Latham talks up a £30 (US$46) book on maps that includes removable fold-out maps bundled in pockets, and a few other beautiful books. Of course, e-book fan that I am, I can’t see myself buying any of those, and wonder just how many people in today’s recession, price-sensitive economy would be interested either.

But on the other hand, if e-books decrease consumer demand for hardcovers, perhaps mass market hardcovers will dwindle and the ones that remain will be more on the order of the objects d’art Latham seems to want. If people are interested in buying a physical artifact in an electronic world, they’ll certainly want the best one they can find.

(There do seem to be a couple of search and replace errors in the article. In the second and third paragraphs Latham refers to “e-book readers” but it would make more sense from context to say paper book readers in those places instead.)

A 2011 survey showed that 33% of British children do not own a book, according to the National Literacy Trust. This program is meant to help remedy that by putting an actual printed book, rather than a cheap plastic toy, in the hands of young would-be readers.

Not everyone is fond of the move. UK bookseller Katie Clapham has an essay on The Bookseller complaining that the free giveaway devalues “what we work so hard to give value to” by equating it to those cheap plastic toys.

Selfishly, what upsets me most is the news that the other token gift in the box is a voucher for another Morpurgo book, redeemable only at W H Smith. As an independent children’s bookshop in a town that shares the high street with a W H Smith we are constantly working to compete with their never-ending deals and red sticker discounts. Now they can give away for free what we have to pay to sell.

Of course, it is not surprising that an employee of a specialty children’s bookstore would feel that way, as this is clearly just another way that big chains are using their buying power to outcompete the little guy. And books that are given away for free are not books that are being bought from a bookseller, and that are likely to get kids started buying from the big chains that can offer bigger discounts.

I find it interesting that books are finally reaching the point of being given away free with Happy Meals (albeit only in the UK, and for a limited time). Are the printing costs of a book really about the same as the manufacturing costs of a cheap plastic toy? If so, it would seem to lend ammunition to the publishers who insist that printing costs are a fraction of the cost of a book and so e-books should be priced accordingly.

The problem is that printed books are starting to go away due to the encroachment of e-books. Writes McGuire:

[E]very time a discussion of ebooks turns, seemingly inevitably, to "Print is dead, traditional publishing is dead, all smart authors should be bailing to the brave new electronic frontier," what I hear, however unintentionally, is "Poor people don’t deserve to read."

She draws on her own background growing up below the poverty line, with “an ocean of books” in her bedroom to keep her company. “There are still used book dealers in the Bay Area who remember me patiently paying off a tattered paperback a nickel at a time, because that was what I could afford.” She couldn’t have afforded even a “cheap” e-book reader, and many people today are in the same situation.

And how do you give e-books to low-income families? Aside from there being no such thing as a “used” discount e-book, any expensive device put into their hands on a subsidy will end up being stolen and sold.

We need paper books to endure. Every one of us, if we can log onto this site and look at this entry, is a "have" from the perspective of a kid living in an apartment with cockroaches in the walls and junkies in the unit beneath them. A lot of the time, the arguments about the coming ebook revolution forget that the "have nots" also exist, and that we need to take care of them, even if it means we can’t force our technological advancement as fast as we might want to. I need to take care of them, because I was a little girl who only grew up to be me through the narrowest of circumstances…and most of those circumstances were words on paper.

Printed books are probably not going to go away, but even if they don’t, if enough of the “haves” make the switch over to e-books, there may not be enough people still buying and selling paper books to keep the second-hand bookstores in business. What will those in poverty do then?

But actually, Abell explains, he likes e-books himself—he hasn’t bought anything in print since getting his iPad. Still, he sees five areas where e-books don’t quite live up to their print counterparts.

Some of these “problems” are more compelling than others:

1. An unfinished e-book isn’t a constant reminder to finish reading it.
2. You can’t keep your books all in one place.
3. Notes in the margins help you think.
4. E-books are positioned as disposable, but aren’t priced that way.
5. E-books can’t be used for interior design.

Even Abell admits that the interior design gripe seems a bit shallow, and I have a hard time imagining too many book lovers who need reminders of unfinished books, but the other points he raises are ones we have mentioned before.

