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Neu! >> Was ist „Publishing Beyond Publishers“

Ein neuer Report untersucht die vielen überraschenden Facetten, wie Autoren und ihre Leser das Buchgeschäft auf digitalen Plattformen neu erfunden haben. Klicken Sie hier > Kostenloser Download für eine begrenzte Zeit!

Im internationalen Buchgeschäft gibt es so viel mehr als das, was zwischen zwei Buchdeckel passt.

Self-PublishingPlattformen, die sich an hochgradig segmentierte Zielgruppen richten – Multi-Format-Publishing – Multi-Channel-Vertrieb – SerialisierungLeser (und Hörer), die die Rolle von Buchbotschaftern übernommen haben.

Es gibt so viel mehr Möglichkeiten, Bücher zu kreieren, zu produzieren, in die Hand zu nehmen – und sie zu verschlingen!

Erstaunlicherweise ist das meiste davon in den Buch- und Verlagsstatistiken und Bestsellerlisten, die wir zur Beurteilung unserer Branche heranziehen, nicht vertreten.

Zum Download geht es hier.

The library at the headquarter of Yuewen China Literature in Shanghai.
The library at the headquarter of Yuewen China Literature in Shanghai. (Foto: Rüdiger Wischenbart)

Publishing Beyond Publishers“ bietet einen globalen Überblick über das sich rasch ausbreitende Universum neuartiger Verlagsmodelle.

Die meisten dieser Modelle gehen weit über die traditionelle Wertschöpfungskette hinaus, bei der Autoren über traditionelle Verlage (als Gatekeeper und Produzenten ihrer Werke) arbeiten.

Stattdessen können Inhalte in einer Vielzahl von Formaten (Print, digital), Medien (Bücher, Audio, Filme, Spiele), Vertriebskanälen (Communities, Plattformen, Streams) und Geschäftsmodellen (Einzelverkauf von Produkten, Abonnements, Streaming, Freemium, bezahlte Modelle) in meist digital definierten Liefer- und Vermarktungsketten erstellt und verbreitet werden.

In dieser Studie werden zahlreiche Fallstudien dieser neuen Modelle dargestellt und durch evidenzbasierte Indikatoren ergänzt, um Marktanteile dieser Sektoren zu schätzen.

Der Bericht wurde von Rüdiger Wischenbart und Thad McIlroy verfasst.

The Global50 International Publishing Ranking 2021 is out!

Banner ad for Global 50 publishing ranking

The Global 50 International Publishing Ranking 2021 is ready for free download at www.wischenbart.com/ranking.com

55 leadling publishing groups worldwide in consumer books, educational, scientific and professional, listed by revenue from publishing activities, plus a detailed analysis of trends and company profiles with key data.

The Global 50 publishing ranking is updated every year since 2007, and published in cooperation with Bookdao (China), buchreport (Germany), Livres Hebdo (France) and Publishers Weekly (USA).

Sponsored by BOD and Bookwire.

 

 

 

Global 50 CEO Talk: Consolidation, Consumers and Communities: Making Sense of the Big Business in Books (and the Small Businesses).

Wednesday, 20 October 2021, 14.00 to 15.00 CET

The Global 50 CEO Talk 2021 will investigate deep transformative shifts that currently re-define much of the international book business, notably the strong push in mergers and acquisitions, and the consumer centric business strategies with two pre-eminent guest speakers: New York based investment banker Robin Warner of Oaklin DeSilva+Philips, and Klaus Driever of Munich based Allianz Group, one of the leading integrated financial services providers worldwide.

Having closed more than 50 transactions focused on trade publishing, edtech and education information services, and healthcare to companies that include Amazon, Scribd, IPG (Independent Publishers Group), Oracle, Wiley and Macmillan, Robin Warner will analyze recent consolidation perspectives for the international book industry.

As a digital expert with experience in insurance as well as in in publishing and book retail, Klaus Driever will talk about remarkably similar patterns of digital change across industries.

Building on the new “Global 50 Ranking of the International Publishing Industry 2021”, the editors of Bookdao (China), buchreport (Germany), Livres Hebdo (France) and Publishers Weekly (US). The hybrid event in partnership with the Frankfurt Book Fair and with ReBoot Books will be moderated by Rüdiger Wischenbart.

The CEO Talk will shed light on a wave of major mergers and acquisitions is re-shaping the global business of books. Bertelsmann’s Penguin Random House is acquiring iconic US publisher Simon and Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is picked up by Harper Collins, and Workman is taken over by French Hachette – which in turn has been viewed by the other large media group in France, Vivendi, in what is expected by observers to grow into an acquisition bid at some point next year.

The dynamics are not at all limited to the big consumer book houses. Finnish Sanoma, a specialist in digital education, has acquired the respective activities of Spanish Santillana. In Germany meanwhile, a staggering process of consolidation continues with the largest book retail chain integrating smaller regional players throughout the country. And in Great Britain, Waterstones’ James Daunt has announced new shop openings for next year.

The context in which the earlier invitation to Hachette Livre had been made has changed, and therefore the programming of the CEO talk has evolved, in agreement between the organizers of the event and Hachette Livre.

