In Berlin: Kobo’s Fiery Warning about the “Attention Economy”

Of many excellent sessions and presentations at the annual two-day Publishers’ Forum in Berlin last week, the one we wished authors could have heard was a brisk, almost hair-raising commentary from Michael Tamblyn, CEO of Kobo, who flew from Toronto to give one of several keynotes.

As we’ve written, Kobo is especially admired in Europe these days for its recent moves to align itself with audience-widening programs (like the Tolino system, which originated in Germany), plus new efforts in subscription (the Netherlands) and recommendations (Canada’s Shelfie).

While normally quite a funny speaker, Tamblyn this time was full of clear-eyed alarm for what publishers in the room—and their authors everywhere—are actually facing. His troubling term for it is “an arms race of monetized distraction.”

“Online has become a massively distributed fight for attention,” he said, laying out four stages of bookselling that have led us to “the fifth wave, a new generation of bookselling.”

Tamblyn describes the first four waves as:

1. Bookselling in independent shops
2. Chain bookselling, still of mostly physical books
3. Online bookselling, which thrives on the infrastructure created by the chain bookselling stage
4. Digital bookselling online, with the arrival of ebooks and audio in the mix

In Europe, in particular, fixed pricing and a wider playing field for the ebook market have seemed to let publishers dodge some of the dramatic incursions of “international competition,” as Tamblyn put it (referring of course to Amazon, which has dominated the ebook markets in the US and UK).

“The fifth wave isn’t a change in format, and it isn’t a change in where books are sold or how they’re distributed.” No, he said, the fifth wave, in a way, isn’t about books at all, nor about their prices. In fact, the fifth wave “cannot be de-risked with pricing.” “The fifth wave is about the commodification and commercialization of attention,” he said. “It’s about the fight for time.”

In the attention economy, Tamblyn said, thousands of companies, most of them having nothing to do with books or even media, “have a very clear sense of what people’s time is worth”—while publishing hasn’t traditionally thought of its value proposition as being defined by the time commitment its products entail.

Bottom line: In the past waves of bookselling, Tamblyn said, the fear was that publishers wouldn’t adapt to changes in the market. In the fifth wave, the fear is that publishers may not be able to fight the powerful claims on time and attention made by their digitally driven competitors at all. According to Tamblyn, the world of retail is no longer a place in which people ask themselves “Where can I buy the next book?” but “What do I want to do next?” And that may be spending hours binge-watching television or browsing on Facebook or YouTube. For Kobo, he said, “Increasingly, this means that we don’t wait for consumers to come to us. We go where they already are.” The majority of online sales are made through search: customers already know what they want. At Kobo, 10 percent of sales start off-site because their ads—based on what Kobo knows about the customer—are appearing to readers wherever those readers happen to be on the internet.