Everywhere you look you see increasingly paniced headlines that ebooks are killing printed books. In some areas they are… in some other they’re bringing books TO print that would never have seen the light of day before. Don’t worry, the printed book will still be around… but it’ll be less a mass consumer product and more of a experience for those who truly connect with a book. But there will be shakeups in the distribution portion in the meantime. sometimes painful changes.
Like any new technology, it can bring about big changes. First early adopters try it out and it either then trickles down to the masses or withers on the vine. Then someone cracks the technology to ensure consistency of experience. Then comes the format war, as the market fights over what will become the “standard” version consumed by the masses. Then comes a lull as the standard is enhanced, refined, or made cheaper.
Ebooks were around before the Kindle. You could get portable readers for them, But they were expensive and weren’t very user friendly, from either the production or consumption end. The quality was inconsistent. The same was true with digital music for a long time. And video. The internet constantly lowered the cost of entry at BOTH ends and also made consumption so much easier.
On the production end, there was still the cost of entry to contend with, but as it became easier to distribute and sell content without the need for costly and cumbersome distribution channels, the cost of entry as a PRODUCER fell. Which in turn meant that more and more people bought the necessary equipment and economies of scale drove down the price.
And that then started to work its way up the production ladder. The very bottom entry price fell and if they could recoup that money, it could be plowed into midrange equipment… which then started to fall in price as well.
But, music was still dominated by a few distribution channels that had initially allowed entry into the online market. Now we’re starting to see large producers and individuals develop even more alternate channels.
And to distinguish themselves, some are indeed going back to actually pressing RECORDS. Not CDs, records. Digital fueled the new boom in records. Bands still have concerts because it is an inherently different experience than listening to a download.
Film is following a somewhat similar trajectory, but faces the bottleneck of theatres not beign readily accessible to all content producers because most still use actual film for projection. They can make quite a lot of money doing direct to video/DVD/streaming video, but without that last piece of equipment to transfer to film can’t crack the actual movie theatre in most places.
Books started on that trajectory as well as the cost for printing tumbled and computers spread everywhere. But you still had to physically get the material to someone to read because it was so difficult to get formatting right between computers. The quality was just poor.
The Kindle was the piece of technology that brought it all together to provide a consistent experience with ebooks. Obviously the quality of the writing itself varies, but the actual presentation is relatively consistent. You download a book and you know it will be readable. (the writing and editing may be abysmal, but it won’t display as garble, a very real problem with early efforts)
And now we’re into the format wars as Kindle, Nook, and iPad duke it out over what format will dominate as the standard.
But will the ebook kill the printed book? NO.
It will however kill off REMAINDERS. It will significantly change the distribution of printed books. You can see this happening now with smaller publishers. They use the ebooks to sample the market and see whether there is sufficient demand to justify a print run. If not, it stays an ebook and can be sold that way with very low overhead for as long as people keep buying.
If there IS a market for the book as a printed format, print runs can be much more closely tailored to demand to not create remainders. They can thus turn a profit on a print run that wouldn’t be feasible using the traditional model where they have to guess about the run… and produce some total stinkers to find the one that goes into multiple runs.
Much of the “books are dying!” is because the model of printing massive amounts of a few thing hasn’t quite caught up with the reality of ebooks yet. Publishers jumped on ebooks because everyone else was… but the simulteanous release of the hardcover and the ebook (and the ebook is almost always lower priced) cannibalizes sales of the hardcover, leading to more remainders which cuts the profits, which then creates a drag on the whole market.
All of the digital versions of media (books, music, film) favor casual engagement with a product and sampling. Many of the ones selling are in fact short samples. Digital music took off when you could buy a single. Ebooks are driving a resurgence of the short story and the novella, formats that weren’t well served by the printed book model. A short encounter with a digital piece that can be engaged with for a few minutes or only a few hours at a relatively low cost allows people to sample many more items than they would when they were confined to purchasing higher priced, longer works. It required a greater level of commitment to engage at all with the physical version.
In a few years, ebooks will allow people that quick, affordable dalience with a new author with low commitment. The casual reading market will expand. Expect the return of serials as being cheap and affordable to produce short episodes for consumption as ebooks. Print books will still be around, but produced in a greater variety with smaller print runs. More collectors editions will appear. More omibuses collecting together novellas will appear. The longer format printed book would be like attending the symphony instead of listening to a CD of classical music at home. It provides a different, longer experience than that afforded by an ereader.
In some way, this cycles back around to many of the “books” we now consider classics. “Ulysses” by James Joyce was originally printed as a serial. Today, it would be in many ways like turning a Twitter or Facebook feed into a book. ( Ulysses was actually fed out via Twitter recently as part of a project to get people to engage with it in a new and different way.) Dickens wrote many of his books as newspaper serials, with people eagerly buying each new episode, and then also buying the finished book version. If he was working today, he would be posting a weekly blog and then collect it all together in a book at the end. At the time, those darn high speed steam powered presses that could churn out thousands of pages a day were the internet of the day. They’d kill the traditional book!
Ebooks will help make the classics people will talk about fifty years from now… and hold a printed copy in their hand while they talk about them. The printed book offers a different way to engage with the item, offering tactile and olfactory experiences that you can’t have with an ereader. We are just at the point where we are still wildly thrashing about trying to find the highest and best use for the technology. Great things lie ahead… but the way there will be full of unexpected surprises and some heartache for publishers and book dealers as the market adapts and changes.
The bottom end of the market will fall away and the printed book will become more specialized, more elaborate, more detailed, more of an experience, and less of a mere conveyance for words. It will become an EXPERIENCE in and of itself, not just a delivery system for the experience. Because of its lower entry costs for production and consumption, the ebook will become the preferred method for separating the wheat from the chaff. Printed books will be higher quality in both content and actual quality because they will start with better materials and for a more demanding market.
Completely agree. I see a lot of people predicting that paper will go the way of the wax cylinder, but I think – maximum – it will go the way of the vinyl disc. It will for collectors and connoisseurs, although well within the budget of anyone who wants that particular experience.
Your comment that ebooks will “make the classics people will talk about fifty years from now… and hold a printed copy in their hand while they talk about them” is very true. Particularly because anything you read on an ereader, and the ereader itself, will be gone, unusable. Such is the way with changing technology. One thing paper has over electrons is that the information will be available to those who come after us.
I think the printed book will slowly die out though. Take encyclopedias for example. People would much rather read wikipedia. Well books will eventually be for collectors like what you have said. Bu i think the advantage of e-books is less trees cut, it is cheaper to distribute. A wide array of reading material will be more accessible to the masses. Well that’s in the long run.