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How many everyday products have the power to change lives?
Books can.
While most publishers seek to maximise sales volumes by churning out as many titles, pages, and copies as possible – and then selling them at prices cheaper than a movie ticket – the best books can change how you see the world. They make you think, they educate, they entertain, they inspire. The best books empower you to change your life, and even those of others.
Sustainability is about much more than reducing your negative impact.
Yes absolutely, we need to reduce emissions, reduce transportation, reduce waste. And there is plenty of scope to do that in book publishing. Consider, for example, that around 40% of all books are returned unsold and pulped. Consider, for example, that many of these books are shipped around the world from cheapest print location to book store, and then back again. Consider for example, that many books are still made from unrecycled paper, printed with toxic inks, and bound with toxic glues.
Yes, absolutely we can do better. And indeed, when consumers, wake up to these bad practices, there will be huge pressure to transform. Just like in the energy or automotive sectors, the companies who are not thinking radically differently now, will be left far behind.
The real opportunity of sustainability is to enhance your positive impact.
Books can change lives. For people of every age, every walk of life, books educate and enable us to do better, but they also bring joy and happiness, and inspire new possibilities.
Actually, the content, more than the book.
Bringing together more diverse, more interesting authors. Addressing more important, crucial subjects. More personal, more topical, more accessible, more connected. Designing content in more engaging, applicable ways. Delivering content across multiple platforms to increase its reach, accessibility and usefulness.
If we think content first (or even better, audience first), then its relatively easy to see the opportunities for change, rather than being limited by our old lazy practices, and book-first prejudices.
Creating sustainable and profitable growth is the opportunity.
Sustainability used to be a compliance issue – and in some ways ESG metrics are little more than the CSR mantras of old. Today, sustainability is becoming core business. It’s at the heart of your competitive advantage, the key to your innovation and growth.
That’s because it has become a key demand and aspiration of the majority of customers. And employees. And investors. Sustainable businesses attract the best customers, who often pay more, typically around 25-50% more. (How much do you pay for organic food?). They attract the best talent, particularly young people. And more investment. (The world’s 100 most sustainable companies – led by Vestas, Autodesk, Schneider – outperform stock market averages by around 40%).
- Business Tools with Purpose, on sustainability, innovation, diversity and more
- Sustainability as Competitive Advantage, with keynotes, and workshops
- People Planet Profit, my book on sustainable innovation and growth
- Business for a Better World, spider silk and sizzling burgers
The opportunity is to be sustainable, and use that as the catalyst for innovation and growth. And to develop value propositions, and business models, which ensure that the growth is more profitable too. I would call this “good growth” – growth which profitable but not sustainable is not enough, but also growth that is sustainable but not profitable is not enough either. The “sweet spot” is do both, sustainable and profitable. That requires a new leadership mindset, disruptive innovation, and business transformation.
Coming together to create a better future. Future Book Forum 2022.
This year’s forum brought together publishers from over 30 countries, and many other partners in the book ecosystem. Organised by Canon, leaders in digital print technologies, it is the most thought-leading, practically collaborative, forum for publishing leaders. 10 years ago, I sat down with Canon’s Joerg Engelstaedter, and we asked ourselves how we could help this industry to change, innovate and grow. Over the last decade we have together explored all the big topics, from content and communities, sustainability and business models, to reimagining the entire DNA of a book.
Finding new opportunities for sustainable, profitable growth.
We started by looking beyond our own industry, to a world in which every business in every sector knows it needs to change. To reinvent itself in response to changing audiences and agendas. Sustainability is obviously one of the driving forces. However when you combine that challenge with the opportunities of new technologies, the growth of new markets, the different attitudes of GenZ, then radical change emerges. The entertainment world is now dominated by the likes of Epic Games, Netflix and Spotify. The automotive world is championed by EV pioneers like Tesla and Nio – where Toyota makes 10 times more cars, yet Tesla is 10 times more valuable. And BMW and Volkswagen now wish they had changed 10 years ago.
Adidas has transformed its business through purpose and sustainability.
