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Konrath's predictions
JA Konrath goes over his ebook predictions from 2009, notes his success/failure rate (8.5/11 right), and adds some new ones. I don't normally play the prediction game, but I think I know this topic, and I think he's right about some, and missing the mark on others. While I could reply at his blog (and I might, and post a link to here), my thoughts got too long for a simple comment, especially at a blog where I don't normally participate.
1. Publishing houses closing.
Spot on. Publishing houses are in a panic, and playing weird games of chicken with authors, ebookstores, and their own corporate owners, trying to find the magic bullet that will let them have the economic stability (such as it was) they had in 1980 before those computer-thingies got in the way of book sales. Not gonna happen, and sometime soon, the smaller lines under the "big 6" umbrella are going to start folding. The "big 6" (I really wish I knew why Rusch & Wesley insist that's a misnomer) show no signs of understanding the internet nor how it's affecting their business plans, which means that, as ebooks get more popular, they'll close doors rather than figure out how to redirect their energies into what's selling.
2. Interactive multimedia.
I think he's wrong here. Okay, I agree that there will be more multimedia book-things, especially marketed for young kids, more game/book crossovers, more "apps"... but they won't much affect the popularity of books, just like the rise of movies and television didn't destroy books. The process of reading is different from watching a movie, listening to a song, or clicking on images to move characters around, and reading will continue to appeal to people for whom the interactive elements aren't important. Or aren't accessible.
Multimedia products--movie-things, game-things, musically-enhanced-color-changing-things--attached to text sources will get made, but after the initial "OH LOOK A BOOK WITH PICTURES!!!" rush passes, they won't be considered part of the book market by serious readers. Publishers will continue to insist the multimedia app is the future of literature; readers will continue to read books on so many different devices that nobody will make an app that works well on all of them. (Creating a moviebook app that works on your phone = easy. Creating a *good* movie experience on a 2.5" screen... not gonna happen.)
3. Ads in ebooks.
Nope. This'll continue to stagger along; authors and publishers will both try to figure out how to get advertisers, instead of readers, to shoulder some of the costs of books, and they'll continue to not quite manage it in any consistent, widely-marketable way.
See above: reading is not like watching a movie. You can't break it every 20 minutes to insert a note from the sponsor, because you don't know when it's been 20 minutes for the reader. You can't advertise "objects indicated by the subject matter of the book," because what people read about often doesn't connect to sellable products. Then there's the logistics issue: is the ad going to be equally visible & useful on a phone, tablet, laptop, & portable e-ink reader?
Those, however, are secondary issues. Really. They get discussed when ads for ebooks come up, and people argue how the ads could be targeted, and locked into the books, balanced to be useful for the advertiser but not so annoying that people just flock to the torrents looking for the unlocked, ad-stripped version. That's an entertaining discussion (if you like that kind of thing), but not crucial.
The crucial part: If an ebook can only be read by one person, or at most, one family, how much money will advertiser/s pay to get their ads inside?
Amazon is selling ad-enhanced devices, not books. Because no advertiser is going to pay $1 for each ebook that sells unless they believe that they're going to get more than $1 per book in returns. For ads to be worth including--from the advertiser's perspective--they have to bring in money. TV ads are seen by millions of people; they're worth a lot of money. Magazine ads are seen by browsers in the store, the buyer, their family, and often someone else... and each advertiser is only subsidizing a fraction of the cost of production.
For ad-subsidized ebooks to work, the ad buyers have to believe they're making money off the deal. That means they have to believe readers will, as a whole, buy more stuff than they're getting from the discounted ebook price. For that to work, readers have to be *interested* in the ads... and fifteen+ years of internet has not established any formulaic, consistent way to get people interested in ads. Tiny, well-targeted ads: sure. Special-interest titles can be ad-supported. But mainstream novels, and the large genres? There is *nothing* that "90% of mystery readers" is interested in as a group.
