MediaWeek (Vol 13, No 13): Bloomsbury, The Strand Bookstore, Ebooks & Libraries, Education & Academic Publishing

Roundup of publishing news from the past several months.

Harry Potter publisher says Covid has weaved magic over book sales (Guardian) 

“It is a complete surprise because we had as grim a beginning to the pandemic as everyone else in March when 100% of our customers shut down worldwide,” said Nigel Newton, the chief executive.

“And then we found that early on people showed short attention spans and were watching TV. But then reading reasserted its power and people found they could escape through books, and sales have been booming ever since.”

When New York’s Strand Bookstores asked for help, 25,000 online orders flooded in (WaPo) 

“How can I not love my book community for helping like this?” she said in a phone interview. “I really don’t think that we’re just a bookstore. I think we’re a place of discovery and a community center. When I ask for help and they respond this fast, it’s so heartwarming.”

She said in the interview that she hopes the store will survive through the end of the year, and then she’ll reevaluate its future.

Chinese censors target German publishers (DW)

As China tries to expand its influence abroad, it's going beyond politics and business to target literature and publishing. German publishers are among those that have been targeted by censors,

Publishers Worry as Ebooks Fly off Libraries' Virtual Shelves (Wired)

But the surging popularity of library ebooks also has heightened longstanding tensions between publishers, who fear that digital borrowing eats into their sales, and public librarians, who are trying to serve their communities during a once-in-a-generation crisis. Since 2011, the industry’s big-five publishers—Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, and Macmillan—have limited library lending of ebooks, either by time—two years, for example—or number of checkouts—most often, 26 or 52 times. Readers can browse, download, join waiting lists for, and return digital library books from the comfort of their home, and the books are automatically removed from their devices at the end of the lending period.

Skyhorse Publishing’s House of Horrors (Vanity Fair)

“I was thinking about what makes Skyhorse different from other companies,” says Lyons, during a wide-ranging interview this spring, “and it goes back to being open to publishing books that other people might not publish for a variety of reasons.” Those reasons might include a short turnaround time, or disinterest from other publishers. They also, one could argue, include dubious scientific claims that toggle between the merely controversial and the outright inaccurate. Skyhorse has made millions by differentiating itself from traditional publishers, releasing books on a rapid schedule and courting controversies along the national divide, from cancel culture to freedom of the press to hallmarks of the misinformation age. But accounts from former employees paint a picture of a company with internal demons too: reports of a toxic workplace, everyday misogyny, and the human costs of mismanagement in an industry always anxious about its margins.

Profile of Penguin Random House and CEO Madeline Macintosh: Best sellers sell because they are Best sellers (NYT)

To almost everyone’s surprise, the answer to those unnerving questions, at least for the moment, has been: Yes. After a steep drop at the start of the pandemic, book sales not only recovered but surged. Unit sales of print books are up nearly 6 percent over last year, according to NPD BookScan, and e-book and digital audiobook sales have risen by double digits. Reading, it turns out, is an ideal experience in quarantine.

“People were watching a lot of Netflix, but then they needed a break from Netflix,” Ms. McIntosh said. “A book is the most uniquely, beautifully designed product to have with you in lockdown.”

As the industry’s Goliath — as big as the four other biggest publishers combined, analysts say, with authors from Barack and Michelle Obama to Toni Morrison — Penguin Random House has fared better than some of its rivals. Of the 20 best-selling print books of 2020, eight (by far the largest share) are Penguin Random House titles, according to NPD BookScan. It has had 216 New York Times best sellers this year. Penguin Random House’s U.S. sales grew 5.2 percent in the first half of the year, helping to soften a global sales dip of around 1 percent, according to an earnings report from its parent, the German conglomerate Bertelsmann. Overall sales at several other major publishers — Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt — all fell further, according to filings.

Corporate restructuring continues at Houghton Mifflin: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt cuts 525 jobs as COVID-19 accelerates online learning (Boston Globe)

Beyond workforce reductions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said it will also save on manufacturing costs by shifting the business from print to digital offerings. The company plans to “retire” older systems and print-centric processes. Lynch said the new structure creates a “more focused company with increased recurring digital subscription revenue that produces higher margins and free cash flow.”

