Mainstream media admits ebooks to become, uh, mainstream

2 Responses to Mainstream media admits ebooks to become, uh, mainstream

1. Robotech_Master says:

   February 9, 2009 at 3:17 pm

   You know, I like to be opti­mistic about e-​books as much as the next guy. But there’s well-​founded opti­mism, and then there’s pie-​in-​the-​sky “because I say so” pipe dream­ing. Elgan’s col­umn seems to be more the lat­ter. A lot of the things he pre­dicts just don’t make a lot of sense.

   On the other hand, there’s a fel­low named Robert McCrum who polled his pub­lish­ing indus­try col­leagues on whether they used e-​book read­ers, and wrote a fairly opti­mistic col­umn based on their responses.

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2. Robotech_Master says:

   February 9, 2009 at 3:52 pm

   I don’t know. I’d like to be so opti­mistic about e-​books tak­ing off this year and all. But there’s a few prob­lems I see.

   Peo­ple have been pre­dict­ing the Rise of the E-​Book for ten years now, and it has yet to come true. It has a bet­ter chance than ever of com­ing true, but a good chance doesn’t mean it’s nec­es­sar­ily going to hap­pen. And none of the argu­ments Elgan puts for­ward really seem to hold much water.

   1) The Econ­omy: So, basi­cally, he’s say­ing that because the economy’s gone south, peo­ple are going to want to buy a $359 book read­ing gadget…and then twenty to thirty more books so it will pay for itself? Call me crazy, but I thought that in a bad econ­omy, peo­ple were more likely to cut out lux­ury items, like books, alto­gether, and check them out from the library instead. (Or, to be real­is­tic, down­load them via peer-​to-​peer onto non-​Kindle devices they already have.)

   2) The Envi­ron­ment: You hear this touted as a big advan­tage of e-​books from time to time, but it doesn’t really hold up that well. For one thing, paper is a cash crop — for every tree cut down to make the prover­bial “dead tree” books, two more are planted. The more paper we use, the more trees we (even­tu­ally) get. If you want to look at harm­ful defor­esta­tion, look at the slash-​and-​burn agri­cul­ture in South Amer­ica — which doesn’t have much to do with books, tree or e.

   Also, who says that e-​books are nec­es­sar­ily more envi­ron­men­tally friendly? What hap­pens when all those Kin­dles stop work­ing and end up in land­fills? What kind of toxic com­po­nents do they have mak­ing them up?

   3) A pub­lish­ing rev­o­lu­tion. Ah yes, the old cut-​out-​the-​middlemen argu­ment, which it seems like some­one brings up every five min­utes in the “why e-​books will win” debate. The prob­lem with authors tak­ing their books direct to the gen­eral pub­lic is that it only works for authors who have already built a rep­u­ta­tion in the old-​style pub­lish­ing indus­try. If peo­ple don’t know who you are, you’ll have to com­pete with every­body else for their attention.

   And con­versely, pub­lish­ers may be old and stodgy, but they also serve as gate­keep­ers and fil­ters for taste: if I enjoyed one book Baen pub­lished, I might enjoy oth­ers too. The book-​buying pub­lic is used to hav­ing that. That’s what the sys­tem is built around. It could be replaced, of course — other sys­tems could arise to per­form the fil­ter­ing func­tion for indi­vid­ual con­sumers (alas, where’s Alexlit when you need it), but it won’t hap­pen overnight.

   It’s not a mat­ter of “qual­ity and care.” It’s a mat­ter of not hav­ing to rum­mage through a mountain-​sized slush­pile to find some­thing you’d actu­ally want to read.

   4) The rise in aggres­sive e-​book mar­ket­ing. Well, yes. They’ll darned well have to mar­ket “aggres­sively” if they want to stand out from all the other books…which will also be aggres­sively marketed.

   5) A rise in books writ­ten for elec­tronic read­ing. Um, yeah. Is this likely to be the sort of thing any­body wants to read? This smacks of “if you build it they will come.” Kind of reminds me of Ver­nor Vinge pre­dict­ing the rise of hypertext-​based fic­tion in his intro­duc­tion to his anno­tated edi­tion of A Fire Upon the Deep. For it to hap­pen, it has to hap­pen not just because the medium sup­ports it. Peo­ple actu­ally have to want to read it.

   And the struc­ture of the novel gen­er­ally hasn’t changed much in the few hun­dred years since it was invented. If the entire indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion wasn’t suf­fi­cient to change how nov­els work, why would a tran­si­tion to elec­tronic form?

   6) The decline of the news­pa­per indus­try. Um, yeah. I’ve already cov­ered sev­eral arti­cles debunk­ing this in the last cou­ple of days over on Tel­eRead. No need to say more about it here.

   Now, if you’re look­ing for some­one who has rea­son to be cheer­ful about the future of e-​books—real rea­sons, not just because-​I-​think-​it-​would-​be-​neat rea­sons, check out Robert McCrum’s col­umn about the results of sur­vey­ing publishing-​industry folks about how they used e-​book readers.

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