Unless you crack the DRM on every book you buy and load them all into Calibre, the way some readers do, sooner or later you are going to be faced with having bought e-books in more than one store, and being unable to access them all from one place can be annoyingly inconvenient. And although I have never been inclined to scribble margin notes in books I was reading—at least apart from college textbooks—some people make margin notes as a matter of course. And e-books can’t be passed on the way print books can, but we still pay significantly more than paperback price for new ones from the agency six.

Of course, these problems have been around for quite some time, and we don’t seem to be making much progress toward clearing them up. But the more people who complain about them, the more likely it is somebody will eventually do something about it. At least, that’s my hope.

In the past, the book cover has been instrumental in the way books have been positioned, sold and remembered. Indeed, the book cover provides publishers with millions and millions of pounds-worth of promotion each year. It is so potent that even paid-for book marketing still has barely evolved past the point of presenting a cover with a punning headline.

Without the daily visual prompts that book covers provide, the industry will be forced to fundamentally change the way it markets to consumers.

The thing is, Horner devotes the entire post to noting that covers are going away and publishers are going to have to change their strategy, but he doesn’t really say much about how they will have to change that strategy. The one example he brings up, Seth Godin’s decision to remove the title from the cover of his latest book since it will be shown prominently in the Amazon listings anyway, might be helpful for the on-line sales aspect, but doesn’t do anything to make up for passengers no longer being able to see it on an e-book.

I wonder if at some point in the future, when displays have gotten really cheap, e-readers might start being made with a screen on the back (like some cell phones have) that will display the cover image of whatever is being read at the moment? If the e-book device maker is also a content publisher (like Amazon), it could be in their best interest to sell more books that way.

But displays getting that cheap is probably at least ten years away, if it happens at all, and that doesn’t help publishers now. They’re just going to have to take advantage of some of the benefits Internet advertising has over traditional print to make up for those things it lacks.

These different comparisons can lead to some strange optical illusions if considered uncritically. Most notably, they can make e-book penetration numbers appear to fall, though it does not make sense that they should.

Since print books intended as Christmas presents are bought before the holiday, but e-books from e-book readers given for Christmas are bought after the holiday, this means that print books will have their largest shipments in the 4th quarter, while e-books will have a sales surge in the 1st quarter.

These different sales peaks make a lot of sense, and the difference in sales figure reporting is a reminder that we have to be careful how we interpret statistics from different sources. And if publishers are trying their best to prop up the ailing print side of their industry, it makes sense they would report figures that show them in their best light.

Meanwhile, FutureBook reports that for every 100 hardback books Amazon has sold in the UK, it has sold 242 Kindle e-books. (There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent comparison to all print titles such as the one on the US press release, however, making it hard to make a comparison.)

The press release also notes that over 790,000 of the Kindle Store’s 950,000 e-books are priced at $9.99 or less, meaning people who don’t want to put up with agency priced hardcovers have plenty of reasonably-priced alternatives to choose from.

It’s impressive that Amazon is managing to move that many e-books. It will be interesting to see how rumored changes including tablets and EPUB compatibility affect the rate of e-book adoption.

Thirty-six years ago, Levitt pointed out that industries needed to focus on the customer, rather than the product, and some industries still haven’t learned that lesson even today.

Today we have the ereader, be it Kindle or other device.  Like the technology in other areas of our lives it has the capacity to grow and not to diminish.  Dependency will be created.  And, it creates another format, or delivery package, for a book.  Where the status quo of ‘hardback followed by paperback’ remains – although suffering – this is a product of history, surely?  Is relegating the ebook to paperback status also clinging to the past and not meeting current customer needs?

She brings up the example of a reader who asked when the e-book version of a book she reviewed would be available, and the publisher advised it would come out with the paperback. She wondered whether the reader would even remember wanting that book in a few months when it became available. (I know I’ve had the experience of being interested enough in a book to place a hold on it at the library, and by the time the hold came through a couple of months later being completely unable to remember the book at all until I read the blurb.)

She  also talks about a bookstore, Goldsboro Books, that has taken advantage of a hardback-collector market niche and done so well it has been able to expand in a time when most independent bookstores are contracting. But the reason it is doing that is not because “serious readers” want hardcovers, but because some readers want hardcovers, and the store is catering to them. There are other niches of readers who want paperbacks and e-books, and selling to all of them at once would work just as well.

