Last week’s Digital Book World conference lived up to its billing.  Each hour was filled with stimulating speakers and panels focused on every aspect of the emerging world of e-books.

Every aspect except one, that is.

As the three day event progressed I realized that one subject was being overlooked. I pored over the conference schedule seeking programming about print on demand. I found none.

Why should I have expected any? It was an e-book conference, not a print conference, right? Well yes, unless you think of PODs as e-books that are printed and bound. And I happen to think that’s what they are.

It’s not surprising that few think of print on demand as a form of electronic publishing. Because POD produces a tangible object – a printed book – we lump it together with other machine-made goods.  Of course, all printed books are machine-made, whether offset in large quantities or printed on demand in small ones. But that’s where the resemblance stops.

Offset printing is designed to serve a traditional bookstore distribution model. After publishers make educated guesses about how many copies they can sell, they print copies to distribute in bookstores. Because they cannot predict how many copies will be sold, a great many will be returned to publishers for full credit. In the last few decades the return rate for trade books has soared to 50% and even higher, and if the decline of the publishing industry can be attributed to any single business practice, the consignment model of printing and distribution is it.

Contrast that with print on demand, in which copies are not printed until customers have ordered them on the Internet and paid for them in advance. Although books printed on demand are occasionally returned, the return rate in POD is negligible.

Unlike offset printing, POD is ideally suited for a book industry based on preordering – what might be called the Amazon model, a model that is transforming the retail landscape. (See A World without Inventory, Part 1 and Part 2)

The offset and on-demand business models could scarcely be more different from each other. On the other hand, POD and e-books are twins – fraternal twins perhaps, but twins nevertheless. (They were even born the same year, 1998.) The way you order a POD book is identical to the way you order an e-book. The only difference is that the printed volume is “uploaded” into your mailbox instead of your e-reading device.

When we founded E-Reads in 2000 we made POD one of our foundation stones. We were certain that until a viable popular e-reader was created, the reading device of choice would remain the printed book.  This turned out to be correct.  Until very recently, when the Kindle revolution took hold, POD sales represented about 50% of our revenues. It remains a significant contributor to our – and our authors’ – revenue stream. And of course it provides printed copies to those readers who prefer them to e-books. And there are still a lot of them.

It is also becoming a significant option for small presses and big publishers alike. David Taylor, President of Lightning Source Inc., arguably the largest POD press in the world, reported last spring that business was growing at a rate of 20% to 30% annually. Lightning prints, binds and ships 2 million copies a month on machines that run around the clock, a statistic all the more remarkable in view of the average number of copies per title they print on any given press run: two! And that’s just one POD company. There are others including one owned by a little outfit called Amazon. Many independent publishers are shifting to a purely POD model, and bigger houses use POD to keep books in print after inventories diminish and the cost of doing new print runs is prohibitive.

If we may therefore presume to make a suggestion to the program directors of Digital Book World, some attention to POD in 2012 would be welcome by many attendees. How do I know? Well, about 20,000 people have signed up for the On Demand Expo in Washington DC in March 2011.

Are POD’s e-books? Without a doubt.

Richard Curtis

Do you have to go to New York City to get published?

At the turn of the 21st century that was a dead certainty. You came to The City (it had no other name nor needed one) to shmooze with your agent and noodle with your editor and you went home not just refreshed, not just energized, but electrified by the intensity concentrated in the Manhattan heartland. You came in confusion and uncertainty but returned confident that you were back on track, having drunk from the source waters of editorial truth.It was as if faith healers had touched your brow and zapped you with enough received enlightenment to drive you for a year or two before it was time to return to The City for another laying on of hands.

Is that still true? Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, who bills himself as “Chief Executive Optimist” of Digital Book World, says so and in no uncertain terms: “For all the talk of disintermediation, real and exaggerated, New York City is still the metaphorical heart, if no longer the primary physical home, of the publishing industry. All of the major publishers and myriad smaller ones are based here, and despite the increasing amount of influence intermediaries like Amazon and their Silicon Valley competitors have, they’re no strangers to NYC airports.”

Thus spake Gonzales as Digital Book World today opened the doors on last Friday to two back to back conferences sponsored by his company FW Media. “Starting today and running through next Wednesday, more than 1,500 authors, publishing professionals, booksellers, librarians and technologists will be gathered at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers in Manhattan for the 2011 Writer’s Digest Conference and Digital Book World 2011. While I may be a little biased, few could argue that the attendee lists for both events are as impressive as their respective speaker lists. I have the great fortune of participating in both events, giving a couple of presentations and moderating a couple of panels, all with one common thread: engaging readers.”

So, authors? Do you take Manhattan? Or can you take it or leave it?

