The death of the printed book is closer than you think

I'm an odd duck when it comes to reading habits, but the Kindle I got two months ago pretty much revolutionized mine. Previously I read about 5 novels a month and bought roughly 60% of them through Amazon. Since buying my Kindle I have bought 22 novels, 20 of them on the Kindle.<p>(And if they had trashy Japanese sci-fi available I would have gotten the other two on it, too.)<p>I've also bought a LOT more books from new authors than I usually would have, since a) it doesn't threaten to waste my trip to the bookstore and b) "First book in the series is free" is freaking genius and should be written into the standard contract for all sci-fi and fantasy authors (who live and die on selling the same people 1+ copies of every book of each series they are following).<p>While we're at it, can we drag authors/publishers kicking and screaming into Internet marketing? I'll give you my email address in return for a free book. I've spent probably close to $1,000 on Terry Pratchett books and yet I'm left to my own devices to discover that a new one just got published. What the heck. I should be getting my semi-annual update from Terry in the inbox complete with a sample chapter and his affiliate link to Amazon. (Hint hint publishers: cross-promotional opportunities abound.)

<i>Let's say an author were to self-publish digitally with Amazon, and thus forgo all non-Kindle sales, but maintain the same volume of Kindle sales as they would get with a publisher.</i><p>$PUNDIT is making the classic mistake of confusing publishing with bookselling.<p>Amazon isn't a publisher, they're a bookstore -- a bookstore with infinite (virtual) shelf-space. They're in the business of renting shelf-space to merchants.<p>Publishers, contrary to first impressions, are not printers of books. (None of my publishers -- Ace, Orbit, Tor: companies you may have heard of -- own printing presses: they outsourced that side of the business decades ago.) Publishers are in the business of acquiring IP, getting it polished up to publication standard, and feeding it into a supply chain. Booksellers (such as Amazon) are just the final step on the chain before the final consumers (who feed the beast with money). And what it takes to make a profit in this business is a combination of (a) taking raw product and turning it into a package, and (b) knowing how to market it effectively.<p>The assumption implicit in this article is that if you want to self-publish and focus on Amazon's customer base, you can get the same results as if you go through a mainstream publisher who is also servicing the bricks'n'mortar stores. But the marketing push that goes into selling books through bricks'n'mortar <i>also</i> goes into raising your visibility above the parapet among Amazon's clientelle. News about which books are good spreads largely through word of mouth and review columns, and Amazon is to some extent capitalizing off marketing activity aimed at other outlets. The Kindle store prices books below the paper editions deliberately to divert sales into its walled garden; I'm pretty certain that if Bezos sold books via Kindle for the same price as he does on paper, sales would drop significantly. And if you market a book solely at Kindle owners, you'll only get reviews and word-of-mouth mojo from Kindle owners.<p>(Dammit, typing into a seven-line text box is so 1980s!)<p>Anyway, to summarize: If you self-publish, whether in electronic form or on paper, you'll get nowhere unless you understand how book marketing and the book supply chain works. The Kindle store is not a marketing tool, it's merely a delivery/fulfillment vector, and it doesn't get you around the need to market your book. The high-selling Kindle books may very well be boosted by the positive externalities generated by publishers' marketing activities aimed at increasing sales through other channels. In other words: don't believe the hype!

Comparing music(ipods, mp3s) with books is really a broken comparison. The first reason is that switching between an album, CD, and mp3 I have the exact same experience. Reading a digital book and a paper book are still very different experiences to me. Physical books have advantages over digital books, no batteries, better type, the ability to read during take-off and landing, etc. CDs vs. MP3s are basically the same on all of those fronts.<p>You also have to factor in that books are usually single use, which means more people will go to the library or give their book away when they are done reading it. This is all legal now, as soon as it's digital they will become criminals?

Print books aren't going to die. They will decline in popularity and eventually become a niche market. Very few popular technologies (and print was bleeding edge tech in its day) just die out completely. I have a huge pet peeve with this "death of ___" / "X kills Y" literal disease people seem to have these days. Think about what you're saying and you'll realize it's actually a very silly way to phrase what is otherwise a good point. It draws in the casual reader with drama but it probably makes a lot of people dismiss you as being naive.

When Knuth looks good in an eBook, then I'll consider it.<p>Not that I actually sit around and read his books, but I think they're beautifully done, and in any case, I want to be able to read formulas, source code, and so on and so forth just as the author intended it to be read.

The printed book is not going away. The printed book publisher might be. I bought a book from Lulu a while ago, and it was a pretty nice experience. Shipping takes a while (unless you pay outrageous courier rates) but the service is decent, and quality is good. What they do is much closer to the Kindle model, and does satisfy the need to have your own printed book that you can read in no-device locations and away from power sources. I think it's self-publishing that is the important bit, not ebooks.

