Friday, May 11, 2012

The Future Of Books In 7 Easy Steps

HuffPost - 
These challenges are the outcome of two processes. On the one hand, the publishing business has been transformed beyond recognition by a set of profound social and economic changes that have been underway since the 1960s, resulting in the publishing landscape we see around us today: a handful of large corporate publishers based in New York and London and owned by large multimedia conglomerates; an array of powerful agents who have become the unavoidable gateway into publishing for writers and would-be writers; and a retail landscape dominated by a dwindling number of retail chains, mass merchandisers and Amazon.

On the other hand, the technological upheaval associated with the digital revolution is now having a major impact on the book publishing business. After a decade of numerous false dawns, e-books have now arrived and they are here to stay. In 2006, e-book sales amounted to only around 0.1 percent of the overall revenue of large US trade publishers - an accounting irrelevance. Today this figure is around 20 percent, and for some kinds of books, like romance, science fiction and thrillers, the percentage can be 60 percent or more - a huge change in five years. The digital revolution is disrupting many of the traditional practices of the publishing industry, opening up new opportunities and at the same time threatening to dislodge some of the players who have shaped the business of book publishing for half a century or more.
So where is book publishing now headed? Will the traditional print-on-paper book become a relic of a bygone age, a collector's item to be found only in second-hand bookstores and garage sales, much like the old vinyl LP? Will publishers - and perhaps agents too - be displaced by a flourishing of self-publishing and by powerful online retailers like Amazon who can offer to publish writers' work on royalty terms that are much more favorable than those traditionally offered by publishing houses?
The truth is, no one knows the answers to these and similar questions. Many people have opinions but no one knows a thing. There is a great deal of apocalyptic speculation about the future of publishing but most of it is just that - speculation. I've studied the publishing industry closely for the last 10 years and I've seen how often the predictions of so-called experts - often expressed with a great air of authority - have turned out to be wrong. We are living through a revolution of sorts, and one of the few things you can say for certain about a revolution is that when you're in the middle of one, you have no idea where and when it will end.
However, as I say in the new paperback edition of my book Merchants of Culture [Plume, $17.00], some short-term trends are easy enough to see. Here are seven:

First, Amazon will continue to grow as a retail channel, while bricks-and-mortar booksellers (including the bookselling chains like Barnes and Noble) will find themselves squeezed further and further, leading to more bookstore closures and downsizing on the part of the chains. In many ways, the bankruptcy of Borders in 2011 marked the end of an era, in the sense that the age dominated by the big retail chains, rolling out their superstores across America, is now over. We're entering a new era when those retail chains that remain are in a much weaker position and where Amazon has become the main retail force to be reckoned with.

Second, publishers with weak balance sheets and companies that are highly leveraged will face growing financial difficulties, the pressures on medium-sized publishers will intensify and some of the large conglomerates will probably decide that the time has come to divest themselves of their trade publishing interests, which were always a very small part of their overall business anyway, leading to further consolidation in the hands of a small number of large corporations that remain committed to trade publishing and continue to see it as a worthwhile part of their portfolio.

Third, the decline of retail space in bookstores - the shop windows, front-of-store display tables and rows of bookshelves - and the decline of book review space in traditional print media like The New York Times will make it harder for publishers to get their books noticed, so the struggle for visibility will both intensify and become displaced, as publishers are forced to devote more and more of their marketing effort to the online environment, where they will hope to find new ways of bringing their books to the attention of readers.
Read all seven steps at HuffPost

To which Auckland author-publisher Gordon Dryden has replied:

John Thompson’s article, “Where is publishing headed? - The Future of Books – in seven easy steps” — is excellent.  But it only touches some of the biggest changes:

1.  The author as publisher, for all types of digital books.  So far Apple iBooks “Author” software provides only limited templates, but this will grow, and quickly.

2.  Multimedia publishing, especially for digital nonfiction and textbooks.  This is “made” for all publishing which involves live action and demonstrations.   It has already started with cook books, and will boom with sporting biographies, with touch-screen action video.

3.  Dual-format digital touch-screen mini-books.  More than 6 million of the world’s 7 billion people now have mobile phones.  More than half of all such devices produced this year will be “multi-media digital smart-phones” —  interactive computers in your pocket.  Of China’s 1 billion mobile users, almost 70% access the Web from their mobile device.  So even now there is a major market for formats adapted for mobile use: effectively “video slide presentations” sold, like iPod music-tracks, at 99 cents a time. These will be the digital templates that will scoop the global pool.

Around 30 million Powerpoint presentations are made globally every day.  From my experience, not more than 1 percent of these use video clips, computer animations, and music  - nor do they link all together in “Quicktime” YouTube presentations.

But as soon as authors master this basic touch-screen technology for interactive video-slide presentations, the sooner they will then see how easy it is to use individual multimedia slides as the interactive illustrations for the larger iPad and similar tablet devices.  If using Powerpoint or Apple Keynote software as the simple platform for multimedia, touch-screen slides, these can be dragged, placed and scaled to size in any layouts.

Simple me: as a nonfiction, multimedia producer, I had naively thought this would play a starring role in the 2012 Auckland Writers and Readers Festival.

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