RicDay on Publishing

With a new year upon us, this is as good a time as any to do a little gazing in the crystal ball and consider how books and the way we read them might be changed by emerging technology and marketplace changes.

Media

Books have been printed on paper, or materials similar to paper, ever since the Chinese found a way to reliably print on paper and produced the first high volume printed matters around 868 AD.

While I do not think that paper will totally disappear as a medium for the production of books anytime soon, I do think that we are seeing the beginning of the end of paper-printed books as the dominant way of producing and selling mass market books.

Digital books, e-books, will replace paper books in the mass market. I think this shift which started slowly some years ago, will accelerate as standards are set and technology (for the reading devices) improves. I think many in the industry today will be surprised how fast the change takes hold.

So I will go out on a bit of a limb and predict that e-books will be outselling printed books before 2015.

Standards

Every new technology goes through the same evolutionary phases: a confused and chaotic early phase in which many competing standards vie for dominance, followed by a more stable middle phase with just three or four standards competing, and finally a mature phase in which no more than one or two standards dominate.

I think e-book technology is in the middle phase now and will probably move into a mature stage this year or in 2010. My feeling is, we’ll end up with EPUB competing with Amazon’s Mobipocket. And I think EPUB, which has greater potential to evolve (given its roots in XML which is very extensible), will eventually win the war. Amazon’s Mobipocket is too proprietary, too DRM-laden, to survive in a world which wants greater freedom and flexibility.

It will take a few years, because Amazon has deep pockets and considerable scale, but I expect Mobipocket to become an also-ran in the standards war quite quickly, simply because many publishers will be made very uncomfortable by Amazon’s ambitions to become a soup-to-nuts supplier of books and controller of the entire value chain.

Technology

Reading on a computer screen has never been the most comfortable experience. Conventional CRT screens “refresh” (re-draw) at a preset rate, ideally at least 72 times a second, while LCD screens use a backlight which actually flickers on and off a couple of hundred times a second. The screen “flicker” caused by both technologies is no longer visible (until a few years ago, refresh rates could be slow enough we were aware of them), but that flicker is there and is tiring for one’s eyes.

The screens used on e-book readers like the Sony and Kindle employ a new technology, so-called electronic ink, in which individual pixels on the screen are either “off” or “on.” When on, the pixels are dark; when off they are light. Once the pixels on a screen are set to a paticular state, they stay that way without needing to be refreshed. These screens are paper-like in quality, allow a better viewing angle than CRTs or LCDs, and use tiny amounts of power because they do not refresh.

The reading experience with screens using e-ink technology is far more book-like, and long sessions of reading are not tiring in the same way they would be on LCD or CRT monitors.

At present, the e-ink technology is a major part of the overall manufacturing cost of e-book readers like the Sony and Kindle devices. Like all solid-state devices, these will go through a cost “learning curve” as higher production volumes and efficiencies are achieved, and the cost of e-book readers should drop sharply as a result.

Roll-up Displays

Experiments with flexible e-ink displays that can be rolled up when not in use are moving fast. The US military wants them for battlefield information devices soldiers can carry in their pockets, so there is serious money backing the research.

Within the next two or three years, I expect we will see a pocket-size smartphone with a pull-out display for reading e-books. Prototypes are already being shown a trade shows.

Color Displays

Another area of active research and development in the e-ink field is the color display. I think this is a technology that will reach the consumer market nearer 2015 than 2010 and will mark the end of print magazines.

Imagine a roll-up display the same size as a letter-size sheet of paper, weighing 10 ounces or less, and capable of displaying color images and good typography. Now imaging that device automatically downloading articles from digital magazine and news sources. Remove printing, binding, and distribution costs (and returns!) from the balance sheet. Print magazines will be a memory.

Hybrid Books

The Digital Millenials -- kids who grew up never knowing a world without computers and the Internet, are very oriented to visual information. They are the people who are making YouTube the fastest growing information search engine. Many of them do read books, but they prefer the visual medium of film.

I expect e-books will quickly start to become hybrids of text, embedded videos, embedded audio, and connections to the Internet.

The books you and I read in the last century, and still read today, are the way they are — print on paper with perhaps a little illustration — because it costs too much to produce books with more features. Early books weren’t like this. Early books were copiously illustrated, in color, and the illustrations were there to enhance the reading experience — it is no error that they were sometimes described as “illuminations.”

Digital books right now are mostly reproductions of print books. That is understandable. As publishers we want to convert our back lists to digital and test this new medium and new market.

I don’t think the era of digital books being the same as print books will last long. There are huge opportunities in the digital era for publishers to “think outside the box” and reinvent what we call a book. If I were publishing cookbooks today, I would be actively working to embed videos, or links to videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo, in my books.

I expect hybrid books will be commonplace within the next two to three years. Digital Millenials will be looking for them.

Audio Books

I think audio books, as a category, are what my Japanese business friends used to call “a sunset industry.” There is no special reason why e-book readers should not be given the ability to read books to us. Text-to-speech technology has come a long way in the last decade, with companies like Microsoft pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into both speech-to-text and text-to-speech research.

Speech-to-text is hard to do well. Text-to-speech is the easier, and more evolved technology. Smartphones already use some of this technology and I would be a little surprised if Apple, or perhaps Amazon or Sony, do not introduce this for their e-book readers this year.

It is a fair bet that the initial introduction of text-to-speech for e-book readers will cause a bit of an uproar in the publishing community. Audio books have long been treated separately from print in author contracts, publisher rights agreements, and other elements of the many walled gardens which have been built in the publishing industry.

Some of those walls are going to be breached by text-to-speech, and I don’t think there is a lot that either authors or publishers can do about it. If the makers of e-book readers do not introduce the feature, some bright programmers are bound to work out how to add the ability.

My hope is that all participants in our industry see text-to-speech as the positive thing it is, and not as a reason to act like the idiots in the music industry and begin suing consumers for using an enabling technology. If a publisher, author, or some association does decide to start suing, the first time a writ lands on the doorstep of a visually impaired person the media will be all over the story, like flies in a barnyard. Book publishing really does not need to self-inflict the sort of wounds the music industry did.

I expect text-to-speech will be pretty much a standard within a couple of years, and those publishers who embrace it and add the requisite xml tags to flag age and gender differences to their-ebooks will fare well.

Conclusion

We are in a time of profound change for all involved in print media. Newspaper empires are collapsing, magazines are folding, and vendors of e-book readers are having trouble supplying demand.

We are also in a time of tremendous opportunity. Market and technology disruptions afford intereting opportunities for those willing to embrace change. Wil you?