In this episode, we talk to BookNet President and CEO, Noah Genner, about the decade in review. What were the biggest trends in publishing? What were the biggest changes to the supply chain? And what happened at BookNet Canada? We're also bringing you highlights from our top five most popular episodes.
(Scroll down for a transcript of the conversation.)
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Further reading/listening
What’s In Store: The State of Independent Bookselling in Canada
Innovative bookselling, part 1: Outside-the-box partnerships
Information Doesn't Want to be Free - Cory Doctorow - Tech Forum 2015
Slate: The True Crime Memoir
Buzzfeed: Being "polite" often gets women killed
Transcript
Ainsley Sparkes: Welcome to the BookNet Canada podcast. I'm Ainsley Sparkes, and this month, the last of 2019, we're bringing you the highlights from our top five most popular episodes. That's in the second half of the episode, but first, we're going to be talking about the decade in review. What were the biggest trends in publishing? What were the biggest changes to the supply chain? And what happened at BookNet Canada? Here to tell us all about it is BookNet President and CEO, Noah Genner.
Noah Genner: Hi, Ainsley.
Ainsley: Hello, Noah. Thanks for coming. Cast your mind back to 2010. Now, imagine a highlight reel montage of the changes to the book industry from then to now. What trends emerged? What were the biggest issues in this past decade?
Noah: Wow. Ten years is a long time. It's been a busy 10 years, I think, both for the industry, for BookNet, for everyone. I think 10 years ago in Canada anyway, we just had the launch of Kobo in the Canadian marketplace. So, that was a very significant, I think, change to how publishers operated and how consumers discovered and read books. So, I think that was a massive change. And around that time, obviously, we had an expansion or a continued growth of digital reading. So, ebooks at that point were still fairly nascent in Canada. Amazon had entered the country not long before that as Amazon.ca. And then as I mentioned, Kobo launched right around late 2009, I think it was December 2009. So, in 2010, we started to see the growth of ereaders, digital book buying, digital book production, and workflow changes for publishers. And I think that was a huge change at that point. And so, we saw a growth in ebook reading that went steeply up at the start, especially in kind of 2010, and 2011, and 2012. I think that that was a big, big, big change for our publishing marketplace. And then with that, there was all the technological changes that happened primarily from the consumer side. And by that I mean the huge growth in tablets, the huge growth in smartphones as media consumption devices that really began and kind of 2009, 2010, 2011 and grew quickly to be, in some cases, the dominant way for people to consume media content, including books in some cases.
So, we saw that consumer behaviour really, really change at the start of the decade. And it just continues to change all the time now. And I think that that's the case of technology. And then from the publishing side, we saw publishers move really strongly and quickly in Canada to more of a digital workflow production model and the benefits that that brought, being able to adapt later in the decade to audiobook productions and quicker ebook turnarounds, and things like that really, really changed, I think, how publishers operate and how they deliver content out to readers. And also, I think, you know, this may be a BookNet-related thing, but the growth in data savviness amongst industry participants, if I can put it that way, it probably began well before 2010, 2009, but it continued to grow through the decade a lot. And so, that put a premium on getting data, analyzing data, using data to inform business decisions. That really grew up in the last decade, I think. And so, there's not much in the industry now that isn't data-driven to some degree. And I think that that will continue to grow over the next few decades — if it can continue to grow — and if we can get the data. And that's a huge, huge, huge change to how the businesses operate.
And then I think from the landscape of the publishing industry in the last decade, this is also related to the other things I mentioned, the technological changes and such, but the huge growth in self-publishing in the last 10 years or so, we have seen more and more self-publishing titles enter the marketplace. We've seen more and more authors who are traditionally published shift to a self-publishing model once they've built up their brands or a hybrid model where they publish some books traditionally and some books self-published. And the last decade was massive for that, and it's fundamentally changed how retailers operate, how consumers discover, and what they read and how publishers operate. So, both those are kind of a change to the supply chain and a fundamental change to how the whole business operates. I think those are probably the biggest changes. Technology will always have an impact. I'd love to be a prognosticator and look 10 years ahead and say that there won't be any technological change or that I know exactly what's going to happen, but there's always stuff that we just don't know. So, we always had audiobooks, but this massive growth in audiobooks in the last few years, I don't know that many people saw that coming. So, it's hard to know how consumers are going to change going forward. So, that'll be one of the interesting challenges. I think it's why the industry is interesting oftentimes, is that the consumers change what they do. So, we have to continue to look at them to see what's going on.
