The revolution will not be printed
I wrote this ages ago for the blog of the agency I worked at at the time. I’m republishing it here since I recently noticed that since I’ve left they’ve taken my name off it and credited it to someone else. So it goes.
What do Lee Child, Suzanna Collins, Steig Larsson, James Patterson, Charlaine Harris and Nora Roberts have in common (apart from their ability to produce wildly popular works of questionable literary value)? This isn’t a joke – very far from a joke in fact. The correct answer is that these authors are part of an exclusive club that is getting steadily less exclusive all the time; they have all sold in excess of one million units on Amazon’s Kindle bookstore.
These are some impressive numbers, but not particularly surprising ones if you look at the overall picture. Sales figures are hard to come by, however conservative estimates put Kindle book downloads for the last week of 2010 as at least 3 million units, and they may have been as high as 15 million units (of which 10 million were paid rather than free). EReaders (between the Kindle and the assorted Kindle apps Amazon’s dominance over the eBook market is near-complete) are no longer an exotic sight on the tube. Each cramped and humid carriage always contains two or three at least, and the absence of printed matter other than free tabloid pap is a loud silence. Since April 1st, Amazon has sold 105 Kindle books for every 100 print books they’ve sold, a figure made all the more impressive by the inclusion of print books that don’t have a Kindle edition. There is a clear trend here, and one that is set to continue – eBooks are on the ascendant and their rise marks a corresponding fall.
Decline & fall of the printing empires
Why not, after all? The arguments people make about books – the way they look, their tactile qualities, the second-hand bookshops and busy outdoor markets; these are all conditioned sentiments and will eventually be forgotten. People made similar protestations about DVDs and CDs, and before that about LPs. Books will never die out – there are too many rare and precious ones for 
that, too many invested with cultural significance, and too many people who love old and beautiful things. Nevertheless, the role they have occupied for centuries has been eroded; they are no longer the repository of knowledge for entire cultures that they have historically been.
You’ll notice I’ve focused purely on digital downloads, as opposed to install base. Estimates vary wildly but it seems very likely that Amazon has already sold in excess of 12 Million units of Kindle hardware and will hit 18 Million by year’s end. However, this is a far less important figure than the number of books sold. Advances in technology and natural convergence mean that while the demise of the eReader is not imminent (they have significant user experience, battery life and size advantages over more versatile devices), their period of dominance will necessarily be short-lived (iPad sales have broken 25 Million, with 130 million iBookstore books – paid and free – downloaded).
What’s important here is not how the content is delivered, but what form the content takes. Admittedly, when it comes to books, divorcing content and form is far harder than with other media. Like a vinyl record or a roll of celluloid, the content of a book is physical, an actual part of its structure: a track (the format doesn’t matter) sits on a CD, a hard drive or an iPod, a movie sits on a DVD or on an Xbox, but neither sound nor visual is an integral part of the delivery system. The movement from media where content and delivery system are one and the same to one where they are distinct has been relatively easy for film and music since their recorded forms have been around for such a short time compared to the thousands of years books and their ancestors (vellum, papyrus or clay tablets) have been extant.
The process of change is not likely to be as rapid or clean as with those media. You can get bogged down in semantics very quickly here, but consider this: the word book covers both content and channel, and although other types of content and their associated channels do on occasion find their terms used interchangeably, when necessary a distinction can be made between them. This is not the case with books. This enforced identification between content and medium means that the object is infused with the power of the words it contains; something that has manifested itself across a variety of cultures and eras. Biblioclasm (book burning) is a good illustration of this, a common tool of repression and a powerful symbol made all the more powerful with the realisation that it is more than just symbolic. The nature of books means that burning them is the literal destruction of knowledge, culture and ideas. Despite this, change is already here and while we may never evolve two distinct words for the content and the medium, the separation of the two has clearly begun.
Reading between the lies
Reading is important. The enormously important role of symbols in our cultures and in our development as a species is undeniable, and the erosion of reading’s popularity by alternative forms of entertainment has clear sociological and even biological effects. Television and radio require minimal mental effort, and although the Internet does have us reading words, the value of that kind of skimming and dipping is currently unknown, as are the effects it may have on our cognitive processes. We know that people who read ideograms (such as Chinese) havedifferent mental circuitry to those who read languages that use an alphabet, and that reading isn’t an innate skill such as speech. Hence the type, volume and content of what we read online will necessarily develop the human brain in different ways to reading long-form content. This means that ease of access to eBooks is important for us as a culture, and so the ubiquity of devices capable of displaying them and solid, reliable systems for their delivery are important, as is the need to find some successful business models for authorship and publishing (although we already have a wealth of literature, there is no doubt our society would be impoverished by a drying-up of new writing).
