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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.
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*I include ebooks created by AO3's download feature. I just spent a full month trying to worth through that backlog in just one fandom and, ummmm, I got about one-half of the way through it.
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Even when I was on a really tight budget for books, I had to *search* to find good things to read, dig through secondhand piles to find the ones in my genre range. I looked forward to being able to afford more of the ones that were just out of reach. Now that I have money to spend, I'm swamped with choices; I don't have to even think about the ones just beyond my sweet price range. I don't have time to read all the freebies I want, much less all the under-$5 ebooks I can afford.
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Yep. Pretty much. If they didn't have the DRM problem, I might care more but as long as they are embracing DRM, I got places to be, books to read, people to laugh with. I can wait for the industry to fix itself or collapse and something new to take its place. I don't even have to be patient. I'm too busy to care.
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I would caveat that by saying that the real problem is not that they can't adapt successfully but that they can't adapt and keep bringing in the same sort of paychecks they used to. This is exactly the same thing that happened with newspapers well before the "free Internet content" dilemma. There was a push, due to buyouts and mergers, to make newspapers more profitable than they had been in the past -- for the new corporate owners that is, not the employees. So they downsized their staffs, reduced the quality of their output, and took out huge loans to enable larger and larger mergers. Sound familiar? Then when they encountered actual competition from online content they were in no position to compete on quality or loyalty. All they could think to do is more of the same -- more layoffs, more mergers, and further cuts in content and coverage. I'm convinced big publishers will follow the same route because they want to retire in style.
And the problem on the professional front is the same. There are thousands of experienced journalists who have left the profession or are very underemployed because those former salaried positions aren't coming back. It's the same in the publishing business -- there will be, if anything, even greater need for editors than before but not at the salaries that were once common. People want to maintain their standard of living and will wreck their companies sooner than give that up. It's not unlike what Wall Street did in the last decade -- run their companies into the ground so they could continue to cash out.
The multimedia thing is an interesting question. I tend to agree with you that it is much like the 3-D experiment with films. Theater owners and studios want it to be the next big thing because they think it will bring people back or new people into the theaters. And for some features that may be true, but what people really want is a good story not gimmicks in place of one. I suspect publishers are looking at the declining reading rate and think that high-tech texts will bring a new generation back to reading. But it was Harry Potter that did that, without multimedia.
Yes too, on your take on 3-11.