Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading (22 page)
Read Burning the Page: The eBook revolution and the future of reading Online
Authors: Jason Merkoski
The future of writing is changing and requires authors to be part engineer, part marketer, part statistician, and oh yes, part writer too.
Monks in medieval monasteries worked hard to preserve the writing in scrolls and parchments whenever they’d recopy them. The same thing is true of the Arabs who cared for most of the Greek texts that we now have from the era of Plato and Sophocles. They were very wary of making textual missteps and introducing errors, concerned as they were with the wisdom of the past and the purity of the written word.
But now we’re in a more capitalistic time. There’s a frenzy of digitization going on with ebooks, and everyone’s rushing out of the woodwork to profit from books. As these profiteers rush to the market, the texts that they’re bringing us are getting degraded.
For example, there’s a wholesale rush to take all the books in free web archives that have been around for decades—like Project Gutenberg—and repackage them for Kindle and iPad. People are doing these conversions because such books, while not as popular as bestsellers from
The
New
York
Times
, still have fans who would pay a modest premium to buy such a book. Although these books are likely to garner fewer sales than a more contemporary, popular book, a lot less effort is needed to ready them for sale to consumers. After all, the book has already been written and already digitized. It just needs to be reconverted to ebook format.
Because there’s such a frenzy happening now, however, many people are converting the same books over and over again and offering multiple versions of the same book for sale. Sometimes scores of different versions of the same text exist. But each version is corrupted in different ways. Because people are processing these books in bulk, they are rarely edited, and conversion errors rarely get caught. As a result, the books often get adulterated, and sections are chopped up or lost.
In extreme cases, the book is no longer readable. More frequently, explosions of bizarre symbols from the outer reaches of your keyboard appear in the text for no reason whatsoever, like someone swearing at you in a foreign language. There’s a great Japanese word for this:
mojibake
. This phenomenon is often seen on international web pages when they’re rendered badly in browsers, but it’s happening a lot in ebooks too. While this problem is usually more noticeable in public domain content, you’ll sometimes see it even in books from top-tier publishers, such as when an ebook is rushed to publication with insufficient time to review the quality.
You can’t blame the top publishers for moving fast. In a way, everyone involved with publishing is a bit of a hustler these days. There’s a wealth of opportunity to digitize the world’s content, an opportunity that will only come once to our culture as a whole.
Some of these hustlers and opportunists are very crafty. I know a Russian guy who took a flatbed scanner into the Kremlin archives and scanned away relentlessly at all the books in the archives, with the intent of selling them digitally. After doing this for three years, he had enough books to sell as cheap print reproductions of the originals, but he couldn’t convert them into digital books. That’s because his scanners only did black and white, with none of the shades of gray in between, and the quality was just too poor to convert the scans into digital books.
There’s a whole spectrum of opportunity for would-be
mojibake
hustlers these days. So go out and get yourself a flatbed scanner, fly to Iceland or Norway for a couple of years, and see what you can digitize! The gold rush is on to digitize content, and while you’re prospecting for gold, you might find entirely new minerals that no one is even aware of and for which there soon will be a market.
I’m thinking in particular about sheet music scores, old pamphlets, or postcards. There’s a wealth of material to scan in and digitize, and books are just one part of this. Newspapers and magazines are part of this gold rush, although frankly—and I’m completely unbiased here—books are sexier than anything else.
In addition to books, countless pamphlets, comics, newspapers, ’zines, and ephemera of every age could be digitized and made available. Books are only the surface of what’s possible. The printed word goes much deeper than the surface, and there’s a vast shadowy biosphere of words that’s currently unexplored and undigitized.
But what do you think? What would you really like to see digitized? What ephemera from our print past—from cereal boxes to greeting cards—do you think needs to be preserved for perpetuity?
There are a lot of different versions of how the future could play out in ebooks, but what I see happening first is what I’ll call the “utility” model, which is kind of like having ebooks available under a monthly Netflix-like subscription. We view electricity and water and TV as utilities, and most of us have to subscribe to them. Some are flat-fee, and some are priced based on how much they’re used.
Right now, when you buy an ebook, you’re making a one-time transaction. But in the utility model, you would pay one monthly or yearly lump sum to get unlimited downloads. Perhaps the books wouldn’t actually be yours; think of them as rentals, available whenever you want to read. The download happens as fast as always, and the ebook is on your e-reader for you to read. Perhaps it expires in a week or two, but you can always download it again. It’s like a faucet. Water comes out of the faucet when you turn it on, and thus ebooks will, as well.
Amazon recently launched such a Netflix for ebooks, but only a very few books from the Amazon catalog are part of it, and you only get one free ebook a month. Would you use Netflix if it only showed nature documentaries, episodes of the 1980s cartoon
He-Man
, and Mexican wrestling matches? Unless you’re an aficionado of
lucha
libre
, you’ll probably wait until more ebooks are part of the program.
Of course, true book lovers may cling to their print books. For one, books smell nice—although it’s possible that e-reader manufacturers could add the “old book” smell to their products. It’s been shown that volatile chemicals like acetic acid, furfural, and lipid peroxides contribute to that musty smell, and they could easily be swirled into the e-reader’s plastic when it’s being manufactured.
