Prediction: Print Books

I hung out at my brother and sister-in-law’s house last Sunday. My sister-in-law mentioned she’d been reading my blog. She said something to the affect of “I like all the information, but I want you to tell me what it all means. What’s going to happen?”

She asks a fair question. It’s one thing to talk about trends, it’s another thing to make predictions. I don’t know better than anybody else, but there is no reason I shouldn’t engage in a little speculation, right?

The advantage we have in the publishing industry is that we can look back to how the the music/television/movie industry handled the transition to the digital world.

So when I blog I’ll try to be more predictive. I thought I’d start with an easy one: what is going to happen to print books?

There are two ways to look at this. First, let’s compare print books to CDs. In the mid 90s, music, with the help of mp3s, went digital. Increased storage space and high speed internet combined to make obtaining, sharing and storing music very simple. Look around your home town. Do you know of any CD stores that went out of business? I do. It’s just too convenient to go digital. I have over 250 hours of music, and over 500 hours of podcasts on my mp3 player. I still buy music, but I will likely never buy another CD.

So that means books are dead, right? Print books are going the way of the LP and 8-track, right?

Well, now let’s compare print books to music itself. During the mid 90s, when all the music sharing was going on, CD sales actually went up, as did attendance at concerts. This is important to note, mp3s didn’t kill music, they killed a revenue stream. And to be honest, they only changed a revenue model, at the same time they provided many new ways to market, promote, and sell music. In a very real sense, mp3s brought music to life.

So are print books more like the CD, or are they more like the music itself?

My best guess is that print books fall in the middle. Right now we’re seeing a surge in the sales of print books. It’s hard to pin down exactly why this is happening, but it’s possible that people are discovering authors through e-books and then buying p-books because they want more. But just as we saw a surge in CDs right before the went out of style, I think we’ll see a surge in print books, but that ultimately e-books will win out. Think about it from a consumer’s standpoint.

Imagine you’re going on a trip. How many books do you take? You have a book that you should be reading because it’s going to help your professional development. Then you have that classic you’ve meant to read for years. Then you have your guilty pleasure, but you think with the long flight you may need a second in that category. So you’re already up to four books. Four books take up space, especially if any of them are hardback.

Instead of taking four books—all of which you may decide you didn’t really need, and instead should have brought the one on your nightstand—why not take 2,000 books? It’s hard to argue against convenience like that.

I just moved. I probably carried 15-20 boxes of books up and down a set of stairs. Many of these books I’d never get rid of. I know I can get any Jane Austin book at the library, but I bought a very nice edition for my wife a few years ago. I have several hard-to-find editions of one of my favorite authors, Frederic Brown. I can’t part with them.

But the majority of my books are easily replaced. I have an incomplete set of The Great Brain series. We can get all of these at the library, so I’m not ever going to buy these books again. But if I could get the entire digital series for $9.99, and know I’d never need to buy them again, I’d do it in a heartbeat. It’s a new revenue model. Of all the books in my library, I’d probably replace well over half of them with digital copies just for the convenience.

And there is the kicker. More and more authors will realize what many musicians already have—that you can bypass the establishment and hook up directly with fans. Not only that, you can make a comfortable living at it. Sure, I’d love a print contract, but I may be able to do just as well with a strictly e-book strategy. And part of that strategy is to undercut the big publishers. I don’t have their overhead, so I can sell my book for $2.99 instead of $12.99.

Once these things happen, books will eventually go the way of the LP. Which by the way, is not the way of the dinosaur. I was at a thrift store last week, and there were hundreds of LPs to choose from. There will always be a market for new and used p-books, but the size of the market in the next five years is about to shrink drastically.