On a recent flight across the country, at least one in every 12 passengers were either reading or watching entertainment on tablets or smartphones. About 40% of these were reading books. About 1 in every 25 passengers were reading traditional books. This personal observation is anecdotal, of course, but it made an impression. That e-readers are becoming the new norm as personal digital devices become more intuitive, adaptive to personal needs, reliable and affordable is no longer news.
Then, a report from Pew Research and the American Life Project was released yesterday. The take-away from the NYTimes article: tablet and e-reader sales doubled over the last year. Adult users increased from 10% of adults in Dec 2011 to 19% of adults in December 2012. Increased ownership of tablets is especially pronounced among highly educated users with household incomes exceeding $75,000. In fact, nearly one third of people with college degrees own tablets.
As a writer, I’m pleased to see that many people are choosing to read when they have the opportunity. How they choose to read helps inform my thinking about how my stories should read on the page vs. screen, and where to allocate my time and resources.
I’m happy to announce that SAINT, my novel about resurrection of human memory via biogenetics and neuroscience, is now available at Barnes & Noble for download to the Nook Simple Touch, Nook Color and Nook Tablet.
Biogeneticist Andrew Shepard resurrects the memory of an ancient in a living human subject. Simon Peter is reborn.
For the faithful, it is a miracle. For the world’s political and spiritual leaders, it is a crisis. For humankind, it changes everything.
Peter escapes from the BioGenera lab in a desperate attempt to return to Rome and to confront the Pontiff, while being stalked by an assassin intent on silencing him once and for all.
First e-book edition
SAINT, my novel about the resurrection of human memory via biogenetics and neuroscience, is now available for download to the Kindle and Kindle-friendly devices including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Droid and PC.
The rising wave of manuscripts moving from writers’ keyboards direct to readers’ hands built momentum recently. In case you missed the rumble of the latest break in this evolutionary cycle, Amazon has entered into publishing, both electronic and traditional paper. In fact, it is committed to publishing 122 books this fall.
Publishers’ responses to Amazon’s publishing authors directly is reminiscent in some cases of the record industry’s response to iTunes’ disruption of its business model in 2001.
Forget the myths: television did not doom the Hollywood blockbuster; video did not kill the radio star; the Internet is not ending the prime-time sitcom; and e-books will not shutter the publishing industry.
According to the recently released comprehensive survey, BookStats, the publishing industry expanded over the last three years while housing, autos, banking, the television networks, and our political institutions faltered.
Each industry adapted, some more successfully than others. Darwin’s theory of Evolution pertains. The weakest properties, channels, and business models have suffered, some to extinction — remember Microsoft BOB (1995)? Yet, good ideas took root. Smart, passionate innovators made them better with positive results. New media are multiplying audiences. Case in point: digital e-Readers.
Partly as a result of the sizzling pace of improvement of digital book devices and software, the e-book has rescued publishers, at least those able to perceive that consumer needs were changing and they could either adapt or find another line of work. Unlike the recording industry’s resistance to home cassette recording and then Internet music sharing, the publishing industry saw the writing on the screen and a few publishers recalibrated their attitude and business model.
“We’re seeing a resurgence, and we’re seeing it across all markets — trade, academic, professional,” says Tina Jordan, vice president of the Association of American Publishers. “In each category we’re seeing growth.”
The Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group collaborated on the report, collecting data from 1,963 publishers the trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional and scholarly categories.
Read by Amazon Vine reviewers, Publisher’s Weekly reviewers, Penguin editors, and ABNA expert panelists–and voted on by Amazon customers–the two winning authors have each been awarded a publishing contract with Penguin, which includes a $15,000 advance. The announcement was made in Seattle.
There were three finalists in each category. The other four finalists were Lucian Morgan, Phyllis T. Smith, Cara Bertrand, and Richard Larson.
In a vote of confidence for the growing digi-lit market, E-Reads, a leading independent in the e-book and print on demand space, has uploaded more than 200 titles to Apple iPad, Kobo, Diesel and Google editions. E-Reads is converting its ten-year, 1000+ title inventory to the specifications of these and other retailers, as well as older customers.
Self-publishing is leveling what has been a uneven field of competition for authors, for readers, and for book sellers. Writers still write books on spec, but now they can manage rights, take responsibility for when and how their work is published, participate more fully as equal partners in their work’s publication, connect more directly with readers, and be better literary citizens.
