The Future of the Art Book

Christopher LyonThe Monacelli Press

Art Books in Print

13.5 in.

23 in.

What is an “art book”?• The oversize art book, extensively illustrated with large color illustrations,

is a distinctive feature of post-World War II culture in the U.S. • The illustrations are either the dominant element or as important as the

text.• Their purpose was to reach beyond the specialized audiences of scholars,

collectors and others with a financial or professional interest in art to engage a new readership hungry for culture.

• Hardcover large-format volumes (the "classic" trim size would be something over 9 by 12 inches)

• Heavily illustrated with color plates (or with duotone or tritone reproductions of black-and-white photography)

• Usually a text by an authority in the field, an expert author.

Definition• DEFINITION: The category of "art books," as publishers and

retailers employ the term:– A volume, usually in a large format, in which the illustrations are

either the dominant element or as important as the text. – Large format and high-quality reproductions allow it to simulate

the visual experience of many kinds of art, architecture and design, even sometimes at the scale of an original object.

• Susan Rossen, the former head of publications at the Art Institute of Chicago: "Art books are important because they carry the experience of art wherever you are. They give you the time to look at things. They extend the time and space of the experience of art."

Art book publishingThree related environments:• the supply side, consisting of authors, image providers and

publishers• the distribution network, including brick-and-mortar booksellers,

on-line retailers and the distributors who feed them• consumers.

The most significant changes in the past 20 years have occurred in the middle, where constriction of the channels of distribution—as independent bookstores have closed and museums have backed away from selling books other than their own publications—making art books inaccessible to a broad audience.

Content providers

• Authors—very few professional writers; agents rarely involved; rely on academics, critics, and specialists using book to establish reputation

• Images—preferred are museums and galleries, or artists and estates, able to provide at no cost; agencies prohibitively expensive (Art Resource, VAGA)

How are books supported?• Books that lack enough inherent appeal or extraneous sales

boost like a popular exhibition must be subsidized in some way for a commercial publisher to take them on. – Artist, dealer or architect pays for a monograph (avoided by

mainstream trade publishers)– Collector, gallery or museum agrees, as a form of subsidy, to

buy a quantity of books• Book is taken on by a subsidized publisher (often a

university press); another option: a not-for-profit foundation (e.g., Aperture Fdn for photography)

• Foreign co-editions: used to help extend print runs to reduce unit costs; difficult to arrange because of the continuing decline of the dollar and the spread of English as an international language

Distribution

• New volumes reach wider audience through:– sales at exhibition venues – big box stores– few remaining independent bookstores– online sales

Pricing Pressures

• price resistance—customer resistance to higher-priced books; $60 book a good value, but hard to sell

• price deflation--book priced at $75 in 1980 might now be priced at $60 but really ought to be $50 to be readily salable

• market saturation—books aren't "consumed" in the way that other merchandise is; even if out of print, they continue to circulate.

Audience

• Must appeal to the core audience for the subject—but number of potential buyers in that audience usually too small to support a print run that makes economic sense.

• Beyond the core audience, a publisher considers a number of factors in estimating an initial printing:– tie-in events to provide publicity (typically an exhibition);– appeal of the subject (measured by past sales) balanced

against the degree of market saturation– author's critical reputation and track record of his or her

previous books.

Measuring the market

• Sales figures vary widely depending on:– amount of publicity– timing of book's release– attractiveness of the design – appropriate pricing

• Overall, illustration-driven art books—including ones on fine arts, photography, architecture and design—probably less than 2 percent of annual U.S. trade book sales

Trends

• The past two decades have witnessed the consolidation of commercial art book publishing under increasingly stringent corporate control. In this decade, more than 80 percent of U.S. trade books are produced by 5 or 6 conglomerates.

• Declining print runs--In general, print runs have declined by half: books that once would have had a 10,000-copy first printing now pegged at 5,000 copies, a 6,000-copy run reduced to 3,000, and so on.

Electronic Future

• Feb 2011: Florrie Kichler, president of the Independent Book Publishers Association, said: “What publishers are facing right now in our industry is that we are retooling our operations from a traditional print operation of the last five or six centuries to all of a sudden to an e-book environment that has exploded in the last decade.”

Two of the probably thousands of articles announcing the on-rush of e-publications in mainstream publishing:

• Ebooks have become the single bestselling category in American publishing for the first time, according to new data released in April. The latest report from the Association of American Publishers, compiling sales data from US publishing houses, shows that total ebook sales in February were $90.3m (£55.2m). This makes digital books the largest single format in the US for the first time ever, the AAP said, overtaking paperbacks at $81.2m. . . . America's ebooks enjoyed a 202.3% growth in sales in February compared with the same month the previous year, the book trade association revealed. Print books fared much worse by contrast, with the combined category of adult hardback and paperback books falling 34.4% to $156.8m in February.

• (Boston Globe) 2011-07-18. Last year, the publishers surveyed by the Association of American Publishers saw 8.3 percent of domestic net sales from e-books. Three months into this year, Simon and Schuster’s e-book sales had climbed to 17 percent of revenue; at Hachette, parent company of Little, Brown, the figure was 22 percent.

How does an art publisher respond to the electronic option?

• Make an e-pub that imitates a printed book?

• Or modify the e-pub format to add bells and whistles?

What then?• Leave behind the metaphor of the codex• Adopt a spatial metaphor—for example, a virtual space to

represent the gallery or the museum

The medium of the art book has reached a fundamental turning point: the transition from print to electronic platforms.

Three ingredients make an art e-platform market possible: • Cloud-sourced content—reducing memory requirements for initial allows reader

direct access without being tethered or forced to enter a brick-and-mortar or virtual store

• Multi-megabit broadband networks—able to handle large amounts of

downloadable or streaming content • Mobile connected devices—not just that you can carry it around and read your

book but can remain connected in order to stream or download enhanced content, updates, and of course more books

Who Is the Audience?

• Identifying the market– Gift book market would be gone

• what is the marketplace? app store pros and cons; will the iBookstore and similar online stores be able to sell a kind of hybrid book app?

How do we market the e-platform?

• Social networking?• Publicity?• Gift potential?• Apple and other recommendations?• What is the sales “window”?• Feedback potential