Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (12 page)
Read Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading Online
Authors: Jason Merkoski
There’s an enormous market now for used books—a recent article in
Publisher’s Weekly
puts it in the billions of dollars. Because this market is so big, it allows us as readers to either buy used books ourselves or read used books that have been donated to libraries.
But there’s no such thing yet as a used ebook.
All purchases are individual, and DRM makes sure that a book that you purchased can only be read on your own device. Of course, there’s a dark undernet for pirated ebooks. As an experiment, I searched the peer-to-peer networks for
The
New
York
Times
bestsellers available this week in ebook format, and I found pirated versions of all of them, contributed by anonymous and technically sophisticated book lovers. And don’t doubt that these folks love books, even though they’re pirates.
Still, though there’s no legally sanctioned and technologically functional used ebook market yet, it’s going to happen. I predict it will be started first by a company like Barnes & Noble that allows the resale of its ebooks through other websites—that is, third-party companies who will be able to sell ebooks to you at a discount perhaps, even though they buy the books directly from Barnes & Noble. There’s nothing strange about this reseller model. It’s used all the time for physical goods. I think the adoption of a reseller model for digital goods will open up a thriving used ebook market.
Perhaps a time period from the original date of a book’s publication will have to pass, maybe a year or two, after which the book will be available as a used ebook sale. At that point, the ebook would be available at a reduced price.
Or perhaps the laws of another country will allow used ebook sales, so you’ll end up going to an offshore website, like those that run legal online gambling sites, entities headquartered in Bermuda or Turks and Caicos. They’ll provide a marketplace for sellers and buyers, and these entities will take a small percent of each sale. They’ll be companies small enough to be run by one person, sitting in a beach chair in Bermuda and drinking a mai tai while his servers hum quietly in some nearby warehouse, raking in the cash and storing all the digital files.
I think it would be healthy if we could have a used ebook market. There are even hopeful signs that it may be starting soon; in 2013, Amazon applied for a patent on the sale of used digital goods, including ebooks. Used books—and by extension, used ebooks—would help readers, because more books could be bought at cheaper prices. This lets a reader get more bang from his or her buck. And it would help authors too, because being able to buy used ebooks means the author’s ideas and stories are kept in circulation longer. A book, once read, could be liberated from a Kindle or Nook and find another reader.
The drawback to used ebooks—and the reason why so many retailers and publishers are against them—is that they might encourage book piracy.
Piracy is possible for physical books, although to a much lesser extent. If a book is stolen from your house, it could be sold to a used bookstore, which in turn might resell it. But theft of physical books is rare, and it’s even rarer when a volume is resold and recognized—although that does happen. In 2010, experts at the Folger Library in Washington, DC, caught a thief who had stolen a first-edition Shakespeare volume from England ten years earlier. The thief had mutilated the book and ripped pages out, but it was still identifiable.
It’s much harder to catch a digital book thief. Ebooks lack sophisticated watermarks or other identifying mechanisms, so one digital book looks a lot like another. This means that there’s no real way to identify whether a used ebook was resold after being rightfully purchased or illegally copied one or more times.
In fact, because there’s no way to forensically differentiate a pirated ebook from a lawfully purchased one, the assumption is that any ebooks not sold by a major retailer must have been pirated. This taints the concept of used ebooks, which is unfortunate. At this point, used ebooks are presumed guilty of being pirated until proven innocent.
I, for one, think we need used ebooks—but what about you? Would you buy a used ebook? Trade one with a friend? Do you wish you could donate some of your own ebooks to a library? Or do you feel ebooks are already priced well and that selling them for less would hurt the livelihoods of authors and publishers alike?
As retailers like Barnes & Noble and Apple entered the e-reader market, they created increased competition for Amazon. But more importantly, and more positively for Amazon, their success signaled that the ebook market was evolving from mere innovation to full-blown revolution.
And because the ebook revolution is largely technical, the best measure by which to view it is the theory of the diffusion of innovation.
