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Paper publishers, the Kindle and a little TM bliss in the Amazon basin
December 10, 2007 | 11:35 am
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By Richard J. Guthrie
Our latest contributor is Richard J. Guthrie, a member of the editorial board of LOGOS, a distinguished publishing journal. Welcome, Richard!
“…Sadly, the Amazon Kindle doesn’t get us there. It falls into the ‘nice try’ category, but lovers of traditional books don’t have much to fear….” – Dwight Silverman, Houston Chronicle technology writer—in Kindle a nice try but a real book is a more solid value.
No big surprise. The Kindle, just a few small steps ahead of the Sony Reader, fails to excite those skeptical toward e-readers. It has a wireless connection, but how many Moore’s Law years have we waited for this meteor of techie whiz-bangery?
The Kindle, yes, lets you connect to Amazon’s strong box of intellectual property. But if you’re going to make a portable reader like this even partway exciting, let’s get lap-toppy real and have it play miniature DVD discs as well, or something.
Gee! A world as clean as a pine needle whistle!
I have a confession; maybe p-booklovers are right. We should stick with the perfect bound, beautifully leafed paperbacks stuffed in our bookshelves. They are such heirlooms to pass on. As a bonus, we can clean the world up a little, remove the remaining naturally occurring forests and replace them all with pine softwoods for paper products. That would make the Amazon basin attractive. Imagine cool temperate pines instead of those sweaty tropical hardwoods, all that impossible undergrowth, those pesky bugs, salamanders, birds and pint-sized mammals.
With pine forests everywhere you blink, you’d be able to walk in silence across the globe. So much peace you could hear a pine needle drop. The world would be as clean as a pine needle whistle. We could finally spell an end to raucous, riotous out-of-control nature, and look forward to a one-size-fits-all pine forests for our continuing bliss. Why have we waited so long?
My real point here
The real point is, and always has always been, that digital books and readers should not be considered, really have not been ever been, a threat to paper books. Film not only survived TV, it thrived on it. Radio not only survived film and TV, it thrived on both of them. Books would thrive like an untouched Amazon rain forest on e-books—if the trade-publishing minds making the hard economic decisions would just relax a little.
If only the meddling moguls and their attendant tribe of fetlocking Luddites could just let things happen a little naturally. Look at what Seth Godin (Unleasing the Ideavirus—PDF alert) did with his 200,000 free e-book downloads. He sold a barrel full of hard covers, 26,000 of them. Now, maybe the sale-to-download ratio wasn’t all he could have hoped for, but, really, do you hear him crying?
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More on Richard: He came to our attention in January after he asked whether large publishers were hobbling e-books; and in fact some now wonder if the heavily DRMed Kindle is a half-hearted experiment designed to show that e-books can never work.
An earlier version of Richard present essay appeared in Luminog, his blog. He is author of two forthcoming books, one titled Power Over Publishing. For his Ph.D., he studied “power issues in e-book development” at Nottingham Trent University. He also holds an M.A. in publishing studies from City University, London, and he has a background, too, in film and television. Among his publishing-related credits are:
- Three way debate in Logos: Point Counterpoint: “Why has the e-book revolution stalled?” with Joseph J. Esposito and Charles Levine, Logos, 18/1, 2007
- “Riding the eFrenzy of 2000: Stephen King and the e-book,” Logos 17/3, 2006
- PhD Thesis: “Power Over Publishing: organised publishing’s strategic suppression of the trade e-book” 2006
- “Electronic Publishing: the unanswered challenge,” Logos, 16/2, 2005
- “E-books in development hell, Gemstar’s demise and the Murdoch factor,” Logos, 14/4, 2003
- “The e-book: Ahead of its time or a burst bubble?,” Logos, Journal of the World Book Community 13/1, 2002
- MA Dissertation: “The e-Book Challenge to the Trade Paperback: Determinants, Dynamics and Structure of Trade e-Book Publishing in the UK,” 2001
Related: Will the Kindle e-reader change anything?, in Richard’s blog.
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Comments:
I agree that ebooks won’t kill pbooks. I suspect, however, that they will eventually kill mass market paperbacks, and possibly trade paperbacks.
Why? Because the paperback market seems to me to be driven by cost, convenience and content. If the same content is available in ebook form for a substantially lower cost, as it could be before long, some readers will shift for that reason alone. But convenience is also a factor. And I think we can all see ways in which ebook readers could become robust and high definition enough to compete with the book or even exceed it, while removing storage and weight issues, etc.
Will this happen tomorrow? No. Will it happen at all? I don’t see why not. And when it does, the effects on the book business will be pervasive and profound. Ingram, distributors, warehouse operations, and bookstores will all be hit hard. We’ll all have the opportunity to build something amazing in the process, but not if we don’t think about the possibilities beforehand.