Rocket Bomber - publishing

[boilerplate intro]
Say circumstances handed me a chunk of cash and the mandate, “Start a new comics publisher. Licensed manga, manhwa, Euro-comics, English originals, et al. and thank you. Here’s a wad of cash; tell me how you’ll use it.”

Kodansha launched their US comics imprint with a scant 2 Million Dollars [see also] — granted, Kodansha doesn’t have to negotiate licenses [as a major publisher in Japan, they already own them] and also, Kodansha doesn’t have to establish a Tokyo office, fly executives and editors across the Pacific, spend money smoozing the gatekeepers and content-rights holders, convincing the most conservative businesspeople [& as in many industries, mostly conservative business men] on the planet to take a chance on a no-name small firm with no publishing history, few alliances, sketchy prospects, and an amateur as Publisher & CEO.

All that said, Stu managed it. And if someone handed me $16 Million Dollars [I’ll need more than the token $2Mil. Kodansha fronted] then I’d make one hell of a run at it.
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##

What’s the difference between a small publisher and a self-publisher? Maybe an S-corp or some other legal doc, but it’s mostly a matter of scale. A self publisher has one writer, one editor [or purchases proofreading and other minor editorial services retail, one book at a time], a very modest backlist (whatever one person can manage to write), and no budget for marketing. A small publisher will have an editorial staff (however small) and deal with multiple writers & properties, but the backlist is still quite modest, all things considered. Every city and most larger towns already have at least one publisher — maybe they only do regional titles or kids books or they’re the University press at the local institution of higher learning, but they’re out there. A lot of folks can do it — have done it — and while it’s not a way to get rich it *is* a way to produce books.

What’s the difference between any small publisher and one of the major multi-media conglomerates that control programming, publishing, movies, music, and your life?

Night and day.

Starting small means starting from zero, really. A major publisher engenders imprints like a snake sheds its skin: it’s a natural process, happens all the time as the beast grows. They have an exisiting infrastructure (editorial & marketing departments, contacts and contracts with printing companies — and not just an arrangement with a book distributor but direct distribution to retail) and there’s no way to copy that. If Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House, Scholastic, or Simon & Schuster decided to launch a new comic imprint tomorrow, we’d see books by December. And in fact, most of these major publishers already have a comics imprint [or a distribution agreement with an exisiting, smaller publisher]

• Random House distributes DC, Vertical, and Kodansha — and puts out excellent books under both the Pantheon and Villard imprints.
• Hachette owns Yen Press
• Scholastic has their own Graphix imprint (Home of Bone)(to say nothing of all the other illustrated books they do)
• Simon & Schuster distributes Viz
• Macmillan owns First Second, and distributes Seven Seas
  [& Disney owns Marvel, but despite recent growth Diz is not a ‘big six’ publisher]

Two majors are left out of the dance at the moment — HarperCollins lost it’s affiliation with Tokyopop (even before T-Pop went under) but given the success of the HC/Tokyopop cobranded comics they really should get into this soon. [hey, HC, if you don’t have a junior VP on this already: call me] — and Penguin/Pearson is the great white whale: the only major without a comics sidekick. The indy who lands a deal with Penguin (especially if they can get the oval-penguin logo on orange and black spines for a RH-Pantheon- or Villard-type lit-comics imprint) has all but won the lottery.

Like I said, any of the majors have the resources on hand to launch an imprint as easily as I sneeze. Heck, they don’t even need seed money; just reassign a few staff, or add the comics as a new initiative at an established brand [Del Rey, anyone?]

##

Many folks think that to start a publisher, you need to copy the heirarchies and relationships of a Big Publishing House: you have a publisher [job title], and editors, and marketers, and contracts with a printer, and solid working relationships with distributors like Ingram or Baker & Taylor (or Diamond, maybe). You negotiate with agents (or authors direct) to acquire titles, you package & prepare books for print runs (carefully calculating just how many to print, based on your budget, and projected sales, but mostly your budget) and you all-but-bribe some buyers at Costco, Wal-Mart, and Barnes & Noble to get your books out on shelves, and then hope the eventual and unavoidable returns don’t amount to more than, say, half the total so you at least break even.

