The new title is also terrible. It takes one fact mentioned in an article about broad trends in publishing and elevates it to the main thrust, which it really isn't. Would have been better to leave the original title and let people who actually read it decide what to discuss.
If you have a suggestion for a better more descriptive title, perhaps you could share it so that it could be improved. I don't agree with your suggestion that making it more vague would be an improvement, but I can see why you'd feel the way you do. No reason why that can't be turned into a better title.
Follow the guidelines and use the original title unless there's good reason not to. I don't consider vagueness to be a good reason.
The problem with the title that I was commenting on (it has since changed) is that almost everyone was reacting to the title alone without reading the article at all. If a vague title forces people to read TFA before they comment, all the better.
I honestly don't see why this is much of a problem? Does the book industry truly need hypebeasts to survive? 4% of your market buying the same paperback in some mass hysteria moment is not sustainable, that's just not how physical books work. Diversity in literature is a good thing, people reading different things is a good thing.
The book industry (much like many content industries) has always been hit driven. The issue this article is bringing up is the way they diversified that a little and found new hits was via old fashioned on the ground bookstores.
We now have pretty empirical proof that the algorithm driven sales via online and big retail sales channels make the industry more hit driven and less diverse.
The question now is can brick and mortar stores comeback? After a 20 year decline the stores had stabilized in recent years but the pandemic wrecked them. Too soon to tell but I’m pessimistic for their future, which makes me worry about publishing long term.
> The question now is can brick and mortar stores comeback?
No. The tax break went on for too long, and that online bookstore became a global near-monopoly on all physical items the size of a coffee table or smaller. Before that, traditional bookstores had already been slammed by grocery-store sized bestseller warehouse chains - the more than a decade long state subsidy to internet retailers actually killed those.
I’m not the commentor and I’m skeptical of that claim too.
Here is the place where you wanna go to get information about the industry: https://www.bookweb.org. You might could dig enough to find answers to all the claims in this thread.
Even if everyone's prices were MSRP (which they aren't), why pay ~10% more for an item at a local store who has to pay sales tax when I can just order it and have it brought to my door for a lower price?
A lot of Amazon's growth (and really any internet retailer) was because of inefficiencies they worked out of the merchandising process, but a lot of it was stuff like not paying sales tax if they didn't have a physical presence in the state which gave them an unfair advantage IMO. That benefit is disappearing as state's are starting to realize the damage to their tax base (FL amazingly being one of those even though we've paid Amazon sales tax for a while since they have a large presence here), but the damage has been done already in a lot of areas.
> but a lot of it was stuff like not paying sales tax if they didn't have a physical presence in the state
Amazon collects sales tax in every jurisdiction outside the USA, yet still had incredible growth. It's not really about prices ( a new book I want is £7 cheaper on ebay ) but convenience.
Which claim? The near-monopoly on all items was obvious hyperbole. The destruction of local bookstores by Books-A-Million, Borders, and Barnes and Noble is well-documented.
Big local stores that sold books at a discount hurt small indies. Those big local stores were driven out of business by the big chains. And those chains have largely been put out of business by Amazon.
I don't think it is obvious hyperbole, most of the people I know seem to think Amazon is in control of most of retail. Even the US gov seems to think so too. I hate that my local book stores are dying. But they were way more expensive, it's only recently here in the UK that super markets could start discounting books (I think I read that right a few years back). Most of what Amazon gets accused of, is being anti competitive. I don't think they lack competition at all, I think their competitors just want protection from real competition and hence they lobby government.
I’m suspicious that unique content is something that consumers intrinsically value. While the first round of game of thrones is fun, the 5th clone gets pretty old.
The question is how do we algorithmically boost unique content without bringing along junk content.
It wasn't totally clear to me if those were all physical purchases or not. However, it would be shocking if in-store sales weren't markedly down. I basically haven't been in a store casually to browse for over a year and I doubt that's unusual.
The book industry was not hit driven and it which was more profitable in the early 1960s when the book industry was owned by people who were good at publishing.
By the mid-1960's every petroleum and electronics conglomerate had capital that it couldn't put back in its own business, so they started buying other businesses, and publishers were a popular target.
Once the publishers were controlled by people who were motivated by money they tried to make more of it but in the process profitability dropped, sometimes below zero.
