Zoe Dattner on lessons from the TOC conference
Zoe Dattner recently returned from the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in New York. Below she shares some of her highlights, including an ‘aha’ moment on POD.
Thanks to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, I had the opportunity to visit the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference in New York recently. For those of you who may not know, TOC is a large event, now in its eighth year, initiated and convened by the highly innovative publishing house O’Reilly. Its function is to explore all the current debates and developments in publishing and technology taking place around the world, and thousands of delegates flock from all over to attend.
As with any conference, some content was more relevant or insightful than other content, and one of the things that stood out markedly was just how different the market in the US is, with its wide scope (and encouragement, quite frankly) for playing and exploring, and the multitude of companies and individuals taking part. However, a number of key points struck me as things that should be significant areas of focus in the Australian book industry.
A panel on the economics of a local literary economy focused strongly on the need for the high-street bookseller to drive the ‘in person’ literary community (as opposed to the online community). This isn’t necessarily a new idea, but what was interesting was that the emphasis was really on the bookseller doing this rather than the publisher. In the world of small press, at least, it is the publisher that tends to drive this community. They are the ones holding launches and events.
When it comes to rallying their local community around a common purpose or creative idea, the bookstore can be doing a lot more. Booksellers need to think about what is going to work for their community in terms of accessibility (such as the best time of day for people with children, for seniors, for people at work), and give them a reason to be there (and it doesn’t have to be a big-name author). Otherwise it is all going to exist online, as will the default point of sale. Value the effort the person has put into being there and ‘respect the messy lives of the readers’.
Many of the sessions focused purely on the technology side of the industry, and a recurring theme among the presentations was ‘how are we going to deal with Amazon?’ (represented in one slideshow by an image of a lego Darth Vader figure). There are a lot of start-ups working in the US and Europe that are forging new paths for publishers to embrace in order to weaken Amazon’s stronghold. The message was clear: the publishing industry needs to start investing in its own technology if it wants to make it through the changes currently facing the industry.
Publishing is not just a content-related business anymore; there are now services around that content, and if publishers don’t invest in these services, they will not survive. Publishers are focusing on an easy, simple way to do digital publishing, but what are they missing out on by focusing only on the straightforward? (OK, it’s not that straightforward, but hopefully you get the idea.) Perhaps if publishers told start-ups what they needed, then they will build it.
Goodreads: stats on book discovery
One of the more informative sessions was presented by Goodreads, which recently conducted a survey of 1000 users in the US. It told an interesting story.
For discovery, Twitter and Facebook score very low. Friends’ recommendations (word of mouth) is the highest. (It is not known, unfortunately, if the word of mouth people refer to comes from social media or person-to-person. My guess is that Twitter and Facebook are actually far more influential, but people consider this the same as word of mouth.) Following this, the best discovery comes from Goodreads itself, and then from media (presumably reviews and media discussion). Discovery via bookstore and the library ‘hold list’ is also very good. (A separate session that gave some fantastic data about libraries made the brilliant point that a library is really a showroom, and one that publishers and booksellers should advocate for.) On the question of why someone buys the book after hearing about it, the top answers were: friends telling you to buy it, general hype, and book clubs. Over 50% of readers said Goodreads reviews helped to convince readers to buy the book.
One of the most valuable points I took away from the Goodreads session was the statistic that 69% of people want to discuss the book with friends after they’ve read it, making me think how much better the industry could get at providing special deals on multiple copies (specifically ebooks) and that there should be better, and stronger, calls to action at the end of the book. Considering the technology available to us—particularly with ePub 3—the possibilities for a ‘What should I read next?’ page at the end of a book are vast.
A last interesting thought from this session was that 49% say they’d be interested in reading a book in serial form instead of waiting six months for the release, but only with an established author, or someone they like, not at all with an unknown author.
POD: a distribution solution
Finally, I had a major ‘I get it’ moment about POD in a session between Ingram and O’Reilly media, where they explained the journey they’d taken from offset printing to POD. I’ve been interested in POD for a long time, and have been grappling with the supply issues when it comes to booksellers and distributors and so on, as well as some of the quality issues (which have, incidentally, improved in leaps and bounds in the past year). O’Reilly’s CFO Laura Baldwin put it very plainly, and it now sounds completely obvious. POD is not a printing solution; it’s a distribution solution. When we are selling in, say, 1000 books in that initial three-month sell-in period, why are we printing in excess of 2000 copies? O’Reilly prints only what is sold in that initial sell-in period, and every copy thereafter is POD. Why are we still printing massive piles of stock that never sell? It highlighted to me the fact that we have an addiction to print, and it’s high time we went on the wagon.
This is just a very brief snapshot of some of the standout issues that came out at the conference. The upshot of it all, as someone who works in—and is passionate about—the Australian publishing industry, was that we should be thinking a hell of a lot more creatively and collaboratively and with a lot less fear and paranoia around what will or won’t work. It’s far more beneficial for us to acknowledge that we just don’t know, but that we’re going to find out.
For more information about TOC, including slides and videos from many of the presentations, see the website www.toccon.com/toc2013.
Zoe Dattner is the creative director of Sleepers Publishing and president of the Small Press Network.
Category: Features
