The Book is Dead

Over on the Penguin blog, author Nick Hornby writes of his encounter with an iliad in Borders:

It was a quiet Monday morning, and there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four hundred quid e-book reader; what was striking, though, was that there didn’t seem to be too much interest in the four quid books, either. Attempting to sell people something for four hundred pounds that merely enables them to read something that they won’t buy at one hundredth of the price seems to me a thankless task.

He goes on to dismiss e-books, not because the technology ain’t good enough, but with a few points about (yep you guessed it) our cultural habits. And finishes with what he sees as the key problem:

But – and this is the most depressing reason – the truth is that people don’t like reading books much anyway…

Of course, all of his arguments go away if we can introduce e-books by slealth. Those people that won’t drop 400 quid on an iliad are literally lining up for iphones. Maybe there’s a chance that they’ll start reading books on them, given the right incentives. Which is something that has to be figured out. And unlike keitai novels in the east, it’s early days for that in the west.

I’ve always maintained that the e-book piracy scene is relatively small, although (as David Pogue suggested recently) it can be significant in certain market segments. One of those is textbooks, which students are often compelled to buy for relatively high prices. It seems that this opportunity for sharing has been embraced by some - a Chronicle of higher Ed piece details a mob by the name of textbook torrents that’s doing the biz:

One Web site, called Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with the original textbook layout and full-color illustrations. Users must simply set up a free account and download a free software program that uses a popular peer-to-peer system called BitTorrent. Other textbook-download sites are even easier to use, offering digital books at the click of a mouse.

What’s interesting is the response from authors and publishers, whose intent (if not deed) to date mirrors the Music Industry circa Napster (wow has it been almost a decade already!) :

So far the publishing group has not sought to take legal action against individual student downloaders, as the Recording Industry Association of America has done in its campaign to stamp out the illegal trading of music at colleges. The book-publishing group has not sought to shut down entire Web sites that offer downloads either, said Mr. McCoyd. Instead, officials are doing research on the extent of the problem and asking Web-site owners to remove individual files. “We’ve just tried to keep sweeping away these infringements as they continue to come online,” he said.

Far be it for me to suggest that the *desire* for students to access ebooks is an opportunity, not a crisis - and that a co-ordinated, affordable program of electronic textbook availability might actually be a good thing for all concerned (with an emphasis on affordable). I’ve had issues of supply with printed textbooks (nobody’s fault because course numbers can jump dramatically just prior to semester commencement dates) and I emphasise with students who have to jump through the hurdles of long lines outside the bookshop (yes, even in the 21st century), high prices and inconsistent usage of texts. 

(via Slashdot)

There’s a bit of a debate happening about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail theory after the Harvard Business Review did a bit of a critique. Not going to rehash the points made here - it’s all summarised nicely in this Techdirt piece. Which nicely points this out:

Even more to the point is that the concept of the long tail changes the shape of the market. When shelf space was limited, it made it that much more difficult to even get a creative work produced at all. You had to be able to convince someone that your work would make it into the “hits” category, and then get them to finance the creation of the work. And, anything that didn’t actually become a hit fell off the chart completely.

Echoing many of the themes that have come up here, author and new media/marketing guru,  Seth Godin posts his thoughts on Kindle, having actually owned one for two months (unlike yours truly, who merely speculates on the known unknowns!). A few points resonate:

 It changes (at least for me) what it means to buy and own a book.

I’ve often thought (and said) that cultural change is harder than technological change, and this statement nails it really eloquently. The social practices surrounding the book experience are much broader than just the reading - kindle et al might have the screen and reading  bit down pat, but the rest isn’t there yet.

Word processing didn’t work because it was typing but a little cheaper. It worked because it was better than typing. Email didn’t work because it was mail but a little faster. It worked because it was fundamentally better than snail mail…

Builds on the previous bit. Cultural shifts won’t happen without some kind of motivation. E-Books have to be better than p-books, not the same in a new package.

And:

The pricing of books is whacked. $9.95 is a publisher-friendly price, not an author-friendly or reader-friendly price.

The easiest way (maybe the only way) to shift social practices is to appeal to the hip pocket nerve (although the experience of very expensive *new* cultural practices like downloading ringtones suggests that people are less cost-sensitive when they’re offered something new and exciting to play with). And it appears that the book trade just doesn’t want to explore the possibilities of the new:

My first thought is that every Kindle should ship with $1,000 worth of free books on it. I offered Amazon rights to as many of my books as I control if they would just agree to put em free on every Kindle. They declined.

I did a presentation for the NSW Editors Society a few weeks ago, which sparked a few thoughts. In particular I (very broadly) canvassed some ideas about the motivation for book publishers to get on book the e-thing. As usual, I drew some analogies with the music business

For publishers, there are few compelling reasons to embrace ebooks. The size of the ebook market is currently tiny, and whilst many have made titles available for the kindle and the sony reader, there has been no shift away from the codex– for most publishers, ebooks are an experiment, or a just-in-case maneuver. 