Particularly interesting to me is that a) American publishing early on consisted mostly of reprinting foreign hits due to lax copyright b) the 1920s golden age was largely accounted to by macroeconomic trends c) in the 40s publishers got by printing hits for the overseas military and d) even the “modern” publishing industry born in the 50s was subsidized by commercial hits.
You are attributing profitability to the industry being "owned by people who were good at publishing" rather than a large variety of things like a rapid and massive increase in the entertainment options available to the average person.
Most people do not read for pleasure often. Those who do will most often read hits. Those who read outside of that are a very small portion of the population.
Brick and mortar bookstores I’ve seen that have done well usually have something to keep patrons coming in the door regularly, like live events for the community or a cafe that sells coffee and snacks to consume while leafing through a book.
Or they diversify into other fields like stationery where people actually prefer buying them in person sometimes.
Power law exists in every industry and the profits from the top sellers do indeed fund the long-tail.
This is true of music, books, art, everything.
The hits will always be present, and this is OK so long as the underlying businesses continue to invest in the long tail to fund the next generation of writers.
Well you're talking about publishers. But what author can afford to write for months on end, if they only sell 1k copies at £5 each? (I don't know what percentage of that actually reaches the author after publishing)
It depends on the publisher but 7% to 9% is common. So for authors selling "only" 5 K copies the only way to survive is to self-publish. Now of course when you self-publish you have to find a way to reach your audience.
Is the article saying that's a problem? If there is a problem it's a form of life being destroyed ("Publishers now worry about the long-term health of physical bookstores"). Reminds me of my father taking me to the local VHS rental place when I was a kid. That's gone now. Bookstores could easily follow.
Of course these changes happen due to consumer decisions. It's creative destruction and I wouldn't want to live in a static society. But for people who are attached to the thing that's disappearing, it's a little sad. I've discovered authors by mistake in bookstores. I use Amazon and Alibris all the time but it's not the same as a bookstore.
Bookstores are different from "physical stores" in general because books themselves are arguably obsolete.
My $50 Fire tablet can hold 1000+ books in PDF form not to mention Kindle format, HTML, etc. It's almost as good as "read a penguin paperback" on the bus or in bed.
Go to an academic library and you see the stacks are empty (of people), books rarely circulated, but people are crowded around the computer terminals. (e.g. smart introverts go use the terminal deepest in the stacks)
"Books" as a form of literature could survive the end of physical books quite well, just as "Movies" could survive if the theaters never re-opened and it was all direct to video.
Contrast that to Lowe's or Kohl's or some other store that sells physical objects that are still in demand.
B and N tried the "build a community space with free WiFi" but in our town it became a downmarket version of the public library (another five minutes from the police station) and one day they "kicked the bums out" and as I walked by an Asperger's female with poor hygiene was complaining about it.
Physical books maintain a UI advantage for many kinds of works, which may outweigh their extra storage burden and lack of full-text search. They compete worst (in fact they lose, probably, overall) for ordinary fiction, and other works that use few text features and are mostly linear prose. In favor of ebooks, that category does happen to be a high percentage of all books sold.
Actually if you want to refer to material in five different books simultaneously and have a notebook to write in and a scratchpad traditional media still wins.
The publishers usually survive because of the income generated by large bestsellers. This income is what pays for the books that end up not selling well. The vast majority of books don't sell much, so without the popular books, publishers can't afford to publish.
There are many publishers today whose whole operation is basically funded by two or three authors that sell really well. Those earnings offload the cost and losses of the other books.
Reading that, it leads me to believe that the best-selling authors are really funding other peoples' hobbies.
I wrote a draft of a book around the beginning of the pandemic. At the end, I lost interest and moved on to other things. (The whole idea of trying to get it published looked harder than writing the first draft.)
Not so much, publishers view the long tail of currently non-bestselling authors as a pile of lottery tickets. Some of those will pay off, and that funds the next pile of lottery tickers, which is the business model.
So do you think it's worth trying to get it published? I enjoyed writing it until I got to the last chapter. By then I was ready to do something else.
Honestly, I'm kinda curious what the "time commitment" is to revise and publish. It probably took me about 100 hours to write the first draft. When I've looked back I see typos, so I assume that putting the polish needed to try to publish it would take at least another 100 hours.
