In February of this year the O'Reilly
fiefdom held its second "Tools of Change for Publishers"
conference in New York City. Though the title of the conference suggests that
it was not limited to book publishers, books were indeed the focus. Details
from the conference have been slow to emerge in cogent form.
Steve Paxhia, my colleague at Gilbane, offers a thorough
overview in the May 29, 2008 edition of The Seybold Report, but unfortunately
access is limited only to subscribers ($499 per year for the online version).
The conference site, linked above, now also offers many of the presentations and
other coverage of the event.
I was pleased to find today equally thorough coverage in
the July-August 2008 issue of The
Futurist, fortunately available online
without charge. Senior editor Patrick Tucker perhaps enjoys an advantage in his
coverage not available to Steve Paxhia: he is not intimate with the publishing
industry, and by the nature of his publication is more focused on "the futurist"
perspective than the insider's perspective. As a result he makes an additional
effort to contextualize his coverage of the presentations and highlights of the
event.
The article struggles with the issues of balancing social
media, new technology and the value of content in a very cogent fashion. Some
of the ideas are familiar; others quite fresh and provocative.
My
favorite quote is from Lewis Lapham, until recently the long-time editor of Harper's
magazine, and now the publisher and editor of Lapham's Quarterly.
From Tucker's report, "To Lapham, the crudeness, silliness, and uncultured
quality of today's Web culture is a symptom of the immaturity of the new medium
and the youthfulness of its users. The change will be gradual. 'We're still playing
with it like it's a toy,' he said of the Web. 'We don't yet know how to make
art with it. McLuhan points out that the printing press was (introduced in the
West in) 1468; it (was) a hundred years before you (got) to Cervantes, to
Shakespeare.'"
If you've read the section
on this site about eBooks and (what I call) eContent, you'll know that I'm not
a big cheerleader for eBooks. I lived through the first eBook "revolution,"
featuring the forgotten standalone eBook readers like the Rocket eBook and the
SoftBook Reader. That revolution never took off, and wound down more-or-less at
the same time as the burst of the Internet bubble. Microsoft used to offer the
Microsoft Reader software for eBooks both for its PocketPC and for don't fit-in-your-pocket
PCs. For some reason this software can still be downloaded from a page on Microsoft's
website that notes "Updated: May 19, 2005." Microsoft is obviously not
currently interested in the eBook phenomena.
But when Jeff Bezos and Amazon caught the eBook fever
last November with the release of the Kindle, he managed to somehow erase
everyone's short-term memory and has re-kindled an explosion of interest in the
eBook format. (Even The Economist
found its short-term memory damaged, stating in a June 5, 2008 article
that "… Kindle and its kind are merely the first
generation [emphasis mine] of a product that is sure to evolve quickly in
the coming years.")
Yesterday I learned of CitiGroup's Mark Mahaney who has
calculated, with very slim data, that Kindle could add $750 million to Amazon's
top line by 2010. This prompted John Paczkowski on AllThingsDigital
to label Mahaney as "an honor student at (the) Strained Credibility Academy."
Well today I learned (once more with credit to Bob Sacks) that another student at The
Strained Credibility Academy is looking for higher marks than Mark. According to
a posting
on paidContent.org, "Pacific Crest analyst Steve Weinstein argues that global
e-book sales at Amazon could reach $2.5 billion by the year 2012," and could
add "as much as $330 million to operating income." Wow!
Go back to my section
on eBooks where you'll see that the highest estimate of all eBook sales last year
was $67 million. Then do the math on the CAGR
through 2012, keeping in mind that Amazon, which was originally built on
selling books online, currently accounts for only 6-8% of all book sales in the U.S.
Why did God give us analysts at investment banks? A
Google search offers only one answer. According to an article
on Innovating Tomorrow, "God gave some people the ability to analyze and
measure situations. These are people who love to do this and have some deep
seeded [I assume they mean "deep-seated"] talent for it. These are people and
gifts God has given us to use in ministry."
I think
not. God gave us analysts so that businesses would have an external
justification for making bad decisions that they have already decided to go
forward with. The eBook gold rush is one of them.
Credit where credit is due: I was first informed of this
fascinating tale about the future of writing and book publishing from David
Pogue's always fun, provocative and illuminating weekly
column in The New York Times. His
May 22nd column
provided his take on whether he should provide free downloads of his (many) books.
After a couple of bad experiences he's now firmly against it, while admitting
that "I realize that it puts me, rather awkwardly, on the same side of the
piracy issue as the record companies and movie companies, who are suing
teenagers for downloading songs, and of whom I've made endless fun."
But a far more intriguing story is referenced in Pogue's
column: the story of author Steven Poole, who took a successful book, "Trigger
Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames," and posted it for download on his blog. The book was
first published in 2000, to favorable reviews, and, according to Poole,
continues to sell well. But last November, as a simple experiment, he offered Trigger Happy as a free download, under
a Creatives Commons license, which
meant, if not in legal terms, but in technical reality, "no strings attached." He
asked only that "if you like the book, you can leave a tip via PayPal," and
provided a link for PayPal donations.
