Kobo’s Michael Tamblyn on why ebook publishing is a global business

Michael Tamblyn, Kobo’s executive vice president of content, sales and merchandising, spoke to Digital Book World’s Jeremy Greenfeld about ebookselling, data-mining, what traditional publishers can learn from self-publishers, and the changing role of booksellers.

Jeremy Greenfeld: Expanding internationally must be very difficult. Even very large companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble are struggling to do it well.
Michael Tamblyn: What I think that shows is just how difficult it is to do. Kobo was born international and knew from the very beginning that the only way to succeed in the ebook business was to be an international company. For reasons of raw economics, outside of the US, there probably isn’t another single national ebook market that’s big enough to sustain a player on its own in the space of international competition.

If you decide to base your entire business on selling ebooks in the UK, there aren’t enough ebook purchasers there to sustain enough revenue to make the investment required to compete against other international players. When you look around the world, you see that pattern repeated. Local players try to spin up an ebook solution of their own and then realise it’s tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars of investment to compete against Amazon and Apple. Unless you’re international, unless your focus is global, to compete in this business is very difficult.

From the very beginning, we knew we’d be in multiple countries and in multiple languages and we executed on that from the very beginning.

JG: Kobo was recently acquired by a large Japanese e-tailer. Microsoft recently entered into a joint venture with Barnes & Noble. Google just launched a new tablet and seems to be ready to join the ebook battle anew. And Amazon is the big kahuna. Why will Kobo compete and win the ebook war?
MT: You look at that list of companies and what becomes clear is you just can’t be good at one thing. You can’t just have a good device. You can’t just have a good bookstore. You can’t just be in many international markets. You have to be able to integrate a great international experience, a great multilingual experience, a great device, a great catalog of books, a great customer experience, a great reading experience or customers don’t get excited about you and it’s hard to grow. Because of the resources Rakuten has given us, we are able to meet those expectations.

When you hear about a company struggling, it’s because expertise isn’t necessarily transferable: to be good at one thing doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re good at the others. That’s why we’ve been able to stay in this game and grow as rapidly as we have.

JG: There was a big article recently in the Wall Street Journal about data that e-booksellers gather through their readers. Kobo has long been known in the industry as the e-bookseller that has been most forthcoming with data. Why do you share so much data?
MT: There are a couple of reasons for it. We fundamentally believe that for Kobo to do well, publishers have to be doing well and authors have to be doing well. We are part of a content ecosystem. Authors and publishers right now have massive decisions that they have to make. And most retailers treat this whole process like a black box: ebooks go in, revenue comes out and the publisher and the author have no real insight into how those sales are being made. The more insight we can give to a publisher and to an author about how this market is developing, how this consumer is different from a print consumer, the more likely they are to make good decisions, the better it’s likely to be for us.

JG: Do you share more data with publishers than you share during your talks at industry conferences?
MT: Oh yeah. This has been another fundamental policy for us. On a very regular basis we’re sitting down with publishers and breaking down data on how their particular business with us is doing, how are they benchmarking relative to others and especially in this world of agency, how are their price points performing, what are the time cycles around their books, what’s the seasonality around their books, how have marketing campaigns we’ve executed together performed. You can never give enough. There’s always the next question and the next data point. As a part of that ongoing dialogue, we are always getting better at answering the publishers’ question of how we’re selling together.

It has its limits. We don’t get into aspects of specific consumer behavior. We are obsessively protective of privacy. But where we think there’s an opportunity to preserve reader privacy but at the same time provide reader insights into how our customers are performing in the ebooks space, we’re interested in that.

JG: Can you give insight into the kinds of data you share?
MT: It’s a mix of informal chats and hard data. Most of what we’re doing is packaging up reports and bringing them to publishers and often sitting down together and dissecting the data that comes from that. The interesting question for us going forward is how do we make that a broader, more scalable process. We have tens of thousands of publishers and we have them all around the world. What works well when you’re visiting 10 big publishers in New York, doesn’t work as well for 20,000 publishers around the world in 60 languages. So we’re looking at scalable solutions.

JG: Like a publisher dashboard of sorts?
MT: It’s much more incremental than that. Expanding the range of reports that we give, making them easier to produce and more replicable and then looking at the different ways that publishers want to be communicated with and how do we get our insights to that larger group: newsletters, PDF reports and portals are all in the mix but I’m not going to commit to a timeline right now because it’s a very iterative process. We do a bit and see if publishers like it and then do a bit more.

