Book trade can learn from music labels’ mistakes

Book publishers are better equipped to ride the digital revolution than the music industry was a decade ago, using options for selling and enhancing their products that their counterparts at record labels lacked.

The book trade is on the brink of a sharp increase in demand for electronic books, driven by devices like Amazon’s (Kindle and online distribution from Google — and it dreads following the music industry into years of decline.

But the different ways music and books are enjoyed, as well as the different stages the two industries have reached in their development, mean parallels are not necessarily useful.

At the Frankfurt Book Fair this week, representatives of both industries berated themselves for not acting faster and more decisively to defend their copyright and exploit new opportunities offered by the Internet.

“We have to act at once. We can’t afford to observe, analyse, observe again,” said Alexander Skipis, chief executive of Germany’s book trade association, during a panel discussion entitled Learning from the Music Industry.

Digital piracy

The book-publishing industry certainly fears a spread of the digital piracy that some blame for the music labels’ woes, with most consumers by now believing Web content equals free content.

But, by comparison, the book industry is far ahead of where the music industry was when online music-sharing site Napster burst onto the scene 10 years ago, paving the way for a multitude of illegal MP3 file-sharing sites.

At that time, Apple’s iTunes online music store — still the world’s most popular way for legally buying music online— was still two years away, but the market was already ripe for music distribution via the Web.

By contrast, legal marketplaces for e-books are fast establishing themselves today, with three million e-readers expected to be sold in the US this year.

Last week, Google announced it was entering the fray with an online store for e-books accessible from any device with a Web browser.

Music industry revenues have been in decline in Europe since 2001 and are not expected to start growing again until 2011.

According to Forrester, file-sharing is nearly four times more widespread than paid downloading among Europeans aged 16 to 19.

The European recorded-music market is now worth about seven billion euros ($10 billion) a year, compared with almost 12 billion euros in 2001.

By contrast, book publisher revenues rose one per cent in the US last year to $40.3 billion, according to Book Industry Trends 2009.