By Sean Murphy

CE products are perpetually in some state of transition. Movies, for instance, were silent, then shown on public screens, then available on private screens (TVs), and now they can be viewed on PCs and smartphones. Music went from vinyl to reel-to-reel to digital, with the hardware constantly becoming smaller to the point where a device holding thousands of songs can now fit snugly in your front pocket. Games have followed a similar course: from cardboard table-sized offerings to free wireless programs that can be played simultaneously by people in different area codes.

Books, on the other hand, have remained virtually unchanged since their inception. They have been refined to accommodate ease of use and their means of production have advanced considerably, but a book has remained a bound and printed product, read the same way yesterday as it was six centuries ago. Thus, the rather recent development of electronic media (specifically e-books and their associated hardware, or e-readers) signals a considerable paradigm shift.

Indeed, where the transformation of music and movies has been underway for some time, the big battle of the immediate future is the ostensible decline of book sales once e-books gain mainstream traction. One important distinction is that the book publishing industry − beneficiaries of the hard lessons learned by the music business − has already embraced these inevitable developments and continues to plan accordingly. The prediction, therefore, that books will follow CDs to the tar pit is unlikely to reach fruition anytime soon: paperbacks, especially used copies, are significantly less expensive than compact discs ever were. As such, physical texts are affordable and entrenched; they will not become extinct in our lifetimes.

Books, as their history illustrates, represent arguably the most adaptable and user-friendly form of entertainment ever created. Put simply, people love books and savor the experience of reading text; the somewhat recent portability of music is a solution books never needed to address. On the other hand, the initial success of e-books owes more to a refinement of the experience as opposed to an obliteration of it.

This refinement represents a relatively simple reality that may anticipate the success of e-books. Ultimately, the process of watching or listening (or reading) is unchanged: the inherent attraction of new hardware is related to increased convenience and/or decreased cost. When it comes to books, the essential model exists, and the consumer is simply trading the experience of reading a physical book for an electronic text.

Unlike music and movies, which have never been easier to procure for free (albeit illegally), the price proposition for books is, to a certain extent, already established. Put another way, it remains difficult to conceive a process by which books are easily procured at no cost. Uploading a song, or album, is light years − in conception and execution − removed from the task of uploading a novel. In other words, even if the possibility of pirated text was feasible, what would the net gain be? Saving ten bucks on a paperback that you still need to store on your notebook? Or download to read, or print? Neither of those options seems demonstrably preferable to paperback books, which are portable and not reliant on batteries. A book, in other words, is already close to an ideal delivery device for a specific type of content, and e-readers might perhaps be best positioned as an alternative instead of a replacement. E-readers can (and, in this writer’s opinion, will) exist harmoniously with traditionally bound books.

Nevertheless, there is no way to avoid the reality that the next generation of kids will be increasingly unfamiliar with the more “old fashioned” types of content. We have already seen it with music and games: it is no longer unusual to encounter a teenager who has never owned a compact disc or seen an LP record. So as computers become more commonplace in classrooms, another trend to keep a close eye on is how e-books will impact academia.

While it’s improbable to envision paperback books disappearing, it’s much easier to see how bulky and costly textbooks might slowly phase out in favor of PC (or eventually, e-reader) accessible content. McGraw-Hill Education has already announced that they are making a number of college textbooks available for use via Kindle. CourseSmart LLC, which has a catalog of over 7,000 e-textbooks, is now available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Even, if not especially, at the High School level, a younger demographic raised on PCs and portable devices is increasingly likely to engage with the dynamic capabilities of e-text, and may find textbooks old-fashioned. In addition to the green-friendly aspects of this conversion, there is a potentially substantial cost-savings initiative involved: in a recent feature for The New York Times Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is quoted as predicting that providing “free” e-textbooks could mean savings in the millions on an annual basis. In the same article, William M. Habermehl, the Orange County superintendent, predicted that within five years the majority of students will be using digital textbooks.

Next up, what these developments could mean for authors − as well as the people who edit, market and sell books…

Read Part One and Part Three of this blog.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Consumer Research, Portable Electronics. Reply to this post, or trackback from your own site. Follow responses to this entry through the comments RSS feed.