Harry Potter and the Booksellers of Doom
What is the ideal commercial publication? To my mind its a predictable, popular, and profitable publication, updated on a regular basis, which will appeal to a broad market group and will have multimedia cross over . The best consumer example of this has been the Harry Potter brand, broad appeal, regular update cycle, cross media reach, non-saturated market.
Yet when we go out to buy this in the next couple of weeks, we will probably add it to the shopping at Tesco or Asda. Is there something wrong in the value proposition here?
The big retailers exploit Mr Potter to sell groceries, not books, or other media ,well possibly top 10 music and Harry Potter videos. Books stores are now forced to follow suit and sell well below margin. What should have been a bumper summer is now caught up chasing what often may prove to be elusive cross sales.
It seems like a missed opportunity, to put something back in the channel. After all its probably not going to dent units irrespective of who distributes the content after all its already freely available on the internet for those who must have it.
But it could have made a long term difference to broad based distribution and even picked up one or two cross sales for other publishers.Without doubt cash is king, but a this short-termism will not necessarily serve the publishing industry well into the future.
Whither audiobooks?
The findings published in the Bookseller, about the state of the audiobook market is interesting and timely.
With MP3, iPhone and the podcast markets buoyant, publishers have been slow to adopt and benefit from the audiobook format. Its time to move on, accessible and reasonably priced audio in usable formats are required if publishers are to make anything of this format.
It’s a fantastic cross sell opportunity, which I suspect will in no way detract from the purchase of the written word. Perhaps virgin will make a new market with its erotica products on download, but there has to be a bigger market than that brigade. Additionally, the download from digital radio has to be a route worth exploring, given the possibility of segmenting and serving market niches.
The market is ready for some innovation in this regard, and it will be interesting to see how publishers will respond.