together within a union. this is a reworking of that going through more unitary, a probally emblazoned on the side of a bomber owned by the u.s. government, represented a kind of national unity. the way she holds her hands painting within the lines captures the way americans internalize their sense of obligation to the government. >> james sparrow, the university of chicago where booktv is on location. here's his new book, "warfare state." >> nick smith 2011 gaithersburg book festival a discussion on the state of the book including jed lyons, president and ceo of rowman & littlefield, geoff shandler, editor-in-chief of little, brown and company, gail ross, founder and president of ross yoon agency, and mark

laframboise, bookseller at politics and prose bookstore. >> i've been in the book business for two decades and over that time i've met a lot of wonderful smart people. i'm pleased to say five of those colleagues are assembled here at the stage to discuss the often frustrating industry that we love. in new york city people from all corners will gather at book expo america, the annual book convention. i suspect many of the talk here about today will be the same subject discussed in new york next week, so please sit back and we offer you, the c-span viewers, an exciting chance to see behind the curtain the power of what you see in the future. the moderator is michael norris. is a senior analyst at the book research firm simba information at the editor. so without further ado, i'll turn things over to michael. enjoy the panel.

>> thank you very much, gene. my name is michael norris and i am senior analyst from simba information. and with me today is mark laframboise, the legendary politics and prose independent bookstore. jed lyons, the president and ceo of rowman & littlefield and had a national book network. geoff shandler, editor-in-chief at little, brown and company, and gail ross, the president and founder of ross yoon agency. before i do a good job introducing everyone i just wanted to start off with a few words. i have been studying the publishing industry for about seven years now, and it's actually a pretty long time if you think about everything that has happened and just the past three and a half, over the past seven years or so i have watched a lot of changes going on in terms of not just what is being said about the future of books, but actually also who is actually talking about it. because over the years a lot of

newspapers have really scaled back their coverage of books. and i can't think of a single paper off the top of my head that has scaled back their coverage of the tech industry, or technology industry. a lot of what we are seeing in just day-to-day press if it comes from the view or the lens of a tech columnist, or it comes from the marketing department of a multibillion dollar organization that really has a big financial stake in the future of it's important to remember that books. if someone has a future that completely and 100% is tied up in e-books, they are going to tell you the future in the state of the book is all about e-books your now, in order to try to separate the rhetoric from the reality of simba information on with our parent company, we put together a nationally representative u.s. consumer survey. and we wanted to go to the entire u.s. adult population and

basically ask who is buying these things anyway. do you buy e-books? what devices do you, on which do you read? how many books do you buy, and so forth. and over the three-year period we've been collecting this data, we've been collecting at quarterly for our e-book publishing 2011 report, we found about 90% of u.s. adult population hasn't bought a single solitary digital book. not a single e-book. we also found out because we asked questions that print book buyers still outnumber e-book buyers about five to one. and the other thing we found out after, this is kind of interesting, the new devices that are out there such as the ipad, we found about 40% of all ipad owners in the u.s. haven't read a single solitary e-book on the ipad.

so once you actually have a lot of independent and objective information about the book industry, you think you can talk about the state of the book, and rather than doing that i just want to talk about the state of one book, and this is a book that i bought about six weeks ago. i was in, i was at the london book fair and i was walking across this massive exhibition hall, and i just saw something that made me stop dead in my tracks. a very large, black wall which was the sight of the publishers booth. and on the wall were all of these photographs, two-foot by three-foot photographs of really old and nice looking bicycles. if you spend more than five minutes with me outside the books you know i'm really into bicycles. i saw these signs and i thought to myself, wow, this is an incredible book. i knew nothing about the book. i didn't know where it was published. i didn't know what can the book it was. i just knew i had to have it.

i made up my mind at that moment i was not going to leave london without this book. i know you're all wondering but yes, i was able to get the book. i came into the fair the next day. i was able to get it. the book is about as large, this thing. is a very, very heavy book and i had to carry it around with me the whole rest of the day because i never made it back to my hotel. i was really, really grateful to do that because the book is literally so gorgeous. i'm thinking about building a coffee table just to go with it. now, so when we discuss the future of the book, we really can't -- we can't build it on anything that steve jobs holds over his head in the mac world. at the end of the day, you're not framing and creating content or telling the story to a device that's going to be declared obsolete in 11 months. the future of the book regardless of the format or how it is distributed, it really has to do with selling one book at a

