Global publishing heads debate pandemic impact at BolognaBookPlus

Publishing heads from around the world discussed supply chain disruption, the rise of online sales, subscription models and the dominance of Amazon at a round table event this week for BolognaBookPlus, the new general trade arm of the Bologna Book Fair.

Louise Sherwin-Stark, chief executive officer at Hachette Australia & New Zealand, said the major challenge of the pandemic was the supply chain and meeting the huge demand for books, explaining: “We have around 45,000 titles of which about 25,000 are supplied on demand, which means we’re not actually holding the stock in Australia. In a traditional year we’d air freight books in as we needed them, which would take about two weeks. But during the Covid year there were no planes, there are still no planes, so about 8,000 of those 25,000 we just can’t get them to Australia or New Zealand except by boat. In normal times a boat would take three months and now it’s taking six to eight months.”

She added: “Because there’s no air freight, the freight has moved to sea freight, and Europe is being prioritised by shipping lines from Asia.” She noted that this had given the publisher some benefits, such as printing more on shore and a push to be more sustainable. “We don’t want to air freight books again, we want more production on shore but we also want better demand forecasting," she said. "We want to reduce those returns by anticipating what bookshops need."

Roberto Banchik, director general at Penguin Random House Mexico, said the main challenge in Latin America was trying to get books to bookstores and customers, explaining: “The development of online sales was not very impressive at the time the pandemic hit. Mexico was at the time the only country that had Amazon, for example, and still is. But there were no other online channels to distribute books.”

He said: “Demand was there, supply was there, we just had no idea how to get books to readers.”

However, Hakan Rudels, c.e.o at Bonnier Books in Sweden, said 2020 was a “record” year for the publisher: “The biggest challenge for us was to try to figure out what was going on,” he said. “Suddenly we realised the pandemic would be a positive thing for us, which was really weird, I think many of us wrestled with this because people are dying and the world was in the biggest crisis more or less in modern times, and we had a fantastic business.”

He said Bonnier started to look at grabbing market share and bought five publishing houses in the year. “You become quite confident when sales increase,” he said. “Month after month you just broke sales records... it was being in publishing but in a way being in the dot.com era because you just saw sales increases that you had never seen before." Around half of this revenue was in children’s books sales, due to schools being closed, he said.

Richard Charkin, chair of the session and founder of Mensch Publishing, said it was “an absolute bonanza year for academic publishing of a digital nature", citing Bloomsbury which saw an increase on digital sales of more than 40%. He said the UK market was looking “OK” but worried about the monopolisation of distribution channels.

Banchik agreed, arguing that the investment and technological capabilities needed for online distribution will drive smaller bookstores out of business if nothing is done differently. However, Chantal Restivo-Alessi, chief digital officer and c.e.o. for international foreign language at HarperCollins, said she wasn’t so sure, adding the pandemic has shown that many consumers are invested in their local bookstores and the curated selections on offer there.

“That curation I don’t think exists in the algorithmic work. I think there’s two different purposes and they can co-exist,” she said. Sherwin-Stark agreed, noting that suburban and regional bookshops did incredibly well in Australia: “Online sales have absolutely grown, they have at least tripled from pre-Covid levels. But we weren’t a very online market before that time. Amazon’s only been here a couple of years, the local player Booktopia is still bigger than Amazon,” she said.

Rudels also said in the Nordic countries Amazon is not particularly known for books, despite being a large online general retailer: “We have the chance to build new companies, new retailers on the digital service side, but then we as publishers need to try stuff and not be so protective.”

In response to a question on subscription or a la carte models for e-books, he said publishers “must be more curious and trying more stuff". Banchik, however, argued that one of the reasons PRH has kept out of the subscription model so far is to protect the income of authors. "It makes books a commodity, all of them, in the subscription model, and this, in my opinion goes counterintuitive to the essence of books, which is there’s an author behind it, who lives out of the books,” he said. “We have been keeping away from it, and we will still.”

Looking ahead, Sherwin-Stark said that a lot of “amazing” debut books have been hitting publishers’ desks recently, and companies will need to continue supporting debut authors to take advantage of the increased appetite for reading. She said the "pandemic books" have been “perfectly crafted and worked over for the last year and the advances are high so I think we’re going to see some fantastic debuts hit the world stage in the next year or so".