It extends to music as well. Consider the acclaimed jazz label ECM. Some of its recordings of more obscure jazzmen sell only a few hundred copies, not even covering production costs. But a Keith Jarrett record will sell so many thousands of copies that it can subsidize other releases on the label.
4% of your market buying the same paperback in some mass hysteria moment is not sustainable, that's just not how physical books work.
That's exactly how physical books work. It's always been this way. All media is a hit driven business with a long tail (perhaps with the exception of film which doesn't have much of a long tail).
No, historically most of these books would simply not be published; the publisher would make a run only if they believe they can sell a larger quantity - and they had more means (more control over distribution and marketing) to ensure that they sell most of what they printed even if it turned out to be not so popular.
Right. It's a property of winner-take-all pursuits where the maximum scale is at the unit of the individual and the product can be replicated for low marginal cost. It's especially magnified when it's a common passion pursuit since that increases the supply of people doing it. It's a recipe for an extremely large long-tail.
I think Nassim Taleb does a good job talking about this in his books. In essence, more and more of things that exist in the world follow a power series distribution where as this wasn’t the case in the past. We today live in the world of “Extremistan” where it’s winner take most.
In fact I think he uses book sales as an example of this today.
That's globalization and, in the "intellectual property" area: 1) the ability to record & duplicate things in the first place—being able to play the piano tolerably well is worth basically nothing now, socially or commercially, which wasn't the case before radio & recorded music became common, for example, and 2) ever-decreasing costs of duplication.
Vonnegut treated of this in more than one of his books. He seemed to regard the effect as likely more socially destructive than it was net-beneficial.
Yeah “Player Piano” was a good read. I don’t think I really 100% got it when I was 15 but it rings true today still. Might reread it - building a collection of novels for my son in case I die early. And that’s one (as well as “Breakfast of Champions” and “Slaughterhouse 5”) from KV he should read.
Assuming some kind of long tail, then this just means they're giving slightly more risky authors a chance just in case any becomes the next JK or whatever. Is this a bad thing?
I'm sure most authors would rather their work was published, even if it only sold a few thousand.
Agreed. I also wonder if we underestimate or undervalue when thousands of people pay for and read your material. (Many of those books won't sell close to 5k copies, but that's the bar the article set.)
I think a lot of the hand-wringing about this forgets that books are very cheap to produce. A single annual bonus for a FAANG software developer could easily cover the full upfront cost of several books, including a decent sized advance for the author (not GRRM or JK Rowling obviously, but a normal author).
A book that sells 5k copies probably isn't making money, but it also isn't losing a large amount unless they gave the author an unusually large advance.
Power law distribution of popularity, attention, wealth, and success.
There are many important, insightful, landmark works that languish in obscurity.
How many people read Chalmers Johnson or Bartolomé de las Casas? Heck, how many people even read all six volumes of Edward Gibbon's anymore?
Popularity doesn't really matter unless you're trying to eek out a living with copy. I wouldn't count on becoming rich, or even comfortable, as a writer unless you're a public figure or celebrity already, or know one.
The most famous Edward Gibbon published his main work on the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, and the writing style is famously conversational and informal, especially in the extensive footnotes. It's not at all difficult to read. Though it certainly is long.
Shakespeare's much easier to watch than to read as you can pick up context clues from the visual component and from the delivery of the lines, which aid greatly in understanding. Watching the plays performed makes the plays easier to read, over time, in my experience. Unlike, say, a film version of a novel, I don't think you're losing anything watching his plays instead of reading them. Arguably, watching them (or both watching and reading) is the superior way to experience them.
Yes, but hard to find productions of many of his plays, unless you are in a major city in the West, with dedicated Shakespeare companies. For many people reading remains the only option.
There are plenty of really good video recordings of all but the most obscure plays (I'm sure there are a few of King John, for instance, but not a tenth as many as there are of King Lear). It's not the same as seeing it live, but serves the same purpose of making the language easier to follow.
And why is this a problem? I write niche books on topics that really interest me, and if I write a book that a few thousand people buy [1], and perhaps fifty readers engage with me via email, social media, or a phone call, then I am totally satisfied.
