Just for Sara: The e-book bathroom test redux—and a reminder that E can displace P and grow the book market

By David Rothman

Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, can’t resist the old myth.

Please, Sara. You can enjoy an e-book in the bathtub or shower—and your book will actually be at less risk than a p-book. Just use the right precautions. None other than the online edition of PW published the facts in my E-Book Report blog.

Alas, however, the past tense applies here. You see, PW didn’t just kill my blog, the one where I’d had the nerve to take on DRM and eBabel repeatedly, including the Amazon varieties. PW also mysteriously deleted the E-Book Report archives from the Web, and the more I read Sara’s thoughts on e-books, the more I can think of motives beyond possible commercial ones. Her thoughts are worth analyzing, because, as I see it, many in the traditional book business probably share them. If anything, Sara is more open minded than the average New York publisher is.

Sara’s state of denial about the future of E

Much to her credit, Sara is far from a full-strength Luddite—she does tote a Sony Reader these days—but she still isn’t fully comfortable with the technology and is in a state of denial about its potential. Her vision is that P will be a major part of the book business forever, and, yes, her ignorance of the bathtub possibilities enters into it.

“Sure, there is some cannibalizing and crossover,” she writes like a buggy-whip advocate hoping that horses and automobiles can coexist eternally at the mass level, “but just as there are certain books you would rather listen to than read (and vice versa) and some movies you’ll rush to the theater to see, there is room in the world for another way to enjoy written narrative. Put it another way: there will always be books you can read in pixels, and others you’ll still want to read in the bathtub.”

No need to cry over a dunked Crying—not if you read it as an e-book

Ugh, Sara, do you really want your p-book to look like The Crying of Lot 49—as shown above, after a not-so-healthy dipping—if you drop them in the tub?

Learn from Chris Steib‘s “ultimate e-book experiment”! Or Joseph Gray’s rugged three gallon Ziploc bag. Or maybe one Ziploc inside another? Check out the Ziploc site. What’s more, who knows about the future—maybe Otterbox will discover the Sony Reader market.

But wait! Preferring to report this first-hand, I took my own $300 Sony Reader PRS-505 into the Rothman bathroom and wrapped it up in three Hefty OneZip freezer bags, hardly the best brand. Even with the Sony’s less-than-ideal contrast between text and background, I could still read the first chapter of The Invisible Man (moi as far as PW, virtual or physical edition?). Look. See for yourself, Sara. I let the Reader float for five minutes without encountering the slightest leakage and would not hesitate to try this again with only two bags to allow a better view. Remember, the idea isn’t to use the bagged Reader as a rubber ducky but rather to protect it against accidental drops in the tub, speaking of which I did a deliberate one into the water from several feet.

I’ll insert a disclaimer—don’t sue me if through some freak occurrence you and your Reader suffer a mishap—but in your shoes, Sara, I’d be a good sport and give it a try after considering the above. Click on the photo for a better view of the floating test, while keeping in mind that things will get much better as the screen contrast of the Reader and other E Ink machines improves. With a bigger bag, moreover, I could even have enjoyed my somewhat water-resistant OLPC XO-1 machine in the tub and have avoided the contrast problem.

Sara a tech seer?

More importantly, Sara, while you’re accomplished in your own area, how much do you know about the future of technology? The Sony’s E Ink is rather backwards compared to future displays, which in time will provide for color and full, TVlike motion, not far more contrast between text and background.

Just as significantly, many young people will want a mix of interactivity, multimedia and social networking that p-books can’t provide.

I myself love old-fashioned linear books in both E and P, and in fact my TeleRead plan would help by integrating them and other e-content with our schools and libraries, while fairly compensating writers and publishers.

But should the book industry automatically assume that young people will share my tastes in media?

The math angle: Trade and the U.S. are just a fraction of E’s possible market

That’s not my only problem with Sara’s analysis. Yes, I agree, with her and others, that we need to be skeptical about about the Steve Weinstein‘s predictions of up to $2.5 billion in global e-book sales for Amazon in 2012. But I’d also challenge her own use of numbers. “Two-and-a-half billion dollars in just four years?” she asks. “The total trade book market, according to the AAP, is ‘only’ about $9.6 billion. That seems mighty optimistic, indeed, especially if you consider that his $2.5 billion is the total sales of e-books that retail for around $10. That’s a whole lotta units.”

But, Sara, the $9.6 billion figure you trotted out is apparently for trade-book revenue achieved by book publishers in the U.S. market. What about total trade-book sales at the consumer level—not just here in the States but also in the rest of the world? Even in the States, moreover, total net sales of the publishers, including categories beyond trade books, reached $25 billion in 2007. Now plug in other countries’ sales to keep things consistent with Weinstein’s global figure of $2.5 billion.

And remember, Sara, Amazon isn’t a publisher—it’s a retailer, so maybe we’d better think about global consumer-level sales to make a comparison. Simply put, I find your use of the $9.6 billion to be unwittingly misleading when compared to the $2.5 billion, which, in the general scope of things, isn’t as big as you makes it out.

