent bookseller outside of major metropolitan areas, and if you wanted to read the latest hardcover book, you put your name on a waiting list at the library.
Someone from New York or San Francisco is about to chime in, “That’s just wrong. There was a vibrant book scene in 1981…” and yes, and kindly STFU. Like many of my readers (at least, those alive at the time), I spent the 80s in a suburban hell with no local indy, no coffee shops, the nearest mall 20 miles away, a local library that squeezed into a small space next to city hall, and a bike. Give me a break, I was like, 12. I didn’t get a car until 1990.
I was not a ‘typical’ customer but neither was my personal experience unique. In junior high and well into high school, I would ride my bike the 6 miles to the local library, load up as many books as I could carry, and ride back — twice a week. Once a month or so the family made the trek out to the mall [it was the 80s, you likely did the same] and I’d hit the bookstore with relish, spending my allowance and all but begging my parents for another dollar or three to get just one more paperback.
I never went into the library or bookstore in need of ‘just this one book’ — I went in to browse and discover. I had no idea what was out there; I was a thirsty sponge willing to soak up it all, especially science fiction & fantasy.
Now, you might attribute that to my youth: in the 80s I was that special age, 7 to 17. What the hell did I know, what the hell would I be expected to know?
…well:
Oprah didn’t have a book club until 1996, the vaunted New York Times and their book reviews reached less than a million readers outside of New York even into the 90s [& today, though more used to read it online; no telling what their new web policy actually means; the print edition has been in decline for years] — in 1980, radio hosts and TV personalities didn’t push books like Oprah once did, or Glen Beck and Fox News currently does.
Also, there was no C-SPAN2’s BookTV [which only started in 1998 – and how many of you watch C-SPAN2?]
Granted, I was not an avid consumer of radio and TV in the 80s – but prior to 1996 folks did not come into a bookstore, walk immediately up to the information desk, and demand a book, by title, only this one title will do, what do you mean you don’t have it!?
The mall bookstore didn’t have an information desk. They had a short counter with a couple of bookmarks and a register. And a bored cashier [not a bookseller] who was making less than $5 an hour.
Obviously bookstores could order it for you; they order books all the time – but prior to computerized inventory systems it wasn’t something bookstores did every day – prior to the internet web sites, it wasn’t something customers even thought to ask. Indeed, prior to 1986, it was a big, fat catalogue known as “Books in Print” — and good luck! — and even after ’86 it’d be a few years yet before you’d find a bookseller with a computer and a copy of Books in Print on CD-Rom and the wherewithal and savvy to search it for you.
Only once (back in 1990) did I need a book — but only because it was assigned to me. It wasn’t out of print, it wasn’t from a small press; I was assigned Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene for high school AP English. There was a Penguin Classics edition, in paperback — but no one had it. Neither the high school library nor the local municipal library had a copy, but that didn’t phase my English teacher, who was a royal bastard with a PhD [in education, not English, btw] and who did not care. I couldn’t even get an extension on my due date. Mom & Dad had to drive me into Atlanta to Oxford Books, the only place we could find in the phone book that had a copy.
I’d like to point out that Spenser is available for free from Project Gutenberg and as a Penguin Classic, the physical book [isbn 9780140422078] is available just about everywhere these days; the bookstore I currently work in stocks a copy [with another half-dozen copies available through our other outlets around town – not every store, only about half] though to my knowledge we’ve never actually sold one – but that just demonstrates how far even brick-and-mortar book retail has advanced in the last 20 years. As much as some hate the Big Box, it still means more books available to more folks in more places — if you can drive to the cineplex, you can drive to a bookstore, which is something we couldn’t say in 1985, or even 1992.
Parallel to the development of Big Box Books, is the explosion of the internet. And in the last 15 years, a sea change in the way book lovers shop for books.
As a young man, I was practically starving for books; I would prowl shelves at the library or bookstore and pounce on new and likely-looking titles. I shopped the bookstore, the whole bookstore — I bought books, but it wasn’t like I was shopping for a particular book. Not that just any book would do, but to an extent, yes, any book would do. [I still shop this way; though of course my current preferred method these days is to work the back room & receive books as they come in and shop right out of the box, before customers even see them — highly recommended if you can manage it] As a lover of books and avid reader of books, this whole business of “I just saw this book on TV: Gimme.” is not only annoying, but counter-productive: an author can be on TV before his book even gets back from the printer, let alone is in warehouses, or available in stores, or is available to order, from us or Amazon.
Buzz about a title is one thing, but this game is stupid, and reinforces negative public perceptions about the bookstore; I get blamed for not having books that do not physically exist yet while also bearing the full burden of stocking “all books” — a claim even Amazon can’t make — and the TV celebs and networks don’t get blamed even if the customer [when they eventually get a copy] doesn’t like the books they plug [assuming they even read it].
No. Really. Folks are buying Atlas Shrugged like the books are shipped with $50 bills inside, or maybe next week’s lottery numbers, and despite fervent protestations that Of Course they’ve read it: I very sincerely doubt folks who are hard pressed to read even one book a year are all reading *1088 pages* about trains and steel production.
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The bookstore is set up to sell books – like a butcher sells meat, or a grocer sells vegetables, or the internet sells porn: sure, we try to have your favourite, but since we can’t sell everything we don’t try – please look at what we do have.
You can have it now, you can have it cheap, or you can have exactly what you want: but at most you get to choose two. And even if I don’t have organic free-range ostrich — fresh fillets, not pre-packaged ground meat — well, I might still have something you’d enjoy for dinner.
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4. Amazonification
I could make all sorts of points about how Amazon.com has made fundamental changes to retail [and likely will, in some later post] but at a store-front, physical bookstore level what is more annoying is the changes Amazon has affected upon my customers. The customer base is not what it once was.
Primarily,
“Oh, you don’t have it? I’ll just order from Amazon.”
Yes. [*gritted teeth*] Thank You So Much, since I was able to find that for you after 35 solid minutes on the internet when you walked in not only with incomplete information but incorrect information, and we pulled in 3 other booksellers, and eventually found for you exactly what you wanted, something that is also available from my warehouse.
I’m [*gritted teeth and a barely constrained snarl*] so… Glad… we were able to help. Thank You for not paying my rent or payroll today.
So that’s one case. Fairly rare, if I had to admit it. Much more common are the folks who call on the telephone.
