Music featured on this episode (all from albums released in 2007) includes “,” “,” “,” and “.”

This series will continue biweekly through the end of the year, covering all twenty-five winning BTBA books (poetry and fiction) culminating in a Best of the BTBA award chosen by YOU, the listeners and fans, at the end of 2021. Stay tuned to Three Percent for additional posts, interviews, analysis of translation trends, and more.

If you don’t already subscribe to the Three Percent Podcast you can find us on and other places. Or you can always subscribe by adding our feed directly into your favorite podcast app: http://threepercent.libsyn.com/rss

Then, the podcast’s main event: Chad and Tom are joined by the one-and-only Richard Nash to talk about Richard’s recent in the Virginia Quarterly Review. The title and subtitle should give you a nice teaser to their discussion: “What Is the Business of Literature?: As technology disrupts the business model of traditional publishers, the industry must imagine new ways of capturing the value of a book.”

And this week’s music is from the new and self-titled album by Bored Nothing.

As always you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by clicking . To subscribe with other podcast downloading software, such as Google’s , copy the following link.

Matt Runkle: There’s a lot of worrying about the disappearance of the book as an object. Do you see the printed book in the same state of flux as the publishing industry?

Richard Nash: If people want something, why do they think it’s not going to exist? Not to get all sort of laissez-faire capitalist about this, but I’m going to have a moment of laissez-faire capitalism here and note that if people want to read the book in its printed form, then I predict there are going to be ways in which they can ensure that they will continue to get it in printed form because people are going to be willing to pay for it. [. . .]

MR: Will the failure of Borders change the way the book business thinks of books?

RN: What does a person do when they want something to read? One of the big mistakes that often gets made in publishing is we focus a lot on price. We focus on how much a book costs and we decide whether it’s worth it or not. Now we’ve got a lot more books that are absolutely impoverished. The reality is that people’s decision-making process has a lot more to do with time than with money. It’s 15 hours in the inside of your head. Books are so cheap compared to the hours of entertainment they provide. The problem is, do they provide entertainment? Is it in fact a book you want to read? If after four hours you hate it, what most people say is “I can’t believe I spent fifteen dollars on this.” But what they really mean is “I can’t believe I just wasted four hours of my life on this.”

MR: Red Lemonade allows people to view free of charge complete manuscripts of books you have for sale. You’ve mentioned that having access to the full text online will help readers make up their minds and commit to buying a hard copy. This view differs from a general reluctance of publishers to post complete works online.

RN: Exactly. With the vast majority of books, the problem that most people have is they don’t know whether it’s going to be worth their time to read it. There are a tiny handful of books, in the case of each person, where they can be sure they want to read them. The reality is that I don’t think, in fact, there are a huge number of people reading our books for free online that have made a decision about whether to buy it. I mean there is probably a small number that are doing it for that reason and that number may increase, but I believe the number is smaller than has occurred to people because publishers refuse to do it. But what we’ve very clearly demonstrated by putting it for free online is that reading the book online has absolutely no negative impact on sales. Why in fact would it?

In many respects we’ve got a real Stockholm Syndrome around the model of publishing as it’s existed up until now. We just take for granted that it is the way it is because that’s a good way for things to be. And when something diverges from it we look for proof as to why it should diverge. But I’m interested in trying to reframe questions. Why do we think that a person won’t buy a print book because in theory they could read it for free online? What is it that people are buying? What is it that people want? In many respects what people want is to read it on their own terms, so in many cases, people don’t want to have to read it on a screen. Then the other thing is that people want to feel like they are spending money. It is their way of feeling good about themselves. It is their way of voting for something with their dollars.

Read the whole interview

There are many reasons why the tiny, scrappy independent publisher I ran from 2001 to 2009, Soft Skull Press, became a publisher with a Pulitzer finalist and books on bestseller lists from the Singapore Straits Times to the Boston Globe to the Los Angeles Times. Those reasons include the quality of the books themselves, the engaging authors, the supportive media (sometimes!). But the main reason people discovered our books, read them, and told their friends about them, is that thousands of people over the decade unpacked a box of books and, in the process of putting one on a shelf, got curious about it, decided to read it, and recommended it to friends, co-workers and, yes, customers.

This process replicated itself for hundreds of publishers and tens of thousands of books, numbers that grew as technology made it easier and cheaper to create traditional printed books. America’s book retail sector grew fast in the 1990s and 2000s (with hindsight, faster than the economy could sustain) to keep up with the growth in the publishing of books, enabled by cheap credit (again, with hindsight, perhaps too cheap). Superstore after superstore opened, offering customers more choice than had ever before been found in most physical bookstores.

