BookFinder.com Journal

Publishers ponder the Long Tail

The New York Times Book Review published an article on publishers' reaction to the Long Tail last weekend (which, coincidentally, mentioned BookFinder.com).

The verdict? Some of the largest American publishers are confused:

"'The costs associated with printing small quantities of many different titles and of warehousing those many different titles and of fulfilling single-copy orders...are so onerous that it's not a model that I feel works for publishing today,' said Terry Adams, the director of trade paperbacks at Little, Brown. Susan Moldow, the executive vice president and publisher of Scribner, agreed. 'It only works if you're employing some kind of print-on-demand,' she said, referring to a technology that allows publishers to print a few books at a time, as they are ordered. Although Anderson and some others believe print-on-demand will change publishing history, the technology is still imperfect and costly."

But contrast that attitude with that of NYRB Classics, a fabulous young press that thrives on long tail bestsellers:

"'We're like scavenger birds on the back of hippopotamuses,' said Edwin Frank, the editorial director of New York Review Books Classics, which was founded in 1999 and is affiliated with The New York Review of Books. Top sellers among the imprint's 200 titles include Richard Hughes's dreamlike novel 'A High Wind in Jamaica' and historical novels by J. G. Farrell that revolve around Britain's colonial rule. 'We're happy with any book that sells over 5,000 copies' during its sales life, Frank said."

Donadio writes that:

"Paradoxically, the online sales technologies on which the long tail depends may actually be undercutting backlist sales by squeezing them between the two poles of the market: new frontlist titles and used books, which are easier to find than ever thanks to the rise of online booksellers and search engines like BookFinder.com."

BookFinder.com certainly makes used books easier to find, but it's an overstatement to suggest that we negatively impact backlist sales--and by extension, long tail sales--in any appreciable way. To the contrary...

We help sell new backlist titles. Long tail book sites like Amazon.com and BookFinder.com are some of the best resources out there to find, research, and buy backlist titles; BookFinder.com has worked with new booksellers carrying backlist titles ever since its launch, over nine years ago.

Publishers have always dealt with the existence of used books, and they seem to have been doing fine. According to the article, publishers "rely on backlist sales for a significant part of their business," but goes on to list a wide variety of backlist bestsellers widely available in virtually every brick and mortar used book store in America (e.g. The Lord of the Rings, The Joy of Cooking, books by Beatrix Potter). The online component doesn't change the nature of the game; it just means that consumers can search brick and mortar bookstores in multiple communities, and not just their own. The most profitable of the backlist titles were always easily available used, and there's no change there.

In-print long tail sales are robust. According to Chris Anderson's figures for 2004 (presumably American) book sales, out of 1.2 million books surveyed, 78% of titles in print sold 99 or fewer copies, and 95% sold 999 or fewer copies. The publishing industry as a whole is already delivering the long tail. For every frontlist title or backlist bestseller (e.g. Lolita, The Things They Carried, and A People's History of the United States, each of which have sold about 100,000 copies per year in recent years), there are thousands of also-rans, chugging along with a handful of sales per year. The increased trend toward print-on-demand micropublishing, as covered in another recent New York Times article bears testament to the growth of a vital long tail powered by the publishing industry.

Our tail is longer than that of the publishing industry, lessening overlap. BookFinder.com users' average search "center of gravity" is further down the long tail than the wider publishing industry (which is why we're able to report on the most sought-after out of print books with some authority). Potential overlap between new and used copies of in-print backlist titles might be an issue, but our users' used book purchases don't always compete directly with the offerings of the in-print new book industry.

Worried New York publishers dominate much of the discussion around the future of books and bookselling, but the situation's not always as dire as it's made out to be...

Posted by Anirvan

Kevin Kelly on digitizing books

Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting piece in the New York Times magazine about the digitization of books by Google and others, and how that intersects with publishing models, copyright law, orphan works, and the long tail. It’s an old story by now, but he writes it well. Read the article online (single-page version).

