Staying on Top of the Rate of Change?
It is different for books — the updated edition. Last week I chatted with a friend that used to be in the music business and now works in book retail. I figured he would have a unique take on the music/publishing comparison in terms of the digital transition. Indeed he did. He said two things in particular that stuck with me.
Publishers and booksellers already compete with free. Popular books, albeit ones in the public domain, have been available for free for years. There was a pent up demand for Napsterized Mp3s so the rise of file sharing lead to a equal and opposite decline in music sales. That appears not to be so for books. Customers will continue to pay for public domain books if the price is balanced with convenience (see the app store). Listen to your readers — this line of reasoning goes — and Scribd is not a threat.
The second thing he said was about the rate of decline for the old model. The question for publishers and bookstore owners is how long will this take? The music industry saw double digit declines year over year until the Tower Records empire and the Virgin MegaChain became untenable. At the root of this were declines in every category and every genre. Book sales won’t transition to digital at equal rates across genres. Kids books will likely be the last to cross the chasm. Fiction may be a hold-out as well. The lesson being, if you are a publisher or retailer, prepare yourself to throttle back on different categories of books at different rates at different times. If the business goes into a dive of double-digit losses that is a death spiral no one can recover from. But if a bookstore can experiment in their computer section while remaining profitable in fiction then they are likely to stay alive. Question is how many businesses are that agile?
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