Everett Rogers wrote a book called
The
Diffusion
of
Innovations
, in which he describes the five phases that an innovation goes through as it makes its way through a population. These phases can be used to understand the way consumers approach any new innovation, such as cars or cell phones or computers. Each phase is represented by a group of adopters in the society.
Statistically speaking, the first 2.5 percent of the population to adopt a new technology are called innovators. The next 13.5 percent are early adopters, and the next 34 percent are the early majority. If you add up these three groups of people, you get 50 percent, half the population. The remaining two groups are the late majority, which represents the next 34 percent and, finally, the laggards, with the final 16 percent.
The labels for these five phases in the diffusion of innovation speak for themselves. But to roughly sum it up, the younger and wealthier you are, the more you tend to find yourself on the side of the innovators. The more risk-averse and traditional you are, the more you find yourself with the laggards. Your social status and education level often follow the same progression.
These factors correlate time and time again with every invention that’s been studied using the theory of diffusion of innovation. In fact, innovators and early adopters are no longer the only ones who speak about the diffusion of innovation. The theory has become part of the arsenal of tools used by marketers and product managers when they dream up new business ideas or gadgets. Whether you, as a consumer, are aware of this is unimportant to the people who make and market products, because the theory of diffusion of innovation is as real to them as the law of diminishing returns and the 80/20 principle.
Here are a few examples of how the diffusion of innovation works. It took eighty-three years from the time refrigerators were first available in the United States for them to be available to more than half the households, which finally happened in 1940. Flush toilets were invented later than refrigerators, but they took only forty-three years before they reached everyone in the early majority. That accelerating trend has continued with more recent innovations. Home electricity took only twenty-two years before it reached half of all U.S. households. It took nineteen years for radio, fifteen years for TV, and only ten years for the World Wide Web.
As we move further into the future, the diffusion of innovation happens faster. You don’t have to take my word for this; any study of the diffusion of innovation shows the same progression of this acceleration of culture throughout history. Perhaps this acceleration is caused by the explosion in innovations than can be reassembled to make still more new innovations. The acceleration can be bewildering if you’re unable to keep pace with it. To this day, my grandmother still refuses to use email, and whenever she has anything important to send, she uses a fax.
When are ebooks likely to reach the early majority? Taking a conservative approach and assuming that will take ten years (the same amount of time it took for the internet to reach the early majority), that puts us squarely in 2016, ten years after Sony launched its first e-reader in the United States. I personally think it’ll happen faster, because I’m not conservative, and I see the acceleration of adoption rates across innovations. But even if the conservative estimate is right, half the people who read will have an e-reader of some sort by 2016—and possibly a year or so earlier.
By the early majority phase, you’re at the sweet spot in the rate of adoption, when the most consistent growth is happening from year to year. My numbers tell me that’s where we are now—with the population of readers in the United States, at least. A 2012 report by Simba Information indicates that 24.5 percent of U.S. adults consider themselves ebook readers, and a 2012 Pew Internet study suggests that 33 percent of people in the United States own an e-reader or a tablet. The phase of the most rapid growth is happening now as reader revolutionaries are taking to the streets and subways with their e-readers. As trendsetters and early adopters, they’re being seen, and their ebook reading habits are being copied by others. Ebook-only content is helping the diffusion, as well. The ebook revolution is a bloodless revolution that spans all the acres of the imagination, across all of time and space to everywhere your imagination takes you while you read.
Now, no one ever wrote a paean to flush toilets or refrigerators. No one rang a bell in 1950 during the heyday of the television, and no fireworks went off in 2001 when half the population found themselves on the internet. As far as I know, no one’s ever written a paean to a cell phone or even an ode to the humble wheel. But the invention of ebooks is different. It’s in a rarefied class almost all by itself, because it involves everything aspiring about the human spirit.
The ebook revolution is ultimately about ideas, and in a very real way, we are our ideas. They’re the music that flows through our veins, the jolts of electricity that keep one day from blurring into the next. The revolution in reading has a tangible and noticeable effect on us as a population. The Simba Information report also suggests that a title originally only available as an ebook,
Fifty
Shades
of
Grey
, may have been partially responsible for a 7 percent year-over-year shift in ebook reading in the U.S. population.