A cooperation of four leading trade media outlets, the CEO Talk traditionally features the Global 50 Ranking of the International Publishing Industry, which is researched by Rüdiger Wischenbart Content and Consulting, and has been updated every year since 2007, currently representing around 50 companies that each report revenues from publishing of over €150 million. The Global 50 Ranking is sponsored by Bookwire (www.bookwire.de )

At Frankfurter Buchmesse, the CEO Talk is a long-established tradition.

The full Global 50 Ranking will be available at www.wischenbart.com/ranking and the participating publishing publications.

About Klaus Driever and Allianz Group: Klaus is a successful and experienced digital entrepreneur. Already in the 90s he founded his first digital startups and brought companies like buecher.de (Germany) and bol.com (Netherlands) to success. As editior-in-chief and Managing director, he worked for leading companies in the media, retail and book publishing industry like Hubert Burda Media, ProSieben and Verlagsgruppe Weltbild. After holding position as CEO of the direct insurance Allsecur AG, Klaus is currently responsible for the strategically relevant digital projects at Allianz Germany. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Freiburg University in Germany and is also Alumni of Trinity College Dublin. Klaus lives in Munich and is active in honorary capacity for InsurTechHub Munich (ITHM) and for BITKOM, Germany’s digital association representing more than 2.700 companies of the digital economy.

The Allianz Group is a global financial services provider with services predominantly in the insurance and asset management business. Over 100 million retail and corporate clients1 in more than 70 countries rely on our knowledge, global presence, financial strength and solidity. In fiscal year 2020 over 150,000 employees worldwide achieved total revenues of 140.5 billion euros and an operating profit of 10.8 billion euros. Allianz SE, the parent company, is headquartered in Munich, Germany. Source: en-2021-10-fact-sheet.pdf (allianz.com)

About the magazines and their editors participating at the Global 50 CEO Talk: Sanguo Cheng, founder and president of Bookdao (China), Lena Scherer, deputy editor-in-chief, buchreport (Germany), Fabrice Piault, editor-in-chief, Livres Hebdo (France), and Andrew Albanese, features editor, Publishers Weekly (US).

About ReBoot: ReBoot Books (www.rebootbooks.org) is a series of book industry and will be represented by Carlo Carrenho. Its sponsors include KNK (www.knk.com ) and BOD (www.BOD.com )

Contact: Rüdiger Wischenbart, founder and president Content and Consulting (Austria),  office@wischenbart.com

 

A Preview on the Global 50 World Publishing Ranking 2021

Breaks, but no breakdowns: The pandemic and its impact on the international book business“ reads the headline of a new preview of the Global 50 World Publishing Ranking 2021.

Generic chart Illustration for White Paper Preview Global 50 Publishing Ranking 2021

Download your free copy of this White Paper at Preview Global 50 2021
This ‘Preview’ to the next Global 50 looks specifically at the following topics:
– The impact of the pandemic on exemplary leading publishing corporations;
– The drivers behind initially unexpected positive market developments;
– The acceleration of business innovation triggered during the pandemic, with
special highlights on digital, audiobooks and subscription models;
– The opening gap in market developments between selected European countries;
– The ongoing surge in competition, driving industry consolidation, new alliances
and powerful impulses from neighboring media sectors;
– The transformative dynamics of the expanding “network and platform” economy
as it reshapes book consumption.

The complete Global 50 World Publishing Ranking will be released by the end of August 2021 at www.wischenbart.com/ranking.

We thank our sponsors of the Global 50, namely BOD, Bookwire, knk and Plureos for their generous and ongoing support.

For book fairs, 2020 was (not is) a watershed moment. On Reed Exhibitions pulling the plug at BookExpo, and related news. About the current re-writing of the publishing play book.

At BookExpo in May 2018, a CEO roundtable with, from left, the Association of American Publishers’ Maria A. Pallante, Macmillan’s John Sargent, Simon & Schuster’s Carolyn Reidy, and Penguin Random House’s Markus Dohle. Photo by Porter Anderson, Publishing Perspectives, used by permission

At BookExpo 2018, a publishing „CEO  roundtable“ hosted by the Association of American Publishers‚ Maria A. Pallante, had 3 heads of New York Big Five publishing corporations debating the future of the industry. I don’t recall details, but am certain that all three speakers were upbeat.

Two years and a bit later, Carolyn Reidy of Simon and Schuster has passed away, John Sargent has quit Macmillan and Holtzbrinck, and only Markus Dohle is still in his position as CEO of Penguin Random House, and announced just a week ago that his group would pick up Simon and Schuster. Another major American trade and educational publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt stands for sale.

And now, BookExpo, together with its consumer sibling BookCon, the by far largest industry gathering in the US, and the States‘ only public platform for welcoming international publishers and other vendors of the book business, has been „retired„, as the press release of Reed Exhibition, the parent company, camouflaged their decision of pulling the plug. (See the summary in Publishing Perspectives)

My personal book fair calender for 2020 saw me packing for London in April, and shortly thereafter for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was considering Leipzig, and would have observed closely Bologna and Paris from afar. Already, I did not plan to attend BookExpo in New York in late May, as I couldn’t anticipate any business for me at the event. Beijing in late August was still undecided. In fall, I obviously planned for Frankfurt, and then Ljubljana in November. I was considering Guadalajara, as my interest in Latin America had seriously increased lately, while working for Cerlalc, the UNESCO partnering organization based in Bogota, Colombia.

