Future of the Publishing industry

I don't know. No matter how "nice" these readers become, there are many people out there who still want to hold dead trees in their hands.

Besides, when you're out in the middle of nowhere and electricity and batteries are hard to come by, you don't have to worry about charging up your paperback.

Here's what agent Richard Curtis had to say on this issue.

While it seems an interesting idea it presupposes some very questionable assumptions. For example, that the major book market in the future will be ebooks (it certainly isn't a very big share now), that people won't lend or gift ebooks (they certainly do now, it may be illegal bit then so is exceeding the posted speed limit) and, of course, that Kindle will have anything to do with it--it is not exactly selling like hot cakes.

The printed codex book isn't going to go away.

It's a proven technology, with years of beta testing and improvements.

Moreover, the desire to hold a physical object in our hands and chant "Mine!" is hard-wired into our primate brains.

Clutching a Kindle, nifty as it is, to our bosoms isn't nearly as comforting.

People have been talking about the end of publishing for decades now. Nathan Bransford made a smart comment on this a while back. To paraphrase, he comemnted that until they devise a better delivery format for a book, printed books will still be popular. It's hard to beat that format.

E-books are growing in popularity, but they still have issues people don't like. I imagine when the newest generation used to text messaging and blogs and reading on screens grows up, the e-book will also increase in sales. They're used to the format.

People want great books, so as long as that stays true, publishing will still exist. I'm sure it will change and adapt over the next few decades, but until the need for reading goes away, publishers will likely still be around in one form or another.

Look how music and music delivery systems have evolved.

Medievalist said:

Clutching a Kindle, nifty as it is, to our bosoms isn't nearly as comforting.

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And nothing beats that moment when you crack open a new book and sniff the pages. (Now - does anyone else do this, or am I a weirdo?)

When they've been on your shelves for twenty-odd years, and the pages are turning brittle and yellow, it's even better. They're like old friends...

OK - I'll stop now and get some therapy.

Clio said:

And nothing beats that moment when you crack open a new book and sniff the pages.

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You know, I first started making, reading, and working in the e-book publishing world in 1989.

And this thing about the smell of a book--the scent of the paper, the ink, and the leather, for instance, keeps coming up, over and over.

The other one that keeps coming up is that e-books won't "make it" until we can read them in the bath, and on the beach.

It's very curious that it's still these "real world" aspects of books that we crave--and I do think it relates to our primate brains, particularly the part about smell, which is hard-wired in terms of both emotional responses and memories.

I do email, text, blog and am used to the format (heck, I write ebooks). But ebooks are not books in the same way e-music is music. Music is a sound, where it comes from matters rather little. With text, medium really is a large part of the message.

Ebooks are not replacing pbooks, but compliment them. Most people will, I think, be like me--and use them in parallel. I continue to buy both e and p for different purposes and applications. Ebooks are good for reference (space saving, searchable), for travel reading, for pornography, for rare/niche volumes that no one will bother to print, for academic papers you want right away etc.

Clio,

I absolutely love the smell of a fresh book. In fact, while I'm reading it, I'll take a sniff every once in a while just to see how much of that original fresh smell is still there.

I also used to love the smell of a brand new record album too. That first whiff of vinyl chloride was extasy!

I don't think I'll ever convert to the electronic format unless someone comes up with a wildly "novel" (ha ha) concept. I sure haven't seen it yet.

I have to touch it and feel it. Hold it in my hands and leaf through the pages. It's all part of the reading ritual.

Call me weird, but that's just the way I'm wired.

Feidb

The e-book wont catch on in any significant way because paper books are still more hi-tech than any e-book viewing mechanism currently in production or coming down the pipe.

Forget the smell...

Books are more portable, last longer, require no power to use, far more durable than any electronic device, you can give them away or sell them to used bookstores and not lose the expensive viewing mechanism, you can dunk them in water and still read them later, freeze them, read them in a furnace as long as its under 451 degrees Fahrenheit, and drop them off a hundred story building with no loss of content.

Also, and this is the real big reason e-books won't catch on that everyone fails to mention. The back light. Digital viewing devices use backlights and anyone who works at a computer and needs to stuff their right eye socket back in their eye at the end of the day can attest to how hard that gets after a while.

I don't care what tiny iPod like wonderful device you crank out to read books, it's still going to need a backlight in order to view.

if e-books were going to take off, they would have done so in 1996.

kuatolives said:

if e-books were going to take off, they would have done so in 1996.

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Err . . . the company I first worked for made 11.5 million in 1994 selling e-books on floppy and CD-Rom.

They have taken off, but they haven't, and won't, replace the printed book.

But they are working--particularly in higher ed.

Clio said:

And nothing beats that moment when you crack open a new book and sniff the pages. (Now - does anyone else do this, or am I a weirdo?)

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Only with library books. Mmmmm.

I'll go against the grain and say that I believe e-books are the 'books' of the future.