More credible than the Nelson calculation, but…

More helpful calculations come from Evan Schnittman at Oxford University Press, who says e-book related sales from Amazon and Sony can in time become three or four percent of the present world worldwide book market of $90 billion. The $90B would seem to be a good figure for consumer sales. Three percent would be $2.7B—not necessarily achievable as quickly as Weinstein might hope, but still possible.

Now here’s the weakness in those predictions. We don’t know what the global economic downturn will do. That is just one reason why I’d be wary of any predictions, even those as thoughtful as Evan’s, who himself appreciates the perils of prophesy.

Beyond Kindle and Sony books

Furthermore, why focus on just one machine or even class of machine? As I see it, the real action in the end will be on all-in-one devices such as general tablets, laptops and cellphones. Even Amazon is hedging its bets on the Kindle by making certain that its Mobipocket e-reader will run on phones. The screenshot shows Mobi in a cellphone incarnation.

E as potentially more than just a fraction of book sales

No matter who’s right in the interpretation of sales statistics and future trends, I would caution both Sara and Evan against thinking that E use will forever be just a tiny fraction of P. The technology, as I keep saying, based on more than 20 years of writing about consumer electronics, will dramatically improve. Beyond that, more and more students will discover e-books in both the usual linear form and others.

Just last month we learned that Princeton would be offering Kindle books. Students are sick and tired of lugging around heavy backpacks full of expensive textbooks, and it’s only inevitable that more and more electronic alternatives will be sold for the Kindle and rivals. E won’t make P vanish overnight, but more and more students will accustom themselves to the former.

Other groups may catch on. We’ve already told how E could be the new large print for the growing numbers of the elderly, who eventually may prefer light, Kindle-style tablets to heavy large-print books. Just wait until the hardware is better and easier to use.

The Wikipedia and developing countries factors

As if that isn’t enough, let’s go back to the fact that many e-books won’t be books in the traditional sense but will be far, far more interactive. Wikipedia is an e-book even if it’s free rather than sold like the old encyclopedias; it will be interesting to see if commercial publishers like the Britannica can add enough value to flourish over the long term. Regardless, however, free or not, visible in sales statistics or not, wiki-style efforts can be books indeed.

Consider, too, that in many jungles, deserts and mountains, E may be the only book alternative. When will the book business finally discover projects like One Laptop Per Child? Consider How the OLPC laptops could give commercial e-publishers an iPod moment—and not just in developing countries.

If the iPod moment eventually happens as I expect, then global E sales could in time dwarf P sales, not in the near future but as children grow up accustomed to electronic books, including those in nontraditional forms. And remember this would be on top of other factors like improved technology and apps such as elderly-related reading.

E as a book-industry grower:

Another problem with Sara’s analysis, long term at any rate, or at least the analysis of the “worriers” she cites, is her concern over $10 prices for e-books. That’s the level of the Amazon best-sellers, though not all books that the store carries.

Listen, Sara. I have news for you. Ellora’s Cave, one of the success stories of e-bookdom, is selling lots and lots of books for, say, $6 or $7. The key is volume, a phenomenon that may happen whether you want it to or not. E-book technology will improve and get cheaper, and the ultimate market will dwarf the present one, especially as e-books in time show up low-cost cellphones with better-than-Kindle-quality. Whether though One Laptop Per Chlid or other means, electronic books will reach geographical markets ill-served by paper books. In the end, with E reducing the demand for P, the real volume issue may be with paper books, which, after all, need press runs of a certain size. When will it happen? Damned if I know. But it will.

What traditional publishers should do

Meanwhile my advice to traditional publishers would be to reduce costs, pay fewer multimillion-dollar advances, focus more on QC, use viral marketing and interactive sites to build quality-related branding, and worry less about piracy than about growing the audience for all books—E and P. That means more long-term thinking. Let’s place more emphasis on parent-child reading and on literacy campaigns, a TeleRead-style national digital library system to augment existing distribution, and less fixation on stupidities like DRM and Draconian copyright legislation. You can’t expect DRM to pen people in so they just reading paper books. Won’t work. They will merely shift to other forms of entertainment or to books from publishers without “protection.” And of course eBabel, whether or not enforced by proprietary DRM, just makes things worse.

So will an ostrich-like ‘tude toward E, just as one of four commenters seems to be saying in response to Sara’s column, even if he’s blind to the bathtub possibilities. I’d urge her to heed his warning if she wants to help traditional books make the transition to E. Publishers Weekly can zap my E-Book Report archive, but not the inevitable future of e-books—however long it takes to arrive. Well, enough cosmic-level thoughts. Ready for those Ziplocs, Sara, and a nice read in the tub?

Reminder: I enjoy P, too! I’m simply trying to get the ostrich heads out of the sand (just a figure of speech, considering that ostriches apparently have been badmouthed as much as E). As I see it, P will be around forever. But it will be like the horses in Central Park, not the main show.