time to one person at a time, and really making the book have so much value that somebody like myself did at the london book fair, will not care about any price barriers or any content barriers in order to get it. and we're always going to read print books forever. you can write that down and i will sign my name under, we will always have print books forever. but we'll also have e-books forever. the future of the book is going to involve all of us talking about where we stand in relation to the other and how we can get innovative and intelligent people to really talk about ways to make the industry better. so, with that i'd like to introduce our first panelist. jed lyons, he is the president and ceo of rowman & littlefield publishing group your rowman & littlefield publishers about 1200 new books annually under rome and littlefield scarecrow

press, lexington books, government institutes, taylor trade, and others. jed also serves as ceo of national network, distributor of 200 the publishers which rowman & littlefield launched in 1986. he graduated from podunk college in 1974 and is a member of the chief executives organization, the council on foreign relations and the chapter of washington national cathedral. jed, welcome. >> thank you. well, i've often heard the book business referred to as the accidental profession. and when i first got into this, 36 years ago, i asked why, and the reason i heard that there's really no way to prepare to be a publisher, you can't, at least in those days you couldn't go and get a degree in publishing. you can now get even masters degree in publishing. but the accidental profession

has now how it's been known for a long time, if you'll indulge me i thought it would tell you my accidental experience. so like, my guess is like most in the book business, it started in high school with a fabulous teacher at a suburban high school outside of chicago called barrington high school, where in the 1960s i was lucky enough to have a fantastic dead poets type english teacher named charlie white. and in this gigantic public high school outside of chicago, charlie would show up every day, wearing a tweed jacket, paisley ascot, long beard, long hair. and he was our hero. he was everything we wanted to be. he got us interested in reading and writing. most of us have never had any interest in it at all.

but we were very lucky to have a guy like him inspire us. so after high school, literally the day after i graduated, i hitchhiked around the country to visit all of my favorite authors hans. i started off at concord, massachusetts. i spent a week dodging all the park rangers because i didn't realize it was a public park. i spent a week trying to do with henry david thoreau. i found the bar where eugene o'neill wrote the iceman cometh. and even one of the bartenders. from there i went down to see thomas wolf's place. then out to pals, new mexico, because i was a big d. h. lawrence fan at the time. and actually met d. h. lawrence's widow.

he had married late in life, he married a much younger live woman and she was still living in the house. so by now you can imagine i have a full head of steam after summer of visiting all these famous authors homes. and finally wound up in san francisco checking out where all of the beat poets were. so now i'm off to college, going to bowdoin college of the main. and, of course, i'm going to be an english major. and i was lucky enough to have some great teachers there, too, who would teach herman melville, and i go out to the home of the professor which was situated on the rocks overlooking the atlantic, and he would talk about ahab and the whale. this was all very real to me. so after college, more hitchhiking.

and now i'm trying to become the great american novelist. and i am not making much headway. i'm having a great time, but i find it very difficult to sit down and actually write something that is longer than a short story. so, eventually i just had to come to the realization that i wasn't going to be the great american writer. maybe i would explore something else, and publishing seemed like the next best thing. so, 36 years ago, we started our little company here in maryland. that was after i pounded on doors in new york city, try to find a job in publishing. that was in late 1975. there were very few jobs available. anyway, i've never regretted the choice. publishing is a wonderful business, and although today when i meet people for the first

time and say i'm in the book publishing business, they kind of look at me like i have a terminal illness. are you okay? how are things going? i mean, you're actually still publishing books? i say yes, as a matter of fact, we are. we had our best year ever in 2010. but what has changed is that we're publishing many more books than we used to because we are selling many fewer copies of the books that we publish. and this is one of the phenomenon that i'll talk about in a minute. it's hard to imagine that just 10 years ago there were just 50,000 new books a year being published in the united states. five years ago, it ratcheted up to 180,000 new books a year. and that's one book every 30 seconds. and last year, 1 million new books, approximate 1 million new books were published.

so in 10 years we have gone from 50,000 new books, to 1 million. the vast majority of those as you might imagine our self-published, and companies like authors solutions in indiana have purchased a lot of self-publishing businesses. and they actually do what they do very well. but the majority of these books are not being sold through normal channels. and they're also not being sold widely. the average sale of an authors solutions book is under 100, 100 copies. so after you have exhausted mom and dad and aunts and uncles, there aren't many books being sold. the number of publishers has also skyrocketed.

