Early in July Salon put up a February Barnes & Noble interview with Clay Shirky. This is a man on whom is heaped the praise, “Shirky has emerged as a luminary of the new digital intelligentsia, a daringly eclectic thinker as comfortable discussing 15th-century publishing technology as he is making political sense of 21st-century social media. I don’t know about all that, but the interview touched on the subject of the Gutenberg revolution, and the present day equivalent, so I read the interview.
The interview was not as focused as I would have liked, or as deeply insightful as Mr. Shirky was billed. That said, he manages to articulate some points well. An example:
So when I say “publishing is the new literacy,” I don’t mean there’s no role for curation, for improving material, for editing material, for fact-checking material. I mean literally, the act of putting something out in public used to be reserved in the same way. You used to have to own a radio tower or television tower or printing press. Now all you have to have is access to an Internet cafe or a public library, and you can put your thoughts out in public.
So what happened to literacy in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s is that it went from being reserved for a specialist class to being a general feature of the middle class. The same thing is happening to publishing — the ability to put something out in public is becoming more important to society, but the delta between “I can put something out in public” and “I can’t put something out in public” is no longer so great that you can automatically make money simply by having access to the means of publication.
For more: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2010/07/09/clay_shirky/index.html
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A few links to give an un-scientific snapshot of where ebooks currently stand in the book market.
Mashable.com(1) has an article up asking readers which they prefer more, ebooks or physical books. Being a tech leaning website I expected ebooks to score well with all the techno-phile readers. After all, people who avoid computers aren’t even going to participate in the survey, so ebooks have a significant edge. Surprisingly, whatever boost the gadget loving people gave the ebook, it was not enough. As of writing this article the survey stands with 23% saying ebooks are better 42% say physical books are better and 35% say both have their advantages. A survey that was not biased to tech users would have the ebook scoring even lower, so this says something about people’s prejudices, or the real life inferior experience of the ebook.
On that subject, Nielsen Norman Group discovered in a recent usability survey(2) that it takes longer to read books on a Kindle 2 and iPad then reading a physical book. Reading speeds declined by 6.2% on iPad and 10.7% on the Kindle 2. This adds up to a significant amount of time when we’re talking about the hours it takes to read a longer book, and is the clearest evidence that the screens on ebooks are still not up to the quality of physical books.
But then, Amazon has recently said that sales of ebooks has outpaced the sales of hardcover books.(3) While this says something, I’m not convinced it says as much as Amazon would like people to think. (It was clearly released as a PR gambit against the iPad.) Hardcover books hold a smaller portion of the publishing market than paperbacks, but I haven’t been able to get a clear figure on exactly what percentage of the market is hardcover. Also, it isn’t clear how much of Amazon’s sales were in hardcover before, compared to the rest of the book selling market. So, while yes, ebooks are selling more, Amazon’s information is very short on facts.
But, interestingly enough, the sales of physical books are doing well too. In the middle of June the Association of American Publishers released sales figures for books(4) in April. Hardcover sales increased 49.2% from the previous year softcover increased 19.4% from the previous year, and ebook sales increased 217.3% from the previous year. While ebook sales are clearly experiencing explosive growth, it does not appear to be killing off either hardcover or softcover books.
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(1) http://mashable.com/2010/07/19/reading-faceoff-e-books-vs-print-books
(2) http://mashable.com/2010/07/02/ipad-kindle-reading-study/
(3) http://mashable.com/2010/07/19/amazon-kindle-sales/
(4) http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/aprilstats.htm
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It can be interesting to read through articles in the publishing industry and see how different people, and companies, are reacting to the changes in the publishing world.
An example of a more embracing attitude would be David “Skip” Prichard the c.e.o of Ingram Content Group. Prichard’s attitude is that, “New players don’t know what the rules are, they simply do things as efficiently as they can to reach the most people. They will change the model repeatedly. History is an asset but also a challenge, because we need to adapt so quickly.” (1)
Another differentiator between those who fear the future of publishing and those who embrace it is their view on DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology. Those who truly understand and embrace the publishing future are looking beyond DRM. Those who are terrified of the future are scrambling to figure out what DRM they can use to lock down the world. TheBookSeller.com(2) has a good article summing up some ideas presented at this years Tools of Change conference. It is a short article, but makes a brief summary on why DRM is not the way of the future. One quick quote: “You create piracy by the failure to release digital content. Don’t try to solve piracy: think about managing it.”
And then there are those who, by the very way they speak, demonstrate the depth of their failure to understand (or be willing to embrace) the future of publishing. At the BEA (Book Expo America) a bunch of prominent people in the publishing industry got together to talk about the future of publishing, and most of it was fretting, with comments like “Something’s radically wrong about the way the market has determined the value of the book.“(3) (Ie, things are too cheap.) The article is a fascinating look into the bunker mentally of fear and fighting the future.
For more reading, check out my own, “The Future of Publishing Series.”
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(1) http://www.thebookseller.com/in-depth/trade-profiles/122935-looking-beyond-print.html
(2) www.thebookseller.com/news/113616-copyright-piracy-and-anti-drm-dominate-tools-of-change.html
(3) www.thebookseller.com/news/119510-publishers-express-fears-over-price-paperbacks-and-fragmentation-at-bea.html
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