[1] I recently made all of my recent books free downloads at my personal web site https://markwatson.com so the situation is now even better: a huge number of downloads, and increased engagement with readers.
I am a big fan of 'C++ Power Paradigms', although it does make me kind of insufferable when talking to people who bring up 'recent advances in AI'. Thanks for writing it all those years ago, it opened my eyes to there being more to programming than reversing linked lists and figuring out widget layout errors.
The article's focus is fiction. Writing a good novel (not pulp) can easily take years. Royalties on a few thousand copies sold are not reasonable or sustainable compensation for that kind of effort.
Article does not provide older numbers for comparison but implies that this represents an acceleration of earlier trends:
> Unlike the serendipitous sense of discovery that comes with browsing a bookstore, people tend to search by author or subject matter when they shop online, limiting the titles they see. Often, they see whatever a search or algorithm delivers, or find themselves steered toward titles that retailers push because they are already selling well. As a result, many of the new books that were released in 2020 languished, as panicked retailers focused on brand-name authors and readers gravitated toward the most popular titles.
I believe the music industry is about the same, or close.
That said, the music industry (afaik) no longer offers mega-advances, etc. How does the book industry do so? That said, if you're a sure bet (e.g., former POTUS) why not self-publish and keep more for yourself / foundation?
Publishers insisting on DRM for ebooks means that once I buy into one ecosystem (Amazon's Kindle is the biggest), then that's where I'll probably stay. The publishers are giving away an enormous amount of power by requiring DRM.
"Books about [...] practical, domestic tasks like cooking were were in high demand and drove nonfiction sales. Nonfiction titles for kids grew more than 23 percent as parents turned to books to educate their homebound children."
I mean...I'm not surprised? The pandemic forced a lot of folks to stay home so I would imagine they would be interesting in learning new domestic tasks, such as cooking. And if a lot of kids were forced to be remote learning as well, that seems like a logical extension that parents would get involved too.
In the cookbook world, it seems that nearly everyone has a cookbook, so seeing a general cookbook (i.e. it has a lot of different recipes to try) with a couple of well known people (Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewert) would seem like a safe bet to purchase.
That being said....I would honestly pass on “From Crook to Cook”. I got it as a holiday present, and I tried a couple of recipes. A lot of the recipes were very off the mark for how to do things, which honestly surprised me considering it was written with Martha Stewert.
The one that sticks out to me is a cimmamon bun recipe I tried in it. One of the (many) problems was the recipe only called for one rise, and IIRC it was after you already shaped the buns in the pan. They did not have a first rise (before shaping) then a proofing stage (after shaping), which I just added because I knew to do that. I had to modify the recipe in several ways and by the end it just was a different recipe. (if you are interested in baking, I highly suggest https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes . I have their cookbook, and it is a fantastic resource).
Did you try the recipes as presented? I can understand that an introductory cookbook shortcuts recipes for the sake of simplicity; and I wouldn't find it fair to recommend a more advanced resource unless the intro recipes give results so bad that they're offputting.
> Did you try the recipes as presented? I can understand that an introductory cookbook shortcuts recipes for the sake of simplicity.
Unfortunately, in the case of the cinnamon bun one, I would argue that is not a shortcut that should not be taken. The reason you have a first rise is to allow for the yeast to "multiply", so when you proof it, you get a light, ariy dough. If you skip that step, the cinnamin buns would come out dense and unevenly proofed since there is simply not enough yeast evenly distributed to make a proper rise.
I recall making a different dish out of it and following their recipe, and it was just okay.
In the end, I simply think there are better introductory cookbooks out there. One that I would recommend oddly enough is Blue Apron's cookbook. I found it used and decided to get it, and they have a lot of pretty good recipes, and they have a lot of "lessons" on how to improve your cooking technique. Maybe it was because I had low expectations for it, but I was impressed with how well it was put together. I have a few of their recipes that I have bookmarked that I rotate into my schedule.
So basically when people who don't read are forced to read because of lockdowns, they pick books written by people they've heard of? I don't see how that necessarily signals a long term trend- do people really believe that long term reading habits will change because you read a celebrity cookbook during lockdown?
92 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadThe problem with the title that I was commenting on (it has since changed) is that almost everyone was reacting to the title alone without reading the article at all. If a vague title forces people to read TFA before they comment, all the better.
