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Ebooks are helping to rip apart traditional publishing, but the biggest thing tearing publishing apart is the disintermediation of their traditional Brick and M
by johnrgrace 14y ago
Ebooks are helping to rip apart traditional publishing, but the biggest thing tearing publishing apart is the disintermediation of their traditional Brick and Mortar channel partners by online bookselling. Further exasperating things one retailer, Amazon, has captured the majority of the online book business.
Publishing companies are all B2B companies with most publisher brands meaning very little to readers, but a lot to their retailer partners. Unlike most consumer goods, books are returnable to the publishers for a full refund if not sold which has been the glue keeping publishers and booksellers workign together since the 1930's.
Publishers were tied to their partners and couldn't walk away from them to go after new opportunities. Further, the "culture" of the industry is such that everyone leading it grew up in publishing so many players never even saw what was happening because they knew how the world worked.
- snogglethorpe 14y agoIt would be very interesting to see statistics about this based on location. Traditional booksellers (and many other types of "small item" retailers) get a lot of casual drop-in business, and fare much better where there's heavy pedestrian traffic. Consequently, places like the U.S. where many people live in sparse suburbs that require them to drive to the store, should be experiencing a much great loss of drop-in businesses like bookstores tend to be. [This certainly matches my impression; the area I live in, Tokyo, despite bookseller and publisher hardships (no place is really safe), still has a huge number of bookstores, with many to be found in any busy shopping area. The news stories I read about the U.S. on the other hand, make the situation there sound absolutely dire, with bookstores seemingly disappearing completely in some areas...]