All that helps, sure.

Here’s the thing: that is a 19th century business model, using 18th century tech and medieval thought processes.

It also suffers from the worst possible contribution from 20th century business practices: accountants, and outsourcing.

To an accountant, of course it makes sense to contract with a printer: they can produce your books cheaper than you can, since they do nothing but print books all day: scale brings lower unit costs. The printer assumes the risks of investment in expensive machinery, and its maintenance and ongoing operation, and you as publisher just ‘rent’ the massive beast for however long it takes to run off your books. Of course the printer takes his cut [a reasonable profit] but he can still print them cheaper than you could yourself.

For a major publisher, with their extensive print runs, maybe the savings is only pennies per book, but we’re talking millions of books and accountants earn their salaries by pinching those pennies.

##

That said,

Now consider the parable of Dell Computers:

Dell sold direct to the customer. Options added to one of a few basic frames were selected by the customer, then custom built from common components as needed and shipped — after it was paid for. Eventually, Dell got big enough that they shipped some of the most popular configurations to retailers — you could walk into a store, buy a stock Dell, and take it home the same day — but the bulk of their business was still direct internet sales.

Dell is typically considered to be a success. Instead of stockpiling in bulk of a predetermined model of computer, they waited for the market to tell them what was needed, and how many of each.

Considering all the components that can go into a computer, Dell has it rough — and they have to constantly purchase new peripherals and cards and chips and all that jazz, as the technology all-but-completely rolls over every 6 months.

A publisher attempting a similar strategy has it easy: paper, cover stock, and ink. Sure, you need more than black ink if you’re doing colour covers, or want to print full-colour, heavily illustrated things like textbooks and “coffee table” books — and comics — and you can certainly go wild with paper, from cheapest newsprint to fine cream papers — but honestly? Your local Kinko’s had all that in stock. This isn’t expensive.

One of my favourite quotes is: “The Press is only Free to a man who Owns one.” I can’t remember where I first read it, and I’m sure whoever wrote it down for me to read stole it from someone else. The point being made was that 1st-amendment-style-free-press only applied if you were wealthy enough to publish it yourself, otherwise there will always be an intermediary between you & your thoughts, and the world.

But it also points out: You can own a printing press. “Printing” is not just a service provided by specialist firms, Print is a verb as well as a noun, and for relatively small sums one can own the means of production. Just because the Bigs don’t bother with their own printing anymore, doesn’t mean you have to slavishly follow the business model dictated by scrooge accountants who don’t see value in ownership, and merely want to pare a business down to a preconceived ‘core’ without any thought of what that costs — in real terms, not just in dollars.

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First up, set up shop. I personally like the idea of intown real estate, if not downtown; find a funky artists’ neighborhood on the cusp of urban renewal, old industrial converted to loft space [and soon, to be converted by us back to industrial].

Pick a building with plenty of room. Consider that you’ll need some warehouse space, and some production space (for the printing equipment), and some office space — and we’re going to want enough leftover space right at the building’s ‘store front’ for, well, a store front.

Yes, we’re a publisher. Yes, we print our own books, on site. Yes, this is the nexus from which we distribute books to the world: but true to my bones this will also be a bookstore.

Why not? We sell books. Might as well sell a few right over the counter at the front of the shop.

Right now, I don’t know how much this might cost. Capital investment in equipment is, in fact, capital investment. But it can’t be that much, and why not have a printing press, if you sell books? Go ahead and sink the million or two into offset printing capabilities. (and then forget about those dollars. Don’t worry about paying it back; write it off from the start. Get the books to pay for themselves, and eventually they’ll also pay for the equipment. Maybe you find a printing firm to start off with, buy it as an ongoing business, and then start running your publishing imprint from the back room.)

There’s a one-time charge to prep a book for print, but once you have your plates set up for each book, well, you can run off 100 or 1000 copies whenever you like. Also, there is nothing stopping you from printing other folks’ books: run the printer as a sideline, same as anyone else who owns the machinery.