I honestly don't see why this is much of a problem? Does the book industry truly need hypebeasts to survive? 4% of your market buying the same paperback in some mass hysteria moment is not sustainable, that's just not how physical books work. Diversity in literature is a good thing, people reading different things is a good thing.
We now have pretty empirical proof that the algorithm driven sales via online and big retail sales channels make the industry more hit driven and less diverse.
The question now is can brick and mortar stores comeback? After a 20 year decline the stores had stabilized in recent years but the pandemic wrecked them. Too soon to tell but I’m pessimistic for their future, which makes me worry about publishing long term.
No. The tax break went on for too long, and that online bookstore became a global near-monopoly on all physical items the size of a coffee table or smaller. Before that, traditional bookstores had already been slammed by grocery-store sized bestseller warehouse chains - the more than a decade long state subsidy to internet retailers actually killed those.
Here is the place where you wanna go to get information about the industry: https://www.bookweb.org. You might could dig enough to find answers to all the claims in this thread.
A lot of Amazon's growth (and really any internet retailer) was because of inefficiencies they worked out of the merchandising process, but a lot of it was stuff like not paying sales tax if they didn't have a physical presence in the state which gave them an unfair advantage IMO. That benefit is disappearing as state's are starting to realize the damage to their tax base (FL amazingly being one of those even though we've paid Amazon sales tax for a while since they have a large presence here), but the damage has been done already in a lot of areas.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-494_j4el.pdf
Amazon collects sales tax in every jurisdiction outside the USA, yet still had incredible growth. It's not really about prices ( a new book I want is £7 cheaper on ebay ) but convenience.
https://www.sfgate.com/business/article/How-Amazon-factor-ki...
The question is how do we algorithmically boost unique content without bringing along junk content.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1514753/
Everything I've read indicates bookstores have done phenomenally well during the pandemic
> Bookstore sales fell nearly 30 percent in 2020, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
By the mid-1960's every petroleum and electronics conglomerate had capital that it couldn't put back in its own business, so they started buying other businesses, and publishers were a popular target.
Once the publishers were controlled by people who were motivated by money they tried to make more of it but in the process profitability dropped, sometimes below zero.
Particularly interesting to me is that a) American publishing early on consisted mostly of reprinting foreign hits due to lax copyright b) the 1920s golden age was largely accounted to by macroeconomic trends c) in the 40s publishers got by printing hits for the overseas military and d) even the “modern” publishing industry born in the 50s was subsidized by commercial hits.
Most people do not read for pleasure often. Those who do will most often read hits. Those who read outside of that are a very small portion of the population.
Some never stopped. Powell's (physical) bookstore in Portland is bigger than most city libraries I've been in. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell%27s_Books
Or they diversify into other fields like stationery where people actually prefer buying them in person sometimes.
This is true of music, books, art, everything.
The hits will always be present, and this is OK so long as the underlying businesses continue to invest in the long tail to fund the next generation of writers.
Of course these changes happen due to consumer decisions. It's creative destruction and I wouldn't want to live in a static society. But for people who are attached to the thing that's disappearing, it's a little sad. I've discovered authors by mistake in bookstores. I use Amazon and Alibris all the time but it's not the same as a bookstore.
My $50 Fire tablet can hold 1000+ books in PDF form not to mention Kindle format, HTML, etc. It's almost as good as "read a penguin paperback" on the bus or in bed.
Go to an academic library and you see the stacks are empty (of people), books rarely circulated, but people are crowded around the computer terminals. (e.g. smart introverts go use the terminal deepest in the stacks)
"Books" as a form of literature could survive the end of physical books quite well, just as "Movies" could survive if the theaters never re-opened and it was all direct to video.
Contrast that to Lowe's or Kohl's or some other store that sells physical objects that are still in demand.
B and N tried the "build a community space with free WiFi" but in our town it became a downmarket version of the public library (another five minutes from the police station) and one day they "kicked the bums out" and as I walked by an Asperger's female with poor hygiene was complaining about it.
(Hmmm.... but what if I had 7 e-ink pads?)
There are many publishers today whose whole operation is basically funded by two or three authors that sell really well. Those earnings offload the cost and losses of the other books.
