Publishing, we're told, is on the brink of its iPod moment. Something - maybe the Kindle, maybe something else - will make electronic books so brilliant that it'll change the way we read forever.
That may well be true, but if publishers fall for it they're signing their own death warrants.
For all its joys, digital music has been a disaster for record companies. But while the internet was always going to hurt the CD, that doesn't mean it has to do the same to books.
The difference is digital. Music has been digital since the CD was invented, so it was only a matter of time before the internet took that digital data and stuck it on Napster, Kazaa, the Pirate Bay and so on.
On the legal side of things, it quickly became obvious that whoever dominates the market gets the power, which is why Steve Jobs is now the most important man in the music business.
Books are pirate-proof
Books, though, generally aren't digital. And that's what makes them so great, not least because they're pretty much pirate-proof. If there isn't a digital source, it's hard to make digital copies.
Who can be bothered looking for a scanned or retyped version of Jade Goody's biography when the real thing only costs a couple of quid, isn't hobbled with some daft DRM scheme and can be turned into a flaming torch or hurled out of a window when the prose gets too tedious? And who's going to bother scanning or retyping it in the first place?
Books aren't music. You don't read a book when you're concentrating on something important, you don't skip between chapters, books and authors in the space of a few minutes and you don't need 1,000 different titles to read on the bus.
Unless you're constantly hopping on and off planes or lugging around heavy textbooks, the electronic book is the answer to a question you didn't ask.
There are other differences. The MP3 player owes its existence to unauthorised copying, especially in the UK where CD ripping is technically illegal.
By contrast, there's no easy way to rip your existing library of books - are you really going to scan them? Really? - and while illegally copied books are available online, book sharing isn't mainstream.
Pirate content
That means there isn't much illegal content to drive hardware sales, which mean that the Kindle is some way away from being the iPod of books. If publishers are smart, they'll keep it that way.
Don't get us wrong. Electronic books could be a boon in some areas: niche titles that won't trouble your local Tesco, for example, or short stories, self-publishing and anything else that doesn't do big numbers.
They make sound sense for subscription content such as magazines and newspapers, too. But for mainstream books, the blockbuster novels and the celebrity autobiographies, there's absolutely no reason to make them digital.
The music industry discovered far too late that it wasn't in the music business: it was in the business of making plastic things that just happened to play music. The internet made those plastic things obsolete.
Right now, the publishing industry faces a similar change. If it goes digital, it's moving into a world where there are bigger, more powerful and more experienced players, and those players will eat the publishers' lunch; if the book trade thinks supermarket discounting is making its life difficult, it ain't seen nothing yet.
By sticking to dead trees, however, the book publishers can keep on doing what they're doing. Sure, some people will be happy with a leaked download of Harry Potter, or a badly scanned how-to manual. But they'll be the minority.
Recorded music is a relatively new invention, but books have been around for nearly two thousand years and mass-produced books for several hundred. If publishers don't rush into digital, they could be around for hundreds more.
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Your comments (4) Click to add a new comment
kasino72
April 24th 2009
4. Anon654: I think we're in the early days of electronic paper. There are plenty of prototypes and concepts where PCs use it. I think right now the tech is good enough for dedicated readers but not good enough for multi-function devices such as PCs. That'll change.
E-paper today reminds me very much of the screens you used to get on the Psion mini-laptops: monochrome, smeary and desperately slow. Now, manufacturers are starting to put HD colour displays into similarly sized netbooks. E-paper will go the same way at a similar speed, I suspect.
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kasino72
April 24th 2009
3. Liquidindian: I agree that the music business stuck its head in the sand for too long, but I think there's another key thing: the CD. By standardising on that format the music business essentially moved to an all-digital distribution, and it didn't (couldn't?) predict the arrival of the CD drive. That started a ball rolling - CD-Rs, MP3 compression and file sharing - and it couldn't stop it, because pretty much everything it sold now contained easily copied digital data.
It's rather ironic, because had the industry stuck with vinyl and cassette, it wouldn't be in the mess it's in now. Piracy would have remained at the taping the top 40 off Radio 1 level. But the record companies thought that if they made those formats obsolete, they could make an enormous amount of money. They were right, but they were also laying the foundations for the Napster moment, the Metallica moment and the iPod moment.
If CD hadn't been invented, I don't think we'd have cassette players in PCs or computers hooked up to turntables. Not in any big numbers, anyway.
I think with books, we're in that situation now. The overwhelming majority of content is delivered in an analogue format that's exceptionally hard to copy, and unlike the CD I don't think there's a book ripping technology in development or likely to be in development. Some people scan books, but not many (There was a news story yesterday about "the pirate bay for books" - it was an online library where people sent real books to one another). Non e-book piracy is still so small as to be completely irrelevant.
The ebook, though, is the CD. DRM will be cracked, files will be shared, readers will try the free option before considering payment, on the legal side of things one or two online retailers will have all the market power. It's inevitable. Piracy might not happen in anything close to the numbers you see in music, but it'll happen. So purely from a book publisher's point of view, the longer they resist digital the happier they'll be.
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anon654
April 23rd 2009
2. Books should be allowed to become digital, but they should be able to be viewed on any digital device with a decent sized display.
Personally, I think ebooks should not be limited to proprietary readers. I think there are very few people who would by a reader instead of a cheap laptop or netbook. But one feature that the proprietary readers have is long battery life, which is due to the static image and the display not needing power until the image is changed. If this kind of display could cleanly show fast movement, and had the ability to display colours with a good contrast (when powered), yet still had the ability to show static images without using power, then there would be no benefits to having a proprietary reader over a laptop or netbook with the possible exception of the difference in weight.
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liquidindian
April 23rd 2009
1. Book sharing isn't yet mainstream, but it would be madness to assume that it'll stay this way. Ignoring the potential issue is how the music industry got into its current troubles. Publishing should engage with digital nice and early - with the iPod moment might come the Napster moment, the Metallica moment...
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