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E-books and P: How will publishers adjust to smaller markets for print books?
November 9, 2009 | 7:02 am
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By David Rothman
Doubt that e-books are a disruptive technology? How about this warning from Mike Shatzkin at the Idea Logical Company?
This might not be exactly a “tipping point”, since that implies a point at which growth accelerates from some people to most people, or nearly all people. But print publishing will be seriously disrupted long before ebooks are used by “most people.” That’s because print publishing is a “critical mass” business: we need to sell enough to make a sensible print run, to keep the bookstore open, to support the sales organization and the warehouse. Our bestseller lists (with one exception) capture exclusively print sales, our author-publisher contracts and sales terms with accounts are based on the notion that we’re selling a physical object, and the biggest publishers in the land use their scale to perform capital-intensive functions that are, as much as any editorial or marketing expertise, what the authors need them for.
If nothing else, I suspect there’ll be a lot more interest in print-on-demand technology.
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Comments:
Truer words have never been said.
And yes, we will see more interest in POD as a result… but I expect that to be a temporary aberration, because POD isn’t cost-efficient at the corporate or individual level. Long-term, I don’t expect consumers to want to bother with POD except for boutique and gift uses, which will mean tiny margins and pricey products.
Just as audiophiles have gotten used to keeping collection of music on an MP3 player or computer, books will end up electronically stored and read on the device of personal choice.
I hope this follows: that POD really has a larger future….it is now about half of scholarly publication. To wit:
It is sometime remarked that the paper book provides both storage and delivery display in a single format while screen books require different formats for storage and display. With this duality in mind other possibilities emerge including paper storage and screen display for any given book.
But what are the actual attributes of each of these states, storage and display? In all variations the display function correlates with the volitions and incitements to reading; we only use display when we read. Likewise we only use storage when we do not.
Reading device advocates may contend that the most efficient book would be one that displays during reading but requires no inert storage. Reading is the purpose of books, is it not?
But perhaps there are other functions lurking in the storage phase. In the legacy of paper books it was the storage phase that gave rise to libraries and to classification of knowledge by librarians. Automated indexing of electronic text appears to dispense with this. But another hidden function of storage is authentication. The stored master certifies the text of the screen surrogate. This appears to be a somewhat more significant role in context of responsible delivery.
Another surprising attribute of paper storage in direct interdependence with screen delivery is that the paper master can confirm that a given screen delivery is not there! The public or a researcher can discover what is deleted or only selectively displayed. Such a role, exposing censorship or corporate agenda, begins to add luster to the storage function.
I use POD. Let’s face it, though. POD does have significant costs. If you’re printing thousands of books, you can do so for pennies. POD is not going to be as cheap. One reason there are practically no POD books published in mass market format is that our pricing would look silly compared to that on the books you find on supermarket shelves.
Rob Preece
Publisher
Author J.A. Konrath, noted for his extensive book tours, suggests that all e-books in the future will be free, and like magazines and newspapers, will carry advertising to subsidize their cost. The major stumbling block to that will be typical publisher contracts which currently prohibit inclusion of advertising in books, going back to the 1970s, when tobacco companies began tipping ads into books.