This morning I gave a talk to some Chinese businessmen on publishing. Mostly on ebook publishing.

Right now, the big publishers are facing serious competition on many fronts.

The Unique Selling [Proposition] (or USP) of a trade-publishing house is its ability to print large numbers of physical books cheaply and get them into lots of bookstores. That’s the real reason a writer hands over a huge chunk of his or her royalties to a traditional publisher.

However, with print in terminal decline and bookstores on the way out, this USP is becoming less valuable by the minute.

Source: Let’s Get Digital by David Gaughran

I disagree that print is in “terminal” decline, but I agree with Gaughran’s point that publishers have lost a lot of their advantages in the market. As book stores continue to close it’s only going to get worse, because a big publishing house has little benefit in a digital book marketplace, like Amazon.

Of course a lot of books are sold in other places — like Supermarkets and Sam’s Warehouse and such — but an increasing proportion are sold online, where being a big trade-publishing house doesn’t help you much.

This morning a few Chinese publishers asked me how they could get English translations of their math and science-realted texts into American schools.

Think about that. China has world-class scientists too, and their work has already been incorporated into age-appropriate texts. Why not translate them into English?

I realize that the marketplace for school books is very complicated, but look at the larger issue here. As English becomes more common around the globe (mostly because of the Internet), and as trade becomes easier, American publishers won’t just be competing with domestic start-ups and self-publishers, they’ll be competing with English translations of foreign books.

Update: And today I see this — Publishers aim to take Chinese literature to the world.