McAnally's (The Community Pub) > Author Craft

Books in a digital world, and when will books be obsolete?

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Dom:
Books and the digital world of media are an interesting subject for me.  With all the hullaballoo over music pirating, and movie pirating, and digital image pirating (less so, but still there), book pirating hasn't--quite--taken off.

Part of that is because no ideal e-book reader has been made yet.  There's no iPod of the book world.  When your average book takes at least a day for even the speediest readers to read and doesn't need batteries, or to be recharged, or to do much of anything but sit in your car or backpack or whatever, it's kind of hard to beat that.  Why buy a reader for $100+, PLUS the price of the book you want to read, PLUS batteries or whatever, just to read a book?  Nobody in their right mind would do that unless they have a compelling reason, such as no room for physical books, needing to travel a lot (which, again, is no room for physical books), or being blind (an e-book can probably be read by a computer reader even if there's no audiobook version yet.  Not as nice as an audiobook, but it does the trick in a pinch).

So until that ipod of the book world is made, physical books are in little danger, at least compared to what the music and movie (and art to a lesser extent) world is experiencing.  There's no need for authors to figure out where their money is going to come from.

However...that's not to say it's not coming.  There is tech being developed where you can have "screens" that are as flat as paper, and that keep their image until changed (no extensive battery drain, you can use it when the light is out, for days and days or months or whatever before the letters fade).  Stick a bunch of those in a spine you can hook up to a computer, and voila!  You have your physical book-killer.  One physical book, gazillions of digital stories.  Heck, put a cellphone in the spine, and you can dial up or some such a new book without having to go home and load a new one in via your computer.

Once that happens, books will be in the same spot music and movies are in.  But only on a few fronts in the SFF lit world do I see anyone trying to adapt to this eventuality...a few online magazines here, a few there.  The whole, "It's a magazine, BUT IT'S ONLINE!!!!" thing all over again. (People tend to think they have an entirely new concept if it's online, even if the concept is actually an old one.)

One of the strangest things, for me, is how SLOW the SFF genre is at adopting to the digital world.  It doesn't make sense...you'd think the genre that predicted this stuff in the first place would be the ones on the bleeding edge of technology.  And yet we're not.  Why is that?

I think the solution is already here, though.  But it's not the publishing houses or the authors who are doing it...it's the fans.  Is anyone familiar with Fanfiction.net?  Gigantic fanfiction archive.  Anyone can upload or read stories, but to get fancy features on your account, it's a subscription service.  That is how they pay their webhosting bills, I assume.  Of course, the problem with anyone being able to upload their stuff is that most of it is crapola.  But that's another matter.  The fact remains that there is currently a site that's an archive of fiction SELLING SUBSCRIPTIONS.  IE, they're making money enough to float the hosting, although they're not paying their authors.  (It's fanfiction, they can't.)

The issue in the future of writing is how will authors promote and sell their stuff in the digital online world so they can continue to produce more.

I think if you get an online store--like Amazon but exclusively for digital content--you could pave the way for the lit world's "iPod". Merge amazon.com with fanfiction.net .

Of course, we hit another problem here.  Traditionally, a writer makes their story or book.  Then they convince an experienced agent or publishing house that their story can make money.  The story is bought, the writer is paid an advance, and then the book is sold.  Sometimes a few royalties trickle in afterwards if the book sells really well.  However, in any case, the writer gets paid in full before the books get into the reader's hands.  They're paid once they give their content to someone.

To get a digital lit store off of the ground, you'll need to convince talented (and often established) writers that this sort of format will work.  You'll need the talent (and not the dross of fanfiction.net) to draw a real reader base you can make a profit on and pay your authors with.  It's a very strange concept for writers...no physical books involved.  No magazines, or online magazines.  And how will the writers get paid?  *When* will they get paid?  Where are the agents and publishing companies in all of this?  The tried-and-true way for a pro writer to get published will be totally changed.  And that will freak people out.

The benefits of going digital with writing is that you get a wider audience...much as with anything that goes online.  And if it's a pay-for service (for the readers, not the authors), the author could potentially get a larger cut of the profits.  The only overhead would be the webspace and staff to keep the site running.  And if you do it now, you'll have your base when that ipod-of-the-lit-world is made, so while everyone else is floudering, you'll be happily selling books to people owning the new gadget.

But it's a really scary thought.  I've been considering on and off if I should release one of my novels chapter-by-chapter online.  And it's scary because there IS no ipod-for-the-lit-world yet, nor a central group of readers to tap or advertise to, or software to use to collect my profits, so why the hell am I wasting my hard work and time by giving it away possibly free when I could sell the darn thing to a traditional publisher and get paid all at once for it?

It's sort of a chicken-and-egg thing here, with no biologists to step in and assure everyone that the egg was first.  Nobody wants to take the first step, because there's no real reason to yet so long as physical books are still selling and people are making money, but still this situation is inevitable and we're getting play-by-play action of how the music and movie industries are slugging the whole digital content thing out.