Other education publishers, including Pearson, Cengage, and McGraw-Hill, have also been shifting more of their business from printed textbooks to software and digital tools. The process has taken several years but is likely to be sped up by the pandemic’s impact on schools.

Moody's downgrades HMH (Yahoo) 

In the UK a group is asking the government to look in to academic publishing and eBooks:  Open letter calls for ‘investigation of academic publishing industry’ (RI)

The letter states: ‘The Covid-19 pandemic – where students and researchers have not been able to physically visit libraries and access paper books – has brought the many market issues regarding ebooks sharply into focus, as ebooks have become our only purchase option. As lockdown began in March we observed students borrowing as much of the print material that they needed as possible, but as libraries shut academic librarians then did their best to source digital versions. 

‘Due to UK copyright law university libraries cannot simply purchase an ebook in the way an individual can – instead we are required to purchase a version licensed specifically for university use. Public policy to support education and research should support a healthy ebook market, but we in fact see the opposite.’

Large-scale study backs up other research showing relative declines in women's research productivity during COVID-19. Inside Higher Ed

A new study of enormous scale supports what numerous smaller studies have demonstrated throughout the pandemic: female academics are taking extended lockdowns on the chin, in terms of their comparative scholarly productivity.

Online Test Proctoring Claims to Prevent Cheating. But at What Cost? (Slate)

While some aspects of the pandemic-era classroom translate just fine to a digital format, exams have become more complicated. Typically, students take the SAT, the GRE, or any number of midterms or finals in classrooms with proctors standing in the front of the room. But with students at home, some instructors have turned to proctoring software to ensure students aren’t using unauthorized notes, textbooks, or other tools to aid their test taking.

Corporate Blogging

A rehash originally from September 21, 2006:

As boss you are always worried - at least you should be - that your message is getting out to the troops. Getting this out to them and having them embody it is always a challenge. Having quarterly company wide get togethers is great if you can pull it off. I was lucky to do it once every six months even with a small company. The CEO blog is becoming an effective mechanism for not only presenting the corporate strategy and goals but also the person behind the big desk. CNN recently published this article on corporate blogging and Mr. Charkin is getting quite a reputation. While I didn't start this blog while I was at Bowker, I wish I had because it could have been an effective communication tool. While I spent most of my day with my staff, communication at the level of status meetings and product development discussions can be disjointed and somewhat out of context to the strategy. The type of corporate communication you strive for should be integrated, coherent and concise to be ingested and internalized by the staff. It can often be hard to attain this when you are dealing with the minutia in a editorial or IT status meeting. Offering a perspective on the big picture puts the daily activities in perspective which is what the CEO can do as king of the mountain. A blog entry once or twice a week can bring clarity to what everyone is striving for.

The other aspect of blogging is that is can be personal - Richard recently mentioned his cricket team's closing match and Karen Christensen (also mentioned by CNN) discusses all types of things that aren't strictly related to her publishing company. For staff, this makes their boss more human. You can't have a personal relationship with every employee but it is interesting how much commonality exists across the levels of an organization. Blogging if used as a pseudo-corporate communication method has to be kept up and it also should have some standards - good (not perfect) punctuation and no swearing. It wouldn't be terribly funny for the boss to be written for creating a hostile work environment via their blog. There is the confidentiality aspect which some PR departments are concerned about which is legitimate but I would hope blogging CEOs know enough about what they can say publicly or what they should be cagey about.

Bowker is a private company, but early on in my tenure I was paranoid about email messages from me getting to our competitors since there was so much inter mingling of staff over the years; however, as the years went by we were doing so many more interesting and positive things that I ceased to care. I am more surprised that more CEOs don't do this - maybe it has to do with more mundane matters such as an inability to write coherently in a free form manner.

Just Like Magic: The Harry Potter Economy

I've such a backlog that I am still on The Economist Christmas Special. Here is a selection from an article on the The Harry Potter economy (Economist):

In fact the Harry Potter books were the iceberg. As each book appeared it drew new readers to the series and expanded sales of earlier books in a snowball effect. Thanks largely to the boy wizard, Bloomsbury’s turnover, which had gradually increased from £11m in 1995 to £14m in 1997, took off. In 1999 it stood at £21m. Two years later it was £61m. By the middle of this decade, with Bloomsbury’s revenues above £100m, rival publishers were griping that there was no point bidding against the firm for a children’s title. So far the books, which are published in America by Scholastic, have sold more than 400m copies worldwide. Not all were read by the young. Central to the books’ success was a repackaging, with a darker cover, for adults embarrassed about being seen reading a children’s book.