Subject-wise, I don't know if there's been any massive changes in the subjects that get published and bought. We have seen a growth that began a little before 10 years ago, but really expanded in the last decade for the Juvenile and YA areas. More books started to get published into the YA category that may have been published into Juvenile or traditional Adult Fiction, for instance, in the last 10 years or so. And we've really seen a growth in that category as a category on its own that the YA kind of titles. We have that little blip in the middle of the decade with colouring books. That seems to have gone away, but we will see other blips. Here in Canada, we've seen a large growth in the last couple of years in Indigenous publishing, in Indigenous books, and I think that that will continue over the next while. And we've seen areas change in how the publishing and how the retail works in it. So, many Fiction categories now are digitally-driven even if there are print books and digital books, but they are digitally driven. So, if we look at Science Fiction and Fantasy or Thrillers, those are becoming more and more digitally driven all the time. And we're seeing kind of a bounce-back in some cases of the Non Fiction titles in the last few years coming in print. So, it just changes, I think, depending on what people want. It'll continue to change, I think.
Ainsley: Yeah. And you were talking about following the consumer and seeing where they go, but as a consumer, I don't think I would've predicted that by 2019 I'd be listening exclusively to audiobooks. I don't know where I'm going.
Noah: I think that even for my own habits, as I've said many times, I'm almost a 100% digital reader now, but I don't think I was 10 years ago. So, that's happened in the last decade for me. And I wonder how many other people have made that, you've mentioned audiobooks — how many people have made that unconscious decision to switch their behaviours? Right? And that's a challenge, because I think oftentimes it's done unconsciously. And so, how do you tap into that? Right?
Ainsley: Can you talk a little bit about the biggest changes to the supply chain?
Noah: Yeah. I think that this change, again, it started a little bit before 10 years, but we've really seen it happen in the last 10 years here in Canada where we went kind of from one supply chain for digital books. We've gone to multiple supply chains based on, I think, a little bit on consumer demand and a little bit on format if those two things can be uncoupled from one another. And by that, I mean we really have a supply chain that is different for digital books than it is for print books. And even within the digital books, it's a little bit different between audiobooks and ebooks. So, I think we've seen that change a lot, and that has really changed how publishers or content creators need to engage with the retailers and the consumers. So, there's these multiple chains, multiple consumer-driven chains that everyone needs to take part in. You know, 15 years ago, if I can go back into the previous decade, you just made your print book and shipped it out to retailers as a publisher or a distributor, and it sold. Now, you have to make all these different formats. You have to engage with all these different actors, participants in the supply chain, libraries, library wholesalers, e-book retailers, traditional retailers, online retailers. So, that has fundamentally changed the complexity of the supply chain and what people need to do. So, I think that that is a challenge. Maybe it's made people more efficient, but I'm not sure that that's the case. It's definitely made them have to be a little more savvy to consumer demands.
Ainsley: So, now it's time to toot our own horn. What happened at BookNet over the past decade?
Noah: Wow. Again, casting way back 10 years. So, BookNet, I believe, this year is 17 years old. So, the last 10 years, a decade, is longer than half our life. But we've seen a lot of change, I think, in the last 10 years. We've launched a bunch of new products and services in that 10 years. So, actually, most of the services we have now didn't even exist 10 years ago. So, BiblioShare was new in the last 10 years. So, that's our bibliographic aggregation engine. CataList was new in the last 10 years. Loan Stars was new in the last 10 years. All the ad-ons to those products were pretty much new. And then two releases of SalesData in that time to our current version three of SalesData, which was a massive change for us in a big build. And then launching late December, early January is our LibraryData. And that brings another fundamental change to BookNet in the last 10 years, is that we added public libraries in Canada as a stakeholder group. We're interested in that, and we added them as an important channel or a stakeholder group to engage with. And so, we've built products and brought them into the mix as a participant in the supply chain in Canada, so an important participant in the supply chain in Canada. So, that was a big change.