Modern revolutions are more like microrevolutions. Modern political revolutions follow the same trend toward increased speed as innovations. The revolutions are instigated and completed faster than political revolutions of yore. This is related to the fact that we’re online with one another all the time. We’re a connected civilization, and this connection is accelerated more by ebooks than by flush toilets or refrigerators. We’re revolutionaries with one another because we’re linked by ideas, by currents that ripple through our civilization in the books we write and read.
And it’s not just that we have more access to books now or that they’re available almost anywhere within sixty seconds. The ebook revolution also means that we can take what we’ve read, and the ideas that have been sparked, and then communicate them at lightning speed to people all over the world—whether through annotations on the ebook or highlights others can see or social network postings on Facebook or Twitter where we can share an interesting passage from an ebook and our comments about it. Wherever we are and whenever we want, we can talk to others around the globe about a book, as if the world is our reading club and the author our best friend.
When I said earlier that the Kindle was one of the two best inventions of the twenty-first century, I meant the
concept
of the Kindle, the concept of a portable e-reader and all the ebooks that can be read on it. I think that other devices since the original Kindle have vastly improved its basic features and added new ones. But they are all rooted in the Kindle. In terms of reading, the iPad owes as much to the Kindle as a smartphone owes to the humble rotary phone.
Like the basic Kindle, current eInk e-readers still have a ways to go as actual gadgets. They may never truly compete with multifunction devices like the iPad or Google’s Nexus tablets or even the Kindle Fire released by Amazon. But what we have now is directionally indicative of a future that all book lovers should want to live in, the future of on-demand reading, of having any and every book that’s ever been published available to us no matter where we are.
In fact, some books already exist only in electronic format and offer things that print books can’t, like the ability to be updated every few days. For a number of years, Kindle’s number-one bestseller was a guide to Kindle in ebook-only format by an author who self-published it with Amazon. The author, Stephen Windwalker, updated his book a couple of times a week. Purchasers could redownload the updates at no charge, so they could always have a fresh copy on hand.
This is something that Walt Whitman dreamed about. He revised his greatest collection of poetry,
Leaves
of
Grass
, nine times in his lifetime, constantly editing and constantly changing the order of poems, adding new ones, and refreshing old ones. He printed this book time and time again at his own expense, which left him broke and barely able to support himself. Even when he was near death, he was only concerned with proofreading his “deathbed” edition. With ebooks, every author can be his or her own Walt Whitman, constantly reclaiming his or her own work by revising it and redistributing it.
Admittedly, today’s distribution network for content updates needs to be improved. As a reader, for example, I have no way of knowing whether a new version of a given book is available on my e-reader. We need a distribution mechanism that works like blogs do to push out updates as they become available and then notify us of them. I’m thinking in particular of the way that the iPad and iPhone show a “badge” on the icon of every application to indicate if there’s an update or if I have new email or if someone tagged me on Facebook. The same idea could apply to ebook content.
This is the great thing about where we are right now. I’m not speaking as a pie-in-the-sky futurist but as someone who sees technological inevitability. Nimble authors and publishers are able to move fast to take advantage of new ebook features—like animation, interactivity, live chat, location tracking, quizzes, and recipe calculators—that are gradually being added on top of existing features. People in publishing who are smart enough to leap on this accumulation of features are finding themselves with hits, because these features aren’t just snazzy eye candy to the digerati, passing memes of the day that get touted in the blogosphere and in some article in
Wired
magazine. These features work because that’s how people want to consume information, and they want it all in one convenient package.
But this can only happen if authors and their publishers fully embrace the potential that the ebook revolution presents. I’d like to say that all of them have the potential to grasp it. But as I traveled the country, meeting with publishers, authors, and others to evangelize for Kindle, I began to see that this was not true. Some did not get it at all, and you could sense it in everything they said and did about ebooks. But thankfully, others did. These are the companies that I think will not only survive but thrive in the world after the revolution, while the others will look around in wonder at how quickly their once-mighty empires fell.