I cannot comment on current e-book readers since I've never used one. But, from comments I've heard, none of them are perfect. At least not yet. But I'm confident they'll get better.

More important to me is the fact that the medium itself (bound books made of paper) is tremendously wasteful and inefficient. Not just in the physical aspects (the paper it's made from, fuel spent trucking the physical book from publisher to stores, etc.) but also in terms of how the money someone buys it for is unfairly allocated.

The author get - what? - 10% of the cover price (minus 15% of that to their agent leaving 8.5%). The rest goes to the bookstore, the trucking companies, the publisher, the bookbinding companies, etc. etc.

Heck, if I were a published author, I'd rather sell a download for $4.99 (and get to keep almost all of it) rather than a hardcover at $25.00 (from which I would net $2.13). And as a reader, I would buy more books.

And a reader has several advantages that people never mention. (Actually, I don't know if they actually do have these advantages but a 'perfect' reader would have them.) For example, changing the font. As the population ages, the printing in some books gets harder to read. Wouldn't it be nice to simply hit a button and make it bigger? Maybe there's a word I don't understand - hit a button and its dictionary definition pops up. Maybe a how-to book could have links to short videos demonstrating exactly what it's trying to explain. Maybe the book mentions an owl hooting and you can hit a button and actually hear it. (That last may sound silly but how many kids - or adults - today actually know what an owl sounds like?)

Reference books could especially benefit. Updates could be downloaded for significantly less than buying a whole new book. You could search for a particular word or phrase.

I'm sure there are other advantages I haven't mentioned.

All in all, I think e-books are a win-win situation for both readers and authors.

BarbaraKE said:

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More important to me is the fact that the medium itself (bound books made of paper) is tremendously wasteful and inefficient. Not just in the physical aspects (the paper it's made from, fuel spent trucking the physical book from publisher to stores, etc.) but also in terms of how the money someone buys it for is unfairly allocated.

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The royalty model for e-books is tied to the royalty model for printed books--often a little more, but more often, the same.

There's another problem with e-books though, and that's longevity. They are dependent on software to read them, which must work with an available OS, and the hardware to run that software.

The first books I worked on, and others that were published as recently as 2002, are no longer readable with current operating systems and hardware.

That's a problem.

But I can still read books printed in the fifteenth century, and the books are in super condition because they're printed on high quality hand-made low acid paper.

Even a cheap paperback book, at this point, has a better lifetime durability/readability than an e-book.

Books vs ebooks

Power nerd that I am, I own a Sony e-reader. It's a great little device. Its small, it's light, it can last for a long time without a recharge, and it holds bajillions of books at once. Thanks to e-ink, you do from time to time forget that you are not reading a printed page.

While it is a great way to read books, and while I'm sure future e-readers will be even better, it's not going to kill dead tree publishing. Most of the advantages of a hand-held electronic device just aren't that useful for conventional novels. Sure you can hold a million books at one time, but most people I know don't read three or four novels at once, they pick just one and finish it (or toss it against a wall in disgust). Dictionary and search features are nice, but being a semi-literate guy, I don't feel the need to lug around a dictionary so I can look up words from the new paperback I just got. Search features? if the novel is so complex that I have to constantly flip back and forth to figure out which character is doing what, I'm going to toss the book long before I resort to trying to google through it.

The thing that e-readers are good for is increasing the availability of books. With an e-reader, I can read authors that are a little more difficult to find in a Barnes and Noble. Its the main reason that I got it in the first place.

Even if you throw out all the advantages printed novels have over electronic ones, there is still something inherently cool about reading physical books. Just like there is something cool about attending a concert, even in the age of the ipod, or watching a play instead of a movie. Printed matter has been with us since the papyrus in egypt, I doubt its going any place soon.

The thing I love about e-readers, ranging from my laptop, to my first Palm, to my current favorite e-book reader, my iPhone, is that I can easily have 100 books on any of them.

Given that I fly a lot, and read rapidly, this is a huge boon.

I’m a software engineer and I hate e-learning, e-reading, and e-thinking. I want the book in my hand so I can flick the pages to scan for the items I want. I want to stain the cover with my coffee cup. I want to be able to take my C# manual outside in the shade and be able to see it.

I predict, and this is actually in one of my stories, that the two will merge. You will be able buy the size base book you want, paperback, magazine, hardcover, ect. The pages will be blank until you download a newspaper, novel, sex manual or what ever over the internet. The pages of the base book will fill with printed words and everyone will be in bliss, until the batteries die.

You just can't beat the printed, ink and paper, page.

Medievalist said:

The royalty model for e-books is tied to the royalty model for printed books--often a little more, but more often, the same.

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There's no reason it has to be that way. In fact, I bet publishers just love it - they don't even have the risk/cost of actually printing anything.

What would stop an author from selling his book himself directly (and keeping all profits). Obviously, publicity is a problem - but that can be overcome. (Besides, I've heard many complaints that publishers only spend money on advertising relatively few of their books.)