Mr Newton says he became “fearful and respectful” of the windfall. A sudden hit can destabilise any company, but the danger is acute in the swaggering media industry. Bloomsbury banked a lot of the money, and has taken advantage of the slump in asset prices to pick up specialist and scholarly publishers. It now owns Arden, most famous for its series of Shakespeare texts, the legal publisher, Tottel, and the cricketer’s bible, Wisden. Having learned to handle magic, Bloomsbury is thus returning to its Muggle (non-wizard) roots. The ideal, Mr Newton says, is to balance the risks—and large potential profits—of the trade fiction business with the dependability and high margins of specialist publishing.
.....
Fans get up to much more. As the books and films took off, the hunger for Harry Potter news and content quickly became so much greater than Warner Bros or the increasingly press-shy Ms Rowling were able to supply that alternative sources began to spring up. The emerging internet fuelled their growth. The most obvious of them are fan websites like MuggleNet and The Leaky Cauldron, which mix official announcements with rumours. But the most intriguing is the strange world of fan fiction. Ms Rowling’s “worst nightmare” was that her hero would end up on fast-food containers Re-telling the Harry Potter story is a popular pastime. One website dedicated to it, Fiction Alley, added 14 book chapters in November 2009 alone, together with many shorter works. Would-be Rowlings push the Harry Potter story in new directions by focusing on different characters or writing about years not covered in the books. Many plunge into the characters’ romantic lives—perhaps the weakest point of “the canon”, as the original series of books is reverentially known. These amateur stories, which are often subjected to rigorous criticism from other fans, are for the most part competent. The students in them often talk the way teenagers actually talk. “I can’t just be an arse to him for no reason,” splutters Harry at one point in the third book in the “Lily’s Charm” series, by a writer called ObsidianEmbrace. That carries a convincing whiff of the playground.

Bloomsbury Launch Library Online

Adam Hodgkin has a post about a new and interesting initiative by Bloomsbury (UK) to tackle the library market.

Bloomsbury have held steady to their target of developing a service for libraries, initially primarily in the UK. It has turned out to be pretty much the project that they explained to us before Christmas. A shelf for libraries of some of the best books, from contemporary authors, which will grow and which will also serve to promote sales of the print books and public awareness of the authors selected. I suppose that there is, in this chosen vehicle, an element of quasi-political support for public libraries - a resource which publishers rightly hold to be key to the flourishing of a literary culture. Nevertheless it is interesting that one of London's leading Trade publishers should set such a priority on the support of public libraries, and that they should fashion such a service for a market which must be a tiny fraction of the market for their print publications.

Here is the Bloomsbury release:

Bloomsbury is set to transform the relationship between publishers and libraries, and between libraries and readers, with an innovative development in public lending: The Bloomsbury Library Online.

At a time when the British library system is under pressure to reach larger audiences with tighter budgets, and when the reading public is feeling the pinch, Bloomsbury is launching a unique, affordable and user-friendly online initiative.

In association with www.exacteditions.com and using existing technology in libraries across the country, Bloomsbury is rolling out a groundbreaking e-lending strategy which will allow readers toread collections of bestselling books at local library terminals or with the use of a library card on home computers and internet enabled devices.

The Bloomsbury Library Online will consist of a number of themed shelves: children’s books, sports titles, international fiction, Shakespeare plays, reference books and more. They will launch with a shelf of Book Group titles including Galaxy Book of the Year, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, Orange Prize longlisted Burnt Shadows, by Kamila Shamsie, word-of-mouth phenomenon The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer, and international bestseller The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri. Embracing the advantages of the online format, users will be able to read the book, search the text, access author interviews, reviews, press features, and links to specially commissioned reading group guides.