Given advances in technology, maybe you don’t even need a massive steam-powered-clockwork-rube-goldberg-press in the back room to make this work: Buy an Espresso Book Machine from On Demand Books for a scant $100,000. This is the same tech Ingram is using for its Lighting Source Print on Demand division — it’s an all-in-one box that fits in a closet:

Once again, if you own the means of production, there’s nothing stopping you from selling other books printed POD — or accepting orders from your customers to do custom print runs of family genealogies, vanity projects, local history, poetry, or even an actual goddamn novel from a local author — or competing for larger jobs like festival and sports programs (or similar annuals from the local symphony & opera), tourist guidebooks, marketing materials of many sorts, and maybe even a quarterly or bi-monthly magazine.

The printing business might just be self-sustaining, or even turn a profit… and when you’re not fulfilling orders, you can print your own graphic novels in the wee hours of the night.

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Say you want to be a small publisher.

Fine.

But you don’t have to contract everything out to someone else, paying their profit margins and guessing at the best size for a print run or how to warehouse the books from a overlarge order you placed because the per-book-cost was cheaper that way.

Own the press. Own the shop. Sell you own books from your own storefront, both in meat-space and online, and on Amazon or B&N or wherever. Sell digital books the same way, if you’re able and feel the need.

The investment will be worth it, and will be self-sustaining. And you can do a short-run of lovely books whenever you like.

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Other resources and references:

Here’s a guy who has been at it for years: http://www.fonerbooks.com/selfpublishing/

http://www.fonerbooks.com/paper.htm

http://www.fonerbooks.com/pod.htm

If you just want to get a *very* rough idea about the market, try these online calculators:
http://www.gorhamprinting.com/pricing/InstantQuote.php
http://www.48hrbooks.com/

This is just an estimate, from my own research: $3.50 a book for a run of 1000, $2.70 for a run of 3000

The devil is in the details, and who knows what an actual cost might be.

http://www.frugalmarketing.com/dtb/cheaperprinting.shtml
“Now you can have just 100 to 500 books produced and used for promotional purposes. Authors may send copies to agents and publishers. Publishers may send copies to major reviewers, distributors, catalogs, specialty stores, associations, book clubs, premium prospects, foreign publishers suggesting translations and various opinion molders.”

http://ireaderreview.com/2009/05/03/book-cost-analysis-cost-of-physical-book-publishing/
“For larger print runs, the cost of printing a book comes to just 10% of a book’s price. So the perception that ebooks should be a lot cheaper than physical books because there’s no printing or binding is inaccurate.”

http://www.broadfootpublishing.com/publishing%20cost.htm
http://www.bestbookprinting.com/prices
http://dogearpublishing.net/resources-book-costs.aspx
http://www.millcitypress.net/book-printing-costs.aspx
http://printshopcentral.com/book-printing.php

I almost hesitate to add…
http://www.colorprintingforum.com/printing-business-practices/low-cost-color-book-printing-singapore-china-88.html

And the Espresso isn’t the only solution out there — Xerox sells direct:
http://www.xerox.com/digital-printing/printers/print-on-demand/docutech-6115/enus.html

I’m not sure how to title this one.

I think I may default to “Illustrated Empire” – though that isn’t a search-engine-optimised term, or even one that describes the subject: it’s what I would call my [theoretical] book publishing company, but doesn’t actually describe the content of what I hope will be a new series of posts.

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Say circumstances handed me a chunk of cash and the mandate, “Start a new comics publisher. Licensed manga, manhwa, Euro-comics, English originals, et al. and thank you. Here’s a wad of cash; tell me how you’ll use it.”

So.

Kodansha launched their US comics imprint with a scant 2 Million Dollars [see also] — granted, Kodansha doesn’t have to negotiate licenses [as a major publisher in Japan, they already own them] and also, Kodansha doesn’t have to establish a Tokyo office, fly executives and editors across the Pacific, spend money smoozing the gatekeepers and content-rights holders, convincing the most conservative businesspeople [& as in many industries, mostly conservative business men] on the planet to take a chance on a no-name small firm with no publishing history, few alliances, sketchy prospects, and this guy

as founder, chairman, CEO, Geek-at-large, Beer Disposal Unit, and Otaku-in-Chief. [none of those are selling points]

All that said, Stu managed it. And if someone handed me $16 Million Dollars [I’ll need more than the token $2Mil. Kodansha fronted] then I’d make one hell of a run at it.

