Whatcha Gonna Do With That Duck?: And Other Provocations, 2006-2012 (59 page)

The answer, of course, was 59. Slowly shrinking wasn’t an option. The overhang was too large—crossing it was going to take a leap, not a gradual series of steps. And that’s why the future is uncomfortable for most successful industrialists, including those in the media business.

It’s interesting to note that the only people who are in favor of SOPA and PIPA are people who are
paid
to be in favor of it. And creators (authors like me and Clay Shirky and Scott Adams) aren’t. While the folks at the Copyright Alliance pretend to be looking out for the interests of independent filmmakers and authors, the fact is that the only paying
members of their lobbying group seem to be big corporations, corporations that are worried not about creators but about profits. Given a choice between a great film and a profitable one, they’d pick the profitable one every time. Given the choice between paying net profits to creators and adjusting the accounting …

Anyway, back to the future:

The leap to a new structure is painful for successful industries precisely because they’re successful. In book publishing, the carefully constructed system of agents, advances, copy editors, printers, scarcity, distributors, sales calls, bestseller lists, returns, and lunches is threatened by the new regime of the long tail, zero marginal cost, and ebook readers with a central choke point. The problem with getting from one place to another is that you need to shut down Building 59, and it’s hard to do that while the old model is still working, at least a little bit.

Just about all the people who lost their jobs in Rochester meant well and worked hard and did their jobs well. They need to blame the senior management of Kodak, the ones who were afraid of the future and hoped it would go away. There are more pictures being taken more often by more people than ever before—but Kodak leadership couldn’t deal with their overhang. They were so in love with their success that they insisted that the world change in their favor, as opposed to embracing the future that was sure to arrive.

Please understand that the destruction of the music business had no impact at all on the amount of music available, and little that I can see on the quality of that music. Musicians just want to make music, thanks very much, and they’ll find a way to make a living gigging in order to do so. The destruction of the film business in Rochester is going to have very little impact on people’s ability to take photos. The destruction of the New York publishing establishment will make me sad, and they/we should hustle, but it’s not going to have much impact on the number of books that are written.

Before we rush to the most draconian solution we can think of to save the status quo, I think it’s worth considering what the function of the threatened industry is, and whether we can achieve that function more directly now that the future is arriving.

A year ago, I explained why the Domino Project chose to reject the very broken, easily gamed
New York Times
bestseller list.

Many authors and some publishers bend over backward, changing every element of their business just to get on the list, in the mistaken belief that it still matters. It doesn’t, because shelf space and discount decisions aren’t based on the list the way they used to be. Add to this the fact that recent additions to the list (it now takes up many, many pages each week) have made it almost impossible to read and understand.

The key question is this: What is the list for?

If you’re a publisher, what you care about is how many books you sold last week. This number isn’t based on category or format; you just want to know how many. BookScan and other data sources tell you that.

For the rest of us, then, the reason we care if something is a bestseller is that
we want to know if our friends are reading it
. We want to know this so we can stay in sync with them, so we don’t appear stupid, or, perhaps, because we trust their judgment. That’s why you don’t care a bit about what the bestsellers in New Zealand are.

The digital world opens a new window, something that was unknowable just five years ago. Tell me what other TED attendees are reading, please. Tell me what readers of
Mother Jones
or
Newsmax
are reading. Or what my Facebook friends bought last week. Or highlight for me what people who read what I read are finishing on their Kindles.

Suddenly, there isn’t one bestseller list. There are a million. And almost all of them aren’t relevant to you. Except the few that are, and those lists are the lists that matter.

This scenario works for music, too, of course, as well as for movies and even wines and restaurants.

No one has built this new kind of list yet; it is sort of showing up around the edges of a variety of sites and services and industries. Creating this list is a great opportunity if you can figure out the best way to source the data and then distribute it. The person who knows what’s hot right now, and has permission to talk about it, has earned an asset that will be valuable for a long time.

What does your gut tell you about this statement: “kids in high school read more books for fun than their parents.”

In fact, it’s true. Young adult reading is up 20% since the last time the survey was done by the Feds, and a recent commercial survey finds the same thing.

Of course, these kids aren’t reading the right books, the books we read, the
hard
books.

And go take a look at the bestseller lists for the Kindle and other e-readers. You’ll see 99-cent short stories, self-published books, disgraceful genre fiction. Nothing much that was published by Knopf and others in that ilk in 1983 and is deemed literature. On the other hand, Walter Dean Myers has known this for decades. We worked together years ago.

Readership of blogs is up infinity percent in the last decade (from zero), and online journals and magazines continue to gain in power and influence.

And there’s more unsettling stuff being read by readers of all ages—books that question authority and force readers to consider deeply held beliefs. The words may have gotten shorter (along with the sentences), but there’s plenty of intellectual ruckus being made.

You could view this shift as the end of the world and a threat to how you publish, or you could view it as an opportunity and shift gears as quickly as you possibly can. Publish what people choose to read (at a price they want to pay), and odds are, they will choose to read it. There’s plenty of room for leadership and art here, but little room for stubborn intransigence.

Not just a few things, but everything about the book and the book business is transformed by the end of paper. Those that would prefer to deny this obvious truth are going to find the business they love disappearing over the next five years.

The book itself is changed
. I’m putting the finishing touches on a manifesto I hope to share soon, and I found myself writing differently because I understood that the medium that was going to be used to acquire, consume, and share the book was different.