Matthias Rippel, Adidas Global Director of Brand Strategy, joined us to talk about how Adidas rose to the challenge and opportunity of sustainability. Adidas, by coincidence has a purpose statement, remarkably similar to books – “through sport we can change lives” – the only difference is the product. 2015 was a seminal year for the global sportswear business, when it joined forces with Parley to address the challenge of ocean plastic waste – and creating a new range of premium-priced shoes made from the recycled waste. It changed mindsets, and demonstrated new ways in which they could compete, innovate and grow.
Since then, Adidas has worked to find new materials – for example working with Bolt Threads to create Mylo, a form of “vegan” leather. Every pair of Adidas Stan Smith’s will now be made from mushrooms. They also collaborated with their most sustainable competitors like Allbirds to achieve more together, creating the new Futurecraft Footprint which has a total carbon footprint of just 2.93kg (written on the sole), almost 10 times less than normal. Just this week Adidas launch “Run for the Oceans” where over 5 million people signed up in the first days to take part – for every 10 minutes they run, Adidas recycle the equivalent of a plastic bottle of waste.
As Canvas8’s social scientist Jemima Cox said “Make it simple. Make it positive. Make it desirable.”
Growth Accelerator: Finding “good growth” in book publishing.
At the heart of each year’s Future Book Forum is practical, innovative action. This year’s Growth Accelerator saw 10 teams of industry leaders explore what “good growth vs bad growth” really means for the future of publishing. First they explored ways in which book publishers could reduce negative impacts across each aspect of the value chain, and then how to enhance the positive impacts.
The real opportunity was then to explore initiatives which could both be sustainable and profitable for book publishers – either by taking sustainability challenges (like addressing excessive waste from returned orders, or paper usage, or toxic pollutants) and innovatively rethinking the business model – or by focusing on the key profit drivers (such as blockbuster authors) and thinking how to sustainably do more with them (for example, through innovative use of content across platforms, personalised storytelling, and focusing on key issues).
Key opportunities for “good growth” which publishing industry leaders chose to focus on included
- Harnessing the power of storytelling as a way to inspire people to explore and address key sustainability issues, in more engaging, motivating and practical ways.
- Addressing big issues, bringing together more diverse audiences, and using social aggregation platforms to create collective thinking, responses as big problem solving.
- Better data analytics to forecast sales opportunities, and then “print on demand” to achieve smaller order sizes, or respond to customers as required.
- Distributed production, to enable this print on demand functionality anywhere in the world, through networks of printers, and avoid excessive transportation.
- Addressing big issues, bringing together more diverse audiences, and using social aggregation platforms to create collective thinking, responses as big problem solving.
- Personalised content, which could be user-generated, and used across platforms, in more valuable and applied ways – building on the success of photobooks and greeting cards.
- Building a pre-loved marketplace of second hand books, and also utilising the backlist of older titles which can easily be printed on demand.
- Eliminating book returns, changing the industry practice of accepting unsold books back from retailers, which are typically then pulped
- Reducing the amount of physical sales visits, the number of inspection copies sent out, and instead harnessing digital marketing, social influencers, and new platforms.
- Eliminating the use of toxic inks and glues in the production of books, and particularly handbook formats, and being more open to content-first hybrid versions, rather than print first.
- Enabling customers to achieve more themselves – creating networks or communities of readers who can take book ideas into practice collectively, and apply their impact.
One of the most effective frameworks for developing a sustainable business is the B Corp assessment and certification model, which also provides a useful, comprehensive benchmarking model. It identifies global leaders in every industry. Cuento de Luz, the wonderful small publisher developed by Spain’s Ana Eulate, is the world’s most sustainable book publisher. She says “stories that take the imagination on a journey, care for our planet, respect differences, promote peace.”
- Business Tools with Purpose, on sustainability, innovation, growth
- Sustainability as Competitive Advantage, with keynotes, and workshops
- People Planet Profit, my book on sustainable innovation and growth
- Business for a Better World, spider silk and sizzling burgers
Bringing this all together, we launched a new initiative, Publishing 2030, which seeks to build a collaborative approach to more sustainable, profitable book publishing. This will include the development of a manifesto for better books, and become an initiative in which all participants in the Future Book Forum community can participate. The progress will be tracked in the next forums.
