Bookwire launches into the world of podcasting with «Publishing Intelligence with Bookwire»

«Publishing Intelligence with Bookwire» is an original podcast from Bookwire, an expert digital content distribution company.

The podcast is a space to share information and address concerns that players in the publishing world are questioning or opining about today. In each episode, there will be connections with Bookwire experts and guests from around the Hispanic world to get the industry’s view of the issues brought to the table in this podcast.

«Publishing Intelligence with Bookwire» is aimed at industry professionals, people interested in technology applied to the publishing industry and curious about innovation.

Episode 1: The digital publishing market today

The first episode of «Publishing Intelligence with Bookwire» provides an introduction to today’s digital publishing market. In addition, Daniel Benchimol, director of Proyecto451, an Argentine company focused on the development of digital strategies for the publishing sector, gives a detailed overview of the future trends that will develop in the coming years in formats and consumption models, as well as new tools that publishers will be able to develop.

From Barcelona and Mexico on the digital publishing environment in relation to technology and industry developments. This episode is dedicated to taking a look at the current digital publishing sector.

To begin with, we must understand where the future of publishing is going. You can’t understand digital publishing content consumption without the word that has held the world back: pandemic. Confinement has held back all industries, but it has created a wave of paper-to-e-book conversions by publishers. The pandemic has also caused publishers to go online to reach customers beyond the bookstore. The digital publishing world has evolved.

Pandemic figures

2020 has been a year in which content consumption brought our users closer to digital consumption. In 2018 the year-on-year growth was 57%, in 2019 35% but in 2020 113%, this figure has driven publishers to digitize their works or for bringing their content to audio. These figures are from the Bookwire 2021 report.

Studies published during the de-escalation further consolidate the newly acquired habits. Daniel Benchimol, a guest of this podcast that inaugurates the season, believes that «the pandemic has generated a kind of acceleration of a process that could take five or six years but that in a matter of months has lightened. This happened, in part, because the publishers themselves were in a hurry to have their bookstores closed, so they turned to this format, beginning to digitize their collections and creating offers. On the other hand, readers found the bookstores closed and wanted to consume content, so it was understood that this was a good opportunity to try these formats, especially during March, April, and May 2020. Something that had never happened in 10 years of digital book history in Spanish».

Trends in digital consumption

It is difficult to replicate the figures of the pandemic year, but they have not gone down. The trend in digital consumption from 2021 onwards is likely to remain on a 5 or 6-year line. «We are amid in a ferment of change. A few things have happened beyond this growth that is guiding us. On the one hand, consumers are turning to the consumption of backlist rather than novelty, which is what sells more, but at the moment when the book circulation system was in trouble, the reader tended more to the backlist book. From here, we encourage publishers to build their catalogs from the backlist and not always start from the novelties. We have an industry that sells little of many books. In digital, the novelty table is not removed in the early days, but we combine it with the backlist, which forces us to design globally valuable products».

Audio format

The audiobook could be a business model in itself. It will be an axis to make visible and support the rest of the formats.

«There are many challenges to solve, we are at a zero point. There is consumption and demand, but we have to think about other industries, such as What problems does Netflix have today? Hundreds of people are night after night eager to consume content. This is very interesting because Netflix got this need, the digital publishing industry needs to create this need like with the Netflix platform».

Unit sales: new forms of e-book marketing

You have to create a structure that enables any business model, create some openness to these models given that we are surrounded by change and turbulence. An era of subscriptions, not only in content platforms, and users feel comfortable with it. In terms of books, we have to think about where the reader feels value with the subscription model, given that they tend to be for a particular reader and not for everyone.

Small to mid-sized publishers may find the subscription model a way to improve or business that favors their business.

Listen to the full Bookwire podcast on The Digital Publishing Market for Daniel’s thoughts on future trends and new applications for selling non-tangible products.