I have a name: Illustrated Empire. I have ideas for three imprints under the Illustrated Empire banner [Avalon, Albion, and Amaterasu] and know enough about the US bookstore business to avoid obvious mistakes (I’m sure I’ll find all the non-obvious ones soon enough) and you know: folks lend Trump billions despite his track record, so maybe I have a chance at this too.

[I buy a $1 lottery ticket every week, just in case.]

So, how would I run the Illustrated Empire? What makes this comics company different?

##

Allow me to start with a digression: I spent seven [plus] years at university, and while some stereotypes are correct [rampant alcoholism, parties every weekend, and hanging out in bars for the other 5 nights each week] I might be an exception in that I was spending my days in class, and once I gave up on earning any one specific degree, I was emancipated – & ending up taking a little bit of everything.

Among the [many] courses of study pursued at Georgia Tech, I took classes on contract law and urban development. I spent a semester with construction contracting. I own a hard hat; I’ve followed projects from brush clearing to first pour to topping out.

My experience on construction sites is beside the point — but contract law, that was fun (in its own way), and there are some excellent concepts that should be transferred to publishing.

1. The Surety Bond

Those of you who invest, or merely follow investments, think you know what a bond is. And you’re likely right, for whatever context you’re familiar with: Treasury Bills, corporate bonds, bail bonds…

The bail bondsman is the closest analogue here: A Surety Bond is a form of insurance. Let’s walk through an example: Say you want a 20 story building. You own the land, you’ve hired the architect, you’ve a sheaf of plans and tenants lined up and a schedule you have to keep to. So when you go to hire a contractor, even if you find a reputable firm with impeccable history and more than sufficient assets — it’s not his ass on the line if the building fails to go up. You’re the one left holding your balls the basket if this all falls through.

So no matter how much money you have or how much money the contractor has: you ask for a Surety to be sure the project is seen through to completion. Like any contract, the terms can vary to cover whatever the needs of the owner are, or whatever risks might be anticipated

two very typical versions are

2. The Performance Bond

an assurance that certain minimum standards are met — or that the contract specifications (no matter how unreasonable) are met — and

3. The Completion Bond

…if I’ve plans for a 20 story building, and tenants already lined up for a 20 story building, even if the contractor I’ve hired to build this thing goes out of business after only 12 stories are built — I still need that 20 story building. A Completion Bond will pay for someone to finish the job even if the original contractor can’t.

Firms that specialize in this field are often referred to as “Assurance” companies, though this is just a very specialized insurance field. In fact, you might have already seen this, if you are a homeowner dealing with plumbers, electricians, or other contractors: if a firm advertises themselves as “bonded”, “bonded and licensed”, or “bonded and insured” then they likely have a small but quite tidy sum invested in Surety Bonds, and you’re fairly safe dealing with them for your normal-home-repair-type-crap.

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So, what does this have to do with publishing, generally, and licensing manga, particularly?

Nothing.

so sad, in fact: a basic concept like finishing up on a contractual obligation means nothing to most licensees.

But let’s say I’m on good terms with an assurance provider and I can offer blanket performance-and-completion bonds for English rights to any title I license from a foreign publisher: what would this mean?

- Professional translation and adaptation, or else the bond pays out for a new translation under the ‘minimum standards’ clause of the contract and

- Completion of the series even if I go out of business. Exactly like a bond would pay out to finish building the last stories of a 20 story building, fans [and the original rights holder] would have a completion guarantee that a series would be seen through to an end in translation. Maybe only, say, 1000 copies of each volume printed (or some such; terms as specified in the contract) but through to the end and to a specified minimum standard.

Wouldn’t this make licensing more expensive? Yes, and no. There are some fees involved in sourcing and adminstrating assurance bonds, but provided one meets all the terms & conditions of the contract, you get the principal back: which you can then recycle into the performance-and-completion bonds for the next title.

Would this make a difference?

For Japanese rights-holders who also happen to be the original publishers? Maybe not. I might suppose that they’d be more interested in dollars up-front, no matter how you package the deal – they would be not so much interested in series completion or other assurances, even when backed up by bonds.

