With another chain headed for life in the arms of a wealthy suitor, you have to wonder if perhaps private (and dynastic) ownership is a good thing for bookshops.

I’ve been thinking about that for some time, thinking especially about the horrible pain that will have to be administered to bookstores and their workers if chains are to survive.

I’m not sure I know the answer yet:

The Norman family, owners of the Farmers department stores and a raft of Australasian jewellery stores, bought the 57 Whitcoulls and five Borders shops from administrator Ferrier Hodgson for a confidential sum.

David Norman told BusinessDay the company would almost certainly honour all existing vouchers and gift cards at full face value once the deal is complete.

He also confirmed that customers would not have to spend a similar amount to redeem their vouchers, which caused an enormous customer backlash shortly after the Whitcoulls, Borders and Bennetts bookstores were put into voluntary administration by their previous owners REDgroup Retail.

via Whitcoulls, Borders sold to Norman family | Stuff.co.nz.

Most small and medium-sized publishers who haven’t  YET decided to act on digital publishing wonder where to start. They are especially cautious if they have been in business for some time and have a backlist they are worried about converting. That’s a significant up-front cost for small publishers if they only have PDF copies of their titles.

In their minds backlists look like a cost sink rather than a potential digital profit centre. That’s because depending on who you talk to a backlist conversion from PDF to epub or .mobi will cost about €150-€250 and what’s more, it’ll be even more for a high-design title.

If you’ve been publishing say a modest 10 titles a year for ten years, then you’ve a back list of 100 titles and even at the most reasonable quote that might cost you €15,000 to convert. For a small company that’s a chunk of change equivalent to publishing a few new titles a year in cost terms.

Well to my mind, the first thing ANY publisher needs to do, even if they don’t have immediate plans for digital publishing, is stop making that backlist issue bigger and I’ve a pretty sensible strategy for how they can do that AND start preparing for digital publishing.

1) Stop only holding PDF files
Simple enough really, but if you are using in-house design programmes like Indesign or Quark, make sure you hold onto the Quark or Indesign files of your titles AS WELL as holding on to the PDF. If you are using out of company contractors, make it a condition that designers supply original files to you when they deliver the final files. Doing this means that you have files that are easier to convert then PDFs and will thus cost considerably less money when you decide to explore digital publishing and ebooks.
Cost to you: Nothing

2) Convert all new titles yourself
Many of the best in-house design systems offer conversion tools that publishers  can use to create epub and .mobi files themselves. There are other programs that allow you to create them from word files too, so this isn’t as difficult as it might sound. What’s more it future proofs your business going forward against the conversion fees I highlighted above. If you use an external contractor, make them convert the files at source and deliver the resulting files, this should not take them TOO long and for a modest cost at the time of origination you will be ready to sell ebooks.
Cost to you: Nothing to very modest

3) Audit your backlist
So you’ve stopped making the problem bigger and you’ve created files that can easily be converted to ebook formats of your choice. It is time to see just how big the problem is on the backlist. Go through your titles and find out what files you actually have for them. PDF, Indesign, Quark or Word. From an ebook creation perspective Word files and original design files are actually fairly easy to convert (with a little knowledge) so if you have those file types AS WELL as PDF files for your title, you are in a good place. Sort titles into two groups, those with ONLY PDF files and those with Word or Indesign/Quark files.
Cost to you: Time and frustration

4) Convert the easy titles
As I mentioned in 2 (above) in-house design suites will generally have plug-ins that enable you to convert your Indesign/Quark files and there are cheap commercial products that will convert word files. You can make headway in creating a digitzed backlist by converting the files in those formats before worrying about the PDF files. Likewise, external designers will charge MUCH less for converting those files then a PDF, if they don’t, they are probably over-charging you.
Cost to you: Nothing to modest

5) Start selling them
Of course this section requires some thought and strategic planning* before you forge ahead, but once you’ve done that and chosen the right path for your company, you actually have files in formats that can be uploaded to major ebook retail sites. Create accounts, add metadata and start selling them, or sign up with an ebook distributor who will do that work for you. Once the converted titles start to pay back some cash, use that to convert the tricky or PDF-bound titles.
Cost to you: Nothing to modest depending on the sales channel you chose

And there, in five easy steps, is a simple strategy for small and medium-sized publisher looking for somewhere to start on the digital publishing market but worried about their backlist problem.

*Which Green Lamp Media will be happy to help you with. We can provide strategic advice and planning, operations support or we can provide digital publishing services, depending on your needs.

Image Credits
Some rights reserved by RachelH_

I wonder when most people will realise that B&N is literally killing itself to boost the ebook business. It’s a sensible decision and I’m sure the physical division will persist in a much reduced form for some time to come, but for all of that, B&N is killing itself to survive.

“Barnes & Noble is just a better-run bookstore. They have better locations, their stores are brighter and it’s better stocked,” says Bill Kavaler, a senior analyst at brokerage firm Oscar Gruss & Son. “And while there’s some discomfort with Barnes & Noble’s management, you can’t say they’re not trying to run a good book chain.”

But the question is how long Barnes & Noble can stay ahead of the gradual shift from print to digital. Barnes & Noble still has 705 bookstores in the U.S., and those locations are less profitable than they used to be, though that drop seems to be slowing. Worse, its online operation continues to lose money. Overall, Barnes & Noble’s profits in its most recent quarter, which ended in January, fell 25% from a year earlier to $60.6 million. In order to stem the losses, Barnes & Noble’s executives decided recently to stop paying stockholders a dividend and invest the money in its online and e-books division to boost growth.

via As Borders Closes Bookshops, Rival Barnes & Noble Survives – TIME.