[Now Reading: Foxy-T by Tony White]

Posted by Anirvan

The Long Tail of books

Chris Anderson points to the Book Industry Study Group’s recent Beyond the Bestsellers event, a one-day conference on “growing sales opportunities in the ‘long tail’ of the book market” — what most booksellers know as midlist, backlist, and out of print titles.

The presenters’ slides are online in PDF format, and rather interesting. Of particular interest are the presentation from Abebooks on marketing long tail titles, and from Cambridge University Press and Lightning Source about print on demand publishing.

You can download all the presentations from the conference’s presentations archive.

Posted by Anirvan

Delving into the data

We’ve always spent a lot of time looking at the universe of books (new, used, out of print, international) and the way they’re categorized, distributed, and sold, so we can figure out how best to serve the community of book shoppers online. Here are some pointers to what we’ve been reading.

I’ve enjoyed reading tech columnist Glenn Fleishman’s analysis of commercial book-related metadata issues, and his two latest blog posts deal with issues that we’ve been addressing since we launched BookFinder.com: managing multiple editions, and brainstorming clustering strategies. He also points to an interesting piece on book-related metadata in the Boston Globe.

Wired editor and Long-Tail-Guy Chris Anderson has been trying to figure out the size of the “long tail” for books in the US. He took a stab at it on his blog, but after some further back of the envelope calculations, figures that the long tail constitutes 15% of book sales today. I think even his new numbers are a bit conservative, but his discussion and methodology are worth reading.

Posted by Anirvan

BISG: Used books a $2.2 billion business

Big news. People have been talking about the new Book Industry Study Group’s comprehensive new report on the American used book industry for years. Well, it’s finally out.

Here’s what we now know about American used book sales in 2004:

• Overall sales were over $2.2 billion (over $600 million of that online)
• Overall sales grew 11% from 2003 to 2004 (4.6% offline, 33% online)
• 111 million used books were sold, making up 8% of all books sold (expected to grow to 9% by the end of the decade)

Academic books (textbooks) are where the money’s at:

• Used textbook sales were $1.6 billion, sold mostly offline (an 8.5% increase over 2003)
• Used textbooks cost an average of $42.31
• Used textbook sales account for 30% of the value of all textbook sales

But sales of general (non-textbook) titles are booming:

• General used book sales were $600 million (a 25% increase over 2003)
• General used books cost an average of $8.12
• General used book sales account for 3% of the value of all general book sales

See more details in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

(More posts on industry metrics: used books don’t cannibalize new book sales, problematic textbook pricing trends.)

Posted by Anirvan

Economists analyze used book sales

Information economist Hal Varian has a fascinating column in today's New York Times, dicussing the relationship between used book sales on the new book market. Hal used to be dean of UC Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems, where I first started tinkering with book search engines, way back in 1996. He was one of the faculty members who encouraged me to take a leave of absence from school, to work on BookFinder.com full time.

In his column, Varian discusses two pieces of research that support our arguments against the critics of the online used book industry.

The first paper he cites is "Internet Exchanges for Used Books: An Empirical Analysis of Welfare Implications and Policy Issues", a 2004 paper on the impact of used book marketplaces on new book sales online, using data collected on Amazon.com Marketplace from 2002 to 2004. Some of the conclusions:

• only 15% of used book sales at Amazon directly cannibalize new book purchases
• the remaining 85% of used book sales would never have occurred if the cheap used book option didn't exist
• publishers lose only about 0.2% of total gross profit due to online used book marketplaces

This analysis suggests a very different picture from the anti-used-book, anti-right-of-first-sale, the-sky-is-falling posturing that groups like the Authors Guild have been engaging in.

The second paper he cites is "Are Durable Goods Consumers Forward Looking? Evidence from College Textbooks" (PDF format), which explores how college students base their textbook purchasing behavior based on realistic expectations of their ability to resell the books, an issue we discussed on this blog last month.

Both papers are of interest, and worth perusing.

As a service that connects shoppers with new, used, out of print, and international books, we see the co-mingling of the various types of materials as a major benefit for readers, with little negative (and some positive) impact for publishers and authors. We plan to continue writing about this issue as the situation evolves.

[Now Reading: Dear Paramount Pictures by Iqbal Pittalwala]

Posted by Anirvan