His recent book “Here Comes Everybody” is well worth a read and is a pleasant rebuttal to Andrew Keens appalling “Cult of the Amateur”

As it is, I can think of a number of strikes against the paper book.

1. Its bulky and heavy. My current ebook reader, with an sd card can hold more than a thousand ebooks. If we assume the average book shelf holds 100 books, I am saving a lot of floor space by using ebooks instead of paper books. Also, when I move its a lot easier to pack .

2. Paper books are not a very environmentally friendly technology. Trees must be cut down to make the paper; various chemicals need to be used to bleach the paper and make the inks; Lets not forget all the pollution that is produced in distributing the book. And this ignores the fact that large numbers of books get destroyed every year because no one buys them.

3. Books are relatively durable only because the average book only gets read a few times. I bet the average mass market paperback will start to fall apart after a dozen readings; some I have purchased started the process on the first read. I bet popular library books only last a year or two before they need to be replaced.

Just look at cookbooks. Now, there’s absolutely no reason for anyone to buy a cookbook today since there are thousands of recipes available for free on the Web. Thousands. Yet, people still buy cookbooks. (And, no, I don’t know the sales figures and probably there has been a decline in cookbook sales but they still exist.) More importantly for this conversation, most cookbooks exhibit a great amount of design. The beauty of the cookbook is one of its attraction for those who buy it. And cookbooks make nice gifts.

People who like a nicely designed book are people who buy books. Now that’s not everybody but it does represent a market for some publishers.

I think I’ve made the point here before, but not for a year or so, that clay tablets are really the perfect technology. Clay is forever rewritable. It is cheap (it uses dirt) and hence environmentally sound. And if you bake it, it becomes something that lasts forever. The oldest manuscripts in the world aren’t vellum or papyrus (certainly not paper), they’re clay tablets.

Just because something is a ‘perfect technology’ however, doesn’t mean that people will keep using it.

I definitely don’t see the Franklin Mint market for books as being sustainable. For one thing, think about the intersection between people who read and people who buy things from the Franklin Mint (small). For another, the Franklin Mint/collectable model is based on scarcity (artificial or real). Book publishing, by its nature, is based on abundance.

Paper is a good technology. It’s a technology we’ve grown used to and, like internal combustion, it’ll be hard to replace. But it will be replaced.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com