there's about 70,000 publishers in the united states today. and, of course, it's much easier to be a publisher, hang out a shingle. technology is much easier to work with, typesetting, printing is easier. so there are many more publishers, many more books being published. now you have e-books entering the fray, and that i predict is going to ratchet up faster because now a lot of authors just skip the book and go straight to the e-book. and i have a lot of second thoughts about that. what is selling in the world of a million new titles a year? well, i would say probably two-thirds of those books are fiction, and half of those are erotica. that means almost half a million are erotica. and i guess these are fantasies

that authors are putting down on paper. i'm not sure who the customers are, but they're having a lot of fun writing them anyway. so, let me talk for just a little bit about the books. e-book sales last year were around 6% industrywide. talk about different categories, it's much higher, or lower. fiction, nonfiction doesn't sell as well as fiction. and erotica fiction sells better than fiction. so a lot of what's being sold through e-books is fiction, and a lot of that is erotica. the nonfiction space i think will probably double, e-books sales will probably double this year. they will still be under 10% in the nonfiction category, but that is double which means that our sales which are tracking

pretty much along these lines going from 3% in '09 to 6% this year, i think they'll be 10-12%. that's a doubling of sales. now, what does that mean to us as publishers? it's actually great news because we don't have to pay to print, bind, ship and run warehouse is to sell these books. my bank loves it because the margin on these books is much better. and later he agency like it will tell you that's good for us as well as publishers. so the margin really is significantly better. and the economics of the book business are getting better because of e-books. so as e-books grow i think the importance of publishing, the power of the industry, the strength, economic strength of the industry, will improve and that's all good.

kindle is the number one best selling e-book vendor by, i think, a wide margin. most people i speak to, and i ask people this question all the time, seem to think that the kindle is the easiest on the i for longtime reading. my wife loves kindle. the ipad is also very popular, but they have two different strategies. kindle's strategy is to be an inch deep and a mile wide, all things for all people, make available every single book. the same strategy that amazon has followed in books and any other category in which they are retailing. so they are making available a huge number, millions of titles, and selling small quantities happily. or as the apple ipad has taken exactly the opposite attack.

just as they did when they opened up itunes. they're going to into categories, where they know best selling fiction primarily and best selling nonfiction's cell. so they're not interested in being all things to all people. they want to sell bestsellers by best selling authors which come mostly from major publishers. so it's a completely different business model. they're also following something called the ages plan on whether sharing 70% of the revenue with publishers as opposed to kindle which is what i think an outdated model, the retail model, which is really like selling a book to a bookstore at 50% off. then third would come the barnes & noble nook, the new color nook is on display over here, and they claim to 25% of the market.

there's big news that barnes and nobles may be purchased, which is probably good for barnes & noble. and we want to see barnes & noble survive. we want to see borders survived, too, we are working hard with him to try to keep them alive. then there's the sony reader, the motorola soon, but the real wild card in my opinion is google. unlike all of the others, google does not have a dedicated device. coca selling content through the cloud to anyone's device. it could be an ipad. anything but kindle because kindle will not sell google's products. but you can purchase google content on a blackberry, on your pc, whatever. and the big advantage that google has, because they have been digitizing much, much longer than anyone else, they have a much larger stable of

content. and they think they could be a very, very significant player. they just launched their new e-book business in december, so they are the last entrance into the business but i would watch them very carefully. there are altogether, as far as we know, 50 customers buying e-books right now. many of them are aggregators buying books for libraries, library consortiums such as net library comic he library. net library with just bought. so i will just conclude by saying my biggest concern about the proliferation of the new data, whether it be paper or e-book, is that by removing the filter that publishers provide, we are going to be flooded with an awful lot of books that probably should not have seen the light of day. and i hate to be sounding like what may be an elitist note, but

then again i am here to talk about publishing. and publishing does provide an important filter, and hopefully protect the public from some of the direct, what otherwise might be foisted upon, so i think i will stop right there. >> thank you, jed. our next panelist is geoff shandler. geoff is the editor in chief of little, brown and company, one of america's oldest publishers. he started his career at random house 1993, and among the authors he is edited is not in glasgow, james bradley, robert wright and the comic geniuses of the onion. is authors include dana priest, evan thomas, charlie savage and others. his greatest moment in book publishing occurred this past year when, in his book, "the fifth witness," the best selling author named the law firm.

