Apple Isn’t The Only Disruptor: How Amazon Is Killing Publishers
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I really hope this was caused by luck and timing, and perhaps by the overwhelming focus on SOPA - but a voice in the back of my head is saying that it could well be getting more attention for being from TechCrunch, which would be sad.
Regardless, better to see it on the front page now than not at all, good piece.
I'm still young, but I never thought I would see this day come. Go back to 1990 and tell the average person on the street that in the next few decades, bookstores would all go out of business and the only way to buy a book would be to read it on a digital device. They'd either flatly refuse to believe you, or be frozen in horror. Yet that's where we're headed, not so far in the future, and as far as I can tell, there's nothing we can do about it.
Look at the features: a) It smells better b) You can store them and it only takes an entire room of your house c) They weigh enough such that you can curve your children's distressingly straight spines with them.
Flipping to the index or table of contents, keeping a pen or finger in another page and flipping back and forth. Once that is figured out I will be a complete convert and stop preferring physical books.
What would be nice would be gestures. Maybe tap once, make a gesture and it remembers that gesture as a bookmark to that location. Later, make a line and the same gesture and it heads to that bookmark.
This way you can be looking at a chart, tap and make a number one. Head a few pages or another chapter down, tap and make a number two, a line and number one to look at the chart again and a line and a number two to head back where you were. Or maybe a standard "back" gesture.
Pressing multiple buttons and following many links is nowhere near friendly enough.
The gestures suggestion above still only works if you know you're going to be returning to a location when you get to it. Flipping through the book to quickly find a past location is a harder problem to solve.
iBooks has an 'overview' mode that sort of works if the book is well marked up. However it's not nearly as good as flipping, & the processor needs to be much faster.
http://ipadwatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/ibooks-pdf...
I don't read books for the experience of turning pages - I read them for the experience of reading and interpreting and taking in a story.
What exactly is more romantic or useful about reading the latest Stephen King novel on a tablet versus a bound sheaf of paper?
The death of the printed book boils down reading to the bare essence of appreciating the written word.
You also compared your favorite parts of one medium with your least favorite parts of another. Why not ask yourself your favorite parts of ebooks and your worst parts of books also? You'll have a more valid comparison then.
I point this out because this pattern of comparing things is so common -- confusing opinion with objective truth and comparing the best of A with the worst of B -- and we benefit from avoiding the pattern. I didn't mean just to single javanix out and I hope this came out respectfully.
When I can easily browse my bookshelf in actual physical three dimensional space, it's easier for me to move backwards and forwards through thoughts and ideas that I have acquired from those books, thoughts that otherwise would get easily buried in digital layers of organization.
Don't get me wrong--I am pro e-book. I have many in my collection. While technology allows me to simplify many things and aggregate diverse objects to a single place, it doesn't solve or simplify how I organize books (and to me books represent hundreds of hours of invested time and education). To say that with an e-book everything is at my fingertips is somewhat misleading. The organization of a physical library still beats the organization of my books in Kindle or iBooks or any of the number of programs I've tried. And for a lot of my comics and art books, the dimensions of the paper itself is part of the final product.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, or maybe when I have touchscreen wallpaper I'll consider switching over to completely digital.
I'm also concerned about volatility. Paper books last for decades, or even more if properly cared for. I struggle to keep e-documents even a few years old. This is a fundamental problem and it needs a proper solution, quickly.
Finally, DRM gets in the way big time. Lending an e-book? Forget it. Finding one day that the content on your tablet was remotely deleted from the mothership? It's unlikely, but the reality is you're at the mercy of whoever made the tablet and they can certainly do so by invoking some obscure paragraph in the 200-page EULA that nobody ever reads. You're the "owner" of an e-book in name only; Amazon is the real big kahuna who calls all the shots.
We will inevitably move to electronic formats, no doubt. But this is the Stone Age of e-books - these are the stone tablets of e-content. We're still in a very very early stage.
Volatility - My books are in the Amazon Cloud. All of my digital books are still available to me. 100%. I have access to about 5% of the paper books I've purchased in my life. The _worst_ case scenario, is that Digital Books become as Volatile as paper books, if Amazon.com goes out of business, and I'm stuck with (horrors) the physical representation of the book as present on my kindle/iPad (and Laptop backup, and back blaze backup of my Laptop).
The cloud changes everything for volatility.
