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