(no subject)

[ivyfic]

This week's Publishers Weekly shows the book industry disappearing into a black hole.

This is a bad sign.

They have a list of industry stock prices. Book stocks are never the most profitable, but on this list, the average stock drop is around 50%. And then there's Borders. Borders stock has dropped 96% over last year--from 10.65 a share to .40. According to Publishers Marketplace, "they were informed by the New York Stock Exchange on December 31 that their stock is in danger of being delisted after trading for less than one dollar for 30 days."

We are all going down.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Perhaps that was why they had the best selection of calendars for the tardy-of-purchasing, like myself: no one else was buying!

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

I would suggest using Amazon (AMZN) and Barnes & Noble (BKS) as somewhat better indicators of market health than Borders--Borders made some really stupid business decisions in a effort to make totally inappropriate growth targets. The others are much more in line with general retail trends. Which is not to say that publishing, as a business, won't need to overhaul itself to changing business models--it will--but I don't think this is the harbinger of DOOM you're making it out to be.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Amazon down 44.6%. B&N down 56.5%. Oh, I think publishing will be around in the future, but it looks to be one of the toughest years in its history.

[chuckro.livejournal.com]

The S&P 500 is down about 45%, is more my point. The non-Borders book retailers are within a comfortable range of that.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Um. Out of curiosity, what did Borders do?

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Short version: they leveraged themselves too much. Basically, a few years ago they borrowed heavily to build more stores and develop in-store print-on-demand and that sort of thing. By the beginning of 2008, they were in too much debt and looking to sell. They basically sold their souls for a loan (I don't remember the exact terms, but the loan-giver gets a huge share of the company if they default) to make them attractive enough to sell. They hoped to have an offer by last fall. Then the economy went to crap and they missed the deadline on the loan. I believe they've been getting extensions, but they've also had huge turnover in management to try and fix this. But with booksales down (depending on how you count it) somewhere between 7% and 20% over last year, this is not a good time to be shaky financially. Chances are, they will go bankrupt sometime this year. If you have a Borders gift certificate, use it now.

[raveninthewind.livejournal.com]

Related to this topic:
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=1565

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

My parents sent me that WSJ article. From what I've seen within the industry, it's completely right. At the moment, the only books whose sales continue to be strong are the blockbusters—if publishing is going to survive at all, it needs to focus its attention on blockbusters rather than splitting that attention over hundreds (or thousands) of books that barely break even.

The blog response, though… So many things I disagree with in that. (Um, this kind of turned into a huge rant, not directed at you, but at the blog. I may post it there later. But, uh…here you go…)

1 – It's presenting commercial success and quality as mutually exclusive (which they aren't), assuming that publishers can either line their greedy pockets or produce "culture." Believe me, most people in this business are here for the love of books, not the money.

2 – It refers to books with big advances as undeserving. Undeserving? I'm not going to argue the literary merit of Dewey, but that book more than made back its advance and is one of the reasons Hachette is the only publisher that seems to be doing well right now. Big sales deserve big advances. That's good business. Advances aren't some grade publishers are giving out for effort.

3 – Holding up Penguin Classics as a purveyor of culture. Penguin Classics publishes classics because they are public domain and therefore free. The only cost is production. If that was not the case, Bronte and Melville wouldn't be readily available. And to think that those classics—a term that has more to do with historical perspective and tradition than objective merit, compared to everything written at that time—did not have to face market pressures in their own time is ludicrous.

4 – It's all well and good to complain about the attention paid to bestsellers, but bestsellers are called that because they sell. And just throwing money and publicity at a book is not enough to make it one (I give you The Interpretation of Murder), so it's not like publishers are being arbiters of culture, choosing to focus on these books because they think they are more worthy. Publishers focus on the books they do because they think they will sell. That's it. And it's pretty ludicrous to expect those of us trying to make a living in this industry to deliberately make bad business choices. You want art for art's sake? That's why there are so many charitable organizations for the arts.

5 – Why is this person complaining about bestsellers squeezing out other books? Do they have any idea how many books are published every year? Even in this recession, my company is publishing more books next year than it ever has before. We are in no danger of seeing the number of new books each year drop below the tens of thousands. Those books are out there right now. If this blogger doesn't want to read Dewey, it's not like there aren't other options.

The problem with these sorts of rants, which have been around since the dawn of time, is that they are pointing to a problem that doesn't really exist. There are thousands of excellent writers in print and in bookstores right now. The problem is not the lack of options, it's that the author of the rant thinks people should pay attention to "worthy" books, not the stuff they do pay attention to. And that's a problem that has no solution.

One of the biggest problems facing publishing right now is that is filled with people who are making decisions based on love of books, not on business. That's how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place. I should just point to the number of layoffs happening in book publishing right now as proof that we have not been focusing on the bottom line nearly enough. We are businesses, to survive we have to start acting like businesses. To expect us to act like patrons of the arts is ludicrous.