The results were, to say the least, disappointing from a
financial perspective. As Poole reports in an April 2008 blog entry,
"the proportion of [31,697] people who left a tip after downloading Trigger
Happy was 1 in 1,750, or 0.057%," and as he comments later in the responses to
his entry, "the average donation was a (very reasonable) couple of bucks. The
total was a vanishingly minuscule fraction of what I earned from the book's
traditional publication."
What
I found most important here are the nearly 230 comments found in both the original
blog entry offering the book, and in its follow-up. A few of the comments are
of course inane, but the sum of the comments (with a generous series of
responses from Poole) amounts to the most fascinating discussion I've yet
encountered on how writing and publishing are faring in the ongoing struggle to
find an effective new business model that will encourage book-length
publications (rather than articles and blogs) to flourish in the age of the
Internet.
I'm thrilled to have received permission to post Heidi Julavits' short piece of creative nonfiction, "The Writers in the Silos." It projects the future of publishing as nothing has before.
I first encountered it in the September 2007 issue of Harper's Magazine, though it was a reprint from "Creative Nonfiction Issue #31: Imagining the Future," published by the provocative journal Creative Nonfiction.
As I wrote to Ms. Julavits when I discovered "The Writers in the Silos": "It's hilarious, of course, but also wonderfully anarchic and apparently prescient. I was completely delighted to have found it."
I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.
(Click here to read "The Writers in the Silos.")
I bet you didn't observe it with a special ceremony at your company (nor, privately, at home), but April 23rd was UNESCO's annual World Book Day (coinciding with Shakespeare's birthday). I learned about this on the website of German media giant Bertelsmann. With sales approaching $30 billion annually, it is easily one of the largest publishers in the world (including in the U.S., through its Random House subsidiary).
It seems appropriate that April 23rd is also the day that the press got wind of Bertelsmann's plan to issue a book version of Wikipedia. According to the New York Times report, the book will be published in September in German only, based on the German version of Wikipedia, with a list price of 19.95 euros. While the online German Wikipedia has nearly three-quarters of a million entries, the book will contain only 20,000 of these, each verified by Bertelsmann's editors.
Meanwhile, over at another encyclopedia company, Encyclopedia Britannica, a very different kind of announcement was making the rounds this week (although actually first announced on April 13): free access to the online version of Encyclopedia Britannica through a new program called Britannica Webshare.
The Wired Campus blog in The Chronicle of Higher Education suggests that "Encyclopaedia Britannica…apparently fears being nudged into irrelevance by the proliferation of free online reference sources…
"Comscore analysis, also reported on TechCrunch, found that '[f]or every page viewed on Brittanica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia,' or 3.8 billion v. 21 million page views per month…
"Under a new program entitled Britannica WebShare, the encyclopedia publisher is allowing 'people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers,' to read and link to the encyclopedia's online articles. The company seems to hope that by offering its services free to Web publishers, links to Britannica articles will proliferate across the Internet and will persuade regular Web surfers to cough up $1,400 for the encyclopedia's 32-volume set, or perhaps $70 for an annual online subscription."
Hurry: Get your application in here.
My last blog entry referred to a groundbreaking report just issued by IBM on the future of advertising. Also issued this week was a long-awaited report from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), To Read or Not To Read, "the most complete and up-to-date report of the nation's reading trends and — perhaps most important — their considerable consequences."
This is a follow-up report to Reading at Risk, a ground-breaking study from the NEA issued in 2004. I cover this report extensively in my section on book publishing.
Quoting from the new report, "The story the data tell is simple, consistent, and alarming. Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years. There is a general decline in reading among teenage and adult Americans. Most alarming, both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates."
The two reports taken together will change your view of the future of publishing generally, and more specifically of the future of book publishing.
A few key data points:
• Nearly half of all Americans ages 18 to 24 read no books for pleasure.
• The percentage of 18- to 44-year-olds who read a book fell 7 points from 1992 to 2002.
• The percentage of 17-year-olds who read nothing at all for pleasure has doubled over a 20-year period.
• 20% of the reading time of middle and high school students is shared by TV-watching, video/computer game playing, instant messaging, e-mailing or Web surfing.
• Although nominal spending on books grew from 1985 to 2005, average annual household spending on books dropped 14% when adjusted for inflation.
The report is 100-pages long, too long to properly summarize here. It is however available to download without charge. Much of the report covers what the NEA views as the consequences in the decline in reading, including lower levels of academic achievement, decreased performance in the job market and the reduced likelihood to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting. This is outside the direct scope of the future of publishing, although nonetheless provocative. When the most positive expression contained within a report is a prayer that officials will be moved to take action because they're so upset by the completely bleak implications of the data, you've got some troubling information within. Essential reading, assuming you still can!
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