"For the first time in history, the discovery of writing talent will depend more on skill and persistence than on luck."<p>Really? Sure, the selection process will be less centralized, less monolithic. But way too many authors will still compete for way too little attention. And to win they will still need luck. Hopefully less, but still.

I don't think the author has completely thought this through. Yes a "new" way of publishing i.e. self-publishing on electronic media is now possible but extrapolating that and making the leap to say that the Printed Book is itself becoming obsolete sounds quite far-fetched.<p>I cannot imagine something like SICP on the kindle , where will i make my notes - where will i jot down the failed approaches i took to solve a problem and most importantly where is the tactile feel of turning a page and reading a book.

Well that seems kind of obvious: Amazon customers already are a very specific subset of all the book sales, and I bet they are far more willing to read an ebook than the average book reader.<p>For an article that promises the death of the printed book, I do find it strange that it almost solely focuses on the increase of ebook sales, rather than the decline of print sales. Could there perhaps be a new audience of people who would only read ebooks and no print editions? The only real information provided about this in the article seems to be a quote from an author who assesses he will earn more from ebooks than from print sales in 6 years time, but this is just one example and can depend upon the audience of the author: I bet ebooks will do better for SF fiction than ancient history literature.

The point of the article is not so much in the death of the printed book, it's in the emergence of e-books as a viable business model for authors. But I don't think that much really changes here -- instead of signing a traditional contract with a publisher, the authors make new ones with Amazon, who is actually a new kind of publisher.<p>Just like traditional publishers, Amazon has a vested interest in the success of your book (the more you sell the more they earn), so they do (or will do) all the things that traditional publishers used to do in terms of promotion and marketing, except that they have the tools and technologies allowing them to be more efficient and handle more titles and authors simultaneously.<p>Also, they own the platform at this point, but this will change in time (Kindle is a great product, but others will soon follow). We've seen it all before when there was a monopoly (medieval monks) of the platform, but the underlying standard (latin alphabet) was open and new technology (printing press) allowed others to produce more final products. And the effect was that the publishers appeared as middlemen between creation and production.<p>So yes, the printed books are going the way of the dodo, just like previous technologies which were replaced by better alternatives, like steam engines, CRT monitors or black records. But the business model remains the same, and as always only those players who can adapt will survive; so there isn't much of a revolution here.

Until they develop a really good note-taking / annotation system, I think academics are going to remain buyers of printed books for a long time. I think a well-done annotation system could be a big value-add for e-books, if those annotations were searchable, or operated like tags, etc. But until that day, the ability to scribble notes in the margins, underline key points in the text, and make comments on the back pages is going to be indispensable.

I hope printed books will not die because there is a big advantage to having text that is readable decades or centuries later.<p>Much precious information will be lost to our descendants because the data formats of websites and e-books will become obsolete.<p>If you want to preserve data then emulate nature's approach to seed dispersal. Produce multiple hardcopies of your photos and writings and mail them to friends and relatives!

People didn't stop going to the movies when VHS movies came out.<p>People didn't stop buying CDs when MP3 came out.<p>Come to that, people didn't stop telling stories when books came out.

What happens with traditional book stores? Are they going to slowly go the way of Blockbuster?

His argument works just as well for createspace/lulu/etc physical books as ebooks.

I like to think of the topic from a different angle. According to me a technology as handy as an printed book can never die. As an analogy I would like to present the case of radio v/s TV.<p>Before the advent of TV radio was the main mode of entertainment. But as TV started to take over the market everyone speculated that radio may never be able to catch up and will die for sure.But radio still exists. Why?Because it now survives in very small but concentrated markets like car radios.(I know mp3players are now more dominant in developed countries like the US,but for developing countries and other less privileged people radio is still a luxury in cars and taxis).New radio stations are being created and now in my city i have 6 options where when six to seven years back there was just 2.<p>In the same way, paper books may never lose there market and may never die. There would be always an increasing number of book stores springing up at every corner.Devices like kindle have surely revolutionized the eBook market,but we must except that what kindle did was make a market of its own rather than attracting attention from other markets.<p>Also due to the mindless DRM's and copyright issues with ebooks, you may never have the pleasure of having the feeling that you OWN the book. You cannot lend it to a friend, you cannot store it somewhere other than your kindle,you cannot redeem half its value at a second hand book shop. These special privileges are only offered by a good old printed paper book which you can carry in your hand.

&#62; I have some data<p>&#62; everyone my age has at least played with one or knows someone who has one. Amazon has been pushing it massively and adoption is only going to accelerate<p>Um, that's not data of the "valid to support sweeping conclustions" sort.<p>Insert questionable math based on single point of data 35% sales, from single source, for a narrow datum "books available both in print and on Kindle.<p>&#62; In spite of the shortcomings and shortcuts, I think my model provides a good ballpark estimate<p>Yeah, I think you're full of hot air and bull shit.