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Publishers must establish good trading relationships with digital distributors such as Apple and Google if they are to successfully “navigate” the changing digital landscape, Pan Macmillan’s digital director has told the Tools of Change (TOC) conference being held in Frankfurt today (13th October).

Sara Lloyd, who also spoke at the Tools of Change conference in New York this February, opened the first-ever TOC day in Europe. She told the audience that book publishers were “only a few inches away from being in the same place” as newspaper publishers and the music industry, and stressed that the digital world was not “the future” but “the present”.

Lloyd said the big digital players, such as Apple and Google, were not used to dealing with publishers so there were “no established terms”. She said: “There is almost a whole new distribution chain sprouting overnight . . . You need to start working out how you deal with them.” Mobile phone companies, such as Vodafone, could also extend their reach from the digital music downloads to the world of book publishing. “Unexpected players can come out of the woodwork,” she said.

She used the talk to revisit her Publishing Manifesto for the 21st Century, written last year. Lloyd said she remained largely positive about the future for publishers in the digital world, rejecting claims that the role was becoming increasingly redundant as authors go straight to their readers.

“Publishers have always provided a great service for the hard things, and that just has to be applied to the digital world as it has been applied to print,” she said, highlighting the fight against piracy, negotiating the best deals in the supply chain and ensuring good merchandising and marketing for the given title. “Unless you have the expertise, it’s quite boring and difficult to navigate all this as author,” she said.

Despite her optimism, Lloyd ended the talk with a warning, which she described as “a sorry reminder of what can happen when an industry doesn’t engage” with the many changes facing it.
“The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old will be. But if you wait until then it’s going to be too late.”

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