Why print books will not be killed off by ebooks anytime soon
First, the standard "read what I actually wrote, not the imaginary thing you think I said" disclaimer: I like ebooks. I own a Nook and am very happy with it.
Now then.
People have compared the book industry to the music industry in terms of the conversion from a mechanical delivery system to an electronic one, and point to the general death of vinyl as a precursor of the death of paper. But let’s consider what’s really going on, eh?
People don’t adopt a new medium just because it’s there. They adopt it if it brings something useful to them. Let’s talk about how music formats progressed, shall we?
Vinyl went through several different formats and eventually settled on the standard 12" LP, running at 33.333 rpm. It’s before my time, but I assume this was because the disk could hold more data, since it rotated slower and was wider than a 78. A standard LP holds about 22 minutes per side, which is comfortable enough for five or six pop songs.
The weakness of LPs was their lack of portability--you had to stay in one place to listen to them, and they were kind of heavy to cart around. They lacked something in durability, too. Store them wrong and they warp, distorting the music. Drop them and they get scratches, which are bad enough, but also sometimes skips, which effectively rendered them broken. (Though putting a weight on the needle--quarters were good--could often allow the needle to plow right through the skip.)
[I’m skipping 8-tracks because they were so quickly supplanted by cassettes that it’s hardly worth addressing. Most of my comments about cassette tapes apply to 8-tracks.]
Cassette tapes were smaller and lighter and more portable. They weren’t any more durable, but that wasn’t obvious--if you kept the children and pets away from them, and didn’t store them in the glove box of a hot car, they would be fine for several years. The sound quality wasn’t as good as an LP on a proper stereo, but they had the HUGE advantage of portability.
Even before the cassette player in the car or the Sony Walkman, cassette players were significantly more portable than the luggage of a “portable” LP player. And they ran on batteries, so you could bring one to the park or walk down the street with it on your shoulder, blasting away and annoying everyone around you.
The Walkman and car cassette player just made it that much more desirable to have cassettes.
They had only two weaknesses compared to vinyl: 1. They didn’t sound as good, but since most people don’t notice that and their primary use was for pop music, this was minor. 2. You couldn’t conveniently skip a song. You could fast-forward, but you had to kind of hunt around and it wasn’t good for the tape. Compare with records, where you could simply move the needle to the next large groove marking the start of the next song. But this was a minor inconvenience, and once the tech that allowed dubbing from records or radio or other tapes to a blank tape came out, the joy of making your own mix outweighed the issue of manually skipping a bad song.
CDs supplanted both vinyl and cassette because they had all the advantages of both:
1. small and light and compact
2. you could skip songs easily
3. portable (though not so dependably, as joggers who used the Sony Discman could attest)
And eventually, once household computers caught up and became both commonplace and equipped with CD burners, the mix CD was easy to make. You could back up your music with little loss of quality, so even if the CD cost more than the LP or cassette, you at least felt you were getting something for that money. The benefit of the format was enormous.
Which brings us to easy access to individual songs, and eventually the iPod and iTunes. The advantages:
1. Portable players that don’t skip if they get bumped
2. Even smaller storage, that can hold thousands and thousands of songs.
3. Complete customizability to make your own mixes, and change them with ease
4. You can buy individual songs rather than being forced to get an album with a bunch of B-side toss-offs.
5. Durability--you can back up your data with little to no loss of fidelity
To say nothing of the “extras” that later generations of iPod and phones brought to the game. Your Walkman was only good for playing music, but your modern music player can show videos, play games, and access the internet; and it can be plugged into a speaker system so you’re not beholden to the headphones.
Let’s compare this to ebooks, shall we? What do ebooks offer that print books don’t?
1. You can carry a ton of books around with you.
2. You can enlarge the type (if it’s a proper ebook and not a fixed PDF--I predict this will clean up more as time goes on)
3. You can share electronic files with friends and colleagues
4. Instant (or near-instant) gratification; you don’t have to wait for a new book to arrive in the mail
5. Hyperlinks--someday ebooks will have more interactivity than just looking up words in the dictionary. Academic books already have hyperlinks to the notes.
