publish or perish, round 876

After the recent trifecta of “scandals” (Frey, Leroy, Nasdijj) in publishing, it’s only to be expected that one of the newsmagazines would take a look-see at the industry they’ve been neglecting since it lost its glamour (around about when Harry Evans exited the stage, in 1997).

U.S. World and News Report is first out of the gate. First we hear the same old song about the reasons for the industry’s decline (there are only six major players in publishing, all of them owned by foreign media conglomerates; they publish too many books; readership is down; young people would rather watch videos or read blogs or magazines, etc.).

Then, surprisingly, we’re offered reason for hope–and guess what? Jason Epstein, who I talked about here and here, is offered as an example of someone who is going out to meet the future with a print-on-deman device that might revolutionize book publishing:

Another alternative presented by technology would retain the traditional book format but change the way books are produced and delivered. Print on demand–which makes it financially feasible to print small batches of books inexpensively–is already a boon for the self-published author (box, Page 49) as well as for traditionally published authors seeking to reprint their out-of-print books. Now Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House, is preparing to test a more sophisticated, even less expensive all-in-one book-making machine capable of producing up to 20 quality paperbacks an hour. The World Bank Bookstore in Washington, D.C., is installing the Espresso Book Machine, as Epstein calls it, later this month. Using digital files, the machine will be able to immediately print any book in the World Bank catalog. The chief benefit of the machine, says Epstein, is that a requested book would never be out of stock or out of print. Such a machine could make books less expensive, Epstein believes, because it would eliminate the need to warehouse and ship books; instead of guessing how many books to print–a game that leaves bookstores stuck with piles of unsold flops and readers unable to find out-of-stock surprise hits–the supply will always be just right. Will the Espresso brew satisfy? Technology–and copyright–updates on all these developments are sure to follow….

The article goes on to note that publishers are, supposedly, going to explot their back catalogs.

Their goal is to wag “the long tail”–a concept popularized in a widely read article by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired.

When publishing executives invoke the long tail–and almost everyone interviewed for this article did–what they mean is that if you tote up enough small sales (especially via a low-cost, direct-to-consumer sales tool like the Internet), you can add up a big profit over time. So for the first time in many years, publishers are once more interested in smaller–not just bigger–sellers. That’s good news–until you wonder how they lost track of all the smaller and classic back-list sellers to begin with. In his 2001 book, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future, Epstein noted that, in recent decades, publishing houses have concentrated on bestsellers to stay profitable but have tended to neglect the potentially larger assets they could derive from the long-term revenues of their back lists.

Once again, Epstein looks like a visionary (he turned his attention to the print-on-demand business in the late 1990s).

The questions is whether the publishers aren’t just paying lip service to the technological revolution, because new ideas are rarely heard to emanate from their boardrooms.

Meanwhile “big” publishing is still in the game: On Wednesday it was reported that Ann Godoff of the Penguin Press bought the rights to Fed chairman Alan Greenspan’s book for $8.5 million.