“Yeah, I’m looking at this online and wondered if you had it available for pickup today”
The short answer is no. The long answer is yes, maybe we have it, but I can’t match the online price — among other things, I have to pay rent, and pay for stock on shelves (for you to pick up today), and pay someone to answer the phone (which you just called) to answer your question. Additionally, I’m not going to have 20 copies no matter how badly you need them later today (indeed, 20 copies may not physically exist in any distribution chain anywhere) and a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
Just sayin’. And if you’re looking at it online, just order the damn thing online. No need to waste my booksellers’ time for your copy of A Gentleman’s Guide to Organic Ostrich Farming.
The web provides instant gratification: Oooh, I read a review, then follow the link, then click-click-click-BOUGHT. Go me!
And if it takes 3 days from click-click-click until you actually see your book, well, at that point you’re mad at UPS or FedEx or DHL or the old standby, the US Postal Service — but not Amazon. Amazon [or whichever web site] sold you the book, it can’t be their fault.
Unless of course you ordered the exact same book using very similar systems at a bookstore. (I can tell you, it’s the exact same system as our website if you do it from my bookstore.) If you provide us with an email address [a requirement, not an option, at Amazon] you’ll get the same updates: we’ll email you the tracking number, we’ll let you know exactly when it ships. Via EMAIL. But about twice a week I get a call at the bookstore, “But I ordered it two days ago, why isn’t it here yet?”
[*sigh*] …and there goes more of my limited payroll.
Yes, I complain. Yes, these are the interactions that stick in my memory, as they’ve taken up too much of my time. We are also able to order common books, and even a few uncommon ones, and have them delivered without problems — several hundred every week. Happy customers, happy booksellers, profits to both my corporate overlords and my store front.
& We’re all happy! Yay! Books! — but on top of that I get these really awful-book-sales experiences that amazon doesn’t, because they don’t have to (and choose not to) support every customer.
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Folks come up to the desk multiple times every day [multiple times an hour even] [or call on the phone, an option Amazon doesn’t offer] and aver/demand, “I’m looking for a book…”
They are not asking. It’s sort-of phrased like a question, “I’m looking for book or magazine or whatever on…” but in fact it’s a demand, “I’m looking for this and you will help me, no matter how stupid or unreasonable I am, because you work here and have no choice but to capitulate, you poor bastard.” — not that they even put that much thought into it — It’s a matter of them being a ‘customer’ [sic] [note: real customers spend money] and us being retail wage slaves.
“I never go to bookstores or hardly any retail stores any more. Salespeople with a superior or condescending attitude are the worst. It’s totally inappropriate given their place in the food chain.”
[that’s a really fun thread, btw, for both pro & con bookseller views.]
Even if “customers” don’t think of it that way, they’re asking for a lot: they’re asking me or my booksellers for expert help, often help in shaping the search, or help in clarifying partial and misremembered details, or help identifying an author, or basic things like which subject, which topics, which keywords, and for the really tough ones: how to spell Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Italian, or Spanish keywords and author names. Help they don’t get from Amazon, by the way. Just sayin’.
… or the type of help not even trained psychiatric professionals would be able to provide
…but this is my ‘customer base’. Love you guys.
Note: Not the tech-savvy computer people. They can use Google, they can figure out what they want – many if not all of them then order online.
Not the the smart people: these folks know what they want, too, and can remember the two pertinent data points (title, author) even if it took an hour to drive into the store, or five whole minutes to walk from the car to our info desk.
No, I get everyone else
what’s the title? “I don’t know”
or the author? “I don’t remember”
ah. Is it fiction or non-fiction? “Definitely fiction. It’s a true story.”
Ah. …so it’s a biography? “No, not a biography, I said it was a true story. It’s a memoir.”
Ah. …so a new memoir about…? “I don’t remember. But it was just on Oprah, or 20/20. Or 60 minutes. Or maybe CNN or Fox — you know, on TV. Can’t you find it from that? I just told you it’s a new fiction memoir that was on TV or maybe the radio sometime in the past month and while I can’t remember the author or title I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”
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Some days — I’ll be honest with you — some days I *can't wait* to go out of business if that is to be my eventual fate, if only to see the look on the face of this particular type of customer.
Amazon does not play 20 questions. There is no app for this. Amazon can’t deal with incorrect and conflicting input, as Amazon is a computer. Amazon has no idea what it’s like to have a demanding customer come in and treat you like a personal shopper [please note, personal shoppers get paid much more per hour than retail clerks] only to have said customer return it all in two days because a ‘better’ gift idea occurred to them.
Web sites like Amazon took the easy customers from me; the ones who could help themselves, the ones who bought the most books, the ones who love books and recommend them to friends (some still do so in person, but many more just email the link).
I have many reasons to hate Amazon, not least of which is they just might manage to put me out of a job. But primarily I hate them because they’ve squeezed a lot of the profits and fun out of my job, and I’m left doing the drudge work — often doing their drudge work because I’ll still spend a half hour with a customer who then says, “Oh? You don’t have it in stock, today, and at a discount? I’ll just buy it from Amazon”
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I don’t even have time in this essay to complain about the college students who call every semester looking for text books. [OK, I’ll make a little time:] If only we as a society could, I don’t know, maybe open up a set of specialist ‘college’ bookstores on or near campus to help these customers. These ‘college’ bookstores could even get syllabi from the instructors so they’d have the books in stock before classes start, so students wouldn’t have to call all the local general bookstores looking for $200 texts the day after.
But of course I’m just speaking out my ass: there’s no way anyone or any campus would open such a bookstore — obviously no one has based on the number of calls I have to take almost every week – speaking of which, I thought classes were taught on a regular schedule? either you kids are waiting way past the last minute or you’re just messing with me.
“Books are the last bastion of analog,” [Bezos] says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We’re in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world’s largest virtual store. “Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn’t.” Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That’s shorthand for a revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish. The Kindle represents a milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of print culture, and Norman Mailer’s recent death underlined the dearth of novelists who cast giant shadows. On the other hand, there are vibrant pockets of book lovers on the Internet who are waiting for a chance to refurbish the dusty halls of literacy.
The fight isn’t for publishers or mass-market acceptance, or readers per se. The fight is for “vibrant pockets of book lovers” and we’re already on the net. [I say “we”, I’m one of them.] Some partisans fight for libraries, some for bookstores, some for genres, some for capital-L-Literature and some just to be read themselves. Indeed, some readers on the internet will argue until they’re blue in the face that ebooks are better and I’m an anachronism, fighting for carriages and steeplechase in an age of jet travel and fibre-optic cable.
