Remember paper and ink? We used to read things on it. Not like you’re doing now, on your computer, or phone, or iPad, or whatever. For free.
Well, in case you haven’t noticed, print’s pretty much over. The latest evidence, at least when it comes to books, is in this news release from Amazon.com saying that its Kindle e-books are now outselling hardcovers.
First thing is, take it with a giant grain of salt. It’s a big, steaming piece of corporate PR cleverly written to make it sound like e-book sales have overtaken hardcovers. But it only applies to one kind of e-book out of many (Amazon’s proprietary Kindle e-books, sold only through Amazon, originally readable on a device sold only by Amazon). Nowhere does it say how many of anything – Kindle books, Kindle devices, hardcovers, whatever – have been sold, only how sales compare with each other. I love the verbiage about the increased interest in Kindle devices – “the growth rate has tripled” – which sounds like they’re selling three times as many machines, but really means. . . . what? That last year’s growth rate was 1 percent and this year’s is 3 percent? Or is it 50 percent and 150 percent? We’ll never know. Nor do we know what they mean by growth rate. What about the Kindle book numbers? A lot of Kindle downloads are free – are they counting those downloads among their “sales”?
The real purpose of the PR blast is this: Amazon wants to shore up its Kindle house brand in the face of all-out attacks from Apple’s iBooks and Google’s soon-to-launch Google Editions. Amazon versus Google versus Apple: It’s like one of those old Godzilla versus Megalon movies.
The monsters of the web world are battling because they understand that the e-book market is big and is going to get bigger. There’s a lot of money to be made, and they want it.
Most writers I know still consider e-books an interesting sidelight, not a big deal. You hear a lot of, “I’m just not into e-books,” and “I just love real books,” and “I can’t stand reading on my computer.” Or maybe writers don’t care because as of a few weeks ago e-books only constituted somewhere around 5-10 percent of the book market (although it could be half that, or twice — good numbers are hard to come by).
They don’t yet see that the old publishing world is crumbling about them. As a long-time author with a vested interest in the print paradigm, I have been watching this trend with a sort of dread fascination, and I can tell you this: The e-book revolution is real, it’s here, and it is going to change everything, from what is written to which companies publish it to how agents work to who’s going to be able to make a living in literature.
Bottom line is stark: paper and ink books are on the way out. There, I said it. Printed books will still exist – like vinyl records still exist, in vanishingly small numbers, bought by collectors. Printed books – especially hardcovers — will become collectibles. Too many trends are working against print: (1) market economics (e-books are cheaper to produce, ship, and buy); (2) reader convenience (e-books offer immediate delivery, lower price, and bells and whistles like the ability to enlarge text); and (3) electronic infrastructure (a growing number of people are comfortable reading on little screens, they can do it on multiple devices (I just read my first book on my iPod Touch and the experience was fine), the little screens are getting better and cheaper and more attractive, the large-scale computing and communications systems are in place). And the technology just keeps getting better and cheaper. Three years ago, the first Kindle cost $399. Today’s improved version sells for half that. Eventually we’ll have screens you can roll up, put in your pocket, and unfurl as you lay on the couch, like the evening paper (but in full color, with video, web access, and no ink stains).
I know, I know, what about the innate wonderfulness of printed books? I’ve heard a lot during the past few months about the sweet smell and delightful heft of printed books. I love print books, too. But I am tempering my love with a dose of realism. Information is going to move to e-books. Printed books will increasingly become, what, Furniture? Antiques? Objets d’art?
Book publishers are beginning to wake up. Publicly, the old “Big Six” trade publishers are assuring everyone that print will be here forever. Privately, they’re scrambling to find ways to adapt. Agents are fighting to get better e-deals for their writers. Big bricks-and-mortar bookstores are dying and, in ten or twenty years, will be dead (check profit numbers at Barnes & Noble and Borders for the past few years. They are going to start shuttering stores soon). Small booksellers have already gone through one round of extinction; now they’re likely to experience another. Think of them like the little neighborhood video stores that used to be everywhere, but have, for the most part, vanished.
That’s for starters. The whole industry is going to change. Basically, the old print-book model, like all printing, works on economies of scale: The more copies of a book you print, the cheaper each copy is to produce (much of the expense of book printing comes from initially setting up the plates and press; once the presses start rolling, everything gets cheaper). Economies of scale are why publishers depend on sales of a few big blockbuster books to cover the losses from all those little books that never sell more than a few thousand copies.
What happens as e-books hit is this: People buy e-books instead of print books, so fewer print books are sold, so fewer need to be printed, so publishers lose their economies of scale. As print books become more expensive to produce, profit margins – already thin in this industry – shrink even more. That means smaller advances for most authors. More betting on a few big books, less betting on chancy projects. Smaller publishing lists. As fewer print books are published, fewer people will have reasons to go to bookstores, and as bookstores go under, there will be fewer options for buying print. So sales will fall even more. It’s a vicious cycle. Couple this with the alarming decline in newspaper book reviews, purse-string tightening at libraries, and increasing energy costs (which affect the cost of shipping all those books), and you can see what happens. If you want more details on this particular vision of literary apocalypse, look here.
But it’s not all bad news. In fact, it will be very good news for a lot of people. I’ll look at that later.
[This is a draft of a piece I wrote for an upcoming issue of Lauren's online nonfiction magazine, Etude]