which is his first but probably not his last cameo appearance in a book. >> i'm going to be quick because i think questions will be more interesting. and there were many things that were said here that we differ on as far as different that a publisher. one thing quickly i just want to make it clear i'm speaking for myself, not for little brown or the company that owns us. i want to talk about library furniture. and there's a reason for that and actually this is a perfect place for it because of mark, the transit system here. there's another mark as well, which is a system that was introduced in the early '60s to automate the transfer and recording of the bibliographic information. so it came about at a time where the digital revolution was really starting and it started earlier but it was getting going and it was a great idea in a lot of ways, which was too great was effectively an electronic card

catalog. and if you're born probably before 1980, you will remember card catalogs. card catalogs were pretty sweet. they were like these big things and they were like shelves and like to be deep and you pulled them out and they had the cards. the cards with the entire library catalog by number, and then within alphabetical order author names, these sorts of things. and they're fantastic, almost in the same way labor stacks are fantastic, in that there were certain degree of serendipity when you looked up a book. so even if you knew you what you are looking for, you had to laboriously leave through these cards and you often would find something you never expected to get. and it was just such a wealth of the. i grew up in a town where there was one library, and it wasn't a huge library. but its holdings went through my mind as a kid, massive. one of the great liberating

things about a card catalog or stacks, even in a small library, i realized there were more books out there that i could ever read, even if i wanted to. i would stumble upon a whole host of a shelf that there was nothing that i expected. and then devote myself to those. in college, i went to college with a fantastic library, one of the world's biggest libraries. and it was amazing to go into the stacks, and not only would you find in millions of books that you could never read, but all books. 18th century books on the shelves. there was a rare book library where i went to school that was so amazing, and i'm not even entirely sure this was true though, everyone said and the reference library had a score where where they kept the seriously weird things, and if there was a nuclear attack, they build it in the '60s, this

core would sink into the ground and be entombed. so for future generations the books would be saved. and that was incredible, right? [inaudible] >> to yale. so there's something that is just fantastic about that serendipitous encounter with books, or other things as well that you didn't expect that the virtue in a wonderful way. i know for myself many of the books that i discovered that we turned out to be my favorite books ultimately. so we talked about a lot of stuff and we will about digital transformation of the book business. the thing that worries me the most is that we are in an ecosystem, which are all complicit with often inadvertently which is that information online has been personalized based on all sorts of interactions you've had with the web that you did not realize was so influential. one of the sites we like to use at work, not surprisingly is

dictionary.com. because i could not all of us were major but even then it's like a silly thing to rack your brain for that word when you could look it up. has anyone here going to dictionary.com ever? dictionary.com when you go to it in page 234 cookies on your computer. every time, right? and that tracks you. and if dictionary.com is doing that to gather information about you, because they are looking at what she looked up and they can extrapolate that and sell to advertisers and other companies. you can imagine when you are constantly voluntarily putting your stuff up like on facebook or gmail or google will stand your gmail for keywords, stuff like that, there's so much people know about you. they know so much about you. there's a firm in arkansas that has actually this foraker server farm, and you can pay them and they will tell you so much about yourself. they will even tell you if you are right or left-handed. they know everything, right?

they know everything. so what happens and maybe have noticed this as well, some of the ads that you get on the outskirts of these webpages, they are not like totally tailored but they are kind of tailored. they stick with you, like you are on one side and you could say, you could be looking up on kayak which is a travel site, fly to québec city, right? and then subsequent pages, little things about french lessons, you know? this kind of thing follows you. they can even go page to page. this is a very lucrative business for google and facebook and whatnot. so the good of it, right, wikipedia is amazing. it's fantastic. it's amazing in a lot of ways. but your information and your profile in the mind of advertisers and vendors comes very specific. and maybe in ways that are constricting. certainly reduces serendipity.

and that when you look for something on an online bookseller, for instance, you know, there's the recommend. but it's a tiny fraction of what you see if you walk into a bookstore, even a small book store. if you walk into a small bookstore you're going to see stuff you never expected to get. there's an interesting statistic that was out last year from a rival company where they did a survey of 43,000 americans, and he looked at a book buying. and they found that shoppers who shop online at booksellers, 28% of them end up buying something they didn't expect to buy. in physical bookstores, 43%. that's a huge 50% spread, and actually it's very ominous in a lot of ways for book publishers and authors who are hoping people walk in, walk out with other impulse purchases. that's a huge, huge, huge gap. there are in the great things about online bookseller.