An interesting parallel in the music industry is the shift in format from vinyl records to digital CDs. Consumer demand was driven by the promise of greater fidelity, longevity and convenience. But the motivation for record companies was also clear– they could persuade consumers to re-buy music they already owned in a new format, and they could charge a higher price for that privilege. The situation surrounding ebooks is very different; the motivations that persuaded music companies to invest in a format change simply do not exist for book publishers. In order to voluntarily reconfigure practices that have worked well for decades (or even centuries), they must see a format shift as an opportunity to make money. 

The other motivation for industry change is fear. In the case of the music industry, Napster (and other downloading services) and the reality of dwindling CD sales provoked the major record labels into action. In the face of a threat to revenue streams, the music industry belatedly embraced online distribution. Arguably, this format shift was not voluntary, but a reaction to entirely new environment, driven by new computer and communications technologies– remember that it’s a computer company, not a music company that is at the vanguard of the digital music revolution.

For a moment, it appeared that google book search might represent a similar threat for book publishers; but the printed book appears so entrenched in consumer minds that google has, so far, not had bunch of an impact on the book buying public. There is really no threat to to the current method of book distribution– the bulk of the mass-market book trade is safely the domain of print and paper. In the absence of a something that actually threatens existing revenue streams, publishers have good reason to ignore possible incremental increases in revenue from niches and long tails. 

Of course, all this would change if there was enormous consumer demand for the digital product, but that has yet to happen…

Quick pointer to Mike Cane’s rant for the day:

Writers are dying — dying! — out there in the printed paper world.

I didn’t see Shakespeare & Co. closing their lower Manhattan store as a sign.

I figured since Borders opened a big store a few blocks away, it was another Wal-Mart Syndrome reaction.

But then within the past few weeks I’ve seen Barnes & Noble close two bigstores. And I mean big: multi-floored affairs, each which had a Starbucks-like cafe in them!

Of course, the situation in book trade is way more complex than Mike suggests. As much as I love my various bits of Cupertino-made gear (and desperately want one of Mike’s ‘ipod airs’), I’m sceptical about Apple singlehandedly being able to save the day. I’m just not sure that a killer ebook device (with or without ecosystem) is going to do the trick. I’ve been thinking about this stuff a bit lately, and will post more soon. Love the sentiment though!!

No, I’m not talking about petrol/electric motoring, but what I see as a kind of transition mode of delivery - which combines the network effects of the Internet with good old fashioned touchy feely print on paper. In book publishing, there’s lulu and now would be magazine publishers have Magcloud. Both services provide a backend print and distribution service for people who can do the frontend - produce a pdf file and upload via their web browser. 

Years ago (OK, decades), a few mates and I tried to set up a magazine - and even managed to convince an investor to stump up six figures (just). We pulled the plug because we realised that low six figures just wouldn’t pay the bills after a few months, and the interest from adverstisers was, shall we say ‘mild’. Twenty years down the track, and we coulda been king of the world

Via Daring Fireball

For those living under rocks, Apple announced the second generation, 3G iphone last week with Australian availability (finally) on July 11th. More importantly though, the new iphone will allow the installation of applications, so we’re all waiting breathlessly for a ‘legitimate’ ebook reader. And it appears that, hopefully, we won’t have to wait too long. A post at jkonTheRun details a response from the Fictionwise/eReader folk about just such a toy:

We have two Mac development experts doing the work to make eReader function on the iphone/itouch right now. Apple will allow third party applications, like eReader, to be used by customers after the next iPhone/iTouch firmware update which is currently estimated to be released on June 30 and we expect to be done with our porting work at about the same time…

… which would make the contents of the ereader store available to us iphoneheads

(via Teleread)

Evan Schnittman over at OUP does a bit of kindle/reader speculating that wouldn’t be out of place over in the Apple blogosphere. Drawing on Digitimes reporting, which suggests that e-ink screens are being manufactured at a rate of 60,000-80,000 a month and trending upwards. Which leads him to suggest that Sony and Amazon will (together) sell 1,000,000 e-reader devices in 2008:

With production ramping up to 120,000 units a month these numbers will look much better - to the tune of a combined 1.4 million units over 12 months! Even with the Kindle out of stock for a big chunk of the first and second quarter, combined sales of these two e-ink devices in 2008 will most likely top 1 million.

That seems a lot and instinctively it feels optimistic, given that most estimates put sales to date at somewhere less than 100,000. I’m tempted to say that I’ve never seen a Kindle (or a Sony Reader) in the wild, but then that wouldn’t be fair since I’m down under. But then again, I have run into a large number of iphones in the wild in Sydney and you can’t get *them* here either!!

Read the comments for some feedback, and there’s more on the mobileread forums.

(via O’Reilly Radar)

Computerworld has an interesting overview of the history and (possible) future of e-paper technologies, using kindle as the touchstone. Not a lot of deep analysis but some industry quotes that put the fledging e-book business in perspective:

These current limitations lead at least one industry observer to predict that the acceptance of e-paper displays will take a while: “E-paper is still five years from being a mainstream technology,” says Len Kawell, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft.

(via slashdot)