The Shelf Awareness for Tuesday, January 20 featured a letter sent in by author and marketer M.J. Rose, which you can find here. For those who don’t feel like clicking over and reading the letter in its entirety, Rose recounts purchasing an e-book in under a minute on January 16—for a title that won’t release in bookstores as a hardback until January 27. What?!
Within the publishing industry, we’re anticipating the growth of e-books. That’s why publishing houses across the world are experimenting with various e-book platforms and even Ooligan has recently decided which of our titles will be our first e-books. The ability to publish an e-book is quickly becoming an industry requirement.
But Rose’s letter got me thinking: what happens to bound books when e-book buyers get perks for switching platforms? Will bound books go the way of cassette tapes, CDs, and records? Will being a digital customer garner additional perks, like advance release dates? If music is any indication, the answer is a resounding YES.
Look at the transition that the music industry has undergone in the digital age: full-length tracks are released online way ahead of an album’s release, iTunes albums frequently include material, such as additional tracks or videos, unavailable on a traditionally purchased CD, and some musicians have gone so far as to make entire albums of material available to stream for free. While you cannot yet purchase an album ahead of a physical album’s release date, consumers definitely get a few perks by being tech savvy.
I anticipate that the transition to e-book perks will take more time than the digital music revolution did, but it will eventually occur. It will take awhile because e-book readers need to skyrocket in popularity and availability. Once a user-friendly, budget-conscious e-reader is released, it will only be a matter of time before e-books have advance release dates and include additional content, such as author interviews. iPods and digital music did not become popular overnight, and neither will e-readers and e-books.
For the record, the Wednesday edition of Shelf Awareness arrived with a letter from Margot Sage-El, the owner of an independent bookstore, affirming that HarperCollins admits that the early release was a mistake on their part, the issue still got me thinking about the future of bound books versus e-books.
Bound books may not become obsolete during our lifetimes, but as universities toy with adopting electronic versions of textbooks and publishing companies release e-books earlier than bound books (though by mistake), it is only a matter of time before the e-book will prevail. One thing is certain: we’re entering an industry that’s in transition and we’re the ones who will define its future.
I dread the day when bound books are a rarity, but have come to realize that I have to be open to e-books. If I can’t embrace it, I have no business being in the publishing industry and might as well start browsing the want ads. But not at Craigslist. That would be hypocritical.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
An interesting option would be to download the Ebook that you wanted, and then you get the link to print the book from a trusted POD supplier. DVDs are going the opposite way with digital content on the purchased DVDs, giving you the option to watch it on your computer without having to crack and burn the DVD. Chicken and egg..
I guess it is my never-ending optimism, but I don't think bound books will ever go away totally. There are too many people that like the feel and smell of a real book. I am one of them. I also have very little faith in technology's ability to replicate a book well enough that it could actually replace the bound book. I am not doing well with the whole embracing ebooks. I like to focus on the real books and leave the ebook stuff to Brian and Tom.
I recently got rid of (almost) all of my books. Eleven boxes worth. It was less painful than I'd imagined. I haven't given up on bound books, but my relationship to them has changed. Buying a bound book is more of a commitment than it used to be.
I don't believe that printed books will ever go away, but I do believe that their place in our culture is changing more rapidly than many people (and perhaps most especially people in the book trade) realize. I think that the printed codex book and the still protoplasmic "e-book" (in whatever form it eventually takes) represent overlapping but radically different technologies. Can an e-book replace a printed book? In some instances, it can improve upon it greatly. In other instances, no, not at all. They are apples and oranges. The literary forms that have evolved over centuries to fit the parameters of the codex book may or may not apply. In this sense, e-books represent not just a new publishing technology for familiar forms of writing, but an entirely new genre of cultural expression. I think that their emergence is yet another sign that books (as we understand them today) are losing their status as the monoliths of learning and literacy. Books are no longer the sun around which western civilization revolves; they are just one star in a constellation. I don't think this is good or bad. It presents opportunities both for traditional publishers and e-publishers. And it is really interesting to watch...
Post a Comment