[Laer Carroll]

Thoughtful antidote against the almost-daily barrage of Books are Doomed! articles.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/30/death-books-exaggerated

Undoubtedly the ebook is A (not THE) wave of the future. But pbooks have a number of advantages over ebooks. Among them you can literally throw them in the back seat of your car and not worry they will break. Nor will a thief smash your car window and steal it.

Further, you can print them in the millions and give them to people in developing countries where no one can afford an ereader of even the cheapest kind.

[kmtolan]

Thoughtful antidote against the almost-daily barrage of Books are Doomed! articles.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/30/death-books-exaggerated

Undoubtedly the ebook is A (not THE) wave of the future. But pbooks have a number of advantages over ebooks. Among them you can literally throw them in the back seat of your car and not worry they will break. Nor will a thief smash your car window and steal it.

Further, you can print them in the millions and give them to people in developing countries where no one can afford an ereader of even the cheapest kind.

You can still find vinyl records and cassette tapes. People still run around in Model T's as well. The key word here is availability - and yes, hardbound books are heading in that direction. Boutique items. The choice of an eclectic reader. Not mass market.

You will be able to literally toss your e-book reader anywhere, in darkest night or brightest day, and the e-book's cost will eventually hit the "sweet spot". You might not even call the thing an e-book by that time - just another function on your "all purpose everything" that you rolled up and put in your pocket. Yes, "rolled up" (google "OLEDS").

Back in the year 2000, the industry laughed at e-books, debunked them, and then made a terrible mistake - turned their backs on them.

Eleven years later, nobody's laughing. They are, however, still in denial. That too shall pass.

My opinion - which is just as biased as that author's article. (grin)

Kerry

[Chris_KW]

Thoughtful antidote against the almost-daily barrage of Books are Doomed! articles.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/30/death-books-exaggerated

Undoubtedly the ebook is A (not THE) wave of the future. But pbooks have a number of advantages over ebooks. Among them you can literally throw them in the back seat of your car and not worry they will break. Nor will a thief smash your car window and steal it.

Further, you can print them in the millions and give them to people in developing countries where no one can afford an ereader of even the cheapest kind.

If I'm not mistaken, "experts" have been predicting the death of the novel for several years now, so the doom-and-gloom scenario is nothing new. In my opinion, you could easily keep yourself up all night thinking about this, but it all comes down to one of the most simple economic principles there are: supply and demand.

As long as readers want to keep reading new and exciting stories, authors will be around to pump them out. If there is an issue in this constantly-evolving battle, however, it is security. We must do all we can to keep pirating at its lowest.

I agree, though, the evolution of the industry in disconcerting because no one can really tell just how it will eventually play out. I'm thirty-two years old and, fortunately, I got involved in internet marketing when I was twenty one, so I at least have a comfortable level of familiarity with how most things work in the digital economy. But I can only imagine what kind of strategy I'd be employing if I were born just ten years before.

I intend to keep a well-documented log of my marketing techniques in the campaign I'm about to launch so that I can hopefully share some successful ideas with fellow writers and clients down the road.

I'm not even close to being an expert in this field (the greater part of my knowledge lies in the technical), but I'd say the bottom line in all of this is that we all have to stay on our toes a bit more than writers did in the past.

----END RANT. lol :P

[KatG]

They didn't laugh at e-books. They didn't see a way then to make them profitable in 2000 -- before a lot of things happened with Google and Facebook, etc. Publishers couldn't launch e-readers and previous e-book attempts were a mess. They had to wait for a company like Amazon or Apple to launch the retail e-book market and to be ready and willing big vendors for that market. When it happened, it happened very quickly and the publishing industry did not have enough infrastructure to deal with it. It also developed like the Wild West, with Amazon being a robber baron and no standardization whatsoever for the first two years of it. That's my take on it anyway.

Books don't really have a mass market. There was a period from about the 1950's through the 1980's when they had that sort of distribution through the magazine/wholesale field in relatively large numbers and sold a fair amount of paperbacks in grocery stores, but they had much fewer, less international titles than they do now. It was nowhere near as global and just getting going on the conglomerizing of companies. After the fall of that wholesale market for all print media in the 1990's, publishing and bookselling pumped up their hardcover efforts and relied on bookstores. Before the e-book market a scant four years ago, books lived on the 20% percent of the population in countries willing to buy books rather than life's other goodies, including lots of electronic toys. The e-book market has some potential to increase that 20% but it's not necessarily going to be by a lot because while they read a lot online, the elites don't necessarily read books. A lot of them aren't using their e-readers and tablets and smart phones for reading books, but instead other material. So it's still that 20% that wants to read them and a good chunk of that 20% don't have electronic means or circumstances to be big e-book buyers, and the global economy, thanks to the banks, mean that fewer and fewer of them can participate in e-books. The e-book market is growing, but it's got a cap in the Western world (possibly rising in places with a rising middle class like India.)

