A sting in the tale
Steve Jobs, mastermind and chief executive of Apple, is not known for understatement. Even so, when Jobs declared two years ago that ‘‘people don’t read anymore’’, his words drew instant attention. For a start, there was the sneaking perception that he might be right.
In support of his declaration, Jobs told the New York Times that ‘‘40 per cent of the people in the US read one book or less last year’’. There is a considerable weight of other data to back up his basic contention.
But people are still wondering whether Jobs might backtrack on that remark – and do so before this month is out. Jobs’ 2008 comments came as he launched a new Apple laptop, the MacBook Air.
At the time, he was trying to pour cold water on another device that was being hailed as a technological breakthrough. The Kindle, a so-called ‘e-book reader’ sold by the massive online retailer Amazon, had been launched just two months before.
‘‘It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” Jobs said. ‘‘The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read any more.”
In about ten days, however, Apple is expected to reveal one of the most-feverishly anticipated devices of recent years: the iTablet, or iSlate, as it has become informally known. It is so named because, unlike conventional laptops and netbooks that have a so-called clamshell design, it is expected to be flat and unclosable – think of a beautifully designed, cutting-edge digital version of a child’s etch-a-sketch, or a very large iPhone.
While its exact capabilities remain a mystery, and will no doubt include all manner of esoteric capabilities, the screen is expected to be between seven and ten inches in size. There is also a growing belief that one of the device’s functions will be as the most advanced reader yet for e-books and online versions of newspapers and magazines.
(A caveat: Apple keeps the details of its new products extremely close to its chest, and previous confident guesses about the shape of its innovations have proven entirely wrong. Some tech observers have noted that the expectation of the iSlate resembling a ‘Supersize iPhone’ may ultimately be shown to have the same misplaced certainty as the suggestions, in advance of the iPhone’s release, that it would be based around the ‘touch wheel’ design seen on the iPod.)
Even in some traditional media quarters, the iSlate has caused a near-tsunami of excitement.
In fact, the editor of the New York Times, Bill Keller, was one of the first people to inadvertently blow Apple’s cover about the device. An off-the-record briefing Keller gave to staff three months ago leaked out.
The editor spoke about the need for the members of his newsroom to get involved ‘‘in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, Wap or the impending Apple slate’’.
In the literary world, meanwhile, opinion is divided. Some publishers, literary agents and authors look at the advance of the ebook with a kind of numb horror, while others are hopeful that the iSlate might fundamentally change the playing field. They draw a comparison with the music industry – whereas Apple was by no means the first company to manufacture an MP3 player, the iPod’s features and design popularised the format as nothing before had done.
If a similar thing happened with the iSlate and books, publishing industry figures argue that, firstly, reading might become fashionable once again, leading to increased sales; and secondly, that they might be able to negotiate better rates for the digital versions of their wares than would be the case if Amazon alone entirely dominated the market.
This is only the most recent issue to roil the publishing world. The business of books is going through a revolution. Independent bookstores are finding it increasingly impossible to survive; even the big US chains, notably Barnes & Noble, and Borders, are coming under pressure from online retailers and incursions into their territory from retail giants like Wal-Mart.
The price wars that have begun to accompany this shift have the potential to undermine the entire business model of the publishing industry. Projections for the future are marked by vast uncertainty over almost every area and, on top of all that, there are suggestions that the internet does not just compete for the time and attention of people who might otherwise be buying books, but actually undermines reading habits themselves.
All in all, it is not hyperbole to suggest that publishing is facing its most tumultuous period of change since the invention of the printing press. Many in the industry view the future with trepidation and a sliver of gallows humour. ‘‘The future of reading?” one publishing insider asked with a dry laugh when contacted for this article. ‘‘God knows.” If Apple’s new device does actually include a feature specifically geared towards reading e-books, a key question will be the extent to which it undercuts the dominance of the burgeoning market that the Kindle now enjoys.
There are other e-book readers available – the Sony Reader is probably the most well known competitor outside the US, while Barnes & Noble has put considerable marketing resources into its version, the Nook – but, for the moment, the Kindle reigns supreme.
Available to Irish customers through the Amazon website (though custom charges apply to anyone purchasing from outside the US),more books are available for the Kindle than for any other format. The number is constantly growing, but the latest estimate is that about 350,000Kindlebooks can be purchased.
The device has gone through modifications in the two years since it was unveiled, but its basic selling points remain the same.
Customers can download the Kindle version of a book instantly. The price of an ebook is cheaper than the printed equivalent and the potential for carrying an entire mobile library wherever one goes is obvious: Amazon claims that the Kindle can hold up to 3,500 books.
There are other benefits, too. Cognisant of the tendency for conventional LCD computer screens to cause eye-strain, the Kindle, like most readers, uses ‘electronic ink’ which, in layman’s terms, means there is no screen glare and, like a regular book, the text is just as clear in bright sunlight.
