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Books: Dead or not?
August 15, 2009 | 11:07 am
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By Chris Meadows
Newsweek is confident they’re not dead yet. It points out that the number of books in print in 2008 was up by 38% over the year before—for the second year in a row.
Newsweek lays the credit mostly at the feet of Google Books—or, more accurately, a side-effect of Google digitizing all those books from university libraries. Quite apart from Google making them available for sale electronically (depending on whether the pending settlement goes through), the universities themselves have been offering out-of-print or public domain titles for sale through print-on-demand company BookSurge.
Of course, those books being available is one thing. Whether anybody actually reads them is another matter. Back in June, The Stranger looked at May’s “Book Expo America” convention through jaundiced eyes. (This was the convention where author Sherman Alexie famously remarked on seeing someone reading a Kindle on the plane and wanting to hit her, causing a brief furor in blogging circles.)
The Stranger reported that the show size was dwindling from past years, the media attendance was growing, and there seemed to be an air of desperation over the fate of the shrinking, downsizing publishing industry if you read between the lines. However, one bright spot from the convention was that the e-book market is, surprise, growing by leaps and bounds.
The e-books "gold rush"[…] was the weekend’s main topic of conversation. Sci-fi author China Miéville told me, "If I was starting now, I’d be very pro e-dissemination. I think it’s one of those things where it is both inevitable and desirable." It was hard to find an author or publisher who would disagree with him.
(Book Expo America was also attended by TeleRead’s own Paul Biba.)
I think that to call books “dead” (or not) is taking a simplistic view. When times change, all businesses have to change with them—and publishing is no exception. Time will tell if these changes are for the better.
Technorati Tags: books,e-books,book expo america,Sherman Alexie,China Miéville,Newsweek,Google,Google Books
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Comments:
Sometimes you have to wonder about corporate types.
There is nothing happening in publishing that hasn’t happened a dozen times in living memory, that isn’t happening around us to other industries.
We live in a technological era when teechnology changes and disruptions arrive almost daily and most of us have gotten used to it; a lot of us can even see the disruptions coming…
Nothing magical to it; ebooks are a disruptive technology just as microprocessors were in their day and digital cameras are today and electric cars will be in the next decade.
And, as has happened in other industries, some players will die, some will adapt, and some new ones will be born. And everybody will get exactly what they deserve.
The end game is a known fact; ebooks will the dominant form of publishing and print media will survive as a niche and a collectible.
What isn’t a given fact is how long it’ll take or how painful it’ll be to get there. Dinosaurs take a long time to die and their deaththroes can wreak serious havok.
They do, however, provide a nice spectacle.
I suspect the real reason the media presence is growing at these functions is because they smell blood in the water. Most of them expect a publishing industry meltdown sometime soon, and they hope to be there to film the conflagration.
I also wonder about China Miéville’s comments: It is the response of an established print-published author, who sees e-books as another way to publicize their printed books; but when print is on the wane, will they be as enthusiastic, or prepared, to deal with it?
Number of books in print is increasing? What does that mean, in the age of abundance? I bet there are more black-and-white TV shows available this year than at any time before in history, too — but that doesn’t mean black-and-white TV is coming back.
Good point about the number of books in print; wouldn’t the size of the print runs matter? And the percent of returns? Considering all the whining from the publishers maybe they know something they’re not saying?
Does anyone know what percent of e-titles (monographs) are also available in paper? I would imagine nearly all of them. The percent of print titles available for screen delivery is probably 10% and growing. It will reach maybe 50%. All titles could be produced in both formats.
“The end game is a known fact; ebooks will the dominant form of publishing and print media will survive as a niche and a collectible.”
Sorry, dude, but that isn’t a ‘known fact’. It’s a surmise based on some (perhaps reasonable, perhaps inflated) assumptions. There are some features of print that are just not being adequately translated into digital form yet, and that don’t yet seem likely to be replicated by digital technologies. Among these is the ‘abuse factor’–i.e., the amount of physical abuse that the conveying medium can withstand and still be useable / legible. This isn’t an insignificant advantage. Given how sensitive electronic devices are to impact, scratching, exposure to water, etc., there’s really no contest here: print books take a licking and keep on ticking. This isn’t a ‘feature’ that generates much buzz or that inspires futurists, but it’s a silent and powerful (and probably even unconscious) influence on the buying behavior of millions of people.