One of the conversations organised during Readmagine 23 was focused on a very general issue: Innovation in the book industry. The session was moderated by Carlo Carrenho (Head of Business Development at StreetLib) with the participation of Alyna Wnukowsky (CEO at Libri) and Santiago Rosillo (Business Development & Innovation at Hachette Livre).
Carrenho asked Wnukowsky and Rosillo to share a brief explanation about what they do and how innovation is involved in their companies and maybe bring one or two examples of successful innovation.
Alyna Wnukowsky said that Libri’s goal is to service the players in the book industry so that readers can get to their books and where they are coming from. One important thing here is to keep in mind German readers do not accept waiting for their books, meaning they expected, and even before Amazon was there, that every book has to be in their bookstore that they’ve ordered until 06:00 p.m. At night, next day, 09:00 a.m.. This is something good because it gives a competitive equality to bookstores in comparison to the online channels and she added that «it is also kind of something that drives innovation. Because I can tell you, between six, when you are in the middle of Germany and you have to get somewhere to the North Sea islands, your truck has to leave around twelve. So a very, very short time to make sure that this book gets to the reader and to the bookstore on the next day. So this is what we do and this what has driven innovation».
On the other hand, this scheme means that bookstores should have their own websites and requires having an infrastructure so that 1400 bookstores in Germany are using this logistics also to be able to serve their customers delivering both what they order online at home and Wnukowsky added that means «to drive back to the bookstore because we know someone who is human in front of a customer can sell you normally more because we are still human than if it’s just a machine. So this is where the challenge comes from».
In this video you can follow also her very interesting explanation about the POD and self-publishing integration into this whole system, because their vision is «that everything that is ordered before 04:00 p.m, that is just a black and white paperback, can be delivered next day in these totes, the same old totes that are going back and forth to the booksellers. And this is our dream».
Santiago Rosillo started with a short reminder about what Hachette is. This group is the third largest publisher in the world, with sales of over 2.8 billion last year, 2022 for 7400 employees around the world in four main markets, which are the UK market, the US. Market, the French market and the Spanish market «And in all Hachette I work in the Business development and Innovation department which is a cross functional and international department created a few years ago to work in every single field in innovation for the company from the research to the meeting with startups, startup collaboration, box project management. When I said international and cross functional is, in the first case, because we are five people all around the world working from California, the Silicon Valley to Paris where I am based. And cross functional because we work in every single field of the company of Hachette; so from trade to education and to improvement of internal processes with every single one of our publishers».
Later, Rosillo focused on an example, a project called the «Hachette innovation challenge», which was an opportunity for every single employee of the group. “Each of those several thousand 400 people, from the intern to the big director, to send us ideas on how do they think we could reach a new generation of readers, how do they think we could reach a new audience, create a new business for the company. And we got a lot of ideas. And after a year of challenge, today we have four winning projects that aim to become full businesses, full businesses for the company and to be scalable in all four of our geographies».
Carrenho opened the debate by asking how is it to do innovation in such traditional companies in very conservative markets as the German and French (more conservative than the Spanish or the British). Rosillo responded that Hachette is going to be 200 years old in a few years (in 2026) and he thinks that the challenge not only for Hachette, but publishing has always been to embrace new trends: «We saw it first with ebooks, then with more cases and a new example can be TikTok. We saw TikTok arrive and we adapted to it. We create book-tok and we reach this new generation of readers. So I think that publishing is a creative business. It’s not that hard to innovate because we are launching, in my company, for example, we’re launching, every year, 1500 new titles. So you have to be creative, you have to be innovative to do that. You just need to believe in it and of course, to invest. And also you said it is difficult to do it in such a big company. But you can think of Hachette and you can think as a big publishing group. But you can also think that we are a lot of small publishing houses. So we, as a department, don’t run innovation in the department. We don’t own the innovation on Hachette but we help publishers to run their projects. So it’s the publishers who have the innovation in a shed. And of course, it’s easier to work with an imprint with a publishing house where it’s ten people and it would be more difficult to do it with the whole group, of course».
Alyna Wnukowsky answered that «We are not this old. We are only founded in 1928. But yeah, as you can say, it’s also kind of traditional. The thing is, I believe that without innovation and that is I think, sure for all of us, we wouldn’t last this long. So I think, yeah, we might be traditional, but I think to be becoming this old, you have had something in your culture that always promoted kind of innovation, because if not, you wouldn’t have had the ideas and also the willpower, because you can imagine these kind of things that we are doing. They’re huge investments. And if you don’t have somewhere this dream where you say, yes, I want to be there. I want to kind of shape how books get to readers and how there can be more books available. And at the same time this will always be also economically viable without innovation, that is just not possible, I would say».
You can follow the rest of this insightful conversation in this video.
Alyna Wnukowsky, 44, has been the managing director at Libri since April 2022 and CEO since July 2022. Prior to this, she worked for the French Quadient SA company, where she was the managing director for Germany and Austria, before also becoming a member of the worldwide executive committee being in charge of business process automation. After starting her career at AOL Germany in Hamburg, Alyna Wnukowsky worked for the Bertelsmann Direct Group in Paris for many years. She was responsible for the e-commerce and e-book activities for the book club and bookstores. After Bertelsmann sold the French Direct Group, Alyna Wnukowsky became a member of the executive board of the successor company Actissia. Having studied internationally, she has a degree in business administration and is the mother of two children.
Carlo Carrenho is Head of International Business Development at StreetLib. Carrenho has been working in book publishing his experience is particularly strong on digital strategy, business development and general management. He has been consulting for companies and organizations such as Dreamscape (USA), Beletrina (Slovenia), Arabic Language Center (Abu Dhabi), Podiprint (Spain) and Meta Solutions (Brazil). In the past I have consulted for Bonnier Books New Markets (Germany), HarperCollins (USA), Livres Canada Books, Elisa (Finland), Bookwire (Germany), Porto Editora (Portugal), Bajalibros (Argentina), and various Brazilian companies and entities such as Somos Educação and the Brazilian National Library. I have also co-authored several publishing studies and reports, particularly with Austrian consultant Rüdiger Wischenbart. He founded the online book trade media PublishNews in Brazil and Spain and sold his equity in these companies in November, 2021. Carrehno has a degree in Economics and in Publishing at the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a summer programme that used to be offered by the Radcliffe College in Cambridge, US.
Santiago Rosillo is a Project Manager in the Business Development and Innovation Department of Hachette Livre, in charge of the Spanish and Latin American territories. His responsibilities are mainly related to identifying new growth opportunities and supporting the development projects of the group’s publishing houses, while fostering an internal culture of innovation.
