Editor’s Introduction
by Jeremy Greenfield
DECEMBER 2012
When I first joined Digital Book World in Oct. 2011, I knew very little about the book publishing industry and almost nothing about ebooks. In preparation for the job, I bought my first e-reader—a Kindle 3G e-ink reader with a keyboard and ads—and loaded it with books about the publishing industry, including the excellent Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future by Jason Epstein (W.W. Norton & Co.).
As good as Epstein’s book is, it didn’t give me the knowledge I would need to begin to do my job, which is to cover the ebook industry and provide its people with the information they need to run their businesses better and advance in their careers. It did teach me two important things, though:
- The business is ever-changing the future is nearly impossible to predict. Book Business is nearly a decade old and at the time one of the emerging technologies in the industry was the Espresso Machine, which, despite its misleading name, does not make coffee but prints books—a print-on-demand machine for bookshops. Epstein predicted that this machine would take the industry by storm and change the dynamics of back-list sales and distribution, among other things (needless to say, the Kindle was the device that would eventually do those things and not the Espresso Machine).
- The book business is all about the people. From colorful tales about authors like W.H. Auden and Ted Geisel dragging themselves into the Random House offices in the old Villard mansion at Madison and 50th St. in New York to stories of great mergers between old publishing houses, people are at the center. It’s true in every industry that a company’s best assets walk out through the front door every day at 5:00 PM; it’s much more true in media businesses, for the products we create are a manifestation of our personalities.
While I knew that I knew nothing on the day that I started, Epstein gave me a clue to learn what I would need to know. From day one, I started talking to people. I scheduled as many conversations as I could—over coffee, usually, but many on the phone, too. I spoke with heads of digital at major publishing houses as well as independent ebook production geeks. I met with agents, self-published authors, publishing consultants and book marketers. I talked with folks at Amazon and Kobo, Ingram and Constellation, Aptara and Innodata. I spent a lot of time talking to my colleagues at F+W Media, who live and breathe the industry.
I asked them about their careers, the industry, the companies at which they worked. I wanted to know what they knew about what was going on in publishing as well as what they didn’t know so I could go and find it out for them. And I told them my stories—where I came from, what I liked to read, what I hoped for Digital Book World and myself.
A small fraction of these conversations made it onto DigitalBookWorld.com and into this ebook. The character or residue of many of them have turned Digital Book World into what it is today.
As I said earlier, in the media business, the products we produce are a manifestation of our personalities. I couldn’t have chosen a better way to learn about the industry. Unfortunately, almost everything I learned became irrelevant the minute I learned it. It’s a sensation many people in book publishing must be feeling these days. The industry is changing so quickly that one has to be a voracious consumer of information just to keep up.
Herein lies the reason I think this book is important. Technologies and business conditions change and industries will change with them, but when it comes to executing that change, it’s all about the people. In many of the interviews in this book, you’ll hear executives talking about training their people to do new things and hiring new kinds of people. You’ll see that some of the subjects are c-level executives at major publishers and come from outside the industry—a deliberate move by management to change the direction of an organization. And you’ll learn about the career histories of many successful business leaders, seeing how they overcame challenges and capitalized on opportunities.
If you want to know where the publishing industry is going, you only need look to the people guiding it. Just ask them what’s coming and they’ll tell you.