[PeteMC]

Two very interesting viewpoints, both from the Guardian (UK) literary pages within a week of each other:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/aug/22/are-books-dead-ewan-morrison

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

What do we think, folks?

[Cirias]

I tend to dismiss any doomsayers with regards to the publishing industry. I worked in a bookshop for 3 years, recently, and when you're inside the trade you actually get a much more positive view of how publishers and authors are faring. That shop is still doing brilliant trade now and I know that its thousands of customers are really passionate about physical, old-fashioned books. I don't think its really the same as the Vinyl/Cassette/CD transition - some people will buy real books because that's the way they like to read and some will fork out their cash on an e-reader/e-book because it suits their lifestyle. The same happens today with games and music - many people buy a CD/Game because they like to own a physical thing, while others will instead download directly onto their device because its instant, portable and sometimes cheaper.

In my view, skilled, professional authors are needed by society the same way that we need skilled and talented actors. Humanity has always told stories and that's what it all comes back to. People will want to read/watch good stories whether its in books, cinema etc. and the only way they're going to be able to do that is if they pay their money to the hard working writer behind it all. If they don't, writers will stop writing and people will realise what they're missing. It happened in Hollywood not long ago and look what it did to the industry then.

[kmtolan]

The article does go to the extreme, however we are already seeing a shrinkage in the paper book market thanks to e-books. This will continue, but I also think there will be paper books for as long as there are people interested in the media.

That the quality of writing will suffer in any form is complete BS. Good writers will be read. Wannabe writers won't. Separating the two while shopping, from a reader's perspective, is an issue, but eventually this too will hopefully pass.

As far as writers not being able to make a living off writing alone, most can't already. The agency model will help, but then you're always going to be undercut by independent small presses. This is not the fault of e-books - this is the end effect of accessibility in a market that traditionally could only handle a small percentage of good manuscripts. E-books leveled the field in some respects, though the Big Six still have plenty of clout right now and probably will always be perceived as being the top tier. Least for the immediate future.

Kerry

[oasis seeker]

I'm just now reading the first article and already it's slightly disingenuous. The author, Ewan Morrison, claims Barnes and Noble sold 3 times more ebooks than paper books. But if you read the article cited - that's not true.

Barnes and Noble sold 3 times more ebooks than paperbooks ON BN.COM. That's a big difference, and only makes sense - since BN.com is the only place people can go to buy books for their Nooks, whereas most people like to go to the bookstore to buy paper books.

Anyway, it's misleading, if not downright disingenuous, and already predisposes me to not give the article much credence.

[Triceratops]

No denying that e-books are gaining clout and availability, due in part to easy purchasing online and devices which can hold tremendous inventories. But paper will remain with us, in spite of this transition. I think e-books will eventually reach a saturation point and, possibly level off a bit.

Chris

[KatG]

I've been hearing that books are about dead since I was seven, so this always amuses me. WARNING: I'm about to go long.

The problem here is, besides the plus of anecdotes is not data bit that Lloyd Shepherd rightly notes, that people who announce the death of the book tend not to look at the whole industry at all and its history. In particular, in recent death throes, those claiming e-books are killing books and print books keep pretending that there was no global recession in 2007-2008, right when Amazon launched the Kindle and ushered in the still tiny but popping viable retail e-book market. So let's take Morrison's bits one by one:

Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers,

Mr. Morrison seems not to understand that it has always been the rule of fiction book publishing that first-timers get a lot of media attention if you can pop them out and get them the initial attention. Debut novels are the life-blood of fiction; they generate way more excitement with reviewers, booksellers, etc., than mid-list authors' works, even if they lose their publishers money. They are the shiny lure of novelty, the next great discovery. As such, it always seems like publishers are paying exorbitant attention to first timers and want them more. (In actuality, they only pay exorbitant attention to a select percentage of their first timers, some of whom then tank on the gamble, the rest get paid squat, have their shot and work to find an audience.) It especially seems like this when there's a recession, because during one of those, publishers always cut mid-list authors from their lists but will still buy some newbies, where loses are more allowed in tough times, causing understandable muttering by mid-list authors, and unfortunately sometimes losses of those authors from the business, (so again, the indie scene is a definite benefit against that.)

