| Books
in a Cyberworld
The Future
of Books
The Future of Publishing
Industry
Will Books Survive?
Many have predicted the death of books in a digital
age, but the fact is that more book titles are published today than
ever, with increasing numbers sold online. (Article by Dr Patrick
Dixon, Director Global Change Ltd)
I have recently opened an online book
shop of my own, offering instant book sales. I
am selling 1.5 million other titles, taking instant electronic
orders from all over the world on credit card for a commission of
8%. It took me 30 minutes to create it, design the entrance and
get ready for customers. It costs nothing to set up and run or maintain
- the robots do it all. I never see online book sales, or invoices.
In a virtual world all I see is a check each month. Life's too short
to get bogged down in mail order when a virtual company will do
it all for you.
High street bookshops are still usually cheaper than
the net because online discounts are less than postage. Expect that
to change as volumes increase. However "real" bookshops
will still have an edge when customers want to browse, hold, feel,
smell, turn the pages. But for many people who have made a decision
to buy, the convenience of online ordering is more important than
price.
 So
here is a paradox: a virtual world
trading in physical books. What about virtual books? Will paper
books still find a market? The longer term answer is "yes"
for fiction but "no" for much of the rest. It's already
happening. Books are compact, easy to read, convenient to store,
and pleasurable to hold. They cannot be beaten when it comes to
fiction which requires a start-to-finnish, comfortable read. But
book publishing is heading for a major crisis when it comes to non-fiction,
especially for textbooks and reference works.
Twenty years ago my wife and I spent £1,500 in real
terms on Encyclopaedia Britannica "for the children".
Today the volumes are almost unused, despite four children at home
doing school projects..
We could have bought a CD-ROM replacement of course for a mere £150
but why bother when better is available for free?
The cost of all information is falling rapidly to
zero, with a small premium for up-to-the-minute quality comment
on instant-access news. No encyclopaedia
can possibly compete with what I already have on my PC for nothing.
Encyclopaedias are simply too small.
Take my nine-year-old son: after a recent cub camp
weekend he returned with an assignment to write a one-page "newspaper"
account. Within eight minutes of logging online he had located lots
of vital information about the organization - and even found an
aerial colour photo of the campsite. In seconds text and pictures
were cut and pasted into his project. The result was semi-professional,
attractive, informative - and up to date. No conventional publication
could have delivered this.
All
non-fiction books are competing with a free online resource which
is growing every day by more than 800 million floppy disks. In one
week alone this year, one group of companies in the US added 43
million entire documents. Of course, the saying is "rubbish
in, rubbish out" and there's a lot of rubbish on the net. But
search guides are becoming very easy to use and powerful, and some
trim out almost all the rubbish. Any regular user has his or her
own favorite starting places, which may be lists of vital sites
collated by someone else with very similar interests.
The most useful electronic "books" are not
more than a few pages in length and would be worth paying for -
but are given away for nothing. They consist of lists of reviewed
links with star ratings for content. Lists will never make money:
 |
The culture is
that information is free, including information about where
to find other information. |
|
Distribution
costs are effectively zero. |
|
Lists are impossible
to protect by copyright, and can be sent to tens of thousands
of people in seconds at no cost. |
|
Enthusiastic
amateur information detectives easily cover by direct sponsorship
of advertising or by the gift of time the nominal cost of
developing such publications. |
The Internet wins hands-down when it comes to data.
In contrast to the linear fiction read, people searching for facts
want instant random access to constantly updated sources. For a
while CD-ROMs such as Encarta (lower cost than Britannica) will
fill a market gap for those who don't have access on-line or are
unfamiliar with the net. It is still true that there are thousands
of useful articles on CD-ROMs that have no equivalent on the net
but that will not be the case tomorrow.
But
what about fiction? Will electronic novels ever be as easy to read
and handle as a paperback? Possibly yes. The two limits on long
digital reads are lack of resolution on screens and lack of contrast.
The blacks are not black enough and the whites are dull or glaring.
Expect this to change by 2010 with the first true digital books.
Most people will only own two or three at most. Each will have several
hundred blank pages, bound in a conventional cover. These books
will be loaded with the text of any work you want to read, and will
be as easy to read as traditional books today. They will be able
to carry many volumes, selected instantly from memory. Prototype
ultra-thin high-resolution flexible sheets are already in development.
So then, paper books will continue for many years
to come, with competition from digital publications in non-fiction.
All book retailing will be influenced in future by the electronic
mail order business and price will be a critical factor. Tomorrow's
most powerful book clubs will be net-based.
Another important issue is falling print costs - despite
what publishers will tell you about labour and paper and ink. The
fact is that I have recently printed 10,000 paperback books with
a glossy full colour cover for just 33 American cents each - in
India. And a book twice the size would not have been much more.
That included all typeset, design, cover origination and warehousing.
Finally, the nature of book writing itself will change
profoundly, as it did with the advent of the word processor. My
grandfather edited Chambers Encyclopaedia with ink and pencil, through
no more than three or four drafts. Today's works can go through
thousands of layers of revision in the same time. Tomorrow's first
drafts will be created with speech recognition.
I can already dictate up to 100 words a minute
of continuous speech into my computer, which is the equivalent
of 6,000, words an hour or a complete paperback in less than twenty
hours.
Electronic
books allow hyperlinking - instant jumps from one idea to another
in another part of the book or in another work. This is the essence
of true research: digging deeper in unique ways through layers of
knowledge to create a new understanding. But it also allows hyper-story
creation, where the reader shapes the outcome of a novel by making
hundreds of choices along the way. In a visual TV-dominated age,
expect many of these kind of "books" to become interactive
soap operas or feature films with minimal text backed by fully animated
cartoons or video sequences.
So then, if you are a bookseller, sit tight; carry
on selling as you are today. Your greatest threat is not the web
or CD-ROMs but the massive realignment of the retail trade with
the ending of the net book agreement and aggressive bargain selling
by large chains.
If you are a publisher, reckon that the capital invested
in a reference book will need to be written off even faster than
before and that cyberspace will become the natural graveyard for
most non-fiction books once their initial selling spurt is over.
Remainder the physical stock and give
the text away on the net. Your competitors will do so, and authors
with any sense will insist on it. There is nothing more depressing
for a writer than a much-cherished work going out of print.
And finally, if you are an entrepreneur and want to
make history, get into multimedia web publishing as fast as you
can, but make sure your backers are in for the long haul. Push the
medium to the limits, invest in first class information sources,
give it all away for free, generate heavy traffic and sell advertising
space.
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