None of these events would have any physical presence or attendees, it turned out.

Instead, together with a few friends like Carlo Carrenho and Klaus-Peter Stegen, we decided as early as late April to launch our own, purely digital conference format, ReBoot: Books, Business and Reading, which eventually took place with 4 workshops in September and a 6 hour marathon series of industry debates on October 13, 2020, which normally would have been Frankfurt’s opening day.

I summarize these details not out of nostalgia, nor anticipating any „return to normal“ in 2021. Yet I am an optimist. I am confident that the vaccine will have a – hopefully broad, and not limited to the rich countries and mega cities only – impact on our lives and businesses.

I am fairly confident that the book business overall will cope, and adapt – which is synonymous to ‚deeply transform‚ – in the course of the pandemic. But I am also convinced that the same may not necessarily apply to book fairs. At least those in North America and in large parts of Europe, plus Japan. For all the rest of the world, this is a different story, which I’ll address another time.

There surely will be industry gatherings in the future, with actual visitors, with some kind of exhibits, and certainly with receptions and parties, probably as soon as in early summer or fall of next year. But I would wish to be a fly on the wall when a sales representative of Frankfurt or London will call up the person in charge for marketing budgets at Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins – or, very similarly, at Planeta, Bonnier, or German Bastei Lübbe in spring 2021, in the ambition to sell some significant booth space. ‚Best of luck‚, as those hard nosed sales reps would say.

All the big, and many medium sized companies have their finance people right now spending hours and days in home offices and zoom calls to figure out how to slash office space and rent, shift resources into a more de-centralized model of organization, invest – hopefully – heavily in streamlining their workflow and otimize their processes (ERP companies, but also Salesforce/Slack and other will further expand), AND they will be, at the front end of their operations, all about  ‚the consumer‚.

„D2C“ – Direct-to-Consumer will be the magic formular for 2021, I am sure.

These moves will fairly quickly result in shifts in companies‘ internal power balances, hopefully by just even more strongly separating what, on a day-to-day basis, editorial does, and what the ‚back office‚ does with what editorial is proposing to them – or in return, by drastically re-framing the set-up in which editorial is supposed to do their work.

That swing does not necessarily clip the aisles of good editors in theit creativity. But it may rewrite the overall playbook of book publishing.

To give just one example: Anything more ‚niche‚ may be handed over to some ‚special arms‚ of the organization, or be delegated into new (or already existing) ‚author platforms‚ – as in publisher + Wattpad cooperation deals.

In less fortunate organizations, which will be around too, it will be a new regime that hardly breathes that old air of sniffing out that new genial literary hero who might be a winner of some award half a writing life later.

These are, of course, just a few guesses. But for traditinal book fairs, they carry a few clear lessons. First of all, there is little reason for publishers to spend a fortune on renting huge booth space, add more money for flashy cusomized stand constructions, and send over hald the company staff for a week.

Fairs will be closer to festivals on the one hand, and on the other hand to the more operational, small-table plus hotel-bar-and-dinner-separée type of the rights business. In addition, the ‚industry talks‚ will be hybrid at best, and much debate will be within closed settings– e.g. behind corporate community walls, rather than public.

For the ever more pressing opening up, embracing new ideas, interact with an ever growing number of new comeptition from new entrants and start-ups, this may become a huge problem. For letting in new company talent, the result may be a desaster, really endangering a necessary renewal of the professional book communities.

But, as an optimist, I see all these ‚problems‘ mainly as bringing some transformative strains that we all have seen coming already before the virus struck, didn’t we?

With regard to BookExpo, Michael Cader now wrote in his Publishers‘ Lunch: „The show itself had diminished for years.“ So let’s move on, and make the best of it.

PS: David Unger, of Guadalajara FIL, commented in the Facebook group Publishing without borders: „Rudiger: for many years BEA was running itself into circles and into the ground. It had no identity and changed its focus and format sometimes twice a year. It cannot be compared to other international book fairs that have very clearly defined roles and focuses. I know you agree with me.“

This allowed me to specify, how I would differentiate between 3 types of international book fairs:

 Full agreement on part 1, BEA. Not so sure on part 2, which I would split into a) Frankfurt, London, Bologna, b) Beijing, Sharjah, Guadalajara, Madrid/Barcelona, perhaps Italy Paris, Göteborg and c) the many ‚other‘
To a) frankly I see no way back to the old ‚charging high price booth space‘ business model for any of that top tier group. No way.
To b) These are different, as hubs for specific, commercially relevant regional markets, plus their price tag is much smaller, due to local subsidies, subsidies to national collective stand models and much more affordable booth spending anyway, so they make more sense perhaps, economically,
To c) an entirely different kind of beasts, either as national show cases of local industries (my domestic Austria being such, or focused on selling books! (All across the Middle East), etc.
So we have a LOT to figure out, I guess.

 

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