I do not doubt your expertise as a paper publisher but you need to research better the transforming power technology has had on many other industries. Paper publishing is next in line to be transformed.

You write emphatically: “E-books are never going to replace print books. Never.”

Never is a very long time.

I have seen how typewriters would “never” be replaced by $20,000 word processors. I have seen how these same word processors would “never” be replaced by personal computers. I have seen how two way radios would “never” be replaced by cellular phones.

As an executive in each of these industries I heard “experts” entrenched in the traditional thinking of their industry claim that it would “never” happen.

In each case the early products were incomplete and awkward to use, but they kept improving until they were irresistible.

Besides the products rapid evolution, what was interesting to watch is how in every industry entirely new companies were created to distribute the new technologies. Faced with agile and ferocious new competitors, the legacy companies already in these markets either disappeared or had to “surrender” and use gobs of cash to buy and integrate the upstarts (like the telcos buying wireless carriers) to survive as viable entities.

New technologies necessitate new business models. E-books are a new technology looking for the right business model. When the right business model is perfected, whether an e-book has been reviewed by The New York Times will be completely irrelevant because consumers not the elite matter. In any case, I am sure that the New York Times will review e-books because new important books, rejected by traditional publishers, will be discovered on the web.

Let me share our own experience at creating a business/publishing model built around e-books.

A friend of ours had seen her book rejected by paper publishers. She asked us to help her get her book published. She wanted to be read. Fame and money were completely secondary. Her book was written as a eulogy for a young boy who had passed away due to a rare illness and she gives all the revenue from this book to a foundation researching this disease.

As you know paper book publishing is a high risk business where few profitable successes pay for all the unprofitable books. (In the process, an incredible amount of paper/trees/energy are wasted.) Paper publishing our friend’s book was too risky, but web publishing her book was a no risk proposal. Especially since we quickly encountered other frustrated authors looking for an outlet that would accept their creative works. Helping a friend became an accidental business helping authors get published and children get free books.

So we built a completely different publishing model than the industry you had a successful career in. We are one of many new companies about to disrupt paper publishing as completely and permanently as your telephone “traditions” have been changed. You can see our beta web site at http://www.sharing-books.com.

At Sharing-Books we remove the barriers your industry has spent years putting up up because of the high risk of paper publishing. Your industry has to review and edit books and spend countless hours agonizing how to pick the winners. Careers are made or broken by good or bad choices.

At Sharing-books.com we publish every book that is uploaded if it is judged appropriate by our virtual volunteer librarians. These are qualified volunteers who have their own group web site and who decide if the books submitted are within our contribution guidelines.

Our upfront cost for our books is nil. We share with the authors 1/3 of the revenue we receive through six different revenue streams (most of which are unavailable to paper publishers). Our review cost is nil. Our editing costs is nil as authors can “upgrade” their books by uploading a new versions. Our cost to “publish” (host) a new book on our site is negligible.

Once built, the fixed costs of our business are minimal. Our investment has been minuscule compared to building a traditional paper publishing business. We don’t even have office costs as our international development team meets and works virtually. Our model is so automated and efficient that we can afford to be patient with our development and we can give 1/3 of our revenue to Room to Read, an important charity equipping developing nations with literacy resources.

In addition, our readers will tell us which books are the real winners, not critics. Based on downloads and user ratings, we will know which books are so popular that paper publishing them will be a risk-free business decision. For free we get perfect market research and testing of new books.

Whether we prefer or not a specific e-book reading device over paper is not relevant. E-readers will only get better and they will become ubiquitous. Books are content – do not confuse them with their paper “container”.

At Sharing-Books, we focus on children under 11; and what we see in their hands when teachers and parents are not looking are electronic devices not paper books. So we better learn to deliver “book” content to their favorite devices or reading will be a declining activity.

This is an important responsibility. Rather than resisting inevitable change, I suggest you become an advocate of these new technologies so that the love of books you and I share can be transmitted to our children.

