This is something that concerns me directly as an author. The digital revolution has taken over in how my own books are doing. Print versions don't seem to sell very well, however my Kindle editions sell very well. Quite often they are on the best seller lists. I would have to agree with this Huffington Post article that someone made me aware of.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-b-thompson/future-of-books_b_1501182.html?ref=books
There will be many less physical book stores in the future and there are none within a couple of miles from where I live at. The experience I used to enjoy of walking through the aisles at the nearby bookstore I'm afraid are pretty much gone. I so used to love going through the store and holding various volumes in my hands, flipping pages and doing a bit of reading before making my selection. You can get a little of the same experience at your local Walmart or Kmart but at the same time it isn't the same. They carry on average maybe 100 books, the bookstore of the old days used to carry several thousand books. There was also an ambiance that is completely missing at your local Walmart or Kmart. That is what I miss more than anything I think.
What probably did more than anything to create the dearth of local bookstores is the ease with getting your books just about anywhere you can be at. From what a fellow told me once was floating down the Nile river and they downloaded a book that they started to read. While I live in a city with little unsecured Wi-Fi it's still pretty easy to connect my Kindle up to the computer and download books just about whenever I want. When I seen how easy it was to do I knew where the print publishing industry was headed in the future. I even have an app on my Blackberry that I do most of rough drafts on for reading Kindle editions.
Some of the best sellers have 80% pulp rates for their print editions from what I understand. That means that they are not being read, they are getting turned into new books. That's incredible! In fact, some small publishers won't do print editions from what I understand. Oh, print won't go away completely I'm sure. It will become an even smaller portion of the book market though in the future.
Print won't go away, but mass-market 'pulp' books aren't sensible, or profitable, either, today. There will be bookstores, but they'll carry coffee table books, collector's editions and have a POD machine in the back room for those books you love that you also want to add to the library you'll will to a grandkid. That's been known since the EPA said no more extensions on pulp mill cleanup and the forest service said no automatic clearcutting permit renewals. That was at the beginning of the 80's.
ReplyDeleteThe corp publishers had slow change to very profitable e-pub, which they did intend and do price 'equal' to print books, when they purchased the financially strapped trad publishers, at that time.