More like the new 8-track, amirite?

The latest Mintel report is out, and on first impression, the publishing market seems, well, kind of dull.

The print and ebook markets are flat, and will seemingly stay that way. Overall book purchasing is pretty stable as well, at around 60% of the population. (This is not dissimilar to Pew's conclusions from the American market as well.) Nothing's really moving, except for audio - and that's still a very small part of the £2b UK market. It is what it is: boring.

BUT WAIT! If we peek beneath the surface, this duck is paddling like crazy. Publishers are flailing to tackle diversity (of staff and of voices); Brexit is poised to wreak havoc on rights and sales markets; retail is collapsing; Amazon is doing Amazon things... In four years' time, we could be imprisoned in our Amazon bunkers being digitally water-boarded by David Walliam's Saucy Grandma. Prime subscribers get a local anesthetic first! Or, you know, everything could be exactly the same. Never underestimate the inertia of an industry that firmly believes it is an art.

Which is all the more reason to scrutinise current user behaviour: something we can see. And, although these are some very slight numbers, it  seems there might be a trend here:

• Teeny increase in independent bookstores (as opposed to the decrease we've seen for years)

• Teeny increase in print buying amongst young millennials (55% have bought a print book in the last year, compared to 51% of all consumers)

• A slight decrease in the children's print market and a corresponding increasein (adult) print fiction

• Claimed behaviour in bookstores ("browsing!")

• Claimed behaviour in digital shopping ("price!")

These are some very faint dots. And I'm connecting them in a dubious way. But: things are looking a wee bit vinyl. Or, to be more accurate - the new vinyl/streaming symbiosis.

Let's keep imagining!

There's now a fairly substantial body of work proving that consumers increasingly view digital and physical books as different products, different solutions, and even different types of "ownership experience". So, maybe, this could be foreshadowing the new normal: an Amazon-owned mono-market of disposable, democratically-selected, price-led, rent-a-reads ('streaming') and an 'artisanal' retail landscape of curated, luxury, crafted physical books ('vinyl'). Sip a turmeric activated latte at the London Review Bookshop and buy the latest in hand-picked, velvet-bound grief narratives,... and then secretly binge on downloaded elf-bonk novelettes at 15p each.

Everyone's a winner!

Except for the losers.

In the music industry, CDs and downloads are both getting hammered, and, as they go, so do the high street and chain retailers. The vinylfication of music did no favours to Fopp, Virgin Megastores, or HMV. That bodes ill for Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, et al.

Similarly, vinyl grabs the sexxxy headlines, but it still only accounts for 5% of the total album market. By contrast, print is currently 83% of the publishing market by value. If that dropped to vinyl-size, we'd be looking at corresponding loss of (counts on fingers) £1.5 billion from the market. Even if the entire volume of print sales shifted to digital, due to the price differential, the industry would need to quadruple ebook sales to maintain the market's current value.

(This Forbes articles is being shared around as good news, but it is actually a pretty grim story - SF/F unit sales have doubled. SF/F sales value hasn't increased. We're seeing the impact of cheap, cheap ebooks and Kindle Unlimited titles. Welcome to streaming!)

And that's the rub (a bit of Shakespeare, to appease London Review of Books shoppers), any solution that involves format-fiddling is like detailing Dom Toretto's car: it may look pretty, but it is still inevitably going to explode (Fast & Furious, for everyone else).

Any real chance at survival - much less growth - relies on scrolling waaaay back up in this email and taking a long, hard look at the 40% of the UK population that didn't buy a single book last year. Now that's an interesting challenge...

Get: Publishers

To: Create new readers

By: Demonstrating that an attractive scenario is actually a real shitshow

Further reading:

• How are publishers taking demographic shifts into account? New Viacom study on age and social media use. Enjoy the existential horror that comes from learning that 44% of 6-11 year olds have a social media account.

• Think you can make retail work? Try SimMall! Seriously, Bloomberg created a virtual mall simulator to bring to life their (really bleak) report on the state of retail. An awesome way of visualising their work, and a fun game. Nicked from an old issue of Imperica's Web Curious (immensely wonderful, nsfw, subscribe here).

• Screw it. Go pitch your own book. Canelo are taking pitches on Twitter, on the hashtag #CaneloPit.

• And, for personal reasons: "The Useless Agony of Going Offline". A friend sent this to me when I - argh! - left my phone at home for the day. I'm still twitchy, but recovering, thank you for asking.