

E-Books Destroying Traditional Publishing? - theone
http://www.npr.org/2012/12/27/168068655/e-books-destroying-traditional-publishing-the-storys-not-that-simple

======
petercooper
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._

Here in the UK, frequent visitors to newsagents and stores like Tesco may have
also noticed a trend on the newsstand of _children's_ magazines and
periodicals taking over an increasingly larger space. This is no accident.
With the ability to offer small toys on the cover, stickers inside, and with a
very art-driven aesthetic, print really suits these publications and the
childrens' magazine scene is blowing up, in a good way (some easy citations:
[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/aug/16/moshi-
monsters-s...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2012/aug/16/moshi-monsters-
sales-rise-magazine-abc-roundup)
[http://babbleabout.co.uk/2012/04/23/childrens-magazines-
gett...](http://babbleabout.co.uk/2012/04/23/childrens-magazines-getting-past-
the-buy-one-magazine-get-five-tacky-two-minute-wonder-toys-for-free-to-
something-educational-and-beautiful/) [http://www.fipp.com/news/PPA-says-UK-
ABC-figures-show-sustai...](http://www.fipp.com/news/PPA-says-UK-ABC-figures-
show-sustained-demand-for-print)).

Fewer TV guides, less fiction, less crap.. and more stuff that _deserves_ to
be in print. It's still happening.

(Added: Magazine addict Jean Snow seems to have some similar thoughts -
<http://themagaziner.com/2013/01/magazines-in-2013/>)

------
sown
> 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?

------
charonn0
E-books revived my inner bookworm, and I'm sure I'm not alone in that.
Traditional publishers who snub the e-book market are throwing money away.

~~~
lucian303
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.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

~~~
gabemart
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.

~~~
lucian303
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.

------
johnrgrace
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.

~~~
snogglethorpe
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...]

------
miahi
_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.

------
lucian303
"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,

die;

~~~
milkman
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.

~~~
snogglethorpe
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_...