This is not a war between Amazon & Bookstores — it’s not a war at all — it is a much larger conversation about books, and how books are packaged and propagated, & to a lesser extent on how books are bought & sold. Before we decide on a single answer and close off other paths, we need years yet [decades, if we can manage] to figure out just what books are — surprisingly, we haven’t even answered that question yet, even after centuries
I will hang on for as long as I can, the noble opposition fighting the good fight, even if I know or might guess I’m on the losing side.
Books have value. Libraries have a value that goes beyond books, if only we can convince governments of that. [we might need a 21st century Carnegie, a billionaire who loves books and loves to give away money to support them]
and Bookstores also have value; I have made this a basis of my own personal career.
and Bookselling has value that goes beyond, and will survive bookstores.
The playing time of the earliest wax cylinders was only 2 minutes.
As the name implies, the phonograph cylinders were wax and could only be replayed 100 times or so before they had to be replaced. [though worn out cylinders could be “erased” and reused for home recordings]
Later cylinders made of celluoid and phenolic resins like Amberol (you may have heard of a similar material brand-named Bakelite) lasted much longer, and in fact Edison [you know, the guy who invented the damn things] came up with a way to double the information packed on cylinders, so you could listen for all of *4 minutes*. [Whoa, give me a minute, I think I’m getting the vapors]
So by the 30s you have Columbia introducing the LP — 10 minutes to a side playing at 33½ rpms on 10” discs — and RCA Victor (not wanting to pay licensing fees for Columbia’s patents) introducing the 7” 45 (which ran at 45rpms — hence the name) (* for those of you who have previously heard of 45s, of course)
The competing formats [which used different spindle sizes and ran at different speeds] shaped the music that was released – and while a number of disc-switching systems were employed to get around size/time limitations, for the most part songs were truncated to the format. The 3-4 minute single is a direct result of the 45. When folks today talk about an EP (~15min, 3-5 songs) or an LP (~40min., the Album of my youth) (or of Albums, for that matter) they use a nomenclature descended from the limitations of grooves in plastic. Wikipedia has a wealth of information on all this minutiae.
The point I would like to make, my major digression before I get to the actual argument I’d like to make in this post, is that consumer music on distributed media in the 88 years between Edison and Rubber Soul was almost exclusively the sale and distribution of singles — a single song, just like 99¢ downloads today. The limits of technology at the time meant an operational upper limit of about 270 seconds. Even prior to discs — before cylinders even, of either wax or plastic — there was printed sheet music, and player piano rolls, which were also largely limited to single songs — and the music business being what it is, of course parties whose profits depended on one model sued the new technology in court: Wikipedia also has an article on the White-Smith ruling. This is a pattern repeated many times and covered at leasttwice in depth by folks who know more about the issue than I do.
But the rights & formats & changing technology are secondary to the primary economics of consumption: except for a golden period in the late 60s and throughout the 70s [the era from Rubber Soul to MTV] the industry was ALLABOUT the production of singles and the mass consumption of “hits” — through the 50s, 60s, disco in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and the decade just past: rare indeed was the artist who released an album as a preconceived artistic whole, and so many of those were also supported by the release of singles that it’d be hard to envision an ongoing music industry without them.
Thriller? Seven of it’s nine songs were released as singles, and the stature of the album itself (to say nothing of it’s record-breaking sales) are as much about the success of the singles as in the album’s “concept” — if it has one. Purple Rain? It even has a movie, right? Can’t separate the tracks from the album — except they did, releasing the title track, Let’s Go Crazy, and When Doves Cry (along with two other tracks that no one remembers) as singles — and just like I can’t think of the name of any other track, I doubt anyone except die-hard Prince fans could even hum a few bars without the album playing in the background.
Classic albums, even Dark Side of the Moon, the 1973 masterwork and ur-concept album — the platonic ideal form of the concept album — all have at least one ‘best’ track that ends up as the single. Floyd’s label released both Time and Money from DSotM, likely without consulting the band. [“btw, which one’s Pink?” & the other lyrics from ‘Have a Cigar’ on Wish You Were Here released 2 years later seems the best commentary on that]
So some few albums aside: it’s all about the single. The single is what we want, and even though artists continued to release album-length CDs throughout the 80s & 90s, we only grudgingly bought the whole disc just to get one or two songs we like. For about 20 years, recording industry profits were unfairly inflated as they were charging $8 — then $10, then $15, then $18 — for a pair of singles.
Add onto that as well the large proportion of fans repurchasing their entire collection on CD: 20 and 30 (and 40) year old albums that wouldn’t have sold otherwise that suddenly found new life, and the ability to package even third-tier artists’ output into ‘greatest hit’ collections that would sell. [Even if, once again, all we wanted were the one or two hits.]
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Many would point to the death of the music chains as a dire premonition for all retailers of packaged entertainment. Oh look, there goes Borders. Watch it, Blockbuster is next.
The advent of downloadable music led to decreased album sales, decreased sales of physical media, the bankruptcy of several chains that sold music [though some individual stores and ‘indy’ music stores seem to be doing OK – many of them by increasing their stock of vinyl!] and in general, much soiling of pants by music industry executives.
*Allow me to call bullshit* : The music industry collapsed because the CD format (and CD pricing) led to an unsustainable bubble built on the $18 price point cited above (for 2 good songs and an hour of dross) and the once-in-a-format buying binge as customers built a “library” — you only re-buy your collection once, though, and once you’ve bought ‘enough’ you fall back to your normal (& typically very sparse) buying habits.
The “rediscovery” of the single by the shopping public made possible by per-track purchases (and the occasional illegal download) supposedly led to the collapse of album sales, but it should come as no surprise that as soon as we could drop the 11 tracks of filler [at an unjustified markup] and just pay for the songs we liked — well, we did so.
(Perhaps many of us downloaded them illegally first — but the whole industry went into transition for a solid 10 years starting in 1999, and one could certainly write a whole book on that. The fact that Apple and Amazon make money off of music proves “piracy”, while real, is not the bugbear the RIAA wants you to think it is.)
I’d argue that the point where we all hit ‘enough’ CDs for our library just happened to coincide with the advent of digital downloads, two trends which both resulted in decreased album sales but also two separate and distinct trends the recording industry unfairly conflated — an assumption which led more or less directly to their present day stupidity like suing fans for liking music, and withdrawing from digital when they should have embraced the new format as firmly as they once did CDs — to the point where they were pushing CDs down our throat. This misstep means they ceded the initiative, and the profits, to Apple — and to Amazon, to a lesser extent. This is ground that they will never make up, and soon the artists [who actually make the music] & the tech companies [who now distribute it] will meet somewhere in the middle and wonder just what the recording industry is for, anyway?
