mivo: Since you chose to mention my Kamakura as an example, let me stress that my remarks are not about me, but about go publishing in general. Kamakura sold out in one year, which suggests the price was not too unreasonable, and the other books seem to be holding up nicely. I certainly wouldn't expect whatever I say here to have much positive impact on sales, so that is not what I am beefing about. In fact I don't think I'm really beefing about anything. I'm just trying to convey my experience of the go market for the benefit of others.
Quote:
It's not so one-sided, unfortunately. Go books are relatively expensive, and the number of English titles seems to increase lately. At the current prices, I wonder if this doesn't mostly "milks" the existing buyer base, collectors more than others, rather than actually increasing the market.
I must admit that when I look at displays of go books nowadays, I too have the feeling that they are on the expensive side and that there are, in a sense, too many (too many similar to each other). But that is a simplistic view, easily shot down in most cases. I also think the accusation of milking is a bit unfair, however. Go players are not trapped in a byre.
First, price. You paid 33 euros but the price from the publisher is about 18 euros. With postage, you could have got it for about 23 euros in about a week (I believe). You can even get a discount in some cases, I think. Maybe 18 euros ($26) is still on the high side, but it's unfair to the author and publisher to imply they may be benefiting from the 33 euro price. Remember also that the baseline is usually the US standard of living.
As to too many books, I think there are too many that cover the same ground, but if one covers different ground, such as Kamakura, comes out, there seems to be healthy demand. I hasten to add that I'm sure that the success of Kamkura has much more to do with the magic name Go Seigen than my input to it, but at least I can claim to have produced a book that is rather different from anything else available, and so the charge of "too many" books does not have to apply in every case.
Quote:
If books were cheaper, more copies would sell...
If you want to sell more go books, you have to increase the size of the market, and one way to do this is by lowering the prices for each book.
This is the nub. I think this is cod economics, more suited to the Stammtisch than the business world. It's a bit like the "build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door" example allegedly taught on MBA courses. The reality is that if you built a better mousetrap someone would either steal your idea or report you to the Society for Cruelty to Animals.
Just as proverbs are unreliable in go, proverbs such as "pile it high, sell it cheap" are unreliable in real business. It can work, but only when the market has been properly identified and analysed, and all the necessary resources have been assured. For example, it can work in an area where there is a busy market place with lots of potential customers, where there is no competition, where there is plenty of advertising, etc. None of these patterns apply to go.
When I produced my first book, for Oxford University Press, this was a proper commercial publisher, and I was lucky to be allowed an insight into the business. I was brought into the task of deciding the print runs - how many hard copy, how many paperback. The way the operation was done was to assume 600 hardcopies copies off the bat that would be bought automatically by public libraries. I had to produce a list of newspapers and magazines that would be likely to do a review. The OUP experts then made an assessment, based on experience, of how many extra would sell as a result of each. An assessment was made of possible extra "local boy" sales in my hometown, workplace, etc. There was another special factor in my case. A famous sports announcer, John Arlott (think Harry Caray for a US equivalent) had got wind of my book and had written in, insisting on an early copy. A few copies were added to the print run to allow for his influence. The book was being allocated to a specific salesman who had a good reputation. Extra copies were added for that, and so on.
Compare that to the fate of an English go book. No libraries buy them. No reviews can be assured. There is little experience, especially for a new type of book like Kamakura. Local-boy effect is zero (at least if the publisher is US and I'm UK). We have no celebs to boost sales. We have no specialist salesmen. In addition, we can't even assume much of a local market - books have to be shipped expensively from country to country.
Go books are far from mainstream business practices in other ways. As Adam Smith long ago pointed out, "skill, dexterity and judgement" are by far the best ways of increasing revenue, but there are also trivial ways, and these are often necessary precursor steps before SD&J can kick in. The first is division of labour. As Smith points out, though, not every economic activity is equally susceptible to division of labour. In his prime example, agriculture, dependent on the seasons, is less susceptible than manufacturing.
Go publishing is also not very susceptible. There is some division of labour in that we have an author, maybe a translator, a publisher, a printer and a bookshop. But the author will also probably be his own researcher, typist and proofreader, maybe also layout designer. The publisher typically also has to be his own designer, accountant, warehouseman, packer, shipper and after-sales man. The bookseller typically has to mount extra operations, in the absence of advertsing outlets, to travel to tournaments and to ship books there. With such an onerous business model, it is hardly surprising that on the scale of Adam Smith's "abundance or scantiness" we are at the scanty end of the gamut.
Many minds have already wrestled with the problem of improving the model, which always boils down to how to increase the market. I'd love a pound for every time I've heard the old chestnuts of "get a tsumego problem in the local newspaper" or "hold a stall on freshers' day" or "put a flyer in the local library". We've known for decades that such ideas don't work.
It is now being argued that e-books will change all that. Maybe, but at the moment it sounds just like the predictions of the past that we'd all be going to work on moving pavements by now. Of course, some ideas really do change our lives. No-one can deny that mobile phones have had a major impact. I was astonished the other week, when visiting my grandson's Beaver pack (junior scouts for kids under 7), that the pack leader asked how many of the kids had their own mobile phones and two-thirds put their hands up. When I was six, I don't think I could use even an ordinary phone.
But the number of these great successes is dwarfed by the ideas that either get nowhere or have small impact. On the face of it, e-books seem likely to have only minor impact on the go market. Purely as a thought experiment, imagine that go e-books come along and have just enough impact to kill off the paper books. Assume, plausibly. that rather many of those people who bought paper books declined to switch to buying e-books. Assume, on the basis of experience, that initiatives which are claimed to boost the number of go players never work. It follows that the e-book market will then be rather small. Add to this the propensity of people who live online to assume everything online must be cheap or free. It is then a plausible assumption that authors and publishers will lose interest. The end result is that both the paper market and the e-market die. No more go books.
I don't for a moment think that is likely to happen, but elements of it ring a bell, do they not? Look at the way national go associations are declining, supposedly because of the internet. Not so long ago, it was assumed the internet would boost the number of go players and the national associations would benefit.
Personally, I don't worry about changes in principle. It's evolution. But during a period of change, the impact on an individual or a group can be immense and unsettling. It's often wise to try to manage the change, or to make sure you don't throw baby out with the bath water. My feeling, from being able to recall a time when there was just one book in English and that was in mimeographed form passed from hand to hand, is that English go books still represent a toddler that needs TLC.