For Japanese rights-holders who also happen to be the creators? Oh Hell Yes. Here I am, fronting a couple million in insurance just on the off chance that *if* I go out of business or you personally think my adaptation is crap and insist on a new version: completion to specs is spelled out in the contract.

Minimum standards, and guaranteed publication of all volumes [as specified, a shorter print run but one that is *guaranteed*] — your entire work will see print in English.

Tell me that isn’t a selling point.

For Fans?

Are you kidding me!?

Any company that guaranteed that all volumes of series will be translated and printed – no matter what the eventual sales might be?

You just bought yourself the undying devotion of a dedicated fanbase – and no matter what the actual sales are on this one series: you win. So, maybe you only print 1000 or 500 or 200 copies each of the last few volumes: it is enough that you tried, and saw it through to the end, and some quantity of the final books are out there for sale. Maybe they have to pay more (or buy them second hand) because the books are in short supply: but the books were printed: This is a readership that will follow you, even if it means going outside their usual comfort zones or into properties they’ve never heard of.

It’s a very simple thing: finish what you start.

And if it doesn’t make economic sense: well, that’s what the surety bonds were for. It’s a type of insurance. You pay a little bit more on the front end, but both your clients (the licensor and the fan) get the product you promised, the small financial loss is insured – and the gains are immeasurable.

Now, I’m all for author rights — I’m an author myself — but my personal take is that folks like J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer would make out just fine even if their rights to their respective works were limited to just, say, the first 40 years after publication [2037 for Potter, 2045 for Twilight] — not only is that a great run for any book, any directly licensed derivative works [AKA movies, TV; AKA *ka-CHING*] will have all been out on DVD, Blu-ray, DataCrystal, Holochip, and direct neural memory download by that point, and if anyone still gives a rats-ass about sparkly vampires in 2045, then the works themselves are likely significant enough that they deserve academic notice and as such should reside in the public domain — and by extension, should also be fodder for popular re-mixing.

But That’s Me. And say you’ve spent decades building a fictional universe through dozens of books, and all of a sudden the characters and locations of the first book are now ‘public domain’, because the copyright laws of 1909 [since superceeded by the 1976 law, and extended again in 1998, but go with me on this] say you only get 56 years (a term of 28 years, renewable once) — not only did you get 56 years from which to profit from a work, which for most of us will be our entire working career from college graduation until retirement or death – but you are also the Author/Creator of a work so profound that your fans and readers are so invested they want to write their own stories and adventures set in the world you created.

A work you created 56 years ago. And if there is money to be made from the public domain stuff six decades on, how much do you think you can make selling Officially Licensed Sequels, to say nothing of New Books “By The Original Creator”?

And if you’re dead, well, I don’t think you should care at all. Your great-great-grand-niece is a nice person, I’m sure, but I also personally strongly feel that creator rights should not be inheritable. Set up a company to sell the ‘official’ crap, let your descendants run that onto the seventh and eighth generations [and into the ground] but any work of Art or Culture really should belong to us all.

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Image by Eric J. Heels, originally posted to erikjheels.com, “Drawing That Explains Copyright Law” – reproduced here under Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/.

Disney built what is now (by some measures) the largest media company EVER — one that currently earns $38 Billion a year — largely on adaptations of 18th century folk tales already in the public domain.

That’s fine too — I won’t fault Diz for doing business, and adding to the many complex versions of those stories, and to the collective corpus and canon of human arts. It takes work to bring a story like that to the screen, and in ways that apparently millions [the majority of us?] enjoy. Praise of the creative output of the company kind of sticks in my throat, though, when I consider all their business practices (including but not limited to the incessant marketing to kids who should be too young to be consumers quite honestly) and of course, their unremitting assault on the Public Domain. [please reference the major legacy of Rep. Sono Bono, a law which guarantees any work produced in my lifetime will never enter the public domain, or at least not until I am very dead, very very cold, and long long forgotten]

The goal of current copyright law and corporate efforts is basically to keep another Disney from ever developing. Also, there are a number of movements afoot to use a mix of regulations, law, law enforcement, and international treaties to keep anything like YouTube or iTunes [or Facebook, or Twitter, or many aspects of Google not including YouTube] from ever rising up again. These things disrupt the status quo, and as such obviously should be illegal — from the corporate point of view. Business is more important than piffling things like freedom, expression, or shared culture. [ref. not only the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, DMCA, ACTA, and likely something else in the works that’s even worse and very, very secret]

This is great for corporations, and for the heirs of dead authors. The rest of us don’t usually think about copyright, as there is a hell of a lot of media out there (more than one person could consume in a single lifetime) and so we don’t necessarily feel the lack.

