The following selection tells how books and publishing are changing, and tells how college students may be buying their textbooks in the future. The author of the selection introduces it this way: The late 1990s saw a major change in the way books were sold, thanks to the Internet. Amazon.com ushered in the world of e-commerce by first offering books for sale online direct to consumers. Barnesandnoble.com followed suit with a similar service. In 1999, the two online booksellers sold more that a $1 billion worth of books. The content of modern books is remarkably varied. Cookbooks and diet books are perennial favorites. In fiction, books by Stephen King, John Grisham, and Danielle Steele generally go to the top of the best-seller lists. In the late 1990s, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series was phenomenally popular with young readers. All in all, the varied content of modern books reflects the eclectic tastes of the modern reading audience. As the current century began, however, the contemporary book industry faced many new challenges. (p. 150)
Digital Books 1 The book industry has been using digital technology for more than two decades. Authors typed their manuscripts using word processing programs and submitted them to book publishers on floppy disks or by e-mail. Publishers edited and set type from these electronic texts. In the past, however, publishers then took the digital manuscripts and printed them on paper. The finished books were then bound together and shipped to bookstores and other sales outlets where consumers purchased them. 2 A book in digital form, however, doesn't have to be printed on paper to be distributed. Thanks to the Internet, the digital book, or e-book, can be distributed directly to consumers. 3 This new distribution channel and a glimpse of the possible future of book publishing were vividly demonstrated by Stephen King. While recuperating from a traffic accident injury, King wrote a 66-page novella entitled "Riding the Bullet" that was published exclusively online in early 2000. Some readers were able to download the work for free from the Amazon.com website; others paid $2.50 for it at other sites. By the time the smoke had cleared, about 500,000 copies of the novella had been distributed in just three days. (King was so impressed with the success of "Riding the Bullet" that he distributed another work on the Internet. His new venture was a serial offered to consumers at $1 per installment. Unfortunately for King, the new venture didn't succeed as many people downloaded the installments and didn't pay for them. Consequently, King stopped distributing the work.) Authors as Publishers and Retailers 4 E-books have the potential to change the structure of the book industry. An author could easily write a book, put it on a website, and offer it for sale, all without the aid of a traditional publisher or retailer. Some big publishers are fearful that a Tom Clancy or a Danielle Steele might use this method to publish a novel and leave the publisher totally out of the process--and the profits. In another variation of this arrangement, an author places a manuscript on a website run by a company that collects and distributes e-books. For example, a company called MightyWords accepts manuscripts from authors and puts them on its website, where they are called eMatter. You can buy a work of eMatter for just a few dollars, and the files are downloaded onto your computer. Promotion and marketing are left up to the author. Big booksellers, such as Barnes and Noble and Borders, are concerned that this new scheme will hurt their business as well. (This is another example of the disintermediation process: a content or service provider is connected directly to the consumer, bypassing the traditional distributor and retailer.) New Devices 5 In years past, the conventional wisdom in the publishing industry was that only a few technologically advanced consumers would ever read books on a screen. (The conventional wisdom in the music industry was similar: Only a few geeks would ever download music from the Internet. Then came MP3 and Napster.) This conventional wisdom was somewhat justified because previous attempts at producing electronic devices for reading books have had limited success. But millions of people who now have personal digital assistants (PDAs) are accustomed to reading e-mail and text on smaller screens. Moreover, several new devices have been designed to make reading e-books just as easy and convenient as reading the traditional paper-and-ink book. One is called SoftBook, a device a little larger than a PDA, with a touch-sensitive screen. Readers can even electronically dog-ear a page, display larger type, put in a digital bookmark, or mark up the screen. 6 Most experts expect this technology to improve even more in the coming years. In fact, at least two companies are working to develop ultrasharp, high-resolution video screens that are as flexible as paper. This electronic paper is expected to hit the market in about 5 to 10 years. 7 A big advantage of e-books is their convenience. A typical display device, such as a SoftBook, can hold the equivalent of 5 to 10 books at one time. No more struggling under the weight of a backpack filled with several heavy paper-and-ink books. Moreover, an e-book is searchable. Looking for a name or a particular passage in a novel or textbook? An e-book will let you jump to a particular page. Printing on Demand 8 Another possibility made possible by digitalization is printing on demand. This is a less radical arrangement; traditional publishers and booksellers are still part of the mix, but books are printed and distributed differently. 9 Printing on demand works in a fashion similar to that of e-books. Publishers create a huge database of books in digital form. A customer goes to a bookstore, browses through a catalog, and selects a book. A machine in the bookstore then downloads the book and prints it while the customer waits. Folletts has installed printing-on-demand systems in selected college bookstores across the country. These systems can download and print a textbook in about 15 minutes. 10 The implications of printing on demand are impressive. Traditional book publishers look for books that will sell enough copies (usually a large number) to make a profit. They then print thousands of books, ship them to bookstores, and hope that most of them aren't returned as unsold copies. With printing on demand, however, publishers don't have to guess how many books they should print. They simply print one whenever somebody orders it. This eliminates all the expensive production and shipping costs and guarantees that no books will be returned unsold. Eliminating these costs and the guesswork involved in forecasting demand means that publishers can make money on a book that sells only a few hundred copies. This might open up the way for a multitude of special-interest books that would be too expensive to publish with the traditional method. 11Moreover, a book title would never go out of print. It would be permanently stored somewhere on some hard drive or disk. Even the most esoteric or obscure titles could be easily accessed. What Is a Book? 12 Finally, the digital age raises fundamental questions about what exactly constitutes a book. E-books could easily incorporate a sound track that plays while a person reads. Video clips that demonstrate how something works could be inserted into instruction books. Illustrations as lush as those done by monks during the Middle Ages are possible. The creative potential of e-books is still unexplored territory. 13 Does all this signal the death of the traditional paper-and-ink book? Probably not. People will still be drawn to the feel of books and the unique experience of reading paper pages bound between covers. Dick Brass, the executive in charge of Microsoft's e-book efforts, put it this way in a Newsweek article: "Traditional books will persist because they're beautiful and useful. They're like horses after the automobile--not gone but transformed into a recreational beast." Book publishing is in a state of transition as it quickly enters the digital age. Defining Features of Books 14Books are the least "mass" of the mass media. It took about 40 years to sell 20 million copies of Gone with the Wind, but more than 50 million people watched the movie version in a single evening when it came to television. Even a flop TV show might have 10 million people in its audience, whereas a popular hardcover book might make the best-seller list with 125,000 copies sold. Even a mass-market paperback might sell only about 6 million copies. 15 Books, however, can have a cultural impact that far outweighs their modest audience size. Uncle Tom's Cabin is credited with changing a nation's attitude toward slavery. Dr. Spock and his Baby and Child Care altered the way parents brought up their children and became the target of critics who blamed him and his methods for the social unrest of the 1960s. Silent Spring changed the nation's attitudes toward the environment. 16 Finally, books are the oldest and most enduring of the mass media. Gutenberg printed a book back in the 15th century. Public libraries have been around for hundreds of years. Many individuals have extensive collections of books in their own home libraries. People throw away newspapers and magazines shortly after reading them, but most save their books. Source: Adapted from Joseph Dominick, The Dynamics of Mass Communication: Media in the Digital Age, 7th ed., New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 2002, pp. 150-53. | 