But selection, whether of books or of music, was hardly a compelling reason to go to Borders, when Amazon had all the books you could want, and iTunes (or the file-sharing site du jour) all the downloads you could want. We have more culture, more media, than we can now consume in a thousand lifetimes — we don’t need any more choice. What we need is help in choosing. Borders was not offering that. [. . .]

Where will we find all the mini-Oprahs we need to connect writers and readers? Bookstores can and should be sites for this conversation. Increasingly, the good ones are places where people seeking deeper engagement with their culture and society choose to congregate. They are offering language classes, reading groups, singles nights, writing workshops, self-publishing solutions.

Not all bookstores have gotten on board with the transition from being a place where books await customers to being a locale of social and cultural exchange, which happens to support itself in part by selling books. The brilliant Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas has noted that the less a retail experience is focused on selling stuff and the more it is about something else — an event, an occasion, a vision — the more a store will sell.

Read the whole piece

Unlike some of the other digitally-focused conferences I’ve attended (such as TOC Frankfurt), this was less about “what’s possible” and more about “what this means.” Which was refreshing and very interesting.

The foundation did record all of the talks, and has made most (soon to be all?) available on (I personally love all the stills . . . We all look a bit over-enthused with our hand gestures and what not.)

All of the speeches were great, and to make this even easier, here are links and quick summaries to the speeches that are available:

of Pan Macmillan gave a great overview of where we are in terms of ebooks and the digital market.

talked about and the need to connect with your audience.

Richard Nash’s speech isn’t online (yet), but he talked about the coming Age of Abundance and how economic theory provides a basis for arguing that this abundance will force prices to zero.

talked about the impact of technology on human imagination from a philosophical perspective.

Harry Blom’s speech isn’t up yet either, but he talked about Springer and publishing edatabase versions of journals.

discussed his book/iPad app.

from Faber and Faber talked about this as well, but from a publisher’s perspective.

gave the funniest, most entertaining speech (Ramy’s a born public speaker of the best variety) about publishing in Arabic and his company

discussed the role of translators in this digital age.

Finally, reading and discovery in the Age of Screens. But I’ll talk more about that in a separate post . . . For now, I just want to encourage you to check out some of these videos. I think you’ll find them very interesting and enjoyable. (And we were all limited to 10 minutes, so they’re short.)

The problem that she describes—how iBooks categorization is total trash, finding book and getting recommendations is hopeless, etc.—ties directly into the quote that I’ve mentioned on here at least 55 times (and which about quite a bit) that “the 20th century was about sorting supply. The 21st is going to be about sorting demand.”

Here’s Miller’s closing paragraph:

It’s become much easier and cheaper to publish a book in the past decade, but the explosion of titles on the market has its drawbacks. When faced with an overwhelming number of choices, most book buyers tend to become less adventurous, not more so. They have increasingly gravitated toward known quantities like bestsellers and widely celebrated or publicized books. The ideal guide to getting out of that rut is still a thoughtful bookseller, librarian or friend (or even critic!) whose taste you know and trust, but such people aren’t always easy to find, and even when found, they’re not omniscient. Good metadata, treated with respect and care, may be your only compass in some of the more exotic provinces of the vast world of books. It’s the little, geeky detail that makes sure a voice from the margins still has a chance to get heard.

Interesting . . .

Lot of interesting ones, including:

• Sara Lloyd, Pan Macmillan:

• Ann Betts, Nielsen Book:

• Ramy Habeeb, Kotobarabia:

• Kassia Krozser, Booksquare.com:

• Richard Nash, Cursor:

• and, Virginie Clayssen, Editis: along with many others.

After months of work, with Dedi’s help I outlined my vision for a new venture at this year’s BookExpo America. Then called Round Table, now tentatively called Cursor, it represents a new, “social” approach to publishing. To call Cursor “niche” or another “independent” publishing enterprise would be a poor approximation, because those terms fail to capture the organic gurgle of culture at the heart of the venture, the exchange of insight and opinion, the flow of memes and the creation of culture in real time that is now enabled by the Internet.

My business plan is now out with investors—I will spare you the P&L numbers and just offer the broad strokes. Cursor will establish a portfolio of self-reinforcing online membership communities. To start, this includes Red Lemonade, a pop-lit-alt-cult operation, and charmQuark, a sci-fi/fantasy community.

