PWR In Conversation with Brian O'Leary, Part Two

Collective Action & Market Safeguards (part two of three)

In part two of the O’Leary interview, the Printed Word Reviews publisher asks more on what the publishing industry can do as a whole, and what that action might actually mean.

PWR: We are seeing platforms like Amazon and Goodreads increasingly flooded with bad-actor content, AI-generated counterfeits, and junk metadata. Barnes & Noble says they may have AI content on their shelves. You’ve argued that bad actors won't suffer from this, but rather publishers and authors will. If individual publishers are too fragmented to police this, how does the industry fight back against the 'pollution' of the digital book marketplace?

O’Leary: I think retailers suffer the most significant consequences if they can’t get it right. Whether online, digital-only, or bricks-and-mortar, retailers have to be seen as commercially trustworthy, or they lose sales. I know retailers are keenly aware of this, and the largest are certainly working to solve a problem that has scaled quickly.

Publishers and authors can certainly play a role in defense of copyright, so bad actors that use the same cover image or slightly mix up the spelling of the author’s name should be called out. I agree that one author can’t solve this flood, but there are many authors with a few books, and their eyes and ears matter. Publishers should provide authors with clear direction on who to contact at each bookseller. Finally, booksellers should find ways to act on those complaints.

See what action Amazon took this past month.

PWR: You’ve spoken about the difficulty of getting the publishing industry to move past the 'convening' stage to the 'and then what?' stage. Why is publishing so structurally resistant to collective action?

O’Leary: Publishing as a commercial industry has been around for 200+ years. That’s long enough to have seen almost everything. It’s also a business with a lot of silos, not just within publishers. There’s a tendency to see something as “someone else’s problem.” Production managers don’t manage warehouses, so they are less inclined to print less or improve warehouse turns.

BISG can help there, but moving from convening to problem-solving takes resources. Whether problem-solving needs research or consensus-building, that doesn’t happen without funding. That brings us back to your earlier question.

PWR: You’ve noted that the book industry wants and deserves robust research and development, yet organizations like BISG remain lightly funded relative to the scale of the business. Why is publishing so hesitant to invest real capital into industry-wide R&D, and what are we missing out on because of that frugality?

O’Leary: The organizations with the greatest capacity to fund research are also the ones large enough to think they can solve problems on their own. In some cases, they may see organizational success in solving a problem as a competitive advantage. Amazon is at once a publisher, a printer, a distributor for many independent authors, and a retailer. Most larger publishers are also distributors for other publishers. These and other competitive conflicts affect how willing they are to invest in research and development whose benefits accrue to the industry.

Naturally, I think that’s a mistake, and Book Publishing Next is BISG’s response. We’re generally estimated as a $30 billion industry. If research and industry cooperation could improve our sales by 1%, that’s a $300 million gain. Overall margins across publishers might be 15%, so the annual income for the industry is $4.5 billion. If we can reduce costs by 1%, that gives the industry $255 million that it could use to help printers, distributors, and booksellers sustain or expand their operations. There’s no doubt that those three parts of the industry are under significant margin pressure, risking U.S. capacity. Why not spend some money researching what might be possible if we collaborated to fix these issues?

Stay tuned for part three of this interview in a future issue of BookCAMP magazine. Missed part one of the interview?, see it here.