Traditional publishers are worthless when it comes to e-books that the author can market himself. Distribution is taken care of so only marketing/advertising is left and that can also be taken care of by a competent author.
I'm really, really interested in the future of content publishing and how things will look fifty years from now. There's a trend across almost all forms of media towards easier, faster, wider and less expensive production and distribution. This is a Good Thing, but it introduces some interesting problems.
One of the main roles of traditional publishing is content curation. This seemed less important in the past when it simply seemed a byproduct of media products (books, tv shows, films etc.) being expensive to produce and distribute. But now, it's becoming clearer that curation is going to become a difficult problem to solve when it's trivial for people to publish their own product on the same platform as internationally successful content authors.
Sturgeon's law applies. In fact, it applies more now than ever because the minimum bar of quality has been lowered. How are we going to navigate something like the Kindle store as vastly increasing proportions of it become saturated with garbage?
I know curation is kind of a buzzword in startup circles at the moment, but it's vastly, vastly important. As a trivial aside, in another tab I'm reading a thread where people recommend the best little-known free software they use. Most of the top replies recommend a single software, most of which I then took a look at. One of them is a list of perhaps 20 softwares; my eyes glazed over and I moved on to the next reply.
You bring up a good point. Curation (filtering) has been quite a huge problem for quite some time. While I do think that traditional publishing houses provided this, they did so at the expense of great writing. So it was far from a perfect system. A lot of crap got and still gets published and a lot of good content doesn't.
I wish I had an answer for it. I tend to look at the music scene, specifically electronic, for a relatively successful model: the DJ as filter (curator). I'm not sure that such an equivalent can be achieved with movies let alone books.
I do think a lot of it will have to come from self promotion and word of mouth (whether by actual mouth or electronic) will become more and more important. It's already almost impossible to navigate the Kindle store if you don't know what you're looking for and that goes for other similar services (Amazon Prime Streaming, Netflix, Hulu, etc.). For example, Netflix ratings in my experience are pretty decent indicators of the quality of most movies, so for some crowdsourcing the value of media may work. (You need a good algorithm and a large enough data set of rated movies.) Others may choose to go more with suggestions from readers whose taste they trust.
What I'd like to see is literary reviews that are accessible to the common reader and that do not assume that you've read the book. This is similar to a lot of the book/movie criticism out there, except for the last clause which is imperative for finding a good book rather than analyzing an already read one.
> In the middle of November, Little, Brown dropped the price from $9.99 to $2.99 for 24 hours — the digital equivalent of a one-day-only sale. "That sparks sales; it gets people talking about it," says Terry Adams, a publisher with Little, Brown. "You've just expanded the market."
Very similar to what Valve is doing.
Now that books are more flexible in their distribution channels like software, what other things could publishers do? Downloadable content for books in the form of new chapters? Embedded animated diagrams or quizes? Interactive content, like a printed version of Sleep No More (http://sleepnomorenyc.com/tickets.htm) ? Code environment simulators like we so often nowadays on websites that teach you how to program? DIY-Language books that harass you to read them if you slack off in reading them enough?
I know exaggeration is the game sometimes, but really they're changing traditional publishing, not destroying. Hugh MacLeod says it better than I can in 'Print is the new Artisanal': http://gapingvoid.com/2012/12/13/artisnal/ (features a great comment from Kathy Sierra too.)
A case in point that I read in the Sunday Times a few days ago is Igloo Books - http://igloobooks.com/ - their revenue is climbing rapidly (>$30m last year) and they focus on print (I believe they were only founded in 2003). They're thriving because the lower quality end of the market is hurting. Fiction is rapidly moving to digital but for both high quality and art-rich publications, there's now more space available to them in retail. Igloo, for example, now has excellent placement in retail in a way they couldn't have achieved 10 years ago. Like Igloo, there are many "traditional" publishers that are really anything but.. but they're still print oriented and doing well for it.
In the magazine scene, at least here in Europe, a common vibe right now is that digital distribution will perhaps wipe out 90% of the print run but that the remaining 10% will be a thriving higher quality industry that's different but not destroyed.
Ebooks are helping to rip apart traditional publishing, but the biggest thing tearing publishing apart is the disintermediation of their traditional Brick and Mortar channel partners by online bookselling. Further exasperating things one retailer, Amazon, has captured the majority of the online book business.
Publishing companies are all B2B companies with most publisher brands meaning very little to readers, but a lot to their retailer partners. Unlike most consumer goods, books are returnable to the publishers for a full refund if not sold which has been the glue keeping publishers and booksellers workign together since the 1930's.
Publishers were tied to their partners and couldn't walk away from them to go after new opportunities. Further, the "culture" of the industry is such that everyone leading it grew up in publishing so many players never even saw what was happening because they knew how the world worked.
It would be very interesting to see statistics about this based on location.
Traditional booksellers (and many other types of "small item" retailers) get a lot of casual drop-in business, and fare much better where there's heavy pedestrian traffic. Consequently, places like the U.S. where many people live in sparse suburbs that require them to drive to the store, should be experiencing a much great loss of drop-in businesses like bookstores tend to be.
[This certainly matches my impression; the area I live in, Tokyo, despite bookseller and publisher hardships (no place is really safe), still has a huge number of bookstores, with many to be found in any busy shopping area. The news stories I read about the U.S. on the other hand, make the situation there sound absolutely dire, with bookstores seemingly disappearing completely in some areas...]
For one thing, digital publishers have the same problem that record labels do: piracy
This is not new and it existed before the e-book publishing started to grow. I remember reading a digital edition of the Lord of the Rings 15 years ago. Found it on the 'net. Somebody OCRed the paperback. This is still happening.
What helps the publishers is that with the new reading devices it's easier to buy an original e-book than pirate it. What doesn't help them is that many times the original e-book you buy is actually worse than the one OCRed by the fans. I saw original e-books that lack images or they offer only low-res versions, while the pirated one looks better and contains every image at high resolution.
"We actually don't have a good gifting tradition yet for e-books," says Sourcebooks' Raccah. Despite all the advances in reading technology, physical books are still the best Christmas presents.
Yes, that is sad. Or even lending (looking at you Amazon!). Nevertheless, e-books have done to publishing what mp3s and online video has done to the record labels / movie studios.
It's basically killed them, yet they are still running around with zombies waiting for that headshot to put them down for good.
E-books are here to stay and publishers, just like record labels, are useless as one can now establish a firm and successful marketing campaign mostly through the web.
Self-publishing may not kill e-books by publishers but has killed not only their monopoly, but also their whole business model.
Welcome to 2013. Accept it or zombify. Or better yet,
I don't see the problem here. If you want to give ebooks as a gift, give them a birthday/Christmas card with a unique short URL. The recipient types in the URL, gets a few seconds of a happy birthday song/Christmas carol, then they automatically download their gift.
The key here is to make obtaining the gift as frictionless as possible. The recipient shouldn't need to create an account, fill out a captcha, verify their email, re-log back into the website, upload their profile pic ("wait, are you sure that's you? We don't see a face here"), pick 5 of their favorite books then stand on their head and spit wooden nickels.
Of course the flipside of that is that an ebook seems sort of ... "cheap." Not literally cheap (the publishers will make sure of that ><), but ... the kind of thing you buy while checking facebook, 5 minutes before showing up to the party.
Oddly that sort of thing would make me rather prefer to give someone a physical book as a gift, even if I know they'd kinda prefer an ebook...