Medievalist said:

There's another problem with e-books though, and that's longevity. They are as dependent on software to read them, which must work with an available OS, and the hardware to run that software.

The first books I worked on, and others that were published as recently as 2002 are no longer readable with current operating systems and hardware.

That's a problem.

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Actually, I doubt that would be a problem for most readers. Anyway, if there was enough demand, that problem could be overcome. Basically we're talking about 'files', not the storage medium (records vs. 8-tracks - cds). Files can be converted to new formats if necessary. Heck, I'm sure companies would spring up that would convert files from one format to another very cheaply.

Medievalist said:

But I can still read books printed in the fifteenth century, and the books are in super condition because they're printed on high quality hand-made low acid paper.

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Again, I doubt this would matter to the vast majority of readers.

Compnaies that only epublish do offer higher royalties--but where the norm for royalties will settle out is hard to say.

I would say that the format problem is a huge issue for ebook readers. I have lost many ebooks to format change and mangeled DRM. IMHO standardising to a non-proprietary format needs to come *before* there can even be a breakthrough reader.

Also IMHO we already have the breakthrough reader--lap tops and blackberries rather than stand alone devices. Ebooks will need to be part of multifunctionality becaise unlike me most people get irriated carrying a lap top, cellphone, digital camera *and* ebook reader in their purse.

veinglory said:

Compnaies that only epublish do offer higher royalties--but where the norm for royalties will settle out is hard to say.

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I think that eventually publishers won't even be needed.

Right now most individual authors don't have the wherewithal to print thousands of copies of their books and get them into bookstores. But that's a non-issue with ebooks.

What else do publishers do? They decide what books are good enough to publish. They provide editorial and/or copywriting services. And they provide publicity. (I'll leave you to decide whether they do these well or not and how much it's worth.)

veinglory said:

I would say that the format problem is a huge issue for ebook readers. I have lost many ebooks to format change and mangeled DRM. IMHO standardising to a non-proprietary format needs to come *before* there can even be a breakthrough reader.

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I fully agree. But I doubt very much that publishers are pushing for this since I strongly suspect they view ebooks as the kiss of death for traditional publishing.

veinglory said:

Also IMHO we already have the breakthrough reader--lap tops and blackberries rather than stand alone devices. Ebooks will need to be part of multifunctionality becaise unlike me most people get irriated carrying a lap top, cellphone, digital camera *and* ebook reader in their purse.

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These people would get just as irritated carrying a lap top, cellphone, digital camera *and* book in their purse.

BarbaraKE said:

There's no reason it has to be that way. In fact, I bet publishers just love it - they don't even have the risk/cost of actually printing anything.

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On the contrary, they have a great deal of time-consuming labor. E-books, of any stripe, are typeset for the screen. Some of this can be done through the wonders of XML and XLST as part of a production model--the typset for paper book takes one path of the digital fork, the e-book another--but the original file is still very much custom created by an expert artisan.[/quote]

BarbaraKE said:

What would stop an author from selling his book himself directly (and keeping all profits).

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Not at thing; but they won't have nearly the same level of distribution nor will they have the same production quality.

BarbaraKE said:

Anyway, if there was enough demand, that problem could be overcome. Basically we're talking about 'files', not the storage medium (records vs. 8-tracks - cds). Files can be converted to new formats if necessary. Heck, I'm sure companies would spring up that would convert files from one format to another very cheaply.[/quote

It can't be done cheaply--speaking as someone with professional expertise in converting from various file format, OS, and hardware formats--and it's very much a three-tiered problem. The file format, the OS and the hardware all have different issues in conversions.

And what you get is at best an RtF file that must be completely re-formatted and typset. It's often cheaper to start from scratch.

How would you feel about having to buy a new copy of your favorite novel every five years

And that's assuming that there aren't DRM issues tied to reading a book on a specific and unique piece of hardware.

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BarbaraKE said:

I fully agree. But I doubt very much that publishers are pushing for this since I strongly suspect they view ebooks as the kiss of death for traditional publishing..

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On the contrary, the major houses are very much in favor of e-books.

Way back when, we licensed all of the Modern Library from Random House with enthusiastic cooperation at the highest levels -- they were keenly interested in what people wanted in an e-book.

Most e-books today are licensed by /from the big three publishers. Genre fiction does particularly well, with SF/Fantasy and Romance leading the way. Pretty much the way they did during the birth of the mass-market paperback.

I like my tree books, thank you. I have dry eyes that get very irritated and watery staring at any electronic screen for more than a few hours. However, I can read a paperback straight through and a day later my eyes are still fine. I also like the feel of holding a paperback, etc.

I do admit that the Kindle does have my curiosity peaked. I travel a lot and the weight of several thick magazines and a couple of books for 9 hour flights gets kind of heavy on my shoulders in a carryon. Not to mention the amount of space it all takes up.

I see ebooks as a nice complement to, rather than replacement for tree books and magazines.

Franz Kafka actually invented the publishing industry. You never get to the Castle.

caw