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One more quick aside: The movie companies suffered from a similar blindness, but also benefited from format changes and the associated bubble as we rushed to build our personal movie collections (something one couldn’t even do in the 70s, unless you owned a film projector) – in fact, the studios got to hit us twice, selling us the same movies on VHS & DVD (and now Blu-ray) and even as ticket sales slump (a trend hidden by ever-increasing ticket prices) they showed improving profits — and developed whole new profit centers.
In some cases, the film libraries are worth more than the current production studios. Movies differ from music in that prior to VHS, there was no collector or home consumer market: you bought the ticket while it was out in theaters and that’s it. Even the occasional broadcast on TV hardly holds a candle to DVD.
So movies finally made their way into a market that music had been developing since 1880. Not surprisingly, there was pent-up demand — in fact, ask any blogger what they want to see on DVD or Blu-ray and even if they blog about business or book retail or manga of all things, I’m sure after some thought said blogger would be able to give you a Top 10 wishlist of things that should be out and available for exorbitant prices but isn’t. Stop worrying about bittorrent, guys. Fire your lawyers and hire archivists — the money is sitting in vaults, on celluloid that is deteriorating as we speak.
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Anyway.
As stated up top: Books are not Music
CDs can be deconstructed into individual tracks — indeed, the single is the “default” unit of music and CDs are the artificial construct: when given the option, we want CDs broken up so we can buy just the tracks we need. In contrast to music, books have always been a long-form art, and even short stories take a hell of a lot more than 4 minutes to read. [If you can read a short story in 2 minutes, that tells me the author worked and agonized, for weeks or months to write something that short, and you need to go back and read it again. now. I’ll wait.]
Songs are played on the radio, available from our personal libraries, available via streaming services, and otherwise permeate our life, and except for our teens — when we soak up new music like life-giving water [and the once-every-20-years format changes, when we’re forced to repurchase the music of our youth] — actual music purchases are fairly rare.
Books aren’t movies, either, for that matter: Both music and movies are passive entertainment — you can turn on the radio and have it playing in the background while you write, or cruise the web, or study, or make sweet sweet love, or many other tasks that require more of your attention. Similarly, I can put on a DVD and simultaneously cram popcorn in my maw while either drinking beer or letting my hands roam over a willing partner [an activity that usually ends with us missing the last half of the movie, but hey, that’s one more argument for owning the DVD].
Movies and music are passive entertainment; we can sit back and do other things while we enjoy them. Seeing a first run movie in a theater is more engaging than watching videos at home — but I think many of us have noted how many other people manage to text, talk, or tweet their way through a movie [you and I would never do that though] — or have noted with distress the jackhole who thinks he’s MST3K but wittier and who maintains a running commentary through the whole thing. [most of you have a tire iron in your trunk; I’m not advocating violence against jackholes but I thought I’d remind you it’s there]
Books are active and engaging. You don’t read a book while you write blog posts and surf the web. Hopefully you don’t read books while driving – mostly because you can’t, but also because it would be dangerous to try. You might be able to page through a magazine, skimming the ads and reading only the article headlines, while talking with friends or otherwise doing something else but when you sit down to read a book: That is all you are doing: You are reading a book, and it takes up your whole brain.
Sure, you can listen to music while you read and I often do: but the one is just background noise, while the other engages you to the point it crowds out everything else.
You can sell music by the track, and assemble playlists from many disparate sources. You can sell TV series by the episode, and while we occasionally marathon a whole series in a single sitting, it is much more common to take TV shows in half-hour to hour chunks, and to keep at least a half dozen ‘stories’ going at a time, at the rate of one episode a week.
Dickens and his serialized novels aside: when we buy a book we buy the whole damn thing, and read the whole damn thing, and the reading of it takes over our whole imagination — and even in a series consisting of several books we only begrudgingly admit that it takes a while to write a book, and given a preference we’d read a whole series at once rather than wait between installments. There are the Twilight books as an example, of course, or Potter mania from a few years back, or the agonizing wait Martin has put us through with “The Song of Ice & Fire” [Game of Thrones for the newbs who only heard about it from HBO] — or King, or Patterson, or Steele, or Woods, or Block, or authors sadly passed who will write no new books, or the next series in your favourite genre that you haven’t even heard of yet.
Readers are obsessive.
Not everyone is a reader; certainly more folks passively consume music [because they’re stuck in a car during a commute, or it’s playing as Muzak on speakers in most public spaces we inhabit] and Movies & TV are a mass media in ways that books will never be. […alas. and our society is poorer for it]
In fact, a book is usually only considered a success after it get picked up for [inferior] TV or Movie adaptation — so very sad. Even a “bestseller” will get a sales bump from a movie, because the movie-going public just aren’t readers.
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Sure, I sell to a niche. And at least two large chunks of that niche [genre readers and avid fans of a particular author, whichever author] are getting peeled off by digital readers: I’m beat, usually by price and certainly in ‘instant gratification’ metrics.
For music, there is radio. And when there were record stores, there was radio. While there were concerts, there was radio — when digital downloads and online streaming and customizable channels and personalized suggestions all hit the scene, there was radio. We can argue that it sucks now, and many of the music stations really, really do suck: but they still broadcast, and it’s still one way (the primary way?) most folks discover new music — if only because broadcast radio is a mass distribution channel, about as ubiquitous as these things get. Seems old fashioned; but still there. Radio is not dead yet.
For books: yes, there are online sales sites and reviews and blogs — and to an extent, customizable channels and personalized suggestion services — but the primary, mass distribution channel is still books on shelves: the retailer. Seems old fashioned, quaint even. But actually bricks-and-mortar retail isn’t going away anytime soon.
[One could argue whether your “bookstore” in 15 years time will be just another small department in Walmart and Costco, but that’s a different essay — and if you ask a publisher whether they’d prefer that kind of channel or an actual bookstore, even a crippled, suffering bookstore that is a pale shadow of the 90s chains on only a fraction of their former salesfloor footprint — well, I think we know which they’d pick]
Books engage. Books demand. Books compel. I can do other things while I listen to music, or while a video plays — but when I read a book I Read and I find myself all but incapable of doing anything else. I can’t even drink beer — well, I can, but I only think to pick up the beer stein at the end of each chapter.
