The future of the book

 Posted by on 26 June 2009  Modern Life
Jun 262009
 

I recently attended the Canadian Booksellers’ Association Summer Conference.  In addition to the renewal of old acquaintances, author visits, sales presentations and other sorts of activities you would expect to encounter at a professional conference, there was a panel discussion on the future of the book industry.  Although this discussion touched on many of the issues affecting independent booksellers (the fluctuating Canadian dollar, reassessments of returns policies, the economy, big box discounters, etc), the most interesting topic, to my mind, was the mindset of various publishers regarding the rise of the ebook.

Even the idea of the ebook gives me a nasty crawling of the flesh.  It isn’t that I am some sort of Luddite or that, as a bookstore owner, I have a vested interest in the survival of the book.  My problem is that the ebook may eventually win out over the physical book, despite the fact that the centuries-old format is the superior of the two.

A cursory listing, in no particular order, of my arguments for this position include:

  1. Books have no requirement for electricity, battery or any form of power.  Thus, they can be used in even the most primitive of conditions.
  2. Although ebook readers have improved greatly with the latest generation of products, the resolution of the book will be difficult to surpass.
  3. Transferability is less an issue for books than ebooks.  While handing a book to a friend is rarely an issue (even if getting it returned is), sharing an ebook across different readers has, to date, been problematic.
  4. Books are a very popular gift.   Ebooks do not possess that physical dimension that is often important in gift-giving rituals.
  5. Environmentally, books are superior.  While much hue and cry can be raised around deforestation and the pollution resulting from pulp and paper mills, there are alternatives to these industrial practices.  Electronic devices, in both production and disposal, are frightening with respect to what is released into soils and waterways.

Certainly, there are additional arguments and just as many counterarguments.  Yet, because the general public has a love affair with hand-held electronic devices, publishers are looking to monetizing that small, but growing portion of the market seeking digital versions of new books.

The general consensus among the publishers present at the CBA conference was that ebooks will not likely play a significant role in the marketplace for at least 5 years.   In that time, I cannot say how else the book industry will evolve as we are truly in a time of change.

In short, although the publishing industry is in a time of flux, it is almost certain that the book will survive.

(This post has been simultaneously published on both Absurd Intellectual and the Pennywise Books blog.)

T. Keith Edmunds

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

    Just to play devil’s advocate for a bit — most of your arguments would have been equally valid in the CD vs. mp3 debate. How’d that work out for the music industry?

    In real life, I’m a dyed-in-the-pulp bibliophile, and I would cry endless tears if books went away. I don’t think they will. But I do think printed, paper books will eventually become more of a niche product, somewhat akin to LPs, as ebook readers penetrate the mainstream, and people become accustomed to carrying around tens of thousands of books in their pocket instead of just one.

    • http://pennywise-books.blogspot.com/ T. Keith Edmunds

      The thing is that the publishing industry has watched the music and film industries fail in their attempts to deal with the shifting business paradigms. Both music and film came down heavy-handed and alienated much of their audiences.

      Publishers are experimenting with giving away pages or chapters or entire books online (mostly within the science fiction genre) and have found that often these giveaways lead to an increase in sales of the physical book.

      People tend to have more attachment to books than they do to music or movies. Trust me, I love my movies, but I don’t care if they are in digital format or a DVD on a shelf. But even if I will never read certain books again, I like to see them on my shelf. Books don’t only contain the stories printed within them, but they also carry with them their own stories — “This book changed my life”; “This was my Grandmother’s book”; etc.

      I know I sound like I’m denying the inevitable, but it’s not that at all. I just don’t think that the time of the ebook is yet. It is coming, yes. Five years is what the publishers are predicting, but they don’t seem to think that five years will have enough people clamoring for ebooks. I can’t see it — the physical book is a format that technology will have a hard time surpassing.

  • Stumpy

    I could see ebook technology being useful if it allows the reader to “write” on pages and highlight passages (my neurosis is such that it is difficult to write in a book). But one of my biggest concerns is file storage/recovery. I want my book collection to be an investment, something that will last a long time – I wouldn’t want my favorite books to become obsolete just because I purchased the Betamax equivalent of an ebook reader.

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com/ Grant Hamilton

    @ Keith — I agree that people have an attachment to books, but I disagree that they don’t have the same attachment to music. A well-packaged album is a physical artifact that can’t be replaced with a digital copy — this was particularly true in the days of the LP. Books are like that, too — people love the feel, the smell, the design of them. I suspect that ebooks will be for day-to-day reading, but for something special, perhaps a keepsake or a special gift, people will buy special editions of the physical book the way they always have.

    @ Stumpy — there are so many more things that an ebook can do — imagine a book with a video clip in it, or a choose your own adventure with hyperlinks. As for storage/recovery, I’m not arguing its perfect, but if you have a copy on your Kindle, you also have a record of that stored on your home computer, and on the servers at Amazon. Lose your home library in a flood or a fire, you may not even remember what books you’ve lost. But if you lose your Kindle, you should be able to redownload everything in a matter of minutes.

    /devilsadvocate

  • http://www.absurdintellectual.com Amy Breen

    I think I agree with Stumpy’s last point. The technology of the ebooks will be constantly changing, and people will be scrambling with updates and out-of-date technology.

    Books? They’ve been basically the same for the last few hundred years.

  • http://empty-cage.net Kae

    I think the physicality of the book itself has an important part to play. Despite being a child of the technological generation I still find it a real pain to read long passages off of a screen, and can only imagine a small screen would not make this problem any better.

    Inversely, for travel I do like the idea of a million books all in a nice small package. So, perhaps there is a market for both ebooks on the go, and paper for all other occasions.