When I’ve traveled to destructive scanning facilities, I’ve seen machines that seem like they belong in a slaughterhouse, machines with whirling knives that slice the spine straight off the back of the book. Sometimes the process is more manual and less sophisticated. It may be a team of women in India sitting at a long table, holding razor blades, and doing the same work, but much more cheaply.
I think you’ll see such a process at the mall, where nimble-fingered teens wield razor blades to scrape the spines from your book so that they can quickly scan each individual page. The book will be destroyed in the process, but the process will be painless for you—unless you had any emotional attachment to the book. It will be like a visit to LensCrafters, where you get your new glasses in about an hour.
You can easily imagine the shady file-sharing markets that might emerge as people learn that they can swap these scanned-in files with one another. Or maybe people will go to bookstores with these toaster-sized devices under their trench coats and scan in this week’s bestsellers. But in a positive sense, I think this type of conversion will help the used ebook market grow, making that eventuality turn into an inevitability. Maybe with this kind of device, legitimate used ebook stores will emerge. Maybe used ebooks can be resold once or twice before they spontaneously combust like Maxwell Smart’s secret messages.
Books are important, so let the consumers have them, used or otherwise. Publishers should get a fair price, as should authors and any middlemen like retailers, without whom the entire ecosystem would fail. Likewise, I think libraries can benefit. There might even be a company whose sole purpose would be to allow libraries to exchange digital copies of one another’s scanned books so that they don’t have to rescan each book at each library.
The value of books will change, of course, and perhaps for the better. Right now, books that are esoteric and hard to find are at a premium because there are few print copies of them. But once a book is digitized, with endless amounts of secure backups, there’s no reason why prices shouldn’t drop. And prices should follow a new paradigm: the price of a book should be inversely proportional to its popularity.
We see this now with out-of-print books from before 1923. When digitized, they’re commonly free. They’re part of the public domain. There are older books that are not part of the public domain, not yet, and when they’re digitized, they’ll be of interest to historians and scholars and anyone who happens to follow links to them in a possible Facebook for Books. The cost of these older books should be damn cheap, almost zero.
Conversely, the most popular books of the day—like those on The New York Times bestseller list—should be at a premium, in keeping with the marketing investment that the publishers spent to promote them and create consumer demand. But a book that was on The New York Times list five years ago is rarely worth the same as what’s on the list this week. We see the decay in price of new titles, but older, rarer books are still inflated in price because they haven’t been digitized.
There’s a chilling reversal, though, by which retailers might become the new libraries.
This is a scary mind shift, but it is in keeping with the currents of our culture as we commoditize every aspect of our lives. Given these currents, it makes sense that retailers will assume stewardship of our culture. Libraries once held all of the world’s knowledge, but, with rare exceptions, there is no longer any library on the planet with a larger collection than the books currently held by the likes of Amazon or Google or Barnes & Noble. Information is available, but it’s no longer freely available.
This is a future that I don’t entirely welcome for philosophical reasons, but it does seem likely. Retailers might become the new libraries. Perhaps this happens first by publishers acquiring one another so that they can lobby for favorable ebook terms and discounts with retailers. Indeed, we’re already seeing this, with the recent merger between Random House and Penguin. To be competitive, smaller publishers may feel pressure to acquire other publishers or merge with them so that, as a bloc, they can negotiate with the retailers.
Eventually, though, what’s to stop a company like Amazon from acquiring one of these large publisher conglomerates? Apple might then have to retaliate and buy another mega-publisher. Retailers will try to acquire publishers’ vast content holdings in a bid to become the predominant purveyor of the written word—whether in book form, magazine form, or pamphlet form.
And once this future is played out, then what happens? Do the retailers themselves converge and consolidate, like banks did in the 1990s? Are they acquired by the governments, in response to the monopolization of the written word or because of fears that retailers will hijack the language itself and censor it? Does Apple send emissaries out to all the state libraries of the world and license digital rights to their content?
I can’t tell you. My crystal ball is dark regarding this matter. When I first joined Amazon, they gave me a Magic 8 Ball. They gave them to all new employees at the time. When I shake my Amazon-issued Magic 8 Ball, this time it says, “Ask Again Later.” For now anyway, the future is as cloudy and as dark as a busted eInk screen.
Only one thing is certain: content was, and is, still king.
Clearly, as a culture, we’re smitten with the digital. Ebooks make sense for so many reasons. But what will happen to print books in the years ahead?
As more and more people buy ebooks, they’ll start to preferentially buy ebooks, because the experience is so “sticky” and because the more digital books you have, the more you gain from the network effects of searching and indexing, something that works poorly in print books.
Eventually, there will be a tipping point at which the benefits of digital outweigh print, and there will be a mass shift from print to digital. Nobody in the book industry is sure exactly where the tipping point is for selection. It may be that Amazon or Apple needs to have 95 percent digital coverage of all the books in print before people stampede to ebooks.
But for a time, people will have libraries that are part digital, part print. Those of us who see what’s coming realize that as more consumers start buying ebooks, they’re going to look at their personal libraries of print books and try to figure out what to do with them, since they’re becoming obsolete.
The obvious thing to do is to sell them.
You’re going to see a lot more used book sales in the next ten years than ever before. People are going to start dumping their print books to get whatever prices they can from them, simply because it’s more convenient to go digital. And let me tell you, print books are not convenient. I have four thousand of them, which means that every time I move into a new house, I have to box them up and haul them around, something my back may not be able to handle one day! So I’ve started selling them.
I’ve sold more than a thousand of my print books already on Amazon’s used book marketplace. It’s simple to do, especially if you have a computer with a video camera on it. The video camera can scan in the bar codes on the back of the books through the same process that retail stores use to scan products with a laser at checkout. Software like Delicious Library automates a lot of this, and you can often get a free membership to Amazon’s Seller Central that lets you sell your used books. You don’t have to work at Amazon like I did to get these benefits!
There’s actually a thriving subculture of people armed with laptops who go to used bookstores, scan in the bar codes with their video cameras, and see if any of the books are worth enough to buy used from the bookstore. If so, they resell the book online at a higher price. You’ll see more of this in the years ahead, as well as better tools on smartphones to allow non-experts to make a living at this.