I wrote a draft of a book around the beginning of the pandemic. At the end, I lost interest and moved on to other things. (The whole idea of trying to get it published looked harder than writing the first draft.)
Honestly, I'm kinda curious what the "time commitment" is to revise and publish. It probably took me about 100 hours to write the first draft. When I've looked back I see typos, so I assume that putting the polish needed to try to publish it would take at least another 100 hours.
That's exactly how physical books work. It's always been this way. All media is a hit driven business with a long tail (perhaps with the exception of film which doesn't have much of a long tail).
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
(works on Firefox too)
In fact I think he uses book sales as an example of this today.
Vonnegut treated of this in more than one of his books. He seemed to regard the effect as likely more socially destructive than it was net-beneficial.
I'm sure most authors would rather their work was published, even if it only sold a few thousand.
A book that sells 5k copies probably isn't making money, but it also isn't losing a large amount unless they gave the author an unusually large advance.
There are many important, insightful, landmark works that languish in obscurity.
How many people read Chalmers Johnson or Bartolomé de las Casas? Heck, how many people even read all six volumes of Edward Gibbon's anymore?
Popularity doesn't really matter unless you're trying to eek out a living with copy. I wouldn't count on becoming rich, or even comfortable, as a writer unless you're a public figure or celebrity already, or know one.
To eke out a living is to supplement with great effort for only incremental gains.
To kee out a living is to release an Indian Tamil-language techno-thriller.
I agree with you in spirit though. Most people are reading shit.
As for the 16th (and early 17th) century - Shakespeare?
[1] I recently made all of my recent books free downloads at my personal web site https://markwatson.com so the situation is now even better: a huge number of downloads, and increased engagement with readers.
> Unlike the serendipitous sense of discovery that comes with browsing a bookstore, people tend to search by author or subject matter when they shop online, limiting the titles they see. Often, they see whatever a search or algorithm delivers, or find themselves steered toward titles that retailers push because they are already selling well. As a result, many of the new books that were released in 2020 languished, as panicked retailers focused on brand-name authors and readers gravitated toward the most popular titles.
That said, the music industry (afaik) no longer offers mega-advances, etc. How does the book industry do so? That said, if you're a sure bet (e.g., former POTUS) why not self-publish and keep more for yourself / foundation?
I mean...I'm not surprised? The pandemic forced a lot of folks to stay home so I would imagine they would be interesting in learning new domestic tasks, such as cooking. And if a lot of kids were forced to be remote learning as well, that seems like a logical extension that parents would get involved too.
In the cookbook world, it seems that nearly everyone has a cookbook, so seeing a general cookbook (i.e. it has a lot of different recipes to try) with a couple of well known people (Snoop Dogg and Martha Stewert) would seem like a safe bet to purchase.
That being said....I would honestly pass on “From Crook to Cook”. I got it as a holiday present, and I tried a couple of recipes. A lot of the recipes were very off the mark for how to do things, which honestly surprised me considering it was written with Martha Stewert.
The one that sticks out to me is a cimmamon bun recipe I tried in it. One of the (many) problems was the recipe only called for one rise, and IIRC it was after you already shaped the buns in the pan. They did not have a first rise (before shaping) then a proofing stage (after shaping), which I just added because I knew to do that. I had to modify the recipe in several ways and by the end it just was a different recipe. (if you are interested in baking, I highly suggest https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes . I have their cookbook, and it is a fantastic resource).
Unfortunately, in the case of the cinnamon bun one, I would argue that is not a shortcut that should not be taken. The reason you have a first rise is to allow for the yeast to "multiply", so when you proof it, you get a light, ariy dough. If you skip that step, the cinnamin buns would come out dense and unevenly proofed since there is simply not enough yeast evenly distributed to make a proper rise.
I recall making a different dish out of it and following their recipe, and it was just okay.
In the end, I simply think there are better introductory cookbooks out there. One that I would recommend oddly enough is Blue Apron's cookbook. I found it used and decided to get it, and they have a lot of pretty good recipes, and they have a lot of "lessons" on how to improve your cooking technique. Maybe it was because I had low expectations for it, but I was impressed with how well it was put together. I have a few of their recipes that I have bookmarked that I rotate into my schedule.