We changed the offices at least once in that last 10 years. And we grew along with the launching of all these new services in the last 10 years. Our research division grew in that 10 years to include a huge focus on the consumer, because we do think that that's really, really important, that the industry understands where the consumer's going and how they're behaving. So, all of that was done in the last 10 years, and we added people to deliver those services to the market at their behalf. So, I think in the last 10 years we've doubled in size, and we've added more and more different roles, library people, technical people, podcast people. So, we continue to have to adapt to changes in our own marketplace, just like any business does. And so, we'll hopefully continue to do that. But it's been a busy 10 years from us as an organization, I think. So, a good 10 years.
Ainsley: So, you talked about not being a prognosticator for consumer trends, but what about BookNet? What do you see coming?
Noah: BookNet? Well, I see a launch of our LibraryData product probably early into our next decade, very early into our next decade, I hope. We continue to grow our research area. We think being able to measure what's going on in the supply chain and measuring what's going on, as I've already mentioned, from the consumer side is hugely important. And we see that as a huge function of this organization. So, we continue to focus on that. I think we're going to grow that, because that's what our stakeholders, our consumers are demanding. So, we'll continue to do that. More data-driven projects, I hope. You know, we are continuing to focus on metadata as a tool for discovery. Accessibility is a huge focus for this marketplace right now. So, we're involved in that and standards development. We think all of those are fundamentally important and the areas that we will continue to focus on. So, data, data, data over the next 10 years. I sound like a broken record, but it is all data-driven. We try and walk the talk. So, we teach people to use data in their decisions, and we try and use it for all of our decisions here where it makes sense to do so. And so, I see us capturing more data, more business decisions made on that data, more insights both for us and for the market whole based on that data. And so, it'll be an interesting 10 years, I think.
Ainsley: Well, thank you.
Noah: You're welcome.
Ainsley: And now, we'll pass it over to Marketing Manager, Zalina Alvi, for the best of the BookNet podcast.
Zalina Alvi: To mark the end of the decade and five seasons of the "BookNet Canada" podcast, we're going to count down our five most popular episodes according to number of listens and play you some of our favourite clips. In the fifth spot is part one of our innovative bookselling series, which came out this past summer to go along with our new What's in Store study on indie bookselling in Canada. In this clip, Kerry Clare, the literary matchmaker, author, and editor of the website 49th Shelf, talks about the spirit of ingenuity that sparked the CanLit-focused online bookstore she founded called Briny Books and its partnership with the brick-and-mortar bookstore, Blue Heron Books in Uxbridge, Ontario.
Kerry Clare: I am very inspired by how positively it's been received. I think there is an appetite for new and fresh things in bookselling. And Shelley Macbeth from Blue Heron knows that, and that's why her store is doing so well and why she's so well-known in the community, because she's willing to take risks and try new things. And so, it was really exciting for me that she was willing to go along with this project. And so, now that it has been successful, I feel pretty positive about moving forward and just keep going and keep selling good books. And I hope too that it inspires people to think more about where they buy their books, what kind of books they buy. It might make people who aren't reading as much as they want to be pick up a book and read it. And all of those small actions, I think, come together, and I think they can make a big difference.
Zalina: Next up in the fourth spot is an episode we did in July 2018 with fundraising consultant, Rahim Ladha, who started an awards program for underrepresented writers in Canada called Shoot for the Moon. Here he is talking about the need for a program like this and how he got it off the ground.
