Alamosa Writes . . . on e-Books

While we acknowledge that e-books are the future, there is a steady stream of misconceptions coming to our ears. We thought we might make a stab at correcting that. And give you a fun (ish) experiement that illuminates the future of e-books.

First, to understand how things will change, let’s discuss how they stand today. Books are written by authors, distributed and promoted by publishers, and sold by web or brick-and-mortar retail stores. Financial power is concentrated in publishers. Controlling distribution and production, publishers command the highest sales percentage of each book sold today. They also control which books are actually published for the most part.

There are several categories of books. There are standard adult-market books. They make up the bulk of the industry. There are textbooks and illustrated informational books, usually large and heavily illustrated (and expensive). Then there are juvenile market books. While just as heavily packaged as the informational books, juvenile books are small and cost less — about half the price of an adult book. 

Many juvenile market books will never be good as e-books. Picture book readers — young children — shouldn't handle expensive electronic tools. Plus, picture books are not best enjoyed on small screens. Middle grade and young adult books are also not best as e-books. Many have integral illustrations that can’t be replicated on e-readers. Furthermore, their cheaper retail price means that e-books cost the customer about the same as print books. Thus, today most people will choose print over electronic media. That may change if e-books become cheaper or if e-reader quality is substantially improved.

Informational books are also not ideal e-books. Screens on e-readers are too small to accommodate illustrations. Making reading devices larger makes them less portable and likely less desirable. Further, use of these books is non-linear. Easy access to other parts of the book is essential. Current e-reader formatting makes paging through text annoying at best. Finally, informational books are accompanied by note-taking. This is impossible on e-readers today. However, all this can be accomplished with current personal computer technology. It is very likely that this type of book will migrate to your laptop, not your e-reader.

Environmentally conscious people would like most general adult market books to go electronic. In this case, print isn’t superior and uses more resources. E-readers are also smaller than print books, making them preferable where portability is desired. This is where the transition to e-boks will happen first and fastest.

What will the transition to e-books look like? To answer that we need to understand who loses and who benefits from the change.

Authors will reap higher profit percentages because many will likely turn to self-publishing. However, they’ll also likely sell fewer books without the promotional might of publishers. Bestselling authors will probably see lost proceeds. Unknown authors will likely see increases. Most authors will see neither loss or gain.

Web stores will obviously benefit, but sales of e-books will be dominated by those with marketable e-readers. Sales of e-books will definitely increase, but it is likely these sales will be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands — largely Amazon, which controls production and distribution of the Kindle, and Apple, with its ubiquitous iStuff.

Most brick-and-mortar stores will be reduced to specialty markets, but this has been a trend in book sales for many years. For example, Borders didn’t fail because it refused to embrace electronic media as the common misconception goes. Borders collapsed because it never found a niche focus and couldn’t compete with box stores like Walmart which sell bestselling books at deep discount.

Walmart can afford extreme discounts on books because books are not where Walmart makes its profit. They use books as "loss-leaders" — eye-catching lures so that customers will be drawn in to the store and then buy lots of other things besides the markdown books. Most bookstores can't offer those same discounts on books because 1) unlike discount stores, books are all they do sell in quantity and 2) most bookstores can't buy in the volumes necessary to earn deep wholesale discounts from publishers (but that's a subject for another day). So unless bookstores specialize they’re doomed— not because of e-books but because of discount retailers.

The biggest losers in the transition to e-books are print book producers — printers, paper suppliers and publishers. Authors will be reluctant to give up as large a percent of sales to publishers when the only benefit is better promotion. So most will go to self-publishing. Authors are already market savvy, handling their own publicity as publishers concentrate marketing funds in a few bestselling books.

So the players with current control of the biggest slice of the publishing pie lose the most when e-books take over. What is the likelihood that there will be resistance to change?

Here is what some of us think will happen. As their revenues dwindle, publishers will limit selection of e-books, perhaps restricting best-sellers to print media. There may come a time when the bestseller list — currently designated as such largely because of Amazon sales — will be turned upside-down. An unknown self-published author with access to Amazon may be able to out-sell James Patterson who would be limited to print in this likely future.

Facing dwindling supply of books, retailers will be forced to down-size and specialize. Eventually, even bestsellers will be e-books, so the only print that will be left will be the books that do not translate to e-reader technology effectively. Kids' books will far outnumber all other kinds of books remaining as print media in the future. (ie our store is likely well-insulated from e-books.)

When publishing is cheap and unrestricted, authors will of course bolt to e-books. It makes complete sense. However, this may have devastating results for reading. E-books will largely be self-published — meaning there will be very little editorial oversight. Just about anyone will be physically capable of being a published author regardless of skill. This will vastly increase selection, but the overall quality of published books will go down.

Finding a book you want to read will be like finding the proverbial needle. In a haystack the size of the sun. Who will take the time to wade through the mess to find a good book? Probably fewer and fewer people. Information will be so readily available it will become white noise. And reading fiction could well become a quaint, anachronistic hobby akin to candle-making and sword-play.

So e-books may not merely be the doom of print media, they could be the doom of the book.

Go to Amazon and search for "dystopian fiction young adult", arguably the hottest genre in the market today. Now try to find one of those really hot titles in the list Amazon generates. How many pages in is Hunger Games? And notice the high number of Kindle editions at the front of the list! Now, imagine that this is your only method of finding a book. How do you differentiate between hot and not so much if this list is your only point of reference? How does that e-book future look now?