Another reason why book lovers aren’t giving up print books is because the books are not yet available electronically. When Kindle launched, about 90,000 ebooks were available for sale on its website. Even now, at the time of this book’s writing, there are only 1.8 million Kindle ebooks. This may sound like a lot, but it’s chump change compared to the 35 million books in print. Early adopters like CEOs and former presidents and astronauts would have no problem buying e-readers despite the limited content selection, but mainstream readers demand more content selection.
To get even more books digitized, I think a company could make a device the size of a toaster oven into which you could put a book, a device that would work on books of most sizes. The device would page quickly through the book, take a picture of each page, and upload the pages to the cloud. The toasters would have to be intelligent enough to correct for poor lighting conditions and the way the words get elongated near the break between pages. If you don’t believe me, try placing a book on a photocopier and see what you get. See how the words get distorted and unreadable near the spine.
I imagine it would be called the “ebook toaster.” As far as gadgets go, the ebook toaster would be kind of dangerous. A warning label on it would recommend that it be used by people age 18 and older. Why? The two blades inside the toaster would be sharp enough to slice off the spine of a book. And just as a regular toaster has a tray to catch the breadcrumbs from your bagels or pizzas, the ebook toaster would have a tray to catch the spine that’s been snipped. If books could bleed, this tray would catch the blood.
Mechanical robot arms would unfurl themselves within the toaster and lift each page, one at a time. An arrangement of mirrors and cameras would carefully take pictures of each page. When that process is done, you would either put a rubber band around the remaining pages to keep the print book, or you’d dispose of it. As long as your ebook toaster is connected to your home’s Wi-Fi network, you would get your ebook back in about an hour. It would show up on your e-reader’s home screen, ready to read, with no crumbs or burnt crusts.
When the ebook toaster finished its job, the ebook would be reassembled in a reflowable format from each of the original book’s pages. This would allow you to convert your library of print books to digital. Perhaps it would take a half hour per book, but once it was done, the process would be like ripping a CD into MP3 files. You’d have the ebook files accessible anytime, anywhere, regardless of device. In 2003, I spent a few months slowly inserting all my CDs into my computer to gradually digitize my music collection, and now I have those music files forever.
Perhaps instead of doing this at home with an ebook toaster, you’d hire a company to do the conversion for you. Readers like you and me aren’t going to sign contracts with conversion houses in India or the Philippines to convert our personal libraries, book by book. But that’s okay. Companies will come into existence to do this for you, at a cost. I think that in a few years, you’ll be able to mail boxes of your print books to conversion facilities that will manage the print-to-digital conversion and send you back files in the format of your choice. Or maybe you’ll see larger versions of the ebook toasters at the mall.
You may see kiosks in the mall where you can bring your books and get them converted. You can watch while they do it, or come back after you’ve gotten a pretzel from the food court, and then collect your digital books on your flash drive. You’ll see these kiosks in malls, and probably small stores too, where retail space is cheap enough. They’ll be a lot like eBay shipping centers where you go to get your goods packaged and mailed, a service that you’re happy to pay a small surcharge for, to save yourself the hassle.
It will be a lot like going to the mechanic to get the tires on your car changed, except that now you will have newer, better tires. And yes, you’ll still have to pay a handling fee to dispose of the old tires or, in this case, your print books. The conversion machines will likely use what’s called destructive scanning, meaning that the book has to be destroyed to be converted. This is what most major publishers do when they have a print book that they want to convert into digital format.
When I’ve traveled to destructive scanning facilities, I’ve seen machines that seem like they belong in a slaughterhouse, machines with whirling knives that slice the spine straight off the back of the book. Sometimes the process is more manual and less sophisticated. It may be a team of women in India sitting at a long table, holding razor blades, and doing the same work, but much more cheaply.
I think you’ll see such a process at the mall, where nimble-fingered teens wield razor blades to scrape the spines from your book so that they can quickly scan each individual page. The book will be destroyed in the process, but the process will be painless for you—unless you had any emotional attachment to the book. It will be like a visit to LensCrafters, where you get your new glasses in about an hour.
You can easily imagine the shady file-sharing markets that might emerge as people learn that they can swap these scanned-in files with one another. Or maybe people will go to bookstores with these toaster-sized devices under their trench coats and scan in this week’s bestsellers. But in a positive sense, I think this type of conversion will help the used ebook market grow, making that eventuality turn into an inevitability. Maybe with this kind of device, legitimate used ebook stores will emerge. Maybe used ebooks can be resold once or twice before they spontaneously combust like Maxwell Smart’s secret messages.
Books are important, so let the consumers have them, used or otherwise. Publishers should get a fair price, as should authors and any middlemen like retailers, without whom the entire ecosystem would fail. Likewise, I think libraries can benefit. There might even be a company whose sole purpose would be to allow libraries to exchange digital copies of one another’s scanned books so that they don’t have to rescan each book at each library.
