Our discussion of the comparison of the music industry and the book publishing industry continues this week with
Question 3: Is there an opportunity to learn from the format that has been developed for music in downloading content?
The comments from last week’s Better Books: Part 2 certainly suggest that there is a great opportunity to be had from looking at the business models that work with music and those that work with books.
Victor from Bookyards points out that
Quote: The main difference between music and ebooks is the time component. A song lasts a few minutes, a book will take longer to consume. But even with this difference, ebook popularity has been steadily growing.
He goes on to offer some interesting insights into the number of book downloads from his competitors’ websites.
Dan makes a similar comment in this week’s “Better Books” conversation:
Quote: Technology has the potential to revolutionize both the music industry and book publishing — I just think it’s a mistake to assume that the outcomes will be the same. It doesn’t logically follow that we’ll want to download books because we like to download music.
Listening to music and reading a book are very different kinds of activities. On a very basic level, listening to music is often a passive experience; reading requires some kind of engagement.
Dan goes on to agree with my point from last week (a la Cory Doctorow) that the music industry has seen much greater change than the publishing industry in terms of the driving forces behind format.
Quote: Music has constantly evolved in terms of how we listen to it,- we have gone from vinyl to tapes, tapes to CDs, and CDs to MP3s in my lifetime,- because people wanted better sound quality and more convenient ways to listen to music. By comparison, books have hardly changed at all. The print quality has improved, but the format — the book itself,- was always a pretty handy (and cheap) way to read things so it has stayed the same more or less.
And, it’s not just that there isn’t a good way to read books digitally as yet (although I’m sure our kids won’t be as squeamish about reading digitally as we are), there are lots of great things about digital music that just don’t apply to books — downloading single tracks, shuffling songs, creating playlists etc etc. For now, most people still want to read books (especially fiction) cover to cover in the sequence in which they were published.
Dan does mention that “I can see that textbooks and manuals are going to have to go digital, but I would argue that this has more to do with competition from the likes of Google and Wikipedia than to music downloads.”
I differ on Dan’s opinion to some extend but more or less agree.
Paper is a damn good technology, and I suspect that we will see widespread use of ebooks when we no longer have trees to make paper.
But I disagree about there being no good way to read books digitally. I read all sorts of materials (long materials) online.
PDF is a great format. With my MacBook most text is quite easy to read for long periods of time (font on PCs really does suck). And although it’s difficult to drag a laptop to the beach or the bathtub, that’s not where I do most of my reading. It’s easy reading when you are propped up on the couch, in bed or at a desk.
For me the choice between digital and paper is about longevity. How long do I want to have ownership or access to a particular piece of work. There are some books I have to own. There are others that I’m happy to read online and, because I have a lowsy filing system, I’m sure to lose or misplace them without a care.
Short stories, poetry, reference books, recipes, trashy novels, I’m happy reading it online.
And, being in a university setting the last couple of months for the occasional guest speaking gig has shown me, quite clearly, that reading assignments, however long, are preferred in a digital format by students. It’s not our children, it’s the people who are 5 years younger, 10 years younger who are embracing this format.
I agree with Dan that textbooks and manuals are already digital. My point is that university students have no desire to buy and carry around textbooks. If they can read it online, they are happy to. There’s no question about it. Certainly some still want to highlight pages, but overall students have a totally different attitude to books for school. If it’s required for school, put it online: articles, novels, textbooks.
Reading for pleasure is the only category that really isn’t seeing advances in digital–again, Cory Doctorow would argue differently, “science fiction is the only writing that people are willing to steal online.” He releases everything for free from his website, gets hundreds of downloads, and enough sales of physical copies that his publishers are happy.
Doctorow argues that the challenge is not about losing physical sales because of free or almost free digital copies, but rather the challenge for any author is obscurity.
We’ve probably said enough, but Dan and I like to go on.
Dan points to Scott Pack, the Commercial Director of publisher The Friday Project and former head buyer for Waterstones bookshops. Scott recently posted his ideas about the comparison of the music and publishing industry on his blog Me and My Big Mouth.
I recommend subscribing to his blog.
And because we like to go on and on, after batting around ebooks, Dan and I drifted off into POD-land, Print on Demand.
Quote: It seems to me that there is also a good case to suggest that print-on-demand (POD) is really the future of publishing not downloads. British journalist Bryan Appleyard wrote a fascinating piece for the Times newspaper about it last year.
Honestly, I’m currently fascinated by the idea of POD, or at least a printing process that can respond quickly and cheaply to demand. To my mind this is where the industry should be looking,
It’s true, Bryan has an interesting perspective on POD being the wave of the future, but here again is a problem with technology.
The technolog exists to make books on demand. The technology exists for ebooks.
The problem is with quality.
The POD systems I’ve seen tend to have challenges printing full colour book covers. The interiors are ok but sometimes the binding isn’t as great as it could be.
Sure the technology continues to improve and even in the last 2 years I’ve seen a difference, but the costs have not come down the way a publisher would hope.
If it costs me as a publisher $6-10 dollars for a POD book and $3 for a traditional printed book then I’m going to go with the lower unit price and gamble on estimating the market demand for the book.
Where POD really can play a role is with books that would otherwise go out of print.
Like ebooks, POD is finding a market with out of print, obscure or copyright free books. Not so much with new releases.
It’s a big topic and one we aren’t going to completely cover today. I’ll stop there and say that next week we’ll look again downloading books, POD and the choices the publishing industry faces.
“Better Books” is a many-part conversation between publicist Dan Wagstaff and Monique Trottier, which looks at the book publishing industry’s challenges, successes and promises from a technology perspective.