By Sean Murphy

With the benefit of hindsight, everyone now knows that the music industry, by taking so long to see the writing on the wall, squandered valuable time to adapt and innovate. The incredibly successful and occasionally sordid history of how records got made and sold too often enriched the labels and disenfranchised the artists. Certainly, great strides have been made in the last decade and they are all consistent with the notion of a truly unfettered marketplace that has served to empower musicians. As a result the benefits are manifold for artists and audience: the entertainment is delivered at a lower cost while greater profits are possible for the people who actually create the content. It is, in short, democracy in effect and yet another illustration of innovation improving an imperfect situation.

These advancements have myriad implications for writers. Fortunately, the publishing industry has mostly embraced the development of new technology and hardware to cut costs, attract audiences and benefit the environment. Michael Cader, who oversees Publisher’s Marketplace, points out that the success of e-readers was easy to predict. “Dedicated e-reading devices were introduced before MP3 players took off. Early Palm devices included a popular e-reading application, but these (and similar products) did not succeed in their first incarnation.” When asked his opinion of how the publishing industry is embracing the concept of e-books, he offers some illuminating insights. “I don’t think publishers “accept” or “reject” new technology so much as they make intelligent investments, moving with the market and their audience. Most publishers are accelerating digitization and e-book investments as the market shows signs of rapid expansion.”

Authors only stand to gain from these advancements, which are both profitable and environmentally sound. The less money that is spent on antiquated means of production (trees becoming paper that go to factories to produce books) and marketing (PR people to promote books, in print) liberates the author to focus on the work of writing and disseminating their work. The increasingly old-fashioned (and exceedingly expensive) efforts of promotion (the ads in print media, the exclusive practitioners who placed them) perpetuated the unfortunate reality that only established authors could afford to be properly marketed. Now, a virtually unknown writer with an e-mail account and a website can do more than even a moderately successful writer could imagine doing a decade ago. Add the revolutionary message-spreading potential of social networking and it would not be wrong to consider this a major paradigm shift, unfolding right before our eyes.

Jeff Kleinman, co-founder of Folio Literary Management, has been intimately involved in the publishing industry for two decades and welcomes the advances e-books are making possible for both writers and readers. When asked if he can envision traditional books disappearing in this generation or the next, he looks to the past to anticipate the future. “(Printed) books going away seems doubtful to me, but they seem to be going the way that illustrated manuscripts went, when the printing press came out,” he observes. “All of a sudden there was a much cheaper, more popular way of having access to a book’s content. We’re not even near where things will be moving in the future. Most insiders are realizing that the e-book industry is pretty much the only sector of the marketplace that is growing.”

In much the same way musicians have found ways to benefit from streaming their music (for free and/or via iTunes or a service), authors have a considerable stake in the e-books sweepstakes. For obvious reasons, the prospect of cheaper and easier access to content is a strategy writers can endorse, and it represents another step toward democratized dissemination of material, while operating within the profit-driven imperatives of the free market. “Books are not dead, but the definition of the “book” is changing,” Kleinman explains. “People are always hungry for content, and the print newspapers or print books increasingly seem like antiquated means of delivering that content. Interestingly, Amazon has repeatedly stated that the older demographic has been utilizing Kindle specifically because of its ability to expand font-size.”

What we have here is another happy example of innovation prompting technology that creates unprecedented opportunity in the marketplace. This is great news for artists and audiences, and it represents another success story for the CE industry.

Read Part One  and Part two of this Blog.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 10:43 am and is filed under Consumer Research, Digital Rights, Portable Electronics. Reply to this post, or trackback from your own site. Follow responses to this entry through the comments RSS feed.