Re: "The Elusive E-book"

At 12:33 AM +0100 5/8/08, Joseph Harris wrote:
>
> I am not sure there is a competition with paper,
>so much as an expansion of total experience.

I very much agree. Remember, we still have and use horses, more than 100 years after the introduction of the automobile. And the transition from majority use of horse for transportation to the majority use of automobiles took decades.


>This will be clouded for analysis by the rise of POD, which is
>both going to be far harder to track and will reduce total print
>volumes even if sales increase. The ebook needs a paying
>structure to become big. That is the devil in the detail for
>it.


I also agree that POD clouds the picture. But I don't agree that POD "will reduce total print
volumes even if sales increase." If my reading of the sales data is correct, POD already accounts for perhaps as much as 75% of all new titles published each year (Over the decade that POD has been viable, the number of new titles published each year in the US has risen from 100,000 to 400,000.)

In addition, the number of traditionally printed titles, is still increasing.

While POD titles don't have as many copies printed as traditional titles, as long as the number of traditionally printed titles continues to increase, its hard to see how the total volume could possibly be going down.

I do think that eventually print volumes will come down from whatever their high ends up being. But it could take decades for print volumes to be lower than they are today.



>
>The ebook which relates to the traditional print book will have a
>future as a free and low cost product, but the matter of how to
>mount enough business on it to get mass use is the question.
>Other forms of ebook, such as websites, will undoubtedly expand -
>and no doubt be renamed and classified separately.
>
>Joseph Harris


Again, I agree. It will be interesting to see the effect Chris Anderson's new book "Free" has on the debate.


At 5:08 PM -0700 5/7/08, Aaron J. Walker wrote:
>>The ebook needs a paying structure to become big. That is the devil in the detail for it. >The ebook which relates to the traditional print book will have a future as a free and low cost product, but the matter of how to >mount enough business on it to get mass use is the question.
>
>I think part of the issue hurting e-books is authors and publishers seeing e-books solely as a way to drive paper book sales - and mostly for free.
>
>I'm new to e-publishing so I can't really say how that came to be. It makes it very hard for e-publishers to compete on equal footing if traditional publishers will happily give away the e-book version in the hopes to drive paper sales.
>
>How can the e-book industry then expect to become viable and mature if we are constantly having to compete with free content?

This is exactly what I mean by saying that Anderson's book "Free" will have an effect.

As I understand it, the "Free" argument, simplified and in my own words, is that items with no duplication cost (most digital items are like this), are destined to be free, and distributed as essentially loss leaders for other services and goods. For example, mp3s become loss leaders for concerts and other goods.

Kent




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