4. Ereaders under $49.
I agree. I think it's a bold statement, but I think it's coming. The company that could knock the Kindle off the top of the heap is the one that can produce a modern version of the eBookwise that can read .epub and .txt (and, sigh, PDF, although that's never going to be great on a small screen) for $50. It doesn't need wifi. It doesn't need e-ink. It needs good hardware and good firmware and 6-10 hours of battery life, and if someone can get it ready by spring of 2012, it can take over as the high-school-and-college ebook device.
5. People abandoning paper.
Yeah, we'll see more of this, but I don't think this is specifically an ebook thing. More longtime, avid readers will switch to ebooks; everyone else will just continue to prefer TV and video games to books. We'll see a lot of Kindle purchases by people who think that battery-powered books will make them interested in reading, and then discover that's not true.
6. Global market.
I agree, but I have more doubts than Konrath. The current publishing industry patterns are deeply entrenched, and opening the international markets would take big changes--and they're not showing signs of being open to big changes. However, I agree that US-based indie publishers & self-pub authors will be looking at non-US markets, and more stores that support those will spring up, and soon it won't be "people in Australia can't get anything but fragments," but instead, "people in Australia can't get anything by [list of names] publishers."
7. Bookstores, book fairs, writing conferences, and writers organizations will have to change, or perish.
Ooooh yeah. The entire publishing industry has changed, drastically, and there is no going back. (If the world oil market collapses tomorrow and we're all thrown into post-industrial hippie-dystopia--the publishing industry will not be the same as it was in the 1700s. Nor the 1950s, even if we could keep the factories running.) The digital market is different and will take different accounting systems, different writing methods, different ways of finding customers. Some people who were successful on the older system are going to fail and be squeezed out. Some people--a lot of people--who couldn't be successful with legacy publishing systems, are going to get rich. And a whole lot of people will be thrown into utter chaos in the meantime, trying to find the new boundaries for "what do I have to do to make a reasonable career out of this?"
8. Pottermore is just the beginning.
Yep. Trying to keep this short: there'll be a lot more individual author sites, and more that have formal publisher support. Authors now *do* have an option, like musicians, to make money from fan gatherings. Authors who like that kind of interaction have new options, yay. Authors who don't, are going to have to scrabble to find other options.
9. We'll see a lot of new stuff from old writers.
More backlists! (More backlists competing with new stuff, which will add more chaos to the pile.) More "odd-length story not long enough for a book but too long for a magazine story." More outtakes and off-genre stuff connected to series. ("It's an urban fantasy series, but I've got this novelette about how the protagonist's cousin became a lawyer and why she hates cops" is now a marketable story.)
10. Libraries.
I think he's missing this one, too. Oh, I think he's right; it's a great market, and more people will be looking into it, from all sides--but I think he's glossing over the logistics issues. Breaking publishers' locks on book production doesn't break Overdrive's lock on library access for ebooks, and that filter keeps out indie authors. Creating something else in their place means every library contracting separately for their own loan-out DRM system (although some are apparently experimenting with honor-system non-DRM'd loaners); more technological tangles = slower changes. I expect a lot of hype about digital libraries; I don't expect a lot of changes in the near future.
11. I won't continue to pay my mortgage with my ebook sales.
Because, of course, his house will be paid off. Yeah, I think he's right about this one, too. Those who have found their niche(s) for digital sales, will continue to be successful in selling; the market's not going to vanish or hit capacity anytime soon.
All of which is fine for authors (well, most authors), but he doesn't discuss at all the future from the readers' perspective: How will I find books? How much will they cost? Who will I buy them from, and how much hassle will that be? Will proto-geek children become geeky bibliophile teenagers if they read on a screen? How do I find good stuff that isn't topping anyone's bestseller lists yet? [How] Can I bring a stack of ebooks to my aunt/spouse/grandfather in the hospital in three years? Will ebooks be inheritable?
