Books redux
Books again. On Saturday I was at BEA, the Bookseller's Expo of America as a guest of my publisher (my book, Privacy Lost, is coming out in September from Wiley, preorder from Amazon). It was amazing...tens of thousands of authors, editors, books sales agents and those funny little people that go to all the trade shows and collect the cheap give-away stuff. Is it possible that they're all the same people at every show? What do they do with all of it? They must eat it, the spongy balls and bookmarks and canvas tote bags.
So, for me, the really interesting thing was Google. They had a big booth and they had little Googlemobiles, acting like taxis, driving attendees around the city for free. What a nice company.
There was a lot of talk at the show about the digital/analog problem with books; this discussion spurred on, no doubt, by the polite presence of Google, explaining their book search program. The Washington Post has an article on this this morning.
I'm becoming firmer in my belief that the progress of technology regarding entertainment content is inevitable. I can't imagine the tide being turned at this point, Yet, I'm not so sure the old word of reading as we know it is dead. It's not the same problem as movies, for instance. Nobody watches a VHS tape instead of a DVD if they have a choice. Yet cinephiles do occasionally prefer seeing reels, just as audiophiles like to use turntables.
Let's make a distinction between revenue and publishing. I think that the publishing industry will have to find alternate ways to make a buck from their books. No question in my mind. However, that doesnt' mean that there isn't a place for books in our future. We just might not be able to count on sufficient income from sales to justify the printing of the book.
Perhaps flash-in-the-pan bestsellers or what I'd call "beach books" could be distributed in the new ways and the John Updike books come out in paper. Libraries will always buy them as would bibliophiles.
I'm starting to realize how antiquated the publishing industry really is. It's not quite Dickensian, but it's not exactly the Jetsons, either.
The trick for publishers is to figure out how to embrace the coming digital wave and figure out how to make money by giving the consumers what they really want, because after all, isnt' that what capitalism is all about?
Posted on May 22, 2006