I’m not worried about the new digital landscape — if the world of bookselling changes so much that it’s all online, then well, the online players will need booksellers. I think I’ll be able to find my way. Books are not music, after all. You can make up your own mind about a song in about 5 minutes — in fact, you can listen to the whole damn song in that amount of time in nearly every case.
Books take longer to appreciate, and more skill to sell.
Also, publishers are embracing digital publishing in a way the recording industry never did — and still hasn’t. I’m not saying publishers volunteered to host this party, but now that everyone is showing up, they’ve sent the interns out to buy chips and dip and a digital keg.
Also, there is no related format-bubble like the CD or DVD binge as customers re-bought all their old favourite titles over again to build their new library…
Well… unless you count digital books as the new-format bubble that will eventually pop. (I’m not going to push the point or force you to confront it: I’m just going to leave that little gem right here where I can link to it later.)
As long as there are books, and readers, there will be bookstores. And Amazon is not a bookstore, which is my next topic.
I hear ebook this and ebook that so much — not only from news sources but from my corporate overlords — it makes me sick. Sure, ebooks are growing, but I feel the time and attention (not to mention resources, financial and otherwise) focused on ebooks are missing the point.
Yes, Ebooks are blowing open new holes in the publishing industry. New! Shiny! You can read ‘em on your iPad!
…but folks are still buying a lot of paper.
Let’s start off with a messy graph.
& let me break it down for you: The red line tracks adult hardcover sales, the yellow one is trade paperbacks, the green one is mass markets — this is just for those three categories as reported by publishers.org — so no kids books, no text books, no teen books [classed as Young Adult by most pubs, so part of the ‘childrens/YA’ chunk of AAP’s data] but the “Adult Trade” category is the still largest part of the trade market.
(Text books completely blow any segment of the “trade” market out of the water — which makes all kinds of sense given the price points, numbers of students, number of classes taken, and the requirement to use a text. But no one says anything about e- compared to the text book market, yet.)
(and I’ve posted these numbers before — well, most of these numbers: I’ve added data for Sep. 2010 to Feb. 2011 as they became available — which you can go see laying aroundhere and there on this blog)
The Latest News, widely repeated, is that purple line: unit sales of ebooks.
For February 2011, ebooks ranked as the #1 format among all categories of Trade publishing (Adult Hardcover, Adult Paperback, Adult Mass Market, Children’s/Young Adult Hardcover, Children’s/Young Adult Paperback).
This one-month surge is primarily attributed to a high level of strong post-holiday e-Book buying, or “loading,” by consumers who received e-Reader devices as gifts. Experts note that the expanded selection of e-Readers introduced for the holidays and the broader availability of titles are factors.
Additionally, Trade publishing houses cite ebooks as generating fresh consumer interest in—and new revenue streams for—“backlist” titles, books that have been in print for at least a year. Many publishers report that e-Book readers who enjoy a newly-released book will frequently buy an author’s full backlist.
For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, ebooks grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.
I have done a bit of massaging to the AAP reported sales numbers. I divided sales for each by an average unit price to find an estimated number of units sold. It actually makes the rise of ebooks a bit more dramatic.
What the press release skips over is something I think most of us can see: January and February are awful months for publishers — among the worst (when they are not in fact the worst) two months of the whole year. This is because book retailers bought their stock back in September and now they’re running clearance sales, cutting back on displays, and recovering from the December shopping orgy.
I put a vertical gray line into the chart to point that out for you.
Sales of ebooks, though, are instantaneous. There are no physical storefronts [just online ‘shops’] and publishers get to bank that sale right away. The messy, seasonally-variable and returns-prone book business just doesn’t affect ebooks: that’s why the three trade categories wobble like an EKG, and the e-book graph just goes up and to right in ways that make MBA’s hearts skip a beat.
You tell me, based on the first graph. Which business do you want to be in?* [it’s a trick question, but you may not have figured out why yet.]
##
Let me simplify things. Please allow me to add back childrens’ books, and the university presses [but not text books, yet], and the “professional” category which includes quite a few computer books & building codes and some other stuff I carry — and then add everything up to get to an honest ‘bookstore’ number. And let me take the wobble out of the graph: I’ve enough data culled from AAP press releases to compute a rolling 12-month average for this same time period.
This distributes the Christmas rush over the whole year, and makes the time delays related to shipping books to retailers moot: we can see the direction books are actually heading.
I think you’ll be surprised.
and let me re-quote one paragraph from the AAP press release:
For the year to date (January/February 2011 vs January/February 2010), which encompasses this heavy post-holiday buying period, ebooks grew 169.4% to $164.1M while the combined categories of print books fell 24.8% to $441.7M.
Dead Tree Artefacts still outsell Digital Files 3 to 1 — for the first two months following the gifting of millions of ereader devices — and for the two months of historically abysmal revenue for publishers. Ebooks are doing quite well, but are not the whole book market quite yet, even during the winter sales slump.
We’re not just comparing apples to oranges, we’re comparing apples to digital downloads: and the apples are still selling.
##
For the data above I assumed an average price per print book of $15, and an average price for e-book of $10. I assumed publishers gave retailers of whichever sort the standard %40 discount off of list prices. And the AAP reports publisher revenue: all those free, public domain ebooks or sales by self-published authors aren’t included.
Please note the green line is largely flat. Please note that book sales are seasonal, and when a press release comes out saying one format (ebooks) outsell another format (hardcover, whatever) that’s because the people tracking these numbers split things into at least a dozen categories, and we can play with numbers all we like, and make them say lots of things, especially if we do a press release in March, instead of November.
Your take-away:
1. Book Sales are seasonal, but after accounting for seasonality: Actually Print Book Sales Are Flat.
2. Ebooks are growing. Obviously. And it is much too early to predict when those sales are going to level off: but I’ll tell you, ebooks can’t maintain exponential growth forever and eventually, yes, it’s going to level off. [I’ll refer you to the manga bubble, 1998 to 2007, for those with short memories: just because it’s E- doesn’t make it immune to market forces.]
Ebooks are the only segment of the industry that is growing right now. So they get a lot of attention.
However: I ran the math, and ebooks aren’t cannibalizing sales of physical books. (yet.)
3. Text Books are still the market to crack. The person or company who manages a “kindle” for elementary, secondary, and college text books is going to be rich.
7.2 Billion Dollars Annually, equal to all ebooks and trade books combined.
I’m posting this as part of my series on how to run a start-up publisher [see part 1, part 2] but the points I make today could easily be extended to any start-up [tech or otherwise] and of course would be an obvious extension of my “rethinking the box” posts about bookstores: for any small independent, of course you rely on key booksellers to help with the important buying decisions that might otherwise be made by “corporate” – an added layer whose “benefits” you cannot “enjoy”.