it's been a very good business so far for us. i grew up in a small place, i could not buy, you know, 0.000 whatever percent of the books that i can buy now. it's fantastic. but we are in a feedback loop here, and i think it extends not just to books, but politics and all that stuff where you are increasingly just with the people are like you, like the same things as you, you are an algorithm, and sometimes right and sometimes wrong. so here we are in a metro area without a book review section anymore, which is amazing given washington. there's not one in los angeles. so what are these filters? what is coming through and how do people decide and our people surprised? i think ultimately what happens otherwise is you have such an air wing, and maybe we can agree

on this or not, of the kinds of books where exposed. if you are not exposed to a you don't know about it. so for us, certainly a huge challenge now is taking out how do we surprised people. and a card catalog, not to put too much into the, card catalog was 1789, france, right? the card catalog is linked, other reasons historically with the kind of enlightenment set of values about democratization. there's something about a card catalog that going through that apple is amazing. and i go back next weekend is my 20th reunion in college. and i had gone back there last year to speak. and went into the big library and there were the card catalog. it was so amazing. there was an online digital catalog when i was there. i went to the shelves and they're all empty. thousands and thousands. there are universities, nyu,

there was a celebration, they burned the cards. it was like a big thing, right? so again, lots of advantages. it's very cool to interlibrary loans the way you could have with an old card catalog, great, but this is an old. for us a real challenge now is how do we surprised people when they're going to buy books. and that is something we have to solve when the market is going to be narrow, narrow, narrow. the same things we talked about, utah one last example of this is the long tail argument which is because of inventory, you know, everything can be found. there's truth to that but at the same time, the movie business 10 years ago, they thought that would lead to this explosion of independent films that were financially successful. the truth is it has been the opposite. given more and more other avatars, the big comedies. the independent film has effectively died in america in

terms of released its i don't think we are living in a world where people find everything. in fact, there is great tendency for the big blockbuster stuff to be stronger and stronger and stronger. so we look for help to figure out how to break that and small bookstores are certainly a way but not the only way. there are issues there, too. >> thanks geoff. the next panelist is actually from a bookstore, mark laframboise, who is from politics and prose independent bookstore. i -- is from chicago and has been a bookseller working at in the bookstore since 1991. he began working in a very small store while in graduate school in illinois and eventually became the head buyer and stored manage of the stone lined bookstore in fort collins, colorado, for five years. he has spent the last 13 years as a bookseller at politics and prose, and is on the executive board of the new atlantic independent booksellers

association, the regional booksellers trade organization covering new york, new jersey, pennsylvania, maryland, delaware, northern virginia and washington, d.c.. mark, welcome. >> thank you so much. i'm going to read -- [inaudible] my opinion right now is -- [inaudible] >> talk louder. >> my opinion right now, it's a great time to be an independent bookseller. with challenge comes opportunity. and so with great challenge comes great opportunity. so we have great challenges. the challenges we face are real. e-book sales as a percentage of books old and though sales dominated by giants like amazon and apple, although we do sell e-books, too, in case you're wondering you can buy them from us. ever-increasing competition.

[inaudible] the steady rise of prices for both hardcover and paperback environment. we face challenges before. explosive growth of national chains, so-called superstars in the late 90s and 2000 discounted by e. retailers who sell mark notman obligated charged sales tax to name a couple, and yet we survive. [inaudible] whether it's to the hosting of sponsor of neighborhood booksellers enlisting experts in a field to offer classes, authors and providing space for neighborhood activism, schools, churches and synagogues, organizers, not to mention the

books, the challenge to entertain readers of every age who walk through our doors. we serve as a center for intellectual arguments to authors and publishers of an independent bookstores to not only make books available to act as a wedge between the committee and the authors words. to know how and when, traditional newsletter, and author events. even with the arrival of e-books, printed book is far from day. worldwide one minute titles were published in 2011. in the u.s., new books and new additions and old ones, but to figure 288,355 suggest a healthy book market. this doesn't account for the explosion of nontraditional books like self-published books and on demand books. which account for another almost three quarters of a million books. and these figures all came from the article of higher education.