The idea of simultaneously publishing an exciting new title both as a hardback and as an e-book seems totally crazy. If only publishers could publish the book as a hardback initially, then put out the e-book some months later, bookshops would be given a sporting chance to stay in business, and the dizzying decline of book sales could almost certainly be slowed.

I was fascinated to discover that serious readers—people who buy more than 12 books a year—are fast becoming the keenest e-book customers. These, surely, are the very people who would wish to purchase hardbacks rather than waiting months for an e-book edition.

I wonder just what rock he’s been living under lately. Delaying (which is to say, “windowing”) the e-book has been tried, but not all “serious readers” are so biddable as to let themselves be pressured into buying the hardback. Many of them will submit one-star reviews on Amazon decrying the publisher’s asinine anti-e-book position and not buy it at all out of spite, and others will go out and pirate the book as soon as some enterprising pirate scanner makes it available—and then not buy the e-book when it is released.

And as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there are those who think that the idea of “windowing” hardcovers and paperbacks should itself be stopped, because only making the book available in a more expensive form costs the sales of those who wouldn’t buy that form but would buy a less expensive one then—but lose their enthusiasm by the time that less-expensive version comes onto the market.

There’s no point in taking up arms against a sea of troubles. E-books are rapidly gaining popularity because people find them more convenient than paper books. If you try to force them to go back to the old dead-tree format for the sake of “saving bookstores,” you’re going to cost yourself sales (probably more than enough to offset the hardcover sales you’d gain), and you’re going to look like just the kind of greedy corporate exec whose works people pirate just to piss off.

Perhaps Mr. Blake’s position can be explained by what he says in later paragraphs, citing friends of his who “used to be” crazy about e-books but are now buying printed books again. He seems to believe that most people who buy e-books don’t really want e-books, and would actually just prefer paper books if they only thought about it. What a remarkably patronizing point of view.

First of all, we know from anecdotal evidence that people with an ebook reader often buy hard copies of the books they really want. The ebook reader is a filtering mechanism. It reminds me of the Napster era in the music business. During its heyday, people were buying more CDs than ever. Yes, they were bootlegging like crazy, but also buying like crazy. I’ve discussed this phenomenon ad nauseum, but suffice it to say that Napster was like a great sampling system that resulted in sales.

The same will happen with ebooks. The book publishers should relish the prospects of the easy money ahead.

I’m not so sure I buy this. If this is true, print book sales should be surging, but it appears that they’re starting to decline as e-book sales rise. Might there be an error in Mr. Dvorak’s calculations?

On Singularity Hub Aaron Saenz points to the recent Kindle library news, and the rise of e-book sales as printed book sales decline. He suggests that digital downloads could become the majority of the market as early as 2015 or as late as 2025, though it’s unclear at what percent of overall sales volume paper books will level out in the end.

And this leads Saenz to point out that piracy is going to be an increasing problem the more popular e-books get. It’s fast and easy, not to mention free, to download the entire works of many of the more popular authors. Writes Saenz:

The only thing, that I can tell, that has held off the flood of intellectual property piracy from hitting literature has been reader’s preference for physical books. Clearly, however, the popularity of e-readers and ebooks shows that preference is changing. If most of us own an e-reader by 2015, then most of us are going to be susceptible to the temptation of piracy. Already digitization has dropped the price of books from $15 to $9. Piracy could bring it down to $0.

Sure, printed books are dying, but the bigger news is that traditional publishers are probably going to die with them.

Though Saenz points out this may not necessarily be the end of the world for writers and readers, given the ability to self-publish through the Kindle or other means. And since Amazon pays considerably more per book sold in royalties than traditional publishers, the end of a traditional publishing model could lead to not necessarily more, but at least a greater percentage of  money going to the people who actually write the books.

I think that even if traditional publishers do go down, there will still be a market for stories, and people who will be willing to pay what a story is worth to them. So the market will find some way to make it work.

But the Big Six may not be off to the glue factory just yet. On the Huffington Post, Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., suggests that traditional publishers might find ways to reinvent themselves in the wake of the digital revolution instead. They could develop their own self-publishing arms to compete with Amazon, for example, and could also start marketing direct to consumers and bypass middlemen such as Amazon. (Baen already does this, after all.) Literary agents might reinvent themselves as general-purpose book and publishing consultants, and bookstore placement will become less important from an overall marketing point of view.

