I half agree and half disagree. I think the digital conversion of books are more likely to affect certain categories more than others. Among such categories, I would place the following: travel (already quite affected), cookbooks, crafts and how-to, college textbooks, business books (already affected), references, and possibly current affairs. While I do believe that serious fiction, poetry, philosophy, and arts won’t be as affected directly, it will be affected indirectly in the following ways:
1) Large general bookstores will be affected by losses in other categories and many could close down, both chain stores and independents. This will be a large loss in many towns where the only bookstore is a general bookstore.
2) Large publishing houses will have to figure how to adapt to the new digital format properly across multiple categories in order to survive. While there are the high-end niche readers who would contend that the large houses are not publishing the books that matter to them, I would say that there is a give and take relationship between the large and small houses. Many times, a large house will take on an author from a smaller house, paying the smaller house a nice fee for those rights that goes towards keeping such smaller houses sustainable. Additionally, such a scenario means that the larger houses’ powerful publicity and marketing arms will provide a second life to the author’s backlist as well as additional revenues for the small house.

I agree with a lot of this. Wouldn’t you say, too, that for a lot of these categories POD will come into play? I’m thinking of along the lines of what Apple offers with their customizable photo books. I can imagine people really jumping on something like that vis a vis cookbooks, textbooks (this has already been going on for a long time with class readers), and maybe even something along the lines of travel. Anywhere where the keepsake aspect of it is enough to make people want a printed book.

Point 1 is totally accurate. This has already killed some great indies.

Isn’t 2 complicated by the fact that a number of large houses don’t know if they’ve bought the electronic rights or not (e.g. Random House declaring pre-emptively that they own rights that aren’t explicitly stated in contracts)?

Yes, I think you are dead-on about Apple’s customizable photo books as a prototype for what publishers can do to reach out to an increasingly tech-savvy readership. In regards to what you write about textbooks, I was struck by Macmillan’s recent announcement of textbooks that can be digitally sliced as well as text that can be written over. I believe that such applications, if made available in trade books– particularly for craft and how-to categories– will be widely used.
In regards to POD, one of the things I’ve been wondering is if Espresso machines are being offered at the optimal places where they would be used. If the Espresso machine was only being offered for out of print titles, bookstores make sense.

However, if people want to collate files and create their own books (such as the cookbook example where I could imagine myself taking multiple recipes from various cookbooks and putting it together as “My Favorite Recipes”) it’s possible that the Espresso machine would be more useful if available at the local drugstore like a copier or a fax service.

Any house, large or small, that has not secured electronic rights is facing a difficult road ahead with multiple negotiations. I take back what I wrote (oh so recently) about authors not being willing to take on their own marketing and publicity by self-publishing their books. This past week saw two announcements by authors who are trying out the self-publishing route. If this does turn to be a larger trend, there will be more robust publicity/marketing/sales services provided to such authors who would reap the entirety of their royalty payments, provided they are willing to pay an upfront service fee. I imagine that it is possible for such service “publishers” to take on the legal service model where the author would be given a bill that accounts for billable hours, phone calls, print services, etc. I don’t think it’s only royalties that authors are seeking but also the possibility of keeping all their books available to the readership. I assume that authors and agents are now actively seeking to change contract models and my feeling is that publishers should respond by proactively finding out what their authors want and providing an attractive package.

That’s something I was wondering about POD too–if bookstores could work it to make the “build-your-own-book” model function in a traditional bookstore, or if it would just be too confusing. I’m guessing that the building of the book is something people would want to do in their own homes, but maybe a bookstore could build a workshop around it (e.g. do a cookbook-building event with a celebrity chef on a book tour) to give people a reason to come out and do it there.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens with self-publishing. I still have the feeling that the culture is at a place where self-publishing isn’t “real,” and even people who buy their own PR will do it in hopes of getting picked up by a publisher. Also I wonder about the future of PR in a self-publishing world. I get enough emails from independent PR firms to know that some of them are really awful and are just filling in blanks, and some of them are staffed by really smart people who know how to sell a book. So will be interesting to see what trends emerge in terms of what kind of self-published author ends up with what kind of firm.

