Current Issues

Peter Kilborn | 11/05/2009

Away from the glamour of e-readers and smartphones which tend to dominate the trade press headlines agenda, the industry has some hard thinking to do if digital is really going to become the dominant delivery mechanism for content, overtaking printed books, some say, within a few short years. Although some of the mechanisms of making books will survive unchanged – many editorial and production procedures, for instance – many won’t. What about the warehouse extensions publishers have been so ready to finance in the last decade? What about the investments in additional shop floor space Waterstone’s and others have made, acquiring more and more stores and more and more space to fill with – fewer books?

It may not happen. I gave a presentation at the International Supply Chain Meeting at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year showing how wrong digital predictions have usually been, particularly where timing is concerned, and I remain sceptical about the universal substitution of printed books by digital content. But if I’m wrong, and the industry is going to survive and prosper, it needs to be ready to cope with the consequences.

One of the big issues here is identification of e-books. The UK industry (unlike the situation in the USA) has by and large accepted the official International ISBN Agency’s position that every digital manifestation should be assigned a separate ISBN, appreciating that this admittedly potentially cumbersome mechanism is the best way to trade digital products in the supply chain, enable them to be discovered using trade-wide databases and in a wider search context, and facilitate reporting back to publishers and to such services as Nielsen BookScan, the UK sales data agency. Despite this, there remains concern about ‘metadata bloat’ – the number of product records which may have to be maintained for a single entity - and the number and cost of ISBNs (for we have to pay for them over here) such a policy demands. Some publishers, ignoring the wishes and needs of their reselling partners, are assigning a single ISBN to an .e-Pub file even though that particular file is never going to be traded. This could prove an expensive mistake if the digital market doesn’t develop in the way they expect.

Another issue is the standardization of sales reporting. At the moment resellers and intermediaries supply retrospective sales data to publishers in a variety of file formats and at irregular intervals. Whilst this may just be a time-consuming annoyance for the recipient publishers, who generally deal with them using manual processes, it is clear that as the number of intermediaries and the amount of traded content grow as they must if digital is to have a significant impact on publishers’ revenues it will become an unmanageable burden unless automated processes are established. The time to do that is now, not when the pressure becomes intolerable.

A third – and most contentious – issue is that of territorial rights in digital content, but that probably needs a post of its own… 

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