Let’s say there’s a local college library; they have many resources you could use, and some you might want to use even though you don’t need them every week, and certainly there are some archives you don’t even know about yet — but for the most part you just need access to one archive of one particular academic journal.
It’s a private college, so you can’t just flash ID at the library door to get in; they reserve most of their collection for current students, faculty & staff, college alumnae — and donors.
For a single, sizeable yearly donation, you could have access to the entire library and all it’s collections, but since you think you only need the occasional citation from this one particular journal, instead of becoming a benefactor of the library, you work out a deal with one of the reference librarians – once a month or so you submit a specific request, and you get a single file folder with just the information you need — or at least, the pages you asked for, as the librarian feels no need to go outside your request.
[this is an extended metaphor, folks, I know libraries don’t work this way]
[speaking of metaphors…]
##
Let’s say between you and your printer, there is an apple farm — and going the long way round, miles out of your way, there is a toll road — but you have to take the toll road because you can’t cut across the farm. Even though it adds a couple hours to your trip, you always take the toll road because, well hell, you only make this trip once a month or so.
You have to get to your printer, because it’s the only way to get your books printed.
Of course, you could bribe the apple farmer to let you cut through the orchards. As a bonus, you get free apples, whatever you can pick up along the way. The thing is, the apple farmer wants a steady payment, once a month: you get the shorter route to the printer but you’re stuck paying the farmer all the time, not just when you need to get to the printer.
The toll road ends up being more expensive, per trip, but you do the math and you figure, no, I don’t need a shortcut. We’ll keep driving around the apple farm.
##
There’s an amazing database of cheat codes, shortcuts to get you through most—if not all—video games. You desperately need a code to get you past the final boss of this one game you’ve been working on for months. You could buy access to the whole cheat code database, but they only sell monthly subscriptions – not single-day passes. You contact the folks who maintain the database, and they agree to sell you the one cheat code you need, but for $100. You could buy 10 months of access for that much, but once again, you only need the one cheat code, right? to get past this one boss, and finish the game. You know it’s going to save you a hell of a lot of time, so you pony up the $100. After you buy it, though, you still can’t clear the boss.
Oh hell yes you go to complain. You raise all holy heck. You threaten and cajole and start badmouthing this site everywhere you can think to post…
…and it turns out you were using it wrong. Once you’ve been corrected [condescendingly] you finally get the code to work, you clear the boss, you win the game.
But you’ve burned bridges, and now you’re banned. Where once, you could have been a monthly subscriber, with access to the member forums, with the ability to ask questions, and seek clarification, and get support for all sorts of games — now you just have a $100 cheat code you got to use once, and a whole bunch of experts who actively hate you.
##
[I mentioned these were metaphors, right?]
You’re a college student. You could sign up for the meal plan, at a significant per-meal savings, but you like fast food and pizza too much [it’s just so tasty, even though it’s a bit empty nutrition-wise for the calories]
You figure, heck for as often as I use the dining halls, I’ll just pay a la carte — so you do, which means when you go for dinner, you pay per plate for salad, sides, a main dish — & maybe you skip dessert.
Instead of eating whatever you want whenever the dining hall is open, you pay for a box of cold cereal on a Saturday morning, and pay extra for the 8oz. carton of milk. It’s not quite enough milk, but you make do. You congratulate yourself because you didn’t ‘waste’ money on the meal plan, and you try [but fail] to ignore the smell of bacon and butter and syrup from the guy eating a pancake breakfast next to you.
And since you ‘saved’ so much money, not buying a meal plan, well now you have the priviledge of spending $23 a pop on pizzas, or $7 a meal going through the drive-thru — twice a day.
##
The bookstore offers a member card, $25 a year but you always save 10%.
You think, what a rip off. I don’t spend that much money at a bookstore — besides, why don’t they just discount the books for everyone anyway? Why pay for a coupon?
And maybe you don’t spend enough on books to make the discount card pay for itself.
But you buy magazines once a month… $10-20 worth. didn’t figure that into the total.
And you buy CDs and DVDs — well, at least for as long as the bookstore carries them. Sure, you might get them cheaper from Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t really discount the BBC stuff — Inspector Morse box sets are still $70 each, and hell, that’s the same price you’d get at the bookstore with the discount card. Hm. And you’d get to take them home the same day, watch ‘em that night.
And by the time the holidays roll around and you’re shopping for Festivus and Yule presents [or whatevs] and you find yourself spending $200 — you could save $20 just that day! — you still talk yourself out of buying a discount card ‘cause it means an extra $5 on today’s receipt, and you still can’t justify spending more — you’re just not in the bookstore that much.
##
Sick of the metaphors yet? Have you figured out what I’m driving at?
No matter what business you’re in, you can hire talent, have it in-house working for you 5 days a week (plus the occasional weekend, if you pay well enough) and have guaranteed access to those skills, that knowledge base, that experience set — to say nothing of one more creative brain actively working with you to solve problems…
Or you can hire consultants & freelancers.
Sure, any freelancer will perform to specs and deliver what was ordered. But only what was ordered: if you didn’t think to ask for it you’re not getting it. And if you are hiring someone short term for open-ended projects that might require creative solutions or additional freelance work to exhaust all possibilities: you’re going to be charged a really ridiculous rate.
Less than what you might pay someone in yearly salary and benefits, but you’ll be paying through the nose for this one project — so your brain-dead mechanical accountant says: “Pay the freelancer. We don’t have the budget for that, in house“
But gods forbid you have to run more than one ‘major’ project a year, or you have to go back to a consultant for another ‘fix’ on something they did years ago — even if they are still available [not a guarantee], even if it was their mistake [and not your mistake, when you set the scope-of-work], well, you’re going to get charged more anyway.
Go ahead and buy the talent. Buy the short cut. Buy the cheat code. Buy the meal plan. Sign up for the year-long discount.
It only seems like more money. I’ve said it before, employees are an investment and in the end, they’re going to be the only investment worth having. Find the best people, get them to ‘buy in’, to be invested in your company and what you’re doing.