[inaudible] this your e-books are expected to hit 20% but there are indications the sale of printed books will increase at the same time. our store i approached a gentleman and asked him if he was fine and he was looking for. he mentioned a ton we didn't have so we offer to order for him. he declined and said he will probably just download it through rear. i think the computing platform, e-books, audio books in hardcover, paperback books are going to coexist. i will go out on a limb and state that readers will read books. our challenge when all of us on this panel share is to grow readership, turn more people, and that's as a the bookstore we hope they by traditional books, but for right now i think it's a challenge to find readers. whether they read on the platform or a regular book. challenges are best met head on.

we as independent booksellers are we at politics and prose more particularly will continue what we do best, that's acting as a bridge between the committee and our book world, challenging, engaging and entertaining customers. providing a platform for the exchange of ideas and a stage for authors to present their work. and making use of available resources both human and technological to achieve our goal. we can't just announce our system upon, we have to demonstrate it every day. so i think that the biggest challenge, like i said, is to find more readers. whether they are on and the reader or regular traditional book that we love, our biggest challenge is to turn non-raiders into readers. >> thanks so much, mark. our final panels is gail ross to choose a president of ross yoon agency.

she says that each of her new projects must be to import country. and must make her daughter's proud and must offset their college educations. she sincerely believes the phrase books change lives. she represents a variety of important commercial nonfiction and she entered -- works very close with first time office and is earned the reputation an issue for providing enthusiastic editor of guidance at all stages of the publishing process. through the agency's blog and regular happy hours she encourages her writers to view themselves as members of the literary community, helping one another towards a success. she is also a media lawyer where she advises individuals, companies and nonprofits on copyright, publishing and new media and licensing. gail, welcome. >> thank you. geoff, you're right, anything you put on the internet you are about to hear back. you've got to make sure that one child is already through college, and the other is almost done. so now i can take time.

part of what i'm here today to do is talk about money and authors in this new environment. but before i do that i wanted to say couple things about the state of the book from my perspective. i've had a wonderful, wonderful privilege of working in this business for come as both a media lawyer for about 30 years, and as an agent for 22 of those years. in d.c. which in a lot of ways i think the nonfiction capital of the company. i have seen a lot of the e-book revolution because my lawyer hat, i was working on electronic journal contract for some of the learned societies that i've represented over the years. as early as 1990. so i've seen a lot, and i must say this last year is about the most positive your icing. i was saying to someone in new york just last week that the mood, and i go to manhattan a lot, the mood in publishing a

year ago was much different than it is today. we are starting to understand what's going on, and the present of one company said to me, that she feels like it's the wild west now, but she feels like at least she has had three years experience, but she is starting a totally new job. she brings 30 years experience to it so she feels better than she did a year ago. it's an interesting time. we're making up rules, working on contract light which is in both bookbinding and challenging and exciting because a lot of these language about e-book versus enhanced book versus multimedia book rights is all in play, and confusing us all and making my authors terribly frustrated at times, and different people at different publishing houses are responding to our entries about the in different ways. but happens to be a very nice

business. and people are generally collaborative and generally are seeing that authors and publishers for the most part are on the same page and at the same interest. and really fundamentally we all share the same interests that mark spoke about which is getting more people to read. i've become quite agnostic about what the device is. i just want the next generation to -- one statistic you didn't say was how many americans buy books at all. and that's a fairly low percentage, and i worry about that. i love my hardcover books, but whenever anybody buys, is fine with me. one of the reasons why i love my hardcover books is because of how my authors get paid in hardcover royalty versus the electronic book world, a little bit of what i wanted to show today. as you may or may not know,

there's a traditional royalty structure for a major book trade publisher, a list price royalty. and it's based for purposes of this, we'll talk on the price of the book, okay, the actual price of the book. so if you're getting 50% royalty and we're talking about a $26 a book, that's $3.90 that is credited to the officers -- authors will. that's where hardcover book to give you what we call the agency model, as jed mentioned porting e-book, the publisher accepts the price. it's usually $12.99 or $13.99. let's just say $13 so i can get my math simple. and so then the publisher, what the author gives is 25% of the net received by the publisher, okay? so in this case and i store or

whoever it is, google or even amazon ar is paying 70% of the . that's $9.10 for the publisher, 25% of that is $2.28. so that same book is published at the same time, as your hardcover, to the author, royalty of three would have i just said, $3.90 versus $2.28. when the hardcover is a. when the trade paperback is that it's different. and, in fact, the money to the authors account from the e-book sale is better. the trade paperback that has a 15-dollar as opposed to an e-book, a print book, 15-dollar retail, the net to the publisher is $7.50, and there's 7.5% with price royalty which is what's typical on the trade paperback,