Mr. Morrison also seems not to understand that in fiction, a percentage of "first-timers" now aren't first timers. They're mid-list authors using a new penname to fool the number crunching computers from Nielsen that big booksellers so want to be the magic key. Big booksellers are allowed to take more chances on new novels with no track records, whereas mid-list authors who don't hit the algorithim right (even if they sell some of their books in large numbers,) get less of a chance, especially during a prolonged recession that we are currently in. The actual booksellers know that the first timer is really the mid-list author, but the numbers look good to accounting in corporate.

In non-fiction, except for memoir, first-timers are not really that interesting.
Non-fiction, which mostly provides information, depends on having knowledgeable authors with multi-media platforms. This is why nearly every journalist is writing a non-fiction book.

by teams,

Not sure what this refers to. Perhaps tie-in fiction related to games and web content. Multi-media for publicity purposes is one of the great benefits of the Web and needs to be used more to help books, but in any case, the tie-in market itself is always one part of mostly genre fiction -- it does not take over and greatly declined in the 1990's with the Great Paperback Depression.

He may also mean book packagers, who have had success in fiction with multi-media YA plus James Patterson and who have regularly done books in NF. There used to be way more book packagers in fiction publishing, but circumstances now make it difficult for them to get a purchase and so we are unlikely to see a huge mushrooming of book packagers any time soon.

by speciality subject enthusiasts

The NF market has always been run by specialty subject, so this seems to make no sense. If anything, we've had a delightful expansion of this which has helped book sales.

The Web and books:

1) The Web market is only one part of the shopping market.

2) Hardcovers are not the big sellers for publishers. In the 1990's, with the collapse of the wholesale market (the Great Paperback Depression,) publishers became more dependent on bookstores to sell their wares. They bumped up the percentage of books in hardcover to get more reviews and then because booksellers wanted it. And they've done well. But the big money remains in mass market paperback -- a format curiously seldom compared to ebook sales. :) Ebooks reached 8% of trade sales in 2010, which is dramatic growth, but it's still 8%, and that 8% is not largely replacing print sales -- it's in addition to print sales.

3) Amazon does sell a lot of e-books, but a lot of those are books that have no print version, and the same now for the Nook (as Morrison notes.) They are additional books in the market, not replacement sales. So they're juicing their numbers of e-book impact. Why? To sell gadgets.

4) In the late 1990's, that's when there was great fear that the non-fiction book market would completely die off because all that information was on the Web. If you could get it for free, why buy? They still buy and non-fiction has grown and is still the main money maker for the whole decade. The Millienials are comfortable getting news and doing schoolwork online because they've been doing it all their lives. But educational publishers have found a mix of online and printed text most successful, is the most successful sector of publishing, and schools are being defunded, not funded for expensive electronic teaching. And that's in the rich parts of the world.

Basically, if the Web killed off authors getting paid, it would have already done so in the last decade. Instead, where once there was a micro e-publishing business and lots of pirating, there is now a flourishing, profitable e-book business giving authors royalties and Amazon sales, because despite access to free, people are still willing to pay for downloads to electronic devices and for hardcopy of long works of text put together by authors. What has happened is that the free, pioneer Web has now settled down into adolescence and figuring ways to make lots of money and not just from venture capital.

5) With the advent of Goosebumps and Harry Potter, YA fiction went from being the least important, rather small sector of kids books to the biggest gorilla in the house in seven years. Kids and teens -- who are marketed to all the time -- are way more willing to pay for stuff they like than adults and more of them are reading fiction than in the 1990's.

[KatG]

In the last 50 years the system of publishers' advances has supported writers such as Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, JM Coetzee, Joan Didion, Milan Kundera, Don DeLillo, Salman Rushdie, Norman Mailer, Philp Roth, Anita Shreve, Graham Greene, Muriel Spark and John Fowles.

