On Book Publishing…

Linked below is a very sobering article about how the publishing industry works. The author read all the transcripts from the antitrust case stemming from Penguin Random House trying to buy Simon & Shuster (it was blocked).

From the testimony, the author draws out some statistics:

• The industry is “hit driven,” meaning almost all books fail, and business is kept alive by the tiny percentage that succeed
• 96% of books sell less than 1,000 copies; 50% of books sell less than a dozen copies
• The big hits are consistently celebrity books and “franchise authors”; these are the people who get advances they can live on

(Something else I learned from a friend: lots of “traditional” publishing houses will only publish your book if you guarantee a minimum purchase. Consequently, this friend had pallets of her book in her garage. Also, if you want your book on the front table at an airport bookstore, that’ll be $7,500 per week, thanks.)

I’ve published four books about CMS(-ish). O’Reilly published the first, I self-published the next two through Amazon, and the fourth was published through some other means (I just co-wrote it; I didn’t do much with production).

In the technical space, physical book publishing has nose-dived. I can tell you from my experience with O’Reilly that they’re way, way more interested in online access and video tutorials these days. The publisher A Book Apart just recently went under. And the other day, I realized that the computer book section at Barnes and Noble was only about three-feet of shelf space, way in the corner.

I’m left wondering if books are the right medium for transmitting large bodies of information in this age. Don’t get me wrong, I love books – I have a home library of some 1,300 titles. But if you really want to get information across to an audience, is a serial, chapter-by-chapter book the right way to do it anymore?

(Note that I differentiate this from reading for pleasure. There’s still value in a serialized narrative, but that’s very different from learning or reading for information.)

There have been amazing advances in the ePub standard. I read an entire book (ha!) on ePub3, and the format is less of a book, and more of a container for an interactive experience. You could create something in the ePub format that only vaguely resembles a “book” in the traditional sense.

I have another friend who wrote something amazing in Notion (or Roam?), the note-taking app. It became a source to generate a website that had inter-connected chapters that were only loosely organized into a series.

I have a couple more books in me, I think. Mark Demeny and I are playing around with a second edition of “Web Content Management: Systems, Features, and Best Practices” (the O’Reilly book) and there are a couple other topics bouncing around in my head.

But, increasingly, I think a “book” might just become just one more transmission format for a domain of information that needs to be absorbed, and probably not even the most effective one.