Opinion - Interviews   

"The bird on the book does mean something"

Mukund Padmanabhan

Penguin's chief executive on the future of the book publishing industry and his company's plans for India and elsewhere.

John Makinson: "We would have been shortchanging ourselves if we just focussed on the English language [in India]." — Photo: R. Ragu

John Makinson, 51, is chairman and chief executive of the Penguin Group, one of the world's mega publishers. He is also on the Board of Directors of Pearson, the international media company of which Penguin, the Financial Times Group, and Pearson Education are part.

Mr. Makinson's career has straddled journalism and investor relations. After reading History and English at Cambridge, he started with Reuters in 1976, joined FT in 1979, and served as its managing director between 1994 and 1996. His career in finance saw him serve as vice chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi's U.S. holding company, co-found an independent specialist consultancy in 1989, and serve as the Pearson group's finance director between 1996 and 2002. He has been Penguin Group chairman since 2000 and its chairman and chief executive since 2002.

Mr. Makinson, who was in Chennai recently, spoke to The Hindu. Excerpts from the interview:

Over the last few decades, big publishing houses such as Penguin have grown even bigger through a series of acquisitions. What is the future for small publishers in an environment like this?

I think there is a space for small publishers. There are at the moment in Britain small publishers that are very successful. Profile [Books], a tiny publishing company, had three of the best-selling titles in the U.K. Then there is Canongate, which has also been very successful. But it is a very risky business and you have to have real hits to succeed. Canongate had Life of Pi and Profile had Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Both of them have been big international bestsellers.

The problem that small publishers have is that even if they are successful with a book of that kind, the advance requirement goes up so much that it is often difficult for them to afford to buy the next book. So it is not an easy life being a small publishing company.

But survive they will?

I hope so. We really do need them. The danger is not so much consolidation in the publishing sector, where there is a natural consolidation and fragmentation. It is consolidation in channels, particularly high street retailing. In Britain, there is a proposed merger between the two largest specialist booksellers — Waterstones and Ottakars. If those two businesses come together, then the risk for small publishers who publish first-time authors and growing authors becomes very much greater. Because if you are not successful in persuading the buyer at that combined enterprise to promote a title, you are lost. So it is a threat for literary publishing generally, but a particular problem for the smaller publishing companies.

Penguin turned 70 last year and you marked this by publishing 70 short books as a series. Did they do well or was the decision to publish them only to make a statement about Penguin and paperbacks?

Well, we sold over two million copies of them, so they have been very successful in that respect. But their real value to us is as a branding statement about Penguin and paperbacks. Not just to say, "We are Penguin and we are inventive publishers" but to remind everybody of the Penguin paperback heritage. What we did last year was also to remind everybody of the design heritage of Penguin. They were beautifully designed books. We went to 70 designers, gave them 70 days and 70 pounds. It was not a lot of money to design these books, but we got so many beautiful designs. It's also been very good for us in relation to our authors. I've lost count of the number of authors who appeared in that series that came to me and said, "That was really great. We just loved that."

What are the main growth areas for Penguin now?

Well, the main opportunity, which is a challenge as well, is how digital technology impacts on the book business. Whether the e-book becomes the format of choice, whether we start to sell books by the pages, whether we start to rent books as well as sell them, whether we create subscription services online ... that is the strategic nugget we are all wrestling with. Clearly, there is the potential of a threat but there is also an enormous opportunity.

The history of book publishing business down the years shows us that supply drives growth, not demand. So if you create new outlets for books — whether it be in supermarkets or online — that creates a new demand.

The digital world is certainly going to create that additional supply. We have to be very careful about copyright protection, about territorial copyright issues, about ensuring that our authors are getting the right kind of return on the digital exploitation of copyright.

But have e-books really taken off? You do hear the odd success story with an author such as Stephen King, but not much more.

Don't you think, to use Malcolm Gladwell's phrase, that new things reach a tipping point? I think there will come a tipping point in a number of these formats.

The Sony e-book reader, which is just being launched, is dramatically different from the e-book devices I looked at ten years ago. Yes, I don't think any of us are going to be reading War And Peace on an electronic device ... certainly not in my lifetime. But will we download travel information, recipes, educational information? I think we will. I think we will want an opportunity to rent it as well as buy it, to take it by the chapter or by the page.

Is Penguin's entry into regional language publishing in India going to be limited to the country? Or is it a part of a larger experiment or strategy?

It is contrary to strategy in a way. We have been an English language publisher from the start. My view is that foreign language trade publishing markets are very distinct, very different from the English language market and on the whole not very profitable. So we haven't felt confident enough — either in the economics of the business or in our familiarity with the market — to want to be a publisher, for example, in French, Spanish or Italian.

What is different about India is, firstly, that we feel confident in our knowledge of the market. We've been here for 20 years and while distribution in Malayalam or Hindi is somewhat different from the distribution economics in English, they are not that different. The [Penguin] brand is very well known here even among Indian language speakers. The bird on the book does mean something. Secondly, I felt very strongly that we weren't doing justice to India by publishing [solely] in English ... that if we are publishing in a culture as pluralistic as India, we should be publishing in a multiplicity of languages. Thirdly, and we are not obviously alone in this, we see India as a hugely important market to us in the future. We would have been shortchanging ourselves if we just focussed on the English language. We are stepping up the programme [of regional language publishing] very actively and so this year we will probably have 70 titles in Indian languages compared with 180 titles in English.

You set up a Chinese division recently. Do you sense a big opportunity there?

Division might be a slightly grand word for what we have established. But we have employed a very able person in Beijing. The opportunity in China is very different from the opportunity in India. We can't actually publish under our own name. We are having conversations with a lot of Chinese publishers and there is no doubt the climate is changing.

One of the political issues in China is reciprocity. The Chinese are extremely anxious that Chinese writing is brought to the attention of the English language audience. The more we are able to do this, the easier we will find it to make our own way in the Chinese publishing industry.

Which do you regard as the bigger market? China or India?

I am a little wary of the whole China-India competition. I think they are very different markets with very different profiles and opportunities. We are going to be without question a very large educational publishing company in China. The opportunity to participate in the English language teaching programme in China is huge for us. I think it is less likely that Penguin, at least in my time with Penguin, is going to emerge as a dominant player in trade publishing the way we are today in India. But there is a very vibrant publishing activity in China and we want to be able to participate in it.

The output of Penguin India has grown dramatically over the past few years. But how happy have you been with the quality? Some of the fiction you have put out is pretty unimpressive.

Well, if you publish 200 books a year as we do in India, not every book is going to be commercially successful and you're not going to be able to say that every book was a fabulous book. But if you look at our output overall and compare it with any other publisher in this country, I would say it's the best in terms of the quality of the writing.

I don't know if it is a historical accident or what, but there was a great age of Indian fiction writing. That created Rushdie and Roy and Seth. And we don't seem, in the last few years, to have developed those new talents to compare with those before. And I don't think the fault is with the publishers. If that talent was available, it would have come to our attention and we would have developed it. I think it is just one of those things ... like why so much great music was written in Vienna in the 1780s. Don't know. But it was.

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