not to the author of $1.13, okay, that's for the trade paperback. if the trade paperback is out, you're looking at a 10-dollar retail, pretty much what the publisher, 10-dollar retail online for an e-book. that's what the publisher is going to price it at is $10. so they get 70%, the same 70% which is a net to the publisher of $7 then the author is getting 25% of that net. so this case the author is get $1.75. so when the trade paperback is out, the e-book royalty is better for the author. but when the hardcover is out the royalty from the e-book is less advantageous pick the interesting thing does happen, and this is where many of us have been very upset at times, the question of when did we publish the e-book as compared to the hardcover. in the beginning there was a

move so that the e-book did not come out at the same time as the hardcover. that there was a period of time for some people, six months, for others six weeks. but there was a period of time when people could buy the hardcover and e-book wasn't available. and there was a lot of discussion, i'm sure geoff and talk about this, but the horse is out of the corral and that's not going to change now. so that the e-book is published simultaneously with the hardcover, and so if you can get the e-book for $13 online, do you really want to pay $26, or even the discount that you will find in a bookstore. there is a difference. there's definitely a difference. so those are some of the numbers. it has had an effect on advances that are provided to authors. how much? i can't really tell because it's too early and the publishers are having a hard time putting in a factor for how many e-books are

selling. i only give nonfiction, and it's still pretty much only 10 come in some cases 10-50%. as jed was saying in his case, it's gone from three to six in one year. it's going up, but in a fiction work it is very, very different and there's been a huge impact. in some cases publishers seeing 50% of their fiction titles being sold electronically. that has a huge, huge affect on these royalties. especially when the hardcovers are out, as i said. so i use it to go around the country talking about e-books and saying that i was never -- people my age or older would never read an e-book if they were prone, you know, on the bed, on the beach, on the couch. but i've become a total ipad junkie. i have to say. i did a very interesting thing recently. i was just in europe and had an experience i'd never had before.

i read each and for pleasure because i spent so much time working in the nonfiction area, and i always read one novel at a time and i'm totally engrossed, and i love it. i was going to paris, and i was reading the paris novel, halfway through on my way over. and i downloaded, and then a friend of mine was writing a book that is about to come out about seduction in france, and that was in a pdf or. it hasn't been published yet, and she sent it to me. and the person whose apartment we're staying in had done a book about restaurant in pairs so i downloaded that. and then, there were times i was going on a walk and i needed, i did want to get my ipad is little heavier than they like, i have the first one, and so i went into shakespeare and company and i bought a copy in

paperbacks are have something to walk around and just sit in a café and read for a little bit. so by the time i got back i realized i had read about eight books. but i was going back and forth. it was a very interesting experience. i'm not sure i want to do more than once a year, but it was different and i loved it. and now i'm reading one novel at a time, but on my ipad. thank you. >> thank you so much, give. and we still have a few minutes left and would love to take any questions if any of you have them. please step up to the microphone. >> is it possible to get an independent published book distributed widely through bookstores? and if it isn't, why? if it is, how? >> we represent a lot of independent published books, a lot of self-published books. we try to do it for people who live in our neighborhood. it's part of our mission to be a neighborhood bookstore. we do it on a consignment basis.

so we pay the authors as the books sell. but we are very free and very open to the idea, but we do get requests because people see us on c-span or whatever and they want us to carry it. books published in other parts of the country independently, audie self-publish platform generally linger on the shelf and don't find much of a market. but if it's by a local author and he tells his friends to come in and get it, we are happy to be the place where they can point people to come by their book. >> i would like to ask about library acquisitions and how that is trending. a lot of folks, 26, 1299 -- $12.99 is not something to do on a regular basis but the libraries would invite a lot of books. i'm wondering about per capita with the exposure, my suspicion based on the montgomery county

library is that there are fewer books being purchased by libraries and, therefore, fewer books that are available. >> it's actually been quite a while since i've seen data about libraries and trends in that regard, but any others have any thoughts on that? >> i think libraries are mostly getting burned, you know, by the world. but there's a real debate going on with publishers about e-books and how to account for the kind of borrowing e-books. there's a general myth worth mentioning in passing that e-books are free for publishers, like the finished book is done but there's a huge amount, back-office staff. so for instance, greek systems by which you can track how many times a library book is lent out. and if it reaches a certain point there's discussion from self publishers, sometimes it's almost the equivalent of a physical book be lent out for so many, it would be destroyed and

you have to buy a new and. how does that work? no one has figured it out. there's a lot of different systems being built. and there are some big publishers are really not kind to libraries, but i think most people in the book business grew up loving libraries. and on the other hand, we cannot give away the books for a lot of reasons, including authors deserve to be compensated. >> i remember meeting a publisher and i said are you going out with your authors tonight, or the stores quick he said no, i'm taking my brains out. he said in a given year he kids the buyer for all around the boston area, they will buy more books than most of the independent bookstores that he is dealing with. so he was very smart. he sold a lot of books that way.

