Suppose Apple released an electronic-paper iTome, I thought, and suppose it was easy to use, reasonably priced, and allowed one to switch between text and audiobook on demand. Suppose, further, that it was convenient, even sexy. Would there still be something sacred and special about bound sheaves of paper? Or would we soon see them supplanted by iTome on the subway, in the classroom, even curled up beside the fireplace?
Doesn’t sound so bad to me. But the idea is like a can of poisonous snakes to most book publishers, and it’s easy to see why when you consider what’s happening to the music industry. Go to limewire.com, home of “the fastest file sharing program on the planet.” Take a couple of minutes to download and install the LimeWire client, et voilà. Despite the best efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America, you have access to nearly every song of the modern era all downloadable free of charge.
The “free content” folks argue, “information wants to be free.” This sounds good; maybe it even sounds right. But like many slogans it makes no sense. Information is an abstract noun, and for itself it doesn’t want anything. Information is what we do with it, but what if we decide we want it for free? You can’t compete with free. Or can you?
While most publishers tremble and fret, some authors actually want to put their work online. Many in this group are from the forward-looking field of science fiction. If you’re so inclined, you can go online right now and read (for free) highly acclaimed science fiction novels such as Charles Stross’s Accelerando, Peter Watts’s Blindsight, and the entire oeuvre of Cory Doctorow. Science fiction publisher Baen Books has made available a “library” of copy-righted-but-free novels. You may be wondering why these authors and publishers have cut their own commercial throats. But the evidence to date indicates that releasing a book online actually increases offline sales. Readers try and then they buy.
Caveats apply. Such releases are still unusual, and thus they receive unusual publicity. Many readers will begin a book online, decide they like it, and buy a paper copy rather than fight their way through 100,000 low-contrast words. (And, indeed, sales and publicity are the two reasons I want to put my own book online immediately, before the iTome emerges as a replacement force.) But there’s also a growing body of evidence that people often buy paper copies of books after reading them online for free, that many readers actually want to pay authors. I find this reassuring because, scary as it might sound, in the long run it’s the publishing industry’s only hope.
The music business has moved to voluntary payment already. Virtually every song available on Apple’s iTunes store is also available on LimeWire at the same quality, with fewer restrictions, and at no cost. Listeners can download these songs without fear of legal repercussions from any Internet café or public access Wi-Fi hotspot — and yet iTunes’s business is booming. Literally billions of songs have been sold. It seems that an enormous number of people are willing to pay for what they can get for free.
Digital books have huge advantages. Printing and distributing bound sheaves of paper is expensive and not exactly environment friendly. In fact, it’s very strange, in this Internet era, to be shipping text on trucks and railcars. If publishers can cut out those costs and pass the savings on to their readers, basic economics dictates that more books will be purchased and profits will grow.
Unfortunately, once a book is an e-book, once a text has been turned into pure information, then all the copy-right-protection schemes and intellectual-property lawyers in the world won’t keep it from being made available for free. It’s simply too easy to share text across servers, nations, and individual computers. And if publishers don’t convert their paper books to e-books, pirates will. In the not-too-distant future, all books will be freely available, just as essentially all popular music is right now. Readers will decide whether books are worth buying, and if so for how much, often after they’ve read them.
Comments (11 comments)
orsted: The iTome does exist already as an application for the iPhone.
http://code.google.com/p/iphoneebooks/
Some hacking required. August 22, 2007 10:02 EST
Stan Scott: I have one qualification about why e-books have failed to achieve a substantial market share. The issue isn't just reading an e-book on an LCD screen. It's also the fact that no one has yet made a simple, easy-to-use electronic reader at the right price.
Sony's reader is way too expensive, and they've chosen to add a cumbersome and proprietary DRM (everyone remembers that this is the same company that used its CDs to secretly install tracking software on personal computers). We need a combined hardware/software solution for e-books similar to what Apple has done for downloadable music with the iPod, which integrates seamlessly with the Apple's iTunes music store.
That said, I've discovered several writers through e-books. After downloading and reading Stross's Accelerando, I went to Amazon and purchased two of his other novels. If Cory Doctorow hadn't made some of his writing available electronically, I probably wouldn't have read anything by him. "Try before you buy" can work, if it's used properly. August 28, 2007 20:26 EST
Cthulhu: The SONY Reader is the best e-book device out to date. Electronic Ink is amazing. It is truly a technological wonder, and a joy to read. Like many others, I have been privileged to purchase a Reader for far below cost.
There are many formats available for the Reader, at least with some manipulation (some legal in "fair use," others perhaps not), and as Adlai Stephenson suggested in dim reading environments, illuminate, do no perseverate on your condition.
Buy a Reader, and support the coming revolution. August 30, 2007 20:24 EST
Lee: I agree that all books will eventually - and probably in the not too distant future - be freely available. The 'try before you buy' in one model, but there are others.
And I'm waiting for a publisher to get savvy enough to offer reading plans like the mobile/cell phone companies did in much of Europe, i.e. give away an ereader if someone subscribes for a minimum length of time. September 17, 2007 04:25 EST
Chris: The coming revolution in collaborative online writing (COW) and the direct profits that each author can make on sites like storymash.com, I can understand why the publishing world is afraid.
