background preloader

Books

Facebook Twitter

As E-Books Gain, Barnes and Noble Tries to Stay Ahead. Twelve years later, it may be Joe Fox’s turn to worry. Readers have gone from skipping small bookstores to wondering if they need bookstores at all. More people are ordering books online or plucking them from the best-seller bin at . But the threat that has the industry and some readers the most rattled is the growth of e-books. In the first five months of 2009, e-books made up 2.9 percent of trade book sales. In the same period in 2010, sales of e-books, which generally cost less than hardcover books, grew to 8.5 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers, spurred by sales of the and the new . For readers, e-books have meant a transformation not just of the reading experience, but of the book-buying tradition of strolling aisles, perusing covers and being able to hold books in their hands. Carolyn Reidy, the chief executive of Simon & Schuster, said in an interview that e-books currently made up about 8 percent of the company’s book revenue.

Are books dead? The book is dead. Long live the book. I have nothing against books. But the book is an outmoded means of communicating information. And efforts to update it are hampered because, cuturally, we give undue reverence to the form for the form’s sake. Publish or perish, that’s the highest call of our intellectual elite. But any medium that defines itself as a medium is in trouble: newspapers, broadcast TV, broadcast radio, and books. They are all faced with new and better means of doing what they do without regard to the limitations of any one medium.

The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. The book industry is meeting in Washington now and there are lots of stories about how depressed publishers are. Publishing database Web site Bowker reported that there were more new book titles sold in Great Britain last year – 206,000 new titles, an increase of 28 percent – than in the United States -172,000 new titles, a decrease of 18 percent. Variety reports: Well, yeah. Is the Paper Book Dead? | Gear Diary. There’s been quite the firestorm of debate over the future of the printed word recently. With the new Kindles selling out and Apple selling iPads like crazy, everyone is tripping over each other predicting the end of the road for paper.

But is it really time to say goodbye, or are predictions of paper book’s death greatly exaggerated? In my opinion, there’s a few areas that need to hit a “tipping point” before ebooks truly overtake paper books in all areas. Price, audience, software, and content all need to come together. And it’s important to remember that ebooks fall into a category of their own that is slightly different from other digital media. Unlike the music and DVD migrations from physical to digital, books never required anything more than the book itself and maybe a lamp in a dark room.

Digital Rights Management/Format Wars: This is a huge obstacle. Teleread reported recently on Cory Doctorow’s fight to sell DRM-free ebooks in B&N, Amazon, Kobo, Apple and Sony’s stores. The Book is Dead! Long Live the Book. Did you hear that Barnes & Noble is up for sale? The sale, which will likely be accompanied by belt tightening and shuttering of many Barnes & Noble stores, is a watershed event.

It foretells a future where the book of yesterday and today will look very different from the book of tomorrow. And I love it. My love affair with words started when I was still in junior high school. My parents would get extremely frustrated with me because I would rather read books than talk to them or anyone. I’d read everything from F. Scott Fitzgerald to James Hadley Chase to Lawrence Sanders to Ayn Rand. Books were my ships: my portals into new vistas. To dream about different things. While that day came a long time ago, that definition now includes buying any book anytime and anywhere.

Considering how much time I spend on the go, I’m not surprised that I’ve started to buy more electronic versions of books. Books aren’t the first media undergoing a digital shift.