Mike Shatzkin talks about the impressive/scary growth of ebooks in the US market:

Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch reported you have to subscribe to use the links that BookScan numbers show a drop in unit sales of printed books of 4.4 % from 2009 to 2010.

But don’t take that number to any bank. It is already out of date. Cader did a further analysis of more recent BookScan data shortly thereafter showing that print book sales have dropped by over 15% compared to the prior year over the first six weeks of 2011! And the share of print sold online keeps rising, so that almost certainly means that print sales in stores has fallen even faster. Could print sales in stores have dropped 20% or 25% from a year ago? They certainly could!

Sales of iPads, Kindles, and Nooks exceeded most expectations for Christmas 2010. Dominique Raccah, the head of independent publisher Sourcebook, a company with a diverse trade list, reported on her blog that dollar sales at her company in January were 35% digital!

via From some perspectives, we are tipping right now and publishers’ metrics will show it – The Shatzkin Files.

Nice counterpoint to my arguments earlier, but two thoughts in response:

1) This is the beginning, give the folks a few months, they may get the hang of it
2) Even if this fails it represents a loss of earnings for the publisher, even if the results are only 2/3 or half as good as with a publisher, the estate may get more revenue from it

But there’s the problem. A poorly written press release sent unaddressed to The Bookseller’s newest reporter, backed by a quite ludicrous web-page “news flash”, which does not even appear on the site of its publisher partner “M-Y Books”, does not strike me as the sort of marketing campaign the initiative merits.

In short, there’s a reason why publishers do the jobs they do, and why they are mostly successful at it. We should not think that just because it is easy to do something digitally, it should be done with only facile attention to the basics. And as Wendell’s speech made clear, these are readers that are worth nurturing for the long term.

via A fine romance? | FutureBook.

Aside from the unfortunate puns, this is a fascinating story. It marks a real danger for publishers as ebook publishing for estates and the backlists of successful authors becomes much, much easier.

As it does and as the royalties offered to authors who go direct to AMazon, B&N and Apple remain more attractive than working with a publisher, estates and authors will sacrifice their relationships with publishers to gain revenue. It’s a sensible decision but one that further increases the pressure on publishers and peels away at the basis of their business model:

The estate of the romance writer Barbara Cartland has fallen to the embrace of digital, in a move that sees her print publisher suffering a painful rejection. About a quarter of Cartlands extensive ouevre is to be published digitally in e-book format by her estate for the first time on Valentines Day.

The deal has echoes of the decision by Ian Fleming Publications to release the writers James Bond books as digital editions, but not through his current publisher Penguin. The works, part of the Pink Collection, comprise 160 titles and are being made available through a partnership between Barbaracartland.com and M-Y Ebooks

via Barbara Cartland is latest author to be wooed by digital | TheBookseller.

It is hard to recall, but Eason paid around £30 million for the full British Bookshop chain in 2005. Getting half the chain for such a small price shows two things. The first is that retail fortunes have come crashing down driven mostly by the recession and the fall in consumer spending rather then by the more medium term digital challenge. The second is that WH Smith has made a VERY savvy acquisition that is bound to be earnings positive (unless there is a debt element to the deal that we don’t know about).

In a trading statement, the retailer said: “W H Smith High Street confirms it has acquired 22 stores and intellectual property from British Bookshops and Stationers Limited in administration for a total cash consideration of £1.05 million.”

via WHS acquires 22 British Bookshops stores | TheBookseller.

Interesting stats these:

Falling prices and new business models will help U.S. e-book unit sales to grow from an estimated $313 million in 2009 to $2.7 billion in 2013, according to a new Yankee Group forecast. The research firm predicts that e-book downloads will outpace those of paid mobile apps during the period, growing at an annual rate of 83% compared to 72%.

via MediaPost – news and directories for media, marketing and online advertising professionals.

The recent decision by Apple to reject Sony’s eReader app seems to have opened up a much larger and far more wide-ranging debate about in-App and non-iTunes purchases.

Amazon’s Kindle App sends readers to their buying system in Safari to avoid paying Apple’s toll (30%) but recent suggestions are that Apple are intent on stopping that and enforcing either full in-app purchases or at the very least offering in-app purchase as an option.

It brings to mind for me the need for publishers to have their own web strategy and not to become reliant on the platforms of others whose goals and plans are in no way aligned with theirs:

Apple has indicated the sales outside of iTunes can continue, as long as sales through its store are provided as an option. “Rest assured that we want our customers to be able to get their publications easily both from our App Store and obviously from websites or other ways they get them,” Mr. Cue said.V

Apple is tightening enforcement of a rule governing how some apps for the iPad must handle sales, a shift that affects online books as well as other electronic publications. Above, a customer looks at the Angry Birds game on an Apple Inc. iPad tablet computer at the Simply Mac store Salt Lake City, Utah.Apple hasnt disclosed details of terms it is offering publishers, but generally takes a 30% cut on such iTunes transactions. News Corp, which also publishes The Wall Street Journal, appears to be getting a similar deal for The Daily, which Apple helped develop. Rupert Murdoch, its chairman, said in an interview Wednesday on the Fox Business Network that his company is getting 70 cents of every dollar for the first year, with Apple getting 30 cents. He said the terms after that were subject to negotiation.

via Apple to Tighten Control of How Magazines, Content Are Sold for iPad – WSJ.com.

Fascinating way to make money, hard to argue with it as a service too, why shouldn’t the owner of a book scan it for their own convenience?

Consumers such as Yusuke Ohki, who has 2,000 books in his Tokyo apartment, are scanning them and accessing them through their iPads.

Ohki has since started up his own 120-person firm that does the same thing for customers. There are as many as 60 companies offering such a service, according to Bloomberg.

via BroadbandBreakfast.com: Japanese Book Publishers Up Against Wall As IPad Spurs Cottage Industry of Book Scanning.