On the National Post, a Canadian publication, Robert Fulford ponders the “death” of the printed book and finds that e-books are engaging enough that he won’t miss it. A septuagenarian himself, he relates his own experiences and also quotes an 80-year-old German literature professor who has been reading since the age of six and has also come to love the Kindle. 

Electronic reading on the Internet has been available for a long time but, as Klüger says, it has begun to interest book readers only in recent years. She’s no longer anxious to buy traditional books but “I am impulsively snapping up ever more electronic reading material.”

I recognize that instinct. Since getting an e-book, I’ve found myself spending more money on books than I did a year ago, and spending it faster. Each e-book costs less (around $9 for a new novel), which tempts me to be more of an impulse buyer. Moreover, there’s an undeniable pleasure in the ability to obtain a book instantly.

Meanwhile, India News’s site Rediff.com is carrying a report on e-books that seems oddly ambivalent. The article notes that people who own Kindles or other e-readers tend to buy more books than those who don’t, though it’s not clear whether that’s because people who buy Kindles are likely to buy more books, or because people who buy more books are likely to buy Kindles.

But it also points out that “Since time immemorial, printed books have been seen as the preferred way of keeping a permanent record of our civilisation. This is not going to change for many years to come.” And it suggests that people who buy e-books might decide they want to buy a printed copy as well for “serious” reading.

Many customers, who purchased eBooks on Kindle or iPad, have later on decided to buy the same book in printed format. Roshni Khanna, a Delhi University student, and an avid book reader says, "Fluff one can read in digital form, but the works of real importance have to be enjoyed the print only." (sic)

And it suggests that “high quality works should always be printed.” Clearly, the p-vs-e advocacy flamewar is still alive.

But what interests me about this is just how many of these particular posts we’ve been seeing over the last few months. They’ve always been with us, even from the days when the preferred e-book device (among those few who read e-books) was the Palm Pilot, But we’ve been seeing so many of them lately (and everyone posting them seems to think he’s stumbled upon some new and original insight) that it seems almost as if the e-book has finally become popular enough that paper-book-lovers are starting to go into denial. “E-books won’t kill printed books! They’ll make them better.”

Of course, it’s certainly possible e-books will lead to publishers concentrating on printed books as artifacts rather than just word containers. But it’s funny to see so many readers seemingly all grasping at exactly the same straw at once.

Unlike a number of pundits we’ve heard from in the past, Shatzkin holds that it is logical for publishers to try to keep e-book prices high to protect the print market. He feels that publishers should stick to doing what they do best, and what they do best is putting books on shelves. From that point of view, “the fate of the big publishers is inextricably linked to the fate of brick-and-mortar stores. So of course, they would try to preserve them.”

But without bookstore shelves to fill, I fear the major publishers have very little to offer. In their own defense, they tend to fall back on “curation” as their strong suit, but I’m afraid their curation is B2B and the B they curate for is the book trade! They have very little curation “brand” with consumers.

This puts me in mind of some of the previous stories I’ve covered here about publishing industry representatives who concluded that publishers needed to build a better relationship with consumers. The question is whether they can.

Shatzkin also points out that it is really an oversimplification to refer to “the publishing industry” because there are actually two publishing industries: the big publishers, and the rest of the industry. The big publishers are the ones who pay the best royalties and get the best terms from those they deal with. They have entirely different pricing and revenue models from smaller publishers such as O’Reilly.

Shatzkin concludes:

It is often said that the big mistake railroads made was not realizing they were in the transportation business, or they wouldn’t have let airlines pass them by. I don’t buy that; running a railroad in no way qualifies you to run an airline, let alone to invent one. One listmember in the discussion in which I appeared to convince nobody suggested that the big publishers should focus on how to be more upstart and more vertical. I am afraid that trying to be something that you’ve never been is a very hard path to follow.

Actually, that’s said of competing with other forms of transportation in general, not just airlines. Trains could have competed with trucks—both being cargo-carrying vehicles that go along the ground at about the same speed—a lot more easily than they could with faster airlines for carrying passengers.