Rahim Ladha: And some of them you give them ratings posts by racism campaign. I'm sure you've seen, of course, as well. I, first of all, was horrified just in terms of...because you know privilege exists, you run into your career every day no matter what kind of professional yard, I mean, and it's so frustrating. I've had my fair share of it where opportunities have been denied for one reason or another. People can extrapolate from that. And I looked at that, and I was mad first of all. That was my first reaction, was like genuine anger. And then I thought, "You know what? You have the opportunity to do something about that." So, what is that? I started thinking of it. And I literally just started taking advice from people, friends versus looking at the Twitter hashtag. And I was looking at everything. I was just like, "Well, why aren't there more...? Why isn't there not more money?" Just, you know, whether it's an award or just grants for process, you know, things like that. And process was a very important thing for me in terms of dance-wise. So, I was thinking, "Okay. Why don't we treat the time that a writer has, even if they're just sitting around and staring at a blank page," which is going to happen a lot, "why don't we treat that as valuable time to at least know, you know what, you're supported in just one way or another." So, I figured, "Okay. Budget out for three years." That was my first reaction, was like, "Budget out for three years. How much money can you, like, either have or will have?" Like, look at the numbers. And then, when I saw what was doable just in terms of doing one award, I thought, "Okay, let's do it." I just announced it, and, you know what, when I announced, I looked at the numbers again, I'm like, "Well, we kind of have room for another, and there's..."
Zalina: Sorry. Which one was the first one?
Rahim: That was Spark. So, that was for Queer, Trans, Two-Spirited, Black Indigenous Persons of Colour. It literally, the dialogue was, "Well, $1,000 a month seems good."
Zalina: In the third spot is one of our earliest episodes. It's a talk given at our Tech Forum conference in 2015 by writer and activist, Cory Doctorow, where he describes three laws of information-age creativity, freedom, and business that are woven deep into the fabric of the internet's design, the functioning of markets, and the global system of regulation and trade agreements. It's heavy stuff.
Cory Doctorow: Now, of course, the DMCA's prohibition on breaking locks doesn't actually stop people from breaking locks. The easiest way to break a lock, if you're interested, is to just visit The Pirate Bay and download a copy of the work that has already had the lock removed from it. But it does mean that once Amazon, or Apple, or Adobe, and that's just the As, puts its lock on your copyrighted work, you lose control over that work and over the customer who buys the work. That customer is now permanently bonded to the company that put the lock on your copyright. Because the only way to convert an iBook to a Google Play book, or an Amazon Kindle book is to unlock it first. And the only company under all of these global laws that can authorize the conversion from an iBook to anything else is Apple, just as only Google can authorize a conversion from Google Play to Amazon Video and so on and so on. Which means that inevitably when you and your digital distributor have a negotiation in which your distributor wants a bigger share of the purchase price, you can't afford to turn them down, because if you stopped selling through Amazon and give discounts at Google to tempt your customers to convert their libraries and follow along with you, none of your best customers can take you up on the offer, because the only way to go from Amazon to Google or Apple to Adobe is to dump all your purchased media and buy it again in a new format or maintain two separate ecosystems that you flip between depending on which retailer you bought it from.
It's as though we passed a law that said that every time you bought a book from Chapters, you'd have to buy the bookcase from The Brick. Now, you can understand why this would be good for The Brick and good for Chapters, but it wouldn't be very good for the companies that are making the books. Now, this is not a hypothetical, this business where distributors get the whip hand when you put DRM on your works. All you have to do is think back last year to Hachette when it had its very famous and infamous dispute with Amazon in which they had a disagreement about how much money should be going from one to the other. And Amazon stopped selling Hachette's ebooks, and Hachette had to effectively capitulate to Amazon, because since the very first days, Hachette had been the publisher that was most aggressive about insisting that all of their works were sold with DRM. So, its customers, more than any other publishers, were locked to Amazon. And if it took its business elsewhere, those customers would remain in Amazon's wild garden. Now, this is only going to get worse. There's another Amazon division that you're familiar with called Audible that doesn't just control a small majority of all the ebooks, but actually controls 90% of the digital audiobook market. They're also the only audiobook distributor that will sell on to iTunes. And unlike Amazon with its ebook business, Audible will only allow you to sell through them if you allow them to put their DRM on your works. This is not optional when it comes to Audible. And they've already started to put the screws to the audiobook publishers and the studios, and this won't let up. It's not going to get better. I'll bet you a testicle, although not one of mine, that very soon they'll start locking suppliers out of their store unless they agree to enormous concessions, and the revenue split, and the marketing of their books.