Say I ran a manga publisher, and all of a sudden one of my best clients decides to pull all their licenses to publish direct to the North American market on their own — I know, it seems so unlikely — but if I had good agents negotiating on my behalf in Japan, a solid editorial staff to translate comics, and capabilities in-house to do my own art adaptation, formatting, & printing — I don’t think I’d sweat it. We’d get started on new books. Maybe we have to look further afield — say we hire folks who know the Korean market, or we hire folks fully conversant with the dojinshi circles so we can find artists willing to work to spec on our scripts
Or say we contract with creators direct — put them on payroll for a set number of books, or option a first look at their work for a small sum, with an advance on royalties for anything we do decide to print.
[If we hadn’t burned our bridges with domestic comickers by offering a really bad deal a few years back, compounded by no marketing and mid-series cancellations, why, there is a lot of work to be done right here in North America on original comics that has nothing to do with manga or asia or licenses — I’m just sayin’]
There are many examples of comics imprints that have failed: CrossGen, Tokyopop, CMX, Broccoli, Aurora — and each failed for different reasons. Many over-reached and overspent. Some suffered from too little capital to begin with, or corporate overlords that refused to market the books, expecting that comics would somehow sell themselves just because they are comics.
Your first sign that a publisher is about to face significant challenges [up to and including bankrupcty and going under] is they fire staff. The deeper the cuts, the more experienced staff that they lose — the better the chance that their days are numbered.
You just can’t get that back. Even if you recover, and re-hire, it will be very rare that you’ll improve on the staff that you lost. One can come back from the brink, but never quite to the same heights.
##
Maybe it’s just me: I have always felt that payroll, the right people in the right jobs, is the only investment that pays off in the end. Freelancers are fine — in fact, hiring freelancers is a great way to ‘interview’ people for a job: if they do good work, pull them into your organization and put them on the payroll.
If you invest in your staff, and they invest (emotionally, not just financially) in the company, then when the hard times come everyone pulls together and works their way out of it.
I would rather drive a company into the ground, personally borrow against my house & my life insurance, get that last $10,000 from a loan shark who is going to break my kneecaps — just to make one more week of payroll — rather than let anyone go.
But That’s Me. I know I can’t think of everything myself; I need all these smart people around me. As many smart people as I can find. And you never know when the part-timer who is working your mail room ends up being a grad student whose thesis is exactly what you needed to solve your problem — of course you won’t know if you fired her.
And obviously: You also won’t know unless you hired her — even if it’s ‘just’ and internship, or ‘just’ a part-time menial job: if you’re committed to identifying talent, promoting from within, working on training, and eventually integrating part-timers into your full-time staff, well, these are the real gems. So far as I know, no one does this kind of hiring anymore. One can’t work their way up a corporate ladder; those paths were closed and only Harvard or Wharton grads get the entry tickets. Andrew Carnegie would be stuck as a telegraph boy, John D. Rockefeller would have spent his days as someone else’s bookkeeper, Oprah would just be a newsreader on a local Tennessee radio station, H. Wayne Huizenga would just be a garbage man, Richard Branson merely a record shop proprietor.
Oh sure: these are all self-made industrialist and entrepreneurs. The rags-to-riches Horatio Alger Fairy Tales we all love to believe in. But no matter how self-directed, every self-made-mogul has, in their history – an educator, an investor, or an early employer who believed in this young genius and gave them a leg up, a boost to the next level — or even just the first $1000 of investment.
Speaking for myself: I would be overjoyed to be put out of business by someone who rose up through my organization and ended up doing the job better than I ever could. I would be as proud as any parent.
##
In each of my parables that opened the post, an initial and ongoing outlay of cash means access to resources or shortcuts that would otherwise not be available. And even when you know what you’re buying [a shortcut to bypass the toll road] you occasionally get bonuses from your employees that you never counted on [free apples!]
You’ll never get all you can from your “associates” unless you commit to them first – put ‘em on the payroll. The investment will pay off over time.
Only in an age of nigh-immortal corporations has my second point been lost: the life-work of any craftsman is not just the craft, but in raising the next generation. Trump has permanently poisoned the term, but there is value in apprenticeship: in training not only your successor but also your future competitors. In a world where interns and part-timers hold only those roles not filled by consultants and freelancers — and the whole business is run like an elaborate temp agency — there is no craft, only maintaining the status quo.
We need a world run by craftspeople — not accountants.
If you own the shop, if you run the company:
Find the best people, and put them on payroll. Find promising people, and lock them in. Love them. Train them. Shape them. – And listen to them; if they’re good enough to hire, hell, they’re smart enough that you should always repect their opinion even if you know they’re wrong [at least this year… next year everything you think you know should be tossed out the window]
Like I said: I’m not that smart. I need as many smart people as I can find to help me, and that’s the only investment that will pay off in the long run.
Need another parable? Twitter — the service now known as Twitter — wasn’t the original business; hell, it wasn’t even on the radar. But a company once known as Odeo had enough smart people on payroll that when their original business model collapsed, a new business emerged almost despite corporate ‘oversight’ and interference. Next time you hire a freelancer, consider that you might in fact be giving that next Twitter-equivalent to someone else…
Call my take on it sour grapes if you must, but I didn’t leave a dozen properties and hundreds of thousands of fans hanging…
##
I don’t like Stu Levy.
I’ll admit that.
Kinda hate the smug bastard.
Sure, he’s had more good ideas about comics (especially manga) than I’ve likely had to date, and he certainly put his money where his mouth is, founding the company that became Tokyopop and merely by being a barb and foil to a staid industry that was otherwise going to putter on in obscurity [if we ignore Nintendo, Pokemon, Cartoon Network, and anime on Saturday Morning local broadcast TV] Stu Levy deserves some props for making the Manga Revolution a reality.
The guy is smart, sure. Or at least, he was in Japan at the right time, and had access to venture capital — which, back before the tech bubble popped in 2001, apparently any reasonable writer could obtain with the right keywords and ‘cool’ quotient, a fact many novelists missed as we were working on consumer fiction, while the real money was in corporate fictions.
Stu and Tokyopop lucked out. They got Sailor Moon – a manga property that was also showing on TV. Though I have to say, ultimately, that’s also a failure: until the recent announcement that Kodansha would re-release these volumes, there was no way to buy these books for years. Tokyopop got credit for printing books that were immensely popular but that no one could buy.
Tokyopop luck continued [also thanks to lax Kodansha licensing] with a number of CLAMP titles & Love Hina, and the Hakusensha title Fruits Basket.
All this is very early in Tokyopop history. From first blush and early success, Tokyopop…
Coasted? is that too strong a term to use?