I don't have answers for those, and I'd love to see more exploration of them. I think the future for authors, for the business side of things, has some points of clarity, although a lot is still open; the future for readers, other than the very basic "hot DAMN we are gonna have access to a lot of ebooks" is much more blurry.
1. Publishing houses closing.
Spot on. Publishing houses are in a panic, and playing weird games of chicken with authors, ebookstores, and their own corporate owners, trying to find the magic bullet that will let them have the economic stability (such as it was) they had in 1980 before those computer-thingies got in the way of book sales. Not gonna happen, and sometime soon, the smaller lines under the "big 6" umbrella are going to start folding. The "big 6" (I really wish I knew why Rusch & Wesley insist that's a misnomer) show no signs of understanding the internet nor how it's affecting their business plans, which means that, as ebooks get more popular, they'll close doors rather than figure out how to redirect their energies into what's selling.
2. Interactive multimedia.
I think he's wrong here. Okay, I agree that there will be more multimedia book-things, especially marketed for young kids, more game/book crossovers, more "apps"... but they won't much affect the popularity of books, just like the rise of movies and television didn't destroy books. The process of reading is different from watching a movie, listening to a song, or clicking on images to move characters around, and reading will continue to appeal to people for whom the interactive elements aren't important. Or aren't accessible.
Multimedia products--movie-things, game-things, musically-enhanced-color-changing-things--attached to text sources will get made, but after the initial "OH LOOK A BOOK WITH PICTURES!!!" rush passes, they won't be considered part of the book market by serious readers. Publishers will continue to insist the multimedia app is the future of literature; readers will continue to read books on so many different devices that nobody will make an app that works well on all of them. (Creating a moviebook app that works on your phone = easy. Creating a *good* movie experience on a 2.5" screen... not gonna happen.)
3. Ads in ebooks.
Nope. This'll continue to stagger along; authors and publishers will both try to figure out how to get advertisers, instead of readers, to shoulder some of the costs of books, and they'll continue to not quite manage it in any consistent, widely-marketable way.
See above: reading is not like watching a movie. You can't break it every 20 minutes to insert a note from the sponsor, because you don't know when it's been 20 minutes for the reader. You can't advertise "objects indicated by the subject matter of the book," because what people read about often doesn't connect to sellable products. Then there's the logistics issue: is the ad going to be equally visible & useful on a phone, tablet, laptop, & portable e-ink reader?
Those, however, are secondary issues. Really. They get discussed when ads for ebooks come up, and people argue how the ads could be targeted, and locked into the books, balanced to be useful for the advertiser but not so annoying that people just flock to the torrents looking for the unlocked, ad-stripped version. That's an entertaining discussion (if you like that kind of thing), but not crucial.
The crucial part: If an ebook can only be read by one person, or at most, one family, how much money will advertiser/s pay to get their ads inside?
Amazon is selling ad-enhanced devices, not books. Because no advertiser is going to pay $1 for each ebook that sells unless they believe that they're going to get more than $1 per book in returns. For ads to be worth including--from the advertiser's perspective--they have to bring in money. TV ads are seen by millions of people; they're worth a lot of money. Magazine ads are seen by browsers in the store, the buyer, their family, and often someone else... and each advertiser is only subsidizing a fraction of the cost of production.
For ad-subsidized ebooks to work, the ad buyers have to believe they're making money off the deal. That means they have to believe readers will, as a whole, buy more stuff than they're getting from the discounted ebook price. For that to work, readers have to be *interested* in the ads... and fifteen+ years of internet has not established any formulaic, consistent way to get people interested in ads. Tiny, well-targeted ads: sure. Special-interest titles can be ad-supported. But mainstream novels, and the large genres? There is *nothing* that "90% of mystery readers" is interested in as a group.
