Tom Keane, The Boston Globe:
... There are a great many business ideas where some entrepreneur can strike it rich; [brick-and-mortar] bookselling is no longer one of them. ...
The book is dead. Books (and by “books’’ I mean words printed on paper with a hard- or softcover binding)" ...
Two weeks ago, the American Association of Publishers reported that January sales for adult hardcovers were down 11.3 percent, adult paperbacks were down 19.7 percent, and adult mass market books down 30.0 percent. Expect to see those kinds of numbers repeated.
Not all kinds of books will suffer as badly, of course. Children’s books and art books — where layout and graphics are paramount — will persist. Paper is still (for a time) a better medium than digital screens for complex layouts and — especially relevant for kids — far better at absorbing spills and accidental drops. But when it comes to long-form, picture-free books such as novels, paper no longer makes sense. Electronic readers are this year’s hot-selling items because they really are a better way to read. ...
The end of [paper] books may be to the betterment of both writers and readers. The expense of publishing and distribution necessarily meant the imposition of middlemen — agents, editors, printers — who picked and chose what would get published. Now anyone can write a novel, for example, and make it available for sale. The industry seems to be figuring out the issue of digital rights management (something the music industry still hasn’t solved), meaning that authors get paid for their creativity. And even though e-books are less expensive than books, arguably more of that will get back to the people involved in their creation.
Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the medium is the message.’’ I’ve never understood why. It is the message — “the information,’’ as journalist James Gleick calls it — that matters. [Paper] Books die. Digital rises. The medium changes; the message remains.