That's completely incorrect. Fiction never supported its authors. Most of them have and had day jobs. Including some big names who have made a lot of their living off being college professors and journalists. A small percentage manage to live on writing alone, mostly bestsellers. What helped fiction authors out a lot in the 50's-70's is that a lot of fiction authors were WASP's with their own money already, as were young people in publishing. Genre authors faced a more hardscrabble existence, writing non-fiction and fiction for any outlets they could find.

What happened was this: in the 1980's, there were massive corporate buy-ups and mergers of publishers as an investment opportunity. The wholesale market was also going great guns with mass market paperbacks in thousands of outlets and booksellers wanted to see large advances as proof of publishers' commitment to a book and paying co-opt advertising money to booksellers for it. So there was new cash and the era of the book auction. Advances skyrocketed for big bestsellers. Everyone knew it was a bubble and publishers worked to have it burst because it was a problem. It came to a head when Big Daddy Stephen King wanted $7 million for Bag of Bones in the 90's and his long-time publisher said no. They countered with $3 million. King ended up selling the rights to Simon & Schuster for $2 million and an unusual royalty deal. And the corporations started getting out of book publishing.

And then the wholesale market collapsed and shrunk in the 1990's. Newspapers, magazines, books lost thousands of outlets, millions of sales. Fiction in paperback particularly got hard hit. Before the Web really became a huge factor, long before the Kindle, there was a really big dip exacerbated by several recessions because books became less visible everywhere. So advances, especially on the higher end, dropped and kept dropping over the last fifteen years. And whenever there is economic downturn, like the recession of 2008, publishers try to take it even further, especially again on mid-list authors. And as Shepherd notes, there are more authors. While authors don't compete with each other directly, publishers still can only hand out so much in advances, especially if incoming sales don't float enough cash to do it.

What also happened in the 1990's were the wholesale box stores like Costco which sold books at deep discount and demanded really low prices. So as Shepherd notes, the deep discounts have been around two decades and Amazon has also been around, doing wholesale discounts, for two decades.

As Shepherd notes, book sales grew through the oughts and became more international. Then came the recession and they dipped, mid-list authors were cut, advances dropped, etc. The decline had little to do with e-books. Borders did not go under because of e-books but because its corporate parent ran it into the ground and they mismanaged getting a buyer. Sales went up for 2010 across the board, particularly in YA -- the part that is supposed to be most dying? -- but they are book publishing sales, ie. maybe 2-5% growth instead of other industries' more impressive numbers. The Harry Potter series ended, which actually did effect sales numbers because it was a big driver.

But books are getting more media attention than they have in awhile. Authors are being given marketing tools through the Web than they ever had before and a new market platform. There's a whole new book market that is a success. There are more books, making more sales and more across the globe. Film rediscovered their interest in books in the 1990's and continue to help the market. Etc.

Amazon can sell millions of books by obscure authors, while at the same time those authors, when they get their Amazon receipts, will see that they have sold only five books in a year.

And this is different from bookselling as usual how? This is not a digital thing. This is a book thing. It’s always been a pyramid. The base of the pyramid has grown huge because of indie publishing in electronics, but the market buying those books is only part of the entire book market.

Writing has already begun its slide towards becoming something produced and consumed for free.

Not really. It used to be a lot more free back in say 1996, 2000. Now, writers who used to have to give away print copies can sell some as e-books on the Web. Bloggers who used to write for free and pay webservers for their blogs now get paid by advertisers and corporations. Sites that ran at a loss and offered everything for free now rack up profits in venture capital, advertising, software and consulting. Non-fiction writers who used to have to trudge across the country doing workshops and lectures to make a living can now do half of it on the Web from home. Amazon spent its first six years operating at a loss as a free search engine bookstore before finally making a profit. Television producers and networks who used to give their stuff for free on the airwaves now can also sell it through the Web as downloads, which people pay for even though it's free on the Web. And there are a lot of folk vigorously trying to shut down the Web's free content -- the pay tollgates are going up and there will be more of them. Right now, there’s a bill being proposed in the U.S. Congress that would essentially potentially shut down Twitter and YouTube.