Things are not going badly. Many more children reach age-appropriate literacy levels compared to fifteen or fifty years ago, and while there are still problems we need to engage with (16% of adults in the UK are functionally illiterate, and around 5% have a reading age of less than eleven) reading is still present and pervasive. There is an issue around book ownership amongst children – the much quoted “three in ten children own no books” – but this is an issue around delivery, and around attitudes towards long texts. The latter can only be improved by a cultural shift, but the former has a ready-made answer, and that answer is the eBook.
Why bookmakers offer long odds on the book makers
What about piracy? Unlike film and music, books have no alternative revenue stream, no equivalent to the cinema or the live gig. Historically they also have less opportunity and success with merchandising, which means the eBook has to be a standalone success. DRM will fail in this regard just as it has failed every time, succeeding only in alienating consumers and driving them to piracy. The solution is – as always – to provide consumers with something as good as or better than the free version. With a 50% year-on-year increase in 2010, eBook piracy is already a reality, and the grasping, desperate flailings of the music and film industries are an object lesson in how not to handle the issue. Hopefully what has been learned from their travails can be used to inform and decide the direction the publishers take.
Think about the way people consume books. Aside from a few key favourites or reference texts, people don’t want or need a specific book except in intense short bursts a few times in their life. In these terms, books are far more similar to films than to music. That means that while having permanent ownership of digital files is ideal for certain items (the favourites) in general a rental or subscription service is the better option. Rental services for books already exist – they are called libraries and they are currently free. Once they go online however, free is no longer going to work. (There is an important footnote to this; the number of public-domain works of literature is absolutely vast, which is a good thing and means that it will be far more difficult for publishers to make money from texts that have gone out of copyright. However there is no reason for them not to be included in premium digital libraries (as well as the free ones) as a value-add).
There is also the issue of how books are consumed. A film is watched in one sitting, a song listened to in one go, but books are generally stretched out over multiple episodes. This creates significant but not insurmountable problems for any kind of rental system; and in fact rental systems are the best way forward for authors, publishers (there will always be a need for publishers, despite interesting alternatives such as Unbound) and most importantly of all, for the reader.
The Future is not a closed book
There are two obvious payment models. The first is the pay-per-download version, which would mimic services such as Zune Film, and the monthly-subscription version, which would have roughly the same patterning as Spotify. This latter has the added benefit of making people read more; for £10 a month you could have access to a library more vast than any in the physical world, but the actual value of it would be predicated by the amount you actually read. It’s a crude Gamification element, and one that could be expanded upon by building similar social features to Spotify. This would mean that the issue of “sharing” eBooks is completely bypassed; if the person sharing the book wished to send it to someone within the service, simplicity itself. If they wished to send it to someone who wasn’t using the service, that person would receive a preview chapter and a link to download the application. You could even create an ad-funded free version of the service for people who wanted to read more but couldn’t afford it (a segment of the population that contains some highly desirable demographics).
The second alternative is the pay-per-download option. It would have the structuring of a film marketplace, with preview, reviews and so on, and would allow people to read at their own pace. Since the charge for renting a book would be less than buying it (after reading people would have the option to upgrade their “rent” to a “buy”, for the same cost as buying it in the first place), the volumes involved would counteract this since people would be more likely to try stuff, more likely to pick up a book just for a train journey. Aside from this, a relatively small amount of revenue is an order of magnitude greater than the zero revenue authors receive from the torrent sites. To deal with the problem of varying reading speeds the book would be available in the user’s library for six months after they’d rented it, or for two days after they reached the last page, whichever occurred sooner.
These models are far from perfect and may never be so, but what they are is a lot better than the current broken system we have, built on the remnants of a centuries-old status quo that simply cannot survive in the digital age. When the film industry first encountered digital piracy on a massive scale it was both notable and surprising how little they had learned from the identical experience of the music industry and how many of the same mistakes they made. The question now is whether or not book publishers, with their sole revenue stream, will make these errors yet again. And if they do, how much of a catastrophe will it be?
The future of this is fairly rosy. Ad blockers are 
