Reasons The Book Industry Is Not ‘Going The Way of The Music Industry’
Or: 
Your predictions of doom are unfounded, and you pessimism is bringing everyone down.
…
1. There is a huge difference between the consumption of a novel and the consumption of a single. This in turn will lead to different buying patterns, and in turn different anti-piracy strategies. For example, the music industry has adjusted their business model to discourage piracy by promoting the purchase of cheap (less than £1) singles. This is different to the purchase and consumption of the latest thriller, and this difference affects the attitude of the person buying/pirating. I’m not saying this will lead to less piracy, but certainly there may be fundamental variances in the way the digital product could be marketed and protected. To assume that now something is online it is automatically going to follow the same trajectory of something else that is online is like comparing two things that are green. You’re looking for similarity that isn’t there.
Piracy in general was a blow to the music industry before digital piracy entered the picture. Demand in this case was its undoing. We have grown up with free music on the radio, in bars and cars, and in general we have an underlying idea that it can, and possibly should, be free to listen to in our own homes. In order for the publishing industry to crumple like a crisp under the weight of digital piracy, authors (and reading) would have to be a lot more high-profile and readers’ attitudes in general lean toward the expectation that novels should be free. I don’t think people do have this expectation, and as long as publishers play their cards right I see no reason why this should change.
…
2. Writers and musicians have very little in common. Writers have never had a ‘live’ industry in the same way music has. Literature festivals have been created relatively recently, so I don’t believe writers will make the bulk of their income from readings and live appearances in the future. Some of the best selling authors are dead.They are making money. Live music was around before the current iteration of the music industry we have now, and musicians have always made a significant amount of money from this. Writers have never been pop stars, not even the famous ones. Only J K Rowling has managed to approximate this, and one author out of hundreds who are published every year maketh not the duplication of the music industry.
…
3. Something has been learned from past experience with DRM and Napster. Don’t pretend that publishers are too stupid to learn vicariously in order to service your own pessimism, which ultimately comes from wanting to blame someone else for your own unsuccessful attempt to make money from writing.
…
4. Publishers have already put The Agency Model in place to ensure that eBook prices don’t fall the same way mP3 album prices did. They have locked in the fairest system they can for authors. This is supported by Apple. Steps are being taken to both protect the value of the medium and discourage piracy. It took music a shitload longer to do that than the year or two it’s been since people started selling the eBook hardware seriously.
…
5. People have to get used to paying for shit they can’t throw over a fence, or bake in the oven, or lend to a friend (although if you’re so stuck on this lending idea, fine, lend your Kindle or your iPad to your pal and they can read all your books. I’ve swapped iPods with people before for this reason, and in that sense the lending experience was all the better because I got ALL their albums for a while rather than just the one I knew I would like). Not everything that is tangible has the sort of value we pay for it, and not everything that’s intangible is fucking worthless. This makes me seriously angry.
…
6. eBooks are a fucking amazing way to reach a massive amount of people. Never before have debut authors had the chance to market themselves directly to a global and yet niche audience so convincingly (though some wankers can be too over the top about it).
…
7. Think about the possibilities for the kind of communities you can create around books now. This was first introduced to me when I read The Raw Shark Texts (a fucking amazing novel by Steven Hall). There is actually a bunch of people who meet up and go to the ‘unplaces’ that are described in the book, and someone (presumably the author) has actually written the stuff the characters find in the book on the walls. Is this unpleasantly realistic, or fucking awesome? I’d say the latter. I’m not saying this was spawned by eBooks, but certainly it flourished in an online environment. And if I were to release a novel like The Raw Shark Texts as an eBook you can guarantee that I would be putting secret shit in the margins for people to decode when they connect to your servers. That’s not only the sort of awesomesauce that draws people away from pirated copies, but it also gives a different experience when reading.
…
8. Imagine the comeback of the short story format, and the poem. Publishers might actually start buying and selling collections of shorter work again alongside the novel instead of deciding they’re too hard to market. I would kill to have a subscription service serve me up a daily downloadable short story to read on the way to work rather than just peering over the guy next to me’s shoulder to see what crap is in the Metro (yeah I could get my own copy but I hate it).
…
9. What is this ‘way of the music industry’ anyway? Thanks to shit like Spotify (the greatest online music sharing set up in the world) and YouTube, musicians that can’t get or don’t want a record deal (or parents who own a recording studio )can reach an audience. The key thing here is that through these free channels, people discover not only the joy of certain bands, but gain a wider appreciation of music in general. If you’re as sick of radio as I am, you won’t mind having a computer program instead of a shitty DJ point you in the direction of the next song you may enjoy.
On this point, I think people need to remember that those who enjoy buying or pirating enhanced eBooks are not always the same people who were buying print novels. How can you know this? Because print sales aren’t down in the same way that eBook sales are up. Either some eager beavers are buying the book twice, or we’re reaching a new audience. This is something the music industry enjoyed, and I think it’s something people forget too easily when they’re hiding in their fucking bomb shelters sniffing in the pages of a yellowed hardback like some frenzied coke fiend.
…
10. As long as publishers continue to produce books by authors who are interesting and intelligent and marketable for a price that’s fair to both producers and consumers (as they have been doing) then I see no reason why the publishing industry will disintegrate due to the development of a new format. And if some pricks tears down The Agency Model because of complaints (probably made by prickfaced Amazon), I am going to burst into flame with rage.
