The certainty in the headlines is almost palpable. “eBooks Now
‘Dominant Single Format’ in Adult Fiction Sales,” shouted book
publishing site
GalleyCat. “Kindle ebook sales have overtaken Amazon print sales,” trumpeted UK’s
The Guardian. “E-book revenue outstrips hardbacks in first quarter,” trembled
The Bookseller.
But if these stories led to you to believe that the march from paper
book to eBook for all books is inevitable, you’d be just as wrong as
those who assumed the introduction of airplanes would mean we’d all now
be piloting
flying cars.
The eBook stats are impressive. Tallying up dollar sales for the first quarter of 2012, the Association of American Publishers
concluded
that eBooks — as a format — outsold hardcovers and mass market
paperbacks for adult fiction and non-fiction. While eBooks didn’t quite
outpace adult trade paperbacks or any paper formats combined, it was the
first time the eBook format beat hardcover.
For all of last year, the new
BookStats 2012
report states eBooks were the dominant single format for adult fiction,
accounting for 30 percent of net publishers’ sales in 2011. And Amazon
recently piled on with the detail that this year in the UK, for every
100 hardbound and paperback books it sold, customers bought 114 eBooks —
meaning, in Amazon’s particular case, that more digital books are sold
than the physical formats combined, extending to the U.K. a Kindle
milestone already achieved in the U.S.
But while many texts may head for an eBook future, not all will. Some
types of printed books are likely to go in two wildly different
directions: skipping eBooks entirely for other digital forms, or
prevailing in paper.
It’s a matter, for the former, of even an eBook still being so
“book-like” that it remains a too-restrictive format. And for the
latter, of human psychology and nostalgia.
Here’s my book-lover-yet-digital-author look through my crystal reading glasses at how the tome triumvirate may rule:
eBooks. Lighter, able to sync across devices,
(sometimes) cheaper: eBooks have lots of advantages over paper. But
“traditional” eBooks of the Kindle/Nook variety are still a largely
linear, monolithic medium: you start at the beginning, you read to the
end. (Sure, you can jump around or search, but you can also flip pages
of a physical book.)
As a result, eBooks are ideal for linear fiction and narrative
non-fiction where sequential storytelling is paramount. And indeed, many
reports indicate that genre fiction (such as science fiction) is doing
the best in eBooks and
massacring mass-market paperbacks, which had been genre fiction’s preferred format.
For narrative works — and narrative isn’t going away, as the
storytelling function has a centuries-long history, regardless of form —
eBook is the new pulp.
Apps. Quick: what’s the most convenient way to work
with a recipe? It’s not propping up your grandparents’ huge Good
Housekeeping cookbook between an iPad and a Roku. It’s reading off of a
single sheet of paper or — two generations ago — an index card. Recipes
from cookbooks are the type of non-linear information that can be
“chunked” and mixed (similar to the content of textbooks and how-to
books): the kind of information that’s likely to first flirt with the
eBook format but then abandon it completely and turn to software apps.
Digital textbook materials are
already experiencing
this kind of chunking as they are broken apart by educators and
recombined into custom courseware. How-to apps and websites have the
freedom to add multimedia elements, such as animations and videos.
Even children’s books that rely as much on activities as narrative are becoming more app than eBook:
Callaway Digital Arts
has been a pioneer on iOS, and the much-loved CD-ROM Living Books of
last century (remember Little Monster at School?) are being fully
updated by
Wanderful Books and re-released as apps.
For these categories of chunkable or activity-rich content, a
physical book was a necessary but imperfect distribution mechanism that
didn’t allow the content to fully shine. It’s processed cheese (or the
recipe for it) unbound.
Paper. Take a minute to visualize a well-designed
physical book. The heft and comfortable fit with your hand. The
satisfying, subtle crack from the binding as you open it for the first
time. The sight of a well-chosen font and laid-out page. Even the smell
of new paper and ink.
Setting aside the reality that paper will live on as a continued
cheap, portable and disposable book medium outside of the first world,
positive memories of books will ensure it lives on everywhere. For some,
books are as much about paper, binding and cover art as they are about
the words inside. They are collectable and desirable in and of the fact
they simply are
books. And there’s the undeniable pleasure of
getting a hand-written autograph from a favorite author to place in a
physical book — the Kindle
equivalent, in the case of a collectible, really isn’t.
For a while, graphic novels and art books will still be superior on
paper, but that’s a transitory resolution advantage fast fading.
At some point, most paper books will effectively be coffee table
books, primarily for display. For many readers, it’ll be the evolution
from book as content into book as object.
So, eBooks fully triumphant? No. The right content will go the right
way: digital or paper. Think of the destination formats, appropriately,
as bookends.
Source: Frank Catalano, http://www.geekwire.com/2012/ebooks-rule-earth/
