I can imagine a retro company in Portland or Brooklyn doing this, a company run by hipsters in prim mustaches and fedoras, a boutique company that prints ebooks onto paper in the same way that other Brooklyn boutiques publish print magazines as clay tablets.
Each family has its own story, often partly inscribed in the pages of its books. Does your family have a book with an important inscription? A family Bible? Is a chapter of your own history preserved between the brittle pages of an old book? Care to share your story?
Innovators and Laggards: The New Face of Publishing
The biggest revolutionaries in the ebook revolution aren’t the retailers or authors—or even the publishers. They’re the readers, the ones who took a leap of faith and bought the first Kindles or who plunked down six hundred dollars on the first iPads. They’re the innovators and early adopters who told their friends and families how good ebooks were, how readable they were, and who bought up ebooks like crazy.
You have to ask yourself, of course, why people bought ebooks in the first place. To be fair, e-readers are sexy, and they’re great gadgets. And when innovators get their hands on a great new gadget, there’s often a lot of cachet that goes with it, which others adopt. You see the same thing all the time in fashion design and technology—this trickle-down effect of social mores and conventions, fads, trends, and gadgets. But one thing that is different about ebooks is what I call “reader’s guilt.”
While MP3 players and airplane-friendly DVD players are neat, most of the music or videos we consume are for entertainment purposes. But books are different. You spent years with them in school. You’ve likely been taught how important they are, and you suspect in a kind of hangdog, guilty way that you should be reading more often than you really do. That’s reader’s guilt. And that’s partly why some users—maybe even you—voraciously buy ebooks. You feel like you ought to. This nagging, guilty feeling may encourage you to give in and buy a Nook.
And let’s face it, we have every right to feel guilty for not reading as much as we ought to. According to studies funded by the National Education Association and publisher advocacy groups, the U.S. population is fragmented into two equal groups: half the population reads, and the rest don’t read. We’re a nation of readers and nonreaders. According to these studies, 33 percent of high school graduates who don’t go on to college never read another book for the rest of their lives, and 42 percent of college graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. Sadly, 80 percent of U.S. families didn’t buy or read any books last year.
These numbers scare publishers, of course.
When it comes to ebooks, there are two kinds of publishers: innovators and laggards. During my time as Kindle’s technology evangelist, I met plenty of both.
In my travels, I found that, in general, the most innovative, flexible, and successful publishers in the book market were the small and midsized ones. They’re the ones that have the most to gain, the ones that are willing to take the largest risks. But they’re not so small that taking a risk with technology will bankrupt them. I’m thinking in particular about my own publisher, Sourcebooks, a company I first visited years ago when I was managing Amazon’s audio and video ebooks.
Sourcebooks was the first publisher to include CDs and DVDs with their print books, bundled as companions to the content. The idea that you could read the poetry of Sylvia Plath or T.S. Eliot and also hear them reciting their own poetry caused a stir when it was first launched ten years ago. Not only was Sourcebooks first to combine text and audio in print, but they also were the first to make the same move with ebooks. I remember working with them to get recordings of poetry slams digitized or videos by Johnny Cash that could be embedded and then seen in an ebook as it was read.
Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah runs the company with as much attention to detail as Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs. And yet, unlike them, she’s nimble enough to adapt quickly and seek inspiration where she least expects it. She’s brazen and no-nonsense, the kind of person who’d run a saloon in the Wild West gold rush of ebooks. (Full disclosure: because of their talent for innovation, Sourcebooks was the first publisher that came to mind when it came time for me to pitch this book.)
Based outside Chicago, Sourcebooks has three or four hands in different technology pies, building out enhanced ebooks that seamlessly integrate video and audio with reading and dazzling storytelling, as well as interactive children’s books that personalize the reading experience for each child.
Bill, another innovative publisher I know, runs a company that makes travel guides. He totally gets the future of books, even though he seems like a classic old-school publisher. He enunciates clearly, thinks through every word and nuance, and speaks as if he learned rhetoric in college, clearly a dying art. I could sit for hours listening to him in his conference room, which is lined with travel guides to places as remote as Baja and Bali.
I’m not sure what’s more exotic, all those travel guides and the worlds they represent, or this voice of grandeur from publishing’s past, when publishers were not only eloquent but understood their financial models and kept up to date with technology. That’s dizzyingly difficult and complex for most publishers today, considering how overwhelmed they are by all the new pricing models and gadgetry available.
When I talk to Bill about the travel guides of the future and how reading will change, we agree that there will be guidebooks that blur the lines between reading about a place and experiencing it more tangibly, even from another location.
Publishers like Dominique and Bill are looking at creating ebooks that are more like digital applications, because those ebooks can do more than traditional books or even regular ebooks. They see ebooks as interactive and engaging products, with enough narrative or nonfictional glue to bind everything together.
These kinds of ebooks are expensive to make, so you’re not likely to see a lot of them, at least initially. Ebooks as applications are sexy, but like the sexiest of creatures, their beauty soon fades. What looks really hot now with all of its techno-trickery will, of necessity, become obsolete in a few years. That’s the way of applications. I challenge you to find a computer that will load and run software you bought ten or twenty years ago. Even if you could find the software in CD or downloadable form, the computer’s hardware and operating systems will have changed so much in the intervening years that you’d be hard-pressed to get the application running.
This fast pace of innovation is a problem with technology in general. For example, I found a digital tape of some of the earliest writing I did as a kid, from when I’d visit my father’s newspaper and write stories on the newspaper mainframe. These stories were backed up onto tape spools, which I have now. But I’ve searched far and wide, and the only place I can find that has a working reader for this kind of tape is a computer museum in Germany for technology that was still working twenty years ago.
Technology ages. Fast.
The shelf life of an ebook application is only a few years at best. And an Android ebook app has a different kind of code than an Apple ebook app. They’re written in different languages, and you have to pay engineers tens of thousands of dollars to port them from one platform to another. Today’s hot application becomes yesterday’s fossil in the blink of an eye.