I get a little annoyed when people confuse the physical book (just a bunch of pressed wood pulp, ink, and glue) with the book itself (a collection of letters, arranged into words, arranged into sentences, in a one-of-a-kind sequence). Sure, it’s okay to have your preference in reading medium, but War and Peace is War and Peace even if you pee it into the snow or yodel it.
So when I read things like this post from techradar (Why Publishers Would Be Mad to Support eBooks), it grinds my gears a bit. Beyond the fact that the author has clearly done little research and likely hasn’t taken the time to actually try an ereader before condemning them (I was an opponent won over quickly and those who naysay without trying one really sounds akin to someone in the 80s calling email a gimmick), he doesn’t seem to read books all that much, and certainly doesn’t love them.
Right now, the publishing industry faces a similar change [to that encountered by the music industry]. If it goes digital, it’s moving into a world where there are bigger, more powerful and more experienced players, and those players will eat the publishers’ lunch; if the book trade thinks supermarket discounting is making its life difficult, it ain’t seen nothing yet.
By sticking to dead trees, however, the book publishers can keep on doing what they’re doing. Sure, some people will be happy with a leaked download of Harry Potter, or a badly scanned how-to manual. But they’ll be the minority.
Recorded music is a relatively new invention, but books have been around for nearly two thousand years and mass-produced books for several hundred. If publishers don’t rush into digital, they could be around for hundreds more.
Besides the basic economic principal that competition drives innovation, the recommendation that the book publishers can safely keep doing what they’re doing is ridiculous. They are currently pushing extra production of the “safe” books at the expense of taking new risks, which is buoying their bottoms lines in the short term, but they know it won’t save them. At some point, even Nora Roberts fans will get sick of Nora Roberts. Also, a news flash: the “bigger, more powerful and more experienced” players are already involved, and the absolute worse way to handle things would be to do as the music industry did (almost fatally) and stubbornly ignore the inevitable change in market trends.
This guy changed the literate world six centuries ago; it's high time to give change another go.
Books get me really excited. Nowadays, ebooks get me worked up too. I love the idea of them, and I can’t wait for them to hit their stride and really improve upon the book as it has been for the last 570 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, I love deadtree books and will continue to buy them until the day I die. Currently 99% of my reading is done in deadtree books. Despite that, I recognize that electronic books offer a real chance for books to evolve into something more. This change could be as significant as the transition from carving stone to stretching parchment, from monastery transcriptions to the Gutenberg press. Imagine being able to search your books easily, link your notes between books, have instant access to similar books (actually similar, not Google search of a title similar), interact with your book in various ways, all while retaining the solitary, distraction-free activity that is reading a book.
This is all coming, and likely soon. The pieces are in place, it’s just that ebooks are not quite superior to paper ones yet. All we need now is for someone to put the effort into making an ebook with the care and effort that goes into publishing a deadtree book. Because, honestly, as handy as ebooks are, in their current form they are little more than text dumps. Rather than stubbornly trying to force a failing business model and succumb to a buyout from a hardware pusher like Amazon, publishers need to step up and innovate; they need to create a product that the buyers will want and that the hardware makers will need to support. They shouldn’t cower and stay the sinking course in an attempt take what they can get before slipping into obscurity, as this Iago seems to suggest. The sooner they realize the obvious financial benefits of innovation, the sooner the readers like you and I can breathe easy again.