Some good points MR Payneox
I was in a workshop group with bookly types this week and was having similar thoughts but what is apparent, and alarming, is the confusion/ denial/ panic among publishers and bookshops in this country
Change is coming and this supply chain they so love will be altered but they are not sitting down and calmly sharing what to do, ra5her putting up the barriers and thinking they can fight along against this “digital doom”
sigh
In other news Carrablles!
Hey Mr D Ryd (oh, that was an accident – a happy one … Mr D Ryd is a nickname I wish I could have),
First thing I’ve gotta clear up is that Felice wrote this post, not me. I WISH I could write like this. I nearly shat myself more than twice.
The confusion/denial/panic is absolutely there – I’ve felt much of the former, but tend to manage to avoid the latter two, both of which take too much energy. I find the uncertainty exhilarating rather than frightening, most of the time. On my good days.
But the barriers – I haven’t seen those. From which sector were these bookly types you were wining and dining with? Workshop, yeah … at the pub.
In Adelaide there’s a thing called Digi SubComm ElectroTron Cluster of Many and Varied Awesome Minds, where we all go along and drink NOI Group’s wine and try to share as much of our bemusement as we possibly can without looking too silly or dropping carrot sticks on our shirts. It’s all very informal and casual, but earnest and frighteningly ad hoc. Are there not things like this happening in Sydney? Or Melbourne? If something like this is not happening at the Wheeler Centre I would be both surprised and upset.
Either way, the sharing is ABSOLUTELY KEY to understanding any of this stuff. Nobody really knows what they’re doing, not even the big guys. As far as I can tell we’re all just making it up as we go along, but we’re pretty good at doing that and a lot of stuff is actually getting achieved.
The more of these achievements we share with each other, the less we each have to remake the same goddamn achievement all over again, which is just a waste of time when we’d all rather be drinking at 3.30 and tinkering with proofs until 8 pm.
This seems so obvious to me that I feel stupid saying it – I would be very upset if I encountered someone in this industry who was wilfully withholding their understanding of all this vastly complex rubbish like Apple’s eBook terms, which appear to be illegal here (figure that one out).
Crabapples indeed!
Boy oh boy, so much for all my Twitter ranting helping with my brevity.
On the tangible product, I agree with you to a point. I’m not sure if you’re talking about the whole Readings/Booki.sh thing, but anyway. I don’t care about whether my files are stuck in one device or format so long as the experience of reading is practice. For instance, I don’t so much mine that my books are locked to Amazon devices such as the Kindle because the Kindle is awesome and it’s a joy to read from whereas, some files I can move from device to device but they’re all shit devices that I don’t enjoy reading from. With booki.sh, wow I can read on any browser, but I don’t want to read from a browser. I can’t read books how I want, which is the problem, not the fact it’s on a cloud
I’m not too sure about the Readings/Book.ish thing – what’s that about? Sounds interesting. Being in the UK, I haven’t had a lot of news about how things are placed in Australia at the moment. I agree with you about devices, though I do find the Kindle clunky and unappealing for some reason. I don’t want to read books in my browser either, and to a point I now think it’s up to publishers to develop a bespoke eBook product that works for readers who enjoy paper books as much as it is to develop a business model that works. That, and they need to make their novels available on as many devices as is humanly possible, even if it is a prick in to do. What we shouldn’t do is bury our faces in the sand or spend years just to ’see what happens’. What’ll happen is that someone else will make the eBook available (a la Harry Potter) and we’ll be bent over with nowhere to go.
Ya know, I’ve never even started to read a book on a real eReader, and I got about a fifth of the way through Postcards by Annie Proulx on my iPhone before I got bored and started on something else. I don’t know if it was Proulx or the reader that bored me, but the experience of reading on a screen felt like a novelty at best.
Hands up all the book editors in the country who don’t own an eReader. I’d wager that one in every three people put their hands up, because most of us can’t afford them or if we can we still can’t quite justify the cost, and that’s a problem right there. I’m a relatively young editor – one who was born with books, but without a computer. Most of the people in this industry have spent a lot more time not reading on screen than I have, so their sensibilities are going to be somewhat skewed away from screens in the direction of print.
It dawned on me the other day that producing, marketing and selling eBooks without reading eBooks is much like writing without reading or fucking without knowing how to wank. Because if you don’t know how to wank, all you be able to do is fuck – to make love you need to know how to wank.
I think it’s time I hit up my boss for an in-house iPad.
The workshop was the “industry” (Or as i may have to call them the dinosaurs wondering what that cold chill thats rolling in is) booksellers, bookshops, agents and the authors (a deliberate term there) Hence the use of the term ’supply chain” its all about keeping the existing jobs
I have much thoughts about this but as we know I am notoriously lazy and prefer to write in1 40 words or less or just shout at people as i drive past
Publishing Industry = Recording Industry drives me nuts so I’m glad to see others on the same wavelength.
I was at the same workshop as David and it confirmed my suspicion that few people in “the industry” are prepared for the shift in balance of power towards readers that digital publishing promises. Paper versus screen is a hyperbolic excuse to whinge.
Oh and this line is twenty-four carat gold: “hiding in their fucking bomb shelters sniffing in the pages of a yellowed hardback like some frenzied coke fiend.”
Anyone who mentions the smell of books instantly loses their argument.
Locating the village barn might not have been a challenge for my German removal firm, but carting my awkwardly shaped belongings up the narrow staircase within the barn it was! For long term storage it’s imperative to take up as little space as possible by stacking items upwards and to keep belonging safe and dry. Next time I shall certainly purchase green, recyclable boxes when moving house again.
I am really glad to see that you are putting so much of effort for encouraging the readers with valueable posts like this.