We’re starting at the top with our big publishers but also starting at the bottom with Writing Life, giving a ton of visibility to self-published authors on sales and looking at how books sell around the world. Are there territories you should be looking at? Should you be setting prices differently around the world? In our mind, a self-published author is a publisher—it may be a publisher of one book but they make all the decisions a publisher has to make.

JG: What advice would you give someone who wants to enter into a career in bookselling?
MT: There are so many more ways into it now, on one hand. But in some ways fewer places to do it.

You either have to deeply embrace the physicality of the book and build the small, beautiful independent bookstore or you come somewhere like here. Now, bookselling means a lot of different things. We have people here who are booksellers born and bred who are picking and highlighting different titles and deciding which ones we should put our muscle behind in a particular market. But there are also people who write recommendation algorithms or who do data mining—that’s bookselling, too. So, whether you’re someone who has taken three degrees in English literature or two degrees in engineering, if you love books, there’s a place for you in this industry.

JG: Discoverability is a big buzz word right now. What can publishers do through the Kobo platform to help their books get discovered and to sell more books?
MT: There’s a lot of talk right now about the lessons that traditional publishing can learn from self-publishing. There’s an extreme you can take that to that I don’t think makes sense. But there are some things that self-published authors do really well that would be interesting for traditional publishers to emulate. Self-published authors spend a lot of time thinking about how people find books: You’ll see subtitles optimized for searchability and what category do I put this book in to get on a bestseller list; thinking very strategically about descriptive text; watching the performance of each book with a near religious obsession; and caring about the performance of each book.

Self-publishers look at each title with a laser-like focus. That’s easy when you have five books. It’s hard when you have 10,000. The publishers who figure that out, who treat each book as an individual platform with an individual audience behind it will see big gains.

JG: What else should publishers do?
MT: Publishers should experiment more. We just launched the Kobo author notes program. Author notes allows authors to interact with readers inside the book, to penetrate that last barrier in publishing, which is between the author and the reader. You can see some publishers say, ‘I don’t’ think my author would go for that,’ but some publishers light up because they say, ‘now we can get out authors engaged with our reading base,’ because they know getting authors involved with their reading base is the whole game now.

We know publishers we can go back to and we can go to them and say, ‘why don’t we try this’ and they will and some publishers will say, ‘no, we can’t, we don’t have time, too difficult.’ The difference in attitudes will be a huge differentiator for publishers going forward because authors are going to look to that.

Authors have made this dramatic leap forward in terms of their expectations. They know the level of control they have with self-publishing platforms and they’ve had experience with traditional publishers. It’s not just what can you do for me now, it’s what can you do for me that’s better. That’s an upheaval in the industry. It’s quite ground-breaking for publishers to start to think like that. I think it’s fantastic. It’s going to change publishing and the relationship between publishers and authors for the better.

JG: It’s been a trendy thing to do to guess when ebook revenues will surpass p-book revenues in the adult trade market. When do you think that will happen?
MT: At a certain point, I think it’s less about when digital supplants print and more about where do we believe the tipping point exists, where we start to see real systemic, structural changes happen because of that shift. We know that things like chain bookselling can sustain a certain amount of transfer from print to digital and the question then becomes how much of that shift happens before those companies have to dramatically remake themselves.

I look at some of the great innovations that our former parent Indigo is doing right now. They figured out early on that they can’t dedicate as many square feet to books as before—that they have to become a cultural department store.

So what I’m more interested in is when we will cross that tipping point where the industry has to radically remake itself.

JG: Are print books going away?
MT: No, I don’t think they’ll ever go away. I don’t think they’ll go away any more than vinyl LPs have gone away. But more than that, there’s some kinds of content and there are some reading experiences that just fit so beautifully with the printed page that I don’t think we’re ever going to see those go away.

One other thing that the transition to digital has done is force publishers to really examine their relationship to the physical product that they’re putting out. The reason that so much has transitioned to digital—romance and science-fiction and fantasy—is that those books had almost no relation to the product. There was very little care to how those books looked in the world. The move to digital was no big deal because all people were worried about was the word.

There are some books where the physical experience is a huge part of the value. There are some publishers who will think, ‘you know what? I’m going to focus on the beautiful book. Even if 50% move over to digital, I’m going to keep the larger share of what’s printed on paper.’

This is an edited version of an interview that first appeared on Digital Book World. Read the full interview online here.

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Category: Features