The online literary experiments will produce the first "Great Internet-nation Novel", available for everyone to print and read for free... THEN comes the first internet produced movie. Storymash and other self-publishing sites already allow anyone to pitch in and profit. I can see how this might be a solution for the striking Hollywood writers. November 10, 2007 20:28 EST
Anonymous: The role of the publisher is not simply to deliver a writers words on paper. The relationship between publisher and writer is intertwined. A good publisher (within its many guises) should provide an objective view of the work, knowledge of the stages of book production, knowledge of page and book design, knowledge of the market, motivation and suggestions to the writer before, during and after writing, have an understanding of key promotional times and target markets etc. Many of these criteria will still be valid whether the work is published online or in print. If publishers are defunct as suggested and readers will buy directly from the writer then does this mean writers have to take on the publishers role as well? Surely this therefore compromises the content available if readers are only viewing material from writers either willing to take this on (and 'tech-savvy' enough to do so) or writers publishing work without this input (it may be good content but if it isn't easy to read in terms of design then many readers will disregard it).
Publishers bridge the gap between the information/content a writer holds and knowing what the market wants. Many new writers are not even aware they are capable of writing or have something the market wants to read. If all information is to be free in the digital age then publishers will still have a valuable role in sourcing this content, (to a greater or lesser degree) shaping it and making it available to all whether in a digital or print format.
This may mean a shift in percentages and fees between writer and publisher and most certainly will mean a large degree of adaptation for traditional publishers to take on board. However, in order to make all content accessible and allow the creativity of writers to prevail, publishers will still exist to deliver the content we want to read. January 15, 2008 20:19 EST
Jonathan Brun: Printed books are dying. Though Mr. Jobs does not seem to have any intention of releasing an iTome, there is still hope. The Amazon Kindle, with it's wireless access to books (and newspapers and magazines) looks very promising.
Mr. Jobs recently commented on the Kindle, “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Alas, people still do read, and I hope that someone will make an ipod, for books. January 18, 2008 11:51 EST
Anonymous: I think the author is right that the texts posted online can still draw a profit. _In Rainbows_ is presently no. 2 on the Billboard Album chart. But the price of an iTome will have to come down quite a bit before habitual readers will truly convert. I can accidentally leave on the train or drop in the bath a $15 paperback, or even a $36 hardback, without too much financial hardship. I can drop my book on the sidewalk, and it will still work. Furthermore, that small minority of us who still read books will probably want something we can underline, or highlight, or dog-ear before we'll truly convert. Oh, and we'll want some way to line our living rooms with the books we've read and the ones we hope to. Or maybe we can just have holograms of bookcases with the spines projected out of our iTome library like the iTunes cover-art. There is, after all, a case to be made for the physical world. The printed book is a technology the deficiencies of which are not self-evident; why the rush to replace it? January 18, 2008 18:57 EST
Anonymous: Physical book has _a lot_ of deficiencies, compared to electronic. The ratio of size and weight to stored information amount is an instant win for books-in-bytes. Physical books are destructible, subject to tear and wear. You can't use search or copy-paste a quote. If on vacation you finish a book, you can't download another one from your library at home or an online shop. You can't change the font in the book if you don't like it. The list goes on.
Sorry, I hate the habit of dog-earing, so I consider it a win that my books will be free of that. But in electronic book you can have as much bookmarks as you like and give them descriptive names. As for notes and highlighting, I'm sure there'll be possibilities. Imagine also, how easier it'd be to write an article (or just a blog post) based on those notes. January 27, 2008 17:02 EST
Jeromey Martini: I wonder if Mr Evans gave the aesthetics of printed books too short shrift. There is a difference between experiencing music played on vinyl or electronically, but the experience is slight and remains only an auditory one. Paper books engage all the senses (well, few of us eat our books; but most of us have tasted paper, and memories of that taste inform our experience as we read books yellowed with age or books sharp, bright and chemical. We know the sound of turning pages and can visualize, without looking, a book's paper by the pitch of that sound). Book lovers participate in a longtime social convention of displaying their collections prominently all around the home - even devoting, as space permits, entire rooms to personal libraries. Libraries themselves are more ancient than the codex. Although we speak of 'cd libraries' these are purely functional; usually only the clear plastic spine of the cds are visible, and the collection is tucked away on a rack in the corner. Or we hide our cds in zip-up cases for easy portability. With music, it is the music itself that matters so that iTunes (etc.) gives the listener more of what is desired. Books, I think, satisfy more than simply our cognitive wants. The paperless book will need to take these additional wants into consideration before we see a complete revolution of the publishing industry. January 31, 2008 07:35 EST
Anonymous: There was an interesting study in the UK which found that people were happy to access information electronically but for leisure reading they prefered an actual paper book. I personally think that not only is technology the issue but cost. There are a great many people the world over who, no matter how cheap an e-book reader becomes, will never be able to afford one. However, secondhand stores sell old books for cheap and libraries lend them (generally) for free. While libraries may be able to lend you the e-book, I cannot see lending the e-reader happening anytime soon - it's a money thing, again. February 03, 2008 13:51 EST