>> i was just wondering how you saw e-books changing the market in the back catalog in particular? certainly one of the more frustrating things for the reader is books going out of print because there's just no market for them. but if the margin is lower for producing an e-book and so on, is that something where you see out of print books becoming more and more rare, they're just going to e-book rather than -- previously that was kind of an exclusive, i mean, you had to go to a used bookstore, whereas now it seems like it's more possible that these things would be available spirit it's actually pretty great. i mean, they are available. in the way they are not, and the author can be compensated for the sales versus, like these books are great but these books are being resold. the authors not getting any more money when the book is resold.

i think again the inventory of digital books is fantastic, and it may allow for -- a lot of books are not paperback at all. a lot of the books that we do as well, they sold so few copies in hardcover that it's not sensible for bookshops to order a a lot of copies because they have limited space. so i think it's pretty great. >> the other thing is the print on demand capability. i several authors who books would be out of print. they can get the reversion, you know, just immediately but they go run the country into speaking in places where they speak, they order the book, print on demand is very, it's a little bit more expensive than books would be otherwise. it looks just like the book but it keeps them in business. my clients don't have to pay for a new cover, printing costs, paper costs, anything like that so they just keep it, rather than ask for the rights back a keeper with a publisher and

order print on-demand copies. and very efficient. >> one more question. >> yeah, i assume google is going after things that the copyright has expired on, and i was wondering, do they have people physically in libraries copying things? because i found a pretty esoteric books on family history on google reader, and i was produced surprise, and i just wondered, are individuals uploading things, to? how does that work? >> it's an epic saga. this is a huge thing, and it's too boring to get into. but basically several years ago google did deals with some of the major libraries of the world, to scan an enormous amount of content. i mean, that's the surest way to explain it. >> how do they decide what content? >> they just did everything. it's a google. they do every bit of information.

it's amazing effort that they did. incredible amounts. >> and then they were sued by authors and guilds and for the ones who were not out of print. there is a settlement and now the settlement is banned so there will be more to come. >> so are they going after the ones that -- [inaudible] >> but they have. probably almost everything. that you can find in a library anywhere. >> google is everywhere. >> thank you for your question. thank you for your attendance. let's thank all the panels. [applause] >> thank you all for coming today. the keynote speech is next door. >> this event took place at the second annual gaithersburg book festival in gaithersburg, maryland. for more information visit gaithersburg book festival.org.

>> booktv as at the annual publishers convention at the javits center in new york city. it's called book expo america. we are prevailing some of the fall 2011 books that are coming out. we are joined by the publicity director, jeff seroy come to talk about some other upcoming titles. i want to start with that used to be us, about just coming out. what is at? >> well, peter, it's a continuation of tom friedman's amazingly influential and best selling book, the world is flat, hot, flat and credit. this time he is corroborating with a foreign policy adviser who is also a close friend and longtime associate of his. and the book is really outlines for ways in which america has gone off the rails and for ways we could get it back on.

>> when is this coming out of? >> it's coming the day after labor day. it's highly programmatic, and it is just a roadmap for the u.s. which is going to be a great event. >> mr. seroy, who is andrew feinstein? >> andrew feinstein is most likely the world's leading expert on the global arms race, the kind of black market in arms around the world. he was an south african by birth, a politician who now lives in exile in london. and he is the go to person for every media organization and every ngo on the global arms race. >> y. in exile? >> well, it's a long story but it has to do with the corruption of the government and his attempt to stand up against it a few years ago. >> in south africa. >> correct spent and i want to ask you about a nobel economics prize winner, author that you

have,. >> that is daniel. we like to say is the most influential author you never heard a. he won a nobel prize in economics for his psychological thinking. his area is decision-making, and he's been very influential are not complied well and all sorts of people who are in, who work in the area of business and how we make decisions we do. and this is his first time in print with a book for the general reader. super well regarded by ceos and fortune 500 people all around the world, and by thinkers in a lot of different fields. at the great privilege to be publishing them. >> jeff seroy present some of the all 2011 books. ..