Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn on the Future of Publishing

Michael Tamblyn spoke to TWR by telephone on Thursday, April 21. This is an edited transcript of the conversation.

1) How did your leadership of BookNet Canada prepare you for what you’re doing now at Kobo?

The first element was, BookNet Canada was really about helping publishers through change, about how do we get the Canadian book market as efficient as possible by using data in new and interesting ways, figuring out how to make decisions better, really figuring out how a Canadian publisher whether large or small could both survive and thrive in this new market that we find ourselves in. The focus at BookNet was on the print side of the business, although it started to spread into digital as well.

It was also highly collaborative in the sense that it was BookNet, publishers, and retailers working together to make improvements in the book industry happen, and similarly in my work at Kobo we believe that this digital revolution that we’re going through is something that should happen with publishers, it shouldn’t happen to publishers. Everything that we can do in terms of sharing information and helping publishers get their arms around what it means to work in this digital space is something that we think is very important.

The third is, while BookNet was focused primarily on the Canadian market, it had a fairly strong international profile as well, and as Kobo moves from country to country at an increasing rate, having had that sense of the international market has been very helpful.

2) What does the ebook mean for literary publishing especially?

We think there’s a lot of value in what literary presses do and have done in Canada. They’re part of the fabric of literary culture in this country, for readers as well as writers and publishers.

We’ve just had this huge success with The Sentimentalist when it won the Giller Prize—we were the only retailer to have it in the first critical weeks after the win. That was a huge benefit to author, publisher, and the reading public—who in many cases were introduced to e-readers this way.

3) How do you think literary publishers are going to have to change the way they do business, specifically because of the emergence of ebooks?

There’s a lot of good news that we see in our engagement with the literary publishers. I can speak more from the perspective of a retailer who’s been trying to sell literary books for years as opposed to telling a publisher what to do with their business.

Whether I was working at an independent bookstore or a chain or on-line, the struggle was always around inventory and which titles do we take a position on. If you’re an independent bookstore it’s kind of do I take one, or three, or none. The struggle is just to get titles onto shelves. In chain bookselling the problem is even more exacerbated. There’s a limited amount of space and every book has to be picked very carefully, and a lot of titles just don’t get the distribution that they need.

In ebook and in digital that lack of physical space ceases to be a problem, so it really comes down to the ability to create audiences and direct their attention towards titles that matter, as opposed to I only have a certain number of places I can put books. This means that there are much greater opportunities for literary publishers to showcase their work, but they have to do it in different ways. They do have to be able to build audiences on-line and direct them to where those books are available, but a lot of that can be done without a lot of money—something that’s always at a premium at a literary press.

4) What are the likely impacts of ebooks on booksellers? How do you think they’ll need to adapt?

Similarly to what has gone on with music retailers, there are difficult times ahead for booksellers. But there are certainly things that can be done to adapt.

When we look at the retailers who are likely to come through this next round of digital change intact, they probably have a few characteristics: they aren’t just about the moving of units or the selling of books; they are hubs of community for people who are interested in and passionate about books—they are a meeting place. They’re doing everything they can to leverage that physical space they have—being able to meet authors and get books signed, and come together face to face to make that a valuable experience. The second characteristic is that they have a wonderful role as curators.

It’s their ability to turn the disadvantage of limited shelf space into an advantage, through the knowledge of the customers they have and the community in which they sit. That means a store has to have more personality, a stronger opinion about the kind of books that they’re interested in.

The third characteristic that I’m seeing a lot at successful independents today, is really starting to look at the book itself as an object of value, of beauty, cherishing the physicality of that object, the things that make people want to come into the store and see it and hold it.

5) What has surprised you the most about the consumer response to ebooks in the last year, and why?

The biggest surprise we’ve had about the ebook consumer in the past year is that our customer is not a technology early adopter, not that traditional eighteen to thirty-five-year-old male who’s interested in gadgets. It is the person who loves to read. It is the person who normally would come into a bookstore a couple of times a week and leave with books every time.

One of the reasons we’re seeing that shift from print to digital happening faster than anyone expected is that the people making that shift were buying a lot in bookstores. We’re surprised by the frequency with which they are buying. The average book consumer buys about one book a month, the average loyalty cardholder or frequent customer maybe two a month. Our average is two a month. Our top customers are buying a book every day.

6) Are customers still opting mostly for longer-form narrative, as you’ve talked about over the last year?

It’s still true that people want to read long-form narrative fiction or non-fiction on e-readers more than short forms such as articles, short stories or single chapters. We’ve had times in 2009 and 2010 where all our top sellers were 800 pages or more in their print equivalent. Not to say that we haven’t seen shorter works selling. But we’ve seen a market for novellas develop that didn’t really exist before, because you couldn’t put them on a bookshelf.

The great thing about opening up a 900 page ebook is that it doesn’t weight any more in your purse or pocket than a 150 page ebook does. I think one of the things that really appealed to those heavy readers, those passionate readers, is that they get to carry their whole reading life with them all the time.

7) Do you think that the reduction in cost of colour screens will diminish interest in long-form narrative among consumers? In other words is the long form interest a function of the technology, or more a function of what readers want?

Well, I don’t think the introduction of colour printing really changed how people read books. I think the draw is toward narrative that can provide either that immersion or escape or the carefully constructed long argument that appeals to people. Not to say that there aren’t lots of other things that you could read. But there’s still a huge population of people out there who want to have a long narrative in their day.

8) What advice would you offer literary writers about how to market themselves in the age of the ebook and the virtual world?

It’s no longer enough to deliver your book unto a publisher and then sort of sit back. You have to be a self-marketer, you have to build the community of people who are interested in your work. So we see everything from authors who are especially active in social media, to ones who have assembled giant mailing lists of those who follow their work, to those who engage their audience in seeing how the books come together as they’re written.

I can absolutely sympathize with the frustration of a lot of authors, who are saying as if writing wasn’t hard enough on its own, now I also have to do all this other stuff. There’s a lot publishers can do to support authors.

But at the same time we see this incredible rise in authors who are not represented by a publisher, who have chosen to go it alone. Some of those authors are becoming very successful. At Kobo self-published authors now represent a significant percentage of sales, which is completely unheard of in bricks-and-mortar retailing or even on-line bookselling. Those authors who succeed in that space are all very gifted at self-marketing, at building a brand around themselves, and of engaging a community of interest.

9) When you talk about Kobo you often use the phrase “device agnostic.” What does that mean?

It’s always been our position that if you want to read ebooks you shouldn’t be limited to a single device. What kind of heartbreak would be involved in leaving your books behind because a new device, whether a smart phone or an e-reader or tablet appealed to you? You should never be locked into a particular device—whether because of DRM [digital rights management] or file format.

Books really are for life. I’d hate to leave behind all the books in my life, from childhood to now. That would be heartbreak for me, and I’ll never put users of the Kobo in that position.

10) What about McLuhan’s dictum that the medium is the message—in other words do you think ebooks and especially enhanced ebooks (with video, sound, etc.) themselves will change narrative art?

No one’s done this in a compelling way yet. The question for me is how do enhancements improve the reading experience? Do they make it more immersive, richer? So far all we’ve seen is print narrative with a few add-ons. But somewhere an author will think how can I take advantage of the medium, and create a new kind of art conceived and executed in digital form that has no print equivalent.