One thing that often strikes me about the e-book conversation – especially with regard to Levi’s notion of a ‘revolution’ – is that it often seems to forget that a profound reading revolution has already happened: the Web itself! Still largely a text-driven medium, the Web means millions now read “stuff” (like this blog) on a screen who never read on a screen before…

Further, I’m still at a loss, really, to think why I’d bother to read an e-book on a dedicated reader and not on a multitasking machine that gives me a reading experience which is only “bad” when compared to an eReader if I want to read in situations that I rarely want to read in (say in bright sunlight or in the bath!)

But that doesn’t matter. A small market is there, and growing, and they will make some eReaders a profitable proposition. But, alongside that, there are enough nay-sayers – and publishing is cheap – to mean that the codex has a bright future. As Levi says, if this revolution was going to happen it would have happened. Books are not CDs.

You’re both right to say that e-books seem to be affecting certain areas within book publishing (business and travel) but not really doing much to e.g. fiction. But fiction buying is a very small part of profit-driven publishing (literary fiction a yet still smaller part of that small tranche). And I think that fiction’s niche status is what is actually preventing mass e-book take up: there actually isn’t a mass to take it up!

Apple’s iPad is interesting for magazine publishers – the B&W Kindle doesn’t reflect magazine’s content very well. And the iPad (for all its faults) has set its stall out as the big challenge to the Kindle. The next Kindle will be colour; the next gen iPad will be Flash compatible and able to mulitask. All good. But note the “mission creep” here – eReaders know, in their hearts, that they are rubbish computers. Books, happily, never have to suffer that particular existential angst!

Mark: Good points here. I agree with you that the iPad’s strength at this point looks to be magazines. Not that I would buy a $500 device to read magazines on, but I didn’t buy a first-gen iPod either, and now I use that thing every single day.

The mission creep point is a good one. Beyond a certain segment of the population that really loves technology or needs an e-reader for professional reasons, I’m not sure how excited people are to be reading e-books. But if you could give that gadget a few more apps that people perceive as useful (e.g. text-to-speech, which people seem to really be liking), then, yeah, I think the market will broaden.

There really should be no argument about e-books at all. E-books exist and convey literature in a perfectly legitimate way to readers. That’s it.

I get my serendipity fix looking at women not books.

Or think of it this way: an e-book is simply one extra book on your shelf. But it’s a magic book that connects to a theoretical everything. You’ve got your three hundred books in the room with you and you’ve got your ten million books in that little sliver of plastic on the coffee table.

It’s a slow revolution until you buy one. But then watch.

Mark, I agree with you that the internet itself is a huge argument for digital text. If anything, I think the internet, entertainment, music and games are more likely to make books obsolete rather than e-book readers.

I used to be one of those people horrified that George W. Bush had not read a single continuous book. However, in recent years, spending more time with people who are neither in the book industry nor academics, I realize that George W. Bush is more emblematic of how Americans read (or don’t read) than serious readers. There are so many other ways in which the storytelling need in us is satisfied: movies, tv, video games with elaborate story structures, and yes, the internet. Whereas movies, tv, and video games have all existed before, better technology and better services means that all these storytelling outlets are now available constantly.

More than a switch to format, I fear that an increasingly larger percentage of Americans will stop reading discretely contained texts (books) and be satisfied with reading only for information.

In using the word “fear” in my previous paragraph, I privilege the act of reading as a superior way of satisfying that part of me that needs a story. The reason why I think reading is superior is because it necessitates both time and interpretation. Its very lack of immediacy means that the self must work to interpret the text, and it is exactly that lack of immediacy which makes it an endangered activity in a world where immediacy is a very attractive part of more technologically advanced storytelling.

Soo Jin: Couldn’t agree more. Just the other day I read the statistic that the average American reads something on the order or 100,000 words per day. That’s a novel a day!

Of course, this kind of reading is very different than the kind experienced when you spend a week with a lengthy text purposely composed to function on numerous levels at once and to treat certain questions with great depth.

To paraphrase something the late David Foster Wallace said years ago, the more the world becomes fragmented, the more it needs good writers who can help us form narratives.

Scott, thanks so much for that David Foster Wallace quote….You made my day! You are right (and David Foster Wallace too): narrative-forming still is, and always will be, a meaningful act.