There was no talk of “evolution or revolution” at the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair’s CEO panel, just a solid look at what it is, with a glimpse at what’s on the immediate horizon for the global book market.
The discussion featured Penguin CEO John Makinson; Arnaud Nourry, Hachette Livre; Yu Chunchi, Chinese educational publisher FLTRP; Oleg Novikov, CEO of Russian Publisher Eksmo, and was led by representatives from each of the study’s publishing partners. Fabrice Piault of Livres Hebdo began by asking whether the book industry was in decline.
“It all depends on how you define a book,” Makinson observed. "If we’re talking about physical books," he noted, "the answer is yes." But if you look at "our consumption of our media,” he added, “it isn’t decreasing at all.” Nourry said the current travails of the industry were cyclical, and pinned lackluster performance in recent years on the global economy. “We are living in tough times,” he noted, saying the French market was flat, but not declining. “People still want to read.”
On the Asian side, Yu Chunchi, cited a growing, if still nascent business in China, and said the challenge for the industry was to capture the attention of the new generations awash in digital options, “like Angry Birds.” In Russia, the book market is challenged, but potentially vast. Novikov said the country’s largest chain was bankrupt, and that there was on average just one bookstore for every 80,000 citizens. He was upbeat, however, about the potential for e-books to help the industry—provided, he noted, there was some way to combat digital piracy, which he estimated was 10 times larger than the legal market for books.
PW’s president George Slowik then asked each panelist about the opportunities in digital. Makinson said that so far, readers seem only to want books on their devices, and seem uninterested in the bells and whistles of so called enhanced e-books. “But it isn’t all about e-books,” he noted. “Digital is affecting every aspect of the business,” he observed, from how editors consider manuscripts, to back office operations, to production, publicity and marketing.
Nourry remained bullish on print, meanwhile, saying he expected e-book sales to eventually top out at 30% to 40% of the market in France, and said e-books challenged publishers to make better physical books. In sharp contrast to the U.S., where trade e-book revenues are around the 20% of the market, and the U.K., where it is around 10%, Nourry said France’s e-book business was about 0%, presently. Novikov, meanwhile, said e-books accounted for just $2 million in total sales in Russia.
Each panelist embraced the opportunities now available on the global stage, and acknowledged the challenges of the future, ending the discussion with still simmering concerns of currency issues, and digital piracy. Nourry urged the publishing community to work together to lobby governments in their piracy efforts, but he noted, there will always be the ability for someone to pirate a digital copy if they are motivated to do so. The strongest weapon, he said, "is to publish our books at an attractice price, in as many formats and markets as possible."
The panel was based on the “Global Ranking of the Publishing Industry” report comissioned by Livre Hebdo and supported by PW and other international trade magazines. The session was moderated by the study’s author, consultant Rüdiger Wischenbart.
