At this time last year, I was fresh off my successful crystal balling of 2013. All my ebook predictions had come true and I was basking in the glow of my talent as a trend-spotter. As it turns out, I was basking a little too much. Most of my predictions for 2014 fell short of the mark. Perhaps I had too much faith in the ability of the market to innovate—in many of my predictions, I see the first emergences of baby steps, but I had anticipated a more fully realized progress. In others, the market simply shifted in areas of interest I had not accounted for…
So here were my 2014 predictions. Let’s see how I did…
1) A Tagging Revolution. I was anticipating a book filing system which would let people easily sort and filter new content—to differentiate, for instance, between books which had benefitted from a professional edit and books which had not. We did not see anything like this emerge. I have seen a handful of Amazon listings which mentioned the editor’s name in the blurb, the same way illustrators often get a credit. But a handful of listings does not a revolution make.
2) A Shake-Up in the Magazine Market. Well, if by ‘shake-up’ you mean ‘nobody is interested’ then perhaps I was spot-on on this one. I was anticipating the rise of more choices for this market—different apps, subscription plans, winners and losers emerging in a big shakeup. What happened instead is that movie and book subscription sites were the story of the year, and nobody cared about the magazines. I suspect that, as Twitter and social media continues to make its impact felt, there will be even less interest in magazines. There is no shake-up because there is no market.
3) Experimentation with the Tablet Apps. Well, I was partially right on this one. All of the major vendors did continue to upgrade and grow their tablet apps. But I was expecting bigger steps here, and I was expecting the apps to strive for—and reach—feature parity with the e-ink operating systems. That didn’t happen, and I am not sure why. Why are there still features my e-ink Kindle has which are not available on the iOS version? Why don’t they want the feature sets to be the same so that people can make full use of the available options? I have no clue why this hasn’t happened.
4) The Rise of the Para-Professional. This has happened, to an extent. I have seen several writer-oriented blogs and books and columns which mention outpouring the covers, the editing and so forth. But what I was hoping for was for the editing scene to develop its own Hugh Howey—a big-name indie celebrity example who would legitimize this part of the process for everyone else. I’m still waiting!
5) Niche Sites to Grow in Popularity. This has happened, I think. I know everyone at my school is addicted to Teachers Pay Teachers, for instance. Most of them only download the freebies though—or else they skim the samples of the paid stuff and use them as inspiration for their own things. I bought one or two things, and my boss did reimburse me for them, but I think it has not crossed anyone else’s mind to try and ask for that though…
6) The Library Market Will Shrink Significantly. In my area, demand for library services has grown significantly! But it has shrunk somewhat for books. When the Toronto Public Library has rolled out new services, they have been things like the Hoopla media service, which rents movies, or they have been renovations to physical branches. They do continue to add new eBooks at a steady clip, but it’s not making news like it used to.
So, a bit of a mixed bag this year. Stay tuned later this week for my predictions for 2015!