The Kindle has attracted plenty of praise.
‘‘This took me by surprise,” author and blogger Andrew Sullivan wrote last summer.
‘‘I’ve become a huge convert to the Kindle.”
In the online magazine Slate, Farhad Manjoo extolled its virtues even more extravagantly.
‘‘If you think there’s no way you could ever get used to curling up with an electronic reader, you haven’t given the Kindle a chance,” he wrote in February 2009. ‘‘The Kindle is the future of publishing.”
Others, however, are not so sure. We have become accustomed to our gadgets being aesthetically seductive as well as functional – the iPhone is a prime example – and the Kindle remains conspicuously ugly.
Though the technology of electronic ink is advancing all the time, for the moment the Kindle offers only basic black and white text. The lack of the tactile experience of reading a book – the feel of the pages, the design of the cover – remains an issue for some people.
‘‘I don’t believe it’s possible for one to read on a Kindle the same way one can read on paper,” says Zoe Pagnamenta, a New York based literary agent (and Kindle owner).
‘‘One of the principal problems with Kindle is that the page numbers have absolutely no connection to the page numbers in a book. Page 60 in a printed book could be Page View 2,219 on a Kindle. That makes it fairly useless when it comes to making notes and taking them back to an author, for example.”
For all its merits, and for all Amazon’s extolling of them, there is a notable opacity about the Kindle’s actual sales performance.
Jeff Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, said last year that the company may never release data on how many it has sold. It has tended to crow about specific boosts – supplies ran out after Oprah Winfrey proclaimed the Kindle to be ‘‘absolutely my favourite new thing in the world’’ in late 2008.But some of the claims are not quite as impressive at they sound at first glance.
A flurry of media coverage greeted the news that Amazon had sold more digital books than physical books ‘‘at Christmas’’.
Actually, the company had sold more ebooks on Christmas Day – hardly a major surprise given that this is one of the quietest in-store shopping days of the year. It is also safe to assume that a lot of people who received a Kindle for Christmas immediately rushed to buy some books for it.
Still, Bezos has claimed that Amazon sells about 48 digital books for every 100 physical books overall, an impressive performance that can only be expected to grow. Tech industry-watchers also note that the expansion of the market for both e-books and the devices on which to read them has been explosive.
‘‘E-book readers are one of the hottest consumer products right now,” says Priya Ganapati, who writes about hardware and emerging tech forWired.com. ‘‘Although Amazon doesn’t release exact figures for the Kindle, overall the estimates are that there were about five million e-book readers sold last year. That may not sound like a huge number but remember that, two years ago, that market didn’t exist at all. And they believe that the market will double this year.”
The potential of e-books is obvious. Bezos again and again asserts that the lower price and convenience factor spur Kindle owners to buy more books than would otherwise be the case. But others see downsides – and the sceptics are not confined to the publishing industry.
Amazon contrived a mini-PR disaster for itself last year. In July, the company discovered what it believed to be breach-of copyright issues on some of the Kindle books it had sold. But rather than alert readers or find away to compensate those whose rights had been infringed, the company ensured that the next time anyone who had bought those books logged on to their system, the disputed books would be automatically removed.
When it came to the media’s attention that the two books in question were George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, the story became irresistible. What, after all, could be more Orwellian than a major corporation essentially reaching into the private libraries of its customers and deleting books? Issues of copyright infringement or libel might be one thing, but the episode gave a graphic illustration to the potential for stealthy and effective censorship in this supposedly brave new world.
As blogs lit up with complaints about the ‘Kindle Swindle’, Bezos took to his company’s website to apologise. The decision to delete the books was ‘‘stupid’’ and ‘‘thoughtless’’, he admitted. Aggrieved customers were offered the choice of having the books reinstated or receiving a $30 gift certificate. For its part, Sony emphasised that it did not have the capability to remove books from its Reader.
The episode also opened up the vexed issue of digital rights management. Major tech and media companies have instituted policies aimed at preventing widespread piracy – the tight controls maintained on the dissemination of songs and videos purchased via iTunes is perhaps the most obvious example.
But if the vendor still controls the product, even after being paid for it – and, in Amazon’s case, retains the right to take that product back – what does that say about the changing concept of ownership?
‘‘You don’t really own the book, you can’t really share the book, you can’t re-sell the book,” Ganapati says. ‘‘So then the question comes up as to what rights the owner of a physical book has that the owner of an ebook doesn’t.”
Worries about civil liberty implications and amorphous concepts of ownership rights are one thing, but for the people at the heart of the industry – authors and their representatives – there is a more basic concern:
money. Major publishers generally offer authors about 25 per cent of their net receipts on e-books, but writers and agents argue that this is not enough, since it is the publishers themselves who are accruing one of the biggest benefits from the expansion of e-books: the removal of major overheads.