DRM Sucks. Big Time. With that said, Amazon's implementation only impact is that I don't casually lend books to other - which I typically never have anyways, so no impact on me. I too like (and frequently take use) of the fact that 100% of my books are available on my Kindle, iPad, iPhone, Laptop, and CloudReader.
But - with that said - the DRM on physical books is pretty harsh too - You need to go to a photocopier to make a copy of the book. I just lend my mother my cloud reader account, and she can read any of my books on the web. Or lend a second friend my Kindle, and voila - he has all of my books. While I still have all of them on my iPad and iPhone. Or, if I don't have five lent out, I can pull them onto my old K2.
I don't think DRM on the kindle has ever stopped me from reading, or lending a book to someone I know. It _does_ prevent casual lending. Agreed there.
I haven't read a paper book in about 4 years. I find it bizarre to even consider moving back to them.
Electronic media offer benefits as well: searchability, ease of duplication, amenability to quantitative/qualitative analysis (one example: http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_book...), extremely compact storage.
Both formats have their benefits. I'd greatly dislike having hardcopy disappear entirely. I appreciate the utility of online media.
The biggest concern I have with the Amazonization of the book industry is that we're moving from a highly concentrated publisher-dominated model to an absolute monopoly at the retail/distributor point. I'm very, very leery of concentrations of control and influence.
Doesn't anyone remember a decade ago when most people "couldn't read" things on screen, so they'd print out every doc? These days it's relatively rare. Humans usually adapt and move forward faster than we expect we will.
But just in case, if you reread a book 20 years later. You may found the margin notes you left 20 years ago "romantic". Of course probably most books don't deserve reread every 20 years.
I don't have any notes that I kept on computer 20 years ago, they are either lost in disk crash or server meltdown. I still have some note books from then.
1) You easily lend them out to anybody at all. 2) You can save a ton of money by purchasing used books. 3) Once you buy it, the store you bought it from can't just delete it from your bookshelf like Amazon has done in the past and I'm sure Apple will do in the future.
So then I hear people say things along the lines of "Sure ebooks have their advantages, but a physical book just feels better". They often make it sound like everybody either agrees with them or is indifferent, but this isn't the case.
Ebooks are cheaper to distribute than physical books. They are easier to carry around (thanks to the Kindle synchronization service, I _always_ have my book with me, because I always have my phone). The barrier to entry is lower, so we get to see books that wouldn't have, otherwise. Sure, a lot of it's crap, but most of everything is. We get some good stuff, too. The increased convenience and available gets many people (myself included) to read more. Moreover, some people, like me, just like it better.
Then I hear people say that the impending supremacy (in the sense of popularity) of ebooks over physical books is a catastrophe?
What?
More people are going to read more books, more often, more easily, and this is a tragedy? Really? How is this not excellent? How is this not wonderful?
Besides, physical books will still exist. LPs weren't killed by CDs, and they weren't even killed by digital music (although CDs might be, but nobody seems to care). Indeed, the fact that physical books will become a niche item probably means that they'll be higher quality (if more expensive) as people buy them for the binding, and not just for the book. Meanwhile, ebooks will enter the mainstream, and most people will be fine with them for most purposes. I'll wager dollars to donuts that the next generation won't really care.
The physical book is not dying. It's simply moving on to another stage of life. The book will be better off than it ever was.
On my Kindle, I have a semester's worth of textbooks, a dozen periodicals, and a few novels I've been busting through. And that's a mere fraction of the allotted storage space, whereas it would take two backpacks to fit all of the physical copies.
As someone for whom reading is a passion, not a hobby, this is far and away my favorite technological development of the past ten years.
No doubt it's only sad for people who grew up reading paper not screens - which probably will even include people being born now - and one day nobody will care how their great-grandparents read... but for now there's still plenty of people for whom books are more than just the sum of the words.
In fact I think it's generally a case that physical objects can do more emotionally than digital replacements - and I don't mean that the story, or whatever the object is for, will be better, but the item itself. The books that mean the most to me were either given to me by people I care about, or passed down generations. The same thing can become true of watches (won't be quite the same to inherit a four-generations-old iPhone...)
Some people buy watches for aesthetics, not to tell time; generally speaking, these are the people passing them down. Personally, I'm a fan of anything that pushes away from materialism for materials' sake.
