SubscribeRead BookSwim’s Director of Member Service CHIP O’BRIEN at Forbes.com
What is happening to the future of books? Consider this: Amazon sold more Kindle books than paper books on Christmas Day in 2009, despite decisions by publishers like Harper Collins (Palin’s Going Rogue) and Simon & Schuster (King’s Under the Dome) to delay the release of eBooks long past the release of their hardcover counterparts. It seems the popularity of eBooks is growing much faster than publishers’ willingness to embrace them.
But e-publishing doesn’t have to bring an end to traditional paper books, or spin its wheels trying to translate the paper book model into a far different space. Instead of trying to understand eBooks within the space of the old paper-and-binding universe, we should examine the media that survived the first wave of the distribution revolution: movies and music.
Taking cues from the music and film industries, here are five things book publishers should offer:
Combo Deals: Bundle purchases of paper books and eBooks. According to science fiction novelist Eric Flint, releasing a free online copy of his novel Mother of Demons raised the book’s sell-through rate by 11%. While it can’t be shown that his subsequent novel, 1632, definitively benefited from being available for free as an eBook from its publishing date onward, its own 88% sell-through rate doesn’t seem to have been harmed. Many print novels, especially series volumes, currently include a “sneak peek” chapter of a forthcoming book at the end. Instead, why not offer a free download code for a large online excerpt of another title, or even a complimentary eBook in its entirety? It would be an easy way to add value to a paper book purchase, and a great way to promote other titles.
More Flexibility: With the rising popularity of book-swapping sites like Book Mooch and of online book-rental clubs like BookSwim, readers are finding flexible ways to get and keep (or return, as it were) books. Meanwhile, eBook file formats seem almost deliberately restrictive: Nook books can be read only on Nooks and PCs, Kindle books only on Kindles. The music industry long ago gave up on DRM. Offering eBook files that can display on all eReader devices would be a friendlier option for the consumer, allowing the same book to be read on a Nook, a Sony eReader, or any PDF-reading program on a computer.
Product Expansion: The eBook format can break down the traditional linearity of a book; why not use that to the book’s advantage? Like a VHS tape, paper books give access only to the finished product in a single linear sequence. As with DVDs, versatile ebook technology would allow content-producers to “layer” content that would be impossible to include in a paper book, from author commentaries with a display/hide option to extras like deleted chapters or characters that didn’t make the final revision. Links to blurbs of background information could be embedded in the text, so the interested reader perusing The Da Vinci Code could click a link to see a picture of the Louvre museum or a snapshot of “The Last Supper.” Publishers might even consider including free user-submitted content like fan commentary and analysis—material with little-to-no cost that still enriches the basic text.
Some may object to the idea of book “extras” in the same way Spielberg refuses to record audio commentaries for his films: because it might distract attention from the work itself. Would these changes take away from the mystical self-completeness of a book? Perhaps, but it may be time for the book to lose its one-way conversational flow. When you increase the interactivity of a book, you increase its ability to engage an Internet-age audience.
Friendlier Reading For Short Attention Spans: When a would-be reader complains that he or she doesn’t have time to read, it’s more likely that they’re simply missing a continuous block of free time to plow through several chapters at once. It may be worthwhile for publishers to take inspiration from such sites as DailyLit, which breaks novels into 1,000-word chunks and emails those excerpts on a customizable schedule. We may not have time to read 500 pages today, but we could certainly read two pages a day for a few weeks. Many of today’s classic novels, from A Farewell to Arms to Great Expectations, were originally published in serial form—what if, like a band releasing several EPs instead of a single long album, publishers released books in segments?
Social Experience: Reading has traditionally been a solitary activity, which may explain the growing appeal of blog-reporting over traditional newspapers: through comments and follow-up posts, the text talks back. But armed with wireless connections, eReaders can finally create a seamless social reading experience. They might include the option to connect with other readers currently working through the same section of the book, allowing for a kind of impromptu disposable book club. Another possibility is to “Wiki-fy” every text: Allow readers to add comments throughout the book, while others vote on the relevance and helpfulness of those comments.
Finally, a note on what not to do. Netflix recently reached an agreement with Warner Bros. to delay rentals of the studio’s movies until four weeks after their retail release. This bears an uncanny parallel to publishers’ delay of eBooks to preserve hardcover retail sales. In both industries, though, scrabbling frantically for retail sales will fail when the consumers know they can rent (or, dare I say, pirate) the product elsewhere—and the appearance of bullying consumers into buying at hardcover prices is highly unlikely to give readers a sense of compassion for beleaguered publishers.
This is the exact wrong time in history to fret about the imminent death of reading—eReaders have the power to transform books into far richer, far more interactive experiences than ever before. Instead of deriding the eBook as a profit-killer, why not unite our old ideas of reading alone in quiet rooms with the vast potential created by new technology? Let’s re-imagine what books can become.
Read BookSwim’s Director of Member Service CHIP O’BRIEN at Forbes.com
