Here’s another theme from the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference last month in New York: E-readers. New versions were demoed and, the day before the conference, Amazon had announced they would start delivering the updated version of their popular Kindle Reader. There have also been many articles and blog posts declaring the “death of the book” or questioning whether (when?) e-books will overtake traditional books in sales. I didn’t hear that at the conference; the prevailing wisdom was, as one of the speakers said, “It’s not about the final format the content takes, it’s about the IP [content] itself. Just assume, as publishers, your content will need to be available in a variety of formats. Don’t worry about which one.”
This makes a lot of sense, but it also brings up two other points. First, will publishers earn the same margin on different formats? Clearly, publishers are thinking not, because Amazon offering e-books for $9.99 seems to be raising a stink. Recently, Carolyn K. Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, told the New York Times. “I don’t believe that a new book by an author should ipso facto be less expensive electronically than it is in paper format.” Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, argued to the contrary, saying, “readers are going to demand that [e-books are cheaper than printed books], and they are right because there are so many supply-chain efficiencies relative to printing a paper book.”
Secondly, as the popularity of varying formats grows (dedicated e-reader, mobile devices, traditional format, audio) what do authors need to consider that wasn’t important before? For example, e-readers have crisp screens that can be read in just about any light, but they are [now] monochromatic. In nonfiction, color photographs won’t have the same impact; charts and graphs need something other than color to be meaningful. Or, for a fiction author, what are the pacing implications of reading a novel on an iPhone with smaller page sizes? Scott Meyers gave a great talk (“Authoring Challenges in a Multiplatform World”) on this at TOC.
I believe in addition to challenges for authors, these expanded platforms offer opportunities for new types of authoring that weren’t possible before (blog post). E-books and e-readers will continue to gain popularity, but they will also push traditional thinking about books, publishing, and authoring.