How will it work?
• The Bloomsbury Library Online will be sold on subscription – libraries will subscribe to a bookshelf for a year at a time and will pay according to the size of population served.
• New titles will be added on a continuous basis – free of charge within the subscription year.
• Users will click through from the Library terminals or through an online portal accessible via any web browser (including those found on iPhone and Blackberry) anytime, anywhere in the UK.
• Text accessible through screen readers and therefore available to blind and partially-sighted users.

Bloomsbury Buys Wisden

I think Richard Charkin will be walking around the Bloomsbury offices this morning with a big smile on his face. Wisden is the official almanac for Cricket and Richard being a big cricket fan as well as Chief Executive of Bloomsbury is going to be well chuffed since they now have their hands on it.

From AP:

John Wisden & Co was bought by the billionaire Paul Getty in 1993. Since his death in 2003, the company has been owned by his son, Mark.

Published every year since 1864, the yearbook is known among cricket fans for its mixture of statistics, features and opinion pieces.

Bloomsbury Publishing chief executive Nigel Newton called the acquisition "a landmark event in the history of the company and an important step in our strategy to increase our presence in reference and sport publishing."

Bloomsbury Reports

Commenting on his company's results and prospects Bloomsbury CEO, Nigel Newton, said:

“We have had a good first half performance, particularly, in the UK Adult and Specialist Divisions. As well as continuing to enjoy notable success from long-running bestselling titles such as The Kite Runner, we are also well positioned with strong publishing lists for the second half and beyond. We are now seeing the benefits of our focused strategy, which is positioning us well for the rest of the financial year and the longer term.”

Other points from the press release:

• Profit before investment income increased 6.1% to £3.5m (2007, £3.3m)
• Investment income increased to £1.9m (2007, £0.6m)
• Earnings per share increased 41.2% to 4.97 pence (2007, 3.52 pence)
• Interim dividend up 7.1% to 0.75p per share (2007, 0.70p)
• Strong list for second half including Alice Schroeder’s biography of Warren Buffet; The Snowball; Just Me by Sheila Hancock; The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer; and, on December 4, JK Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle The Bard
• Net cash balances increased by 13.0% to £53.8m (31 December 2007, £47.6m)
• Well positioned for further organic and acquisition-related growth
• Strongest ever first six months sales performance from the UK Adult trade division

Newton in further comments noted that:

The programme of digitising our entire English language catalogue has been completed. This will enable us to increase significantly the range of electronic products we can offer both to individual buyers and to resellers serving the library and institutional markets, where we have already made encouraging sales of e-book collections. Digitisation also enables us to make our titles more easily available as print on demand (“POD”), a particularly appropriate model for specialist publishing where a wide range of titles are sold in small numbers consistently over a long period of time. In addition to digitising the in-print backlist, we are engaged in an active process of digitising out of print titles in order to offer them POD and in a variety of electronic formats.

Bloomsbury intends to expand the academic part of its Specialist Publishing Division and a number of acquisitions under consideration. We have appointed Jonathan Glasspool as Managing Director of Bloomsbury Academic. The recent growth of the Methuen Drama list, many titles of which sell to higher education students and lecturers, illustrates how well Bloomsbury can reach the academic and higher education markets.

Our sharing of copyrights across the Atlantic and other initiatives have resulted in a considerable year-on-year improvement in the results of Bloomsbury USA, with sales growth of 10% and a 60% reduction in operating losses.

Charkin Returns

Just as the opening credits role in High Plains Drifter, we discern the image of the returning fighter but its not Eastwood it's Charkin returning from the blogging wilderness to post a brief effort on Eoin Purcell's site.

Sales of some novels are spectacular but even the most spectacular compare in revenue and terms very unfavourably with, for example, a drug, a car, an airline, or an oilfield. As an industry we should be very grateful for all the attention (and I am) but why this journalistic obsession with the economics of books and fiction in particular?

Still no news about his permanent return.

Bloomsbury Guidance

Bucking the trend in yesterdays stock melt-down, shares of Bloomsbury Publishing rose on the back of a report from the company that operating results would be better than anticipated. The company is the publisher of Harry Potter but has invested broadly over the past 12 months in advancement of the series' denouement. The company reports that several specific titles, investments in the US and Germany and a number of key rights sales have contributed to the expected full year performance.

Full year results will be released on April 1st.

Bloomberg
Guardian