For the vast majority of authors, the risk is not somehow being cheated of earnings decades after publication, but in being lost (lost in a vast sea of what’s available) or cheated out of legitimate earnings from the onset by some big company. In the case of ‘work for hire’ the 1998 Act extends copyright for up to 120 years from date of creation. Somehow, corporations get (at a minimum) an extra 25 years — 25 at a minimum if they screw over the original creator of any work and can claim ‘corporate authorship’. That is to say, I get 70 years, as an individual, but Disney gets 95 years from date of publication (or 120 years from date of creation, whichever is less — so there is no penalty if a corporation dusts off even a 25 year old property to publish today; all rights still reserved and they get the full term)

If you want to write great fiction, skip novels and write copyright laws. This stuff is high fantasy.

Say, did you know you can embed selections from Google Books, just like YouTube Videos? Well, yes, we can.

This an excerpt from Publishers Weekly, 1888, on how a new sales-and-distribution model is threatening the ‘old’ way of doing business via established local bookstores.

Anyone care to draw parallels to Amazon, or to ebooks?

Comics on the iPad: sounds great, doesn’t it? I mean, the iPad is a beautiful device, easy to use, comes from Apple so you know it’s cool (and others see the Apple logo on it so they know you’re cool, too), and… um… iPad! Why aren’t you getting this?

There are 6 million of them out there already — well, maybe a few less, but if there aren’t 6 million of them now, then Apple will hit that point really, really soon [source] — and if you’re not paying attention, that seems like a Really Big Number!

My problem with the iPad (indeed, with most platforms) is that no matter how cool it is, it’s still just a small part of the overall market. On top of that, things like the iPad and the Kindle are available only from a single manufacturer — compare to DVD & Blu-ray players, which not only are manufactured by dozens of companies, they cram them into computers, game systems, TV sets, toasters, everywhere.

here, have some numbers:

6 Million
– number of iPads sold.

4 Million
– Kindles, plus or minus: estimated between 2.5 – 4 million [source 1, and 2]

Less than 1 Million
– Nooks. Though I think there are at least a million in their supply chain at the moment at the rate they’re manufacturing them. I’m sure B&N will have a big press release when that hit that magic million number.

Looks good; but compare to

73.5 Million
– iPhones [source]

62 Million
– PlayStation Portables [source]

135 Million
– Nintendo DS units [source]

…and of course, a billion computers. One. Billion. And that’s computers in use, not just built and sold to date. The billionth computer was built and sold back in 2002.

Even if one considers the ‘captive audience’ part of the iPad userbase to be a plus, 6 Million isn’t as big as it looks. compare:

12 Million
– World of Warcraft subscribers. (not units sold, but monthly subscriptions)[source; see also]

16 Million
– Netflix subscribers [source]

30 Million
– Xbox Live subscribers (out of 50 Million XBox 360 units sold, so there are another 20 million potential customers) [source]

41 Million
– PS3s sold. Add in the 62 million PSPs and that’s a potential userbase of 103 million for the PlayStation Network, though there are only 60 Million PSN accounts at the moment [source 1, and 2]

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There are 218 Million HDTVs out there [source]. There are 277 Million DVD players — adjusting for those who own several, that’s an estimated 92 million households with DVD [source]. Blu-ray is already up to 27.5 Million players [source] — and both DVD and Blu-ray require you to buy discs at $5-40 each (heck of a lot more than the cost of an app).

3.7 Million went to Yankees games last year. [source] 2.5 Million people watch college football games every Saturday in the fall, live [source] at massive stadiums across the country; countless millions more watch it on TV — well, OK, someone is counting: 20.2 Million people watched 208 telecasts during the regular season [source] and 131 Million watched the top 20 bowl games just these last 2 weeks [source].