So hardcover sales are/are going to fall, certainly. Especially in the U.S. with Borders tanking through mismanagement. But they're likely to fall to 1980's sorts of hardcover sales levels, with e-books taking the place of cheap paperbacks. They'll still be around for quite awhile because they are useful as a launch tool. The 20% of the population -- not really mass market enough -- should remain the core of book sales, regardless of electronic or print form to the product.

If, as some people seem to feel, print books simply disappear, then that's not necessarily a great thing for the society as the global society is not prepared to support electronic access for wide swaths of people when businesses find short term profits are better if you try to impoverish them and access to education is already being severely restricted. Only the top 20% of wealth will then have regular access to books and a shrunken lower middle class will have sporadic access to books (depending on how restricted the marketplace finds it useful to make it.) The working class and less will have very little access to books, mostly through schools, unless all the schools get privatized, in which case most of those kids won't have any access or school. So that means that rather than expand, the book market may actually shrink if it goes all electronic.

But I don't really think that's going to happen until a good bit down the road and only if the electricity does not run out. What we are more likely to see is fewer hardcover launches, more experiments with e-books, fewer titles put out in print, a highly effective regional e/print press burgeoning and regional booksellers making gains, new places to sell e/print/pod books, a reduction of Amazon's monopoly online and with e-books, etc., all catering to the 20% of the population interested in books and pulling in as many others as might be possible for event books if nothing else.

Books have never been wildly popular, even when literacy increased among the population in the last century and a half. But they've also been consistently read by a small portion of people. So it's really hard to sink them as an industry. But it's really hard to make them consistently sexy as a mass market industry either. The electronic revolution of new toys and storage devices isn't about e-books, so there's not a lot of indication that people's attitude towards books (whatever the form,) have really changed much.

[Chris_KW]

Seriously, KatG, your depth of knowledge in this field is amazing.

[kmtolan]

Only the top 20% of wealth will then have regular access to books and a shrunken lower middle class will have sporadic access to books (depending on how restricted the marketplace finds it useful to make it.) The working class and less will have very little access to books, mostly through schools, unless all the schools get privatized, in which case most of those kids won't have any access or school. So that means that rather than expand, the book market may actually shrink if it goes all electronic.


How many folks have smart phones with an internet connection? That many now have access to e-books. It's not about the dedicated readers when you talk market penetration, it's about the convergence of affordable electronics. I would argue that more people have access to books now then ever before, as e-books allow the library to come to them and not the other way around.

I don't think print books are going away either, but, to quote Ming the Merciless, "Let's just say they'll be satisfied with less."

Kerry

[Laer Carroll]

FAN-OUT. That is the idea you must keep in mind in discussions of the future of any technological advances. Or INCREASING DIVERSITY, to use a more jargony term.

The history of technology is a well-established research area of history, and if you want to be a sci-fi writer you need to know a bit about it. It shows that tech advances show evolutionary patterns similar to those of biological species.

The wheel is the classic example. There are wheeled vehicles that are miniscule. There are some as large as a battleship (mining earth-movers). Some are powered by muscle, or gravity, or compressed springs. Potentially some could be powered by nuclear reactors, an idea Heinlein used in "The Road Must Roll" I seem to recall. Wheels are made of all sorts of materials.

So it is with ebooks and pbooks. We will see more diversity in the future, not less. Electronic and print tech have competing AND cooperating advantages against the other.

And when you talk about how it will all end up - you are being naive. This field will continue to evolve, not come to some steady state.

As an example, a century from now neither electronic flat screens nor printed pages may display books. They will be displayed directly on the retina. Or maybe beamed directly into the brain.

[Chris_KW]

As an example, a century from now neither electronic flat screens nor printed pages may display books. They will be displayed directly on the retina. Or maybe beamed directly into the brain.

If that really does happen I'm so glad I'll be dead by then. ;)

[KatG]

How many folks have smart phones with an internet connection? That many now have access to e-books.

Among the top 20, 25% of wealth, a lot. Among the rest of them, much more limited. Even if they manage to afford a cellphone -- which wildly range in cost for phone and service -- that access doesn't translate to actual e-book sales. Games, magazines, newspapers, website content, work documents, video, app programs, streaming movies and t.v. -- all much bigger markets than e-books. The people who have smart phones always had access to books and the income to buy them. The people who don't have smart phones can manage some print books (and they are easier to donate.) They can't manage e-books, not simply because of the price but because of equipment and service costs and taxes and etc., and the telecommunications industry wants to make it harder to have access, not easier, to maximize Internet income. And with libraries closing, it's worse.

