The Future of Books & Bookselling, Part I

Over the next week or so, I’ll be having a discussion with A.J. Kohn (of the Used Books Blog) about the current state and future of Internet bookselling. Our conversation will run here in installments, and you are free to jump in - we’ll incorporate comments into future posts.

If you don’t recognize the name, A.J. was, until recently, the Director of Direct Marketing and Sales at Alibris (that means he was in charge of search-engine marketing, the affiliate program, and advertising). Now he’s with Vizu, a technology company that has developed a polling widget and also a network of sites that allows businesses to do affordable and fast market research. A.J. has kindly offered to let us use the technology to ask a question about books or online bookselling. If you have ideas for what we should ask - and remember, this question will be asked to the general public all over the Internet, not just here - post it to the comments.

FB&C: As the former director of marketing for a company that facilitates the sales of physical goods – mostly books but also music and videos – do you think digital books will replace the real thing?

AJ: I'm not bullish on digital text for the near, or even mid-term future. I'll cast aside the past performance (or lack thereof) of eBooks hype and focus on our present situation and why I think the adoption of books in a digital form will be a laggard.

First and foremost, books are active in nature while music and movies are passive. I often work while listening to music, and movies create and present the story FOR you. Books on the other hand are absorbing and force the reader to engage in the entertainment, not just the act of reading, but the act of interpreting the text, of fixing the features of a character or a landscape or the inflection in dialog.

Second, there is no intrinsic advance in books or reading like there has been in music or movies. Advances in technology have disrupted those forms of entertainment, and once disrupted can be shaped into new and different forms.

For music, the sound quality is increased as we move from vinyl. (Yes, some will debate this, I know.) And then music suddenly became portable with boom boxes and walkmans. These were highly motivating factors that encouraged change within the music medium. For movies, it was the ability to watch movies in your home, from big screen to little. Then the advances in quality and now even portability. Again, highly motivating change factors that allow an industry to change and transform itself.

Books on the other hand have no inherent technology to expand upon. By in large they've been portable for quite a long time. There isn't an easy motivating change agent for books. I touched on this slightly in a recent review of Jasper Fforde's The Well of Lost Plots.

In this novel, Fforde writes about an upgrade to the book operating system, something he dubs UltraWord. This is the type of change would be an example of a motivating change agent that would likely push books into the digital mainstream.

Third, I don't think there is a lot of pent of demand for digital text. When music went digital, you likely had a vast collection of music that you were eager to upload and listen to. You might even have a movie collection that you'd be interested in watching from time to time. I've watched Fletch over and over - it never loses it's appeal. But is there a pent up demand for digital text?

How many times do you read a book? How many times do you read your favorite books? I'm running a poll on this topic and will have results soon. In lieu of that, I'd say that it's very unlikely that you'll read your favorite books more than you will listen to your favorite music. And while I loved the Hitchhiker's series, I've seen Spinal Tap plenty more times.

Again, reading is an active act, and it is also a time investment. If the average novel is 60,000 to 100,000 words and you read 250 words/minute, you're talking 4-7 hours for each novel.

So, even with the new Sony eReader, would I suddenly want to purchase and have my analog book 'collection' in digital form? No, particularly with a $300 price point for the device. And, as Marty Manley (Alibris CEO) reveals, when that breaks - you go back to basics and purchase the analog copy. From his July 2, 2007 post 'Hitchens vs God and Islamic Jihad':

"I busted the e-book while traveling, so I quickly bought a real copy from my favorite online seller of real books."

That's not to say that I don't think there is a market for digital text, I just don't think it will go mainstream anytime soon. I see the application for business and reference texts (Nolo Press) and maybe even cookbooks. By far the area that screams for it the most is textbooks. And should the transformation of analog to digital take place here, then you may find mainstream adoption as they grow up with digital text.

That brings us to the last point: inertia and an entrenched industry. What happens to all the Barnes & Nobles when everything is in digital text? Do publishers see an easy way to control and monetize digital text? These big questions that will keep digital text away from the spotlight for years to come in my opinion.

Tomorrow AJ reveals why online bookselling isn’t dead or dying.... Read it here.