Read details in Publishing Takes Over NYC

Richard Curtis

After the eruption of Iceland’s unpronounceable volcano disrupted the London Book Fair last month, Publishing Perspectives’ editor Ed Nawotka wondered why “no one is trying to find a way to teleconference people in or to schedule online chats,” and asked if there was any interest in a virtual book conference.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

Technology and bandwidth have advanced to the point where it is entirely feasible to mount a virtual trade conference, one that would be fully participatory for traditional and e-book publishers, booksellers, librarians, educators, literary agents, authors, book-related exhibitors and their technology counterparts – plus the most important attendee of them all, readers; all from the comfort of their homes, offices or commute.

Virtual trade shows are a common practice in many other industries, and there have already been a couple of virtual book fairs including Virtual Children’s Book Fair and the Poisoned Pen Mystery Writers conference which included a number of live and on-demand webcasts of “more than 50 panels and presentations featuring over 65 mystery and crime authors.”

While both examples are relatively modest, they prove it can be done, and the model can be scaled upwards for a full-fledged virtual book expo that participants could attend in their bathrobes!

While the main event itself could be of short duration, it could easily morph into a 24/7/365 marketplace centered around books and authors, publishers, booksellers, bloggers AND readers; a kind of “Second Life” for the book publishing industry. It could be a combination website, bazaar, and social gaming environment where real business is done, books are bought and sold, but with a high fun quotient limited only by the technical skills of art departments, web designers and graphic artists, and the boundless imagination of the publishing industry.

What do you think? Is publishing ready to go beyond eBooks and take the digital transition to the next level?

Richard Curtis

Digital Book World will conduct a free webcast pairing agent and E-Reads publisher Richard Curtis with Richard Nash, a former publisher and now consultant. The dialogue will be hosted by F+W’s Guy Gonzalez and will take place on Tuesday April 27 2010 at 1PM East Standard Time/10 AM PDT. Visit the DBW website to tune in.

Writes Gonzalez:

“The publishing industry is undergoing an extreme transformation, and there are many innovative thinkers challenging traditional thinking and helping push that transformation forward.

DBW Conversations pairs two respected thought leaders for a 60-minute discussion on the future of the publishing industry, and what they’re doing to ensure they have a place in it.

DBW Conversations: Richard Curtis & Richard Nash.

* Richard Curtis, president of Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., is a leading New York literary agent; founder of E-Reads, an electronic book publisher; and a well-known author advocate. He is also the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction including several books about the publishing industry and is a former president of the Association of Authors’ Representatives.
* Richard Nash ran Soft Skull Press, now an imprint of Counterpoint, from 2001 to 2007 and ran the imprint on behalf of Counterpoint until early 2009. He’s now consulting for authors and publishers on how to reach readers and developing a start-up called Cursor, a portfolio of niche social publishing communities, one of which will be called Red Lemonade. He was named one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” by Utne Reader, and one of “15 Twitter Users Shaping the Future of Publishing” by Mashable.com.

Content and features spun off from January’s Digital Book World conference are being generated by the DBW website, and from time to time we’ll pick up the feed in case you aren’t following its postings regularly (and if you aren’t, why aren’t you?)

Of particular interest this week is a roundtable discussion speculating on how the clash of titans Amazon and Apple will play out as Apple prepares to release its iBook – and the radical retail model that goes with it.  Here’s DBW’s description:

On last week’s Roundtable we discussed Amazon vs. Apple, and the consensus was over the next 12 months at least  that Amazon was more likely to benefit from increased eBook sales via their cross-platform Kindle apps than Apple would via the iBookstore.

If the agency model means books are priced same from all retailers, does it all come down to user interface/experience? And if so, has Amazon already won?

Click here to hear the roundtable.

RC

After two intense days of speeches, panels, presentations, celebrations and debates, breakout sessions, networking and exhibits, there was so much to take away from the Digital Book World conference that my head swam. But after contemplating it all in tranquility I was able to reduce the takeaways to one simple but powerful impression: the paradigm shift in publishing from a tangible culture to a virtual one has finally begun to take hold, and its grip will endure.

The moment I beheld a CD-ROM I knew that a day would come when I would behold an electronic book reader. For years I have chronicled the evolution of digital technology, noting its incremental but inexorable trajectory toward a tipping point. I cannot say that we have reached it – indeed, Impelsys’s Sameer Shariff told an audience at DBW that the industry is where the primitive video game Pong was in the early 70′s. Nevertheless, the conference attendees clearly grasped that the gravitational pull on their home planet has weakened and the tug of a new world has become palpable.

How to characterize that new world? It’s no longer about the product. It’s about community, the impossibly tangled, virally sprawling, thrillingly energetic, intoxicatingly imaginative web of writers, editors, readers, entrepreneurs, aggregators, curators and technologists in the service of authors and books, utilizing tools of staggering complexity and power. It’s bigger than any of us but publishing people, even old timers (over 40), have lost their fear and accept the new medium and its tools not just as inevitable but as benign.

