Thanks to Sam Hendrix for the post below! If you have something you’d like to submit feel free to send it to paulkbiba@gmail.com.
In an earlier post made last year, I stated that purchasers of e-book readers were also purchasers of p-books and that the loss of p-sales due to e-readers would dramatically affect the publishing industry. The sales figures of e-book readers, no matter how fuzzy, are in the tens of thousands. It comes as no surprise to me that the publishing industry has seen a sudden and massive collapse in printed book sales. At the same time, Amazon and Sony are raking e-book sales by the thousands. A paradigm shift in publishing from print to electronic media is happening right before our eyes and it is happening at a speed and depth that, I admit, surprises even me. Where will this end? Most probably with consolidation within the publishing industry and substantial increases in the price of printed books.
Below, I have attached a news article from today’s (December 5, 2008) National Public Radio broadcast. I think publishers have been caught with their pants down and must rapidly respond to the new king-of-the-hill – E-Books!
“We were already facing certain big challenges before the recession came along, and those challenges were connected to the traditional mechanisms of the book business,” says Jonathan Burnham, the CEO, vice president and publisher of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Burnham says the economic downturn means publishers may be forced to find an alternative to the system of returns, which allows stores to return unsold books to warehouses, resulting in books being shipped back and forth across the country at great cost. Beyond that, Burnham says, the industry must now truly grapple with digital advances, like electronic readers, that are already leading to dramatic changes.
“It’s making us focus even more intently on how to make sense of a digital future and how quickly we should move toward it, given that publishing digitally will liberate publishers, and indeed readers, from the costs and the problems of producing physical books,” he says.
Burnham says book lovers will always be able to buy beautifully produced copies of books. But there could be fewer of them as booksellers and book publishers search for a new way to do business in the new economy.
I’m not sure how much blame for the current situation I’d assign to e-books. Most of the talk in that story focused on the recession and economic downturn (though e-books won’t exactly help matters any).
Still, it’s going to be fascinating to see how this all plays out.
I blogged on this this morning.
I think mostly the bad economy is causing the collapse in book sales, but ebook readers long term will chip away at the demand for printed books. Over the past year, I noticed a significant drop in my Amazon sales of books. I think this is from the recession, but it did cross my mind that maybe the Kindle ebook sales were taking away from me too. (At this time I’m still mulling over adding my titles as Amazon ebooks because I sell ebooks from my website and am not overly tempted to give Amazon a 65% cut.)
I’ve already come to the conclusion that long term, my business will focus on ebooks because they are the logical product choice and business model for me as a small potatoes operation. I probably won’t do any reprints of existing trade paperbacks, and will find print-on-demand options that are affordable for consumers so as to keep the printed book option but without big upfront production costs.
I’ve always considered the longstanding business model of book returns with bookstores sending them back to wholesalers to be an appalling waste. Don’t even get me started on the pollution caused by all that useless shipping around. Moriah Jovan’s above comment and associated blog article proposing the bookstore of the future sounded good to me. Can’t wait for it.
Publishing as a business is in for a big overhaul and I think it will be great.