Much like TV, which quickly evolved from simply broadcasting radio programs into its own unique medium, there’s a line where something stops being a book and becomes…something else entirely — a completely new medium with its own rules, pros and cons. We’re not there yet, though.
A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.
It’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of eBooks or eReaders, but there’s no question they’re growing in popularity… at least amongst technology companies. While the hype coming out of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show was so over-the-top it’s difficult to take any of these new devices seriously, it does make you appreciate a bit more the huge advantages Amazon has with its Kindle.
Publishing Perspectives’ editor Edward Nawotka stirred up some controversy last week with his opinion that the current breed of eReaders were good enough, noting, “My septuagenarian mother is delighted with her first-generation Kindle.”
My thirty-something wife – an avid reader, elementary school teacher and generally a late-adopter – also enjoys her Kindle (a birthday gift from me in November 2008), mainly to read books she’s either unfamiliar with or unwilling to buy in hardcover. But it’s not going to become her primary reading option any time soon. Among her criticisms are the limited selection of books she wants to read; inelegant navigation and annotation functionality; and, in her words, “Everyone talks about portability, but what’s more portable than a book?”
“I suppose we could sum up this entire two-day conference under the headline ‘too early to tell.'”
I attended MediaBistro’s eBook Summit this week and Wasserman’s summation is perfect; consumer book publishing is smack in the middle of the digital transition, and solid answers about how it will all play out are hard to come by. That doesn’t mean, of course, that there aren’t plenty of people willing to throw their two cents (and millions of VC dollars) into the conversation.
While ostensibly a competitive event with Digital Book World, my sense was that both the program and attendees were very different from ours — the former more theoretical and broader; the latter… well, just different, I’d say. There’s clearly room for both events, which I was actually glad to see, because I’m a fan of MediaBistro and I don’t want the wonderful Carmen Scheidel getting mad at me after we just became friends!
I live-tweeted both days of the Summit — Day 1 and Day 2 (sorry LiveJournal friends!) — and after cleansing my palette by reading more of the latest issue of Monocle (an absolutely beautiful example of what can and should be done only in print), here’s my top five takeaways:
People will continue to read printed books for a long time, just as some people still watch movies on VHS. But the printed book will be "dead" in a few short years in the sense that the bulk of the adoption curve, the pragmatic majority, will have moved on. --Arvind Narayanan, "The death of the printed book is closer than you think" Narayanan's post is the latest addition to the tiresome "print is dead" meme, and like the vast majority of digital evangelists, he presents a false dilemma, posits a zero-sum scenario, and evokes the tired and largely irrelevant example…
Just as many entrepreneurs no longer need venture capitalists to launch their companies, authors no longer need publishers to publish.
Mark Coker, Do Authors Still Need Publishers?
Picture this: In the future, as the risks of publishing shift from the publisher to the author, publishers will be able to invest in technologies that allow them to bypass authors completely, developing sophisticated algorithms to scrape their content from the Internet, repurpose and repackage it for non-discriminating readers, and charge advertisers fistfuls of money for their wandering eyeballs!
It sounds even better if you say it out loud in Dr. Evil’s voice. Or Chris Anderson’s. Or Arianna Huffington’s.
Resistance is futile!
If Coker’s second linkbait advertorial for the Huffington Post didn’t add anything new to the conversation, it did at least spawn a new hashtag on Twitter, #publishersmatter, and generate some interesting discussion around the value publishers do, and don’t, offer authors nowadays.
My take?
"Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral... Each technology has an agenda of its own. It is, as I have suggested, a metaphor waiting to unfold." Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death There's a lot of handwringing and finger-pointing happening in publishing these days, both by those struggling to find solutions to the challenges the industry faces, and by various Joker-pundits who apparently "just want to see the world burn." Demagogues and idealogues love the spotlight, and attention-seeking media outlets happily provide them a stage to stoke faux controversies over…
By offering consumers a low cost digital product, the economics of ebooks create a virtuous, self-reinforcing cycle. The low price expands the available market by making it affordable to more consumers; low production and distribution expenses allow the publisher to earn a healthy margin; and the larger addressable market allows publishers to sell more units at greater profit margins.
Mark Coker, Why We Need $4.00 Books
One of the problems with the new media business model of trading exposure for content and attempting to monetize the eyeballs (a la The Huffington Post, The Daily Beast, Geek Dad, etc; all a variation on the B2B editorial model, but with even more of a self-promotional angle) is that it makes the content suspect. Without a firm editorial vision, the result is typically a mish-mash of shallow opinion and punditry, with the occasional gem slipping through.
In his first essay for The Huffington Post‘s new Books section, Smashwords founder Mark Coker offers a half-hearted op-ed on ebook pricing, taking the narrow position that print books are too expensive for many consumers, especially those in developing economies, and that $4 ebooks are the mass-market paperback of the future.
Of course, there’s not a single mention of the prohibitive costs of eReaders, smartphones and their expensive data plans, or broadband Internet access. It’s a classic case of willfully ignoring the forest for the trees.