Book Publishers Go Back to Basics (WSJ)

Book publishers are giving an advance review of the industry’s future, and it looks a lot like the past.

After a decade of technological upheaval and lackluster growth, executives at the top four U.S. consumer book publishers say they are done relying on newfangled formats to boost growth.

It has been nearly 10 years since Amazon.com Inc. introduced its Kindle e-book reader amid the financial crisis, destabilizing publishers and challenging their well-honed business models.

Now, e-book sales are on the decline, making up a fraction of publishers’ revenue, and traditional book sales are rising. The consumer books industry is enjoying steady growth in the U.S., with total revenue increasing about 5% from 2013 to 2016, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Executives gathered in Frankfurt for the industry’s biggest trade fair said they are returning to fundamentals: buying and printing books that readers want to buy—and they are streamlining their businesses to get them out faster than ever before.
It is about “knowing what [readers] want,” said Markus Dohle, chief executive of Bertelsmann SE and Pearson PLC’s joint venture Penguin Random House, “to drive demand at scale.”

The shift is a surprise reversal for an industry that experts just a decade ago predicted was facing radical change, if not a slow death, because of digitization and changing reading habits. Instead, e-book sales in the U.S. were down about 17% last year, according to the AAP industry group, while printed book revenue rose 4.5%.

Interviews at the Frankfurt Book Fair with the top four consumer book publishers in the U.S.—Penguin Random House, CBS Corp oration’s Simon & Schuster Inc., Lagardère SCA’s Hachette Livre and News Corp ’s HarperCollins Publishers—showed the decade of seeking cover from outside threats is over, but the fight to overcome the lackluster growth it left behind has just begun.

One thing all agree on is the need for speed. Companies are reinvesting in printed books after years of cost-cutting, and they are building pipelines to bring author’s words into readers’ hands faster.

The effort has been spurred on by the success of books that resonate with the political moment such as HarperCollins’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” by J.D. Vance, about rural American culture and Penguin Random House’s “Devil’s Bargain,” by Joshua Green, about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon.
more at:  https://www.wsj.com/articles/book-publishers-go-back-to-basics-1507983856

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