BEA: Print Keeps the Lights On

Shelf Awareness

Amazon may be selling 105 Kindle editions for every 100 print books, but that trend isn't universal across publishing. "We're selling five trade paperbacks for every e-book we sell at Algonquin," Workman group publisher Bob Miller announced Wednesday morning in a panel called "The Report of My Death Was Exaggerated: The Printed Book." Miller, along with Lonely Planet executive vice president John Boris and Chronicle Books v-p of sales and marketing Tyrell Mahoney, emphasized that their core business had not changed. "The market [for travel books] may have declined," Boris admitted, "but it's far from dead." Mahoney agreed: "Everyone knows that print is what keeps the lights on." The day before, at "You Bought Your E-Book Where?", SIMBA senior analyst Michael Norris offered a blunt proposition for negotiating the tensions between the print and digital markets. "I think this industry owes it to itself to make both sectors grow without letting one just pillage consumers from the other," he argued. Instead of overstating the influence of new gadgets, publishers and booksellers both need to take advantage of the interconnected paths of book discovery linking print and e-book consumers--and to remember that they shouldn't be tailoring content to any particular device's technical limitations, but rather to the reader's needs. Norris, too, pooh-poohed the notion that print was on its last legs: "This industry has always had its share of Harold Campings, if you know what I mean," he said, drawing appreciative laughter from an audience that had survived the prophesied Rapture of the previous weekend. Not that there aren't bad omens to be observed: Quoting a recent survey, he warned that nearly 105 million Americans simply didn't buy any books at all in 2010. "That number is growing," he added, "and that concerns me." (At least, he conceded during the q&a segment, that stark statistic didn't take into account the possibility that those non-buyers might still be reading books they received as gifts or borrowed from their local public library.)--Ron Hogan