After all, Amazon does not staff all of its divisions with hyper-competitive cutthroat business people except for Audible, where they send their patchouli-scented info hippies. They have a normalized degree of sociopathy across all business units, and you can expect every one of them to be equally aggressive. And it's not just Amazon. Think of what Apple did with its App Store where it started off by saying, "If you will collectively invest trillions of dollars in making us the dominant platform, we will only take 30% of the initial purchase price, and you can keep all the money you make after that." And as soon as they attained platform dominance, they told all of the people who'd made them into the dominant platform that from now on they were also going to take 30% of every penny that those apps generated for them from now on. And suppliers have to cave, because every serious audiobook customer, the 20% of customers who represent 80% of sales, will have sunk thousands of dollars into an investment that's locked to Amazon until Amazon decides to unlock it, which is to say forever. Anytime someone promises you that by locking up your stuff, they'll protect you, you can tell that they're in it for themselves if they won't give you the key.
Zalina: All right, it's time for our second-most-listened-to episode of all time. Surprising perhaps no one, it's about a topic that continues to be popular in both the book and podcast spaces, true crime. Here's a clip of our own project manager, Monique Mongeon, explaining why the genre holds a particular appeal for women.
Zalina: It's also interesting to note that many of these books, particularly the true crime memoirs, are written by and about women. Have you noticed that?
Monique Mongeon: Yes. Yeah. I actually have so many feelings about women in true crime as a woman lover of true crime. Yeah. It's really interesting, because that Slate article, which I feel like we've talked about a lot so far, but it is so interesting and such an interesting exploration of sort of true crime and books is that the closer true crime kind of started to slide into memoir compared to how it used to be, which was a more sort of commercial and investigative journalism approach, is that when it got closer to memoir, more women were writing those stories, and it was kind of, like, for and about women. So, it was really interesting, this, like, female-authored true crime narrative that was for women. And there's a lot of interesting studies and articles about women and true crime specifically. Yeah. So, do we want to get into this?
Zalina: Yes.
Monique: Okay.
Zalina: What do those articles say? I mean, what is the — Why are they so women-focused and driven?
Monique: Yeah. It's interesting, because there's a few kind of main prevailing theories. So, one of them is that it is a sort of cathartic narrative of crime where the perpetrator is held accountable. So, you go in this kind of, like, journey with the narrator of the story where the crime is experienced, and you get this, like, hit of adrenaline, you're excited, you're scared, it's terrifying, you're thrilled, there's suspense. And then when you go through this sort of back end, the justice part of it is that you eventually do see the perpetrator punished for their crime in some way. And that because women are so often the victims of crime or feel a fear that they may become a victim of a crime, they find that kind of, like, comforting in a way to see a sort of black and white depiction of crime and then punishment in the same way that a lot of women, I think, are interested in shows like CSI and Law and Order and all of those shows that I definitely watched as I was, like, a young woman growing into an adult. Because there is this sort of sense that, like, you go on this horrifying journey and then all is right in the end and that there's a sort of comfort in that. And then there was an interesting piece by Scaachi Koul on Buzzfeed called Being "Polite" Often Gets Women Killed, where she actually recounts a situation where a listener of a true crime podcast called "My Favourite Murder" actually rescued another woman who was also a listener of "My Favourite Murder." She spotted a man hunched behind this woman's car in a parking lot, and they actually approached him together, and he ran away. And, at the end, they sort of talked about how their listening of that podcast and kind of thinking about crime and being sort of constantly immersed in this culture of learning about crime made them feel more prepared to prevent it from happening to them.
Zalina: Wow.
Monique: Yeah. It's so interesting. Georgia, one of the hosts of "My Favourite Murder" actually says, like, "We want to know all about it so it'll never happen to us."
Zalina: And now for the absolute, all-time most popular episode of the BookNet Canada podcast, so far, anyway. It's our Demand for Diversity episode from just six months ago. In it, we share highlights from our Demand for Diversity study and clips from Tech Forum 2019 that discussed diversity in the Canadian book industry.
