Monday, 18 June 2012

Impact of eBooks on publishing etc going forward



What do you think is going to happen to the publishing industry now that e-books are really taking hold? And you read stories about authors successfully self-publishing via Amazon.

It seems to me that the effect on the publishing industry will be as profound as the effect on horse breeding when cars became common.

It will still exist but the industry will be much smaller and more niche. Perhaps mainly concentrating on the sort of coffee table book that can't be appreciated fully on a Kindle or iPad.

I know many people say they will never give up on the hard copy format for books – I used to be one of them, myself.  But for normal print books without illustration, I have no double that the e format is the way to go.  Quite apart from anything else it frees up so much storage in your house if you don't have shelves and shelves of books.

But one of the other impacts that worries me is that it is going to get harder and harder to identify new books that you want to read.   So we'll keep on reading our old favourite authors and this will make it harder for new authors to break into the market.  Not many individual authors will have the skill or money to be able to market their book the way the mass market publishers can.  This problem is already occurring in the music scene.

And, it has to be said, making it easy to self-publish books will lead to a lot of lesser quality works making it to market.  They might be very creative but won't have benefitted from a professional editing process.

On the up side, there will be much more scope for niche books that would never have otherwise been published.  On balance I think that ebooks are going to be good for authors.  But not perhaps for publishers, book stores, agents and editors.  But I think there will be a real place for credible book reviewers and for sharing opinions on books by blog – one of the reasons I have started the monthly Books You Loved series.

One thing's for sure though – the price of e-books must reduce significantly or people will just vote with their feet and download them for free. The old pricing model just has to go. And if Amazon and Apple (and others) don't make this change, there will be pressure on governments to do something about it.

What do you think the future holds for books? And libraries?

2 comments:

  1. I've thought about the exact same thing. I'm a book lover. I do own a kindle. I find the newer books for kindle are so expensive, so I still prefer to borrow mine them from the library. I think in the future there will be more used book stores rather then Barnes and Nobles or other stores like it. We'll see.... Great post!
    www.findyoursparkle2.com I just did a review on one of my favorite books "Kisses From Katie" :)

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  2. Maybe I'm an over-optimistic book lover but I don't think e-books will ever fully take over the market. I think we'll always have libraries. Personally, I don't like reading using a screen... It's a waste of power and I miss turning pages.

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