Indeed, it took an over-40 veteran, publisher-turned-agent Larry Kirshbaum, to remind the assembly that however dazzling the delivery systems may be, the real magic of books is produced by authors and publishers, and it always will be. Good for you, Larry! And a big shout-out to Mike Shatzkin, F+W Media and the other sponsors for creating an event that would enable us to grasp how vast and wonderful our community is.

We are told that “May you live in interesting times” is a curse. I cannot remember a more interesting time for publishing than today, and I feel blessed to witness and be part of it.

Richard Curtis

“In a dynamic panel at Digital Book World about rights in the electronic age,” writes Rachel Deahl in Publishers Weekly, “a number of hot-button, complex issues were broached on Tuesday. One of the best rights panels of the afternoon, ‘Tomorrow’s Book Contract,’ moderated by Richard Curtis (of Richard Curtis Associates), saw lawyers, agents and an executive at one of the ‘big six’ coming up against pressing problems regarding the fact that the industry has no solutions for how to address certain rights snafus that have arisen as a result of the increasingly fractured, digital retail market for books.”

Curtis’s panelists were agents Simon Lipskar and Miriam Kriss, attorney Dev Chatillon, and Penguin USA Corporate Director of Business Affairs John Schline. Curtis is pictured left. Another illustrious chairman is pictured right.

For the full story read Digital Book World: Debating E-Rights Issues

Ladies and gentlemen, start your crystal balls.

Digital Book World, a conference devoted to exploring the future of publishing both digital and conventional (if there is any such thing anymore) begins today with guru Mike Shatzkin as its driving organizer and master of ceremonies. It will take place at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers in New York City, January 26th and 27th.

The schedule is studded with publishing notables who have led the industry’s charge into cyberspace, but it will be attended by professionals who have to apply the thrilling advances in technology to a business still mired in another century, arguably the 18th.

But “Digital Book World isn’t just about strategies, it’s also about the network,” says the event’s website. “Because of our focus on consumer publishing, our speakers and attendees represent publishers of all sizes and niches – from HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House to Tor, Chelsea Green, National Geographic and Ellora’s Cave – as well as literary agents and other allied professionals, and vendors with an interest in the future of consumer publishing.”

Among the highlights are:

• An overview of Google Editions
• “Back-Loaded Book Deals” with Roger Cooper, Bob Miller and several agents
• “The Next Generation of eBooks”
• “Tomorrow’s Book Contract: New Language and Provisions to Reflect New Conditions” hosted by yours truly

A big draw on Wednesday will be “The Changing Agent-Author Relationship: How it Will Affect the Business Model” moderated by Sara Nelson of Oprah’s Book Club. Her panelists will be agents Gail Hochman, Scott Waxman, Brian DeFiore, and Wendy Keller of Keller Media.

A spectral but influential presence will be Apple, which will be announcing details of its tablet on the afternoon of the conference’s second day, and not a few attendees will be glancing at their blackberries to learn details of the breaking news. Ironically, that will happen around the time of a concluding statement by Guy LeCharles Gonzales of Digital Book World entitled “The Future of Publishing is Bright”.

You can click here to visit the conference website and here to view the schedule.

Richard Curtis

Don’t start the e-book revolution without us. That seems to be the message coming out of the literary agent community as reflected in their response to invitations to a major conference taking place in New York City’s Sheraton Hotel and Towers at the end of January and presented by F+W Media (publisher of Writer’s Digest and Writer’s Market)

The revolution has overcome countless obstacles on the road to the tipping point, but one stubborn source of resistance has been the agents. Their intransigence has not been so much a matter of hostility as uncertainty. Caught flat-footed by developments that went from zero to warp-drive speed in the blink of an eye, agents have struggled to get a handle on their role in the new e-world order. Though they take pride in being ahead of their clients, in the case of e-books many of their authors are way ahead of them, doing things or at least thinking thoughts that do not involve services commissionable by their agents such as self-publication of unsold books. Other agents simply want to be able to answer author questions or help their clients find a place in a universe that seems to be hurtling out of control. One wag described it as “Agents on the verge of a nervous breakdown.” (See Why Don’t Agents Want to Play?)

Mike Shatzkin, chairing Digital Book World on January 26th-27th, is determined to draw agents into the e-book process by designing a number of programs specifically to interest them. “The Changing Agent-Author Relationship: How It Will Affect the Business Model,” chaired by Oprah’s Book Club’s Sara Nelson, is one such. Another, “Tomorrow’s Book Contract,” chaired by yours truly, features several agents, a lawyer and a publishing company rights manager presenting wish lists of contract language and provisions reflecting changes in the publishing landscape.

Other panels and speeches will address non-e-book topics of concern to agents such as “Back-Loaded Book Deals: No (and Low) Advance Contracts, Profit-Sharing and Other Innovative Business Models”.

With its glittering roster of publishing industry star speakers and panelists, we’re told that the conference is almost sold out, but if you’re a literary agent you can be sure Mike Shatzkin will do his best to squeeze you in.

For complete information, visit Digital Book World.

Richard Curtis