A New Print Business Model

Print books are still selling, of course. But are they selling in a rhythm that will be sustainable over the long run? Digital downloads are selling, too, but are they selling fast enough, or well enough, to support the current editorial, sales and promotional infrastructure? Might the selling price of digital content in fact drop to zero? Agents and authors continue to license works to publishers. But they still require significant chunks of working capital at a time when publishers' own working capital is under major stress. In fact, the entire retailing and wholesaling side of the print book supply chain has been pushing inventory risk back onto publishers as fast as mathematically possible. Publisher Richard Nash would like to reconcile the traditional author-agent-publisher-printer-warehouse-wholesaler-retailer-reader supply chain with the potential power of the Internet as a platform. He uses the word “platform” to distinguish from how most publishers currently use the Internet—mostly as a logistics and marketing tool. He proposes a model that to some will seem unconscionably radical, to others unconscionably conservative: a business that properly avails itself of all the tools that now exist to enable the creation of writing and reading communities from which all else emanates—print books, downloads, marketing and publicity, editorial services—and, of course, revenue. The Cursor business model seeks to unite all the various existing revenues in the writing-reading ecosystem, from offering services to aspiring writers far more cheaply than most vendors to finding more ways to get more money to authors faster. It also will create highly sensitive feedback loops that will tell each community's staff what tools and features users want, what books users think the imprint should be publishing, how the imprint could publish better. Cursor is not designed to “save publishing,” but simply to offer the kind of services that readers and writers, established and emerging, want and the Internet enables. Were it not for the power of the Internet, all this talk of the social nature of reading and writing might remain just casual, useful little thought bubbles built around books. But especially in the Web 2.0 incarnation, which focuses on communication and sharing, technology has emphasized a simple truth at the heart of this model: we are what we read, we are what we write, and we organize ourselves around and connect with one another through what we read and write. “This is the foundation on which I hope to build a more robust, dynamic, creative, democratic version of the reader-writer relationship than what I once called publishing,” Nash says.