Now, if you want to supply a lot of the population with free smart phones with free Internet connection and free batteries and power to charge them, then it's a different ballgame. But e-books remain a market of the privileged with limited access to the general population. (Also, if it's reading on the phone, of people with functional eyesight to read tiny print and the bulk of the book buying audience is older.)

It's not about the dedicated readers when you talk market penetration, it's about the convergence of affordable electronics. I would argue that more people have access to books now then ever before, as e-books allow the library to come to them and not the other way around.

Yes, the electronics are affordable for those with sufficient discretionary income and jobs, and aren't affordable but often necessary for others, and so they will penetrate the market. They already have. But that doesn't mean that e-books will be a big product on those devices, just as they have not become a big product in online sales despite nearly twenty years of that huge, library-like access. They aren't a big product, there is no expectation that they will become a big product, and except for the e-readers, they aren't buying the devices because of e-books. Even when they buy the e-readers, e-books are not the big items for them overall. Newspapers and website subscription material are and they're working on video to compete with tablets and not on e-books. For poorer kids, especially with what's happening to the school and college systems in many countries, and younger adults, a computer they manage to get cheap will be for jobs, having a contact address, schooling, communication, visual entertainment, news, getting paid when all the banking is electronic, etc. Books will be very low down on the list, where they usually are, wealthy or poor.

I don't think print books are going away either, but, to quote Ming the Merciless, "Let's just say they'll be satisfied with less."

If that happens, then essentially the e-book market has failed. The hope of e-books is that we will have a healthy print market and an expanding e-book market that brings in lots of new, additional customers so that book publishing grows larger and more profitable, from self-publishing to bestseller. If instead print drops, with some of those customers going electronic, and few new customers emerge on the e-book front, then the book market will simply have shrunk or stayed steady on the 20% of the population and e-books will have added little, plus made it harder for a lot of people to have much access to books/print books. As fast as the e-book market is growing, that 5-10% is still mostly part of the regular 20% of core book buyers. We don't have a lot of evidence of additional book buyers on any regular basis. We need more readers, not more print readers shifting to e-books. We always need more readers.

We also need books to be more visible in more places and that will take print. On the Internet, books are not highly visible. If you go to Amazon, they're there. If you don't go to places that are about books on the Internet, though, you're not going to see them, same problem as with the superstores. If you see them when you shop for groceries or in a shopping center or department store or gift store, then you might notice and buy books that you would not otherwise have thought to buy if you're not part of the 20% that regularly search out and buy books. That's why Apple has stores in malls -- and e-books can be sold there too. The more places books are seen and sold, the more sales we get. And that hasn't happened yet with e-books, though it's early.

Sorry to rant.

Seriously, KatG, your depth of knowledge in this field is amazing.

I know of several members of these forums who deeply disagree with you on that view, but thank you.

[kronides]

Well, at one time, automobiles were for the wealthy and privileged; later, everybody had one. Same with VCR's, then DVD players, then cell phones. Before long, everyone will have an e-reader as well. They will be standard in the culture and not only for rich people. This is already happening. The prices on kindles continue to fall and the sales of e-books continue to rise. E-readers are very common on college campuses now, and the students who own them are not all rich.

Of course more people use technology for other purposes than reading books. Does anyone claim that most people will start reading books because of technology? Most people have never spent much time reading books. The issue is print books v. e-books, and I guess we disagree but I think e-books and particularly POD publishing pose a mortal threat to traditional publishers, at least as they have always done business. Very recently, Simon & Schuster signed John Locke, a successful indie, and let him keep his e-publishing rights--a thing the Big 6 said would never happen. But it has happened, and will continue to happen a lot more frequently from now on. Who else is going to want to keep his/her e-publishing rights, and their 70% royalties that go with it? Stephen King and Stephanie Meyer will stay, but they don't need the money. Even Bransford was blogging the other day about how major publishers will have to switch over to offering authors "services packages" if they wish to survive, and that guy's as insider as they come.

I'm not saying this is all unequivocally good. I don't want all bookstores to be like airport shops that sell only vampire novels and celebrity tell-alls. It's just what I think is happening. Within a few decades, it is very easy to imagine people who READ doing so electronically, and BOOKS being the artifacts of collectors, museums and wealthy people who think "book shelves" look good in their houses. The same thing that happened to the medieval illuminated manuscripts after Gutenberg invented the printing press.