I'll give you an example: Daren Criss and his talented pals, while students at university, found a comedy musical theater troupe called StarKids. StarKids created A Very Potter Musical, riffing off Harry Potter, and performed it for cheap. They put a recording of it up on YouTube for free. It went viral. Their other productions also went viral. They released cast albums for pay on iTunes and video recordings too, and were on the Billboard list. Things got even bigger when Criss ended up as a regular on the t.v. show Glee. They have an international fanbase that buys merchandise from them such as T-shirts and posters. StarKids is now doing a national concert tour, they are in talks to take their Starship musical national with investors, they put out a book, etc.

As Morrison notes, the companies putting up this content get a lot of money out of it now, but that's because they provide a massive distribution network to a large audience for little to no cost to the content creator. And those creators then can reach more people for their products and attempt to monetize their creations if they want and can. And this was something that content creators did not have before. Fiction authors are at a disadvantage in this, far more than non-fiction authors. Few want to buy their T-shirts. They can't really multi-media much unless a game company, or film studio, etc. picks up rights from them or they can afford to launch it themselves. So the Web is more for publicity than product sales. Their only real product is their book. And people are buying those books online and piracy is down.

The reality is, would the author who gets five copies sold and helps make Amazon rich have been able to sell anything if Amazon wasn’t there? Maybe, but it would cost the author a lot more to do. Does selling on Amazon keep the author from selling elsewhere, online and in the real world? No. Can the author sell other places instead of Amazon? Yes. Does the author have an opportunity to start building on those sales, try to reach more people, get reviews online, get a publisher interested in investing in them for new or reprint? Yes. Is there a better opportunity to do this with the online avenues than used to exist before the Web? Yes. The long tail simply wasn’t there before for authors to even try out. And while the economy and situation on the Web place a heavy burden on authors to produce big sales, that same problem existed as a central issue for trade books before the Web existed.

So death is complicated.

[Window Bar]

My own take on things is that people misunderstand the cheap (or free) ebooks . Self-published ebooks are to publishing what coffee houses and nightclubs are to music: They give beginners a chance. This last week on the West Coast, any one of us could have gone into any number of bars or clubs and listened to any number of unknown acts performing music. Most of the music would have been mediocre; a small fraction would have been exceptional.

Also, this past week, Vince Gill (country singer) put on a concert in Northern California. Attendees would have paid (and I'm guessing here) $50 or more to hear him.

Do the coffee houses and bars prevent future Vince Gill-level shows? Not at all. They ensure that such shows will exist long after Vince retires. The cheapo ebook revolution will give more authors a chance to try to build an audience. The successful authors will be those who connect with lots and lots of people, and can slowly move out of the 99-cent pricing for their work.

This stuff is fun. We can't prevent it, so we might as well learn to enjoy it.

Kind of connected... here's a very odd fact: In the United States we have seen a century pass since the introduction of the automobile. You would think the horse would have become a very rare commodity. Not at all. There are far more horses in this nation now than at any time in history.

[MrBF1V3]

True Window Bar, but the function of horses has changed somewhat. They are not often the only means of transportation for a family, and are almost never used for agricultural work.

The function of paper books is changing. Even the trade paperbacks cost more than most epub downloads. (That there are exceptions is interesting actually. I was looking at a $40 ebook today-non fiction- and wondering if it was really that good, or useful.) I think the mass market is going electronic, paper will be the step up. It may take some time though, don't sell your bookshelves yet.

B5

[KatG]

Self-published ebooks are to publishing what coffee houses and nightclubs are to music: They give beginners a chance. This last week on the West Coast, any one of us could have gone into any number of bars or clubs and listened to any number of unknown acts performing music. Most of the music would have been mediocre; a small fraction would have been exceptional.

Also, this past week, Vince Gill (country singer) put on a concert in Northern California. Attendees would have paid (and I'm guessing here) $50 or more to hear him.

That seems apt to me.

I think the mass market is going electronic

Since the mass market is the market for the poorest readers and requires no devices, software, providers, etc., this seems unlikely to me. E-books seem cheap or even free, but the infrastructure to have people be able to have them is quite costly.