Join the Club
Book Clubs Reinvent
the Digital World
FROM PUBLISHING TRENDS (MARCH
2005)
If the
term 'book club' evokes a muddled mélange (if
not somewhat terrifying dream) of Oprah
covering Tolstoy in gold stickers,
growing legions of like-minded enthusiasts discussing
scrapbooks or maybe even booksellers in Kabul, classes
filled with Scholastic catalogs offering
Shrek 2 tie-ins, while exclamation-point-laden
mailers emblazoned with "6 books for a dollar!"
fall from the sky, well, join the club.
This increasingly
bloated term now refers to a variety of disparate categories
- from reading groups to the recommendations of the
Today Show and Oprah. Exacerbating
the confusion, book clubs' individual identities became
obscured in the 2000 joint venture between Bertelsmann
and AOL Time Warner that formed Bookspan,
the 40-club-strong Goliath of the industry. The new
name constantly provokes misunderstandings, either because
it is confused with VNU's Bookscan,
or because the corporate entity acts as a stand-in for
its discrete parts (Bookspan as Book-of-the-Month
Club, or the Literary Guild,
Bookspan as all of the Doubleday clubs
combined).
With such disheveled
semantics, it is difficult to pin down, what exactly
people are rallying against when they vow (as a particularly
vehement blogger did recently) never to join a book
club, "short of being in prison, living in some
remote country, or being socially isolated in the extreme."
In a recent survey of middle-aged readers, it was clear
that the surveyees didn't distinguish between discussing
books in a group or paying for monthly shipments --
but they didn't want either.
Reading groups,
however are going gangbusters (to use a favorite phrase
of Bookspan honcho Markus Wilhelm)
and layoffs and "reorganizations" to the contrary,
book clubs may yet have some life left in them. What
is dying is the definition of just what that is.
The
New Clubs on the Block
Throughout
decades of expansion and proliferation, book clubs remained
anchored in their "value propositions" as
Ruth Stevens, president of e-marketing
strategies and veteran of BOMC and Time Life,
described them: editorial selection, the bribe (X number
of books for $1 when you join), and the convenience
of direct shipments. By the late ‘90s the first
and third value propositions had been hijacked, and
only the bribe was left to seduce an increasingly savvy
and wary public.
But once again,
the equation is shifting, as publishers become online
retailers, on-line booksellers begin to offer memberships
(Amazon Prime), as well as on-line
reading groups (B&N's ) and everyone gets into the
continuity biz. Audible has been the
most obviously successful (investor lawsuits to the
contrary) by offering some 400,000 users a flat fee
membership that buys them audio books at an average
of $10 a pop.
Bookspan's
latest endeavor is Zooba, which, though
still beta testing, dramatically differs from the original
club's model, and offers the venture a real shot at
a sustainable model. Similar to Time-Life continuities,
Zooba members pay $9.95 a month to receive the hardcover
book of their choice, until they cancel their subscription.
Exclusively on-line, the snazzy site -- replete with
bestsellers, and a virtual host that welcomes you and
then follows your cursor with her eyes -- advertises
its affiliation with Bookspan, by splaying "Brought
to you by Book-of-the-Month Club" across the top
of the screen, even while asserting independence. Another
Net-Flix style venture, also developed
in 2000, is Booksfree, the on-line,
membership-based book rental site. "We bring the
library to your home," says Doug Ross,
president and CEO of the company. Although comparatively
small in size, Booksfree's membership base is double
what it was just two years ago. Supplied by distributors
Ingram and Baker & Taylor,
Booksfree also rents out audio books via snail mail
(like Audio Queue, Recorded
Books, Simply Audiobooks,
and ZDag), but is the only company
that currently has such a concept with books. "One
of the benefits of our service…is the ability
of members to try new authors without losing any money
as they would if buying the books," Ross said.
The resurfacing of rentals as a way of saving money
by erasing commitment is akin to the used book market
where readers are in possession of books for a certain
amount of time before earning their money back through
reselling.
In the virtual
world of the spoken word (where Audible has rapidly
expanded since becoming Apple iTunes'
audiobook partner) Media Bay, a company
similar to Audible that got its start when Book-of-the
Month sold off its Audio Book Club,
is just now segueing from selling hard goods primarily
via mail order to "digital distribution via wireless
and internet downloads." On March 1 the company
announced that it will offer downloads of S&S
Audio titles through its partnership with the
MSN Music service. Meanwhile, a new
generation of legal P2P file-sharing networks are also
becoming vehicles for audiobooks, such as LimeWire
(where users pay a flat rate for an unlimited lifetime
membership) and Wurld Media's "Peer
Impact" beta site, where members pay for
individual songs, and soon other media, but then receive
credit for file sharing.
What
remains to be seen is whether, as media converges into
a few sturdy subscription models, where paper and ether
are interchangeable and credit card billing is the standard,
the arcane distinctions between royalty deals and retail
discounts, between exclusive and nonexclusive deals,
and between retailers, clubs, publishers and file-sharing
networks will persist. "I've been saying forever,
if the book clubs become like an on-line bookseller,
why should they be getting things any cheaper?"
asked Michael Cader, founder of Publishers
Marketplace. For now, precedence presides,
and until the publishers pull the plug, or online retailers
begin to demand similar deals, precedence rules, even
as the clubs break away from the models that came to
define them.
©2005
Publishing Trends
