PETER OSNOS: The Man With A Plan

Shaman Drum Bookshop is about one hundred steps from the central campus of the University of Michigan, one of the top ten public universities in the United States. Among the many reasons why this location is a great advantage is that interesting people are constantly visiting our neighborhood.

Yesterday Peter Osnos, founder of the Caravan Project, was in town. He spoke for two hours in U of Michigan Press Director Phil Pochoda’s class on Book Publishing, and Phil was kind enough to invite me to sit in on the session. It was a terrific corrective to the imminent-death-of-the-bookstore message Stephen Levy cheerfully delivered earlier this week.

In 2006 Mr. Osnos stepped away from his position as CEO of Public Affairs Books, a distinguished list of current affairs, politics and history titles, to start the Caravan Project. Pochoda described Caravan as “the most important project for small and medium book publishers in the digital world.” I was present two years ago when Osnos described this program to a small group of independent booksellers, but I hadn’t heard much about it since then.

Mr. Osnos, an intense man with a stockpile of wonderful anecdotes from a 40 year career in the world of books and newspapers, told the class that he turned over management of his publishing company to a successor in order to take the time “to understand and then do something about what’s going on in the digital world.”

“The Technology people were just talking to each other,” he said. “I needed to translate this into a language I understood.”

Osnos divided the world of book publishing into two parts. There are the creators of content on one hand, and on the other are the people responsible for distributing that content. What has changed is distribution—how we get books into the hands of readers.

According to Osnos, there are five ways readers might choose to access a book these days:
-Print-On-Demand
-Large Print
-E-Book
-Audio Book
-chapters
He is interested in establishing a protocol that would enable publishers and booksellers to make books available in all these possible formats to customers immediately.

“We’re about to begin our third season with the Caravan Project,” he said. “Over the past two years we’ve solved many of the technical problems around doing multi-platform simultaneous distribution.”

He used the metaphor of a pipeline to describe the political and economic questions surrounding the distribution issue: “Who will be in control of the pipeline? Google and Amazon tell us, ‘We’ll do it for you—don’t worry about it.’ They remind me of Lampwick talking Pinnochio into going to Playland.”

Peter didn’t think that booksellers had the time to figure out the technical issues surrounding multi-platform distribution. “With all due respect, I think booksellers are just too busy.” Instead, he looks to new businesses that are being created specifically to deliver e-materials into the hands of customers. Booksellers could then form partnerships with these new businesses.

Independent bookstores are seen by many of us as community assets, but Osnos believes we need to be more than that. We must be able to get our customers books in any format they wish. We need to offer our customers a menu of options.

He ended by saying that the impulse behind this initiative is the absolute necessity to provide our customers with excellent service. He quoted a sign he saw in a hotel in the Middle East: The answer is ‘Yes.’ There is no other answer.

Peter Osnos conceives of the bookstore of the future as a kind of showcase or showroom in which books will be previewed by customers and then delivered to them in whatever format they want, either in-store or on-line.

I think he is correct. Of course, now it’s up to us to do the difficult work of figuring out how we might actually do this.

You can stay tuned to what’s going on with this innovative and interesting program at http://www.caravanbooks.org/ .