Being a book geek, I often find myself having conversations with booksellers and former booksellers about the future of the book. For those of us that work or have worked in the industry, there is a quiet undertone of fear every time the latest technology for reading ebooks is released. Every year in Publisher's Weekly the category sales for books are released, and it seems that every year there is a triple digit increase percentage wise in ebook sales. That increase can be a bit misleading, as according to the 13 publishers that report to PW, ebooks only accounted for 3.3% of their sales last year. It should be pointed out that that is more than double their sales from 2008. It should also be pointed out that Amazon adamantly refuses to release sales information for the Kindle, or ebooks in general. What are you afraid of Amazon?
So what does that mean for the physical book? Is it doomed to go the way of the CD? Only purchased by people too old to understand MP3 players? Some people feel that way. Some people are desperate to prevent that at all costs. Booksellers and ludites unite! Okay, perhaps the rallying cry needs work.
It should also be noted that there are some valid points that the book industry is responding well to the technological revolution, and will not experience the bloodbath that was the digital revolution for music. So help me if a publisher or author ever sues a ebook pirater for lost royalties, I will throw up on my own shoes. We experience this very phenomenon in the bricks and mortar retail world; we call it shrink. The only way to deal with theft is to be vigilant in your efforts to prevent it, and understand there is no way to totally eliminate it and still run a profitable enterprise. That and where theft is concerned, understand that for every effort you make to prevent it, thieves are doubling their efforts so they can still get your goods for free. It's all they have to do. You, on the other hand, have other responsibilities. Sorry, I used to work Loss Prevention, and that needed to be said.
Ebooks, and ebook readers have a lot to recommend them. They are very portable; they hold a ridiculous amount of information; and in the case of the Kindle, Nook, and iPad which offer Wifi connections; they provide instant gratification. You can order a book anywhere you can get a signal. One of the major slights against a dedicated ebook reading device I have encountered from techies (one I agree with wholeheartedly) is they want one device that functions as a phone, ebook reader, and laptop. You better believe it's coming, and if Apple can do it with a device similar in size to the iPad, they'll be poised to dominate the entire technology industry. As if they weren't already.
I guess that leaves us with the one question that this entire post has been leading to, "where does that leave the bookstore?" It is my greatest hope that it just leaves it in flux until it finds how best to serve its book buying community. In offering a nod to the nearly defunct record store (or music store if you like), it should be pointed out that book buyers are old, whereas traditionally those who buy music tend to be younger. This is not an insult to the typical book buyer, it is just that those who tend to buy the most books, and read the most, are in their mid 30's to late 40's. It's an avocation of those who have more free time. That means the technology aspect should take longer to catch on than it did with the music buyers in their late teens and early 20's. This merely give bookstores longer to prepare than record stores. How to prepare is the question. That I will endeavor to cover tomorrow.
Love the play on words, "ReadHead". Very smart...
Posted by: Furniture Quest | February 28, 2010 at 01:05 AM