Right now, this is probably an established-writer's-market.  An author who has a reader base and people who would pay them something no matter the format has less to lose then a newbie who could still potentially sell their story to a traditional publishing house and get paid the old-fashioned tried-and-true way.

When the ipod-for-lit comes out, it will be a newbie-writer's market, because they will have nothing to lose as the old format will be dying anyway, and there will be a new "audience" of people who use this new gadget who want more and more content for it.

Wow.  I wrote a lot. I guess it's been stewing for a while.

Sorry if it's a bit of a mess.  I tried to make my chain of thoughts logical.

Anyone else have thoughts?

Or, anyone want to open a business with me? ;)

* * * *

Will books ever be obsolete?

First you had the radio serial.  Spoken books and voice actors and a family event around the radio.  That didn't kill books.

Then you got the movie, and TV.  Life action books with special effects and everything.  That didn't kill books either.

Why don't either of these kill books?  Because books are a connection into a writer's mind.  Radio, video...those are time-lapsed and preserved plays.  Theater.  What you normally see when interacting with another person in real life.  Books, on the other hand, introduce you almost direclty to the thoughts of another person.

Once you can pipe thoughts from one mind to another, then I think the novel may become obsolete, because there will be a new media that can convey the same, or nearly the same, thoughts the writer wishes to convey to their readership.  Instead of writers, you will have thought-crafters who can put together a unique mental experience for their...readers.  Or thinkers.  Or whatever you call them.  But until then, books will endure.

smoorman:
Baen Publishing has had an e-book line for some seven years now. What they do is, you can can get the entire month's worth of books for about what a single hardback costs. As I understand it, they pay those authors in the exact same way the pay for paper versions.

Antimatter Girl:
If your goal is to actually make money by selling your book(s) online, I would recommend against it. If Tad Williams couldn't make S'march work as a viable e-business, I doubt it is even possible in today's internet climate ^.^

BTW, how'd this sort of venture work out for Stephen King? I think he tried this once, too.

There is also a severe handicap to the medium of online reading. People read text on a screen slower than they read text on a page. In other words, it is physically harder to read words on a computer screen. (Note to web designers, this is also true of text and background colors; a dark background with light text is harder to read than a light background with dark text.)

I think perhaps if books are to become marketable as internet-based documents that authors will have to look at webcomics for a business model. On the other hand, successful webcomics will often have pulp editions, so we're seeing again that paper is powerful. Perhaps if one were to pool together several authors and offer sample chapters from their novels to generate interest, then sell hard copies to loyal readers through self-publishing? That might be a better alternative to just use the net as a marketing tool.

Frankly, I'd be more concerned for the newspaper community than I would the bookselling community. Online media offer an immediacy that daily papers cannot hope to reproduce without their own webpages. But that immediacy is not an essential aspect for enjoying a book, so the net loses that advantage when it comes to selling online novels.

The only other advantage (assuming storage space is not an issue) would be the barrier to exposure, but that becomes a double-edged sword; anyone can publish what they want online, but a person's work becomes dilluted in such a vast market to the point that making any sort of money off it would be impossible without the backing of publishing-house marketing. iTunes hasn't exactly seen the advent of independent music -- it's just another way to get what the record companies are already selling on CD.

Yeah, don't think we'll see the death of paper books any time in the near future.

Belial:
" There is tech being developed where you can have "screens" that are as flat as paper, and that keep their image until changed (no extensive battery drain, you can use it when the light is out, for days and days or months or whatever before the letters fade).  Stick a bunch of those in a spine you can hook up to a computer, and voila!  You have your physical book-killer.  One physical book, gazillions of digital stories.  Heck, put a cellphone in the spine, and you can dial up or some such a new book without having to go home and load a new one in via your computer."

The main problems I would see with this are one: I would imagine that this technology would be awfully expensive (I could be wrong), and thus make it impractical. And Two: It sounds like it might be fairly easy to damage, in which case the repair costs just wouldn't be worth it.

As for the idea of a subscription based book service online, the problem I see with that is this: If I'm going to sit down and spend hours of my time reading a book, I'm already in a select group (let's face it, a lot of people these days don't like to read). Now, among the people I know that like to read, all of them prefer the book format to the computer. Why? Books have a soul, I can lovingly trace the creases on the spine of my books, I can't do that with a computer. Computers are stale and lifeless, just not the same feeling. Anyways, if I'm going to pay money for something, I want it in a "hard" format, not as memory on a computer. Even if I could print it, I'd be spending almost as much money doing so as I would buying the book (paperback that is).

Those are just my two cents. I may be a freak, I may love books a little too much, and I may be an optimist (or a pessimist depending on how you view it). But I just don't see the traditional book going anywhere anytime soon. And I for one, am glad of it.

BigMama:
The newspaper world is already suffering from the loss of revenue as a result of internet news services. As long as there are bibliophiles, e-books will only be one of a myriad of choices. The love and ownership of physical books is part of an emotional attachment that developes between the author and the reader. It simply cannot be duplicated digitally, IMO. I also find it very hard to cuddle up to my monitor with a cup of tea on a cold winter evening. Not the same sensual experience as reading a traditional book.

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