The business will focus on developing the value of the reading and writing ecosystem, including the growth of markets for established authors, as well as engaging readers and supporting emerging writers. Each community will have a publishing imprint, which will make money from authors’ books, sold as digital downloads, conventional print and limited artisanal editions—and will offer authors all the benefits of a digital platform: faster time to market, faster accounting cycles, faster payments to authors. But the greatest opportunity is in the community itself. Each will have tiers of membership, including paid memberships that will offer exclusive access to tools and services, such as rich text editors for members to upload their own writing, peer-to-peer writing groups, recommendation engines, access to established authors online and in person, and editorial or marketing assistance. Members can get both peer-based feedback and professional feedback.

Other revenue opportunities include the provision of electronic distribution services to other publishers; fee-based or revenue-share software modules, especially for online writing workshops or seminars for publishers, literary journals, teaching programs; fee-based linking of writers to suppliers of publishing services, including traditional publishers and agents; corporate sponsorships and site advertising; and events and speaking fees. Yes, I envisage Cursor obtaining a larger basket of rights than is the industry standard, but that will be in exchange for shorter exclusive licensing periods. Our contracts will be limited to three-year terms with an option to renew.

The Cursor business model seeks to unite all the various existing revenues in the writing-reading ecosystem, from offering services to aspiring writers far more cheaply than most vendors to finding more ways to get more money to authors faster. It also will create highly sensitive feedback loops that will tell each community’s staff what tools and features users want, what books users think the imprint should be publishing, how the imprint could publish better.

It’ll be interesting to see what this looks like once it launches, and how it evolves. And I’m sure we’ll be writing more about the implications of this business model in the future. One thing that strikes me about Richard’s idea—and this definitely comes through in talking to him about publishing and the future of the book business—is that he has a strong interest in the social aspect of reading and believes that the primary value of publishing houses is their ability to connect writers and readers (through marketing, through distribution chains).

That’s not to undervalue the editorial knowledge present in publishing houses, but he tends to shy away from a publisher as a creator of a particular editorial vision. Or at least as the only player creating a particular editorial vision:

An indie press’s distinctive voice is a profoundly collective thing, set by its authors, its fans, its casual readers. The publisher’s role, my role and the role of the staff are to be conduits, advocates, enablers, to serve the readers and writers—to be the grease. Toward the end of my Soft Skull tenure, however, it occurred to me that we’ve all—indie and corporate—fallen victim to the notion of ourselves as gatekeepers. Perhaps that is to compensate for, well, the lack of other compensation. But in the past couple of years, sustaining the gatekeeper mentality has been hard as the pressure has grown from within and without.

This does seem to be a new model for publishing—one that might not replace all existing models, but will definitely complement them. As to whether it will “save” publishing, Richard has a nice bit about that idea:

Cursor is not designed to “save publishing,” but simply to offer the kind of services that readers and writers, established and emerging, want and the Internet enables. I believe especially strongly that the model must be viable in a world where the effective price of digital content falls to zero, and paper becomes like vinyl records or fine art prints. After all, the world is littered with things that people won’t buy at the prices their producers want to charge—like, say, the contents of remainder bins.

(Some Twitterer mentioned that Richard seemed a bit like Tom Cruise in Magnolia . . . I can see that.)

People, the book will live on with the publishing business!!! That is not really what is changing, and to the extent that it might be, it will only be because the writers and the readers want it to.

The book isn’t in trouble, it’s that everyone who takes some of the money that a consumer pays for an author’s content need to re-justify their share and not assume that because they used to get that % they still in fact deserve that %. And I sense too many people hiding behind the notion that this has something to do with grandiose cultural notions about the life and death of the book rather than more quotidian concerns about the vision and competence of individuals populating this business.

On one extreme, booksellers, wholesalers, sales reps, publicists, editors, and agents could all fail to make a good case for a piece of the action; another extreme is that they all succeed in making that case. Unsurprisingly, I think it will likely be somewhere in the middle—some intermediaries are likely to be necessary, others not. I firmly believe that people with the talent to persuasively communicate the merits of cultural content are going to do immensely well in the future (and, depending on their inclinations, immense could mean lots money, or lots high-brow authority, or both, or something else immense entirely) and I suspect that people who are now publishers’ sales reps, and indie booksellers, and publicists, and so forth will number amongst those.

Who exactly, and structured in which way, that’s what remains to be seen. But the book is fine. Focus on connect writers and readers and you won’t have to ask for whom the bell is tolling.

Right on. The problems the industry is going through at the moment isn’t due to the product itself (the book), but with the model.