The idea was not that they should try to expand into other forms of transportation—trying to “run or invent an airline”—but that they should have competed better by offering a more compelling reason to use their form of transportation. If they couldn’t compete on speed, they could compete on price and bulk, for example, or on quality of service.

And from my point of view, the same holds true for publishers. No matter how hard they try to cling to brick-and-mortar bookstores, their role is going to dwindle as print dwindles in years to come. While print books are probably never going to go away entirely, there is still a question of just what level of print book sales will be enough to sustain brick-and-mortar stores.

What happens if even 50% of print book sales go digital? Will bookstores be able to survive on half their previous revenue? Little wonder that the pre-eminent paper book e-store and all the major paper book brick-and-mortar chains are trying to hitch their wagons to the e-book star.

It’s like Marc Andreesen said: traditional media needs to “burn the boats” and forge ahead with their efforts to go digital. While in the case of book publishing they shouldn’t drop them entirely, but they should try to figure out how to leverage new technologies like print-on-demand to increase efficiency and reduce cost and waste, rather than remaining mired in a decades old legacy infrastructure that results in printing twice as many books as they need and then having to absorb the cost of taking half back.

Or to put it another way, companies tend to underestimate the disruptive effect that innovations have on their business model until it’s too late to change. I’ve previously mentioned Mike Masnick’s piece in Techdirt about how Kodak waited until it was nearly too late to switch to digital photography, and Blockbuster did wait until it was too late to copy Netflix.

Publishers can’t just cling to print books forever, because consumers are starting to move forward. They need to figure out how to move with the times, or consumers will leave them behind. Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Borders are already trying to move forward—but publishers’ agency pricing might be holding everybody back.

Mike Masnick on TechDirt

The review, and Masnick’s review of the review, focuses on predictions of techno-apocalypse throughout history:

The locomotive riled 19^th-century Great Britain, which feared that engines would blight crops, terrify livestock, and asphyxiate passengers with their high speeds (greater than 20 miles per hour). The numbskullery continues. Gutenberg’s press was going to destroy the clergy and destroy the state. Television was rotting the public’s brain. Comic books were corrupting our youth. Similar predictions and warnings about the bicycle, the radio, the automobile, the airplane, the washing machine, and the microwave were sounded.

The book casts the panics of the present-day, such as the aforementioned Internet attention span crisis, in the light of these previous ones that never came. It talks about where the current rapid pace of change might be leading, and how we can deal with it.

A sample excerpt consisting of the introduction, part of the first chapter, and the epilogue is posted on Scribd, and it makes for some interesting reading. In the part of the introduction I’ve read so far, Bilton talks about how his love affair with the print edition of the New York Times waned over the years in favor of the electronic version, and how he got into trouble when he told Wired reporter Ryan Singel that he did not read the print version of the Times himself anymore.

And Bilton is using QR codes in the printed book to link to a section of his website where discussion and supplemental material is posted. This includes videos, such as the one embedded below.

I might just have to ante up and buy the e-book, which is available for Kindle for $9.99 or, oddly enough, for Nook for $13.45. There is reportedly a free iPhone/iPad app, too, though I couldn’t dig up the link in the time I had.

Nick Bilton – I Live in the Future & Here’s How it Works from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

Gibson notes that, thanks to Twitter, he is experiencing a larger level of fan engagement than he had been able to previously and finding it “more pleasant” than he had expected. He is also able to get a clearer picture of where the book is being released and when.

He also notes that he doesn’t see the rise of the e-book as the daunting prospect many of his contemporaries do, but doesn’t expect physical books to completely go away, either. And he points out that a lot of the environmental waste associated with modern publishing could be eliminated by the rise of print-on-demand book machines like the Espresso.

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they’re able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. Book making machines exist and they’re remarkably sophisticated. You’d eliminate the waste and you’d get your book -– and it would be a real book. You might even have the option of buying a deluxe edition. You could have it printed with an extra nice binding, low acid paper.

I’ve been meaning to read Gibson’s present-day books, Spook Country and Zero History, having heard good things about them. I do find it interesting that essentially co-inventing the cyberpunk genre has given Gibson cred as a futurist, given that he originally based it more on the video games his kids played than on real computers, about which he actually knew very little at the time.

But then, anyone who thinks about the future at all could be called a futurist I suppose. And it does bear thinking about—it’s where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives, after all.