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Article: Future of ebooks
Nifty article at Mobile Opportunity blog: The future of publishing: Why ebooks failed in 2000, and what that means for 2010. His five points about why they failed, in brief:
He touches on some potential solutions:
• Short story sales,
• Backlist sales,
• Rethink *everything* about periodicals
And he's got some terrific questions for publishers to consider, including "What if some of the people you just laid off form an editing cooperative and then contact your authors with a cut-rate offer?"
One of the questions he doesn't address (and publishers are working very very hard to ignore) is, "How much is the ebook market competing with amateur content?" Book publishers like to think that their competition is (1) other book publishers, and (2) newspaper/magazine publishers. They don't think of the local knitter's circle newsletter, nor student-made poetry collections, nor crazy rants that've been photocopied & stapled to telephone poles, as "competition." But in Web 2.0land, they are--because all of those are blogs you might be reading instead of a printed book. And you can find *all the knitting info you want*, with personalized feedback & advice, instead of buying a book of knitting startup tips and hoping you'll be able to understand the instructions.
Ebooks have *almost* reached wide-scale technical feasibility. And the publishers who succeed in the long run will be those who figure out how to exploit the useful features of ebooks while bypassing the drawbacks.
Drawbacks: They *suck* at coffee-table art books. They're going to continue to suck at art books. They suck at research: you can't have six books open at once and easily flip between them; can't put greenpostits bookmarks on the "history" passages and yellow ones on the "technical info" passages. All the screen displays are poor compared to books; they're okay for straight text, but have problems with pictures, and most of them have *big* problems with diagrams & charts. DRM is a nightmare. Backlist availability is even more of a problem than with pbooks, because you can't hit the used book stores to fill out the gaps in a series. (Used ebooks. Hrm. I'm firmly convinced that ebooks won't *really* go mainstream until there's a legal used ebook market.)
Advantages: Can be cheap. Lightweight/Tiny--not half a pound (~225g) for a novel; not two pounds (~1kg) or more for a textbook. Searchable--if search hasn't been turned off. Easy copy/paste--ditto. Ability to play multimedia games--add sound & vid sections. Easy sharability--if the publishers don't freak out about that. Sharable annotations, maybe.
Authors & publishers are going to have to stop thinking of ebooks as "the computer version of a paper book," and acknowledge them as a completely different medium, with its own pros & cons.
- Not enough ebooks.
- Ebooks too expensive.
- The hardware form factor was wrong.
- Periodical problems.
- Poor marketing.
He touches on some potential solutions:
• Short story sales,
• Backlist sales,
• Rethink *everything* about periodicals
And he's got some terrific questions for publishers to consider, including "What if some of the people you just laid off form an editing cooperative and then contact your authors with a cut-rate offer?"
One of the questions he doesn't address (and publishers are working very very hard to ignore) is, "How much is the ebook market competing with amateur content?" Book publishers like to think that their competition is (1) other book publishers, and (2) newspaper/magazine publishers. They don't think of the local knitter's circle newsletter, nor student-made poetry collections, nor crazy rants that've been photocopied & stapled to telephone poles, as "competition." But in Web 2.0land, they are--because all of those are blogs you might be reading instead of a printed book. And you can find *all the knitting info you want*, with personalized feedback & advice, instead of buying a book of knitting startup tips and hoping you'll be able to understand the instructions.
Ebooks have *almost* reached wide-scale technical feasibility. And the publishers who succeed in the long run will be those who figure out how to exploit the useful features of ebooks while bypassing the drawbacks.
Drawbacks: They *suck* at coffee-table art books. They're going to continue to suck at art books. They suck at research: you can't have six books open at once and easily flip between them; can't put green
Advantages: Can be cheap. Lightweight/Tiny--not half a pound (~225g) for a novel; not two pounds (~1kg) or more for a textbook. Searchable--if search hasn't been turned off. Easy copy/paste--ditto. Ability to play multimedia games--add sound & vid sections. Easy sharability--if the publishers don't freak out about that. Sharable annotations, maybe.
Authors & publishers are going to have to stop thinking of ebooks as "the computer version of a paper book," and acknowledge them as a completely different medium, with its own pros & cons.