Flipping the bird at answers

or, Have You Ever Actually Seen an eBook? In Their Current Iteration They’re Fucking Shithouse.
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A halfway whimsical and mostly sarcastic note I posted on Facebook and Twitter recently solicited some unexpected comments that have lead me to think critically about what some people would say is the most important publishing-industry debate raging at the moment: the emerging eBook market and how it will affect the pBook market and its bookstores.

The tweet came to mind after I followed a link of Creative Penn’s to another whitepaper about the emerging eBook market. Among the first pages is this quote: “‘2011 will clearly be the year of the e-book.’ – Bloomsbury’s founder & chief executive Nigel Newton.”

WTF is Nigel Newton, and WTF is ‘Bloomsbury’ emboldened!?

Because Bloomsbury narrowly escaped the doldrums of print publishing by inflicting us with Harry Potter?

I heard this claim last year from B+P’s Digital Publishing Symposium , so I tweeted: ‘[insert date here] will clearly be the year of the e-book. – [insert authority here]

I also posted it on Facebook, and Candace Petrik wrote, “Don’t forget that (insert date here) will be the end of the bookshop industry”. And Felice Howden wrote, “Or the classic: ‘e-books will make up [insert arbitrary percentage here] of all book sales by this time next year.’” After scrounging for something witty to say, I added: “And [insert monopolistic online retailer here]’s e-book sales outstriped p-book sales on [insert gifting holiday here].”

(Then I wrote: “*stripped”.)

On Twitter the post was retweeted a few times and Lyndon Sharp added ‘Journo’s quote template’ before his ‘RT’.

This all sounds pretty funny, but it’s serious. There is a lot of media hype around at the moment about the momentous changes tearing through the industry, and there seem to be a lot of people around who have taken it upon themselves to lie about the speed with which the eBook market is overtaking the pBook market.

What I’m trying to get at here, though, is that people share this sentiment with me; it’s not just me being a dick. When you discover your ideas are shared with others, not because you shared those ideas but because they came to that conclusion themselves, you feel validated, right.

So this is a real thing that’s happening: people are making outlandish claims about the exponential rise of the eBook market, and people aren’t buying it. Nor are these people buying more eBooks than they buy pBooks. Why? Because eBooks, in their current iteration, are fucking shithouse. Why can’t we admit that to ourselves? Because we want to come off as progressive. Show me some progress and I’ll call you progressive.

I don’t know why people seem to enjoy making unfounded claims about things that not even Thorpe/Bowker would be able to make, and I can’t quite be bothered trying to counter the claims with contrary evidence (because we could play this game all day and ultimately the market will determine the conclusion, no matter what we have to say about it), but I think it’s worth noting that banging on about all this for too long might be the reason we’re (allegedly) so far behind in the global eBook market, which is also not true, apparently.

Maybe we should just be making good (read: novel) eBooks and trying to sell them, rather than dragging up half-researched figures and waving them around like we need evidence of the digital revolution we’re storming ourselves with. This topic used to be an elephant in the room: it is now more like an elephant in a china shop; we’re talking about this stuff as though we’re going to break the fucking industry if we don’t revolutionise our business models immediately.

That’s crap: our industry is one of the most curiously robust industries in our mixed economy, and I worry that if we try to force it to operate in a way it is not yet ready to operate, we will begin to lose sight of the point, which is to publish great literature for people to read: how we deliver this literature is just one of many ongoing problems the industry has always suffered, which is the result of literature being a relatively marginalised and misunderstood commodity of more cultural worth than we’ll ever know how to quantify economically.

I, for one, am going to try to shut up about eBooks for a while, at least until I stumble across some evidence that any sort of major shift is actually occurring. I’d appreciate it if you’d do the same, but I understand that conversations between ignorant strangers are difficult and sometimes need to be filled with chatter.

But that’s all this is right now: partially informed chatter between people who want to sound like they know what they’re talking about so they can say in [insert date here] they predicted the demise of the book industry. Well fucking done! What a great claim to fame. Shut up and read a book, and get back to me when you have some actual evidence, because currently, most eBooks are just electronic representations of existing pBooks.

*yawns*

Until someone uses this you-beaut technology to create something that is actually (how do you say?) novel (*coughs*), the eBook market will stay exactly where it is (in the margins of the margins), no matter how many times an industry aficionado says otherwise.

If you want to see the eBook market take over the pBook market, stop talking about it and start making eBooks that are actually better than pBooks.

Like this. Or even this. These are examples of the future of digital storytelling. And until they are made in abundance we will be stuck with this dead-tree industry that you so like to disparage.

Meanwhile, bookstores will be fine. Kapeesh? Orrighty then. Carry on.

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This post was drafted while listening to 65daysofstatic’s We Were Exploding Anyway, because I am a fucking hipster and listening to post-rock while ranting about literature markets makes me simultaneously happy and sad.
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