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E vs. P: The Cannibalization factor
July 9, 2008 | 2:06 am
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By David Rothman
In Just for Sara, I told how Pollyannaish it would be to think that e-books and the paper kind would happily co-exist forever. P won’t vanish completely. But it will be like the horses in Central Park.
Another parallel comes to mind, a closer and more relevant one than the horses. DVD sales are suffering massively as a result of digitized competition. Hollywood, beware. PaidContent is out with a post headlined Analyst Whacks Entertainment Industry: Major Cannibalization Set to Begin…Now. Click on the chart to see what DVDs did to cassettes. Next extrapolate ahead to the physical-vs.-virtual battles, then apply the same logic to books.
Toward e-books with flippable pages
I know. Reading an e-book off a screen is a much more radical step than just changing from DVDs to iTunes. But consider that e-readers in time—don’t ask me exactly when—will be like physical books and offer flippable pages. Add that to the fact that children are growing up accustomed to reading E, and that the number of digital titles will multiply in the future. Just why, then, shouldn’t electronic books displace the paper variety, when you can carry whole libraries in your hand?
Another besieged industry
Hollywood isn’t the only place to look to see the future of books. We’ve already seen what the Net has done to the newspaper business here in the United States. The latest is that the Baltimore Sun is dropping its stand-alone business section. How soon until similar shocks hit the book business? What Sara is seeing now is just a sliver of what’s ahead, long term.
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Naaaw. Can’t see how that would be pollyannaish (or do you take such a grumpy perspective on life that you equate naive with sunny?). And, more importantly, paper is here to stay. Simply, because it is cheap, ergonomic, reliable, easy to use and culturally well established. In contrast, horses were expensive, slow, unreliable, and difficult to maintain. And for the VHS – well. This does not have a single thing going for it, once you bought the new player.
Even when we have good eReaders, and some of us read the majority of their books on them, they might still be “the microwave ovens of reading”; very useful, but still the quick’n'dirty alternative to the real thing.
I am culturally conditioned to valuing books for what they are: even if it is a mediocre book, it is still a book, a cultural artifact, and thus good. If I like a book and can afford it and find the time to read it, I am never hesitant to buy it. For eBooks, it is just not the same – here, I am not paying for the book, but for its availability. The possession of a PDF or an ePub is just not the same as the possession of a book to me, yet. And I do not see myself presenting my friends and family with a nice PDF file…
So, yes, eBooks are going to take a huge bite out of books. But books are probably here to stay, for now.
Hi, Joscha. That’s the operative phrase–”for now.” I agree. But I’m looking ahead.
Thanks,
David
Flippable pages will come when Apple finally does ebooks. Thinking about that, I’d also expect Apple’s software to do highlighting and that thing that is sure to make some people here swoon: NOTES! And, yeah, there will be Search too. Apple will do it right.
e-EVERYTHING is e-INEVITABLE.
Paper books will become collector’s items, nothing more. And when those collectors die, the books will be pulped.
It’s a dangeous trap to compare video’s and music to books and ebooks, it’s probably a flawed model because firstly as with VHS DVD’s have physical containers and transferable licenses something pbooks have but ebook’s lack and secondly ebooks are dependent on readers technoligy that can be made obsolete and pbooks dont.
Going from VHS to DVD did not mean you abolished the notion of a second hand market going from pbooks thats sold to ebooks thats leased is going to do just that.
This legal issue is whats more then anything is standing against going all digital with traditional media content.
And you have the postority problem if i handed you a 5.4 floppy would you know where to find a reader and what about VHS, you dont have that issue with paper, sure the museums can easyly deal with storage of digital but that box up on the attic is unreadeble to you in 20 years unless it’s content is on paper.
Hi, Daniel. The obsolescence risk is a big one right now, but the industry has made progress with e-book standards. If publishers can only back off from DRM, then maybe the book world will see standards for real. Should the existing giants not budge, then other publishers will take their place. The digital edition of my own novel, I’m proud to say, will be available without DRM, so you can buy it and almost surely be able to read it 20 years from now and even pass it on to your children or grandchildren. Kudos to stores like Fictionwise—one of The Solomon Scandals’ future outlets, via Twilight Times Books—for their multiformat approach. David