Book Publishing is Becoming Self-publishing
The Internet has made every individual a potential publisher. And technology is making every idea, story, and work of art marketable. Even the business side of the transaction is returning to a one-to-one exchange.
JA Konrath has six books in print and thirteen e-books available from Amazon. He has projected that he will earn up to $100,000 this year on sales of his e-books alone. Each sale is initiated by an interested reader who decides to download one of his novels to their Kindle, iPad, PC, Mac, iPhone, iTouch, Droid, or any other of an expanding universe of personal e-reading options. Amazon’s online Kindle Store (or Apple’s iBook and others) completes the transaction within seconds. No shipping. No waiting. From JA Konrath directly to Ima Reader wherever she is on the planet.
After iPad
There are thirty-nine e-readers on the market. Considering the quantum leap forward in quality of the user experience, it is tempting to rephrase that device snapshot to something more like: the Apple iPad and thirty-eight others.
The iPad provides an excellent, even transformational e-reading experience. It feels good cradled in your hands, on your lap or propped up against your thighs for those middle of the night reads. It has a high resolution color screen that is easy on eyes, especially aging eyes. It responds instantly, enthusiastically to any impulse. Turning the page is almost as satisfying as leafing pages in that 600-page Dickens anthology you’ve had since Lit 101. And you can look up words in the dictionary without getting up to go find it. Plug in some ear buds and you can even listen to the voice of your choice read your book to you.
The iPad will dash the ambitions of many early e-readers and the field will inevitably narrow to a select few devices. Sony and other quality device manufacturers will accept iPad’s challenge and up their game. All for the better. Whatever makes the author’s work available in a high integrity transaction, on an enjoyable-to-use device, and to more people is good.
Opportunity is Calling
When in your lifetime did obstacles to getting your work published actually diminish in number? If you have a good book, some appealing cover art, a compelling description and the ambition to grow your audience, now would be a good time to get out there and share your work.
Ken Auletta offers a short course on the agency business model and the ever-evolving history of publishing. This article also includes a situational analysis about the stakes for authors, publishers, bookstores, and device makers in the current competition between the printed page and the panel of pixels known as the e-Reader (Kindle, iPad, Nook and others coming online). The writer, journalist and media critic at The New Yorker has been a keen observer of media trends. His Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way put the failing big three television network model in stark context for us in 1991. Now, he has once again captured a dynamic period in media history on the page.
His recent article, Publish or PerishCan the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business? (The New Yorker, 30 April 2010), is similarly timely and incisive. A ‘must read’ for authors, agents, publishers and readers.
The climate for writers is changing as it is changing for so many other professions. At least three writers I know believe that we are approaching a tipping point where a sustainable writing career might slip beyond the grasp of many talented and deserving writers.
Contracts written prior to 1994, when Random House modified its contracts to include electronic rights, are subject to interpretation as to whether e-rights are covered. It is primarily these backlist titles that are the focus of much of the current dispute. Large publishers’ legal departments see sufficient ambiguity in older contracts to claim the rights advantage before the courts intervene and define these terms for them. While publishers, agents, lawyers and judges argue whether imprecise pre-ebook contract language amounts to legally defined rights, the practical result is denied opportunity for writers. This is not meant to ignore that the economic downturn and the paradigm shift in technology have also forced publishers into an urgent sprint to develop a business model that works for them. My focus here is on writers and their ability to continue to create the raw material required by the publishing industries. Uncertainty in publishing leads to risk aversion among all parties, delay, and ultimately a degraded environment for writers whose professional survival is already a marginal existence. Last night, I dreamed I was a polar bear on a small floating patch of rapidly melting ice. Nothing symbolic there, right?
Are traditional publishing’s aggressive responses to the evolving e-book market threatening the careers of writers who invent, research, and craft original literary fiction? Probably not in the long-term, yet it seems that way sometimes.
Publishers are lining up for a high stakes confrontation with writers and agents. Traditional publishers are positioning for expanded control of individual author’s rights, including wrapping e-rights into their traditional print rights contracts. Authors want to share in the revenues produced by e-books at a level that reflects the lower cost of marketing e-books vs. print books. If publishers will not honor this proportionality, then it seems reasonable that authors would want to retain the opportunity to market the e-rights to their books. The Authors Guild sides with the writer. Where will the courts side? Which Golden Rule will guide them? Ultimately, enterprise and economics will decide. In the meantime, we writers have to keep writing, keep finding ways to support ourselves while writing, and keep faith that our work will make a difference.