Shimona Hirchberg: We asked readers if they actively look for books about diverse topics or experiences or by diverse authors. We combined positive responses and discovered that, and you may have already heard this stat, 62% of readers are seeking out diverse books. One-quarter of readers were neutral, and only 12% answered in the negative. Let's dive deeper. How does this change when we segment between underrepresented and well-represented readers? Maybe unsurprisingly, underrepresented readers are overwhelmingly more interested in reading diverse authors and well-represented readers scheme neutral. This divide is also shown when looking at whether readers seek out books that represent who they are. Thirty-five percent of our readers do, while 34% are neutral. Underrepresented readers are more likely to do so with 45% in agreement and 35% being neutral.
Zalina: Given this interest from readers in seeking out diverse content, let's see what publishers and booksellers think about the demand for diverse books in the retail market. At another Tech Forum panel called Building Bridges, Not Walls: Successful Publishing and Retail Collaborations, booksellers, publishers and agents got together to talk about their common goals, challenges, and successes. In this clip from the discussion Morgen Young from Ampersand Sales Agency, Chris Hall from McNally Robinson Booksellers, Athmika Punja from Penguin Random House Canada, Megan Byers from Livres Babar Books, Laura Ash from Another Story Bookshop and Ruth Linka from Orca Book Publishers talk about how diverse books are actually selling well.
Chris Hall: I'd like to advocate for something based on this morning's keynote address. And that is Indigenous publishing. When we set up our store in The Forks, it's 1,000 square feet, we have a 25,000 square foot store in Winnipeg and in Saskatoon. We have about 45 shelves of indigenous books in the big stores. We put in 15 in the 1,000-square-foot store at The Forks. The Forks in Winnipeg is in an ancient meeting site for indigenous people. So, it felt right. It felt like something we do well. We do a lot of events with indigenous books, and the response has been amazing. The whole community is buying books from that store, families coming in and buying kids' indigenous books for their kids from all the communities of Winnipeg. I think it's a real necessity in this country and in our city in particular, and our two cities, because Winnipeg and Saskatoon are on the front edge of this calamity. And so, yeah, there are many, many stories to be told from that community. And I would urge everyone to tap into the great storytellers that are coming from there. Sorry.
Morgen Young: Don't be sorry. I think that that's great. And I think that that's exactly why you want to have a conversation with your booksellers, because this is exactly the kind of feedback that we're looking for to take back to publishers in order to fulfill that kind of demand, which I think that they're doing. And that is a trend that we've heard started more in the West, and it's taken a little while for those kinds of books on indigenous topics by indigenous authors to really take off in Ontario anyways. And now we're really seeing it as well. It's true. It's interesting.
Chris: Absolutely. A lot of our shelf space is taken up by local publishers, so they are from Manitoba and Saskatchewan. They're the ones producing these things. So, it just needs to spread from there.
Laura Ash: Well, one of the things that I thought was interesting was someone who mentioned earlier, but there was, like, a lack of data. And fair, there's a lack of data, because bookstores might not be taking a chance, but there actually are bookshops who are taking a chance and maybe you're just looking at the data wrong. I mean, I don't know much about data, but if you look at the bookshops that their mandate is to make sure that they have queer content, black authors, LGBTQ, trans, indigenous and see how well they're doing, you'll realize that there is a need for that. There's a want for that, and there's no risk, like...
Chris: No, there isn't. It's not altruism.
Laura: Just, I don't understand.
Ainsley: Thanks for listening to our podcast this year. We'll be back in 2020 with all-new episodes. We look forward to talking to you then. You can find the links to all the episodes we mentioned in this episode in the show notes. I'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge that BookNet Canada staff, board, partners, and our makeshift podcast studio operate upon the traditional territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, the Anishinaabe, the Haudenosaunee, Wendat, and Huron indigenous peoples, the original nations of this land. We endorse the calls to action from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and support an ongoing shift from gatekeeping to space-making in the book industry. And we hope that our work, including this podcast, helps to create an environment that supports this shift. We'd also like to acknowledge the Government of Canada for their financial support to the Canada Book Fund. And of course, thanks to you for listening.
A deep dive into book prices in Canada from our upcoming Canadian Book Consumer Study 2023.