Monday News: B&N is being investigated by the SEC, marketing v. publishing, the digital publishing market, intellectual property jobs, and the growth of Harlequin India
Publishing NewsBarnes & Noble / digital publishing / Harlequin / India / intellectual property / Mills & Boon / Nook10 Comments
Were Nook’s Books Cooked? Barnes & Noble’s Accounting Investigated By SEC – Forbes – In the immortal words of Astro and Scooby Doo: Ruh Roh. It seem the SEC is a mite concerned about two issues:
(1) the Company’s restatement of earnings announced on July 29, 2013, and (2) a separate matter related to a former non-executive employee’s allegation that the Company improperly allocated certain Information Technology expenses between its NOOK and Retail segments for purposes of segment reporting.
Barnes & Noble reports that it is cooperating with the SEC’s investigation; however, BN stock fell almost 8% after the bookseller’s quarterly report detailing the investigation was released. Forbes
Customer choices – Brian O’Leary has a very short, but very provocative piece on the way in which marketing platforms like Hubspot are innovating very quickly in their interest in and ability to individualize marketing streams to consumers, meaning that publishers may no longer fill that media void. There are a lot of implications here that O’Leary doesn’t detail, but that you can extrapolate from his article, especially his parting points:
“The lines between editorial and marketing content are already blurred, as marketers work to answer questions and solve problems for both current and prospective customers. If publishing incumbents can’t establish a customer-facing legitimacy, marketers may become their new and even primary distribution channel.” Magellan Media
Mike Shatzkin Says That There’s no Market for Anything Other Than Narrative eBooks – I’m Not Sure I Agree – Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin has a lot of opinions about a lot of publishing issues, and here’s another one, with interesting commentary from Nate Hoffelder. As Hoffelder points out, just five years ago, the traditional publishing industry was convinced that ebooks weren’t going anywhere, and look at things now. In fact, had the traditional publishing marketplace taken digital books more seriously back then, they may not have lost ground in the failed agency pricing model or federal collusion allegations. So let’s hear it for more independently produced digital cookbooks and textbooks!
“To say that there’s no market today for digital products like cookbooks, textbooks, and the like would be like saying in 1978 that there was no market for PCs in the home or school simply because there were only a handful of truly successful models, none of which came from one of the major computer manufacturers (Wikipedia).” The Digital Reader
Jobs Involving Intellectual Property Make Up 6% of US GDP: IIPA – At first glance, 6% may not seem like a lot, but this study by the International Intellectual Property Alliance found that “copyright industries” contribute more than a trillion dollars in UC economic value per year, inclusive of industries that support newspapers, books, television, music, and radio. Numbers in these fields continue to grow, adding more credence than ever to the assertion that we are living in an information economy.
“The report found that these industries included about 5.4 million jobs for US workers or about 5 percent of all private sector jobs. These jobs paid on average 33 percent more than other jobs, according to the study.” Galley Cat
Harlequin India bets big: Indian writers give Mills & Boon brand a fresh lease of life – This is a really interesting article on Harlequin India, led by Amrita Chowdhury, a former Silicon Valley semiconductor engineer and Hachette-published author, who is focused on growing, diversifying, and modernizing Indian-authors Harlequin/Mills and Boon Romances. Some of these books sell 100,000 copies a year, reflecting a strong demand for Indian-written Romances within the M&B framework. Harlequin established itself in India in 2008, and cultivates some authors through its annual “Passions – Aspiring Author Auditions” writing contest, noting that many authors do not have a writing background. In many ways, they reflect the readership Harlequin India is building:
“‘These are often professionally successful women who represent the new India. Even though a large part of our readership still comes from older women in the 35-40 years age bracket, we are wooing a younger demographic such as college girls and young professional women who are probably single and at a marriageable age,’ adds Chowdhury.
That the stereotypes about the Mills & Boon men being chauvinistic and dominating are changing also helps in wider acceptability. “The Indian titles, which now sell far more than the global ones in this market, offer a great degree of cultural and gender sensitivity. The women characters are not just secretaries or school teachers like those of yesteryears, they are doctors, bankers and engineers; and the men even if they are rich and handsome are also sensitive and make adjustments. The themes of second marriage and arranged marriage have also been explored in recent Indian M&B titles,” explains Chowdhury.” Economic Times
“Customer-facing legitimacy”? I find it difficult to take seriously anyone who can use a phrase like that with a straight face.
Oh I love Indian movies. Even the ones with predictable plots and ham acting. Seeing the values and assumptions of a different society adds so much interest. How do I find Indian Harlequins?
Given that Shatzkin has gotten just about everything wrong, why does anyone listen to him anymore? Unless the publishing industry starts to think outside the box, they will lose the market for things like cookbooks, craft books, travel books etc. to apps which allow for interaction. I recently just purchased the Food that Really Schmecks (Edna Staebler’s cookbook of Waterloo Region Ontario recipes (mostly Mennonite/Amish) which was first written in the 70s – she has the best pumpkin pie recipe IMO). It is searchable, has photos and vidoes of Edna and of the Waterloo Region, and it is only a few dollars. I can certainly see cookbook and craft people doing somehing like this, rather than just publishing a simple book.
I hope that we’ll see some of the Indian titles here in North America.
Yeah, I want to find some of these Indian Harlequins too. A couple of Shoma Narayanan’s were reviewed on DA, and the KISS ones are 1.99 so I think I might buy them. But I can’t find any of the other authors mentioned in the article on Kobo or Sony.
Also, hearing about another engineer writing romance novels makes me smile :)
I think most of these books are only distributed in India. Harlequin India has its own website and there are about a dozen Indian-authored books available (including Shoma Narayan’s), but the India-origin ones aren’t distributed outside India by Harlequin that I can tell. Rupa is an Indian publisher, widely available there but not distributed in the US/Europe.
IndibooksIndireads is also publishing romance (Jane reviewed one, HAVELI, earlier this year). There is also a line of India-set, Indian-authored historical fiction by a publisher whose name escapes me at the moment.If you want the Harlequins as ebooks you have to download an Indian app (I think it’s only at the Google Play store) and I don’t know if content is available outside India, I haven’t tried it out.
Print books are available through Indian sites like flipkart.com. ETA: Indireads makes their books available via Amazon (US for sure, don’t know about other countries).
Today I read on article saying that Ida Pollock has died at the age of 105 years. She wrote more that 120 romance novels under the names Susan Barrie, Rose Burghley and Marguerite Bell, primarily for Mills and Boon.
@Lynnd: That cookbook has been a family staple for years now — I agree, that pumpkin pie is amazing! Thanks for letting me know it’s available online, I can stop using the photocopied pages from my mom’s copy, hah.
E-ink didn’t really do a lot of justice to cookbooks and the like, but with tablets that’s really been taken care of, and I still have some recipe books that are formatted really well for my e-reader — no pictures but the recipes themselves are pretty great. I’d love a tablet for photography books, mine take up massive amounts of space and they’re hard to handle without worrying about damaging them.
I don’t have a problem with digital cookbooks for the most part, and I have a fairly decent collection of them. I’m less comfortable with craft books–especially ones with patterns, charts, lengthy instructions, etc. I haven’t figured out a way to get them to work well for me.
Shatzkin is sooo wrong. As a knitter / crafter, lemme tell you, wrong wrong wrong. One of the best things about ebooks is knitting books, books with other instructional pieces.