The internet is full of ironies. I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things. I've been on an End of Books reading tour since August and it turns out that what the internet gurus say about consumers being more willing to pay for events, speeches and gigs, rather than buying cultural objects, is now becoming true.
While the launch of Apple's iBooks 2, its new multimedia textbook format, and iBooks Author, the free authoring tool Apple has produced to create them, may indeed "reinvent the textbook," there are a lot of questions to be answered before it does. That doesn't mean that Apple didn't put on quite a show last week. In addition to debuting its own digital textbook format as well as an easy-to-use authoring tool, Apple also seemed to be ratcheting up the appeal of the iBookstore as a self-publishing platform. And iBooks 2 textbooks (or whatever else is produced using iBooks Author) will be priced at $14.99 or less.
2011 was a busy and eventful year in book publishing--but 2012 promises to be even more so, as various issues that started bubbling up in '11 shift and mature. Here are three predictions.
The cannibalization of print by digital accelerated in 2011, with unit sales in the outlets tracked by Nielsen BookScan falling 8.9% with one week to go in the year. The drop in print sales was double that of 2010, when units fell 4.5%. The decline from 2010 to 2011 sped up in all major categories and formats, and the categories where digital sales are having the greatest impact on the sale of print books didn't change--adult fiction and mass market paperback.
In the December 2010 inaugural issue of PW Select, the heads of different self-publishing companies talked about the way e-books were becoming a bigger part of their business. That trend accelerated in 2011, helping to keep the number of titles produced at the major e-book vendors soaring.
In anticipation of January's Digital Book World, where one panel was entitled "Skills Sets Publishers Don't Have: How Do We Get Them or Deal with It?", Publishing Trends sent a survey to a range of publishers, agents and industry insiders, asking them about this increasingly urgent issue.Of the respondents to our survey, 60% work for a book publisher and 20% are agents, followed closely by the self-employed; just over 5% are searching for jobs.
Are apps marketing devices for authors and books, or a new revenue
stream? This is just one of many questions publishers are asking as they
develop apps from their content. When PW approached large and midsize
publishers to find out about their app programs, we discovered that many
houses don't have "programs" per se.
If Paul Vidich, a former technology executive at Time Warner and AOL, is
right, his new venture, Storyville, may lead to a revival of the short
story. Launched at the end of 2010, Storyville is an iPhone/iPad app
that offers readers a weekly short story for an inexpensive six-month
subscription.
Many shoppers may assume e-readers, a popular holiday gift, are more
eco-friendly than old-fashioned books. After all, they obviate the need
for all that paper. But are they really greener?
My last post, in which I mused about whether we were living through a
"phony war" period in publishing, generated thoughtful comments in
several places around the web. Several readers questioned my statement
that we were likely to see a steep drop in print book sales in the near
future. One said that e-books had been boosted by the Kindle, but "they
could just as easily be just another fad like Tamagotchis, as I
personally ascribe the drop in hardcopy book sales to a mix of the
recession and the fact that there's just nothing out there I really
want." Another said print and hardcover sales were not really "at war"
and that they could continue on parallel tracks. Another said that
e-book sales had enormous room to grow (inarguable) and that it was more
likely print sales would grow alongside of e-books.