The value of books will change, of course, and perhaps for the better. Right now, books that are esoteric and hard to find are at a premium because there are few print copies of them. But once a book is digitized, with endless amounts of secure backups, there’s no reason why prices shouldn’t drop. And prices should follow a new paradigm: the price of a book should be inversely proportional to its popularity.
We see this now with out-of-print books from before 1923. When digitized, they’re commonly free. They’re part of the public domain. There are older books that are not part of the public domain, not yet, and when they’re digitized, they’ll be of interest to historians and scholars and anyone who happens to follow links to them in a possible Facebook for Books. The cost of these older books should be damn cheap, almost zero.
Conversely, the most popular books of the day—like those on
The
New
York
Times
bestseller list—should be at a premium, in keeping with the marketing investment that the publishers spent to promote them and create consumer demand. But a book that was on
The
New
York
Times
list five years ago is rarely worth the same as what’s on the list this week. We see the decay in price of new titles, but older, rarer books are still inflated in price because they haven’t been digitized.
There’s a chilling reversal, though, by which retailers might become the new libraries.
This is a scary mind shift, but it is in keeping with the currents of our culture as we commoditize every aspect of our lives. Given these currents, it makes sense that retailers will assume stewardship of our culture. Libraries once held all of the world’s knowledge, but, with rare exceptions, there is no longer any library on the planet with a larger collection than the books currently held by the likes of Amazon or Google or Barnes & Noble. Information is available, but it’s no longer freely available.
This is a future that I don’t entirely welcome for philosophical reasons, but it does seem likely. Retailers might become the new libraries. Perhaps this happens first by publishers acquiring one another so that they can lobby for favorable ebook terms and discounts with retailers. Indeed, we’re already seeing this, with the recent merger between Random House and Penguin. To be competitive, smaller publishers may feel pressure to acquire other publishers or merge with them so that, as a bloc, they can negotiate with the retailers.
Eventually, though, what’s to stop a company like Amazon from acquiring one of these large publisher conglomerates? Apple might then have to retaliate and buy another mega-publisher. Retailers will try to acquire publishers’ vast content holdings in a bid to become the predominant purveyor of the written word—whether in book form, magazine form, or pamphlet form.
And once this future is played out, then what happens? Do the retailers themselves converge and consolidate, like banks did in the 1990s? Are they acquired by the governments, in response to the monopolization of the written word or because of fears that retailers will hijack the language itself and censor it? Does Apple send emissaries out to all the state libraries of the world and license digital rights to their content?
I can’t tell you. My crystal ball is dark regarding this matter. When I first joined Amazon, they gave me a Magic 8 Ball. They gave them to all new employees at the time. When I shake my Amazon-issued Magic 8 Ball, this time it says, “Ask Again Later.” For now anyway, the future is as cloudy and as dark as a busted eInk screen.
Only one thing is certain: content was, and is, still king.
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Clearly, as a culture, we’re smitten with the digital. Ebooks make sense for so many reasons. But what will happen to print books in the years ahead?
As more and more people buy ebooks, they’ll start to preferentially buy ebooks, because the experience is so “sticky” and because the more digital books you have, the more you gain from the network effects of searching and indexing, something that works poorly in print books.
Eventually, there will be a tipping point at which the benefits of digital outweigh print, and there will be a mass shift from print to digital. Nobody in the book industry is sure exactly where the tipping point is for selection. It may be that Amazon or Apple needs to have 95 percent digital coverage of all the books in print before people stampede to ebooks.
But for a time, people will have libraries that are part digital, part print. Those of us who see what’s coming realize that as more consumers start buying ebooks, they’re going to look at their personal libraries of print books and try to figure out what to do with them, since they’re becoming obsolete.
The obvious thing to do is to sell them.
You’re going to see a lot more used book sales in the next ten years than ever before. People are going to start dumping their print books to get whatever prices they can from them, simply because it’s more convenient to go digital. And let me tell you, print books are not convenient. I have four thousand of them, which means that every time I move into a new house, I have to box them up and haul them around, something my back may not be able to handle one day! So I’ve started selling them.
I’ve sold more than a thousand of my print books already on Amazon’s used book marketplace. It’s simple to do, especially if you have a computer with a video camera on it. The video camera can scan in the bar codes on the back of the books through the same process that retail stores use to scan products with a laser at checkout. Software like Delicious Library automates a lot of this, and you can often get a free membership to Amazon’s Seller Central that lets you sell your used books. You don’t have to work at Amazon like I did to get these benefits!
There’s actually a thriving subculture of people armed with laptops who go to used bookstores, scan in the bar codes with their video cameras, and see if any of the books are worth enough to buy used from the bookstore. If so, they resell the book online at a higher price. You’ll see more of this in the years ahead, as well as better tools on smartphones to allow non-experts to make a living at this.
I think we’re going to see a huge number of used book sales in the next five years as digital books go more mainstream. We may have a glut of books, in fact. If you’re like me and you think that the moldering, forlorn used books for sale on a scrappy rack outside a bookstore are sad, then wait until you see how much sadder it will get for printed books.