The first change in the creation of the ebook is that there is no appropriate length. Print books are bounded on two sides—they can’t be too short, because there’s a minimum price that a bookseller needs to charge to make it worth stocking. At the same time, a book can’t be too long or ornate, because there’s also a maximum price that readers are willing to pay (and a maximum weight we’re willing to haul around).

None of these boundaries exist in ebooks. As a result, we get blog posts (which are a form of writing that was virtually unknown ten years ago—personal, short, helpful nonfiction that’s serialized over time), 1000-page zombie novels, beautifully illustrated and interactive apps, and everything in between.

[Aside: How come we don’t call blog posts “really short, free ebooks”? I’m not being facetious—what makes something a book? The length? The paper? The money? I don’t think we know yet.]

We’ve gone from a very simple taxonomy of classifying (and thus creating) the thing we call a book to a taxonomy that’s wide open and undetermined. This is unsettling to anyone in the media business—we know how long a movie is supposed to be, how much music goes on a record, etc. And now, because the wrapper is changed, so is the product.

The second change is that ebooks
connect
. Not so much on the Kindle platform (yet) but certainly in PDF and HTML, we see that it’s almost an insult to the reader to create a nonfiction ebook that fails to include links to other voices and useful sources. Not only are the links there, but the writer needs to expect that the reader will actually click on them. A little like being a playwright while knowing that in the middle of the performance, the audience may very well pick up the phone and chat or tweet or surf based on what’s going on onstage.

Beyond these two elements of what makes a book a book, there’s a fundamental change in the way ebooks are being consumed. Paper meant that a book was very much a considered purchase—more expensive, more time consuming, involving shipping or schlepping, together
with long-term storage. With a 99-cent ebook (or, as is the majority, if we count the Web, with a free ebook), not only is the “purchase” an impulsive act, but the number of titles consumed is going to skyrocket.

The consumption of free (or nearly free) ebooks is more like browsing through a bookstore or library and less like purchasing and owning a book. As a result, there will be significantly more unread titles, abandoned in mid-sentence. Think blogs, not
Harry Potter
.

As soon as paper goes away, so do the choke points that created scarcity. Certainly we’re already seeing this with the infinite shelf space offered by the digital bookstore. Hard for the layperson to understand, but for decades, the single biggest benefit a publisher offered the independent writer was
the ability to get the book onto the shelves of the local store
.

The entire sales organization at the publishing house (amplified by the publicity department and the folks who do cover design and acquisition) is first and foremost organized around getting more than its fair share of shelf space. When my mom ran the bookstore at the museum in Buffalo, there were sales reps in her store every single day. And of course, for every book that came in, one had to go out, so it wasn’t an easy sale.

Publishers cared so much about shelf space that they made bookstores a remarkable offer: don’t pay for the books. We’ll bill you, and if you haven’t sold the book in two months, don’t pay the bill, just send the book back. In other words, books were (and still largely are) a guaranteed sale for bookstores. That’s how Barnes & Noble got to build such big stores—they were financed by publishers, who took all the risk.

Of course, if there’s infinite shelf space (as there is for ebooks), ALL of this is worthless.

Previously, I’ve written about the economics of substitution and the inevitable drop in the price of backlist nonfiction and fiction and just about anything for which there is an acceptable substitute. Since bits aren’t scarce (remember, this is a post about the death of paper), it’s extremely difficult to charge a premium for an ebook that has a substitute. The vast majority of books published do have substitutes, of course, so the price is going to fall.

Summary: flip scarcity with abundance and everything changes.

The Hawthorne effect describes how people react to changes in their environment—particularly to the knowledge that they are being paid attention to. Turn up the lights in the factory and productivity goes up. Turn them down and productivity goes up.

It turns out that the Hawthorne effect works in retail, too. Tell the buyer for the store that you have a new edition, or a new format, or a new cover, or a new pricing strategy, and you have a new chance at getting shelf space.

The scarcity effect is surprisingly powerful in a world that’s suddenly filled with abundance. We’ve been trained to expect that every book will be available everywhere, forever. When I had 600 copies of a book that I no longer wanted to warehouse, I blogged that I had just a few left. Sold them all in twenty minutes—and (alas) disappointed more people than I would have liked to. The interesting takeaway for me is that the book had been available for over a year, so it’s not like it was hiding. Only when it became scarce did the rush happen.

The showroom effect is something we’re seeing again and again online. Having your product in a store makes your online sales go up, sometimes significantly. It certainly has a huge impact on ebooks because, at least for now, ebooks are seen as a
shadow
of the real book—so if the “real” book is right there, before your eyes, it prompts you to go online and get the digital replacement.

As retail shifts within the book world, some of these effects are going to wane, but right now they matter a lot.

Ask a friend with a tablet (iPad or Kindle Fire) to show you her bookshelf.

More and more, you’ll see nothing. Emptiness.

When we juxtapose an ebook with a movie, Instagram, or pigs that attack turtles, the ebook often loses.

One of the very real truths of our culture is being hidden in the dramatic shift from paper to ebook—lots of people are moving from paper to “no ebook.” For now, this trend is being concealed by the
super-readers, ebook readers who are on a binge and buying more books than ever before.

If you’re a fan of reading or publishing, though, the real truth is sad. At $15 or $20 for an ebook, lots of people aren’t developing the online reading habit, and the industry is going to pay dearly for that in the decade to come.

My best suggestion: every device shipped ought to come with a dozen entertaining bestsellers already on it, for free. Not all authors are open to subsidizing this seeding, but I sure am. Add five million or ten million readers to an author’s fan base and she’ll have no trouble at all making back the lost royalties, and publishers will soon discover that habits formed early last a long time.