Regards,
Pierre Lapointe
http://www.sharing-books.com

Perhaps the author fails to note the irony in the fact that the New York Times has one of the world’s largest online readerships, measuring in the tens of millions, meaning the vast majority of those reading the aforementioned reviews will be doing so from a computer screen.

Newspapers are themselves having to embrace electronic distribution, and many sorts of books — once the technology has matured sufficiently — will go the same way. If critics want to have anything to review, they’d better get used to the idea of e-books! Unfortunately for our penurious British critics, they’ll be unable to sell them on in the Charing Cross Road …

Sadly, my colleagues in French Lit. do not have this powerful tool at their disposal. That is because many people like yourself believe in the power of paper… with content indexed at the back of the book, and accessible only if you have a particular physical artifact at hand. What would the field of history be like if every book, article, and journal of history were available for full-text search? Linguistics? Imagine if a student of history could search across all of the scholarly and popular works surrounding the birth of nuclear energy, and compare their findings with our own popular conceptions today… with the same ease that I can look at 50+ years of publications in computing? It would transform academia, and indeed, transform how we call can learn from the work of those that came before us.

I love my leather-bound copy of the Hitchhiker’s Guide. And I, too, have a house full of books. But I’d trade many of those books for a robust tablet with a long battery life (weeks) that held my complete library. If I could search, full text, every book on my shelf, be brought directly to the page containing that text (or even my own annotations), I would love it. Please. Want.

If I could decide that I wanted to start reading some Greg Bear (and start with his early works), or perhaps some classic mystery… and download it directly to my ebook reader, at a fraction of the cost of a paper book, it would be amazing. I see no reason to kill trees for pulp works, or specialized academic texts, when we could just as easily distribute them cheaply as zeros and ones. Amazon misses the boat because the reader is too small, it is laden with DRM, and the cost is still too high for an electronic artifact that I don’t “own”. I won’t pay $10 to rent a book from the publisher, period.

As a teacher, I want to vomit over the price of textbooks. $60 to $80 is the norm, and $150 and more can be found today. It is disgusting and unnecessary, a sign of an industry gone wrong. I agree: editors add value. Indexers add value. A good designer turns my words into a visual treat, choosing typefaces and accents that make the text a work of art. But no number of promoters will offset the value that I can give to the world by making my work available cheaply and electronically. If I have a choice between a free or low-cost ebook for use in my classroom, or a $100 textbook that weighs a ton, I’ll choose the free text for my students, because I have enough expertise (as does any teacher) to evaluate whether the ebook is of quality or not. And I don’t have to beg some publisher to send me a “review copy,” because the content is available/affordable in the first place.

Stories untold have no value. Stories freely given change lives.

So you go on thinking that ebooks will never catch on. We’re already aware that electronic documents are more easily found and more often cited by researchers[1,2]. As more authors follow Cory Doctorw’s lead, we’ll find that they’re more likely to succeed (e.g. develop a following) than authors who are only promoted and published through “traditional” means. I’m looking forward to the day that I can do the majority of my reading on an excellent, large-format electronic device that holds my entire library (sans DRM, thank you very much) as well as the current edition of the New Mars Times. It should update me when new content is released by any of several hundred e-publishers that might be of interest. Naturally, these recommendations will be based on the contents of my current library. I’ll select and download a number of these new works, only read one in ten, but they’ll be added to my local store for the next time I want to read up and sound knowledgeable in a 3D holo-forum.

I also want antigravity boots, solar cells that work at 90% efficiency, and a pony. Fortunately, at the rate publishers are going, I’ll have all of those things before I have affordable access to DRM-free ebooks across the entire spectrum of human stories, factual, fiction, or otherwise.

[1] http://www.librijournal.org/pdf/2004-4pp221-227.pdf
[2] http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/aci-computer/aci-computer99.html

I don’t suppose book reviewers are any closer to the 21st century than publishers, but one reason for reviewing from an ebook is convenience. Not so long ago scientific papers were reviewed from hardcopies express mailed to the reviewers, but now it is all done electronically.

Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother”, a couple of weeks ago.

I think he attempts to publish the electronic and the dead tree books simultaneously, but in effect that means that a real person can get the electronic version first.