The buzzword for the foreseeable future in European publishing is difference, and this perspective of increasing differentiation—or fragmentation—is the fallout of globalization. For several years now, what had been an industry where the largest companies had stakes in all publishing segments has steadily given way to an business dominated by specialization.
Some companies have moved out of traditional publishing altogether, most notably in 2007 Reed Elsevier, which sold Harcourt's international and testing operations to the U.K.—based Pearson and dealt Harcourt's U.S. educational/trade/reference units to the Ireland/Cayman Islands—based Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep. Within the trade sector, publishers saw sales gains in such areas as children's, young adult fiction and fantasy. Graphic novels and manga are a strong new segment, at least in Germany, France and Italy.
While Reed's sale of Harcourt meant that the Dutch-Anglo company exited the American book market, several other European groups have aggressively expanded in the U.S. and have targeted America for further growth. French-based Hachette is perhaps the most aggressive on the trade side, and expects 20% of revenue to come from its American holdings, despite the nasty exchange rate of the U.S. dollar against the euro.
Within Europe, difference is a good key to understand how the market operates now. Perhaps 40% of all bestselling titles across Europe originate locally, not globally or even internationally, with a good number of those successful titles spreading, through translations, across the continent. While global wonders like Rhonda Byrne's The Secret and Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns made it onto European charts, authors like Jonathan Littell, Ildefonso Falcones, Andrea Camilleri and Jan Guillou continue to make their mark on the European reading landscape, with national and even regional differences evident on diverse local bestseller lists.
But it was an international star that heavily shaped European bookselling in 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows made it to the top of the German bestseller list in English and hit the top 10, more surprisingly, in Spain as well. However, in Switzerland, where price regulation was abandoned just in time for the German translation of HP7, a market behavior nightmare occurred: despite discounting the book (up to 50%), HP7 figures rose less, compared to HP6, than in Germany, where prices are still fixed.
Another battlefield where publishers are looking to differentiate themselves is digitization, and 2008 could become the year when technological innovation and change are relevant for a general audience, not just for techies and company strategists. The point is not about Amazon's Kindle, which received mixed reviews in Europe, but digitization of content. In 2007, the ground was prepared for several European initiatives to speed up competition with (or alternatives to) Google and Amazon in the quest to make a wider range of books digitally accessible.
Most prominently, the European Union has announced the launch of a European digital library, slated for November 2008, that promises to make available at least two million books, photographs, maps, archival records and film material from Europe's libraries, archives and museums, and to expand that to six million items by 2010. The project supposedly will also include a copyright model for the digitization of out-of-print works and orphan works, where it can often be very difficult to locate the rightsholders, which in the past has been at the core of the controversy between Google and many publishers and publishers' associations.
In Germany, the publishers' association, Boersenverein, has launched its own book digitization and search initiative, Libreka (www.libreka.de), and claims that to this point, 600 German publishing companies have signed up for free scanning of their titles. Still, industry voices have remained critical with regard to the very limited number of titles actually accessible in the system.
The problem of ownership and access to content is beginning to be addressed by ACAP (or Automated Content Access Protocol, www.the-acap.org ), an initiative driven at first by newspapers and news agencies, but which has found support from major actors in the book industry as well, notably the International Publishers' Association. ACAP allows content owners to automatically regulate and fine-tune access to their online possessions. After a preparatory period of only a year, the protocol was released in November 2007 at a conference in New York and is now ready for companies to join.
Some companies have moved out of traditional publishing altogether, most notably in 2007 Reed Elsevier, which sold Harcourt's international and testing operations to the U.K.—based Pearson and dealt Harcourt's U.S. educational/trade/reference units to the Ireland/Cayman Islands—based Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep. Within the trade sector, publishers saw sales gains in such areas as children's, young adult fiction and fantasy. Graphic novels and manga are a strong new segment, at least in Germany, France and Italy.
While Reed's sale of Harcourt meant that the Dutch-Anglo company exited the American book market, several other European groups have aggressively expanded in the U.S. and have targeted America for further growth. French-based Hachette is perhaps the most aggressive on the trade side, and expects 20% of revenue to come from its American holdings, despite the nasty exchange rate of the U.S. dollar against the euro.
Within Europe, difference is a good key to understand how the market operates now. Perhaps 40% of all bestselling titles across Europe originate locally, not globally or even internationally, with a good number of those successful titles spreading, through translations, across the continent. While global wonders like Rhonda Byrne's The Secret and Khaled Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns made it onto European charts, authors like Jonathan Littell, Ildefonso Falcones, Andrea Camilleri and Jan Guillou continue to make their mark on the European reading landscape, with national and even regional differences evident on diverse local bestseller lists.
But it was an international star that heavily shaped European bookselling in 2007. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows made it to the top of the German bestseller list in English and hit the top 10, more surprisingly, in Spain as well. However, in Switzerland, where price regulation was abandoned just in time for the German translation of HP7, a market behavior nightmare occurred: despite discounting the book (up to 50%), HP7 figures rose less, compared to HP6, than in Germany, where prices are still fixed.
Another battlefield where publishers are looking to differentiate themselves is digitization, and 2008 could become the year when technological innovation and change are relevant for a general audience, not just for techies and company strategists. The point is not about Amazon's Kindle, which received mixed reviews in Europe, but digitization of content. In 2007, the ground was prepared for several European initiatives to speed up competition with (or alternatives to) Google and Amazon in the quest to make a wider range of books digitally accessible.
Most prominently, the European Union has announced the launch of a European digital library, slated for November 2008, that promises to make available at least two million books, photographs, maps, archival records and film material from Europe's libraries, archives and museums, and to expand that to six million items by 2010. The project supposedly will also include a copyright model for the digitization of out-of-print works and orphan works, where it can often be very difficult to locate the rightsholders, which in the past has been at the core of the controversy between Google and many publishers and publishers' associations.
In Germany, the publishers' association, Boersenverein, has launched its own book digitization and search initiative, Libreka (www.libreka.de), and claims that to this point, 600 German publishing companies have signed up for free scanning of their titles. Still, industry voices have remained critical with regard to the very limited number of titles actually accessible in the system.
The problem of ownership and access to content is beginning to be addressed by ACAP (or Automated Content Access Protocol, www.the-acap.org ), an initiative driven at first by newspapers and news agencies, but which has found support from major actors in the book industry as well, notably the International Publishers' Association. ACAP allows content owners to automatically regulate and fine-tune access to their online possessions. After a preparatory period of only a year, the protocol was released in November 2007 at a conference in New York and is now ready for companies to join.
