Now that the E-book Is Here, Let's Make Books
With respect to other industries, the publishing industry has undergone slow transformations. Until now. The traditional and still dominant technology has consolidated over the space of five centuries extremely versatile support for three forms of fruition, which are now possible with specialized devices: relaxed reading (fiction and trade non-fiction), mobile reading (paperback travel reading), and interactive reading (research and learning).
The recent diffusion of increasingly functional devices is bound to make reading on paper less and less appealing. Unitil recently I was skeptical of the potential of e-books, but there are now several trends pointing toward a fundamental discontinuity that alters the trajectory of the industry.
The first is the emergence of "neutral" publishing formats enables the publisher to treat texts for reading across different platforms. Then there is the digital transformation of newspaper publishing and of classroom education, which are more potent agents of social and economic change, and push firms and consumers to ride the wave of innovation. And of course we see the marketing of dedicated readers and thus of catalogs of e-book titles creating market opportunities that force various actors in the supply chain to realign their behavioral patterns toward a new direction of business development.
All this could be not enough, though. Certainly, the iPad will be the cool present of Christmas 2010, and publishers know it well, and they have filled their catalogs with fall e-book titles. Still, we shold keep in mind that half of the population doesn't even read one book per year (school textbooks excluded). And half of those who read buy no more than three titles a year, hardly a justification to purchase a dedicated costly product which doesn't provide a sustantially superior "relaxed" reading experience with respect to an e-reader. But if the only advantage of the e-book is letting the voracious reader carry with him dozens of texts without having to lug a heavy briefcase, then the change won't be radical enough. But if we think about all the digital services that can enrich a travel guide or a college textbook, then the e-book opens the gates to a future of innovation and market expansion.
It will take time to see written works that fully seize the opportunities offered by the new devices, but I think the time has come for a different economics of book publishing. Amazon and Apple have done their share. Now it's for publishers to make their move. Or Google.