eBooks are everywhere. They romped gleefully through the London Book Fair, dominating all in their unstoppable zeitgeisty path. The Bookseller cannot stop writing about digital issues. Our dear broadsheets are even picking up on the story, reporting about the rise of digital here, here and here. Publishers, services providers, manufacturers, gurus, consultancies, warehouses, distributors, information vendors and, yes, readers pile joyfully into the gleaming future of the digital space. A utopian world of digital plenty is upon us. Undervalued for years, it seems that digital publishing is finding its place in the sun.
Which is why I am worried.
Things are good- too good. Booktwo highlighted this recently by linking to two articles written by Times columnist and author Ben Macintyre. The first is a breathless panegyric to the aforementioned digital future dating from 1999. The second is a retraction, a statement that “ebooks will never be our friends”, written in February of this year. In fairness to Macintyre the piece is much more balanced than the title suggests- he prophesies that people will read both on screens and in print.
Macintyre, it seems, learnt his lesson the hard way. That there is a lesson to be learnt here might be disputed: for many the digital revolution is assured, as certain as it is doomed for those who believe it will collapse. Amid the furore I think listening to Macintyre might help all of those, like myself, who have a vested interest in seeing digital publishing work.
All the noise surrounding eBooks might be detrimental if, for example, take up is slower than anticipated (and what is anticipated is not enormous). The constant media attention is welcome, but could inflate expectations over the short term and hence could harm the long term future of eBooks by scaring off investment before time and leading eBooks to be branded failures before they gain purchase in an uncertain marketplace. There would be no shortage of people lining up to say “I told you so” when, or if, eBook sales do not immediately shoot skyward.
My fear then is that we could be entering a hype bubble, a bubble that will be followed by the inevitable bust, i.e. people will assume eBooks have not worked out, just as people are now beginning to assume that they are the Next Big Thing.
So while all the discussion, the interest, the massed activity and the hopes are brilliant we should all acknowledge that this is the start of a long process, possibly a slow process and probably a difficult one. We should do this not in a spirit of negativity but rather with a sense of guarded optimism. This attitude safeguards the future, avoids the mistakes of the past and allows this exciting nascent media a chance to develop.
5 Comments
There is a fundamental problem in that it takes longer to build things than it does to talk about building them. Therefore for the most part the expectation runs ahead of the product. There are a few notable exceptions, such as the iPhone, but for the most part I think this is one of the root causes of inflationary pressure.
Hi,
The usage of ‘eBook’ in this article suggests it as a definable object, I see it more as a generic term. More a method of delivery – not something akin to HB/PB. Certainly as this article mentions, that method of delivery (both in accessing and purchase) needs to be considered, but the eBook (be it PDF, blog post, wiki, email) is something that wraps around the medium and is accessible from multi0le devices.
It’s certainly going to be a long process, just as music publishing is constantly evolving. What’s interesting with the music analogy is that the evolution is coming from other sources, namely the artists (radiohead, NIN) and social web (last.fm, musicovery, iTunes/iPod) and in a very iterative way (launch/tweek). For me the noise is more about a desire to get content electronically, as people are extremely used to it. There is a danger the same sort of evolution for book publishing comes from similar places. . People are now used to getting high quality writing (albeit for ad-supported free) from places as the dear broadsheets, (very) long blog posts from journalists, politicians, historians, comedians, scientists, writers and authors.
I feel people just want to access the content in a way they want to on a device they want to, and are certainly prepared to pay for that. I know I am reading content much more online than I ever did offline and availability of millions of books online would certainly enrich that experience. I think my point is that it will happen, indeed it already is happening.
Rich, I certainly agree that it’s happening, though longer fiction (i.e. novellas and novels) is taking longer to catch on. The problem is complex – everything from trustworthy filters of quality to the cost, availability, functionality, and user acclimatisation regarding e-devices to the changing nature of narrative art itself as a consequence of internet use. Personally, I’m also hoping that better models for indie writers to earn a modest living from their work aside from ad-supported sites will develop. All in all, I’m happy to ‘give it away’ in order to develop a readership, but I’m not typical.
Hype always creates expectations that can’t be met but ebooks (whatever they are – good points, Rich) have been through it before and survived. In fact they’ve been through hype, been dismissed, then been rediscovered, and now they’re back in hypeland again. They’re here, and we all agree are here to stay; they won’t totally replace offline and print but we probably all agree on that too. What’s important is that publishers recognise we’re living with a web of data that exists in and around the printed word and the users of the web of data want to be just that: users. Publishers need then to ensure their content is available as data for whatever users need it for. Hey, they might even read it.
It will be a good thing if the nascent ebook market does not become dominated by the top 100 titles in the way that most bookshops have done…the supermarket effect on book publishing. Digitisation could bring about much broader access to many more types of stories than we have currently. There are no certainties here, and it’s probably going to be a painful period for writers and publishers and readers as we all try to find our way through. But hype is tiresome and tiring. I’m with you, Michael, on the guarded optimism. Kate
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