‘‘It doesn’t cost a publisher very much to provide Amazon or Barnes & Noble with a file,” says Pagnamenta. ‘‘All the costs of making books, designing books inside and out, printing books, sending books around the country and the world, go out the window. The author’s percentage should be higher than the current standard.”
For their part, publishers argue that they have cause to be concerned, since if Amazon or any other corporation reached a position of total dominance of the e-book market, and if e-books also became the major format in which books were sold, the corporation could then put the squeeze on publishers, demanding that they hand over their material for much lower fees.
At present, Amazon is understood to be selling e-books at a loss, paying publishers more than the $10 it generally charges customers to download each work. But it clearly isn’t doing so for altruistic reasons; the working assumption is that it wants to control the market.
A flurry of price wars before Christmas further heightened fears in the literary world – and put publishers, agents and authors all on the same side. Last October, the world’s biggest retailer, Wal-Mart, opened up a battle with Amazon. Wal-Mart made a high profile announcement that it would offer ten best-selling books at $10 each.
The two most prominent books offered were former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue, and the new Stephen King novel, Under the Dome.
Amazon was left with no option but to follow suit, and another major retailer, Target, also got in on the act. The consequence was that Wal-Mart eventually dropped the price of each book to $8.98.
There was no question that the retailers were all losing money on the deal – the recommended retail prices of both books were $29 and $35, respectively.
The industry fretted about the possibility that consumers would get used to buying new hardcover blockbusters for under $10, a price that would utterly transform the economics of publishing. Even the biggest bricks-and-mortar bookstores suspected that one of the reasons battle had been declared between Amazon and Wal-Mart was that both corporations saw benefits in driving customers onto websites and away from traditional shops. ‘‘It’s textbook loss-leader economics,” financial journalist James Surowiecki wrote in The New Yorker magazine.
It is difficult to argue that the move towards Wal-Mart or Target dominating the book industry could be a good thing; authors have already expressed concerns about the narrow range of titles that such stores tend to offer. But when it comes to ebooks more generally, some see hopeful signs.
One potential area of growth is self-publishing. If e-books become the norm, it would theoretically be possible for authors to bypass publishers entirely; the move would be somewhat analogous to the countless young bands which try to raise their profile, and ideally generate some income, from the judicious use of MySpace and other internet sites.
‘‘I foresee that there will be a lot of people publishing more directly,” says Mimi Calter, assistant librarian at the University of Stanford.
She believes that, as a consequence of such a possibility, ‘‘authors are becoming more cautious, they want to maintain more control. The pattern of simply assigning rights to a publisher is going away. People are getting much more interested in licensing.”
Calter is among those who also see the potential for much greater use of technology in the future to offer e-books that combine other elements, such as audio files and video, thus providing the reader with a multimedia experience. Others argue that publishing could adapt lessons learned by other industries.
Pagnamenta highlighted the fact that Twelve, the publisher of the late Senator Edward Kennedy’s memoir, True Compass, announced that it would release the hardcover edition first, and that the e-book would only become available later.
She believes this could be away forward for publishers: ‘‘to treat the e-book somewhat like a DVD is treated in relation to a movie. The movie does not face competition from a DVD coming out at the same time, and a printed book would not face immediate competition from the cheaper e-book.”
All such ideas are dependent upon one thing: that, contrary to Jobs’ assertion, people want to read book-length works. The evidence here is mixed. Sunil Iyengar, of the US’s National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), says that his research suggests a rather depressing trend.
The NEA’s statistics claim that ‘‘there is a long-term trend of a decline in book-reading’’.
At the same time, the most recent survey, Reading on the Rise, found a more inspiring characteristic. In what NEA chairman Dana Gioia proclaimed as ‘‘a significant turning point in recent American cultural history’’, the rates of reading literature among Americans rose for the first time in more than 25 years.
But was it really a turning point, or merely a blip? Iyengar is unsure, but he knows it matters: high levels of reading, especially among young people, correlate strongly not just with higher academic attainment but other, less expected, benefits, like greater participation in sporting events and civic life.
While Iyengar does not dismiss the concerns of those who worry that much online writing delivers a less rich experience than traditional books, he also points out that literature has faced challenges long before internet usage surged.
‘‘Historically, TV takes up more of people’s leisure time than reading books,” he said. ‘‘Americans typically spend two to three hours of every day watching TV, and that figure has not changed very much at all over time.”
In an odd way, that may be reassuring. It is a reminder that the demise of the book has been predicted before, and the worst was avoided. But it doesn’t change the fact that publishing is now facing challenges on more fronts than ever before in its history. And no one knows where the pieces will fall.
