Craig Mod has a great, thoughtful article titled “Books In the Age of the iPad” in which he celebrates what he believes is the imminent demise of the publishing industry as we know it. Some random thoughts, in no particular order:
- That many books are “disposable” isn’t necessarily a reflection on the quality of the physical product, but rather of the content itself. Ironic that Craig chose Danielle Steele as an example. I bet many people have hundreds of albums that they’ve listened to over and over, and dozens of movies that they’ve seen several times. But the number of books that people re-read is probably really small. I just did a quick survey of one of my bookshelves. Out of 89 books, there were 20 that I’d read more than once, and that was skewed high because it had a large number of children’s books, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, that I read obsessively as a kid. Anyway, the point is that if a book is thrown in a box in the garage or left on the airplane or in a hotel, it’s probably because the content was only meant to be consumed once.
- One problem I face in the switch to digital books is the loss of a signaling function. I like having my house full of bookshelves stuffed with books. I like seeing them and touching them. I like it when other people see them and touch them. Whenever I go to someone’s house, one of the first things I do is wander over to the bookshelf to see what they read. Physical books provide a powerful social signal that I worry will fizzle out in the transition to digital. Admittedly, the transition of music to digital means this could just require a behavioral change. I love music as much as I love books, and for years kept my CDs displayed in racks in the living room. But the switch to digital meant they just took up a lot of space without contributing anything, so I boxed them up. Now, signalling about music tastes is done through direct conversation — “Heard any good music lately?” — and through browsing through someone else’s iPod.
- I’m not too worried about losing my whole book library to some technological malfunction. The Kindle, at least, backs up your purchases in Amazon’s cloud, so you can re-download any book you’ve bought at any time. And since an EMP powerful enough to fry Amazon’s databases could really only be caused by a nuclear device, I think there will be other things to worry about if that scenario comes to pass.
- As to the Big Brother aspect of e-books, like we saw with Amazon’s bumbled handling of the unauthorized George Orwell books a few months back, I think e-book distributors will very quickly find what is and isn’t accepted by their customers. No one can afford the bad publicity that comes with careless treatment of people’s beloved books. Also, and this may sound naive, but I do think that Jeff Bezos is at heart a book guy and an idealist. He wants to revolutionize the world. He wants to make money, yes, but he’s a long-term thinker who knows that doing what’s right for customers is the best path to success.
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