(The latest ebook readers can do more than just books, yes. That will help drive the adoption of ebooks, but it isn’t in itself a benefit of the format. We already had portable game players and internet access.)
Don’t get me wrong--those are pretty big things. I can think of at least two populations that can benefit greatly from #1: travelers and students. I don’t know why textbooks aren’t more universal on ebooks yet, but I predict they will be very popular, particularly once someone comes up with bundling agreements so you can buy all ten of the novels you need for a literature class in one download.
People with limited space can have lots of books. I’m not sure the search-find-whatever function of ereaders is entirely useful yet, but I imagine it will improve. People who read a lot will figure out how to make it work for them.
Point #2 serves who it serves. People who don’t like mass market paperbacks because the type is too small now have an option that will eventually be at the mmp price point, or something they can borrow from the library without requiring the large print edition.
Point #3 is my personal favorite use. I beta-read sksperry’s latest novel on my Nook. I didn’t have to carry around printouts, and I could still mark up the file with notes. I couldn’t send the marked up file to him, but that’s probably my own tech weakness, and anyhow I’m sure that will be solved eventually.
Editors in NYC were early adopters of the Sony ereader precisely because they could download manuscripts they were working on. They no longer had to carry reams of paper around on the subway and commuter trains (where they do a lot of work).
#4: that’s a plus.
#5: not really applicable to a novel. If you have significant hyperdata in a novel, you’ve gone and made a different kind of work. I like this point as an expansion of the potential of this thing we call a “book,” but it’s not really an improvement on what is currently called a book.
Furthermore, the benefits of ebooks are offset by some (mostly minor, but at least two major) negatives:
1. Electronic bookmarks are nice, but they don’t compare to the ease of thumbing through a book, especially when you know the passage you’re looking for is on a verso page, near the bottom, about 1/3 of the way through the book. If you didn’t bookmark the passage, you’re SOL unless you can accurately quote it and search that way. (Which I personally have so far found to be slower, owing to the clunky mechanism of typing on an ereader. YMMV.)
2. Permanence. Unlike music, at this time there isn’t any way to guarantee that you get to keep the ebook you bought, particularly on the world’s most popular ebook platform.
3. Resellability. If I lost my job and were completely screwed, I at least know I could get a couple of bucks for my books. And I definitely sold college textbooks in order to have cash at the end of the year when I was running skint.
4. Visual quality. In their current incarnation, ebooks aren’t even close to being useful picture books. This will surely improve, but given the technological hurdles (embedding art in a reflowable text is a pain in the ass; the quality is only screen-good, not print-good), the primary use of this will be for hyperlinks to illustrative images, not images truly incorporated as part of the book.
5. You need a dedicated reader to use them. If nothing else, this is a clear problem for people who don’t have lots of money. Libraries are free to rich and poor alike, but ebooks are strictly for those with at least $100 of disposable income with no preferable use for it than books. Also, you then worry about your reader breaking, being stolen, or going obsolete, causing a second cash outlay that might be better used to pay your rent.
My point is, the benefits of ebooks over print books are not as significant as the benefits of MP3s over earlier music formats. Contemporary music formats have everything their predecessors had and then some. Current ebooks aren’t a full substitute for paper books, and I don’t see that changing significantly in the near future.
They’re separate products, much as mass market paperbacks and hardcovers are separate products. They look a lot alike and have the same purpose, but the details cause people to choose one over the other. There's a reason most ebook-reader owners still buy some paper books.
We’ll see what the future brings and how readers’ preferences change. Someday ereaders will be cheap as disposable cell phones, and all your books will be stored in the Cloud so you can’t lose them, and they’ll be cheaper than paper editions. The question is how soon that will happen, and will people always prefer that to having a print edition in their hands.