My cargo pants pockets exactly fit a paperback book, and if I ruin a paperback by being caught in the rain I'm out at most $8. Books are a great combination of disposable and persistant. I can read a book one-handed, in the bath, and can easily and quickly share books with friends or use them to answer questions I am asked.
More than half of my library has been bought used, most for $2-$4, which no eBook even comes close to on price. The best thing about eBooks is how much cheaper the paper versions have been as everyone else sells them off.
eBooks have a long way to go before they are as useful to me as a physical book.
But there are also benefits to ereaders. I live an hour away from London on the train, and I go there for a night out probably just over once a week on average, as well as fairly often going there and other places for meetings. Until I got a Kindle I would chose between taking my bag with iPad and/or a book, or having nothing to do on the train - the latter on occasions when having a bag with me would be a nuisance the rest of the time. Now I can always read on the train, and it slips into my pocket the rest of the time.
Equally for longer journeys, whether it's a couple of days back where I come from (Oxford, ~3.5 hours away from me) or a longer trip, maybe abroad - as I'd always have a bag and/or suitcase taking a book wasn't a problem, but now I don't have to think about how many books I need, or how much space they'll take, and if I fancy a break from what I'm reading I have 100s of alternatives ready to go.
But yes, there's plenty of times I'll chose to pick up a physical copy rather than the Kindle, and plenty of books I have in both forms.
With a physical book the only hoop I have to jump through is meeting up with them and giving them the book. I've done this a number of times through university with textbooks and it saved me and several colleagues hundreds of dollars.
The rise of gun-based warfare lead to the decline of sword-making in Japan. It never recovered.
The movement from an oral society, where stories were passed down by story-telling, to a written society in ancient Greece, lead to the decline of the art of story-telling.
Disruptive technological advancement can, and has historically, lead to the loss of an artform, even while granting numerous additional benefits. The decline of an art is sad - it is a loss of a form of expression we once had.
I love my Kindle, but I also love old leather-bound books. The subtle creases and variation that marks some of my old books as unique and the sentiments/bond created by handling a physical object cannot be replicated by my Kindle, and I recognize that even while choosing to use my Kindle for convenience for most reading.
Even small things like some books are designed around the structure and material, with pages or patterns that are dependent on having two sides you can view in parallel, are a huge difference.
It's a new media that, if it does replace the old for the most part, will result in a small loss. There are benefits (such as hyperlinks) but there is still a cost that should be acknowledged.
You could really make the same argument about using a monitor to read books versus holding a physical book, just with the difference of a Kindle being designed around being held versus propped up on a desk.
Printed books will become a small percentage of all books, but they will be around for a very long time, even if they mostly become vanity items.
I prefer the tactile experience of paper books, you may call that vanity, I just call it my preference, not worse than anyone's brand preference.
Paper books come along with a certain amount of convenience and freedom. Digital books, while convenient in some ways, are inconvenient in other ways (like DRM). So, I really don't think that his statement must be sentimental.
With paper printing and thousands of independent copies, this becomes difficult. With digital copies, especially in an iTunes-match or Amazon Digital Locker scenario, this becomes trivial.
If you think this is paranoid, watch the latest moves that DHS and TSA are making and combine them with SOPA for chilling effect.
The digitization of books is, to me, like the digitization of voting - appealing, but very dangerous and possibly not worth the societal dangers that come with it.
Information that requires special equipment to read is a dangerous thing.
Still, there are remedies for companies that engage in this behavior--maybe they'll come too late to save small publishers in this case, but they exist.
When market leaders are so entrenched, your only hope to beat them is by disrupting them and changing the game forever. One way they could've done that is by trying harder to bypass the middle-men and enforce self-publishing. They're sort of trying to do that with Google Artist Hub for music artists, but I doubt they are taking that very seriously, either.
There's a reasonable chance our civilisation will collapse in the near future (within 100 years). (Not going to go into detail of why - think climate change, viruses, meteors... take your pick)
When it does, there'll still be people around. And if it is a severe collapse, there won't be the infrastructure to recharge, install new books, manufacture or maintain e-readers.
This is a pain, as books will be really useful then. e.g. About farming, traditional methods of manufacture etc.
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Both Amazon and Apple want to obsolete publishers and labels eventually. It's a no brainer. They're high-overhead middlemen that are adding less to the value chain every day. By eliminating them, they can lower prices to consumers while increasing profit to themselves as the new distributors of content.