Tokyopop also attempted to channel early fan enthusiasm into a “Global Manga” line: encouraging creators to sign up their comics to the T’Pop banner under, hm, less than favourable terms, and pushing licensed properties [and the Abhorrent Cine-Manga line, which included NBA ‘comics’ and Paris Hilton ‘comics’, and other TV-screen-shot-photo-montages which aren’t even comics, let alone manga, and which poisoned the brand back in 2005.]
And the HC/Tokyopop books would pay for themselves and then some; Erin Hunter’s Warriors series ran for 10 volumes in adaptation, all of the them still perennial bestsellers; Cabot’s Avalon High and Schreiber’s Vampire Kisses have also sold well, and are still selling.
This is the core of HarperCollins new comics imprint, in fact, should they choose to launch one. With Tokyopop out of the picture, maybe there is a token payment to be made to Levy [the bastard] for the step up, but eventually: The whole new edifice will stand on its own and Tokyopop was merely the sand beneath the foundation, or the Jimmy Hoffa buried in the concrete of Soldier Field.
##
Even with the distribution & support of a Big Six publisher, which all but guaranteed placement in bookstores, Tokyopop struggled. There were layoffs in 2008. There were layoffs right before the end.
Layoffs, I might point out, that took place while a movie was in production [considered by most to be a ‘lottery ticket’ and ‘gravy train’ but I guess the Hollywood Money never trickled down past one Mr. Levy]
Was the collapse of the manga market Stu’s fault? No… and the anime bubble that popped before that? No, not much any publisher of manga could do to affect the DVD market collapse.
but Tokyopop was already diversified, with many original properties [all but stolen from their creators] and licensed properties ranging from Disney to Star Trek to Blizzard, and better product placement and initial orders than most other comics publishers could hope for… DC and Marvel included.
Circumstances and a few shrewd business deals handed Stu Levy the sun and the moon and a vigorous manga imprint besides. Key employees were able to negotiate deals with Japanese publishers that were the envy of the [granted, small niche] market and right up to the bitter end: Tokyopop was releasing books the fans wanted, the critics enjoyed, and which were selling. Divested of the OEL experiments and licensing missteps [we ALL want to forget Cine-Manga] it seemed like a leaner, focused Tokyopop would help lead the manga industry into the next decade.
And while Stu [and others] might think his recent ‘philanthropic’ efforts in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan somehow ‘redeem’ this showboating bastard and make it all worth it, consider:
Many, many of us contributed to charities without posting about it to YouTube. Many of us will continue to support Japan, charitably and economically by buying anime and manga — without withdrawing out of the manga business — or filming a documentary in Japan over the next year:
A documentary I consider to be exploitive, more than anything else. Help Japan rebuild, yes. Yes, please, and thank you. But do it without pointing a camera in their face.
##
Stu, AKA DJ Milky [a dick-move I hated him for even before he ran a profitable and ongoing imprint into the ground], is the right guy to have, for one specific window of time, but he never should have been the CEO; I’d peg him as the marketing/licensing guy who managed to do good work in the field for a couple of years and then switched to a blog, analysing the market and complaining about how everyone was doing it wrong in intermittant web blasts that don’t always make much sense but have good sound bites —
— and hey, if he were just another industry blogger, he could still do his Japanese charity/penance, with just as much publicity, without leaving licenses in limbo and just closing up the shop when he could have, should have, SOLDTHECOMPANY to a publisher who gives a damn about manga, and books.
No, really: WHY did Tokyopop close, when it could have just as easily been sold? I would like everyone who runs into Stu at any comics/book/anime/fandom related event to ask this very pertinent question: Stu, even if you were bored with books, why kill Tokyopop?
It’s a very simple question. I can only assume that Stu is so full of himself that he imagines that if *he* couldn’t manage it, no one else could make Tokyopop [an ongoing concern with popular licenses, a strong backlist, and title to original English-langugage comic properties still held in an iron grip] work as a publisher.
Hubris.
I Hate Stu Levy. His current ‘charitable’ efforts in Japan, no matter how necessary and admittably helpful in the ongoing crisis, smack of self-service and condescension. His abandonment of the business because it’s too much ‘work’ — even while honest work was producing books we all enjoyed — is lax at best and contemptuous at worst.
Also, Stu is closing Tokyopop while grimly hanging onto all rights to the OEL books that might be worth something — without putting any effort into realizing that potential — or releasing rights back to the original creators.
##
Stu: you suck. You bailed, when we need you most. You failed, in a niche of publishing you claimed to invent.
Prove me wrong: come back. Restart the Tokyopop publishing division. If you can’t: hell, give the licenses and Tokyopop name to me, and I’ll do it. You can even sell it to me: I’ll give you a dollar. (You can’t really demand more; you just threw it away) — Keep your damn movie division, and the weasel-rights to the OEL titles and all the rest.
Give me the Tokyopop name and the current title list. Give me a roster of your current freelancers, and the contact info for the folks you just fired. Give the manga back to the manga community, don’t let your ego kill a company with so much promise.
Suck the marrow from our bones, take the producer credit for the Priest movie, and credit as the founder for Tokyopop, and however many millions you’ve collected as salary for the past decade — but don’t take the company with you into obscurity.
If you don’t want to leave Tokyopop with me, sell it to someone.
Why, why, why close it all down? Even if you are bored with books & manga, Stu, the rest of us are not.
On June 1, 2015 (after 6 years and 11 months) I needed to relaunch/restart this blog, or at least rekindle my interest in maintaining and updating it.
Rather than delete and discard the whole thing, I instead moved the blog -- database, cms, files, archives, and all -- to this subdomain. When you encounter broken links (and you will encounter broken links) just change the URL in the address bar from www.rocketbomber.com to archive.rocketbomber.com.
I know this is inconvenient, and for that I apologise. In addition to breaking tens of thousands of links, this also adversely affects the blog visibility on search engines -- but that, I'm willing to live with. Between the Wayback Machine at Archive.org and my own half-hearted preservation efforts (which you are currently reading) I feel nothing has been lost, though you may have to dig a bit harder for it.
As always, thank you for reading. Writing version 1.0 of Rocket Bomber was a blast. For those that would like to follow me on the 2.0 - I'll see you back on the main site.
In my head, I sound like Yahtzee (quite a feat, given my inherited U.S.-flat-midwestern-accent.)
where I start my browsing day...
...and one source I trust for reviews, reports, and opinion on manga specifically. [disclaimer: I'm a contributor there]
attribution
RocketBomber is a publication of Matt Blind, some rights reserved: unless otherwise noted in the post, all articles are non-commercial CC licensed (please link back, and also allow others to use the same data where applicable).
