Search Results for: label/e-books

A: Of course not.

Okay, let me qualify that. If by ruin you mean “bring an end to” and if by book publishing you mean the “careful and professional preparation and dissemination of long form intellectual property expressed in words” then I stick by my answer and say, of course not.

Are paper-and-ink books dying?

Now if by book publishing you mean the above definition but specifically and predominantly in a paper, ink, and binding medium, then I guess the answer is possibly. Probably not, but possibly. Maybe the readers of the world will gradually or spontaneously decide that we don’t need to kill any more trees and that electronic dissemination and acquisition is the only way to go.

But paper and ink aren’t what make a book. As has always been the case in book publishing content is king and packaging secondary.  So if paper, ink, and binding do some day go away, I would simply say, no big deal. I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon as the latest research (the PubTrack program from Bowker) indicates that 82% of Americans – who represent one third of the book publishing market – still prefer printed books exclusively.

For updated stats see my blog How Many People Are Reading on E-Reader Devices, which shows much more robust numbers for e-readers – but still indicates that paper and ink will be around a good while!

In his book Business At the Speed of Thought Bill Gates asserted that we tend to overestimate the amount of change new technology will cause in its first two years but underestimate the amount of change that will occur in the next five years. How long has Amazon had the Kindle and Sony its e-book reader in the market? If Gates was right then it will be 2012 or 2013 before we have a pretty good idea where e-books are going.

Now if by book publishing your definition is closer to “long form intellectual property expressed in words” no matter what media is used to distribute the material then I would say for that to come to an end some entirely different dynamics other than an e-book reader would have to be involved. Mike Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson and my former boss, raised the question of what the Internet is doing to our brains in relation to its impact on long form reading. He cited Nicholas Carr’s article in the Atlantic Monthly, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr’s observation is that as the Internet has become his universal medium, concentrating on longer pieces for more than a couple of pages has become increasingly difficult. Carr says:

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

Since an e-book, at least in its most popular hardware expressions, is designed to essentially look, feel, and behave like a a paper, print, and binding book, you can’t blame it for any for any widespread impact on people’s ability to apprehend long form content just because it’s in a digital format.

Again, citing the most up-to-date research from Bowker’s PubTrack data, in 2007, 164 million Americans over the age of 13, about 75% of the population with discretionary spending power, purchased at least one book. Book consumption is greater with age but still relatively constant. And for those who assert that junior readers simply won’t read unless the content is wrapped up in a digital sight, sound, and interactive experience, I’d simply point to the Harry Potter phenomenon where seven- and eight-year-old kids could suddenly read 800-page books! There is an ongoing voracious appetite for books across ages and within all the niches of the human marketplace. And America won’t always account for one-third of all book consumption.

So will e-books ruin book publishing? Absolutely not. Will they change book publishing? Over time, most likely, but not in its essence.

So is book publishing, a medium brought to the masses by Johannes Gutenberg through his invention of mechanical printing almost 600 years ago, safe for at least another millennium?

Now that’s an entirely different question! Give me a sec and I’ll see if I can google an answer!

Publisher’s Weekly just reported:

The total unit sales of print books sold through the outlets whose sales are captured by Nielsen BookScan dropped 10.2% in the six month period ended July 3, falling to 307.1 million. Among categories, the biggest decline came in adult fiction with units off 25.7%, while mass market paperback had the steepest decline among formats with units down 26.6% in the period. BookScan totals cover about 75% of the outlets where print books are sold.

Is this yet another signal that the book is dead or should at least be placed on the endangered species list?

As someone who makes a living in the book publishing industry I continue to maintain an optimistic position on the future of the book, in part, because I don’t define the book as a physical object.

I see no reason for hand wringing. Publishers need to keep their focus on what they can control and what matters most: great content. The distribution medium matters but is not paramount. The music industry fought Napster (rightfully) and electronic distribution (wrongly) for most of a decade – and lost control of its own packaging and pricing. I think the book publishing industry has maintained a much healthier point of view toward electronic formats from day one.

I like physical books – actually, love is the better word for it – but I’m not going to lose sleep if we sell more books as electronic editions and kill fewer trees in the process. One of the biggest benefits of selling e-books for publishers is fewer dollars tied up in paper and ink with all the inventory management issues surrounding that. The amount of time it takes to recoup a dollar of the investment that goes into publishing a book is long enough without making the irreversible commitment to a print quantity that may not dovetail with real demand.

Of course many publishers have long built financial models around a certain percentage of their unit sales coming from higher priced hard cover releases. As e-books continue to eat into the number of hardcovers sold, particularly with adult fiction, it changes the proforma dramatically, so I’m not saying this change makes things easier in all ways. Change is hard.

I’m strictly describing what I think is – not proscribing what should be. And no matter how strong Amazon is as a bookseller, I still hope the market will support a robust brick and mortar retail environment. (Borders might not agree that is possible – but we should know if their reorganization is Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 within days – or even hours.)

My personal prediction – more gut than numbers at this point – is that five years from now 35-40% of all books sold will be e-books (digitally distributed), which would mean the majority of books consumed would still be on the ink and paper medium. I also think that projection would leave space for a strong brick and mortar presence for at least Barnes and Noble and some exceptional independents that incorporate an e-book strategy into their overall sales mix.

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” said Mark Twain after hearing his obituary had been printed in the New York Journal.

The same can be said by and of the book.