Millions are easy numbers to throw around.

24 Million live in Texas. 37 Million live in California — 16 Million of those just in LA. 19 Million live in “New York”, 8.3 Million of those just inside New York City Limits, and 1.6 Million plus just on a small, 13-mile-long island in the middle of the Hudson River.

The install base for the iPad doesn’t even exceed NYC. Instead of developing an iPad app, you might as well open up a comic shop in the Bronx.

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Of course I’m being both sarcastic and facetious, throwing numbers around just to prove my own straw-man argument about the futility of the iPad as a platform. That, and I like trivia.

But go back to the very first set of numbers: including the iPad, there are about 12 million or so e-readers out there: 12 million out of a US Population of 308 Million. That number could double each year for the next 5 years — true exponential growth — and at that point there would be one e-reader for every 4 TV sets, or one for every three computers — actually one for every six computers because by 2014 there will be a projected two billion computers in use. [1.4 billion tv sets, source, via – and doubling each year for 5 years is 2⁵, 3200% — a total of 384 million ereaders world-wide in 2015.]

If we include tablets (a category that also subsumes the iPad) then maybe, yes, there will be 300 or 400 million “e-readers” — portable devices which can display books — in five years’ time. But we’re wandering a bit far from the initial premise at that point, and just because something can display books, doesn’t mean users will buy ebooks (or even read free ones).

Can you make money from an e-book? Sure. An individual author could likely make enough to live at or around the poverty line, depending on how hard she works to market the book. (Merely producing the ebook isn’t enough, as it just gets lost in the millions of available titles.) Can you make money from digital comics? By themselves? —no. But some webcomickers seem to be doing a fair job selling stuff while giving away the comics for free, and also selling books (physical books, self-published) – typically also while still giving away the comics for free. There are discussions of how to do this, resources for artists, and rare success stories on the internet, if you look [try typing something like “living on webcomics“ into a search engine, for example].

But both relentless author self-promotion and successful (or not) web comics rely on the internet, accessable from one-going-on-two-billion computer screens, your iPad, your smart phone, and even the occasional TV set besides. Using the net increases your potential audience by a factor of hundreds, maybe even a thousand.

Can DC and Marvel make money from an iPad app? Sure. Some small fraction of the 6 or [eventually] 20 or [maybe even] 100 Million iPad owners are comics fans, and some of those have money, and some of them might even be willing to buy comics for the iPad.

And 1% of 1% of 1% of a Million is still a dollar. Small fractions can add up, and some fractions might be bigger than just 1%. But why limit yourself?

What happens if the one company that makes your one platform suddenly goes out of business? This isn’t a risk with a DVD, because many companies make DVD players. This isn’t a risk with a book, as you don’t need a device to read a book at all. (Well, maybe a lamp – or reading glasses.) And I’ll grant that it likely isn’t a risk with Amazon or Apple either, at this point — But why limit yourself?

What if the *brand new thing* in 2012 isn’t an iPad, and isn’t compatible? Sure, you have your established userbase (for as long as they own and use the old devices) but unless you can port things over, your business and app sales just stopped growing and your days are numbered. It would be a relatively easy challenge to overcome, but why limit yourself to just the “now”, and just one platform?

I think we all can see the appeal of digital comics (and by extension, other full-color heavily illustrated books like school texts, cookbooks, travel guides, art books, and ‘how-to’ guides of all types). And the iPad is a great device. The two go together like peanut butter and marshmallow creme — sure, not to everyone’s taste but some folks will swear it’s the best thing between two slices of bread. Someone will come up with a way to make money off of iPad comics, and they might even make a lot of money.

But the company or individual who comes up with an internet-based solution to the digital comics problem is going to make a lot more money, and might even change the publishing industry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what it looks like, to scale:

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

and are still hardly a blip.

##

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

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

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

Here, let me run some projections:

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, no.

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

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

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

##

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

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

Book Retail numbers from the Census Bureau

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here’s what I have for Del Rey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

So,

[*sigh*]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have money.

##

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

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

[here’s the important bit]

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

[/important bit]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promises, Promises.

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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

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

##

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

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

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

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