Richard Charkin with newly arrived Ukrainians at his favorite spot in the Tarn, in the south of France. Image: Richard Charkin
Editor’s note: From his summer place near the French village of Puycelsi, Richard Charkin has sent back the above photo and a note about how much he admires ‘the strength and resilience of the Ukrainian people’ including ‘the determination of these six Ukrainians, who traveled 3,000 kilometers to escape with their two dogs and a cat to a safe place in France and wait for the moment to return and rebuild their lives and their country. Slava Ukraini!’
By Richard Charkin | @RCharkin
‘The Key to the Future’
While we’re all working furiously to help the Ukrainian people, we should not forget the importance of our collective day job, publishing.
Emilie Marneur
One of the major developments in our industry has, of course, been the ability for us to publish digitally as well as in print. This column is all about digital publishing and, given my extreme age and waning faculties, I’ve been assisted on the recent developments by the much younger and more digitally-savvy Emilie Marneur, the director of audience and business development at Bonnier Books UK. She oversees Bonnier Books UK’s digital strategy and manages its digital-first imprint, Embla Books.
It all started for me 40 years ago when I heard about a New York-based start-up, which was developing electronic versions of reference books for distribution on quaintly-named “floppy disks.”
I managed to license them various smaller Oxford dictionaries for an absurdly high advance with promises of untold royalty wealth to follow. I don’t think we ever saw a royalty check but we did have some electronic products to boast about, and the advance helped pay for a few lexicographers. Less than a decade later, we were able to sell the whole of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary on just two CD-ROMs.
General book publishers in the 1990s were way behind. It wasn’t until the launch of Amazon.com in 1994, opening up a completely new sales channel, and the subsequent launch of the Kindle in 2007, that publishers began to wake up to a new world order.
How would traditional bookshops survive? Public libraries? What would be the appropriate royalty rate? Is the sale of an ebook a sale or a license? How to protect the content from piracy? How to avoid monopolization of the distribution channel without breaking antitrust regulations?
In parallel, the 1995 launch of Audible.com opened up new markets and new commercial issues, particularly when acquired by Amazon, thus cementing the superpower’s position as the undisputed heavyweight champion of the intellectual property distribution world.
Authors and publishers had to adapt. Major booksellers tried but with little or no success. But the book in all its formats sailed on into the new worlds of self-publishing, Kindle Direct Publishing, subscription models, and new supply-chain imperatives. This brings us to today and the new opportunities and challenges for our industry, for authors, retailers, and of course publishers.
Proliferation and Specialization
While Amazon, including Audible, remains the dominant retailer for ebooks and audiobooks, we’re seeing the emergence of many new online retail platforms and business models.
Most of these start-ups focus on English-language content, but some of the most innovative may well be operating in Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, and other heavily-used languages. The English-language businesses range from highly-specific entities serving the higher-education market such as Perlego or Kortext and professional support such as nkoda supporting music and musicians. There are more general offerings for foodies such as ckbk and for people with limited reading time such as the German-based book-summary service Blinkist.
And of course these and other businesses can interact directly with authors, potentially cutting out the publisher’s role altogether. Substack has attracted significant authors and has earned some of them significant income from their writing. And there are more traditional self-publishing sites for authors. How much these sites will suck revenue and energy from traditional publishers is unknown but they’ve represented a wake-up call for publishers to focus more on the value of services they offer authors.
Then we come to the so-called audio boom.
There can be little doubt that listening to books, radio, and podcasts online has increased and this growth is reflected by industry statistics. Audiobooks again saw double-digit growth in sales in 2021, and continued growth for the 8th year running. With that growth has come an appetite among retailers for exclusive and original content, not unlike what we see with video-streaming players.
More recently, we’ve seen interesting shifts and developments in audio-streaming and subscription platforms. Storytel reported 24-percent growth in its subscriber base in 2021 across 28 markets and will be entering the United States’ market with the acquisition of audiobooks.com. Bookbeat’s user base meanwhile rose by 38 percent year-over-year going into three new markets last year alone. And we’re waiting to see what Spotify’s acquisition of Findaway will become.
While the revenue models represented by those services remain controversial for many, these programs and platforms are also significant channels with which to reach engaged and avid consumers and to drive author- and title-discoverability, the joint objectives of publishers everywhere.
In all areas of publishing businesses, digital activity holds the key to the future.
The problem, as I see it, is not the lack of great ideas but the difficulty of implementing those ideas, particularly in large organizations in which much of senior management is understandably more comfortable reviewing the P&Ls of existing business units than backing untested ideas to their cash-absorbing next stage.
Follow our coverage of Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine and its impact on the country’s publishing players and international industry reactions. 
Join us monthly for Richard Charkin’s latest column. More coverage of his work from Publishing Perspectives is here.
More from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here.