Charlie Stross writes a Q & A about his free ebook editions… and I can’t help but feel a little proud, as I was talking about this stuff before there were even web browsers.
Synchronistically, I just got a request from Mark McGarry, who’s writing a piece for the International Herald Tribune, on my take on ebooks nowadays. Here’s what I sent him:
Electronic publishing and the Internet has completely and irrevocably changed traditional publishing. It’s a given in everything except what people expect an electronic book to be, a little gimgaw that has books on it.
Consider:
* There are no major newspapers or weekly magazines that do not have an online component. Many of them are more widely read than their paper editions, and may be more profitable. Readership and revenues for paper editions are plunging. (How many of your readers are reading this on a screen right now?)
* They stopped publishing a paper edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica a few years back. Most people didn’t even notice. Many other magazines have died or cut back from weekly to monthly, because their timeliness has been obliterated.
* Google has announced that they’re digitizing the libraries at Stanford, UMich, Harvard, Oxford, and the New York Public Library.
* It took less than twelve hours after release for the latest Harry Potter book to be placed online in a bootleg edition. Similarly, approximately 75% of all comic books ever published in the US have been scanned and distributed online illegally. And you’re as aware as I am of the thousands of books floating around online nowadays.
Sales are comparatively small, yes– but sales aren’t the only way to make money. Ad revenue has increased dramatically across the board, and people have discovered that giving copies of the book away online rarely hurts sales, if ever– indeed, it’s helped Cory and Charlie tremendously. And Bruce Sterling. And Baen. And so on. Most authors have found out that the number of people that read their weblog can dwarf the numbers who read their books– and blog readers come back day after day after day.
More, think of all the times that you’d go to look up something in a book and you go to Wikipedia or Ask Jeeves instead. Or hundreds of other different websites that in another time would be books– recipe sites, how-to sites, medical research, gardening, and thousands of subjects that just can’t fit in a bookstore.
So what’s the biggest problem? Finding the right price point. People clearly have no problem staring at computer screens for hours, but there’s so much free stuff available online, and it’s very hard to compete with free. But not impossible.
The bigger problem, to my mind, is demands on time– there’s just too much information and entertainment coming at us nowadays to absorb. If you can’t read everything in your RSS reader, or view everything in your PVR, or have a year’s worth of movies in your NetFlix cue, you begin to see the problem of adding just one more book to the pile– electronic or otherwise.
One of these days, I’m going to get around to reprinting the e-publishing columns I did for the SFWA Bulletin and see how they aged. I suspect they’ll age quite well, if my old revolutionary ideas have now become conventional wisdom.
They stopped publishing a paper edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica a few years back.
No they didn’t – the 2005 Print Set Suite is available from the Britannica Store, and I have the 2003 set on my shelves here.
More generally, I think that paper books and e-books both have their advantages and disadvantages. I now have 5 bookcases in my flat, and I’ve still running out of space, whereas buying a bigger hard drive is trivial. On the other hand, I always take a book to read whenever I’m on public transport – laptops are too clunky to serve that purpose, and PDAs only work for straight text rather than books that have photos/diagrams in them.
I think a bigger problem with e-books (and I’m an author of several, myself)is the lack of a screening process for good writing. Publishers more or less screen out bad writing, but as the internet has proven, any idiot can write and distribute on-line. With the vast quantity of junk out there, taking the time to mine for quality can be prohibitive.