4. Ereaders under $49.
I agree. I think it's a bold statement, but I think it's coming. The company that could knock the Kindle off the top of the heap is the one that can produce a modern version of the eBookwise that can read .epub and .txt (and, sigh, PDF, although that's never going to be great on a small screen) for $50. It doesn't need wifi. It doesn't need e-ink. It needs good hardware and good firmware and 6-10 hours of battery life, and if someone can get it ready by spring of 2012, it can take over as the high-school-and-college ebook device.
5. People abandoning paper.
Yeah, we'll see more of this, but I don't think this is specifically an ebook thing. More longtime, avid readers will switch to ebooks; everyone else will just continue to prefer TV and video games to books. We'll see a lot of Kindle purchases by people who think that battery-powered books will make them interested in reading, and then discover that's not true.
6. Global market.
I agree, but I have more doubts than Konrath. The current publishing industry patterns are deeply entrenched, and opening the international markets would take big changes--and they're not showing signs of being open to big changes. However, I agree that US-based indie publishers & self-pub authors will be looking at non-US markets, and more stores that support those will spring up, and soon it won't be "people in Australia can't get anything but fragments," but instead, "people in Australia can't get anything by [list of names] publishers."
7. Bookstores, book fairs, writing conferences, and writers organizations will have to change, or perish.
Ooooh yeah. The entire publishing industry has changed, drastically, and there is no going back. (If the world oil market collapses tomorrow and we're all thrown into post-industrial hippie-dystopia--the publishing industry will not be the same as it was in the 1700s. Nor the 1950s, even if we could keep the factories running.) The digital market is different and will take different accounting systems, different writing methods, different ways of finding customers. Some people who were successful on the older system are going to fail and be squeezed out. Some people--a lot of people--who couldn't be successful with legacy publishing systems, are going to get rich. And a whole lot of people will be thrown into utter chaos in the meantime, trying to find the new boundaries for "what do I have to do to make a reasonable career out of this?"
8. Pottermore is just the beginning.
Yep. Trying to keep this short: there'll be a lot more individual author sites, and more that have formal publisher support. Authors now *do* have an option, like musicians, to make money from fan gatherings. Authors who like that kind of interaction have new options, yay. Authors who don't, are going to have to scrabble to find other options.
9. We'll see a lot of new stuff from old writers.
More backlists! (More backlists competing with new stuff, which will add more chaos to the pile.) More "odd-length story not long enough for a book but too long for a magazine story." More outtakes and off-genre stuff connected to series. ("It's an urban fantasy series, but I've got this novelette about how the protagonist's cousin became a lawyer and why she hates cops" is now a marketable story.)
10. Libraries.
I think he's missing this one, too. Oh, I think he's right; it's a great market, and more people will be looking into it, from all sides--but I think he's glossing over the logistics issues. Breaking publishers' locks on book production doesn't break Overdrive's lock on library access for ebooks, and that filter keeps out indie authors. Creating something else in their place means every library contracting separately for their own loan-out DRM system (although some are apparently experimenting with honor-system non-DRM'd loaners); more technological tangles = slower changes. I expect a lot of hype about digital libraries; I don't expect a lot of changes in the near future.
11. I won't continue to pay my mortgage with my ebook sales.
Because, of course, his house will be paid off. Yeah, I think he's right about this one, too. Those who have found their niche(s) for digital sales, will continue to be successful in selling; the market's not going to vanish or hit capacity anytime soon.
All of which is fine for authors (well, most authors), but he doesn't discuss at all the future from the readers' perspective: How will I find books? How much will they cost? Who will I buy them from, and how much hassle will that be? Will proto-geek children become geeky bibliophile teenagers if they read on a screen? How do I find good stuff that isn't topping anyone's bestseller lists yet? [How] Can I bring a stack of ebooks to my aunt/spouse/grandfather in the hospital in three years? Will ebooks be inheritable?
I don't have answers for those, and I'd love to see more exploration of them. I think the future for authors, for the business side of things, has some points of clarity, although a lot is still open; the future for readers, other than the very basic "hot DAMN we are gonna have access to a lot of ebooks" is much more blurry.